The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture 3031307844, 9783031307843

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The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture Edited by  Corina Stan · Charlotte Sussman

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture

Corina Stan  •  Charlotte Sussman Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture

Editors Corina Stan Duke University Durham, NC, USA

Charlotte Sussman Duke University Durham, NC, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-30783-6    ISBN 978-3-031-30784-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jasmin Merdan/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For our families

Contributing Editors: Derek Duncan David Herd Josephine McDonagh Rita Sakr

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Corina Stan and Charlotte Sussman Part I Figurations of the Migrant  13 2 Figurations  of the Migrant: Introduction 15 Charlotte Sussman 3 Narrating  Migration in the Settler Colonies: From Systematic Colonization to the Climate Refugee 19 Philip Steer 4 Invasion  and Replacement Fantasies: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints and the French Far Right 37 Corina Stan 5 Between  History and the Discord of Time: The Figure of the Migrant in A Seventh Man and Transit 61 Luka Arsenjuk 6 A  Border Poetics of Migration: Five Mappings of Migration Literature in Norwegian and Swedish 77 Johan Schimanski 7 “A  strangely familiar place”: Cinematic (Re)framings of the EU’s Easternmost Border 95 Argyro Nicolaou

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8 Migration,  Romani Writers, and the Question of National Literature111 Ileana Chirila Part II Hostile Environments 127 9 Hostile Environments: Introduction129 David Herd 10 Setting  the Stage of Contemporary Migration in the Italian Hostile Environment133 Claudia Gualtieri 11 The  Dystopian Imaginary, Climate Migration, and “Lifeboat-­Nationalism”151 Matthew Whittle 12 Black  Parisians in Merry Colors: Queerness and Creolization in the Popular Comedies of Lucien Jean-Baptiste167 Eva Jørholt 13 Classification  and the Secrets of Kinship: Migration, Scientific Naturalism, and the Racialization of Blood in the Eighteenth Century183 David A. P. Womble 14 “There’s  Ways to Survive These Times … and I Think One Way Is the Shape the Telling Takes”: Hostile Environments and Hospitable Connections in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet201 Rachel Gregory Fox Part III Migration as Palimpsest 217 15 Migration  as Palimpsest: Introduction219 Corina Stan 16 Migration,  Forced Displacement, and Aesthetic Agency: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum225 Claudia Breger

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17 Comparing  Migrations? Russian German Jewish Writers on the “Refugee Crisis”241 Katja Garloff 18 Literary  Archives and Alternative Futures. Memories of Labor Migration in Contemporary Turkish German Fiction255 Maria Roca Lizarazu 19 On  the Afterlife of Lucrecia Pérez: Literature and Migrant Memory Against Nationalist Myth-­Making in Democratic Spain271 N. Michelle Murray 20 Muslim  Interpellation: Hijabs, Beards, and the Post-9/11 Border Regime287 Nasia Anam 21 Another Home303 Pico Iyer and Caryl Phillips Part IV Migration and Language 317 22 Migration  and Language: Introduction319 Derek Duncan 23 “Struggles  with Identity Don’t Care About the Latitude”: Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft (Where You Come From) as “Born Translated” Text325 Frauke Matthes 24 “Verstummung”:  Carmine Abate’s Dislocative Voices339 Derek Duncan 25 Going  for Nothing: Migration and Translation in Cristina Rivera Garza353 Ramsey McGlazer 26 “Life  Goes on, Defying Common Sense”: On Translating Russian Émigré Poetry369 Boris Dralyuk

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27 “It  Is Hard to Choose”: An Italian Author on Migration, Diaspora, African Literature, and the Limits of Labels385 Igiaba Scego and Saskia Ziolkowski 28 Poetry  as Love and Resistance: A Presentation by Behrouz Boochani and Janet Galbraith397 Behrouz Boochani and Janet Galbraith Part V Migration and Media 407 29 Migration  and Media: Introduction409 Josephine McDonagh 30 Sound  in Place: Italian Migrant Street Music in the Nineteenth-­Century Novel415 Briony Wickes 31 Restorying  the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange and the Partition of India and Palestine Through Graphic Narrative: Hand-Drawn Lines, Embroidered Histories, Portable Homelands435 Kristina Gedgaudaitė 32 “Resonance  is Contact Ripple”: Media and Contemporary Poems of Mediterranean Migration457 Charlotte Sussman 33 Ways  of Seeing: Ethics of Looking in European Refugee Films475 Johannes von Moltke 34 Curating  Hospitality: Toward a More Sensitive Perception of Vulnerability497 Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Fabienne Brugère, and Guillaume le Blanc Part VI Migration and Experimentation 509 35 Migration  and Experimentation: Introduction511 Corina Stan 36 Reading  the Politics of Exile: Matei Vișniec’s Mr. K Released517 Ileana Orlich

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37 H  assan Blasim’s God 99: Staying with Fragments, Designing Other Worlds533 Claire Gallien 38 Melancholia  of Migration in the Transnational Italian Imaginary549 Laura Sarnelli 39 “not  safe any / where anymore”: Biopolitical Poetics and Irish Migration Poetry567 Ailbhe McDaid 40 “A  historian of the soft tissue”: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil585 K. Bellamy Mitchell Bibliography595 Index643

Notes on Contributors

Nasia Anam  is Assistant Professor of English and the 2023–2024 Joe Crowley Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her current book manuscript, Muslim Heterotopias: Colonial Logics of Space in Literatures of Migration examines representations of Muslim migration in Anglophone and Francophone literature from the postWorld War II to post-9/11 eras, arguing that during this period the meaning of “Muslim” as a category of difference transforms within geopolitically significant spatial configurations such as the immigrant enclave, the airport checkpoint, and the refugee encampment. Her work can be found in Interventions, ASAP/Journal, the Journal of Narrative Theory, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Post45: Contemporaries, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Luka Arsenjuk  is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at The University of Maryland, where he directs the Program in Cinema and Media Studies. He is the author of Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis (2018). Behrouz  Boochani  is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, activist, writer, and film producer. From 2013 to 2017, he was held at the Australian-run detention center on Manus Island. His book about that experience, No Friend But the Mountains (2018), won the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2019, along with a number of other awards. Claudia Breger  is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Having received her PhD and Habilitation from Humboldt University, Berlin, she taught at the University of Paderborn, Germany, and Indiana University, Bloomington, before joining Columbia in 2017. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary culture, with emphases on film, performance, literature, and literary and cultural theory, as well as the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race in a transnational

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framework. Her most recent book is Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (2020). Fabienne  Brugère  is Professor of Philosophy at Paris 8 University. She has authored nine monographs and edited numerous volumes on aesthetics, taste, political engagement, and the politics of care. Most recently, she has coauthored La Fin de l’hospitalité (2017) with Guillaume le Blanc. Ileana  Chirila is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of New Hampshire. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary transcultural/transnational literatures in French, Sino-French literature, emergent Romani literature in French, and multiculturalism. Her first book project, Reinventing the Republic: Transcultural Literature in the Cosmopolitan Age, looks closely at cultural, political, and geographical realities underpinning the literature of French writers of foreign origins, whose mother tongue is not French. The second book project, now in its early stages, explores one of the very few real “world” literatures, produced by Romani writers in French and several other languages. She has published articles on new literary cosmopolitanism, transcultural literature in French, and Sino-French literature, and her work has appeared in journals or volumes in the United States, France, Canada, Portugal, UK, and Romania. Boris Drayluk  is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016), co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), and translator of volumes by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. He is the former editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and his poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Granta, and elsewhere. Derek Duncan  is Professor of Italian at the University of St Andrews. His has written extensively on modern Italian literature and film, particularly on intersections of sexuality/gender and of race/ethnicity in a transnational framework. He was founding editor of the Cultural Studies issue of Italian Studies and of Liverpool University Press’s acclaimed series Transnational Italian Cultures. He is also co-editor of Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook (2022), the core text of Transnational Modern Languages a series of books aimed at taking students beyond the ethnonational perspectives characteristic of the discipline. He is currently interested in exploring Italian cultural production as a set of vernacular material practices extending beyond the peninsula itself and in the multiple legacies of migration from Italy. He is increasingly engaged with developments in the Creative Humanities and in the fusion of academic research and creative practice. His current research project funded by a Major Research Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust investigates the

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representational afterlife of two maritime disasters looking at questions of citizenship and cultural memory through the prisms of race and ethnicity. Rachel Gregory Fox  is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Kent whose research project focuses on migration, the UK’s Hostile Environment, and the ethics of storytelling. She is the author of (Re)Framing Women in Post-Millennial Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran: Remediated Witnessing in Literary, Visual, and Digital Media (2022) and co-editor, with Ahmad Qabaha, of Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance (2021). Janet Galbraith  is a writer and poet living in the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung. She is founder of Writing Through Fences, an online project that collaborates with artists and writers incarcerated in immigration detention. She is the author of the poetry collection, Re-Membering (2013). Claire Gallien  is a senior lecturer at the University of Montpellier. She has authored the monograph L’Orient anglais (2011), edited a special issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing on refugee literature, and her articles have been published in numerous international journals and volumes. Katja  Garloff  is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (2005) and Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture (2016) and the co-editor (with Agnes Mueller) of German Jewish Literature after 1990 (2018). Her most recent book, Making German Jewish Literature Anew: Authorship, Memory, and Place (2022), charts the reemergence of Jewish literature in contemporary Germany and Austria. She has also written numerous articles on authors such as G.  E. Lessing, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Joseph Roth, Peter Weiss, Paul Celan, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, W. G. Sebald, Barbara Honigmann, Benjamin Stein, and others. In recent years Garloff has been the recipient of research grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is a member of the PEN Zentrum deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland and serves on the editorial boards of Humanities, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, and Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies. Kristina  Gedgaudaite  is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests fall within the fields of twentieth-century Greek literature and culture, cultural memory, migration, comics, and graphic novels. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and has previously held a position as postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. Kristina’s first monograph Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary, published by the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series, examines the memories that shaped Asia Minor refugee identity, focusing on the ways in which these memories continue to reverberate in

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present-day Greece. Her current project engages with contemporary Greek graphic novels as a site of artistic innovation and social critique. Gedgaudaite has taught widely on the topics of Greek literature, language, and culture as well as European cinema and has written on intergenerational transmission of memory in literature and comics. She is a coordinator of the partnership Greek Studies Now and an associate co-editor of the Reviews+ section in the Journal of Greek Media & Culture. Claudia  Gualtieri is Associate Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Milan. She has written on African and Canadian cultures and literatures in English, travel narratives, colonial and postcolonial writing, and cultural theory. Among her recently edited and co-edited books: Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean. Shifting Cultures in Twenty-­First-­Century Italy and Beyond (2018), Utopia in the Present. Cultural Politics and Change (2018), Crisis, Risks, and New Regionalisms in Europe. Emergency Diasporas and Borderlands (with C.  Sandten, R.  Pedretti, H.  Kronshage, 2017), Narrating Flight and Asylum (with M.  Beck, R.  Pedretti, C.  Sandten, 2022), Conversations on Utopia. Cultural and Communication Practices (with M. Bait, 2020), and the Italian translation of Lawrence Grossberg. Studi culturali, il lavoro intellettuale e la pratica politica. Saggi 2015–2021 (with R.  Pedretti, 2022). In From the European South. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities, she edited the Special Focus “Mobility, immobility and encounters along the South-North European Route” (2019) and contributed the essay “Keywords, again: provisional reflections from a situated perspective” to Surviving the Pandemic issue (2020). Claudia is the author of Representations of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial Travel Writing (2002). At present she works on questions of migration and resistance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture, borders and borderscapes, historical and cultural memory, cultural performances by new Italians, and the role of the public intellectual in contemporary Europe. She teaches at the University of Milan and has written extensively on migration, imperialism, travel, and multiculturalism. She is the author of Representations of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial Travel Writing (2002) and (co) editor of numerous volumes of essays. David  Herd  is a poet, critic, and Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent. He is the organizer of the Refugee Tales project, on which he collaborates with Anna Pincus and the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group; the goal of the project is to articulate the call for an end to the UK’s policy of indefinite detention through public sharing of the stories of people who have experienced indefinite detention. Herd’s own poetry has addressed the language of the “hostile environment” in several volumes: All Just (2012), Outwith (2012), Through (2016), and Walk Song (2018). He is also the author of John Ashbery and American Poetry (2000), Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature (2007), editor of Contemporary Olson (2015), and series

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editor of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan). His monograph in-progress, Making Space for the Human: Non-Persons, Persons, Movement in the Postwar World, explores the history of the juridical non-person with particular reference to the period 1948 and 1958. Pico Iyer  was born in Oxford, England, in 1957 and studied at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. Since 1982 he has been a full-time writer, publishing 15 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road, and The Art of Stillness. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, as well as liner and program notes, a screenplay for Miramax, and a libretto. At the same time he has been writing up to 100 articles a year for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. Since 1992 Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan. Eva  Jørholt is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Creative Media Industries at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Communication. Her main field of research is cinema and migration, that is, films made by (former) migrants and/or films addressing issues related to (im)migration, with a particular focus on France and Africa. In 2019, she co-edited (with Mette Hjort) the anthology African Cinema and Human Rights. With regard to Antillean migration, she has previously published the article “Unearthing BUMIDOM: the state-organized migration of French Caribbeans to mainland France (1963–1982), as portrayed in recent audiovisual productions” (Modern & Contemporary France, 30 (3), 2022). Since 2021, editor of Studies in World Cinema: A Critical Journal. Bhanu  Kapil  has written three books of poetry, including How to Wash a Heart (2020), which was awarded the T.S. Elliot Prize in 2020. Guillaume  le Blanc  is Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the Denis Diderot University in Paris. He is the author of over twenty books, including La Fin de l’hospitalité (2017, with Fabienne Brugère) and Vaincre nos peurs, tendre la main (2019). Frauke Matthes  is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research focuses on contemporary German-language literature, particularly by authors of non-German origins; transnational and world literature; and masculinities in literature. Her publications include: Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990–2006 (2011); Ethical Approaches in Contemporary GermanLanguage Literature and Culture (2013, coedited with Emily Jeremiah); Emine Sevgi Özdamar at 70 (Oxford German Studies special issue, 2016, coedited with Lizzie Stewart); and Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria

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Today (2021, coedited with Dora Osborne, Katya Krylova, and Myrto Aspioti). Her latest monograph, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust with an Early Career Fellowship, is New Masculinities in Contemporary German Literature: From “Native” to Transnational (2023). Ailbhe McDaid  is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of English and Digital Humanities at the University College Cork, Ireland, working on the Ports, Past and Present Project. She held an Irish Research Council (IRC) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at in the School of English at University College Cork (UCC) from 2018–2021, and was awarded the Busteed Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool in 2017. Ailbhe’s research interests circle around marginal narratives, via migration literature, women’s writing, conflict stories, and the literature of underrepresented populations. Her scholarly work has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals including Humanities, Journal of War and Culture Studies, Irish Studies Review, and New Hibernia Review. She has chapters published and forthcoming in numerous edited collections, including Cambridge History of Irish Poetry; Race in Irish Literature and Culture; Women and the Irish Revolution and Post-Ireland?. Her first book, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017, and her monograph-in-progress, Domestic Disruptions: Women, Literature and Conflict 1912–1923, explores female narratives of Irish conflict in the early twentieth century. Josephine  McDonagh  is George M.  Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she is also the director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and an editor of the journal Modern Philology. She is the author of four books, including Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876 (2021), Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (2003), and DeQuincy’s Disciplines (1994), and a co-editor of three collections of essays, including Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2017). She has written numerous essays on nineteenth-­ century literature. Her current research focuses on human mobility, and she is involved in a number of collaborative projects that bring work on world migrations of the past into conversation with the urgent questions raised by contemporary situations. She also works on the commodity culture of the British colonial world. Ramsey  McGlazer  is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020) and co-editor, with Joshua Branciforte, of Reaction Formations: The Subject of Ethnonationalism (2023). K. Bellamy Mitchell  is a writer from Old Town in Alexandria, Virginia. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, jointly affiliated with the John U.  Nef Committee on Social Thought and the Department of English Language and Literature, where she writes about the poetics and politics of

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apologies and has received fellowships for her scholarship and pedagogy from the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, and the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning. She graduated from Georgetown University where she received honors in poetry and philosophy, the Ora Mary Phelam Poetry Prize, and a fellowship from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. Her poems and essays can be found in Gulf Coast, Prodigal, and Chicago Review. N.  Michelle  Murray  is an associate professor of Spanish and European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests are contemporary Spanish literature, film, and culture. She is the author of Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2018). She is working on a book project about migration, human trafficking, and political economy tentatively entitled Migrant Markets. Argyro Nicolaou  is a Cypriot scholar and filmmaker based in New York City. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University, and has taught film and literature courses at Princeton and Columbia Universities. Her academic writing has been published in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Mediterranean Studies and in numerous edited volumes. Argyro has also written extensively on contemporary art and film for online and print publications including MoMA post and the Boston Art Review. She is currently at work on her first book, which deals with how representations of Mediterranean migration in literature, film, and visual art shatter the myth of Fortress Europe. Argyro’s short films have been screened at festivals in Europe and the US (Black Nights Tallinn—POFF Shorts, Lemesos International Documentary Festival, Los Angeles Greek Film Festival), while she has also curated and participated in film and visual arts programming in New York, Athens, and Cyprus (Buffer Fringe Performing Arts Festival, Gallatin Galleries NYU, space52, The Island Club). In 2018–2019 she worked as a curatorial researcher at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the Department of Media and Performance. Argyro is a member of the European Film Academy, the Directors Guild of Cyprus, and the Visual Artists and Art Theorists Association, and is one of two Artistic Directors for Cyprus Film Days International Film Festival. Ileana Orlich  is Director of Romanian Studies and President’s Professor of Comparative Literature in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. She also directs the Central European Cultural Collaborative and the European Studies Certificate. She is the author of translations from Romanian fiction and Spanish and Russian theater. She wrote stage adaptations in English and French for performances in Romania, France, and the US and her numerous scholarly articles have been published. Her monographs include Subversive Stages: Theater in Pre- and Post-­Communist Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (2017); Myth and Modernity in the Twentieth-Century Romanian Novel (2009); Articulating Gender, Narrating

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the Nation: Allegorical Femininity in Romanian Fiction (2004); Silent Bodies: (Re)Discovering the Women of Romanian Short Fiction (2002). Since 2000, Orlich has served as Hon. Consul General of Romania in Arizona. Caryl Phillips  is a novelist, playwright, essayist, and professor of creative writing at Yale University. His novels include The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), Foreigners (2007), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). His non-fiction volumes are The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), and Colour Me English (2011). He is also the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/ Open Book Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N.  Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence. He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. Maria Roca Lizarazu  is a postdoctoral researcher in Creative Futures at the Moore Institute, University of Galway. Her research specialisms include contemporary German-­Jewish literatures and cultures, including Holocaust memory, as well as (post-)migration, transnationalism, and citizenship in the German-language context. Lizarazu is the author of Renegotiating Postmemory. The Holocaust in Contemporary German-Language Jewish Literature (2020) as well as several additional articles on contemporary German-­language Jewish literatures and cultures and the cultural politics of memory and belonging. She is working on her second monograph which examines how a range of authors from so-called minority backgrounds reimagine belonging and togetherness in postmigrant Germany in the face of increasing diversification on the one hand and ultra-­nationalist backlash on the other. The book examines how these literatures may contribute toward more inclusive and convivial futures by ethically and aesthetically challenging dominant assimilationist, integrationist, and ethno-nationalist paradigms. Maria also has an interest in creative collaborations and methods as a tool for communicating her research beyond academia and for fostering wider social transformation.

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Rita  Sakr  is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Global Literatures in the English Department at Maynooth University, where she has designed and co-ordinates the MA Program Cultures of Migration in the Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies and Philosophy. She is the author of “Anticipating” the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies (Palgrave, 2013) and Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (2012), as well as co-editor of The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (2013) and James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (2011). In 2014, she codirected and co-produced the Research Council-funded documentary film White Flags, on peace-building through memory projects and the arts in postwar Beirut. Recent and forthcoming publications focus on migrant and refugee cultural production (primarily Arab and Kurdish) at the crossroads of bio/ necropolitics, more-­ than-­ human rights, the environmental and medical humanities, and experimental aesthetics of forced displacement. She is at work on a monograph provisionally entitled “Arab (Im)mobilities and Experimental Form.” Anne-Gaëlle  Saliot  is Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Core Faculty of the Arts of the Moving Image Program at Duke University. Her research explores translations and migrations of cultural objects across epochs, and across geographical and linguistic frontiers. Her work encompasses literature, theories of the visual, film studies, and dance. She is the author of a book on the famous “Inconnue de la Seine” (The Drowned Muse, 2015) and the coeditor of the Cahiers de la NRF dedicated to Philippe Forest. Her essays on French cinema and literature have been published in SubStance, French Cultural Studies, Studies in French Cinema, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and several edited collections. Laura Sarnelli  is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a PhD in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy, where she was also granted a master’s degree in Foreign Language Education (2007). She held Visiting Scholar appointments during a four-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz (2011–2012), and the University of California, Santa Barbara (2013–2014). At UC Santa Barbara, Sarnelli teaches Italian language and culture, as well as courses on Italophone literature, translation, women studies, and gender and sexuality in Italy. She has written extensively on postcolonial literatures in English and Italian, Gothic literature, melancholia, migration and the Mediterranean, gender and queer theory, contemporary Caribbean and Italian women writers. She is the author of two books, Il libro dei desideri. Scritture di deriva nella letteratura femminile diasporica in Nord America (2009), and La donna fantasma. Scritture e riscritture del gotico inglese (2013). Her latest articles include: “The Gothic Mediterranean. Haunting Migrations and Critical Melancholia” (Journal of Mediterranean

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Studies 24.2, 2015), and “Women Crossing Borders. Elena Ferrante’s Smarginature Across Media” (California Italian Studies 10.2, 2020). Igiaba Scego  is an Italian author of novels and short stories. Scego was born in Rome in 1974 to a family of Somali origins. Winner of the Mondello Prize, her memoir La mia casa è dove sono (My Home Is Where I am, 2010) explores her and her family’s relationships with Rome and Mogadishu. Translated into English by Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto (2005), her short story “Salsicce” (“Sausages”) was awarded the Eks&Tra prize for migrant writing in 2003. Her novels Oltre Babilonia (2008), Adua (2015), and La linea del colore (2020, awarded the Premio Napoli) have been translated into English: Beyond Babylon (2019) by Aaron Robertson, Adua (2017) by Jamie Richards, and The Color Line (2022) by John Cullen and Gregory Conti. Her work has been central to debates in Italy about migration, colonialism, postcolonialism, racism, and women’s literature. Scego received the International Award Viareggio-­Répaci in 2021. She has edited and co-edited a number of important volumes, including Italiani per vocazione (2005, with works by authors who moved to Italy), Anche Superman era un rifugiato (2018, a collection which underscores connections between refugees over time), Future: il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi (2019, a collection by Black Italian women authors), and Africana (2021, a selection of works from Africa). Roma Negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città (2014, with Rino Bianchi) describes the afterlife of Italy’s colonial history in Rome and its architecture. Her non-fiction has appeared in significant venues such as The Guardian, World Literature Today, Internazionale, and Corriere della Sera. After graduating in “Foreign Literature” at the La Sapienza University in Rome, she obtained her doctorate in pedagogy at Università Roma Tre. Her work as an educator frequently takes her into classrooms, from high schools in Italy to universities, such as Duke University (2022), in the United States. Johan Schimanski  is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo, where he has previously served as Head of Research for the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages. At present he does research on border poetics, migration literature, Arctic discourses, and literary museums. He has led and co-led major research project on border aesthetics, Arctic discourses, Arctic modernities, and author museums, and led a working package in the EU project EUBORDERSCAPES. He has recently led a Nordic workshop series, “Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing: Contemporary Public Migration Narratives in Europe.” In 2021 he stayed at the Universities of Saarland and Luxembourg as Professor of Border Studies at the Centre for Border Studies at the University of the Greater Region; he has previously served as Professor of Cultural Encounters at the University of Eastern Finland. Recent publications include the book chapters “Reading the Future North,” “Migratory Angels: The Political Aesthetics of Border Trauma,” “Can Migration Narratives Change Public Conceptions of Borders?,” “(Un)folding

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European Borders,” “Border Utopias, Border Dystopias,” and “Seasons of Migration to the North: Borders and Images in Migration Narratives Published in Norwegian,” and the co-edited volumes Border Aesthetics (with Stephen F.  Wolfe), Border Images, Border Narratives (with Jopi Nyman) and Transforming Author Museums (with Ulrike Spring and Thea Aarbakke). A volume of his essays on border poetics translated into German, Grenzungen: Versuche zu einer Poetik der Grenze, appeared in German translation in 2020 (Turia + Kant). Central elements of a theory of border poetics were first published in the article “Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and a Method” (2006). Corina Stan  is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Duke University. She is the author of The Art of Distances. Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-­Century Literature (2018) and of articles published in Comparative Literature Studies, New German Critique, English Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Modern Language Notes, The European Journal of English Studies, Etudes britanniques, Critical Inquiry, Philosophy and Literature, NOVEL, several collective volumes, as well as public-­oriented venues such as The Point, Aeon, LA Times and Public Books. Between 2017 and 2020, she was co-director of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab at Duke University, funded by a Humanities Unbounded Mellon grant. She is working on a monograph on the European self-understanding in contemporary literature and philosophy, entitled After the West. Philip  Steer  is Associate Professor of English in the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication at Massey University, New Zealand. His research explores the cultural, economic, and environmental aspects of settler colonialism from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a focus on Australia and New Zealand. He is author of Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire (2020), and co-editor with Nathan K. Hensley of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (2019). His essays have also appeared in PMLA, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Victorian Studies. His current project approaches settler writing in the nineteenth century as a form of environmental knowledge and asks what this archive might tell us about the cultural dimensions of present-day environmental problems. His chapter was supported by the Marsden Fund Council (grant no. MFP-19-MAU-022), managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi. Charlotte  Sussman  is Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of three books—Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus (2020); Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1660–1789 (2011); and Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (2000)—and the co-editor, with Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, of Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780–1830 (2008). Her articles on eighteenth-century literature, colonialism, migration,

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and slavery have appeared in PMLA, Modern Philology, ELH, Cultural Critique, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and other journals and edited collections. Between 2017 and 2020, she was co-director of the Representing Migration Humanities Lab at Duke University, funded by a Humanities Unbounded Mellon grant. She is leading a collaborative digital humanities project entitled Remembering the Middle Passage, which seeks to visualize oceanic mortality in the transatlantic slave trade. Johannes von Moltke  is Professor of German and Professor of Film, Media, and Television at the University of Michigan, where he works on film, media, critical theory, and cultural history. His research and teaching interests in the representation of refuge and migration in recent European cinema originated in a year-long stay at the Institute for Advanced Study (FRIAS) at the AlbertLudwigs-Universität in Freiburg. The recipient of numerous fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, among others, he served as president of the German Studies Association from 2020 to 2022. von Moltke is the author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (2015) and No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (2005). He has co-edited several anthologies of essays by, and about, Siegfried Kracauer, which have been published both in the United States and in Germany. His articles have appeared in New German Critique, October, Screen, Cultural Critique among others. Together with Gerd Gemünden, he edits the Camden House book series “German Film and the Visual” and “German Film Classics.” von Moltke has recently turned his attention to the media cultures of the New Right, including an ongoing research project together with Susanne Komfort-Hein at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt on Common Sense, Critique, and Ressentiment in the Age of Populism. Matthew Whittle  is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. His teaching and research concentrates on migration, the climate emergency, species extinction, and the legacies of colonialism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. Matthew’s first monograph, Post-War British Literature and the “End of Empire” (Palgrave Macmillan) explores literary responses to Britain’s imperial decline. This work identifies a post-war moment when colonial servants and settler writers viewed decolonization within its global contexts (alongside the aftermath of the Second World War, the rise of America, and immigration to Britain from colonized regions) while also offering a critical understanding of Britain’s colonial history. His co-authored book Global Literature and the Environment: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Routledge, forthcoming 2023) explores how cultural texts interrogate dominant discourses of the Anthropocene and enable us to envision global futures. Concentrating on literature from the Global South and Indigenous nations, the book addresses how the climate emergency is a consequence of colonial domination and examines how the despoiling and exploitation of land, water,

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air, and life are underpinned by a history of capitalist-­ imperial relations. Matthew has also published articles on dystopian depictions of climate-­induced migration, post-war Caribbean literature, post-colonial African nationalism, and representations of trophy hunting in contemporary art. These have appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Moving Worlds among others. He is a member of the Postcolonial Studies Association, the University of Kent’s Centre for the Global Study of Empire, and the Kent Animal Humanities Network, and his research has informed contributions to The Independent, Newsweek, Wire, and The Conversation. Briony Wickes  is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Sustainability in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century British literature, with expertise in the environmental humanities, settlement and migration, histories of colonialism, critical animal studies, and theories of the novel. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Literature and History, Victorian Literature and Culture, International Migrations in the Victorian Era, and Cambridge Critical Concepts. She is completing a monograph, Animal Materials: Ecology, Settlement, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, which examines the histories and narratives of settler colonialism and the trade of animal-based products (including fur, feathers, blubber, meat, and wool). Wickes also holds a position of International Research Associate on the five-year study “European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture (VICTEUR),” based at University College Dublin and in collaboration with Science Foundation Ireland INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics and the British Library. Working with the British Library’s digitized nineteenth-century collection, consisting of nearly 36,000 books, the VICTEUR project combines data analytics and literary criticism to investigate representations of migrants and by migrants in Victorian fiction. Funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, the project also uses big data to examine the impact of European migration on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long term. David  A.  P.  Womble  is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he specializes in the literature, sciences, and political philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is completing a book on migration and mass behavior in British fiction and political theory, portions of which have appeared in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction and English Literary History. While finishing that book, he is at work on a set of projects related to the Energy Humanities, including a second monograph, Enlightenment Energy, on the rise of thermodynamics across Britain and Europe, and a four-volume collection, co-edited with Lynn Voskuil, British Energy Systems, 1790–1914: Science, Industry, Culture.

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Saskia  Ziolkowski  is Andrew W.  Mellon Assistant Professor of Romance Studies and core faculty of Jewish Studies at Duke University. She works on Italian literature from a comparative perspective. Her first book Kafka’s Italian Progeny (2020) explores Franz Kafka’s sometimes surprising connections with key Italian writers, such as Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino, Paola Capriolo, Elena Ferrante, Natalia Ginzburg, Tommaso Landolfi, Giorgio Manganelli, Elsa Morante, Cesare Pavese, Lalla Romano, Italo Svevo, and Antonio Tabucchi. It was awarded the Best Book in Literary Studies Prize by the American Association of Italian Studies (2020). Her other publications analyze Italian literature in terms of world literature (Elena Ferrante, G.E. Lessing, William Shakespeare), Austrian authors (Joseph Roth, Musil, and Bernhard), Trieste (Magris, Slataper, Quarantotti Gambini), Jewishness (Giorgio Bassani, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante), migration (Carlo Greppi, Helena Janeczek, Igiaba Scego), and modernism (Kafka, Rilke, Woolf). She holds a PhD from Columbia University in Comparative Literature & Society. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Austria and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in The Comparatist, Comparative Literature Studies, Forum Italicum, Italian Culture, Journal of Austrian Studies, and Modern Language Quarterly, among other journals. She has reviewed translations for Public Books and Reading in Translation. She is working on a book about the Jewishness of Italian literature.

List of Figures

Fig. 12.1 The Elisabeth family (here Lucien Jean-Baptiste and Firmine Richard) taking a rest during their skiing vacation in the Alps. Frame grab from La Première étoile (2009) 172 Figs. 12.2 Paul and Sali Aloka (Lucien Jean-Baptiste and Aïssa Maïga) and and 12.3 their baby, Benjamin. Frame grabs from Il a déjà tes yeux (2016) 173 Fig. 12.4 Colorless Patrick and his daughter Alice are greeted at the airport in Fort-­de-­France by Zamba (Edouard Montoute), who is all dressed up for the carnival. Frame grab from 30° couleur178 Fig. 12.5 A new model French family? An adoption bureau poster showcasing Benjamin and his parents in Il a déjà tes yeux (2020). Frame grab 180 Fig. 13.1 The Census at Bethlehem, Pieter Bruegel the Elder 189 Fig. 13.2 The Wedding Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder 190 Fig. 13.3 The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn, William Hogarth 191 Fig. 30.1 “The Italian Quadrille,” illus. John Leech, Punch 36 (1859): 226 423 Fig. 30.2 “Foreign Enlistment,” illus. John Leech, Punch, 27 (1854): 262 424 Fig. 30.3 “Faust and the Organ Grinders,” illus. John Leech, Punch, 46 (1863): 53 425 Fig. 30.4 Fosco and the Organ Grinder, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White [1860], American edition, illus. John McLenan (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865) 427 Fig. 31.1 From Kate Evans’s Threads (2017), London: Verso, pp. 6–7 436 Fig. 31.2 Top panel: Asia Minor refugee camp at the Temple of Hephaestus, reproduced here from archival photograph. Bottom panel: Protest against the arrival of refugees. The banners read “Burn the Turkish spawns” and “Gallows.” From Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou’s Small Lives, Mytilene: Enati Diastasi, p. 27 442 Fig. 31.3 From Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou’s Small Lives, Mytilene: Enati Diastasi, p. 32 444 Fig. 31.4 From Nina Sabnani’s “Know Directions Home?” in This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, New Delhi: Yoda Press, pp. 101–102 446

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Fig. 31.5 From M Hasan and Sukanya Ghosh’s “Making of a Poet,” in This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, New Delhi: Yoda Press, p. 141 448 Fig. 31.6 From Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, p. 16 450 Fig. 33.1 Drone shots render abstract views in Human Flow (dir. Ai Wei Wei, 2017)480 Fig. 33.2 The filmmaker and his daughter captured in the mirror in Midnight Traveler (dir. Hassan Fazili, 2019) 484 Fig. 33.3 A life raft carrying refugees on the reflective Mediterranean, as seen from the deck of a passing cruise ship in Havarie (dir. Philip Scheffner, 2017) 486 Fig. 33.4 Images of refugees projected onto the titular Paul Nkamani in When Paul Came Over the Sea (dir. Jakob Preuss, 2017) 489

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Corina Stan and Charlotte Sussman

Introduction What happens when we shift our attention from the progress of history to the movement of actual people? This is the question we set ourselves in 2017, when we, along with several colleagues at Duke University, convened a humanities lab entitled Representing Migration. The purpose of a humanities lab is to investigate a phenomenon in artistic and literary life from a variety of perspectives. Our lab was invested in studying human migration not only as a demographic, political, or sociological issue but also as a matter of representation; in other words, we explored how literary, cinematic, artistic, and musical representations both reflect and shape the experience of people on the move—as well as the lives of the more settled people they encounter. Furthermore, we considered how familiar representational forms—the novel, say, or the comic book—might look different when understood in the context of the history of human migration. The lab’s inaugural date is not accidental. The European “refugee crisis” of 2015–2016 focused a good deal of public and political attention on the plight of people from Syria and other war-torn countries attempting to enter Europe. In the United States, where we are situated, the same years saw a rise in fearmongering about people crossing the southern border, centered on so-called caravans of migrants from Central America, the legality of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) act, and other issues. The lab was founded in response to this agitation, as we struggled to understand why the alarmist,

C. Stan (*) • C. Sussman Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_1

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presentist rhetoric surrounding migration seemed such a mismatch for the understanding of human mobility we had absorbed as students of literary and cultural history. An important impetus for our work was a desire to interrogate the prevailing discourse that characterized the events of the 2010s as “unprecedented.” Collectively, we explored what previous episodes of large-scale human migration, both voluntary and involuntary, might teach us about the current situation. In this way, we hoped to contextualize the politics of shock and disapprobation that often greets migrants in our own day and to uncover the oft-occluded narratives that link present-day migration to the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental change. While the Representing Migration lab ended in 2020, our desire to explore these questions did not; they are the impetus for this handbook. The materials collected here ask what difference attention to literature can make to our understanding of human mobility, and, conversely, what an understanding of migration can bring to the study of literature. We define literature quite broadly, and include chapters about film, drama, photography, and graphic novels, as well as interviews with poets, novelists, curators, memoirists, and activists. Our goal throughout is to approach the representation of migration from a variety of perspectives—analyzing not only the way literary and artistic techniques can humanize stories of migration but also how rhetorical and narrative forms have been deployed to dehumanize and vilify people who move. We include throughout the voices of writers who have themselves experienced migration, through interviews, conversations, and reflections. They suggest it is crucial that we engage with art not only to understand how the settled cultures of nation states see migrants but also how migrants see settlement and national identity. This handbook directs those questions to the issue of European migration. Throughout, we address “Europe” as both a place and an idea. But what does it mean to approach the venerable, world-transformative, and yet unwieldy topic of Europe in this way? On a map, it looks like a peninsula attached to its eastern neighbor—“a small promontory on the continent of Asia,” as Paul Valéry put it. Many thinkers took this geography for symbolic destiny: they saw Europe as headed west, at the avant-garde of humanity’s progress from a primitive state toward “peace, freedom, and well-being for all” (Derrida 1992; Glendinning 2021). “The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History,” Hegel famously proclaimed, convinced he was explaining God’s plan for humankind. He was inspired by Kant, who had sketched a “cosmopolitan society” through expansion of the social contract model on an international scale, which laid the conceptual foundation of (what would become) the European Union.1 These thinkers narrated the progress of human history through reference to versions of the state or an 1  In the early days of the war in Ukraine, a war that raises questions about the borders of Europe, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy addressed the European Union in the terms central to its philosophical project: freedom and democracy.

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abstract notion of universal Man, and their ideas were instrumental in justifying the civilizing mission of European imperialism. A different view of Europe emerges, the chapters in this volume show, if one turns away from these abstractions and considers the concrete and specific movements of people. This reorientation is important because the empirical history of Europe is “a history of people on the move.” As Peter Gatrell puts it in The Unsettling of Europe, “it is a history of migrants, many of them Europeans, escaping from violence or being relocated against their will” (2019, 3), but also of people in search of economic and social opportunities. The chapters that follow point out that every major event of the past century and a half—colonialism, the Spanish Civil War, two world wars, movements of independence and decolonization in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and other territories, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Communism in the Eastern bloc, the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of Yugoslavia, the enlargement of the European Union, Brexit, many conflicts outside the continent—was connected to migration. Attention to this phenomenon unsettles Europe both as a place with clearly demarcated borders and as a philosophical project rooted in universal humanism. In fact, many migrants’ lived experience suggests that Europe’s promise of democracy and freedom for all remains elusive. In this volume, analyses of the intersection of migration and literature bring forth an understanding of Europe as address, in both of the senses captured by this word, that is, a noun and a verb: address as a place of residence—a home— that one used to call, or one would like to call, one’s own; and an address, that is, an act of speaking to someone as part of a lived relationship. Dear Europe, I have never written to absentees—to those who do not care about being called upon, to those who do not care about ever answering. I have constructed myself, politically, at a time when your name was synonymous with many hopes.2

So begins “As an Ideal, You Are Yet to Come into Being. Letter to Europe,” by French philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi. Expounding on Susan Sontag’s attachment to the imaginative weight carried by Europe—“the diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture”—Kisukidi exposes the utopia of a borderless cosmopolitism of the mind as a myth and denounces “civilization” as the belief “in the inferiority of that which is different from oneself.” She distinguishes between the Europe of her daily experience, which externalizes its border control in an effort to keep away refugees, and the Europe she knows as a philosopher, fond of the ideal of a “democracy to come.” In her words: 2   The French original text appeared in Nouvel Obs, https://www.nouvelobs.com/ debat/20190512.OBS12808/lettre-a-l-europe-de-nadia-yala-kisukidi-en-tant-qu-ideal-tu-es-­ encore-a-naitre.html. The English translation by Callisto McNulty is online at https://www.versopolis.com/times/opinion/821/as-an-ideal-you-are-yet-to-come-into-being.

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there are two Europes. The Europe that you embody, in which I live and that fails to fulfill, pushing away its walls, its borders towards Africa. And a second Europe, which is constantly being postponed, only existing on the hypothetical mode of what is yet to come. In between them, what remains: the intimate ferocity of the political fight.

Published in May 2019, on the occasion of the European elections, Kisukidi’s apostrophe echoes a poem written the year before by the Swedish writer Athena Farrokhzad, “Europe, Where Have You Misplaced Love? An Open Letter from a Poet.” Read aloud at the 2018 festival Days of Wine and Song, it rewrites Alan Ginsburg’s 1956 poem “America” for the European situation in the 2010s, replacing Ginsburg’s McCarthy-era “million Trotskyites” with today’s “millions of guest workers.” Farrokhzad borrows Ginsburg’s mode of furious but committed interrogation, creatively relocating some of his lines, to ask, for example, “Europe, why are your libraries full of tears?”3 The apostrophic structure, which envisages Europe as a living entity as well as a political construct, allows the poet to address Europe in intimate, interpersonal terms, the way one might hold accountable a friend one cares about: “Europe, you cannot separate la mission civilisatrice from Christianity, Christianity from feudalism, feudalism from industrialism, industrialism from capitalism, capitalism from barbarism.” Like many of the texts about migration and postmigration life analyzed in this handbook, the poem’s most powerful moments describe the way the “insane demands” of the politics of integration in European countries infiltrate even the most mundane moments of domestic life. With Kisukidi’s “intimate ferocity,” Farrokhzad uses her imagination to picture the elusive “what is yet to come” as “one day” when the simple pleasure of maternal community will be free from the abrasions of European anti-migrant prejudice: Europe, one day I’ll eat pastries with Shora and Miriam and Hanna. No one will raise an eyebrow when we enter the finest bakery. No one will address us in English. We will stir our cups with exquisite little spoons. We will let our daughters order everything they see. No one will look away when we ask for high chairs. No one will sigh when the children spill.

We cite Kisukudi and Farrokhzad at length because their work exemplifies the relationship we think many of the contributions to this handbook construct with “Europe”: critical, interrogative, looking toward both the past and the future, acknowledging the value of European literary and philosophical traditions while also questioning their dominance and exclusivity. Importantly, however, these chapters, like Farrokhzad’s poem, engage with Europe not only 3  This question is not only a transposition of Ginsburg’s question within a European frame of reference but also an echo of Walter Benjamin’s provocative thought in Theses on the Philosophy of History that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

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as a construct of policies or a history of conquest but also as an affective force, shaping both the imaginative and the emotional life of writers from all parts of the globe. In The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), Lisa Lowe excavates the history of the kind of entanglement Farrokhzad depicts between psychological states, everyday activities, and global movements of people. Lowe “unsettles the meaning of intimacy as the privileged sign of liberal interiority or domesticity, by situating this more familiar meaning in relation to the global processes and colonial connections that are the conditions of its production” (2015, 18). For her, “the intimacies of four continents become a way to discuss the coeval processes of settler colonialism, slavery, and imported colonial labor as the conditions for British and American national formations of liberty, liberal personhood, society and government at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries” (2015, 20–21). While most of the chapters in this handbook focus on human migration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many analyze the degree to which human mobility is inflected by the history of European colonialism, from the displacements of indigenous people across the globe beginning in the fifteenth century, to the violence of transatlantic slavery, to the vast outward migration of Europeans to settler colonies, to upheavals of decolonization in the modern era. One thing attention to literature allows us to see in relation to this history is the role that Europe as an economic-­political entity, as an idea, and as an affective force played, and continues to play, beyond its geographical borders. For this reason, several of the chapters included here analyze the literature of former European settler colonies, such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, uncovering the way the legacies of colonial expansion, stretching back to the seventeenth century, have shaped responses to migration in the present day. Others explore the cultural ramifications of decolonization, including the movement of formerly colonized subjects to the metropolitan spaces of France, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Some scholars, including P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods, trace that global intimacy into the present, charting a causal chain of events between the forced mobility that fueled European colonial expansion and the violence that characterizes current migration into Europe, particularly through the Mediterranean. They remind us that Italian merchants funded Portuguese raids across the Mediterranean Sea and down the Atlantic coast of Africa. The wealth built by Italians from the early slave trade in Africans bankrolled the subsequent “voyages of discovery” that further established Portuguese and Spanish dominance of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. The Europeans were soon purchasing cotton and other commodities in India to exchange for slaves in Africa to mine gold in the Americas, swiftly yoking four continents into one global accumulation regime premised on racial violence. (2014, 64)

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They conclude that “any discussion of policing [migration] today that does not ground itself in the historical context of slavery and colonialism is imagining a world that is not, rather than dealing with the world as it is” (Saucier and Woods 2014, 60). For Lowe, Saucier, Woods, Kisukidi, Farrokhzad, and many other scholars and artists discussed in this volume, the so-called migration crises of today, with their attendant coercion and prejudice, are not merely analogous to the upheavals of the past, but their direct results. Many of the chapters concerned with these connections also engage with “migrations of memory” and unavoidable questions of temporality and space for which Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory provides an apt framework. Moving away from the unidirectional understanding of history as progress that drove the imperial enterprise, Rothberg mobilizes Walter Benjamin’s model of the constellation and the rhetoric of (re)turning embodied in Aimé Césaire’s image of the boomerang of Western violence. The “time of historical influence,” he writes, “consists not only of mechanical, transitive causality but also of repetitions, reverse shocks, and returns of the repressed. But ‘turns’ also take place in space and suggest the need to consider the spatial coimplications of colonialism, racism, and genocide” (2009, 107). Rothberg identifies a model of multidirectional memory in W. E. B. Du Bois’s work, more specifically around the Black American intellectual’s trip to the Warsaw ghetto in 1949, which made him reassess his 1900 statement that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (1996, 625). In light of the Holocaust, Du Bois wrote, slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States no longer appeared to him as “a separate and unique” experience. The “race problem… cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men” (1952). This revision of Du Bois’s understanding of “double consciousness,” which originally described the peculiar condition of Black experience in America, has been immensely generative for a host of writers invested in illuminating not only the archives of the Black diaspora in relation to European history but more generally the fraught predicament of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” and the possibilities of establishing points of contact between seemingly unrelated histories of human mobility.4 At the most general level, Du Bois’s formulation “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” captures the fundamental reality of the migrant, and her capacity to see sociopolitical and cultural realities from a double perspective. These themes and concerns were outlined in our call for proposals for this handbook, which emphasized the crucial relationship between migration and 4  We have in mind figures like Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Paul Gilroy, James Baldwin, Caryl Phillips, and others. For double consciousness as a diasporic condition, see Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), particularly Chaps. 4 and 5, on Du Bois and Richard Wright, respectively. Michael Rothberg (2009) describes Phillips’s work as marked by a nonappropriative hospitality to the stories of others.

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literature broadly defined, our understanding of Europe as a construct with historically shifting and contested borders, along with the hierarchies and obfuscations resulting from the use of “Europe” as a metonymy that often designates a West (Western Europe) oblivious to its various “others,” both internal (Eastern and Central Europe) and external (former colonies and dependent territories). Our contributors considered questions such as the following: How has literature shaped the space of migration and mobility? What are the uses of narrative in surviving the experience of migration? How does literature enable or prevent memory and forgetting in migration? How are genres and forms themselves mobile and how do they enable new forms of intertextuality? What forms of mediation does migration demand, encourage, or generate, both human and technological (translation, collaboration, technologies of mediation such as print, cell phones, messaging apps)? How has migration shifted the borders of the literary, and how has it been a driver of formal innovation in literary history and cinema? How can literature and film help us escape replicating the categories associated with the current “crisis” and help us imagine human mobility differently? When have cinema and literature shifted paradigms of understanding migration? The contributions included here are by no means an encyclopedic or exhaustive treatment of European migration in literature and culture. Rather, they are a mosaic of interventions that often trace a historical arc or offer a broad context for the cases discussed. In the spirit of attunement to the realities on the ground that characterized the Representing Migration Lab, which hosted numerous speakers, activists, and writers, the handbook includes conversations with writers, artists, and curators, and more generally a variety of approaches and methodologies meant to challenge the hegemony of academic discourse and keep the conversation open to anyone interested in the topic of migration. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the Lab and of the work on this volume has been the collaborative nature of both projects. The Lab started as a reading group, from a desire to create an archive of resources on migration. While selecting materials for discussion, especially historically distant texts, it dawned on us that we were “choosing” our contemporaries and letting their insights guide us in making sense of what was happening around us. Among the participating students, a few had volunteered in refugee camps in Europe and the Middle East, and some of our guests were activists involved in social justice projects, as well as writers with first-hand experiences of migration. While working on the handbook with our intellectually generous and accomplished contributing editors—Derek Duncan, David Herd, Josephine McDonagh, and Rita Sakr—the liveliness of exchange was a crucial ingredient in generating ideas, including in the form of virtual workshops where the contributors to each section shared and discussed earlier versions of the chapters. The generative force of community and collaboration is also a fundamental aspect of artifacts about migration, be they novels, memoirs, poems, plays, or other objects: their authors often rely on a community—whether improvised, imagined, or longed for—of fellow artists, thinkers, or writers in exile. While some chapters

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here highlight the concrete aspects of an interdependence that makes the generation and transmission of art possible—translation, correspondence, the exchange of technology—others unpack the workings of a less-physical community: the web of intertextual references in the artifacts, often in the spirit of a solidarity with other migrants across time and space, that helps (re)affirm the solidity of a shared world. We have grouped our contributors’ responses to the provocations in our proposal into six sections, each curated and introduced by a contributing editor. We begin with a section on Figurations of the Migrant. The chapters in this section explore the historical roots of hostile representations of people on the move, as well as how migrants themselves reconfigure those images to more accurately portray their own experiences and the world around them. Honing in on the world created by negative preconceptions of migrants, the chapters in the next section, Hostile Environments, examine how literature, painting, and drama reveal what it’s like to live under such conditions, and the power of stories to resist and repair them. The following section, Migration as Palimpsest, adds to the problem of politicized space the question of time, particularly the capacity of memory to make connections between different episodes in the history of migration in Europe. The chapters in this section explore the difficulties and consequences of fitting individual life experiences into the frameworks bequeathed us by previous events. Migration and Language, the next section, brings us to a concern central to the intersection of migration and literature: the crossing and mingling of language traditions in depictions of human movement. The chapters in this section take up not only the crucial issue of translation but also the ways in which language use changes and evolves under the pressure of human movement. The chapters in the fifth section, Migration and Media, ask what kinds of media have carried stories of migration in different time periods—from print, to film, to art, to digital forms—and how those stories have been shaped by the opportunities and limitations of those mediums. The chapters in the final section, Migration and Experimentation, look more closely at how the effort to depict the experience of migration as a physical, emotional, and intellectual reality has altered and expanded conventional forms of representation, including the novel and the lyric poem. This grouping into sections favors one way the chapters fall into thematic constellations, or a particular angle from which the mosaic of contributions can be viewed. If we shift the metaphor and think of the collection as a kaleidoscope, other shared concerns that link chapters across sections become visible with a simple turn. For example, questions of identity and kinship, home, and imagined (or disowned) communities, nationalism, and other forms of tribalism are central to the conversation between Caryl Phillips and Pico Iyer, and to the chapters contributed by David Womble, Frauke Matthes, and Corina Stan. Borders are examined by Kristina Gedgaudaite, Johan Schimanski, and Nasia Anam. The chapters by Luka Arsenjuk, Maria Roca Lizarazu, and Briony Wickes address labor migration, including street musicians in the nineteenth

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century. The pressing issue of climate migration is analyzed by Philip Steer with reference to Australia and New Zealand, Matthew Whittle in relation to British and Norwegian novels, and Ailbhe McDaid, who focuses on Irish experimental poetry. A number of chapters, including those by Eva Jørholt, Michelle Murray, and Argyro Nicolaou, make a case for a vibrant, heterogenous, postmigration culture throughout Europe, from Norway to Cyprus, and from Britain to Spain. Charlotte Sussman, Laura Sarnelli, Claudia Gualtieri, Fabienne Brugère, and Guillaume le Blanc in conversation with Anne-Gaëlle Saliot reflect movingly on memorialization of lives lost to migration and on curatorial practices. Affect, poetic imaginaries, and questions of aesthetic agency bring together the contributions of Behrouz Boochani and Janet Galbraith, Ileana Orlich, Boris Dralyuk, Derek Duncan, Ramsey McGlazer, and Claudia Breger. Johannes von Moltke, Katja Garloff, and Rachel Gregory Fox’s contributions discuss aesthetic responses to the “refugee crisis” of 2015–2016, while Ileana Chirila’s engagement with Romani literature, Claire Gallien’s chapter on an Arab-­ language writer who lives in Finland, Bellamy Mitchell’s interview of the poet Bhanu Kapil, and Saskia Ziolkowski’s interview of the novelist Igiaba Scego challenge the premises of national literatures and raise important questions pertinent to debates in the field of world literature. We hope that, taken as a whole, the materials collected here demonstrate the tremendous ranges of reasons that motivate people to migrate to, from, and among European countries, and the inadequacy of any single definition of “migrant.” (Many chapters propose a sustained reflection on the histories, merits, and limitations of terms like “migrant” and its cognates, “race,” “refugee,” and others.) We believe that from the perspective of the materials in this handbook, the history of Europe looks less like the history of white people residing continuously in ancient, homogenous nation states, and more like the history of a sedentarist ideology that has often been used to obscure the presence of nonwhite and/or mobile peoples on the continent for millennia. We know that readers will come to these literary, critical, and personal accounts of migration from a range of perspectives. For some, the reality of migration will be very close, something they’ve experienced in their own lifetimes, or learned of from parents and other relatives. For others, it may be more distant, the topic of a news story, or perhaps only encountered in a novel or film. For some, it will have been an experience of violence and loss, for others one of liberation and opportunity; for most, it will have been some mixture of those things. As we put this handbook together, we found ourselves grappling with our own relationships to migration. Corina is a native of Romania, who, after living in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, now makes her home in the United States with her family. Charlotte is a native of the United States, but the granddaughter of a Jewish emigrant to this country, a woman who was born in what was then Russia but is now Ukraine. While we are both scholars of European literature, one of us lived most of her life in Europe, while the other has only spent brief periods of research or tourism there. This difference in perspective—one of us an insider, one an outsider—has proved

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enormously useful in coediting this volume. In the course of putting together the handbook, however, we also discovered an unexpected intersection of our own family histories: both our great-grandfathers migrated from Transylvania to Ohio at the beginning of the twentieth century—Charlotte’s to Akron and Corina’s to Cleveland. Although there is no record of it, they may have known each other, given the smallness of the Transylvanian community in the state. Corina’s great-grandfather, George Tăutu (Magyarized Tóth), returned to Transylvania after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, however, while Albert Greenfield, Charlotte’s great-grandfather, moved to Maryland and raised a family there. Although these stories are gentle and uneventful compared to many migration experiences then and now, the near crossing of our great-grandfathers’ paths brought home to us some of the complexities involved in discussing European migration: the vagaries of national affiliation (Corina’s family is Romanian, whereas Charlotte has always thought of her family as Hungarian even though they come from the same place); the motivations for mobility (economic opportunity, religious freedom, family ties); the push and pull of language traditions (Corina’s great-grandfather returned to his homeland only when he could speak Romanian again there, whereas Charlotte’s brought his daughter up to speak American English); and, perhaps most importantly, the challenge to the idea that migration only moves in one direction. We expect that many readers will bring similarly complex personal histories to the materials collected here and that their relationships to migration will affect the way they approach and digest them. We hope, however, that they will allow this handbook to alter their preconceptions of migration and migrants and open up new ways of thinking about people on the move. The materials collected here do that work in different ways: many view mass experience through the lens of an individual life, sometimes the writer’s own, humanizing an experience we often view through statistics or policy; others use language or images to make us see seemingly familiar things in new ways; still others provoke uncomfortable emotional responses that can transform our understanding of things we thought we knew, if we are willing to sit with them long enough. In short, we hope that this book about migration will challenge not only the idea that physical settlement is the norm but also the complacency of settled ideas about what kinds of people are migrants and what their motivations are and have been. The attempt to capture the experience of migration is always frustrating to some degree. Migration is, by definition, a temporary condition, a passing state, while most forms of art and literature are meant to be lasting. In a world where human mobility is policed and vilified, people on the move must often cover the traces of their passage, burning documents, lying about their movements, throwing their cell phones into the sea to destroy evidence of their routes. Governmental bodies tasked with documenting migration usually do so in aggregate, assembling statistics of border crossings, of asylum requests, of deaths by violence and neglect. The bodies of those who die in transit often

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remain unidentified and thus unmourned. Under these conditions, individual stories of mobility are easily forgotten or intentionally erased. Yet despite all this, migrants have turned their experiences into literature, into art, into film. The circumstances of their lives strain against the conventional parameters of representation, leading them into linguistic, formal, and visual experiments, many of which we document in this handbook. European migration has shaped literature and culture in ways we have only just begun to understand; the future of migration will also shape the future of art.

Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading. Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1952. The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto. Jewish Life, May, 14–15. ———. 1996. The Oxford W.  E. B.  Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric Sundquist. New  York: Oxford University Press. Gatrell, Peter. 2019. The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent. New York: Basic Books. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London & New York: Verso. Glendinning, Simon. 2021. Europe: A Philosophical History. Vol. 2. London: Routledge. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Saucier, P.  Khalil, and Tryon P.  Woods. 2014. Ex Aqua: The Mediterranean Basin, Africans on the Move, and the Politics of Policing. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 61 (141): 55–75.

PART I

Figurations of the Migrant

CHAPTER 2

Figurations of the Migrant: Introduction Charlotte Sussman

The chapters in this section pose two complementary questions: How are migrants represented in literature and culture? And how do migrants themselves transform conventional forms of figuration by representing their own experiences? In other words, the chapters consider the migrant both as the object of figuration and as its agent. These questions beg a third: Who is considered a migrant, and how does that identity, born of mobility, intersect with, or challenge, other identities related to nation, class, ethnicity, or culture? The chapters share a conviction that being a migrant has more to do with being figured or imagined as one through the conventional narratives of transit, than it does with any essential quality. As Thomas Nail has written, The figure of the migrant… is like a social persona that bears many masks (the nomad, barbarian, etc.), depending on the relative social conditions of expulsion… a figure is a social vector or tendency. Insofar as specific individuals take up a trajectory, they are figured by it. But it is also possible for individuals to leave this vector and take up a different social position, since it does not define their essence. (Nail 2015, 16)

A wealth of such personas has been produced by the long history of human mobility, many of which have exerted an outsized influence over the cultural imagination, including the exile, the immigrant, the emigrant, the vagrant, and the nomad. These individual identities share the cultural stage with equally resonant figures of human mobility in aggregate, such as the wave, the horde, the caravan, and the invasion. Any particular figuration of the migrant thus asks C. Sussman (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_2

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us to understand the relationship between the part and the whole, the individual and group. But they also require that we consider the relationship between these preexisting figures and the lives of actual people. As Edward Said famously wrote, “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” (Said 1984). The chapters in this section also share an interest in how migration changes the figuration of temporality, whether of the past, the present, or the future. Chapters by Philip Steer and Corina Stan consider the way past narratives of human movement, particularly sinister stories of invasion, surface in present-­ day contexts, revealing the degree to which the history of colonialism still affects both European nations and their former settler colonies. In contrast, chapters by Ileana Chirila and Argyro Nicolaou reveal how centering representations wrought by migrants themselves challenges those inherited narratives, whether they concern the primacy of national literary traditions or the primacy of national languages, offering us a more complex understanding of identity and art in the present. Meanwhile, chapters by Johan Schimanski and Luka Arsenjuk comment on the way attention to migration and the voices of migrants affects our understanding of the future, analyzing how some representations of migration can foreclose a utopian future, while others call for it in a prophetic voice. These analyses of figuration challenge us to think about Europe differently by demonstrating the porousness between Europe and the larger world. Steer asks us to consider current representations of migration in Australia and New Zealand in relation to the great movements of people out of Europe at the height of nineteenth-century colonialism. Stan takes us to the endpoint of that era—the end of French colonialism and the repatriation of French citizens from Algeria and Indochina in the mid-twentieth century—revealing the impact this movement of people had on French ideas of race. Arsenjuk looks at the importance of the uneven development of different areas of Europe, while Schimanski and Nicolaou reveal the way border spaces create pockets of cultural diversity within seemingly homogenous communities. Chirila’s analysis, meanwhile, argues against the conventional association of literary traditions with nations or regions. The chapters in this section move from the roots of figurations of migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to contemporary representations of migrant experience by migrants themselves. The first two chapters explore the often-racist figuration of migrants as an aggregate—particularly as a inchoate mass threatening to invade more sedentary communities. Philip Steer’s “Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies” argues that contemporary novels depicting climate migration to Australia and New Zealand by Rohan Wilson and Kirsten McDougall are beholden to an ideological opposition between settled and mobile labor, inflected by anti-Asian racism, that arose in the context of nineteenth-century European colonialism. The limitations of imagining climate migration through the enduring trope of the invasion narrative are revealed by the chapter’s concluding analysis of a short story by Maori author

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Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), which demonstrates how different climate migration might look when understood through an indigenous paradigm. Corina Stan’s chapter, “Invasion and Replacement Fantasies: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints and the French Far Right,” continues the section’s exploration of a strain of racist thought that imagines migrants as invaders, focusing on the changing perceptions of race in France since the mid-twentieth century. Taking a close look at the 1973 novel that invented “replacement theory,” a powerful political idea whose violent ramifications continue in the present, the chapter pays particular attention to the rhetorical strategies that figure migrants as a threatening non-human mass. It shows that the novel’s disavowal of colonialism and racist representation of labor migration to France are components of a political myth that shaped—and continues to shape—the anti-immigration stance of the far right. The remaining four chapters in this section explore what happens to conventional narrative and visual forms when they are refracted through perspectives sympathetic to migration. Luka Arsenjuk’s chapter, “Between History and the Discord of Time: The Figure of the Migrant in A Seventh Man and Transit,” while continuing to interrogate the category of labor migration, turns from representations of colonialism and its aftermath to figurations of migration within Europe: A Seventh Man (1975), a photo-essay by John Berger and Jean Mohr that engages with the movement of labor from southern to northern Europe; and the film Transit (2018), a loose adaptation by the German director Christian Petzold of Anna Seghers’ 1941 novel of the same name, depicting refugees attempting to escape Nazi-occupied Europe through the French port of Marseilles. Arsenjuk argues that while a mid-twentieth-­ century work like A Seventh Man could explain the sense that migrants lived in an earlier historical era even as they penetrated the spaces of modernity by invoking the Marxist theory of uneven development, the twenty-first-century film, Transit, can no longer posit any shared temporal horizon for migrants as they move through a temporally discordant world in which past and present chaotically coexist. The challenge of figuring the migrant, Arsenjuk proposes, is to reinvent “a shared sense of temporal existence and prefigure future forms of emancipation.” With Johan Schimanski’s chapter, “A Border Poetics of Migration: Five Mappings of Migration Literature in Norwegian and Swedish,” we turn to representations of mobility by migrants themselves. The chapter explores the way that literary representations of borders and border crossing by migrant writers in Norwegian and Swedish challenge conventional ideas of borders as discrete terrestrial demarcations. Through the eyes of migrant writers, we see how air borders can expand into carceral zones, or the way that symbolic borders can transect life in a new country. Schimanski, too, directs us to the way that figurations of the migrant can generate calls for a new future, analyzing Athena Farrokhzad’s powerful poem “Letter to Europe” (2018), which is made up of a series of prophetic images of a world released from the restrictive and often dehumanizing historical paradigms of migration.

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Refiguring borders from the perspective of migrants is also the topic of Argyro Nicolaou’s chapter, “A Strangely Familiar Place: Displacement’s Cinematic Reframing of the EU’s Easternmost Border,” which centers on the nonfiction film Evaporating Borders (2014) by Iva Radivojevic. The crucial division here is the border that has bisected the island of Cyprus since 1974, dividing the Turkish-held north from the Greek-held south. Cyprus has been part of the European Union since 2004, but because the Turkish-led government isn’t recognized by the Union, the border between the two parts of the island constitutes the EU’s easternmost border. Radivojevic’s film juxtaposes her own experience of emigrating to Cyprus after the break-up of Yugoslavia to the experience of present-day asylum seekers from Syria. Nicolaou argues that the process of displacement describes the film’s formal and narrative principles as well as its content. Pursuing an epistemology of displacement allows the film to subvert “fixed and hegemonic narratives of place and identity,” revealing Cyprus to be a multicultural space, rather than a bicultural one, and in this diversity to be a “microcosm of the European Union itself.” Ileana Chirila’s chapter, “Migration, Romani Writers, and the Question of National Literatures,” also engages the epistemology and aesthetic of displacement to rethink conventional figurations of human mobility. Romani writers, Chirila explains, are members of a cultural group whose mobility is not defined by the more conventional rubrics of exile, emigration, or asylum-seeking. The chapter focuses on three such writers—Anina Ciuciu, Oksana Marafioti, and Mariella Mehr—who work in three different languages. Grouping these writers in relation to their identification as Roma challenges the idea that all literature can be sorted into national traditions. Instead, Chirila argues, such writers offer us an “opportunity to reimagine literature for a post-national world.”

Bibliography Farrokhzad, Athena. 2018. Europe. In Öppet brev till Europa / Odprto pismo Evropi / Open Letter to Europe / Offener Brief an Europa, 32–45. Ljubljana: Beletrina. Nail, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Said, Edward. 1984. Reflections on Exile. Granta. https://granta.com/reflectionson-exile/.

CHAPTER 3

Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies: From Systematic Colonization to the Climate Refugee Philip Steer

No sooner did the colonies gain the right of self-government than the work of exclusion was begun. —William Pember Reeves (State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902))

Among the impacts of climate change under debate in the settler polities of Australia and New Zealand, one prominent area of shared concern centers on the consequences of rising sea levels for low-lying territories in Asia and the Pacific. The “cosmopolitan gaze” through which this issue is typically viewed, as Carol Farbotko points out, tends to focus on two contrasting yet related spectacles of disaster (2010, 58). One is the image of sinking Pacific Islands, which offers a “readily observable” synecdoche for the complex and distributed effects that the Anthropocene is wreaking on the earth system, “scalable upwards to aid understanding of the urgency of climate change at a global scale” (Farbotko 2010, 53). More politically fraught, however, are vivid anticipations of large-scale movements of the populations displaced by those rising waters. “Much like in the drowning Pacific Islands, the connection between climate change and displacement in Asia is impossible to deny,” assert Denise

P. Steer (*) Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_3

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Robbins and John R.  Wennersten, who point out that Asia has the greatest number of people likely to be affected by climate change (2017, 190). Just as there is a “mainstream” consensus that wholesale population relocation is the “inevitable future of Pacific states” (Oh 2020, 597), so commentators look to the inevitable displacement of “highly populated, low-lying coastal regions … [with] high vulnerability to tropical cyclones” in Asia (Biermann and Boas 2008, 10). As discussions in Australia and New Zealand focus on the national impacts of receiving these migrants, the rise of climate fiction has enabled the novel to be at the forefront of conceptualizing such futures. Recent Australian and New Zealand fictions of climate-driven population displacement highlight that this issue occupies an uncertain legal terrain between asylum and immigration. Such narratives often center on the climate refugee as a figure of sympathy, as vulnerable to state power as they are to the weather. The title of Tulia Thompson’s short story, “Serf,” refers to a “massive population” of immigrants in a future New Zealand who are employed in service roles for the “landowning elites”: “diverse Indigenous peoples displaced by climate change, who didn’t own anything and mostly lived in … overpopulated, derelict and squalid buildings” (2020, 193). Similarly, the title of Clare Moleta’s Unsheltered describes a designated category of internally displaced persons in a future Australia who are the victims of what is simply called “Weather” (2021, 52). Such representations accord with Andrew Baldwin’s observation that the climate refugee offers “a means of rendering climate change less an abstract hyperobject and more one that bears directly on human experience” (2017, 3). The increasing prominence of the category of climate refugee has been accompanied by criticism that it oversimplifies the decisions involved in migration (Baldwin 2014) and diminishes the agency of affected populations (Munoz 2021). Moreover, despite its rhetorical power, the concept of the climate refugee doesn’t work legally or diplomatically, because environmental factors are not recognized as a basis for asylum under the Refugee Convention of 1951 (Crossen 2020, 77). As a result, climate displacement is currently approached in Australia and New Zealand as a matter of immigration policy, allowing each nation “to say who can come into our country and who can’t, and set the terms of any visa programme” (Crossen 2020, 72). Indeed, reviewers have readily identified that the novels under discussion in this chapter—Australian author Rohan Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times (2019) and New Zealand writer Kirsten McDougall’s She’s a Killer (2021)—explicitly frame their accounts of climate refugees in relation to current debates about immigration. Emily Paull (2019) argues that it is “clear from the outset” that the migrant detention center at the heart of Daughter of Bad Times offers a parallel to “the current situation” of Australian immigration policy, while She’s a Killer has been described as “close-to-the-bone” in its extrapolation of current practices of granting New Zealand citizenship to wealthy immigrants (Dass 2021). Yet while these novels appear to have very contemporary political horizons, they are also merely the latest participants in a much longer history of settler writing and legislating about European, Asian, and Pacific migration.

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This chapter argues that even as the novel provides one of the key cultural mechanisms for imagining climate-induced migration to Australia and New Zealand, its future-looking narratives remain tethered to formal approaches that were developed as means of comprehending migration to the settler colonies in the nineteenth century. In the analogous context of the United States, Bryan Yazell argues that climate fiction “formally reproduce[s] old types and figures from more familiar cases of migratory life that loom large in the American social imaginary” (2020, 179). Similarly, portrayals of the climate refugee by settler writers in Australia and New Zealand draw on thinking about European “migratory life” first articulated by the early theorist of settler colonization Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who proposed two contrasting relations between capital and labor: a “social” model that prioritized a settled and homogeneous population of nation builders, and an “investment” model that asserted the financial value of mobile non-white laborers. That tension is crystallized in the late nineteenth-century genre of the invasion novel, which gave virulent expression to anti-Asian immigration sentiment in works such as Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895). The reemergence of the thematic and formal concerns of the invasion novel in response to climate-driven migration in novels such as Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times and McDougall’s She’s a Killer, suggests that settler culture remains beholden to those foundational conceptual dilemmas of European migration in the nineteenth century. Those enduring limitations are further highlighted through the contrast with a short story by the Māori author, Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), “How Much Courage” (2014), which demonstrates how differently climate migration might be conceived of in Indigenous terms.

1. Settler ideas about population mobility in Australia and New Zealand have been defined in terms of labor and capital at least since Edward Gibbon Wakefield began to advocate for a “systematic” approach to colonization in the late 1820s. First expressed at length in A Letter from Sydney: The Principal Town of Australasia (1829)—purportedly written by a settler in Australia, but actually penned by Wakefield while incarcerated in Newgate Prison—this “new template for colonization within the British Empire” (Ballantyne 2014, 29) was couched as a thoroughgoing revision of economic orthodoxy. This ambition is reflected in Karl Marx’s description of Wakefield in Volume 1 of Capital (1867), as “[t]he most notable political economist of that period” (1976, 830), whose “great merit” was the unintentional discovery “that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (1976, 932). Although he claimed to offer a unified theory of settler colonialism, there are two distinct kinds of “social relation” in play in Wakefield’s writings—reflecting the contrasting priorities of colonists and investors—which play out in a striking opposition between nation-based and transnational

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conceptions of capital’s relation to labor. On the one hand, the interests of European settlers are addressed with a “social” model where a stable and settled presence on the land of a known workforce is proposed as the basis of an enduring social order. On the other hand, the priorities of European capitalists are met with an “investment” perspective that proposes that the flow of capital across borders is of greater importance than the identity of those whose labor it mobilizes. At the same time, both those economic framings rendered Indigenous populations completely invisible (Birchall 2022). The “social” understanding of the value and purpose of migrant labor outlined by Wakefield is aligned with the vision of a racially homogeneous nationality. This aspect of his writings proposes that settler colonization will be an English endeavor, where the primary challenge is the cultural task of becoming a “people,” as opposed to “merely a colony of low-bred English” (1968b, 150). The challenge faced by colonial societies, in this analysis, is that the ready availability of “waste” land encourages settlers to constantly seek new terrain to exploit, rather than remaining in place and putting down roots, so that they are reduced to the “barbarous condition” of a nomadic population, “scattered over a territory immense in proportion to their numbers” (1968b, 119). Wakefield’s enthusiasm for settled labor reaches back, via the developmental theories of eighteenth-century conjectural history, to one of the foundational economic justifications for European imperial expansion, John Locke’s account of the origins of private property in the Second Treatise on Government (1689). As numerous scholars have pointed out, the “traces are especially abundant” in this work of Locke’s awareness of and involvement in British colonizing activities, notably as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina (Armitage 2004, 603), which famously led him to propose that “in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was any where known” (Locke 2003, 121; sec. 49). Locke’s state of nature is defined by common possession of the earth, which is destined by divine law to be transformed into private property through individual labor: As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common… . God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i. e. improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. (2003, 113; sec. 32)

For Locke, the value of the earth is determined solely by its capacity to produce commodities for the material benefit of humanity, and his account helped establish the idea that agricultural production marks the threshold to capitalist modernity. James C. Scott cites Locke as a progenitor of a “narrative of progress and civilization,” centered on the twin developments of sedentarism and agriculture, which has “mesmerized” humanity (2017, 7). Settler colonialism

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in particular gained impetus from the argument that God intended the common for “the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it)” (Locke 2003, 114; sec. 34). The idea of a universal commons that can (and should) only be possessed through “industrious and rational” settled labor permeated the legal and cultural regimes of colonial Australia and New Zealand, most notoriously in the way that a perceived lack of Aboriginal agriculture justified the British treatment of Australia as terra nullius (Banner 2005, 110; Hickford 2011, 40–47). Wakefield’s account of “systematic” colonization traces a long arc directly from the foundational act of primitive accumulation envisaged by Locke to the formation of a national culture. The “migrating habits of the Americans” are presented as a counterexample to successful settlement, precisely because their ongoing mobility has (in Wakefield’s eyes) made it impossible to create the trappings of nationality: “I saw a people without monuments, without history, without local attachments founded on impressions of the past, without any love of birthplace, without patriotism—unless men constantly roaming over immense regions may be called a country” (1968b, 134). By contrast, the imagined settler narrator of Letter from Sydney describes a vision of nationality that might arise in Australia if its English colonists were to remain settled in place: The people will increase rapidly, and will be unable to spread. The proportion between people and territory will be like that of an old country… . Division of labour will follow… . Wealth will bestow leisure; and leisure will bestow knowledge. Wealth, leisure, and knowledge mean civilization… . A nation will be born[.] (1968b, 133)

Such comments usefully indicate the enduring power in the settler colonies of ideas linking national identity with specific kinds of labor and specific kinds of laborer. The “social” understanding of colonization as nation-building exists in Wakefield’s writings in tension with an “investment” model that prioritizes the financial benefits arising from the global mobility of capital and labor. Rather than stressing the settled qualities desired for a nascent colonial society, this strand of thought instead emphasizes the expansive needs of metropolitan investors. As Wakefield summarized in “Outline to a System of Colonization,” a programmatic appendix to the discursive Letter from Sydney, the “whole object” of his colonizing scheme is built upon “rendering the purchase of waste land a very profitable employment of capital” (1968b, 182). Similarly, in a later and more extensive work of political economy, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (1833), Wakefield argued that the “objects of an old society in promoting colonization” were encapsulated in a single principle: “an enlargement of the field for employing capital and labour” (1968a, 508). Such proposals took aim at the orthodoxy of Say’s Law, associated with political economists such as James Mill and David

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Ricardo, which maintained that “any loss, waste or export of capital was to be deplored” (Winch 1963, 389–390). “The English people,” Wakefield argued in response, “have so much capital that they know not what to do with it” (1968a, 367). Rather than holding that a nation is diminished when capital leaves its borders, he instead proposed that the primary value of a settler colony lay in its ability to offer a return on metropolitan investment. Crucially, this did not require the investor to emigrate: “If there were no such obligation, much British capital might be invested in the purchase of colonial land” (1968b, 182). That is, Wakefield’s primary focus in the “investment” version of his argument for settler colonialism is not on the nature or effect of labor in the colony but on the conditions that will enable the transnational flow of capital between the metropole and the colony. One consequence of this “investment” theory of colonization is to disconnect the value of labor from national culture and associated racial hierarchies. This is graphically on display in the postscript to Wakefield’s Letter from Sydney, which offers a serious proposal that the Australian colonies might best meet their “urgent want of laborers” not through migration from Britain but by turning to “those numerous over-peopled countries, by which they are, as it were, surrounded” (1968b, 170). After canvassing the potential of the “islands of the Pacific Ocean,” and the “British dominions in India,” Wakefield turns his focus to China: [T]he Chinese, especially, who, with a population of 300,000,000, feel the pressure of people upon territory more than any other nation whatsoever,—who are greatly disposed to emigrate,—and who are by far the most industrious and skilful of Asiatics—might, not only supply the want of labourers now felt in the British Australasian settlements, but they might, in the course of a century, perhaps, convert the whole of this enormous wilderness into a fruitful garden. (1968b, 170)

This advocacy of Chinese settlement highlights the contrasting ways that these “social” and “investment” models understand the function of migration in relation to the settler colony. Wakefield’s willingness to contemplate a large Chinese population in Australia arises because he approaches the issue of migration at this moment not from the perspective of a racially homogeneous national culture, but from that of migrants’ economic value. Although conceding that that “the people of England [should] have no motive” for supporting a Chinese presence in Australia “according to the laws of nature”—that is, due to their racial bias—he argues that the case appears differently from a commercial point of view: “But would it be no advantage to British manufacturers to enjoy free trade with millions of fellow subjects of Chinese origin, and, through them, perhaps, with hundreds of millions of customers in the celestial empire?” (1968b, 177, original emphasis). What I will argue are enduring tensions in Australia and New Zealand between prioritizing the idea of a white nation sustained by European migration and a desire for cheap and plentiful nonwhite labor were most forcefully articulated by settler writers at the end of the nineteenth century.

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2. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was inconceivable that white settlers in Australia or New Zealand would entertain a proposal to encourage Chinese migration. The belief that European and nonwhite migrants were categorically different, based on the divergent ways their labor was held to contribute to national culture, is encapsulated in the account of colonial immigration legislation offered by the New Zealand historian and liberal politician William Pember Reeves in State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902). Tony Ballantyne argues that Reeves’ “fashion[ing] [of] an image of New Zealand as the embodiment of political enlightenment and social progress” was articulated both through the contrast with “the hierarchical traditions and political inertia of Britain” and “in opposition to Chinese migrants” who were deemed unassimilable (2005, 97). Reeves devotes a chapter to the subject, “The Exclusion of Aliens and Undesirables,” which begins with the tendentious claim that the Australian and New Zealand colonies were unique among the Empire for their lack of “race-fissures” (1902, 2.325). He describes approvingly the emergence of a predominant colonial commitment to the “social” view of migration, its relation to national identity, and an equal and opposite skepticism toward the “investment” perspective espoused by metropolitan commentators: “[T]he Australians … felt with some bitterness that their national life and future were being endangered by the same British trading spirit which … was ready to champion the cause of China when money was to be made by swamping Australia and New Zealand with yellow barbarians” (1902, 2.339). The first significant influx of nonwhite migration had originated from China as a result of gold rushes in Australia in the 1850s and New Zealand in the 1860s, and in later decades labor from the Pacific also became fundamental to key sectors of the Australian economy. What Reeves described euphemistically as “the black spot on their map” (1902, 2.350) centered on Australia’s northern colonies—Queensland in particular—where large plantation farming was highly dependent on the practice of “blackbirding,” which sourced indentured labor from the Pacific Islands. “From 1863 until Federation in 1900,” Victoria Stead summarizes, “some 60,000 men, women and children were transported to the cane fields in north-eastern Australia from what are now the countries of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Kanaky/New Caledonia” (2019, 136). Tracey Banivanua-Mar describes how “the mood of white public opinion towards Islanders in the sugar districts of Queensland ebbed and flowed throughout the nineteenth century,” ranging from “acceptance and a general resentment” to “hysterical upsurges of anger and violence,” in response to changes in Islander “independence, freedom of movement, and visibility” (2007, 85). This late-century context of increasing nationalism and racial antipathy gained forceful legal expression through a

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number of measures—poll taxes, restrictions on ships’ passengers, and language tests—collectively known as the White Australia policy (similarly oppressive measures also existed in New Zealand), and attained its most powerful cultural form in the genre of the invasion novel. The invasion novel emerged in Britain in the 1870s as a means of exploring the nation’s military vulnerability, but in the settler colonies it was soon adapted to express alarm about the cultural consequences of investment-driven immigration. The origins of the genre are commonly traced to George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), a short narrative depicting a future invasion of Britain by Germany that stresses the invaders’ superior organization and technology. Chesney’s novel was republished around the Anglophone world and spurred an “industry of future-war and invasion-scare literature” in many places over the following decades (Melby 2020, 390). Whereas later British invasion novels remained focused on fin de siècle anxieties about imperial Britain’s declining geopolitical strength, settler writers in Australia and New Zealand repurposed the genre into a vehicle for imagining the budding nations’ vulnerability to being swamped by migrants from Asia (Steer 2020, 167–182; Walker 1999, 98–112). As Kenneth Mackay, the author of The Yellow Wave, stated in an interview, “As an Australian, I am anti-Chinese on national grounds” (“Australia’s Danger” 1898, 10). Mackay’s novel is set in Queensland, and, while it ostensibly takes place in 1954, it responds to the present-day shaping of the region’s demography by the labor needs of pastoralism, gold mining, and sugar plantations. At the time it was written, the white settler population in the northern hinterland was “heavily outnumbered” by Asian and Pacific migrants, in addition to the indigenous Aboriginal population, while each port was also the center of a Chinese business community (Macintyre and Scalmer 2013, 215–216). The Yellow Wave views this racialized terrain solely through settler eyes, overlooking the presence of Aboriginal laborers entirely but lighting on a migrant population that is nevertheless invoked only through fleeting glimpses and derogatory epithets. In describing the rural areas, for example, reference is made within the space of a few pages to “an army of Asiatic workmen,” the sight of “a squat-faced, shaggy-haired Kalmuck stockman,” and “ever-recurring camps of dark or yellow-skinned labourers” (2003, 94–95). This lack of individuation in the depiction of Asian immigrants is of a piece with the novel’s restriction of sympathy to the kinds of labor and national culture associated with its white settler characters. The invasion novel articulates these racist views within a narrative structure that pits Wakefield’s “social” and “investment” models of immigration against each other. The genre’s sympathies clearly lie, as Reeves put it a few years later, with the right of “small democracies, with limited capital,” to “exercise some care in selecting those whom they take into partnership, and for whose well-­ being they become responsible” (1902, 364). Such ideas are mobilized in plots that establish “a powerful juxtaposition … between the shining purity of a white Australia and the dirty compromises of a British capitalism” (Walker 1999, 106). The exemplar of white settlement in The Yellow Wave is a rugged frontier farmer,

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Dick Hatten, described by David Walker as a “silent man from the dry interior” who is “the proper embodiment of racial fitness” (1999, 106–107). His resistance to the invasion is strengthened by falling in with a like-minded community of settler pastoralists—“belonging to that class who stand midway between capital and labour” (Mackay 2003, 141)—whose national commitment is reflected in the principles of their “co-operative settlement,” which operates independently of the “interests of capital” as expressed by the “representatives of finance” (2003, 143). The “investment” model of immigration, by contrast, is afforded no such sympathy. The businessman and banker are “stigmatised figures in Australian invasion literature … deficient in both manliness and patriotism” (Walker 1999, 106). Mackay’s narrator and various settler characters castigate the emergence of a “powerful oligarchy, whose plantations covered the North, whose railways shot their snake-like arms far into the interior, and whose cheap alien labour created dividends unknown in the days when a white population existed” (2003, 89). In the logic of the invasion novel, the problem posed by such developments is that they bring into being a population that, despite its labor, does not derive its identity from attachment to the soil. The “votaries of capital” have instead, as the narrator puts it, created a “helot population” (2003, 231). In the terms of this analysis, it is simply impossible to imagine that nonwhite migration might prove commensurate with the idea of a settled national identity based on a shared cultural commitment to the land.

3. Catriona Ross points out that, in Australia, “narratives of Asian invasion … have continued to be written throughout the twentieth century and are still being produced in the present” (2006, 88). Recent settler “cli-fi” that imagines the future arrival of environmental refugees is similarly marked by the interrelated concerns over migration, labor, and transnational capital that animated the colonial-era invasion novel. Rohan Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times constellates Australia with the Maldives, Japan, and the United States through a plot that describes the ruthless attempts of the transnational Cabey-Yasuda Corporation to profit from the labor of displaced migrants: What better pitch than helping the refugees of the world? Who doesn’t want to help refugees, right? The five Australian facilities—Wollongong, Ballina, Port Lincoln, Bunbury, and Eaglehawk—are immigration detention centres, sure, but they’re also manufacturing plants. That means two revenue streams for one facility. And we also clean up our image. We’re not just a corrections company anymore—now, we’re building communities, we’re saving lives. (2019, 30)

By contrast, McDougall’s She’s a Killer foregrounds the economic, social, and political unrest created in New Zealand by an influx of capital-rich migrants that her novel dubs “wealthugees” (2021, 9). As the cynical narrator, Alice, reflects:

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Their stories were all the same. Their countries were flooded, burning or in drought. They ran from civil wars and useless governments, and they all had the money to leave… . I pointed out to one guy that he was lucky. He’d been able to come to New Zealand because his family could offer large amounts of money in return for residency; they could afford a small piece of land on which to build a house… . He slapped my face and yelled at me, saying I didn’t understand what he’d lost. (2021, 9)

Even as both novelists highlight how responses to climate refugees in Australia and New Zealand might be inflected by present-day immigration policies, the ways that they structure their narratives also reveal the ongoing influence of longer colonial histories of policing migration. Literary accounts of the climate refugee in Australian and New Zealand settler fiction reflect the two nations’ divergent histories of immigration policy and debate, while also testifying that those policies have in both nations “required a greater degree of planning and control than was normal in other developed nations” (Jupp 2002, 13). Wilson’s novel centers on the unlikely romance between Yamaan Ali Umair, a climate refugee from the Maldives detained in a so-called Migrant Training Centre in Tasmania, and Rin Braden, the adopted daughter of the CEO of the Cabey-Yasuda Corporation, which operates that detention facility under the auspices of a fictional Australian policy known as MWD: Migrating With Dignity. (The name echoes the “Migration With Dignity” plan propounded by the Kiribati government from 2014 to 2016, which proposed to relocate its entire population to the Fijian island of Vanua Levu.) Wilson’s migration narrative is shaped most directly by Australia’s “Pacific Solution,” a policy framework that since 2013 has allowed all asylum seekers to be indefinitely detained in Regional Processing Centers on Nauru and Papua New Guinea and barred them from resettlement in Australia regardless of whether they are ultimately deemed to be refugees (Akal 2023). McDougall’s She’s a Killer, by contrast, describes the gradual radicalization of its settler protagonist, Alice, as she becomes embroiled in a plot to assassinate an overseas investor who is spearheading a scheme to “buy forests and turn them into private parks for rich people” (2021, 250). This plot reflects the controversial use of immigration policies in New Zealand to proritize highly skilled and wealthy migrants under categories such as “Investor” and “Investor Plus” (Simon-Kumar 2015, 1178). The most prominent example is the 2011 granting of citizenship, under “exceptional circumstances,” to the billionaire Peter Thiel after he had spent less than two weeks in the country, based on his entrepreneurship and philanthropy (Roy 2017; Mavelli 2018). Despite their contrasting class perspectives and policy contexts, both novels are united in depicting large-scale global movements of climate refugees in conjunction with the transnational circulation of capital. These settler fictions of climate refugees are also united in self-consciously asserting continuities with colonial ideologies of, and attitudes toward, European migration. In the case of Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times, the

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detention center at the heart of the novel brings to light Australia’s nineteenth-­ century history of forced convict migration. The Eaglehawk Migrant Training Centre is located in the vicinity of the former Port Arthur penal colony, which the novel describes as the “last address for prisoners transported from England in the nineteenth century” (2019, 311). According to the historian of convict transportation, Robert Hughes, Port Arthur “has always dominated the popular historical imagination in Australia as the emblem of the miseries of transportation, ‘the Hell on earth’” (1987, 400, original emphasis). By contrast, the New Zealand history of migration brought most deliberately to mind in She’s a Killer is the Indigenous dispossession wrought by voluntary British settler colonialism, through the narrator’s involvement in opposing a “wealthugee” scheme to purchase land that had previously been confiscated from Māori: A non-violent protest was being held by iwi [a people group/tribe] in the Wairarapa over … land being sold by the government to overseas investors. A spokesperson called it third-wave colonization and theft. A hı ̄koi [march] was being planned from Cape Rēinga to parliament to remind government of its Te Tiriti obligations. (2021, 109)

The reference to “Te Tiriti,” or the Treaty of Waitangi, recalls the document that formally established British sovereignty over the colony in 1840 and that “remains at the heart of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements today” (Hayward 2015, 131). These colonial references suggest that each settler nation’s response to climate migration will be shaped by their distinctive histories of European immigration. Whereas Rohan Wilson imagines an Australian future in line with the violence of its carceral past, Kirsten McDougall envisages a repetition of the dispossession wrought by settlement. At the same time, however, settler climate refugee narratives also engage, with varying degrees of directness and self-consciousness, with colonial legacies of restricting nonwhite immigration as articulated by the invasion novel. Daughter of Bad Times registers this awareness through its rejection of some of that earlier genre’s most recognizable elements. At a broad level, it inverts the nineteenth-century pattern by focalizing the experience of climate refugees at the mercy of settler sovereignty and leaving settler voices largely silent. More specifically, Wilson’s refugee protagonist directly addresses—and refutes—the paranoia that the invasion novel expressed toward Asian populations: “We lower classes are not a horde of starving, suffering Mongols kept in check by the police apparatus. That’s the fantasy of the wealthy. We don’t seek their overthrow… . We’re too busy trying to feed ourselves” (2019, 201–202). Yet while Daughter of Bad Times presents itself in opposition to the logic of the invasion novel, She’s a Killer actively embraces the genre by figuring the arrival of “wealthugees” as an influx that threatens the nation. The protagonist, Alice, initially offers a voice of liberal resistance to the thinly veiled racism of a friend who expresses just such a view:

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“[O]ur country is being invaded!” “Invaded?” I said. “Is that really what you think?” She narrowed her eyes at me. “What would you call it?” “Immigration by rich people,” I said… . “Whatever! Immigration is organized, thought out. This is an overnight invasion.” (2021, 178–179)

As the novel develops, however, Alice’s radicalization leads her to embrace just such a perspective. The “wealthugee” land scheme proposes to construct luxury bolt holes for its investors, surrounded by an “electrified predator fence,” and Alice comes to see this as a literal declaration of war: “The war didn’t look like wars often looked, but that fence was a declaration. Only a few people would ever be allowed to live in this Eden; the rest of the people were predators” (2021, 358). In presenting a local population facing dispossession from their homeland, and a select few demonstrating sufficient political awareness to resist these encroachments with violence, She’s a Killer replicates the basic plot of the invasion novel to a striking degree. The deepest formal resonance between these recent settler novels and the invasion novels of the nineteenth century occurs through the figuration of climate-­ driven migration as a tension between “social” and “investment” understandings of the relation between capital, labor, and the colonial state. Daughter of Bad Times highlights transnational capital as facilitating global movements of populations valued solely for their ability to labor. The Cabey-­ Yasuda Corporation that operates the Eaglehawk detention center is based in New York and profits from running its prisons in a cut-price manner and putting its detainees to work. It is the corporation rather than the climate that unites the novel’s disparate settings, as it plucks displaced Maldivians from exile in Sri Lanka and relocates them in Australia, aided by the willingness of the UNHCR to “re-categorise the internally displaced as environmental refugees” so that they can be “sent to any countries that will take them” as a captive labor pool (2019, 265). In a grim parody of the Lockean principles of settlement, the newly defined refugees are promised their neocolonial slavery will prove their suitability for citizenship of the settler nation: And we in Australia want to help. We want to help rebuild your lives. Rebuild your homes. Help you generate an income… . We want to teach you how to be independent. We want to teach you work habits that last a lifetime. We want to give you a sense of discipline, a sense of community, and a sense of productivity. (2019, 138–139)

These promises inevitably prove hollow, as Cabey-Yasuda arranges for the Australian government to suspend the resettlement scheme so that it can continue to exploit its captive workforce. The decision prompts rioting at the Eaglehawk detention center, and eventually Rin manages to secure Yamaan’s release—although the lovers are only able to be reunited in Japan, her country

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of birth. The implication is that the settler state remains unwilling to view nonwhite climate refugees (“Maldivians, yes, but Micronesians and Bangladeshis too” [2019, 294]) as commensurate with the national community, regardless of their legal status or their willingness to labor. A more complex tension between “social” and “investment” understandings of capital and labor plays out in She’s a Killer, because the “wealthugee” is portrayed critically both as the embodiment of transnational capital and as an immigrant horde. On the one hand, much of the plot centers on a neocolonial land scheme proposed by a single wealthugee, Philip Alexander, a quintessentially unsettled member of the global elite “who thinks he can buy anything” (2021, 249). His unsuitability as a citizen is evidenced by a transnational trail of human and environmental damage: He also owns mines in Australia that have ruined the land around them and thousands of years of Aboriginal history to boot. Plus two in Congo where children as young as six work… . People will see that they can’t just make problems in other countries, then come and make new ones here. That people can’t ruin the land anymore. (2021, 242)

McDougall presents her settler protagonist, Alice, as gradually coming to the realization that the privileged transnational mobility enabled by capital, as embodied by Philip Alexander, is antithetical to the political and environmental needs of the “country’s future” (2021, 248). On the other hand, much of the antipathy directed toward the “wealthugees” is associated with their sheer numbers, coupled with their racial difference. The nation’s population “had increased by half a million in the last eighteen months,” and there are riots in several cities in response to rising costs caused by their arrival (2021, 10). The negative response of the settler population is summed up by Alice’s mother, whose conservative views are ostensibly dismissed by the younger characters yet are endorsed by their own acts of resistance: This situation has created an even wider gap between the haves and the have-­ nots… . All these Saudis and Asians and Italians and god knows who else have arrived overnight… . This is too many people for our country far too quickly. These are grave problems. (2021, 216)

Even as the novel seeks to focus its critique on the particular privilege and threat posed by the “wealthugee,” it also treats them as representative of a more generalized population group of nonwhite climate refugees. “They’re immigrants,” as one character observes, “Even if they’re rich ones” (2021, 187). Put in the terms of the current argument, what is presented as a critique of an “investment” model of immigration, skeptical of the antisocial priorities of transnational capital, proves to be founded upon a “social” model of immigration that remains haunted by the fear of being swamped by foreign hordes.

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4. Focusing exclusively on settler writing risks implying that the legacy of colonization, and the questions of capital and labor that accompanied it, ensures that imaginative responses to climate-driven migration must always be overdetermined by racialized tropes of invasion. A short story by the Māori writer Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu) suggests alternative possibilities grounded in the persistence of Indigenous knowledge and practices. “How Much Courage” is set in Ahipara, a small town on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand, at an indeterminate point in the future when the nation is facing an influx of boats fleeing the “parched cities across the Tasman” (2014, 236). While the story avoids discussing migration in economic terms, it forcefully invokes the nationalist defensiveness associated with the “social” understanding of migrant labor’s value by describing a military response to what the narrator terms an “invasion” (2014, 236). The violent repulse of the migrants’ vessels is justified officially because of their sheer numbers, their apparent cultural difference, and because they carry an unnamed infection that renders people stricken by grief— and unable to carry out their usual duties on behalf of the state: They would totally take over, one of the militiamen was saying. There are a shitload more of them than us. And they’re different from us, another said. Even their accents. They’re so fucked up you’d never understand a word. I don’t know, Marama said cautiously. Are they really that different? Yes, Allie said. They’re all infected. I heard you get it just seeing their faces. (2014, 229)

Fran is part of the citizen militia that operates a gun emplacement tasked with destroying any boats before they land, and on the night in question her teenage daughter, Euchie, meets her friends and some members of the militia at the beach, and is thus on the spot when one succeeds in evading the military cordon. At one level, the epidemic of grief brought by the invaders can be seen as a symbol of climate trauma—the nearing flotilla is “a lot of sadness on the way” (2014, 228)—that the settler nation hopes to keep at bay by strengthening its borders. At another level, however, the symptoms of grief experienced (and, at first, hidden) by Euchie and her friends even prior to the boat’s arrival signal the possibility of a different kind of relationality to the migrants, one that predates the colonial state and now surges up once more through fissures in its edifices of power. Even though settler sovereignty is evidenced by the way the gun emplacement has been constructed over the indigenous remains of “old pa fortifications” (2014, 228), when Fran leaves her post in the gun emplacement to meet her daughter on the beach, their tears reveal the persistence of Māori tikanga, or customary values and practices:

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[A] wail broke from her, and the sound brought forth Euchie’s own keening. Their voices wove a song above the beach, soaring and falling, an echo of the karanga that sang ashore the first boats, centuries before. The new arrivals began to drop over the side of their craft into the shallows. Their sobbing carried on the breeze, a terrible chattering grief, scorched and dry. Ghosts of their parched cities across the Tasman. A sunburnt continent, abandoned. (2014, 236)

A karanga is a ceremonial call that marks the beginning of a pōwhiri, a formal ceremony of welcome to visitors. In suggesting that climate refugees might be viewed not as invaders to be repelled but as visitors deserving of welcome, “How Much Courage” asks from where such a different political imaginary might be derived within the settler state. Faced with the centuries-old logics of settler capitalism that configure migrants in terms of labor and capital, Low’s story suggests that much older Indigenous understandings of people and place might be commensurate to the challenges of migration in the Anthropocene.

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Biermann, Frank, and Ingrid Boas. 2008. Protecting Climate Refugees: The Case for a Global Protocol. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 50 (6): 8–17. https://doi.org/10.3200/ENVT.50.6.8-­17. Birchall, Matthew. 2022. Mobilizing Stadial Theory: Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Colonial Vision. Global Intellectual History, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 23801883.2022.2074508. Crossen, Teall. 2020. The Climate Dispossessed: Justice for the Pacific in Aotearoa? Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Dass, Kiran. 2021. Book of the Week: She’s on Fire. Newsroom. Accessed 21 December 2022. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/book-­of-­the-­week-­shes-­on-­fire. Farbotko, Carol. 2010. Wishful Sinking: Disappearing Islands, Climate Refugees and Cosmopolitan Experimentation. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51 (1): 47–60. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-­8373.2010.001413.x. Hayward, Janine. 2015. The Constitution. In New Zealand Government and Politics, ed. Janine Hayward, 131–140. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Hickford, Mark. 2011. Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Robert. 1987. The Fatal Shore. New York: Knopf. Jupp, James. 2002. From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration. New York: Cambridge University Press. Locke, John. 2003. Two Treatises of Government: And a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press. Low, Nic. 2014. How Much Courage. In Arms Race & Other Stories, 219–236. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Macintyre, Stuart, and Sean Scalmer. 2013. Colonial States and Civil Society. In The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, 189–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackay, Kenneth. 2003. The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia, ed. Andrew Enstice and Janeen Webb. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, ed. Ernest Mandel and trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. Mavelli, Luca. 2018. Citizenship for Sale and the Neoliberal Political Economy of Belonging. International Studies Quarterly 62 (3): 482–493. https://doi. org/10.1093/isq/sqy004. McDougall, Kirsten. 2021. She’s a Killer. Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press. Melby, Christian K. 2020. Empire and Nation in British Future-War and Invasion-Scare Fiction, 1871–1914. Historical Journal 63 (2): 389–410. Moleta, Claire. 2021. Unsheltered. Cammeray: Scribner. Munoz, Sarah M. 2021. Environmental Mobility in a Polarized World: Questioning the Pertinence of the “Climate Refugee” Label for Pacific Islanders. Journal of International Migration and Integration 22 (4): 1271–1284. https://doi. org/10.1007/s12134-­020-­00799-­6. Oh, Rebecca. 2020. Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish. Modern Fiction Studies 66 (4): 597–619. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2020.0044.

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Paull, Emily. 2019. Rohan Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times Presents a Disturbing View of the Future. AU Review. Accessed 4 May 2022. https://www.theaureview.com/ books/book-­review-­rohan-­wilsons-­daughter-­of-­bad-­times-­presents-­a-­disturbing-­ view-­of-­the-­future/. Reeves, William Pember. 1902. State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. London: Richards. Robbins, Denise, and John R. Wennersten. 2017. Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-first Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ross, Catriona. 2006. Prolonged Symptoms of Cultural Anxiety: The Persistence of Narratives of Asian Invasion Within Multicultural Australia. JASAL 5: 86–99. https:// openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/10168/10066. Roy, Eleanor Ainge. 2017. New Zealand Gave Peter Thiel Citizenship after He Spent Just 12 Days There. The Guardian, June 29. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/new-­z ealand-­g ave-­p eter-­t hiel-­ citizenship-­after-­spending-­just-­12-­days-­there. Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press. Simon-Kumar, Rachel. 2015. Neoliberalism and the New Race Politics of Migration Policy: Changing Profiles of the Desirable Migrant in New Zealand. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41 (7): 1172–1191. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1369183X.2014.936838. Stead, Victoria. 2019. Money Trees, Development Dreams and Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Pasifika Horticultural Labour. In Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia, ed. Jon Altman and Victoria Stead, 133–157. Acton: Australian National University Press. Steer, Philip. 2020. Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Tulia. 2020. Serf. In Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology, ed. Paul Mountfort and Rosslyn Prosser, 190–205. Auckland: Steam Press. Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. 1968a. England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations. In The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ed. M.F. Lloyd Prichard, 313–636. Glasgow: Collins. ———. 1968b. A Letter from Sydney: The Principal Town of Australasia. In The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ed. M.F.  Lloyd Prichard, 93–185. Glasgow: Collins. Walker, David. 1999. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Wilson, Rohan. 2019. Daughter of Bad Times. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Winch, Donald N. 1963. Classical Economics and the Case for Colonization. Economica 30 (120): 387–399. https://doi.org/10.2307/2550802. Yazell, Bryan. 2020. A Sociology of Failure: Migration and Narrative Method in US Climate Fiction. Configurations 28 (2): 155–180. https://doi.org/10.1353/ con.2020.0009.

CHAPTER 4

Invasion and Replacement Fantasies: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints and the French Far Right Corina Stan

Carpet-like, the great migration was beginning to unroll. Not the first time, either, if we pore over history. Many a civilization, victim of the selfsame fate, sits tucked in our museums, under glass, neatly labeled. But man seldom profits from the lessons of his past.—Jean Raspail (The Camp of the Saints, 2861)

In Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), one million Indians board hundreds of ships and invade Europe through France.2 Encouraged by their arrival, the immigrants who already reside there revolt against their white masters. A few days later, the West has been “conquered.” Renaud Camus, founder of the In-nocence party,3 transformed this fictional scenario into the Great Replacement theory, which was eagerly adopted in European and

1  References are to the English translation by Norman Shapiro, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1975. 2  I am grateful to Toril Moi, Michael Hardt, and Fredric Jameson for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. 3  Camus’s spelling of the name is intended to highlight his party’s stance against hurt or damage (nocence) to France’s ecology, which is as much about its people and their customs, as it is about their “natural” environment, the French territory. The party was founded on October 24, 2002. See https://www.in-nocence.org/index.php.

C. Stan (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_4

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American far-right circles.4 Raspail, Camus, and others with similar beliefs anxiously bemoan “a demographic crisis across Europe,” where “our peoples are becoming a minority in their own countries” due to “declining birth rates, mass immigration and the sharp increase in Islamic parallel societies.”5 According to them, the solution is “Remigration,” measures to reverse migratory flows to Europe. Eric Zemmour, leader of the Reconquête Party and author of Le Suicide français (The French Suicide, 2014), explicitly invoked elements of the Great Replacement theory on the 2021–2022 campaign trail: “The French people are being replaced by another civilization. This wounds me, this destroys me. I come before the French people to say, let’s together stop this evolution.”6 In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015), 2022 is the year when France elects a Muslim president and Europe is on its way to becoming integrated into Eurabia, losing its cultural identity through conversion to Islam. The absence of any Arab or, indeed, Muslim characters in Houellebecq’s novel was duly noted by some of his critics, but this did not prevent the book from hitting the best-seller list, just as Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints had in 2011 after it was publicly recommended by the then-leader of the French far right Marine le Pen. The popularity of these two novels, Raspail’s and Houellebecq’s, suggests that scenarios of invasion and replacement have a powerful hold on the French imagination. Indeed, in The Return of Decadence (2022), Pierre-André Taguieff shows that the fear of invasion and the specter of the “Great Replacement” keep resurfacing in the French social imaginary, amalgamating into an explanation for the perceived decline of France. At the time The Camp of the Saints was published in 1973, the far right felt resentment and frustration after the defeat of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1945, the loss of Indochina (1954) and of Algeria after a brutal war of independence (1954–1962). Many of the future members of the New Right, including the founder of the National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen, were supporters of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), an armed group who conducted a “scorched earth” policy against the Algerian fighters and their French supporters; the defeat of the OAS meant their continued marginalization. As Christopher Flood and Hugo Frey attest, “[f]rom the time of the Evian accords of 1962 until the FN [National Front] began to make electoral headway some twenty years later, the extreme right remained impotent and embittered on the 4  The Great Replacement: Towards a New Society was also the title of the manifesto published by the Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant before killing 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. For an essay on the work of Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, which memorializes the victims, see McDaid in this volume. 5  Identitarianism is a pan-European far-right political ideology originating in France as Les Identitaires (2003), formulated by journalist and political philosopher Alain de Benoist, historian Dominique Venner (co-founders of Europe Action), journalist and writer Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, and others. 6  “The French Elections and the Online Far-Right Narratives on Immigration and Islam,” report of the Hope not Hate organization, April 2022, https://hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2022/04/french-report-2022-04-v1-1.pdf.

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edge of political life, […] unable to retaliate effectively against the claims of leftists, third-worldists, multiculturalists and liberal humanitarians who demanded moral and material recognition of the exploitative and oppressive aspects of the colonial era” (Flood and Frey 2003, 400). Founded by JeanMarie le Pen in 1972, the Front National received only 1% of the electoral vote in the 1973 national elections. At the tail end of the “glorious thirty” years of postwar reconstruction and modernization, the far right blamed the changing economic climate and rising unemployment rates on immigration from former colonies. As the party gained electoral ground, Raspail’s novel garnered attention, in spite of an initial damning review in Le Figaro. It was hailed as “visionary” by far-right fringe publications like Minute and Rivarol, “prophetic” (Benoist-­ Méchin, Clavel), and “historical” relative to the future (“the implacable historian of our future,” Jean Cau). Others read it as a novel about the “death” of the West (Pauwels) or its “final tragedy” (Dutourd), the novel offering “less entertainment than a warning” (Maulnier) and “probably, the most adequate expression of what will be the last Judgment” (Déon) (Moura 1988, 116). The novel was reprinted eight times, and by 1985 it was clearly a success. The National Front saw its usefulness and gave the author a forum in its flagship journal, Identité (Flood and Frey 2003, 404). Praised in 2015–2016 as a visionary who anticipated the “refugee crisis,” Raspail was credited by Marine le Pen for having offered a prescient dramatization of today’s “migratory submersion” and by Steve Bannon for having shown the failure of political “elites” to defend the “underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West.”7 Describing The Camp of the Saints as a “grandiloquent, often verbose and violently racist 325-page dystopia,” Cécile Alduy aptly notes that “[t]o trace the novel’s popular trajectory over the past half-century is, in a sense, to trace the rightward political shift in France—and much of Europe and the United States—and to watch the trivialization of hostile rhetoric against immigrants and other ‘cultures’” (Alduy 2017). In this chapter, I show that The Camp of the Saints has been instrumental in forging a political myth about migration that the far right has embraced wholeheartedly and used to justify its anti-immigration stance. By “myth” I do not mean, as in everyday use, something to be discredited because of its untruthfulness or illogicality; rather, following political scientist Christopher Flood, something arising “from people’s need for faith and vivid objects of the imagination in order to commit themselves to great collective causes potentially involving personal sacrifice” (Sorel, in Flood 2013, 88). In this sense, he proposes situating political myth at the intersection of sacred myth and ideology (Flood 2002, 2013). While ideology works through argument, sacred myth contributes its discursive form (narrative), content (origins, including historical), cultural status (sacred truth), and cognitive, affective, and social functions 7  The daughter of Jean-Marie le Pen, and president of the National Rally from 2011 to 2021, Marine le Pen said that she had read the novel at 18 and that it had had a huge impact on her.

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in the communities in which it operates (symbolizing and cementing the community, validating its social segmentation and hierarchy, evoking powerful emotional responses such as fear). Flood argues that political myth is amenable to fictional representation, but the reception of The Camp of the Saints suggests a two-way road: Raspail tells a narrative of invasion through migratory apocalypse, borrowing the authority of the Bible to predict a scary future. The novel invites readers to see themselves as a community by invoking a racial hierarchy, the preservation of which is crucial if they are to survive. The scenario is all the more plausible since Raspail, who built his credentials as a visionary of apocalypse while exploring the remnants of forgotten civilizations, was awarded numerous prestigious literary prizes.8 The Camp of the Saints (1975) is a “vivid object of the imagination,” the very stuff of myth—used by the far right. For a nonadherent, the novel’s unapologetic racism is most jarring in the dehumanizing description of the refugees who invade Europe and the nonwhite immigrants who already live there; they are represented as an undifferentiated mass driven by blind instincts. I will show that this dehumanizing figuration—or, borrowing Achille Mbembe’s words, this “lack of figuration” of the other as human—is symptomatic of a social imaginary defined by a nativist perspective typical of the invasion novel, here authorized by the biblical scenario of the Apocalypse (part one), a revisionist account of the colonial past and its aftermath (part two), and an oversimplification of the migration landscape in France (part three). These themes are anchored in the specific ideological terrain of the French far right, and they also correspond to key strands of European radical right ideology: nativism, racism, and anti-immigration (see Eger and Valdez 2015).9 Since the elaboration of a nativist myth involves a selection of events, reading myth critically will require restoring what is obscured, glossed over, or willfully ignored: here, the involvement of colonized 8  Before 1973, he was known to the French-reading public for travelogs like Land of Fire  – Alaska (1952), Inca Lands and Peoples (1955), Hong Kong, A Reprieve for China (1963, with Aliette Raspail), Let’s Shake the Coconut Tree (2 vols., 1966, 1970), and a handful of novels and novellas. Then one morning in 1972, at home on the Mediterranean coast, he had a vision that spelled out the prospect of his own civilization’s disappearance: “They were there! A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multitudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West” (2017, 313). This vision became The Camp of the Saints, a novel that crystallized his obsession with lost civilizations, as his later work testifies. His 1981 novel I, Antoine de Tounens, King of Patagonia was awarded the Académie Française Prize, Who Will Remember the People… (1986) received the Chateaubriand Prize, Sire earned him the Great Prize of the Novel from the City of Paris, and Seven Riders Left the City at Dusk through the Western Gate, Which Was No Longer Guarded (1993) was awarded the Prince Pierre de Monaco prize. All these prestigious literary prizes consolidated his cultural capital on the French literary scene. 9  In French, “l’extrême droite” (extreme right) refers to the far right, as opposed to the progressive Left or “l’extrême gauche” (represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise). “Republicanism” (to which the far right has been perennially hostile) refers to the modern republicanism that emerged in the late Enlightenment in France, a body of thought central to the history of the five republics beginning in 1848 (see Berenson et al. 2011; Buettner 2016, 327–328).

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people in the epos of French imperialism, and of immigrant laborers in the “glorious” postwar reconstruction and modernization of France. The novel’s tortuous account of the end of the West places under erasure the complex landscape of immigration to France by disavowing colonialism, while acknowledging that “the Third World immigrants” have long been crucial to the economic survival of the West. This admission, however, leads Raspail not to the vision of a society respectful of all its members, but to apartheid as a salutary scenario in the second half of the twenty-first century: 30 million people might have to practice, he thought, a French communitarianism [un communautarisme français] in order to pass on the values, culture, and religion no longer shared by the majority. The attention received by Raspail’s novel and by the “great replacement” theory both in France and abroad suggests that the French far right is no longer “an unacknowledged, embarrassing case of French cultural exceptionalism,” as Christopher Flood wrote in 2005 (2005, 234). Nationalist fantasies have a powerful hold on many Europeans today (in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and other countries), and many revolve around political myths that fuel hostility to immigration. A critical reading of Raspail’s novel shows just how such myths are born.

The End of the West Through Migratory Apocalypse: The Camp of the Saints as Invasion Novel And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison, and will go forth and deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and will gather them together for the battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up over the breadth of the earth and encompassed the camp of the saints, and the beloved city.—Revelation 20:7–9 (Epigraph, The Camp of the Saints)

As the title and epigraph suggest, The Camp of the Saints is underwritten by a religious millenarian scenario in which Satan leads his army to battle against the “beloved city,” here “The Village” defended by the last representatives of Indo-European aristocracy. The narrator raises the question of God’s intentions for the white race: Does he want the West’s world domination to end, or is the prospect of replacement scary enough for it to awaken from its decadent slumber? This was also Raspail’s existential question. He hoped to jolt his readers out of complacency by immersing them in the horror of the white West overwhelmed by “the Third World.” The migratory apocalypse is all the more violent since it occurs on Easter day: the Christian celebration of humanity’s new lease on life through the resurrection of its Savior turns into its defeat by the “legions of the Anti-Christ” who land on the southern coast of France. Their arrival is witnessed through binoculars by Calguès, a retired literature professor and Raspail’s alter ego. “At midnight, as Saturday passed into Sunday, the first minute of Easter, the day of

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the Resurrection, a great noise was heard along the coast, somewhere between Nice and Saint-Tropez. The prows of ninety-nine ships plunged headlong onto the beaches and between the rocks.” Calguès, who “believed in God … and all the rest” (3), crossed himself and muttered, “Vade retro, Satanas” (161). By the end of the day, the world has been taken over by “five billion growling human beings” (294–295). As the narrator writes the postscript from his Swiss exile the Thursday after, the Village is bombed, and “old Monsieur Calguès’s villa, built in 1673 to last a thousand years, [i]s a heap of rubble.” The premise of The Camp of the Saints is that the Indian refugees represent the avant-garde of a destitute humanity determined to share in the abundance of the European continent: “the Western paradise appeared, spread out before them with its streams of milk and honey, its rivers thick with fish, its fields fairly bursting with crops, far as the eye could see, growing wild for the taking” (13). Described both as “a river of semen” and as the West’s sewer (260), the refugees are an unwanted solution to declining birth rates among white people. “And not a soul was there, not a living soul” (13): the irony points both to the coward French citizens who have fled their homes and to the refugees’ disregard for the European inhabitants. Retrospective narration then tracks the progress of the fleet from Calcutta, around the African continent and through the Suez canal, while the rest of the world watches, paralyzed by an inability to act against defenseless refugees. The narrator has as much contempt for the naïve, decadent West as for its wretched invaders. Although he sets himself the task of explaining the causes of the fall of the West, the narrator mines the religious parable to feed a conspiracy theory according to which the world is controlled “by a new apocalyptic beast […] that, in some primordial time, must have vowed to destroy the Western World” (13). References to this beast multiply throughout the novel, as if the monster’s tentacles regenerated through a sort of prismatic narrative reflection with every mention of the refugees as an amorphous mass (sometimes designated as “the beast”) and with every act of denigration of the “lackeys of the beast,” that is, everyone from blasé ordinary citizens to the political establishment, including religious figures, the media, and cultural personalities. Viciously racist, Raspail’s novel reads like a belated response to Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, and in particular to Marlow’s dilemma when he encounters the African wilderness: “Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk and perhaps was deaf as well.” Whereas Marlow remains undecided between the “suspicion that [Africans] were not human” (Conrad 2016, 36) and the possibility that they were, which felt “like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment” (Conrad 2016, 51), Raspail’s narrator develops a fascinated disgust with the “dumb thing” that decidedly “handles” the Europeans, and uses every rhetorical means available to him to discredit the possibility of its humanity.

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The landing creates a dilemma of figuration not unlike Marlow’s: the narrator is first struck by the smell (“it stunk to high heavens”) and overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the spectacle. As if unsure of the newcomers’ species and their mode of locomotion, he hesitates between several comparisons with animals and metaphors of liquid mass before settling on a trope borrowed from science fiction: first the boats appear “alive, like an anthill slashed open” (260), but as he zooms in, the ants look more like animals (“the horde was slipping down into the water”), and finally like something recognizably human, albeit undifferentiated (an “endless cascade of human flesh”). Their humanity is swiftly revoked, however, when the narrator decides they are not bipeds; the landing of “monsters, the grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta,” prompts comparison with “a pack of basset hounds, or a heard of clumsy seals exploring an unfamiliar shore” and finally relegation to the status of aliens (“like an army of little green men from some remote planet”). Whatever these creatures might be, the narrator implies, their form of life is radically incompatible with the civilized West. Beastly, they belie any possible claim to a shared humanity: “the monsters snuffled and sniffed at the sand, mouthed it by the handful, struck it with their fists to make sure it was real, and convinced that it was, sprang somersaults over their horrid, twisted limbs. Yes, the country would suit them fine” (260). The scandal here is that an ultimately unnamable species should assess France, the crown jewel of Western civilization, as if it were a banal commodity up for grabs. The refugees’ invasion represents half of the apocalyptic scenario; for the other half, the replacement of white people, the narrator’s attention shifts to the “Third World immigrants” who do menial work in France. Emboldened by the news of the Indian landing but focused single-mindedly on their own exploitation, they revolt and commit grotesque acts of revenge in cold blood. Among other such scenes, the gruesome episode of a manager’s murder at a pork-packaging plant stands out as a vivid image of incorporation that literalizes the idea of replacement. The white man felt no more pain than any of the other pigs in the line. Stunned, hoisted, slaughtered … and hanging from his hook, between two blood-drenched hogs, he started into production. As he moved along through each successive phase, growing less and less like man and more like pork, he caused a certain amount of interest, but no special disgust. They had seen such things before, after all. At market, in the Congo. […] The Third World workers went on with their jobs, conscientious as could be, even unto the final labeling of the tins where the white man’s remains ended up as pâté. Perhaps we even ate some of him ourselves. As time went by and conditions grew worse, we tended to be a good deal less fussy. (223–224)

These grotesque scenes inspire in the narrator a measure of admiration for the judicious restraint with which these workers finish off only a select few white scapegoats; or so he claims. It is unclear what “they” have seen before in

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the market in the Congo; the most extreme possibility—certainly not beneath the narrator’s imagination—is that he is alluding to cannibalistic practice, supposedly endemic among the Congolese.10 Couched in the dark humor of the white man becoming a meal that implied readers might have already consumed is the warning that, if white people continue to be oblivious to these foreigners’ customs, they risk becoming barbarians—cannibals eating their own kin— themselves. Silence means complicity in self-destruction. Later on, as chaos reigns on the streets of Paris, the narrator doubles down on the incorporation imagery, this time with a racist allusion of a different flavor, echoing anti-Semitic rhetoric: “The rats won’t give up that cheese called ‘the West’ until they’ve devoured it to the very last crumb. Big and thick as it is, that will take them some time” (231). Committed to discrediting fully the “revolution,” he duly notes that as in any such event, “the cleverest of the rats saved the best part for themselves” (231). This comment refers to the white French population’s dispossession of their homes by the latecomers, in an episode reminiscent of the European Jews’ forced dispossession of their property during the Third Reich.11 And as if the reference to Nazism was not scary enough, the new world also looks like an ideological dystopia reminiscent of 1984, where everyone, including school children, is brainwashed in antiracist dogma.12 Raspail’s novel draws on a well-established archive: the tradition of invasion novels, replacement theories, and other texts by far-right intellectuals and violent revolutionaries. Already after the defeat of 1870, the fear of immigration-­ invasion filling the void caused by low French birth rates haunted nationalist circles. In 1900, Maurice Barrès spoke of a civil war in times of peace, invoking a conspiracy of foreign elements taking advantage of falling birth rates in order to destroy and replace French civilization (Barrès 1925, in Joly 2015, 144). Barrès’s indictment of Dreyfus as a dangerous foreigner inassimilable by virtue of his religion is well known: “That Dreyfus is capable of treason, I can tell from his race.”13 He was echoing a sentiment otherwise well documented in La 10  Although even Conrad’s narrator Marlow discovered that this wasn’t the case, as he wondered why the starving crew of locals did not eat the whites, whom they vastly outnumbered (Conrad 2016, 40–41). 11  Raspail seems to have it both ways here: the analogy with the rats, echoing Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric, casts the immigrants as Jews, but then the dispossession of the French also puts the latter in a situation reminiscent of the European Jews during Nazism. 12  A parenthetical aside offers a brief glimpse into the postapocalyptic future: “For the record, we should note that, today, all three of those wires [from foreign leaders, begging the French president to defend the West even if he must spill innocent blood] form the central exhibit at the Antiracism Museum in the UN’s new Hanoi headquarters, as the dying examples of a racist hatred that wouldn’t go unpunished. Schoolchildren the world over know the texts by heart, and have to be able to recite and discuss them on demand, whatever their age or class, for fear that we may let down our guard, and allow a rebirth of those loathsome sentiments so much at odds with man’s true nature” (196). 13  For documents on the Dreyfus Affair, see https://www.marxists.org/history/france/dreyfusaffair/index.htm.

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France juive (Jewish France), the anti-Semitic tract published in 1886 by Edouard Drumont (also a notorious anti-Dreyfusard), with an engraving on the cover featuring Drumont himself as a knight defeating a naked old Jew, whose hand is still clutching a bag of coins scattering on the ground.14 A number of invasion novels shed light on fears of immigrants from Italy (Bertrand Louis’s The Invasion, 1907), Asia (Émile-Cyprien Driant’s The Yellow Invasion, 1904), and Africa (Driant’s The Black Invasion, 1913).15 In conjunction with revolutionary agendas, replacement scenarios often involve murderous violence. The Terror during the French Revolution (1793–1794) and the “Red terror” organized by Lenin in Russia (1918–1921) required that the “enemies of the people” be eliminated so that the disalienated people could be created.16 A few decades later, the neofascist Maurice Bardèche warned that the class struggle would be replaced by a race conflict. In 40 years, human migration would take again the form of Great Invasions and the white race would fight for its biological survival: “Tomorrow, it will no longer be the proletarians and the capitalists who would struggle for the riches of the world, it will be the Whites, proletarians and capitalists united, who, as a minority race, would have to defend themselves against the planetary invasion,” he wrote in a prophetic tone similar to Raspail’s (Bardèche 1960, 3–4).17 Taking one step further, the Swiss neo-Nazi Gaston-Armand Amaudruz expounded on a New European Order in the Social-Racist Manifesto (1971): “the only non-Aryan white ethnic groups that will be admitted are the ones whose residence has been ongoing for several centuries. It is clear that the North-Africans of France will be deported” (Amaudruz 1971, 117). The French far right’s “remigration” proposals echo this very idea. The Camp of the Saints belabors many of these themes—declining birth rates, xenophobia, the violence of replacement through invasion and revolutionary action, and racial war obscuring class struggle—and Raspail alerted readers to take them seriously, cautioning against a literal understanding of the unity of time, place, and action in his novel. It is “[a]n allegorical text, where everything unfolds in twenty-four hours over 400 pages, while in reality, we are dealing with an infiltration over several decades.” In other words, the invasion novel contracts a long historical process to the shock of an apocalyptic event so

14  https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en/french-school/cover-of-la-france-juive-depictingedouard-drumont-as-a-knight-defeating-a-jew-1886-engraving/engraving/asset/4108688. 15  For another engagement with the invasion novel (with reference to New Zealand), see Steer in this volume. 16  Abram Tertz (Andrei Siniavsky) described Stalin’s regime in similar terms in “On Socialist Realism”: “So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons. So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese Wall. So that work should become a rest and a pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed” (Abram Tertz 1960, 162). 17  The essay, entitled “Racism, this unknown,” appeared in the magazine Défense de l’Occident (Defense of the West), which he edited.

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that it can serve, like all dystopian fiction, as a warning.18 Unlike Conrad, who was at a double remove from the “heart of darkness” through the mediation of the narrator recounting Marlow’s story, Raspail allowed himself hardly any distance from the narrator or the patriots in his novel.19 He confessed he was “happy to have lived for eighteen centuries in [France],” to which he was “attached by the roots, the history, the memories, the pleasures, and whose essential values [could] not be shared with the newcomers” (Méritens 2011)— just as the old literature professor Calguès is proud of the arts of living bequeathed by his ancestors and identifies with all the battles of the West against its enemies since the Fall of Constantinople. This nativist perspective, which collapses individual biography and a mythical history of the West, requires the radical othering of “the newcomers” through racist representation and a disavowal of colonialism—or, as Achille Mbembe might put it, the “excision of the history of our presence in the world and of the presence of the world in our bosom” (Mbembe 2005, 149).

“The Sinister Mea Culpa of the White Man”: Racism Old and New Why are the refugees Indian? Most obviously, because the Indian caste system provides Raspail with a ready sample of outcasts, which he can use as a metonymy for a destitute humanity in need of help. Gandhi’s legacy of nonviolent disobedience morphs here into a picture of defenseless weakness that the West cannot bring itself to confront with violence. The narrator spares no variety of obscenity in describing the refugees as an undifferentiated mass led by a turd-­ eater and his monstrously disabled son; they eat rice cooked on fires lit with their own dried excrement and are oblivious to their countless dead. When their bodies, at first lethargic, awaken to “the natural drive of a people who never found sex to be a sin,” the narrator indulges in a pornographic description, mesmerized by the promiscuity, abandon, and virility on display. But Orientalizing stereotypes only go so far in accounting for Raspail’s choice of India. Indeed, he acknowledged that it was out of “prudence,” as a “refusal to enter the false debate about racism and anti-racism in French daily life” (2016, xv). To unpack this explanation, we need to take a brief detour, following the 18  For an explicit engagement with the genre of dystopia, fueled by anxieties about climate change, see Whittle in this volume. 19  In a 2011 interview in Le Figaro, entitled “Today, The Camp of the Saints Could Be Sued for 87 Reasons,” Patrice de Méritens called out Raspail for “a certain brutality that belong[ed] to a different era.” Raspail acknowledged that he himself had been startled upon rereading his novel (so he was surprised to have internalized “political correctness”), yet he felt proud to have written it with the strength of younger age and of his convictions, at a time when “freedom of speech was still almost intact.” “Clearly, the restrictive laws that followed (Gayssot 1990; Lellouche 2001; Perben 2004), would make the novel unpublishable in 2011 without serious amputations.” Raspail claims that Ronald Reagan and Samuel Huntington read it, along with many others on the right and on the left who praised it in private and criticized it in public (Méritens 2011).

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suspicion that Raspail likely attached a more old-fashioned meaning to “race” than fellow Frenchmen discussing racism in the early 1970s. The common meaning of the word “race” used to be associated in France with the “historical race,” that is, as Calguès’s attachment to his ancestors’ home and arts of living suggests, to the “continuity of generations rooted in a territory” (Saada 2006, 64).20 It took the publication of the seminal study Le Creuset français (The French Melting Pot, 1988) by historian and sociologist Gérard Noiriel to acknowledge that the republican model of integration to the nation-­ state, which privileged legal citizenship and socio-professional affiliation over aspects like foreign origin, had obscured the crucial role of immigration in the economic, social, and cultural development of France in the twentieth century. “This dimension of the individual and collective past of citizens was in fact ignored in official commemorations, administrative documents and history textbooks” (Noiriel 2006, 159). The omission had to do with the specific way in which the state apparatus was designed from the beginning of the Third Republic, but also with a French antiracist tradition going back to the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), during which the political vocabulary of race—xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, ethnicity—was forged. This turbulent period saw a repoliticization of the racial question: attention shifted away from the scientific discourse on race that had preoccupied intellectuals on the Left, to the political arguments of the anti-Dreyfusards on the right and extreme right. The repugnance felt by the republican elites vis-à-vis the word “race” took on whole new dimensions in the 1930s, when the Left rallied against anti-Semitism and Nazism, and after the Second World War, when the critique of colonialism was formulated in strong antiracist terms: colonialism was a system, Jean-Paul Sartre explained in 1956, in which economic domination was perpetuated because racism gave it legitimacy. In short, the concept of race—obscured by the universalist rhetoric of republican humanism, and fallen into disrepute through association with the right and the far right during the Dreyfus Affair and Nazism—returned to the Left’s field of vision as racism, which it denounced along with colonialism.

20  This sense received a different inflection in the colonial context, where the difference was between Europeans and indigenous; the distinction was fundamentally racial, but the notion of race there was still connected to “environment” and “civilization,” leaving culture and nature indistinguishable (Saada 2006, 64). Zooming in on the colonial context, Saada clarifies: “Race is not understood here as a group defined by a shared biological capital, transmitted through heredity and identifiable thanks to a specific phenotype. In its colonial usage, the notion refers rather to a community of values and rules of life that have very little plasticity and are passed on across generations: in this sense, ‘race’ refers to populations seen as the pedestal of unique civilizations, characterized above all by specific social rules” (Saada 2006, 65). And later, “no more today than yesterday, racism is not reducible to a visual ideology, or race to ‘skin [color]’” (ibid.).

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Denouncing the debate about racism, colonialism, and (in the 1970s) immigration, as “false,”21 Raspail sets out to circumvent it by having the refugees set sail from Calcutta, rather than from North Africa. Instead of French-speaking Algerian immigrants who would make the question of colonialism salient, he opts for an amorphous mass of refugees. Ironically, by severing the colonial connection, the novel represents them as radically other, illustrating precisely the kind of dehumanizing racism that made colonialism possible in the first place. For example, when the last defenders of the West take a symbolic final stand against “these freaks,” the narrator’s language zooms in on the obscenity of bodies disintegrating into anomalous matter: “There’s nothing more ghastly to watch than misshapen gnomes or mental misfits writhing in pain. Caricatures of suffering bodies. Blank, gaping stares, trying to comprehend. Blood flowing from monstrous, malformed flesh” (261). This passage enacts a gradual withdrawal of figuration, an index of old-fashioned racism in its raw state.22 It is precisely as radical alterity—as “the dissimilar [dissemblable], that which one wants nothing of” (Mbembe 2005, 140, my translation)—that the refugees conjure up the ghost of a disavowed colonialism.23 Achille Mbembe notes that “in the rhetoric of the French Republic, the African continent has always served as a figure not of freedom, equality, and fraternity, but of radical alterity” (2005, 141). For Mbembe, the question of race as the dissimilar is raised by “the primordial scene of brutality and discrimination”—the plantation during slavery, and the colony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reliant on mechanisms of bestialization, the politics of absolute difference and its logic of segregation, pushed to extremes, has always ended in war. Mbembe’s formulation is memorable: colonial wars have always been race wars because they were “waged not against other human persons, but against ‘human detritus, rejects’ [déchets humains, des rebuts]” (Oliver le Cour Grandmaison, quoted by Mbembe 2005, 142). This brings out the racist logic of Raspail’s novel. Raspail avoids the African continent because he needs a “dissimilar” to whom the French can say they owe nothing—someone radically different lacking individuality because in a war of races there can be no figuration of the other as human. In the absence of the historical colonial connection, the mass of Indian refugees appear as the other of (the idea of) race: beastly, they lack the logos; nonviolent, they lack the pride that galvanizes 21  Raspail doesn’t shy away from tackling the topic of racism in his novel. The problem with it, as the narrator sees it, is the double standard: “it’s a known fact that racism comes in two forms: that practiced by the whites—heinous and inexcusable, whatever its motives—and that practiced by blacks—quite justified, whatever its excesses, since it’s merely the expression of a righteous revenge, and it’s up to the whites to be patient and understanding” (227–228). The irony here is that, while he acknowledges the existence of racism practiced by white people, there is no allowance for the traumatic effects on its recipients. 22  See also Albert Memmi’s classic study Racism (1982) and, for a more elaborate analysis and taxonomy, Pierre-André Taguieff’s The Force of Prejudice. On Racism and Its Doubles (1987). 23  “Disavowed” introduces here an ambivalence about colonialism that will become clearer shortly: it is only a disavowal of the republican principles that shaped the governance of the empire (universalism), not of the project of colonization itself, entirely justified for traditional nationalists after 1890 by their belief in the French nation’s destiny on the stage of the world.

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warriors; promiscuous, they simply multiply. They are the embodiment of a globalization that makes claims on the West to acknowledge “one world now”; a cosmopolitan ethics [un cosmopolitisme mondialiste] that Raspail, and more generally the far right, hold in contempt.24 Raspail cannot avoid colonialism entirely, of course: it comes through the backdoor as a return of the repressed, legible in the reactions to the landing of Indian refugees. The “lackeys of the beast” are portrayed as convinced that the West was “guilty in general,” hence the suicidal generosity they extend to the wretched of the earth25; for the narrator and for patriots like Calguès, Captain Notaras, or Colonel Dragasès, such guilt is at odds with the belief in one’s superiority and greatness.26 “So sure of the law that might makes right” is how Dragasès evokes the time of imperial glory: “Ah, the great things we did in the name of that law! And how nice it felt, for all those years, making everyone accept it!” (78). The denigration of the Left on account of its guilt about colonialism is an ideological move of the French far right, captured by the title of Jean-Marie le Pen’s speech, “The Sinister Mea Culpa of the White Man,” where “sinister” connotes both the suicidal aspect of Western self-reproach and the etymological root of the word “left” (sinistra), here referring to his political opponents. According to Le Pen, the origin of this affliction is “Enlightenment ideology, which wants humanity to be peopled by ‘Man,’ this abstract entity whose trace no one has found, and not by individuals who have inherited different cultures, living in different lands, with different laws, beliefs and customs. Postulating that all men are equal, the enlightened spirits derive a duty to bring their knowledge to the good savages at the antipodes” (le Pen 1994).27 Le Pen’s denunciation of abstract universalism is symptomatic of the far right’s disavowal of the ideological project of colonialism, which nonetheless coexists with their proud support for its myth (“the great things we did in the name of that law,” as Dragasès puts it in Raspail’s novel). In “Colonialism,

24  I am borrowing Peter Singer’s title as shorthand for the ethics of globalization he develops in his 2002 book. 25  This representation is consistent with Flood’s analysis: “The extreme right-wing subculture lends itself to conspiracy theories and to seeing connections among different sets of enemies, past and present. Its members saw the so-called devoir de mémoire and the constant demands from leftwing groups for acknowledgment of France’s past crimes as an attempt to brainwash the population into attitudes of political submissiveness coupled with hatred of the nationalist right. They responded by seeking to undermine the interpretations offered by their political enemies” (Flood 2005, 231). 26  The names Notaras and Dragasès, which Raspail chooses for some of the last defenders of the West, establish a connection with the end of the Roman Empire: Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos was the last Byzantine emperor, who died in battle at the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, which officially marked the end of the Eastern Roman Empire. His chief minister and commander-in-chief of the Byzantine navy, Loukas Notaras, died in the same fatidic battle. As if to seal the connection, The Camp of the Saints ends with the melancholy evocation of Prince Bibesco’s words: “The fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened to us last week.” 27  The critique of abstract universalism is an unexpected point of convergence between the far right (as sketched by Le Pen here) and postcolonial studies (as summarized by Achille Mbembe in “La République et l’impensé de la race.”).

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Child of the Left,” Pierre de Meuse concedes that the Right did not have its own colonial doctrine, but ended up accepting the one proposed by the Left.28 Its belated but unconditional defense of the Empire was grounded in epic, rather than ideological, considerations. It was drawn to the epos that it would build into a myth—by magnifying the spirit of adventure, the courage and the sense of sacrifice that animated the explorers, the soldiers and the builders of the Empire whose story is the most beautiful in French history. A story told by the cinema and by literature, with the foreign legion as one of its torches. It replaced the morality of the Left with the ethics of the Right. (de Meuse 1994, 8, my translation and emphasis)

This passage sums up the extreme right’s changing position with respect to colonialism, from resistance to Jules Ferry’s expansionist policy in the 1870s to an increasingly favorable attitude by the 1890s: “colonial epic, military ethic, religion and nationalism could go hand in hand as expressions of the values of heroism, authority, obedience, faith and patriotic sacrifice which they revered” (Flood and Frey 2003, 400). Without believing that non-whites could actually be “civilized,” they accepted the republican notion of a French civilizing mission, which would become the dream of “the greater France” of 100 million Frenchmen living in the hexagon, the colonies, and the overseas domains.29 The reference to the foreign legion obscures the human cost of “the most beautiful story in French history,” symbolically acknowledged by the image of an African boy saluting the French flag on the cover of the magazine Paris Match in June–July 1953. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes pointed out that this image was supposed to illustrate “that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.” The African soldier, Barthes argued, could serve as the mythical signifier of the French empire because of his service not only in Indochina but also in two world wars

28  The flagship journal of the Front National, Identité was published from 1989 to 1996, including in each issue a dossier on a major political topic (immigration, education, neocolonialism, globalization). The formula was borrowed from the magazines Eléments and Nouvelle Ecole, published by the New Right think tank The Group of Research and Studies for European Civilization (GRECE), whose activist-intellectuals shared “the belief that the quest for political power needed to be underpinned by metapolitical struggle to achieve ideological dominance in the cultural sphere, including the reconquest of historical interpretations” (Flood 2005, 226). The three articles I am engaging with here, by Jean-Marie le Pen, Pierre le Meuse, and Didier Lefranc, were all part of an issue on French colonialism. 29  With the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, France, like Britain, “reaped imperial rewards” following the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. The expanse of France’s empire was second only to Britain’s, and its policies of assimilation and association “legitimated French imperialism, allowing its attendant civilizing mission to reign supreme” (Buettner 2016, 111).

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(Barthes 1977).30 Moreover, the empire, especially French Africa where General de Gaulle’s Free France took refuge, enabled his movement to form its army and reassert French sovereignty (Buettner 2016, 120).31 But while gratitude for the sacrifices of colonial soldiers in World War I was publicly expressed, and the role of the colonies as a bastion of French sovereignty in the context of World War II was clear, the prospect of colonial independence and self-government was always kept at a distance, or violently rejected.32 This, summarily sketched, is part of the background story that colonel Dragasès glosses over when he evokes nostalgically “the great things we did in the name of [the law that might makes right]” (78). Raspail’s avoidance of colonialism by way of depicting Indian refugees enacts the French far right’s gesture of disavowing imperialism in the very act of affirming the myth of France’s imperial greatness. Since the late 1980s, the far right has led a campaign of “de-demonization” [dédiabolisation] meant to distance it from the “old racism” of the early days of the National Front (Dupont 2022). Claiming that the idea of “‘superior races’ shocks [them] today” (de Meuse 1994, 7), the far right ideologues have appropriated the rhetoric of “the right to difference” affirmed by Jacques Chirac’s government in the 1980s, making themselves champions of the right of every nation to exist and flourish, but in its ancestral territory, since cultural differences are irreconcilable.33 Remigration would ensure that autonomy.34 But Raspail’s depiction of the nonwhite labor force inadvertently shows why the idea of such autonomy is preposterous in economic terms. As we are about to see, it is also belied by a lengthy history of labor extraction and labor migration.

30  As historian Elizabeth Buettner shows, two-thirds of the 500,000 troops who fought in Indochina on France’s behalf were indigenous recruits (from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and African soldiers (from Morocco, Algeria, and Senegal) (Buettner 2016, 135). During World War I, France relied on a multiethnic army, including over 90,000 European settlers from Algeria, and over half a million more troops mobilized from colonized populations across France’s empire (Buettner 2016, 108). 31  De Gaulle’s provisional government was established in Algiers from November 1942 to the liberation of Paris in August 1944. 32  See, for example, the Brazzaville conference (1944) and the Sétif massacre on May 8, 1945, when a revolt of Algerians during the celebrations of “Victory in Europe” across Algeria led to the killing of 102 Europeans and, in “savage and unyielding” reprisals, to 45,000 victims claimed by Algerians (Buettner 2016, 122–123). 33  In “Le Tiers Monde à libérer,” Didier Lefranc argues that the Western policies of aid only maintain the Third World’s dependence on the West. Raspail’s novel sets the stage in these terms already in the early scene in Calcutta, where the poorest Indians are gathered at the Belgian consulate to protest the ending of the adoption program that had enabled them to give away their children. 34  Etienne Balibar, Paul Gilroy, Martin Barker, and Elizabeth Buettner have variously argued that this “neo-racism” retains many traces of the “old” racism predicated upon supposed genetic inferiority (Buettner 2016, 325).

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Under Erasure: The Immigration Landscape in France The wretched of the earth want the prosperity they created.—Athena Farrokhzad (2018b)

Irony is a very strange thing in The Camp of the Saints. There is the transparent kind, designed to draw closer the circle of committed readers who might acquiesce and wink, occasionally with knowing laughter, and the more nebulous kind that might be troubling to the reader who suspends her disbelief, yet stays attuned to the inconsistencies and gaps in the fabric of the myth. Here is one example: “a young West Indian girl that night, at her job in a Croissy electronics plant, exclaim[ed] simply, as she plunged a screwdriver into her supervisor’s breast: ‘Plantation days are over!’ A remark with a lot of history behind it” (227). The narrator does not expound on this lengthy history of labor extraction—the sugar plantations on San Domingo, for example, where the French brought more enslaved persons than were ever brought to the United States, could have been a place to start, or the evictionist theories that emerged in the Antilles in the nineteenth century, calling for a reversal of the social hierarchy between the white colonizers and the colonized (Debono 2016). The reference to the history behind the girl’s remark is brief enough to strike an ominous note for the committed reader, who should fear it because her anger has been simmering for centuries. For the reader attentive to the history under erasure here, the night of the revolution, suffused by a righteous, but controlled, anger, echoes Frantz Fanon’s reflections on violence in The Wretched of the Earth: “decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ [espèce] of men by another ‘species’ of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution” (Fanon 1963, 33). The deadly violence is assumed necessary: “life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse” of the exploiter (Fanon 1963, 91). Raspail applies the same undifferentiated and demeaning representation of Indian refugees to the collective portrayal of nonwhite immigrants who work in France. Here, however, an interesting critique, albeit undercut by racism, takes place: the narrator acknowledges the indispensable character of nonwhite labor in French (and implicitly Western) economies, criticizing the oblivious reliance of the French on a sizable foreign labor force. He takes the time to enumerate many of the menial jobs in which nonwhite laborers are employed, and while his contempt for them is transparent, his scorn for the ignorance of the French sheds an oblique light on the mechanisms of assimilation and exploitation: the swill men, sewer men, sweepers from all the dumps the length and breadth of Paris; the peons and bedpan pushers from all the hospitals; the dishwashers from the shabby cafés; the laborers from Billancourt and Javel, from Saint-Denis and beyond; the swivel-hipped menials doffing their pits around as pipes and cables; the fodder for industry’s lethal chores; the machinery feeders, the Métro-­ troglodytes, black crabs with ticket-punching claws; the stinking drudges who

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mucked around in filth; and the myriad more, embodiments all of the hundreds of essential jobs that the French had let slip through their delicate fingers. (30)

This passage is noteworthy as a partial record of foreign labor and the economic sectors in which it was employed, at a time when the French historians’ lack of attention to this aspect—Noiriel’s groundbreaking history of immigration came out in 1988—contributed to “a wider public perception that France relied on foreign workers only to a limited extent. Nothing could be further from the truth,” writes historian Peter Gatrell (2019, 124). In a chapter dedicated to France in The Unsettling of Europe, he shows that foreign labor migration from Belgium, Italy, Poland, and North Africa was crucial to French mining, construction, and manufacturing from the later nineteenth century onward. Algerians and Moroccans worked in French munitions factories and fought on the Western Front; after 1918, Armenian and Russian refugees took manufacturing jobs in major towns such as Paris and Marseille; a wave of refugees arrived from the Spanish Civil War (126). After 1945, considerable numbers of migrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa joined people from the French colonies already working in France. Cyclical labor migration, largely male, had been a staple of the colonial period, and independence movements did not change patterns of immigration to France; ironically, with over two million French men drafted in the Algerian war (in what has been called a military migration), the French needed Algerian workers to fill depleted industries. After France’s military defeat in Indochina in 1954, 70,000 French settlers and officials returned with their families, along with Vietnamese factory workers, merchant seamen, merchants, and restaurant owners. It is migration on this scale that sustained the trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years of postwar reconstruction and modernization, Gatrell points out. Raspail’s narrator ironizes the willful ignorance of the French with respect to this situation as he pans over the gathering of rebellious workers, “a few hundred thousand Arabs and blacks, invisible somehow to the ostrich Parisians, and far more numerous than anyone would think, since the powers that be had doctored the statistics, afraid of jolting the sleepwalking city too violently out of its untroubled trance” (30). The preoccupation here is obviously with numbers only, in support of the argument that the French are submerged and choose to live in willful ignorance. Ironically, Raspail chooses to ignore the dramatic 1962 landing of half a million repatriates in port cities of southern France, one-third of the 1.5 million who returned between 1950 and the mid-1960s from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. The latter were the pieds noirs (literally black feet), Algerian French settlers who had lived most or all their life in one of the three French départements on Algerian soil, and who were variously referred to as “repatriates,” “the retreating,” “refugees,” “bandits,” or even “holidaymakers”

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(Gatrell 2019, 129).35 At the same time, thousands of the 200,000 harkis, Muslim soldiers who had fought alongside the French against the National Liberation Front, were also brought to France with their families, “often at the dead of night in overcrowded boats” (Gatrell 2019, 133). Theirs was a double migration: “arriving in France, and then, after lengthy incarceration, being sent to the north of the country to contribute to industrialization, as well as a double segregation, first in the bidonvilles and then in the banlieues, or suburbs of French cities” (2019, 136). Whereas before, when “the Mediterranean [ran] through France as the Seine [ran] through Paris,”36 Algerian villagers who worked in France seasonally had been internal migrants, once Algeria became independent, Algerians arriving in France became immigrants.37 President de Gaulle himself put distance between Algerian Muslims and Frenchness: “The term repatriates obviously does not apply to the Muslims. In their case, we are dealing only with refugees” (in Gatrell 2019, 133). In his view, France was a country “of the white race, of Greek and Latin culture and the Christian religion… The Muslims, have you seen them, with their turbans and their djellabas. You can see clearly that they are not French!” Absent restrictions on immigration, he feared the prospect of replacement: “my village would no longer be Colombey-lesDeux-Eglises, but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées” (de Gaulle 2015).38 In the Camp of the Saints, Raspail (1975) glosses the complex immigration landscape summarily sketched here with the term established at the Bandung Conference, “the Third World.” This is often a signifier of Western exploitation, the recognition of which legitimates the nonwhite people’s resentment. “There’s no Third World. No, not anymore,” an Indian high 35  As Gatrell shows, about half of the French citizens living in Algeria had come from Malta, Gibraltar, Spain, and Italy, so their “repatriation” to France was actually a painful migration to a land that often remained foreign. An exception among these were the 120,000 Jewish French citizens “whose ancestors’ presence in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia preceded that of other European settlers for centuries,” and upon settling in France, “they foregrounded an identity based upon Frenchness and Jewishness rather than playing up a colonial past” (Buettner 2016, 241). 36  General Raoul Salan, the French army’s commander-in-chief in Algeria in 1958, quoted by Buettner (2016, 137). 37  Their status changed between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s following several immigration laws (see Noiriel’s Histoire de l’immigration en France; also Buettner 2016, 296) meant to address permanent settlement and family reunification. 38  De Gaulle’s remarks about the twin mosques replacing the two churches in his native village were applauded by the far right (Scott 2007, 61). As Gatrell shows, even in the early 2000s, “wellmeaning French people speak of having treated [the harkis] shamefully, yet at the same time often still think ‘they were after all traitors to their own people’” (2019, 136). It took until April 2012 for President Nicolas Sarkozy to admit that France had abandoned French Muslim loyalists. In September 2021, President Emmanuel Macron asked for forgiveness on behalf of his country for having “failed in its duty towards the Harkis, their wives, their children” (Huron 2021). This apology came after the publication of historian Benjamin Stora’s report on the “reconciliation of memories” between France and Algeria (see https://web.archive.org/web/20210519000843; https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/algeria/news/article/report-by-benjaminstora-19-feb-2021, and Stora 2005).

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official warns the Belgian Consul early in the novel. “That’s only a phrase you coined to keep us in our place” (15). And yet, the narrator keeps using the term as he refers to the nonwhite labor force in France, which he recognizes as indispensable: “In other industrial towns—Billancourt, Vénissieux, Le Mans, and the like—the rhythm of Western life floundered and drowned in quite the same way. The fact that it owed its existence to Third World sweat doesn’t change the picture” (226, my italics). Not only does he acknowledge the economic dependence of Western economies on nonwhite labor, he even points out the absurdity of a few million people exploiting “billions of them.” This narrator, one might think, has read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth complete with Sartre’s preface, and nods with understanding at the workers’ felt need for violence as the only means of regaining dignity: “In the hellish hubbub of the Quai de Javel, in Paris, where Third World labor amounted to better than eighty percent, the revolt took on a liturgical form, like a mass or a ritual sacrifice” (224).39 He also appears to extend the critical insights of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times to an understanding of the specific predicament of workers from rural areas in former European colonies regimented into the unforgiving rhythm of industrial production in French factories: When you take into account the fact that the profit potential of the automobile industry relies on assembly lines, strictly timed and paced, it’s no surprise that poor, uprooted, illiterate folk, subject to all the concentration-camp fancies of wildly disparate retribalized existence, should have endowed the timers—those high priests of clock almighty—with all the coercive and sacred powers of a religion forcibly imposed by the masters. (224–225)

In passages like this, the narrator seems to invite the reader to put themselves in the shoes of workers and empathize with the alienation and false consciousness of assembly-line labor. But the liberal continuum between exploitation and the imperative of righting injustice is undercut here by the racist claim that rational planning is the exclusive talent of the West; therefore, its domination was necessary. And in any case, muses Dragasès, given that white people were vastly outnumbered, it would have been preposterous to try and establish “a just master-servant relationship.”

39  Sartre is quoted in the novel by the Archbishop of Paris, in a meeting with the French president. Raspail uses the opportunity to mock Sartre’s position and anyone’s who endorsed it by having the president who reports the conversation suggest that it was all part of a conspiracy against the West: “He even quoted that remark of Sartre’s—yes, Sartre from a Prince of the Church, if you can believe it!—that quotation that caused such a stir not long ago, and that gave rise to so many avant-garde theatrics, all subsidized of course. You remember: ‘There are two and a half billion people in the world: five hundred million human beings, and two billion natives’” (188). This passage is from Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

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The occupation of the West, the narrator notes bitterly, has led to the corruption of its civilization through a contagious lack of sexual restraint, and “equality” has been achieved through universal access to the “monstrous welfare budget” (227). The narrator piles up the ironies to make the case for an unmitigated catastrophe and, in a double rhetorical coup, enlists the support of witnesses who testify against their own race. First, he zooms in on the small minority of “upper-crust blacks” who had escaped, in Paris, “the fate of [their] race in the white man’s wake” (230) and who distance themselves from “their ragged doubles, cold and hungry, whose dark skin, peddled so cheaply, offended that black pride of theirs that they valued so much” (230). Then, a Hindu ex-deputy from Pondicherry requests admission into “The Village” on account of having denigrated his own people on television. He pledges allegiance to the “mental outlook” of whiteness: “Every white supremacist cause— no matter where or when—has had blacks on its side. And they didn’t mind fighting for the enemy, either. Today, with so many whites turning black, why can’t a few ‘darkies’ decide to be white? Like me” (304). Yet again, Fanon’s insights, this time from Black Skin, White Masks, resonate in these colonized individuals’ adherence to an ideology that has convinced them of their racial inferiority. Ironically, it is when they express their alienation that Raspail’s narrator takes their views at face value. * * * The novel’s undemocratic and anti-egalitarian view of society resonated with Renaud Camus’s observation of the “decivilization” and “deculturalization” of France through what he perceived as a “leveling down” imposed by immigration. In 2011, he dedicated his book The Great Replacement to Jean Raspail and Enoch Powell, turning a fictional scenario of invasion and replacement into a theory easily adaptable to various national contexts. Camus could have chosen for an epigraph Colonel Dragasès’s tirade against young people’s sympathy for the refugee cause: “All taking their cue from the poorest, filthiest, stupidest, laziest, scruffiest scum of the lot! And whatever you do, don’t ever look up, or have any ideals. Never think for yourself. It’s so much less sweat! Well, that’s a hell of a way to try to build a world. Even one like theirs! Never let yourself climb up on anyone’s shoulders and try to rise above the crowd. Just follow along in the gutter, down with everyone else” (78). The condemnation of “egalitarianism,” of the “leveling down of everyone, the diminution of all cultures to a global civilization built on a common denominator” (Alain de Benoist, in Moura 1988, 120) became a leitmotif of the rhetoric of the far right and an argument against immigration. Dragasès’s tirade is, again, shot through with irony: intended irony, in the sarcastic address to an imagined interlocutor whom he “advises” to give up all aspiration to improve and build a culture on the shoulders of ancestors and the tradition they’ve bequeathed; and unintended irony in its dismissal of those presumed to be without ideals and incapable of thinking for themselves, when it is precisely their “Third World sweat” upon which the Western world depends.

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Postscript: Should One Read The Camp of the Saints? In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Heart of Darkness,” Chinua Achebe famously critiqued Joseph Conrad for “reducing Africa to the role of props for the break­up of one petty European mind,” thus contributing to the dehumanization of Africa and Africans. Later, he clarified: “I am not Ayatollah Khomeini. I don’t believe in banning books, but they should be read carefully. Far from wanting the novel banned, I teach it” (Achebe, in Conrad 2016, 333). The Camp of the Saints does not come with “the gifts of Conrad.” Raspail is by no means the stylist Conrad was, his plot is simplistic, and the book is shot through with a relentless, unapologetic racism that is often hard to bear. If one decides to read it—and I am by no means saying that one should, or that it is a duty to read it as literature (as J. Hillis Miller argued with respect to Conrad’s novella)—it can only be from a conviction, like Achebe’s, that books should not be banned. Then The Camp of the Saints has to be read carefully, as something that can do deadly harm, but also as something that can help us understand how some of our fellow humans see the world and how political myths can come to take hold of our collective imagination.

Bibliography Alduy, Cécile. 2017. What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us about Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon and the Rise of the Populist Right. Politico, April 23. https://www.politico. com/magazine/story/2017/04/23/what-­a-­1973-­french-­novel-­tells-­us-­about-­marine-­le-­ pen-­steve-­bannon-­and-­the-­rise-­of-­the-­populist-­right-­215064/. Amaudruz, Gilles-Gaston. 1971. Nous autres racistes. Le Manifeste social-raciste présenté par le professeur G.-A. Amaudruz. Montréal: Editions celtiques. Bardèche, Maurice. 1960. Le racisme, cet inconnu. Défense de l’Occident 9 (7): 3–4. Barrès, Maurice. [1902] 1925. Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme. Vol. 1. Paris: Plon. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York; London: Hill and Wang; Fontana Press. Berenson, Edward, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson, eds. 2011. The French Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Buettner, Elizabeth. 2016. Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Camus, Jean-Yves. 2017. Far Right Politics in Europe. Boston: Harvard University Press. Conrad, Joseph. [1899] 2016. Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong. Norton 5th ed. New York: Norton. Debono, Emmanuel. 2016. Aux origines du “Grand remplacement.” October 6. https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/antiracisme/2016/10/06/aux-­o rigines-­d u-­ grand-­remplacement/. Dreyfus Affair dossier. https://www.marxists.org/history/france/dreyfus-affair/ index.htm. Dupont, Marion. 2022. Histoire d’une notion: la “dédiabolisation,” une ritournelle de l’extrême droite. Le Monde, June 8. https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/ 2022/06/08/histoire-­d-­une-­notion-­la-­dediabolisation-­ritournelle-­de-­l-­extreme-­ droite_6129387_3232.html.

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Eger, Maureen, and Sarah Valdez. 2015. Neo-nationalism in Western Europe. European Sociological Review 31 (1): 115–130. Fanon, Frantz. [1961] 1963. The Wretched of the Earth [1961], trans. Constance Farrington, Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Grove Press. Farrokhzad, Athena. 2018b. Europe, Where Have You Misplaced Love? An Open Letter from a Poet, trans. Jennifer Hayashida. Literary Hub, August 23. https:// lithub.com/athena-farrokhzad-europe-where-have-you-misplaced-love/. Fassin, Didier. 2006. Nommer, interpréter. Le sens commun de la question raciale. In De la question sociale à la question raciale?, ed. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, 19–36. Paris: La Découverte. Flood, Christopher. 2002. Myth and Ideology. In Thinking through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kevin Schilbrack, 174–191. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. The Politics of Counter-memory on the French Extreme Right. Journal of European Studies 35 (2): 221–236. ———. 2013. Political Myth. A Theoretical Introduction. London and New  York: Routledge. Flood, Christopher, and Hugo Frey. 2003. Questions of Decolonization and PostColonialism in the Ideology of the French Extreme Right. In The Decolonization Reader, ed. James D. le Sueur, 399–414. New York: Routledge. Gatrell, Peter. 2019. The Unsettling of Europe. How Migration Reshaped a Continent. New York: Basic Books. de Gaulle, Charles. 2015. Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées. Les Observateurs, September 28. https://lesobservateurs.ch/2015/09/28/charles-­de-­gaulle-­colombey-­les-­ deux-­mosquees/. Hope Not Hate Organization. 2022. The French Elections and the Online Far-Right Narratives on Immigration and Islam. https://hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2022/04/french-report-2022-04-v1-1.pdf. Huron, Jean-Marie. 2021. Macron Apologises for French Treatment of Algerian Harki Fighters. France24, September 20. https://web.archive.org/web/202109 20164826/https://www.france24.com/en/live-­n ews/20210920-­m acron-­ apologises-­for-­french-­treatment-­of-­algerian-­harki-­fighters. Joly, Laurent. 2015. Naissance de l’Action française. Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras et l’extrême droite nationaliste au tournant du XXe siècle. Paris: Grasset. Le Franc, Didier. 1994. Le Tiers Monde à libérer. Identité, September 22, 13–17. Le Pen, Jean-Marie. 1994. Le Sinistre mea culpa de l’homme blanc. Identité, September 22, 3. Mbembe, Achille. 2005. La République et l’impensé de la ‘race’. In La Fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, ed. Pascal Blanchard et al., 139–154. Paris: La Découverte. Memmi, Albert. [1982] 2000. Racism, trans. Steve Martinot. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Méritens, Patrice de. 2011. Aujourd’hui, Le Camp des saints pourrait être poursuivi en justice pour 87 Motifs. Le Figaro. https://www.lefigaro.fr/lefigaromagazine/2011/ 02/05/01006-­20110205ARTFIG00621-­jean-­raspail-­aujourd-­hui-­le-­camp-­des-­sai nts-­pourrait-­etre-­poursuivi-­en-­justice-­pour-­87-­motifs.php. Meuse, Pierre de. 1994. Le Colonialisme, enfant de la gauche. Identité, September 22, 5–8. Moura, Jean-Marc. 1988. Littérature et idéologie de la migration: Le camp des saints de Jean Raspail. Revue Européenne des migrations internationales 4 (3): 115–124.

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Noiriel, Gérard. 1988. Le Creuset Français. Histoire de l’immigration en France au XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2006. “Color blindness” et construction des identités dans l’espace public français. In De la question sociale à la question raciale? ed. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, 158–174. Paris: La Découverte. Raspail, Jean. 1973. Le Camp des saints. Paris: Robert Laffont. ———. 1975. The Camp of the Saints, trans. Norman Shapiro. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 2011. Le Camp des saints; précédé de Big Brother. Paris: Robert Laffont. ———. 2016. C’est maintenant que le camp des saints commence. August 19. Jean Raspail « C’est maintenant que le camp des saints commence »—YouTube. Saada, Emmanuelle. 2006. Un racisme de l’expansion. Les discriminations raciales au regard des situations coloniales. In De la question sociale à la question raciale? ed. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, 55–71. Paris: La Découverte. Scott, Joan. 2007. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stora, Benjamin. 2005. La Gangrène et l’oubli. La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: La Découverte. Taguieff, Pierre-André. [1987] 2001. The Force of Prejudice. On Racism and Its Doubles, trans. and ed. Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2018. «Race»: un mot de trop? Science, politique et morale. Paris: CNRS Editions. ———. 2022. Le Retour de la décadence. Penser l’époque postprogressiste. Paris: PUF. Tertz, Abram (Andrei Siniavsky). 1960. The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism. New York: Vintage Books.

CHAPTER 5

Between History and the Discord of Time: The Figure of the Migrant in A Seventh Man and Transit Luka Arsenjuk

A comparative juxtaposition of two works as disparate as John Berger’s and Jean Mohr’s photo-essay reportage A Seventh Man and Christian Petzold’s film Transit requires a preliminary clarification about the specific difference around which to orient the comparison. Both works address migratory movement and migrants, yet do so in rather obviously distinct ways. One is a photo-essay, an assemblage of photographic images and printed text in the form of a book; the other is a film. One focuses on economic migration; the other, based on a novel about refugees during World War II, presents, at least on its surface, a story of political migration. One is a work of explicitly Marxist historical analysis; the other, despite its director’s familiarity with Marxism, is not explicitly or necessarily so. The comparative and largely formal reading of the two works in the present chapter, however, wishes to suspend these differences of medium, theme, and method so that the encounter between A Seventh Man and Transit can become an occasion to think about what may be called their historical difference, by which is meant not only the temporal distance that separates the two texts (a book from the mid-1970s and a film from the second half of the 2010s) but more specifically the difference in the way they relate their subjects (migrants and migratory movement) to the question of history and the specific ways the figuration of migratory movement in each work becomes entangled

L. Arsenjuk (*) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_5

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with the task of grasping and making sense of their respective historical situations. The aim in the following pages is not only to use history to measure the difference between the two works (the task of historical contextualization) but also to trace this difference in order to measure the distance internal to history, the distance of history from itself, so to speak. If in pursuing such an aim, other potentially significant differences become suspended, this does not mean they must fall out of view. They may also be recast and rethought. Take, for example, the difference between economic and political migration, between migrant laborers and refugees, which may be the most obvious way to distinguish the contents of A Seventh Man and Transit. It is clear that this classificatory difference itself rests on a more general legal and ideological separation of the economic and political spheres foundational to the functioning of capitalist society and the liberal-capitalist state. Without the separation between the economic and the political, capitalism cannot function, and in helping to establish the institutional forms of capitalism’s functioning the separation itself becomes naturalized, immune to questions of significance, simply assumed as a given. Based on this foundational separation, the establishment of the difference between (economic) migrants and (political) refugees appears not as an absolute difference but rather is constitutive of a zone of permeability, which allows people to be moved between the two statuses: refugees may be converted into economic migrants, just as noncitizen laborers can be constantly exposed to the possibility of political displacement. The crucial aspect in all this is that the power to sort out people in the zone of permeability lies primarily with the capitalist market and the state. Furthermore, one can observe how this differential classification may be discursively mobilized in various ways. It is, for instance, a common trope of the reactionary discourse of politically rightwing parties and movements to emphasize the difference between the “good” refugees (at least when this aligns with their political goals and when the refugees in question are not too distant ethnically or racially) and the “bad” migrants (coming to “steal our jobs,” as the popular slogan goes). But one may also observe, or speculate, that as the global system of liberal capitalism sinks into an ever-deeper crisis, the classificatory differences which make sense within this system will themselves lose their capacity to orient and organize the activity of governing institutions as well as those that oppose them. Take, for example, the relatively recent figure of the climate migrant/refugee, which Philip Steer discusses in his chapter for this section—is she a figure of primarily economic or political migration? It may therefore be worthwhile and necessary to distinguish the question of the figure and figuration from the imperatives of classificatory differentiation, both so that we may critically question the institutional forms that have governed our past and that continue to govern the present and so that we may prepare ourselves for what is to come, which inevitably appears as a scrambling of categories and a confusion of forms. Indeed, the overarching assumption of the present chapter is that the work of figuration which takes as its subject migrants and migratory movement consists, above all, in giving us access to the

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disorder of historical time and in helping us make sense of the subject’s relationship to history beyond the classificatory representations through which we typically order our reality.

A Seventh Man Published in 1975, A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words About the Experiences of Migrant Workers in Europe remains in many respects an exceptional work among the books dedicated to the topic of migrants and migration. Made by the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr (with contributions by the painter Sven Blomberg and designer Richard Hollis), it is a documentary account of a specific population of migrants in a particular moment in history: proletarian men migrating from Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey) to search for employment in the countries of the European North undergoing the postwar economic boom. In their introductory “Note to the Reader,” Berger and Mohr make explicit the limitations at work in the choice of their subject (Berger and Mohr 2010, 12). The focus on South European migrant workers and the neocolonial relations internal to Europe means, firstly, the exclusion from the book of workers from the former European colonies in other parts of the world (and the exclusion of Great Britain, where these workers constituted the majority of migrant labor force). Secondly, the focus on male migrants means the exclusion of women workers, themselves a significant part of migratory labor population, and consequently the absence from the book of any account of the various forms of domestic service and housework, since male immigrant workers from the South typically found employment in manufacturing industries and infrastructure-­building projects. While A Seventh Man offers a critical account of North European societies of advanced Fordist development, its investigation of the exploitation and the suffering of South European proletariat as the condition of European postwar peace and prosperity can productively be complemented by postcolonial and feminist critiques of Fordist civilization. Berger’s “Preface” to the 2010 reissue of A Seventh Man helps us contextualize the book further by placing its production in the historical moment that could back then not yet know itself, but which has in retrospect clearly crystallized as the moment of the terminal blow to the very model of Western Fordist arrangement the book was attacking: the economic crises of the early 1970s that gave rise to neoliberalism and globalization, the relative deindustrialization of the West and the increasing dominance of financial capital and its institutions (the World Bank, IMF, WTO), the emergence of new forms of war and of climate catastrophe, all of which today place the question of migration and labor in a different situation than the one that occupies Berger and Mohr’s book. At the same time, however, were this necessary localization and contextualization to remain our sole account of A Seventh Man, we would miss the point of the book. For the wager of the book is that through a focus on a particular figure of the migrant, the movement of male Southern European migratory

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workers in the early 1970s, one can say something about the condition of migrancy as such.1 This short-circuit of the particular and the global that A Seventh Man asks us to perform has to do with the way the book links migratory movement to the experience of proletarization, which may simply be thought of as the exhaustion of objective possibilities of existence, the stripping away from the people of their capacity and the means to provide for their own survival. In the case of the book’s subject, it is the impossibility of survival in the rural areas of the European South, itself a consequence of the South’s integration into the modern capitalist world-system, that forces the inhabitants of these areas to leave and become migrant workers. For them, “the further working of the land is withdrawn as a possibility” (Berger and Mohr 2010, 28). Yet it is not difficult to see that under proletarization lived in this particular guise also proletarization as the more general condition of human existence and cause of migratory displacement in capitalist modernity. One of the key tendencies of capitalism in its historical development consists precisely in the ever-­ expanding proletarization of humanity (through war, political violence, economic dispossession, ecological destruction, etc.). And while proletarization is necessarily lived in a variety of particular forms, it must also be grasped as a dimension irreducible to the ways capitalist modernity has inscribed humanity into its various economic, political, legal, and sociological categories, which make the fact of proletarian existence invisible. In addition, the book opens a certain global perspective through its particular focus by including in its account a reflection on the work of figuration and the operations that make migrants figurable in the first place. Such a seemingly general reflection must, at least initially, arise alongside the problems encountered in handling a specific and concrete set of materials gathered by way of a documentary encounter between the artists and the migrant proletarians. The material in A Seventh Man thus serves a double function. Through a documentary use of text and photographic images, Berger and Mohr record the experience of the seasonal journey of proletarian migrants from the European periphery to the continent’s industrial metropoles, and back home again. Simultaneously, this material and its organization reveal a preoccupation with broader conceptual questions of figuration that make it possible for us to derive from the book a basic sketch for a theory of the figure of the migrant.

1  The authors write, “The subject [of the book] is European. Its meaning is global” (Berger and Mohr 2010, 11). It is important, however, not to understand this “globality” of the book’s meaning in identitarian terms. The reason for the global meaning of the book lies precisely in the fact that the subject of the book (the South European migrant workers) confronts the identity of Europe with its unacknowledged part (exploitation of migrant labor), upon which Europe nevertheless crucially depends. The global meaning stems from the ability of the book to estrange Europe from itself—a dimension that can be seen also in the reception of A Seventh Man, which was largely dismissed and ignored in Europe, but enthusiastically received and translated in the countries of the global South.

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The Figure of the Migrant: From Dream to History… In one of the striking passages concerned with the question of figuration, Berger writes: A man’s resolution to emigrate needs to be seen within the context of a world economic system. Not in order to reinforce a political theory but so that what actually happens to him can be given its proper value. That economic system is Neo-colonialism. Economic theory can show how this system, creating under-­ development, produces the conditions which lead to emigration: it can also show why the system needs the special labor power which the migrant workers have to sell. Yet necessarily the language of economic theory is abstract. And so, if the forces which determine the migrant’s life are to be grasped and realized as part of his personal destiny, a less abstract formulation is needed. Metaphor is needed. Metaphor is temporary. It does not replace theory. (Berger and Mohr 2010, 45)

According to this passage, the figure of the migrant may be situated in the movement between a theoretical account of history and the documenting of migrants’ experiences. The theoretical knowledge of history in A Seventh Man relies on the Marxist analysis of the law of combined and uneven development, which allows the authors to account for the difference between Southern and Northern Europe, between the stunted development of the largely rural periphery and the advanced industrial economies of the metropoles, by showing how both of these realities are produced by the singular process of global capitalism. As it integrates the world within the mechanism of the global market, capitalism distributes neither the speed nor the form of development evenly. The industrial development in the North requires the transformation of Southern countries into raw material and resource commodity producing economies, a process that severely limits the ability of these countries to pursue independent paths of industrial development and maintains them in economic and political subordination to the metropole (a relationship the authors call “neocolonialism”). The blockage of economic, political, and cultural development in the South, which often appears as “backwardness” and gives rise to a class dynamic and ideological formations strikingly distinct from those found in the North, is thus a result of the South’s uneven inclusion into the system of global capitalist relations. We can see how the figuration of the migrant draws its purpose from such an account. The migratory proletarians are namely the ones who translate the difference between the “underdeveloped” South and the “developed” North into movement. They are the ones who connect the distant parts of the world. Their experience, which can be documented and arranged as text and images in a book, makes it possible to suggest that the seemingly discrepant realities of the periphery and the metropole in fact make up a single world—and that an awareness of such a world could “encourage, among other things, international working-class solidarity” (Berger and Mohr 2010, 7). Yet at the same time, as long as we remain at the level of the experiential and rely on the

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personal stories or “destinies” of the migrants, the true dimensions of this shared world remain hidden. Migratory experience links the distant places into a shared world, but the categories of experience also remain irreducibly metaphorical and as such disguise the world’s real social basis, which is to be found in the abstract mediations of the capitalist world market and its relations. To clarify the figurative task at hand, a task that allows for temporary uses of metaphor in the service of theoretical knowledge, A Seventh Man paradoxically reaches for a metaphor: Yet this migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another. As a figure in a dream dreamt by an unknown sleeper, he appears to act autonomously, at times unexpectedly; but everything he does—unless he revolts—is determined by the needs of the dreamer’s mind. Abandon the metaphor. The migrant’s intentionality is permeated by historical necessities of which neither he nor anybody he meets is aware. That is why it is as if his life were being dreamt by another. (Berger and Mohr 2010, 47)

As in our dreams we often find ourselves carried along by some strange agency beyond our control, the migrant is moved along by a cause outside of the reach of migratory movement proper. This heteronomy of migratory movement is the reason that the true nature of the movement is illegible to the migrant himself, just as the meaning of our dream remains elusive and requires an analyst to help us relate the dream’s strange passing to a cause that works on us from “another scene” (Sigmund Freud’s way of describing the unconscious). The project of A Seventh Man, which Berger and Mohr compare to a moment, in which “a dreamer tries to break his dream by deliberately waking himself up,” can therefore be understood as one of enlightenment (Berger and Mohr 2010, 11). The aim of the book is to figure migratory movement and to make it legible by relating the “subjective experience of those trapped within it” to the “objective economic system” that determines the migrants’ destinies. In this way, the book seeks to clarify the illusions and confusions of experience in the direction of the latter’s true causes. In the strange territory of the dreamlike migratory movement, this figuration aims not merely to record the bewildering unfreedom of this movement as a kind of oneiric spectacle but also to isolate and configure within it a set of elements that may be read as symptoms—signs whose meaning must be sought in the causal agency of “another scene”: the historical dynamic of capitalism. Such an operation, in which the figure functions as the support of Marxist exegesis, elucidates history as the scene of unfreedom. Yet by making unfreedom something to be thought, the figure cannot but also be related to the project of emancipation. Figuration, by allowing us to read proletarian migratory movement as a symptom of unfreedom, also casts the elements of this experience as prefigurations of some future moment of liberation, which in A Seventh Man fleetingly appears as a revolt of migrant proletarians against the conditions of their movement (“unless he revolts”).

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… and Back to the Dream. The metaphor of the dream and the above-quoted passage that lays it out also insist, however, on a different reading. There is, firstly, the fact that the meaning of dreaming and wakefulness is far more ambiguous than has been suggested thus far. Psychoanalysis, for instance, teaches us that the intention to wake up might play the opposite role from the one indicated by such notions as enlightenment and emancipation. Waking up from a dream, reentering reality, may serve as an escape from an encounter with some traumatic kernel of one’s unconscious desires back into a state in which we may remain blissfully ignorant of the traumatic knowledge as we go on with our everyday life. In this case, it is precisely the moment of waking up that allows us to maintain our illusions and avoid the disturbing thought of our unfreedom encountered in the dream. Secondly, Berger and Mohr are quite precise in locating the project of the book not simply in opposition to the dream, as an intervention of Marxist theory from the outside into the false perceptions and thoughts that shape the experience of migrants, but as an intention to wake up that is born “within the dream” itself, which, if taken seriously, would suggest that one encounters already in the dreamlike form of experience something that is not merely an illusion or an obfuscation of real historical relations and processes, but rather bears a certain relationship to truth. Where exactly may we find in A Seventh Man such a dreamlike form, one that works according to the logic of the “dream dreamt by another”? It may be found in the formal construction through which Berger and Mohr organize the text and the photographs that make up their book, which follows closely the disjunctive relations a dream might establish between its various elements. The form of a dream puts us in front of a message whose very code is missing; the form of the book in A Seventh Man puts us in the position of a reader who may follow the disjunctive linkages between text and image without being able to recognize behind them the existence of a common measure. This has the effect of turning the reader into a dreamer, carried along by the exigency of the formal work rather than assuming control of it, adjusting the movement of the reading to the alien movement of the form without ever quite being able to seize it from the book. Formal disjunctions, relations without a common measure, which help the book enact the sense of a heteronomously determined movement for the reader, can be observed in the simple fact that “the book consists of images and words” and that, as the authors state in the opening “Note to the Reader,” each of these registers requires its own kind of reading (Berger and Mohr 2010, 10). According to the formal logic of the book, its words are not there to explain or describe its images, just as the images are not there to illustrate what is written in the text. At its most basic level, words require linear and sequential reading, while the photographic images interrupt the linearity of the reading and strike us, at least initially, as something simultaneous, to be taken in all at once. When a certain reading of the images does unfold, it fails to resemble the “horizontal” temporality of the written text and instead

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constitutes a strange kind of “vertical” temporality all of its own that must be distinguished from the linear articulation of printed words. Things become even more complex as we begin to note also the internal heterogeneity of both registers on their own. The written text may be organized as a kind of polyphony of fragments, which among other voices include the third-person accounts of individual migrant experiences (gathered in a generalized “He…”), original theoretical and historical analysis, poetry, racist statements made by the people of the metropole, and direct quotations from economic and political texts. This polyphony creates its own sense of textual simultaneity, which the book in certain moments attempts to register in a more direct fashion: for instance, when the text splits into two “simultaneous” columns to organize the thought of a migrant worker’s contradictory position in relation to the workers and the capitalists in the West, or when the text plays with typography and layout in a manner that resembles the avant-garde manifestoes of the 1920s to enumerate the causes and effects, the processes and results, that constitute the overall movement of historical underdevelopment (Berger and Mohr 2010, 150, 42). At the same time, the images occasionally find themselves organized sequentially and in this form “make a statement: a statement which is equal and comparable to, but different, from that of the text” (Berger and Mohr 2010, 11). The sequential ordering of images can take on a plurality of forms as well: a sequence of snapshots on a photographic film strip (migrant workers constructing a tunnel under Geneva); a group of images on a single page (the juxtaposition of a rural bus stop in Yugoslavia and the underground metro station in Stockholm); a diptych or a triptych of photographs laid out across two pages (migrants as cleaners at the Vienna airport and hotel porters in Switzerland); consecutive pages each containing a single image (the series of archetypal images of women: grandmother, Virgin Mary, porn magazine spreads, “a peasant girl working in the field”); the fracture of a single large photograph across the verso-recto division of the book’s pages (a crowd of migrants observing a civic festival in Avignon) (Berger and Mohr 2010, 165, 123, 134–5, 176–9, 202–3). These examples suggest that the image sequences in the book must be viewed as something closer to cinematic montage than to the linear unfolding of the written text.2 In a disjunctive relation to each other, the text and images that make up A Seventh Man each contain further divergences, which may be as intense and generative as those that exist in the relationship between the two registers. The primacy of disjunction between and within the different registers is what makes the book formally a dream dreamt by another, giving it the sense of a construction from which the very agency that would guarantee the presence of form as a common measure between the elements is missing. Insofar as this disjunctive dreamwork helps construct the figure of the migrant in A Seventh Man, it is 2  Indeed, Berger notes that the project of A Seventh Man was initially conceived as a film and that the idea of organizing images and text as “film sequences,” as well as treating individual elements as “close-ups,” carried from this initial conception into the production of the book (Berger and Mohr 2010, 9).

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necessary to clearly distinguish it from the operations we identified earlier in the task of figuration in the service of Marxist exegesis. There, the figure had the function of referring what on the surface appeared as disjunctions (the anachrony between the “developed” North and the “backward” South that registers so intensely in the migrant’s experience of displacement) to the reality of a singular historical schema (uneven and combined development). In allowing us to read the traversal of disjunctions in experience as metaphors of a single historical process, the figure operated the double function of enlightenment (leading us to a theoretical knowledge of historical causes) and emancipation (prefiguring in the grasp of the condition of heteronomy the possibility of a future freedom). Insofar as the figure remains formally tied to the logic of the dream dreamt by another, however, its task has to do primarily with registering the disjunctions (between image and text; internal to both images and words), not as they may be referred to in some singular historical or temporal schema, but as they themselves make up a superimposition or coexistence of discordant temporalities. Figuration in this case finds a purpose not in relating disjunctions to history as their temporal common measure, but instead in dispossessing the form of the book (and us as readers) of any such shared measure and exposing us to a sense of time as discord or crisis. A Seventh Man therefore presents us with the figure of the migrant that can, ultimately, be understood in terms of a configuration of two different logics: the logic of time as the shared horizon of a developmental schema and the logic of time as the absence of a common measure, as oneiric discord. The greatness and the continuing relevance of A Seventh Man has to do with the fact that, in its figuration of the migrant, historical time, which is the time of development, opens up to a discord of temporalities that dispossesses us of a shared form and may not be referred back to history as its singular temporal horizon, while the temporal discord that assumes the oneiric form of the book’s construction opens itself up to being inscribed as such in the book’s treatment of historical reality and the process of capitalist development. The book is capable of thinking the event of migratory movement as an event precisely because it pushes historical temporality in the direction of divergences and disjunctions of time beyond any historical schema of development, while also making the discordance of time appear as a problem of historical thought.3

 This reading of the figure of the migrant in A Seventh Man as a twofold operation proceeds along a similar line as the one pursued by Mauro Resmini in his book on the figures of Italian political cinema of the “Long ‘68”—cinematic figures contemporaneous with the migrant proletarians in Berger and Mohr’sbook. According to Resmini, a figure is “always a figure of the Two: order and chaos, form and the formless, figuration and disfiguration. The relation between the two terms, however, is not of inoperative externality, but of dialectical co-implication.” Following Ernst Bloch’s concept of the tension-figure, Resmini suggests that it is best to understand such dialectical figures as “tentative experiments of legibility of a given historical sequence: since no overarching meaning or orientation is guaranteed by a transcendent principle, the figure must open itself up to the ‘holes and hollow spaces’ that make up history in times of crisis. [Figures] provide a legible image of this disjointed historical time…. By registering the gaps in the historical continuum, tension-figures give shape to the fundamental fault lines that run under its visible surface” (Resmini 2022, 324–3). 3

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Transit: Temporal Discord Without History The distance between the making of Berger and Mohr’s book in the early 1970s and our present moment may in some general way be measured by the relative decline of the sense of historicity that has taken place over the last half-­ century. Whether one ascribes it to globalization—the capture of time and space by capital that from the perspective of A Seventh Man still lay in the future—or to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War— which brought to a close the twentieth-century contestation between two different visions of historical development (Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”)—or indeed to the more recent realization of the possibility of human extinction caused by anthropogenic climate change, the capacity of historical schemas to make sense of human experience by referring it to a shared temporal horizon seems today profoundly weakened. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly difficult to see how the discord of time, the various crises we are living through, could be inscribed in some genuinely historical form of collective existence. Accordingly, and as a sign of this larger shift, the various contemporary figurations of migratory movement have come to be characterized by a certain one-sidedness: they register with great acuity the discord or the crises of our time (war, ecological disasters, economic impoverishment), even as they more often than not also prevent us from grasping the historical meaning of these crises. The growing waves of panic around migration we have observed in recent years in the advanced capitalist societies of the global North can be taken precisely as a sign of the migratory figure’s increased capacity to index the out-of-jointedness of our time, which is accompanied by a decrease in the figure’s ability to serve as the support for historical legibility, let alone its capacity to prefigure some kind of historical agency capable of overcoming the multiple crises of the present. The remarkable achievement of Christian Petzold’s 2018 film, Transit, lies in making this new situation thinkable by showing how the figuration of migratory movement today is determined on the one hand by the weakening of the historical schemata and on the other by an intensification of the sense of discordant temporalities (of time itself increasingly appearing as crisis), which asserts itself in Transit as the guiding idea of the film. The form of Transit, which Petzold himself compared to a kind of oneiric construction, namely rests on a combination or superimposition of temporalities, in which it is the disjunctive character of their relations that is privileged over the sense of some general form of time (of the narrative itself, for example) that could provide these temporalities with a common measure. Any enumeration of the discordant temporalities that find themselves superimposed in Transit should probably begin with the most obvious: Petzold’s choice to refuse the conventions of the historical or the period film genre and to situate the dramatic events of his film, which have to do with German refugees fleeing Europe during World War II, in the setting of contemporary France, which, of course, evokes for the present-day viewer a very different set

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of migrants, as well as the dreadful response of the European states to the so-­ called migrant crisis of 2015. This flattening of historical difference, achieved in Transit through a direct superimposition of two heterogeneous times, does not, however, authorize us to read the film’s historical message as expressible through a series of comparisons according to which the German refugees would be just like contemporary refugees from the Syrian War or migrants from Africa, the French gendarmerie would serve as a contemporary version of Gestapo, and the nationalist xenophobia and state violence of today would be readable in the image of twentieth-century Fascism. Transit resists the temptation to establish historical interchangeability as its animating idea. Instead of transposing the historical phenomena of migration and racist state violence onto a plane of equivalence, the film seems far more interested in preserving the disjunctive and discordant relation between the temporalities it superimposes: When the film’s protagonist, Georg (Franz Rogowski), a German refugee who comes from “the past,” rings the bell of an apartment, where he expects to find the wife and child of one of his friends, a fellow German refugee, he instead encounters a Maghrebi immigrant family from “the present.” The two have little to say to each other, and “the present” family gathered at the door silently observes this refugee figure of “the past” as he awkwardly apologizes for the interruption and departs. A different set of discordant temporal superimpositions is at work if we place the film in the histories of cinema and the novel. As a loose adaptation of a novel written by Anna Seghers during World War II, Transit may also be seen as a distant remake of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942)—apparently one of the inspirations Seghers herself drew upon in her writing—from which it borrows both the love triangle and the hardboiled idea of understated heroism and sacrifice. By turning its protagonist at times into a detective, Transit also draws on some of the genre characteristics of film noir more broadly, which introduces into the film the idea of fate as a distinct schema of time that is used to trouble a simpler and more linear sense of causality, but must itself also be kept at a safe distance to keep it from swallowing the overall narrative of the film (a fatality the film does not manage to avoid entirely). Perhaps for this reason, Petzold includes references to other film genres, most explicitly to zombie films, which yet again suggest to us a slightly different sense of time: not only the return or the repetition of the past, which is already suggested by the fatalism of film noir, but also the specific temporality of the undead, to which the refugees wandering the streets of Marseille are compared at one point in the film.4 The novel as a form has, of course, since the Romantics been recognized as a genre of genres, and Petzold himself has expressed interest in how Seghers’ 4  Hester Baer has described such handling of genre in Petzold’s films as well as in the films of other Berlin School directors as a “disorganization” of generic and temporal conventions of inherited cinematic forms, which allows the filmmakers to perform a kind of “archaeology of genre” and to recombine and “resignify” the genre fragments with the purpose of turning them into “images of the present” (Baer 2021, 278–87).

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novel combines a German or European literary form with the style of American short story writing. But it is also the case that the novel manages to render a sense of the historical significance of the events it represents in a manner that does not have a counterpart in the film. In the novel, the Old Port of Marseille is a place where, in the everyday chatter of the city’s inhabitants, one can hear the chitchat and the gossip of ancient Mediterranean civilizations upon which the history of Europe was built. But the view of the Mediterranean that opens from the port is also the view of a European who has reached the end of Europe and imagines across the horizon the beginning of a new historical period centered not around the exhausted Old but rather the emerging New World. Nothing in the film’s play with the distinct temporal schemas of the various genres (made possible by the negation of the genre of the period film) is able to reach for the unity implied by such a grand vision of history as that found in the novel’s evocation of the rise and decline of civilizations. On a more micro level, the film preserves the sense of temporal discordance by alternating between two distinct modes of cinematic narration. The first is of the more classical, verbocentric type, in which speech assumes the role of dramatic dialogue around which all other representational elements are organized in a more or less subordinated way. The other mode consists in the use of voice-over narration, or textual speech, which serves less as the representation of action in its happening and more as a kind of evocation of the images of action that has already taken place and that the narrative can draw on as though from a distance. The voice-over narration serves as an echo of both the literary provenance of the film and of the film noir genre conventions. Petzold uses it to condense time and to describe the inner states of the film’s protagonists, but he also places the evocative function of textual speech in an unreliable relationship to the images that the voice-over is meant to call up and describe, at times openly contradicting what we see take place in front of our eyes. Narratively, these divergences are justified by the fact that the voice-over narration exists in the film as a second-hand account, a narration of narration: it comes not from the protagonist whose actions it describes, but from the bartender, a marginal character in the plot, who narrates what must have at some prior point been narrated to him by Georg. The doubling of narration divides the sense of diegetic time rendered in the film. At the level of the image, a similar splitting occurs with the insertion of images that clearly do not belong in the diegetic world of the film but seem to come from some sort of elsewhere. They concern the encounters between Georg and Marie (Paula Beer), the Rick and Ilsa of Transit, except that, unlike the lovers in Casablanca, who share a past, the lovers in Transit do not have one. The images of their encounter, which interrupt the film, therefore come neither from the diegetic present nor from some memory that could plausibly exist in the world of the film. They are not flashbacks, but appear in their own time, as a virtual supplement that gives us the temporality of the couple’s encounter as something separate from, but no less real than, the actuality of their meeting in the film’s diegesis. These images present the encounter of the two lovers as a pure event, an event that

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constitutes its own time, irreducible to the time of the protagonists’ actions, their motivations, and the constraints of their milieu. Finally, the film’s plot itself places the significance of temporal discord at its center insofar as it revolves around the theme of pretense. At the beginning of the film, while still in Paris, Georg is asked by a friend in danger to deliver letters to a famous German writer, whose name is Weidel. When Georg arrives at the hotel where Weidel has been staying, he finds out that the writer, having lost hope, has committed suicide. In the hotel room, Georg picks up an unfinished manuscript and Weidel’s traveling documents that include a visa for Mexico. Needing to flee Paris due to the advancing movement of the Fascist forces, Georg escapes to Marseille. Once in Marseille, a city that itself quickly comes under threat from the advancing occupying forces, he, without much thought or without really planning to, adopts Weidel’s identity, primarily, it seems, to be able to escape France on one of the many transatlantic ships on which the refugees are leaving Europe. The film thus links pretense—Georg assuming the mask of the writer Weidel—intimately with his ability to maintain his migratory movement. In Marseille, Georg is confronted with Weidel’s wife Marie, who broke up with Weidel in Paris, but now, due to Georg’s appearance as Weidel, mistakenly thinks that her husband is in town and wishes to rejoin him, since this is the only way she can obtain her own travel documents. As would happen in any respectable plot, Georg falls in love with Marie, who at the same time carries on an affair with a German doctor named Richard (Godehard Giese). Georg decides that he will help Marie obtain her transit papers. There thus ensues a further twist in the pretense-plot. For Georg cannot pretend to be Weidel in front of Marie (she knows what her husband looks like), while he at the same time tries, as Weidel, to obtain her visa and transit papers so she may leave Marseille. He is neither sincerely himself (and, importantly, when he tries to level with Marie and tell her about her husband’s death, she is completely unwilling to hear any of it) nor simply continuing his pretense as Weidel. He is, we could say, not not pretending, which adds another layer to the already-­ complex relationship between the protagonist’s sincerity and his mask. It was Gaston Bachelard who, in The Dialectic of Duration (1936), described pretense as an exercise of superimposed and discordant temporalities: Let us for example study the temporal texture of pretense and see that this has already been detached from the continuous pattern of life: pretense is already a temporal superimposition. Indeed, even when we first consider it, we cannot but be struck by the fact that the texture of pretense is full of lacunae. A continuous pretense cannot really be imagined. (Bachelard 2016, 102)

Pretense, the act of assuming a mask, introduces a distinct temporal level that must, according to Bachelard, be distinguished from the “time of the self” or the “time of sincerity.” Neither of these levels is in itself continuous, but the temporality of the mask is particularly uneven and full of holes. This is due to

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the fact that, when we pretend to be someone else, we must necessarily abstract from the other’s identity a selective set of traits around which we organize our pretense. To ensure the consistency of our pretense, we cling to these abstracted traits with great intensity, which in turn results in the choppy temporality of the mask. Although the temporal form of pretense must in some way be coordinated with the “time of the self,” the superimposition of the two always remains somewhat artificial, and any incorporation of the time of pretense is necessarily also an interruption of the “time of sincerity.” Nor must the temporal superimpositions of pretense be limited to the two levels of the self and the mask. In Bachelard’s account, pretense may take on an exponential form, for it is possible to think pretense to the power of two—pretending to pretend—as well as the more rarefied form of pretense to the power of three—pretending to pretend to pretend. By placing him into the role of someone whose basic action is to pretend, or for whom pretense constitutes the very milieu of action, the plot of Transit sets up the protagonist as an amalgam of these different times, each formally distinguishable from the other: the time of sincerity (Georg), which is severely constrained by the situation of occupation and flight depicted in the film; the time of pretense (Georg assuming Weidel’s identity), which the film establishes as the condition of migratory movement; and the time that may perhaps be seen as a version of what Bachelard calls pretense to the power of two (Georg not not pretending), which in the film is the level that is most difficult to sustain, but also the level where a certain heroic decision of the protagonist becomes possible (and is expressed in Georg’s doomed declaration of care for Marie’s situation: “Ich will mich um dich kümmern”). The consistency of the film’s central character is thus established in relation to the irreducibility of these levels that must nevertheless somehow be coordinated in their superimposition. Borrowing from Bachelard, it would be possible to define this peculiar consistency as a “consistency without continuity” or a “‘continuity’ without a continuum.” The above enumeration, admittedly incomplete and rather schematic, suggests that the figuration of migratory movement in Transit confronts us with the thought of temporal discord as something that must be encountered for itself, directly in the superimposition of discontinuous and irreducible forms of time. Significantly, Petzold’s film does not run away from registering in this way a certain weakening of the sense of history. The negation of the history or period film genre, which opens up the experimentation with other genres, the incongruous combination of distinct narrative modes, and the use of a protagonist who exists in the multiple temporalities of pretense all point to the absence of a singular form of time in relation to which temporal discord could be read and made sense of. Yet in this way, the film also raises the question of how, in the absence of temporal commensurability, the discord of time might nevertheless be inscribed in some kind of form. Does the superimposition of discordant times itself offer opportunities for constructing a new kind of temporal consistency, a consistency of the fundamentally discontinuous (to refer once again to Bachelard’s concept)? Might the event of migratory movement,

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which will undoubtedly continue to register the intensifying crises of our time, not also point the way toward new forms of consistency, from which we may be able to reconstitute a temporal horizon as the scene of our collective existence? Whether one would then think of this in terms of a renewed sense of history or as the emergence of some new type of collective time, it would in any case have to be unrecognizable under the old categories with which people have made sense of their historical existence (the state, nationhood, development and progress, etc.). As Transit suggests, the wager is to begin as closely as possible from the discord of time itself, to begin in the absence of any real historical continuity, and to reinvent from there the projects of enlightenment (making time legible as the condition of our unfreedom) and emancipation (prefiguring in time the event of revolt and liberation). A tall order, perhaps an impossible task, but it is the task our present moment sets before any successful figuration of migratory movement.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. 2016. The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Baer, Hester. 2021. German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. 2010. A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words About the Experiences of Migrant Workers in Europe. New York: Verso. Petzold, Christian, dir. 2018. Transit. Resmini, Mauro. 2022. Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 6

A Border Poetics of Migration: Five Mappings of Migration Literature in Norwegian and Swedish Johan Schimanski

Approaches to migration literature require us to negotiate our concepts of borders. Since the 1990s, the field of border studies has grown out of its departure point in political geography and become an interdisciplinary field, involving also questions of border culture (Konrad and Amilhat Szary 2023), border poetics (Schimanski 2006; Sturm 2020), and border aesthetics (Schimanski and Wolfe 2013; Schimanski and Nyman 2021; Rosello and Wolfe 2017). Through the development of concepts such as cultural borderlands (Anzaldúa 1987), border zones, mobile borders, internal borders, b/ordering (Houtum and Naerssen 2002), borders as method (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), borderities (Amilhat Szary and Giraut 2015), borderscapes (Rajaram and Grundy-­ Warr 2007; Brambilla 2015), and bordertextures (Fellner 2021), border studies scholars have come to accept that borders are not just top-down institutions, but also everyday bottom-up practices. Bottom-up practices of bordering involve the negotiation of border imaginaries through actual border-crossings as well as culture, art, cinema, and literature. The “border turn” in cultural studies has thus been accompanied by a “cultural turn” in border studies. Recently, border studies has increasingly begun to overlap with migration studies, especially as it has responded to political responses to the “refugee crisis”

J. Schimanski (*) Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_6

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and current processes of rebordering and border securitization across the world. These intellectual shifts provide many of the conceptual tools necessary for a new focus on migration and border control in border studies. The pioneering sociologist Georg Simmel argued that “[t]he boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially” (1997, 143). While he emphasized that it is “sociological” differences (we could widen this to symbolic differences of all kinds) that bring about spatial borders, I would argue that once borders attain the spatiality that makes them into borders, that spatiality will also have “sociological” (and other symbolic) effects. This double dimension of the spatial and the symbolic is central to arguments about the topographical borders of the nationstate and the symbolic borders between different cultures. The spatial/symbolic join also provides the basis for studies of narrative space that focus on borders, as pioneered by Juri Lotman (1977), and more specifically “border poetics,” the theory and study of narratives of border-­ crossing. Border poetics is a form of analysis that addresses borders in different dimensions—not only the topographical and the symbolic, but also their variants, the temporal, the epistemological, and the textual (Schimanski 2006; Viljoen 2013; Sturm 2020). Every narrative of border crossing will involve these dimensions. Border poetics can be used to make mappings between two or several of these dimensions and identify various figurations and configurations of the border. Meditations on the role of borders in migration literature can also be found in other approaches to migration literature (Bhabha 1990; Clingman 2009; Trinh 2010; Sbiri et al. 2020). I will be addressing the dimensions of border-crossing identified in border poetics in a series of five mappings focusing on the five dimensions above, taking most of my examples from migration literature in Norwegian, with some material in Swedish. A literature of migration in Swedish has been established for many decades (Kongslien 2007, 205), going back to authors such as Theodor Kallifatides, who came to Sweden in the context of Greek work migration in the 1960s and established himself within the Swedish literary field. Lately, two authors with African fathers and Swedish mothers, Jonas Hassan Khemiri and Johannes Anyuru, have become major voices in Swedish literature. In contrast, Norwegian literature is still searching for “the great immigrant novel.” “Immigrant literature” (innvandrerlitteratur)—a problematic term, as it tends to fix migrant authors within a set category (Sturm 2020, 22–36; Olaru 2017, 141–144)—was first established around the time of the publication of Khalid Hussain’s Pakkis (a derogatory term for Pakistani, corresponding to British English “Paki”) in 1986. This novel, written originally as a school essay by a 16-year-old, was first joined by other examples of Norwegian migration literature in the late 1990s and the 2000s. Norwegian migration novels have mostly been one-offs by young authors who base their narratives on their own experiences of migration and diaspora. These share their discursive space with more explicitly autobiographical testimonials by refugees and illegal migrants who are prominent in public debate. Some of these Swedish

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and Norwegian authors have their background in work migration (initially Greek and Turkish in Swedish, Pakistani, and Indian in Norwegian, later also Polish and others), others in migration forced by political violence (from Somalia, Syria, and the Caucausus).1

Topographical Borders: Aerial and Urban Border-Crossings With an increased global focus on borders in art, literature, cinema, and other aesthetic forms comes a corresponding proliferation of narratives of border-­ crossing. In Norwegian and Swedish migration literature, only in very few instances do characters cross the outer topographical borders of nations over land or sea; almost all scenes of national border-crossing take place either in airports and in airplanes or on the finer scale and inner national space of urban and architectural boundaries. In Maria Amelie’s testimonial narrative Ulovlig norsk (“Illegally Norwegian,” 2010), she and her parents—originally from the Caucasus—do cross the land border to Norway by car, illegally, over the northern border of Finland.2 Her later account of her deportation, Takk (“Thank you,” Amelie 2014), however, is mostly set by the Oslo airport at Gardermoen, as well as in Oslo itself. In the novel Jacayl er kjærlighet på somali (“Jacayl is love in Somali”), a collaboration between public figure Amal Aden and novelist Håvard Syvertsen (2015), the Somalian protagonist’s young lover crosses the sea borders of the Mediterranean illegally, though this crossing is not described directly. Invocations of maritime crossings in the Mediterranean in political poetry written after the migration “crisis” of 2015—such as Sumaya Jirde Ali’s “Jeg er et kart” (“I am a map,” 2018, 7) or Athena Farrokhzad’s “Brev till Europa” (“Letter to Europe,” 2019)—is similarly “off-scene.” Aden’s lightly fictionalized testimonial of her own journey from Somalia to Norway as a child refugee, Min drøm om frihet (“My dream of freedom,” 2009) focuses, however, on air and urban borders. With borders as our departure point, we can differentiate roughly between two sub-genres of migration literature in the Swedish and Norwegian contexts, the postmigratory and the migratory proper (cf. Moslund 2015; Jagne-Soreau 2021, on “postmigration literature”). The first consists of novels and poetry about urban postmigratory  youth and the second of novels and testimonial narratives focusing on more explicitly migratory journeys involving border-­ crossings across the outer borders of Norway or Sweden. In the first sub-genre, national borders only figure in such texts when they are crossed by secondary characters such as family visitors, as in Gulraiz Sharif’s Hør her’a! (“Lis’en ’ere, ’ey,” 2020) or by family members on return journeys, as in Hussein’s Pakkis (2005). In these narratives and in other novels such as Jonas Hassan Khemiri’s 1  Previous important literary traditions deal with the extensive Swedish and Norwegian emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century. 2  We now know that Maria Amelie was born in the Russian republic of North Ossetia.

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Ett öga rött (“One eye red,” 2003), Maria Navarro Skaranger’s Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner (“All foreigners have closed curtains,” 2015), Zeshan Shakar, Tante Ulrikkes vei (“Aunt Ulrikkes Road,” 2017), as well as in the poetry of Sarah Zahid’s La oss aldri glemme hvor godt det kan være å leve (“Let us never forget how good it can be to be alive,” 2018), national borders are implicitly or symbolically folded into the nation, to reemerge as the borders of urban spaces (typically those between high-rise satellite conurbations and a city center) and the borders of homes and buildings. Zahid’s poetry collection, for example, frames a narrative of upward mobility played out as a series of border-­ crossings from the childhood home with its memories of Pakistan to school life in the multiethnic satellite conurbation of Holmlia, to a more secluded life in suburban Bjørnlia, to forays into the cultural and professional life of the Oslo city center. While the collection is full of topographical and other borders, only one poem, “alle må forlate toget” (“everybody must leave the train,” Zahid 2018, 70), explicitly uses the word “border” (grense), describing the city center river Akerselva as “the simplified / traditional / border / between the east side / and the west side” (my translation). This historical border between working class and bourgeois Oslo has been replaced by the borders between center and Eastern/Southern satellite conurbations and suburbs, represented in the poem by Mortensrud, on the last stop of an underground line. In the second sub-genre, focusing on migratory journeys, border-crossings do not always take place to Norway or Sweden; in some cases journeys are made from Norway and Sweden either to countries of origin and back—as in Nasim Karim’s IZZAT—For ærens skyld (“IZZAT—For the sake of honour,” 1996) and Amal Aden’s Min drøm om frihet (2009)—or to other countries in transnational diasporas—as in Roda Ahmed’s Forberedelsen (“The preparation,” 2008). Some novels tell the stories of the migratory journeys of parents from the perspective of their postmigratory or accompanying children, as in Romeo Gill’s Harjeet (“Harjeet,” the name of the father in the novel, 2008) or Johannes Anyuru’s En storm kom från paradiset (2012, translated as A Storm Blew in From Paradise, 2015). Others juxtapose narratives of parental migration with narratives of postmigratory urban youth, as in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore: En unik tiger (“Montecore: A unique tiger,” 2006, translated as Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, 2011). Within this second sub-genre, narratives can also tell the stories of sequences of crossings involving multiple national borders, as in Anyuru’s book (2012), a semi-biographical and semi-autobiographical novel about his father’s journey from Uganda to Greece to Italy to Zambia to Tanzania to Kenya and then to Sweden, in an extended border zone or “limboscape.” Anyuru’s novel illustrates the tendency of national borders—often intended as simple, unambiguous lines dividing sovereign territories—to multiply and be disseminated across time and space (Schimanski 2006, 48–49). In his novel, borders in Africa are crossed over land, while the borders of Europe are crossed in airplanes; the contrast between land and air borders becomes a primary motif in the novel. The narrator’s father is sent to Greece to train as a pilot for the newly formed

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Ugandan air force, so air flight and atmospheric spaces come to stand for future potential, while the land borders of Africa accompany the traumatic story of how he is unable to fulfill his dreams of a career as a pilot after his training is broken off following Idi Amin’s coup in Uganda. The air becomes a third space that disturbs standard narratives of national borders, as do the various police and military training camps in Tanzania in which he is detained after been abducted from Lusaka airport in Zambia. Airports and air travel also play a significant role in Amelie’s testimonial account of her deportation from Norway, Takk (2014). She is kept for several weeks in a police holding facility placed in a fenced-off space tangential to the outer perimeter fence of Oslo Airport (Schimanski 2017/2018). International airports have become the site of border-crossing for many migrants, and their security and passport controls create pseudo-international or interstitial border spaces. Amelie is subjected to a violent form of border-crossing—with full body searches—each time she enters or leaves the deportation facility, officially named Politiets utlendingsinternat, literally “The Police’s Internment-­ institution for Foreigners.”3 International airports and a camps of this kind are situated inside and symbolically outside national borders; to use Jacques Derrida’s figure of the border, they “participate without belonging” (1980, 59). As in Anyuru’s novel (2012), the air is seen as a traumatic space in Amelie’s testimonial (2014). While in the deportation facility she feels frustrated by the views through the windows of airplanes landing and taking off from the airport. Her earlier book, Ulovlig norsk (2010), is based on a well-known blog on growing up as an “illegal” migrant, and her subsequent arrest and deportation made her into a cause célèbre. The public reaction to her deportation led to changes in the Norwegian application of immigration rules (the “lex amelie”), making it possible for her eventually to reenter Norway. On her return she can look through the airplane windows but is unable to see the facility in which she was held: “I look out of the window. I look and look and I do not want to see. I turn away. I look again. But I do not see it. Trandum. It happens each time I fly” (Amelie 2014, 106, my translation). Windows, themselves part of the topographical borders of buildings, become figurations of the national border. In other novels, the view from the air—not from one side of the border to the other, but at the border from above—can make the crossing of the border into a site of potentiality, as in Romeo Gill’s semi-autobiographical novel Ung mann i nytt land (“Young man in a new land,” 2011), in which the protagonist sees Norway from the air while flying as a boy from Punjab to rejoin his work migrant father. In Gill’s novel, kites, tall buildings, and airplanes all promise a liberation from borders (Schimanski 2021, 213). The attraction of air travel and tall mountains in Sara Azmeh Rasmussen’s semi-autobiographical novel Skyggeferden (“The shadow journey,” 2013) is more transitory (Schimanski 3  The Norwegian word internat usually refers to boarding schools, which have a sinister history in Norway, as many were set up for the forced education and temporary settlement of indigenous nomadic Saami.

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2021, 215–19). As an accepted refugee escaping religious persecution in Syria, such motifs give as sense of promise, but she also associates heights with walls— symbols of split identities from which one might fall (as in the book cover image of a child balancing on top of wall, a photograph taken by the author)— and also with depression and suicide.4 One could see the topographical dimension of national borders as providing a baseline—integral to our concepts of migration—onto which other forms of border in migration literature can be projected. If so, it is a rather uncertain border line, constantly extended into border zones, challenged by the ambivalence of vertical perspectives or folded into urban spaces.

Symbolic Borders: Borders of Culture, Language, and Generation Typically, the multiplication of borders in migration literature expands from spatial and material versions of topographical borders into more symbolic forms of border. Some Swedish and Norwegian migration narratives see the crossing of territorial borders as only the first stage on a longer, cultural journey that involves the crossings of many symbolic borders between cultures of origin and Norwegian/Swedish cultures. Aden’s testimonial, Min drøm om frihet (2009), emphasizes how the author continues to live within an essentially Somali culture for a long period after arriving in Norway before her first performative encounter with a Norwegian—“performative encounter” here in Mireille Rosello’s sense (2005), that is, a meeting which changes one’s own identity. This encounter, a turning point of the narrative, is carefully situated at the mid-point of Aden’s book (2009, 92). The topographical borders of Norway and Somalia, for example, are intimately connected with cultural differences, in other words the symbolic border between Norwegianness and Somaliness. Such mappings are seldom exact, the crossing of the cultural border is delayed and any notion of the fixity of cultural boundaries is questioned. Intersectionality further challenges the idea of the border as fixed line, folding national and cultural differences into the borders between genders, classes, sexual identities, sub-cultures, and generations. Some narratives can negate received conceptions of the symbolic differences between nations. The protagonists of Amelie’s testimonial Ulovlig norsk (2010), Gill’s novel Ung mann i nytt land (2011), and Rasmussen’s novel Skyggeferden (2013) all begin to feel at home in Norway because they meet something (e.g. mountains and snow, or farming land) that is familiar from their home countries (Schimanski 2021). Expectations built around European ideas of northern identity can be subverted, for example when Norway is seen a green and fecund country in comparison to Indian Punjab in Gill’s first novel 4  For a discussion of air travel in a Francophone literary context, see a forthcoming article by Anna-Leena Toivanen, “Peripheralizing the Metropolis: Aeromobile Portrayals of Paris in Francophone African Literature.”

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Harjeet (2008, 139, 209), rather than as cold and wintry. The differences or symbolic borders between nations and national characters can often have only tenuous links to topographical borders. It is striking that the young protagonist of Gill’s second novel experiences both recognition and difference in the book’s introductory scenes of landing at and traveling onward from Oslo airport (Gill 2011, 9, 21). Migration literature often uses different languages to express the complexity of symbolic borders between cultures. In novels and poetry of urban postmigratory youth in Norway and Sweden, the binaries of national difference are challenged and subverted through the use of multiethnolects. Khemiri’s debut novel, Ett öga rött (2003) and Maria Navarro Skaranger’s Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner (2015) attracted much attention for being written in a form of rinkebysvenska (“Rinkeby-Swedish,” after Rinkeby, a stereotypically multiethnic conurbation on the outskirts of Stockholm) or in kebabnorsk (“kebab-­ Norwegian”). Sharif’s humorous and satirical novel Hør her’a (2020) is also written in kebabnorsk and Shakar’s well-received novel Tante Ulrikkes vei (2017) carefully differentiates between the class formation of its two narrators, one (upwardly mobile) writing in standard Norwegian and in the other (more down and out) writing in kebabnorsk. In these cases, an emphasis on the difference between postmigratory youth and a majority culture coincides with the neutralization of symbolic borders between different diasporic groups. This figuration of the symbolic borders between ethnicities, age groups, and class identities are then mapped in these novels onto the borders between satellite conurbations and city centers, or even onto the external topographical borders of individual apartment blocks, containing their multiethnic communities. Shakar’s novel (2017), Sharif’s novel (2020), and Zahid’s poetry collection (2018) all feature apartment blocks on their covers, and the title of Skaranger’s novel (2015) refers to them metonymically through its motif of curtains. In his third novel, De kaller meg ulven (“They Call Me the Wolf”), Shakar describes one such block as a “grensevakt” (“border guard,” 2022, 10). Crossings of topographical borders inevitably create new symbolic borders and shifts in affiliation within diasporic communities. On arriving in Norway, the protagonist of Aden’s Min drøm om frihet (2009) experiences divisions both between Norwegian and diasporic culture in Norway (reinforced by institutional racism and Somali skepticism about Norwegian cultural norms) and between herself and a Somali diaspora that she sees as reproducing the conflicts and clan divisions that she has grown up with during the Somalian civil war. Migration narratives in Swedish and Norwegian also emphasize an internal conflict between children and parents. Ingeborg Kongslien has identified many of the protagonists of migration literature in Norwegian as either second-­ generation migrants or “1.5 generation migrants” (2007, 211), that is, migrant children born outside of Norway but growing up there, having migrated with their families or, as in the case of protagonists in Aden’s testimonial (2009) and Rasmussen’s novel (2013), alone as young refugees. A focus on the symbolic borders between generations—the older living on the other side of a cultural

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border, the younger attempting to liberate itself from its strictures—is often the driving narrative force within these narratives. Such generational borders are mostly mapped onto the outer topographical borders of the home, that is, the outer walls, windows, curtains, and entrance of the family apartment, with for example the protagonist of Hussein’s novel Pakkis (1986) experiencing the outer walls and entrance of the family apartment as a symbolic border between a repressive Pakistani and a nihilistic Norwegian culture. Marit Ann Barkve (2018, 131–174) traces a pattern of liberation and escape within migration literature in Norwegian, primarily looking at those with female protagonists. She compares this figuration with the plot of Henrik Ibsen’s Et Dukkehjem (Ibsen 1879, translated as A Doll’s House). Nora, the protagonist of Ibsen’s play, rejects patriarchal structures of power and walks out of the front door of her family’s house at the end of the play. In doing so, I would argue, Nora crosses topographical borders with symbolic dimensions (emancipatory/patriarchal, public/private, etc.). Barkve compares Nora’s narrative with migrant protagonists leaving their families in Aden’s Min liv i frihet (2009), Ahmed’s Forberedelsen (2008), Karim’s IZZAT (1996), and Hussain’s Pakkis (1986). Again, both symbolic and topographical borders are crossed, as when the protagonist of Ahmed’s novel (2008) escapes from the threat of an arranged marriage in London by taking the Eurostar train to Paris. Sharif’s novel Hør her’a! (2020) provides a counterexample—perhaps related to the novel’s comic aspects—in which a possible tension between generations and between Norwegian and Pakistani culture is neutralized and harmonized with the parents’ (and even visiting uncle’s) acceptance of the protagonist’s brother coming out as a transgendered person. Notably, the protagonist of Sharif’s novel also attempts to erase the symbolic borders of Pakistani and Norwegian identities by identifying as “oslosk” (“Osloian,” 2020, 69). This kind of third space, in this case neither Pakistani nor Norwegian, is the necessary product of the dissemination and intersectionality of symbolic and topographical borders in many of the texts discussed here. Simmel’s dictum mentioned earlier would give primacy to symbolic borders, such as the borders between cultures, languages, generations, and also genders, in migration narratives. While topographical borders provide powerful manifestations of such borders on national, urban, and architectural scales, they also provide containers for the complex third spaces of identity.

Temporal Borders: The Liminality of Travel, Development, Trauma, and Hope Each crossing of topographical and symbolical borders in migration narratives is marked by the crossing of a temporal border between a “before” and an “after” within the biographies of their protagonists. The common focus on young protagonists for many of the novels, poetry, and testimonials that make up Norwegian and Swedish migration literature means they often take on aspects of the genre of the novel of development or Bildungsroman, most importantly

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in their descriptions of the threshold states of the transition for childhood to adulthood, described by social anthropologists such as Victor Turner (1967) as states of liminality. According to Turner, liminal states are positioned between an integrated before and a re-integrated after. However, they combine this temporal border-­ crossing with other forms of border crossing—the limen or “threshold” is indeed a topographical figuration that implies the temporal act of entry. The initiation rituals that Turner describes often involve crossing topographical as well as symbolic borders (e.g. out of a village). The Swedish and Norwegian narratives of the migratory journeys across outer national borders pivot around an extended in-between state. However, while the standard narrative of initiation rituals presupposes integration both before and after a liminal state, in this case the subsequent integration is into a new culture and society, not back into the old one. This means that the migrant protagonist often becomes a liminal figure, inhabiting a more permanent “liminoid” (Turner 1982, 20–60) and hybrid state in which they belong to two cultures at once. In narratives of urban diasporic youth the liminal border is often positioned as a topographical threshold in a very material sense, placed at the entrance of the family flat— examples include the novels by Hussain (1986) and Sharif (2020). The migratory journey sub-genre primarily focuses on “travel time” between one country and another. Such in-between zones have both topographical and temporal aspects. Migrant protagonists in testimonials such as Amelie’s Takk (2014) or in novels such as those by Khemiri (2006) and Anyuru (2012) experience these in-between zones as spaces of captivity, created by power hierarchies and precarity. Such migrant spaces/times, with their temporalities of repetition, boredom, and trauma, have been called spaces of waiting or “limboscapes” (cf. Houtum 2010; Ferrer-Gallardo and Albet-Mas 2013; Houtum and Wolfe 2017; Khosravi 2022). Books by Aden (2009), Rasmussen (2013), and Gill (2008, 2011) involve extended periods between the crossing of the outer topographic borders of the nation and the symbolic borders of national culture. The crossing of the cultural border may be mapped onto the crossing of a topographical border, as when Aden’s and Gill’s protagonists (Aden 2009; Gill 2011) move in with Norwegian friends. The first sub-genre defined earlier, novels and poetry of urban or suburban postmigratory youth, may only refer to the extended “travel time” of migration obliquely or primarily in relation to return and cross-diasporic travel. Some novels, however, intentionally reconstruct parents’ journeys and juxtapose them with children’s stories, constantly crossing temporal borders back and forth between times in their narrative discourse. The novels by Khemiri (2006) and Anyuru (2012) tell the stories of migrating fathers, but also the stories of how these stories are reconstructed and written by their sons. The first novel in Gill’s unfinished trilogy, Harjeet (2008), written in a more realist and less postmodernist mode, switches between the story of the work migrant father in Norway and that of his sons growing up simultaneously in the Punjab. This first volume functions as a prequel to the story of the sons (primarily the older

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son) growing up as an adolescent in Norway in the second novel Ung mann i nytt land (2011). Such stories of parents and children constitute family histories and trace extended border-crossings taking place across generations. Migration narratives also relate to the wider and longer scales of historical narratives about migration, decolonization, and globalization. Gill’s Harjeet (2008) focuses on the history of work migration from the Subcontinent to Norway, with the division between India and Pakistan looming in the background, while the novels by Khemiri (2006) and Anyuru (2012) describe lives strongly inflected by the civil wars in Algeria and Uganda, respectively. Such macro-scale historical events are temporal borders that often involve the collective crossings of topographical borders and equally collective traumas. In a global perspective, migration can be seen as symbolic of different and disjunctive temporalities. Migration challenges the safe, calendrical time of the nation state (Bhabha 1990; Anderson 1991). This disjunction becomes particularly apparent when the act of migration becomes an experience of trauma, fragmenting the migrant’s sense of a continuous time frame in their own lives. Novels of memory by Khemiri (2006), Ahmed (2008), and Anyuru (2012) all explore the disjunction between personal calendrical time and the neurotic repetition caused by personal trauma.5 Most of the testimonials and novels here are presented as narratives of contemporary or past experiences. They can leave unsaid a sense of futurity, implying a final act of integration in which their protagonist-writers cross a symbolic border into the public sphere, promising future possibilities for migrant and diasporic readers who may follow their examples. The activist poetry of Athena Farrokhzad (2019), in Swedish, points actively to the future however, using the prophetic voice of the romantic and revolutionary poet. In her long poem, “Brev till Europa” (“Letter to Europe,” Farrokhzad 2019; translated into English by Jennifer Hayashida as “Europe,” Farrokhzad 2018), which constantly refers to the experiences of migrants and refugees, she uses a subjunctive and indictive vision of the future to cross borders out of the repetitions of colonial trauma. Anaphoric lines reiterate the phrases “When will you …,” “One day, I’ll …,” “One day I will …,” “No one will …,” “I hope …,” and “I want ….” Trauma is referenced ironically in lines such as “Europe, one day the Lagos conference will take place and Africa will redraw your borders” (Farrokhzad 2018, 37). Temporal borders are integral to the plots of migration literature, creating liminal space in stories of personal development, and connecting perspectives of trauma and hope.

5  For discussions of the border traumas of historical migration and displacement around the Finnish–Russian border, see Kurki (2021).

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Epistemological Borders: The Paradoxes of Visuality Both, memory as invoked by Khemiri (2006) and Anyuru (2012) and prophecy as practiced by Farrokhzad (2019) involve crossing not only a temporal, but also an epistemological border. In such works, epistemological borders figure acts of knowing and unknowing, imagining and ignoring, vision and blindness, hearing and deafness, as well as remembering and forgetting. Epistemological borders can be related to topographical borders, which often function as the horizons of the known world. Narratives of migration in Norwegian and Swedish reconstruct retrospectively migrants’ meetings with the unknown. They also present double epistemologies, poised between majority perspectives and migrants’ practices of “seeing from the border” (Rumford 2011). Novels, poetry, plays, films, and testimonials can function as acts of witnessing that help make migrants visible and audible. However, even within migration literature, we must be aware of the paradoxes of visibility. As Brambilla and Pötzsch (2017)—building on Hannah Arendt (1958) and Marieke Borren (2008)—make clear in their work on in/visibility in the borderscape, migrants can be made visible in ways that take political agency away from them, both as racialized bodies/masses in media and political discourse, and as targets for policing and surveillance in a panoptic border regime. Even well-meaning attention on the part of the media, politicians, ethnographers, and artists can be co-opted by surveillance and racist actors, or contribute to a media spectacle that makes us blind to the actual concerns of migrants. The publication of Amelie’s testimonial Ulovlig norsk (2010), along with the blog that preceded it, made her cause visible and revealed her identity, leading to her arrest and deportation. I have already mentioned the ironic role of windows in her subsequent testimonial Takk (Amelie 2014), functioning as a form of “glass ceiling” or transparent border that allows her to see privileged airline travelers from the deportation center at Oslo Airport, but not to partake in their freedom. Amelie extends this cluster of glass motifs, not only to include the floor mirror used by the police for intrusive and traumatic full-body searches as she crosses the topographical borders of the deportation center, but also to address the massive media spectacle around her case, figured metonymically in the book through the camera lenses of television companies and newspaper photographers. This media spectacle she also finds intrusive and traumatic, even as it makes her cause known and ultimately leads to her being allowed to re-enter Norway. The visual epistemology of photographs is also central in the novels of Khemiri (2006), Ahmed (2008), and Anyuru (2012), figuring here the political aesthetics of memory and trauma. All three authors describe family photographs through ekphrasis, as well as giving them symbolic values and plot functions; Anyuru (2012) also includes actual photographs of his father on the inner cover of his novel. These photographs, alongside several other examples of what Debra A. Castillo (2007) would call “umbilical border objects,”

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connect their tangible existence in present European spaces, across temporal and topographical borders, to intangible African pasts. This narrative handling of fixed, repeated images also allows these authors to address the blanked-out spaces of traumatic memory. I have here focused on epistemological borders as borders of visuality and image. However, all these literary texts also implicitly involve the epistemology of reading, or, by remove, of having a voice and being heard. Ultimately, each published text of fiction, poetry, or testimonial signals the crossing from the limited epistemology of the private sphere into the wider epistemology of the public sphere. In Swedish and Norwegian migration literature, several novels and testimonials function not only as Bildungsromane (novels of development), but also as Künstlerromane (novels of the formation of artists). Novels and testimonials by Khemiri (2006), Amelie (2010), Gill (2011), and Anyuru (2012) either imply or describe how their narrators become the authors of the published texts that the reader is reading. The migrant protagonist’s crossing of epistemological borders into the public sphere is mapped onto the extended border-crossing of migration as it reaches a symbolic border of successful or resisted integration. Borders do not only regulate mobilities in migration literature but also their epistemologies, creating horizons that overlap topographical borders, though never exactly. They create our public spheres, the spaces in which migrants may acquire or lose their agency.

Textual Borders: The Materiality of the Text One of the theoretical challenges posed by border poetics is how borders presented in storyworlds relate to the material and formal borders of the textual medium itself. When readers read texts, they cross their external and internal borders—their beginnings, divisions, and endings, their transitions between different modes or between text, and what is on the outside of the text. Paratexts, genre, style, and literary techniques can regulate how those borders are configured, and we can even hypothesize possible commonalities or interactions between how textual borders and borders in the world outside are conceptualized. Textual borders become important when Gill chooses to begin his second book, Ung mann i nytt land (2011), with his young protagonist crossing the border while arriving by plane in Norway. Anyuru places an important scene related to a crossing from Tanzania to Kenya both in the middle of the novel En storm kom från paradiset (2012) and on its outer edge, in a small prefatory fragment situated between the colophon and the beginning of part I of the novel. The novel creates a layering of stories, introduced by (1) the one fragmented scene mentioned above; and continuing with (2) the story of his father’s interrogation by the Tanzanian secret police, which envelopes both (3) short fragments/ekphrases of his father’s photographs from pilot training in Greece and folds out into (4) the whole story of his life before arriving in

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Lusaka and being handed over to the Tanzanians, along with his escape from Tanzania and eventual migration to Sweden afterward, before transitioning then into (5), the story of the author’s own reconstruction of his father’s life and Benjaminian/Fanonian reflections about that life, ending with his father’s death. The way in which Anyuru’s novel creates folds and borders in its own text, crossed by symbolic connections around the motifs of sky and flying, gives us what is in effect a “historiographic metafiction” (Hutcheon 1989) and a highly specific way of framing a migratory experience and history. Similarly complex metafictional structures are involved when the novelist protagonist of Khemiri’s Montecore (2006) is asked to write a highly fictionalized account of his photographer father’s life, superimposing epistemological borders in the form of fictions and irony onto a topographical border-crossing from Tunisia to Sweden and a symbolic border between father and son. Rancière calls the political aesthetics of how “what can be sensed” is “divided/ shared” a question of “style” (2004, 32, 2010, 156). Whether a book is a testimonial, a drama, a collection of poetry, or a novel, whether it is a historiographic metafiction (Anyuru 2012), a realist narrative (Gill 2008, 2011), a realist narrative containing short fables (Ahmed 2008), or a comic satire with a happy ending (Sharif 2020), it will be connected to the kind of epistemological, temporal, symbolic, and topographical borders it is addressing. A text that layers narratives, as does Anyuru’s novel (2012), will suit the story of a highly extended or multiplied border-crossing, distributed across time and space. An author of testimonials such as Amal Aden can turn to fiction (Aden and Syvertsen 2015) when trying to convey the uneasy silences of the Mediterranean crossing during the 2015 migration “crisis,” outside of her own experience. Bringing the focus back to the formal dimension of literature and the choices writers make while writing, textual borders—for example, in the form of paratexts and layered narratives—help articulate different stories of migration and how migrant experience enters into the public sphere.

Negotiating Borders by Narrating Migration In this chapter I have examined primarily Norwegian-language material, along with some examples of texts in Swedish. I have aimed to show how thinking about borders, and analysis through border poetics, may help us understand how migration literature narrates the symbolic, temporal, and epistemological dimensions of topographical border-crossings and gives access to migrant experience through its handlings of textual borders. Textual borders—involving textual divisions, style, narrative techniques, and genre—are central to an understanding of how migratory and postmigratory experiences cross the epistemological borders of the public sphere, raising questions about the function of literature and of the specific ways in which literature is framed (or bordered). It remains to suggest that work within literary ethnography—already initiated where migration literature in Norwegian is concerned by Tisdel (2020) and Fagerlid (2020)—may provide further keys to understanding how migration

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literature and its border-crossings function within society, in particular in the light of intense political debates about migration in Norway and Sweden. Acknowledgments  This essay has partly come about within the research group “Migration, Borders and Identity” and is dedicated to the memory of its founder, Nelson González Ortega. I would like to thank Liridona Qaka for introducing me to Gulraiz Sharif’s novel Hør her’a! and for our discussions about this text and Khalid Hussain’s Pakkis. To Mikkel Nørregaard Jørgensen goes thanks for introducing me to the poetry of Athena Farrokzhad. Research connected to the NOS-HS-funded workshop series “Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing: Contemporary Public Migration Narratives in Europe” also fed into this text.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1980. The Law of Genre. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 55–81. Fagerlid, Cicilie. 2020. When Author Meets Audience: The Potentiality of Literature to Re-narrate Selves, Belonging, and National Community. In A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging: Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes, ed. Cicilie Fagerlid and Michelle A. Tisdel, 71–96. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Farrokhzad, Athena. 2018. Europe. In Öppet brev till Europa / Odprto pismo Evropi / Open Letter to Europe / Offener Brief an Europa, 32–45. Ljubljana: Beletrina. ———. 2019. Brev till Europa. In I rörelse: dikter, 8–18. [Stockholm]: Albert Bonniers förlag. Fellner, Astrid. 2021. Grenze und Ästhetik: Repräsentationen von Grenzen in den kulturwissenschaftlichen Border Studies. In Grenzforschung: Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium, ed. Dominik Gerst, Maria Klessmann, and Hannes Krämer, 436–456. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Ferrer-Gallardo, Xavier, and Abel Albet-Mas. 2013. EU-Limboscapes: Ceuta and the Proliferation of Migrant Detention Spaces across the European Union. European Urban and Regional Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776413508766. Gill, Romeo. 2008. Harjeet: Roman. Oslo: Oktober. ———. 2011. Ung mann i nytt land: Roman. Oslo: Oktober. Houtum, Henk van. 2010. Waiting Before the Law: Kafka on the Border. Social & Legal Studies 19 (3): 285–297. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663910372180. Houtum, Henk van, and Ton van Naerssen. 2002. Bordering, Ordering and Othering. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 93 (2): 125–136. Houtum, Henk van, and Stephen F. Wolfe. 2017. Waiting. In Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F.  Wolfe, 129–146. New York: Berghahn. Hussain, Khalid. 1986. Pakkis. Oslo: Tiden. ———. 2005. Pakkis. 2. utg ed, Tiden pocket. [Oslo]: Tiden. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History. In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, 3–32. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ibsen, Henrik. 1879. Et dukkehjem: Skuespil i tre akter. København: Gyldendalske boghandels forlag (F. Hegel & Son) / Græbes Bogtrykkeri. Jagne-Soreau, Maïmouna. 2021. “I don’t write about me, I write about you”: Four Major Motifs in the Nordic Postmigration Literary Trend. In Postmigration: Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe, ed. Anna Meera Gaonkar, Astrid Sophie Ost Hansen, Hans Christian Post and Moritz Schramm, 161–180. Bielefeld: transcript. Karim, Nasim. 1996. IZZAT—For ærens skyld. Oslo: J. W. Cappelens Forlag. Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. 2003. Ett öga rött. Stockholm: Norstedt. ———. 2006. Montecore: En unik tiger. Stockholm: Norstedt. ———. 2011. Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, trans. Rachel Willson-Broyles. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Khosravi, Shahram. 2022. Afterword: Waiting, a State of Consciousness. In Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, ed. Christine M.  Jacobsen, Marry-­ Anne Karlsen, and Shahram Khosravi, 202–207. London: Routledge. Kongslien, Ingeborg. 2007. New Voices, New Themes, New Perspectives: Contemporary Scandinavian Multicultural Literature. Scandinavian Studies 79 (2): 197–226. Konrad, Victor, and Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary. 2023. Border Culture: Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics. London: Routledge.

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Kurki, Tuulikki. 2021. From Heroism to Grotesque: The Invisibility of Border-Related Trauma Narratives in the Finnish–Russian Borderlands. In Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings, ed. Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman, 105–126. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lotman, Jurij. 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Michigan. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Moslund, Sten Pultz. 2015. Towards a Postmigrant Reading of Literature: An Analysis of Zadie Smith’s NW. In The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories, ed. Sten Pultz Moslund, Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm, 94–112. London: I.B. Tauris. Olaru, Ovio. 2017. Norwegian Innvandrerlitteratur and the Spell of Transnationalism. Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 3 (2): 132–153. Rajaram, Prem Kumar, and Carl Grundy-Warr, eds. 2007. Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. ———. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum. Rasmussen, Sara Azmeh. 2013. Skyggeferden. Oslo: Humanist. Rosello, Mireille. 2005. France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Rosello, Mireille, and Stephen F.  Wolfe. 2017. Introduction. In Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F.  Wolfe, 1–24. New York: Berghahn. Rumford, Chris. 2011. Seeing Like a Border. Political Geography 30 (2): 61–69. Sbiri, Kamal, Jopi Nyman, and Rachida Yassine, eds. 2020. Mobile Identities: Race, Ethnicity, and Borders in Contemporary Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Schimanski, Johan. 2006. Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and a Method. Nordlit 19: 41–63. https://doi.org/10.7557/13.1835. ———. 2017. Frontières de verre / Glass Borders. antiAtlas Journal 2: 1–27. ———. 2021. Seasons of Migration to the North: Borders and Images in Migration Narratives Published in Norwegian. In Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings, ed. Johan Schimanski and Jopi Nyman, 206–224. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schimanski, Johan, and Jopi Nyman. 2021. Introduction: Images and Narratives on the Border. In Border Images, Border Narratives, 1–20. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schimanski, Johan, and Stephen F. Wolfe. 2013. The Aesthetics of Borders. In Assigning Cultural Values, ed. Kjerstin Aukrust, 235–250. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Shakar, Zeshan. 2017. Tante Ulrikkes vei: roman. Oslo: Gyldendal. ———. 2022. De kaller meg ulven: Roman. Oslo: Gyldendal. Sharif, Gulraiz. 2020. Hør her’a! Oslo: Cappelen Damm. Simmel, Georg. 1997. The Sociology of Space. In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, 137–170. London: Sage.

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Skaranger, Maria Navarro. 2015. Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner: roman. Oslo: Oktober. Sturm, Anne-Maria. 2020. Grenzen und Grenzüberschreitungen: llija Trojanow— Dimitré Dinev—Sibylle Lewitscharoff—Evelina Jecker Lambreva. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Tisdel, Michelle A. 2020. Narratives of Competence and Confidence: Self, Society, and Belonging in Norway. In A Literary Anthropology of Migration and Belonging: Roots, Routes, and Rhizomes, ed. Cicilie Fagerlid and Michelle A. Tisdel, 125–156. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Trinh T.  Minh-ha. 2010. Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. Viljoen, Hein, ed. 2013. Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Zahid, Sarah. 2018. La oss aldri glemme hvor godt det kan være å leve. Oslo: Flamme forlag.

CHAPTER 7

“A strangely familiar place”: Cinematic (Re)framings of the EU’s Easternmost Border Argyro Nicolaou

One day, in early July, sixty-five migrants were caught floating in the Adriatic Sea, off the coast of Croatia. Cramped on a boat without gas, they wanted to find themselves in a country of the European Union. Soon, they found themselves in Dubrovnik, the most touristic place in Croatia. A few days later, nearby, on the Mediterranean’s waters, about fifty people die, trying to do something similar: reach Italy. Twenty-five-year-old Abbas, the only survivor, gives different stories about their trip from Tunisia. A bit further to the south, at the end of August, a boat carries four men, a woman, and two children, from Syria to the northern coast of Cyprus. No one survived, besides the smugglers who were arrested as soon as they landed safely on shore. Such incidents become known only if a fisherman finds a body floating off the coast. —Opening voice-over text (Evaporating Borders 2014)

In the 2014 nonfiction film Evaporating Borders: A Story in Five Parts, Serbian filmmaker Iva Radivojević returns to the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus where she grew up as a migrant, to document the influx of asylum seekers at the outset of the Syrian civil war. In its opening sequence, the film weaves a poetic collage of spoken text and images from Croatia and Cyprus into a snapshot of migration to Europe via the Mediterranean, a phenomenon that would accelerate at an unprecedented rate in the two years following the film’s

A. Nicolaou (*) Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_7

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release. As evidenced from the opening voice-over text cited above, in Radivojević’s telling, Croatia, Italy, and Cyprus, all distinct places with distinct cultures, languages, and geopolitical backgrounds, are also one and the same space, that of the (coastal) borderland of the European Union (EU), the desired destination and landing point of thousands of surviving—and deceased—migrant and refugee bodies making their way from various countries in the Global South to the so-called paradise of Europe. Up to the end of the film’s first sequence, then, Evaporating Borders proceeds pretty much in line with narrative and filmic tropes that audiences have grown accustomed to in media representations of Mediterranean migration in the past decade: shots of the sea, refugee boats reaching the shore, tourist destinations not far from sites of refugee boat rescues, a spoken litany of migrant shipwrecks, and a camera immersed in water. Yet after this short preamble, Radivojević lands on an image taken miles away from the beachfronts of its opening sequence: it is a crossroads in the heart of the walled town of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus and “the only militarily partitioned city in Europe.” A member state of the EU since 2004, Cyprus is the EU’s unstable easternmost border. It has been divided with a de facto border into a Turkish-Cypriot-­ controlled north, occupied by the Turkish military since 1974 and recognized as an independent territory only by Turkey, and a Greek-Cypriot-controlled south, the seat of the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus. While in theory the whole territory of the island is part of the EU, in practice the implementation of the acquis [EU law] is suspended for the northern part of the island, pending a final settlement of the so-called Cyprus problem (Trimikliniotis 2019, 2). It is at this very crossroads, then, where EU law is both present and absent, that Evaporating Borders takes an unexpected turn. Over shots of the divided city of Nicosia, the voice-over shifts from a seemingly detached, third-­ person point of view to a familiar first-person register that implicates the audience and establishes an indexical relationship between spoken word and image: “I want to tell you about this place, this island in the sun, the island of Cyprus. But you should know that for me, it is my home, even if I belong here only as a familiar stranger” (my emphasis). Like Nicosia itself, with its proliferating identities triggered by long-standing division, Radivojević announces herself in a multiple way, as both an “insider” and an “outsider” to Cypriot society, blurring the boundaries between the two.1 With the filmmaker’s aural breaking of the fourth wall, we are made aware that Evaporating Borders is more than just a document of the state of migration in Europe in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It is partly autobiography, the filmmaker’s own story; and it is also a film about Cyprus, where Radivojević and her family sought refuge following the breakup of their home country of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In the pages that follow, I will map how 1  I use these terms as they have been employed in the fields of anthropology and ethnography, with an “insider” being someone privy to, and part of, a culture or a particular group and an “outsider” being someone who is not.

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Radivojević treats migration not just as one of the subjects of Evaporating Borders, but as a formal and narrative principle, an interpretive and epistemological framework with the power to subvert fixed, hegemonic narratives of place and identity. I am especially interested in how Radivojević uses her firsthand experience of displacement as “a sensual, ethical experience of constant encounters with otherness, which requires ongoing cultural translation” and hence as a tool to reconfigure the narrative relations between “Europe” and its “Others” (Imre and Zimanyi 2016, 122). Works of film and art in general are in a strong position to function as catalysts of such processes of cultural translation. Migration’s potency as an artistic and analytical lens is evident in Radivojević’s distinct cinematic—and political—vision of Cyprus as a fundamentally multicultural space rife with contradiction and paradox, an approach that differs greatly from dominant representations of the island as a divided, bicommunal, bicultural space paradigmatic of the so-called clash of civilizations between “East” and “West,” “Greeks” and “Turks,” Christianity and Islam. While most art produced by people who are refugees or migrants is often preoccupied with home and a return to home, Radivojević uses the term to refer not to her place of birth, but to what sociological parlance would term her “host” society, the “new” country that became her home after her initial displacement (Said 2000). This “strangely familiar” perspective infuses both the narrative and the formal and stylistic choices of the film. By approaching Evaporating Borders as a filmic portrait of Cyprus through the lens of displacement and, by extension, as a case study of how works of art by displaced individuals can fundamentally alter our perception of place and identity, this chapter will address the following questions: What different visions of Europe emerge from Radivojević’s—and other migrant artists’—“strangely familiar” positionality of displacement? How does a view from the small island of Cyprus, the EU’s unstable easternmost border, problematize dominant definitions of European identity and alterity? And, finally, how can privileging works by displaced artists in scholarship and criticism help writers, researchers, educators, and students in the pursuit of decolonizing humanistic thought and crafting more equitable imaginaries of Europe, and the world?

An Island Cleft in Two? The history of the island of Cyprus is, as Radivojević reminds us, “long and tumultuous,” “complicated,” “sordid and manipulated.” Home to (Greek Orthodox) Greek- and (Sunni Muslim) Turkish-Cypriot populations, as well as to other ethnic and religious groups (including Armenians, Maronites, Latins, and Roma), Cyprus was granted independence in 1960 after an anti-colonial struggle against the British, who took control of the island from the Ottomans in 1878. In the mid-1960s,  the newly established Republic of Cyprus—an aspiring consociational democracy with power finely balanced between the

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Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities—suffered a major constitutional crisis that led to intercommunal fighting between the island’s two main ethnic groups.2 Around 25,000 Turkish-Cypriots were displaced during this time (Gürel 2012). In July 1974, a coup d’état carried out by Greek-Cypriot extremists with the support of the Greek military junta led to the temporary removal of Cyprus’ democratically elected president. A few days later, the Turkish military invaded the island claiming a treaty obligation to protect Turkish-Cypriots. By the end of the ensuing war, the Turkish military had occupied a third of Cyprus’ territory (in the north), and a preexisting cease-fire line first drawn in the 1960s—the so-called Green Line—was extended across the island, becoming a UN Buffer Zone that has divided the island in two ever since.3 As a result, about 160,000 Greek-Cypriots (a third of the Greek-Cypriot population) and 48,000 Turkish-Cypriots (half of the Turkish-Cypriot population) were displaced (Gürel 2012, 10), the former moving to the south and the latter to the north of the island. Movement across the Green Line was prohibited for thirty years, until several checkpoints opened in 2003. This was meant to facilitate a political solution to the “Cyprus problem,” as the conflict is often called, before the island’s planned accession to the EU a year later. In 2004, however, a UN-brokered peace plan fell through after 75% of the Greek Cypriot electorate voted against it in a referendum. More recent attempts to solve the problem have failed, and, at the time of writing, peace negotiations have all but ground to a halt. Cyprus remains the only divided country in Europe and the EU, turning that part of the EU’s external border into a shifting, and contested, terrain. The “Cyprus problem,” construed primarily as a problem of competing nationalisms, ethnicities, and religions, has dominated the representation of the island both domestically and abroad. While the island played host to film productions on a range of topics before 1974 (including Exodus by Otto Preminger (1960), Ghost in the Noonday Sun starring Peter Sellers (19744), Sin or The Beloved (1970) starring Raquel Welch, and a host of ethnographic, colonial documentaries by British filmmakers),5 film, and other audiovisual works about the island since 1974 have focused overwhelmingly on the interethnic conflict between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots and the consequences of the Turkish invasion. The documentary genre has dominated. Notable titles include Academy Award nominee Michael Cacoyiannis’ Attila ’74: The Rape of 2  Consociationalism refers to democratic systems of government and constitutional arrangements in deeply divided societies that are based on power sharing between elites from different social groups (Britannica). 3  The island is also home to two British Sovereign Base Areas British (overseas British territories) that take up 3% of the island’s territory. 4  This film has a convoluted production history. For more information on the film and its history, see Medak (2018). 5  For Cyprus’ pre-1974 status as a filming destination and the need for more scholarship on the topic, see the 2020 lecture performance History Lesson https://youtu.be/PW1wM7-QS5k.

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Cyprus (1975) as well as documentaries by Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot director duos, such as Our Wall (Chrysanthou and Kizilyurek 1993) and Parallel Trips (Chrysanthou and Zaim 2004)6 as well as films made by a younger generation of Cypriot filmmakers on the same topic, including Sharing an Island (Stylianou 2012).7 On the domestic production side, which now includes a growing number of European co-productions thanks to EU funding models, the island is experiencing a flourish in narrative fiction and documentary film on a variety of topics.8 However, the most commercially successful Cypriot narrative fiction film of the past decade demonstrates the tenacity of the bicommunal, bilingual, and binational narrative framework that has structured the Cypriot experience since 1974. Smuggling Hendrix, a 2018 comedy directed by Marios Piperides about a dog that crosses the UN Buffer Zone into the Turkish-Cypriot-controlled north of the island, and his (Greek) owner’s attempts to bring him back home, while dealing with his family’s refugee trauma and overcoming his prejudices to become friends with the Turkish-speaking characters that help him along the way. The film screened at the Sarajevo and Tribeca Film Festivals and boasts internationally recognized distributors, including The Match Factory (which also distributed Drive My Car, the 2021 Academy Award winner for Best International Picture). From a commercial perspective, then, the “clash of civilizations” and the reconciliation narratives that such a clash produces as exceptions are the facet of Cypriot reality that most “attracts” foreign producers and foreign audiences to the island. As for foreign productions, close to 50 years after the summer of 1974, the Cyprus problem continues to be the main lens through which filmmakers culturally translate and make legible the Cypriot experience to an international audience. In the past decade especially, Cyprus has been the subject of numerous international productions for TV and the Internet especially. An overwhelming majority of these are documentary projects, many of them from journalists, and are focused on the Cyprus problem in general (National Geographic’s The Island of Cyprus (2012), Austrian broadcaster ORF’s Zypern—Insel Zwischen Zwei Kulturen (2017)), or an aspect of it: from the painful topic of exhuming the war’s missing on both sides (YouTube history channel Real Stories’ The Green Line (2021)), to the opening of the erstwhile ghost town of Varosha (Netflix’s Dark Tourist (2018) and US journalist and YouTuber Johnny Harris’ series on Cyprus (2021)). These productions invariably prioritize the binary of Greek/Christian/European versus Turk/ 6  For more information on the history of Cypriot films and their relationship to the conflict, as well as a comprehensive list of Cypriot filmography, see (Papadakis and Constantinides 2015; Kleanthous 2005; and Tekerek 2021). 7  This is far from an exhaustive list. 8  Recent short-form and feature-length cinema has highlighted social issues, including women’s stories (Pause, Mishiali, and Birth Days, Stylianou) as well as LGBTQI+ issues, on the island (The Hunt, Zahraei and Kaldun, Thin Green Line and The Call, Psaras).

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Muslim/“Other.” which is evident in recurring visual tropes common to all of them, including shots of the Greek and Turkish flags across barbed wire in Nicosia,9 and sequences where churches are juxtaposed to mosques, and sounds of Greek Orthodox mass are followed by imams’ prayers.

Displacement as Frame In their work on recent Cypriot film history, film scholar Costas Constandinides and anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis use the term “Cypriot cinemas” to overcome the restrictive binary of Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot categories that limit the interpretation of all kinds of artistic production on the island. The plural term acts as (1) as a paradigm for interrogating normative and aberrant representations stemming from multiple viewpoints on the Cyprus Problem, and a multi-ethnic Cypriot society; (2) as a paradigm that wishes to depart from the normative perception of the ‘National’ as a host and source of binaries; and (3) as a paradigm that examines the transnational ‘frame’ as a cultural, affinitive, and/or epiphanic exchange, which extends to other interactions that are not exclusively economic. (Constandinides and Papadakis 2015)

Radivojević’s film is exemplary of this kind of plural definition of the island’s contemporary filmmaking production for many reasons: (1) it had a transnational mode of production—with producers in Cyprus, and the United States, footage from Palestine and former Yugoslavia—even as it centered Cyprus; (2) it focuses on the multiethnic composition of the island through a series of interviews with refugees and migrants10; and (3) it adopts a genre-defying form, described as a “film essay” or “essayistic documentary,” which subverts mainstream commercial norms of narrative through elements such as a poetic approach to montage, multilingualism, and the use of citation and intertexts. The choice of subject and form are intimately connected. Evaporating Borders’ fragmentary and poetic structure, which sources images, sounds, and references from different countries and traditions, more accurately described as a film essay, “practices dislocation” and is conceived “less as a sequence” and 9  Note that the flag of the Republic of Cyprus is an altogether different one, so the local “national” identity of the Republic of Cyprus is almost crowded out by these two symbols of ethnic nationalism. 10  The list of Cypriot or Cyprus-based films that focus on migration and/or refugeedom (other than the internal displacement of Cypriots) is short. It includes the 2021 short documentary Every Sunday by Keti Papadema, a socially engaged film about the community of Philippine domestic workers on the island, as well as the 2008 documentary “Hope Against Hopeless” by Constantinos Patsalides and George Avraam, which tracks the routes taken by refugees from Syria and Iraq to Cyprus, via Turkey, albeit with an anti-Turkish slant. If we open the category up to films about Cypriots emigration, then we can also add Elias Demetriou’s narrative feature film Fish n’ Chips (2011), about a Greek-Cypriot immigrant in London working for a Turkish-Cypriot-owned fish and chips store, on that list.

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more as a “construed coexistence in space” (Biemann in Imre and Zimanyi 2016, 121). “Construed coexistence in space” is an apt form for the experience of displacement itself, with its shared and contested spaces occupied by the diverse subjectivities, bodies, identities, cultural traditions, languages, ethnicities, and beliefs of migrating people. Evaporating Borders (2013) offers a much-needed epistemic reframing of Cyprus’ contemporary situation. Radivojević’s displaced perspective leads her toward presenting the island as first and foremost “a multicultural society” where “a quarter of the population are migrants.” This 25% is not a monolithic group. Radivojević approaches migrant identity, and migrant art, as “accented by multiplicity and addition” not “binarism and subtraction” (Naficy 2001, 14–15). This multiplicity and addition is evident in the polyphonality of the film, which puts the internal pluralities of both the local and the migrant populations of Cyprus front and center. Radivojević invokes the voices, opinions, images, and words of multiple refugees and migrants, as well as those of bigoted politicians, passionate migrant activists, regular citizens, far-right extremists, and anarchist protesters. We hear, and see, Sri Lankan domestic workers dancing during a festival in Nicosia on their day off; Eastern European women serving drinks in bars, the specter of sex trafficking looming over their images; Palestinian and Iraqi families in squalid conditions in temporary accommodations including a makeshift refugee camp; a teenage Iraqi skater who lives in Cyprus alone, codeswitching between Greek and English; university students from Bangladesh, China, and Africa who spend their savings on tuition fees at universities that are not recognized internationally. In this way, Radivojević’s film sets Cyprus’ de facto division in a much larger context than that of the local intercommunal conflict. At the time of the film’s production—2012 and 2013—the Green Line “made Cyprus one of the easiest entry points into the attractive and impermeable castle that is called the EU.”11 Ten years on, with other routes into the EU becoming less accessible, the Green Line route has become more popular, and its securitization more aggressively militarized and surveilled. When Radivojević was making the film, the number of refugee arrivals to Europe via the Mediterranean had not yet peaked, and asylum applications in Cyprus were relatively low.12 In the past four years, however, there has been an exponential increase in the number of asylum applications in Cyprus,13 and 60% of asylum applications lodged by 11  When Radivojević was making the film, the number of refugee arrivals to Europe via the Mediterranean had not yet peaked: that was to happen a year after the film’s release, in 2015, when more than a million people crossed the sea to seek asylum in the European Union. 12  This is due to a number of reasons, including the fact that Cyprus is geographically distant from continental Europe (and northern EU states in particular, which are still the most attractive countries for asylum seekers and migrants) and the government has deliberately made the asylum application conditions, including living and working opportunities, particularly onerous to “reduce the pull factor” (see Trimikliniotis 2019). 13  From 7761 asylum applications in 2018 to 13,200 applications in 2019, 7036 in 2020, and 13,773 in 2021 (See Trimiklionits 2019; UNHCR).

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persons who cross the Green Line from the island’s occupied north. The exigencies of displacement thus imbue the Green Line with an altogether different pragmatic and symbolic function. While for the local Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot populations, the Green Line is what anthropologist Olga Demetriou calls a “topographical register of loss,” a reminder of war and violence and the increasingly solidified ethnic segregation that the Turkish occupation has brought about since 1974; for asylum seekers wishing to pursue a better life in Europe the Green Line is “a pocketed terrain” (Demetriou 2018, 151), and an opportunity. The filmmaker’s “strangely familiar” perspective, then, allows us, the audience, to see one of the most iconic symbols of the Cyprus conflict in radically different terms. Far from restricting mobility and “fixing” people—and identity—in place, the Green Line offers a constellation of proliferating meanings. In fact, as Demetriou notes, it is worth being reminded that “the multicultural aspect of inner-city Nicosia developed…because of the existence of the division” (Demetriou 2018, 163).14 Beyond emphasizing the linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity of the migrant and refugee population of Cyprus, Radivojević also draws attention to local socio-racial hierarchies that impact migrants and refugees. As one migrant activist sarcastically states, if you are blond and Christian, you are not considered a threat to the island’s demographics. Wealthy Russians, for example, “are welcome on the island, not only for their wealth, but because they share the same religion. They are Greek Orthodox.” Radivojević herself benefits from this hierarchy of discrimination, as her status as a white person, a person who people assume is a Christian, and her knowledge of the Greek language is what enables her access to many of the interviewees in the film. If you are Muslim and brown in Cyprus, on the other hand, chances are that you will be cast as “a noisy and crazy fanatic,” an expression used almost gleefully by a Greek-Cypriot member of Parliament in his interview with the filmmaker. This distinction is representative of a broader European trend whereby the implementation of European asylum law and policy responses to migrant flows is heavily influenced by the race, religion, nationality, and ethnicity of those migrating.15 This criticism has resurfaced in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with observers criticizing the EU for double standards (Lederer 2022; Deeb 2022) and drawing attention to the sharp contrast between the unified, welcoming attitude that the EU has shown to Ukrainian refugees and its treatment of non-­ European, Muslim, black, and brown asylum seekers and migrants.16 On Cyprus this has meant refugee boat push backs to neighboring countries such 14  According to Demetriou, this happened because “areas near the border were considered insecure” after the war “and were left to wither,” which “made them cheap to rent and therefore attractive to migrant residents and businesses” (2018, 163). 15  For the racialization of (im)migration and the importance of local socio-racial hierarchies on the reception of displaced people, see Freier and Bird (2020) and also Freier et al. (2020). 16  According to the president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, “the 27-member European Union still has different approaches to migration at its eastern border from Ukraine and its southern border on the Mediterranean” (Lederer 2022).

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as Lebanon, as well as refugee push backs into the Buffer Zone; unduly long adjudication times for asylum claims; and squalid conditions in refugee camps (AIDA 2021 Report). The film also works against dominant tropes of victimization on the island, which are inevitably challenged by the presence of third-country migrant and refugees. The terms “refugee” and “displaced person” have profoundly symbolic, affective, and political resonances for both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots who lived through the violence of the 1960s and 1970s and their families. For the Greek-Cypriot community—of which Radivojević became a part—the discourse of being victimized by Turkey became a “foundational tenet” of its post-1974 identity (Kovras and Loizides). This hegemonic narrative assigns complete blame to Turkey for all of the ills that have befallen the island since 1974, and frames the abuses suffered by Greek-Cypriots at the hands of Turkey and the Turkish military as the primary, and dominant, narrative of human rights abuses on the island, ignoring both the intercommunal and intra-­ communal violence of the 1960s and 1970s (Nicolaou and Papadakis 2020, 210). Instead of eliciting solidarity with refugees from elsewhere thanks to their common plight, Radivojević’s film shows how the presence of competing narratives of victimhood on Cyprus are often channeled into either narratives of exceptionalism, or a zero-sum-game worldview. There is also the appropriation of the victimhood discourse by far-right, ultra-nationalist Greek-Cypriot organizations such as E.LA.M (Ethniko Laiko Metopo or National Popular Front), a sister-party of Greece’s now-criminalized Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party, that elected four representatives in Cyprus’ House of Parliament in 2021. Documenting one of ELAM’s protests, Radivojević captures a local iteration of the so-called replacement theory that has been gaining ground in Europe and the United States in recent years, fueling anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobic violence.17 Radivojević’s camera turns on a sea of people carrying the Greek flag, many of them wearing black T-shirts featuring the organization’s emblem—an unsheathed sword in the center of two laurel branches. The filmmaker’s microphone picks up on the voice of the protest’s leader speaking through a megaphone in deliberate standard Greek, a repudiation of the local Greek-Cypriot idiom, with its accented dialect and syncretic vocabulary that features loanwords from Turkish, Arabic, Italian, and French. E.LA.M’s speaker connects the occupation of the island’s north by the Turkish military to the influx of refugees and migrants to the south: “The whole of Cyprus is under occupation,” he says. “Half of it by the Turks, and the other half by illegal immigrants.” In this narrative, repeated (albeit in a milder form) by the head of the Cypriot Asylum Office in his interview with Radivojević, refugees and migrants become part of the “Cyprus problem” discourse, using Cyprus’ occupation by Turkey as an alibi for the 17  The belief that native white Europeans are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants from Africa and the Middle East (Anti-Defamation League 2021). See also Corina Stan’s chapter in this section.

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inadequate treatment of refugees and asylum seekers on the island. The E.LA.M speaker suggests that Turkey is purposefully letting migrants and asylum seekers through the Green Line to change the demographics of the south, and “dilute” its Greekness.18 This narrative weaves together fears of the migrant “Other” with Greek-­ Cypriot fears of Turkey at the expense of the human rights of refugees and migrants. Its insidious ubiquity is distilled in a graffiti-filled wall that Radivojević films in the south part of Nicosia, which reads: “ΕΞΩ ΟΙ ΤΟΥΡΚΟΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΚΥΠΡΟ” in Greek (TURKS OUT OF CYPRUS) in one column and “FUCK ARABS” as well as “KILL ARAB REWARDS” in two other columns. The graffiti raises questions of language politics: the nationalist slogan demanding that Turks leave the island is only legible to the “insider” population of the island, while the hate speech against Arab migrants, like the Palestinian and Iraqi families interviewed by Radivojević for her film, is written in English, purposefully made legible to its intended audience: the migrants themselves.

Displacement as Form The process of narrative creation allows people whose lives have been upended by factors beyond their control, like forcibly displaced persons, to regain agency over their life stories by reconfiguring their lived experience in and on their own terms (Rorty 1989). Telling stories is not enough. It is how stories are told that can have the biggest effect on our understanding of certain issues. As an “exilic” and/or “diasporic” filmmaker, Radivojević’s work is an example of “accented cinema,” a term coined by film and media scholar Hamid Naficy to define the work of exiled or otherwise displaced filmmakers from postcolonial and/or Global South contexts living in the West. According to Naficy, accented films are characterized by “artisanal and collective modes of production” (Naficy 2001, 22), “narrative hybridity” (Naficy 2001, 22), “polyphony and heteroglossia” (Naficy 2001, 25), and “critical juxtapositions of multiple spaces, times, voices, narratives and foci” (Marcus 1994 in Naficy 2001, 28). While Evaporating Borders falls within a nonfiction film tradition, it is far from a straightforward documentary. It features interviews with migrants, refugees, and other local stakeholders such as asylum officers, migrant activists, politicians, and just regular Cypriot citizens, but these are never framed in a formal interview context. The film’s division into five parts and a postscript gives it a quality of a series of vignettes instead of a singular coherent narrative. The film features footage from across the island in an itinerant mode like a visual travelog, poetically weaving together image and text in surprising ways. Furthermore, it never uses on-screen text (such as titles describing her interviewees’ names and professions) unless it’s for the purpose of translation or 18  The E.LA.M speaker continues: “illegal immigration has been transubstantiated into a modern-day Trojan Horse.” The irony that the Trojan Horse was a Greek contraption, the deceptive brainchild of the Greek hero Odysseus as a means to infiltrate Troy’s gates, is perhaps lost on him.

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subtitling. The film is thus closer to the “unclassifiable” style of Agnes Varda and Chris Marker, not quite avant-garde and not quite a product of world cinema. Radivojević’s formal approach is inextricably tied to her lived experience of displacement and her centering of migrant narratives. Radivojević’s simultaneous anchoring and distancing from place, the concurrent homeliness and unhomeliness of her experience in Cyprus, is reflected in the partial and restricted framing of her camera, that focuses on side angles, distant views, and half-obscured images with soft focus. These shots emulate the contingent, and often obscured, or hidden, gaze of displacement. We peer onto the street from balconies. We look at scenes from behind curtains or grilles, or in the dark. Radivojević’s filming style—including her camera’s searching focus on the objects that make up refugee and migrant lives, including documents, kitchen implements, toys, food, and other everyday objects—is also an example of “tactile optics”: a kind of “distracted vision and glance” (Feldman Barrett 2017, 29) that experiences a (new, unfamiliar) environment in a piecemeal and sensory fashion, before the whole narrative, or the whole story, of a place takes shape in one’s mind with the passage of time. These “tactile optics” emulate the “experiential blindness”19 of displacement and the processes of learning and adaptation that displaced persons go through (Feldman Barrett 2017). In the remaining pages, I will focus on two other formal elements of the film, multilingualism and citation, and how these help the film “practice dislocation” and displacement. Multilingualism Radivojević can access both the migrant and the “local” experience on Cyprus by virtue of having lived there for an extended amount of time, and having learned the language of the majority Greek population. Her choice to narrate the film’s voice-over entirely in accented Greek is a linguistic act that mirrors her simultaneous insider/outsider perspective, as “accent is one of the most intimate and powerful markers of group identity and solidarity, as well as of individual difference and personality” (Naficy 2001, 23). It is important to keep in mind how the film is perceived differently depending on the linguistic capabilities of each of its viewers. For Greek speakers, Radivojević’s voice-over is very clearly accented, and it often features grammatical “mistakes.” From the perspective of a Greek-speaking audience, then, the accented, and often jarring Greek voice-over brings the viewer more fully into the fold of the filmmaker’s migrant positionality. The subtle nuances of accent, dialect, and grammar are not legible to a non-Greek speaker, who will, in all likelihood, consume the 19  “Experiential blindness” is a term used in neuroscience to describe the brain’s inability to perceive what it already doesn’t have a concept for. By extension, “experiential blindness” triggers the formation of newly acquired concepts and meaning-making structures (Feldman Barrett 2017, 26–30).

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film entirely through its subtitles, unless the subjects in front of the camera speak English. However, Radivojević’s use of Greek for the voice-over is still a deliberately estranging act that puts the global, Anglophone audience she anticipates (hence the subtitles) into a more difficult interpretative position. Speaking the voice-over in Greek is thus a double gesture of participation and distance. Radivojević’s language choice also blurs the distinction between marked and unmarked languages and the way they delineate individual and collective identities in the film.20 In the intra-filmic world of Evaporating Borders, Greek is the hegemonic language of the majority Greek-Cypriot community, and as such is the “unmarked” language of the film, the language “expected” to be used. In the global networks of independent film distribution, however, English is the hegemonic language, making the use of Greek by Radivojević “marked” from the get-go. Marked languages are usually used by bilingual or plurilingual speakers who are “deliberately attempting to redefine the context or the relationship between the speakers” (Mesthrie et al quoted in Barnes 2012, 248).21 This tension between the intra-filmic and the extra-filmic environments, between a hyperlocal, island view and a global audience and circulation of the film, is one way in which Radivojević performs her displaced positionality, which is far from the victimized and passive stereotypes usually ascribed to displaced persons by even (liberal) Western media representations. Here we have a displaced author who is redefining the relationship between host and refugee populations by claiming her stake in the community she is documenting, while also announcing, and performing, her concurrent role as a “stranger” to that community. Combined with the empowering role of maker and creator of the film, what would count as a linguistic “disadvantage” in a linguistic context that prizes purism is employed by Radivojević as a creative and identity-­ claiming tool. In fact, there are several characters in the film who have bilingual and/or multilingual capabilities and who are seen code-switching on camera, like a young skater, Yassin, a refugee from Iraq, who switches between Greek and English as he handles multiple interlocutors, including the filmmaker and a passer-by. This linguistic competence is a sign of the displaced characters’ “familiarity with the cultural and legal codes of interacting cultures, and the way in which they manipulate identity and the asymmetrical power situations in which they find themselves” (Naficy 2001, 32), and a reminder that “in multilingual film, language functions not only as a vessel of meaning, but also as a loaded and complex tool…[with] symbolic power” (King 2017, 2). 20  An unmarked language is “the language the speaker would normally be expected to use” in a specific context (Barnes 2012). 21  Use of a non-English native or other familiar language is one of the features that Naficy identifies in exiled or diasporic filmmaking: “many accented filmmakers doggedly insist on writing the dialogues in their original language—to the detriment of the film’s wider distribution” (Naficy 2001, 23).

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Citation The willingness to borrow, to cut across the grain of human perspectives, is a way of combating intellectual and moral tunnel vision (MacDougall 1998, 94). In addition to the multilingualism and polyphonality of her film, Radivojević combats such tunnel vision by citing texts from other sources in her film. The film’s ending is exemplary of her aesthetics of citation, which also draws attention to the processes of translation that undergirds the entirety of Evaporating Borders. In the film’s postscript section, Radivojević grafts the voice of refugee poet Ghassan Sadoon as well as a reference from W. E. B DuBois (spoken by her, in Greek translation). Sadoon recites a poem titled “Sea Sickness” (in Arabic) which he has written in a refugee camp in continental Europe. Describing the experience of displacement, Sadoon’s slow and mournful voice states that “We will never recover from this sea sickness / No matter where we land / And we will always vomit our dreams, our memories / And the faces of those we left behind / Until we spit the last piece of home / And die.” The powerful image of home as a fragmented concept that is regurgitated throughout a displaced person’s life is an apt bookend to Radivojević’s fragmentary film, and recasts it as the filmmaker’s attempt at dealing with, and emulating, the seasickness of her own displacement. The poem is also a reminder that there is no substitute for the security of home, and that other variations of it, including artistic representations of it, are open-ended processes that work through a trauma, and not definite or cathartic solutions aimed at conclusively narrating or resolving the pain of displacement. The W. E. B. DuBois quote that the film ends on reflects the open-­endedness and inconclusiveness of Radivojević’s aesthetics of displacement: “Who will let the world be beautiful?” The question is taken from DuBois’ 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” first delivered as an address to the NAACP annual gathering of that same year. In his speech, W. E. B. DuBois outlined the need for black artists to break the molds white gatekeepers cast them and their art in, and the need for black art to address issues from the African American past as a corrective to the white-washed narratives of history and contemporary politics. What DuBois called for was an art by and for black people, without the mediating distortions of the white gaze or of white authority. As an ending to Evaporating Borders, the question serves multiple functions: first, it suspends the contradictions, aporias, and ethical questions that the film has raised, offering no convenient solutions or narrative resolutions; second, it connects the plight of the multiplicity of migrant voices and experiences on Cyprus to other struggles, such as those of the African American community in the United States; third, it situates Radivojević’s work within precisely that artistic and critical tradition that acknowledges art’s power to influence through representation. In its process of tying “together disparate places into a particular field of connections” (Biemann cited in Imre and Zimanyi 2016) that is politically and ethically empowering, Evaporating Borders gestures toward a filmmaking style of cross-cultural and transnational solidarity. Going against

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the grain of the Greek-Cypriot community’s tendency to view itself within the sphere of influence of Greece and the EU, for example, Radivojević’s grafting of different experiences, literary traditions, and genres onto her film to demonstrate the similarities between a local Cypriot population, the refugee and migrant populations on the island, and other disenfranchised or subaltern populations in the world. “Who shall let this world be beautiful?” is a cry for a world where “men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life” (Du Bois 6) regardless of their race, ethnicity, immigration status, or citizenship.

Conclusion Radivojević’s position as a “familiar stranger” in Cyprus allows the viewer to “read” Radivojević’s film both as part of the canon of Cypriot cinema(s), that is, within the national cinema framework, and as an example of transnational filmmaking, that is, of a film produced across disparate locations, with diverse sources of funding, using multiple languages and representing, as well, the experience of crossing nations.22 As my reading of the film as a counterframe to dominant representations of Cyprus has shown, this “double” quality of Evaporating Borders—its simultaneous emplacement on Cyprus as well as its migrant sensibility—gives it the force of destabilizing and rearticulating existing “national” conceptions of the island by using the current binational symbolic arrangement of the island as a “canny dialogical partner” to be problematized and proliferated (Ezra and Rowden, 4). At the same time, the film also valorizes the “trans” of the “transnational,” by turning the transported, forcibly transferred, and transient positionalities of its displaced subjects and maker into resources of both content and form. In this way, Evaporating Borders breaks with the comfortable, and comforting, forms of “progress narratives” that “prevent citizens from being confronted with more difficult questions about the West’s relationship to the rest of the world” (Imre and Zimanyi 2016, 128). Watching this film and hearing Radivojević’s (self)estranging voice-over, whether by adapting our ear to her accent in Greek or by adapting our eyes and cognitive faculties to the translation process of watching most of the film through subtitles—is an invitation to acknowledge the multicultural, multilingual, and interrelated conditions of present-day Cyprus and the EU, but also to stand adjacent to—if for a little while—the perspective of the displaced and experience the audiovisual and sensory kind of adjustments required by one’s arrival to a “foreign” and “unknown” space. Rejecting the “flattening [of] the world into blocs of stakeholders,” Radivojević instead introduces a register of intimacy, poetic fragmentation, and complexity anchored in her “in between” state and the fact that she occupies multiple identities and multiple categories of “mobility” (refugee, traveler, tourist, etc.) (Cox et  al. 2020, 4). Her choice of crafting a work of art  On the multiple definitions of transnational cinema, see Ezra and Rowden.

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demonstrates that she perceives her displaced positioning not as a disadvantaged state of permanent “lack” but also as a state of resourcefulness, insight, and creativity, a distinct framework through which to view the world which in turn paves the way for alternative aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities foreclosed by the hegemonic narratives of (Western) nation states. As my analysis of how Radivojević’s film reframes and reconfigures the narrative relations subtending dominant representations of Cyprus shows, a displaced positionality assigns value to the fragment instead of the whole; to the contingent, instead of the “natural” and “innate”; to the “mobile” instead of the “static”; and to an openness in perception, and a malleability of thought, that is at the heart of much-needed processes of resilience and solidarity in today’s world, where both citizens and migrants, nationals and refugees, share a world where more than 80 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes.

Bibliography Anti-Defamation League. 2021. The Great Replacement: An Explainer, published 04.19.2021. Accessed 10 December 2022. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/great-replacement-explainer. Barnes, Lawrie. 2012. The Role of Code-switching in the Creation of an Outsider Identity in the Bilingual Film. Communicatio 38 (3): 247–260. Constandinides, Costas, and Yiannis Papadakis, eds. 2015. Cypriot Cinemas: Memory, Conflict, and Identity in the Margins of Europe. Topics and Issues in National Cinema. New York, Bloomsbury Academic. Cox, Emma, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, eds. 2020. Refugee Imaginaries: Research across the Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deeb, Bashar. 2022. Europe’s Refugee Double Standard Leaves It Vulnerable. Politico. eu, March 31. Accessed 18 May 2022. https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-­ refugee-­double-­standard-­leaves-­it-­vulnerable/. Demetriou, Olga. 2018. Refugeehood and the Postconflict Subject: Reconsidering Minor Losses. SUNY Press. Feldman Barrett, Lisa. 2017. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston: Mariner Books. Freier, Luisa F., and Matthew Bird. 2020. Seeing “Race” Through a Prism: Relational Socio-racial Hierarchies and Immigration. COMPAS. Accessed 17 May 2022. https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/2020/seeing-­r ace-­t hrough-­a -­p rism-­r elational-­ socio-­racial-­hierarchies-­and-­immigration/. Freier, L.F., M.D. Bird, and S. Castillo Jara. 2020. ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, and Forced Displacement. In: The Handbook of Displacement. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47178-1_11. Accessed 17 May 2022. Gürel, Ayla. 2012. Displacement in Cyprus: Consequences of Civil and Military Strife. Report 4. “Turkish Cypriot Legal Framework.” Oslo : Peace Research Institute Osolo. Imre, Anko, and Eszter Zimanyi. 2016. Frames and Fragments of European Migration. Transnational Cinemas 7 (2): 118–134. King, Gemma. 2017. Decentering France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Kleanthous, Alexis. 2005. Ο Κυπριακός Κινηματογράφος [Cypriot Cinema], 1962–2005. Athens: Aigokeros. Lederer, Edith M. 2022. Europe Accused of “double standard” on Ukrainian Refugees. Washington Post, May 17. Accessed 19 May 2022. https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/europe-­accused-­of-­double-­standard-­on-­ukrainian-­ refugees/2022/05/16/6ff4ce48-­d57a-­11ec-­be17-­286164974c54_story.html. MacDougall, David. 1998. Subjective Voice in Ethnographic Film. In Transcultural Cinema, ed. Lucien Taylor, 93–122. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmakers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nicolaou, Argyro, and Yiannis Papadakis. 2020. Reaching Across: Migrant Support Activism on a Divided Island. In The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous In International Migration, ed. Carlo Tognato et  al., 203–230. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Papadopoulos, Theodoros, and Fotis Papastefanou. 2015. Μικρές ζωές (Small Lives). Mytilene: Enati Diastasi. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Statistics: Cyprus” Asylum Information Database. https://asylumineurope.org/ reports/country/cyprus/statistics/. Accessed 19 May 2022. Tekerek, Hüseyin. 2021. Nationalism and Reconciliation in Cypriot Documentary Film, 1976–1987. SAGE Open, July 16. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 21582440211033832. “The Great Replacement: An Explainer”. Anti-Defamation League. https://www.adl. org/resources/backgrounders/the-great-replacement-an-explainer. Accessed 17 May 2022. Trimikliniotis, Nikos. 2019. Cyprus as a New Refugee “Hotspot” in Europe? Challenges for a Divided Country. Nicosia, Cyprus: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Accessed 17 May 2022. https://library.fes.de/pdf-­files/bueros/zypern/16001.pdf. UNHCR. Cyprus. https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/cyprus.html. Accessed 19 May 2022.

Films & Other Media Works Cited Chrysanthou, Panikos, and Niyazi Kizilyurek. 1993. Our Wall. Documentary. Chrysanthou, Panikos, and Dervis Zaim. 2004. Parallel Trips (Paralel Yolculuklar). Film. Cosmatos, George. 1970. Sin (or The Beloved). Farrier, David. 2018. Dark Tourist series. Netflix. Harris, Johnny. 2021. Cyprus Uncharted series. Medak, Peter. 2018. The Ghost of Peter Sellers. Documentary. Papadema, Keti. 2021. Every Sunday. Patsalides, Constantinos. 2008. Hope Against Hopeless. Preminger, Otto. 1960. Exodus. Film. Radivojević, Iva. 2013. Evaporating Borders. Schmölzer, Hansjürgen. 2017. Zypern—Insel zwischen zwei Kulturen.

CHAPTER 8

Migration, Romani Writers, and the Question of National Literature Ileana Chirila

Introduction At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when inchoate questions about the intersections between migration and literature were starting to be addressed by literary critics and academic scholars, a unique anthology of poetry and prose was put out on behalf of the PEN American Center as a volume in their Threatened Literature Series. The Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers1 was published in 1998, a few months after the repealing of the last state-level law that officially permitted municipal discrimination against Roma in the United States.2 The title of the anthology might allude to the initial Roma exodus from India to Eastern Europe in about AD 1000, and the subsequent migrations throughout Europe in the following 400 years, a hypothesis 1  Roma historians and activists consider “Gypsy” not only a misnomer, derived from an early legend about some supposed Egyptian origins, but also a racial slur. Although there is no single term embracing all people of Romani or related ethnic affiliation, in this chapter I use the term Roma as an ethnonym, and other terms, like Gypsy, Yenish, and Tzigane, to keep with the choices of the authors represented here. The use of the quotation marks (“Gypsy”) is meant to underscore that non-Roma often attach derogatory connotations to these exonyms. 2  New Jersey’s last-known vestige of official discrimination, an 80-year-old statute permitting municipalities to regulate “roving bands of nomads, commonly called Gypsies,” was repealed on January 3, 1998.

I. Chirila (*) University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_8

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confirmed by genetic, anthropological, and linguistic studies (Fraser 1992; Kalaydjieva et  al. 2005; Mendizabal et  al. 2012), which indicate a common genetic origin for all Roma populations, broadly ascribed to north/northwestern India. It has now been thoroughly documented that Roma had begun to enter the Balkans by the eleventh century (a phenomenon called the “first migration”), some groups slowly moving through the Slavic-speaking regions until they reached Wallachia and Moldavia (nowadays Romania), where most of them were enslaved. After the Romanian Principalities abolished slavery in stages, between 1840 and 1850, small groups of Romanies drifted off in different directions in Europe and the Americas (the “second migration”). A third wave of migration started for the Eastern European Roma after the fall of the Iron Curtain, triggered by a combination of violence, discrimination, and racism, bad economic and social situations, sheer poverty, and mistrust of public institutions (the “third migration”). This constant displacement has contributed to a situation of great dispersal, and to the overall minoritization of Roma, who, as minorities everywhere, constitute not only “one people,” but also a mosaic of groups scattered across the world.3 Today, the estimated 12–15 million Roma live on every continent except Antarctica. Historians refer to this exodus and dispersal of the Romani groups, in conjunction with their deterritorialized way of living, as diaspora, a term that, for scholars, has proven to be to be highly challenging when referring to the specific situation of Roma. The International Organization for Migration provides a broad definition of diasporas as “members of ethnic and national communities, who have left, but maintain links with, their homelands. The term ‘diasporas’ conveys the idea of transnational populations, living in one place, while still maintaining relations with their homelands, being both ‘here’ and ‘there’” (International Organization of Migration). Recent extensions of the term, prompted by massive temporary economic mobilities after the expansion of the European Union, have come to embrace labor migrants who maintain (to some degree) emotional and social ties with a homeland (Sheffer 2003). In an even further extension, academic literature includes references to putative diasporas of other sorts: the Dixie diaspora, the Yankee diaspora, the white diaspora, the gay diaspora, the liberal diaspora, the conservative diaspora, the deaf diaspora, the queer diaspora, the redneck diaspora, the digital diaspora, the fundamentalist diaspora, and the terrorist diaspora (Brubaker 2005). In this context, the case of Roma is quite exceptional: despite all this proliferation of meanings, the notion of Diaspora has been widely avoided by most Romani scholars, although other diaspora specialists have tried to underline that Roma do indeed share some defining features of a paradigmatic diasporic population: they have a collective memory and a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness; they have a troubled relationship with host societies; and especially they are a widely dispersed and internally varied group. Their great dispersion is mirrored in the  “Minorization” is a concept that, in sociolinguistics, describes “languages whose value is not recognized on the interactional scene by speakers of a sociolinguistically dominant language (official language, written language, contact language, language of schooling, backed by regulating and prescriptive norms)” (Kasbarian 1997, 185). 3

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variety of terms and ethnonyms used by Romani groups in defining themselves. Depending on their geographical location, they call themselves Roma (Rom in the singular) in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, Romanichal (England, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand), Sinti (Germany, Austria, Central and Northern Italy, and Southern France), Kalé in Spain, Manouche in France, and so forth. In an article published in 2009 in the journal Translocations: Migration and Social Change, Paola Toninato argues that one of the main reasons why diasporic narratives failed to gain wider acceptance among the Romani scholars so far is that these narratives resemble the attempts of authorities and autochthon populations to mark them as “different” and exclude them as undesired and undesirable “foreigners” who in the distant past entered Europe from India. Such labeling is by no means an isolated occurrence and is not confined to policymakers or racist groups. Diaspora scholars themselves emphasized the fact that the Roma are different by virtue of their lack of other crucial diasporic features, a strong link with a homeland. Safran, for example, emphasizes that Roma have “no precise notion of their place of origin, no clear geographical focus, and no history of national sovereignty” and that they are a “truly homeless people” (Safran 1991, 86–87). As Barany argues, the Roma “are unique in their homelessness”; for them “every country is a ‘foreign’ country, a ‘country of residence’” (Barany 1998, 143, quoting Liégeois 1994, 225), and this is the main reason why their communities cannot be defined, strictly speaking, as a diaspora. This picture is complicated by the social practices of some Roma communities as nomadic minorities, practices difficult to grasp from the perspective of Western sedentary societies. Many analysts point to the fact that Roma are at home anywhere, in the sense that they share the public space with non-Roma, yet nowhere, since wherever they go, they are reminded of their inability to “fit-in” and be identified with a territorialized and spatially bounded culture. From this standpoint, a definition of diaspora that would more accurately describe the situation of Roma populations is the one put forward by Lilly Cho, who notes that Diaspora brings together communities which are not quite nation, not quite race, not quite religion, not quite homesickness, yet they still have something to do with nation, race, religion, longings for homes which may not exist. They are collectivities and communities which extend across geographical spaces and historical experiences. They are vast numbers of people who exist in one place and yet feel intimately related to another. (Cho 2007, 13)

Within this framework, Romani diaspora is brought together by a common history of migration, a rich oral tradition, customs, beliefs, artistic expressions like dance and music, an emphasis on family, and Romanës (or Romani), the Roma language. The title The Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers might also refer to the difficult journey Roma had to take to achieve freedom and

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self-determination, as the history of Romani people has been plagued with horror stories of massacres, genocide, enslavements, detention in camps, forcible removal of children from their families, forced sterilization of women, deportations, and other human rights violations. It might also allude to the necessarily nomadic way of life some Roma communities were forced to adopt for hundreds of years to avoid precisely these reprisals and discriminations, or to maintain the group cohesion/survival that only a commercial or artistic nomadism could sustain (Acton 1995).4 But “the roads of the Roma” could also be read as a suitable metaphor of Romani literature itself, a literature that, in its modern written form of texts endowed with literariness,5 is only about 100 years old, and thus still “on the road” of being produced, defined, and consolidated.6 The special feature of this young literature is its multilingual, diasporic, transnational occurrence, which makes it, together with Jewish literature perhaps, the most accurate representation of what a “world literature” should embody. A quick look at the list of countries (and languages) represented in the anthology should confirm Romani literary multilingualism and transnationalism: Latvia, France, Slovak Republic, Republic of Macedonia, Spain, Italy, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Switzerland, Russia, Croatia, Germany, England, Belarus, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Kosovo, and the United States. The publication of this catalog of Romani writings at the end of the 1990s joins an explosion of other literary events dedicated to Roma, such as the organization of international Romani literature festivals and competitions, or the establishment of the Romani PEN Centre in Berlin in 1996, the International Romani Writers Association (2002–2008), and the publication of other anthologies presenting Romani authors across the world (Zahova 2014, 63–64). Undoubtedly, this significant growth of Romani literature in the period after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 was facilitated by the intensification of the discourse around “Roma issues” among international organizations following the exodus of Eastern-European Roma to Western countries and the United 4  As a way of overcoming the harassment of their communities, some Roma have practiced commercial or artistic nomadism for a long time, selling handmade items from village to village, practicing their craft, or putting on performances (circus, musical bands, etc.) for financial benefits. This type of peripatetic economy led to all Roma being associated with nomadism, although at present, it is doubtful that more than 10 percent of European Romanies are nomads. 5  I am using here the definition of literariness as conceived by Miall and Kuiken (1998), involving foregrounded stylistic or narrative features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings. 6  The assertion that Romani literature is only about one hundred years old has been contested by Sophia Zahova who, in the “Introduction” to Roma Writings. Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II contends that Romani literature and media don’t have a belated history, contrary to the misconception that writings by Roma developed very late due to a low level of literacy and education. Zahova points out to writing practices and authorship of Roma dating back to the nineteenth century, in close similarity and concurrency with those of the non-Roma in the European nation-states within which Roma communities have lived.

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States (Sigona and Trehan 2009), the rise in visibility of Romani activism and its support for cultural initiatives, and the rapid internationalization and globalization of the Romani literature scene due to an easier access to digital platforms (Zahova 2014, 59–62). Considering this swift expansion of Romani literature, which continued after 2000 and is still ongoing, any accurate description of the current state of literature in general, and especially any comparative study bearing research on the junctures between literature and migration should be heightened by including this still emergent, but very fertile, body of work.

Considerations on Terminology Roma, Nomadism, Migration, Migrant Literature This chapter will not explore the extensive record of Roma migration further, but it should be mentioned that this history has influenced long-standing harmful attitudes and opinions about Roma and has led to a recurring and overused topos of the “wandering Gypsy” in the literature produced by non-­ Roma, and thus to the literary exoticization of these ethnic groups, frequently depicted as vagrant, elusive, outcast, and mysterious.7 Activists, scholars, and researchers have shown that, when associated with Roma, migration and nomadism have been interpreted mostly as racially conditioned cultural choices, sufficient to justify why Roma had “wandered” from the “East” (the Orient), and why they continued a long history of mobility in Europe or between continents (Acton 2016). This negative view of Roma as permanent vagrants/ nomads belonging to a homogenized and unified group continues to prevail in public discourse even in the twenty-first century, despite the numerous studies showing the actual ethnic heterogeneity, the vast cultural, linguistic, and social diversity of these populations, and their various norms in terms of social behavior (Csepeli and Simon 2004; Messing 2014; Surdu 2016). For example, it would be difficult to think of the Gabor, Ursari, and Kalderash in Romania, Manouche in France, Sinti in Germany, Vlah and Lovari in Hungary, Calé in Spain, Travelers in the United Kingdom, Yenish in Switzerland, Kaale in Finland, Romanichal in the United States, and Romanlar in Turkey as one homogenous ethnic group. Therefore, in this chapter, I use Roma/“Gypsy” as umbrella terms to account for population groups with very different ethnic identities and traditional cultural/social norms across Europe and even within the same country. Adding to this complexity of Roma “identity,” the concept of “migrant” has been recently perceived as a label meant to perpetually otherize all Romanies as nonbelonging to a specific national context and even to transnational statutory structures (Brubaker 2017). This discursive frame is apparent in the way 7  For more on Roma and migration, see Constructing Roma Migrants by Magazzini and Piemontese (2019).

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European legislation, for example, has been targeting Roma to control their movement inside Europe. As citizens of an EU member state, Roma should be free to move within the borders of the European Union, where their movement should be considered mobility, and not migration. Instead, in many European countries, especially France and the United Kingdom, fear of “Roma migration” provoked extensive negative press coverage and explicitly discriminatory public discourses and measures by the government (Cahn and Guild 2010).8 I agree with Messing that “injecting migration into the already problematically simplified category of Roma results in a notion that essentializes an overly complex and diverse phenomenon” (2014, 21). This assertion is not meant as an invitation for the a priori exclusion of the concepts of “migration” and “migrant,” but as an appeal to caution when applying these overly capacious categories to a population that has been constantly treated as an objective construct, is viewed as essentially nomadic/migrant by choice, and is verifiably the most stigmatized minority in European public opinion. In more recent studies, the expression “migrant literature” (or “migration literature,” or “literature of migration”) refers to works that “are produced in a time of migration or that can be said to reflect on migration” (Adelson, cited in Walkowitz 2006, 533), or to the textual practice of authors who “chose to narrativize the experience of migration” (Xavier 2016, 12). These works have been usually analyzed through a lens fitting the wider approach put forward by postcolonial studies, a field so expansive that it now covers an unreasonably large terminology.9 While this extreme expansion has led some scholars to declare that “many new readers are often put off by the excessive engagement with, and sometimes quite baffling vocabularies of, postcolonial theory” (McLeod 2003, 13) and to announce “the potential exhaustion of postcolonialism as a paradigm” (Yaeger 2007, 633), others contend that the field is thriving now more than ever, and its encompassing area has morphed from commonwealth literature to postcolonial studies and then to transculturalism or transnationalism (Geoffrey 12). I find these changes in the terminology used for postcolonialism, and for categorizing and analyzing literature in general, encouraging, as they are in keeping with the dynamic social, economic, and cultural shifts brought on by globalization and technological developments. 8  In 2010, for example, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave a famous speech in Grenoble, in which he directly targeted the ethnic Romani minority. In this speech, he promised to dismantle half of the Roma camps, to entrust the decision to evacuate the camps to the prefects and to reform the policies against illegal immigration to prevent the Roma from “returning each year to the French territory.” 9  A nonexhaustive list of the concepts is now associated with postcolonial theory: multicultural literature, transnationalism, literature of migration, migrant literature, migratory aesthetics, postexilic literature, refugee literature; diaspora literature; exile literature; post-migration; acculturation; globalization; mobility turn; cosmopolitanism; transnationalism; transculturality; minority literature; ethnic literature; critical multiculturalism; polycentric multiculturalism; superdiversity; plural society; otherness/othering; hybridity; Third Space; migratory aesthetics; ethics of migration; minor literature/deterritorialization; nomadism/displacement; post-monolingual condition/translational studies/traveling concepts; TransArea studies; world literature.

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We should not disregard that the same thing happens to the various notions and theories used for exploring the literature related to migration, and acknowledge that this abundance of terms demonstrates that the discourse associated with migration is socially and politically charged, even when it simply relates to textual analysis. For example, although Ponzanesi and Merolla use the term of “migrant literatures” in their study, they highlight the problematic issue of the status of the writer producing this literature, who ceases to be a migrant once established in the new country (2005, 25). Another potential problem is when a piece of writing exhibits all the textual, thematic, and stylistic criteria proposed to define “migrant literature,” but the writer does not have personal experience related to migration. Although questions of literary gatekeeping are real and increasingly present, it has also been contended that the broadened usage of these terms, to stress less the author’s ethnicity and history of migration and more the thematic and stylistic features of any text dealing with displacement, flux, and transformation, renders the concept completely useless in categorizing literature. “Immigrant literature,” “migrant literature,” “migratory aesthetic,” and “migrant writer” have all been contested at some point as essentializing or marginalizing, and alternative terms have been proposed (postexilic literature, diasporic writing, and multicultural writing). In the case of Romani writers, regardless of the definition or placement of “migrant literature” inside or outside the postcolonial realm, the concept has been used to point to the minoritarian, “marginalized” condition of the author, as well as to the prevalent literary themes present in their works, but in general it has been found inadequate to account for what scholars call Romani literature, another concept that has provoked countless debates.10 Julia Blandfort, for example, rejects the category of “migrant” as a useful analytical tool for Romani literature, preferring the term of “diaspora” as defined by Roger Brubaker (2005, 12) and other diasporic theories (2015). Additionally, she favors the concept of “nomad,” not to refer primarily to a way of life, but to account for an identifying feature, a recurrent motif in Romani literature.11 In Romani Writing: Literacy, Literature and Identity Politics, Paola Toninato also rejects the concept of “migrant” when talking about Roma, referring to two important factors that undermine the Roma’s alignment with the definition proposed by the International Organization of Migration. The first factor defines the paradoxical situation of a number of Romani groups (especially in Central and Eastern Europe) who “have been forcibly settled, while those who wish to lead a nomadic way of life are often prevented from doing so” (2013, 120). Equally flawed for Toninato is the use of the label “migrant” not only as a strategy to represent Roma people as different from the local population of the destination country but also to perpetuate the “foreignness” of Roma even 10  For some critics, like Alain Reynier, Romani literature doesn’t even exist, only oral Romani traditions and texts produced by Romani writers. According to him, for such an emergent literature to exist, a collective conscience beyond the community must take form (Reynier, 115). 11  See Blandfort (n.d.).

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in their own birth country, where they are continuously perceived as “immigrants” who came from elsewhere. The second factor underlined by Toninato is that Romani literature does not conform to the model of migrant writing suggested by critics and scholars, which usually manifests in four phases, going from testimonials and autobiographies to texts aimed at the immigrant community, to experimental and self-reflexive writing, and finally to “post-­ migration” literature. Romani literature, claims Toninato, is diametrically opposite to this model, and should be better classified as nomadic, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in their Treatise on Nomadology (1988), because “the nomad’s experience is one of deterritorialization, whereas the migrant tries to resettle in a new territory (a process called ‘reterritorialization’)” (Toninato 2013, 121–122). It is easy to remark, referring to the start of these short considerations on terminology, where I argued for the general rejection, by scholars, of the concept of “nomadism” in conjunction with Romani communities, how confusing and sometimes utterly contradictory the theories concerning Roma, literature, and migration are. This chapter’s proposition is to avoid a conceptual generalization of Romani literature either as migrant or as nomadic, and to employ a comparative analysis of three Romani writers within the more general framework of “literature and migration” to confirm or deny a few hypotheses related to the manifestations of a particular type literature (be it Romani or migrant). The three authors represented here are contemporary writers Anina Ciuciu (2013), Oksana Marafioti (2012), and Mariella Mehr (1987), who belong to three different national and literary spaces (France, the United States, and Switzerland, respectively). What unifies them is the selfclaim of belonging to the wider Roma culture/ethnicity and producing Romani literature, and the fact that for all three of them mobility, biography, and literary creation are inseparable, as mirrored in the main works discussed herein, although lately Oksana Marafioti has been delving into creative fiction that breaks with the self-referential focus. Through this approach, I show that the idea of a specific type of literature (“national,” “migrant,” and “ethnic”) made up of collective representations of “similar” identity narratives is no longer appropriate for the contemporary creative landscape. The identification or classification of a literature through the shared ethnicity of the authors and through centering textual and visual descriptions of shared experiences ceased to be viable at the end of last century, when complex new cultural phenomena were ushered in by an increased mobility of populations following the opening of the borders and the democratization of the access to new technologies.

Romani Literature as Post-nation/ Cosmopolitan Writing Romani literature could be considered the epitome of what many contemporary critics call “post-nation writing” or “cosmopolitan literature” (Domingues and D’haen 2015). According to the sociologist Ulrich Beck, the once

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functional dualities local/global, national/international, us/the others have disintegrated and recomposed nowadays in new forms, which require a new type of analysis (Beck 2006). The fallout from these recent phenomena is the spatial relativity of cosmopolitanism: the term in itself does not include “everything,” and above all it does not represent “the cosmos” or “the globe.” It does not exclude the local, just as the transnational does not exclude the national. Thus, the theory of cosmopolitan literature goes against the tendency to judge the situation of a text only according to the ethnic or national belonging of its author. Romani literature is an example of such cosmopolitan artistic manifestations, especially because it has positioned itself in an intrinsically transnational and ethnically diverse space since its inception. If Roma literature emerged and began to develop only relatively late in the modern era, and de facto in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Marushiakova-Popova & Popov 2020), this emergence happened simultaneously within the spaces of several nation-states in Central and South-Eastern Europe, and in several languages, primarily through religious translations and folklore materials, “with several instances of original Romani literature or Romani translations in the context of the nineteenth-­century romantic nationalism movements in the respective regions, a tendency that continued at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century” (Zahova 2021, 7). Although it is highly possible that, for a long period of time, there was no contact between Romani writers of different nationalities, or even awareness that they existed in other national spaces, and Roma authors were mainly published and known within the borders of the state in which they lived, it does not minimize the importance of the supranational existence of this literature.12 This literary supranationality made possible a rapid internationalization and globalization of the Romani literature scene at the end of the 1990s and continuing through today and led to developments that go far beyond the borders of any particular country or region (Zahova 2014, 59–63). It is by using this transnational/cosmopolitan background that an analysis of the works of three Romani authors, Anina Ciuciu, Oksana Marafioti, and Mariella Mehr, could extend the idea of Romani literature beyond the restricting concepts of “national,” “ethnic,” “migrant,” “diasporic,” and “homeless.” These works demonstrate that inside the literary Romani paradigm specific novels or pieces of literature can, at the same time, fit these narrow models, dismiss them entirely, or illustrate them only partially. In other words, through their manifest diversity, they are following the pattern of any other transnational writings (like Jewish literature, for example), while, at the same time,

12  As proof that, for many years, Romani literature remained contained within the space of the nation-state where it was produced and published, Zahova (2021) gives the example of Philomena Franz and Ceija Stojka, who were not aware of the existence of each other’s work, despite the fact that both were Romani writers, both published their memoirs about the Holocaust in the same period (the eighties), and were both living in German-speaking neighboring countries.

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rendering impossible the claim that this supranational literature is identifiable (unlike Jewish literature). Anina Ciuciu’s novel, Je suis Tzigane et je le reste (2013),13 can be considered as closely fitting the narrative of “migrant” literature, namely a type of writing that either is written by migrants, or describes the experience of migration, or both. Ciuciu, a Romani/French writer born in Romania, lawyer, Roma activist, educator, and cultural mediator, recounts the journey from the Romania of her childhood, where her family suffered discrimination at work and was rejected in a peripheral neighborhood of the city, without water or electricity, to stable accommodations and happier times in Bourg-en-Bresse, France. The clandestine journey is strewn with obstacles and pitfalls: if poverty, discrimination, and lack of a future pushed her family to leave Romania in search of a better life, the trip turns out to be equally unsafe, from becoming victims of human trafficking and crossing the border illegally, to ending up in the slum of Casilino, in Rome, Italy. There, the protagonist (Anina) and her family experience once again misery and deprivations and are forced to resort to begging in order to survive. The family leaves again, for France, where the situation doesn’t improve much: after squats in Lyon and temporary accommodations and social hotels in Mâcon and Valence, the family receives the order to leave the territory, and is on the brink of being deported. The escape from these unfortunate conditions finally comes with the help of a French teacher, who opens the doors of school and integration, allowing the protagonist and her sisters a real education and a legal status. Anina proves to be a brilliant student, and she ends her literary journey on a hopeful yearning to continue her studies in the best university in her adoptive country, the Sorbonne. This literary account of a real journey follows very closely a specific model of migrant writings that starts with the description of the difficult social context in the country of origin, continues with the experience of migration itself, moves on to the challenges the protagonist faces in the country of arrival, and ends on an optimistic note, with the emancipation from the sense of rootlessness, and the realization that the protagonist is now the beneficiary of an enriching experience that comes with the immersion in a different culture. Similarly, Oksana Marafioti’s American Gypsy (2012) is a narrative written by a “migrant” writer of Romani (on her father’s side) and Armenian (on her mother’s side) origins, and inspired by a personal story of migration, this time from one side of the Atlantic to the other, from the former USSR to America. The parallels between Ciuciu’s and Marafioti’s narratives stop here, however. Apart from the use of a questionable exonym in the title (“Tzigane” for Ciuciu and “Gypsy” for Marafioti), an obvious editorial choice meant to attract a readership for whom the terms might evoke exotic stereotypes, the two works are fundamentally dissimilar, from the form of authorship to the tone and the storyline. For Marafioti’s protagonist, the act of migration is followed almost  I am a Gypsy and I remain so, in a literal translation

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immediately by the dissolution of the family. Young Oksana’s introspective viewpoint reveals the fallout as a continuous state of in-betweeness, a life flanked by two or more worlds, between two or more languages and cultures, between a mother struggling to make ends meet and a somewhat emotionally abusive father, a young woman unable to anchor her coming of age in the familial model. By contrast, Ciuciu exhorts the values of a strong familial bond. Her protagonist goes through even more difficult trials (illnesses, accidents, extreme precarity, and mendacity), but without losing the sense of morality and values passed on by her family, who continues to be, throughout the whole narrative, the moral point of reference for the central character. From a formal point of view, Marafioti delivers a witty and hilarious memoir, in a literary style that reveals the proper literary education of its author, whereas Ciuciu’s book is not really a memoir, not really a novel, not really a journalistic piece, but a cross between popular literature, literary journalism, and paraliterature, an atypical literary category of auto-ethnographic writing that resembles a testimonial. The very act of writing is trumped, in Ciuciu’s case, by the act of giving oral testimony, considering that for the making of Je suis Tzigane et je le reste Ciuciu’s remarks have been collected, and the text has been elaborated, by Frédéric Veille, a French journalist (Chirila 2021). Ciuciu thus confronts conventional ideas of literature and authorship, implicitly claiming that even modern prose can be “told” and “transcribed” (instead of being “written” and “imagined”), that it can support unambiguous editorial interventions by “outsiders” as part of its composition, and that it can reinvent itself by incorporating texts without intrinsic artistic value. Also challenging the idea of literature and authorship is Mariella Mehr, a Swiss writer born to a Yenish mother and a Jewish Holocaust survivor father, who was not supposed to be a writer. As part of one of the largest nomadic populations in Europe, the Yenish, Mariella Mehr has been a victim of horrendous persecutions at the hands of the Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse (loosely translated, “Charity for the Children of the Country Road”), a private organization that was allowed to implement guardianship and disciplinary welfare measures against Roma and Yenish populations throughout Switzerland. A particularly brutal practice of this organization was taking children away from their parents, to break up traveling or nomadic families living in Switzerland and to eliminate their seasonal mobility, which was often associated with the itinerant trade (Murphy 2017; Szőke 2022).14 Mehr was removed from her parents as a child, transferred between 16 different orphanages, and, consequently, spent prolonged periods of time in mental institutions and prisons (French). In 1997, Mehr chose the road of exile to Italy, following repeated racist aggressions against her. In her first novel, steinzeit, she takes it upon herself to tell the story of her silenced people by means of a postmodern literary 14  The coercive measures that were part of this eugenics program were institutionalization, child removal, marriage bans, sterilization, and castration.

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piece that reads rather as an auto-fiction than as a memoir.15 An experimental text that tries to name the unnamable, steinzeit depicts an I/Ich based on a triple character, “silvia-silvio-silvana,” and assembles passages that consist of a series of disconnected texts: a word, a line, a paragraph, or, rarely, a page of continuous narrative, short sketches of a disintegrated identity. Mehr’s silence, almost as powerful as her words, and represented by textual white spaces, underlines the fragmentary nature of Silvana’s childhood experiences and her efforts to remember them coherently. If her own life is at the origin of this work, Mariella Mehr blends fictive images and autobiographical facts drawn from journal entries she made during therapy, and clearly stipulates that this is a novel and not an autobiography. The type of testimony present in Ciuciu’s work is barely present here, only suggested by the highly fictionalized voices who struggle to memorialize a torturous past. Mehr’s style is fragmentary, psychoanalytic, making use almost obsessively of mise en abymes, superpositions, and literary editing, like the lack of capitalization combined with block capitals (“ICH” “WARUM”), words fused together or spaced apart and typeset wider than usual, the use of fragments of texts entirely in italics, broken syntax, and even unintelligible mumbling. All this textual play leads to polysemic expressions and phrases, just like the novel’s title, which recalls the violence of prehistory, a metaphor for harshness and inhumanity. Mariella Mehr was not supposed to be a writer: she lacked formal education; she was institutionalized and deprived of family during the most formative part of her life; she was abused to the point of being sent to psychiatric hospitals, where she was subjected to unnecessary electroshock therapy. She had no access to the closed world of literary publishing. Nevertheless, she succeeded in becoming the most important literary voice of the contemporary Yenish community. The three texts discussed here have very few commonalities. They were written in different languages (French, English, German), by authors of different ethnicities (a Romanian Roma; a Russian-Armenian Lovara; and a Yenish), showing different experiences of mobility (illegal crossing, trafficking, and panhandling for Ciuciu; legal immigration for Marafioti; internal displacement and forced exile for Mehr) in completely different styles (journalistic writing, oral testimony, collaborative editing for Ciuciu; contemporary memoir for Marafioti; fragmentary postmodern writing for Mehr). Even the transcultural experiences that inform these self-referential texts are different: Ciuciu—French/Romani/ Romanian; Marafioti—American/Russian/Armenian; Mehr—German/ Italian. Furthermore, while Ciuciu’s storyline reiterates the topos of the Romani family’s strength and permanence, Marafioti features the dissolution of the immigrant family, and Mariella Mehr’s narrative is generated by the total absence of household. The first protagonist is proud of her Roma heritage, the second is ashamed of her status of “half-breed,” while the third deals with a cultural void. And yet, all three have been marketed and celebrated as  stoneage in English. The lack of capitalization keeps with the choice of the author.

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important manifestations of Romani literary expression, and, at the same time, as belonging to the national space where they were produced, showing that a post-national literature depends on the significance and public impact of the literary work of its transcultural authors, and is not necessarily related to the author’s language or ethnic identity. Born from a long experience of migration, Romani literature embraces the paradoxes of multilingualism, transnationalism, and transculturalism, and questions the hierarchies of nation-based thinking. The case of writers of Romani heritage is especially suggestive of the ways in which the idea of literature should reject the Western “national” model that claims to display a unity in its language, themes, and construction, and relegates to the margins the “minor” literatures that bend this model and force it to carry the multiplicities of supranational spaces.

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Csepeli, György, and Dávid Simon. 2004. Construction of Roma Identity in Eastern and Central Europe: Perception and Self-identification. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30 (1): 129–150. Davis, V. Geoffrey. (2017). “Opening Things Up”: Some New Trends in Postcolonial Studies. Recherche littéraire/ Literary Research 33. http://www.ailc-icla.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/07/Recherche-litt%C3%A9raire-2017-vol-33.pdf. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press. Domíngues, César, and Theo D’haen, eds. 2015. Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational. Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi. Fraser, Angus. 1992. The Gypsies. Oxford: Blackwell. French, Lorelei. 2015. Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World. New York: Bloomsbury. International Organization for Migration. Engaging Diasporas for Development IOM Policy-Oriented Research. https://www.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl486/files/ jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/shared/mainsite/policy_and_research/ policy_documents/iom_research.pdf. Kalaydjieva, Luba, Bharti Morar, Rapahelle Chaix, and Hua Tang. 2005. A Newly Discovered Founder Population: The Roma/Gypsies. BioEssays 27 (10): 1084–1094. Kasbarian, Jean-Michel. 1997. Langue minorée et langue minoritaire. In Sociolinguistique, concepts de base, ed. Marie-Louise Moreau, 185–188. Bruxelles: Mardaga. Liégeois, Jean-Pierre. 1994. Roma, tsiganes, voyageurs. Council of Europe. Magazzini, T., and S. Piemontese, eds. 2019. Constructing Roma Migrants. IMISCOE Research Series. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11373-5_2. Marushiakova-Popova, E.A., & Popov. 2020. Beginning of Romani Literature: The Case of Alexander Germano. Romani Studies 30 (2): 135–162. Martín Sevillano, A. B. (2021). The Romani Ethos: A Transnational Approach to Romani Literature. Critical Romani Studies 3 (2): 24–40. McLeod, John. 2003. Contesting Contexts: Francophone Thought and Anglophone Postcolonialism. In Francophone Postcolonial Studies, ed. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, 192–201. New York: Routledge. Mehr, Mariella. 1987. Age de pierre, trans. Jeanne Etoré. Paris: Aubier Montaigne. Mendizabal, Izabel, et al. 2012. Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani from Genome-wide Data. Current Biology 22 (24): 2342–2349. Messing, Vera. 2014. Methodological Puzzles of Surveying Roma/Gypsy Populations. Ethnicities 14 (6): 811–829. ———. 2019. Conceptual and Methodological Considerations in Researching “Roma Migration”. In Constructing Roma Migrants. IMISCOE Research Series, ed. T. Magazzini and S. Piemontese, 17–30. . Cham: Springer. Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. 1998. The Form of Reading: Empirical Studies of Literariness. Poetics 25 (6): 327–341. Murphy, David. 2017. Ethnic Minorities in Europe; the Yenish (Yeniche) People. Travellers’ Voice. https://www.travellersvoice.ie/2017/07/25/ethnic-­minorities­in-­europe-­the-­yenish-­Yenish-­people/. Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Daniela Merolla, eds. 2005. Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe. Lanham: Lexington Books. Reunier, Alain. 2009. Les enjeux anthropologiques d’une culture romani de l’écriture. Etudes Tsiganes 37 (2) 110–117.

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Safran, William. 1991. Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora 1 (1): 83–99. Sheffer, Gabriel. 2003. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sigona, Nando, and Nidhi Trehan, eds. 2009. Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilisation and the Neoliberal Order. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Surdu, Mihai. 2016. Those Who Count: Expert Practices of Roma Classification. Budapest: CEU Press. Szőke, Dávid. 2022. The Cultural Genocide of the Children of the Country Road Programme and its Memorialisation in Mariella Mehr’s Stone Age and Dijana Pavlović’s Speak. My Life. Critical Romani Studies 4 (1). https://doi.org/10.29098/ crs.v4i1.138. Toninato, Paola. 2013. Romani Writing: Literacy, Literature and Identity Politics. New York: Routledge. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2006. The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer. Contemporary Literature 47 (4): 527–545. Xavier, Subha. 2016. The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Yaeger, Patricia. 2007. Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel. PMLA 122 (3): 633–651. Zahova, Sofiya. 2014. History of Romani Literature with Multimedia on Romani Kids’ Publications. Sofia: Paradigma. ———. 2021. Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II. Schöning: Brill.

PART II

Hostile Environments

CHAPTER 9

Hostile Environments: Introduction David Herd

“Hostile environment” is a politician’s term. It entered the language in 2012 when, in a moment of striking directness, then British Home Secretary Theresa May described her intentions for her government’s upcoming immigration legislation. As she put it, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, her aim was to “create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” May’s statement was in one respect fundamentally inaccurate. In referring to what she called “illegal migration,” she meant the movement of people from one country to another for the purpose of seeking asylum. Such movement is legal under international law, as enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, to which the United Kingdom (UK) was an original signatory. What May meant, rather, by the idea of the illegal migrant was the person the UK didn’t want to come in. Where her statement proved true, however, was in the intention to construct a hostile environment; an environment in which people who were not deemed welcome or desirable would experience the reality of the State’s refusal. The environment itself, the place in which they had been compelled to seek a life, was to manifest hostility at every turn. The purpose of the upcoming legislation to which the British Home Secretary referred was to make the life of the person migrating to seek asylum practically unliveable. To understand the category “hostile environment” it is therefore necessary to have some grasp of the lived experience to which it gives rise. For as long as their asylum claim is pending, which might easily be several years, the person seeking asylum in the UK is not allowed to work. In the absence of work (a prohibition which can be demoralizing to the point of abjection), if they are

D. Herd (*) University of Kent, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_9

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fortunate they will be granted minimal relief. In 2014, shortly after May’s statement, that relief was paid in the form of a top-up voucher known as an Azure card, where the payment was £35.39 per week, £5.05 per day. The card could only be used at certain outlets and on designated products. It was not valid on public transport. Every time the person went shopping their card would announce them as somebody whose presence was deemed invalid. Every time they walked somewhere they would be reminded that this was an environment by which they were denied. There are many such details—recent immigration legislation has been nothing if not thorough—but even here one begins to glimpse the lived reality to which the phrase refers. Underpinning that reality in the UK is the fact that, at any moment, the person seeking asylum is vulnerable to detention, which is both arbitrary and indefinite, and which might last for months or years. And just as they might be detained at any moment, so, if are they released back into the community, the person seeking asylum might be re-detained. There is no settling, no rest, no coming to feel at home. For the person seeking asylum in the UK, the environment is permanently hostile. In certain particularities, the environment described here is specific to the UK. The UK, for example, is the only country in Western Europe which detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Taken in its general intentionality, however, what the category points to is a disposition toward people migrating to seek asylum that, as the essays in this section indicate, is both common across Europe and indicative of future policy toward migration. As Claudia Gualtieri’s essay on theatrical responses to the Italian asylum regime details, the shared aim of many European states is to generate a legal-political context which, while overseen by the nation state, is barely identifiable with it. Such liminal contexts, the realities in which people seeking asylum are compelled to live, are broadly captured by Giorgio Agamben’s phrase “state of exception.” Agamben’s intention in reviving Carl Schmitt’s early twentieth-century political paradigm was to understand indefinite detention in the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay. His larger point, however, was to describe a political logic that, as he saw it in 2005, would all too easily extend through the system. The hostile environment is the state of exception writ large, a setting in which a person is vulnerable to the full force of the law but where they do not have access to the law’s protections. What Theresa May provided, in other words, in her candor, was a name for an approach to forced displacement that has its equivalent across many parts of Europe and the global north: a response to the reality of human migration where the lives of those who move are suspended. Gualtieri details the legal-political framework by which such suspension of life is maintained in Italy, while documenting a series of theatrical responses to the specific circumstance of immigration detention on Lampedusa. The importance of the term hostile environment as a hermeneutic lies in part in the fact that, as Matt Whittle’s essay outlines, it frames a view of human movement that might all too easily shape future policy toward migration. As the UNHCR Global Trends Report 2021 documented, at the end of that year,

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“89.3 million individuals worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.” Representing more than one person in every hundred on the planet, that figure is only set to rise, principally, as Whittle observes, because with climate change environments in the Global South are set to become hostile to the point of uninhabitability. Whittle’s essay thus uses the term to point in two directions: to the national settings in the global north in which hostility toward people moving will become more brutal and more intense (as imagined in the dystopian novels he considers), and to areas of the world rendered increasingly uninhabitable by European models of extraction. But if hostile environment is a political term that points from the brutality of the present to a potentially dystopian future, it is also a category that draws on long material histories and all too well-established tropes. Whittle and Gualtieri both show that the practices of the hostile environment are fundamentally neocolonial, reimporting racist regimes of differentiation that underpinned colonial programs of compartmentalization. It is crucial, therefore, as Eva Jørholt shows, that we consider ways in which colonial regimes both oppressed and were resisted by those subject to their structures. Taking the politically subversive comedy of the Martinican film-maker Lucien JeanBaptiste as her focus, Jørholt shows how one function of art in a residually colonial environment is to destabilize “the binary constructions undergirding any kind of normativity, especially with regard to race.” The environment in question is metropolitan France and Jørholt’s critical model is Edouard Glissant’s “creolization.” As Jørholt shows, it is by Jean-Baptiste’s “queer creolization” that his films refuse the compartmentalization that, as Fanon showed us, always underpins the differentiation of the racially hostile regime. Carrying us further back through such differentiating logics, David Womble documents a phase in the cultural policing of migration in which a calculus of exchange or contribution—the question of what the migrant might bring— was displaced by an essentializing model of kinship. Womble’s focus is the different representation of human movement found in Bruegel and Hogarth, where in Bruegel those entering are rendered legible by their function in the labor economy, but where in Hogarth the migration is figured as mass. What this transition rests on, as Womble details, is the emergence in eighteenth-­ century science of a taxonomical model that as it transmutes into migration discourse asserts kinship—and therefore consanguinity and therefore race—as the determinant of belonging. That such brutally compartmentalizing taxonomies are still with us today in a European context is only too evident in the demographics of UK immigration detention, where almost without exception it is Black people whose lives are suspended at the border. But if one function of cultural criticism is to demonstrate the deep logics that govern the racist demarcations on which hostile migration environments continue to depend, a more hopeful task is to articulate strategies whereby such hostile relationality might be overcome. Rachel Gregory Fox’s essay on Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet shows how always, where compartmentalization

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occurs, one mode of counter-action is story, whether that is the new story that needs to be told about belonging, or the new mode of belonging that comes of hearing those stories the hostile environment regime attempts to shut down. Behind Gregory Fox’s account of Smith’s chronicling of recent UK history is Hannah Arendt’s understanding of story, where what story always reveals is the interconnectedness of the human web. As I have written in the “Afterword” to Refugee Tales IV, with reference to the UK’s hostile environment, “Where rights are denied, stories are silenced. Which does not mean that the sharing of stories entails the securing of rights. What it does mean is that the act of sharing stories cannot stop.” The essays in this section detail both epistemological fictions on which hostile migration environments depend and also contexts of story-sharing in which such brutalizing compartmentalization can, yet, be overcome.

CHAPTER 10

Setting the Stage of Contemporary Migration in the Italian Hostile Environment Claudia Gualtieri

Introduction This chapter argues for an understanding of the hostile environment for asylum seekers constructed in Italy in recent decades that recognizes the cultural specificity of the regime. Official narratives, populist rhetoric, legal norms, media discourse, and stereotyped interpretations have produced diverse locally hostile environments for asylum seekers. They are rooted in the specific context of the nation’s culture and history and have developed through time. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to revisit the whole history of Italy, even since unification in 1861, but it is useful to observe the nation’s cultural formation and development in order to identify some of the peculiarities and discrepancies that characterize the Italian context and the ways in which the nation has responded to recent migration flows. If we use the phrase “hostile environment” broadly to define the effective political system of the national expulsion of migrants, it is useful to recognize that the Italian hostile environment cannot be understood as a coherent political construction, nor as a consistent set of practices, but The author wishes to thank Maurizio Veglio, Roberto Pedretti, Lina Prosa, David Herd, Andrea B. Farabegoli, Lidia De Michelis and Itala Vivan, who have contributed to this paper with their comments and who have been part of the conversation on movement and migration.

C. Gualtieri (*) Università degli Studi di Milano Statale, Milano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_10

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rather as fragmented rhetorical fabrications and unsystematic, concrete procedures that reflect diverse regional and local contexts. Indeed, a variety of subjects and conditions contribute to the formation of diverse forms of hostile environment. In the Italian case, the accumulation of different migration flows over a short period of time—from the end of the 1980s onward—is a distinguishing feature. The Italian hostile environment, therefore, may be perceived by examining how distinctive life conditions, conventions, behaviors, and norms generate specific cultural practices and productions in unique moments in time. Along this line, the Italian hostile environment may be apprehended as a cultural product, which has taken shape according to the Italian way of living and to the specific situations people experience (publicly and privately, officially and domestically) in different moments of their lives as they are determined by, and embedded in, precise conditions, relations, and affects. This conviction draws on a cultural studies’ approach. Fundamentally, it is inspired by Raymond Williams’s definition of culture as “a whole way of life” (1989), is animated by Stuart Hall’s analysis of ethnicity (1989, 1992), and is expanded by Lawrence Grossberg’s recent exploration of affect (2017). In Grossberg’s critical theorization and pragmatic activism, following the project that Stuart Hall founded at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the 1980s, conjunctural analysis is instrumental in helping to gain insight into the simultaneous convergence of tensions and lines of power that may provoke a crisis in society and bring about rupture and changes in the existing balance. Methodologically, this chapter thus owes to cultural studies the goal of being alert to transformations in culture and society, of investigating the dynamics of power and raising doubts about mainstream discourses and constructions in order to imagine new possibilities for change (Grossberg 2018). Cultural studies’ concerns are contiguous with postcolonial studies’ attention to colonialism as it extends over times and places to reproduce shifting structures of subjugation, systems of control, and unequal power relations. In today’s postcolonial condition, as Sandro Mezzadra theorizes, one of the legacies of colonialism is manifest in the policies of control, bordering, and exclusion that are perpetrated on human mobility, especially from Africa, as the Italian case illustrates in this chapter (Mezzadra and Rahola 2006; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Similarly, at an earlier moment in the debate, in Policing the Crisis (Hall et  al. 1978), Stuart Hall observed the changes in British culture and society in the 1970s and described how the mechanism of race construction may be rearticulated and reused in new ways in specific conjunctures so as to reproduce racialized social structures and institutional racism. Hall’s investigation acquires additional strength in a postcolonial perspective, which applies the examination of the vicious mechanisms of racialization in today’s multiple contexts of bluntly or surreptitiously imposed subordination, marginalization, exclusion, and erasure. In the following analysis, the Italian context becomes exemplary of a number of possible rearticulations of the power structures and actions which Hall identified in the British situation he was scrutinizing.

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This chapter is structured around three main clusters of analysis: how specific the construction of a hostile environment is in relation to the culture and history of the nation and in relation to the main lines of recent immigration discussed in this chapter; how Lampedusa conveys a discursive and symbolic construction of Mediterranean crossing and is also a stage in migrant storytelling; how storytelling, which is here explored mainly through an analysis of recent plays, has helped to forge narratives that problematize and contest the manifold modes of articulating and discursively upholding hostile environments. The chapter’s dual objective is to address the function of narrative in the hostile environment by characterizing the specific Italian environment also in relation to the European context of migration and to provide a wider canvas by presenting some texts that are representative of the Italian response to today’s migration. Political and popular reactions to the arrival of people in Italian national territory have contributed to forging specific forms of hostility and indifference. These have been complicated by the norms implemented by diverse Italian governments, which have variously complied with European treaties. Hence, the official and demotic narratives of migration—in the media, online, in political debates, in private conversations, and in social activism—have taken advantage of legislative gaps and ambiguous procedures while also acquiring local specificity in pragmatic applications according to regional, provincial, and city management, as well as to the practices of voluntary organization and social activism. An overview of Italy’s juridical organization in relation to and within the European system is useful in order to provide a wider perspective on the articulation of Italy’s hostile environment for the movement of people on its national territory in recent decades, and to clarify the multifarious dynamics that contribute to the uneven development of Italian migration management.

Italy and/in Europe In Nation and Narration (1990), Homi Bhabha highlights the ambivalent construction of nations not simply as disciplined forms of government, but also as cultural systems of signification. A collective narrative provides the unifying frame for the state community and offers a cultural, political, and juridical system of recognition according to which a form of national identity is bestowed. National narratives pursue the objective of community cohesion in support of and response to the nation’s historical concerns in particular times. Italy’s present national configuration is recent and tied to the history of the European Union in its present form. In 1941, during their confinement on the island of Ventotene, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi drafted Per un’Europa libera e unita. Progetto d’un manifesto, known as The Ventotene Manifesto, which anticipated the project of a united Europe. On 1 January 1948, the Italian Republican Constitution became effective, taking on board the preoccupations that 20 years of fascism and World War II had brought to Italy, Europe, and the entire world. During the 1950s, a number of treaties marked

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the initial steps toward the European Union as it is understood today, while the Italian judicial system conformed to European legislation for member countries, hence voluntarily ceding its national sovereignty on specific matters. A 2001 amendment to Article 117 officially incorporates European authority in the Italian Constitution. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union announces the protection of six fundamental rights—dignity, freedoms, equality, solidarity, citizens’ rights, and justice—and has the juridical force of a treaty for the member states, setting the objectives that must be pursued according to each state’s Constitution. The commitment to comply with European treaties also means their adjustment to national customs. In Italy, this adjustment derives from a political history which is, in certain respects, unstable, and from the delicate and sensitive situation of Italy within the Mediterranean theater. Article 117, letter b, of the Italian Constitution quotes that the state has exclusive legislative power in a number of matters, among which is immigration. The state is actually managing recent immigration from Ukraine, which has rocketed to general attention in national public speech. By contrast, the administration of migration flows from across the Mediterranean to Italian shores in recent decades has often been delegated to regional, provincial, and local authorities, if not outsourced beyond national boundaries. By making this precise migration narrative peripheral and external to the national concern, the state is marginalizing and silencing it. Part of the narrative of migration is missing in public understanding, if not paradoxically spectacularised, as in the cases of tragic shipwrecks or impactful death (like Alan Kurdi’s), in order to raise superficial compassion while avoiding a consistent analysis of the pragmatic possibilities of state hospitality and migrant integration. The interpretation and application of the law is ambiguous in ways that affect the recognition of the conditions of migration and the consideration of personal cases, generating chaos and contributing to the construction of a hostile environment that feeds on uncertainty and partiality of information. At the state level, no planned strategy has been devised, notwithstanding a generic and underestimated national plan for immigration and integration elaborated in 1998. Different actions have been activated by local administrations, associations, and civil society, hence producing ambiguities and contradictions because of the disparate elaboration and application of norms and practices. At the political level, no analytical debate has been activated in order to face the challenges that the arrival of people on the national soil entails. Specific policies aimed at rendering migrants illegal and at combatting illegal immigration are implemented in different ways in each country. In Italy, they have been launched by various governments, hence producing an excess of law-­ making and an accumulation of often contrasting and incoherent norms. The Legislative Decree 286/1998 concerning immigration discipline and the condition of foreigners provided the first organic—yet cautious—norm, since then modified and still used today. The 2002 Bossi-Fini law (issued by a conservative government) was designed to make previous migration legislation more

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repressive. While it did not succeed in substantially reducing incoming fluxes, it set specific modes according to which the state would implement its border control. The 2009, 2018, and 2019 Pacchetti Sicurezza [Security Packs], the 2017 agreement with Libia, and the 2020 Lamorgese Decree (aimed at softening some previous security norms) helped to configure the ongoing contrasting national debate on migration. Restrictive laws have caused political resistance from opposing sides according to ideological interests, ethical concerns, and civil society’s activism, thus complicating the national political panorama and the ways in which Italy is responding to migration. The damaging effects of this incoherent politics affect the whole institutional system. The operation Mare Nostrum, which was implemented from 18 October 2013 until 31 October 2014  in order to search and rescue migrants in the Mediterranean, is an example of the difficulty of pursuing organic policies at the national and European levels. Following the tragic shipwreck of 3 October 2013,1 Mare Nostrum was led by the Italian Navy and then superseded by the European Union’s Frontex operation known as Triton, which started on 1 November 2014 with the contrasting aim of protecting borders. In certain ways, it has helped to structure member countries’ policies and implementation of hostile asylum environments. The Dublin III Regulation of 2013, determining which EU member state would be responsible for examining applications for asylum, also complicated Italy’s national and international position, by fixing procedures which impose the rule according to which the first country of arrival is responsible for asylum applications. Italy is almost an obligatory step on the Mediterranean migrant route. Its geographical position puts extra strain on the nation’s capability to cope with incoming people. However, Italy is a transit area where the majority of migrants do not wish to settle. This national weakness is understated in the official narrative, which instead capitalizes on the common fear of huge numbers of incoming migrants. Other powerful forces in the political landscape contribute to complicating the analysis of the construction of the Italian hostile environment and its relationship with Europe. They include the Catholic Church and the community of the faithful with its determining influence, especially on humanitarian issues; organized crime, which infiltrates the field of labor management and makes the exploitation of irregular labor an organized system (New Keywords Collective 2015; Aradau and Tazzioli 2020); and the ideological opposition of the political right to migrant inclusion. From this set of contextual co-ordinates, it is useful to extrapolate two lines of analysis that contribute to articulating different national narratives or, perhaps, to showing how historical silence is produced: emigration from and immigration to Italy. These interconnecting flows reveal additional constitutive features of the Italian hostile environment by incorporating the country’s past history into the present one. 1  This shipwreck has infamously become famous for the huge number of reported deaths. More than 360 migrants lost their lives in the tragic accident. See: https://www.nytimes. com/2013/10/04/world/europe/scores-die-in-shipwreck-off-sicily.html.

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Emigration and Immigration Italy has a long history of emigration. Intranational movement from the poor rural and fishing areas of the south to the more economically developed and industrialized zones of the north is a constitutive part of the nation’s formation. The lack of jobs was (and often still is) one of the main triggers of internal movement. In time, stereotypical and derogatory classifications of the people of the south were produced, thus nourishing a narrative of their marginalization and exclusion that, at its worst, drew on and underpinned racism. Interestingly, in the Italian translation by Elena Battista of Ander Lustgarten’s play Lampedusa (2017), Denise, the Yorkshire woman on stage with the fisherman of Lampedusa, Stefano, speaks with an Italian southern accent, thus showing the persistence and significance of stereotypes derived from intranational migration in the popular imagination. International movement from Italy clustered around the country’s unification in the mid-nineteenth century and at the end of World War II (Gabaccia 2000). Officially, the history of migration has been censored and expunged from the national narrative, with the result that Italian migrants themselves have been expelled and erased from cultural institutions. No national museum has critically tackled the Italian history of emigration and the story has not been publicly retold. Some local private museums have tried to fill the void, like La nave della Sila, which combines the narrative of Italian emigration in the past with today’s stories of immigration toward Italy (Vivan 2018; Archive of Migrant Memories). It can be argued that a cancellation of memory has made the nation insensitive to migration. Or, more acutely, that the national failure to reconcile with the memory of Italian emigration—a thorny history of poverty, loss, institutional disregard, and social inequality—has generated, at institutional and popular levels, an incapacity to recognize past narratives of emigration in the present stories of immigration. The lack of recognition hinders the possibility of retelling and rewriting national history and rooting it in the needs, challenges, and changes of the present. In this regard, migrant storytelling has a political function: being positioned in the present, it does not simply offer testimonial accounts of migration, but hopefully contributes to activating a form of historical recognition, which may promote deeper cultural understanding (Bromley 2017). “The Teenager’s Tale” (2021) as told to Maurizio Veglio and “The Delivery Person’s tale” as told by HH, in Refugee Tales IV (2021), both collected in Italy, may provide just one kind of example in this regard. By contrast, Italy’s encounter with mass immigration is historically recent. It is specific, arising, as it does, with the influx of Albanians after the collapse of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania at the beginning of the 1990s. Statistical surveys show that Albanians constitute one of the most populous communities in Italy. Many landed on the shores of Apulia after crossing the southern Adriatic Sea, were hosted by the local people and spread around the country, becoming part of the social fabric, so the simple story goes. The

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Adriatic Sea has an ancient history of trade and cultural exchanges with the Balkan region, but also signals the eastern European frontier, which was particularly relevant during the years of the Cold War. At a time when migration challenges borders, and past history is superseded by new forces and events, Alessandro Leogrande, a writer and investigative journalist, explored Italy’s recent actions and narratives of the relations with its neighboring countries beyond the seas. In Il naufragio. Morte nel Mediterraneo [The shipwreck. Death in the Mediterranean] (2011), Leogrande provided the documentary material for the script of the play Katër i Radës (2014). The shipwreck. The story, told in the present tense, documents how deterrence and pushback policies were implemented by Italy against immigrants from Albania. The play presents the 1997 ramming of a small Albanian patrol boat loaded with people fleeing from civil war in their country by a corvette ship of the Italian navy. Beyond material facts, which Leogrande meticulously researched despite official attempts to cover up information, the play constructs the Italian fear and terror of invasion, while presenting the tragedy of forced displacement as a chant of ghosts in which living and dead figures give voice to their personal and collective traumas. The scene consists simply of a raft on which the drowned and the saved are crowded together. Cries and broken sentences, shouts and laments, thoughts and dreams, memories, and fear all give voice to the dead and the survivors in the form of a chamber opera in Albanian and Italian, accompanied by the disturbing music of Albanian composer Admir Shkurtaj, and the sound of cupa-cupa. The dead are given voice to utter their hopes and desires, and the living articulate their struggle for survival. Real events acquire a mythical and symbolic dimension, which is representative of all similar tragedies, while the play powerfully expresses its political message by constructing a dialogue between brute facts and human values, life and loss. Still unacknowledged in official narratives, other communities have lived part of their lives in Italy. Statistics show the Moroccan community to be one of the largest, as well as the Romanian, along with other communities mainly from northern African and eastern European countries, China, and the Indian subcontinent. These communities formed through the decades and settled inconspicuously. Among the arrivals from sub-Saharan African countries, Senegalese people (and other communities from diverse African countries) have settled since the 1980s in Ravenna, a city port in the Upper Adriatic Sea. An important example of their active presence and creative work is the project “Romagna Africana” [African Romagna] that the theater company Teatro delle Albe based in Ravenna renamed “Le Albe afro-romagnole” [The Dawns of Africa and Romagna]” for the occasion. It started and developed with Senegalese griots, among them Mandiaye N’Diaye and the actors of Takku Ligey Théâtre (Gualtieri 2015). The experiment produced a number of plays that enacted the hybridization of languages and cultures through sharing and adapting traditions and narratives to the different as well as familiar contexts of emigration/immigration (Martinelli 1993; Fiore 2018). These migrant presences from the last part of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the

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2000s did not generally trigger the creation of hotspots,2 centri di trattenimento [detention centers], and containment measures. The process of integration was casual, erratic, and not organized. Perhaps, the social and economic wellbeing of the time—more jobs availability and functioning social welfare— contributed to the fact that migrants were largely ignored in official and media discourse. Due to its geographical position, Italy has many crossing points along its terrestrial borders in addition to its numerous islands and ports. Among the most popular in public discourse are Ventimiglia toward France, Trieste on the Balkan route, Fernetti between Italy and Slovenia, and Lampedusa. Different moments in the country’s history have brought diverse forms of arrival and border crossing to the headlines. In Trilogia del naufragio Lina Prosa focuses on sea access in “Lampedusa Beach” (2013) and on the alpine frontier in “Lampedusa Snow.” Here, Lampedusa is a metonym for any hostile place, any frontier and border: both the sea and the Alps. However, the Mediterranean Sea has risen to the foreground in recent decades as the iconic setting for the twenty-first-century movement of people. It is a stage where cultures shift and hybridize (Gualtieri 2018), where modernity is interrogated (Chambers 2018), border discipline is imposed (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002), and biopolitical and necropolitical control dominates (Mbembe 2003, 2020). In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the recent systematic construction of institutionalized hostile environments is a response to immigration across the Mediterranean in particular (Bromley 2021). For Italy, the colonial imagination of the migrant draws on the national enterprise in Africa in the nineteenth century, in Libya, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia.3 The constitution of the unitary modern Italian state in 1861 found one of its raisons d’être in the colonial enterprise in the Horn of Africa. Nation formation and colonial empire conspired in supporting the country’s claim to the role of a middle power in Europe, and fascism made use of the settler colonial narrative, which identified Africa—and the black subject—as Italy’s colonial objects. This iconic use of the colonized subject contributed to the formation of the national imagination regarding the colonial enterprise, according to which black is the defining color of colonial subordination. The national narrative 2  “Being part of the European Commission’s Agenda on Migration, the ‘hotspot’ approach is generally described as providing ‘operational solutions for emergency situations’, through a single place [the hot spot] to swiftly process asylum applications, enforce return decisions and prosecute smuggling organisations through a platform of cooperation among the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), Frontex, Europol and Eurojust. Even though there is no precise definition of the ‘hotspot’ approach, it is clear that it has become a fundamental feature of the relocation procedures conducted from Italy and Greece until September 2017, in the framework of Council Decisions 2015/1523 and 2015/1601 of 14 and 22 September 2015 respectively.” https://asylumineurope.org/reports/countr y/italy/asylum-procedure/access-procedure-and-registration/ hotspots/. 3  Historians Giampaolo Calchi Novati and Angelo De Boca have amply examined Italian colonialism and its legacies.

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imposed by fascism came to dominate public rhetoric with the ideas of the benevolent colonizer and the willingly subdued colonized: a collaborative relationship hiding the violence and trauma of colonization. This distorting representation still persists in today’s national discourse and imagination. In opposition, activists and writers (like Carlo Lucarelli, Erri De Luca and the Wu Ming collective), and new-Italian artists and writers (among them Igiaba Sciego), contest the representation of benevolent Italian colonialism and collaborative African servitude, resurrect Italian colonial history, and attempt to activate a debate that is long overdue. An ambiguous mix of narratives and historical legacies inform the national imagination and the collective perception of the African immigrant in Italy. In this construction, Lampedusa has become a memorial of tragic events and a stage for the spectacularization of death at sea and of the frontier. It is also a holiday resort which hides the migrants from sight. It marks a step in the narrative of the travelers’ expectations and hosts a combination of stories (more or less reliable, more or less complete) of people’s experiences in the place.

Lampedusa A focus on Lampedusa is useful for two reasons. First, to emphasize how the elaboration of a national and international icon of migration and its stereotypical construction contributes to the discursive articulation of a hostile environment. Second, and conversely, to show how Lampedusa may mark a step in the formation of personal stories and become part of a storytelling that dismantles conforming narratives of migration while allowing different stories to gain voice. Lampedusa is a raft thrown to the middle of that sea—as Giusi Nicolini, former mayor of Lampedusa, once called it—on to which migrants desperately hold: an image of isolation, of remoteness from firm land in the middle of the storm, an enclosed controlled space, a frontier, a stage for displaying the power of the state, the scene of death and the scene of rescue. Even so, however captivating and powerful, this symbol of migration is incomplete and misleading in its fixity. It has captured the national and international visual and media discourse by offering only one perspective on the movement of people from the northern coast of Africa to Europe, fostering an imaginary swarming with boat people, smugglers, and shipwrecks. As a consequence, the varied, complex, and multifaceted dynamics of the phenomenon of human movement are obfuscated, and populist reactions as well as political debate are constrained according to ideological interests and populist propaganda. Lampedusa may be interpreted as a deceiving formulation of hostile environment. When I first visited it in July 2016, my onsite research was intended to interrogate that iconic construction and also to witness and probe what had been going on and reported about the place. I recall how difficult it was to gather information about the Verso il Museo della Fiducia e del Dialogo per il Mediterraneo [Toward a Museum of Trust and Dialogue for the Mediterranean] that was going to be hosted at the Museo delle Pelagie from 3 June until 3

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October 2016, and how the media and online discourses that were describing Lampedusa were not informative enough on how sea rescue and arrivals were managed. Three years had passed since the tragic shipwreck of 3 October 2013, and Lampedusa was on the front line of the so-called migration “crisis” in Europe. I could observe some aspects of the island (or, perhaps, their performance), but my interest was mainly to investigate the presence of migrants, and I realized that quite a number of researchers from different areas and across the disciplines were attracted by a similar concern. Lampedusa had become a fashionable and malleable topic. However, few signs of refugees were in evidence, and the location of the hotspot building was practically unreachable. Only at Porto M, the Askavusa collective had gathered objects found on the beach and at the boat cemetery, objects the sea had brought to the shore after shipwrecks—clothes, shoes, books, pots, glasses, a variety of personal items—and displayed them in an unstructured museum (Gatta 2016; Mazzara 2018; Faleschini Lerner 2021). Information about a possible local and national political project about how to face the current situation was sparse and confused. My own research and conversation with informants in Lampedusa, in collaboration with Lidia De Michelis, who was there with me, and Itala Vivan, who went later, were tentative and ambivalent. We witnessed different reactions by the local people to the prominent role that the island was acquiring in rescue and hospitality practices and in migration policies, and to the new construction of the island’s identity that public discourse was assembling and actively promoting. Still, a major part of the narrative was missing, which concerned the lives of the persons who kept landing and being hosted in the hotspot as well as the unrecoverable voices of the shipwrecked and drowned. In the short tale “Twenty thousand alive under the Sea of Sicily” (2018), Senegalese-Italian writer Pap Khouma gives voice to the dead, as does Ethiopian-Italian filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer in the video “Asmat—Nomi” (2014), in order to celebrate the memory and voices of migrants and also to launch a message of political resistance and struggle.4 The resurrection of the past and its saturation into the present through the dead’s voices and their recognition in the communal and national history may help to formulate better forms of storytelling for today. In my personal experience, some of the gaps in the narrative I was trying to assemble in Lampedusa and after my trip were filled during my participation in the 2019 Refugee Tales walk from Brighton to Hastings. While walking, telling, and listening to stories, people who had been forced to seek asylum— Rashid, Osman, Nami, Marina, Seth, and others—some of whom had been hosted in Lampedusa’s hotspot—filled in some of the blanks that my Lampedusa trip had left unresolved, thus marking a step forward in the composition of a 4  On 20 June 2018, in The Guardian, Niamh McIntyre and Mark Rice-Oxley published 56 pages containing the provisional “List of the 34,361 documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of ‘Fortress Europe.’” See also Iovino and Verdicchio (2020) and Cattaneo (2022).

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partial personal and communal storytelling of solidarity and movement. To acknowledge the incompleteness and situatedness of the stories is particularly relevant not only because testimonies are neither exhaustive nor coherent, but especially because storytelling is also made of silence, personal secrets, inexplicable facts, and private experiences that should be and are kept hidden, unrevealed, and unspoken. I have briefly mentioned my first encounter with Lampedusa in order to focus on ways in which the island marks a step in the storytelling of migration, and also to underline how this kind of storytelling is both personal and communal. The unifying emblem Lampedusa is made to represent is, in fact, fragmented and disassembled into many personal stories that incorporate the island as a living part of personal experience and of the storytelling of migration. In it, Lampedusa is indicative of the construction of the Italian hostile environment. Relevant theatrical productions about immigration in Italy over the last two decades have combined to trigger a conversation from a variety of perspectives and aesthetic realizations. I will briefly introduce a few plays that may be representative—as far as the artistic and political role of theater is concerned—of Italian reactions to migration. They also offer a reflection about ways in which sharing personal narratives of migration may contribute to weave a web of collective storytelling in which everyone may recognize elements of their individual everyday story in the communal and national narrative. The form of the monologue, which is often used in the plays under scrutiny, aptly conveys both intimate reflection and interrogation about migrant traveling and the widespread discourse of migration. Collective narratives take shape in piteous descriptions of the tragedy of migration or, in opposition, in reports of institutional and populist reactions against the migrants. In 2010, well before the explosion of what became known as the refugee “crisis,” Marco Martinelli wrote and directed the play Noise in the Waters (2010), in which the half-lit figure of a general, a bureaucrat servant of power, complains about his job of ordering the dead on an unnamed island. The description of his efforts in identifying and counting the corpses against the rotting force of the sea composes both his explanation of how the system plainly works through figures and classification and his attempt to imagine a personal story for each one of the bodies as a strategy to emphasize his protest and to ease calculation. A simultaneous and ambiguous dehumanizing and humanizing process takes place on stage as the apparent dullness of the general’s actions recalls Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil. The play elaborates its resistant and ironic message on the opposition of the human and non-human, and through the deconstruction of the enumeration paradigm, which contrasts the indifference of power with the resurrection of dead migrants’ personal stories as the general feels almost compelled to imagine and narrate them on stage. A combative form of resistance to mainstream propaganda against migration is put on stage by Leonardo Capuano when he interprets Fabrizio Gatti’s personal experience as undocumented traveler in disguise. In 2015, with his play Bilal. Nessun viaggiatore è straniero [Bilal. No traveler is a foreigner], Gatti

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(2008) produced a stage version of his nonfictional testimony Bilal. Viaggiare, lavorare, morire da clandestino [Bilal. To travel, to live, to die as clandestine], written in 2007. This text is the document of an investigative report of Gatti’s factual journey, when he passed himself off as a Kurdish refugee and, without documents, followed the migrant route across the Mediterranean from northern Africa to Italy. The scene offers a shocking masquerade that shows how any members of the audience may physically resemble, and therefore be taken for a migrant. The actor on stage describes his peregrinations by setting up a dialogue with people offstage who represent the real encounters he had during the trip across the Sahara, inside the detention centers, across the Mediterranean, and at his arrival in Italy. The detailed description of every step of the journey conveys the traveler’s hopes, doubts, fear, suffered violence, dreams, the realistic terror of dying at sea, and the horrific awareness that it is all happening on the Africa-Europe migrant route. It is communal storytelling, made of many voices—the protagonist’s, his migrant travel companions’, the policemen’s, smugglers’, thieves’, taxi-drivers’—which animate a dramatic and all-too-real struggle for survival. One of the play’s most powerful effects lies in the erasure of the imagined border that separates migrants from non-migrants, while nonetheless maintaining a distinction between what is incredible for some and realistic for others.

Conclusion This chapter has pointed out how the construction of hostile environments is complex and multifarious, and is produced from within the history and culture of a nation. It has also argued that Italy has created hostile environments for migrants by handling migration in local, sometimes arbitrary ways. The specific national constitution and management as well as local cultural practices and forms of governmentality have shaped specific applications of hostile asylum practices. This is the context for Lina Prosa’s, Marco Martinelli’s, and Fabrizio Gatti’s theatrical productions on migration, each of which refers to the events, conditions, and popular attitudes that the Italian hostile environments have generated. By the same token, embedded, as they are, in the specific contestuality of Italian politics, these texts may also be understood as exemplary expressions of the ways stories and voices of migration can counter hostile environments. In the same way as Lampedusa has become representative of the treacherous journey migrants have to take, these literary texts can speak to wider audiences, beyond local (Italian) ones, and in so doing elicit recognition and understanding. Lina Prosa’s Lampedusa trilogy, Noise in the Waters and Bilal modulate storytelling into an important instrument of sharing. In most of the examined texts, the language is Italian, which, however, is intermingled with other languages, sounds, and music, so as to deconstruct its exclusive power as a token of nation identity. More important than the language is the story. It is the power and energy of the story that drive both the intellectual hope and the

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pragmatic action of continuing the search for better understanding. The examined texts attempt to instigate forms of recognition in the audience, at the personal and collective levels, in order for them to identify, comprehend, and witness their own stories within the communal storytelling that the plays offer. As Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero argues in Relating Narratives (1997) and For More Than One Voice (2003), the “narratable self” offers a perspective about subjectivity and identity that highlights the uniqueness of every human voice. The act of speaking reveals the sound of a distinctive embodied voice, which allows Cavarero to reconfigure the relationship between logos and politics by arguing in favor of the relevance of the voice that is speaking. How speaking and listening, storytelling and identification are inseparable has been powerfully highlighted in Lina Prosa’s (2020) “Ritratto di naufrago numero zero” [Portrait of castaway number zero], written just after La trilogia del naufragio in 2016 and first read on stage in 2020. The short text presents two apparently unrelated individual stories: Desirée’s and a castaway’s. Desirée has been abandoned by her lover, Diego, who sold the red boat of their love to Libyan migrant smugglers. She feels miserable and desperate. She wanders on the beach trying to heal her pain of betrayed and abandoned love. In her mind, she interrogates Diego about their life together while she witnesses the passage of fishermen and travelers on the beach. Having experienced the shipwreck of her soul, she wishes to help the migrants to wait for a better moment before crossing the sea. Desirée’s intimate struggle, her acute involvement in the travelers’ anguish for departure, and her painful search for an explanation of Diego’s betrayal for profit acquire a more tragic dimension when she sees a shipwrecked person on the beach: “È incagliato nel mio mondo. […] / Dargli un numero? / Va bene lo zero. / Ancora prima del numero uno.”5 Doubt precedes the counting. The enumeration procedure is erased. Desirée’s interrogation about her shipwrecked love confronts the castaway’s tragedy, which also becomes her own as she spots a red wooden splinter between his toes. The assailing doubt about whether the boat of love has turned into a boat of death, whether the generosity of love has morphed into the greed for money, signals Desirée’s involvement in a collective tragedy: “Dove situare, umanamente dico, / un naufrago nella storia di una donna / abbandonata?”6 For Desirée and for the reader and the listener to her story, castaway number zero is a ­category that exists before shipwreck; it is the moment of interrogation, of the recognition of one’s personal experience in other people’s stories, of the search for truth. In the conclusion of “Ritratto di Naufrago numero zero,” Desirée’s words become a collective voice inhabiting both the inside and the outside of the text. Her I-narrator’s perspective seems to extend and include every I-speaker and I-listener. Desirée implores a fisherman to take her in the middle 5  “He is wedged into my world. […] / Give him a number? / Zero is fine. / Even before number one.” Translations are mine unless differently indicated. 6  “Where to situate, humanely I mean, / a shipwrecked person in the story of an abandoned / woman?”

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of the sea to look for the red boat and for the answer to her doubt. But the traveling is a search for impossible truth, because the sea swallowed and concealed every proof and evidence. The story of Desirée’s courage and struggle, of her empathy and stubbornness, and of her tragedy and search eloquently reveals how we are all the subjects of shipwrecks, how we are all involved whether we appreciate it or not. Desirée’s condition instills the idea that the personal and local story can elicit forms of recognition and understanding, which may also inspire commitment and even action. Such commitment entails the interrogation of the received stereotypes, absorbed categories and divisive policies that characterize specific constructions of hostile environment. Migration has been a driver in many artistic, activist, and research fields in Italy, for example: documentary cinema, investigative journalism, juridical reports, new archives, public history, music, fiction, and critical studies. They establish interdisciplinary and international conversations that explicitly place migration and movement as global issues, in that they extend to everybody the probability, possibility, and need of mobility (Giuliani 2021). As Jaan Valsiner argued in his keynote lecture at the 2021 International Migration Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe (IMISCOE) Conference, “we are all migrants.” European institutions such as European E-Justice, associations like IMISCOE and Euronomade, and projects like Stories in Transit (just to quote a few examples) are working at devising and activating proposals that may unite European nations and recommend a collaborative vision, which can, hopefully, affect the governance of Europe. This rethinking is now essential to combat the proliferation of hostile environments that change ever more rapidly according to historical contexts, social and cultural relationships, and political convenience. Rethinking may be activated on many levels of interpersonal life by way of interdisciplinary collaboration between experts and their interaction with civil society and by practices of social integration for migrants. Their everyday life strategies, identities, and labor must be enabled to affect the construction of new political, social, and creative scenes (De Genova 2021). As a conclusion of this chapter and returning to the politics of the voice, listening is equally an act of self-awareness, participation, and accountability. It is a willing resistant and radical action against the construction of hostile environments.

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CHAPTER 11

The Dystopian Imaginary, Climate Migration, and “Lifeboat-Nationalism” Matthew Whittle

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the climate emergency has become central to assessments of migration in Europe. In the UK’s 2006 Stern Review, “The Economics of Climate Change,” it was estimated that extreme weather conditions and rising sea levels could force 200 million people to migrate by 2050.1 Following this prediction, the European Commission stated that regions that “already suffer from poor health conditions, unemployment or social exclusion are rendered more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which could amplify or trigger migration within and between countries,” an assessment that underscores the warning that “Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure” (2008, 4). The World Bank’s 2021 Groundswell report on internal migration across Eastern Europe, as well as other key “hot spots” in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, updated the Stern

This work is informed by my role as a Co-I on the British Academy-funded project “Hostile Environments: Policies, Stories, Responses,” which is led by Prof. David Herd (Kent). 1  See “HM Treasury: Stern Review final report” (2006), The National Archives (archived April 7 2010), https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20100407172811/http://www. hm-treasury.gov.uk/stern_review_report.htm [accessed 8 December 2021].

M. Whittle (*) University of Kent, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_11

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Review (2010) to predict that the climate emergency could be responsible for “up to 216 million climate migrants by 2050” (Clement et  al. 2021, vi).2 Elsewhere, research in climate migration has shown that ecological breakdown could increase African migration to Europe (Goff et al. 2012) and lead to a higher level of asylum applications to the EU (Missirian and Schlenker 2017). In each case, climate-induced migration is framed as a national security issue whereby migrants are regarded as potential terrorists and sources of social conflict in host countries.3 All the while, as Neel Ahuja notes, “the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other international institutions have not established accepted legal definitions of climate migration or climate refugees” (2021, 47). This is because the 1951 Refugee Convention allows for asylum to only be granted based on a fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, and political opinion; it does not include forced migration due to environmental factors. Sociological analysis of global migration has long argued for seeing the climate emergency as a primary driver of mass displacement and anti-migrant policies. In Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti has warned of “off-kilter weather patterns” causing, compounding, and amplifying “humanitarian crises and fueling civil wars” (2011, 7, 6). Such conditions, he says, “suggest a future in which millions of people will be on the move” and “the borders between wealthy core economies and the developing world [will] harden and militarize” (181, 183). In Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller has shown that, as the climate emergency causes further socio-economic instability across the globe, it will increasingly shift from being an environmental concern to being a central aspect of “the politics of uneven mobilities” (2018, 142). This in turn will exacerbate the “narratives driving current politics” which include “ethno-­ nationalist exclusion” (2018, 142). One such narrative, which will be my focus in this chapter, mobilizes an apocalyptic analogy that frames wealthy nationstates as already-full lifeboats.4 It is by invoking the allegorical image of the lifeboat that a broad range of ecologists have projected a catastrophic fate for nation-states in the Global North if they refuse to respond to the climate emergency with anything other than policies of anti-migrant exclusion. The term I am suggesting for this ideological position is “lifeboat-nationalism.” In doing so, I am drawing on what Parenti terms the “politics of the armed lifeboat” to name the interconnected policies of “open-ended counterinsurgency, militarized borders, aggressive 2  The report predicts that the reduction of greenhouse gases, the revival of damaged ecosystems, and the alleviation of global poverty, could mitigate against up to 80% of people forced to migrate. 3  For a discussion of the pitfalls of framing the climate crisis as an issue of national security, see Warner and Boas (2019). For an in-depth analysis of how the “national security” rhetoric that was central to the UK-US War on Terror has been taken up in US assessments of the effects of climate change, see Miller (2017). 4  This chapter draws on my contribution to the “Postcolonial Futures” special issue of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (see Whittle 2021). I would like to thank the editors, John McLeod and Shirley Chew, for their permission to revise and expand upon this material.

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anti-immigrant policing, and a mainstream proliferation of right-wing xenophobia” that industrialized nations have adopted in response to deepening environmental crises (2011, 11, 226). Here, I offer a definition of lifeboat-­ nationalism that expands upon Parenti’s sociological research to trace the apocalyptic analogy of the nation-as-lifeboat to its roots in Malthusian concerns with overpopulation and migration. The central problem that I will interrogate is the way in which lifeboat-­ nationalism traffics in a similar environmental apocalypticism as is evident in contemporary literature about climate migration. In both cases, a dystopian future of socio-ecological ruin is imagined if current trends continue unchecked. In the sections that follow, I will outline the generic features of the dystopian imaginary that conjoins literature about climate migration and lifeboat-­ nationalism, while also defining the neo-Malthusian worldview of the latter. I will then explore how John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) and Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean (2017, originally published in Norway as Blå) represent two contemporary novels of climate migration that adopt a dystopian form but also provide a counter-narrative to the lifeboat-nationalist position: where lifeboat-­ nationalism focuses on trends relating to overpopulation and the scapegoating of migrants, Lanchester’s and Lunde’s novels focus on climate change denial/inaction and corporate culpability.

A “Janus-Faced” Environmental Apocalypticism Dystopian literature is widely regarded as being the dominant literary form capable of inspiring global action to prevent the worst extremes of the climate crisis. According to Rowland Hughes and Pat Wheeler, “climate change […] has now eclipsed nuclear terror as the prime mover of the apocalyptic and dystopian imagination,” meaning that the “language of disaster” offers storytellers “the most compelling […] means of persuading [their] audience, not only of the devastation being wreaked upon global ecosystems, but of the human consequences of that devastation” (2013, 1, 2). In this line of thought, “[a]pocalyptic visions have the power to transfix their audience with horror, to command attention and shock people out of a position of comfortable apathy, in a way that strict adherence to the data cannot” (2). Similarly, Kate Rigby maintains that “works of the creative imagination that depict a dystopian vision of a climate-­changed future could play a valuable role in helping to motivate mitigation efforts” (2015, 9). These perspectives update Lawrence Buell’s argument in The Environmental Imagination that “[a]pocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (1995, 285). This, he says, is because “the rhetoric of apocalypticism implies that the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis” and projects a disastrous future for “a civilisation that refuses to transform itself according to the doctrine of the web [of interdependence]” (1995, 285).

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As is evident from these examples, the advocacy for apocalyptic imagining as a cultural weapon in the fight against ecological catastrophe often assumes that any civilizational transformation that ensues will be one of mutual, supranational cooperation across the globe. My intention here is not to argue against or overturn such investments in the hopeful impulses of dystopian imagining. It is rather to explore what we might understand to be the “Janus-faced” nature of environmental apocalypticism, especially where it concerns climate migration.5 In doing so, it is necessary to note that, in policy debates involving governments, think tanks, and NGOs, climate-induced migration, as  Andrew Baldwin et al. maintain, “has been dominated by its futurology” due to the fact that “our knowledge and practices about climate-induced migration are mostly speculative” (2014, 121, 122). This has given rise to “a ‘prophetic’ imaginary, one which casts the climate refugee as a sign for the sins committed by humanity and which calls for the nation state to reinforce order to avert an apocalyptic future” (127). While such discourse can mobilize a resistance to the rapacity of fossil capitalism, the call for “order” also risks drawing on a long tradition of environmental apocalypticism that involves the scapegoating of racialized migrants under the erroneous belief that overpopulation in the poorer countries of the Global South is a primary driver of ecological despoilation and migration.6 This belief bolsters the strict border controls that have flourished across Europe since the “War on Terror” and the introduction of austerity in the early twenty-first century, exemplified by the UK’s Hostile Environment policy, lending them a “green” legitimacy that has the potential to capitalize on mainstream awareness of the climate emergency. A range of critical perspectives offered by Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2015), Kyle Whyte (2018), and Philip Aghoghovwia (2021) have already begun to query the validity of the dystopian literary form as an adequate means of attending to localized instances of ecological despoilation in post-colonial, neo-­ colonial, and Indigenous societies. A shared concern across these perspectives is the way in which environmental apocalypticism too often projects climate breakdown and migration as an abstract, future problem for a largely undifferentiated and universalized humanity, thus negating the long history of colonial resource extraction that has been destroying environments and forcing Indigenous and colonized people to migrate for centuries. In contributing to this debate, the focus of this chapter is informed by the acknowledgment that there is a particular form of storytelling that lifeboat-nationalism and contemporary European novels depicting climate-induced migration share, namely what critics of dystopian fiction term the “critical dystopia.”7 In the broadest sense, critical dystopias are stories that warn their audiences of the world that 5  My use of this term is influenced by Tom Nairn’s account of nationalism as the “modern Janus” (1975). 6  My reference to “fossil capitalism” here draws on the historical study of the relationship between capitalist expansion and fossil fuel use in Malm (2016). 7  This category of dystopian literature was first suggested by Lyman Tower Sargent (1994) and later developed by Tom Moylan (2000) and Raffaella Baccolini (2004).

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awaits them if existing conditions are left unchecked. Rather than negating utopianism, they offer “ambiguous, open endings” that “maintain the utopian impulse within the work” (Baccolini 2004, 520). In identifying the critical dystopia, it is possible to see how such texts spur a resistance to encroaching dystopian conditions that are nascent in the audience’s contemporaneous society, in comparison to what has been called the “classical dystopian” form (sometimes referred to as the “anti-Utopia”) that rejects utopian planning based on notions of civilizational progress. As Fredric Jameson maintains, the critical dystopia “is a negative cousin of the Utopia proper, for it is in the light of some positive conception of human social possibilities that its effects are generated and from Utopian ideals its politically enabling stance derives” (2005, 198). The classical dystopia, on the other hand, is “informed by a central passion to denounce and to warn against Utopian programs in the political realm” (2005, 199). In this way, as Raffaella Baccolini argues, classical dystopias reveal the horrifying underside of utopian visions in a manner that leaves their protagonists “crushed by the totalitarian society” with “no escape” (2004, 520), whereas critical dystopias enable storytellers to subvert socio-economic forms of subjugation, especially for “women and other ex-centric subjects whose subject position is not contemplated by hegemonic discourse” (2004, 520).8 This is certainly the case for the feminist dystopian writers that Baccolini discusses, namely Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler.9 As we will go on to see, however, lifeboatnationalism also offers an allegorical story that traffics not only in an apocalyptic vision but specifically in the storytelling form of the critical dystopia, and it does so from a hegemonic position of power. Rather than voicing the perspective of subjugated groups, it frames wealthy nations of the Global North as imperiled spaces of precarious socio-economic and ecological balance that are set to be tipped toward ruination if too many outsiders are admitted.

Defining Lifeboat-Nationalism Lifeboat-nationalism is characterized by an anti-migrant, protectionist, and at times eugenicist rhetoric based on what is referred to as the “carrying capacity” of individual nation-states, meaning the perceived balance between population size, living space, and resources required for human survival. In this way, lifeboat-­nationalism aligns with what has commonly been called “green nationalism,” which names the Far-Right belief that “protection of the white nation” is “the protection of nature” and where the climate emergency is “enlisted as a reason to fortify borders and keep aliens out” (Malm and Zetkin Collective 8  For a detailed overview of the historical shift from utopian literature to classical and critical dystopian literature, see Seyferth (2018). 9  To these examples we can add Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by the Aboriginal Australian writer Alexis Wright. For a discussion of The Swan Book as a text that challenges lifeboatnationalism, see Whittle (2021).

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2021, 154–5). Yet, a language of lifeboat-nationalism, as opposed to green nationalism, is strategically important in at least three ways: firstly, it more precisely signals the environmental apocalypticism that cannot be complacently assumed to be the preserve of the Left; secondly, it more firmly locates calls by a broad range of ecologists and environmentalists for reinforced borders and population controls within an economic and philosophical tradition stretching back to the eighteenth century; and thirdly, it invites a critique of the rhetoric of climate securitization, whereby the figure of the racialized climate refugee is invoked in the Global North to frame climate breakdown as a national security concern. The lifeboat-nationalist worldview first flourished in the 1970s, when the American environmental movement combined dystopic visions of ecological breakdown with fears of a global population boom.10 At this moment, as Ahuja comments, American environmentalists viewed the “purported overpopulation of poor countries […] as the potential source of economic degradation, food crisis, and geopolitical emergency” (2021, 52). It was here that the Romantic investment in a pristine and utopic wilderness, which in America had “long been held up as a crucifix against the advancing and seething non-white masses” (Malm and the Zetkin Collective 2021, 142), met with dystopian interpretations of population projections. This convergence gave rise to what can be thought of as the founding text of lifeboat-nationalism, Garrett Hardin’s 1974 article “Living on a Lifeboat.” In “Living on a Lifeboat,” Hardin envisions a world of unchecked migration as one in which the citizens of poorer countries will inevitably clamor to enter wealthy countries, leading to a situation of “mutual ruin” (1974, 562). In making this claim, Hardin sets out the kind of evocative analogy that is characteristic of the critical dystopian form whereby all nation-states, regardless of wealth, geopolitical dominance, or geography, are like lifeboats; “each rich nation,” he says, is “full of comparatively rich people,” while poorer nations are analogous to “crowded lifeboats” (1974, 561). The language of a nation’s “carrying capacity” (1974, 561), as it is deployed in Hardin’s view, lacks any recourse to statistical evidence regarding the localized specifics of living space or economic factors that vary across nations. Rather, the lifeboat imagery is evoked to establish a clear dichotomy between the wealthy and “full” on the one hand, and the poor and “overcrowded” on the other. Negating the history of colonial exploitation, underdevelopment, and resource extraction, Hardin asserts that it is because population size has exceeded capacity that people from poor nations “fall out of their lifeboats” and hope “to be admitted to a rich lifeboat, or in some other way to benefit from the ‘goodies’ on board” (1974, 561). The simplistic and emotive language, exemplified by the word “goodies,” presents migration from poor to wealthy nations as being driven by avarice while also exposing Hardin’s patronizing view of migrants from non-Western regions as both childlike and parasitic.  For an analysis of the birth of American environmentalism, see Robertson (2012).

10

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Once this overly simplistic dichotomy has been established as an objective truth, Harden poses the question: “What should the passengers on a rich lifeboat do?” (561). In response, he argues that wealthy countries should only admit “political refugees” and “men and women of unusual talents,” while also limiting the “usual democratic franchise” to avoid “political instability” (567, 568). It is an assertion that pre-empts present-day trends across European nations where, as Ahuja notes, “right-wing political movements” that “focus on immigration’s purported negative cultural and economic effects” configure the climate crisis “as a security concern signaled by mass population movement” (2021, 7). Hardin adds that, in addition, “a world government that is sovereign in reproductive matters” is needed to curtail what he describes as “the rapidly-breeding poor” (1974, 565). The sacrifice, however, is to be shouldered only by those who do not match Hardin’s own racial, class, and national identity; as Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective note, “It tends to be someone else who sires too many children: Hardin himself had four, and he opposed efforts to convince white Americans to bear fewer” (2021, 141). Hardin is regarded as one of the most prominent “neo-Malthusian environmentalists” (Ahuja 2021, 52) of the 1960s and 1970s, meaning that the guiding principles of his rhetoric can be traced back to the writing of the late-eighteenth-century English cleric Thomas Robert Malthus. It is in his Essay on the Principle of Population ([1798] 2004) that Malthus attended to the perceived dilemma that population growth automatically leads to a subsistence crisis due to shortages in essential resources. Charlotte Sussman notes that, in setting out this dilemma, Malthus “represents an epistemic break not only in ideas about population growth, but also in ideas about human mobility and reproduction more generally” (2020, 181). Prior to the publication of Malthus’s Essay, Sussman explains, any strain on living space or resources could be thought of as being alleviated by assisting emigration to other, hospitable regions. Malthusianism thus marks a definitive shift away from the notion that “[l]arge-scale mobility” can “be invoked as a solution for the human condition” (181) as global space is reconfigured as being finite. This proposition— now known as the “Malthusian trap”—called for a range of checks that included prioritizing national agriculture over foreign trade and limiting reproduction to those members of society with the financial means to support a family. As these checks suggest, a core aspect of Malthusian thought involves placing the burden of avoiding catastrophe on the poor while reinforcing the legitimacy of the national border. In this way, as Eric B. Ross maintains, Malthus offered the ruling class “an ideological framework which naturalised poverty […] by attributing poverty and starvation to personal inadequacy and excess fertility” ([1998] 2004, 239). Malthus’s solutions to the perceived threat of overpopulation laid the foundation for later advocates of his thought to concentrate on protectionist forms of nationalism and reproduction controls over any consideration of the equitable redistribution of resources. In the twenty-first century, the climate emergency has provided fertile ground for a revitalization of the Malthusian image of the nation-as-lifeboat in

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European anti-migrant discourse. This is despite widely available data that the primary driver of the climate emergency, as David Satterthwaite (a contributor to the IPCC) has shown, is not population size but the unsustainable level of CO2 emissions caused by the “consumption of goods and services” (2009, 547) that require fossil fuels for their production, distribution, use, and disposal. In setting out this assertion, Satterthwaite notes that energy use in most countries in the Global South is not based on fossil fuels, whereas “many of the nations with the slowest growing national and urban populations,” most commonly in the Global North, “have the highest levels of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions per person” (551). Yet, this fact has not prevented Hardin’s simplistic analogy of the nation-as-lifeboat from finding a broad contemporary European audience. The Far-Right environmentalist Pentti Linkola, for instance, has argued that environmental catastrophe has been caused not by a rapacious and underregulated fossil fuel industry, but by the “ever-increasing, mindless over-valuation” (2011, 132) of human life. Repurposing Hardin’s nation-as-lifeboat apocalypticism, Linkola avers that only “those who hate life” would attempt to pull drowning people on to a full lifeboat, while “[t]hose who love and respect life will instead grab an axe and sever the hands clinging to the gunwales” (132). As well as influencing Far-Right anti-migrant agitators, traces of Hardin’s environmental neo-Malthusianism can be found in a range of European charities, NGOs, and think tanks, such as the Overpopulation Project (based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden) and the Rientrodolce Association in Italy. In the UK, the think tank Population Matters boasts as patrons Sir David Attenborough, Paul Ehrlich (author of the 1968 neo-Malthusian text The Population Bomb), Dame Jane Goodall, and the influential British environmental scientist James Lovelock, who formulated the Gaia hypothesis.11 To be clear, not all of these organizations call for immigration controls, but the Malthusian worldview that is central to their focus on population and reproduction over the damage caused by fossil capitalism feeds into the lifeboat-nationalist narrative. This is most evident in Lovelock’s 2009 book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, which predicts a future in which only a small number of islands (including Britain) will remain habitable. Considering this, Lovelock asserts that “our leaders” should act “out of selfish national interest” and see 11  See “Population Matters: Our Patrons,” https://populationmatters.org/our-patrons. In his support of the organization, Attenborough has asserted that, “All of our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder—and ultimately impossible—to solve with ever more people.” This view was also voiced in a 2018 interview on BBC Newsnight, in which Attenborough stated that, “In the long run, population growth has to come to an end,” before asserting that, even if projections suggest that numbers will stabilize, “they are going to stabilize […] at a rather higher level than the Earth can really accommodate” (see “David Attenborough on the future of the planet—BBC Newsnight,” 3 October 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pRETT1L-aZQ). Attenborough’s views on overpopulation are commensurate with those of his one-time collaborator, Julian Huxley, grandson of “Darwin’s bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley and former president of the Eugenics Society, which changed its name to the Galton Institute and is now called the Adelphi Genetics Forum.

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themselves as “captains of the lifeboats that their nations might become” (2009, 16). This, in effect, means fortifying national borders against the “great clamour from climate refugees” (161). So far, we have seen how the ideology of lifeboat-nationalism mobilizes the storytelling style of the critical dystopia to warn of socio-ecological ruin if population sizes and immigration are not policed. This brings us to the question of how literary critical dystopias can interrogate this increasingly mainstream discourse. It must be noted here that it is not a given that environmental literature will mount a challenge to lifeboat-nationalism. For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century when, as Thomas Robertson demonstrates, nation-­ states first began “registering citizens, issuing passports, and in some cases, restricting immigration” (2012, 13), a nascent version of lifeboat-nationalism can be identified in some utopian fiction. Janet Fiskio, for instance, has identified a “lifeboat narrative” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), in which the nation “achieves its purification not through the destruction that characterizes the disaster novel, but through careful planning and stewardship of resources, with attention to the welfare of future generations” (2012, 18, 21). By the mid-twentieth century the dystopian form began to flourish, particularly in novels depicting fears of overpopulation (e.g. Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed [1962], Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! [1966], and the 1973 film based on it, Soylent Green, written by Stanley R. Greenberg). At this historical moment, the dystopian ur-texts of European climate migration appeared in J.G. Ballard’s novels The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1965), both of which are important intertexts for an analysis of Lanchester’s The Wall and Lunde’s The End of the Ocean.

Climate Migration in Contemporary Dystopian Literature In The Wall, Lanchester takes a world of lifeboat-nations as the setting for a critical dystopia that warns of a future of authoritarianism and environmental devastation if the current trend of climate crisis denialism/inaction persists. Much like Ballard’s The Drowned World, the narrative is set in Britain (indicated by references to London and the Lake District) after rising sea levels and desertification have destroyed crops and beaches. These extreme ecological conditions—referred to only as “the Change” (2019, 28)—have left most people “starving and drowning” (35), “floating in the dark, on some makeshift boat or raft or inflatable” (65) and desperate to reach a habitable host country. In response, the British government has erected a concrete “National Coastal Defence Structure,” known as “the Wall” (21) around the entire coastline. Lanchester’s first-person narrator is Joseph Kavanagh, a young man who has known only a post-Change world and who begins the novel at the outset of his conscripted two-year role on the Wall as a Defender. With little training beyond how to use a gun, this posting principally involves killing climate refugees— commonly referred to by the dehumanizing label of Others—to prevent them

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from crossing the border. As Kavanagh states, “We were used to feeling frightened of them, hostile to them: if they came here we would kill them. It was that simple” (66). The phrasing here, along with the tone of resignation to a sentiment of hostility, suggests that climate securitization has built upon and expanded the UK’s existing “Hostile Environment” policy. When Kavanagh’s unit is outnumbered and overrun by a flotilla of Others who manage to evade capture, he and his Defender partner Hifa bear partial responsibility and are exiled. Forced to exchange their “lifeboat island” for a real lifeboat, they join the multitude of Others seeking sanctuary on the open seas. Lanchester’s speculative future may align with Lovelock’s predictions regarding the habitability of temperate “lifeboat” island-nations but the novel, as Kristen Sandrock notes, both stages and satirizes a prevailing “politics of isolationism” (2020, 170). For instance, Kavanagh describes how Britain’s immigration policy in the immediate years after the Change was “[o]ne in, one out: for every Other who got over the Wall, one Defender would be put to sea” (2019, 36–37). Here, Lanchester’s use of the dystopian form is able to expose the cruel absurdity of an obsession with the “carrying capacity” of nation-states by taking it to its logical conclusion. Kavanagh notes that even this restrictive policy was regarded by the state as offering too much of an incentive, and so it was amended to give Others who crossed the border the option of “being euthenised, becoming Help or being put back to sea. […] Almost all of them choose to be Help” (47), a condition which amounts to slave-labor. Ultimately, then, alongside the militarization of Britain’s border, the dystopian parameters of The Wall call for limits on immigration to be combined with a choice between political disenfranchisement and modern slavery or the death penalty. The state-sanctioned execution and subjugation of climate refugees is upheld by a social structure that is based on pre-existing inequities of wealth both nationally and internationally. Alongside reports of “countries breaking down,” Defenders hear of “coordination between rich countries” (11) to forestall the arrival of Others. And where those safely located on wealthy lifeboat-­ islands refer to the global watershed as “the Change,” the Others call it “the ending” (82): the stark contrast between the two points to the sense of managed, socio-economic transition for the former and apocalyptic finality for the latter. The inequitable access to scarce resources also structures social relations within this dystopian society, and, as Malm and the Zetkin Collective note in their discussion of the novel, “possession of a fossil-fuelled vehicle is a token of might”: for example, motorboats and planes are used to scour the coast to kill approaching Others, meaning that “[t]he sea around the nation that first developed a fossil economy is a single moat of blood” (2021, 249–250). Moreover, only “members of the elite” can use aviation fuel for their private planes, allowing them to leave the country to “talk to other members of the elite about the Change and the Others and what to do about them” (2019, 28). Despite this, Ben De Bruyn maintains that, because Kavanagh experiences life as an Other, the “basic message of Lanchester’s novel” is that “privileged citizens and irregular migrants are fundamentally similar, […] and climate

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change threatens to make environmental refugees of us all, with or without borders” (2020, 8). Yet, this is not strictly the case, and it is on this matter that it is possible to see Lanchester’s significant divergence from Ballard’s dystopian vision in The Drowned World, where the post-apocalyptic landscape of Britain is made up of uninhabitable lagoons, abandoned apartment blocks, and dense, tropical vegetation. In Ballard’s novel, ecological breakdown has made environmental refugees of everyone, but the precarity of Kavanagh and Hifa’s life at sea in The Wall has been caused not by ecological breakdown per se but by the lack of political or economic agency of lower-class conscripts. When Others breach the Wall, Kavanagh and Hifa have no power to appeal a ruling where the elites, whose planes contribute to the conditions of the Change, bear no accountability, while conscripts are forcibly expelled from their homes with little chance of survival. The fact that the state orchestrates a breeding program “so that there are enough people to man the Wall” (2019, 34–35) ultimately suggests that this form of class exploitation, in tandem with international collaboration between wealthy states and the persecution of refugees, shows little sign of abating. The novel concludes with Kavanagh and Hifa building a new life together on a disused oil refinery. The refinery is stocked with food crates, water, “the complete works of Shakespeare” (2019, 259), and is occupied by only one inhabitant, a “pale, very thin man, wearing nothing but black drawstring trousers” (2019, 257) who is unable to speak and whom Kavanagh nicknames “Our hermit” (2019, 263). It is a moment that offers an intertextual allusion to the final scenes of The Drowned World, in which Kerans discovers a starved Lieutenant Hardman in the thick overgrowth of the lagoons. In Ballard’s novel, after Kerans has turned his back on what is left of a flooded human civilization in favor of a lonely voyage through the lagoons on a raft, he encounters the blind and “emaciated figure” of Hardman wearing “tattered black rags” ([1962] 2014, 170). Hardman had preceded Kerans in his aimless journey on the open seas, and so Kerans feeds the dying man for five days before waking to find that Hardman has left to pursue his “odyssey southwards” ([1962] 2014, 173) toward the sun by himself. Kerans soon follows only to become “completely lost, following the lagoons southwards through the increasing rain and heat” ([1962] 2014, 175). It is a concluding moment that underscores the categorization of Ballard’s novel as a classical dystopia, whereby no alternative to the narrative’s apocalyptic conditions is offered. By comparison, Kavanagh and Hifa’s discovery of the disused oil refinery provides an open and ambiguous ending in The Wall that is characteristic of the critical dystopia. This has led to an investment in the text’s suggestion of a hopeful future beyond the logic of militarized borders and national isolationism. The refinery, as Sandrock argues, is symbolic of “the twofold history of Western imperialism and environmental destruction, both of which are causes of global migrancy and ongoing sources of border conflict around the world” (2020, 177). The fact that it is derelict leads Sandrock to conclude that the rig is also a “sign that the novel is exploring the beginning of the ending of Western

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modernity’s border epistemologies” (177). Similarly, De Bruyn argues that, because Kavanagh and Hifa are saved by the rig’s sole inhabitant, the novel’s conclusion suggests that “the idea of home has not been completely abandoned, and strangers will on occasion still make you feel ‘welcome’” (2020, 9). The tone of hope on which The Wall ends, however, is undermined in the same instant when Kavanagh finds working lanterns, matches, and a supply of oil. Kavanagh describes having the ability to “control […] light and heat” as “[a]n ordinary miracle, a thing we had done dozens, maybe hundreds of times a day all our lives before the sea” (2019, 260). This revival of a reliance on oil leads to a tearful cry of salvation which, despite Kavanagh’s experience as an Other at sea, fails to realize any sense of post-Change communal solidarity. Rather, Kavanagh’s use of “we” and “our” is instructive: it excludes the novel’s Others, whose access to energy sources has been violently restricted by Defenders like himself, and it discounts the fact that the oil Kavanagh jubilantly celebrates is the very combustible material that has led to a flooded planet. This miraculous final moment, then, encapsulates the limits of Lanchester’s dystopian tale of life after ecological breakdown: in The Wall it is possible to imagine the end of the world but not the end of fossil fuels. Where The Wall can be thought of as a contemporary revisioning of the ecological disaster that is central to The Drowned World, Lunde’s The End of the Ocean presents us with an apocalyptic future that is similar to Ballard’s The Drought, in which lakes and rivers have dried up and clean water is scarce. Lunde’s novel alternates between 2017 and 2041. The 2017 narrative tells the story of seventy-year-old Signe, a Norwegian climate activist who recounts how, when she was an adolescent, a pipeline was built in her village to create hydroelectric power. This development is presented as having been accepted because of the short-term advantages for the local tourism industry, despite the detrimental ecological impacts on the local river, waterfall, and wildlife. As an adult Signe discovers that a company run by her childhood boyfriend, Magnus, has begun extracting ice from the Blåfonna glacier and marketing it as a luxury commodity, “the most expensive ingredient, to be put in a drink, a floating mini-iceberg, surrounded by golden liquor” ([2017] 2021, 7). Signe sets off on a journey southward in her boat Blue from Norway to France, inspired by a spontaneous moment of civil disobedience: after dumping a batch of glacier ice from an unmanned tanker, she steals twelve containers with the aim of transporting them on her boat to the doorstep of Magnus’s house in Bordeaux. When she arrives, however, she finds a repentant Magnus with whom she reunites. The 2041 narrative recounts the story of a young French father David and his daughter Lou. Escaping drought and war that has broken out across Southern Europe, David travels northward to a refugee camp in Bordeaux in an ultimately futile attempt to find his wife and son. A short walk from the camp, David, Lou, and David’s new partner Marguerite discover Magnus and Signe’s house and find the twelve containers of clean water buried in the garden. As such, there is a similar conclusion to both The End of the Ocean and The

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Wall that marks a departure from Ballard’s classical dystopias. In The Drowned World and The Drought, the post-apocalyptic settings are presented as encapsulating an endpoint in human evolution. In both Lanchester’s and Lunde’s critical dystopias, on the other hand, the refugee-protagonists find a new home, at sea and on land respectively, that contains sustenance for future survival and, in Kavanagh and Hifa’s relationship in The Wall and David and Marguerite’s in The End of the Ocean, the potential for mitigating outright human extinction. In keeping with the view of Baldwin et al. that the figure of the climate migrant acts as a prophetic warning to humanity, moreover, David warns that, “Even if you hear that the world is changing […] [y]ou don’t think about it until the day when it’s no longer the alarm clock that wakes you up in the morning but the sound of screams” ([2017] 2021, 91). In this way, Lunde’s deployment of the dystopian form differs significantly from both Ballard’s and Lanchester’s in that it locates the reader simultaneously in a present and future moment, glimpsing the instant when ecologically calamitous decisions that were made by corporations and individuals could have been avoided. While alluding to a possible, hopeful future beyond the narrative, Lunde’s dystopian vision is marked by the exacerbation of national and regional divisions. Permanent conflict has broken out across Europe between the “water nations,” beset by storms and floods, and the “drought nations,” affected by desertification and scorched by wildfires (91). International conflict is aggravated by “internal strife in some countries” (91), such as in Spain where a “tiny corner” of the country near to the Ebro River “wants to isolate itself from the rest” (171). At the camp, David and Lou encounter an internal border where “guards wearing military unforms” (22) request to see their passports and, at the novel’s denouement, clashes between Northern and Southern European refugees leads to a fire that destroys the whole camp. Thus, although David forges new allegiances and develops a relationship with Marguerite, ultimately in Lunde’s dystopia the camp becomes a site not of solidarity but one of heightened conflict rooted the very ideology of nationalism and the logic of the border.

Conclusion I have shown here how the storytelling form of the critical dystopia—whereby a projected future of socio-ecological ruination acts as a warning to present-day society—is shared by the discourse of lifeboat-nationalism and by contemporary novels of climate migration: the two provide an insight into the Janus-­ faced nature of environmental apocalypticism. Lifeboat-nationalism mobilizes an apocalyptic vision of unchecked global mobility and population growth to support policies of national isolationism, anti-immigration, and (in some cases) reproduction controls. In the face of contemporary concerns about climate-­ induced migration, this Malthusian worldview diverts any possible discussion of culpability away from the fossil fuel industries and instead justifies the reinforcement of national and continental borders. Alternatively, in both The Wall and The End of the Ocean, it is not overpopulation/migration but the rapacious

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commodification of nature and the militarization of national borders that underpins dystopian conditions for those fleeing inhospitable regions and those policing “hostile environments.” In addition, Lanchester’s and Lunde’s dystopian novels of climate migration interrogate the view expressed by the post-colonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has optimistically envisioned a world in which the climate emergency will beseech us to think in terms of a collective human species. Rather than resort to competition between classes or nation-states, Chakrabarty says, the global impact of ecological breakdown points us intellectually to “a universal that arises from a shared sense of catastrophe” (2009, 222). Counter to this position, in both The Wall and The End of the Ocean, the figure of the climate refugee is freighted with a double warning: firstly, that unless the apocalyptic conditions of the climate emergency are averted now, the future will be one of mass European migration; and secondly, that the policing of mobility at national and regional borders will triumph over global solidarity.

Bibliography Aghoghovwia, Philip. 2021. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta. In Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene, ed. Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, and Jeff Diamanti, 33–46. Abingdon: Routledge. Ahuja, Neel. 2021. Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Baccolini, Raffaella. 2004. The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction. PMLA 119 (3): 518–521. Baldwin, Andrew. 2014. Pluralising Climate Change and Migration: An Argument in Favour of Open Futures. Geography Compass 8 (8): 516–528. https://doi. org/10.1111/gec3.12145. Baldwin, Andrew, Chris Methmann, and Delf Rothe. 2014. Securitizing “Climate Refugees”: The Futurology of Climate-Induced Migration. Critical Studies on Security 2 (2): 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2014.943570. Ballard, J. G. [1962] 2014. The Drowned World. London: Fourth Estate. Ballard, J. G. [1965] 2014. The Drought. London: Fourth Estate. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. London: Harvard University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. Clement, Viviane, et  al. 2021. Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration. Washington, DC: World Bank. De Bruyn, Ben. 2020. The Great Displacement: Reading Migration Fiction at the End of the World. Humanities, Special Issue: ‘Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change’ 9 (1): 1–16. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2015. Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene. In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, 352–372. London: Routledge.

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European Commission. 2008. Climate Change and International Security, March 14, S113/08. Fiskio, Janet. 2012. Apocalypse and Ecotopia: Narratives in Global Climate Change Discourse. Race, Gender & Class 19 (1/2): 12–36. Goff, Leo, Hilary Zarin Goff, and Sherri Goodman. 2012. Climate-Induced Migration from Northern Africa to Europe: Security Challenges and Opportunities. The Brown Journal of World Affairs 18 (2): 195–213. Hardin, Garrett. 1974. Living on a Lifeboat. BioScience 24 (10): 561–568. Hughes, Rowland, and Pat Wheeler. 2013. Introduction: Eco-Dystopias: Nature and the Dystopian Imagination. Critical Survey 25 (2): 1–6. Jameson, Frederic. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Lanchester, John. 2019. The Wall. London: Faber & Faber. Linkola, Pentti. 2011. Can Life Prevail? A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. 2nd ed. Helsinki: Arktos. Lovelock, James. 2009. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. St Ives: Penguin. Lunde, Maya. [2017] 2021. The End of the Ocean. London: Scribner. Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. Malm, Andreas, and Zetkin Collective. 2021. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. London: Verso. Malthus, Thomas Robert. [1798] 2004. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed, ed. Philip Appleman. New York: W.W. Norton. Miller, Todd. 2017. Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security. San Francisco: City Lights. Missirian, Anouch, and Wolfram Schlenker. 2017. Asylum Applications Respond to Temperature Fluctuations. Science 358: 1610–1614. Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. London: Routledge. Nairn, Tom. 1975. The Modern Janus. New Left Review, November/December 1/94. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i94/articles/tomnairn-­t he-­m odern-­j anus. Accessed 8 December 2022. Parenti, Christian. 2011. Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. New York: Nation Books. Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. [1915] 2015. Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper. London: Vintage. Rigby, Kate. 2015. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives and Ethics for Perilous Times. London: University of Virginia Press. Robertson, Thomas. 2012. The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Ross, Eric B. [1998] 2004. The Malthus Factor. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed., ed. Philip Appleman and Thomas Robert Malthus. New York: W.W. Norton. Sandrock, Kirsten. 2020. Border Temporalities, Climate Mobility, and Shakespeare in John Lanchester’s The Wall. Journal of Modern Literature 43 (3): 163–180. Satterthwaite, David. 2009. The Implications of Population Growth and Urbanization for Climate Change. Environment and Urbanization 21 (2): 545–567. Seyferth, Peter. 2018. A Glimpse of Hope at the End of the Dystopian Century: The Utopian Dimension of Critical Dystopias. ICLEA 30: 1–10.

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Sheller, Mimi. 2018. Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. London: Verso. Stern Review. [2006] 2010. The Economics of Climate Change. The National Archives. https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20100407172811/http:// www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/stern_review_report.htm. Access 8 December 2022. Sussman, Charlotte. 2020. Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tower Sargent, Lyman. 1994. The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited. Utopian Studies 5 (1): 1–37. Warner, Jeroen and Ingrid Boas. 2019. Securitization of Climate Change: How Invoking Global Dangers for Instrumental Ends can Backfire. Politics and Space 37 (8): 1471–1488. Whittle, Matthew. 2021. Hostile Environments, Climate Justice, and the Politics of the Lifeboat. Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 20 (2): 83–98. Whyte, Kyle P. 2018. Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises. Environment and Planning: Nature and Space 1 (1–2): 224–242.

CHAPTER 12

Black Parisians in Merry Colors: Queerness and Creolization in the Popular Comedies of Lucien Jean-Baptiste Eva Jørholt

Introduction The Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the French Antilles, are a nexus of migration. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans, first from Spain, later from France, either killed or drove out the original Arawak and Carib inhabitants. The islands’ present-day population is, therefore, based entirely on immigration, mainly forced displacement from Africa by way of the transatlantic slave trade, but also from France and, after the abolition of slavery, from India and China (indentured labor) as well as the Middle East. As a result, Antillean culture is markedly Creole, a mix of influences from all of the above in addition to other Caribbean islands and the Americas. According to the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant: What has been happening in the Caribbean for the last three centuries is literally this: a coming together of cultural elements from absolutely diverse horizons, which become truly creolized, which really interlink and mix with one another to produce something absolutely unforeseeable, absolutely new: Creole reality. (2020, 5)

E. Jørholt (*) University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_12

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The 1960s and 1970s also saw a flux of emigration from the islands to metropolitan France. Unlike most other French colonies which aspired to independence after the Second World War, in 1946 the Antilles opted to become an integral part of France, and were changed into domaines d’outre-mer (DOM), or overseas departments. Faced with pervasive unemployment and extreme poverty, the islanders had chosen departmentalization mainly out of a hope for social security, but as the French parliament’s adoption of the necessary legal framework dragged on, thousands of Antilleans left their islands in search of a better life in mainland France. Many of them were lured by the French state agency BUMIDOM (Office for the development of migration in the overseas departments) and its promises of jobs and opportunities for social advancement. BUMIDOM was established in 1963, ostensibly to “solve” the problem of demographic growth in the Antilles, but also to reduce the number of (potentially) rebellious local youths and, not least, secure cheap labor for the construction of the French welfare society (Pattieu 2016; Condon and Ogden 1991; Anselin 1990; Ndiaye 2008). For the Antillean migrants, life in France turned out to be a far cry from what they had been led to expect: they were offered jobs at the very bottom of the wage scale with no possibility of ever climbing the social ladder, and their living conditions were, for the most part, miserable. By 1982, when the organization was closed down, more than 100,000 Antilleans had been displaced through BUMIDOM. It is estimated that another 100,000 had made their way to metropolitan France on their own, and with childbirths adding to the statistics, the number of Antilleans living in mainland France by the early 1980s, predominantly in the larger Parisian area, had reached 325,189, a number largely equivalent to the population of either Martinique or Guadeloupe (378,311 and 349,319, respectively). Paris had effectively become the “third Antillean island” (Anselin 1990, 110). While immigration has been high on the French political agenda for decades, Antillean immigrants have tended to pass under the radar. Partly because, formally, theirs is a case of internal migration, but also because BUMIDOM and the way it transplanted people according to the needs of the French state was met with scathing condemnation—some even saw it as a revival of the slave trade (Anselin 1990)—this state-sponsored mass-migration was for many years a topic that was not talked about, neither by the authorities nor by the migrants themselves, who were too ashamed to reveal that they were BUMIDOM migrants. Also, Antilleans living in metropolitan France have never drawn much attention to themselves, yet they have been met with the same kinds of racist discrimination as other non-White immigrants. In the words of historian Philippe Dewitte, “those who believe that citizenship is the alpha and omega of integration are proved wrong by the example of the Antilleans who are French citizens and victims of discriminations” (in Ndiaye 2008, 169, my translation). The fact that the Antilleans are indeed citizens of the nation of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—and have been so since the abolition of slavery in 1848—has only added to the humiliation they felt, and feel, at being treated differently from other French nationals.

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Against this background, it may at first glance seem paradoxical that Martinican-born actor and film director Lucien Jean-Baptiste has chosen to work primarily within the comedic genre. He has been involved in the production of serious documentaries on racism and colonialism too—such as Pourquoi nous détestent-ils? (“Why Do They Hate Us” 2016), for which he directed “Nous, les Noirs” (“We the Blacks”), and Décolonisations: du sang et des larmes (2020, “Decolonisations: Blood and Tears,” dirs. Pascal Blanchard and David Korn-Bzoza), for which he lent his voice to the spoken commentary. Comedy, however, is the genre that has secured him a place in French cinema and established him as one of the country’s few well-known Black actors and directors. One should not be deceived by the light tone, bright colors, and often slapstick-­ like humor of his comedies, though: they run much deeper. In what follows, I shall pinpoint what I see as Jean-Baptiste’s strategy to counter racism by inviting his audience to “enter into the difficult constitution of a relational identity, an identity that involves an opening up to the other, without risk of dilution” (Glissant 2020, 11). To this, I further assert, Jean-Baptiste adds a queer approach, “queer” understood here beyond the field of sexuality and gender that it usually denotes, in an overall attempt at destabilizing the binary constructions undergirding any kind of normativity, especially with regard to race.

Lucien Jean-Baptiste and French “Ethnic” Comedy Born in Martinique in 1964, Lucien Jean-Baptiste and his five older siblings were taken by their mother to mainland France when he was three, during the height of the BUMIDOM era. After two years in a maid’s room in central Paris, they moved to a housing project in the southeastern Parisian suburb of Créteil, where he grew up. As his dream of becoming an actor was considered ludicrous by his friends and family, he instead ended up as an event organizer, until the loss of a child in 1994 propelled him to disregard all objections and pursue his childhood dreams. He enrolled in an acting class at the renowned drama school Cours Florent only to realize that roles were scarce for Black actors. After dubbing American stars like Will Smith and Jamie Foxx and being engaged for a few, usually stereotypical and minor Black parts, he decided to create his own roles by turning to writing and directing films that drew on his own life experiences: “I try to make films that resemble me. I also wish to talk calmly about this topic, this narrative of difference that I have been experiencing not only recently but since I was a kid. It is of concern to me, questions me and is sometimes a problem, but at the same time, it amuses me” (MUBI n.d., my translation). His feature film Dieumerci! (2016) and the documentary Pourquoi nous détestent-ils?, neither of which are comedies, are the closest to his personal life. The documentary directly addresses the Black actor, filmmaker, and father that he is, his family history, highlighted through a visit to his mother still living in Créteil, but also the challenges he has been confronting throughout his career, from the Cours Florent where he was the only Black student, to

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casting directors objecting to his perfect French diction—to them, Black characters invariably speak either some African variant of French or suburban gangsta French—as well as his concerns about his children growing up in a racist environment. As for Dieumerci!, it is a fictionalization of his decision to become an actor and subsequent struggles to pay for and get through the classes at the Cours Florent. The protagonist, Dieumerci, is played by Jean-Baptiste himself. If his comedies are not as autobiographical, the early ones do take their cue from his own life. His directorial debut, La Première étoile (Meet the Elisabethz, 2009), is, for example, inspired by an episode from his childhood when, against all odds, his mother (who has a small role in the film) decided to take her children on a skiing holiday (Gbadamassi 2009). While his choice of the comedic genre no doubt has to do with his sense of humor, it is likely to have been influenced also by comedy’s position as “without doubt the popular French genre par excellence” (Moine 2015, 233), which would, if not necessarily assure him a large audience, then at least distance his work from the considerably more niche category of “immigration films”—a genre predominantly associated with more or less bleak portrayals of life in la banlieue, the crime-ridden housing projects in the Parisian suburbs. Immigration and the diverse ethnic make-up of present-day France are, however, important ingredients of contemporary French popular comedy, which “does not present merely an image of a monocolored France, but instead gives ethnic minorities greater visibility [...] even though this may be at the cost of being reduced to stereotypes” (ibid., 252). In the immensely popular Intouchables (The Intouchables 2011, dirs. Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano), for example, about a wealthy quadriplegic White man and his young Black helper (Omar Sy), “the character played by Omar Sy condenses [a string of] racist clichés (the comforting nanny, the buffoon, the lout, the Black with rhythm in the blood” (ibid., 243). Indeed, over the past few decades, a sub-genre has emerged that some scholars (e.g., Lanzoni 2014; Leadston 2019) refer to as “ethnic comedy” or “comedies of ethnic integration” (Vincendeau 2015), others (Rosello 2018) as comédies communautaires (community comedies). Notwithstanding the slight differences in generic designations, practically all of these films rely on the same type of set-up in which White French people are contrasted with immigrants of various sorts, no matter whether the creators have an immigration background themselves or not. An almost archetypal example is Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? (Serial (Bad) Weddings 2014, dir. Philippe de Chauveron) in which the four daughters of an affluent French couple marry first an Arab, then a Jew, next a Chinese, and finally an African from Côte d’Ivoire. Initially, the girls’ parents are extremely prejudiced—as is the Ivorian father—but once they all get to know each other, differences are reconciled, so the end credits can fittingly be accompanied by the Charles Trenet evergreen “Douce France.” Overall, the film is one long parade of stereotypes that the happy ending is no doubt meant to denounce. But, as underscored by Rosello (1998), stereotypes feed on repetition and “thrive on being denounced; every time someone opposes them, they

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gain in strength and consolidate their cultural positions as pseudotruths” (18). Antilles sur Seine (2000, dir. Pascal Légitimus), the first Antillean comedy to be released in France, arguably falls squarely into this trap. Through its tagline, “Le film qui va vous tropicaliser!” (“The film that will tropicalise you!”), it signals from the outset a strategy of exaggeration with regard to the stereotypes surrounding the islands and their inhabitants, and goes on to present Guadeloupe as a tourist’s paradise whose hot-blooded inhabitants break into song and dance on any given occasion, and practice voodoo. Whereas self-­ exoticization can indeed subvert imposed exoticization and “reconstitute the exoticized subject in new, locally meaningful terms” (Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016, 16), in this case it rather ends up reinforcing some of the most pernicious Antillean stereotypes. While the popularity of these comedies (Intouchables sold almost 42 million tickets, Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? more than 20 million) reflects a French society trying to come to terms with the country’s present multi-ethnic composition, I am not convinced that they also indicate “vital changes in society” as suggested by Vincendeau (2015, 567), given the degree of stereotyping that characters and actors with an immigration background are subjected to. If the term “ethnic comedy” is problematic in and of itself in that it only applies to films involving non-White minorities, labels such as “ethnic integration comedy” and comédie communautaire are in direct opposition to what I see as Jean-Baptiste’s project. For whereas the word “integration” would, especially in France, rather suggest assimilation, that is, a full adoption of majority French culture on the part of minorities, and comédie communautaire relies on largely essentialist understandings of communities and identities, Jean-Baptiste advocates for what Glissant (2020, 89), following Deleuze and Guattari, calls “rhizomatic identities”: dynamic, fluid identities generated in exchanges among people of different cultures who enter into relation without losing their respective cultural characteristics in the process. Why Not? Jean-Baptiste does engage in subverting stereotypes, only not through exaggeration or overt denunciation. Rather, he humorously brings to light some of the tacit and often seemingly innocuous preconceived notions that underlie everyday discriminatory practices vis-à-vis minorities. But instead of investigating, for example, why it is considered strange, inappropriate, perhaps even outlandish, for Blacks to go on a skiing vacation, his perspective is affirmative in that he asks why not? Why shouldn’t Blacks go skiing? Let’s go skiing! This is the premise of La Première étoile where in a defiant attempt to offer his three children the same privileges as their schoolmates, Jean-Gabriel (Lucien Jean-Baptiste), the (unemployed) Black father of a suburban working-class family, promises them a skiing vacation in the Alps. The family immediately becomes the laughing stock of friends and neighbors in Créteil—“Le ski, c’est pas pour les bronzés” (“Skiing is not for the tanned”), one of them jokingly remarks, referring to an earlier comedy, Les Bronzés font du ski (French Fried

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Vacation 2, 1979, dir. Patrice Leconte) about an all-White group of ski tourists, to whom the stay in a mountain resort is more about sex, alcohol, and getting a tan than about actually skiing. The mockery, however, only solidifies Jean-­ Gabriel’s decision to go, in spite of the family’s inability to afford it. And once they do make it to snow-clad Les Gets in Haute-Savoie, thanks to much creative thinking and help from good friends, both the locals and the other guests, all of them White, also make it abundantly clear that the family is completely out of place: they are literally black spots on a white holiday resort at the foot of the “White Mountain” (Mont Blanc) (Fig. 12.1). Much the same approach is found in Il a déjà tes yeux (He Even Has Your Eyes 2016) in which a Black, couple, Paul and Sali Aloka (played by Lucien Jean-Baptiste and Aïssa Maïga), seeks to adopt a child. At a meeting in the adoption bureau, whose walls showcase posters of happy, White, heterosexual couples with White, Black, or Asian babies, they are informed that theirs is a special case, a first for the adoption bureau, but that a four-month-old boy named Benjamin has indeed been found for them. Asked whether issues of gender and origin are still of no importance to them, they affirm that they will be pleased to adopt any child. They—but not the spectator—are then shown a photo of Benjamin. A brief moment of bewilderment quickly gives way to happy, loving smiles on their faces, while the adoption officers appear skeptical. On their way home, Sali and Paul talk about how much they are looking forward to including Benjamin in their family; “he even has your eyes,” as Paul says jokingly to the mother-to-be. Only some time later—presumably days,

Fig. 12.1  The Elisabeth family (here Lucien Jean-Baptiste and Firmine Richard) taking a rest during their skiing vacation in the Alps. Frame grab from La Première étoile (2009)

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Figs. 12.2 and 12.3  Paul and Sali Aloka (Lucien Jean-Baptiste and Aïssa Maïga) and their baby, Benjamin. Frame grabs from Il a déjà tes yeux (2016)

maybe weeks, have passed—does the spectator get a first glimpse of Benjamin: the sweetest little blond and blue-eyed baby (Figs. 12.2 and 12.3). Whereas on the surface, both films may appear to follow a trajectory similar to the typical “ethnic comedy” (in that what starts out as skepticism and prejudice against “others” is eventually overcome to suggest a happy ending for all), they arguably stand out in several notable ways. What first catches the eye are their saturated, almost glaring colors. Beyond adding further merriness to the humorous plots, these blatantly exaggerated colors may also suggest both an unrealistic, fairytale-like aspect to the films’ resolution of issues related to race and discrimination and a certain carnivalesque quality that I will discuss further later on. In addition, Jean-Baptiste’s films highlight prejudices and preconceived notions not only on the part of the White majority population but also within the Black minority. In La Première étoile, for example, the family’s Black friends and relatives are as skeptical about their skiing project as are the White residents of Les Gets. Similarly, in Il a déjà tes yeux, the adoption bureau’s doubts about giving a White baby to a Black couple is matched, if not trumped, by the reaction of Sali’s Senegalese family in Créteil. Indeed, Sali’s mother and a particularly meddlesome adoption officer both do their utmost to prevent the adoption from going through. Also, whenever Sali takes Benjamin out, be it for a

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medical examination or for a stroll in the park, she is taken for his nanny by the White doctor and by other Black women. The comedies consistently question essentialist notions of both White and Black identity. In La Première étoile, Jean-Gabriel’s wife is White, and while some of the residents of the skiing resort are clearly racist, others greet the family with open arms. Il a déjà tes yeux similarly features an array of Whites ranging from “official persons” (such as the medical doctor and the adoption officers) to the couple’s closest friend, Manu (Vincent Elbaz), who takes Benjamin on as his godson. Nor do the films describe a uniform Black community: the skiing family is itself composed of diverse shades of Black between the atheist Creole Jean-Gabriel, his equally Creole but very religious and tradition-bound mother (Firmine Richard) who frequently also speaks Creole (and is a fervent admirer of General De Gaulle), and the children whose skin tone is lighter and whose cultural preferences do not differ from those of other French children their age. In Il a déjà tes yeux, this critique of community thinking is taken even further as Blackness is here distributed between atheist Antillean Paul and Sali’s Muslim Senegalese family, to whom is added, in the eponymous 2020 television sequel to the film, Paul’s Christian father from Côte d’Ivoire. If the films’ “why not”-strategy does take community thinking as its starting point (Blacks cannot do this and Blacks are not supposed or expected to do that), their demonstration both of the fallacies of such preconceived notions and of the highly composite nature of any alleged ethnic or cultural community serves to destabilize the understanding of communities as distinct and more or less incompatible, that is, the very premise underlying most so-called community comedies. Proust Meets Bonga Yet another defining characteristic of Jean-Baptiste’s comedies is their polyphony of references to phenomena and artifacts of diverse origins that are woven together to form a colorful tapestry of intermingling cultures. This feature may be seen as an expression or instance of creoleness as described by the Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau in Éloge de la créolité / In Praise of Creoleness (2021), where they define a Creole identity and a Creole literature based on the fraught history of the Antilles and the consequent amalgam of cultures in the islands. Defying consistent attempts on the part of the French to suppress Creole language and culture, the authors declare creoleness “the major aesthetic vector of our knowledge of ourselves and the world” (113), and define it as “the conscious harmonization of preserved diversities: DIVERSALITY” (114): “We call Creole the work of art which, celebrating within its coherence the diversity of meanings, will preserve the mark which justifies its pertinence regardless of how it is understood, where it is culturally perceived, or to what issues it is associated” (113). If Antillean culture was already Creole in this sense, emigration and globalization added more influences to the mix, resulting in an even more culturally

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diverse blend among Antilleans living in metropolitan France, especially in the multi-ethnic suburbs where most of them settled down (Giraud 2009, 196). Jean-Baptiste’s juxtaposition of very diversely originating quotes and references makes his comedies exemplary of this “super creoleness” among Antillean immigrants. The title of La Première étoile, which translates as “the first star,” refers to a beginner’s level ski training program, but it is also a reference to an eponymous song made famous by Mireille Mathieu. And in a key scene, to which I shall return later, Jean-Gabriel’s daughter, Manon, participates in a local Gets song contest where she gives an a cappella performance of “La Montagne,” the French singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat’s 1964 hymn to the region. But the film also features the 1993 hit “La Divinité” by the Martinican kadans band Perfecta both as musical background to the opening and closing credit sequences and diegetically in a scene I shall get back to later as well. Equally noteworthy is that the sequel, La Deuxième étoile (Let It Snow 2017), in yet another instance of what I have described as Jean-Baptiste’s why-not strategy, has a group of small-time, rather pitiful suburban gangstas quote Corneille’s Le Cid and express a preference for the intellectual New Wave-films of Eric Rohmer over a high-octane action film like Nikita (1990, dir. Luc Besson). While additional examples can be drawn from the film version of Il a déjà tes yeux, it is in the follow-up television series that “super creoleness” reaches its apogee. Benjamin is now 14 years old and has a slightly younger brother, Noé, whom Paul and Sali conceived themselves. Benjamin is fond of sports, jazz, dancing, and hooded sweatshirts, whereas the bespectacled Noé, typically dressed in blazer and a tie, is a bookworm who also plays classical piano. So, within the family home in the suburbs—not a dreary housing project but an idyllic old house in a cobbled street aligned with hollyhocks—the music played and listened to ranges from hip-hop and African drums to Chopin and Schubert. In addition, the soundtrack features songs by the Angolan singer and independence icon Bonga, French-Italian Nino Ferrer, and Norwegian Rebekka Karijord, as well as Malian kora music. Also, Homer’s Odyssey is referenced (as a parable of migration) alongside African proverbs and allusions to Marcel Proust, Pierre Corneille, Usain Bolt, and René Magritte, besides John Ford’s western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and the dark French comedy Delicatessen (1991, dirs. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro). And other than (metropolitan) French, the languages spoken include Wolof, Québécois, and Hindi, with dashes of Arabic, Italian, and English. If this tapestry of diverse cultural influences that is so characteristic of Jean-­ Baptiste’s comedies may be seen as an assertion of his own cultural identity as Creole, I would argue that what is played out in his films is actually not so much an instance of creoleness (créolité, in French) as, rather, of creolization in the sense given to this latter term by Édouard Glissant. In a conversation with Manthia Diawara, Glissant observes that “when you say ‘Créolité,’ you fix its definition of being once and for all in time and place.

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Now I think that being is in a perpetual state of change. And what I call creolization is the very sign of that change … Créolité is unaware of this. It becomes another unity like Frenchness, Latinity, etc., etc.” (in Diawara 2011, 7). Indeed, while creoleness is primarily an attempt at according significance and value to Antillean culture, Glissant’s concept of creolization—and his concomitant theory of Relation—is not only dynamic (as he emphasizes himself in the above quote) but also goes beyond the Caribbean to address changes and exchanges playing out at a global level: the world is creolizing: that is, the world’s cultures today, brought into contact with each other at lightning speed, in an absolutely conscious manner, change through exchange with each other, by way of inexorable clashes, pitiless wars, but also of advances in consciousness and hope, which enable us to claim—without being utopian, or rather, by embracing utopianism—that today’s human communities are engaging in the difficult process of giving up something to which they have obstinately clung for a long time: that is, the conviction that the identity of a being is valid and recognizable only if it excludes the identity of all other possible beings. (2020, 6)

Though painfully aware of powerful national cultures’ attempts at obliterating those of minorities, Glissant insists that these cultural exchanges are multidirectional: all cultures enter into contact with each other, and change in the process. Crucially, however, he also asserts that creolization is not a cultural melting pot—what Glissant refers to as “some indescribable soup” (in Diawara 2011, 9) or “a mush, a mish-mash” (Glissant 2020, 64)—and that creolization does not entail giving up one’s own culture: “[It] is not this formless (uniform) mix in which everybody loses themselves, but a string of surprising resolutions that can be subsumed under this fluid maxim: ‘I change, by exchanging with the other, without losing or denaturing myself in doing so” (Glissant 2009, 66, my translation). Whereas difference is essential to Glissant who defines Relation “as the realised quantity of all differences in the world, without excepting a single one” (2009, 42, my translation, emphasis in original), any kind of single-root thinking and perception of barriers between communities of different origins, with different roots—including multiculturalism understood as “living-apart-­ together” or “virtual apartheid” (Ang 2001, 11, 3)—runs counter to the concept of creolization. In Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu, the French and the Ivorian father, equally opposed to the upcoming wedding between their children, put forward two metaphors that may serve to further pinpoint the “third way” chosen by Glissant and, as I argue, Jean-Baptiste. The Ivorian likens the dreaded union of their respective families to oil and water: the two will never mix! In what comes across as a conciliatory gesture, the French father suggests to see it rather in terms of milk and coffee, which blend perfectly to form a café au lait. If the oil and water metaphor epitomizes community thinking and multiculturalism, the café au lait, on the other hand, is equivalent to Glissant’s “indescribable soup”

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insofar as both the coffee and the milk lose their distinctive qualities. To stay in the culinary world, Glissant instead advocates for a meal based on a multitude of different ingredients that come together and affect each other, without losing their individual flavours. Carnival—Queer—Creolization However central the concept of creolization is for a full understanding of Jean-­ Baptiste’s comedies, it does not stand alone but is, arguably, paired with and further developed through queerness. In 30° couleur (Bright Spin 2012, co-dir. Philippe Larue), Jean-Baptiste’s most radical, and least popular, comedy, he plays Patrick Rima, a celebrated historian with his own TV show. At the film’s opening, he is doing a televised talk on Marie-Antoinette on the very premises of the Petit Trianon, her château at Versailles. Patrick, who was sent from his home in Martinique to Paris at the age of ten to get an education, has assimilated into majority French culture to an almost caricatural degree and now lives with his daughter Alice in an exquisite modern apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower. When his sister calls from Fort-de-France to inform him that their mother is dying and wants to see him one last time, he reluctantly returns, with Alice, to the island he hasn’t seen in almost 30 years. At the airport, a huge person in a flamboyant pink dress, corresponding wig, high heels, and wildly excessive makeup, throws themself at Patrick and hugs him fervently. This person turns out to be his childhood friend Zamba, who has come to pick up Patrick in his pink, customized Volvo, a stark contrast to Patrick’s own distinguished, black Renault Laguna III.  Unknowingly, Patrick and Alice have arrived on Dimanche Gras, the Sunday that starts off the carnival in Martinique, and during the next four days, until the Mercredi des Cendres (Ash Wednesday) which closes the carnival, Patrick’s life and the values he has made his will be turned upside down, or queered, as it were. As described by Glissant (1997), a central element in the Martinican carnival is that men and women switch roles following the “custom of burlesque marriages … a critique of the family structure. The man plays the role of the wife (typically pregnant) and the woman that of the husband” (514, my translation). While this tradition of carnivalesque cross-dressing has attracted the attention of a number of queer scholars (Spear 1998; Hammond 2018; Fumagalli et al. 2013, for example), it is, however, hardly “queer” in the gender and sexuality-based understanding of the term. In fact, Frantz Fanon remarks that the “men dressed like women” should not be mistaken for homosexuals: “Generally they wear shirts and skirts. But I am convinced that they lead normal sex lives. They can take a punch like any ‘he-man’ and they are not impervious to the allures of women” (1986, 139, note 44). It is not for me to speculate on the sexuality of Martinican men, so suffice it to say that Zamba in 30° couleur is an apt illustration of Fanon’s “men dressed like women”: he is a womanizer and perfectly capable, even in high heels, of pursuing and roughing up a poor bastard who has stolen Patrick’s beloved cell phone.

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To the extent, however, that the concept of “queer” can be defined as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Halperin 1995, 62, emphasis in original), including “along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-­fracturing discourses, for example” (Sedgwick 1994, 9), the carnival as such is, arguably, queer. Indeed, during the carnival, most norms, truths, and binary classifications are temporarily suspended, as noted by Mikhail Bakhtin with regard to the medieval European carnival: [The] carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. … All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. (Bakhtin 1984, 10–11)

Other than as a celebration of Antillean culture, the queerness of the flamboyant, brightly colored carnival in 30° couleur serves to further frame Jean-­ Baptiste’s strategy of tearing down perceived ethnic and cultural barriers. If upon his arrival to Martinique, Patrick is an embodiment of colorless, rational, Cartesian thought, most of his “truths and authorities” are relativized and disrupted during the carnival: his skin turns white (after some white powder has been thrown at him); he dons a fiery red dress and a blonde wig; he declares his love for Zamba; and his deceased mother vanishes, ostensibly to participate in the carnival, but is eventually brought back, perhaps through witchcraft. All that he used to hold as solid melts into a queer chaos pointing toward uncharted horizons (Fig. 12.4).

Fig. 12.4  Colorless Patrick and his daughter Alice are greeted at the airport in Fort-­ de-­France by Zamba (Edouard Montoute), who is all dressed up for the carnival. Frame grab from 30° couleur

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The Jean-Baptistian Universe Revisited When revisiting Jean-Baptiste’s other comedies in light of the queerness of 30° couleur, their creoleness takes on yet another dimension which, arguably, approaches them even further to the Glissantian notion of creolization while at the same time adding a queer dimension to it. Take the scene in La Première étoile, for instance, where Jean-Gabriel’s daughter Manon sings the Jean Ferrat song “La Montagne,” which to the population of Haute-Savoie has gained the status of a “regional anthem.” With her Afro hairdo and dark skin color, Manon is at first glance clearly an outsider. But the distinction between outsider and insider is soon blurred, partly through the lyrics which speak of migration— mountaineers who left the region to settle down in housing projects around Paris, not unlike the Antillean migrants—partly through her sublime rendering of the song, which has all the locals applaud enthusiastically. In the sequel, La Deuxième étoile, set at Christmas and thus humorously challenging the idea of a “White Christmas,” Manon sings “Silent Night” at the traditional Christmas mass in the local church. Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, Manon, however, sings it in Creole, “Mi bel lan nuit,” thus giving an Antillean touch to the celebration. Worth noting in this respect is also a scene in the first film where Jean-­ Gabriel has ventured into the local bar at Les Gets. At first, he is met with racist remarks, but after the intake of considerable amounts of alcohol, the entire bar joins him in singing the Perfecta hit “La Divinité” whose lyrics revolve around the words “sun,” “hot,” and “the sea.” When later making his way home through the cold and dark night to the cabin the family is renting, he falls in the snow, resulting in a whiteface like the one Patrick experiences in 30° couleur. If in this way Jean-Baptiste places the minority in the majority, and vice versa, thus deconstructing or deterritorializing distinctions between the two, the adoption of a White child by a Black couple and sending a Black family on a skiing vacation in White territory arguably serve a similar, queer, purpose. Throughout, the starting point in Jean-Baptiste’s comedies is the very notion of normativitity, which is then queered as their narratives unfold. The inherent risk of such an operaton is of course that normativity may be as resilient as its offspring, the stereotype, and that he may therefore end up reinforcing it rather than deconstructing it. If, however, he had chosen to ignore the various kinds of prejudice and discrimination suffered by Blacks in France, that is, their perceived “otherness,” in order to simply portray Cosby-like happy Black families, his comedies would not have had what I see as their subversive edge. On the other hand, his families are, in most respects, completely ordinary French families facing completely ordinary everyday challenges related to money, employment, adoption, jealousy, and so on. But of course they are Black. Arguably, it is this tension between their ordinariness, their normalcy, as it were, and their lack of acceptance as just that—normal French families—that truly brings out the normativity at work, while at the same time allowing Jean-­ Baptiste to address creolization as a process that affects all, minority as well as majority, in unforeseeable, mostly chaotic ways. Overall, he places his minority

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families in majority territory, exposing the frictions arising from such a maneuver but also the richness of the ensuing dynamic exchanges which in and of themselves contribute to undermining ethnic and cultural distinctions. Importantly, however, the result is not an indistinct melting pot or “soup,” for in Jean-Baptiste’s films, the characters, whether Antillean, Senegalese, Ivorian, Québécois, or White French, preserve their respective cultural characteristics while opening up to each other and, ultimately, to the world. Édouard Glissant might not have approved of Jean-Baptiste’s use of comedy films for his staging of the dynamics of creolization; it was Glissant’s conviction that only poetry could express “the infinite diversity” of creolization (2009, 83). But through their wider reach, films, comedies in particular, have at least the potential to be more effective in changing dominant perceptions. Jean-­ Baptiste’s comedies are indeed quite popular: La Première étoile sold over 1.7 million tickets in France, and Il a déja tes yeux (the film) a little more than 1.5 million. Within his own fictional universe, Jean-Baptiste himself would appear to comment, if not on any possible effects his comedies may have on French society, then at least on the transformative potential inherent in exchanges and relations such as the ones depicted in his films. For example, upon their return to Les Gets in La Deuxième étoile, the Black family encounter markedly less racism; in fact, they are greeted as familiar faces and accepted more or less as “regulars.” An even more persuasive signal of hope is offered in the television version of Il a déjà tes yeux, where the adoption bureau now boasts a poster of Benjamin and his parents: Blacks adopting White children appears to have become a fully accepted, perhaps even normal, practice (Fig. 12.5).

Fig. 12.5  A new model French family? An adoption bureau poster showcasing Benjamin and his parents in Il a déjà tes yeux (2020). Frame grab

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Bibliography Ang, Ien. 2001. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between China and the West. London and New York: Routledge. Anselin, Alain. 1990. L’Émigration antillaise en France. La troisième Île. Paris: Éditions Karthala. Bakhtin, Mikhail. [1965] 1984. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. [1993] 2021. Éloge de la Créolité / In Praise of Creoleness. Paris: Gallimard. Condon, Stephanie A., and Philip E. Ogden. 1991. Afro-Caribbean Migrants in France: State Policy and the Migration Process. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16 (4): 440–457. https://doi.org/10.2307/623029. Diawara, Manthia. 2011. One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara. Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 28: 4–19. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-­1266639. Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 1986. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press. Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, Bénédicte Ledent, and Roberto del Valle Alcalá, eds. 2013. The Cross-Dressed Caribbean. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Gbadamassi, Falila. 2009. La Première étoile de Lucien Jean-Baptiste. Le Nouvel Afrik. com. https://www.afrik.com/la-­premiere-­etoile-­de-­lucien-­jean-­baptiste. Giraud, Michel. 2009. La Guadeloupe et la Martinique dans l’histoire française des migrations en régions de 1848 à nos jours. Hommes et migrations 1278: 174–197. https://doi.org/10.4000/hommesmigrations.252. Glissant, Édouard. [1981] 1997. Le discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2009. Philosophie de la relation: poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard. ———. [1996] 2020. Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, trans. Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Halperin, David M. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New  York: Oxford University Press. Hammond, Charlotte. 2018. Entangled Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kapferer, Bruce, and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, eds. 2016. Against Exoticism: Toward the Transcendence of Relativism and Universalism in Anthropology. New  York: Berghahn Books. Lanzoni, Rémi Fournier. 2014. French Comedy on Screen: A Cinematic History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Leadston, Mackenzie. 2019. Happily Never After: The Visual Politics of Contemporary French Interracial Romantic Comedy. Studies in French Cinema 19 (4): 335–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2018.1526518. Moine, Raphaëlle. 2015. Contemporary French Comedy as Social Laboratory. In A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner, 233–255. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. MUBI.com. n.d. Lucien Jean-Baptiste. https://mubi.com/cast/lucien-­jean-­baptiste. Ndiaye, Pap. 2008. La condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Pattieu, Sylvain. 2016. Un traitement spécifique des migrations d’outre-mer: Le Bumidom (1963–1982) et ses ambiguïtés. Politix 4 (116): 81–113. https://www. cairn.info/journal-­politix-­2016-­4-­page-­81.html.

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Rosello, Mireille. 1998. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. Hanover: University Press of New England. ———. 2018. L’émergence des comédies communautaires dans le cinéma français: ambiguïtés et paradoxes. Studies in French Cinema 18 (1): 18–34. https://doi. org/10.1080/14715880.2016.1264752. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1994. Tendencies. Abingdon: Routledge. Spear, Thomas C. 1998. Carnivalesque Jouissance: Representations of Sexuality in the Francophone West Indian Novel. Jouvert 2 (1). https://legacy.chass.ncsu.edu/ jouvert/v2i1/SPEAR.HTM#1. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2015. From the Margins to the Center: French Stardom and Ethnicity. In A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner, 547–569. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

CHAPTER 13

Classification and the Secrets of Kinship: Migration, Scientific Naturalism, and the Racialization of Blood in the Eighteenth Century David A. P. Womble

When German refugees displaced by famine and religious conflict began arriving by the thousand on English shores in the summer of 1709, the first modern immigration crisis arose. Queen Anne ordered provision for them in Royal Navy warehouses, but, as their numbers topped 12,000—2% of London’s population—public apprehension mounted: How long would malnourished, non-­English-­speakers take to become self-sufficient, and what would their upkeep cost until then (Dickinson 1967, 468–469). The prominent author Daniel Defoe weighed in to dismiss these worries on the grounds that “people are the riches, honour, and strength of a nation, and that wealth increases in an equal proportion to the additional number of inhabitants” (1709a). Considering the matter from a moral angle, Defoe arrived at the same conclusion: England was morally obligated to these refugees whose industriousness and cultural desire to repay charity made them worthy of aid (1709b). Whether pragmatically or morally speaking, an economic calculus governed the question of incorporation.

D. A. P. Womble (*) University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_13

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Over the course of the eighteenth century, this calculus was eclipsed by a new rhetoric of kinship. Incorporation, when advocated, was understood as necessary despite the economic sacrifice involved, and kinship provided the logic that distinguished lives whose only value was economic from lives whose value transcended economic relations. This chapter traces the genesis of this function of kinship in eighteenth-century migration narratives. It examines reconstructed data on mobility, visual depictions of migration, the larger dynamics of intellectual history that gave kinship its importance, and a range of narratives including Nowroji Rastamji’s 1724 suit against the East India Company, Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) alongside his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers (1751), and the autobiographical Life and Adventures of Joseph Émïn, an Armenian (1792). I argue that scientific naturalism’s introduction of classification as an epistemological mode gave kinship its power to address problems of legibility and knowability in the context of migration; and suggest that, by predicating incorporation on an imaginary system of blood relations, migration narratives produced the racial logic informing the discipline of demography that emerged in the nineteenth century (Foucault 2003, 60–62). Despite the paucity of demographic data prior to England’s 1801 census, historians have pieced together approximate back-projections, which indicate that populations became less mobile in eighteenth-century England than they had been across Europe for two centuries prior. While mobility rates dropped, however, migrant journeys became, on average, longer, more permanent, and more diverse in destination than the movements associated with agriculture and apprenticeship that previously characterized migration. These changes in the data are detectable as a broad shift in storytelling conventions, which this chapter anchors in an analysis of the early modern paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and eighteenth-century engravings of William Hogarth. Consistent with Defoe’s economic calculus of migrant value, Bruegel’s work predicates the incorporation of outsiders into systems of village life on their usefulness through labor. He illustrates cyclical, patterned mobility that joins neighboring communities in collective tasks, whereas, for Hogarth, mobility is linear and the source of an anonymous, illegible mass whose inner relations are nothing more than the uniformity of economic self-interest. This juxtaposition articulates in visual terms the logic structuring the hostile cultural environments within which migration took place. Throughout eighteenth-century migration narratives, the public sphere is imagined as a ruptured version of Bruegel’s villages whose rich social relations have been atomized by mobility itself, casting the admixture of distinct demographics as the cause of the hostile environments that defined the migrant experience. Given the social anonymity and antagonism associated with population mobility, how did kinship emerge as a structuring principle of migration narratives? To address this question, the chapter historicizes what it meant for something or someone to become legible. Scientific naturalism, beginning in the late seventeenth century, revolutionized knowledge with its procedures of

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classification. The immense classificatory tables designed by botanists, geologists, and zoologists defined an object of knowledge through the intricacies of its relations to other objects. These taxonomies were almost algorithmic in their ability to accommodate endless new inputs and situate them within a system of relationships that structured the known world. Rather than classifying specimens according to observable features, the specialized nomenclatures of taxonomists stressed traits that required microscopic inspection, dissection, or chemical analysis. These hidden relations allowed naturalists to build up from distinct species toward clusters called “genera,” and still higher into “orders,” “families,” and “classes” that established shared descent among the unlikeliest of things (Stevens 2003). While political philosophers were banishing blood relations from a modern public sphere in which merit rather than birth carried value, kinship staged its return through the history of science. Taxonomic tables equated knowledge with the act of rendering something legible by unearthing the secrets of its kinship. As an epistemological mode, classification turned modern knowledge into a detective plot, making hidden origins within a family structure as the key to legibility. In the 1780s, a young Jane Austen pinpointed this epistemological mode when she satirized the tropes of eighteenth-century migration. Austen’s parody highlights the classificatory procedures underwriting the “secret relative” archetype, which made hidden relation a latent potential in the figure of the stranger. In Love and Freindship, two girls displaced from home are leaving a friendless London when “a gentleman considerably advanced in years” enters an in ([1790] 2014, letter 11). One of the girls reflects, “at his first appearance my sensibility was wonderfully affected…an instinctive sympathy whispered to my Heart, that he was my Grandfather.” “[H]aving attentively examined my features,” she writes, “[he] exclaimed, ‘Yes dear resemblance of my Laurina and Laurina’s daughter, sweet image of my Claudia and my Claudia’s mother, I do acknowledge thee as the daughter of the one and the grandaughter of the other.’” On seeing the second girl, “he exclaimed with every mark of astonishment—‘Another grandaughter! Yes, yes, I see you are the daughter of my Laurina’s eldest girl; your resemblance to the beauteous Matilda sufficiently proclaims it.’ ‘Oh!’ she replies, ‘when I first beheld you the instinct of nature whispered me that we were in some degree related.’” The two traveling companions, who had not known themselves to be related, find themselves cousins. The next traveler to disembark at the inn is immediately identified by family resemblance, leaving “but the presence of Gustavus to compleat the union.” Enter Gustavus. This prolific grandfather hands around fifty-pound notes, saying, “take them and remember I have done the duty of a grandfather.” At stake in the transformation of members of an anonymous public into members of an imaginary nuclear family is what Austen calls duty, or an aneconomic bond that expresses itself as a gift economy. This chapter examines this narrative logic to identify what cannot be incorporated into a system of blood relations. As kinship emerges from an anonymous public sphere, what remains is a space of crowded illegibility where no bonds of duty soften the antagonistic

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relations of self-interest. The masses take shape within this cultural imaginary as a figure of absolute nonkinship, inassimilable to blood relations. As such, the masses serve as the literary focal point for ideologies that formed around efforts to regulate mobility with workhouses, vagrancy laws, and the overseas transportation of convicts. A racial logic coalesces in the negative spaces of the secret relative archetype, designating a human surplus abjected from society proper yet exploited for the economic value of its labor.

A Brief History of Mobility Before the Civil Registration Act of 1836, population metrics were not systematically recorded in England. The census-takers of 1801 had to compile information from parish rolls of baptisms, burials, and weddings performed by the Church of England over the eighteenth century to calculate regional rates of growth or decline. Historians in the twentieth century approached this data with keen awareness of its unreliability. By the 1960s, it became clear that this unreliability was itself the source of new data: where census estimates could be cross-checked to cancel out clerical error, the remaining discrepancy between parish rolls and other sources testified to two things: migration and the presence of people who did not belong to the Anglican Church (Flinn 1970, 9–16). The most reliable studies estimate that from 1700 to 1750, 263,823 people migrated from their parish of birth, or 0.982 people per every thousand annually (Wrigley and Schofield 1981, 219). From 1751 to 1775, the estimate is that 159,339 migrated, or an annual rate of 1.032 per thousand people. And the period from 1776 to 1800 is estimated at 95,511, or an annual rate of 0.506 per thousand. Overall, around 518,673 English-born people migrated in the eighteenth century, at an average rate of 0.876 annually. By comparison, during the seventeenth century, the estimate is 714,391, at an average rate of 1.45. Throughout the century, England lost more people transnationally to migration than it gained. Starting around 1750, 39.8% of transnational migrants sailed for North America, 16.4% for Australia and New Zealand, 13% for continental Europe, 10.3% for Ireland, 6.8% for South America, and 5.5% for Asia (Pooley and Turnbull 1998, 297). The average profile of English emigrants changed from young men in the seventeenth century to familial groups familial groups (Canny 1994, 57). During the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, one out of every eleven adult men in England enlisted in or was impressed into naval service (Rogers 1994, 102–113). As the eastern empire expanded, the standing army presence in India increased in 1756 from a thousand troops to 6500 (Canny 1994, 274). Soldiers of officer rank stationed in Asia were often accompanied by their families, and many employees of the East India Company resettled permanently. By the end of the century, Lascars, or Asian sailors, were traveling through English ports at a rate of more than a thousand per year (Fisher 2004, 66–67). As trade-class families increasingly sought their fortunes in India and returned to England at higher social levels,

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retinues of Indian servants wound up in England, some of whom left domestic service to marry into working-class families. Similarly, Sepoys, or Indian soldiers, were routinely hired as servants by retiring military officers returning home. In North America, the European presence went from majority-­English in the seventeenth century to a mix of continental ethnicities that outnumbered English settlers. More elaborate sea routes across the Atlantic made admixture a more important dynamic in the eighteenth century than before (Canny 1994, 50). New territories opening up for settlement, including the West Indies, meant that admixture comprised both Europeans and indigenous populations in certain areas. For much of the eighteenth century, internal migration involved an average distance of 23  miles, with more skilled laborers averaging farther distances (Houston 1996, 150). Almost 90% of internal migrants are likely to have been under forty years of age and 60% are known to have been married; 80% traveled as part of a family (Pooley and Turnbull 1998, 72–73). These trends were almost the inverse of what was happening on the continent of Europe, where migration continued to rise in a trajectory continuous with earlier centuries, driven by mountainous populations forced to send young men to more fertile farming regions before eventually returning home (Jackson and Moch 1996, 59). By contrast, migration in England was increasingly permanent, driven by accelerated urbanization that tipped England over from a majority-rural population to majority-urban. While the city of London itself nearly doubled in population over the course of the century, its percentage of the total population remained more or less constant: 11% in 1700, 12% in 1750, and 10% in 1800, at which point it had grown to 900,000 inhabitants (Coleman and Salt 1992, 28). Rather, towns of around 10,000 residents attracted the most migrants, growing into urban hubs for regional industries (Moch 1996, 116). Prior to the eighteenth century, mobility involved shorter distances and more temporary time frames. Throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rural populations were more mobile than those in towns and their movement was seasonal. A majority of rural inhabitants—as many 68% of men and 76% of women—left their parish of birth during the seventeenth century, driven by the development of specialized agriculture that required more hands than a village could provide (Clark 1979, 57–90). Mobility was a cyclical phenomenon of short, periodic trips. Permanent internal relocation was overwhelmingly undertaken for the purpose of marriage. Those migrating abroad went as young, single individuals and settled mostly in North America and Ireland (Houston 1996, 150–155). In many respects, then, the eighteenth century constituted a distinctive era in the history of migration. In other respects, however, such as regulations on mobility, the century introduced new inflections to long processes operating across centuries. The 1597 Act for the Repression of Vagrancy established “vagrancy” as a criminal charge for anyone found outside his or her village of birth without means of support. This act shifted away from inciting “idlers” to work and instead sought to secure civil order against outsiders, instituting overseas transportation as a

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punishment. In 1603, the Privy Council specified Canada, the Caribbean, the East Indies, western continental Europe, and Flanders as destinations for transportation. In 1718, these destinations were restricted to English colonies (Beier 1985). Vagrants were thus repurposed as a social threat yet also a source of economic value through labor. As a result, until the American Revolution, 25% of English emigrants to North America were transported convicts (Houston 1996, 155). Similarly, a flurry of legislation from 1723 to 1795 set up the workhouse system, which held the same goal of isolating the mobile poor from society while retaining the value of their labor. Rather than simply suppressing the threat vagrants posed, the eighteenth century oversaw a more complex effort to isolate and exploit victims of forced mobility. In sum, the eighteenth century represents a decrease in rates of mobility but saw new patterns of movement. For centuries, migration across Europe was seasonal; in the eighteenth century, movement in England ceased to be cyclical and became linear. Prior to the eighteenth century, marriage was the main reason for permanent relocation; in the eighteenth century, the family itself became a mobile unit. Villages and towns were transformed into larger hubs dominated by commerce. Controls on the mobile poor were no longer meant to keep civil order, but rather to remove vagrant life from society altogether while recapturing its vital force as labor through transportation and workhouses. Transnationally, admixture emerged as a significant dynamic in port cities and colonies.

Picturing Movement To show how these data-trends were metabolized into cultural terms that circulated through migration narratives, I turn first to the work of Bruegel and Hogarth. Active during the sixteenth century, Bruegel captures an understanding of popular movement at a time when migration was relatively homogenous across Europe, before England’s accelerated industrialization diverged from the trajectories of continental migration. Juxtaposing Hogarth’s work with Bruegel’s illustrates key modes of migration in each historical era: marriage, labor, and subsistence for Bruegel; urbanization, criminal transportation, and military service for Hogarth. In Bruegel’s visualization, the incorporation of outsiders depends on their ability to contribute a legible labor function to the closed system of a village economy. By contrast, Hogarth registers changing migration patterns as the crumbling of social legibility under the pressure of mounting demographic admixture. Heterogeneity collapses Hogarth’s public sphere into an undifferentiated mass whose internal swarming manifests the atomized social relations of individuated self-interest (Fig. 13.1). Bruegel’s Census at Bethlehem is divided between two kinds of movement. On the one hand, village life clusters people around collective tasks throughout the landscape. Homes and dwelling places stand ready to receive them when labor stops. The census, on the other hand, creates a synthetic, linear movement cutting across the landscape into the left foreground to be counted.

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Fig. 13.1  The Census at Bethlehem, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Fittingly, the line of people traveling to be counted wends past spoked wheels in the painting’s center, a semiotic of the vagaries of chance as populations get reshuffled by forced mobility. Illustrating the historical past this reshuffling will sweep aside, the ruins of a castle testify to the erosion of feudal coercion that once fixed peasants to the land. The parents of Christ, in the central foreground, offer a symbolic resolution to the conflict between regional movement and the wider currents of forced migration. Mary and Joseph enter their new village carrying carpentry tools, displaying labor skills necessary to support themselves. The house under construction hints at resettlement, such that the people arriving to be counted will ultimately add to the vitality of village life. The somewhat inept attempt to repair a cart underscores the value Joseph’s carpentry tools will bring. The linear form of forced mobility is foreshadowed to settle into the cycles of village life, and the influx of the displaced is figured as a contribution to the village’s collective skills (Fig. 13.2). The Census at Bethlehem is unusual in depicting a form of movement originating outside a community. More typical of Bruegel’s work is an abundance of movement that dramatizes the inner relations of rural life. The Wedding Dance is centered on a peasant wedding, the dominant mode of resettlement prior to the eighteenth century, which involved the mixing of populations across counties. This is visualized as the chaotic swirling of the dance, which gets sedimented into seated order around the wedding table in the righthand

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Fig. 13.2  The Wedding Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

background. Movement has a patterned, circular form that mixes bodies together and ultimately resolves into the formation of a new household. In the central foreground, the bride in wedding garb dances presumably with her father; scattered throughout the crowd, elderly couples recreate their past courtships; around the margins, young lovers find space for kissing before eventually making their way to their own weddings. This generational repetition extends the image’s cyclicality not simply in space, but also over time. Labor and pleasure blend in these cycles: the music and provision of food and drink, on the one hand, and the calisthenics of dancing, on the other hand, are equal participants in the swirl of bodies. The labor is performed for the community—a way of producing the celebration that encompasses them all—rather than a monetary transaction. And it is labor that confers legibility: whether working or not, the kind of labor one performs is written on the dress, body, or actions. To be legible is to participate through labor in a local economy, just as Joseph enters Bethlehem wearing carpentry tools as a sign that his arrival will add value. Hogarth is known for making his subjects legible not by their labor, but rather through visual manifestations of their desire. The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn demonstrates that illegibility is an equally important category (Fig.  13.3). The scene is filled by an undifferentiated mass that is illegible

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Fig. 13.3  The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn, William Hogarth

within the terms Bruegel used to compose his crowds. Vendors in the foreground fade into an indistinct mass of crowding bodies. Within the space of the masses, the homogeneity of human failings blends social distinctions into formlessness. The individuals in the foreground are rendered uniform in their desire for profit. The pamphlets, fruits, cakes, wine, wig, and dog being advertised for purchase transform Tom Idle’s execution into financial opportunities. The tumbrels carry quantities of human life that, increasingly by 1747 when this image was engraved, might have been diverted from the gallows through transportation, keeping that vital force within the political economy of the colonies—but not within society. Especially striking is the continuity between the convicts within the tumbrels and the surrounding masses. The self-interest motivating the vendors selling their wares is mirrored by the convicts’ empty reflex of desire as they drink wine moments before death. As soldiers clear a path for the bodies of the convicted by beating the bodies of the public out of the way, both groups become continuous with one another as ungovernable lives of no value. Their movement is a swarming admixture that strips them of anything but the lowest common denominator of self-interest. Rising from this scene is a distant, suddenly unpopulated territory in the background that keeps in play the possibility of removal and transportation. Mobility as Hogarth depicts it is a precarious state. It puts the deracinated migrant at risk of criminal status within a public sphere whose social relations are dominated by financial self-interest, unlike Bruegel’s depiction of labor as a

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contribution performed out of a duty to the community. In place of community, Hogarth substitutes a new term: “the masses.” The masses blend social classifications into an illegible quantity of life whose only value is the potential for the economic exploitation of its labor. As Austen’s parody of migration narratives suggested, an anonymous public was the milieu out of which hidden kinship could be discovered. In many narratives, this was the discovery of an actual relative, but any kind of assimilation, inclusion, or incorporation deployed the logic of kinship to suspend the self-interested relations of economic actors and create bonds of duty. In the eighteenth century, in other words, the social relations of Bruegel’s village scenes get restaged as bonds of kinship that form against the backdrop of Hogarth’s masses.

Kinship and Classification To explain why narratives used these archetypes to imagine mobility requires turning to contemporaneous scientific naturalism that was modifying what legibility meant. The sprawling taxonomic tables popularized by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and the French botanist Joseph Tournefort reframed knowledge as a detective story seeking out hidden relations among seemingly unrelated objects. The organization of these tables was contentious, but for the bulk of the eighteenth century most taxonomists were sorting specimens into the following taxa: Phyla Classes Orders Genera Species

In Immanuel Kant’s words, “natural classification group[ed] animals according to blood-kinship,” supplanting straightforward techniques of empirical observation that “grouped [classes] together upon the basis of similarity” (1775). For Kant, classification got to the heart of the difference between a phenomenal object and the thing in itself: placing objects within Linnaean taxonomic systems illuminated a truth that was only legible in the arcing of kinship that leapt like electricity between otherwise unlike things. This role of kinship in epistemology originated in two novel assertions made by English botanist John Ray: first, that the number of botanical species was far higher than believed; second, that plants reproduced sexually. European naturalists had collected 6000 plant species when Ray raised the count to 18,000 with his own collection. When presenting these new species, Ray had to develop a complex new format, grouping specimens that shared clusters of key traits (Mayr 1985, 274). Within these groupings, species were ranked based on how perfectly a particular plant embodied the general characteristics shared by the group. This hierarchical structure was used to illustrate genealogies of shared

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descent. Family resemblance thus served as a kind of shadowy blur stretching across the boundaries of species being differentiated from one another. Ray’s assertion of plant sexuality did the same thing at a higher order, establishing a shared template for how life works that stretched across plant and animal life. The basic shape of the family was thus superimposed onto the natural world, and kinship emerged at a meta-level as a methodology for naturalists to position higher taxa like genera or even phyla in a sibling relationship to one another. Similar expansion of datasets across many fields of scientific naturalism introduced a new question: What defines a set of specimens as a species? It was Ray’s definition that proved authoritative: “no surer criterion for determining species has occurred to me than the distinguishing features that perpetuate themselves in propagation from seed…one species never springs from the seed of another nor vice versa.” This theoretical function of the family structure in shaping naturalism would lead French zoologist Georges Cuvier to describe a species as “the total descendance of the first couple created by God, almost as all men are represented as the children of Adam and Eve. What means have we, at this time, to rediscover the path of this genealogy (Mayr 1985, 436–437). For Cuvier, as for many, the answer was classification. Rudolph Camerarius, a German botanist, cemented Ray’s suggestion of plant sexuality as a dominant theory. In doing so, Camerarius worked against the assumption that structural resemblance between taxonomic orders, whether a species or higher categories, must be observable phenomena (Mayr 1985, 1064). By insisting that defining features of plants such as sexuality lay at a level below the threshold of the visible, he leveraged classification as a means for getting at something hidden—a secret correspondence among objects of knowledge that, outside the virtual space of the taxonomic table, would not reveal itself (Daston and Galison 2007). For Tournefort, these correspondences were valuable because they demonstrated a shared origin in higher taxa. Others such as Linnaeus, however, focused on the horizontal relations among species within the present, rather than the vertical relations of higher and lower taxa. Linnaeus designed a new nomenclature consisting of a lengthy phrasename or polynomial that was meant to articulate its multipronged relationship to all similar species. The expanding dataset, however, rendered polynomials impractical. Instead, Linnaeus turned to binomials, such as Homo sapiens, as a way of abbreviating key relations expressed by a polynomial into an easily memorized term (Stevens 2003). This shift in nomenclature condensed kinship into a terminology that no longer expressed it directly.

The Migration Narrative On the one hand, the taxonomic revolution transformed the structure of knowledge into the process of rendering legible the hidden interrelations of epistemological kinship linking the knowable world. On the other hand, Hogarth depicts an anonymous public sphere whose inner relations are the libidinal transactions of self-interested parties that swarm together as an

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illegible mass. Migration narratives thus took shape within a cultural matrix that assigned importance to kinship, yet understood those relations to disintegrate under the pressures of mass life. These dynamics of kinship are narrativized in the story form of a stranger among the masses whose very position as an outsider and an unknown serves as the condition of possibility for becoming newly legible in terms of kinship. The system of kinship leaves over a quantity of ungovernable life that, in Hogarth’s depiction, merits the naked force of the law, whether as execution, crowd control, or transportation. In what follows, I track these dynamics across a range of genres—fiction, legal proceedings, and memoir—that move outward from domestic contexts to colonial displacement to the wider circuits of transnational migration. Something akin to the social relations of Bruegel’s village are restaged as the inner processes of kinship in Henry Fielding’s writing, Nowroji Rastamji’s suit against the East India Company, and Joseph Émïn’s autobiography. Kinship forms a counter-public suspended within a public sphere whose social relations are imagined to have been ruptured by the byproducts of mobility—vagrancy, robbery, and civil unrest. Fielding’s novel Tom Jones hides its interest in mobility, kinship, and the masses in plain sight. Its subtitle, a Foundling, signals a preexisting cycle of homelessness and rupturing of family bonds from which the narrative is born when Tom is left as an infant in a stranger’s house. When thrown out by his adoptive father, Tom is torn from family once again and swept away by the circuits of mobility. He embodies many figures of migration by turns: military conscript, vagrant, middle-class coach passenger, and refugee driven by hunger. Tom’s companion, Partridge, manifests that same multiplicity of migratory modalities, combining traveling schoolmaster, itinerant barber and surgeon, and sailor. Although both are forced into mobility when the ties linking them to settlement break, migration turns out to be richly generative of new kinships—ties that rebuild Tom’s connection to his adoptive household by uncovering his hidden blood relations. Tom’s journey across England is a sequence of encounters that transform strangers into so many secret relations. When Tom first comes upon Partridge as another nameless destitute upon the road, he discovers that Partridge came from Tom’s village and happens to be the very man accused of fathering Tom illegitimately. The woman Tom later rescues from assault is revealed to be the woman accused of giving him up as a foundling. When plunged into the dense crowds of London, the household on whose doorstep he lands is none other than that of relatives of Sophia, the young lady whom Tom has been in love with ever since leaving his village. His journey ultimately reveals the secret of his parentage, reestablishing kinship that reclaims him from the road. In each episode, the geography and demography of England is transformed through migration from an unknown to a known by the logic of kinship. Scientific naturalism’s taxonomic systems constituted a virtual space in which observable relations among objects of knowledge—predator and prey, for instance—could be rethought by virtue of submerged kinship relations. In

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Tom Jones, kinship works the same way, reorienting the relationship between people who, as anonymous economic actors, would be defined by relations of indifference or antagonism. When Partridge, who regards Tom as a son, joins forces with Tom on the road, they draw up a contract specifying the terms of their partnership. Its comic failure to hold is not due to acrimony between Tom and Partridge; rather, it is always being revised, suspended, or deferred as the two justify their continued partnership at times when the other party cannot fulfill his contractual obligation. The uselessness of this contract dramatizes an aneconomic bond modeled on blood ties. Such bonds, however, generate a problematic human byproduct. When Tom and Partridge arrive at the house of the Man of the Hill in need of shelter, they are told by his servant that the rules of hospitality are not observed there: “Why, sure, he would not be angry with you,” said Jones, “for doing a common act of charity.” “Alack-a-day, sir,” said she, “…He would be terribly angry if he found you here… it is necessary he should keep some arms for his own safety, for his house hath been beset more than once; and it is not many nights ago that we thought we heard thieves about it.” ([1749] 2008, 385–386)

The Man of the Hill introduces a perspective so fixed that it views any mobility as a sign of desperate vagrancy. Society itself becomes a threat, and a hypothetical gang of thieves is the form social contact is imagined to take. Outsiders like Tom and Partridge are to be driven away by force, back into the ranks of the gang to which they presumably belong. This perspective is validated when the man, on returning home, is waylaid by actual thieves: “D—n your blood, show us your money this instant…or we will blow your brains about your ears” ([1749] 2008, 386). On hearing thieves outside, the servant begins pleading with Tom and Partridge, “‘Oh, pray don’t murder us, gentlemen’ (for in reality she now had the same opinion of those within as she had of those without)” ([1749] 2008, 386–387). To distinguish himself as someone who does not belong to the gang besieging the house and someone who is instead worthy of that house’s hospitality, Tom not only risks his own life fighting the robbers, but must also reestablish a baseline value of life that the Man of the Hill is unaccustomed to granting: “‘I have only discharged the common duties of humanity, and what I would have done for any fellow creature in your situation.’ ‘You are a human creature, then?—Well, perhaps you are. Come, pray walk into my little hut” ([1749] 2008, 387). This grudging acknowledgment appears something like a counter-public that distinguishes itself from a larger social system that has forfeited any value. In An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, Fielding argues that the nature of society changed when peasants in the late medieval era began moving around. “Gangs of thieves” became the price of social growth, whether these gangs took the form of highwaymen or “seditious tumult” in cities or the “general riot of the people” nationwide (1751, 13). Fielding’s solution is to require testimonials from “two honest households” in order for migrants to

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enter a county since, he argues, “it [is] impossible for any thief to carry on his trade long with impunity among his neighbors, and where not only his person, but his way of life, must be well known” (1751, 65–66). He thus supports the systematic exclusion of those groups he refers to as “Gypsies” or “persons calling themselves Egyptians,” since their imagined exoticism meant they could bear no blood relation to settled households (1751, 64). The gang of thieves, band of “Gypsies,” and tumult or riot of the people emerge from his Enquiry as the form for what cannot be incorporated into a system of households, and against which the gates of every village must be shut at sundown. Anyone who lacked household ties in an area should be regarded, under law, as part of these mass bodies of criminality. So important was the status of kinship under law that it was the deciding factor when Nowroji Rastamji brought suit against the East India Company (EIC) in 1724. The case pitted the power of blood ties in determining property ownership against the EIC’s economic right to purchase, weighing the moral value of family devotion against corporate profit. The dispute originated with Rastamji’s father, Rastam Manak, who brokered land and shipping agreements for the EIC. He was not only paid by the EIC, but also rewarded with gifts by local rulers. Upon Manak’s death, his property passed to his children, but the EIC contested the legitimacy of this inheritance, as it facilitated colonization for land to be left unclaimed. Acting through a local Nawab, the EIC pressed Manak’s heirs to forfeit their inheritance. When the family refused, Manak’s eldest son was imprisoned by the Nawab in 1721. The middle son appealed to the English governor of Bombay, but, on the assurances of the EIC, the governor placed him under house arrest on the charge of fraudulent claims to EIC property. In 1723, Nowroji, the youngest of Manak’s children, sailed to London to argue the matter before the EIC’s directors (Karaka 1884, 10–13). The directors’ decision balanced the legal claims of kinship against the norms of an open market that facilitated colonization. The directors’ decision in Rastamji’s favor broke from legal precedent, which tended to favor joint-­ stock companies over the claims of individuals and to assert the primacy of marketplace economics over what might be seen as colonial customs. It was precisely because migration across colonial lines was involved that the directors were so struck by the unexpected resemblance between Rastamji’s familial loyalty and English cultures of domesticity. As he showed self-sacrifice “for the good and interest of his brothers and family,” the directors decided, he was awarded the rights to the original inheritance and monetary damages for his brothers’ imprisonment (Karaka 1884, 16). The EIC’s willingness to suspend the economics of empire when articulated as a question of blood points to kinship’s power to organize understandings not only of internal migration, but even movement across lines of nation and race. Few narratives traverse those lines more than that of Joseph Émïn, an Armenian immigrant to England, whose autobiography chronicles his journeys through Europe, India, and Russia, seeking first a livelihood and later a

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following in efforts to liberate Armenia from the Ottoman and Safavid empires. In 1751, at the age of twenty-five, he emigrated on his own to London where he struggled to escape poverty. Émïn’s narrative is notable for a number of reasons—chief among them, his chance encounter with a young Edmund Burke, to whom he then served as secretary. This strange episode is representative of another notable feature of the narrative: every change in Émïn’s fortunes arises when he finds himself singled out at random from a crowd by an observer who experiences a seemingly inexplicable spark of recognition or interest in him. Due in some cases to Émïn’s exceptional personal merit and in other cases to the observer’s eccentric inclinations, kinship provides the connective tissue that forms in chance encounters. “As if he had been his brother,” “as one of the family,” “as a brother to a sister,” and “new-found son” are the terms in which Émïn is picked out from “among the multitude” ([1792] 1918, 30, 34, 49, 56, 63). At a time when Émïn is living on spare rations, Burke latches onto him after they brush past one another in the crowded St. James’ Park. It becomes apparent that Burke assumes Émïn is illiterate—he has to read a paragraph from The Tatler aloud to prove otherwise—suggesting that Burke perceived him as a beggar. With no shortage of illiterate, malnourished newcomers to London amongst “the multitude,” Émïn imagines Burke recognizes something that makes it seem “proper to him to open to him the wounds of his heart” ([1792] 1918, 49–50). In the ensuing exchange of stories, Burke assimilates his personal narrative to the form of Émïn’s migration, claiming, “I am a runaway son from a father, as you are” ([1792] 1918, 51). Throughout Émïn’s narrative, migration arises from this rupture in kinship relations, which then get repaired through quasi-familial connections formed along the road. After breaking from his own father, Émïn’s tales are thickly populated with people who treat him exceptionally because of parental attachments that form around him like magic: an English ship’s captain who distinguishes Émïn from a crew of foreign sailors to “advise[e] him like a tender father”; a landlord who “became a father, and his wife a mother, to Émïn”; and a Duke who hires him on the spot out of a stable-yard ([1792] 1918, 21, 49, 63). The connections often form as a result of locals who have themselves lost family to the circuits of mobility and see that reflected in Émïn. A maidservant at his first lodging house, for instance, seeks him out to say, as “‘you have eaten but a pennyworth of bread and cheese… Your deplorable situation…puts me in mind of the distress of my sweetheart, the dear sailor’ (meaning her husband)” ([1792] 1918, 29). The gift economy that forms here inverts economic relations, and continually resurfaces as covert relations hidden within an atomized public sphere that would, without concern, allow Émïn to starve. Upon losing a job, Émïn enters an alehouse for shelter and for news of any ships requiring labor. To avoid being thrown out, he periodically orders porter, which not only depletes his money but also hurts his empty stomach. The landlady he endeavored to appease with these purchases, however, shrewdly observes, “you have no

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occasion to spend your money in vain; I see you drink against your will, and are not very well” ([1792] 1918, 35). She offers him a place to rest till he is stronger and warns him against drink, taking him to a nearby boarding house to witness a cautionary tale worthy of Hogarth: “many men lying and rolling upon dry hard board…a real purgatory, where, if he should escape dying with hunger, he must share the same misery with them.” On falling seriously ill and collapsing at the back stair of another boarding house, Émïn inspires a similar maternal response in the landlady, who provides him food and a doctor while forgiving rent during his illness. Another lodger, observing this gift-economy in action, attempts to remonetize it by adding up the debt Émïn should now owe the landlady and offering a loan in exchange for Émïn’s indentured servitude. On hearing this attempt to force migration on Émïn, the landlady publicly forgives Émïn’s economic obligations to her ([1792] 1918, 37). A later threat of forced migration recapitulates this episode, when Émïn agrees to indentured labor on a West Indian plantation in exchange for a piece of land after his indenture is complete. Immediately afterward, a chance encounter in the street lands him with a family who investigate the recruiter and discover it to be a kidnapping scheme. As the kidnapper preys only upon those with no household connections to take notice of them, this family creates a servant position for Émïn to void the agreement. They find, however, that although they pay him as a servant, his incorporation into the household dissolves the economics of the arrangement, and it was “with great reluctance [that they] could bring themselves to send him even on an errand” ([1792] 1918, 40). Along the same lines as Tom Jones’ and Partridge’s contract, kinship in Émïn’s narrative acts as a counter-public that suspends the economic relations of the public sphere. At stake in kinship is the difference between a life that can claim the duty and obligation of others and other lives whose sole value is the labor that can be exploited by the workhouse or convict colony. As Hogarth illustrated, mobility in the eighteenth century was bound up with the question of legibility. In an age marked by scientific naturalism and its epistemologies of classification, legibility had to be understood in terms of kinship relations within an expanded family structure.

Conclusion When narrativized, legibility and kinship arise strictly in contradistinction to forms of human life that cannot be incorporated into that system of relations. Émïn’s narrative, like Rastamji’s legal case, stages this becoming-legible against the backdrop of prison. The racial logic of kinship becomes most clearly visible when Émïn, arriving at a town in Armenia after dark, finds the gates have been closed. Fierce dogs are unleashed on him and he is thrown into a small cell, “a place half as big as the black-hole of Calcutta,” above the oven where monks prepared the Eucharist ([1792] 1918, 151). Clapped in leg-irons in oppressive heat among prisoners awaiting judgment, Émïn finds himself in a purgatory— an image he uses throughout to describe the boarding houses of London’s

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diseased, alcoholic, and out-of-work. The overcrowded conditions of the prison room condense the prisoners into the indistinct masses of Hogarth’s vision of London; although Émïn learns of their individual sins, he cannot make out or distinguish one body from another ([1792] 1918, 150–153). I have argued elsewhere that in the nineteenth century under the emergent discipline of population management, statistical groupings were understood to constitute individuals internally in a way that mimics modern racialization (2018). As Émïn’s experiences illustrate, mobility and admixture in the eighteenth century produced a high degree of fluidity and incoherence surrounding race, consistent with an older imaginary of racial difference as static regional populations within a global system of climates (Womble 2020). It is, rather, the totalizing difference between those who can be incorporated into the household and the masses that cannot where modern racialization takes shape in migration narratives. Counterbalancing the logic of kinship is the persistent form given to human life that cannot be incorporated into a community of blood: the dense masses, the gang of thieves, the riot of the people.

Bibliography Austen, Jane. [1790] 2014. Love and Freindship. In Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings, ed. Christine Alexander. New York: Penguin. Beier, A.L. 1985. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1550–1640. London: Methuen. Canny, Nicholas. 1994. English Migration into and Across the Atlantic During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny. Oxford: Clarendon. Clark, Peter. 1979. Migration in England during the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Past & Present 83: 57–90. Coleman, David, and John Salt. 1992. The British Population: Patterns, Trends, and Processes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Zone: Princeton. Defoe, Daniel. 1709a. A Brief History of the Poor Palatine Refugees, Lately Arrive’d in England. London: Goldsmiths. ———. 1709b. The Review, February 26. Dickinson, H.T. 1967. The Poor Palatines and the Parties. The English Historical Review 82: 464–485. Émïn, Joseph. [1792] 1918. Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, 1726–1809, ed. Amy Apcar. Calcutta: Mission Press. Fielding, Henry. 1751. An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. Dublin: Faulkner. ———. [1749] 2008. Tom Jones, ed. John Bender and Simon Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fisher, Michael Herbert. 2004. Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black. Flinn, M.W. 1970. British Population Growth, 1700–1850. London: Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.

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Houston, R.A. 1996. The Population History of Britain and Ireland, 1500–1750. In British Population History: From the Black Death to the Present Day, ed. Michael Anderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, James, Jr., and Leslie Page Moch. 1996. Migration and the Social History of Modern Europe. In European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1775. Lectures on Physical Geography. University of Königsberg. Karaka, Dosahbai Framji. 1884. History of the Parsis. Volume II. London: Macmillan. Mayr, Ernst. 1985. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moch, Leslie Page. 1996. The European Perspective: Changing Conditions and Multiple Migrations, 1750–1914. In European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Pooley, Colin G., and Jean Turnbull. 1998. Migration and Mobility in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge. Rogers, Nicholas. 1994. Vagrancy, Impressment, and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Slavery and Abolition 15: 102–113. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01440399408575128. Stevens, Peter F. 2003. History of Taxonomy. Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. https://doi. org/10.1038/npg.els.0003093. Womble, David A.P. 2018. Phineas Finn, the Statistics of Character, and the Sensorium of Liberal Personhood. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 51: 17–35. https://doi. org/10.1215/00295132-4357381. ———. 2020. What Climate Did to Consent, 1748–1818. ELH 87: 491–517. https:// doi.org/10.1353/elh.2020.0016. Wrigley, E.A., and R.S. Schofield. 1981. The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 14

“There’s Ways to Survive These Times … and I Think One Way Is the Shape the Telling Takes”: Hostile Environments and Hospitable Connections in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet Rachel Gregory Fox

With Autumn, the first installment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, arriving on the heels of the EU Referendum in 2016, Smith firmly situates her series of networked novels within the present political moment in the UK. This chapter considers how Smith’s quartet of novels, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, published between 2016–2020 responds to the UK’s Hostile Environment. While emphasis in this chapter is given to the political and cultural landscape driven by government policy “to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration” (May qtd. in Kirkup and Winnett 2012), Smith’s novels contend with hostile environments of various guises, engaging with both broader contexts of socio-political rupture and the encroaching ecological crisis. As Smith cycles through the seasons, her characters find that such hostilities and anxieties are beginning to intrude upon even the most ordinary of lives and mundane of moments. Her writing consequently captures the complex, and at times contradictory, thoughts and feelings that circulate in response to present-day emergencies, within a Hostile Environment that institutionalizes a politics of exclusion. As she champions the means via

R. Gregory Fox (*) University of Kent, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_14

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which narrative materializes the world and our manner of being in it, Smith’s novels ultimately aspire toward more hospitable environs and moments of connection. Smith’s quartet hosts a seemingly disparate cast of characters who, over the course of the series, chance upon moments of connection, some direct, others less so. In Autumn, Daniel Gluck, a 101-year-old man, lies asleep in a care home, where he is visited by Elisabeth Demand who, in her childhood, was his neighbor. Set on the eve of Christmas, Winter centers on Sophia Cleves, a retired businesswoman, who is visited by a floating baby’s head. As Sophia loses her grip on life, her sister, Iris, son, Art, and his girlfriend, Charlotte, who is, in fact, not Charlotte, descend on her home. Spring begins its narrative with filmmaker Richard Lease, before diverting to an Immigration Removal Centre run by SA4A, a private security firm. Brit, a Detention Custodial Officer, makes the most unlikely of acquaintances with schoolgirl Florence, and the two of them meet Richard in Scotland, amidst a mythologic battle between SA4A and an underground group fighting for the rights of people in detention. Summer, set during the early months of the Covid pandemic, introduces us to sixteen-year-­ old Sacha Greenlaw. Recollections of Daniel’s experiences of being interned in the UK during World War II intersperse a narrative that shows Sacha’s meeting with Art and Charlotte, from Winter, as Iris opens their home to people released from detention. In his discussion of Summer, and the narrative threads, characters, and relationships that surface and resurface throughout these networked novels, Ivan Callus describes how Smith’s writing manifests “a principle and ethic of connection” (2020, 228; emphasis in original). Drawing from this notion of an ethic of connection, this chapter argues that the act of storytelling—underscored by narrative judgment—situates characters and relationships, writers and readers, and orators and listeners amongst shared worlds. The storying of our lives—asserting our experiences in narrative—and the exchanging of these stories have the capacity to facilitate hospitable connections. Smith’s seasonal sequence of novels is later followed by the aptly titled Companion Piece, published in 2022, a lockdown story that muses on the meaning of language, the order—and disorder—of time, and of “Goodbye v hello” in a precarious world (2022, 83; bold in original). While not the focus of this chapter, Companion Piece, both in its content and by its very existence, offers up a sense of unfinished business—of a story not yet, and perhaps still not, complete. The act of storytelling, as it is manifested in Smith’s works about the present, in the present, encapsulates the continuity and continuousness of time, drawing connections between past and present, but also asking questions of what the future holds. Telling stories might, therefore, represent one way that we can extend a gesture of welcome in an otherwise hostile environment. As one of the characters in Spring suggests: “There’s ways to survive these times … and I think one way is the shape the telling takes” (Smith 2019, 21).

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Hostile Environments: “Panic. Attack. Exclude” The EU Referendum, which took place on 23 June 2016, resulted in a highly divisive result, with 48 percent voting for Britain to “Remain” a member of the European Union, and 52 percent voting to “Leave.” Four months later Autumn was published. Consequently, many reviewers of the book have described it as a “Post-Brexit” novel, or what Kristian Shaw coins as “Brexlit”—a body of literature that responds, either directly or imaginatively, to Britain’s exit from the EU (2018, 18).1 Smith’s writing, however, is contingent not on conclusivity (on defined notions of pre- and post-), but on continuity. After all, as Birte Heidemann warns, Brexit is anything but “post” (2020, 678). Even after Britain’s formal, and protracted, departure from the EU in 2020–2021, the long-­term political and economic impacts of Brexit are still in the process of making themselves known. Smith speaks of asking her publisher for an extra month with which to finish her novel, in order to incorporate the results of the Referendum into her narrative, to fully “square up” the “contemporaneousness” of the book’s character (Smith qtd. in Anderson 2016). This editorial undertaking, in the final stages of writing this novel, however, remains one of continuity. As Smith observes, from her experiences of writing in the months preceding the Referendum: “I found, as Brexit started to happen round us all, that what I’d been writing was already about divisions and borders and identities and, yes, slightly more historic parliamentary lies” (qtd. in Anderson 2016). The results of the Referendum did not occur ex nihilo, and while Smith took efforts to update her novel to include them, the political and cultural environs, the demarcated borders, and populist rhetoric against which this divisive vote took place were longstanding, and remain so. Autumn captures the turbulence following the vote—“All across the country, the country split into pieces” (Smith 2016, 61)—but Smith’s writing is insistently circuitous, and as the quartet unfurls, the ruptures encapsulated by the Referendum are rooted and re-rooted in both past and present. Heidemann argues that Autumn “is not necessarily bound to a specific contemporary event. Rather, [it] diagnose[s] an innate yet imminent sense of emergency that, among others, may also be read as the underlying cause for all things Brexit” (2020, 679). Building from this, I argue that Autumn and its successors are not responsive to one particular incident, such as the Referendum, but, instead, receptive to the political, cultural, and ecological environments within which Smith writes. These environmental conditions might give rise to, and emerge out of, more specific events—such as the Referendum in Autumn, or the Covid pandemic in Summer—but Smith is not preoccupied with flashpoints. Rather, her novels accent the currents—past, present, and future—upon which the so-called unprecedented and unexpected are, and have always been, contingent. The polarizing outcome of the Referendum was neither spontaneous, nor unanticipated. As Caroline Koegler, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, and Merlena 1  See, for example, “Ali Smith’s Autumn Is a Post-Brexit Masterpiece” (The Atlantic; Gilbert 2017) and “Autumn by Ali Smith—‘the first serious Brexit novel’” (Financial Times; Preston 2016).

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Tronicke argue, Brexit “represents a moment when anxieties about harnessing and unleashing colonially engineered power structures and cultural hierarchies crystallized” (2020, 585). Brexit is but one chapter in the continuing story of the British Empire: a wanton bid to restore Britain as a “sovereign” nation, to regain “control” over its national borders and immigration. The language of “sovereignty” and “control” that sat at the heart of the Leave campaign for the EU Referendum, has also gained traction through the implementation of anti-­ immigration policy and the increased securitization of Britain’s borders under the governmentally instituted Hostile Environment. The Referendum—as flashpoint—takes place within a more broadly defined socio-political environment, one which “systematically invites and exploits migrant labour, while at the same time making life untenable for anyone seeking (or struggling) to build a life here in the UK” (Cowen 2021, 41). The Hostile Environment both exploits migrants arriving in the UK and perpetrates the deliberately neglectful, often punitive mistreatment experienced by those seeking leave to remain. What Heidemann recognizes as a “sense of emergency” (2020, 679), we might also identify as systematic, and systemic, hostility, which has ingratiated itself within several environments. Politically, hostility manifests via the introduction of increasingly vindictive and immoral anti-immigration policy, as well as through the implementation of damaging austerity measures. In the face of populist, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric in both political and public discourse, culturally defined institutions and communities of all kinds find themselves under attack and/or divided and fractured. Meanwhile, on an ecological front, effective responses to the climate crisis are hindered by climate change denial, and accelerating industrialization, pioneered under neoliberal capitalism. Smith’s literary quartet mediates on these various hostile environments—across temporal and spatial lines, as symbolized by the changing of the seasons. While my focus ultimately lies with the Hostile Environment as it pertains to the topic of migration, the hostile and hospitable paradigms presented in Smith’s novels—political, cultural, and ecological—do not transpire independently from another. Taking a specific example from Winter, we can analyze how the quartet mediates these amalgamated hostile environments. In the course of the narrative, Winter offers up a snapshot where “two huge Sky News JCDecaux Transvision screens” on the King’s Cross Station concourse give a twenty-­ second news round-up (2017, 219). The major headlines read that “there is now 80% more plastic in the earth’s seas … than estimated,” that “there’s an attack taking place on MPs by MPs of the same party,” and that “a poll has found that citizens of this country oppose a unilateral guarantee for the citizens who live here and who are originally from a lot of other countries to be able to stay here” (2017, 219–220; emphasis in original). These headlines point to the various hostile environments encapsulated in Smith’s novels—ecological, political, and cultural. Smith sums them up thusly: “Panic. Attack. Exclude.” (2017, 220). Yet this vision of a hostile environment is not yet complete. To the triad “Panic. Attack. Exclude,” Smith adds an unspoken “Ignore,” telling the reader:

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“That’s the news part over. Next on the screen there’s an advert for a soft drink, an image of happy looking people drinking it” (2017, 220). Hostile environments exist not simply due to fear, aggression, and exclusion, but also in the ways that these sentiments become commonplace, to the point that we wilfully ignore them. We become so switched off to the repetitiveness of these kinds of stories that we stop taking notice, or, perhaps, we find ourselves feeling so anxious, upset, and useless in the face of these events that we try to put them out of our minds, to try to get on with our everyday lives. But as Smith cycles through the seasons, her characters find that such hostilities and anxieties are beginning to intrude upon even the most ordinary of lives and mundane of moments.

Storytelling and/as Ethics: The Novel as New A “national novelist,” as Erica Wagner casts Smith, “is a writer who speaks for a nation’s better self” (2019). It is significant that this mantle is given to an author, based not on their reflections on the state of a nation, but on their aspirations for it. What relationships might we contrive between the novel and the nation? Between the imaginary and the political? Lyndsey Stonebridge argues that “for literary ethics to amount to something more than literary humanitarianism, it too must reckon with political and moral judgement” (2018, 14). How can a work of art—a piece of writing—affect an ethics with the potential for both narrative judgment and political change? What shape does a story take—from the perspectives of both writer and reader, or orator and listener? Autumn presents an example of storytelling, and the dialectic between the act of telling and the act of listening. The novel is, in part, an ode to 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty—mentions of both the artist and her artwork recur throughout the novel, including a scene where Daniel, out walking with Elisabeth, as a young girl, proposes a game: “Every story tells a picture” (Smith 2016, 72). The game, Daniel tells her, is one where he describes a collage and “you can tell me what you think of it.” “Without actually seeing it?” Elisabeth asks. “By seeing it in the imagination,” Daniel tells her (2016, 72). Both the younger Elisabeth and the reader of Smith’s novel are invited to imagine this collage, as he describes it: a dark blue background, upon which sits a black and white cut out of a woman in a swimsuit, taken from a fashion magazine. In the center is an image of a human hand holding a baby’s. A hair color advert lines the top edge, while a small drawing of a ship rests at the bottom. Finally, the collage is overlaid with pieces of pink lace (2016, 73). This rendition of visual art in written language is an act of storytelling—a narrative construction of a picture. Following Daniel’s description of the collage, Elisabeth comments “I like that you could maybe touch the pink, if it was made of lace, I mean, and it would feel different from the blue” (Smith 2016, 74). “Oh, that’s good,” Daniel says, “That’s very good” (2016, 74). This exchange indicates that the narrativization of art is not only an act of recounting—but also of responding

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affectively and analytically. That the image in Elisabeth’s mind eye affects the sense of touch invokes both the ethical and political capacities of imaginative engagement—an intra-action that is, at once, sensory and agential. In her account of reading—both textually and materially—Hayley G. Toth sketches out the “relational potential” for both an ethics and a politics of reading, simultaneously (2021, 651). She presents a reader who is “made up of the reading self and the self-in-the-world”—the ethical persona who suspends reality, investing immanently and affectively with “the text world: the world of another,” and the political reader who is “a cognate, corporeal agent with material, social, and epistemic coordinates” (2021, 651; emphasis in original). These respective ethical and political methods of reading, however, are dialectical: “When we take up the guise of the reading self … a sense of our self-in-the world ‘will never disappear totally’” (Toth 2021, 649). The reciprocity shared between our reading self and our self-in-the-world, and between ethics and politics, manifests an affective and attentive mode of reading, and this encounter between reader and text allows for new imaginaries, new ways of deciphering and making meaning. Thus, when Elisabeth responds to a “story [that] tells a picture” (Smith 2016, 72), making sense of her imagining by invoking the sense of touch, she invokes both her reading self—her comprehension of the different textures that distinguish the pink from the blue—and her self-in-the-­ world—whose imagined action, of “touching” the pink, infers new layers of meaning to the storied collage. “Ethics traffics with politics,” Stonebridge argues, often as “a matter of literary or aesthetic form” (2018, 14), advocating for a political agency that is driven by moral judgment. This game, played by child and guardian, showcases in intimate detail the value and importance of art—a message that recurs throughout Smith’s quartet. Furthermore, it provides a blueprint for affective and analytical telling and reading, through which a much harsher, hostile reality, represented in a milieu of cultural, political, and media forms, can be apprehended. Hannah Arendt argues that “[t]he immediate source of the art work is the human capacity for thought” (1969, 168). Art—and the act of storytelling— materializes thought and feeling, and “[w]ith word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world” (Arendt 1969, 176). The relationship between speaking and acting is intricately bound: speaking is a means of acting, of engaging with people and the political world—just as the reading self can never fully detach itself from the self-in-the-world. As Arendt suggests that the poet has “the task of setting this process of narration in motion and of involving us in it” (1983, 21), she conveys how the action of narration is collaborative. Consider, for example, how the game “Every story tells a picture” (Smith 2016, 72), is composed of Daniel’s narration to Elisabeth and their discussion of the storied picture. Narration, and the act of reading, is a means of being in the world—reconciling with what we experience, with what we think and feel, and sharing these experiences with others. Thus, Arendt argues that “[w]e humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it,

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and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human” (1983, 21). Narrative materializes the world and our manner of being in it. Stories, as Sophie Chao argues, are not simply cultural artifacts, but participate in the environments that they describe, presenting a means for writers and readers alike to situate themselves amongst shared worlds (2022). It is my argument that such a vision of narration is realized in Smith’s seasonal quartet, that her writing captures the complex and often contradictory thoughts and feelings that circulate in response to present-day emergencies, and that such writing might prompt meaningful, moral, and political action both now and in the future. Demands of justice “call for something more robust than an ethics of response and encounter,” Stonebridge argues, and must also “be made accountable within political and historical terms” (2018, 14). Moral judgment is not—or at least not solely—philosophical, but, rather, necessarily political. I have described Smith’s quartet as a series of networked novels—novels which see characters and themes recur and revisited, showing how the experiences and stories of individuals exist as part of a bigger picture. We are the protagonist of our own story, but we also play major and minor roles alike in the lives of others. As Stonebridge puts it: “It is not, or at least not only, the individual person that is revealed or realized in the exchange of stories, but a bigger story about humanity” (2018, 58). The act of storytelling is underscored by a principle of connection and exchange. Maša Mrovlje, in her analysis of Arendt, similarly qualifies storytelling as a communicable, sociable act of exchange, arguing that by “[c]onstantly enriching the web of human relationships and illuminating the boundaries of the world, narrative judgement can thus disclose a worldly space for a new beginning” (2019, 172–173). The content of Smith’s novels is contemporaneousness, but their capacity to ascertain something new comes also from their literary form. As Smith explains: “since the novel as a form is always about time, and since the name we’ve given to the novel form also means new, something new, something so new it’s news—I suppose I’m interested in asking structural questions of the form” (qtd. in Anderson 2016). In the case of Smith’s seasonal quartet, the novel-as-­ form, which is also novel-as-in-new, is dialogic—a set of conversations amongst characters and across seasons that are, as yet, unfinished. The publication of Companion Piece presents a concrete example of how this series of novels is extant and evolving, but the innate dialogism of the novel form—famously celebrated by philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin—also encapsulates “an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contract with unfinished, still-­ evolving contemporary reality” (2011, 7). Dialogism, as it is manifested in Smith’s works about the present, in the present, and primarily written in present tense, encapsulates the continuity and continuousness of time. The act of storytelling aspires toward a principle of connection—toward hospitable connections—against which characters and readers (re-)situate themselves in the world, reading it anew.

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Spring: A Stranger in a Hostile Environment The Hostile Environment—as it is conceived politically through the instigation of anti-immigration policy—comes to the forefront in Spring, which takes, as one of its central set pieces, an Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). IRCs are intended to briefly detain people who do not have a legal immigration status and who are shortly due to be deported. In practice, however, many people who are detained at IRCs are held for long periods of time—and can be held indefinitely—before, most often, being released back into their community. IRCs are also typically overseen by private security contractors. In Spring, this contractor is SA4A, a company that resurfaces throughout the quartet. The reader of Spring is taken through the corridors of the IRC by Brittany Hall—shortened, with analogous intent, to Brit—a Detention Custodial Officer (DCO) who describes how “this isn’t a prison, it’s a purpose-built Immigration Removal Centre with a prison design” (Smith 2019, 160). The Hostile Environment, much like the IRC described here, is built with purposeful intent. The 1951 Refugee Convention, and the 1967 Protocol that followed, requires that states must meet the welfare needs of refugees without discrimination and that no state can return a refugee to a territory where their life or freedom is under threat. Yet, as Lucy Mayblin argues: “The letter of the human rights conventions, but not the spirit, is … met” (2018, 173). Consequently, “[t]he aspiration of hospitality has been replaced by the fulfilling of minimum standards in order to avoid international embarrassment or sanctions” (Mayblin 2018, 173). This distinction, that replaces “the spirit,” or “aspiration of hospitality,” with “the letter”—to simply fulfill the minimum required by international law—are the conditions under which the Hostile Environment is formed. With Spring, Smith examines the duplicity of a Hostile Environment purposely built to expel the same people entering the country that the UK is legally and morally bound to protect. The duplicitous framework of the IRC that “isn’t a prison” but is of a “purpose-­built … prison design” (Smith 2019, 160) operates with its own language system—at once bureaucratic and derogatory. Brit describes: “I’m a DCO at one of the IRCs employed by the private security firm SA4A who on behalf of the HO run the Spring, the Field, the Worth,” and so on (2019, 133). The acronyms function as a form of code, setting the world of detention policy and practice outside the realm of the layman. Anti-immigration policies and institutions formed as part of the Hostile Environment are deliberately designed to be opaque: it is much harder to protest a system that cannot be easily comprehended. Amidst these bureaucratic acronyms, Brit also calls the detainees “Deets,” a word her colleague describes as akin to insect repellent: “you can get really sick, it’s a neurotoxin, under your skin going right into you” (2019, 134). This infectious, even invasive language—of getting “under your skin”—recalls all too familiar media and political coverage, which has variously described migrants as a “swarm” (PM blames Calais crisis on “swarm” of migrants 2015) and as “cockroaches” (Hopkins 2015). And yet, as Brit keenly observes: “You calling them deets makes us the insects” (Smith 2019, 134). The language used in reference to those who have been detained remains derogatory, but the reversal of who is classified, here,

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as insects, also serves to implicate the DCOs as being part of a larger and insidious system, and self-­consciously so. The definition of a “purpose-built Immigration Removal Centre” incorporates not just the building’s infrastructure, but also its workers, and Smith chronicles Brit’s increasing desensitization to what takes place within its walls. Owen Syred, a former DCO and Welfare Officer at Brook House, a detention center at Gatwick run by GS4, which is under public inquiry, reported that “[s]ome staff got conditioned, almost like radicalised into stereotyping nationalities” (Taylor 2021).2 Institutionalizing a matrix of “us vs them” between guards and those who are detained, serves to maintain an inhospitable, hostile environment rhetorically and materially. And yet, the IRC in Spring, with its efficient and amoral bureaucracy, is disrupted by the arrival of Florence Smith, a twelve-year-old girl who, one day, walks into the center unimpeded. The character of Florence—an uninvited and unexpected stranger—is a familiar paradigm in Smith’s fiction. In Smith’s work, the stranger “is the embodiment of contingency—the untimely and unforeseen … the sudden arrival of the catastrophic” (O’Donnell 2013, 97–98). Florence’s arrival shakes the “purpose-built” foundations of the IRC, and she does so, in part, because she is the epitome of a story. She is introduced as as story: “Dave hadn’t seen the girl with his own eyes but he’d heard some of the stories doing the rounds” (Smith 2019, 137). Stories, much like the figure of the stranger, embody contingency—dialogic and, thus, open-ended. The concept of “story,” especially as it pertains to Florence, comes under scrutiny in the midst of a verbal exchange she shares with IRC manager, Bernard Oates. Throughout the exchange, Florence poses a series of questions, asking an increasingly flustered and defensive Bernard about the toxic conditions at the center. Bernard responds, with frantic concern: “What’s the story here?” (2019, 205). Bernard’s invocation of “story” is one of angle: in what way will Florence narrate her experiences of visiting the IRC, and Bernard’s (lack of) answers? That Bernard later asks whether Florence is affiliated with Panorama or Channel 4 further contextualizes this account of “story” as akin to journalistic inquiry (2019, 206). Florence, however, doesn’t offer up a specific narrative angle; Smith’s novel(istic) and, thus, dialogic, narrative inquiry is more open-ended. Instead, Florence suggests to Bernard: “I guess what your story is will depend on what you do about the questions I’ve asked you today” (2019, 206). Stories, for Florence, are not unlike questions—precipitated by narrative exchange, and open to what is, as yet, untold. Stories are not only interested in how we get to a particular place, but also with what happens next. Florence’s arrival at the IRC—and the stories that are exchanged as a result—work toward breaking an enmeshed, systematic hostile environment, seeking, instead, to make further connections, “enriching the web of human 2  The public inquiry into Brook House IRC followed an investigation conducted by BBC Panorama, aired on 4 September 2017 and entitled “Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets” (Brook House Inquiry 2020). The program included footage secretly recorded by DCO Callum Tulley, and investigated the toxic environment at Brook House, which included examples of widespread selfharm and drug abuse.

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relationships and illuminating the boundaries of the world” (Mrovlje 2019, 173). Florence’s attempts to make a hospitable connection, which might go on to affect change in an individual and their immediate environment, include Brit. Traveling into work one day, Brit meets Florence at a train station, and subsequently accompanies her to Scotland. Brit struggles to fully comprehend her compulsion to accompany Florence, but in spite of Brit’s brusque, even bitter, temperament, Florence is unnervingly trusting and inviting. “Kept you a seat,” Florence says, as Brit finds her on the train set to leave Kings Cross, London, for Edinburgh (Smith 2019, 184). Once in Scotland, Brit also meets Alda Lyons, a librarian and coffee truck driver, and Richard Lease, an aging filmmaker, whose narrative takes up a significant portion of the novel’s opening section. Alda, it conspires, also belongs to a network of volunteers who help people who are detained escape: “disappearing people from a system which has already disappeared them” (2019, 272). This unlikely group of people—a librarian, a schoolgirl, a security guard, and a filmmaker—share the front cabin of a coffee truck, as they travel across the Scottish highlands. As they listen to one another tell stories, discuss history, and sing songs, Smith begins to craft a small and contained hospitable environment—a pocket in time and space, filled with potential and possibility. It is within this space, amidst her unlikely companions, that Brit finds herself contemplating how “[s]he has been quite surprised by how unpleasant she is to other people without thinking, and by how bad her being unpleasant to other people is currently making her feel” (2019, 305). Brit’s encounter with Florence unsettles her foundational perspective on the world. Her surprise at the realization that she has been unpleasant, and her introspection on the morality of her actions, speaks to the consequences of a hostile environment that institutionalizes an “us vs them” outlook on the world and the ways this becomes ingrained into daily living. Brit’s change in perspective is born from the interactions that transpire between Florence and herself, both prior to and upon their entering the cabin of the coffee truck. The unrealized potentiality that results from the interconnection between these two characters is described by Smith: “Once there was a Detainee Custody Officer who was on to something. But what? … It could cost her her job. Or it could mean a better job … But it might also be bigger than work. It might be a life changer” (2019, 312). Brit, in the course of her story joining paths with Florence’s, is on the cusp of making a narrative, or even an imaginative, leap—of reconciling herself with a story different from her own; of making a narrative judgment that might give way to something new, that challenges her current world-view. The cabin of the coffee truck is, however, a contained and finite space. The potentiality and possibility that feels palpable within the truck’s cabin are not necessarily tenable when set loose into the wider world, and for Brit, her capacity to make the narrative leap fails. The truck finally parks outside a Tesco in Inverness, and Richard leaves the truck, having reached his intended destination, before reuniting with a frantic Brit in the aisles of the supermarket. The coffee truck, along with Alda and Florence, has left. With the sudden desertion of Florence, the narrative centers on Brit’s response: “she’ll despise herself … Because it was never about her.

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Because she was never a real part of the story. She was just an extra in it” (Smith 2019, 317). Brit’s reaction shows the ultimate failure of the interconnection between Florence and herself. She is unable to recognize the potentiality of the story she has become involved in, and thus change her narrative course. Instead, she laments that she is but an “extra” in this story. But the stories in which we are the main character consistently intersect with others where we are not. It is by recognizing the minor roles we play in the stories of others, and the shared worlds we occupy, that new and divergent narrative pathways might be forged. The frayed connection between Florence and Brit prompts the latter to make an irrevocable decision: “She’ll phone the SA4A Countrywide 24-Hour Hotline number” (2019, 317). Thus, Brit, who was “on to something” life changing (2019, 312), retreats to the familiar, institutionalized fold of SA4A, and the Hostile Environment it operates within. Yet, even in this passage there remains a sense that the narrative is not yet done. By writing in the future tense—presenting a narrative course that is still unfolding—Smith demonstrates the indeterminacy of the contemporaneous novel, and the hostile environments and hospitable connections within.

“Dear Hero”: Moments of Hospitable Connection While the interconnection between Florence and Brit frays, the attempt to make a connection remains central to an aspiring ethos of hospitability. Sometimes attempts to make a hospitable connection fall short, sometimes they can affect material and ideological change. Following the central events of Spring, Richard embarks on a film project, focusing on Alda’s network, in aid of those who have been detained. Interviewing Alda, Richard comments that “What you’re doing’s not feasible in any real world scenario” (Smith 2019, 273). In response, Alda replies: “It’s human … There’s no scenario more real” (2019, 273). This dialogue recalls Arendt’s own argument that “[w]e humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human” (1983, 21). The world, and the stories we tell about it, is ultimately a human space—our words and actions build the environments we inhabit and move through. In seeking hospitability, we seek connection—to the places, people, and objects that cross our path. Smith’s quartet, as Callus describes it, embodies “a singular aesthetic of connection” (2020, 227), and while some of these connections flounder, some stories are gently coaxed into being, moving through the seasons, between novels. We are first introduced to Hero in Spring. He is a Vietnamese man, who is being detained at the IRC where Brit works. When Brit encounters him, he is lying on the floor of his cell, and she asks him why: “I watch clods, he said […] I am watching, she said. Clouds” (2019, 160; emphasis in original). Two points of meaningful connection are made during this exchange, irrespective of where Brit ultimately finds herself at the end—or open-end—of the novel. The first manifests in Brit’s exasperated correcting of Hero’s language, to which he responds with gratitude: “Thank you for help with your language” (2019, 160). That gratitude is extended in spite of Brit’s attitude, that he finds in her responses

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something constructive, suggests the possibility of a formative connection between the two. It is an, as yet, incomplete connection, and not one that we might describe as particularly hospitable, but the narrative exchange builds toward a shared story, one which is co-written by both characters. As a second point of interconnection, the content of this narrative exchange recurs in Brit’s memory shortly after, giving her pause as she walks through Covent Garden and observes a cloudless—“clodless”—sky (2019, 161). As Hero and Brit—standing on opposite sides of a cell door—look up to that same “clodless” sky, both characters catch a glimpse of their shared sky, and their shared world. But Hero also shares his world—and his story—with other characters in Smith’s quartet. Set during the early months of the Covid pandemic, Summer follows, in part, the story of teenager Sacha Greenlaw, who meets Art and Charlotte, two of the principal characters in Winter. Art and Charlotte have been visiting people in detention, and from them, Sacha learns of Hero. The central narrative is interspersed by three letters: the first two written by Sacha to Hero, the last, Hero’s response. These letters—where word and deed materialize as one—represent an exchange of stories, a gesture of hospitality. Sacha’s first letter opens: “You don’t know me, we are strangers” (Smith 2020, 117). Sacha and Hero are a different kind of stranger than Florence, however. Florence’s role of stranger is one of disruption and chaos—perhaps this is partly why the connection she attempts to make with Brit becomes untenable. For Sacha and Hero, the letters, and the act of exchanging stories, is one that moves them from alterity to accord. Sacha writes that in Hero’s last letter to Art and Charlotte—another moment of connection—he “talked about insomnia, cumulo nimbus clouds, the atmosphere, and the problem of trying to look through a window that is opaque” (2020, 118). The resurfacing of these topics recalls the conversation that occurs between Hero and Brit in Spring. The recurring motif of the clouds across three separate dialogues, between Hero and Brit; Hero, Art, and Charlotte; and, finally, Hero and Sacha shows how stories extend beyond individual experiences. Narrative materializes the world and our manner of being in it, but it is in the act of telling that both orators and listeners, and writers and readers, might employ narrative judgment, reconciling with the ethical encounter and political responsibility of a story, and our shared role in constructing and construing its meaning. With each ­(re)telling by and of Hero, of his desire to look upon the clouds in the sky, that which was initially a private hope enters into the stories of others, of Brit, Art, Charlotte, and Sacha. In her letters, Sacha goes on to tell Hero about her life in Brighton, her family, and her experience of lockdown. At the close of the novel, Hero responds with his own letter, now released from detention and living in the home of Art’s aunt, Iris. He writes: “Thank you for telling me stories of your life. Thank you for imagining my life. Thank you for allowing me to imagine your life” (Smith 2020, 377). With this act of writing and exchanging stories, Smith

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encapsulates the importance that narrative has in the process of making human. Arendt invokes the capacity of narrative to “humanize” (1983, 21)—a word that has, in recent years, frequently been invoked in humanitarian discourse protesting the Hostile Environment and the inhospitable, even brutal, treatment of people who have migrated to, and claimed asylum in, the UK. Attempts at “humanizing,” in a strictly humanitarian sense is problematic in various ways, not least because it maintains the dichotomy of “us vs them.” That is, attempts at humanization must convince people that they are human, just like us. In Arendt’s usage of the term, however, narrativization is the medium of humanization. It is not some unequivocable “other” that Arendt invokes in the ethics and politics of humanization, but, rather, writer and reader alike. By realizing our shared worlds—the intersections between our individual stories and the parts we play in the stories of others—“we learn to be human” (Arendt 1983, 21). For Sacha and Hero, the imagining of each other’s life is an ethical act—their reading selves yield to the affective resonances of an imaginative act. But by putting these imaginings into words, Sacha and Hero also invoke their respective selves-in-the-world, connecting their imaginings with, and through, their material and ideological reality. By participating in the narrativization of each other’s stories, both Sacha and Hero forge a hospitable connection, constructing yet one more shared world amongst many. In a hostile environment, composed of large-scale political schemes, structural violence, and ecological disaster, individual acts of protest and calls for change might seem futile. Smith is not ignorant of the anxieties and feelings of despondency that arise in the face of institutionalized hostility, but she does propose the beginnings of a way forward. Smith’s writing is inconclusive. It is neither dogmatic nor certain, rather, it aspires toward networks and connections which, in their coming together in narrative, forge new beginnings. If narrative materializes our manner of being in the world, narrative exchange, that is, the sharing of stories in a gesture of hospitality, materializes new ways for us to imagine ourselves and others in the world. Smith’s seasonal quartet captures the complex and often contradictory thoughts and feelings that circulate in response to fraught pasts and present-day emergencies, aspiring toward an ethics of connection—some made more easily than others—that has the capacity to affect change both now and in the future. As stories thought to be finished recur in later seasons, Smith’s quartet is a pertinent reminder of how our view of the world, and our role in it, is never fixed. “There’s always, there’ll always be, more story. That’s what a story is,” Smith narrates in Autumn (2016, 193). So, what comes next? Acknowledgment  This chapter has been produced as part of a wider project focusing on the ethics of storytelling and the politics of migration and citizenship within the UK’s Hostile Environment, entitled “Un/ethical storytelling: Refugees, migrants, and the Hostile Environment.” The research project is generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust through an Early Career Fellowship.

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Bibliography Anderson, Eric Karl. 2016. Ali Smith on Autumn, Brexit, and the Shortness of Life. Penguin, October 12. Accessed 6 May 2022. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2016/ali-smith-on-autumn.html. Arendt, Hannah. [1958] 1969. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1983. On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing. In Men in Dark Times, 3–32. Harvest, Harcourt & Brace: San Diego. Bakhtin, Mikhail. [1981] 2011. Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brook House Inquiry. 2020. BBC Panorama: Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets. YouTube. Accessed 21 December 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_fp0QLDKgME&ab_channel=BrookHouseInquiry. Callus, Ivan. 2020. The Humanities Connection: Fiction and the Virus. Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 10: 207–233. Chao, Sophie. 2022. Decolonising the Field(s): Insights from the Pacific in an Age of Planetary Unravelling. In Building Bridges: An Interdisciplinary Conference, April 5. Nottingham Trent University, UK. Cowen, Leah. 2021. Border Nation: A Story of Migration. London: Pluto Press. Gilbert, Sophie. 2017. Ali Smith’s Autumn Is a Post-Brexit Masterpiece. The Atlantic, February 15. Accessed 5 May 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2017/02/ali-smiths-autumn-is-a-post-brexit-masterpiece/516660/. Heidemann, Birte. 2020. The Brexit Within: Mapping Rural and the Urban in Contemporary British Fiction. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56: 676–688. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2020.1820670. Hopkins, K. 2015. Rescue Boats? I’d Use Gunships to Stop Migrants. The Sun, April 17. Kirkup, James, and Robert Winnett. 2012. Theresa May interview: “We’re going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception.” The Telegraph, May 25. Accessed 4 May 2022. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9291483/ Theresa-May-interview-Were-going-to-give-illegal-migrants-a-really-hostilereception.html. Koegler, Caroline, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, and Merlena Tronicke. 2020. The Colonial Remains of Brexit: Empire Nostalgia and Narcissistic Nationalism. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56: 585–592. https://doi.org/10.1080/1744985 5.2020.1818440. Mayblin, Lucy. [2017] 2018. Asylum after Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking. 2017. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Mrovlje, Maša. 2019. Beyond Nassabum’s Ethics of Reading: Camus, Arendt, and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination. The European Legacy 24: 162–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2018.1540514. O’Donnell, Patrick. 2013. “The Space That Wrecks Our Abode”: The Stranger in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and The Accidental. In Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Monica Germaná and Emily Horton, 89–100. London: Bloomsbury. PM blames Calais crisis on ‘swarm’ of migrants. 2015. ITV News, 30 July. https:// www.itv.com/news/update/2015-07-30/pm-a-swarm-of-migrants-want-to-cometo-britain/. Accessed 10 May 2022.

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Preston, Alex. 2016. Autumn by Ali Smith: the first serious Brexit novel. Financial Times, October 14. Accessed 4 May 2022. https://www.ft.com/ content/0e227666-8ef4-11e6-a72e-b428cb934b78. Shaw, Kristian. 2018. BrexLit. In Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses, ed. Robert Eaglestone, 15–30. London: Routledge. Smith, Ali. 2016. Autumn. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2017. Winter. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2019. Spring. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2020. Summer. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2022. Companion Piece. London: Hamish Hamilton. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. 2018. Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Diane. 2021. Guard Tells of Toxic and Racist Culture at G4S Gatwick Immigration Removal Centre. The Guardian, 7 December. Accessed 12 May 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/07/guard-tells-of-racist-culture-at-g4s-gatwick-immigration-removal-centre-brook-house. Toth, Hayley G. 2021. Reading in the Global Literary Marketplace: Material and Textual Affects. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 23 (4): 636–654. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1784022. Wagner, Erica. 2019. The National Novelist We Need: Why Ali Smith Defines Our Times. News Statesman, 3 April. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/ books/2019/04/why-ali-smith-national-novelist-we-need. Accessed 3 May 2022.

PART III

Migration as Palimpsest

CHAPTER 15

Migration as Palimpsest: Introduction Corina Stan

A palimpsest is a parchment or tablet used one or more times after the earlier writing has been erased, although traces may still remain. The Greek palimpsestos, “scraped again,” indexes an economy of scarcity haunted by fragmented remnants of the past. (Imagine reading a text that for a brief moment loses its way and starts speaking in tongues, ventriloquizing the voice of a distant ancestor, or the mysterious idiom of a foreign traveler.) Like geological sedimentation, the palimpsest bears witness to the passage of time, conquest, defeat, and the movement of people. The Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul is a prime example, with its Byzantine architecture, Christian iconographic mosaics, and Islamic calligraphy; yet another, “within touching distance of the Syrian border…the palimpsest of ruins in Baalbek—the Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim ruins” that Teju Cole clambers in with his friends on a trip to Egypt (2021, 67); or the “age-old harbor gossip” in Marseille, a vociferous soundtrack to Anna Seghers’s Transit, a “twaddle that’s existed as long as there’s been a Mediterranean Sea, Phoenician chit-chat, Cretan and Greek gossip and that of the Romans. There was never a shortage of gossips,” the narrator muses, “remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another” (2013, 78). For refugees, the palimpsest speaks of their own existence on the run, the coordinates of which are scraped off again and again—the couple in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West know

C. Stan (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_15

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this well—and written over with cautious hopes for a new life in yet another place, and then another. This rhythm is at work in the vivid portrait (or selfportrait of the migrant?) the painter Max Ferber keeps erasing in Sebald’s The Emigrants; when he finally stops, the face on the canvas seems to have “evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper” (1996, 162). Reading a palimpsest is a hauntology, whose urgent insight is that memory defies the logic of scarcity, groping, rather, for connection: between distant moments in time, places, people.1 How can we think about the relationship between different migratory routes and experiences? When it comes to the past century of European history, comparison is an issue fraught with controversy. For decades, Auschwitz marked the caesura of European civilization; yet some challenged the uniqueness of Holocaust memory through comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism, yet others by suggesting continuity between colonial violence and Nazi atrocities.2 Calls to expand memory culture have thus led to juxtapositions not only between major historical events, but also between the forms of human mobility produced by them—by colonialism, Nazism, Stalinism, and other intra- and extra-European historical events such as 9/11. These comparisons raise a number of questions: Can we make sense of contemporary mobility in light of past experiences of forced or voluntary displacement? Are there ways to mobilize traumatic memories of flight and violence in the service of more just visions of the future? What are the benefits and limitations of comparison, its ethical constraints, its political affordances? How do cultural artifacts—novels, music and photo albums, essays, museums, and collections—engage in the work of personal and collective remembering, and what role do they play in shaping identities, belonging, agency, and the sense of a shared future? In short, how does culture shape the relationship between migration and memory? These questions are central to the essays included in the following pages. In the artifacts they examine—novels, essays, music, and photography—family albums and heirlooms connect generations, imposing an obligation of remembrance; archives come alive, haunted by unacknowledged or silenced figures that demand mnemonic repair. The palimpsest is a figure for layered experiences and memories that engage in a productive, often intercultural or cross-generational dynamic; it is also a metaphor for racial scripts imposed on individuals who are thereby cast in a traumatic regime of hyper-visibility through the ideological hailing theorized by Louis Althusser as “interpellation.” Such persons are carriers of memories that challenge the official national 1  Or, as Michael Rothberg puts it, memory is multidirectional, an “ongoing negotiation, cross-­ referencing, and borrowing” (3). 2  On the comparison between Stalinism and Nazism, see the German historians’ dispute (Historikerstreit) in the late 1980s. Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism put European colonialism and Nazism on a continuum. For the expansion of memory culture, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory and “Comparing Comparisons.”

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narrative of cultural, ethnic, and racial homogeneity resulting from a sedentary culture. The artifacts analyzed in these chapters thus help orient our understanding of European societies as fundamentally shaped by movement and migration. Many also show, however, that confining the lives of non-white persons to a paradigm of migration is an obstacle to their acknowledgment as full members in the national community. As Katja Garloff argues in her essay, “the literature of migration is politically most effective not where it summons legal principles, but where it challenges the very demarcation line between migrants and non-migrants.” Michael Rothberg’s claim that memory’s anachronistic quality is the source of its creativity, of its ability to build new worlds, is most obviously at work in Claudia Breger’s essay “Migration, Forced Displacement, and Aesthetic Agency: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum.” Featuring the eponymous character Ada, embodied in different historical contexts, such as 1459 Ghana, 1848 Britain, a 1945 concentration camp, and 2019 Berlin, Otoo’s (2021) novel connects histories of migration from the colonial period, National Socialism, and the contemporary moment, including the “refugee crisis” and Brexit. Building on insights from contemporary Black radical theory, new materialisms, and Actor-Network Theory, Breger analyzes the novel’s intricate narration by a non-human (or not yet human) agent, linking objects alienated and restored, “commodities that speak” (i.e., enslaved persons), migrants on intraand extra-European routes. Exemplary here is a sustained focus on how the novel records historical resonances between the stories of characters from different time periods, enabling solidarities that engender a creative orientation of memory toward better futures and visions of justice. Whereas Breger’s analysis of Ada’s Room illustrates a global field of comparison after the consolidation of Holocaust memory, Katja Garloff’s engagement with the work of Russian Jewish writers suggests that their original participation in Soviet memory culture displaces the centrality of the Holocaust and dilutes its generative power. As her title “Comparing Migrations? Russian German Jewish Writers on the ‘Refugee Crisis’” suggests, Garloff places the problem of comparison at the center of her essay, arguing that “literature can function as a resonance chamber in which earlier experiences of flight and exile can be rethought in light of new historical developments and/or can be invoked to comment on such developments.” The essay examines novels published in the immediate aftermath of the European “refugee crisis” by Vladimir Vertlib, Julya Rabinowich, Olga Grjasnowa, Marina Frenk, and Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and probes the aesthetic, ethical, and political affordances of comparison between migratory experiences of various social groups. The following three chapters address the tension between dominant national narratives of identity, citizenship, and belonging and individual or group experiences of violence or invalidation as members of the national community. In “Literary Archives and Alternative Futures. Memories of Labor Migration in Contemporary Turkish German Fiction,” Maria Roca Lizarazu turns to novels by three contemporary German-language writers of Turkish descent—Fatma

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Aydemir, Dilek Güngör, and Deniz Utlu—whose protagonists are affected by the devaluation of the labor, culture, and life of Turkish guest-workers and their descendants in post-war Germany. Mobilizing the historical context of labor migration to Germany and the sociological insights of John Berger and Jean Mohr in A Seventh Man (1975), the chapter argues that the family narratives these novels construct from an intergenerational perspective enable mnemonic repair and cultural recognition. By formulating claims to inclusion and belonging, they perform artistic “acts of citizenship,” thereby engaging critically with the German national narrative and contributing to its creative transformation. Questions of fraught belonging are also at the center of N. Michelle Murray’s essay “On the Afterlife of Lucrecia Pérez: Literature and Migrant Memory against Nationalist Myth-Making in Democratic Spain,” which takes as its starting point the murder of a 33-year old Dominican woman of African descent in 1992 Madrid. Murray examines the work of three Afro-Spaniard authors who invoke Pérez’s murder to invite reflection on the clash between Spanish nationalist myth-making after Franco’s dictatorship and Black embodiment, the latter inextricable from colonial memory and migration: the photo-­ essay And You, Why Are You Black? (2018) by Rubén Bermúdez, the essay What Is a Black Man Like You Doing in a Place Like This (2021) by Moha Gerehou, and the novel Daughter of the Way (2019) by Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio. In Murray’s reading, these texts present “a more complicated view of democratic Spain, its multicultural tensions, and the power of Black voices to critique rigid and racist nationalisms.” Like Breger in her analysis of Otoo’s novel, Murray emphasizes the role of storytelling in countering the erasure of the African presence in Western European nations, and their marginalization with respect to national citizenship, often assumed to be white. The non-white body as a palimpsest of racial narratives—Fanon’s “black skin, white masks” is explicitly or implicitly invoked by several contributors to this section—is also central to Nasia Anam’s essay, “Muslim Interpellation: Hijabs, Beards, and the Post-9/11 Border Regime,” which examines the post-9/11 scene of hailing of individuals who present as “Muslim” at the airport security checkpoint. Focusing on two novels, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), as well as on Pakistani-British actor and musician Riz Ahmed’s rap lyrics and essay “Auditions and Airports” (2016), Anam shows that the airport has become a border-site that determines who is a “Muslim” (i.e., a potential threat, terrorist, or enemy), a determination that accompanies, even precedes the person wherever they go. “Being a Muslim in the twenty-first century,” she argues with reference to North America, Britain, and France, “is the condition of being always on the border, at the checkpoint, in a perpetual state of migration.” The section ends with a wide-ranging conversation between two old friends, writers Caryl Phillips and Pico Iyer, whose family lives and work have been shaped by migration: from St. Kitts, to Britain and the United States in Phillips’s case, and from Bombay (today Mumbai), to Britain, California, and Japan, in

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Iyer’s. Finding kinship in their experience as “not-really-English English-raised nomads,” they discuss their parents’ expectations as colonial migrants, the layered meanings of “home,” and the equally layered experiences of feeling (and being made to feel) a foreigner in various places, instances of living with a “great, rich, multi-­ cultured treasure-house” of literary references, various forms of “double consciousness,” and/or cultural bifurcation (Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Sam Selvon, among other luminaries), English as a home, and “home” as “a sentence we’ll never complete, and one to which we’ll always keep adding.”

Bibliography Ahmed, Riz. 2016. Airports and Auditions. In The Good Immigrant, ed. Nikesh Shukla, 159–168. London: Unbound. Cole, Teju. 2021. Black Paper. Writing in a Dark Time. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Otoo, Sharon Dodua. 2021. Adas Raum: Roman. Frankfurt: Fischer. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ———. 2020. Comparing Comparisons: From the “Historikerstreit” to the Mbembe Affair. Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 September. https://geschichtedergegenwart. ch/comparing-comparisons-from-the-historikerstreit-to-the-mbembe-affair/. Sebald, W. G. 1996. The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions. Seghers, Anna. 2013. Transit, trans. Margot Bettauer Tembo. New York: New York Review of Books.

CHAPTER 16

Migration, Forced Displacement, and Aesthetic Agency: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum Claudia Breger

Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel Adas Raum (Ada’s Room) received significant attention in the German public sphere as well as transatlantic academic circles after the author had won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with a loosely related short story, “Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin” (“Herr Gröttrup Sits Down”).1 Otoo had relocated to Germany after studying German along with Management Studies at Holloway Royal in London, where she was born to immigrant parents from Ghana. Before the Bachmann Prize, she had been present in the German public sphere as a journalist, the editor of an English-language book series, and the author of two novellas originally written in English (Otoo 2012, 2014). Born translated, in Rebecca Walkowitz’s sense of beginning in more than one place (2015), Otoo’s writing across languages has been mapped by both herself and her critics primarily as part of African Diaspora traditions.2 With prominent references to authors including Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, and pioneering Afro-German poet, scholar, and activist May Ayim, Otoo’s literary innovations have been praised in terms of their

1  Otoo (2016, (in English translation) 2020b, 2021, 2022). An English translation of the novel was published in March 2023 (trans. Jon Cho-Polizzi), but all translations are my own. 2  Korte and Mair (2021) point out that the novel is also in extensive intertextual dialogue with British literature, including the time travel of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

C. Breger (*) Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_16

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resonances with magical realism and Afrofuturism.3 In setting out to write about Adas Raum for this handbook on literature and migration, I need to mark the implications of this affiliation: first, by acknowledging the honor— and accompanying responsibilities—of listening in to Otoo’s conversations with other Black authors and audiences as a white reader,4 and secondly, by detailing the significance—as well as limits—of the migration paradigm for reading Black German literature. Although Black people have been present in German-speaking central Europe since the Middle Ages, and in larger numbers dating back to the nineteenth century, Black Germans continue to be confronted with the nationalist and colonial legacy of racialized definitions of citizenship that tie imagined belonging to whiteness.5 Consequently, some of the political emphasis of Black German activism and scholarship has been on making visible Afro-German presences at a remove from migration and detailing the under-acknowledged histories of generations of Black Germans.6 The section of Otoo’s novel that is set in 2019 Berlin features several distinctively German Black characters, including Ada’s boyfriend Cash (see 268) and her sister Elle. Like any other self-respecting German of her generation and political sensibilities, Elle adheres to a vegan diet, regularly attends protests against industrial livestock farming, and is beyond exasperated with the ever recurring question of “where” she is “from” (Otoo 2021, 219, see 193). Ada herself, however, has recently arrived in Berlin as an international student, courtesy of her British passport, unfortunately about to become useless in the wake of Brexit (170, 179). While her first name is Nigerian, Ada grew up in Accra, Ghana, where her father eventually returned after migrating to Britain earlier.7 Ada’s British mother had died shortly after her birth in an arson attack (189, 251). Beyond the novel, people 3  See Otoo (2020a). Sarah Colvin draws on Philipp Khabo Koepsell’s and Priscilla Layne’s earlier contributions to spell out that the resonance with Afrofuturism does not entail a focus on technology or overlap with science fiction, but interests in movement through time and space and a reenvisioning of Black futurity by way also of remembering different pasts (Colvin (2022, 140–141); with reference to Koepsell (2015) and Layne (2018)). 4  My wording rephrases Otoo’s own comments on her invitations to Black and white audiences, respectively (2020a). While the design of her novel encourages me in trying to teach my students that our different positionalities should not be mentally solidified into unchanging identities (see below), I also remain aware that, as Paul Gilroy put it, the goal of moving beyond “race” requires a continued working through the—now ever more newly virulent—legacies of racism (Gilroy 2005, 9). In writing about Adas Raum, I hope to contribute to the circulation of her creative work while striving for an ethos of scholarly respect and humbleness: not knowing everything better than the text or its author. I follow Otoo and others in capitalizing the notion “Black” (but not white) to engage not skin color per se but our accumulated assumptions about physical characteristics (Otoo 2020a). 5  See, for example, El Tayeb (2001), Honeck et al. (2013), Lennox (2016). 6  To cite just two seminal collections, see Oguntoye et al. (1986), Koepsell (ed.) (2015). 7  Otoo (2021, 185). The name detail emphasizes that migration is not restricted to intercontinental flows. Ada’s father is a Ga: a descendant of immigrants who came down the Niger river during the seventeenth century (185; see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ga). Ironically, Ada points out, the Portuguese colonizers arrived at Ghana’s gold coast earlier than the Ga (217).

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from different West African (as well as North African) countries continue to represent a small minority among Germany’s immigrant population. However, they have been hyper-visible in media representations of Europe’s so-called refugee crisis, better described as the moment in the mid-2010s in which Northern European states could no longer ignore the ongoing state of emergency south and east of their borders. Racialized mainstream media iconographies have notoriously projected images of a (dominantly male) “African invasion,” often associated with drug traffic or sexual violence.8 Otoo’s novel takes up the task of imagining migration differently, including by way of how the fictional Ada arriving in Berlin in 2019 points to a less visible segment of today’s Afropean mobilities. Namely, she evokes the—not necessarily one-way or permanent—flows of regular migration involving on average highly educated people, often facilitated by colonial legacies such as the absence of language barriers or easier recognition of professional qualifications (Beauchemin 2018, 2, 6). Ada, to be sure, learned German at the Goethe Institut because her father was “obsessed” with Germany (188). But this character’s multifaceted migration story is only a small part of the novel’s complex engagement with heterogeneous and layered histories of mobility and uprooting. Most crucially perhaps, the African Diaspora framework demands that we—or enables Otoo to—pose questions about and map a spectrum of experiences including voluntary migration but also forced displacement, escape, abduction, enslavement, and deportation on inner-African and African-­European as well as inner-European routes.9 The title character Ada herself is many people (or, per the novel’s cosmo-theological backdrop I detail below, “an immortal who wanders through time and space,” 130). In addition to the student from Ghana in 2019 Berlin, who is the main protagonist of the novel’s second half, the reader is introduced to three historical predecessors, whose lives (and deaths) are very different while also in resonance with each other. A young woman called Ada has a deadly encounter with Portuguese colonizers in the coastal town of Totope (in today’s Ghana) in 1459 after surviving an earlier attack on her home town Kuntanase in the inland Asante region and abduction from there. In Stratford-le-Bow, England, in 1848, we meet Lady Ada, who evokes the historical British mathematician Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, and whose maid Lizzie has fled Ireland in the famine.10 Last but not least, Ada Marianska is subjected to syphilis experiments as a forced sex worker in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp near Nordhausen in 1945. As Sarah Colvin has noted, the novel’s historical span connecting the age of European colonialism and twentieth-century fascism with present histories of migration resonates with Achille Mbembe’s genealogies of modern and 8  Beauchemin (2018, 1). Sexual violence became the focus of a heated German debate in the wake of incidents at Cologne Central Station during the New Year’s celebrations. See Weber (2016). 9  Honeck, Klimke, and Kuhlmann reference Gilroy’s respective elaboration of the diaspora concept (2013, 5). Göktürk describes the novel in terms of its “imagination of connectivity” (2021, 72). 10  On Lady Ada’s historical background see Colvin (2022, 158).

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contemporary “necropolitics” (Colvin 2022, 146; see Mbembe 2019). To be sure, I argue that Adas Raum also reimagines these histories in more nuanced— and, despite all, somewhat hopeful—ways. While its historical focus is on the North-South axis of European colonialism rather than the transatlantic passage into chattel slavery, the novel’s (in Michael Rothberg’s words 2009) multidirectional memory work does heed Mbembe’s call to take into account slavery’s transformations of men and women “into human-objects, human-commodities, human-money” (Mbembe 2017, 2). Part of Otoo’s reflections on these legacies of dehumanization unfold through the ways in which the novel intertwines histories of human mobility and abduction with the traffic in commodities: along with Ada and other living beings, a golden bracelet connects all four of the novel’s historical scenarios. The novel’s main narrator takes the form of different objects as well, indirectly evoking the (in Fred Moten’s words) “historical reality of commodities who spoke” (2003, 6).11 At this juncture, I might emphasize that the present chapter does not trace the novel’s complex engagements with histories of mobility and forced displacement through a primarily sociopolitical lens. Or rather, it does not do so to the effect of perpetuating the “entrenched sociological positivism” that notoriously casts literatures of migration as reflecting “empirical truths about migrants’ lives” at the expense of literature’s imaginative capacities (Adelson 2001, 145; see also Adelson 2015). More generally speaking, there is no need for calculating such expenses: the interplay of literature’s socio-historical and imaginative engagements does not follow a zero sum-logic (“the more socio-political reference the less imagination,” and vice versa). Instead, I show how Adas Raum unfolds its sociopolitical intervention—in remembering and rewriting history with an orientation toward social justice—precisely by liberally deploying the imagination. Key to this feat is the novel’s intricate act of narration. Traveling through time and space, the non(or as we will see, perhaps not-yet-) human narrator materializes as different objects in different moments: a broom in 1459, a door knocker in 1848, Ada’s room in 1945, and the passport in 2019. This imaginative development of narrative agency accounts for much of the novel’s modulated—surprisingly humorous while still serious—tonality. Yet more crucially, I will detail how it resonates with ongoing philosophical conversations on human and nonhuman agency, including new materialist accounts and Actor-Network-Theory (Bennett 2010; Latour 2005) along with Moten’s insistence on the “Resistance of the Object” (2003, 1). Adas Raum poses these questions of agency quite explicitly—albeit in imaginative rather than scholarly terms—in the narrator’s self-reflexive discourse on their own (participant and teller) roles across the novel’s different scenarios. In several key moments, this discourse unfolds via the narrator’s contentious dialogue with Otoo’s “God,” who is introduced in this monotheistic singular as “das 11  Adelson (2022, 285) also makes the connection to the popular mode of “it-narratives” that appeared in British literature throughout the eighteenth century.

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Allwissende,” an “omniscient being” of neuter gender (2021, 176), while humorously characterized as less than fully authoritative. Of course, this playful questioning of divine sovereignty indirectly also targets modern European philosophy’s conceptualizations of—implicitly or explicitly white and masculine— human agency designed in the image of God.12 In these reflexive folds, the novel develops an extended meditation on agency, and specifically the agency in—or of—aesthetic mediation. What is it, Adas Raum explores throughout its pages, that literary narrations of migration and forced displacement can do? Events of mobility and displacement play a central role in all of the four historical situations designed in the novel, each of which is unfolded across several chapters. The dates provided at each chapter’s outset—1459 for the encounter in Totope—are from the calendar of the Christian colonizers, as Ada explicates in one of the chapters narrated by herself (Otoo 2021, 112). The modern European way of mapping linear time remains contested in the novel but just like the monotheistic God figure, it is nonetheless deployed: perhaps pragmatically for reader orientation, perhaps in acknowledgment of its hegemonic status. The 1459 Ada, whose father had once come from a faraway unknown land, is thus named after the coastal town where she arrived after a long and brutal march in chains, abducted by the “warriors” who burned down her home town Kuntanase (147, 114–116). Not only does migration precede homemaking (see also 16), but, the novel emphasizes here, identity as such may be based on violent displacement. Perhaps, such identity even remains a precarious effect of collective attribution more than a matter of evident identification: “I,” the character introduces herself, “the woman whom they all called Ada” (15). Importantly, this moment of alienation does not index plain violence. Ada’s naming partly contrasts with the fate of her brother who was sold to the Portuguese “like a basket full of fried fish” before even getting a new name (116). When he returns in 1459 with visible as well as psychological scars under the Portuguese name of Afonso, the colonizer Guilherme shoots Ada and takes her golden fertility bracelet. But in the interim years, “the girl eventually called Ada by everyone” (109) has received care in the coastal community, which has since relocated to Totope in pursuit of safety. The women treat her as though she was one of their own children, and she quickly develops new bonds. To be sure, the care Ada receives also includes broom strokes to remind her, time and again, of using only her right hand in eating, cooking, or greeting others. This is where the narrator comes into play in their first materialization: as they explain, they had not been able to choose the object they became at that time, but as a broom they at least retained “a certain room for maneuver” (einen gewissen Spielraum, 32). However firmly Mami Ashitey, one of Ada’s new mothers, holds the broom in her hand, she doesn’t manage to hurt Ada in stroking her, which pleases the narrator.

 For a forceful critique of these models’ contemporary reverberations, see Stan (2022).

12

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While the narrator is focused on shielding the 1459 Ada, their loyalty is more complicated in the 1848 scenario. Lady Ada is a gifted mathematician in Victorian England, and her initial first-person self-presentation seems to introduce her as a potential feminist heroine to the twenty-first-century reader. Sharply, she comments on men (like her lover Charles—Dickens) who “rather considered themselves as ‘the good ones’” with their literary engagement for social justice (sich eigentlich für “die Guten” hielten), while fighting women’s and Black people’s challenges to their “God-given authority” (21). However, Lady Ada’s tone is also quite arrogant. In the following chapters mediated by the main narrator, we are afforded moments of perceptive alignment with her angry husband about to become a murderer, as he sets out to demand back the golden bracelet—family inheritance turned wedding gift—from his unfaithful wife. Just having returned to England from France as an (however unsympathetic) aristocratic refugee in the year’s revolutionary uprisings, Lord William wonders whether Ada actually has any capacity for “deep emotions” or even a “heart made of flesh and blood” (45). Yet later, the narrator traces the perspective of Lady Ada’s maid Lizzie who struggles to uphold her loyalty in the face of an extremely insensitive remark her mistress made, a joke about potatoes in response to the question about what Lizzie might bring for dinner. Lizzie has lost her parents in the Irish (potato) famine that has made the streets of London overflow with “skeletal figures” (61). Called a “dirty Irishwoman” in a commotion with a young chimney sweep she runs into, upon storming out of the house in response to Ada’s remark, Lizzie feels “betrayed of her humanity” (um ihr Menschsein betrogen) in the wake of having lost her “original homeland” (Heimat, 63). Her brother, who managed to flee with her, lives in a place that, lacking privacy and even a bed, cannot possibly be called a “home” (Zuhause, 64). The narrator often evaluates the scenarios they report on in ethical or political terms, but their explicit commentary on Lady Ada’s insensitivity is unusually emphatic. Its high rhetorical register is matched—and its content both emphasized and enacted—by extra paragraph breaks in the text’s set design. This graphic emphasis is equally unusual in a novel that resorts to comparable visual techniques only in a few places: “had she only held out for another moment/ and paused/ Lady Ada as well would have understood that Lizzie’s suffering was immeasurably bigger than her own” (62).13 Short of entirely revoking their own loyalty to Ada, the narrator explains that her failure to respond to Lizzie’s distress was not borne of “spite” and that she had made that joke about potatoes because of her inability to process the “shame” she was feeling (62). Much later in the novel, we will further learn that Lady Ada’s own backstory includes her mother’s escape with the infant from the “violent excesses” of Ada’s father (159) and a subsequent upbringing “on a strict diet  “hätte sie nur einen weiteren Moment ausgehalten und innegehalten, wäre es auch Ada klar geworden, dass Lizzies Leid unermesslich größer als ihr eigenes war.” 13

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consisting of raw indomitability and glimmering rage” (162). Against that backdrop of psychological understanding, however, the narrator’s forceful, pathos-rich rhetoric in evaluating the encounter with Lizzie highlights Lady Ada’s class-based complicity in the histories of displacement and social precarity surrounding her. To be sure, Ada’s own imminent death in an act of gender violence is also shot through with layers of economic insecurity: Lady Ada had asked Lizzie to sell the bracelet to pay her gambling debts; Lizzie, however, buried it instead. What can literature do in telling histories of displacement and violence? In terms of technique, the narrator’s explicit rhetorical intervention and the corresponding graphic design in the described passage can be conceptualized as creating an effect of foregrounding by way of defamiliarization. These are the terms in which Viktor Shklovsky classically characterized the affordances of poetry vis-à-vis prosaic everyday writing: literature’s ability to renew perception—or enable us to notice—achieved, not least, by way of slowing down—or pausing (2004, 19). Later in the novel, this topos comes up more explicitly in the narrator’s discussion with God regarding their plot-level agency in Lady Ada’s death. The narrator articulates—what they suspect humans would call— “despair” about not having protected Ada, despite the “strength” and “power” they should have emanated as a door knocker (227). After all, they come in the imposing colonial design of a lion’s head, and the subsequent owner of the house ascribes an ominous might to the “atrocious door knocker” (grausamen Türklopfer, 226). Instead, the narrator frets, they did permit (ließ zu) Lord William’s deadly access to Ada in calling her to open the door in Lizzie’s absence (229). God, who showed up in the form of an older man wearing an ill-fitting white “dress” to this particular conversation (223), seems unimpressed. In apparent exasperation, he emphasizes that in Victorian England, Ada was owned by her husband anyway: “Of course he had uncontrolled access to her!” (Selbst-ver-ständlich hatte er freien Zugang zu ihr!, 229). But, God claims, this doesn’t mean that the door knocker made no difference at all: while such patriarchal access was generally veiled by social “hypocrisy,” the door knocker rendered it “conspicuous” (deutlich, 230). “Hmm,” the narrator sighs. “And what did that accomplish?” (230). “A good question indeed,” God responds. “Tell me when you have worked out the answer” (230). In the political aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, techniques of foregrounding claimed a prominent, arguably fetishized, place in the wake of Bertolt Brecht’s sharpening of Shklovsky’s concept of reawakening perception into a tool of political critique: Verfremdung as denaturalization, distanciation, and ideological unveiling (see Brecht 2015). But the efficacy or impact of these gestures of visualizing the conventional as a scandal has become less evident in an age in which—in Eve Sedgwick’s forceful words—the “detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure” has become methodologically consensual, while social violence has become “hypervisible,” sometimes “exemplary spectacle” rather than “scandalous secret” in the first place (140, 143). In the age of Abu Ghraib and unabashed Trumpian hate, what is the point? While

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gladly staging his superiority, God refuses to further help the struggling narrator with answering this question. As indicated in this dialogue, neither the monotheistic God nor the narrator come across as unconditionally authoritative and reliable in Otoo’s novel. Even as they both repeatedly indicate ethical and political commitments that seem to constitute social justice orientations, neither is above the fray of ordinary beings. When God slowly sheds the appearance of old age in an ongoing transformation during the conversation at hand, he vainly admires himself (228–229). Divine authority, the novel makes clear, is asserted in the realm of cultural representations of religion: when the narrator denounces God’s old-man-in-white entrance as “cliché,” he justifies it as “opera” (223). God’s changeability does open up alternative imaginations: when they take the form of a breeze (a feminine noun in the German original), the narrator uses female pronouns (127). But God also seems moody and elusive: a “jester” (Spaßvogel, 230) as much as a prospective guarantor of heavenly justice. For the narrator, the task of assessing their own agency becomes ethically even more charged in the third scenario of Otoo’s novel, the central position of which is indicated by the fact that it provides the book’s title: in the concentration camp, the narrator is materialized as Ada’s room. This scenario is further foregrounded by the novel’s one (and only) more extensive deployment of the outlined graphic spacing technique: in the narration of Ada’s 1945 death, it stretches across several pages (122–124). The 1945 Ada has been traumatized beyond measure by her forced displacement and dispossession. As her body has become “the property of the Reich” (Reichsbesitz), exploited doubly for sex work and syphilis experiments on the prisoners, she has mostly lost the ability to feel pain in the present along with her history and any sense of futurity (27–28). Even the memory of any home has become a mere “fading relation to Poland” (31).14 In a dream sequence later in the novel that connects the different Ada scenarios, the reader learns some more about that fading relation: a mother who enjoyed drink and flirtation and who refused to show shame for having four children out of wedlock, an “asociality” verdict (165), the place marker Brwilno, and a deportation scene. But for the most part, the 1945 scenario remains indexed to the “brothel room” in the concentration camp, a materialization that our narrator, once more, did not choose and at first resents more than the episode as a door knocker: in 1945, they explicate, they were 14  With this emphasis on the loss of a “home” and the rights over one’s body, the scenario resonates with Mbembe’s characterization of the slave’s status (2019, 74). In designing this configuration, Otoo subtly intervenes into heightened controversy in the contemporary German public sphere, in which Mbembe’s and Rothberg’s insistence on multidimensional memory and the linking—not equivalence—of colonial and fascist histories has been accused of relativizing the Holocaust (see Rothberg 2020). In this climate of heightened controversy, even a fictional detail such as the one that Otoo’s Ada is not Jewish—as implied by her forced sex work—can resonate as a provocation. Read a bit more generously, Otoo perhaps just wisely refrains from any attempt to represent the Holocaust in one fictional character, while underlining its historical centrality even in the context of linking colonial and Nazi histories.

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not even able to make noise and “damned to witness everything without being able to prevent anything” (51). With respect to literature’s affordances, the function of bearing witness overlaps with that of foregrounding in the emphasis on giving attention to violent events one cannot prevent, but it has been associated with an ethos very different from that of critical unveiling. In Sedgwick’s terms once more, we might characterize witnessing through its more “reparative” orientation, and its spirit of “love,” albeit in acknowledgment of “a world full of loss” (2003, 128, 138). “My walls,” the narrator circumscribes the task of witnessing, “encompassed Ada’s truth”; the act of telling becomes a “proof of love.”15 In this context, Otoo’s design of the novel’s narrative instance facilitates a defamiliarized echo also of longstanding debates about the impossibility of representing the Holocaust. In a direct reader address, the narrator acknowledges the anticipated question of how a room in a concentration camp can witness events that partially took place outside its walls (52). But perhaps the unnaturalness of the narrative situation (as narratologists might put it) corresponds to that of the historical situation: “torture” and “murder” are “rarely… perceptible,” the narrator suggests, and “definitively not by way of human senses” (54). While thus claiming their relative advantage as a witness, our nonhuman narrator admits to a sense of implication that uncomfortably links them to the “torturers—including the proverbial good ones, who claimed not to have done anything” (262). Another (smaller) moment of graphically supported narrative pause facilitates the admission: “And since I hadn’t prevented anything, I felt accused as well” (262). Simultaneously judging this sensation to be unfair, the narrator proceeds to argue with God, protesting their “complete innocence” as a room in a concentration camp (263). God counters: “there is always a choice” (es gibt immer eine Wahl, 263). God’s existentialist affirmation of agency as a radical ethical command echoes the words that the narrator themselves had used earlier regarding Ada’s death in 1945: she is shot in an attempted escape that reflects her selfless “choice” to protect her friend, the only one for whom she still has feelings (95). Ada saves her friend’s life by distracting the Nazi guards who just discovered the bracelet on her arm, a gift abducted from the camp’s property room (Effektenkammer) by the Kapo with whom she has a transactional relationship (95). With respect to their own agency as a room, to be sure, the indignant narrator keeps protesting: “What could I have done?” (263). God replies: “By yourself? Not much. Admittedly,” before he reiterates his existentialist proclamation (“Nonetheless”) and disappears, once more leaving the narrator to figure out the puzzle by themselves (263). The novel’s explicit discourse on agency opens up a different horizon in this dialogue: how might we think of action in general, and the aesthetic action of literary narration in particular, as a collective undertaking in which nonhumans play a significant role—although not by themselves? In conjunction with Black 15  Otoo (2021, 88, 279). On witnessing the Holocaust, see, e.g., Felman and Laub (1992), Hirsch (2012).

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radical theory conversations on how the degradation of “human beings into commodities” forces us to rethink resistant agency beyond the model of the “volitional subject,” we might turn to Actor Network Theory and new materialism here.16 Rethinking literary production and reception through these approaches, I have suggested elsewhere, facilitates an account in which no actor has the godlike power traditionally ascribed to authors and certain narrators, but in which the distributed, nonsovereign agency of characters and readers along with all kinds of narrators, authors, and many others can nonetheless be conceptualized as significant (e.g., Breger 2018). Otoo’s narrator, for their part, finds an empowering answer to their crippling sense of non-agency when they are, finally, allowed to choose what object they would like to become next. “Something that brings joy,” the narrator responds spontaneously (139). “[A]utonomously” (selbstbestimmt, 264), they then emphasize (perhaps all-­ too) proudly, the narrator picks the form of the “sparkling brand-new British passport” that makes Ada’s eyes light up as she clasps it with both hands after landing in Heathrow in 2019 (179). Ironically, she arrives on the very day on which the British government will lose its first vote on Brexit, which highlights the fragility of the narrator’s power along with its utter significance. Surprised about the “recognition” they receive from Ada, the narrator later wonders: a passport surely couldn’t be better than a human? (231). Upon getting Ada into the EU, the narrator further concludes that such a passport control is a “genius invention,” wondering how “the story”—or “history” (the German Geschichte translates as both)—would have ended had it occurred to Ada’s mothers, Totope’s community leaders, to institute a comparable procedure on their beach upon the arrival of the Portuguese (184). In this way, the narrator’s newfound sense of agency indicates a bigger project of reimagining history through the agency of narration.17 Of course, it would be correct to refute my reading’s metaleptic play with narrative agency— between the plot and narration levels of Otoo’s text—as partly a fantasy. Novels do not have the power of legal documents, and literary scholars should not let themselves be tempted to ignore such crucial genre boundaries in sharing a passport narrator’s jubilant intoxication with their momentary power. However, such recognition of reality does not in turn demand that we declare literature’s nonhuman agency in society’s actor networks to be entirely insignificant.18 Otoo’s novel begins to claim such imaginative agency in facilitating access to realms of historical possibility—not as but like a passport—with its epigraph, which introduces the “Sankofa” concept from the Adinkra language of the 16  Lam (2018, 369), with reference to Moten. See, e.g., Latour (2005), Bennett (2010); and Felski (2015) for literary theory. 17  Adelson conceptualizes Adas Raum as part of a contemporary reworking of the genre of the “epic” novel, which paradoxically aims to explore social totality through open forms (2022, 275), with reference to Matthew Miller, who in turn references Georg Lukács and Franco Moretti. 18  In turn, passports are not omnipotent, either. As a passport, the narrator is “a promise” but not Ada’s “identity” (187); and they cannot prevent that Ada is directed to the line for non-EU citizens at the airport based on her physical appearance (190).

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Asante: “Turn around and fetch it! It is not forbidden to turn around and get what you forgot. Learn from your past.”19 The Sankofa figure, which is traditionally visualized as a bird turning its neck to feed an egg on its back (or pluck it from its back), has been compared to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, but it offers a much more forceful emphasis on the agency entailed in the turn to the past as an intervention into present and future histories. In Susan Arndt’s comparative reading of the two figures, the Sanfoka concept is, in fact, “all about agency” in that it entails “an active decision-making about which memories (as narrations about the past) to choose” (2017, 10). Following the epigraph, the novel’s table of contents translates the multidirectional movement at stake into the notion of temporal “loops.”20 In unfolding its human and nonhuman characters’ loops through space and time, the novel imaginatively reworks hegemonic modern European concepts of universal history developed through linear temporalities, but does so without forfeiting a futural orientation. Its project of learning from and rewriting history is oriented at a vision of justice (see Otoo 2020a)—albeit not one guaranteed by a sovereign God or human author or narrator designed in His image. On the level of plot, Adas Raum unfolds this orientation as a project of restitution: the goal of eventually returning the golden fertility bracelet that circulates through the different narrative scenarios. This project is intertwined with the narrator’s own quest to become a “human” or “living being” (174, 138): the novel’s alternating use of both words indicates the force of humanism, perhaps especially against the backdrop of historical legacies of commodification, along with a more encompassing vision of human-nonhuman life worlds. In any case, our narrator is preoccupied—or as God charges, “obsessed”—with the task of ensuring the bracelet’s proper transfer in each scenario, because God has promised that all they need to do is “return the bracelet to its right place” (235, 192). Even the narrator’s goal of bringing joy as a passport involves some calculation about their own advancement. The trouble is: while trying to diligently follow orders, our narrator does not initially seem to understand what would be right. In 1459, they are all intent on passing on the bracelet to the Portuguese colonizer, and in 1848, they operate under the assumption that Lord William is to get it. In the above-cited conversation about the narrator’s door knocker agency, God eventually challenges that conviction: he points out that Lizzie’s holding onto the bracelet actually facilitated some social redistribution, just as Ada’s death made her lose her job (228). Should we blame the narrator’s prolonged ignorance on God’s aloofness and failure to communicate—not to mention model—a vision of justice? We probably could—although Otoo’s God just doesn’t care about whether we “believe” in them “or not” (240). According to the 2019 Ada, the “much more interesting question” is whether “God really believes in us” (241). 19  See Colvin (2022) on the novel’s “archive of possible memories” and “subjunctives of possibility” (152, 141). 20  For a detailed reflection on this reimagining of temporality, see Colvin (2022).

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Instead of improving their skill in following orders, the narrator needs to learn to “question the usual procedure” (43). And Ada for her part needs to learn by remembering her lives, as God underlines with a brief appearance as the Sankofa bird (130). In other words: rather than faith in God, restitution—or more generally the work of justice and futurity—requires collective action. In fact, the narrator insists, it will not succeed if “even a single being refuses to do their homework” (282). Adas Raum unfolds this premise in its tongue-in-cheek tone, which foregrounds the work of literary figuration (without tilting into an oppositional irony that might undo its significance): the role of the uncooperative “villain” refusing to do their homework (282) is assigned to Guilherme/ William/Wilhelm across the novel’s historical scenarios. The German name is shared by two characters: an SS officer in 1945 and his aging son in 2019. The looping returns of villainy in these men drive home the point that history’s possible arc toward justice is not guaranteed from above. The 2019 Wilhelm prefers the company of Abrotsiri men, although, the narrator mocks, he does not even understand the Ghanaian term for white people (285).21 Wilhelm, who found the bracelet in a box in his basement “full of objects from the Nazi period,” looks “proud” as he tells God of his decision to facilitate its public exhibition as “part of our cultural heritage” (286). The problem here is not just that he does so for a fee, as the narrator keeps pointing out, but also in the pronoun “our” and its pseudo-universalist gesture of appropriation. Wilhelm claims that the intended “public” includes “all humans” (286). As many of Otoo’s German readers will associate, the fictional dialogue echoes public controversy around the colonial possessions of German museums, including a heated debate on the Humboldt Forum in the rebuilt Prussian palace in the center of Berlin. The Humboldt Forum has been championed as developing “global perspectives” for Berlin by presenting its non-European collections, including the so-called ethnological ones (i.e., African, Asian, indigenous American, and Oceanian objects, see Reichert 2020). For once, God’s reaction is anything but aloof. When Wilhelm, being pressed, specifies that he means humans from “Asia, from Africa, … From the whole world!,” God rages, with an emphasis on each single word and accompanied by thunder: “Humans! To! Whom! Entry! Into! Europe! Is! Being! Denied!” (287). Any claim to universalism is but a sham as long as humans (and nonhuman actors?) from different parts of the world are not granted equal mobility and access to the treasures of the world—including those that European colonizers abducted from today’s Ghana. That is why in the novel’s fictional restitution plot, Ada has to be sent to Wilhelm in 2019 (287). The two of them meet in the context of Ada’s grinding search for an apartment, exacerbated by her unintended pregnancy and the daily racisms she encounters. In the novel’s dramatic showdown, Wilhelm collapses when he sees the image of the bracelet 21  On the novel’s decentering of the linguistic privilege of non-immigrant European readers, see Korte and Mair (2021).

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in an exhibition catalog Elle had swiped earlier in the apartment search, while the narrator is losing their ability to perceive what is happening—an apparent indication of their imminent transformation into a living being.22 In the final chapter and epilogue narrated by Ada, she ends up at the hospital with Wilhelm where he claims she was his daughter and offers to bestow the bracelet on her, only to erupt in rage when she points out that he cannot give away what does not belong to him (310). While Ada’s boyfriend Cash, who had failed to hear her earlier No to the sex she was not ready for, patiently tries to make amends, she goes into labor and gives birth to a child whom she embraces as “my future” despite her lingering rage at Cash (315). In the novel’s concluding sentence, it seems to be the child also who is identified as “our treasure”— although the image of the bracelet also remains in Ada’s potential view, in the catalog in Elle’s lap (317). In the ongoing positional exchanges and transformations between nonhumans and humans, the novel’s less than definitive resolution thus unfolds a promise of futurity and imagined historical transformation toward justice through a reproductive metaphor. As Colvin has emphasized, Otoo’s deployment of this metaphor queers the usual heteronormative imaginary: while the future of the heterosexual relationship remains uncertain, the Afro-German women whom Ada also met during the apartment search emphasize expanded communities of female kinship and care—of plural mothers, before-mothers, and sisters (257; see Colvin 2022, 163–164). When Ada counters Wilhelm’s “our” with her own first person plural “We” in the showdown, the pronoun probably refers to this transgenerational community, looping back to the precolonial West African scenario (296). To be sure, the reader may have also learned that (individual or collective) identity is in important ways not permanent. Earlier in the novel, the narrator reported on how God unceremoniously explains the novel’s cosmo-theological order: think of the production of sausages as the “partition of a mass” in which “lively personalities, oddball preferences and contradictory habits” are all assembled in a continuum before being cut, accidentally and differently each time, in the production of temporary living beings (129). The narrator further advises us not to focus on pain and blood but simply on the precedence of unity over division. As the novel’s ending emphasizes, this does not diminish the historical significance of these divisions, but it does provide an orientation at imagining a world beyond the “categorizing of humans” (129). To conclude, Otoo’s complex novel engages multidirectional memories of heterogeneous, layered histories of forced displacement and mobility connecting colonialism, slavery, twentieth-century fascism, and today’s 22  The novel does not say so definitively, but there is also a preceding indication of the narrator’s subsequent learning about human feelings (287). My spontaneous reading was that they are born as Ada’s child here at the end of the novel, but Adelson also presents a forceful argument for the possibility that they merge with Ada: “a re-integration of voice and perspective” that undoes the earlier dissociation of perspective and voice produced by historical violence, most starkly in the 1945 scenario (2022, 286).

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(heterogeneous) flows of migration to rewrite world histories “out of the intimacies of continents” (Stan, with reference to Lisa Lowe 2015). Literature’s ability to imagine history differently in fictionalizing real-world memories is theorized as the (collective) interplay of multiple actions in the novel’s explicit discourse on narration. Thus, the narrative undertaking may involve acts of protection by way of an object’s resistance against their violent deployment by humans. It may include acts of foregrounding violences that are, perhaps, no longer conventionally veiled in twenty-first-century regimes of visibility but still require emphasis, time and again, to interrupt habitual (non-)perception. It will include bearing witness to the racialized, gender-, and classbased necropolitics of forced displacement and exploitation as well as blocked mobility that distributes life chances unequally on the fragile planet we inhabit. Finally, this narrative undertaking will deploy the power to provide access to different—possible—historical realms. This may include futural orientations at scenes of restitution along with imaginative defamiliarizations of the enormous, if unstable, power of things like passports and the dispositifs of border control that surround them. As long as Abrotsiri men (and women) have the power to prevent people from around the world to even visit the treasures stolen by their historical predecessors, we may have to imagine God’s loud thundering in unending rage. But if that thundering is to change anything, the novel also insists, we all have to cooperate in acting toward justice.

Bibliography Adelson, Leslie A. 2001. Against Between: A Manifesto. In Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi, 244–255. Rotterdam: Nai Publishers. ———. 2015. Literary Imagination and the Future of Literary Studies. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 89 (4): 675–682. ———. 2022. Experimental Voice and Anti-Racist Narrative in Contemporary German Literature: Alexander Kluge’s Colonial Miniatures and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Epic Adas Raum. Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch 21 (2022): 259–296. Arndt, Susan. 2017. Dream*hoping Memory into FutureS: Reading Resistant Narratives about Maafa by Employing FutureS as a Category of Analysis. Journal of the African Literature Association 11 (1): 3–27. Beauchemin, Chris, ed. 2018. Migration between Africa and Europe. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 2015. Brecht on Theatre, 3rd ed., ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn. London: Bloomsbury. Breger, Claudia. 2018. Cosmopolitanism, Controversy, and Collectivity: Zadie Smith’s Networked Narration. In Edinburgh Companion to Narrative Theories, ed. Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol, 83–98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Colvin, Sarah. 2022. Freedom Time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum. German Life and Letters 75 (1): 138–165. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2001. Schwarze Deutsche. Der Diskurs um Rasse und nationale Identität 1890–1933. Frankfurt: Campus. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Göktürk, Deniz. 2021. Translations from the Poetic Archives of Migration. Transit 13 (1): 71–78. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Honeck, Mischa, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann, eds. 2013. Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914. New York: Berghahn. Koepsell, Philipp Khabo. 2015. Editorial. The Afropean Contemporary: Literatur- und Gesellschaftsmagazin, 5–7. Berlin: epubli GmbH. Korte, Barbara, and Christian Mair. 2021. Beyond the Anglosphere: Some Thoughts on Why Anglistics Should Consider Contemporary Literature in German. Preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356267391. Lam, Joshua. 2018. Black Objects: Animation and Objectification in Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales. College Literature 45 (3): 369–398. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Layne, Priscilla. 2018. Afrofuturism in Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien. German Life and Letters 71: 511–528. Lennox, Sara, ed. 2016. Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oguntoye, Katharina, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz, eds. 1986. Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte. Frankfurt: Fischer. Otoo, Sharon Dodua. 2012. The Things I Am Thinking About While Smiling Politely: Novella. Münster: edition assemblage. ———. 2014. Synchronicity. Münster, edition assemblage. ———. 2016. Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin. https://bachmannpreis.orf.at/v3/ stories/2773423/. ———. 2020a. “Some Kind of Tomorrow”: Honouring the Visions of Black Feminist Creative Authors. Goethe Annual Lecture, Goethe Institute, London. YouTube, November 19. https://youtu.be/Z0rDEU2kGvk. ———. 2020b. Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin / Herr Gröttrup Takes a Seat / Herr Gröttrup Sits Down: Fiction. Still Magazine, June 15. https://stillmagazine. org/press. ———. 2021. Adas Raum: Roman. Frankfurt: Fischer. ———. 2022. Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin: drei Texte. Frankfurt: Fischer.

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Reichert, Kolja. 2020. Humboldt Forum: Ein imperiales Museum, das keines sein will. Zeit online, 17 December. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ———. 2020. Comparing Comparisons: From the “Historikerstreit” to the Mbembe Affair. Geschichte der Gegenwart, September 23. https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/ comparing-­comparisons-­from-­the-­historikerstreit-­to-­the-­mbembe-­affair/. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University. Press. Shklovksy, Viktor. 2004. Art as Technique. In Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd ed., 15–21. Malden: Blackwell. Stan, Corina. 2022. On Europe: A Philosophical History. The Point 27 (Summer): 215–227. https://thepointmag.com/criticism/europe-­a-­philosophical-­history/. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University. Weber, Beverly. 2016. The German Refugee “Crisis” after Cologne: The Race of Refugee Rights. English Language Notes 54 (2): 77–92.

CHAPTER 17

Comparing Migrations? Russian German Jewish Writers on the “Refugee Crisis” Katja Garloff

The contemporary writers Vladimir Vertlib and Julya Rabinowich were born in Leningrad and came to Vienna with a wave of Russian-Jewish emigration that began in 1970 and lasted for about a decade. The wave was preceded by decades of Soviet antisemitism and was enabled by a relaxation of Soviet emigration policy. As the USSR opened its borders for a limited number of its Jewish citizens who were officially allowed to migrate to Israel via Austria (though many eventually settled in the United States), the city of Vienna became, as Vertlib writes in one of his novels, the “turntable of eastern emigration” (Vertlib, 1999, 30). This migration wave of the 1970s has to be distinguished from the more recent wave of Russian-Jewish emigration that began with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and that brought over two hundred thousand Jewish Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) to post-reunification Germany. While the quota refugees were usually able to sustain a relationship with their former homelands and even keep their old passports, the migrants of the previous wave had to contend with strong political reprisals and had virtually no opportunity to return once they had left the Soviet Union. In view of these differences, it is interesting that both Vertlib and Rabinowich began to publish literary texts only after the arrival of the quota refugees in Germany and that the public interest in these refugees has always played a

K. Garloff (*) Reed College, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_17

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role in the reception of their works. Rabinowich herself has promoted this interest by calling herself, erroneously, a Kontingentflüchtling in articles and interviews.1 Vertlib has addressed the fate of the quota refugees in several of his novels, especially in the widely acclaimed Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (The peculiar memory of Rosa Masur, 2001) and even some of his more autographical works give the protagonist a quota-refugee lineage. The publication and reception history of Vertlib and Rabinowich shows that literature can function as a resonance chamber in which earlier experiences of flight and exile can be rethought in light of new historical developments and/or can be invoked to comment on such developments. Both authors initially drew on the migration histories of their own families but subsequently turned to other forms of migration and increasingly embraced global perspectives. Notably, they intervened in the debates around the so-called refugee crisis both through their literary writing and through their civic and professional engagement. Rabinowich, who for several years worked as an interpreter in therapy sessions with traumatized refugee children, wrote a young adult novel, titled Dazwischen: Ich (2016a; In-between: I), about a Muslim child refugee whose home country has been ravaged by civil war. And in Vertlib’s 2018 novel Viktor hilft (Victor helps), the protagonist, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who bears autobiographical traces, volunteers in a Salzburg transit camp for refugees mostly from the Middle East. In what follows, I analyze the complex layering of migration narratives in these and other works by Russian German Jewish writers who have responded to the European “refugee crisis.”2 In addition to Vertlib and Rabinowich, I discuss three authors who came to Germany as Jewish quota refugees in the 1990s—namely, Olga Grjasnowa, Marina Frenk, and Sasha Marianna Salzmann. Jews in contemporary Germany are, in contrast to many other minoritized groups, typically not first and foremost perceived as migrants by the general public, even though the great majority of them have a Migrationshintergrund (migration background). Yet like their counterparts in Austria, contemporary Russian Jewish authors living in Germany have published multilayered migration narratives that also include depictions of recent refugees from the Middle East. Indeed, all of these authors share a notable tendency to connect and compare different migratory experiences, to relate their individual and familial experiences of migration to those of other social groups. My analysis of recent Russian German Jewish literature has a twofold purpose: (1) To describe the precise ways in which literary texts connect and compare diverse historical experiences of flight and migration. This may happen 1  See Rabinowich (2016b), “Mir war es wichtig, schnell Deutsch zu lernen” and “Zurück in die Zukunft.” 2  I refer to these authors collectively as “Russian German Jewish writers” with the understanding that Russian indicates that the writers came from the (former) Soviet Union, whether from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, or other Soviet republics, that is, Russian refers to a language rather than an exact geographical origin. German refers to their language of writing. Jewish indicates that the authors identify as Jewish or at least publicly respond to such an identification.

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through the interaction between literary characters, the use of historical references, or the presence of a narrator with a migrant background. One modality of comparison, which I introduce toward the end of my essay, is the perception and construction of similarity, that is, a relationship between two entities that are neither identical to nor completely different from each other. (2) To discuss what constitutes an effective literary-political response to the refugee crisis. I first trace a thematic shift in recent literature from a concern with narrative empathy to a focus on law and politics. I subsequently introduce the concept of postmigration, which suggests that the literature of migration is politically most effective not where it summons legal principles—which always harbor the danger of turning the “refugee” or the “migrant” into an ontological category—but where it challenges the very demarcation line between migrants and non-migrants.3 The chapter is structured around the interpretation of five recent novels, which illustrate the range of comparative perspectives in contemporary Russian German Jewish writing and the political imperatives derived from these: in Dazwischen: Ich, Rabinowich adopts the perspective of a Muslim girl whose specific cultural background and social experience remain oddly vague to represent migration as a universal experience with which readers can empathize. In contrast, Vertlib conjures in Viktor hilft the enigmatic figure of an African teenage migrant to call into question the possibility of empathy across cultural, religious, and experiential boundaries. Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017; trans. as City of Jasmine) is less concerned with narrative empathy than with the legal status of two Syrian refugees, offering a political response to the refugee crisis that has been praised by literary critics. However, the comparison between Frenk’s Ewig her und gar nicht wahr (2020; Long ago and not at all true) and Salzmann’s Außer sich (2017; trans. as Beside Myself ) shows that privileging the political thus defined may harbor its own problems. These two novels, which establish new transgenerational connections as they relate the migratory experiences of their Russian Jewish protagonists to those of their ancestors, each feature one passage on the recent wave of refugees from West Asia and North Africa. While the demand for a new asylum law in Ewig her goes hand in hand with Eurocentrism and an abstraction of migrant experience, Außer sich is more subtly—and more profoundly—political in that it adopts a postmigrant perspective that transcends the very demarcation line that divides populations into “migrants” and “non-migrants.” Außer sich also offers an example of the paradigm of similarity as it draws attention to the ways that the lives and experiences of literary characters of Russian Jewish, Turkish German, and Syrian origins resemble each other despite their undeniable differences.

3  The prefix “post-” in this case indicates a conceptual rather than a chronological framework. In other words, postmigration does not refer to a time when migration is over but to the ways that societies negotiate processes of diversification and new claims to belonging in the wake of migration. For this conception of postmigration, see Foroutan (2021) and Schramm et al. (2019).

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Julya Rabinowich and Vladimir Vertlib In her 2016 Dazwischen: Ich, Julya Rabinowich draws on the generic conventions of young adult fiction, which tends to focus on universal problems such as first love, family issues, and struggles with authority, to render the experience of trauma and migration relatable. The novel is written from the perspective of Madina, a 15-year-old Muslim girl who witnessed the killing of her best friend in a bombing attack and later fled with her family from their war-stricken home country, which remains unnamed.4 Her story is ultimately not so different from the one Rabinowich told in her autobiographically inspired literary debut Spaltkopf (2008, trans. as Splithead)—that is, it is the story of a refugee who is able to inhabit places of transit and dwell in the in-between.5 The family currently lives in a refugee shelter, but Madina looks forward to the new apartment in which they plan to move after receiving asylum. She serves as her family’s translator with school and government administrations and as a cultural mediator. While her parents fear the loss of their traditions, Madina envisions a future in the new country and begins to question traditional customs such as the preferential treatment of boys. On a thematic level, the novel depicts the development of transcultural bonds, in particular the friendship between Madina and her classmate Laura that helps Madina adjust to the new country. The friendship appears to be grounded in the “secrets” both girls harbor, that is, the memories of traumatic, incomprehensible, shame-inducing experiences they are reluctant to share with others (Rabinowich 2016a, 62). In Laura’s case, it is the circumstance under which her father left the family (he once injured her mother in a violent fit) that ostracized her in the past and now enables her to establish a bond with Madina the refugee. In Madina’s case, these secrets include the story of her enigmatic and reclusive aunt Amina, who had married against the will of her family and whose husband was murdered during the war. Amina holds Madina’s father responsible for her sufferings and seeks to avenge herself through all sorts of meanness. Interestingly, Amina’s husband was called “Amir,” which is a multilingual and multinational name that derives either from the Arabic word for “prince” or from the Hebrew word for “treetop,” suggesting that Amina’s marriage might have crossed religious lines. Madina grasps the significance of Amina’s story, which reveals the rifts within the family and confounds the line between friends and enemies, without ever getting to the bottom of it. Dazwischen: Ich suggests that such unspoken family secrets are the foundation of a friendship across ethnic, cultural, and religious boundaries. On a formal level, the novel’s conspicuous lack of cultural, historical, and geographical references reflects an attempt to promote transcultural empathy by communicating the experience of flight and migration to readers from all 4  Rabinowich’s novel Dazwischen: Ich is based on her theater play Tagfinsternis, which premiered in 2014. While the play focuses on the problems of the adults, the novel adopts the perspective of Madina. On Tagfinsternis, see Danielczyk. 5  For an interpretation of Rabinowich’s and Vertlib’s literary debuts, see Garloff (2022, 117–136).

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kinds of backgrounds. In the absence of place names, the reader knows neither where Madina came from nor where exactly she is now. This ignorance reflects Madina’s own lack of understanding of the political situation in her home country. She recalls overhearing conversations in her hometown—“They mentioned the names of countries I did not know” (Rabinowich 2016a, 94)—and remembers social conflicts in similarly vague terms: suddenly there were odd rifts between the people, some neighbors were no longer greeting her, and others began to disappear. The inward turn toward the end of the book, in which Madina imagines traversing a forest, reaching the sea, and embarking on a ship, further deterritorializes her story, as do the allusions to fairytales at the very beginning: “I come from Everywhere. I come from Nowhere. From behind the seven mountains. And even further away. There, where Ali Baba’s thieves would not have wanted to live. Not anymore. Too dangerous” (Rabinowich 2016a, 7). What the novel depicts on the level of the plot—a cross-cultural friendship based on family secrets that are never fully explained— it reinforces through its narrative style and reader engagement. By bracketing the cultural and geographical specificity of migration, Rabinowich invites readers from different backgrounds to empathize with a refugee child. In his 2018 Viktor hilft, Vladimir Vertlib invokes the figure of the refugee child to a different end, namely to mark the limits of transcultural empathy. The novel draws on the author’s own experiences with migration, both as a child immigrant in Vienna and as an adult volunteer in a refugee camp, to call into question the idea that we can fully understand the experience of others.6 Viktor hilft is prefaced by a poem titled “The Border,” which depicts the impossibility of truly knowing other people: “But I know / The others only the way / One knows a house / The gates of which you pass by / intuiting its life / without comprehending // We hand each other / Words / Like keys / They do not fit / And unlock nothing.” The poem’s author, Tamar Radzyner, was a Polish Jewish poet who survived Auschwitz and in 1959 migrated with her family to Vienna to escape Polish antisemitism. Her similes representing others as closed houses and of words as ill-fitting keys return several times in Vertlib’s text, casting doubt on Viktor’s ability to alleviate the plight of Middle Eastern and African refugees in the transit camp, where he helps them cross the border from Austria to Germany. Already the first pages of the novel, which alternate between the perspectives of Viktor the child and Viktor the adult, suggest that the memories of his own arrival in Vienna do not help Viktor access the inner life of a refugee child to whom he offers treats. His perspective remains purely external when he observes “how the child’s cheeks and ears turned red” (Vertlib 2018, 9). Here and throughout Viktor hilft, child and teenage migrants come to embody the limits of transcultural empathy. The most important of these is the South Sudanese teenager Arok, who is illiterate and speaks only his native language 6  On Vertlib’s work as a volunteer during the refugee crisis, see his “Auslass der Flüchtlinge.” Some sentences of this report are repeated verbatim in Viktor hilft.

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and a few phrases of English and Arabic and is therefore even more isolated than the other refugees. Viktor first provides him with clothes in the transit camp near Salzburg and later meets him again in a refugee shelter in Germany, where Arok’s face brightens as he points to the coat he earlier received from Viktor. He gives Viktor a seashell, apparently out of gratitude, and begins to speak in his native language, but at this point Viktor quickly goes away, a move that remains unexplained (Vertlib 2018, 203). At the end of the novel, Arok tries to take his own life by jumping from the roof of a newly built home for asylum seekers that burnt down during a right-wing demonstration. He survives, but rather than rush to his help, Viktor once again realizes his own limitations: Only now the stiffness of Viktor’s limbs passes. He briefly considers whether he should follow the paramedics and tell them that he knows Arok. He could take him into his arms, could encourage him, could take off his warm winter coat and place it around the young man’s shoulders. He could … But he cannot. (Vertlib 2018, 282)

The laconic comment on Viktor’s inability to act—“But he cannot”—forms an anti-climactic conclusion to the drawn-out scene of Arok’s attempted suicide, which occurs as if in slow motion. The novel provides no real explanation for Viktor’s paralysis at the sight of Arok; it simply creates the impression of insurmountable distance between the two. Ultimately, Viktor’s encounters with lonesome young migrants are an ironic refutation of the novel’s title—Viktor hilft—by showing that Viktor cannot do much to help them. In a recent article, Stuart Taberner has argued that Viktor hilft offers a critique of Western humanitarianism that remains however rather limited. While the novel illustrates the inadequacy of state support for refugees and exposes the dark side of empathy—which often springs from self-centeredness and/or hinges on the other’s likeability— Vertlib fails to point to a political solution. Part of the problem is that Viktor’s encounters with present-day antisemitism, the flashbacks to his family’s past persecution, and the recollections of his own uneasiness as a Jewish immigrant in postwar Austria serve to establish the Holocaust and the ensuing mass displacement as a reference frame for the refugee crisis of the present. But this frame of reference tends to preempt the stories of contemporary refugees and overshadow their predicament rather than help articulate a compelling political response.7 I would argue, however, that Vertlib does more than expose the limits of transcultural empathy—namely, that he develops alternative models of how 7  See Taberner, “Narrative and Empathy.” In his article, Taberner also mentions Michael Rothberg’s (2009) widely acclaimed book Multidirectional Memory, which shows how the public memory of the Holocaust has facilitated the recognition and the representation of other histories of mass violence. Taberner’s implicit argument is that references to the Holocaust mostly lack such a generative power in the novels of Vertlib (2017) and Grjasnowa, and I agree with him on that point. One may add here that the Holocaust is overall less central in Russian German Jewish writers than in many other German Jewish writers, in part because the former came from a different memory culture, one that focused more on the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany than on Jewish victimhood during the Holocaust.

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people of different migratory backgrounds may understand and/or help each other. In Viktor hilft, transcultural empathy and solidarity emerge as a possibility in a protracted and non-reciprocal communication that requires an awareness of boundaries. One example is the reminiscences triggered by Arok’s seashell, which continues to sit on Viktor’s desk, reminding him of one night in the Austrian transit camp during which he first met Arok and, for a host of reasons, experienced intense feelings of shame and self-doubt. If this encounter did not initiate a dialog with Arok in the past, it now ushers in a different kind of verbal exchange, one in which the boundaries between the speakers get increasingly blurred—namely, with poet Tamar Radzyner. For the similes of the locked house and the ill-fitting word-keys from Radzyner’s poem “The Border” resurface in this scene, not as citations but as thought fragments that course through Viktor’s head, who is unsure about their origins. Viktor also subsequently uses the image of the keyless house in an autobiographical presentation at a cultural festival where he is expected to model successful integration, an instrumentalization of the migrant’s experience which he evidently attempts to forestall with the image of the locked house (Vertlib 2018, 217). To be sure, this exchange differs significantly from the cross-cultural bonds described and performed in Rabinowich. Whereas the adoption of the child refugee’s perspective and the reduction of cultural and geographical specificity in Dazwischen: Ich work to universalize the experience of flight and migration, the image of the other as a locked house and the inability of the Russian Jewish protagonist to access the African migrant’s interiority in Viktor hilft tell a more cautionary tale about the possibility of transcultural empathy. At the same time, Viktor hilft suggests that the encounters between migrants from different ethnic, religious, and generational backgrounds may give rise to new, indirect forms of connection and exchange.

Olga Grjasnowa To a greater degree than Rabinowich and Vertlib, Olga Grjasnowa offers a political critique of Western humanitarianism and the empathy solicited in its service by providing a geopolitical analysis of the refugee crisis and encouraging reflection on the legal frameworks that determine the fates of refugees.8 In contrast to Vertlib’s Viktor hilft, Grjasnowa’s Gott is nicht schüchtern does not focalize the events narrated through the lens of a helper but directly narrates the lives of those who need help—in this case, two Syrian refugees whose stories are related in mostly alternating chapters. While the bifurcated structure draws attention to the contingencies that shape the refugees’ lives, the direct narration imparts a sense of the geographic places in which they stop and the legal restrictions and dehumanizing conditions they have to endure. At the outset, their lives are full of promise: Hammoudi, a plastic surgeon who recently 8  My reading of the novel is very much informed by Stuart Taberner’s excellent analysis of Gott ist nicht schüchtern in his “Narrative and Empathy.”

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graduated from a French medical school and just landed a prestigious position in a Paris hospital, returns to Syria to renew his passport. Amal, a young Syrian actress with a Russian mother (who however divorced her father and disappeared from her life when Amal was 11 years), enjoys her first acting successes on TV and a comfortable middle-class life in Damascus. Over the next few years, they each get involved in the Syrian civil war and are thrown into the grinding existence of refugees, enduring constant endangerment in rotten boats, overcrowded camps, and dilapidated apartments. Denied permission to leave Syria and unable return to France, Hammoudi cares for the wounded in the embattled city of Deir ez-Zour, subsequently escapes to Turkey, embarks to Lesbos on a tiny rubber boat packed with refugees, gets discovered on a train to Paris, and ends up in Berlin. Amal flees Syria after attending demonstrations against the Assad regime and suffering harassment and humiliation in prison— another, more personal reason for her departure is her discovery that her father has a second family. She escapes Syria via Beirut, Istanbul, and Izmir and is rescued by the Italian coastguard when the cargo ship meant to smuggle refugees to Europe sinks in the Mediterranean Sea. Amal arrives in Berlin together with her lover Youssef and baby Amina, whose mother has drowned in the shipwreck, and eventually finds a job presenting in the TV cooking show My Refugee Cooks. The radical divergence of the protagonists’ fates in Berlin once more highlights the contingencies to which they are subject, the presence or absence of certain dangers and protections. The paths of Amal and Hammoudi intersect twice briefly, once in Damascus and once in Berlin, where they run into each other at a Syrian supermarket. They rent a hotel room, confide in each other, may or may not make love, lose contact after a few weeks, and in the end meet radically different fates. Hammoudi is murdered by a neo-Nazi who throws a homemade bomb into his room. Amal flies to Los Angeles to produce a pilot episode of her show for the American market, yet changes her mind upon her arrival and boards another flight back to Berlin, presumably to settle there for good. The laconic and detached manner in which their fates are related is emblematic of the novel’s overall style. As Taberner observes, Gott ist nicht schüchtern neither sentimentalizes the refugee experience nor does it necessarily elicit empathy for its protagonists, who are not characterized in unequivocally positive terms—Hammoudi is at times self-absorbed and nihilistic, Amal privileged and egocentric. Instead of empathy, the novel promotes an attitude toward its characters that is engaged yet distanced, that is concerned with political principles rather than individual fates: “what is required of the novel’s reader is a dispassionate but principled insistence that refugees have rights even when they are not likeable or even ‘deserving’” (Taberner 2021, 256). The fact that Grjasnowa’s narrator remains a distant observer and does deliberately not solicit the reader’s empathy is crucial for the novel’ political impetus. Grjasnowa, who was born in 1984 to a Russian-Jewish family in Baku in Azerbaijan and came to Germany as a Kontingentflüchtling in 1996, drew

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on this migration background in her literary debut Der Russe ist einer der Birken liebt (2012; trans. as All Russians Love Birch Trees), and it arguably still shapes the narrative voice in Gott ist nicht schüchtern. The novel’s narrator occasionally intersperses references to Jewishness and the Holocaust, as when she mentions Claire, the Jewish fiancée Hammoudi left behind in France, or draws analogies between Nazi Germany and the Assad regime. Yet as Taberner keenly observes, these allusions never become a truly significant frame of reference for either the protagonists or the reader, in part because the narrator assumes the perspective of an emotionally detached observer whose most powerful intervention is a “quasi-sociological focus on the structural violence of states and bureaucracies in both sending and receiving countries” (2021, 258). The matter-of-fact descriptions of torture, rape, massacres, and chemical warfare in Syria, and of the bureaucratic processing of refugees and Hammoudi’s brutal murder in Germany, help sustain a focus on systemic violence rather than individual suffering. If the novel solicits a response to such violence, it does so most effectively through references to three well-known works of German exile literature by Anna Seghers, Erich Maria Remarque, and Bertolt Brecht. On her flight to Europe, Amal takes along two books, Seghers’s Transit (1944) and Remarque’s Die Nacht in Lissabon (1962, trans. as The Night in Lisbon, which depict refugees from Nazi Germany anxiously waiting for their transit papers. And the third part of the novel begins by quoting a famous passage from Bertolt Brecht’s 1940 Flüchtlingsgespräche (trans. as Refugee Conversations) that extols the benefits of a legally recognized passport. The invocation of these classics of exile literature in Gott ist nicht schüchtern reconnects the humanitarian concerns of the present to the political campaigns of the immediate postwar era, which among other things led to the ratification of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. Through its intertextual references, the novel calls upon readers to support these existing legal frameworks as well as possible new political initiatives for refugee rights.

Marina Frenk and Sasha Marianna Salzmann But should literary representations of the refugee crisis be considered political only where they advocate for legal reform or stricter adherence to international conventions? The comparison of two additional novels by Russian German Jewish writers that reference the refugee crisis, if only in passing, calls into question the idea that the literature of migration must include explicit appeals to law and politics in order to be politically productive. Marina Frenk’s 2020 Ewig her und gar nicht wahr and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s 2017 Außer sich are both multilayered migration narratives whose protagonists came to Germany as quota refugees when they were children. In telling their family stories, the narrators connect their own migratory experiences with those of their Jewish ancestors, which creates an opportunity to address yet other forms of migration. Both novels feature a section on the recent wave of refugees from

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West Asia and North Africa, yet they differ in the ways that they connect this wave to other migratory experiences and in their overall political impetus. Whereas the political demand voiced in Ewig her hinges upon the abstraction and delimitation of contemporary refugee experience, Außer sich weaves such experience into a web of similar—that is, neither fully identical nor completely different—migratory movements. In Ewig her und gar nicht wahr, Kira, a young artist who evidently suffers from depression and has temporarily given up painting, thinks back to her arrival in 1990s Germany and other moments of her personal and familial history, often traumatic or transformative ones. Motivated by this flashback structure, the novel unfolds as a sequence of scenes set in different times and places: in Chisinau in Moldavia (where Kira spent her childhood), in Berlin (where she lives now with her partner Marc and their son Karl), in Ukraine (where the German front moves closer in 1941), in Haifa (where Kira visits her grandparents in 2008), and a couple of others. The fact that each chapter begins with a designation of time and place underscores the temporal and spatial boundedness of each episode. Frenk herself has stressed the importance of boundaries in creating a sense of home and belonging: “Belonging (Heimat) develops as the human being localizes himself in one place and distances himself from others.”9 Toward the end of the novel, the different times and places begin to intersect, in particular in a vision in which four generations of Kira’s family, three generations of Marc’s family, and Russian and German soldiers gather in a freight train car, “someplace, sometime” (Frenk 207, emphasis in the original). Yet such moments of achronicity, which according to Frenk reflect Kira’s failed attempt to bring together the experiences and movements of her dispersed family and create a shared identity, do not cancel the novel’s overall tendency toward temporal and spatial demarcation.10 In Ewig her’s commemoration of Jewish and Eastern European displacements, the only reference to the European refugee crisis occurs in a discussion about the ethical responsibilities of journalists, a discussion in which Kira mentions the latest political crises, including the refugee crisis, and Marc develops an idea for a legal reform. He advocates for a change in the German constitution that would recognize mass migration as an ineluctable fact of history and enable all who desire to come to Europe to do so safely. Marc’s plea for a new asylum law that is not grounded in compassion echoes Olga Grjasnowa’s insistence that the right to immigrate should be codified in the law rather than depend on the goodwill of individuals: “the whole thing has nothing to do with compassion” (Frenk 174). Yet his subsequent explanation also betrays some problems in his vision, including its Eurocentrism and its tendency toward abstraction and equivalency:

9  Picht cites these lines from Frenk’s radio play Jenseits der Kastanien in Frenk and Picht, “Literatur im Dialog” (2021). 10  See Frenk’s remarks in the podcast “Literatur im Dialog.”

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For this recent wave of Syrian war refugees has shown that this is simply a permanent historical possibility: that such a major war breaks out that, in principle, a mass migration follows. For it is precisely that, an Exodus. If one thinks back in history, one can see that this can simply happen, due to environmental catastrophes, expulsions, or, as here, wars. Peoples can shift from one geographical point to another one. (Frenk 174, my emphasis)

In this passage Marc subsumes different migratory movements that may result from war, expulsion, or environmental catastrophe under the umbrella terms of “mass migration” and “Exodus.” His broad generalizations about the causes and consequences of migration culminate in a quasi-geometrical image of widespread population drift. Arguably, the temporal structure of Ewig her is a formal analog to Marc’s abstraction of migrant experience. The novel’s tendency toward temporal and spatial demarcation means that different historical moments are connected through parallelism at best. The text alternates between the present of Berlin and the past of other places with a regularity that mirrors the principle of equivalence on which Marc’s idea for a new asylum law rests. As Marc develops his vision, he also reveals its Eurocentrism, as he wants to conceive of Europe as a “place … that is developed so much further that it has to fear neither unrest within the continent nor immigration because the idea of Europe consists in creating life in peaceful freedom” (Frenk 174; my emphasis). Its idealism notwithstanding, this sentence reinscribes the hierarchical distinction between a developed European center and its underdeveloped margins, insinuating that Europe is, or should be, exempt from the disruptive effects of migration. In contrast, Salzmann’s Außer sich offers a postmigrant outlook that diffuses the distinction between migration and non-migration altogether. The main plot of Außer sich is set in Istanbul, in the period between the Gezi Park protests in May 2013 and the Turkish military coup in July 2016. Genderfluid Alissa/Ali, who migrated as a child with her/his Jewish family from Russia to Germany, travels to Istanbul in search of her/his brother Anton, where she/he gets occasionally drawn into riots and demonstrations. Ali meets Katho, a dancer who is transitioning from female to male, and later begins to take testosterone herself/himself. Interspersed with Ali’s adventures in Istanbul are reminiscences of her/his immigration to Germany and the life stories of her/his Russian Jewish parents and her/his maternal grandparents and greatgrandparents, which Ali apparently reconstructs after returning from Istanbul to Germany. In the second part of the book, two chapters narrate Anton’s experiences in Istanbul from his own perspective, although it is hinted that Ali may have made up these experiences, and perhaps even the figure of Anton itself. Maria Roca Lizarazu has read the novel’s experimental form—its nonlinear narrative, shifts in narrative voice, and dizzying leaps between different times and locations—as a literary performance of non-identity and non-belonging that undermines the very dichotomy between natives and newcomers. Instead of calling for an “integration” of migrants, Salzmann’s novel embraces

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a postmigrant perspective as defined by Naika Foroutan—namely, a “narrative reinterpretation … in which Germanness is perceived as heterogenous and plural as a matter of course” (cited in Roca Lizarazu 2020, 42; p. 10 of 16). Roca Lizarazu also observes that Außer sich defines the self not as bounded and autonomous but as fundamentally relational; the novel is all about encounters, whether real or imagined, actual or missed, possible or impossible. One of these encounters occurs between Anton and Nour, a Syrian refugee who prepares for the arrival of his mother by stealing furniture for the apartment he hopes to share with her. Anton spends time with him until one day Nour is seized by the police and deported back to Syria. This reference to a Syrian refugee in Turkey, a country that during the Syrian civil war granted temporary protection to millions of refugees, is woven into the fabric of the novel in a curiously indeterminate way. It is preceded by a passage on Anton’s relationship with Mervan, a German citizen of Turkish Armenian origins who was tricked by his father into moving back from Germany to Turkey. The narrator hitches the two encounters together by starting the passage on Nour with the sentence “In about the same way (ungefähr so) I got to know Nour.”11 Yet it remains unclear to what kind of parallels between these encounters, or between Mervan and Nour, the “in about the same way” refers: to their propensity for stealing, homosexual activity, and/or sudden disappearance? By beginning the depiction of Nour with a conspicuously vague comparison—“in about the same way”—the novel highlights the very principle of similarity. In recent years similarity has emerged as a new paradigm among scholars who seek to go beyond the binary of identity and difference. Thinking in similarity does not entirely eliminate the category of difference but rather exposes the ideological underpinnings of the talk about opposites, differences, and clashes. Because it blurs clear boundaries and distinctions, thinking in similarity is especially appropriate in an increasingly pluralist world of global entanglements. In contrast to notions of purism and authenticity, “considerations of similarity place more emphasis on the tentative, the transitory, the unclear—on fluid borders, nuances, minimal deviations, fuzziness and vagueness—and define such terms using flexible and polyvalent language” (Bhatti and Kimmich 2018, 9, emphasis in the original). In Außer sich, the serial description of encounters between migrants that are couched in a sense of illegality and precarity allows for the perception of similarities thus understood. Anton, who after his arrival in Istanbul relies on theft and sex work as sources of income, resembles Nour in that he leads a precarious life on the fringes of society. And so does Mervan, with whom Anton shares a few days of intimacy—as well, it appears, a longing for a sister left behind in Germany—until Mervan runs off with the valuables of Aglaja, Anton’s female friend and lover. Recent Russian German Jewish literature that dramatizes the interaction between characters of different migration background is a wellspring of similarity thus understood. Additional examples from the works discussed in this chapter include the 11  Salzmann, Außer sich, 334, my emphasis. The published English translation conveys this vague comparison in a different way: “And that was pretty much how I met Nour” (Salzmann 2020, 289).

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cross-cultural friendship based on family secrets in Rabinowich’s Dazwischen: Ich and the telepathic communication between migrants by means of poetic images in Vertlib’s Viktor hilft. Ali/Anton’s encounters with other migrants in Salzmann’s Außer sich and Marc’s political vision in Frenk’s Ewig her represent two different ways in which literary references to the refugee crisis may usher in political imperatives. Although these two novels at first glance align in their understanding of migration as a historical normality, Außer sich ultimately accomplishes something quite different than the broad generalizations of Ewig her. Salzmann’s novel avoids any simple equation between diverse refugee experiences by creating a constellation of migrant characters who are similar but not equivalent to each other. The encounters between these characters constitute a series with slight variations, one which does not culminate in an abstract image of wholesale human displacement. Highlighting the similarity—rather than identity or difference—between various form of migration, the novel transforms the division between natives and newcomers into an open spectrum where everyone is always on the move, somewhere, somehow. Whereas Marc’s demand for a new asylum law in Ewig her ends up reinforcing existing hierarchies and binaries, including those between Europe and the rest of the world, Außer sich foregoes an explicit appeal to refugee rights in favor of a postmigrant perspective that blurs the clear demarcation line between migrants and non-migrants. Arguably, the postmigrant perspective of Außer sich is a more foundational form of politics than the demand for legal reform voiced in Ewig her. But both novels share the comparative outlook of recent Russian German Jewish literature, thereby adding to a rich archive of literary texts that imaginatively connect past and present experiences of flight and migration. One of my goals in this essay has been to appreciate the full range of political effects in these texts: from expanding the reader’s capacity for empathy to demanding human rights for refugees to challenging the very binaries that relegate migrants to the margins of society.

Bibliography Bhatti, Anil, and Dorothee Kimmich. 2018. Introduction. In Similarity: A Paradigm for Culture Theory, ed. Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich, with the assistance by Sara Bangert, 1–22. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Foroutan, Naika. 2021. Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft: Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie. 2nd, unchanged ed. Bielefeld: transcript. Frenk, Marina. 2020. Ewig her und gar nicht wahr: Roman. Berlin: Wagenbach. Frenk, Marina, and Barbara Picht. 2021. Literatur im Dialog. Podcast of the Selma Stern Zentrum, 22 July 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BObU5Jz8occ&t=6s. Garloff, Katja. 2022. Making German Jewish Literature Anew: Authorship, Memory, and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grjasnowa, Olga. 2012. Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt: Roman. Munich: Hanser. ———. 2014. All Russians Love Birch Trees, trans. Eva Bacon. New York: Other Press. ———. 2017. Gott ist nicht schüchtern: Roman. Berlin: Aufbau. ———. 2019. City of Jasmine, trans. Katy Derbyshire. London: Oneworld Publications.

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Rabinowich, Julya. 2008. Spaltkopf: Roman. Vienna: Edition Exil. ———. 2015. Zurück in die Zukunft. Der Standard, August 1. https://derstandard. at/2000020078821/Zurueck-in-die-Zukunft. ———. 2016a. Dazwischen: Ich. Munich: Carl Hanser. ———. 2016b. Mir war es wichtig, schnell Deutsch zu lernen. Conversation with Katja Lückert. Deutschlandfunk, August 23. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/julya-rabinowich-mir-war-es-wichtig-schnell-deutsch-zu.691.de.html? dram:article_id=363896. Roca Lizarazu, Maria. 2020. ‘Integration ist definitiv nicht unser Anliegen, eher schon Desintegration’: Postmigrant Renegotiations of Identity and Belonging in Contemporary Germany. Humanities 9, (2). https://doi.org/10.3390/h9020042. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Salzmann, Sasha Marianna. 2017. Außer sich: Roman. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2020. Beside Myself, trans. Imogen Taylor. New York: Other Press. Schramm, Moritz et al. 2019. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. New York: Routledge. Taberner, Stuart. 2021. Narrative and Empathy: The 2015 ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Vladimir Vertlib’s Viktor hilft and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern. German Life and Letters 74 (2): 0016–8777 (print); 1468-0483 (online). Vertlib, Vladimir. 1999. Zwischenstationen: Roman. Vienna: Deuticke. ———. 2001. Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur: Roman. Vienna: Deuticke. ———. 2017. Auslass der Flüchtlinge. Das Jüdische Echo (blog). February 7. http:// juedischesecho.at/auslass-der-fluechtlinge-von-vladimir-vertlib/. ———. 2018. Viktor hilft: Roman. Vienna: Deuticke.

CHAPTER 18

Literary Archives and Alternative Futures. Memories of Labor Migration in Contemporary Turkish German Fiction Maria Roca Lizarazu

Introduction: Memories of Work Memory Work

and Counter-­hegemonic

In the essay collection Your Homeland Is Our Nightmare (Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah 2019), activist, journalist, writer, and co-editor of the collection Fatma Aydemir (2019) examines the difficult relationship between (post-) migration and labor. She notes that, despite its huge significance for German economic, social, political, and cultural growth, migrant labor continues to be one of the most undervalued forms of work in the country. While migrant workers share similar socio-economic conditions with other working-class members of German society, they face additional layers of discrimination and exploitation, such as racist denigration and lack of citizenship rights. Aydemir suggests that her fraught relationship with work also has a transgenerational component: as a third-generation member of a so-called guest worker family from Turkey, her refusal to select the career that society deems appropriate for her is a call for emancipation from a legacy of non-recognition and enforced marginalization.

M. Roca Lizarazu (*) University of Galway, Ireland, Galway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_18

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While the continuing “devaluation of the labor, culture, knowledge production, and life” (Doughan 2022) of migrant workers in German society impacts the personal circumstances of migrant(ized) subjects, its repercussions also manifest in collective accounts of German post-war history. Between the 1950s and 1970s, approximately 14 million so-called guest workers entered Germany, 12 million of whom were to return to their countries of origin eventually, after the labor recruitment program was officially halted in 1973 and following considerable encouragement from the German state (Richter 2015). Many of those who stayed brought or started families, changing the demographic and cultural shape of German society: today, approximately 18.6  million people with a so-called migration background live in the country, many of whom are the descendants of former migrant laborers (“Arbeitsmigration nach Deutschland”).1 While the majority of German society was slow and reluctant to acknowledge the contributions of these laborers, scholars and activists have sought to integrate the history of (labor) migration more thoroughly into the national narrative (see Gogos 2021; Plamper 2019; Motte and Ohliger 2004; Göktürk et al. 2007; on Turkish labor migration see Mandel 2008; Chin 2007; Hunn 2005). Plans are also underway to transform Cologne’s Centre for the Documentation and Museum of Migration in Germany, aka DOMiD, into the House of Immigration Society by 2027,2 resulting in what will effectively be Europe’s largest migration museum (Restorff 2022). Post-war Germany’s long-standing neglect of experiences and memories of migration came at a cost, mainly for migrant(ized) and postmigrant populations,3 “bar[ring] the descendants of ‘guest workers’ from fully belonging to the nation” (Brunow 2011, 184). This assessment is supported by memory 1  Fatima El-Tayeb (2011) notes that the label “migrant background” is problematic because it perpetuates non-arrival for migrating subjects and their descendants, as well as for migrantized subjects, reducing them to “a flat, one-dimensional existence in which she or he always has just arrived” (4). 2  DOMiD thus has come a long way from its beginnings as a volunteer organization seeking to document the history of the numerically most significant labor migration movement to Germany, i.e., Turkish migration, in the absence of any official documentation (see DOMiD, “Über uns”). 3  The term “migrantized” is used by, among others, Fatima El-Tayeb (2016) to describe the mechanisms by which certain (often non-white) populations are othered as “foreign” even if they were born in a particular country and do not have first-hand experience of migration. Migrantization forces these populations into a perpetual state of non-arrival and non-belonging (often including non-citizenship) in the imagined and actual community of the nation. The term highlights that categories such as “migration” and “migrant” are not objective but socially and culturally negotiated and can be attached to certain subjects and populations with deeply political effects. The terms “postmigrant” or “postmigration” are used by scholars and activists as a tool and lens to acknowledge and articulate processes of pluralization in societies that have been shaped by largescale migration movements. The aim for many proponents is to promote both epistemological and normative changes, to better accommodate this pluralization. As such, postmigration advocates for a shift in perspective that understands our present-day societies as fundamentally shaped by movement and migration, rather than by a sedentary culture and lifestyle. For more detailed discussions of the term see Foroutan (2019), Gaonkar et  al. (2021), Römhild (2017) and Schramm et  al. (2019). For another chapter that discusses “postmigration,” see Garloff in this volume.

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scholars Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz (2011), who establish a link between cultural memory and access to formal and informal citizenship in Germany, based on the insight that citizenship goes beyond legal status and also encompasses cultural and affective processes and practices of inclusion and exclusion. They highlight that participation in certain cultural memories and imaginaries determines opportunities for belonging and citizenship just as much as legal protocols: “Clearly, full citizenship requires more than legal structures; it requires […] both memory work and affective labor across society” (36). Citizenship on paper is only one aspect of national membership; it needs to be activated and made meaningful through lived, embodied, felt and shared practices of belonging, such as participating in significant collective memories. If certain populations and their experiences are excluded from such shared memories, either because they do not get to contribute or because they are not represented as part of the memory collective, this directly impacts their opportunities for belonging, given that “memory is one of the key scenes of citizenship” (39). Sites of alternative “memory work” are thus sorely needed,4 so that experiences of migrant work(ers) may be integrated more fully into the German national narrative, enabling them to attain full citizenship. This work is counter-­ hegemonic, in that it challenges the status quo and seeks to bring about alternative modes of subjectivity, belonging, and citizenship. Stuart Hall (2016) suggests that the “cultural domain” is a key, albeit not the sole, site where counter-hegemonies can be established (206). He sees the domain of culture as a realm of possibility, where “new positions are opened and where new articulations have to be made” (189f.), which then may translate into wider social and political change. A string of recent “archival engagement[s]” (Sun 2022) with the histories and memories of Turkish labor migration performs such openings in the realm of culture (see also Gezen and Reisoglu 2022; Stewart 2013): the three novels under consideration here—Fatma Aydemir’s Djinns (2022), Dilek Güngör’s Father and I (2021), and Deniz Utlu’s The Indignant Ones (2015)—participate in this broader “revival and reanimation” of the Turkish German archive by means of “creative remembrance” (Göktürk 2022). The three texts offer cultural representations of labor migration in West Germany from an intergenerational perspective and through the lens of family narrative, exploring fiction as a site for the imaginative expansion of dominant citizenship narratives. They also are connected by recurring tropes and themes, interlinking with questions of memory, alternative archives, and new modes of belonging. What makes this fiction-based archival work special is that it is simultaneously past and future-oriented in its quest to (re-)activate forgotten possibilities and unlock “alternative visions of our present and future” (Sun 2022; see also Cho-Polizzi 2022). As such, these authors’ shared attempts to uncover, revive, 4  I borrow the term “Erinnerungsarbeit” [memory work] from Brunow (2011) who herself takes inspiration from Annette Kuhn (187, FN 11).

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and re-imagine “the lost archive of migration” (Utlu 2011) through the creation of literary (counter-)archives resonate with the broader postmigrant project, aiming to develop alternative narratives for a diversifying Germany via a range of media platforms.5 The ways in which they revisit and revive the neglected archives of labor migration thus resonate with the utopian implications of the postmigrant approach (Pultz Moslund et al. 2019), which seeks to uncover and generate new, more inclusive, imaginaries of belonging through a process of “narrative reinterpretation” (Foroutan 2015, 2). This future-oriented, utopian impulse results in artistic “acts of citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen 2008) that open up alternative possibilities of being in the world and with others, while also empowering novel claims to belonging in contemporary, postmigrant Germany.

Legacies of De-Personification In their collaboration A Seventh Man (2010), John Berger and Jean Mohr document the fate of the millions of migrant workers who had moved across Europe in the previous decades, exposing the mechanisms of capitalist exploitation underlying their recruitment. A recurring theme throughout the book is the de-subjectification of migrant laborers through systematic political, social, and cultural disenfranchisement. Turned into commodities, with no citizenship rights, language skills, and meaningful social ties, migrant laborers find themselves in “a situation of almost total unacknowledgement” (191). The novels analyzed here employ the perspective of the second-generation immigrant child to reflect on what this lack of recognition means for (post-)migrant subjectivity, and how it reverberates through the generations, also shaping the nation’s cultural memory more widely. This is most obviously the case in Deniz Utlu’s The Indignant Ones, which centers on the character of Elyas, a son of Turkish migrant workers who came to Germany after the Second World War. Elyas’ life in present-day Berlin unravels after his father falls ill and eventually dies of cancer. Much of the novel depicts Elyas’ personal battle with depression and tentative recovery. Elyas’ personal grief is exacerbated by a lack of social recognition that a loss has occurred in the first place. As an “unacknowledged” subject, Elyas’ father does not feature in the “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) of the nation, and the loss of his life is hence not “grievable” (Butler 2009). This lack of recognition and grievability results in a deep sense of melancholy in Elyas as a second-­ generation migrant; his battle with depression thus goes beyond personal

5  Aydemir and Utlu, for example, also work as journalists, cultural producers, and activists, and they are active on social media.

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psychopathology and is indeed political, in that it responds to historical and discursive practices of exclusion.6 The Indignant Ones illustrates how migrant workers’ lives and bodies were exploited in rebuilding post-war Germany, while they were kept at the physical, social, and cultural margins of society. Their contribution to the so-called economic miracle was never acknowledged, and their memory erased from German post-war and post-unification narratives. Early in the novel, Elyas takes his friends to visit an abandoned attic flat in Berlin-Kreuzberg, an area of the city that used to house many migrant workers. It turns out that this decrepit space was home to migrant workers in the 1970s of whom nothing has remained “except for this bit of sandwich paper on the wall” (15). The injustice that these workers experienced thus remains unaddressed and unrepaired, and these conditions of erasure and de-subjectification have been transmitted through the generations: Elyas’ descent into depression points to a continuing struggle to belong in German society and to perform the role of the good citizen. The novel’s German title, Die Ungehaltenen, might thus not only imply indignation or disgruntlement, but can also be read more literally as “un-gehalten,” i.e., a state of not being held, not being supported and acknowledged. When the Berlin mayor puts on a celebration to mark the 50th anniversary of the German-Turkish recruitment agreement, this further exposes the condition of being “ungehalten.” The event turns out to be an opportunity for the German majority society to celebrate itself and its integration “successes” by publicly parading “good” migrants who have “made it,” rather than acknowledge the contributions of labor migrants. The emptiness of these tokenistic gestures becomes even more apparent when, two-thirds into the novel, news transpires of Nazi attacks on migrant populations in Germany. These are a reference to the murders perpetrated by the National Socialist Underground between 2000 and 2007, which brought to the fore the life-threatening consequences for migrant(ized) subjects of not being fully integrated into the national community. In addition to social, cultural, and political disenfranchisement, Berger and Mohr (2010) note that migrant workers were reduced to a commodity that can be “imported” and “exported” according to the needs of the host country’s economy, and often denied citizenship rights and access to meaningful social bonds. This transformed the migrant laborer into a “set of capacities” (145), erasing the boundaries between what he does for a job and who he is as a

6  The idea that the negative emotions experienced by certain marginalized subjects may fuel critical engagement with wider socio-cultural and discursive conditions is supported by Sara Ahmed’s work, particularly her thoughts on happiness as a “duty” that weights especially heavily on marginalized subjects (2010). Ahmed introduces the figure of the “melancholic migrant” (2010, 121–159), who refuses to let go of the injury caused by, for example, the experience of racist discrimination, thereby becoming alienated from the world surrounding them. I see Utlu’s main character as a variation of this figure; he is a “melancholic postmigrant.” For another chapter that engages with the figure of the “melancholic migrant,” see Sarnelli in this volume.

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person:7 “What he is paid to do reflects what he is” (145). Dilek Güngör’s Father and I engages with this erasure of personhood through the fraught relationship between the narrator Ipek and her father. Ipek’s father, who remains nameless throughout the book, has been forced to identify with his role as a worker to such an extent that this seems to have eclipsed all other aspects of his identity. He has even taken off his wedding ring, lest it should get ruined by the daily manual labor that is the center of his life (21). The daughter has inherited his legacy of “mindless busy bodying” and of physical and mental restlessness: “You need to be diligent, always be doing something, keep your hands busy” (73). The father’s need “to be of use” (2) also manifests in his interpersonal passivity, child-like dependence on the mother, and inability to want or desire anything, as noted by Ipek: “I would have been surprised if, even just for once, you had expressed a wish for anything” (6). The capacity to want something for oneself is an essential component of personhood, also implying agency and the possibility of a different future. Unhappiness with one’s current conditions and a desire for something else can become a seed of transformation. Considering this, Ipek’s efforts to connect with her father and bridge the abyss of intergenerational silence may constitute an attempt to restore his personhood. By seeking to find out who he is and where he has come from, but also what he wishes for, the daughter aims to reinstate her father as more than a commodity or a resource for the labor market.

From Absent Fathers to Intersectional Archives The lack of recognition of the first generation of migrant laborers reaches beyond interpersonal and family relationships, also influencing collective memory. As observed by Rothberg and Yildiz (2011), and, more recently, Esra Özyürek (2023) access to the nation’s cultural memory functions as a central marker of belonging and being barred from certain memories amounts to a form of reduced citizenship. The novels negotiate such compromised citizenships via the trope of the absent father, which surfaces in all three texts: in Güngör’s text, this absence manifests in the father’s silence and the daughter’s inability to talk to him; Utlu’s The Indignant Ones and Aydemir’s Djinns, however, take this trope further by letting the paternal figures die. As previously noted, Elyas’ father passes away from cancer early on into the narrative, and the whole premise of Aydemir’s Djinns is that Hüseyin, father of the Yilmaz-family, dies of a heart attack on the very day that he manages to finally fulfill his life dream, namely return to his native country Turkey and move into his Istanbul flat. These absences have symbolic meaning, offering variations of the trope of the “voiceless ‘guest worker’” (Brunow 2011, 191) and signifying the lack of (self-)representation for the first generation of migrant workers in post-war 7  I am using the masculine pronoun here, as most of the laborers working under the conditions that Berger and Mohr describe—i.e., in factories and doing other kinds of strenuous physical labor—were male. For another essay that engages with Berger and Mohr’s work, see Arsenjuk in this volume.

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German discourse (see also Massiakowska-Osses 2018). This voiceless position of the paternal figures is highlighted further by the use of second-person narration in both Güngör’s and Aydemir’s texts.8 Father and I uses this narrative mode throughout, while in Djinns it is limited to the chapters dedicated to the parental generation. In Father and I, the readers barely get any first-hand information on the father’s thoughts and feelings, except for a few instances of direct speech, as events are filtered through the homodiegetic daughter-­ narrator’s eyes and speculations. The heterodiegetic second-person narrator in Djinns does provide insights into Hüseyin’s and Emine’s inner lives, but, crucially, these are not shared with any of the children, reinforcing Hüseyin’s position as the narrative gap at the novel’s center. The narrative construction of both books thus amplifies voicelessness, as the father figures feature as narratees who do not get to speak for themselves. But is lack of narrative agency all there is to the second-person perspective? In fact, the entire trope of the absent father is read differently by Lizzie Stewart (2015) in her analysis of the 2011 comedy film Alamanya—Welcome to Germany. Here, it is the grandfather (also named Hüseyin Yilmaz) who suddenly dies on a family holiday in Turkey. Stewart interprets this death as “a reflection on generational change” (117), motivating a “shift from lived memory of migration to the broader cultural memory of Turkish guest work” (118). This cultural memory work falls to the following generations; the death of the paternal figures thus makes room for “the third and fourth generation to intervene in, to reconstruct, and even to change the narrative” (115). Read in this way, the absent father figures in all three texts produce narrative gaps, which may allow subsequent generations to step in and develop alternative archives for the future.9 In The Indignant Ones, for example, Elyas aims to build a virtual museum following his father’s death, featuring materials about both the first and the following generations of migrant workers and showcasing “[his] father’s experience of Germany” (85). While Elyas’ plans do not come to fruition, another archive is created by his friend Hekim. Raised and still living in one of the poorest areas of Berlin-Kreuzberg, Hekim uses his music to record the stories of his community. His art also inspires acts of “multidirectional” solidarity (Rothberg 2009), for example when he founds the “Thirty Sixer,”10 a group of (post-)migrant youth who protect themselves and others from Nazi attacks in the immediate post-unification period. The novel thus shows how 8  Second-person narration is difficult to define, due to its boundary-crossing characteristics, and has been explored in detail by Fludernik (1993, 1994a, b). 9  The creation of an alternative archive also comes up in Vater und ich, in which Ipek undertakes an interview-project with first-generation migrant workers to get closer to the lived experience of her father. Compared to Utlu’s and Aydemir’s work, this archive, however, connects less with “multidirectional” acts of memory, which is why I will be focusing on The Indignant Ones and on Djinns. 10  This group is a reference to the existing “36 Boys.” Considered by some as a semi-criminal gang of immigrant youth that was active in the 1980s and 1990s in Berlin-Kreuzberg, others, such as Utlu (“Ins Herz”), perceive them as part of an anti-racist movement of (non-)citizen activists.

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the generational change identified by Stewart may make room for future-­ oriented memory work, linking the migrant worker generation and their descendants to other marginalized and racialized groups in postmigrant Germany. Aydemir’s Djinns also redirects the focus from the first to later generations, aiming to create a more multi-perspectival literary archive of labor migration. While the novel’s first chapter centers on Hüseyin, the following chapters each engage with the perspective of one of his children. The children themselves represent different generational positions and experiences of (post-)migration, ranging from the (supposedly) oldest daughter Sevda, who only came to Germany as a teenager and desperately tries to shake the label “foreigner” (91), to the middle child Peri, who “did not consider herself a part of anything” (182), to the youngest son Ümit, who was born in Germany and experiences his Turkishness as something that mostly is projected onto him by his white, Christian, majority-German environment. Through each of the children’s characters, the question of what it means to be Turkish German is complicated by other issues, be they sexuality and gender (Ümit), gender and racism (Sevda), gender and ethnicity (Peri), or gender, citizenship, and state violence (Hakan). Djinns thus creates a multi-generational and multi-perspectival literary archive of Turkish Germanness from an intersectional perspective, complicating simplistic approaches to Turkish German identity. Despite this multi-­ layered approach, the main characters are also united by shared inter- and transgenerational legacies of “total unacknowledgement.” When Sevda and her children narrowly escape what is most likely a racism-fuelled arson attack, she realizes that the family legacy of de-personification continues, also marking her and her children’s lives as “ungrievable”: “Was that not one of the worst things that could happen to a human—to be annihilated without anyone even noticing?” (135). The depiction of the Yilmaz-children’s fates, all of whom face racist discrimination and violence, resonates with Utlu’s The Indignant Ones, which also links past practices of de-personification to present-day violence against migrant(ized) and racialized subjects. The restoration of personhood and relationality through alternative memory work and archives, as staged in and by way of these novels, thus becomes paramount to generating new “scenes of citizenship” (Rothberg and Yildiz 2011, 39) which may lead to more inclusive futures.

Deconstructing the Family Album According to Berger (2010), readers in the Global South approached A Seventh Man in unexpected ways: they perceived the book not primarily as a sociological study or political treatise but encountered it through the prism of the “family album” (8). Using “family frames” (Hirsch 1997), they re-­interpreted and re-appropriated the archive Berger and Mohr had created, often in the absence of any other documentation or recognition. These “archival engagement[s]”

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(Sun 2022) illustrate that family memories and frames play a key role in memorializing (labor) migration as a marginalized form of historical experience. In Far Flung Families in Film (2013), Daniela Berghahn suggests that telling and disseminating family stories via a range of cultural media such as film and literature provides an opportunity to “represent counter-­narratives” (50), especially for families on the move, whose stories tend to be excluded from official, statesponsored archives. By bringing these stories “into representation,” these subjects may be “empower[ed]” (50). All three texts under consideration here showcase supressed (family) memories of migration through the creation of literary “counter-narratives” and counter-archives, enabling new, intersectional and “multidirectional” modes of memory work. While family frames thus can be empowering in the ways proposed by Berghahn, the novels also express skepticism toward the family archive, presenting it as shaped by its own gaps and mechanisms of exclusion (see also Berghahn 2013, 85–119). This ambivalent status of the family album comes through the most in Father and I and Djinns. Both books unsettle the family archive in an attempt to chart new modes of belonging that abandon the implicitly and explicitly ethnicized boundaries of both national and familial memories. Due to the complicated connection between father and daughter, the family album in Father and I cannot be revived and recreated through acts of intergenerational retelling and memory transmission. Ipek therefore finds herself in a similar position to that of Hirsch’s “generation of postmemory” (2012), in that she is trying to access a past that she has not personally experienced, and which is marked by gaps and silences. She therefore has to supplement the ruptured family archive with alternative materials and “imaginative investment, projection and creation” (Hirsch, “About the Concept” 2022): “The rest comes from films, books, other migrant worker parents” (35). In addition to an interview project with first-generation migrant workers, Ipek approaches her father’s experiences through Yaşar Kemal’s novel Memed, My Hawk. In an act of “imaginative investment” (Hirsch 1997, 22), a black-and-white image of her father as a boy merges with the book’s protagonist: “When I read about Memed running away from home, and about his village, then I imagine that it was similar for you when you were a child” (70). Unlike readers of A Seventh Man, who, according to Berger, imposed their family frames onto the migrants portrayed in Berger’s book, Ipek, by contrast, uses other people’s—real and imaginary—archives and experiences to better understand her own family. Both Berger’s readers and Ipek thus supplement certain archives “prosthetically” (Landsberg 2004), exploding the biological frame of the family album. This expansion is significant in the context of restrictive, biologizing, and ethnicized memory cultures and communities: as noted by Rothberg and Yildiz (2011), what makes certain German cultural memories, such as that of the Holocaust, exclusionary is its underlying “ethnically-­ based understanding[…]” (36) of memory and identity, which presents Holocaust memory as a family affair and hence not accessible to migrant(ized)

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populations who do not have a genealogical link to this past (see also Mendel 2021). Opening up new memories and, thereby, new “scenes of citizenship” (Rothberg and Yildiz 2011, 39), requires transcending these limiting frames. Father and I expands and supplements the family archive, but, arguably, does not leave behind ethnicized frames, as Ipek still draws on Turkish lived experience and culture. At the same time, Fludernik (1993) suggests, second-person narration may have “an increased empathy effect” (227) on the reader, encouraging intimacy and identification. By resorting to this narrative mode, Father and I thus may extend an invitation to the reader to engage with and, potentially, adopt the family archive, leaving behind ethnicized and familial frames. Berghahn (2013) suggests that the filmic genre of diasporic “postmemory documentaries” achieves a similar effect: “Through the act of witnessing distant lives, we who do not belong to these diasporic families, are drawn into family (hi)stories that are not our own” (116). The expansion of the family frame by way of second-person narration might enable the creation of new mnemonic communities and forms of belonging that transcend restrictive frames. At the same time, such invitations to witness walk the fine line between adoption and appropriation—a line that becomes especially tricky to navigate if the “we” that is meant to adopt these “distant lives” is imagined as belonging to white, Christian, majority German society. Aydemir’s Djinns deconstructs the family album in even more radical ways. In her analysis of diasporic family films, Berghahn (2013) focuses on family memories on the one hand, and on family secrets on the other. Noting that many of these secrets revolve around either illegitimate children or suppressed queer desires, she reads them as “revelations of impurity and hybridity” that challenge “fantasies of racial and cultural homogeneity, ethnic absolutism and heteronormativity” (116). Queer desires in particular counter the “hegemony of white heteronormativity and, by implication, the foundations of the family and the nation” (116). Aydemir’s novel also features several family secrets, epitomized by the eponymous djinns, which, according to Peri, symbolize “the truths that are always present, always hanging in the air, whether you want them to or not, but that are never explicitly addressed” (193). The family’s biggest secret concerns Emine and Hüseyin’s first child, a daughter named Sevda, who is taken away from Emine and given to Hüseyin’s older brother Ahmet and his wife Ayşe. In a literal return of the repressed, this child makes a(n) (re-)appearance in the novel as Ciwan, an enigmatic young Kurdish man with whom Peri falls in love but who refuses her advances, for reasons that become obvious once the readers work out Ciwan’s identity. Ciwan is presented as a queer and queering character: they/he disrupt the genealogical order, and, as a trans-character, also cross/es the boundaries of gender. Moreover, Ciwan confuses the family’s ethnic origins by making Peri aware of her Kurdish heritage, another repressed element of the family’s history. Through the character of Ciwan, “impurity and hybridity” thus enter the family collective on multiple levels (Berghahn 2013, 116), troubling the search for pure origins and stable identities that is so often

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at the heart of family narratives. This trouble takes on a literal dimension, when, in a fantastical turn of events, the flat that Hüseyin had purchased and chosen as the new family home is destroyed by an earthquake on the novel’s final pages. This collapse serves as a rather obvious metaphor for the crumbling of the family under the weight of secrets and silences. At the same time, the disintegration of the Yilmaz family home may have an empowering, future-­oriented dimension, if it is understood as a—literal and figurative—seismic shift, rupturing the “hegemony of white heteronormativity and, by implication, the foundations of the family and the nation” (Berghahn 2013, 116). The dissolution of the (heteronormative) family home at the end of the novel reads as a potential prelude to alternative, more inclusive, queerer futures. Queering here is understood, in a narrow sense, as the critical expansion of heteronormative notions of subjectivity and belonging. In a wider sense, it also refers to the deconstruction of pure origins and unified, stable identities, be they sexual, gendered, or ethnic. A glimpse of this alternative family home is provided in the novel’s final paragraphs: shortly before dying in the collapsed flat, Emine revisits a particularly painful family memory as they were attempting a traditional German New Year’s celebration. This turned out catastrophically, exposing both the rifts within the family as well as their inability to emulate average Germanness and domestic bliss. In Emine’s revis(itat)ion of events, however, she conjures up a different outcome, imagining various acts of intergenerational care and repair. The scene ends with Emine opening the door to Ciwan, who, in the real world, died in a car crash before Emine was able to ever see them/him again. This scene of reconciliation and repair, and of inviting the queer Other into the family home, remains on the level of fantasy. Drawing on Stewart’s reading of Alamanya, however, I want to suggest that the disappearance of the parental generation, and of the homes they have built, may herald a new beginning for the next generation, enabling the (re-)construction of more convivial dwellings.

Conclusion: Narrative Relationality and Repair The exclusion of experiences and memories of labor migration from post-war German cultural memory has had tangible impacts on access to real and symbolic citizenship for migrant workers and their descendants. Alternative memory work in a variety of discursive spaces appears as a prerequisite for opening up much-needed alternative “scenes of citizenship” (Rothberg and Yildiz 2011, 39) and more inclusive futures. This chapter has examined three examples of Turkish-German fiction as both representations and enactments of counter-hegemonic memory work that may activate alternative possibilities and futures. I argue that the texts achieve this by addressing and redressing instances of de-personification, cultural non-recognition and archival erasure, drawing on the means of fictional discourse.

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Crucial here is a reconsideration of the mode of second-person narration. I initially read this mode as a silencing mechanism that forecloses direct access to the father figures’ viewpoints and inner worlds. At the same time, Fludernik (1993) proposes that the “you” creates a more intimate narrative setting and encourages empathetic engagement in the reader. I suggested previously that this may open the family archive to new audiences, drawing in the reader as a potential witness. More importantly though, second-person narration is a form of literary address, thus a mode that privileges and establishes relationality. The “total unacknowledgement” described earlier destroys exactly this possibility of address and relationality—as highlighted by Berger and Mohr (2010), the migrant worker becomes a non-person, “homeless” and “nameless” (223), without a place in the world or in the social order. By employing second-person narration, Djinns and Father and I engage in acts of narrative repair that restore personhood and enable relationality—the fathers become visible and addressable, their stories are being told and imagined and their legacies are continued within and, potentially, outside of the family. Relationality also plays a key role on the level of plot in all three texts, as an alternative mode of being in the world in the face of racist and xenophobic discrimination and violence. In Father and I, everyday relationality in the form of food preparation and grooming rituals (re-)establishes a precarious bond between father and daughter, while in The Indignant Ones the (not necessarily romantic) love relationship between Elyas and Aylin points to a different form of togetherness.11 In Djinns, it is female friendship and relationality that seems to have an empowering effect. While literature offers opportunities for narrative redress through depicting and performing acts of relationality that may heal legacies of non-recognition, it also has the power to pluralize the post-war German national narrative. All three novels provide space for showcasing marginalized memories, using family frames to establish a literary counter-archive that is inserted into the cultural memory of the nation. This work results in the creation of new “scenes of citizenship” (Rothberg and Yildiz 2011, 39) in the cultural domain, from which alternative claims to belonging may emerge. As a multi-perspectival, self- and meta-reflexive medium, literature scrutinizes and supplements not only the national, but also the family archive, highlighting that “no archive, whether public or private, is ever complete or fully exhaustible” (Göktürk 2022). Literature thus provides a privileged site for critical memory work, and the novels themselves represent a form of new, future-oriented archive: especially in The Indignant Ones and in Djinns, “multidirectional” connections are established between “past labor migration alienation […] and parallel experiences in the present” (Doughan 2022), which may foster new alliances. Narrative repair via second-person narration and the pluralization of personal and collective archives thus highlight the ways in which fiction, in particular, can address mnemonic injustices and contribute to “mnemonic 11  Utlu himself notes: “The fact that the two [Elyas and Aylin] are able to find common ground is more important than their love relationship. Their story is about solidarity” (see Schreiner 2017).

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solidarity” (Lim and Rosenhaft 2021). The three novels formulate artistic claims to inclusion in the national narrative, while also attempting to creatively transform the narrative as such, supporting the advent of more inclusive modes of belonging and subjectivity. As such, they perform artistic “acts of citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Isin and Nielsen posit that citizenship needs to be understood as performative and as such open to constant re-articulation by various subjects irrespective of legal status. They consider acts of citizenship to be “collective and individual deeds that rupture social-historical patterns” (12) and “create a sense of the possible” (4). By disrupting and expanding the national and familial archive through alternative memory work, these create space for new and unanticipated modes of belonging, and by performing acts of narrative repair and relationality they foster a sense of possible, more inclusive futures. While literature, and culture more widely, thus represent key agents in (re-)shaping the ever more pluralizing postmigrant societies of the future, there is no direct path leading from these literary archives to less discriminatory migration and integration policies. Yet Hall (2016) reminds us that “there can be no sustained establishment of counter-hegemonies without their articulations in culture and ideology” (189f.). New and counter-hegemonic citizenships thus need to be continuously imagined, created, and implemented in a variety of discursive settings, including contemporary literature.

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Lim, Jie-Hyun, and Eve Rosenhaft. 2021. Mnemonic Solidarity. Global Interventions. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Mandel, Ruth. 2008. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Durham: Duke University Press. Massiakowska-Osses, Dorota. 2018. “Wer an die Zukunft denkt, muss sich erinern können”: Deniz Ultu’s Roman Die Ungehaltenen zum Gedenken an die Vätergeneration. Germanica Wratislaviensia 143: 89–102. Mendel, Meron. 2021. Postmigrantische Erinnerungskultur. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: Dossier Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, May 11. Accessed 16 June 2022. https://www.bpb.de/themen/zeit-­kulturgeschichte/juedischesleben/332612/ postmigrantische-­erinnerungskultur/. Moritz Schramm, Sten Pultz Moslund, and Anne Ring Petersen, eds. 2019. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts. The Postmigrant Condition (New York: Routledge). Motte, Jan, and Rainer Ohliger, eds. 2004. Geschichte und Gedächtnis in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Migration zwischen historischer Rekonstrucktion and Erinnerungspolitik. Essen: Klartext Verlag. Özyürek, Esra. 2023. Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany. Stanford University Press. Plamper, Jan. 2019. Das neue Wir. Warum Migration dazugehört: Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Pultz Moslund, Sten, Moritz Schramm, and Sabrina Vitting-Seerup. 2019. Postmigration: From Utopian Fantasy to Future Perspectives. In Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts, ed. Moritz Schramm, Sten Pultz Moslund, and Anne Ring Petersen, 227–248. Routledge. Restorff, Sebastian. 2022. Europas größtes Migrationsmuseum entsteht in Köln. Tagesspiegel.de, May 17. Accessed 30 May 2022. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/das-­n eue-­h aus-­d er-­e inwander ungsgesellschaft-­e ur opas-­g r oesstes-­ migrationsmuseum-­entsteht-­in-­koeln/28349174.html. Richter, Hedwig. 2015. Die Komplexität von Integration. Zeitgeschichte-online.de, November 1. Accessed 30 May 2022. https://zeitgeschichte-­online.de/themen/ die-­komplexitaet-­von-­integration. Römhild, Regina. 2017. Beyond the Bounds of the Ethnic. For Postmigrant Cultural and Social Research. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9 (2): 69–75. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, Michael, and Yasemin Yildiz. 2011. Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany. Parallax 17 (4): 32–48. Schramm, Moritz, Sten Pultz Moslund, and Anne Ring Petersen, eds. 2019. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. New York: Routledge. Schreiner, Daniel. 2017. Ungehaltene neue deutsche Literatur: Ein Interview mit Deniz Utlu. TRANSIT 11(1). Accessed 11 June 2022. https://transit.berkeley. edu/2017/schreiner-­2/. Stewart, Lizzie. 2013. Countermemory and the (Turkish-)German Theatrical Archive: Reading the Documentary Remains of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Karagöz in Alamania (1986). TRANSIT 8(2), 1–22. Accessed 17 September 2022. https:// doi.org/10.5070/T782016294.

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———. [2011] 2015. Turkish-German Comedy Goes Archival: Alamanya— Willkommen in Deutschland. In Archive and Memory in German Literature and Visual Culture, ed. Dora Osborne, 107–122. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Sun, Elizabeth. 2022. Foreword: Archival Engagement. TRANSIT 13(2): i–v. Accessed 17 September 2022. https://doi.org/10.5070/T713258817. “Über uns.” https://domid.org/ueber-uns/geschichte/. Accessed 30 May 2022. Utlu, Deniz. 2011. Das Archiv der Migration. Der Freitag, October 31. Accessed 2 June 2022. https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-­freitag/das-­archiv-­der-­migration. ———. 2015. Die Ungehaltenen. Berlin: List. ———. Ins Herz. http://denizutlu.de/essays/ins-herz/. Accessed 3 June 2022.

CHAPTER 19

On the Afterlife of Lucrecia Pérez: Literature and Migrant Memory Against Nationalist Myth-­Making in Democratic Spain N. Michelle Murray

On November 13, 1992, Lucrecia Pérez Matos (December 15, 1959– November 13, 1992; henceforth Pérez) died tragically, becoming the victim of the first hate crime registered in democratic Spain. The 33-year old Afro-­ descendant Dominican had arrived in Spain only a month before and had been fired from a domestic service position in a Madrid residence for not using a dishwasher properly. Losing both her work and her home, Pérez sought shelter in the abandoned Four Roses nightclub in the Aravaca district, a posh area in Madrid. She and her fellow squatters caught the attention of local white supremacists whose hostility toward Black migrants led to her murder. Increased migration in 1990s Europe meant increased religious diversity and multiculturalism. These demographic shifts resulted in racist violence and the proliferation of hate groups like neo-Nazis. The xenophobic and racist encounters in Aravaca reflect a rise in such attacks that, cultural critics like Silvia Bermúdez argue, were tearing apart the social fabric of the Spanish nation (2018b, 8). Indeed, both immigrants and nationals dwelling in Aravaca at the time claimed they could see the attack coming. Another Dominican squatting in the nightclub stated that a sergeant responsible for carrying out raids and searches in the area would often hurl racial epithets at them (Branche 2014, 109). This sergeant would be convicted of Pérez’s killing. While his action was

N. M. Murray (*) Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_19

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extreme, his motivations reflect some attitudes in the area and in the nation more broadly. Aravaca residents stridently opposed regular gatherings of Dominicans in the neighborhood plaza on Thursdays and Sundays, claiming they fomented drug trafficking, prostitution, and inconvenient disturbances. The Dominicans, in turn, insisted that they held these public gatherings because of explicit governmental exclusion: the local municipality had denied them a room in the Cultural Center. Extreme right-wing materials circulated in the district: posters, pamphlets, and graffiti framed migration as an invasion that ought to be resolved through violent reactions by Spanish nationals.1 Just two weeks before the hate crime, Dominican migrants had clashed with local authorities, with five injured. Soon after, 200 Dominican women protested in the Aravaca Plaza, stoning the police; the latter attempted to detain two migrants who they alleged lacked documentation to reside in Spain legally. The violence leading up to Pérez’s murder makes apparent the ongoing manifestations of racism, xenophobia, and colonialism in democratic Spain. Both the local reaction to Dominicans congregating and the killing of Pérez are forms of state violence insofar as state agents (both a civil guard and a local municipality) wielded their power as nationals to marginalize and exclude migrants whom they surreptitiously figured as unwelcome, invasive elements within the national landscape. Pérez’s four attackers were neo-Nazis, espousing a white supremacist ideology that has sustained the culture of European nation-states like Spain for centuries, evident in Spain’s history of religious persecution, colonialism, and fascist rule. Moreover, while three of the perpetrators of the crime against Pérez were adolescents (Javier Quílez Martínez, Felipe Carlos Martín Bravo, and Víctor Flores Reviejo, all three aged 16 at the time), the ringleader of the gang, Luis Merino, aged 25, was a civil guard, a state agent charged with upholding the law. The murder weapon was a state-­issued gun that used bullets manufactured in Spain for police and military use. While it may seem logical to cast Merino as a rogue officer turned “skinhead” or “ultra” who committed crimes motivated by extreme hatred, he represents a current of violent nationalism and White supremacy undergirding Spanish national culture, a culture that created the conditions wherein the atrocity committed against Pérez could occur. As I have argued elsewhere, Pérez’s murder makes apparent the tensions between official narratives about democratic Spain and social realities (Murray 2018, 60). Just 17 years after the death of Francisco Franco, 1992 was in Spain a year of unprecedented celebrations. The Olympic Games took place in Barcelona, the World Fair unfolded in Sevilla, Madrid received a special designation as a Capital of European Culture, and the AVE high-speed train began rapid travel between Madrid and Sevilla. Tony Morgan notes that 1992 also commemorated the centenaries of Francisco Franco’s birth and Les Bases de Manresa, “the first embryonic declaration of Catalan nationalism” (2002, 58). These two unmentioned/uncelebrated anniversaries underscore the forced 1  For more about racist attacks prior to Pérez’s murder, see Checa (2001) and Sánchez Soler (1996).

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unification of the Iberian nation under Franco’s slogan of “España, una, grande y libre” (“one, great, free Spain”) and antagonistic peripheral nationalisms that undermined Franco’s nationalist ideals. While the struggles for autonomy in the Basque Country and Catalonia serve as one indicator of fraught nationalist myth-­making, the intertwined phenomena of coloniality and migration—issues at the crux of the 1992 hate crime—also make these tensions apparent. In 1992, Spain celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas, an endeavor sponsored by Spain’s Catholic monarchs, on what is known as the Día de Hispanidad, (“the National Day of Spain”). This particular commemoration reveals the ongoing significance of colonialism and attendant White supremacist ideologies that denigrate migrants and racialized populations despite collective attempts to diminish or mystify such tensions in democratic Spain’s cultural landscape. The multiple national celebrations of 1992 mask the rapidity with which Spain underwent modernization following the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), creating what Helen Graham and Antonio Sánchez consider a “schizophrenic” culture wherein the archaic and the modern coexist in a dizzying fashion (Graham and Sánchez 1995, 408). This “schizophrenic” culture reveals tremendous fissures in attempts to fabricate narratives that present 1990s Spain as a culture that had overcome its dictatorial past and was sallying forth toward a cosmopolitan future.2 While studies abound that have demonstrated the ongoing relevance of the Spanish Civil War, Franco and the Nationalists, and his dictatorial regime, scholars have recently begun to study Spain’s inability to acknowledge its colonial past, itself intimately entwined with Francoism and Franco’s vision of a glorious, imperial Spain.3 This chapter examines the ways in which twenty-first-century literature produced by Afro-Spaniards about the 1992 hate crime undoes historical narratives of progress circulating in democratic Spain. Black Spanish authors Rubén Bermúdez (1982–), Moha Gerehou (1992–), and Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio (1981–; henceforth, Mbomío) allude to this hate crime in their respective works And You, Why Are You Black?4 (2018), What Is a Black Man Like You Doing in a Place Like This (2021), and Daughter of the Way (2019).5 In their works, Pérez’s unjust murder constitutes a fundamental turning point for conceptualizing both democratic Spain and its margins, specifically, racialized populations whose attempted assimilation is countered with ultra-nationalist violence. The works reflect Bermúdez’s assertion that Lucrecia symbolized what was left after the party was over, a literal leftover that embodied the violence of racism, which could not be silenced by the rowdy revelry [of 1992]. Migration, already discursively presented as ‘an invasion,’ was becoming a serious issue,

 See Vilarós ([1998] 2018).  See de Diego, Gabilondo (2001, 2002), Martín Cabrera (2007). 4  Publisher’s translation. 5  All texts in Spanish have been translated into English by the author, unless noted otherwise. 2 3

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which needed to be urgently addressed to avert the decomposition of the body of the nation. (2018a, 8)

Through allusions to Pérez in all three works, we perceive a more complicated view of democratic Spain, its multicultural tensions, and the power of Black voices to critique rigid and racist nationalisms. Literary works by Black authors invoke Pérez to conceptualize the clash between Spanish nationalist myth-making and Black embodiment, here, tethered to issues of colonial memory and migration as mapped onto the body of Pérez. This chapter theorizes the role of literature in formulating narratives that contest the aforementioned nationalist histories and logics that unwittingly glorify Spain’s colonial past, marginalize populations from formerly colonized lands, and/or envision Spain through racist paradigms that denigrate blackness. My readings of recent texts by Afro-Spaniards that invoke Pérez demonstrate the interconnected nature of coloniality and migration and generate an important discussion about memory in Spain in relation to the nation’s history of colonialism and imperialism. These authors refer to Pérez to foreground both colonial memory and racial memory in a nation that has not adequately acknowledged its role in a racist world-system. The afterlife of Pérez in contemporary Spanish literary works thus forms an essential part of recovering this memory, complicating understandings of democratic Spain and shedding light upon the fissures of nationalist myth-making by revealing the xenophobic and racist violence to which Black bodies were subjugated in 1990s Spain. What’s more, references to Pérez in literature by Black authors evince an awareness about these issues made possible through intricacies borne out of writing, storytelling, and representation.

The News/Story: Referencing Lucrecia Pérez Matos The first references to Pérez were published in news reports, which, offered accounts of migration that diverged from compassionless governmental information about the issue (Yeon Soo Kim 2005, 207).6 Through references to the murder of Pérez and its significance for the Spanish cultural landscape, activists and journalists attempted to draw attention to multicultural tensions and shed light upon atrocities occurring in Spain despite narratives of progress and overcoming the dictatorial past.7 Furthermore, in drawing public attention to the plight of migrants, these journalists aim to improve the difficult situation described above in a 1990s Europe where violent nationalisms envisioned migrants as perpetual outsiders unworthy of welcome. In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman (2007) refers to the afterlife of slavery in the USA to describe its long-term effects, generations after the Middle  See also Ugarte’s (2010) analysis of news reports about Pérez.  See also more extensive essays reporting on hate crimes, including those of García Bautista (2021) and Sánchez Soler (1996). 6 7

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Passage. I use the term afterlife here not only to subtly invoke the issues of race and racism at the crux of Pérez’s history, but also to discuss the ways in which memories of Pérez began to emerge in Spanish culture as a way to gesture toward the multicultural shifts reconfiguring the Iberian nation in the 1990s and the aftermath of those transformations. Such gesturing has the explicit aim of invoking the undeniable diversity within the Spanish cultural landscape. Tomás Calvo Buezas’s The Racist Crime of Aravaca (1993) is an activist text that aims to cultivate solidarity among diverse populations living in Madrid through the hate crime against Pérez. Offering detailed information about the events leading up to the murder and an array of newspaper clippings to orient readers, The Racist Crime of Aravaca spreads awareness by referencing Pérez to denounce the White supremacist hatred at the root of the killing and to foster a more open and diverse Madrid city space. It primarily remains in the journalistic mode, offering news information so that Pérez’s murder cannot be misconstrued or forgotten. At the same time, it offers a glimpse of a European sociopolitical landscape hostile to clandestine migrants. Calvo Buezas writes that on November 13, 1992, the day of the crime, the newspaper El Mundo offered a lengthy report on Latin American immigrants driven to occupy the semi-destroyed nightclub in Aravaca. “With nightly visits, local police attempt to convince them to leave the locale” (in Calvo Buezas 1993, 25). The article ends signaling a “bad omen” for the Dominican migrants who could be exposed to some tragedy, a warning that materialized that very night when skinheads took the removal of the migrants into their own hands. Calvo Buezas (1993) continues noting the geopolitical context in which Pérez left for Spain, linking colonial rule to neocolonial migratory patterns. He states, “500 years after [1492], history repeats itself: the exploitation and oppression of the ‘other’ (different, poor, and defenseless) and the humanitarian protest of the racists’ fellow countrymen (Calvo Buezas 1993, 99).” Calvo Buezas sustains the journalistic mode of the text by juxtaposing this commentary with images of Pérez’s documentation to relocate to and reside in Madrid (1993, 101). He also emphasizes the anti-racist reactions of some Spaniards to the crime, again in an attempt to cultivate solidarity. Moving beyond a journalistic account, How to Be Black and Not Die in Aravaca by Guinean-born Francisco Zamora operates as a hybrid text that refers to Pérez to bolster the arguments of his essay, yet does not use the affiliative device of the allusion to discuss Pérez and her significance for Afro-­ descendants residing in Spain. Zamora’s title invokes the tragedy that befell Pérez as a point of departure to critique Spain’s colonial and racial amnesia. This distinction is important as Calvo Buezas’s text functions as a way for well-­ intentioned yet unaware white Spaniards to begin to interrogate a cultural context wherein such an atrocity could occur. In contrast, Zamora (1994) makes visible centuries of racism that sustained Spain as a nation-state. While the essay title explicitly references the 1992 hate crime, the text mentions Pérez and her violent demise only once, at the beginning. Jerome Branche contends that the essay focuses more on “what [the hate crime] symbolizes. It does this by

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presenting Aravaca’s intolerance and racial hostility and the neo-Nazi murder it precipitated, as microcosmic of a larger national and cultural reality, and not the aberration that official circles and many media outlets projected it to be” (2014, 108). What Zamora (1994) presents in How to Be Black and Not Die in Aravaca is a caustic treatise on contemporary Spain’s inability to grapple with diverse populations and issues of race. Zamora’s subject position as a Guinean in Madrid, which is to say an African man from a nation once-colonized by Spain returning to the European nation, is noteworthy.8 For Michael Ugarte, a “double consciousness” reminiscent of the work of Du Bois, Fanon, and Gilroy sustains Zamora’s essay (2010, 103). Echoing the diasporic theorizing of Branche, I contend this subject position causes Zamora’s essay to diverge from Calvo Bueza’s text. Branche writes: Zamora’s tone and positioning in his essay suggests that  it is impossible to be sanguine and equanimous when writing about half a millennium of racialized exploitation and genocide; of civilizations crushed as a result of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery; of a Eurocentric discursive hubris that universalizes the provincial and claims to speak for the rest of the human species; of a nationhood (Equatorial Guinea’s) stolen through a conspiracy of expropriation by local and international agents; and of the illogic of an untimely demise for a blameless and unsuspecting woman thousands of miles from her home, for whom race’s randomness has taken sudden paradoxical objectivity. (Branche 2014, 110)

Through How to Be Black and Not Die in Aravaca, the reader perceives both the extent to which migration and race become intertwined in democratic Spain and the ways in which Afro-Spanish authors invoke Pérez to meditate on blackness and belonging in the Iberian nation. The celebrations of 1992 ignored these histories, but the racist crime in Aravaca makes such willful ignorance impossible, particularly for Afro-descendants grappling with their identities in democratic Spain.

Turning Point: Lucrecia Pérez Matos in Afro-Spanish Literature The 2010s and 2020s have witnessed a veritable boom in Afro-Spanish cultural production.9 Many of these authors are Black Spaniards born and raised in Spain rather than migrants. As in other contexts where Black Europeans strive 8  See Aponte and Rizo’s (2014) astute analysis of the multiple “otredades” (“Othernesses”) at play in the work of many Equatorial Guinean authors. For groundbreaking insights about the role of Equatorial Guinea with regard to theorizing the Global Hispanophone, see Campoy-Cubillo and Sampedro Vizcaya (2019). 9  Examples include, but are not limited to the plays No Country for Black Women and Blackface and Other Embarrassments by Silvia Albert-Sopale Alpale, Desire Bela-Lobedde’s Being a Black Woman in Spain, Asaari Bibang’s Despite It All, I Am Here, Debora Ekoka’s Metamba Miago. Stories and Knowledge of Afro-Spanish Women, and Yeison García’s Right to Admission (2021).

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to distance themselves from migration to avow and naturalize their belonging within the European social landscape, many Afro-Spaniards similarly critique linking race and migration. Mbomío has pointed out the invisibility of Afro-­ Spaniards for their compatriots: “People ask me where I’m from more often than they ask what my name is. It seems impossible that a person who looks like me could be Spanish” (in Rosati 2018). Marvin Lewis (2007) indicates that Zamora’s essay (1994) Como ser negro theorizes and historicizes the image of the “negro” in Spanish literature, demonstrating the power of literature to represent realities that nationalist discourse negates. The phenomenon of negating a Black presence in Spain that Mbomío describes also reflects a decade of what Antumi Toasijé (2010) terms a desafricanización or de-Africanization of Spain, which occurred in the ten years between the hate crime against Pérez and the next hate crime to occur in democratic Spain—in 2002, against an Angolan adolescent named Augusto Ndombele Domingos. For Toasijé, this de-Africanization entails “the erasure and negation of the African legacy in Spain, the persecution of African migrants, and the establishment of the maritime border control and surveillance apparatus of FRONTEX” (2010, 13). Through their collective storytelling, Bermúdez, Gerehou, and Mbomío effectively reverse this de-Africanization, emphasizing an African presence in the western European nation. While it is important to normalize Afro-Spanish experiences to stave off the de-Africanization Toasijé denounces, migration remains an important element of these dynamics. Suggestive works like Yeison García’s (2021) book of poetry Right of Admission, which recounts his experience of migration from Colombia through impactful verse, prove that it is impossible to fully sideline migration when discussing race in democratic Spain. This is further evidenced by allusions to Pérez in significant publications by Afro-Spaniards: And You, Why Are You Black? by Bermúdez (2018a), What Is a Black Man Like You Doing in a Place Like This? by Gerehou (2021), and Daughter of the Way by Mbomío (2019). They testify to the intertwining of race and migration and the undeniable significance of Pérez for a new generation of Afro-Spaniards concerned with the significance of blackness. With their writings, these authors implicitly demonstrate Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter’s theories of humanness as praxis, frequently articulated through self-fashioning or an autopoiesis that ensues from storytelling. As Bermúdez himself claims, “there is a great deficit of our stories” (Sánchez Salcedo 2021); and these authors all work not only to lessen that deficit, but also to galvanize an entire community. While El crimen racista de Aravaca creates collective awareness of the crime, Bermúdez, Gerehou, and Mbomío engage in the literary work of metaphor and symbolism. Their use of allusions goes beyond mere reference to craft new associations and imbue the text with deeper meaning (Caple 2010, 113). Chenguang Chang asserts that allusions foster a sense of membership, “belonging to a community with shared linguistic and cultural values, as well as providing interest and novelty to the text, which further increases solidarity” (in Caple 2010, 117). While these affiliative bonds are borne out of the tragic

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crime against Pérez, all three writers allude to her to contemplate and deepen their understandings of blackness—both individually and collectively—in Spain. What’s more, in circulating these texts, their reflections upon AfroSpanish identities function to craft both a broader community and a sense of solidarity within that community. Literary works not only recount harrowing stories of migration, but also empower a growing community of Afro-Spaniards seeking to understand their past as a way to stake out an antiracist future that acknowledges their uniqueness. Like Bermúdez, Moha Gerehou’s (2021) What Is a Black Man Like You Doing in a Place Like This? uses interrogation to explore the Black presence in Spain. As in the title of Bermúdez’s photo-essay, which asks why a person is Black, the offensive question animating Gerehou’s essay similarly asks why a Black person is even present. Both questions gesture toward a surreptitiously violent incompatibility between blackness and the Spanish nation. The questions affirm a rigid nationalist principle once theorized by Gellner, who notes that under such a principle, migrants, or non-nationals, must be killed, expelled, or assimilated to maintain national purity (2006). Disavowing such rigid nationalisms with their texts, which operate to answer the offensive questions with an avowal of their blackness, both Bermúdez and Gerehou affirm their own presence as an indication of a rich Afro-Spanish identity now being made more visible to all. Anchoring his text in reflections on global blackness and Spain’s difficult racial past, Gerehou meditates on his family’s own journey from Gambia to Spain and their residence in the Iberian nation. Like other scholars and authors, Gerehou situates Pérez’s story within the context of the dazzling national celebrations of 1992, noting the “harsh reality” of Black people and migrants in Spain during that time (2021, 25). While his allusion to Lucrecia Pérez is brief, the power of the invocation is undeniable as Gerehou compares the Dominican migrant to his own mother. He observes: “Like my mother, she was another poor, Black migrant” (2021, 25). Humanizing a heretofore nuanced sociological and historical analysis of the conditions leading up to Pérez’s death, this passage in Gerehou’s (2021) text makes apparent a broader threat against Black bodies occasioned by the hate crime and its implications for his family unit. While offering data regarding the feminization of late twentieth-century migration to Spain, leading to an increase in women migrants like Pérez and the writer’s own mother, Gerehou continues his tender comparison: “For people like Lucrecia Pérez or my mother, it wasn’t easy … The fateful murder of Lucrecia Pérez has often made me think that my mother is a survivor” (2021, 27–28). Collapsing the two Black migrant women is powerful. With this allusion, he constructs a shared genealogy wherein he envisions the possibilities denied Pérez, but granted his mother. Indeed, Gerehou’s impactful journalistic and personal analysis of Pérez’s murder implicates another 1992 event that affected his family profoundly: his own birth in Huesca. The journalist points out that Pérez was murdered only four months after he was born (Gerehou

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2021, 26), thus establishing a key juxtaposition of Black violence and Black solidarity-resistance that will mark Gerehou’s lifework as a journalist and activist. Again, the allusion operates to signal an important acknowledgment of a community rallying against centuries of colonial, nationalist, and racist oppression. Confronted with this harsh reality, Afro-Spaniards insert themselves into the weft of an official narrative and insist upon the significance of their own rich storytelling. Mbomío’s (2019) novel Daughter of the Way narrates the coming of age of Sandra, a biracial woman whose family unit is extremely similar to that of the author and is comprised of a Spanish mother, a Guinean father, and two biracial daughters, Sandra and Sara. Sandra grows up in Alcorcón, a multicultural suburb in southern Madrid during the 1980s where Mbomío also lived. With these similarities, Mbomío—much like Bermúdez and Gerehou, who both meld social analysis and their own personal experiences in their essays—wavers between the narrative discourse of Daughter of the Way and her own story. In this way, the reader of all three texts perceives the extent to which each individual balances their belonging in a broader community, as Afro-Spaniards whose lived, embodied presence unites complicated identities. As in What Is a Black Man Like You Doing in a Place Like This?, where Pérez’s death is juxtaposed with Gerehou’s birth to migrant parents in a western European nation that is overtly racist toward Afro-descendants and questions their presence, Daughter of the Way uses Pérez’s death as a mechanism through which the young protagonist interrogates anti-Black, nationalist violence, and her own presence in Spain. This violence begins at school, where Sara and Sandra hear racist comments from parents and their peers. One day, the verbal hostilities escalate: a neo-Nazi named Luis insults Sara, so Sandra beats him to defend her younger sister. The narrator notes that winning such fights was not important, rather “for the child Sandra, those fights served to demonstrate that racist aggression would not go unpunished” (Mbomío 2019, 25). Sandra sees herself immersed in a broader battle when frequent clashes between neo-Nazis and anarchists, many of whom also belonged to SHARP (skinheads against racial prejudice), break out in her middle school and the violence becomes normalized (Mbomío 2019, 30). Sandra learns that skinheads attack people whom they consider different: “there were bodies exposed to risk … bodies like Sandra’s” (Mbomío 2019, 31). Daughter of the Way situates the murder of Pérez in this context of daily aggressions, ranging from parents at their school making hateful jokes about multiracial children to the threat of White supremacist attacks. Unlike Gerehou’s essay, which provides historical data surrounding the crime, Mbomío’s novel offers less social scientific detail and opts to explain the personal resonances of the crime against Pérez for the Afro-Spanish protagonist coming of age in her book. This decision evinces the generic differences of their works as an essay (Gerehou 2021) and novel (Mbomío 2019). Furthermore, Mbomío’s allusions require a reader somewhat familiar with the case of Pérez. The reader gains a sense of the community-building through

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allusion, which assumes at least some familiarity with topics of race in contemporary Spain, if not an Afro-Spaniard seeking insights into their own circumstances. The news of Pérez’s murder profoundly affects the family in Daughter of the Way. Sandra and Sara hear the news while listening to the radio during breakfast. Their mother Aurora is perturbed and fearful, while the girls, aged 9 and 11, wonder about the significance of the murder for Black people such as themselves. The violence persists at school, as Sandra makes her little sister aware of a painful reality that explicates the ongoing tensions: “You are not Spanish, you are Black” (Mbomío 2019, 40). Given these ostensibly opposed identity positions, the children embody a contradiction that rigid nationalists aim to remedy through murder or deportation—the latter option an impossibility for Sara and Sandra, who are actually Spanish nationals. The supposed incompatibility of blackness and Spain is a source of violence: this racist notion of incompatibility explains both Pérez’s murder and the fights occurring in the girls’ school, where the children internalize this lived contradiction and its implications. Like What Is a Black Man…, Daughter of the Way, encourages Afro-­ Spaniards, and readers more generally, to rally against limited conceptualizations of the nation. The story follows adult Sandra, now a successful news journalist (just like Mbomío 2019), and the diverse experiences she has worldwide. The “pathway” or “way” of the title implies a diasporic consciousness Sandra develops as she experiences blackness, its multiple manifestations, and its cultural effects across the globe before defining herself through and against these paradigms. Having endured the harsh rigidity of some identity positions—those that negate her presence or deem Pérez unworthy of occupying space in Spain—Sandra embraces and thrives engaged in a journey toward herself and her blackness. Similarly, Rubén Bermúdez’s (2018a) photo-essay constitutes a journey of Spanish blackness involving Pérez. And You, Why Are You Black? offers a visual response to a hostile interlocutor, one of many the Afro-Spanish author encountered growing up and living as a racialized person in an Iberian nation whose homogeneous whiteness was one of its defining characteristics up until the 1980s. At the same time, while the book constitutes a personal response to an interrogation of his identity, And You, Why Are You Black? operates as what I call a racial archive: a text that aims to engage with an entire racialized community by offering images and references that Afro-Spaniards and Black people in the diaspora may use to understand what Martinican psychoanalytic philosopher Frantz Fanon has famously called “the fact of blackness.” Seeing blackness and being seen as Black are not just about a difference in skin color, but, as Fanon reminds us, a corporeal schema that transforms into an epidermal schema under the influence of racist and colonial histories that cultivated the terrifying Otherness of Black people ([1952] 2008, 84). Bermúdez critically scrutinizes a racial and racialist archive, largely crafted through White imaginaries, and its functioning to define and denigrate Black people. In a recent

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interview, Bermúdez himself states that part of his project consisted of “returning to look at the images to reinvent them” (RTVE 2019). Bermúdez deftly deploys the generic specificities of the photo-essay to grapple with the tensions of racial and racialist archives. The photo itself contains uncanny parallels to the nature of the visual archive of race in Spain. As Victor Burgin claims, “[e]ven the un-captioned ‘art’ photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange for one another” (1986, 51). The image remains subjugated to histories and contexts that make it intelligible for the viewer. By the same token, the archive wields the power of what is sayable in outlining the contours and parameters of appropriate discourse. Here, the photo-essay as an experimental genre is crucial. In “The Photographic Essay,” W.J.T. Mitchell ends up confessing that “an attempt to articulate the formal principles of the photographic essay […] might be seen as a betrayal of the anti-aesthetic, anticanonical experimentalism of this form” (1994, 321). In presenting images to articulate its arguments (for it is an essay and thus argumentative, unlike a poem or a narrative), the photographic essay calls into question the image-text exchange, a dilemma which Mitchell claims has resonances for the realms of the ethical and the political, the aesthetic and the rhetorical (1994, 287). Such is the case with And You, Why Are You Black? which compels the reader to observe the ways in which Bermúdez (2018a) as a child is assaulted with a disorienting array of images concerning blackness— his own blackness, as defined by his Spanish contemporaries—before he enters adolescence and actively begins to “find his own categories and references” (RTVE 2019). And You, Why Are You Black? is thus Bermúdez’s (2018a) harrowing journey through and against racial and racialist archives to visualize Afro-Spanish blackness in light of an archive that suggests his experience ought not to be visible or sayable. And You, Why Are You Black? uses black-and-white pages as a visual cue that alludes to the text’s ongoing dialogue between the Black author and the White supremacist logics that compel Bermúdez’s (2018a) interlocutors to interrogate his presence in Spain—a purportedly White nation—all while defining his blackness. The photo-essay begins with family photos of Bermúdez as a child alongside images of Black icons, most of whom are from the United States. Examples include Bill Cosby (1937–) acting as the family patriarch on The Cosby Show, Magic Johnson (1959–) sporting his Lakers uniform, and a Thriller-era Michael Jackson (1958–2009) donning a tuxedo. Here, the reader perceives Bermúdez’s isolation in Spain and his fervent desire for cultural icons who embody blackness. The tone begins to shift as the author becomes aware of the complexities of embodying blackness. The book shows a newspaper clipping about the political execution by hanging of three ANC members in apartheid South Africa in 1983 and the renowned image of the Black power salute from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The juxtaposition of oppression and power is crucial. The author is learning about the Black struggle but situating that struggle within a context of radicalism, resistance, and power.

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Two black pages serve to indicate a new chapter in the photo-essay. The section begins with the Nigerian goalkeeper Wilfred Agbonavbare (1966–2015), a goalie for second-division soccer team Rayo Vallecano based in southeastern Madrid. Agbonavbare was subject to atrocious racist taunts during matches. Despite his relative fame and economic security in Madrid, Agbonavbare nevertheless felt the sting of a pernicious racism that denigrates Black bodies and calculates migrants’ usefulness to the host society to determine their acceptability. Indeed, the photographs of Agbonavbare are accompanied by the goalie’s own statement that he anticipated racist jeers whenever he played poorly for his soccer team: “Es normal, soy moreno y jugando así esperaba que la gente me chillase” (“I’m used to it, I’m Black, and playing like that, I expect people to scream at me”) (in Bermúdez, 2018a, n.p.). With the book’s representation of hostilities against Agbonavbare, And You, Why Are You Black? manifests its distinctively Spanish stance, despite the imagery of Black icons from the USA at the beginning of the photo-essay. Through images of Agbonavbare, the renowned Golden Age Afro-Spanish painter Juan de Pareja (1608–1670), and images of Black Cubans implicated in Spain’s slave trade, the book shares visual representations of Spain’s specific history of blackness. The author finds himself enmeshed in these collective narratives and histories regarding race, and orients himself around this external interrogation of his blackness and its place in the Iberian Peninsula. In continuing to offer pictures of Bermúdez, the photo-essay, like the novel and essay in this analysis, reveals its paradoxically intimate yet public nature. The next images we see of the author are blurred, which evinces an erasure; he becomes the embodiment of a palimpsest on which racialist narratives are inscribed by others. On the following page, there is a photograph of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), who has theorized the narratives impressed on Black bodies against their will and race on European soil. Fanon appears on white pages, again averring the tensions between Black and White throughout the book—an ethical, political, and aesthetic representation of concerns about race. Two more black pages separate Fanon from a black-and-white picture of Pérez. As in the work of Mbombío, she appears at this juncture as a vital allusion to understanding blackness in democratic Spain. Rather than focus on his own authorial power, Bermúdez relies upon “allusive meaning” by invoking the figure of Pérez (Pucci 1998, 37). In a similar fashion as the images of Cosby, Jackson, and Johnson, which convey an American openness to Black popular figures, the face of Lucrecia Pérez evokes a particular meaning for the readers of And You, Why Are You Black? While the African-American popular icons could embody a range of connotations, Pérez’s meaning-making remains more limited, evidencing the extent to which authors use allusions intentionally, attempting to avoid misunderstanding (Pucci 1998, 37). The image of Pérez appears, like many others in the book, without commentary or explanation. Much like the reader of Daughter of the Way, Bermúdez’s reader must also be familiar with the dead woman’s face, the iconic black-and-white identification photo that has appeared in Spanish newspapers,

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television programs, protests, murals, and other visually based texts and communications since 1992. The lack of explanation is crucial here: it is not only an aesthetic maneuver in which Bermúdez gambles on the recognition and attendant interpretive power of his readers, but also, a social maneuver that conveys the powerful capacity of art as a medium for both cultivating community and creating community awareness around issues of race and belonging. The allusion to Pérez is also unequivocally personal, evincing the complex nature of And You, Why Are You Black? as a personal meditation on blackness and a book that strives to make inroads for a burgeoning Black community in Spain. Like in Daughter of the Way, the allusion to Pérez operates to signal an important turning point for the Afro-Spanish author. Her death conveys to Afro-Spaniards their vulnerability in a western European nation where white supremacist ideals translate as xenophobia against precarious migrants and as violence against Black bodies. Bermúdez setting up and presenting Pérez in this fashion as a clear symbol of Spanish blackness at a time when he himself becomes less visible highlights the national and international images that helped him develop an Afro-Spanish identity. While geopolitical diasporic realities function so that historical events in Africa and the Americas inform his identity, Bermúdez’s text also emphasizes that his blackness remains firmly rooted in the realities and complexities of democratic Spain.

The Power of Allusion Allusion is a common feature of the postmodern condition where everything is connected (Pärsch in Caple 2010, 117). Allusion holds two concepts to be true to create new meaning and to craft bonds across multiple—perhaps event divergent—symbols. Allusions to Pérez in the works of Bermúdez, Gerehou, and Mbomío use her unjust murder to broach questions of the complexities of Spanish blackness. Moving beyond a more simplistic reference to Pérez to make the public aware of her story, these texts have a more profound interest in Pérez and suggest her pivotal role in community formation for a new generation of Black Spaniards. In the texts I have engaged with here, Afro-Spanish authors grapple with the legacy of Lucrecia Pérez Matos through allusions that enable them to question and critique race relations in democratic Spain. In aligning Pérez with their own family or their own journey of self-awareness, these authors establish narratives about Black Spain and its unique specificity within contexts of diasporic blackness. They not only pay homage to a victim of racist and fascist ideologies, but also create new meanings for race in Spain articulated as Black recognition and solidarity.

Bibliography Aponte, Lola, and Elisa Rizo. 2014. Guinea Equatorial como pregunta abierta: Hacia el diálogo entre nuestras otredades. Revista Iberoamericana 80 (248–249): 745–759. https://doi.org/10.5195/reviberoamer.2014.7193.

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Bermúdez, Rubén. 2018a. Y tu, ¿por qué eres negro? Phree and Motto Books. Bermúdez, Silvia. 2018b. Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Spanish Music. University of Toronto Press. Branche, Jerome. 2014. The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings. Routledge. Burgin, Victor. 1986. The End of Art Theory. Palgrave. Calvo Buezas, Tomás. 1993. El crimen racista de Aravaca. Movimiento Contra la Intolerancia. Campoy-Cubillo, A., and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya. 2019. Entering the Global Hispanophone: An Introduction. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20 (1–2): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2019.1609212. Caple, Helen. 2010. Doubling Up: Allusion and Bonding in Multisemiotic News Stories. In New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity, and Affiliation, ed. Monika Bednarek and J.R. Martin, 134–162. Continuum. Checa, Francisco, ed. 2001. El Ejido: La Ciudad Cortijo. Claves socioeconómicas del conflict étnico. Icaria. Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 2008. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. Pluto Press. Gabilondo, Joseba. 2001. The Hispanic Atlantic. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5, 91–113. ———. 2002. Postimperialismo, poscolonialismo y decolonialidad: hacia una teoría geopolítica del Estado español en la globalización. eHumanista 50, 106–117. García, Yeison. 2021. Derecho de admisión. Miguel Ángel Vázquez Martín. García Bautista, J.M. 2021. Crónica negra—pero negra negra—de España. Editorial Samarcanda. Gellner, Ernest. 2006. Nations and Nationalisms. 2nd ed., ed. John Breuilly. Cornell University Press. Gerehou, Moha. 2021. ¿Qué hace un negro como tú en un sitio como este? Ediciones Península. Graham, Helen, and Antonio Sánchez. 1995. The Politics of 1992. Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction: The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, 406–418. University of Oxford Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Kim, Yeon Soo. 2005. The Family Album: Histories, Subjectivities, and Immigration in Contemporary Spain. Bucknell University Press. Lewis, Marvin. 2007. An Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea: Between Colonialism and Dictatorship. University of Missouri Press. Martín-Cabrera, Luis. 2007. Antagonismos postcoloniales de la conversión cultural en La vida aquí al cosmopolitismo radical en Princesas. In Postcolonialidades históricas, ed. Ileana Rodríguez, 111–132. Anthropos. Mbomío Rubio, Lucía Asué. 2019. Hija del camino. Grijalbo. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press. Morgan, Tony. 2002. 1992: Memories and Modernities. In Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, 58–68. Arnold. Murray, N. Michelle. 2018. Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture. University of North Carolina Press.

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Pucci, Joseph. 1998. The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition. Yale University Press. Rosati, Sara. 2018. Españoles de aquí y de allá. El País, 1 June 2018. Accessed 25 August 2022. https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/06/01/planeta_futuro/ 1527859821_806436.html. Sánchez Salcedo, Javier. 2021. Rubén H. Bermúdez: ‘Hay un gran déficit de nuestras historias.’ Mundo negro, 26 January 2021. Accessed 26 August 2022. http://mundonegro.es/ruben-h-bermudez-hay-un-gran-deficit-de-nuestras-historias/. Sánchez Soler, Mariano. 1996. Los hijos del 20-N. Temas de Hoy. Toasijé, Antumi. 2010. La memoria y el reconocimiento de la comunidad africano y africano-descendiente negra en España: El papel de la vanguardia panafricanista. Nómadas: Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, 28 (4). Accessed 26 August 2022. https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/NOMA/article/view/ NOMA1010440277A/2574. Ugarte, Michael. 2010. Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain. University of Illinois Press. Vilarós, Teresa. [1998] 2018. El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la Transición Española (1973–1993). Siglo XXI Editores. Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro? 2019. RTVE, 10 January 2019. Accessed 25 August 2022. https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/la-aventura-del-saber/y-tu-por-que-eresnegro/4933166/. Zamora, Francisco. 1994. Como ser negro y no morir en Aravaca. Ediciones B.

CHAPTER 20

Muslim Interpellation: Hijabs, Beards, and the Post-9/11 Border Regime Nasia Anam

The space of an international airport suggests infinite possibilities of movement, a microcosm of the worldwide interconnectedness and states of liminality that mark globalized modernity. Near the end of the twentieth century, anthropologist Marc Augé (1995) described airports, along with hotels, freeways, and malls as “non-places”—transitional and devoid of any social meaning other than that of economic transaction. International borders between nation-­ states—no longer tethered to physical, geopolitical boundaries—are present in airports across the world. While the international terminal of an airport may index cosmopolitan borderlessness and flow, it is simultaneously a space where mobility can be forestalled or prohibited. The airport is, in truth, a place that assigns meaning and where one’s rights and legal status are determined. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, and further exacerbated by Donald Trump’s now defunct “Muslim Ban” in 2016, the airport has clearly operated in this fashion, most powerfully at the site of the security checkpoint. Airport security has played a central role in the semiotic transformation of what appearing to be “Muslim”1 means in the post-9/11 era in the Global North.

1  In this chapter, I will designate “Muslim” in scare quotes to signify what this term has come to mean in the post-9/11 era, that is, one that has an arbitrary or non-existent connection to religious belief or practice but that is deployed as shorthand to suggest irreconcilable difference with EuroAmerican, Enlightenment-borne civilizational values.

N. Anam (*) University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_20

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In the transitional space of the airport-as-border, “Muslim” is discursively produced as a racial and/or ethnic category that subsumes Afghan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Iranian, Somalian, etc., under the nebulous sign of “Arab,” despite the myriad racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic affiliations of the world’s nearly 2  billion Muslims, and regardless of actual religious practice. And this category of difference slides even more problematically into refugee, ideologue, threat, criminal, enemy, or terrorist. Anyone aiming to cross an international border whose name, accent, nationality, phenotype, or mode of dress or grooming may signify “Muslim” in this milieu must anticipate that at the airport checkpoint they may be hailed first and foremost as a potential threat to national security. Though self-identified Muslims come from across the globe and share no specific racial, ethnic, national, or linguistic ties, the era of the “War on Terror” produces the “Muslim” as a racialized category and decouples this identity from religious practice or piety. For Muslims living through the “War on Terror” era in Europe and North America, the political consequences of the airport checkpoint now radiate out to public spaces like schools, offices, government buildings, and sports arenas. The dynamics of the airport checkpoint can occur at any location where Muslims are hailed into the post-9/11 ideological order, thus rendering the border ubiquitous. Expanding upon Michel de Certeau’s contention that “moving about the city is an experience ‘broken up into countless tiny deportations’ interspersed with relationships and intersections,” Peter Morey asserts that “after 9/11 the intersections were regulated, the relationships sundered, and the deportations in some cases all too literal” (Morey 2018, 129). The pervasive sense that at any moment a Muslim-presenting subject might be subject to innumerable “tiny deportations,” which may lead to a literal deportation, means that all Muslims in the Global North, regardless of citizenship status, are now treated as de facto migrants whose state-sanctioned legitimacy is perpetually in peril. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson draw on Etienne Balibar’s idea of “vacillating” borders to stress “that the border is no longer at the border, an institutional site that can be materialized on the ground and inscribed on the map” (as cited in Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 29). It is this transposition of the border from the geopolitical boundary between nation-­ states to every international airport that makes the security checkpoint a particularly potent site of the “border regime” in Mezzadra and Neilson’s parlance: a regime that itself moves out of the airport to encompass all public space. The 2004 hijab and 2011 burqa bans in France, for example, are a means of enforcing the border regime beyond the airport into far more quotidian realms. Especially in light of the increasingly restrictive immigration laws in Europe and North America that permit undocumented migrants to be apprehended virtually anywhere, the border now looms omnipresent. The precarity of Muslim migrants and travelers in Europe and North America has only grown after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, the 7/7

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bombings in London, and the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and Paris bombings in 2015. It has been further exacerbated by the ongoing refugee “crisis” at Europe’s southern borders. These events have been met and perpetuated by the large-scale retaliatory and protracted response of the decades-long U.S.-led global intervention known as the “War on Terror,” which has amorphously targeted radical and insurgent forms of so-called fundamentalist “Islamism,” including Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, etc. This milieu also produces the mundane, quotidian, small but ever-present violences that constitute the parameters of post-9/11 hegemony for Muslims in the Global North. The regime of the omnipresent border transforms all public spaces into sites of checkpoint interpellation, facilitated by a semiotic practice that equates outward signals of “Muslimness” with hazards to national and global security. Given this context, it is no surprise that the condition of living under constant surveillance and potential apprehension features prominently in recent cultural production by and about first- and second-­ generation Muslim immigrants residing in the West. Visual and textual art representing the day-to-day lives of Muslims living within a global ideological order that hails them as dangerous threats abounds. Recent examples in the Anglophone sphere include novels by Kamila Shamsie (2017), Mohsin Hamid (2007), Ayad Akhtar (2020), and Syed Masood (2022); television shows like Hulu’s Ramy (2019) and Netflix’s Mo (2022); and lyrics by hip hop groups like the Swet Shop Boys, all of which depict border-crossing Muslims being hailed as threats. This chapter examines exemplary scenes that illustrate the ramifications of checkpoint interpellation in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), and the actor and musician Riz Ahmed’s rap lyrics and personal essay “Auditions and Airports” (2016). These texts show the various ways individual border-crossing subjects are hailed as Muslim qua threat, terrorist, and enemy through the assessment of incidental features of dress, grooming, taste, as well as politically charged confrontations about national and religious affiliation. In turn, these texts also portray the anticipation of interrogation and the strategic performance of compliance that have necessarily become a quotidian aspect of Muslim life in Europe and the United States. Significantly, each of these texts portrays these dynamics playing out in acute and consequential ways in the very same space: the airport security checkpoint. The airport, as Hamid, Shamsie, and Ahmed demonstrate, has become one of the most important sites that determines not only who is a “Muslim,” but what the consequences of that determination mean in our contemporary moment. And perhaps even more significantly, these texts illustrate how being hailed into the post-9/11 ideological order means that the border itself migrates along with anyone interpellated as Muslim—that is, Muslim with all its attendant pejorative connotations of potential sedition and treachery. Being a Muslim in the twenty-first-century Global North means being always on the border, at the checkpoint, in a perpetual state of migration.

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Checkpoint Interpellation To understand the far-reaching consequences of producing “Muslim” as a category of difference marked ideologically in the post-9/11 era, Louis Althusser’s classic formulation is instructive—that is, the proverbial police officer shouting “Hey, you there!” at a person on the street, thereby hailing (or interpellating) them as a subject into the existing ideological order. Althusser asserts that “the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who ‘have something on their consciences’” (Althusser 2014, 264). Though a person who might be perceived as Muslim may have no particular reason to feel targeted by a representative of the state (e.g., a T.S.A. agent), when pulled aside for a “random” check or questioning at airport security, they will clearly understand their role as a subject in the contemporary ideological order of the West. The “border regime” of the twenty-first century determines whether mobility in the Global North for a Muslim is permitted or prohibited. This understanding of “Muslim” as a category of difference has only an arbitrary (if any) connection to professing belief in Islam, that is, a 1400-year-old religion that a quarter of the world’s population follows, and one with its own long, rich, and variegated histories of empire, civilization, and culture. As Anjuli Raza Kolb reminds us, “[t]he twenty-first-­ century construct ‘Islam’ in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds—and by extension in global internationalist discourse—is not just ‘barbaric,’ as in the language of the Middle Ages, but also contagious” (Raza Kolb 2021, 3). Being interpellated as a Muslim in the post-9/11 border regime is to be categorically flattened into a collection of physical, sartorial, and ideological features that are defined almost exclusively by what the “West” is not. This social process draws on age-old Orientalist tropes but evacuates them of any history or context outside of the extreme present and translates them into terms of contemporary surveillance states and militarized geopolitics. In the post-9/11 border regime, beards, hijabs, kurtas, Arabic-sounding names, accents of indeterminate origin, questionable browser histories or collections of phone apps, etc., can all be deemed suspicious and potentially dangerous. As Junaid Rana explains, “race is tied to terror and migration precisely through the conjuring of an enemy. The foe is defined in relation not only to democracy and freedom but also to the moral precepts of the ideologically motivated formation of a Christian subject that argues for just war as an obligation of secularity and imperialism” (Rana 2011, 4). This process occurs through the state-sanctioned assessment of certain names, attire, or grooming habits as “suspicious.” These features are scrutinized and evaluated for security threat levels, often eliciting further examination by the state (represented by security and border patrol agents.) As Jasbir Puar has trenchantly argued, this process has included moments of misrecognition that often culminate in violence, especially in the case of Sikhs donning turbans. For instance, after September 2001, Sikhs mistaken for Muslim have disproportionately been targeted in hate

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crimes in the United States, Britain, and other majority-white countries with substantial South Asian populations. Sikhs, other non-Muslim South Asians, Western Asians, Mediterraneans, or anyone who might bear the features that are being stereotyped as “Muslim” are also interpellated as terrorist, spy, insurrectionist, traitor, infidel, enemy. Puar notes: “[l]ike the burqa, the hijab, and the headscarf, turbans mark gender, [religion], and region, as well as signal, to the untrained eye, the most pernicious components of oppressive patriarchal backward cultures and traditions, those that have failed at modernity” (Puar 2007, 181). The practice of Orientalism has thus once again become a thriving enterprise in the Global North. Though Sikhs are imperiled by being hailed into a global ideological order that configures Muslims as treacherous, seditious, and violent, a self-­identifying Sikh could ostensibly attempt to correct the error by insisting upon their non-­ Muslimness. For all intents and purposes, a Sikh who has been misapprehended could thus be correctly identified as Sikh and thereby absolved of the presumed criminal implications associated with being Muslim in the post-9/11 era. In contrast to Puar’s central focus on misrecognition, this chapter’s interest is in the process of interpellation as one of recognition: the moment when, as an act of reconnaissance, the agent of the state hails the Muslim migrant into the current hegemonic milieu. And in that same moment, the interpellated Muslim recognizes the immediate injunction to navigate an ideological terrain where possible apprehension and detention are ever-present, going on to develop a set of preventative practices in anticipation. Thus, for the Muslim-presenting subject in the Global North, the twenty-first-century practice of everyday life necessarily includes honing tactics that would afford clear passage across the ever-present border between “enemy” and “citizen.”

Border Regime Change A potent and early portrayal of this kind of checkpoint interpellation appears in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which brings the unique experience of being a border-crossing Muslim in the Global North after 9/11 into stark relief. Narrated in the second person to an unnamed but formidable agent of the U.S. government, Changez recounts his years after migrating from Pakistan in the 1990s to study as a Princeton undergraduate and work in finance in NYC around the time of the 2001 terror attacks. In his post-collegiate career, he enjoys the privileges of joining the elite jet-setting class of neoliberal cosmopolitans whose ease of worldwide travel is facilitated by the late twentieth-­ century iteration of free-market capitalism. Changez muses during a business trip in Manila that his Filipino co-workers must look up to his American colleagues as “members of the officer class of global business” (Hamid 2007, 65). He clearly identifies the form that imperialism has taken by the late twentieth century: no longer terrestrial but financial, its conquistadors the emissaries of late capitalism’s liberalized global market. Frequenting international airport terminals and luxury hotels—transitional and transactional “non-places” in

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Augé’s sense—he believes he has cemented a powerful position in the cosmopolitan jetsetter class. But the satisfaction of assimilating into global hegemony does not last long. Significantly, it is in the Philippines—the site of one of the United States’ failed experiments in terrestrial imperialism—that Changez comes into political consciousness, becoming suddenly alert to the racial difference between himself and his colleagues in Manila. Sitting in a traffic jam, he seems to notice for the first time his co-worker’s “fair hair and light eyes, and most of all his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work,” thinking suddenly, “you are so foreign. I felt in that moment much closer to the Filipino driver than to him; I felt I was play-acting when in reality I ought to be making my way home, like the people on the street outside” (67). This is a stark contrast to the sense of joyful anonymity he enjoys back in New York, where on the subway his “skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum” and where he feels comfortable claiming he “immediately” assimilated to the identity of being a New Yorker (33). In this moment, Changez sees that the cosmopolitan multiculturalism of late twentieth-century globalization was a false promise. Finance capital does not entirely erase the structural racism and border regimes that organize the hegemonic world order, and Changez perceives this plainly upon attempting to re-enter the United States in September 2001. Changez is still in Manila when he sees a news report of the 9/11 attacks in New York, the city to which he has become attached enough to consider his own. Yet infamously, Hamid’s protagonist reflexively “smiles” in response to learning the news of the attacks before dutifully assuming a posture of mournfulness. As he attempts to return to the United States, he becomes aware of his changed position at the airport, outside the borders of the nation. “I was escorted by armed guards into a room where I was made to strip down to my boxer shorts….My entrance [onto the plane] elicited looks of concern from many of my fellow passengers. I flew to New York uncomfortable in my own face” (74). This is an awkward turn of phrase; he is uncomfortable in his face, the face that smiled upon learning of a spectacular terror attack committed by Islamic extremists and now transforms into a mask of mourning. The border agent at New York Customs asks him a routine question with such force that it takes on the valence of an existential probe. “‘What is the purpose of your trip to the United States?’ I live here, I replied. ‘That is not what I asked, sir,’ she said. ‘What is the purpose of your trip to the United States?’” (75). Changez’s purpose has changed—it is no longer to assimilate to an American ideal that was never fully attainable, and no longer to become a latter-day corporate conquistador. His purpose has changed because in his absence the society he is returning to has discarded the illusion of multicultural acceptance, and he can no longer occupy the space he was attempting to occupy before. In the months after the attacks, George W. Bush argued vociferously that Americans and American sympathizers must choose a side: either with “us” or with the “terrorists.” But all too frequently, the choice of joining “us” or “them” does not exist; rather, the designation is determined for individuals in

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the way they are perceived. Changez is hailed into his position as a Muslim in the post-9/11 Global North, meaning Muslim qua potential terrorist, Muslim qua national menace, a Muslim whose piety or practice of the five pillars of Islam is utterly beside the point. In the months after the attack, he recalls that in a parking lot I was approached by a man I did not know. He made a series of unintelligible noises—‘akhala-malakhala,’ perhaps, or ‘khalapal-khalapala’—and pressed his face alarmingly close to mine…. Just then another man appeared; but he took his friend by the arm and tugged at him, saying it was not worth it. Reluctantly, the first allowed himself to be led away. ‘Fucking Arab,’ he said. I am not, of course, an Arab (117).

Before the September 11 attacks, Changez presumed a certain ease of assimilation in the United States and the West writ large, believing himself a natural member of the cosmopolitan elite. He could not anticipate that because of his religious affiliation that he, and those like him, would suddenly and violently be extracted in order to mark out what “Muslim” would come to mean in the United States, and subsequently across the world. Because his beard could be a visual indicator of Muslimness, Changez’s legitimacy in any public space, be it a subway train or a parking garage, is challenged and thus his allegiances are constantly interrogated. He is never again able to leave, in ideological terms, the space of the mobile and ubiquitous border checkpoint. Changez’s experiences of being aggressively positioned within the post-9/11 world order bear resemblance to Frantz Fanon’s primal scene in Black Skin, White Masks when, having freshly emigrated from Martinique to France, Fanon is ripped out of the illusion that he could ever be fully accepted as French by a child on the street shouting, “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!” (Fanon 2008, 91). After describing this moment, Fanon offers a litany of the various damning connotations in French metropolitan discourse about Black colonial subjects in the milieu of 1950s France, when the French colonial empire in the Antilles and Maghreb still remained largely intact. “The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly; look, a Negro; the Negro is trembling…the small boy is trembling because he’s afraid of the Negro” (93). Significantly, it is only after migrating to the French metropole, despite having been a French colonial subject his entire life, that he fully understands the depth and breadth of what it means to be interpellated as a Black man in mid-twentieth-century France. Fanon rehearses here the discursive production of Blackness as a racial category in the ideology of empire, a category that must exist in order to justify centuries of subjugating and enslaving people of African descent. He thereby perceives his subaltern, dehumanized position within this hegemonic configuration. “The white world,” Fanon realizes, “was preventing me from participating…I hailed the world, and the world amputated my enthusiasm” (94). And when he is denied entry and acceptance in the “white world,” once he

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understands that he will not see himself reflected in it, Fanon’s response is to produce himself as a subject. “I made up my mind…to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer; to make myself known” (95). This process of racialization countered with the assertion (rather than negation) of one’s identity resonates with Changez’s trajectory in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Changez mistakenly believes himself to be an integrated member of American society, just as Fanon mistakenly believes that he will be received as French upon migrating to the metropole. But traumatic scenes of interpellation reveal that in the ideological milieu of the post-9/11 border regime (which is a descendant of the ideological milieu of European empire), Changez will never transcend his position as a perpetual migrant whose legitimacy as a member of Western civilization is constantly called into question. Similar to Fanon’s embrace of Blackness after the disturbing confrontation with the child in France, it is only after the hostile encounters at the airport and parking garage that Changez begins to maintain an unruly beard and to empathize with the side of anti-American imperial politics. He comments, “It is remarkable…the impact a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow countrymen. More than once, traveling on the subway—where I had always had the feeling of seamlessly blending in—I was subjected to the verbal abuse of strangers” (130). Though Changez notes that he is already marked racially by his “complexion,” it is his facial hair that sets him apart as Muslim qua racial category, one perhaps indexed via skin color but only fully recognized because of a grooming choice. And though he is suffering abuse, he is arguably inviting it by willfully maintaining his beard, thus asserting a degree of agency when he can no longer function as a free and mobile citizen. Like Fanon, Changez is making himself “known,” defiantly asserting his place in a society that is now constructed to negate him. After moving back to Lahore near the end of the novel, Changez’s relationship to neoliberal cosmopolitanism and the West writ large has changed radically, as evidenced by his participation in student protests at his university. We are made to suspect that his radicalization will have dire consequences at the end of the narrative, but what sets this domino effect into motion is that first scene of interpellation while attempting to cross the international border at the airport.

Terrorist or Hipster? The beginning of Shamsie’s Home Fire features an episode illustrating how, roughly two decades after Changez’s fictional encounter at the security checkpoint, the post-9/11 border regime has become an established fact of life for Muslims, its vagaries so well-known they have become rote. Rather than a scene of hostile confrontation or direct violence, the interrogation at Heathrow International Airport in Shamsie’s novel has a rather more mundane and insidious dynamic. Isma, a British Pakistani graduate student on her way from London to Massachusetts, mentally calculates all the tactics she can employ to

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pre-empt the inevitable barrage of questions she will encounter at airport security due to her name, her hijab, and her itinerary. She made sure not to pack anything that would invite comment or questions—no Quran, no family pictures, no books on her area of academic interest—but even so, the officer took hold of every item of Isma’s clothing […]. ‘Do you consider yourself British?’ the man said. ‘I am British.’ ‘But do you consider yourself British?’ ‘I’ve lived here all my life.’ She meant there was no other country of which she could feel herself a part, but the words came out sounding evasive. The interrogation continued for nearly two hours. He wanted to know her thoughts on Shias, homosexuals, the Queen, democracy, The Great British Bake Off, the invasion of Iraq, Israel, suicide bombers, dating websites. (Shamsie 2017, 3)

In order to avoid suspicion, Isma has practiced this conversation with her sister multiple times before departing. This fictional encounter reflects the real-­world effects that the two-decade-long geopolitical quagmire of the “War on Terror” has had upon the individual, quotidian lives of Muslims circulating through North America and Europe. The questioning Isma is subjected to—and moreover, the anticipation and preparation for this very line of questioning—illustrates how, in this ideological milieu, Muslims understand themselves to be constantly surveilled and possibly apprehended, detained, or worse. By beginning Home Fire this way, Shamsie depicts how the ubiquity of the post-9/11 border regime has created its own set of protocols for Muslim migrants and travelers, making interrogation of one’s legitimacy at the checkpoint expected, now mundane rather than exceptional. Isma’s checkpoint scene represents how strategic awareness and habitual incorporation of these conditions—proliferating “tiny deportations” in de Certeau’s sense—have become a practice of everyday life. Her expectation of being interrogated on her values, habits, and beliefs as a matter of course in the process of taking an international flight is a uniquely twenty-first-century form of Muslim interpellation: that is, being repeatedly hailed by representatives of the state in the post-9/11 era, and in response, learning to demonstrate compliance in order to function within an ideological landscape that sees one as a potential enemy or threat unless proven otherwise. She is being hailed, but where she will fit in the ideological landscape after answering the proverbial “Hey, you there!” remains unclear. It depends entirely on whether she has delivered the correct responses to interrogations about ISIS and British Bake Off. Learning to carefully tread along those lines by cultivating a canny awareness of competing ideological norms and deploying them at will is arguably a profound form of resistance in and of itself. Further along in Home Fire, Isma’s brother Parvaiz contemplates travel to Pakistan. In response, his other sister, Aneeka, also demonstrates knowledge of how to strategically avoid being interpellated as Muslim-qua-threat. She

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recommends, ostensibly in jest but with more than a grain of earnestness, that he “get rid of that growth on your face…The Heathrow officials might mistake what is fashionista for fundo2 and decide not to let you load the plane to Pakistan…Jihadi alert!’” (154). The novel also suggests that awareness of these tactics is not limited to Muslims. Eamonn, a half-Pakistani, half-British character who has benefitted from his elite class position and English bloodlines, finds himself increasingly alienated from his posh Oxbridge-educated cohorts who jokingly suggest his five o’clock shadow will provoke suspicion of jihadist sympathies. Eamonn’s inquiry, “What would you have done if I had walked in with a full beard?’” is answered with the glib retort, “We’d hold you down and shave it off, my darling. Friends don’t let friends become hipsters” (84). The jokes Eamonn’s friends make betray the recognition that if financially privileged and white-passing enough, a beard can connote “fashionista” or “hipster,” whereas anyone who may bear darker, more South or West Asian features does not have such advantages. Eamonn being only half Pakistani and fully upper class, can seemingly signify either hipster or terrorist by growing facial hair, depending on the circumstances. It is the airport checkpoint that would presumably tip him in the less desirable direction, where he is not protected by the safety of friends who can vouch for him as being a Muslim who is assimilated, and thus non-threatening. The post-9/11 era puts Muslim travelers and migrants on high alert to either change their habits of dress and grooming or at least carry the cultural armature that would neutralize presumptions of terrorist or jihadist tendencies (i.e., knowledge of Bake Off ). This era of circumspection for border-crossing Muslims coincided with a 2010s shift in men’s fashion in the West that discards the smooth and hairless faces prized during the so-called era of the Y2K “metrosexual.”3 Simultaneously as Muslim and Muslim-appearing men found their beards communicating unintended messages of danger and sedition, urban white men were suddenly deemed fashionable or hipsters for donning full beards connoting a kind of swarthy masculinity that had fallen out of favor in the West after the 1970s.4 Hegemony applauds those in power for engaging in the very same cultural norms and gestures it has criminalized among the subaltern class. This, too, is a means of interpellating Muslims in the twenty-­ first century. A recent example of this phenomenon occurred in January 2022, when Vogue France published a post on Instagram depicting model and actress Julia Fox donning a pair of sunglasses and a jauntily fastened kerchief on her head. The post was captioned “Oui au foulard de tête!” or “Yes to the headscarf!” It was understandably met with uproar from many French Muslims who pointed to the hypocrisy of affirming headscarf-wear as fashionable,  Slang for fundamentalist.  Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “metrosexual” as “a usually urban heterosexual male given to enhancing his personal appearance by fastidious grooming, beauty treatments, and fashionable clothes.” 4  The New York Times declared in 2006 that “the hipster beard is experiencing its first summer” in New York City (Montandon 2006). 2 3

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provided the wearer was not visibly Muslim (Ravindran 2022). The post was swiftly deleted thereafter. In the same month, the French government banned women athletes from wearing hijabs during sporting events. In the name of laïcité, or strict state secularity, France has banned headscarves in public schools since 2004 and face coverings (which are part of the Islamic garment known as the niqab) in public since 2011. The issue of head and face coverings as a metonym of France’s Muslim population continues to be an intense political flashpoint. In the 2022 presidential election, extreme-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, ran on an explicitly anti-immigrant platform that called for the total ban of headscarves in public, and even Emmanuel Macron’s center-left re-election campaign promised a focus on “Islamist separatism” (Cohen 2022). Concomitantly, a 2019 independent study by the Institut français d’opinion publique (IFOP) found that 42% of Muslims in France faced religion-based discrimination, and among this population, 60% of hijab-wearing women have faced religion-based discrimination (Le Monde 2019). Since the end of World War II, France has come to house the largest Muslim minority in Europe, most of whom descend from former colonial subjects in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Questions of racial and religious discrimination against Muslims are effectively one and the same in France, since Muslim is almost coterminous with Maghrebi. France’s post-1789 national narrative is predicated upon a universalist notion of “man and citizen” that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries manifests in an official ban on accounting for racial and religious difference in the eyes of the law.5 This makes legislation on banning outward signs of religious affiliation much less complicated than legislating bans on hate speech and crimes against religious and racial minorities, since these minorities are not officially recognized by the state. Vogue France’s celebration of the headscarf for white American and French women in a country where the same garment has been made illegal for Muslim women resonates with Shamsie’s portrayal of the tension between the “terrorist” and “hipster” beard, making clear that the privilege of donning a hijab or beard is predicated on the racial and socioeconomic position of the wearer. These moments are powerful demonstrations of how modes of dress, speech, grooming, and other sartorial and external practices create a semiotics reinforcing the tension between “insider” vs. “outsider,” and effectively racialize external and mutable features such as beards and hijabs. France’s efforts to prevent its substantial Muslim immigrant population from contaminating hallowed notions of French universalism and republicanism are far from new and, indeed, are rooted in European Orientalism and specific French colonial policies of subjugation. France’s measures are not isolated but entirely exemplary of related legislation across Europe and North America limiting the movement and freedoms of average Muslims in the twenty-first century. The ubiquity of 5  As of 1978, France has officially banned the collection of census or any other kind data on race or ethnicity among its citizenry (Bleich 2021).

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Muslim checkpoint interpellation extends to permitting or prohibiting the wearing of facial hair and accessories while moving through public space in the Global North—scarves and beards are permitted for the perceived fashionista but prohibited for the perceived fundamentalist.

Double-Edged Recognition The case of Pakistani-British actor and rapper Riz Ahmed is particularly interesting in this regard. His career as an actor, writer, and rapper has arguably hinged upon the very tension between the successes of late twentieth-century British multiculturalism and the interpellation and scapegoating of Muslims in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, Ahmed himself portrayed the character of Changez in Mira Nair’s 2012 cinematic treatment of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. As a musician, Ahmed first enjoyed mild success with “Post-9/11 Blues,” a 2006 rap track he released under the moniker Riz MC. In the ensuing years, he has won an Emmy, an Oscar, and other established industry accolades for his acting career. But as a writer of lyrics and essays, he has explicitly addressed the deep and confounding existential irony of occupying the elite echelons of Western popular culture while simultaneously being repeatedly hailed as a potential threat to the state, especially while crossing international borders in airport security. As an actor often playing characters who grapple with conflicts between identity and nation, he has incorporated the somewhat metafictional consequences of his increasing fame into his artistic practices. In 2016, with Brexit and Trump’s election looming, Ahmed released the hip-hop single “T5” with his collaborator Himanshu “Heems” Suri under the duo’s group name “Swet Shop Boys.” The lyrics playfully refer to the perils of passing through airport security as a brown man sporting facial hair. The track’s refrain—“Oh no we’re in trouble/ T.S.A. always wanna burst my bubble/ Always get a random check when I rock the stubble”—highlights the clockwork predictability of being pulled aside for a “random” search if one is suspected of being Muslim. In the same year, Ahmed published an essay in Nikesh Shukla’s anthology, The Good Immigrant, narrating the ideological predicaments twenty-first-century Muslims in the Global North can face. Ahmed explains that despite being a British citizen of Pakistani origin throughout his entire life, the way he is interpellated shifts again and again in response to the specific political exigencies of a given historical moment. [As children in the 80s], when my brother and I were stopped near our home by a skinhead and a knife was put to his throat, we were black. A decade later the knife to my throat was held by another ‘paki’, a label we wore with swagger in the Brit-Asian subculture and gang culture of the 90s. The next time I found myself as helplessly cornered, it was in a windowless room at Luton airport. My arm was in a painful wrist-lock and my collars pinned to the wall by British intelligence officers. It was ‘post 9/11’, and I was now labelled a Muslim. (Ahmed 2016, 159)

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Ahmed’s experience in the 1980s of being attacked by neo-Nazis while being hailed as “black” reflects the specific configuration of late twentieth-century solidarities between different postcolonial immigrant groups in the outer boroughs of British cities. As Kobena Mercer asserts, when “various peoples—of Asian, African and Caribbean descent interpellated themselves and each other as /black/ they invoked a collective identity predicated on political and not biological similarities” (Mercer 1994, 291).6 Historical difference preceding arrival in the United Kingdom aside, for these communities the term “/ black/” was “rearticulated as signs of alliance and solidarity among dispersed groups of people sharing common historical experiences of British racism” (291). Targeted equally by racist attackers and concerned legislators alike as undifferentiated Black immigrants, the multifarious cultures of South Asian, Caribbean, and African origin came together in a unified front that resulted in a new cultural formation of subalternity in the British metropole. Ahmed’s recollection of the various epithets lobbed at him and his kin through the decades of his youth exemplifies Paul Gilroy’s assertion that “‘race’ is a political category that can accommodate various meanings which are in turn determined by struggle” (Gilroy 1995, 35). The categories of “Asian” or the more offensive “paki” carried with them a specific political and class-based charge in pre-9/11 Britain, and in the hegemonic border regime of the “War on Terror,” the most potent category of difference for the majority of British South Asians is “Muslim.” Ahmed goes on to describe a scene that demonstrates the astonishing degree to which the surveillance and control of Muslim and Muslim-appearing subjects have been integrated in the fabric of daily life— so much so that its execution has become self-sustaining system, its agents now members of the very population who would otherwise be surveilled themselves. Heathrow airport draws its staff from the nearby Asian suburbs of Hounslow and Southall. My ‘random selection’ flying to LA was so reliable that as I started travelling more, I went through a six-month stretch of being searched by the same middle-aged Sikh guy. I instinctively started calling him Uncle, as is the custom for Asian elders. He started calling me ‘beta’, or son, as he went through my luggage apologetically… As I’ve travelled more I’ve also done more film work, increasing the chances of being recognised by the young Asian staff at Heathrow. I have had my films quoted back at me by someone rifling through my underpants, and been asked for selfies by someone swabbing me for explosives. (Ahmed 2016, 168)

The border agents’ double-edged recognition in these moments, the simultaneous interrogation and affection they issue, again brings into relief the most insidious aspects of Muslim interpellation in the post-9/11 hegemonic order. We may easily imagine the border agents who search Ahmed as being subject 6  “/black/” (as opposed to Black, meaning of African descent) is Mercer’s formulation to indicate the use of this term among multiethnic populations in late twentieth-century who adopted the moniker to emphasize solidarity.

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to those very searches themselves were they not wearing the uniforms communicating their relationship to the state. They evade being hailed as Muslims qua threats by donning the garb of airport security. This highlights how the duration of the two-decade-long “War on Terror” has shifted and contorted the process of Muslim interpellation into an even more perverse operation of hegemony, one that fully integrates the intersections of class and race inequality in the Global North. The labor of representing and reproducing state oppression falls upon the very subjects for whom donning hijabs, or keffiyehs, or beards would mark them as unassimilable and potentially dangerous. Unassimilable, that is, to the kind of culture that can shout, “Yes to the headscarf!” in an Instagram post and delete it when it becomes clear the Muslims were listening. Neither “fashionista” nor “fundo,” the South Asian agents in Ahmed’s anecdote subvert their otherwise disadvantaged position by joining what Althusser would call the “Repressive State Apparatus.” The way out of Muslim interpellation is via identification with the state itself, manning the very checkpoints that permit and prohibit the mobility of Muslim migrants and travelers. The working-class, South Asian, Hounslow-and-Southall-dwelling airport employees make compromises that could conceivably conflict with their own moral commitments in the interest of self-preservation. The most disquieting part of Ahmed’s increasingly bizarre checkpoint encounters is the border agent uttering the word “beta,” or son, conjuring the specter of an alternate, filial mode of relation that could potentially exist between them. It is an acknowledgment that they are both being interpellated in that moment, and in truth, it is the border agent who is more entrenched. The other, younger agent’s confession that he is a fan counters any possible suspicion of terrorist sympathies on Ahmed’s part—arguably a more potent kind of absolution than whatever results the explosive swab test could offer. Ahmed’s cultural capital as a movie and rap star, as an Emmy and Oscar winner, ironically afford him more possibility to pass through security with his beard intact and his “threat” as perceived Muslim neutralized. Hamid, Shamsie, and Ahmed portray different moments through the two decades of the “War on Terror” that produced the post-9/11 border regime and that demand slightly different strategies to avoid apprehension and detention after the moment of interpellation. The episodes drawn from their three texts illustrate the progressive incorporation of checkpoint dynamics as a general condition of life for Muslim migrants and travelers in the Global North. Moreover, these texts are exemplary of a burgeoning body of fictional, musical, visual, and textual art portraying how the perpetual threat of being interpellated as a threat changes the ways Muslims can and cannot move through the world. The external and sartorial cues that indicate one’s Muslimness signify differently based on the ideological order produced out of a given geopolitical condition. In the Global North, the possibility of wearing a hijab or beard without being interpellated as a threat to the fabric of society is its own privilege in the post-9/11 border regime.

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Yet in our current moment, questions of legitimacy and citizenship that coalesce around the perception of one’s “Muslimness” are not restricted to the Global North. Being marked as identifiably Muslim can have dire consequences in contemporary India, China, or Myanmar, for example. By contrast, the volatile 2022 Iranian feminist demonstrations against the hijab and the oppressive government it symbolizes speak to the very different political exigencies informing the ideological milieu of Iran after the Islamic Revolution, the danger lying in being perceived as not Muslim enough. These differing ideological and political configurations highlight the mutability and ever-changing signification of “Muslim” as a category of difference. What remains clear in each of these examples is that whenever and wherever the checkpoint is rendered mobile and ubiquitous, the very meaning of being interpellated as “Muslim” itself migrates, permanently on the cusp between legitimate or excisable, constantly crossing the border between citizen and enemy.

Bibliography Ahmed, Riz. 2016. Airports and Auditions. In The Good Immigrant, ed. Nikesh Shukla, 159–168. London: Unbound. Akhtar, Ayad. 2020. Homeland Elegies: A Novel. New York: Little Brown. Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Bleich, Erik. 2001. Race Policy in France. Brookings, May 1, 2001. https://www. brookings.edu/articles/race-policy-in-france/. Cohen, Roger. 2022. As Final Vote Nears in France, a Debate Over Islam and Head Scarves. New York Times, April 17, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/ world/europe/france-islam-le-pen-head-scarf.html. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1995. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamid, Mohsin. 2007. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Orlando: Harcourt. Le Monde and AFP. 2019. Selon un sondage, 42% des musulmans de France disent avoir été discriminés à cause de leur religion. Le Monde, November 6, 2019. https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/11/06/selon-un-sondage40-des-musulmans-de-france-ont-fait-l-objet-de-racisme_6018225_3224.html. Masood, Syed. 2022. The Bad Muslim Discount: A Novel. New York: Anchor Books. Mercer, Kobena. 1994. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary Online. s.v. “Metrosexual.” https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/metrosexual. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Montandon, Mac. 2006. The Beard: Hip, but Hot. New York Times, July 16. Morey, Peter. 2018. Islamophobia and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Naim, Solvan, dir. 2022. Mo. Season 1, ep. 1, Hamoodi. Written by Mohammed Amer, Azhar Usman, and Ramy Youssef. Aired August 24, 2022 on Netflix.

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Nair, Mira, director. 2012. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Cine Mosaic. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages : Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Rana, Junaid Akram. 2011. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press. Ravindran, Jeevan. 2022. Vogue France says “yes to the headscarf.” Some Muslim women are not happy. CNN.com. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/vogue-­ france-­headscarf-­instagram-­scli-­intl/index.html. Raza Kolb, Anjuli Fatima. 2021. Epidemic Empire: Colonialism Contagion and Terror 1817–2020. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shamsie, Kamila. 2017. Home Fire. New York: Riverhead Books. Youssef, Ramy, dir. 2019. Ramy. Season 1, episode 4, “Strawberries.” Written by Ramy Youssef, Ari Katcher, and Ryan Welch. Aired April 19, 2019, on Hulu.

CHAPTER 21

Another Home Pico Iyer and Caryl Phillips

CP: Having known you for thirty years now and having shared with you an ongoing professional interest in migration in the broadest sense, I think it’s surprising that we’ve never actually had a conversation about what this word might mean to us. All the more so, as we have met and talked, first in Los Angeles, then Atlanta during the 1996 Olympic Games, in New York on many occasions, in Japan, and in Bangkok, Thailand. I’m sure I may well be missing a location or two! Obviously, we both live in countries we were not born in, but I think we continue to nurture an ongoing interest (fascination?) with travel, movement, and all sorts of border crossings. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Some years ago, in an essay entitled “The End of Empire” (which was excerpted in Harper’s in December 1999, from your book The Global Soul), you wrote something which has always haunted me. It was many years before I could see pictures of my father, proud in his Indian formal wear, president of the Oxford Union, and realize that he was flanked on every side by the kind of Englishmen that an Indian might have dreamed of in Bombay (one would go on to become editor of The Times, one deputy prime minister; one would become head of the Liberal Party; one the steady sage of the BBC). I imagined his family gathered round the crackly transistor radio in the

P. Iyer (*) Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] C. Phillips Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_21

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small flat in the Bombay suburbs, listening to their distant hero on the World Service broadcast opposing such notions as “This House refuses to take itself seriously,” and I realized that by going halfway through the open door, he had allowed me to walk out of it on the other side.

This passage has such resonance with me, in part because it nods toward the intensely personal and familial nature of migration, and hints at some of the sacrifices involved. I think that’s where I begin when I find myself thinking about migration; the family unit. I apologize as I’m aware that this isn’t a properly framed question, but I’m hopeful that my quoting a part of your terrific essay might provide a gateway through which we might pass … and begin to talk. PI: You’re always so generous, Caz. And it’s interesting that I consider you a kind of brother, even though you come from the West Indies and I from the Eastern. Simply because both of us grew up, as you know, at exactly the same time, in exactly the same country (England), at a moment when there were not many dark-skinned souls around us (I was the only one in all my classrooms), and yet already we were being viewed with suspicion. In other words, there’s a whole community of Others forming in almost every corner of the world, and we may have a lot in common, in terms of our relation to the center, even if we come from radically different homelands. In the context of the passage you kindly quote, I’ve often thought how my parents, growing up in British India, saw London almost as a suburb of Bombay. While agitating constantly for Indian Independence (my mother knew Gandhi and was passionately allied with his cause), they were also grateful for some of the things the British had given them, such as a language they could use perhaps more powerfully than their so-called masters did. I often think, in this regard, of Orhan Pamuk, suggesting, of cultural bifurcation, that two heads are better than one. I have always felt that my parents could go beyond the Brits who had trained them because they were fluent in Shakespeare as well as the Vedas; they knew the Bible inside out, and Western philosophy, even as they never thought of Buddhism as foreign and had grown up with the Upanishads. Many in that generation made the most of this Janus-facedness: what makes your friend Derek Walcott for me the great poet of my lifetime is the fact that he could draw upon the cadences, the flowers, the beauty of Saint Lucia as well as all the gray and dusty Old World stuff the British had brought to his island; Naipaul, from nearby Trinidad, arguably wrote an English clearer and more dispassionate—more classical—than did any of the Englishmen who taught him (and had more to say besides, because he could see them with an outsider’s sharp clarity).Salman Rushdie, a generation later, saw he had this great, rich, multi-cultured treasure-house to draw upon, in South Asia, even as he was remaking the English language and its literature in the process. My guess is that you and I, coming of age a decade after Rushdie, also saw that we might be

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richer and more various in our perspectives than some of the English people we saw around us who knew nothing but England. Yet the one thing my parents could not see—to go back to that passage— when they arrived in England was that nobody at the other end would take them to be English. My mother could recite long swatches of Tennyson and Shelley and Rupert Brooke, my father actually taught Plato and Kant and Mill at Oxford. Yet for some of the people around them, they would always be aliens, intruders—maybe barbarians at the gates—which finally moved them to migrate to more welcoming California. They did have a love of aspects of the West that had been brought to them in India, but, as Naipaul recorded in his Enigma of Arrival, it was often an unrequited love. They could romanticize England as I, born to England, never could, and in some ways the best thing their experience gave me was a freedom from ever entertaining expectations or rosy feelings about England. By giving birth to me there, they were in some sense, and maybe inadvertently, giving me the freedom to leave it far behind. And maybe that’s part of the sacrifice you mention: my parents gave everything they had to get to the center of Empire, but in so doing, they had to watch me head out the door by another exit, perhaps ensuring that I’d always live very differently from the way they did. I’m really interested to know how your parents saw England, coming from their side of the world, and what expectations they might have had of it, or disappointments. And though I feel you and I have so much in common, as not-really-English English-raised nomads, you in your writing have often worked to transform and re-illuminate the last few centuries of history by giving us the voices that were written out of the official accounts of Empire, the perspectives that were disregarded (while I have concentrated more on the minglings and fresh possibilities of “the Empire writing back”). On a personal level, I’d love to know how your sense of the passage to England differed from mine. CP: Whenever I think of the word migration, I tend to think of the word “expectation.” It’s such a good question. What on earth were my parents thinking in 1958 when they crossed the Atlantic on a ship, with me—a four-­ month-­old—as part of their luggage? Growing up, I tried to ask them about this on numerous occasions, but I was often met with a “straight bat”—to utilize a cricketing metaphor. Basically, they didn’t want to talk because like many immigrant parents, they were keen to make sure that their kids were not “confused.” They appeared to have a desire to forget about “home;” either that, or they waited until the children were asleep to broach the subject. Of course, there were West Indian relatives, and sometimes even West Indian food and music, but my brothers and I (they were born in England) were very much encouraged to “root” ourselves in Britain. I can now look and better understand why this might have been, and I think it’s connected to this word “expectation.” I think my parents—like so many other colonial subjects, who had grown up genuflecting before English

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literature, English history, English geography—believed, to some extent, that with their journey to Britain, they were, in fact, going to another “Home.” The colonial center. A place where they would be, in fact, recognized. They didn’t expect a red carpet, or any special treatment, but at the very least they anticipated being taken seriously. And, as we know, they were not taken seriously. As a result, whatever “hurt” they were internalizing, they were desperate that it should not be visited on their children. This being the case, they set about arming us with a sense of “belonging,” which was their way of trying to compensate for the abandonment they felt in Britain. Of course, as kids we could see through this. Like you, I was always “the only one” in the classroom. The abuse and taunting I received was not going to be alleviated by my boldly claiming to be British. Especially so when classmates, and sometimes even teachers, seemed to relish echoing the words of various politicians, comedians, trade union leaders, etc. in encouraging me to “go back to where you come from.” I think the colonial migrant is very different from the political or economic migrant, in so much as he or she “expects” to be recognized, and anticipates some kind of kinship with the country to which they are journeying. In the mid-sixties, I do remember whispered conversations in my house about the possibility of migrating to Canada, and some relatives did leave Britain for Toronto. In fact, in the seventies, the Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon, whose great novel of migration, The Lonely Londoners, is still one of the most reliable fictional guides to the travails of migration, left Britain for Canada. I think of him, and many other West Indians, as suffering from a kind of “assimilation fatigue” that finally drove them out. Perhaps this is something that occurred with your parents, and finally led them to up and leave for California. However, one further thought. I wonder how you think “class” factors into all of this? I know we both ended up studying at Oxford, but you went to the most elite private school in England, and your parents were highly educated. My parents finished school, but had no university education, and I attended an English comprehensive school. I ask because I think there was, in British society, always an assumption that black or brown immigrants were working class and uneducated. My parents didn’t have the kind of education that your parents possessed, but interestingly enough my mother was not working class at all. She grew up as a privileged girl, with servants. I think part of the shock of her encounter with the Mother Country was not just the cruder forms of prejudice and discrimination that she was exposed to, but the society’s total inability to ascribe to her the class identity (and therefore “respect?”) to which she felt entitled. PI: I love that point about the expectation of being recognized: it had never struck me before, but you’re right that your parents—and mine—were coming to a place they had been encouraged all their lives to think of as home, though nobody had told them they were expected to come in through the servants’ entrance.

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Mastery of British literature would give them no advantage in British culture—and might even be a disadvantage, if they were seen as uppity outsiders, or foreigners daring to presume to belong to a land that had closed its doors on them centuries before. I don’t know whether the US, at least traditionally, has been more welcoming, if only because it has far less of a center, is unburdened by ten centuries of history, and remains a fluid and inchoate place that offers the promise of being made—or remade—by the latest group of immigrants. I certainly did have the sense, coming to the US, that I was entering a world of newcomers where nobody could claim to be much more American than I—even though that in itself would never make me think of myself as American. One of the lessons of being in the US for more than half a century is that the place where people welcome you may not feel like home at all (and in my case the place where people are not always so happy to see me, Japan, still does feel, at some unknowable, unofficial level, like my home). I relate instantly to your really touching comment about your parents training you to be British, even as they saw that they were not being allowed to be so. I think that probably applies to my father and mother, too. Coming from South India and North India, respectively, they had no common language but English, and though my father would tell me stories from The Ramayana at bedtime, though my mother always wore a sari, and though both parents were teetotaling vegetarians, still I suspect they were training me, in earnest hopefulness, to fit in to a country that would never be fully theirs, and maybe to learn from their frustrations.Even as they were finding just what your parents did. Remarkably—I recall this only now—we, too, considered migrating to Canada in the mid-1960s, and it was only a fluke that we ended up in California. I had never known that Samuel Selvon, whose majestic work you introduced me to, made that move, to what I think of as the more grown-up, ironic, history-wise (and modest) America, north of the 48th parallel. It breaks my heart to learn more about your mother’s background. It echoes so powerfully what we see every hour here in the US: those new immigrants we so easily overlook or even deprecate are doctors, lawyers, in many instances the most accomplished products of their countries, whose credentials far exceed our own. In the case of my parents, my mother did come from relative privilege, but my father grew up in a two-room apartment with six siblings and almost no advantages when he won, like his classmate Naipaul, a scholarship to study at Oxford. And as someone who excelled in speaking and thinking and writing, he was a little perplexed, I think, that every door wouldn’t fly open for him in England even as he was probably brighter and more wide-ranging, as well as more charismatic, than most of the people around him. You’re right that I was fortunate to win a scholarship to one of the fancy, snobby-sounding schools in England (and thanks to that scholarship, it was actually cheaper for me to get a good education there, and fly back three times

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a year to see my parents in California, than to get a much less good education at the best school down the road from their house in Santa Barbara). I was the only one who didn’t know I looked different from all my classmates; all I knew was that I’d grown up in Oxford, spoke as my friends did, cheered for the same center forwards as they did, succumbed to the same Pink Floyd albums that they did. It’s true that, when they were trying to get a rise out of me, my schoolmates would always harp on the color of my skin, but I knew that, if they hadn’t had this to turn to, they would have got at me for being too small, too thin, too bad at games, even too pale. Really, it was outside the school’s walls that I felt a constant sense of threat. Like you, I grew up in the age of “Paki-bashers,” and every time I walked down the street, I sensed there was a good chance of getting beaten up—ironically, for being mistakenly associated with the country that my Indian parents saw as their worst enemy. And when, at the age of 11, I heard that the leading Conservative politician Enoch Powell had spoken of “rivers of blood” if more people like myself were admitted into England, I felt the bewilderment of someone who’d been born and grown up in the country now being treated as an intruder. But the question I have to ask you now is whether (if you can say) your parents felt satisfaction, even vindication at all that you and your brothers have done. It seems to me that all three of you have succeeded in England, on your own terms, and that your parents might well feel gratified that they succeeded in their mission: even if they would never be taken as British, they had opened a door for you to conquer England, up to a point. While also, as it turns out, offering you the benefit of a mobile identity of sorts, many homes and an ability—perhaps?—to fit in in many places. I do feel that England is facing a major test, as we speak: will its Conservative Party members choose a dark-skinned man, whose story is not so different from our own, as Prime Minister, or will they shy away (partly—of all things— on the grounds that he’s too rich, or maybe well-educated)? CP: I have had to think hard about your question as to what my immigrant parents to Britain feel about how their children have fared. We were the first on either side of the family to attend university; I know that there was pride in this “achievement,” without it ever being openly expressed. Truthfully, I’m not sure if I’m fully aware of the price my parents paid as migrants, and I don’t think they are aware of how difficult it was for us to grow up in the era of “Paki-bashing” and Enoch Powell. For them to complain about Britain would be to admit a certain type of failure, and where would that leave us in terms of a “home?” We did complain about Britain, but we were encouraged to concentrate on our schoolwork and “get on with things.” In such circumstances, a huge gap of understanding opened up. I never “settled” in Britain. Within ten years of graduation, I was traveling and teaching in India for two months, then in Sweden for nearly a year, then to St. Kitts, and then to the US to take up a position as a Visiting Writer. Whatever door they opened up for me with their act of migration, I walked through it

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and then out the other side through another door and out into the world. Without their initial act of migration, I could not have lived such a life of itinerancy and—dare I say—relative freedom. But what do they think of my absconding in this way? If I had to guess, I would say that they understood that as migrants who were trying to raise their children in a socially and politically hostile country, there was a great chance that they might lose sight of their children. For instance; when I won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, one of the “perks” of the prize is to be offered an audience with the Queen. I think that, even before editors at The Guardian broke the story in their newspaper that I had refused the invitation, my mother would have understood that this would be my response, although privately she would have been hoping that this might not be the case. A girl who had grown up in the Caribbean celebrating Empire Day—in fact, a young woman who in the sixties took me with her to Leeds Civic Hall to stand among a huge crowd and listen to Her Majesty speak— would have little real understanding of how deeply her son loathed the institution of the monarchy. Would I have felt the same way had I enjoyed a Caribbean childhood? Perhaps, but most probably not with the same degree of intensity. Britain had allowed me to see her close up, and with her trousers down. It was not an edifying spectacle. I’m very interested in what you say about your father’s classmate, Naipaul. I wonder if you have read Naipaul’s letters to his father, written while he was a student at Oxford. I found the volume very moving, particularly so as it seemed to me to reveal the whole performative strategy employed by so many migrants in order to try so very hard to belong. In Naipaul’s case, it temporarily failed at Oxford, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. I witnessed a couple of colleagues at university suffer similar nervous breakdowns as they tried, and failed, so hard to be accepted. One of the great, often unspoken, consequences of migration is the onset of problems with mental health, something that—to this day—continues to plague migrant communities in Britain. Earlier in our conversation you mentioned Derek Walcott, who unlike Naipaul, famously never won the scholarship to study at Oxford, and went instead to college in Jamaica. Thereafter, the trajectory of Walcott’s professional life took him to the United States, as opposed to Britain, but the Walcott-­ Naipaul “falling out”—and subsequent sniping—seems to me to have a lot to do with Walcott’s disdain for Britain’s seemingly full-blooded acceptance of Naipaul—an embrace that Walcott perceived Naipaul to have accepted at the price of rejecting the Caribbean. Walcott was always convinced that behind the patrician “English” Naipaul was a skinny little Trinidadian Indian boy who had betrayed himself in order to become part of “that;” he always thought of “Vidia” as trying to maintain a huge performance, something Walcott regarded as generally infuriating, and occasionally hilarious, but ultimately tragic. You wondered whether the United States was more “welcoming” than Britain, because the country is unburdened with centuries of “history,” and offers the “promise” that is etched on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Walking

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out of the front door of my apartment building in New York, I gaze across the water at the Statue of Liberty (and Ellis Island) and often think about these questions, without necessarily finding any answers. I suppose my response might be to ask you, don’t you think that the United States is only more “welcoming” because for the vast majority of migrants it allows choice? Many migrants arrive in the US and face the same questions of discrimination in jobs, employment, and housing; the same racism, religious hostility, and types of unwanted scrutiny which remind them of the difficulties they are fleeing. However, what the United States doesn’t do is make them choose an identity in the same way that a country like Britain seems to insist upon—frankly, the United States doesn’t give a damn. You can call yourself Irish-American, or Italian-American, or Swedish-American; or, these days, even African-American. Even though the United States might privately scorn such heterogeneous self-­ description, the country is prepared to allow you to hang on to your cultural baggage in the form of your language, your food, your music, etc. It often appears to me that the United States is simply too busy to make people choose. There’s a certain “freedom” with this Darwinian abandonment of the newcomer. If this is even vaguely true, can you imagine Britain ever employing the hyphen and allowing her migrants to appropriate a culturally fluid identity to this extent? This would allow them some latitude to reinvent themselves and freely forge a new postcolonial identity out of the building blocks of the past and the present. Even now, over two decades into the twenty-first century, when Rishi Sunak stands next to Liz Truss for a Conservative party leadership debate, for the vast majority of the Conservative electorate which one “looks” British? PI: I couldn’t agree more, Caz, and to be honest, whenever I look out my door at the US, I also look up, toward one of the societies I admire, Canada, and wonder why the US has fallen so far behind its northern neighbor. Of course, the US is much larger and more chaotic and more burdened by power and its sense of being the center of the world, but I’ve always been struck at how Canada moved decisively toward the migrant, seeing that he or she was the way of the future, and decided to turn multiculturalism into an asset—the possibility of a whole that could be greater than the sum of its parts—rather than falling back into it more or less unconsciously, as you rightly say of America. Canadians might challenge this because they’re honest and mature enough to be self-questioning; they might note the huge gulf that remains between the Technicolor city and the relatively homogeneous countryside, and the way that even in their cities, migrants increasingly gather in homogeneous communities. Yet still I’m struck at how Pierre Trudeau introduced a Multiculturalism Policy more than half a century ago and even the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney passed a Multiculturalism Act in 1988. Canadians have seen how much they have to gain from the migrant rather than how much their fragile sense of self might be threatened by greater diversity.

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That said, I was impressed when the US voted a half-Kenyan, dark-skinned man largely raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, into the White House, and I’m interested to see if Britain is ready to be equally expansive in its sense of what it can be (and look like). At a time when more and more of our neighbors have a mother from one culture and a father from a very different one, black-and-­ white divisions seem more and more beside the point. What you say about your parents is so beautiful and moving: I often think my parents were bewildered by my lack of interest in spending any of my grown-up years in England (which hadn’t been entirely unkind to me) even as they always preserved a certain degree of fondness for it (though it hadn’t been very accepting of them). They probably hadn’t noticed that, while 300,000 West Indians were coming into Britain between 1947 and 1962, a million Brits were flooding out to Australia, South Africa, Canada. I actually fled England even earlier than you—as soon as I completed my undergraduate education. I felt—still feel—there was more open space on this side of the Atlantic, more energy, more room for innovation, more attention to the future (even if it comes, at times, with a debilitating carelessness toward history). I continue, as you can tell, to be almost haunted by the fact that I can live so easily in a place that will always be foreign to me, and have no interest in staying in the place that is probably, de facto, my home. I suppose that’s part of the freedom you describe so well: our parents were stuck between a home that was truly theirs and another place that had presented itself as theirs so long as they stayed in their place. They left their homes to go to a wished-for home that either slammed the door in their face or told them that they could hang around and take care of the washing and the groceries. I did read the Naipaul letters back home, which for me turn around that central moment when his beloved father back in Trinidad dies, and Naipaul sends his family a heartbroken tribute, while announcing firmly that he won’t be coming back. In those days—my parents, probably like yours, went to England by boat—every departure could seem final, a real separation for life; of course that remains a reality for millions of desperate refugees today, but you and I were probably saved from a few complications simply by having access to the airplane, which allowed us to commute between our parents’ place and our own. My friend Richard Rodriguez, born to parents who came to Sacramento from Mexico, has written powerfully about how the very fact he realized his parents’ hopes for him separated him from them forever. Precisely by mastering the texts he was given at school, going to Stanford, and becoming an English-­ language writer, he left them behind, irreparably; he entered a world that perhaps they had fervently wished for him, but to which they had no access. He even spoke a language they could no longer follow. The immigrant’s dream—that he or she can make a better life for the children—becomes a kind of tragedy when it comes true.

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As a traveler, I seem to spend more and more of my time thinking about the people left behind: whenever I step into a plane, I see my mother waving to me from behind a gate—waving and waving—before she returns to a house that suddenly feels very empty. That speaks to me for the way in which, as you say, she has somehow opened a door that allows me to fly away and make my own home, even my own self, in a place she can barely recognize (Japan). When you mention Walcott and Naipaul, I think of how Walcott referred to his contemporary as “V.S.  Nightfall,” reminding us how he, Walcott, made bright and liberating use of both the Caribbean and the European tradition to which he’d been exposed; Naipaul, by disowning the Caribbean while never being accepted as a Brit, ended up a “Nowhereian” of sorts, neither here nor there. For me, Walcott is a perfect example of how our cultures have been enriched by the Age of Migration, with people from everywhere bringing their stories, their histories, even their fresh ways of telling stories into our midst. So I have to ask you: how has your writing been shaped by not just movement but by that unmoored sense you must have had as a boy, of not quite belonging anywhere? As you suggest, you would have been a very different being, and novelist, had you stayed in St. Kitts, or perhaps in England. CP: Well, that’s a great question, and my first thought was, “Migration saved me.” But, of course, saved me from … what? I imagine that had I stayed in St Kitts, and been raised there, I might have been encouraged, and felt more obligation, to attempt to enter a profession such as medicine or law. It’s certainly possible that I might not have had the academic capabilities to achieve at this level, but the real question is—would I have written? I doubt it. I think it was Graham Greene who noted that most writers are formed (and acquire their “subject matter”) by their late teens. No doubt he was pithier, and more concise, in his statement, but there is a great deal of truth to this observation. Writers should have something to say; I believe that in a great number of cases there is some early discord that provides a life-long itch that needs to be scratched. In my own case, the act of migration provided me with that disruption to self. Crossing the Atlantic, and migrating along a colonial axis gave to me a subject-matter. My upbringing was “bumpy,” and I was continually being encouraged to see myself through a British lens. How I saw myself, and what I was being encouraged to see, were—in British society—clearly two different things. Naturally enough, the early work often explored this dilemma, but I can now fully understand why you fled Britain after your undergraduate years. Had I had this option I too might well have done so. Instead, I remained, but began to feel increasingly claustrophobic, as I sensed that I would be “seen” and perhaps even rewarded if I simply told different versions of the British story. However, from a relatively early age, I understood that this was not the only story, and not the only story to which I was connected. Even before the publication of my first novel, I was traveling to write about Europe. (I received the page proofs of The Final Passage while journeying through Spain.) I can now

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see that evenings spent with Turkish migrant workers in Frankfurt, or staying with James Baldwin in the south of France, or standing outside of Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, or traveling in Poland during the last days of Soviet rule, were all attempts by me to push beyond Britain in terms of my understanding of, and empathy with, those who were making all kinds of border crossings. I wanted to be free to see (and imagine) kinship with the displaced and dispossessed without being obliged to pledge fealty to Britain and British concerns. After all, carrying a British passport—a British identity if you like—had landed me in this predicament, so why would I choose to spend my whole life seeking to simply adjust the lens on the reductive British gaze? I wanted to do this, but I wanted to go further and do more than this. So, with apologies for my long-windedness—the second act of migration, if you like, back across the Atlantic enabled me, for better or for worse, to become the writer I am now. Far from “abandoning” Britain, I was simply trying to open up the lens so that I might see Britain, and the British story, in a larger context. It’s not for me to judge whether or not I have been successful, but I have become the writer I am today because of two acts of migration. The first was a fortuitous migration by my courageous parents, who were part of that generation of West Indians who arrived in Britain after the war to help the Mother Country. The second was born of my own refusal to accept the relegation from British Subject to British Object, and live with the tacit understanding that I should make peace with the many vagaries of British life. Obviously, for many people, being “unmoored” is not a comfortable, or tenable, state of existence. I think that being a writer brings with it many uncertainties that perhaps make this sense of unbelonging a little more acceptable than it might be for other folks. I very seldom use the word “home”—I used to think of this as a price I have paid. This implies that feeling a sense of “home” is something that one ought to strive toward. However, these days, I don’t feel this way. As Robert Frost famously said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Naturally, they don’t have to do any such thing! But the fact that there might be a cozy and familiar place to which one would actively wish to go—a place that one might call “home”—is, to me, an amazing notion, but not one that I have ever felt. Is this the true price of migration? A loss of “home.” Not a loss of home that might only be measured geographically, but perhaps more importantly a loss of “home” that might be seen in terms of people. With the act of migration, gaps begin to open up—gaps of misunderstanding and confusion, that we’ve spoken of, and these fissures and cracks often cause divisions in families. Particularly between parents and children. Perhaps this is the real price that migrants pay; what they often lose sight of is not a place—a territory, a town, a country—they lose sight of people, including people who are living under the same roof with them. I’ve noticed that, of late, you do occasionally use the word “home.” I began our exchange, so I think it is only proper that you should conclude it. If you

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agree, perhaps you won’t mind if I ask you what exactly do you mean when you use the word, “home?” PI: Be careful what you ask for, Caz; with this sally, you’ve really thrown open a Pandora’s box! Growing up, as you did, in a place that would never feel like home—and that would never be delighted if I thought of it as home—left me spending much of my life turning the term over in my head, wondering how home could be defined more expansively—and inclusively. Certainly, wondering whether community could be defined in entirely internal ways, and kinship, as you say, have less and less to do with family. As cyberspace has to some extent made true for so many. I instinctively felt, growing up, that the English language was my home; it was the one thing that would keep me company with every breath, wherever I happened to be sitting. And when I accompanied my parents to California, at the age of seven, I realized that home would have to be an anthology, a collection of places; as a little boy with an Indian face, an English voice, and an American green card, I sensed that my home could exist only in the mixing and mingling of cultures, even though I could never belong to any one of them. I was grateful that “home” was evolving into a more fluid and open-ended notion than it had ever been for my grandparents. When they were born, they came into a very fixed sense of who they were—their tribe, their caste, their religion, their language—which brought with it a very fixed sense of who their enemies were: very often the people on the other side of the street, or the ones whose circumstances differed from their own. I felt released from having been given a sense of “home” at birth, and thus allowed either to craft one, or to exist at times without any need for one at all, as you say of yourself. And then, early in my writing life, our family home in California burned to the ground in a forest fire, with me beside it, and all the fancy abstract ideas became a powerful reality: lacking a physical structure that I could call home— and having lost all my possessions (even the handwritten notes that would make up my next three books)—I realized that home would have to be a piece of soul, as it were, more than a piece of soil. That home might be not a reflection of where one lived so much as of what lived inside one: in my case, my mother, my future wife, the song that was always going through my head, the books I loved to read and reread. As home became entirely internal, it reminded me, as you say, that migration doesn’t have to be read only geographically: most of us migrate in our circumstances many times over, and I was hardly unusual in having been a comfortable soul with a set future sitting in the house where I’d grown up one afternoon and, the next morning, finding myself sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house with nothing but the toothbrush I’d just bought in an all-night supermarket. I certainly came to feel that home was not the place where one happened to be born—or happened to live—so much as the place where one became oneself; and in some ways losing the physical structure which I’d always considered

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to be “home” emboldened me to seek out the place in which I’d always had a mysterious sense of familiarity and, to that extent, belonging, Japan. A funny choice insofar as no culture is less inclusive; the customs officers in that homogeneous land used to strip-search me every time I returned to the country, three or four times a year. I looked like exactly what they didn’t want to see coming into their country, whether I was (as they seemed to suspect) a cousin of Saddam Hussein, an illegal Iranian immigrant or, worst of all, what I was, an itinerant soul of Indian descent. To this day I speak limited Japanese, don’t love Japanese food, haven’t worked or studied a day of my life in the place I think of as my secret, deepest home. But I recognize it somehow, the way one might see a stranger and feel that she is a long-lost friend. In ways I’ve given up trying to explain, I feel a kinship with it I’ll never feel with India or Britain or America. And I can gladly call it home in part because I’ll always be a foreigner there, outside the system—by which I mean I’d love to spend all my days there, but I’d never want to be Japanese. I suppose this is one of the curious phenomena to which the likes of you and me are heir: having grown up feeling a foreigner even in the place in which I grew up (England)—and knowing I was a foreigner in the country where all my ancestry lay (India), as well as the one where I was given an “alien card” to carry around with me (the US)—I never expected to find an entire culture to which I’d belong, and came to feel at home with the very state of feeling foreign. Indeed, if I felt too much at home anywhere, I suspect I might flee it. Which is, of course, part of what makes me a writer: not wanting to take anything for granted. I’m thrilled you cite that quote from Frost because I think I once wrote, in the context of Japan, that home is the place, for me, where, when you arrive, they don’t want to take you in. I’m often grateful that my upbringing has made me comfortable with being a foreigner, whether I’m in Paraguay or Ethiopia or Laos. Of course, you and I are among the 1% of the very fortunate when it comes to moving between cultures, but to some extent, as our writing has explored, even the most undefended refugee shares many of the questions that we carry with us, the tugs and ambiguities and divisions. The sense that “home” is a sentence we’ll never complete, and one to which we’ll always keep adding, as our best friend turns out to be Canadian and our job takes us to Boston and our parents move to Birmingham and some part of our heart feels as if it somehow belongs in Kenya. This seems to me the community of the coming century, and if it can free us even a little from the “us” versus “them” mentality of the age when each person belonged to one place and was opposed to those who came from every other, that’s an overdue liberation. We’ve all seen how tribalism and xenophobia have risen, often violently, in response to these shifts; and yet, at an individual level, the old divisions collapse every time—and it happens every moment—someone from Indonesia meets someone from France, and realizes that this is the person with whom she wishes to make children.

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You and I have spoken so much, from the heart and from experience, about the pains and complications of migration; maybe the best way to bring this conversation to a close is by noting that one effect of migration, which lasts till our dying breath, is to complicate the notion of home and to ask us to define, consciously, what for previous generations was a given. I once gave a talk for TED on this new society of people who belong to many places, a group that is growing so quickly that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans; already there are by some counts 280 million who live outside the old definitions. And of course people of every background are more and more choosing to migrate across boundaries of gender and class and race, and all those binaries that once kept us all in place. When TED released my short talk, they gave it the title, “Where Is Home?” For me the beauty of that question, today, is that it’s one we need never answer. (By Email—August 1 to 12, 2022)

PART IV

Migration and Language

CHAPTER 22

Migration and Language: Introduction Derek Duncan

The chapters in this section focus on writers and texts which explore a range of creative practices expressing the linguistic diversity of everyday life and the many mechanisms through which migration transforms, with power and critical imagination, the constrictive landscapes of national literatures. These landscapes characteristically depend on the idea of a “mother tongue” that binds language, origin, and identity, celebrating and naturalizing the primacy of monolingualism.1 Yet languages bear the imprint and energy of human mobility. Used to signal symbolically the nation as a monolingual “imagined community,” their inherent heteroglossia insists on difference within as well as across language boundaries. They conserve the historical sediments of past migrations as well as the traces of colonial conflict and incursion, yet continue to mutate and develop in the present and into the future. The increase in demographic movement, forced and elected, as well as the rapid expansion of the anglosphere through globalization and the spread of digital technologies, bring different language systems into potentially transformative contact while accelerating the pace at which endangered languages become extinct. Languages inhabit a complex and unequal global ecology. The singularity of the one language–one nation model is a palpably inadequate description of a world mapped by linguistic diversity. Some places are audibly and inescapably multilingual and their inhabitants move with some familiarity and ease through their variegated linguistic landscapes. Some people 1

 For an extended critique of the abiding power of this trope, see Yildiz 2012.

D. Duncan (*) University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_22

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will live in domestic situations of great linguistic complexity in ostensibly monolingual environments. While many of us inhabit more than one language system, most nations, in the Global North at least, misrecognize the implications of plural linguistic belongings. For example, the language practices of people who speak two languages and who move from one language to the other are commonly seen in binary terms as code-switching. You speak one language and then move into other. Each language is believed to operate as an autonomous, independent system with clearly defined borders. The higher your linguistic competence, it is assumed, the fewer traces or residues you will leave as you pass from one language to the other. This kind of parallel monolingualism, where languages stand beside each other but don’t quite touch, escalates into a perception of multilingualism as simply the cumulative co-­ existence of different languages. Seen through the monolingual prism, the complexities and creative opportunities for thought, feeling, and expression in and across different idioms by those who live in two or more languages are systematically overlooked. While this model of linguistic, and by extension cultural, separation may make an immediate kind of sense, it depends on a series of momentous denials about how languages operate and how their kinetic energy and processes of transformation are constitutive of human mobility, exchange, and interaction. More fluid paradigms are needed to grasp the terms on which different languages stand in unequal proximity to each other. Languages are not afforded equal value, and are vehicles, with different valences, for the expression of differentials of power. When people migrate moving across and into different linguistic systems, they are habitually placed in positions of cultural deficit and of unknowing. The banal tasks of daily life as well as the mazes of state bureaucracy meet linguistic barriers. Language proficiency as the gateway to legal citizenship and residence functions as a hurdle to negotiate and as a mechanism of exclusion. Yet beyond their deployment as weapons of oppression, languages, practically and imaginatively, allow people to thrive in precarious conditions of co-habitation. And on what is only apparently a more formal level, lexical exchange, co-option, adoption, or borrowing offer tangible evidence of what happens when languages touch and intersect. Mary Louise Pratt’s well-known concept of the “contact zone,” developed from its use in the field of Linguistics, is one effective way of figuring linguistic interaction. Referring specifically to spaces of colonial encounter where hierarchies would seem to be unequivocally in place, Pratt envisions the contact zone “not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices,” always marked, but never fully determined by, “asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1992, 7). The spatial asymmetry of language offers unanticipated opportunities for resistance. Doris Sommer notes the cognitive flexibility shown by bilinguals in “the everyday arts of maneuvering and self-irony” (Sommer 2004, 4) as they push back against naturalized forms of fixity in a given tongue. Not all bilingualisms, however, are equal. The educated cosmopolitan language-learner accrues a

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much higher level of cultural capital than the foreign migrant whose accented voice more readily goes unheard. Or at least most of the time. For Sommer, we inhabit “dominant languages that often sparkle with the survivals of resistant speech” (2004, 190)—signs of protest, difference, or simply the cry that things as we know them could be otherwise. Multilingualists possess “an incomparable advantage for developing alternate perspectives, flexibility, and wisdom” (2004, 191). The temptation to romanticize the cognitive privileges of dwelling in multiple language systems is tempered by the necessary return to these systems as modalities of lived practice. Walter Mignolo’s concept of “border thinking” refers to a politicized practice of cultural crossing brokered through “languaging,” the saturated fluid mobility in and across languages bearing the weight of history, marginalized subjectivities, and oppression, yet also offering the creativity and promise of different futures (Mignolo 2000). Following Mignolo, Ofelia García and Li Wei ground their own theoretical work on “translanguaging” in personal histories of migration. To “translanguage” is to engage in “a political process of social and subjectivity transformation which resists the asymmetries of power that language and other meaning-making codes, associated with one or another nationalist ideology, produce” (García and Wei 2014, 43). Literary canons are manifestations of this kind of nationalist ideology. Yet as the editors of the recent Multilingual Literature as World Literature argue, “translanguaging knits sovereignly perceived languages and semiologies into the same fabric, and brings different locals around the globe, even ‘multilingual locals’ into productive literary encounters” (Hiddleston and Ouyang 2021, 7). Multilingual performance challenges categories of literary belonging and the foundational fictions of national identity which they bolster. It redefines commonplace understandings of how and where language and territory meet, and how readers as well as authors are situated in the literary landscape. Migration changes lexical, morphological, and grammatical repertoires and when so-called migrants, or multiple language users, start to write, their work almost inevitably bears the imprint of other cultural codes. Language becomes unfamiliar and opaque through the presence of what Emily Apter refers to as “untranslateables,” words and concepts whose intractability lead to “mistranslation, neologism, and semantic dissonance” (Apter 2008, 597). The point, however, of such intractability is that the world comes to be mapped otherwise through revisionary optics, imaginaries, and knowledges that Mary Louise Pratt has recently characterized as “planetary longings” (Pratt 2022). This expansive vision engages yasser elharirey and Rebecca Walkowitz’s productively provocative contribution to the debates on the intersectionality of migration, language, and literary creativity. Their concept of “postlingualism” points to the “exhaustion point of individual languages” which no longer map onto discrete territorial formation. Looking at literary texts “that operate at the edges of language,” they draw attention to elements of performance and reception that take the “national” out of “language” and compromise categories such as bi-or trans-lingual, and practices of translation which sustain investment in

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language borders (elhariry and Walkowitz 2021, 6). Translation becomes a form of practiced intersectionality. The writers and texts discussed in this section show heightened attention to language as the asymmetrical space of the migratory experience. Frauke Matthes examines Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft, translated into English as Where You Come From, a text that challenges commonplace assumptions about literature and national belonging. Resisting the classification of “migrant writer,” Stanišić adopts a formally hybrid prose style to contort linear narratives of national belonging and linguistic propriety and add layers of complication to his own story of migration from Bosnia to Germany. Drawing on Walkowitz’s concept of the “born translated” text, which structurally and thematically presupposes translation as a medium of multifarious belonging, Matthes suggests that the linguistic layerings of Stanišić’s work contribute to redefining literature in German as an open, rather than exclusive, category of belonging. Derek Duncan’s exploration of the work of Italian-language writer Carmine Abate follows a similar direction. Abate’s first language is Arbëresh. Italian and later on German were languages acquired through formal education and in the workplace. Abate’s heterolingual prose contains fragments of multiple languages that create an historical record of movement and put pressure on the formal structures of Italian. Abate’s refusal to translate these fragments opens up the national language to other histories and non-transparent cultural meanings. Writing as a space of desire and creativity beyond the restrictive delineations and computations of national borders underpins Ramsey McGlazer’s reading of Cristina Rivera Garza’s novel El mal de la taiga (The Taiga Syndrome). Like Stanišić, Rivera Garza does not satisfy a reader’s wish for anthropological information about human mobility toward the Global North. She stays with language’s opacity. Reading the novel in Spanish and in English, McGlazer investigates the expressive fissures created by linguistic mobility and pursues its echoing of Leonora Carrington’s earlier novel, The Hearing Trumpet, whose tendency to provide the reader with excessive amounts of narrative information paradoxically renders the text as uninformative as El mal de la taiga. As a child, Boris Drayluk moved to the United States from Odesa with his Jewish family. He traces the city’s historical political and cultural complexity through the choices he makes as a translator of Russophone poetry acknowledging his sense of ambivalence toward some of the poets whose work he has translated, but also admiration for their dexterity and for the profundity and lucidity of their language. Drayluk refers to Edward Said’s unsettling concept of “double vision” to illuminate the poetry of the exiled émigrés to which he has been consistently drawn. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensifies the urgency of his work as a translator of the displaced. In her interview with Saskia Ziolkowski, the Black Italian writer Igiaba Scego discusses her positioning as the daughter of Somali refugees. Her writing explores multiple forms of mobility including those that are part of Italy’s unacknowledged colonial legacy which Italy’s increasingly diverse younger generations need to know about. Resistant to the

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label of “migrant writer,” Scego affirms the importance of attending to the new diversity of Italian literature, shaped by recent migration from the Global South. Behrouz Boochani and Janet Galbraith’s joint presentation recounts the work of a collaborative group based in Australia called Writing Through Fences. They describe the way the group emerged out of the carceral system of refugee detention in Australia, which involved exiling refugees to detention camps in islands throughout the Pacific, including Manus Island and the island nation of Nauru. The presentation addresses the way language has been used to claim colonized land, but also the way translation can facilitate artistic collaborations across great distances of both space and cultural difference. Galbraith and Boochani articulate the way poetry itself is a language with great potential for resistance. The emergent literature of post-migration puts pressure on Eurocentric models of language, identity, and belonging, on non-normative practices of translation and cultural exchange.

Bibliography Apter, Emily. 2008. Untranslatables: A World System. New Literary History 39 (3): 581–598. elhariry, Yasser, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. 2021. The Postlingual Turn. SubStance 50 (1): 3–9. García, Ofelia, and Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism, and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hiddleston, Jane, and Wen-chin Ouyang (eds). 2021. Multilingual Literature as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2022. Planetary Longings. Durham: Duke University Press. Sommer, Doris. 2004. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

CHAPTER 23

“Struggles with Identity Don’t Care About the Latitude”: Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft (Where You Come From) as “Born Translated” Text Frauke Matthes

Literature and Migration in Germany In The Power of Multilingualism: About Origins and Pluralism/Diversity, the German-language author Olga Grjasnowa closes her discussion of origins and pluralism with the words: Multilingualism is […]  neither a privilege nor a problem. Communication between people, the command of a language, a person’s way of expressing themselves are, however, full of problems and misunderstandings. But this is exactly also the foundation for literature. (2021, 122)1

Grjasnowa, who migrated to Germany as a so-called Kontingentflüchtling (quota refugee) from the former Soviet Union in 1996, is concerned, in this critical as well as reflective text, with how multilingualism, or rather a specific kind of multilingualism, is still in twenty-first-century Germany quite commonly regarded as a problem. When “others” (migrants, refugees, etc.) bring their languages into the allegedly monolingual and monocultural nation, the “risk” of ambiguity and of misunderstanding one another increases, something 1

 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

F. Matthes (*) University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_23

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that should be prevented by the right measures of “integration.” Yet, as Grjasnowa also points out in the quotation above, in the context of cultural production, it is precisely ambiguity and complexity that lie at the heart of literature. In this chapter I wish to engage with one text that consciously reflects ambiguity and complexity in the context of migration: Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft (2019) (literally: Origins; translated as Where You Come From (2021)).2 This text can be read as a story of migration from Bosnia to Germany, of arrival in Germany, and of biographical, geographical, and linguistic belonging. Yet, more significantly, it consciously engages with complex notions of origin, originality, and authorship that go well beyond well-established migrant narratives of the trials and tribulations of leaving one’s country and arriving in a new one. It allows a reading of the text that goes against populist or nationalist attempts at disambiguation and homogeneity. Not reading Herkunft as migration or, as it is also commonly known as, “migrant” literature may at first sight be surprising because in the German literary context, there exists a close link between “migrant literature” and the authors’ origins (see Grjasnowa 2021, 34).3 This nexus dominated the reading of stories of migration since the arrival of guest workers in the 1950s and 1960s, some of whom started writing in either German or in their first languages. Well-meaning support in the form of, for instance, prizes such as the Robert Bosch Foundation’s Adelbert von Chamisso Prize,4 a prize Stanišić himself received in 2008, reinforced the idea that writing by authors whose origins lie outside Germany’s borders is a niche genre rather than part of mainstream German literary production. Put differently: “‘Migrant literature’ is always a literature that is different, that does not belong” (Grjasnowa 2021, 34). The outsider status of “migrant writing” in German literature overlooks the fact that “migrants have long been at the center of German cultural life, often as insiders rather than outsiders” (Peterson 2018, 82; see also 87–88). Grjasnowa sees the root of the continued perception of “migrant writing” as somewhat “different,” connecting German literature to the idea of a supposedly homogeneous and authentic nation and “the one-sided perception of who

 References will appear in the text with the abbreviation “W,” followed by the page number.  For a critique of Stanišić’s perception as a “migrant” author, see Aspioti 2021, esp. 97–101. 4  The Adelbert von Chamisso Prize was awarded between 1985 and 2017, when the Robert Bosch Foundation considered the project to have been completed. See http://www.bosch-­ stiftung.de/de/projekt/adelbert-von-chamisso-preis-der-robert-bosch-stiftung [accessed September 19, 2022]. However, it was re-instituted as Chamisso-Preis/Hellerau in 2017. Since 2023, as Chamisso-Preis Dresden, which is also linked to the Chamisso Poetikdozentur of the Saxon Academy of the Arts, it has been awarded to authors “who bring their individual experiences of a language or culture shift to bear in contemporary German-language literature” by the Saxon Academy of the Arts and the nonprofit association “Bildung und Gesellschaft e.V.” (Education and Society). See https://www.chamissopreis-dresden.de/home/ueber-den-preis/ [accessed July 10, 2023]. For a criticism of the prize, see Peterson (2018). 2 3

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is allowed to belong to the nation” (Grjasnowa 2021, 37),5 an idea I will return to in relation to language. This close link between ethnicity and “German” literature is also reflected in the function that “migrant writing” was given in German literary production. As I have pointed out elsewhere, “German-­ language ‘migrant’ writers have often been regarded as a positive, if somewhat one-way, contribution to German literature that spices up the German literary scene, enriches the German language, and opens German up to the world in a way that nonminority writers are perceived to be less likely to do” (Matthes 2020, 91).6 There is supposed to be an “exciting” element to those writers, or to the quality of their writing, which, however, can only be maintained if these writers keep being reduced to their biographies—and this includes their biography-­inspired subject matter, which these authors are supposed to be “best” at (see Matthes 2020, 92–93; see also 101–102).7 Stanišić has shown himself to be well aware of these discourses revolving around “migrant writing” in Germany as he highlighted in his 2010 contribution to the online publication 91st Meridian. Here he refers to them as the “three myths about migrant writing.” They are: Myth 1: migrant literature is a philological category which stands on its own and thus creates a fruitful anomaly in relation to national literatures. […] Myth 2: migrant literature’s single focus is migration and multicultural issues. Migrant authors have a closer and thus more interesting perspective on related questions. […] Myth 3: an author who doesn’t write in his [sic] mother tongue enriches the language he [sic] has chosen to write in. (Stanišić 2010)

Stanišić’s criticism is here mainly directed against the singular perception of “migrant literature,” which does not acknowledge the diversity of experiences and literature produced, and against any restrictions on what a “migrant writer” is allowed to write about (see also Peterson 2018, 84). He also highlights that authors with a migration background are not an exception anymore and “[m]igrant literatures are not an isle in the sea of national literature, but a component” (Stanišic 2010).

5  This line of argument also chimes with Brent O. Peterson’s criticism of the Chamisso prize, which “presumes that there is such a thing as German culture, an edifice that is intact, homogenous, bounded and authentic […]. […] Others can only contribute to German culture. They are not part of it” (Peterson 2018, 83; emphasis in the original). 6  Matthes also refers here to Taberner (2011, 626). 7  Matthes also briefly discusses the German-Jewish author Maxim Biller’s criticism of Stanišić’s second novel Vor dem Fest (Before the Feast), set in a village in the Uckermark close to the German-­ Polish border and thus far removed from a biographical subject matter (2020, 95). Biller (2014) laments this as, so he argues, only authors with a “migration background” produce “bis ins Mark ethnische und authentische Texte” (ethnic and authentic texts to the core). The debate that followed in the German feuilleton is well documented. See also Aspioti (2021, 104–109) and Haines (2015, 146–147).

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Stanišić wrote this critical piece more than a decade ago. In recent years, “migrant writing” has largely been recognized in German Studies as a somewhat restrictive term,8 which has in many ways reinforced binary thinking between “native German” writers and those whose first language is not German but who write in German, many of whom may be migrants. This development can be linked to a transnational approach to thinking about questions of movement, cultural and national belonging, and language that German Studies has favored lately (Aspioti 2021, 97–98) and that has led the discipline to think critically about where German fits in this transnational world as the title of the recently edited volume by James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield, German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies (2020), suggests. At the heart of this volume is “[t]he question of how we can define and evaluate a specifically German-language culture in […] a global context” (Hodkinson and Schofield 2020, 1). Thus German cultural production can no longer be read in isolation—if that ever was possible. Instead the discipline has become increasingly aware of the transnational developments that have shaped not only the way it studies literature but also the object of its study: German literature and culture. Hodkinson and Schofield’s volume follows a number of publications in German Studies that acknowledge the transnational turn in literary studies. Key to this relatively recent turn is the acknowledgment that transnationalism is an all-encompassing experience. The editors of Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature (2015), Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, thus define transnationalism “as a plurality of intersecting, and crosscutting flows of products, ideas, and people back and forth over borders,” which, used “as an analytical tool prompts us to shift our focus away from the movement of some—migrants, refugees, exiles, or trafficked people—across borders toward the implication of all” (2015, 1 and 4; emphasis in the original). Stuart Taberner in his study Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century puts it this way: “transnationalism [is] a social reality impacting on all” (2017, 7; emphasis in the original). Acknowledging the significance of transnationalism in our contemporary lives requires then a reconsideration of movement and migration as experiences that are also relevant to the German mainstream. In the words of Herrmann, Smith-Prei, and Taberner: “the daily experience of all kinds of otherness, difference, and plurality makes evident the urgency of issues of belonging, inclusion and exclusion, citizenship, forced and unforced movement, status and privilege” (2015,  4). In terms of literature, a separate category of “migrant literature” as a genre that is supposed to engage with such issues exclusively is therefore no longer viable. 8  This is also echoed by Anna Rutka who points out that “it is now commonly accepted in literary studies that these writers are not a ‘special case’ but should long have been regarded as a ‘norm’” (2022, 556).

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This is where Brent O. Peterson’s criticism of the reductionist dichotomy of German literature and “migrant literature” sets in, suggesting instead to “single out migration narratives, that is, works that deal with migration and its aftereffects no matter who wrote them” (2018, 85).9 Peterson offers a broader understanding of migration and the writing about it which is based on “the possibility that replacing ‘migrant literature’ with ‘migration narratives,’ [sic] will expand the universe of texts that warrant study and give scholars, as well as Germans of all ethnicities, a broader, truer, and more inclusive picture of their shared cultural history, including the role migrants have always played in that past” (2018, 96–97). While Peterson takes an historical approach to emphasize the connections between “Germans of all ethnicities” rather than their differences, which the term “migrant literature” implies, it also ties in with a wider recognition that we live in a postmigrant world. To this end Moritz Schramm et  al. (2019) speak of a “postmigrant condition” which draws attention to the fact that “migration is no longer perceived as an abnormality or exception but rather as an integral or naturalised part of everyday life, which has influenced—and will continue to influence—most societies around the globe, including the European societies” (Petersen and Schramm 2017, 1). This remark echoes the awareness in the scholarship mentioned above of the impact of transnationalism on all rather than on the few. Similarly, Anne Ring Petersen and Moritz Schramm also highlight one particular advantage of thinking of our society as postmigrant, one that can be read in conjunction with Peterson’s advocacy for “migration narratives”: “[o]ne of the assets of the term ‘postmigration’ is […] that it helps to direct attention away from ‘migrants’ and ‘people with a migration background’ as objects or subjects of interest, and towards society as a whole. […] [T]he postmigrant perspective seeks to overcome such distinctions and to analyse struggles and conflicts in culturally diverse societies” (2017, 6). With regard to literary criticism, thinking beyond the binary of “German literature” and “migrant literature” helps us do exactly that. As this brief excursion into the relationship between German-language writing and transnationalism has made clear, recent scholarship clearly favors a more inclusive approach to German-language literary production. However, while such an approach has become increasingly necessary to reflect our “social reality,” to refer back to Taberner, as Myrto Aspioti critically points out, “[w]hether we talk about ‘migrant’ or ‘transnational’ literature, […] we are implicitly thinking in categories of identity defined by reference to political and geographical borders” (2021, 98). While I agree with Aspioti, I argue that in Herkunft we can see how Stanišić challenges, dismantles, and redefines supposedly clearly separated categories such as “native” and “migrant,” “original”

9  Peterson admits, however, that “[m]ost migration narratives will continue to be written by migrants or their children” (2018, 85).

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and “other” culture.10 He thereby demonstrates how a writer whose original roots lie outside of Germany can carve out a position in the German and, considering the international success of his novels,11 also wider literary canon that does not restrict them to a “migrant niche” but that enables them to present Germany as transnational (see Matthes 2020, 102).

Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft as “Born Translated” Text Born in 1978 in Višegrad, Bosnia (then Yugoslavia), Stanišić fled to Germany with his family shortly after the outbreak of the Bosnian War (1992–1995) and settled in Heidelberg. Stanišić’s highly successful debut novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006) (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone), perhaps unsurprisingly, draws on his biography, which relates back to my earlier point on the expected subject matter of writing by those with a “migrant” background  (see also Biller 2014). In 2014, however, a more established Stanišić breaks with this narrative: his second novel Vor dem Fest (Before the Feast) marks, namely, a conscious shift away from “migrant” writing in the traditional sense with its focus on a village in the Uckermark in eastern Germany, a move that was rewarded with the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2014. Stanišić is also the author of short stories (collected in Fallensteller [Trapper], 2016), essays, children’s literature, and a play. Stanišić’s writing is often read in the context of the “Eastern turn” or “Eastern European turn” in German literature (Haines 2008; 2011, esp. 106–107; and 2015). These terms acknowledge the literary production by writers of Eastern European origins that has increased remarkably since the early 2000s. Herkunft consists of sections of differing lengths that cover the narrator’s childhood, his migration and settling in Heidelberg, visits to his grandmother in Višegrad and to the village of Oskoruša where his ancestors are from, his more recent past in Germany, reflections on politics and history, and the story of his becoming a writer. The text “straddles different genres and can be read simultaneously as a collection of personal and political essays, a memoir, a novel, and a reflection on the author’s own writing practice” and is a “reflect[ion] on how geographical contingencies continuously shape our identities” (Aspioti 2021, 101 and 102).12 It is a story or journey of recovering and preserving past events and one’s (former) self as well as a story of losing 10  In my article on Stanišić’s novel Vor dem Fest (Before the Feast) I similarly conclude: “Challenging binaries such as migrant versus native, history versus story, and inclusion versus exclusion of people, facts, and cultural memory, and negotiating the tensions between those seemingly opposing concepts, […] Stanišić demonstrates convincingly that the seeming paradox of ‘Weltliteratur aus der Uckermarck [sic]’ […] captures the essence of his work well” (Matthes 2020, 102–103). See also ibid., 101 and 103. 11  For instance, Stanišić’s first novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert has been translated into thirty-one languages (Herkunft book cover). 12  See also Breger who refers to Herkunft as “a memoir with reflexive, essayistic elements, or as an extensive essay probing approaches to autobiographical writing” (2022, 192).

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memories and one’s self: the narrator’s13 grandmother suffers from dementia, and as she is starting to confuse past and present, the narrator starts collecting memories (W, 60) and reflecting on what makes us, that is, where we come from (as the title of the English translation highlights), in terms of geography, politics, language, and family. As I will demonstrate below, these reflections invite readers to think beyond categories of “here” and “there,” “past” and “present,” “native” and “migrant,” and, connected with that, “original” and “translated,” as well as “reality” and “fiction.” On a further level, they also invite readers to reconsider the form of the novel: as pointed out above, Herkunft does not settle on a particular genre and draws on autobiographical references to create this text.14 Yet it also received the 2019 German Book Prize, a prestigious award for the “best” German novel, awarded annually in October by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, even though Herkunft is not labeled as such. Thus Herkunft not only plays with ambiguities in terms of labels attached to the categories just mentioned but also in terms of genre, something which is interconnected. Considering the novel’s reassessment of categories, including that of genre, and of questions of origin, Rebecca  L. Walkowitz’s concept of texts being “born translated” is of particular relevance in my reading of Herkunft. For Walkowitz, many contemporary novels are written with translation in mind. She writes that “in born-translated novels, translation functions as a thematic, structural, conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device” (2015, 4). By drawing attention to translation as an integral part of literary creation, Walkowitz looks behind notions of authorship and authority, originality, authenticity, and (a work’s) origins, and questions their supposed unambiguity. This is exactly what Herkunft does as well: in the same way that a person’s origins cannot be simply tied to one nationality, one culture, and one language, even if nationalist discourse might want us to believe that, the origins of a work of literature are just as complex: they are rooted in cultural, linguistic, and national heterogeneity, social and political complexities, and ambiguities on the levels of, for instance, the text, language, content, and genre. Like born-­ translated texts, Herkunft also “ask[s] us to think about the political dynamics of foreignness and especially about the foreignness that is integral to any multilingual collectivity” (Walkowitz 2015, 89). Yet this is not a foreignness, or “otherness” or “difference,” that allegedly marks “migrant literature” and is supposed to enrich German literature, but a critical engagement with the political dynamics behind divisions, borders, and simplified thinking in categories, and also in literature. 13  In this chapter I occasionally use Stanišić’s name to refer to both the author and the (autobiographical) narrator of Herkunft. As Herkunft is an autobiographical text, the line between author and narrator is somewhat blurred. However, my analysis should make clear whether I am referring to the author or to the narrator. 14  Dominik Zink also draws attention to the open question of genre which leaves “its status of fictionality unclear” (2021, 172).

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By rejecting such categorical thinking, Herkunft could be described as a “world-shaped” text. According to Walkowitz, “[w]orld-shaped novels feature traveling characters who speak different languages, sometimes within the same national space” (2015, 122). While this can certainly also be said of the narrator of Herkunft, I would like to think of “world-shaped” as the counter-narrative to “nation-shaped.” This counter-narrative also finds its way into Herkunft. The narrator explains accordingly: I don’t understand how anyone can insist on nationalist principles or how anyone can like sweet popcorn. I don’t understand how where you come from is supposed to bring with it certain qualities, or how some people are prepared to slaughter others in the name of those qualities. (W, 280–281)

It is perhaps somewhat obvious to connect the narrator’s incomprehension to his Yugoslav background: he calls himself “the child of a multiethnic state, the fruit and avowal of two people who were drawn to each other and whom the Yugoslavian melting pot had liberated from the constraints of different origins and religions” (W, 9). We now know that “[i]n 1991, affiliations and identities turned explosive. Everyone was drinking the same gasoline. Anywhere you came from could turn out to be the wrong place. People were fanning the flames” (W, 96). Judging by the narrator’s experience of the potentially fatal side of nationalist sentiment, it is not surprising that his mistrust of borders and of supposedly unambiguous cultural and national affiliations has also found its way into his writing. Herkunft thus also reveals a political dimension on the level of cultural production because “the fetishization of where a person came from, […] the specter of national identity” (W, 218–219), which the narrator fiercely criticizes  (see also Rutka 2022,  563 and 565), would have prevented him from becoming a writer. He acknowledges: “As for the fact that I can, and want to, write these stories at all, I owe that not to borders but to their permeability—I owe it to people who didn’t compartmentalize but listened” (W, 214). It is exactly this writing of stories that the narrator consciously reflects by playing with the pleasure of making up stories, with imagination, and with exaggeration, which is also often commented on by other characters in the text. For Breger, these “practices of fabulation” are again linked to the narrator’s contesting of ideas of supposedly unambiguous identities: “Herkunft explores the affordances, and potentiality, of critically imaginative fabulation for a reparative project of creating belonging against the explicit backdrop of Stanišić’s critical awareness of the exclusionary, often deadly workings of hegemonic fictions of collective identity” (2022, 194; emphasis in the original; see also 212). Yet by drawing our attention to such literal modes of story telling the narrator also challenges what is, or was, perceived as “true,” that is, what the supposedly “authentic” origins of his now recorded memories are. They are, as the narrator says, “my stories” which “wouldn’t be mine without digressions” (W, 33). This self-reflexive narrating is part of his “project of unforgetting.” For

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Walkowitz, this means: “[l]iterature in dominant languages tends to ‘forget’ that it has benefitted from literary works in other languages” (2015,  23). Thinking further, we could also argue, however, that by exploring, that is, narrating and creatively reflecting where he, as a person and as a writer, comes from, his memories become part of a process of “unforgetting” and also explain, at least in part, what has made his writing, that is, how it became what it is. Memory and narrating memory are obviously important aspects when looking into where one is from. In Herkunft, memories gain a particular meaning considering the narrator’s grandmother’s dementia that both frames the text’s narration of his memories and highlights the narrator’s own (geographical and temporal) distance to what is being remembered and ultimately rendered in the literary text. The following example is an extract from a section entitled “Fragments” in which the birth of the narrator’s cousin’s child in France triggers the narrator’s desire to list what his origins are15: My family lives scattered around the world. We shattered along with Yugoslavia and have not yet been able to put ourselves back together again. What I want to say about where I come from has to do with this scatteredness, too—it has meant, over the years, that where I am is practically never where my family is. Where I Come From is Grandmother. And the girl on the street invisible to everyone but Grandmother—that’s Where I Come From too: memory and imagination. Where I Come From is Gavrilo, who insists when we say goodbye that I take one of his piglets with me to Germany. [Gavrilo is a relative in Oskoruša, in Bosnia; F.M.] Where I Come From is the boy with my last name in Hamburg. He is playing with a toy airplane. I ask: “Where are you flying to?”—“To Split, to Grandma.” He is riding a balance bike. I ask: “Where are you going?”—“To Africa, to the dinosaurs.” […] Where I Come From are the bitter-sweet accidents that brought us to all these different places. It’s a belonging to which you contribute nothing. The unknown family in the acidic soil of Oskoruša; the unknown child off in Montpellier. Where I Come From is war. Here’s what war was for us: Mother and I fled through Serbia, Hungary, and Croatia to Germany. On August 24, 1992, we arrived in Heidelberg. […] If you’re from the Balkans, a refugee, and don’t speak the language, those are your only qualifications and references. (W, 62–63)

15  Incidentally, lists already play a significant role in Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert where making lists is an important way for the narrator to hold on to what was lost due to war and migration (chapter “Ich habe Listen gemacht” [254–297; “I’ve made lists”]).

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Here Stanišić demonstrates not only that he “über Herkunft erzählen möchte,” as it says in the German original,16 but also how memory and imagination are thus closely interlinked. Interestingly the translator of the English version adds “that’s Where I Come From too: memory and imagination” after “Where I Come From is Grandmother. And the girl on the street invisible to everyone but Grandmother.” This addition relates to the grandmother’s dementia but simultaneously makes a convincing connection to the narrator’s power of imagination and the “verisimilitude” of his narrated memories. Unsurprisingly, language,17 as the crucial tool with which a writer produces their work, records their memories, and plays with their imagination, is a key element in Herkunft as in the chapter/section “Bruce Willis speaks German.”18 This episode in the narrator’s school life points us to the close link between translation and migration (Walkowitz 2015, 61). This link not only encourages us to think about the question of access (Walkowitz 2015, 165), quite literally, but also about the access of the “migrant” writer to “German” literature, and about the transnational origins of (world) literature more generally (Walkowitz 2015, 61). You stand outside the door and read “Ziehen.” It’s a door. Those are letters. That’s Z. That’s I. That’s E. That’s H. That’s E. That’s N. Ziehen, “Pull.” Welcome to the door of the German language. And you push. […] No one in the class is from here. No one speaks German. Which is actually perfect, everyone can only barely understand one another and no one has to explain anything because no one can anyway. […] The new language is easy enough to pick up, but it’s very hard to carry anything in it. You understand more than you can say. [...] All the vocabulary and rules and acquisitions send you off on a new trip: you start writing stories. (W, 128–132)

Apart from scrutinizing notions of origins, Herkunft is, as this example demonstrates, also literally a “born translated” text: written in German, it consciously reflects language as it has shaped Stanišić’s, the narrator’s (as well as author’s) life and lets its readers take part in the language learning process. We should also not forget that many characters in Herkunft speak different languages, which are rendered in German but which readers may not perceive as translations into German when reading the German-language text. Thus Herkunft connects language with origin, not as proof of a specific national or 16  The English translation “What I want to say about where I come from” does not quite capture the narrative element that the German word “erzählen” (literally: to tell) has. 17  On the significance of language in postmigrant writing, see also Rutka (2022, 558). 18  The American actor Bruce Willis speaking German refers here to the fact that foreign-language films and TV programs are usually dubbed for German-language audiences.

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cultural affiliation or even of emotional belonging, but as something that is inherent in any writer, regardless of “where they come from.” As Stanišić said in his essay on “migrant writing,” “How You See Us”: “A language is the only country without borders. Anyone can (and should) use the privilege to make a language bigger, better and more beautiful by planting a wordtree there, one never grown before” (2010).

Authorship and (Literary) Belonging In many ways, Herkunft narrates rather than describes language (see Walkowitz 2015, 40). It demonstrates that it belongs to more than one national as well as literary language  (compare Walkowitz 2015, 51): attempting to distinguish between “native” and “non-native,” “original” and “translated” work has become superfluous, because “his [Stanišić’s] emphasis is less on the places themselves,” as the quotation from Herkunft in this chapter’s title indicates, “than on how arbitrary the geography of one’s life is” (Aspioti 2021, 102) and this includes the arbitrariness of the language of writing and the process of becoming a writer. It is therefore no coincidence that Herkunft thematizes arbitrariness and chance, which the narrator refers to as, for instance, “the bitter-sweet accidents” quoted from “Fragments” above. The text makes clear, however, that chance may or may not be positively connoted as it also raises the question of choice, or the lack thereof. More precisely it asks how much choice we have in navigating around “the geography of [our] life.” This becomes particularly noticeable at the end of the book: a “Choose your own adventure” story of sorts, “Dragon’s Hoard,” a genre, so the narrator tells us at the beginning of the book, he discovered in 1991 (W, 8). In this final part the reader is actively invited to choose how to end the book (though this is more of an appendix than part of the actual previous narrative). Here literature becomes most noticeably a “collective project” (Walkowitz 2015, 55), something which Walkowitz relates to “world-shaped novels [that] incorporate global audiences in order to emphasize the role of readers and translators in the production of literary works” (2015, 162). Ultimately, “Dragon’s Hoard” asks its readers to consciously become a part in the exploration, creation, and remembrance of the narrator’s, as well as Herkunft’s, and, implicitly, also their own, origins and belonging (see Walkowitz 2015, 25),19 and to accept chance and ambiguities as determiners of those origins.20 According to Stanišić, “one 19  According to Breger, “the concluding adventure offers the reader to explore their own relation to such (be)longing and fantasy, choosing our own path and, perhaps, finding closure among ten possible endings” (2022, 206). 20  Rutka sees in this final part suggestions of “infinity,” thereby counteracting “mortality and the death of the beloved woman [the grandmother, F.M.]” (2022, 564). However, she also emphasizes the “narrative construction” of one’s origins that are highlighted in this part (ibid., 564 and 565). Breger also highlights “the response to loss” that the final part offers (2022, 206). On the ending, see also Zink (2021, 175). Zink draws attention here to the dependence on context for the comprehension of the text, that is, a text can be understood in various ways depending on the context.

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of the literature’s major roles” is “an act of preferably borderless creativity and invention on one side and a game of reference and relation on the other” (2010). Herkunft ends precisely with (almost) “borderless creativity and invention” as it leaves its readers (almost) free rein in its final pages and invites them to come up with new relations and ways of ending the story. Thus narrative power is shared between author and reader, and the division between them, like the divisions between seemingly clear-cut concepts of national, cultural, and linguistic identity, becomes blurred (see also Rutka 2022, 573). Ultimately, by emphasizing the link between ambiguity and chance in one’s biography, including the language of one’s writing, Herkunft goes “beyond the mother tongue” (to quote the title of Yasemin Yildiz’s pathbreaking study) and contests the “monolingual paradigm” as “a vital element in the imagination and production of the homogenous nation-state” (Yildiz 2012, 2 and 7). This brings us back to Grjasnowa’s remarks on multilingualism in contemporary Germany, which opened this chapter. As a narrative and a literary text, Herkunft thrives on the ambiguities and complexities that are caused by its author’s and narrator’s multilingualism and that, simultaneously, are the essence of literary production. It thus guides its readers to an understanding of German-language writing as “translingual,” that is, writing that “takes place against a backdrop of linguistic diversity in a zone of permanent language contact”  (Weissmann 2020, 58).21 This is writing that decouples language and national or cultural affiliation (see Weissmann 2020, 58)22 and thereby questions “an aesthetics of originality and authenticity” (Yildiz 2012, 9). Writers “can [therefore] become the origin of creative works” without having “an origin in a mother tongue” (Yildiz 2012, 9).23 It is for that reason that Stanišić also contributes with his book to a re-evaluation of (national) literary history that marks born-translated fiction (Walkowitz 2015, 23). In the “choose your own adventure” part that concludes Herkunft, Stanišić lets the narrator’s demented grandmother respond to his question “Where do you live?” with the words: “It doesn’t matter where something is. Or where someone’s from. What matters is where you’re going. And in the end even that doesn’t matter. […] I don’t know where I’m from or where I’m going either. And I can tell you—sometimes that’s not such a bad thing” (W, 331). This conversation highlights that Herkunft is about the process—of writing and of becoming a writer—rather than about the product, the text as such

21  Weissmann is referring here to Steven Kellman’s The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 22  This is also Yildiz’s aim in her monograph, which “seeks to recast the German language both inside and outside German studies as detached from German ethnicity” (2012, 17). 23  The phrases quoted here read in full: “The uniqueness and organic nature of language imagined as ‘mother tongue’ lends its authority to an aesthetics of originality and authenticity. In this view, a writer can become the origin of creative works only with an origin in a mother tongue, itself imagined to originate in a mother” (Yildiz 2012, 9).

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(Walkowitz 2015, 61). Thus with his text Stanišić “think[s] about how, rather than where, novels [including his own work, F.M.] belong” (Walkowitz 2015, 245) and ultimately questions “the national singularity” (Walkowitz 2015, 25) of his, and any, work.

Bibliography Aspioti, Myrto. 2021. Geography, Identity, and Politics in Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (2014). In Politics and Culture in Germany and Austria Today, ed. Frauke Matthes, Dora Osborne, Katya Krylova, and Myrto Aspioti, 97–121. Edinburgh German Yearbook 14. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Biller, Maxim. 2014. Letzte Ausfahrt Uckermark, Die Zeit 9, February 20. Accessed September 28, 2022. http://www.zeit.de/2014/09/deutsche-­gegenwartsliteratur-­ maxim-­biller. Breger, Claudia. 2022. Belonging in the Folds of Fact and Fabulation: Fictionality, Narration, and Heimat in Saša Stanišić’s Herkunft. In Tales That Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture, ed. Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz, 191–215. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Grjasnowa, Olga. 2021. Die Macht der Mehrsprachigkeit: Über Herkunft und Vielfalt. Berlin: Dudenverlag. Haines, Brigid. 2008. The Eastern Turn in Contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian Literature. Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 16 (2): 135–149. ———. 2011. Saša Stanišić, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert: Reinscribing Bosnia, or: Sad Things, Positively. In Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner, 104–118. Rochester, NY: Camden House. ———. 2015. Introduction: The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-­ Language Literature. In The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-­ Language Literature, ed. Brigid Haines. German Life and Letters, 68 (2), special issue: 145–153. Herrmann, Elisabeth, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner. 2015. Introduction: Contemporary German-Language Literature and Transnationalism. In Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner, 1–16. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Hodkinson, James, and Benedict Schofield. 2020. Introduction: German in Its Worlds. In German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, ed. James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield, 1–4. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Hodkinson, James, and Benedict Schofield, eds. 2020. German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Matthes, Frauke. 2020. “Weltliteratur aus der Uckermark”: Regionalism and Transnationalism in Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest. In German in the World: The Transnational and Global Contexts of German Studies, ed. James Hodkinson and Benedict Schofield, 91–108. Rochester, NY: Camden House.

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Petersen, Anne Ring, and Moritz Schramm. 2017. (Post-)Migration in the Age of Globalisation: New Challenges to Imagination and Representation. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9 (2): 1–12. Peterson, Brent O. 2018. Peter Schlemihl, the Chamisso Prize, and the Much Longer History of German Migration Narratives. German Studies Review 41 (1): 81–98. Rutka, Anna. 2022. “Herkunft ist Zufall”: Zu offenen Herkunfts- und Heimatkonzepten in der Literatur der deutschen postmigrantischen Generation. German Life and Letters 75 (4): 554–573. Schramm, Moritz, Sten Pultz Moslund, Anne Ring Petersen, et al. 2019. Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. New York: Routledge. Stanišić, Saša. 2006. Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert: Roman. Munich: Luchterhand. ———. 2008. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ———. 2010. How You See Us: Three Myths about Migrant Writing. 91st Meridian 7 (1). Accessed September 18, 2022. iwp.uiowa.edu/91st/vol7-­num1/how-­you-­see­us-­three-­myths-­about-­migrant-­writing. ———. 2014. Vor dem Fest: Roman. Munich: Luchterhand. ———. 2015. Before the Feast, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Pushkin Press. ———. 2016. Fallensteller: Erzählungen. Munich: Luchterhand. ———. 2019. Herkunft. Munich: Luchterhand. ———. 2021. Where You Come From, trans. Damion Searls. London: Jonathan Cape. Taberner, Stuart. 2011. Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Fiction by Nonminority Writers. seminar 47 (5): 624–645. ———. 2017. Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Weissmann, Dirk. 2020. German Writers from Abroad: Translingualism, Hybrid Languages, “Broken” Germans. In Transnational German Studies, ed. Rebecca Braun and Benedict Schofield, trans. Sarah Pybus, 57–76. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press. Zink, Dominik. 2021. Herkunft—Ähnlichkeit—Tod: Saša Stanišić’ Herkunft und Sigmund Freuds Signorelli-Geschichte. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 12 (1): 171–185.

CHAPTER 24

“Verstummung”: Carmine Abate’s Dislocative Voices Derek Duncan

Era è il vento vento è Wind wo dove ku mi trovo in questo mo(vi)mento —Carmine Abate, Terra di andata (2011)

National literatures struggle with the secure placement of writers deemed to be non-native speakers, an interesting, commonplace conflation of competence in written expression and the ownership of a mother tongue (Yildiz 2012). This struggle becomes particularly acute when non-natives move away from content-­ based, testimonial accounts of personal experience toward creative, experimental modes of expression. When formal innovation and imagination are disallowed, language becomes a space for containment or exclusion, as well as for an often-implicit, albeit always imperious, assertion of entitlement. The parameters between these conflictual positionalities can be nuanced and shifting. For instance, in revising her use of the term “Italophone literature” to designate writing produced by migrant authors in Italy and whose first

D. Duncan (*) University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_24

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language is not Italian, Graziella Parati recognizes how this apparently inclusive category reinforces the idea of language as national property and differentiates hierarchically between those who may claim Italian as a birthright and those who may not. “Italophone” writers are, in this formulation, not Italian. Recalling that standard Italian is in any case a recent invention, formed in part through the eradication of often strongly embedded local languages, Parati looks to Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other recalling the recursive presence of dialect traces in Italian language use that undercuts any confident iteration of a national standard. These traces are multiple and diverse, producing a variegated linguistic ecology that does not map evenly onto national territory. In recognition of this inherent, yet suppressed heteroglossia, Parati argues in favor of a more expansive and inclusive understanding of linguistic borders which would allow migrant voices to stand “in proximity” to the national idiom. This proximity means that migrant writers contribute incrementally to the repertoire of Italian through their deployment of “a complex interplay of translations from other major languages” (57) and through “creating another collective memory bank” that generates “plural interpretations of many histories” (59). The idea of a major European language serving as a transformative lingua franca not only for speakers, but for writers, of multiple other languages, was promoted by the PoLiKunst literary group active in Germany in the 1980s. The group brought together writers whose aim was to address the German public in German about their shared concerns with the aim of creating solidarity between German workers and so-called Guest Workers as well as across different national groups.1 Amongst the most active members of the group was Italian-born Gino Chiellino, living in Germany and writing in German since the 1970s and who continued to write in German after the group had folded. While the initial intentions of the group were political, Chiellino’s commitment to writing in a language acquired as adult was born of a sense that the German language lacked the vocabulary and expressive range to convey what it was like to be an Italian living in German. Rather than having his work translated from Italian into German, or collaborating with a native speaker who would correct his grammatical mistakes and transform his accented language into the national standard, he very self-consciously wanted his voice to sound different. He felt that his duty was to “leave traces” on the German language and register a semantic and morphological imprint on a linguistic system from which he felt excluded. His aim was to make German “a dialogic language” by infiltrating its form and molding it aesthetically to register “a sense of belonging grounded in creativity” (Marzi 2012b) His short poem “Verstummung 1  For a very useful discussion of the group’s aims and its relatively short history in the context of migration to German and literary culture more broadly, see Chin (2007), esp. 114–117. Suhr (1989) presents a very detailed discussion of how writing in German by non-Germans was being received at that time. Luchtenberg (1989) discusses the uses of this literature in intercultural pedagogy. Matthes (in this volume) offers a succinct and up-to-date summary of how approaches to this literature have been subsequently revised by transnational and global German Studies.

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Für Celan” speaks to the silencing effects of two closed monolingual systems. Incarcerated and isolated by Italian in Germany, German represses feeling, causing it to “die on the vine.” “Verstummung,” the noun of the poem’s title, is difficult to translate. It has the sense of “being allowed to fall silent,” not an active silencing or muting, but rather a permission to atrophy, a wasting.2 It is in the separated space between monolingualisms that this mode of falling silent occurs. The dedication to Celan recalls the multilingual, German-language poet’s struggle with language as an expressive medium and as a medium imbued with inexpressible historical and affective resonance. In a collection of essays published together in English under the German title Fremde, whose meaning again resists translation combining a sense of “foreign,” “alienation,” and “exclusion,” Chiellino argues in a more combative vein that “it is only by maintaining his or her difference that the foreign author writing in German can contribute to dislocating the German language” (1995, 28, my emphasis). He resisted the suggestion of his German editor that he might substitute “dislocating” with something less aggressive, convinced that a radical fracturing, twisting, or dismembering of the national language was needed to open enough of an aesthetic breech to allow new stories to be heard. Chiellino’s ambition was to become “an intercultural writer in German” (Marzi 2012b), part of which meant engaging in practices of self-translation which do not domesticate the writer’s accent but which cause friction and extend the parameters of what Rita Wilson calls “literary citizenship.” In her essay on the work of Jhumpa Lahiri and Francesca Marcianno, two more recent instances of transnational or translingual authorship, Wilson explores the increasingly common phenomenon of writers moving between languages as they physically move between cultural spaces. She argues that the translingual creative work of these authors, which cannot be accommodated within conventional canons of the national, “seems to share an underlying aim, namely, to decentre monolingualism and, thereby, to dismantle a monolithic worldview” (2020, 221). She concludes: The act of translingual creation reflects a desire to enter, know and become the Other, and then share two (or more) spheres of cultural and linguistic formation through the process of transculturation, reaching out to explore the possibilities of expression in another language and, importantly, to understand what it is like to achieve linguistic identification with another reality. (2020, 221–222)

“Linguistic identification” should not be confused with the attempt to “pass” as a native speaker. Parati makes the point that migrant authors writing in Italian have largely adopted standard forms of the language to become recognized. Yet the content of their work, she contends, in an echo of Chiellino’s image of dislocation, “negates homogeneity and grounds itself on disjointed 2  I am grateful to my colleagues Bettina Bildhauer and Orhan Elmaz for their insights into the nuances of this term.

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and overlapping cultures that find continuity in the discontinuity of cultures and languages” (48: my emphasis).3 The idea of inflicting damage on a national language to open up new expressive spaces through processes of self-­translation offers a provocative take on Lawrence Venuti’s well-known argument about the ethnocentric violence of translation and the domestication of the foreign text. He imagines translation as potentially “a focus of difference” (2008, 221) rather than of homogeneity. The practice of self-translation does not obviate violence and damage but rather harnesses productively their disruptive kinetic energies and turns them outwards.

Carmine Abate: The Poetics of Untranslation All that I have said so far is the necessary preface to my discussion of the work of translingual author Carmine Abate, who also migrated to Germany from Italy and was for a time associated with the PoLiKunst group. Unlike Chiellino, who remained committed to writing mostly in German, Abate reverted to Italian after the publication of his first two books. His first collection of short stories, Den Koffer und weg, came out in 1984, only appearing in an expanded Italian edition some ten years later. At the same time, he co-wrote a sociological analysis of the transformative effects of migration to Germany on his home village of Carfizzi. Die Germanesi (1984) offers a detailed account of the cultural and economic life of people who had migrated and how Carfizzi had been changed as a consequence. Referred to as “Germanesi,” a neologism denoting their hybrid and often-conflicted identities and social practices, Carfizzi’s emigrants never become fully German, yet when they return home, they no longer fit in. To say that Abate writes in Italian misrepresents the texture of his work. His first language is Arbëresh, the language of the historic Albanian-speaking community in Southern Italy.4 He learned Italian at school before earning a degree in Italian Literature at the University of Bari. He later migrated to Germany, where his father had moved years before as a manual worker, and taught Italian to the children of Italian migrants whose knowledge of German usually exceeded their familiarity with the language of their parents. He has been now living for some years in the northern Italian region of Trento Alto Adige, a kind of third space where the different co-ordinates of Abate’s cultural and linguistic journeys can meet in proximity. 3  In an interview with Federica Marzi, Chiellino says that “although he had become able to express himself fully in German, his aesthetic boundaries continued to be misunderstood by the monocultural reader” (2012b, n.p.) 4  These communities were formed in the late fifteenth century by people fleeing Albania after resistance to the Ottoman occupation ended with the death of Skanderbeg, the mythical national hero often mentioned as a cultural reference point in Abate’s work, albeit not one immediately recognized by many Italian readers. Focussing primarily on Abate’s novels, Berberi (2018) offers an insightful reading of their cultural depth embedded equally in the Calabrian landscape and in the language and traditions of Arbëresh communities.

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Abate’s award-winning novels, short stories, and poetry have characteristically explored the collective experience of emigration to Germany from its Arbëresh communities.5 His language bears the historical imprints of this mobility. Mauceri refers to it as “hybridized Italian” (2006, 77) with its admixture of words and phrases from German and Arbëresh as well as from Calabrian dialect and the idiomatic fusion of all of these in the emergent language of the “Germanesi” themselves. Abate explores the affective resonances of his linguistic heritage in “Lingua del cuore: Lingue del pane” [Language of the Heart: Languages of Bread] (2010b), an essay whose title is an Italian translation of the Arbëresh expression: “gjuba e zemëres: gjuba e bukes.” The “language of the heart” for Abate is Arbëresh which recalls home, family, and childhood friendships. The “languages of bread” are those languages, in Abate’s case namely Italian and German, necessary for work and for earning a living. Arbëresh is associated with the voice and with oral traditions, while Italian is the language of formal education and literacy. At primary school, he felt “foreign” and struggled to adapt to the straight-jacket of Italian, for him a “foreign” language. He couldn’t imagine how to transcribe the phonetic range of his mother tongue with its alphabet of 38 characters. Growing up “illiterate” in his own language, only his later desire and determination to write drew him toward Italian, always uncertain about his command of it and excessively concerned about the accuracy of his expression. He figures himself a “transfuga linguistico,” a “linguistic deserter” for having left his mother tongue behind. Over the years, Arbëresh words and expressions have come to puncture the Italian patina of his writing and Abate has always declined the suggestion that they should be accompanied by a translation or glossary conferring equal “dignity” on both languages. The linguistic particularity of his work gives him a unique location in what Parati calls the “vernacular of difference” (2005, 39) through which he narrates multiple instances of trans-regional, transnational, and translingual border crossings. Parati indeed places a short poem by Abate as an epigraph to one of her book’s chapters. Made up of aligning fragments of Italian, German, and Arbëresh, “L’eredità” (Inheritance) expresses histories of displacement through the performance of parallel or competing language systems rather than through explicit narrative content. Its lyric voice belongs to a parent addressing their son whose incompatible and unassimilated trilingual inheritance is not synthesized nor translated into a single national idiom. In terms of its untranslated address, the poem does not foresee a monolingual reader: unfamiliar languages ask discomfiting questions. Abate’s concern with the migrant history and culture of Arbëresh communities infuses his linguistic repertoire which, Parati contends, “construct[s] the multilinguism of memory” (2005, 41–42: my emphasis). Parati torques the more familiar English “multilingualism” with Italian’s “multilinguismo,” a minor dislocation, and 5  Abate’s own website is a useful reference point for his work and critical responses to it: http:// www.carmineabate.net/

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perhaps one that is easy to miss, but one that offers a pertinent gloss on Abate’s literary practice and its effects on readers who are unlikely to possess a linguistic range mirroring the author’s.

Narratives of Migration and Re-settlement In what follows, I want to explore the changing constellation of language in Abate’s writing in his two collections of short stories Il muro dei muro [The Wall of Walls] (1993 [2006]) and Vivere per addizione e altri viaggi [Living incrementally and other stories] (2010a). In general, his work is filtered mainly through the experience of male migration from the Italian South to Northern Europe subsequent to the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 allowing freer, but never unregulated, labor movement across the EEC. It looks back to earlier patterns of emigration to the US, and Europe, and also forward to later generations whose place in the workplace has been transformed through education and shifts in the labor market.6 Single journeys are embedded in multiple temporalities. In “L’idolo lontano lontano” [Far away idol], the opening story of Il muro dei muri, the narrator sketches out patterns of intergenerational conflict that are a structuring theme of much of the author’s work.7 Told in retrospect, the narrator recalls a childhood spent in the charmed, pastoral landscape of Calabria waiting for his emigrant father to return from Hamburg. His father comes home only to leave again determined to build a better future for his family. Despite attaining all the economic goals he set himself, the dream of return is never realized. The story ends catastrophically for the father when his son, who throughout the narrative had mimicked the older man, taking his place in the family while he was away, migrates to Germany, unable to find work in his hometown, refusing the traditional networks of nepotism which would have secured him a good job. His father’s anger is compounded with a sense of abject failure and the pointlessness of all the sacrifices made. The son’s promise to return home “tomorrow…” will not be kept. The inconclusive sense of deferral with which the story closes is a characteristic structural topos of the collection. In addition, “L’idolo lontano lontano” sets out the socio-economic contrasts between North and South, tradition and modernity, which frames much of Abate’s

6  For detailed and well-informed accounts of Italian migration to Germany in this period and the European legal framework through which it was managed, see Romero (2001), Pugliese (2001), and Marzi (2012a). 7  Most of the stories in Il muro dei muri were included in the earlier German edition Den Koffer und weg, which takes its title from one of the collection’s eight stories. All but one appear in the Italian version published almost ten years later with a further six stories added, one of which, “Il muro dei muri,” gives the Italian collection its title. Both collections start with the same story “Das ferne nahe Idol”/“L’idolo lontano lontano,” which, as noted above, establishes some of Abate’s recurrent thematic concerns.

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work. The story’s linguistic register ranges from lyrical to colloquial yet remains uniformly Italian: gradually German starts to appear in the later stories.8 “Gabbie” [Cages] begins with a discussion about rising xenophobia in Germany and the idea that the once sought-after guestworkers should be sent home. Indeed, expressions of anti-Italian racism become ever more present as the collection proceeds. A television news reporter interviews a Turkish family who had chosen to return to Turkey, scared and exhausted by the growing cries of “Türken raus,” but whose daughter misses living in Germany. Knowing only a few words of Turkish, her “mother tongue” is German, dislocating the presumed overlay of language and territory. Lisa, in the story, “La pallottola” [The Bullet] is the adult daughter of a Calabrian family, alienated from her parents both by language and culture. Rejecting their values as being “out of time and space,” she excelled in German at school, suffering the racist reflections of teachers who marveled that she “spoke just like us.” Refusing to be identified as either Italian or German, her relationship with Giuseppe, a more recently arrived Calabrian migrant, founders over his acceptance of her parents’ traditional value system. Lisa refuses to be his “Putzfrau,” and the attempts of her family to force their way of life onto her with exasperated cries of “Astù faiscteen,” the phonetically rendered deformation of “Hast du verstehen,” confirm German, normatively correct or otherwise, as a space of non-­belonging, of Fremde. For Lisa’s parents, German was to be the language of the future, yet investment in its temporality backfired as Italian became the language of an unwanted past. This realization is transposed into a different key in “I seni di Lucilla” [Lucilla’s Breasts]. Lucilla had fled Italy as a teenager to escape a difficult family situation only to end up the object of sexual predation in the ice-­ cream parlor where she found work in Germany. Now a university student of German Literature, culturally invested in the work of authors such as Heinrich Mann and Christa Wolf, she resolutely distances herself from “self-pitying” Gastarbeiter poetry, and indeed from Gastarbeiter themselves. She claims to know only one Gastarbeiter, Fernando, the less-educated Italian man she is dating. Their sexual relationship fails and at the end of the story Fernando finds out she is a sex worker, a profession which in a curious reversal confirms her as German in his eyes. In terms of their presentation, the isolated, untranslated German words and phrases interrupt and create semantic fissures in Il muro dei muri. Hamburg’s topography—Fischmarkt, Sankt Pauli, Bismarkstrasse, Altona—is not made accessible to the reader by any form of discursive mapping. The term Gastarbeiter is never cushioned, glossed, or translated. German frames the entanglement of racism and exploitative working conditions. In “Come si diventi rovi,” [How to become a briar bush] the first-person narrator recounts 8  The management of language difference in translations of Abate’s work is a fascinating topic in itself and worthy of an in-depth analysis which space prevents me from undertaking here. The solutions adopted provide an incisive commentary on the practice and maintenance of monolingualism itself.

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his revolt against the exploitative working environment which he and other foreign workers endure and in which the German language itself is an antagonist. As always, the reader is given no cushioning for terms such as “Vorarbeiterin,” “Mahlzeit,” “Pfennig,” or “guter ausländischer Kerl” as well as the foreman’s brutal “schnellschnellschnell,” his repeated invocation of “arbeiten,” the cruel, phonetic imitation of the workers’ accented speech “Nix immer blablabla,” (55) and the deliberate mispronunciation of Carmine, the narrator’s name. In contrast, Carmine and his workmates, Carlos and Mustafa, improvise ways of communicating with each other recognizing an exploitation which they share also with the factory’s German employees rendered “foreign” by the inhuman conditions in which they labor.9 Throughout the essays in the collection, the German language blocks access to employment rights and health care. It is also painfully inscribed through the voice expressed in awkward terms that resist easy translation. In “La valigia e via” [The suitcase and off], the narrator is taking lessons to improve his “croaking German” while the German of his friend Nino is “decrepit.” Racist clients in the restaurant where he works taunt him with dehumanizing insults such as “Spaghettifresser” and “Scheiss Ausländer” (145). Linguistic violence inflicted on migrants escalates into physical assault and murder. “La terza sera” [The Third Evening] is the short report, in colloquial Italian, of the racist murder of a young Italian man by one of his neighbors. The shooting is accompanied by shouts of “Ausländer raus,” a slogan, the reader is told exceptionally, meaning “foreigners out.” The slogan is part of the city’s linguistic landscape, commonly painted on walls, indicative of the hostile climate in which foreign workers try to survive. The collection’s final story, “Il muro dei muri,” is another account of racist violence that takes place in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The narrator is a teacher of Italian to second-generation teenagers who are regularly the victims of attack amidst intensifying aggression toward “Asylanten” by “naziskin.” He tries to dissuade his pupils from reacting in a similarly aggressive way after one of their classmates is seriously beaten. Unconvinced by his own arguments, he finds inspiration from an improvised outdoor installation or exhibition of “thoughts” written down in a range of languages on pieces of paper by passers-by for others to read. He takes his pupils to visit the exhibit where they immediately identify his own contribution—an exhortation to the reader to break down racism, the last wall standing.10 Throughout the collection, German functions as a weapon used against migrants. It is also an aggressive intrusion on the linguistic space of the reader. The general absence of translation as a technique of domesticating the foreign 9  This story exemplifies Mezzadra and Neilson’s comments of the radical effects of foreign workers’ “improvised patois” forged “forever in translation and rooted in material practices of cooperation, organization and struggle” (2013, 275). 10  In Vivere per addizione, the later collection, two stories, “Il Duomo di Colonia” and “Naziskin,” reprise and rework this story.

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allows the reader, momentarily and at a great distance, to enter the disorienting and disempowering space of the migrant. Its textual presence is a performative affirmation of alterity. Less obvious but more indicative of the greater linguistic complexity of Abate’s later work, which I will go on to explore, are two terms again not translated nor explicitly glossed, but which point toward increasingly complex representations of cultural and affective diversity. In “La valigia e via,” the Southern dialect term “magarìa” (149), meaning “magic spell,” recalls the author’s specifically regional origins, but more particularly within the economy of the narrative signals the incommensurable space–time gap between life in industrialized, urban Germany and peasant culture. In “La pallottola,” the use of “ika” (185) to refer to the children’s game of hide-and-seek is the first example of Arbëresh in Abate’s writing. It occurs in the internal monologue of Giuseppe when he returns home to Calabria in a momentary fusion of language and place. If German is the present tense of alienation and violence, “ika” belongs to the lexis of memory and the gilded childhood evoked in the collection’s first story “L’idolo lontano lontano.” Untranslated, its minimal presence may escape notice for some, but it will “pierce” others, as the linguistic punctum of the Italian text.11 Before moving to discuss how this linguistic consciousness or confidence is expressed in Vivere per addizione e altri viaggi, Abate’s later collection, it is worth pausing to make a brief comparison between the two versions of “Geschichte eines x-beliebigen Emigranten” [Story of an Average Emigrant], the one story from Den Koffer und weg not included in Il muro dei muri, but which does appear in a revised Italian version in the later book under the equivalent title “Storia di un emigrante qualunque.” It is a spare and quite depressing sketch of a typical Italian migrant to Germany who dies suddenly after years of toil before being able to return home and live the life he had dreamed of. The German text is prefaced with a hard-hitting epigraph, an indictment of the perilous conditions in which migrant workers have lost their lives and for which no one assumes responsibility, that is cut from the Italian version. On a linguistic level, “Storia di un emigrante qualunque” is marked by colloquial and dialect forms creating a very different texture from the standard German original.12 For example, the translation of the simple statement “ich war jung” (156) is rendered as “ero guagnùno” (27). The transposition from unmarked German into Calabrian dialect is an act of formal dislocation. More interesting still is the rendering of the German verb “quatschen,” meaning to “chatter” or “speak nonsense.” The choice of “quacciare” in the Italian version is a striking 11  The reference is to Roland Barthes’ (1981) concept of the “punctum” developed in relation to the photographic image. The “punctum” is detail which bears personal meaning for a viewer of the image, but which doesn’t belong to a familiar system of representation. It also has a strong affective impact on the viewer who recognizes it. 12  It should be noted that the stories in Abate’s Den Koffer und weg had been translated into German from (unpublished) Italian originals which are not identical to the versions subsequently published in Italian. This “dislocative overlapping” questions conventional notions of translation and the priority of the original version.

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example of linguistic creative contamination. It is a neologism improvised on the basis of phonetic similarity as the German verb passes into Germanese. While the sense of the word can be intuited from context, in isolation and untranslated, it is not intelligible to Italian speakers. While the interruption of German characterized the stories of Il muro dei muri, the Italian of the later collection, like Abate’s novels, is disruptively threaded with Arbëresh. The opening story, “Viaggio con la mamma,” narrates the journey of mother and son from Calabria to Hamburg. Addressing the boy as “bir,” she identifies the family as Arbëresh. The term’s inclusion is surreptitious, its disruption minimal, yet the linguistic texture and meaning of the story changes once/if it is noticed and heard. The stories are mostly set in Calabria exploring both the desire or need to leave and what it means to return as well as what the return means for the village. In “Ika,” the Germanesi perform calculations in Arbëresh and move easily, translanguaging, across three languages: “gut, mire, bene” (84). Not everything is translatable. In “Legalität,” the narrator, with a strong Calabrian inflection, recounts his early struggle to learn basic German and his gradual realization that it contains ideas and concepts for which there are no words in either Arbëresh or Calabrian. The lesson he is able to impart to his skeptical children in Germany is the previously unimaginable difference between “das ist legal, das ist illegal” (92). They playfully respond in a chorus of German, Arbëresh, and Italian, yet the narrator’s language also preserves notice of a historical change in the working conditions of migrants and the acquisition of legal rights.

Heterolingual Voices In the course of this chapter, I have tried to avoid using familiar terms such as bilingualism, multilingualism, or plurilingualism to describe and account for the complex linguistic texture of Abate’s writing. Such terms have accrued a burden of both vernacular and specialist understanding and definition which is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage with. Most commonly, these approaches to the use of more than one language assume that language acquisition is additive and that language systems remain discrete. To mix separate languages is habitually seen as a sign of confusion or lack of formal linguistic competence. Increased and more rapid global mobility has meant that more people come into contact with more languages than conventionally had been anticipated. Recent work on how people experience multiple languages suggests that they are not necessarily felt to be, or used as, separate systems. The concept of “translanguaging” is a more dynamic way of apprehending linguistic mobility which does not depend on the isolation of discordant elements from “other” languages but sees crosslinguistic fusion as immersive and expressive of changed demographic realities and transcultural histories. Ofelia García and Li Wei account for it in terms which illuminate the shifting rhizomatic linguistic textures of Abate’s work:

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Translanguaging is the enaction of language practices that use different features that had previously moved independently constrained by different histories, but that now are experienced against each other in speakers’ interactions as one new whole. As such, translanguaging also has much to do with Derrida’s concept of brissure; that is, practices where difference and sameness occur in an apparently impossible simultaneity. (21)

Recognition of this only “apparently impossible simultaneity” obviates the conventional, and in Venuti’s terms, violent imperative to translate born of a not-fully-examined adherence to monolingualism. While Abate’s writing both dislocates and is dislocated by single language systems, as a dynamic practice of translanguaging, it articulates transnational or transcultural mobility through the brissure of formal linguistic innovation. In his work, translation has already happened, meaning and form have already been “carried over” to play on translation’s own etymological history. What his stories recount, as instances of “post-lingual” expression,13 are the cultural consequences of life and language after the time of translation (in the sense of cross-language exchange, equivalence, and substitution) has passed and moved into a linguistic space which is creatively capacious, and whose expansion is not determined by logics of additive quantification. Writing about Anglophone Arabic literature, Claire Gallien (2021) adopts the notion of “heterolingualism” to convey a sense of how the texts she studies are informed by sedimented layers of language difference which appear by way of anamorphosis. Skewed vision allows for the emergence of “entangled alterity. Otherness does not lie outside but inside, hence the idea of entanglement and the deployment of creative principles such as creolization, archaism, linguistic palimpsest and invention” (73). The cluster of associations implied by the concept of “entangled alterity” is a particularly apt way of figuring Abate’s Germanesi, whose very designation (depending on a corruption and repositioning of English rather than German or Italian) doesn’t allow identity and its linguistic expression to reside securely in any one or even two places. Yet Abate’s complexly “heterolingual” characters and texts emerge from a specific configuration of demographic and cultural movements over centuries. Their heterolingualism is profoundly historical, palpable yet ephemeral. In “Rapsodie,” the young narrator becomes determined to capture the traditional and emotive folk epics sung by his grandmother which preserve archaic forms of Arbëresh. His initial attempts to transcribe the lyrics fail because he is illiterate in his mother tongue. He starts to record them on a cassette player, a practice of conservation which would also allow him to capture their performance as well as the words. His project escalates and he starts to collect stories, fairy tales, proverbs, and prayers, all receptacles of his village’s mythical past. He records too the voices and stories of the Germanesi, 13  I take the concept of “post-lingual” from the recent, pathbreaking work of elhariry and Walkowitz (2021) and the challenges it poses to exclusive formations of so-called national literatures.

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fascinated by how they mix and transform languages as they speak and in doing so invent the mythical past of their own emerging community. After his grandmother’s death, he records less frequently, turning his attention to completing his degree at Bari University. Sometime later in Hamburg, he decides to listen to one of his tapes which plays a particularly moving “rhapsody” about a newly married young man Costantino preparing to leave the village. It is to this vocal track that the narrator finally sits down to write—in Italian. The desire to preserve Arbëresh culture is explored with greater irony in “il cuoco d’Arbëria” [The cook of Arbëria]. Famous for cooking traditional Arbëresh dishes (acknowledged as having been modified by contact with Italian cooking), the cook is clear that his food is Arbëresh because he is Arbëresh and cooks for Arbëresh people. It is a moveable feast distinguished more by association than any essential element. Both the narrator and cook move to Germany where they meet up again by chance in an Italian restaurant where the same dishes are being prepared under a national label modified to suit German tastes: the cook is pragmatic about the value in adapting, the narrator a purist, nostalgic for the tastes of his childhood. He despises the blandness of the type of globalized Italian food now unavoidable in his native Calabria, the chef is fine with it. The language of food is the story of mobility and cultural transformation with no originals.14 Narrating a multi-perspectival history of mobility and cultural transformation, Abate’s writing bears the unassimilated linguistic traces and cultural references of these displacements. Yet rather than understanding the texture of his work in terms of an idiolect, it is more productive to share in its difficulty and difference as it recalls, with all the imperfections of memory, the proximate threads of multiple migrations which share commonalities, but which are irreducibly discrete. While Abate characteristically focuses on documenting and exploring emigration from Arbëria, it is the residual and semantically unresolved presence of linguistic diversity in his work which matters. By resisting domesticating practices of translation in his work of self-translation, Abate succeeds in making his project, to pick up again on Venturi’s expression, “a focus of difference.” In “Vivere per addizione,” the short essay which gives the collection its title, Abate reflects again on the “language of the heart and the languages of bread” and the sense of Fremde he had felt moving from place to place. However, he no longer sees a self that is split or divided but one privileged in having the capacity to move across languages and cultures accepting the transformations and misrecognitions that inevitably occur. These feelings find material form in yet another language, the dialect of Trento where he finally settled, exemplified by the word “pomo,” the region’s characteristic fruit whose cultural resonances could never be captured by equivalents like “mela,” “Äpfel,” or “apple.” His point of arrival mirrors precisely Wilson’s concluding remarks on the work of self-translation in the writers she studies:

14  For a compelling and illuminating account of transnational culinary translation and sociocultural transformation in a different, but not unrelated context, see Diner (2003).

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By exhibiting how cultural identities are not necessarily experienced through a clear-cut dichotomy of mother tongue and second language (‘step-mother’ tongue), but rather in the more fluid, less structured transcultural process that encompasses adaptive re-interpretation and contestation, they demonstrate that individuals can and do ‘inhabit’ more than one linguistic home and, perhaps more importantly, the choice of the linguistic home they wish to inhabit supports individual decisions regarding multiple belonging. (220)

The final story in the collection adds a further layer to Abate’s re-imagining of multiple belonging. For decades, the Italian South has suffered depopulation through successive waves of migration northwards. In recent years, it has become home to people moving to Europe from many parts of the Global South. “Prima la vita” charts their arrival in Carfizzi, sketching out parallels with the historic experience of the village’s Arbëresh inhabitants. Time and space are momentarily dislocated by the recursive presence of the dialect term “guagnùno” used to designate the young Calabrian boy in Germany in the earlier “Storia di un emigrante qualunque.” The later “guagnùno” is one of the new arrivals and his identity is conferred by the language of the place he is now in, rather than the place he came from.

Final Note My own chapter takes its title from Chiellino’s poem “Verstummung,” which as I commented refers to a falling silent or atrophied silence. Arbëresh, Abate’s “mother tongue,” is on UNESCO’s list of Endangered Languages. It is categorized as “definitely endangered,” whose definition is that “children no longer learn the language as a ‘mother tongue’ in the home.”

Bibliography Abate, Carmine. 1984. Den Koffer und Weg, trans. Meike Behrmann. Kiel: Malik Verlag. ———. [1993] 2006. Il muro dei muri. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2010a. Vivere per addizione e altri viaggi. Milan: Mondadori. ———. 2010b. Lingua del cuore: lingue del pane. Lecture delivered in Florence. https://www.viv-­it.org/sites/default/files/Scaricabili/04%20Abate_.pdf. ———. 2011. Terre di andata. Nuoro: Il Maestrale. Abate, Carmine, and Meike Behrmann. 1984. Die Germanesi. Frankfurt: Campus. ———. 2006. I germanesi. Rubbettino: Soveria Mannelli. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. London: Jonathan Cape. Berberi, Vikto. 2018. Re Chiellino sisting Erasure: Landscape, Folklife and Ethics in the Calabrian and Arbëreshë novels of Carmine Abate. In Italy and the Environmental Humanities, ed. Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past, 78–87. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Chiellino, Gino. 1995. Fremde: Discourse on the Foreign, trans. Luise von Flotow. Toronto: Guernica.

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Chin, Rita. 2007. The Guestworker Question in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diner, Hasia. 2003. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. elhariry, yasser, and Rebecca L.  Walkowitz. 2021. The Postlingual Turn. SubStance 50 (1): 3–9. Gallien, Claire. 2021. The Heterolingual Zone: Arabic, English and the Practice of Wordlinness. In Multilingual Literature as World Literature, ed. Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang, 69–90. New York: Bloomsbury. Luchtenberg, Siegrid. 1989. Migrant Literature in Intercultural Education. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 10 (5): 365–381. Marzi, Federica. 2012a. Il pretesto della legge in una letteratura in lingua diversa: leggi e scritture dell’emigrazione italiana in Germania. Between 2 (3): 1–14. ———. 2012b. Alla ricerca della lingua: Intervista a Carmine Gino Chiellino. Altreitalie 45. https://www.altreitalie.it/Pubblicazioni/Rivista/N_45/Intervista/ Alla_Ricerca_Della_Lingua_Intervista_A_Carmine_Gino_Chiellino.kl. Mauceri, Maria Cristina. 2006. L’Europa venuta dall’Europa. In Nuovo planetario italiano, ed. Armando Gnisci, 113–154. Troina: Città aperta. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Parati, Graziella. 2005. Migration Italy. The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Pugliese, Enrico. 2001. In Germania. In Storia dell’Emigrazione Italiana, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina, vol. 2, 121–133. Rome: Donzelli Editore. Romero, Federico. 2001. L’emigrazione operaia in Europa (1948–1973). In Storia dell’Emigrazione Italiana, Partenze, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi, and Emilio Franzina, vol. 1, 397–414. Rome: Donzelli Editore. Suhr, Heidrun. 1989. Ausländerliteratur: Minority Literature in the Federal Republic of Germany. German Culture 46 (Winter): 71–99. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. Translation as Cultural Politics: Regimes of Domestication in English. Textual Practice 7 (2): 208–223. Wilson, Rita. 2020. ‘Pens That Confound the Label of Citizenship’: Self-translations and Literary Identities. Modern Italy 25 (2): 213–224. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

CHAPTER 25

Going for Nothing: Migration and Translation in Cristina Rivera Garza Ramsey McGlazer

In a brief text called “A Manifesto in Four Themes,” the anthropologist and feminist critic Rita Segato surveys a range of recent developments in patriarchal and state violence. On her way to imagining an alternative to this violence, Segato pauses to consider “accounts of the travels of Latin American migrants to the US, crossing through Mexico on the train La Bestia” (Segato 2018, 209). She notes that these travelers’ testimonies “have a recurring structure”: they involve repeated, “extreme ordeals” followed by deportations that are not definitive but rather give rise to a determination to “begin the journey all over again” (Segato 2018,  209). What accounts for this determination, for these migrants’ desires to return to the country that has just expelled them? Why do they remain drawn, as though magnetically, to the North? Segato offers several hypotheses: The habitual approach is to explain their decision to leave home as a consequence of material scarcity or of expulsion by gang warfare. Although this explanation is partly true, I would emphasize attraction over expulsion, and I would seek to revise familiar understandings of abundance, lack, and libidinal investment. These are the constructions of a historical epoch and apocalyptic phase of capital with particular characteristics already noted by Gilles Deleuze in his Spinozist critique of Freudianism.

R. McGlazer (*) University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_25

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Because it is abundance that produces lack, installs and imposes it, destroying what had previously been satisfying and fulfilling. At home, relations of trust and reciprocity are worn down, discredited, and broken by the effects of interventionist modernization and under the pressure of the supra-regional market. When bonds are broken, a scarcity appears that is not merely material, but rather a whole social climate, in which the drives are redirected toward what I call “the world of things,” the region “where things are.” A new type of cargo cult is thus imposed: a mysticism that seeks an exuberant paradise of aestheticized commodities. It is the fetish of the North, or rather the fetishism of the North as the kingdom of commodities, that forcibly enters and intervenes in the plurality of the world’s cosmologies. What captures the populations of the Americas, drawing them toward the North, is thus the magnetism of a fantasy of abundance, of a fetishism of the region of abundance, brought to bear on psyches that vacillate in a void of being, in a space now divested of its own magnetism, poor in the pleasures and obligations of reciprocity. Desire, which is always mimetic, is thus produced by a fetishistic excess, mystified and potent. Psyches are sucked into the world of things when the old ties of rootedness fail to retain them. (Segato 2018, 209; translation modified)

Note that Segato draws on a Freudian vocabulary—on the language of desires, drives, fantasies, and fetishism—even while, with Gilles Deleuze, she distances herself from orthodox Freudianism. In her account, the northern “world of things” transforms psychic as well as social, political, and economic life in the South. Encouraging fantasies of abundance, “interventionist modernization,” driven by states and markets based in the North, makes the South itself into “a void of being,” the site of “a scarcity that is not merely material.” This is what Segato means when she claims that “abundance produces lack”: a sense of scarcity, a perception of the world as empty, as stagnant and “poor in … pleasures,” is created and sustained by images of abundance and exuberance. “Old ties” and traditions are emptied of significance by the fantasy of new riches and copious commodities elsewhere. Segato, who has long studied sexual violence and various forms of gendered and colonial exploitation,1 does not deny the material facts of immiseration, gang warfare, or militarized border enforcement. Her suggestion—also a deliberately scandalous provocation—is instead that we consider migration qualitatively rather than quantitively.2 Hence, the persistence or return of psychoanalytic figures just after Segato’s apparently anti-Freudian appeal to Deleuze: drives,  Translations of Segato’s work into English have begun to appear only relatively recently, and it has been my privilege to take part in this effort. For an introduction to her work, see my translation of Segato (2022). 2  Edgar Garcia (2020) proposes “a turn away from quantitative conceptions of risk to qualitative ones” and considers the prevalence of numerical and norm-based understandings of migration. Elsewhere in the essay, Garcia addresses “the various mythemes of an invasive population, an endangered racial norm, and the necessity of borders that shield the normal citizens of a state from the abnormal and undesirable invaders. The regulative instrument of numerating populations creates the sense of a norm that can be levied without necessary recourse to the numbers themselves, let alone the humanity of the enumerated” (2020, 261–262). On the related myth of a “not strictly numerical, but theoretically quantifiable, limit to what a polity is capable of absorbing,” see Ty (2019, 874). On political arithmetic, the prehistory of modern statistics, and the “violence of enumeration when used as a method of managing subaltern bodies,” see Sussman (2020, 55). 1

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desires, fantasies, and fetishes all belong to the vocabulary of a clinical practice that treats patients “one by one” and that seeks to respond to the qualitative, the subjective, the singular, the idiosyncratic. In the paragraphs quoted above, then, “lack,” “abundance,” and “excess” are not matters of empirically verifiable information or quantifiable data. Segato is not making an argument about incomes, remittances, crop yields, or GDP. What does it mean to displace these categories? What does it mean, in other words, to recast or recognize migration as driven by desire as much as need—or perhaps, as Segato suggests polemically, by desire more than by need? And what does this effort have to do with what Segato calls “the plurality of the world’s cosmologies”? What does the language of desire preserve that the language of need or statistics, native to what Segato characterizes as the more monocultural North, might foreclose? These questions motivate my reading of El mal de la taiga (The Taiga Syndrome), a 2012 novel by the Mexican-born poet, novelist, and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza.3 In this chapter, I read Rivera Garza’s novel as a meditation on the kind of “magnetism” that Segato describes: a draw, pull, or power that exceeds “familiar understandings” of migration and evades empirical accounting. But if Rivera Garza shares several of Segato’s concerns, she also inverts the anthropologist’s image of the North. Far from being a “kingdom of commodities” and “region of abundance,” the North in El mal de la taiga is a subarctic expanse, a vast and sparsely populated wilderness, that at once occasions the syndrome named in the novel’s title and is itself the name of “a disease, a syndrome” (T 115; M 113). This place is, I show, like the Lapland imagined in Leonora Carrington’s earlier novel The Hearing Trumpet (2020; first published in 1974), a place for “radically contesting that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it” (Deleuze 1991,  31).4 Rivera Garza finds this horizon in language.

On Empty-Handed Allegory “I don’t write books to communicate,” Rivera Garza notes in an interview; “I tend … towards a process through which I try to empty language … So instead of adding to, I see much of what I do as taking away from, becoming more and more austere” (Samuelson  2007, 140–141). The results of this subtractive method can be seen in The Taiga Syndrome, where the rigor of Rivera Garza’s prose, bereft of description, characterization, and narrative detail, registers the severity of the novel’s northern setting. Yet, it would not be quite right to call 3  Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrome (2018); El mal de la taiga (2012). Citations are given parenthetically in the text, using the abbreviations T for The Taiga Syndrome and M for El mal de la taiga. 4  I am deliberately drawing on a text in which Deleuze reads Freud sympathetically (if against the grain), rather than treating him as an adversary. Although the relationship between Deleuze and Freud is not the subject of this chapter, it’s worth noting that, like Segato’s work, my analysis challenges reductive, dichotomizing readings of Deleuze and psychoanalysis. See also McNulty (2017).

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this setting “empty,” even if the language used to render it might index a creative process of emptying. Declining to reproduce the colonial fantasy of the terra nullius, Rivera Garza’s novel suggests that the taiga is in fact marked by a disquieting fullness. So are those who enter it: “We all carry a forest inside us, yes, kilometers and kilometers of birch, fir, cedars” (T 118–19; M 117). To “discover” this place, then, is in fact to rediscover an inner expanse, a thickly forested psychic landscape, a taiga that is pointedly not a tundra. Still, it matters that the North in Rivera Garza’s novel is the far North, a nearly but not quite arctic zone. In this sense, too, her North differs from the North that Segato describes, which is at once more general and more specific: more general because, used in a relative sense, “the North” for Segato designates the Global North that incubates and exports “interventionist modernization” (Segato 2018, 209); more specific because it points to the US in particular. By contrast, Rivera Garza’s taiga, for all its latitudinal specificity, could be located on any one of several continents, and the novel never allows us to say which with any certainty. The word “taiga,” according to the OED, refers to “the swampy, coniferous forest of Siberia; also, the zone of temperate coniferous forest stretching across Europe and North America” (OED, s.v. “taiga”). Yet in The Taiga Syndrome there’s no there there, either in the text or in the hazy images that accompany without quite illustrating it. (Included in the Spanish-language edition, these drawings are regrettably not reproduced in the English translation.) The novel calls attention to the indeterminacy and the foreignness of the first of its title’s keywords: “Taiga,” a word of Mongolian origin, comes into both Spanish and English by way of Russian. Left untranslated as it travels, the word solicits translation in the form of description, whether botanical or ethnographic. But this is precisely the kind of description that Rivera Garza rigorously withholds. As for the title’s second keyword, which is, in fact, in the Spanish title El mal de la taiga, its first, for good reason and to excellent effect, Rivera Garza’s translators have taken a liberty in rendering mal as syndrome. The latter word places limits on the former’s much broader range of meanings, which traverse the metaphysical, medical, and legal realms but also enter everyday life. A mal can refer colloquially to a shame (as in “what a shame”), to malevolence or bad luck, or to a damage done, an injury incurred, an illness, or specifically a fever (as in the book by Jacques Derrida known in Spanish as Mal de archivo and in English as Archive Fever). Even while the English “syndrome” shuts down several of these meanings, it activates new associations—from Stockholm to Stendhal—and has other advantages as well. “Medicine distinguishes between syndromes and symptoms,” Deleuze writes, “a symptom being the specific sign of an illness, and a syndrome the meeting-place or crossing-point of manifestations issuing from very different origins and arising within variable contexts” (1991, 13–14). The taiga in Rivera Garza’s novel is just such a “meeting-place or crossing-point,” like the syndrome it names. The novel’s narrator is a private detective turned writer; a strange assignment leads her into and then out of the snow forest, where she

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searches for a client’s ex-wife, who has gone missing with another man. Before her departure, the detective hears the following from her client: “It seems,” he continued, almost whispering, “that certain inhabitants of the Taiga begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts [emprenden viajes suicidas] to escape.” He fell silent, though it seemed like he wanted to continue. “Impossible to do when you’re surrounded by the same terrain for [en algo así como] five thousand kilometers,” he concluded with a sigh. (T 10–11; M 14–15)

The sighs, whispers, and silences in this exchange recall Rivera Garza’s characterization of her writing process as an emptying procedure. The noirish setup is conventional, even cliché, despite the gender reversal that makes a male client here hire a female detective. But already in this early scene, the narrator’s mode of delivery is elliptical, even vaporous, to the point of turning the detective story into something else altogether.5 The initial “enigma … gradually loses its value” (Sánchez Aparicio 2014, 438), and as a result, the reader will never learn exactly which “inhabitants of the Taiga” fall ill in the ways described here, or where, or why, or what remedies have proven effective, if any. If the sameness of the terrain is somehow to blame, then do the symptoms vary seasonally? If “suicidal attempts to escape” prove “impossible,” then does the anxiety subside, or does it persist? Does leaving the taiga cure the syndrome that bears its name? Can anyone leave, in fact, or is the syndrome incurable? In transcribing the passage above, I have drawn attention to two moments of slight but significant divergence in the translation: first, the sufferers’ “suicidal attempts to escape,” which are, in Spanish, even more vividly called “viajes suicidas,” suicidal journeys; and, second, the language of approximation that falls away in the English version of the novel: in Spanish “five thousand kilometers” is more emphatically marked as a round number rather than a real measurement, since it’s “algo así como,” “something like” five thousand kilometers of forest that surround the sufferer. These are like “the kilometers and kilometers of birch, fir cedars” that are, elsewhere in the novel, said to reside within each of us (T 118–119; M 117), where the repetition of “kilometers” registers the idea of distance without aspiring to the condition of empirical measurement. Though minimal, the difference between “five thousand kilometers” and “something like five thousand kilometers” turns out to be meaningful in the context of a novel that challenges the abiding assumptions and associations that bind migration to quantification. These have a long and complex intercontinental history that extends into the present and is intensifying under contemporary conditions of datafication, when, for instance, European border enforcement depends increasingly on the use of biometric data, or the border between the US and Mexico is managed by “a border security regime that works by turning migrants 5  Sánchez Aparicio (2014) reads the novel as a work of metafiction. For an ecocritical reading of the novel, see Zegarra Acevedo (2021).

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into data, into interpretable signs” (Stuelke  2021, 49).6 Even while it courts interpretation, The Taiga Syndrome traffics in signs that are anything but easily interpretable. With its mysteries that remain unresolved and its enigmas that are not mere riddles, the novel thwarts the impulse to enumerate. As for the “viajes suicidas,” these recall Segato’s deliberately bleak characterization of Central American migrants’ journeys North. To be sure, these journeys are not directly represented in the novel, which takes place at a remove from such forced migrations, in a series of undisclosed locations that bear little resemblance to the embattled border that Segato describes. And yet the phrase “viajes suicidas” is one index of this border’s implicit presence in the novel. The phrase marks one place where the novel hints at its own status as allegory—though the allegorical staging is complex here and throughout The Taiga Syndrome. To be clear, I am not making a version of the claim “that Global South writers should be native informants and nothing else.” As Ignacio Sánchez Prado notes, to this day “the idea of cosmopolitan Mexican writers, of Mexican writers not just writing about Mexicanness, … blows people’s minds” in the US.7 But to argue that there is an allegorical dimension to The Taiga Syndrome is not to insist that it is about Mexicanness and nothing else (as if all allegory had to be national), or for that matter about migration and nothing else (as if any allegorical interpretation could be exhaustive). “Allegory goes away empty-handed,” according to Walter Benjamin (1998, 233). Benjamin’s own “allegorical method,” Howard Caygill explains, “assembles fragments, … ‘juxtaposes the distinct and the disparate’ in pursuit of a fugitive truth” (2011, 245). Allegory, for Benjamin, “departs from a crisis of representation, seeking to construct constellations out of the material of the past” (Caygill 2011,  245). These constellations are provisional and shifting; unlike symbols, they do not subsume parts into wholes or work to convert “fugitive” truths into timeless ones. It is in this sense that I call The Taiga Syndrome allegorical.8 This reading makes migration not “the truth” or indeed the true North of the novel, but rather one star in its night sky, or hidden by its midnight sun.

On Positing and Postponement That the detective signs a “contract” with the man who hires her—and so undertakes her journey voluntarily—might seem to contradict the allegorical reading that I am proposing (T 13; M 16). But Rivera Garza is at pains to show that various compulsions are in fact at work before, during, and after this contractual exchange. “Instead of taking the money from his hand and nodding in  On biometrics and the European border regime, see Bentouhami (2021).  https://twitter.com/isanchezprado/status/1222638937639915521 8  I am using “allegory” in a sense that differs from Sánchez Prado (2018). Sánchez Prado notes that Rivera Garza takes distance from both the “strong allegorizations of the national” associated with the Latin American Boom (2018, 177) and from “the allegorical mode of more commercial historical sagas” (2018, 147). 6 7

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agreement, I remember I wanted to tell him that, in the end, no one knows why someone leaves. No one can be sure [nadie sabe a ciencia cierta por qué se va]. // But I took the money and I took the briefcase filled with documents and I told him yes” (T 18). To know something “a ciencia cierta” is, as the translation indicates, to be certain of it, to consider it beyond dispute or doubt. But the phrase also contains the word for science, ciencia, and it is tempting to hear it as subtly setting aside scientific categories, just as the novel’s round numbers cast doubt on the very possibility of enumeration. The categories of science cannot suffice, Rivera Garza suggests, to account for the motivations of travelers, including migrants. To leave for anywhere is to be compelled to do so by a force that cannot be completely fathomed, and, without conflating psychic and economic forms of compulsion or suggesting that all travelers are refugees, the novel does challenge us to take this force seriously. If an all too certain science—or indeed the various sciences ranging from statistics to demography, from human geography to economics and beyond—cannot reckon with this enigmatic force, then what would? How could language? In several ways, I am suggesting, The Taiga Syndrome sets out to think through these questions. One of the most stunning features of the novel is its deployment of the figure known as hyperbaton or anastrophe: an inversion of clauses that appears in the first sentences of nearly, though not quite all, of The Taiga Syndrome’s chapters. Here is a representative, non-exhaustive sampling, a series of sentences that also chart the course of the novel’s meandering narrative: “That they had lived there, they told me” (T 7; M 11). “That they had arrived together and in a deplorable state, they told me from the beginning” (T 28; M 31). “That the mission, seeming so simple at the beginning, had become complicated is what I would write in my report for the man who was waiting for news on the other side of the ocean” (T 43; M 46). “That lumberjacks can be cautious I knew, or sensed” (T 67; M 68). “That we needed to do something, something different, is what I said to the translator on our third night in the cabin” (T 79; M 79). “That we asked about them in every campsite we passed in the forest, I would write in the report that by now seemed more like an intimate diary than the kind of text that was meant to gather and provide precise and objective information” (T 95; M 93). “That the translator had already told me, in the local airport where our small dilapidated plane had touched down and from where I was expecting to leave at any moment, how he had been born in a wild and crazy city, a metal oil-drilling structure built over an enormous lake—that I would end up including in my report as well” (T 108; M 107). Arranged in this serial way, the sentences convey, with their increasing complexity, The Taiga Syndrome’s thickening plot. At the same time, their recurring notes—their delivery of reported speech, or their returns to what will be written in the narrator’s write-up—indicate the limits of the protagonist’s progress, and point to the narrative’s stalled, rerouted quality. Or perhaps it would be better to call the narrative not “stalled” but “stalling,” not “rerouted” but

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“rerouting.” It’s not only that the detective falls short of achieving her aim and finds herself producing “an intimate diary” rather than a detached report. The very structure of these sentences complicates our readerly efforts to advance. So too does this structure’s recurrence, which makes each of the sentences quoted above recall the last. In each case, we’re told what the narrator has been told, or what she has said or thought, before we’re then told that she’s been told it, or has said or thought it. The sentences double back on themselves, retracing their steps even while they promise to carry the narrative forward. Etymologically, the word “anastrophe” encodes a turning back, and “hyperbaton” comes from the Greek for “overstepping” (OED, s.v. “anastrophe”; OED, s.v. “hyperbaton”). Both figures involve movement, then, in ways that Rivera Garza’s sentences come close to literalizing. Although hyperbaton is often deployed for emphasis (“this I have to see”), here it not only lays stress on what’s said or to be reported; it also allows for an “overstepping” followed by a retreat, again, a backward turn. (It might be clarifying to imagine the sentences written in a more conventional and straightforward way, whether in English or Spanish. “They told me that they had lived there” is, for instance, a linear formulation that does not create the fold or require the doubling back that I am describing.) Rehearsing the movements of the novel as a whole, these sentences also introduce a hiatus or interval between a statement and the fact of its enunciation. The postponement of the verbum dicendi (“told,” “said,” and so on) creates a gap between two clauses that would otherwise be run together. What happens in this hiatus? On the one hand, the sentences call attention to acts of linguistic positing by opening with what’s posited (again, “that x, they told me” rather than “they told me that x”). On the other hand, these same sentences ask us to notice acts of translation, even when the character called “the translator” is not mentioned in them. This is the significance of their reliance on reported speech: that x is not directly quoted in any of the sentences transcribed above means that we are reminded of their status as approximations, paraphrases, sketchy renderings, or faded copies of other sets of signifiers. Rivera Garza’s engagement with translation extends to her use of media other than writing in The Taiga Syndrome. I have already referred (speaking of sketchy renderings) to the drawings by Carlos Maiques that appear in the Spanish-language edition of the novel. The Taiga Syndrome also features an appendix in the form of a “Playlist” that, unlike Maiques’s drawings, is included in the novel’s translation (T 121; M 119). The playlist gathers classical pieces and popular songs that variously evoke the North. Listening to these creates a sonic surround that is sometimes ominous, sometimes sublime. In an extended sense, then, the novel is translated, its narrative transposed, into these other media, music and drawing. But there is a more basic and more literal sense in which translation structures The Taiga Syndrome. “It was necessary, as it is always necessary, to find a translator,” the narrator confesses in a chapter whose title the translators

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Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana have beautifully rendered as “Tongue to Tongue” (T 33). In Spanish, this title is “Algo de su lengua en mi lengua,” which can either mean “Something of His (or Her or Their) Tongue in My Tongue” or “Something of His (or Her or Their) Language in My Language,” so that the linguistic and the corporeal, confessional intimacy and kissing, cannot quite be told apart. The sentence introducing the translator in Rivera Garza’s Spanish is also resonant: “Hacía falta, como siempre hace falta, un traductor” (M 36). Levine and Kana, the novel’s own translators, have supplied the verb “to find” here: “It was necessary … to find a translator.” This rendering restricts, if only slightly, the generalizing scope of the narrator’s claim, as astonishing as it is sweeping, that a translator is always necessary. This means not only when one is traveling but in any situation whatsoever, even presumably when one is talking to oneself, in one’s own language. It follows that the two—self and language—cannot ever overlap completely. The speaker can never be flush with the language she speaks; a minimal space, an interval, always separates the two. This interval at once allows for translation and makes recourse to translation unavoidable. Such recourse may be especially fraught under colonial conditions, where translation involves negotiation with occupying forces and where language itself functions as a tool of conquest that remains operative after the achievement of national independence, as in the case of Spanish in Latin America. (For, as Segato writes, in this context “it is wrong to assume that the Conquest simply ended one day” [Segato 2018, 203].) That The Taiga Syndrome’s prose is shorn of regionalisms underscores the intercontinental reach of the language, its status as artifact of colonial rule: One could be from any one of several continents and still write in something like this Castilian. But, again, the claim that a translator is “always” necessary makes the need for translation general, even global, suggesting that colonialism does not originate but rather exacerbates and exploits a condition shared by all speaking beings. Lacanians call this condition alienation. For her part, Rivera Garza stresses the proximity of the translator’s alien tongue and language. “THE DISTANT NEVER SO CLOSE [NUNCA TAN CERCA LO LEJOS],” a telegram reads (T 35; M 39). The telegram is repeated, with “variations,” in a letter quoted in the same passage: “NEVER DID THE DISTANT STRIKE SO CLOSE [JAMÁS LO LEJOS ARREMETIÓ TAN CERCA]” (T 36; M 39). This is a near-quotation or inaccurate recollection of a line by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo: “jamás tan cerca arremetió lo lejos,” or, in Clayton Eshelman’s translation, “Never did the distance charge so close” (2007, 512–515). What the novel’s translation into English cannot quite capture is the alteration of word order that, in the letter, has distance precede proximity: In Vallejo’s line and in the telegram, what’s close is named before what’s far. The letter in Rivera Garza’s text inverts this sequence. This is a change in emphasis rather than meaning, but the transposition is noteworthy in the context of a novel so programmatically committed to hyperbaton. Here Vallejo’s use of the figure is forgotten, his anastrophe undone. His rhetorical rerouting is itself rerouted,

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and so The Taiga Syndrome’s “variations” on Vallejo are also translations of his line (T 36; M 39). Traversing the distance between poetry and prose, telegram and letter, far and near, the reader remains on the move.

A Detour Through Lapland I have been attending to the local, lexical choices made by Rivera Garza’s translators. I have also called attention to the role of translation in The Taiga Syndrome more generally, both at the level of narrative and at the level of rhetoric or form. Here, I open a brief parenthesis to consider one other vector of translation. Critics have noted The Taiga Syndrome’s debt to the Mexican author Juan Rulfo, and the “variations” on Vallejo’s line point to the presence of earlier modernist precursors.9 To my knowledge, though, no one has undertaken to analyze Rivera Garza’s relationship to the English-born surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington, a long-time resident of Mexico City. Without programmatically rewriting Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, Rivera Garza translates and transposes Carrington’s North. “If the old woman cannot go to Lapland, then Lapland must come to the Old Woman” (Carrington 2020, 196). And so it does at the end of the post-­surrealist picaresque that is The Hearing Trumpet, another illustrated novel. I call the text “post-surrealist” because of its pointed way of historicizing the movement in which Carrington had once been a key if youthful participant. Though scandalous in the narrator’s youth, surrealist art has become an institution and devolved into kitsch; its masterpieces hang in exhibitions presided over by London’s Lord Mayor and even the Queen Mother herself (Carrington 2020, 82). And yet, in the novel, surrealist preoccupations persist, so that the movement lives on, if only in an undead form. The Hearing Trumpet flagrantly violates conventional narrative norms, suspending relations between causes and effects in time-­honored surrealist fashion, even while it upends, and in this way satirizes the Surrealists’ fetishization of young women (like the young Carrington herself). Written when Carrington was in her forties, the novel movingly depicts aging as a process of marginalization if not outright social death. The narrator is a nonagenarian woman named Marian Leatherby, living in an unnamed country that resembles Mexico, whose family decides, without consultation, to send her to a nursing home known as Lightsome Hall. After her arrival, elaborate, collective, and occult hijinks ensue, with consequences that are literally cosmic and cosmologies that are nothing if not plural (Segato 2018, 209). But here I want to underscore Lapland’s central place in the novel. The narrator’s “lifelong dream of going to Lapland” (Carrington 2020, 5) is realized in the most improbable of ways; what matters more than the paths taken to get there, for my purposes, is the surprising resonance between Carrington’s Lapland and Rivera Garza’s taiga. The earlier novel’s “nostalgia for the north” (Carrington 2020,  11) anticipates the taiga syndrome. 9

 For her reflections on Rulfo, see Rivera Garza (2017).

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This claim is counterintuitive, not least because the two might at first seem to be inverse conditions. Again, the taiga syndrome in The Taiga Syndrome affects those who are desperate to leave but unable to do so except by means of viajes suicidas, or “suicidal journeys.” By contrast, the “nostalgia for the north” in The Hearing Trumpet names a separation from the North, not a condition of confinement to it. Here Lapland is not a confining place but rather a place of escape, a longed-for destination, the site and source of an elusive “remedy.” Just before she is sent against her will to Lightsome Hall, the narrator thinks about the pain of leaving her room in her son’s house: A separation from these well-known and loved, yes loved, things were “Death and Death indeed” according to the old rhyme of the Man of Double Deed. There was no remedy for the needle in my heart with its long thread of old blood. Then what about Lapland and the furry dog team? That would also be a violation of [my] cherished habits, yes indeed, but how different from an institution for decrepit old women. (Carrington 2020, 17–18)

There is more than one kind of separation. To leave for Lapland would be one thing, the narrator thinks here; to be shipped off to “an institution” is another altogether. The remainder of the novel suggests, however, that far from ruling out access to the North, the institution in fact opens onto Lapland, like a portal. Or rather it leads to Lapland by way of Tartarus. (Much of the denouement depends on a painting of the Abbess of the Convent of Santa Barbara of Tartarus, and on a manuscript disclosing the occult secrets of her order [Carrington 2020, 90].) Though not “Death and Death indeed” in the way Marian seems to understand it here—a matter of mere finality—her departure from home is a death of sorts. Or rather, it allows for a transformative traversal of the realm of the dead. It is a viaje suicida that, like those undertaken in Rivera Garza’s taiga, sustains possibility as it separates the narrator from “well-­ known and loved … things” and “cherished habits”—in other words, from the given. Carrington said of her creative practice: “I try to empty myself of images which have made me blind” (qtd. in Warner 2017, xxxiii). This claim can help to account for the sheer proliferation of images and events in The Hearing Trumpet. As I have already indicated, all manner of characters, contrivances, sudden plot twists, and mythical and literary allusions are shoehorned into the novel, which is “maximalist” rather than minimalist (Richards 2020, 270) and so at a far remove from Rivera Garza’s sensibility. If “emptying language” for the latter author involves removing details, descriptions, and proper names, Carrington’s “emptying herself of images” has the effect of making these images accumulate elsewhere. The narrative that results is overcrowded rather than “austere” like Rivera Garza’s fictions. It is also (mostly) comical rather than haunting. Still, both The Hearing Trumpet and The Taiga Syndrome center on a North imagined from the South, a North that confounds number.

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All So Vacant If there is something humanizing about The Taiga Syndrome’s confounding of number and its concomitant emphasis on interiority, its acknowledgment of the depths that we all carry within us, Rivera Garza’s project should not be conflated with that of liberal humanism. Nor should her project be confused with the humanitarian “constitution of a depoliticized ‘humanity,’” a Euro-US response to “crisis” that privileges “compassion” at the expense of “inquiry into the political conditions that produce the crisis in the first place” (Sanyal 2019, 436).10 Such a response depends on “the representational mandates of visibility and recognition” (2019, 457), making compliance with these mandates into a precondition for humanitarian redress. According to this logic, whether we are in Europe or the United States, we aid migrants because (a) we see them, and (b) we see ourselves in them, sensing that, under another dispensation, their plight could be ours. But it is not the other dispensation that activates our curiosity. The moment of compassion does not last long enough for us to ask how the current dispensation came to be, what ensures its maintenance, or what if anything would allow for its undoing. The other calls, and we respond. We become responsible—and congratulate ourselves for doing so—in the process. All the while, though, the framework of humanitarianism automates response and reduces the other as it “retreat[s] into large counts” (Garcia 2020, 266); it subsumes the migrant, makes her into a case and a cause. A figure to be rescued and whose rescue allows for our own imaginary salvation, the other seen in this way is rendered depthless. Though not the “criminal” or “enemy” that she is said to be in reactionary anti-immigrant discourse, she is not a friend, analysand, or potential lover either. She is not the site of enigmatic, let alone “unplumbable,” desires.11 What matters is simply that we see this other and recognize her need. Against these “mandates of visibility and recognition,” Rivera Garza (like Carrington before her) exercises a “right to opacity,” as though concurring with Édouard Glissant, who offers another set of mandates altogether: “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity” (1997, 190). I have suggested that another name for this singularity is desire. I have also argued that theoretical vocabularies—whether Freudian or Deleuzian or both—that may seem far removed from ongoing migrant struggles for subsistence in fact remain indispensable.12 Segato’s account of Central American migrants’ journeys to the US, quoted above, already illustrates this point 10  Sanyal borrows the phrase “the constitution of a depoliticized ‘humanity’” from Malkki (2010, 84). 11   Freud calls the “navel” of the dream—“its point of contact with the unknown”— “unplumbable” (1953, 111). 12  For relevant reflections on psychoanalysis as itself “a study of boundaries, errancy, and otherness,” see González (2020).

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implicitly: to lose sight of these vocabularies or to let them lapse is to risk reducing migrants to the status of flat statistical figures, demographic units, or mere “victims” to be cared for with compassion and “saved” through humanitarian rescue missions. What Rivera Garza adds to Segato’s claims is a crucial supplement, an aesthetic appendage (indeed, a hearing trumpet), reminding us that there is more than one North.13 One is, in Segato’s words, a “world of things” that “commodifies life” and immiserates the South as it empties villages of inhabitants drawn away by promises of ease, abundance, exuberance, and novelty (Segato 2018, 209). But the other North, the fictional North of Rivera Garza’s Taiga or Carrington’s Lapland, is itself a “void of being” (Segato 2018, 209), a place that magnetizes attention and sustains desire, not because it is brimming with commodities or replete with fantasies, but because, on the contrary, its desolation allows one to “empty language,” “to rid [one]self of images which have made [one] blind” (qtd. in Warner 2017, xxxiii). In this place of destitution, “a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it.” (Deleuze 1991, 31). To this place we go “for nothing [por nada],” where that last phrase means not only “for no definite reason,” but also “to seek nothing” or “in search of negativity.”14 Yet as it enters English from Spanish, the phrase “going for nothing” gains in translation, activating associations with “going for broke”: “risk[ing] everything or mak[ing] every effort … ; … try[ing] one’s hardest, do[ing] one’s utmost; go[ing] all out” (OED, s.v. “broke”). To go for broke is to “shoot your shot,” as we now say, even if doing so leaves you with nothing to show for the effort, no balm or compensation for “the shame” (T 15; M 17). To go for broke is to accept the possibility of futility, failure, depletion, and defeat of the kind imagined in the song by Leonard Cohen that Rivera Garza’s narrator recalls: So the great affair is over But whoever would have guessed It would leave us all so vacant And so deeply unimpressed It’s like our visit to the moon Or to that other star I guess you go for nothing If you really want to go that far. (Cohen 1977)

 For confirmation, see Davidson (2005).  “And the negativity that these aesthetic considerations communicate is not abstract: in the borderlands, it is a fact of persistent violence and loss of life. It is present incarceration and an impetus to kill that comes from the highest offices of US governance. It is open hostility and murderous racism” (Garcia 2020, 275). The Taiga Syndrome does not take place in the same borderlands. Still Garcia’s language is apposite not least because it reminds us that Rivera Garza was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, and that the border forms the backdrop of some of her other works. See, for instance, Grieving (2020b). 13 14

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“You go for nothing if you really go that far, that’s what someone said in an old song [Uno va por nada si va tan lejos, eso decía alguien en alguna canción muy vieja]” (T 19; M 21). This rendition elides the wanting in the song’s last line, making departure into an accomplished fact (“you really go that far”) rather than a plan or prospect (“you really want to go that far”). Narratively, this elision makes sense as it makes Cohen’s song sound as a faint echo, its lyrics partially and imperfectly remembered. At the same time, formally, the elision shows us the emptying that Rivera Garza identifies as central to her creative practice. In an effort to “empty language,” she renders Cohen’s lyric more austere than it is in his song (Samuelson 2007, 141). And what falls into the vacant space that results is (one word for) desire. Though no longer named in the narrator’s recollection of the lyric, wanting remains in the form of a trace or a hidden track awaiting amplification. The spaces between words, languages, and persons real and fictional—between Cohen and Rivera Garza, between the narrator and the singer of the “old song” she remembers, between the lyric sung in English and its recollection in Spanish—become charged with desire. Elsewhere the narrator notes: “That, with time, I had become accustomed to the hollow moments [los tiempos vacíos, literally the empty times] of every investigation is true. There are hours, days even, sometimes months or years when nothing happens: Those are the gaps [los tiempos vacíos] in an investigation. In other words, those moments are life” (T 48; M 51; trans. modified). At once continuous with life and moments that suspend the ordinary business of living, these “lapses” let us begin to glimpse something other than the given. The Taiga Syndrome takes up residence here, in the interruptions in communication that are also empty spaces within and between languages. That these gaps are irreducible means, for Rivera Garza, that a space remains open for desire (T 76; M 77). “Y nos iremos otra vez,” she writes elsewhere: “And we’ll go away again” (2020a, 304).

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. London: Verso. Bentouhami, Hourya. 2021. The Life Strike: Disobeying Borders in the Era of Surveillance Biotechnologies. Critical Times 4 (2): 233–262. Carrington, Leonora. 2020. The Hearing Trumpet. New York: New York Review Books. Caygill, Howard. 2011. Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Allegory. In The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, 73–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Leonard. 1977. Death of a Ladies’ Man. Track 8 on Death of a Ladies Man, Warner Bros. Davidson, Peter. 2005. The Idea of North. London: Reaktion. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Coldness and Cruelty. In Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books.

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Freud, Sigmund. 1953. The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, vol. 4. London: The Hogarth Press. Garcia, Edgar. 2020. A Migrant’s Lotería: Risk, Fortune, Fate, and Probability in the Borderlands of Juan Felipe Herrera and Artemio Rodríguez’s Loteria Cards and Fortune Poems. Modern Philology 118 (2): 252–276. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. For Opacity. In Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, 189–194. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. González, Francisco J. 2020. First World Problems and Gated Communities of the Mind: An Ethics of Place in Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 89 (4): 741–770. Malkki, Liisa. 2010. Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace. In In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care, ed. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, 58–86. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McNulty, Tracy. 2017. Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 28 (2): 86–114. Richards, Jill. 2020. Epilogue: Social Reproduction and the Midcentury Witch: Leonora Carrington in Mexico. In The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes, 254–270. New York: Columbia University Press. Rivera Garza, Cristina. 2012. El mal de la taiga. Mexico City: Tusquets Editores. ———. 2017. Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué. Mexico City: Random House. ———. 2018. The Taiga Syndrome, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. St Louis: Dorothy. ———. 2020a. Autobiografía del algodón. Mexico City: Random House. ———. 2020b. Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker. New York: The Feminist Press. Samuelson, Cheyla Rose. 2007. Writing at Escape Velocity: An Interview with Cristina Rivera Garza. Confluencia 23: 135–145. Sánchez Aparicio, Vega. 2014. Perderse en los bosques: El mal de la taiga de Cristina Rivera Garza. In La (re)invención del género negro, ed. Alex Martín Escribà and Javier Sánchez Zapatero, 437–444. A Coruña: Andavira Editora. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2018. The Idea of the Mexican Woman Writer: Gender, Worldliness, and Editorial Neoliberalization. In Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature, 139–181. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sanyal, Debarati. 2019. Humanitarian Detention and Figures of Persistence at the Border. Critical Times 2 (3): 435–465. Segato, Rita. 2018. A Manifesto in Four Themes, trans. Ramsey McGlazer. Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 1 (1): 198–211. ———. 2022. The Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays, trans. Ramsey McGlazer. New York: Routledge. Stuelke, Patricia. 2021. Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon: Lost Children Archive’s Reenactment Play. Genre 54 (1): 43–66. Sussman, Charlotte. 2020. Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ty, M. 2019. The Myth of What We Can Take In: Global Migration and the “Receptive Capacity” of the Nation State. Theory & Event 22 (4): 869–890. Vallejo, César. 2007. Los nueve monstruos/The Nine Monsters. In The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Clayton Eshelman, 512–515. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Warner, Marina. 2017. Introduction. Leonora Carrington. Down Below. New York Review of Books, vii–xxxiv. Zegarra Acevedo, Allen Juan. 2021. El mal de la taiga: Una version de la explotación de personas y recursos naturales en Latinoamérica. Latin American Literary Review 48 (97): 59–67.

CHAPTER 26

“Life Goes on, Defying Common Sense”: On Translating Russian Émigré Poetry Boris Dralyuk

I began to translate poems from Russian at the age of 14, six years after my family and I immigrated to the United States from Odesa, a city in what was then the Soviet Union. Founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great on land conquered from the Ottoman Turks, Odesa was to be the Empress’s southern alternative to the northern capital, Saint Petersburg: an elegant warm-water port, closer to soft-edged Venice than to the stony Amsterdam that had inspired her Hollandophile predecessor, Peter the Great. The name—traditionally rendered “Odessa” in English, with the two s’s it possesses in Russian—is Hellenic, adapted from that of an ancient Greek settlement, Odessos, which may have existed near the city’s current location a few centuries before the Common Era. I suspect the echo of the Odyssey, too, is intentional; after all, in Russian Imperial minds, the land on which the city stands, like the ancient hero, returned home after long captivity—in this case, into the Orthodox hands of the rightful successors of the Byzantine Empire. From the start, Odesa was profoundly cosmopolitan, partly populated by seafaring, mercantile foreigners and designed and governed by Western European noblemen. The city’s central monument is a statue to its first significant governor, Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, the 5th duc de Richelieu, who also lent his name to one of its main thoroughfares, Rishelievska Street. Its best-known street, Derybasivska, owes its name to Admiral José de Ribas, who played an important role in conquering the land for Catherine and who laid the

B. Dralyuk (*) University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_26

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groundwork for the city we see today. A major and, for several decades in the nineteenth century, free port, Odesa also lay in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, beyond which it was nearly impossible for Jews to move. Attracted by the economic possibilities as well as by the intellectual and spiritual freedom of urban living, Jews came in droves early on—and, despite regularly occurring catastrophic pogroms instigated by tsarist authorities, they largely flourished. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth, Jews made up between 30 and 40% of Odesa’s population, which fluctuated between 400,000 and 600,000. Some Jewish families, including my own, were partly evacuated from the city during the Second World War; approximately 100,000 individuals were massacred by the occupying Axis forces. Many of those who survived, both in the army and in evacuation, returned. Only toward the end of Soviet rule, when restrictions on immigration were loosened, did Jews, who had faced increasing official anti-semitism since the end of the war, begin to leave en masse. My family joined the exodus. Today, a mere 3% of the city’s population is Jewish. Yet anyone who has visited Odesa recently can sense that it remains, in some atmospheric sense, Jewish. Unlike other major centers of Jewish life in Eastern and Central Europe—Warsaw, Vilnius, Kyiv—Odesa grew up with Jews. In the midnineteeth century, it was one of the seats of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the Haskalah. The city’s most beloved cultural figures of the Soviet era, from the author Isaac Babel (1894–1940) to the poet Eduard Bagritsky (1895–1934), to the singer, bandleader, and actor Leonid Utyosov (1895–1982), were unabashedly Jewish. The very language of its streets, though nominally Russian, is, as I and others have written, so thoroughly inflected with Yiddish that it has more than earned the status of dialect. And when you consider its rich vein of Ukrainian, along with its admixtures of French and other tongues, it’s hard not to designate Odesan a language in its own right. What has any of this to do with my translations of Russophone poetry? Everything, it turns out. Odesa, which was part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the time of my birth in 1982, became part of independent Ukraine less than a year after my family fled the collapsing USSR as refugees. I never identified as Russian, and my experiences in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, which were few, confirmed for me that I had grown up in a different culture. Yet for much of my life, I have been casually called “Russian” by Anglophone friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The reasons are obvious: I speak and translate from Russian, and I’ve studied and taught Russian literature at the college level. Moreover, the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic was clearly first among purported equals in the Soviet Union—indeed, the USSR was the successor state to the Russian Empire—so it’s no surprise that, in the mouths of Anglophone speakers, the terms “Russian” and “Soviet” were for all intents and purposes interchangeable between the 1920s and early 1990s. In most (though not all) cases, I went along with this misidentification, which usually felt slight. I would have preferred to be called—what? Ukrainian would have been better, Soviet Jewish accurate, Odesan best of all, but how much

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familiarity with myself and my background could I have expected from my interlocutors? “Russian” was short-hand, and I usually accepted it in order to keep things moving along until one of us got to whatever point needed making. In 2014, with the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, “Russian” became the point. More and more often, I began to correct people—gently, with a smile— who referred to me as Russian, saying that I was a Russophone Ukrainian. The launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, when missiles struck Odesa and other Ukrainian cities, strengthened my sense of Ukrainian identity and wiped the smile off my face. I began to reflect on my choices as a translator. I had, it turned out, been most drawn to, and had devoted most of my translational energy to, prose from Ukraine or associated with Ukraine: the modernist stories of Isaac Babel, my hometown hero, the warmly surreal novels of Andrey Kurkov (b. 1961), one of the leading contemporary Ukrainian authors, and the satirical tales of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958), who was born in Saint Petersburg but whose style was perceived as so “southern” in flavor—so colorful yet so melancholy, and so markedly oral—that many believed him to have been born in his father’s native Ukraine. In my choice of poetry, I had been more ecumenical. While co-editing The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015) with my brilliant colleagues Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, editing 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016a), and working on other projects, or while simply pursuing my passion, I translated works by many Russophone poets from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Yet here, too, a deep sense of resonance had consistently drawn me back to Odesa—to the work of poets, both relatively well-­ known and obscure, who hailed from my hometown and spoke my language, as well as to the Yiddish-bestrewn lyrics of Odesa’s infamous criminal ballads and tangos. I would place these translations wherever I could, but most of them would go up on my blog, with brief comments, coalescing into a fragmentary history of Odesan literature and lore. I could go on, very easily and with a light heart and conscience, discussing my mission to affirm the unique cultural legacy of Odesa, which is still in Russia’s sights, but I began this chapter with a more difficult goal in mind. The truth is that, despite my feelings about the Russian state and about Russian culture itself, I have been a translator of Russian poetry since the age of 14 and will continue to translate poems written by people who, often enough, identified fervently not as Odesan or Ukrainian but as Russian, and who held and expressed views I cannot endorse. Why? Because I marvel at the depth and complexity of thought and feeling captured in individual Russian lyrics, and at the skill and ingenuity of their creators. I feel moved by these works and believe I can recreate some of their effects in English—and that seems an important contribution. I want others to be moved. There is one category of Russian verse to which I am especially committed: the poetry of émigrés from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Successive waves of immigration throughout the catastrophic twentieth century displaced millions of people who identified—sometimes only officially, but often, at least

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in part, culturally—as Russian, landing them in Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere. The collapse of the Russian Empire, the hostile Soviet stance toward those who fled, and the restrictive naturalization policies of the countries that, at times reluctantly, received these immigrants rendered many of them stateless for the rest of their lives. A great number of those who chose to flee in the wake of the Revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing Civil War, as well as during the Second World War and in the 1970s–1990s—the three major “Waves” of “Russian” emigration—were highly literate. The result was a global diaspora rich not only in writers but in readers, a prodigiously productive literary community that gave rise to what may be the most extensive and varied body of exilic writing in the modern era. Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky are at the tip of that iceberg, much of which remains submerged, untranslated. The cliché images of Russian émigrés of the First Wave are of the General of the Imperial Army reduced to driving a taxi in Paris and of the pretend-­ Romanov-­turned-restaurateur in Hollywood.1 There is some truth to these, as there is to most clichés. The cliché images of Russian émigré authors of that period are of the penniless youth crippled by ennui and of the deluded old monarchist. There is some truth to these as well. But when we examine the work of one of these youths, the Moscow-born poet Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935), who fled the advancing Bolsheviks with his parents in 1920 through one of the conventional routes (Crimea-Constantinople-Paris) and died of a drug overdose in what might have been a suicide, an accident, or a murder, we see a far more complicated sensibility than the clichés might lead one to expect—death-haunted yet hauntingly nervy, and fully conversant, in its own peculiar way, with then nascent trends of European art, including surrealism and existentialism.2 Nabokov savaged Poplavsky’s only collection of verse, Flags (1931), when it first appeared, but decades later, in Speak, Memory (1951), he sought to make amends, writing: “I met many other émigré Russian authors. I did not meet Poplavski [sic] who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas. His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse.” One of these verses captures vividly the unreality of life in exile, the haziness of stateless existence and the backward pull of the past: Magic Lantern An evil smoker lets loose rings of days that dangle powerlessly from the ceiling. A soldier passing through? Digger of graves? Or just a wastrel, drunken and freewheeling?

 For an introduction to the world of the First Wave émigrés, who numbered, conservatively, between 900,000 and 2 million, with around 200,000 settling in France by the end of the 1920s, see Raeff (1990). 2  Poplavsky also authored two novels, now available in English, Apollon Bezobrazov (2015) and Homeward from Heaven (2022). 1

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His thoughtless art entraps my lazy mind and I light up—but in the thickening air he disappears. All that he leaves behind is just the pipe glowing above his chair. A country of tobacco floats untethered beneath an unassuming lampshade’s sun. From time to time I’m endlessly lighthearted, but then at times I simply come undone. How nice to build a solid ground of haze— a conquest that can bring no fame, no wealth. Spring floats off into summer, floats and fades… Incautiously, life backtracks into death. Волшебный фонарь Колечки дней пускает злой курильщик, Свисает дым бессильно с потолка: Он может быть кутила иль могильщик Или солдат заезжего полка. Искусство безрассудное пленяет Мой ленный ум, и я давай курить, Но вдруг он в воздухе густом линяет. И ан на кресле трубка лишь горит. Плывёт, плывёт табачная страна Под солнцем небольшого абажура. Я счастлив без конца по временам, По временам кряхтя себя пожурю. Приятно строить дымовую твердь. Бесславное завоеванье это. Весна плывёт, весна сползает в лето. Жизнь пятится неосторожно в смерть.

What the émigré poets of the period left behind was not an affirmation of clichés but their interrogation. Their poems are a piercingly nuanced record of their own shifting, conflicted attitudes toward their displacement—snapshots of what the literary scholar Eric Laursen (1998), citing Edward Said, calls the exile’s “double vision.” Laursen speaks of this talent of double vision, which holds the setting of the present in constant tension with the setting of the past, in connection with the work of one of the finest poets of the First Wave, Georgy Ivanov (1894–1958). Ivanov, who was himself a monarchist—and who was falsely accused by his fellow émigrés of conspiring with the Vichy regime during the Second World

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War—dictated his final poems to his wife, the poet and memoirist Irina Odoyevtseva (1895–1990), in an almshouse for the stateless in Hyères. There he found himself surrounded by both veterans of the vanquished White Army and communist escapees from Franco’s Spain (Drayluk 2016a). To the poet’s own surprise, he got along best with the communists—those who had fought for the cause that had forced him from his home, and who were now themselves homeless. No poem better captures the duality of his vision than the following, in which he both extends sympathy to the White Army veterans who are, in terms of their political loyalties and shared past, his natural allies and sees them for what they are: sad husks, whose own vile prejudices and short-­ sightedness doomed the nation they wish, fruitlessly, to see reborn: Life goes on, defying common sense. Old men chatter in the southern sun: “Moscow ballrooms… The weather in Simbirsk… The War… Kerensky… We had freedom then…” Before you know it—forty years in France, a buzzing in the head, chill in the bones. “Masonic plot… The Jews, all their infernal… Ah, you were published? Where? Which journal?” …In the dull sunshine there is peace and grace. They wait and wait—and hope it won’t be long before the old Cyrillic script regains its place, before that age of gold re-dawns. Жизнь продолжается рассудку вопреки. На южном солнышке болтают старики: —Московские балы… Симбирская погода… Великая война… Керенская свобода… И—скоро сорок лет у Франции в гостях. Жужжанье в черепах и холодок в костях. —Масонский заговор… Особенно евреи… Печатались? А где? В каком Гиперборее? …На мутном солнышке покой и благодать, Они надеются, уже недолго ждать— Воскреснет твердый знак, вернутся ять с фитою И засияет жизнь эпохой золотою.

The vision is double, but clear as day. The clarity of Ivanov’s style—subtly musical, perfectly conversational, devoid of eye-catching devices—is no surprise. He began his career in Saint Petersburg among the Acmeists, like Nikolay

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Gumilyov (1886–1921) and Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966),3 who valued lucidity above all else and was himself a forerunner of the Paris Note, the dominant school of Russian émigré poetry of the 1930s–1950s, which placed even greater emphasis on the clear expression of complicated sentiments. A rather different, more explosive embodiment of double vision can be found in the work of perhaps the most formally dexterous Russian poet of the twentieth century, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941), who found herself—or rather, fashioned herself into—an outcast among outcasts in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, before returning to the Soviet Union in 1939, where her husband and daughter were arrested, like most returnees, on suspicion of espionage and she herself committed suicide.4 Shortly before the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I translated a trio of Tsvetaeva’s exilic poems for a journal—a trio I felt captured her triple alienation: from her vanished homeland, from her boorish adoptive country, and, as a poet, from her era (Tsvetaeva 2022). The first, from late June 1931, expresses a fundamental truth about any exile, but one made doubly literal in the case of the Russian Empire, which, at least officially, was erased from the map in 1917: you can’t go home again. That Country Seek it with a lantern round the moonlit globe— you won’t find that land in any space you probe. Emptied like a cup or saucer: bottom shows. If your house is toppled, where’s your home? God knows.

 To underscore the profound and complex interlacing of Russian high culture with Russian and Soviet politics, one might note that Nikolay Gumilyov, a passionate patriot of the Russian Empire, was executed by the Soviet Cheka for his supposed participation in a monarchist plot, and his works were banned for decades. His and Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilyov (1912–1992), spent 13 years in the Gulag, and his imprisonment inspired his mother’s long poem Requiem (1963), a remarkable poetic document of the effects of Stalinist political repression. Lev Gumilyov’s own controversial, anti-Western, and more than vaguely anti-Semitic anthropological theories, which circulated through the late Soviet intellectual underground, fed into the thinking of those now determining Russia’s political course, from Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) to Vladimir Putin himself; an accessible intellectual history of this strand of neo-imperial thought can be found in Clover (2022). 4  To my mind, the best introduction to Tsvetaeva’s work, life, attitudes, and self-fashioning remains Karlinsky (1985). 3

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Pick another country— go be born anew! But you end up mounting the very horse that threw you off its saddle. (Didn’t break your neck?) Beg all you like—who’d hand a crust to such a wreck? No carpenter would offer her a coffin, even. That country of unnumbered versts, kingdoms of heaven— realm whose coins all carry imprints of my youth— that Russia is long buried. …That me—she’s buried too. Страна С фонарём обшарьте Весь подлунный свет! Той страны на карте— Нет, в пространстве—нет. Выпита как с блюдца,— Донышко блестит. Можно ли вернуться В дом, который—срыт? Заново родися— В новую страну! Ну-ка, воротися На́ спину коню Сбросившему! Кости Целы-то—хотя? Эдакому гостю Булочник—ломтя Ломаного, плотник— Гроба не продаст! То́й её—несчётных Вёрст, небесных царств,

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Той, где на монетах— Молодость моя, Той России—нету. — Как и той меня.

Indeed, Tsvetaeva stacks truth upon bitter truth in this dense, precariously constructed pile of a poem, with its characteristic enjambments and off-rhymes. It isn’t only the nation that has vanished but the life—the very self—that had been rooted there. And the trauma of that deracination may prevent the uprooted from ever setting down roots again. No soil will feel permanent, no saddle properly fixed. Another poem, on which Tsvetaeva worked from 1932 to 1935, expresses her inability to settle—specifically, her resentment toward the French bourgeoisie, who in her view hungrily, tastelessly consume the “Russianness” of the poverty-stricken émigrés: No leaving for you and me. Mere holes—the seven seas. Oceans—out of reach with only a fiver each. Poverty’s bone-dry crumbs: summer a crust we gum. The sea—mere shallows. Our summer—swallowed. Bursting with fat—their “luster”— they gorge on butter, feast on our brains: poems, plays, overtures. Cannibals in Parisian couture! You savor us for a franc, then wash your mouths out, freaks, with our glorious, immortal music! I curse you for my burning shame when I shake your hand! For memory’s sake I’ll leave my stinging, five-fingered trace— my autograph—on your face! Никуда не уехали—ты да я— Обернулись прорехами—все моря! Совладельцам пятёрки рваной— Океаны не по карману!

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Нищеты вековечная сухомять! Снова лето, как корку, всухую мять! Обернулось нам море—мелью: Наше лето—другие съели! С жиру лопающиеся: жир—их «лоск», Что не только что масло едят, а мозг Наш—в поэмах, в сонатах, в сводах: Людоеды в парижских модах! Нами—лакомящиеся: франк—за вход. О, урод, как водой туалетной—рот Сполоснувший—бессмертной песней! Будьте прокляты вы—за весь мой Стыд: вам руку жать, когда зуд в горсти,— Пятью пальцами—да от всех пяти Чувств—на память о чувствах добрых— Через всё вам лицо—автограф!

Is that old country buried together with its culture, or does it inhere in “immortal” music? Is the old self gone or does it burn and rage, clinging to what it holds most dear? What is the point of yearning for what cannot be had? What is the sense of trying to move on? These contradictions are irresolvable. They are the poles between which the émigré shuttles endlessly, and Tsvetaeva depicts that shuttling not only across poems but also within her greatest lyric of exile, written on 3 May 1934: Homesickness! Silly fallacy laid bare so long ago. It’s all the same where I’m to be entirely alone— it’s all the same across what stones I lug my shopping basket, toward some house as alien as a hospital or barracks. I do not care what faces see me bristle like a captive lion, or out of which society I’m quickly forced into my own fenced realm of silent feelings. I’m like an iceless polar bear— just where I fail to fit (won’t try!) and am belittled, I don’t care.

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My native tongue will not delude me with its milky call. I won’t, I can’t be understood in any tongue at all by passersby (voracious eaters of newspapers, milkers of rumor)— they’re of the twentieth century, and me—no time is home to me! Dumbfounded, like a log that fell on an abandoned lane, all is the same to me, all, all the same, and what has been most dear to me now matters least. All signs, all memories and dates have been erased: A soul born—any place. My homeland cared for me so little that the most clever snoop could search my soul for birthmarks—he’ll find nothing with his loupe! Yes, every house is strange to me and every temple—barren. All, all the same. Yet, if I see, alone along the verge—a rowan…5 Тоска по родине! Давно Разоблачённая морока! Мне совершенно всё равно— Где совершенно одинокой Быть, по каким камням домой Брести с кошёлкою базарной В дом, и не знающий, что—мой, Как госпиталь или казарма. Мне всё равно, каких среди Лиц ощетиниваться пленным Львом, из какой людской среды Быть вытесненной—непременно—

5   First appeared in harlequin creature, 21 July 2018: org/2018/07/31/homesickness/ Later in Naffis-Sahely (2019).

https://harlequincreature.

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В себя, в единоличье чувств. Камчатским медведём без льдины Где не ужиться (и не тщусь!), Где унижаться—мне едино. Не обольщусь и языком Родным, его призывом млечным. Мне безразлично—на каком Непонимаемой быть встречным! (Читателем, газетных тонн Глотателем, доильцем сплетен…) Двадцатого столетья—он, А я—до всякого столетья! Остолбеневши, как бревно, Оставшееся от аллеи, Мне все́—равны, мне всё—равно, И, может быть, всего равнее— Роднее бывшее—всего. Все признаки с меня, все меты, Все даты—как рукой сняло: Душа, родившаяся—где-то. Тaк край меня не уберёг Мой, что и самый зоркий сыщик Вдоль всей души, всей—поперёк! Родимого пятна не сыщет! Всяк дом мне чужд, всяк храм мне пуст, И всё— равно, и всё—едино. Но если по дороге—куст Встаёт, особенно—рябина…

That rowan—here a symbol of Russia—brings to mind another, lighter poem of exile, a translation of which I included in my recent collection My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022). It is, in two senses, closer to home. Its author, Vladislav Ellis (1913–1975), a trained engineer and a descendant of English master welders who had been invited to the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great, was Ukrainian-born, and Ukraine features prominently in his verse, only a single slim volume of which was privately published in 1968. That volume appeared in Los Angeles, where he settled with his family in the 1950s, after surviving the Stalinist Purges that took the lives of his father and brother, wartime service in the Soviet Army, and imprisonment by the Germans, who put him to work building railways. (Return to the USSR after that would have led to a prompt execution.) Ellis is one of five Russophone Angeleno poets whose

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work I included in my book; three of them had roots in Ukraine, but even they likely regarded themselves as Russian, or perhaps as both Russian and Ukrainian. It’s impossible to say how they might have identified themselves today, and the question doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is how well their most accomplished poems speak to the timeless, universal experience of emigration and exile. And as their fellow émigré in Los Angeles, I feel a special obligation—as I do with Odesan verse—to bring their work out of obscurity. Consider this poem of Ellis’s, which sees him planting another symbolically Russian bit of flora—a birch tree—in Edenic California, where palms cohabitate with pines. Far gentler but no less complexly honest than Tsvetaeva’s fiercest productions, it grows more poignant with each line: A Mexican Birch We disfigure nature to disrupt life’s flatness. I plant a little birch tree beside a prickly cactus, and instantly regret it… How I mourn for her— an orphan in the desert, a spindly foreigner. She’ll dwell here, never hearing spring’s lighthearted song. Heat slayed her catkin-earring: barely burst—now gone. Fearfully, her slender trunk bends with the wind. All migrants understand her: it’s hard without a friend. Мексиканская берёзка Потому природу мучим, Чтоб развеять прозу. Рядом с кактусом колючим, Посадил берёзу. Без берёзки, было б проще. Смотришь сердце стынет; Вот растёт чужою, тощей, Сиротой в пустыне.

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Ей на жизненной дорожке, Песнь весны не спета, Прелесть бархатной серёжки, Зной убил до цвета. Ствол от ветра гнётся тонкий, Словно ждёт подвоха. Ей как всем, в чужой сторонке, Без подружек плохо.

Honesty is one of the virtues of the best of Russian émigré verse, from Ivanov through Tsvetaeva and beyond. Ellis opens his collection with a poem that harkens back to Ivanov’s less-than-noble White Army veterans. Under no obligation to air the unsavory aspects of his own wartime record and those of many Second Wave émigrés, who were taken prisoner by, surrendered to, or even collaborated with the Germans, he bravely exposes the reality of survival and of survivor’s remorse in those inhuman years: Lie, My Friend Lie about all your great battles and how you conquered your fear. Nо need to show me your medals. We’re all well bemedalled here. Lie about shooting down warplanes and the nurse that treated your wounds. Go on—lie all you want, friend. When you’re done, I’ll lie a bit too. Of course, our boasting won’t free us from what happened or drown all our pain. Yes, back there, we were all of us heroes, just not as much as we claim. When the dirt rises up in your breast, choke it down, knock a few back: add a bold ruddy hue to your past, since your future is shrouded in black… Ври, мой друг Ври, как рвались к последней ставке Вы в бою, презирая страх. Я с тебя не потребую справки О полученных орденах.

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Как косил истребителей стaю, Как любил в лазарете сестру. Ври мой друг, я тебя понимаю, Ты закончишь и я совру. Этим ухарски глупым запоем, Боль о прошлом не утолим, Все мы были когда-то герои, Правда, меньше, чем говорим. Ври мой друг, и в душевной ране, Зa бутылкой, утихнет мразь. Коль грядущее в чёрном тумане, Так прошедшее розовым крась!

In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the future is once again uncertain for millions of displaced Ukrainians. The future of the Russian state, in its current configuration, is also shrouded in black. The international status of Russian culture—or what was thought to be Russian culture, but is in fact a variety of Russophone cultures that have historically been lumped together for reasons both ideological and practical—is being rightly, belatedly reevaluated, while many non-Russian Russian speakers like myself are more conscious of, and are more forcefully asserting, our non-Russian identities. Unexpectedly but not unreasonably, at this time of great global and personal paradigmatic shifts, I find myself looking to the work of past émigrés who—truth be told—held opinions and perhaps even took actions of which I would never approve. Yet the best of their work makes up such a blisteringly honest, variegated tableau of the experience of displacement that, to borrow Ellis’s words about his birch, all migrants would instantly understand it, nodding and shuddering in recognition.

Bibliography Chandler, Robert, Boris Drayluk, and Irina Mashinski, eds. 2015. The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. London: Penguin. Clover, Charles. [2016] 2022. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Drayluk, Boris. 2016a. “The Perpetual Triumph of Sacrifice”: Translating Georgy Ivanov. Inventory 7: 35–40. ———., ed. 2016b. 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution. London: Pushkin Press. ———. 2022. My Hollywood and Other Poems. Philadelphia: Paul Dry. Karlinsky, Simon. 1985. Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laursen, Eric. 1998. The Talent of Double Vision: Distorting Reflection in Georgij Ivanov’s Émigré Poetry. Russian Literature 43: 481–493.

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Naffis-Sahely, André. 2019. The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature. London: Pushkin Press. Poplavsky, Boris. 2015. Apollon Bezobrazov, trans. John Kopper. Bloomington: Slavica. ———. 2022. Homeward from Heaven, trans. Bryan Karetnyk. New York: Columbia University Press. Raeff, Marc. 1990. Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsvetaeva, Marina. 2022. “Three Poems,” translated by Boris Dralyuk. The New Criterion, April 2022, 46–48.

CHAPTER 27

“It Is Hard to Choose”: An Italian Author on Migration, Diaspora, African Literature, and the Limits of Labels Igiaba Scego and Saskia Ziolkowski

Igiaba Scego is an Italian author of novels, memoirs, and short stories that have been central to debates in Italy about migration, colonialism, postcolonialism, racism, and women’s writings. Scego was born in Rome in 1974 to a family of Somali ancestry. Her short story “Salsicce” (“Sausages”) was awarded the Eks & Tra prize for migrant writing in 2003. Giovanna Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto translated this now famous story into English (2005). Scego’s memoir La mia casa è dove sono (My Home Is Where I am, 2010) won Italy’s prestigious Mondello Prize. She has also edited a number of volumes, including Italiani per vocazione (2005, with works by authors who moved to Italy), Anche Superman era un rifugiato (2018, a collection which underscores connections between refugees over time), and Future: il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi (2019, a collection by Black Italian women authors). Her non-fiction appears in venues such as The Guardian, World Literature Today, Internazionale, and Corriere della Sera. Her work as an educator frequently takes her into

I. Scego (*) Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] S. Ziolkowski Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_27

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classrooms from universities in the United States to high schools in Italy. She holds a PhD in education from Roma Tre University. Scego describes her latest novels, Oltre Babilonia (2008), Adua (2015), and La linea del colore (2020), as a “trilogy of colonial violence.” All three have been translated into English: Beyond Babylon (2019) by Aaron Robertson, Adua (2017) by Jamie Richards, and The Color Line (2022) by John Cullen and Gregory Conti. The Color Line weaves together the story of a Black artist, Lafanu Brown, who leaves the United States in the Civil War period, for Italy, which is in the process of unifying, with the story of Leila, a curator in contemporary Italy who reflects on migration in terms of art, her family attempting to leave Somalia, and Lafanu Brown. Scego’s explanatory notes, her introductions to edited volumes, and her articles map intellectual spaces and bibliographies, many of whose references also appear in this interview. They include the historian Angelo Del Boca’s three-volume Gli italiani in Africa orientale (1976, 1979, 1982), a starting point for the study of Italian colonialism; the historian Francesco Filippi’s writings on colonialism, fascism, and their afterlives; Francesca Melandri’s 2017 novel Sangue Giusto and its portrayal of the legacies of colonialism in Italy; and Maaza Mengiste’s novel The Shadow King, which explores Italian colonialism in Ethiopia. Like Scego’s non-fiction, Scego’s fiction brings together different literary traditions (European, American, and African) and histories, often to reflect on Italy’s past, present, and future. Her most recent work, Cassandra a Mogadiscio (2023), was nominated by Jhumpa Lahiri for Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize. The interview was conducted in English in October 2021 via Zoom by Saskia Ziolkowski of Duke University, where Igiaba Scego was a visiting scholar in Fall 2022. It has been edited for length. Saskia Ziolkowski: You have a Ph.D. in postcolonial and migration education. Loescher has published a version of your La mia casa è dove sono (My Home Is Where I am, 2010) with pedagogical notes and materials to make it easier to teach. Your collection Anche Superman era un rifugiato: Storie vere per cambiare il mondo (Superman was a refugee too: True stories to change the world, 2018) is aimed at a younger audience. Recently you published Figli dello stesso cielo: Il razzismo e il colonialismo raccontati ai ragazzi (Under the Same Sky: Racism and Colonialism Narrated to Children, 2021). What are the challenges of writing about migration and colonialism for a younger audience? What do you think about for a younger audience that you might not with an older one? Igiaba Scego: I published Figli dello stesso cielo about colonialism: it is basically about my grandfather and me, but in the book, I am eleven years old, not forty-seven years old, like I am now. The grandfather speaks about colonialism, including his experiences during liberal Italian colonialism and Fascist Italian colonialism. It is more for young adults, middle-schoolers. He explains and defines colonialism. He explains the scramble for Africa, human zoos, and

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songs like “Faccetta nera.”1 It is interesting for Italian teenagers and university students learning Italian. The language and style are quite easy to understand. I wrote this book because there is a big gap, a hole, in Italian schools in terms of colonialism. From Columbus to later European and Italian colonialism, it is four-hundred years of our history and so important. The connections between the western world and the global south, what happened? It was a big crash. Our world is in the process of dealing with what happened. In our books for middle-schoolers and teenagers in Italy, no one speaks about colonialism. It is incredible that there are four-hundred years of colonialism and only maybe a few lines in a  school textbook. For that reason, I wrote a book for this age group, so students will discuss this period. There are many books right now, Francesca Melandri’s wonderful novel Sangue giusto or Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King. We also have historians like Francesco Filippi and Angelo Del Boca, but no works for children and teenagers. This was very important for me. It is difficult. SZ: What are the challenges for a younger audience? IS: It is challenging, but I know that the students want to know. I have done presentations with teenagers. Classes are so diverse in Italy now, not like in the United States or the UK, but the students come from different parts of the world and have different backgrounds. There are a lot of discussions about racism in schools. It is very interesting for me as well. I learn a lot from the teenagers’ questions. It is a good exchange of views. The challenge is not teenagers or children, but the instructors, who need to know more than the teenagers. They need to be trained in this history. The problem is that everyone teaching in Italy, or 99%, are white. It is not easy to explain everything. At school, they understand a little bit now about the Shoah, but colonialism is still a big deal for schools right now. This is my challenge because I want people to write books and have discussions in schools about this topic. SZ: So the  challenge is not the  writing but  getting it to  circulate to the schools, the audience is already there? IS: The audience of all my books in a way is young people, the new generation. I want to discuss all this stuff, about migration. I went back into migration with La linea del colore, which will be coming out in English. I am curious to see the reactions of the American audience to the novel. In “Making Of” [the afterword to The Color Line] I explain that I have an African American character, not as an appropriation but as a sort of connection to the story of slavery, of the United States, and also of colonialism here in Italy, of travel, and the Grand Tour. I worked a lot on this issue in La linea del colore and  See Scego’s essay on this popular, Mussolini-era song, “The True Story of ‘Faccetta Nera,’” translated by Anthony Shugaar for Words without Borders. 1

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nineteenth-century imperialism; now I need to come back to Somalia, to the diaspora. When I think about my life, it is inside the diaspora. I was born in Italy, my parents were born in Mogadishu. I have brothers and sisters who live abroad, in the United States, the UK, Canada, Nairobi; I have relatives in Finland and Sweden. These connections are my life. These connections also mean travel is my life. The diaspora lives the connection, thanks to airplanes, phone calls, Whatsapp, thanks to technology. With COVID-19, something broke. You could not even think about getting on an airplane. 2020 was horrible. I understand the meaning of living in a web, the web is the internet and also our life, the diaspora, with feelings, connections, family. COVID-19 changed a lot of our feelings and our way of thinking about life. We find something more connected to our stage of life. We want to be free to be ourselves. In my writing, I want to come back to Somalia, although it is sometimes sad. Two weeks ago, my sister-in-law lost her aunt because al-Shabaab [a jihadist group based in Somalia] killed her. Every day something horrible happens, not just in the country, but also next to you, in your family. Usually, old ladies love to stay outside and see people. These two young boys came and shot her in the head. When my sister-in-law told me that story, I said, “I am so sorry about your aunt.” It is something that happens and is not new. There have been thirty years of civil war, terrorism, bad news. I want to work on the past of Somalia, from 1960s to the civil war and afterward, to explore what happened to the families. This is a big challenge. I don’t want to write about terrorism and al-Shabaab, but about the diaspora. I think we are all involved in it. Maybe above all, with COVID, something happened to me. I want to go back to Somalia but with Italy inside. It isn’t just my experience because I was born here, but it is the experience of a lot of people. For many people, the first time they travel abroad it is to Italy, because of colonialism, because of AFIS [Administrazione Fiduciaria Italiana in Somalia, the Italian Trusteeship Administration in Somalia] returning to Somalia. We are connected, with Italian pop music and Italian cinema. My two countries are really connected. Of course, I show that in La linea del colore as well, but I want to show more of this. It is like with Beyond Babylon. When I read Beyond Babylon now, it is strange for me, because I was so young. Now I have changed. It is part of writing literature, which can be quite hard to do in Italy. Because in the United States or UK they understand more the connections with African people and people in the diaspora. In Italy, Black people are only called on to speak about racism and we are more than that. Racism is something of course that all Black people experience, but we have different lives. They put a lot of Black people together only because of their skin color, not because of their literature. I am so happy that there are so many younger writers now. It is an interesting moment, but we have different experiences. One thing that I would love is for the world of literature in Italy to treat us like they treat other writers. They think, “they are Black, they have the same issues, same feelings,” but we do not have the same feelings. We

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are so different from each other, in origin, age, and where we are from in Italy. We are also different in terms of our African routes, horn of African, sub-­ Saharan African, or from Maghreb, we need to understand the differences inside Black people. This is important and quite, quite difficult in Italy, because there is a lack, a big gap in terms of experience of otherness and different literatures. When Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel prize [in 2021], everyone in the world asked “who is Gurnah?” But the problem here is also the limited experience of African literature and of Afro-descendant literature. For example, at the book fair in Frankfurt, they gave a big prize to Tsitsi Dangarembga, yet her trilogy is impossible to find in Italian translation. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s first book was translated by a small publisher called Gorée, a really wonderful press. They publish a lot of African literature. None of the big publishers in Italy published her, even though she is really important and a pillar of African literature. When I read Nervous Conditions, the first book of hers I read, I understood that I wanted to be a writer. She changed my life. It is so incredible that no one in Italy knew her. SZ: Has your relationship to migration as a literary theme altered since your “Salsicce” (“Sausages”) was awarded the Eks & Tra prize for migrant writing in 2003? What changes in the relationship between migration and literature have happened between then and now in Italy? IS: Society is more open. They want to fight for human rights and citizenship legislation. Society is better, although we have white supremacism, anti-­ Semitism, and we are in trouble, but there are movements amongst young people, especially feminists. The problem is in the intelligentsia, publishers, and the media system, we have a lack of representation. It is quite difficult to find literature published by different people, Black, brown, or by people with other origins, say Chinese, instead it is all white. Our environment is all white, which is crazy. It is difficult to place new things. I am lucky because I have found good people, which is important for a writer, but the system is closed. We need to create the conditions to change the system, meaning the schools, universities, opportunities, talent scouts, publishing, and publishers. These kinds of things also have to do with the media, our newspapers, television, radio programs, and all cultural systems. The problem is not only our skin or our religion but also our class. You have these interconnections of race and class. I am a daughter of a refugee. My father and mother were rich in Somalia, but they lost all their money, possessions, and connections as refugees. My father was a politician, a minister, and ambassador. He lost all that, he cannot be a politician in another country. It is difficult to recreate yourself. As a refugee, everything disappears. When I was a child and teenager I was so poor. When I say poor, I mean for real. My mom and I went to Caritas, a charity, to find something to eat, pasta, or clothes. I remember that was quite hard. Then it changed a little bit. The only thing that I had was public school, without which I would not have written books. A

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good education was the key to my life. I know I am lucky because I was born in a moment when school could change your life, even in Italy, where the rich families of the Renaissance are still the rich families now, say in Florence or Venice. I remember in Venice I met a family that I had studied in a painting, they were rich and they are rich. UK and Italy are two countries where class is very fixed. For me, the problem with representation is not only race but also class. We have to create the environment to find people, to tell them they have an opportunity. There are a lot of intelligent second-generation people that have the problems that I had as a child and teenager: they are intelligent but without connections. It is like in Jane Austen’s novel when they say, if you don’t have connections, you are nobody. It’s the same story. In a democracy, you have to create opportunities for people. SZ: In English there are debates about the terms “migration literature,” “migrant literature,” “exile literature,” “refugee” among others that are sometimes seen as reflecting class differences. Some say “exile” potentially has to do with class, whereas “refugee” or “migrant” literature are from a lower class. How do you feel about these terms? Do you have favorite terms or terms you would avoid using to describe migration and literature in Italian? What about for the categorization of your own work? You were born in Rome, but sometimes are called a “migration author” or “second generation” migrant author. IS: I think I am given the label “migration author” because of my background, not the content of my literature. I think the label is a problem and an opportunity. When I began to write, “migration literature” was at a good point. Pap Khouma had been published a few years before. When I arrived, I found a lot of people who were writing literature, labeled “migration,” like Kossi Komla-Ebri, Amara Lakhous, Tahar Lamri, and Cristina Ali Farah. In that moment it was a key with which I could enter literature. Labels are something outside of us. When I think of myself, I think, I am Igiaba, I am a writer. I try to do my best with my work. I experience big crises when I write. I would love to write faster. Sometimes more commitments are dangerous. Labels are more for academia or the media. “Second-generation” means nothing, second-generation people are so different as I said before. When people call me “second-generation,” I think of children but I am forty-seven, I have had a lot of experiences of Italy. I remember the 1980s of Italy. I remember the Berlin Wall, Brezhnev, and Carter. Second-generation puts together a lot people with different issues. It’s a label that I do not love. It’s not my migration, I was born in Rome. I feel more like a diasporic writer. It is a better fit. No one calls me that, but I feel like I am a product of the diaspora. If I had to choose one label, one word for me, maybe “diaspora” would be the best one, because you do not need to travel. The people traveled for you and suffered for you. You suffer in a different way, but you are involved in an environment of diaspora. And, of course, I write Italian literature, another label that I

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love and that people sometimes use, but sometimes they do not use it because I am Black. I love African literature, but my literature is not African literature. When I edited the volume Africana with Chiara Piaggio, it was amazing. I wrote in the preface, I am not African, I would like to be, but I am an Afro-descendant. I was born in Europe, I grew up in Europe. I have experienced Mogadishu because I would go sometimes in the summer and I did a year and a half there in middle school. I did not have the experience of my parents or brothers. I feel more Afro-European. When I interviewed Bernardine Evaristo, I said, “you speak about the European experience.” I love Girl, Woman, Other. We live the same thing in a way, being Black in a white-majority country. It is different in Africa, you are Black in a multicultural society, but the majority in most countries is Black, so racism is not the issue—there are other problems and other kinds of racism but white and Black is not the main issue. My experience is being Black, being Muslim, being a woman in a patriarchical, majority white society. This is what being an Afro-European woman means. Europe is a difficult concept. Africa is easy, it is like a big mother; in Africa you try to understand the differences between the countries. Mali and Somalia are not the same, Somalia isn’t Nigeria. But for me the first thing about Europe is colonialism, they created their richness from it. But I am European. European identity is not always easy, but it is part of my life. For me, it is easier to be Roman than European. Europe is big and white and up and down, but when I think about my identity, I feel part-African, part-Italian, and Roman, from my city. It is not the same to be from northern Europe or southern Europe. I feel more connected to Spain and Portugal than Norway. I studied Spanish literature at the university. SZ: The different categories you are sharing are also different ways one could consider your novels. While your works can be approached in terms of global narrative movements (or multi-perspectival novels, Americanah or Girl, Woman, Other), they also build on strong Italian literary traditions that are reflected in your writing.  Your literature could also be put in productive dialogue with Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, or Dante, among many others. Which Italian authors or traditions have been influential for you? IS: Italy is my country. I of course think about literature, but the main thing that I think about in terms of Italy is the cinema. When I think about the people who affected my literature, I think about Germi, Fellini, Monicelli. I love Monicelli. I met Monicelli at the university once when he was around ninety years old. He spoke about Somalia, he said, “I went to Somalia, I know Mogadishu.” It was amazing to speak with Monicelli about my country of origin. It was a special afternoon with Monicelli and Scarpelli. Another big director we briefly spoke with was Ettore Scola. Ettore Scola was so intelligent and wise. I love Una giornata particolare, with Sophia Loren and Marcello

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Mastroianni. I love him, I think everyone in the world does. In Una giornata particolare, my favorite film, there is a special friendship, with intimacy. The director put together history and intimacy, which I try to do in my novels. I love Nino Manfredi, Franca Valeri, whom I also met. She was amazing, ironic. I met all these people that I had seen on television when they were in their nineties. Another person I love is Monica Vitti. Movies are the language of my family, which I tried to explain in Adua. I didn’t speak about my family in the novel, but I tried to explain what movies meant for them. My mother was nomadic, they were shepherds. She could read a little bit but could not write. There were no books in her life. My father used to read detective stories. I remember my house was full of detective stories, not only Agatha Christie, but also Dickson Carr. He was famous because the murderer was inside a closed room, it was like an enigma. I read spy stories, Le Carré and Ken Follett. These were the works I had at home. I read detective stories from all over the world, including Ellery Queen. I remember the language my father and mother had with me and each other were of movies. They watched a lot of movies. My father loved Westerns. Though Westerns are often terrible, when I was young I loved one with Glen Ford that I saw with my father. We also watched Hollywood movies, for instance with Audrey Hepburn. One of the movies my mother watched all the time was Gone with the Wind. I hated this movie, and when I was a teenager I asked her why she watched it so often. She said, it is horrible, but she liked the dresses. My mother loves elegant dresses. One of the series she loves now is Downton Abbey too, which is also imperialist. I remember it felt humiliating when I saw Gone with the Wind, especially because the Mamie character is dubbed terribly in Italian. Another movie my mother watched a lot was Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life about the Black history of passing, with Lana Turner. In the film, a daughter of a Black maid tries to pass as white. My mom is so interested in historic Black people and there weren’t a lot of Black people on television. I will have to ask her if this is why she watched these movies with African Americans. My mom also bought me Malcolm X. People have a lot of parts. SZ: You mentioned intimacy in terms of why you love films. Do you start with one character or relationship in your novels? You always have multiple characters with intense relationships. IS: In your projects, you want to change styles. I want to change every time, but I need many voices to create one voice. The character is usually just one, but this character is a pillar for a world. It is not the novel of one character, but a huge history. I need a pillar to create the other characters in the novel. I need a variety of voices, because this is what diaspora means, with family connections or even people we know in school.

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SZ: You have so much history in your novels. The historical and bibliographic notes that appear in your novels were originally intended for Italian readers, but are also extremely useful for an English-language audience, for whom elements of Italian history, especially in terms of migration, colonialism, and racism, can be unknown. Your works build on a range of archival sources that make them visible to a wide audience. What two or three things would you most want your audience reading you in English-language translations to know about migration and Italian or Somali history before starting your works? IS: My novels explain a lot because I do not expect people to know the history. I am a teacher and writer together. The reactions outside of Italy to my book are amazing, especially in Brazil and the United States, two countries that are so different and so similar. They both lived the slave-trade and Black issues are big in both countries. SZ: What are some of the surprises in terms of critics or readers from the United States or Brazil? A number of translators have brought your work to English readers, with Jamie Richardson’s Adua, Aaron Robertson’s Beyond Babylon, Giovana Bellesia and Victoria Offredi Poletto’s “Sausages,” Hugh Shankland’s “Exmatriates,” Frederika Randall’s excerpt from Caetano Veloso, Barbara Ofosu-Somuah and Candice Whitney are translating Future, and John Cullen and Gregory Conti’s The Color Line. These translations have had great popular and critical success in English. Have there been any surprises in terms of how English-language readers or scholars respond to your work, as compared to Italian readers? IS: The surprise is finding readers. I think, “this is Somali-Italian history.” Italian writers and Italian literature are not a big market. When you write in Italian, you know that your market is little. You speak with your audience and you try to speak with the world, but you know that your instrument, the Italian language, is not a big instrument. There are very few prizes for you, no Man Booker Prize. For all Italian writers, it is amazing when we find people interested in our work. It is so wonderful to create this relationship. I understand that I speak about Italy and Somalia, so outside of the big market—outside the big galaxy of literature, but people all over the world have many of the same problems, feelings, and issues that I have. Sometimes the same character in my book appears in Brazilian and American literature, in a Brazilian or American way. I began to create connections with Brazilian and American authors and academia. This is amazing for me because I understand that we are all together. Of course, my instrument is Italian and I love the Italian language. It is my language. When people ask me why I don’t write in the Somali language, it is because it is the spoken language of family and the diaspora. My writing from

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the beginning, from the first day, has been in Italian. The Somali language is inside my Italian, including the experiences of my mother, who is nomadic but is a poet. These oral traditions and nomadic background enter into my creations and characters. My multiple voices in a way come from oral literature. For that reason, I am so happy when I see authors from other countries because we exchange experiences. With the United States and Brazil, I also have a connection with the languages because I know English and Portuguese. The exchange is a real exchange because I read the authors in their languages. One of my dreams is to translate Portuguese. They have so many Black authors that I love, like Conceição Evaristo. People do not know her but she is the queen of African Brazilian literature. When I met her, I was amazed. I knew her before my book was translated into Portuguese. One of my dreams is to translate Brazilian literature into Italian because people often do not know anything about Brazil. They know about the United States, but not Brazilian literature. The success of African American literature in Italy is interesting because it is something new. James Baldwin is big for Black intellectuals, but many people in Italy began to learn about him because of Black Lives Matter. Because of the success of people like Colson Whitehead, Italians understand something about the United States and also about us, about Afro-Italians. I am happy to have connections to these two countries. SZ: Do you think Afro-Italian identity is sometimes read through a lens of African-American identity? IS: In a way, after Black Lives Matter, they began to see us differently. People know us, me, Cristina Ali Farah, for our novels of course, but not for the meaning of our novels. Something happened with Black Lives Matter. New voices enter into the literature. Djarah Kan is so powerful. She experienced the South of Italy (Caserta, Naples), the Global South, and she’s Italian and Ghanaian too. Even people who do not know anything about these histories, they hear the power of her voice. It is a good moment to speak about this, but there is a danger to see us as activists. We are not activists, we are writers. SZ: Scholars discuss your literature in the context of so many different topics, including migration, colonialism, racism, feminism, food studies, Somalia, and Italy, among others. Each topic puts your work in dialogue with somewhat different authors. In “Making of” after La linea del colore you describe Oltre Babilonia, Adua, and La linea del colore as a “trilogia della violenza coloniale” (“trilogy of colonial violence”). Migration also plays a crucial role in these novels. Would calling them a “trilogy of migration” also be appropriate? How does an emphasis on migration change which authors you see yourself in conversation with or how you think of your work?

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IS: Of course, at the beginning of all the stories is migration. There is more migration than colonialism in Adua, with a migrant woman. La linea del colore is the history of travel, there are two stories, both with migration, or the dream of migration for the Somali woman and the realization of the dream for Lafanu Brown. Migration is not just part of my background, but something important that happens to society. It is part of our contemporary world, not only our world today but always. Now it is so big and in front of us. When people think about climate change, I think about climate refugees. People escape from Somalia not only because of the war but also because of the lack of fish in the ocean, drought, and starvation. It is connected to climate change. It is clear that migration is a huge part of society. The big and sad thing is the construction of the wall between us. We live in rich countries, in the rich part of the world, but the really rich part of the world is the global south, but they were exploited. What happened in Sudan is so scary. In the horn of Africa, around the dam of the Nile, there is a big geopolitical war between Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea. When I see what happened, I think it is important to explain from the point of view of migration, what it means to a family, for love affairs. I work on this and I want to work more. Sometimes here in Italy, people say “you write about migration, now write about something else.” I do not want to change, it is important to understand, it is research, which needs time and different ways of thinking. The phenomena change with you. The migration of my parents in the 1970s is not the migration of today. Things change in the world. I am happy that people study my book in different departments, even food with “Sausages.” I think it is normal, in one book you find a lot of different things. Writers spend a lot of time on different things for their work. For La linea del colore, I studied dress. I discovered fashion was so different in the 1880s and 1890s. There are two pages about widow’s dress. In a novel, you study a lot of things. It isn’t just one topic. SZ: This interest in dress is like your mother’s with film. IS: There is an audiobook of La linea del colore, maybe my mother will listen to it. I chose the actress Esther Elisha, a Benin-Italian actress. I wanted a Black woman to read this book. Translation is a free world. I do not need a translator to have the same skin as me, but sometimes I would like to have a translator with my color because we exchange experiences about what it means to be Black in Europe or the United States. I did this with Aaron Robertson. He was so interesting for me. I learned a lot from him. Sometimes if there is a possibility to match people together, it can be a good experience. I hope one day to work again with Aaron. There are so few opportunities for Black translators from the Italian language. Italian language and work can be so white. It can be interesting to have something different.

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SZ: Critics have said migration prompts narration or that literary history is a history of migration, which in the past was primarily told from a male perspective. Many of your female protagonists are storytellers, artists, and creators. How does the gender of your protagonists contribute to their relationship between art and migration? Or how do you think this relationship, between gender, art, and migration, is potentially changing, as you consider your writing? IS: I want to work on manhood in my next work. Manhood and womanhood are huge issues. I am very interested in gender. I was interested in Somali women above all and Black women characters because I wanted to speak about the violence against women’s bodies. Then people asked, “Why are there no men in your books?” There is Zoppe in Adua. Now, the grandfather in Figli dello stesso cielo speaks about being a Black man. Maybe in my new book, there will be a lot of characters, men and women. In general, I am interested in relationships. The thing I want to add more of in my next book is Islam. I do not want to speak about religion, but about what happens to our bodies during the diaspora experience. A terrible moment for the world is 9/11, because of people dying in the Twin Towers, but also because we lived our religion in a normal way until 9/11 and then we became terrorists. For Somalia, a lot changed after 9/11. I want to think about the meaning of this moment in terms of normal people, not terrorists, and for diaspora people. I do not usually face this in my life or literature. I just faced it with a Charlie Hebdo letter I wrote.2 It was so painful. I want to think about this aspect of the Somali diaspora because it is a big aspect of it. You cannot think about the diaspora without thinking about religion. It is a huge part of the experience. I am in a moment in my life where I want to put a lot of things together in my literature, but I have to choose. It is hard to choose.

2

 See Scego’s “Not in my name” translated by Aminda R. Leigh.

CHAPTER 28

Poetry as Love and Resistance: A Presentation by Behrouz Boochani and Janet Galbraith Behrouz Boochani and Janet Galbraith

The event transcribed here took place virtually at Duke University on April 9, 2022. Behrouz Boochani delivered his remarks orally, while due to technical difficulties, Janet Galbraith’s written remarks were read aloud by Charlotte Sussman, the event’s moderator. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer, and film producer. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until its closure in 2017. His extraordinary memoir of his time there, No Friend but the Mountains, was published in 2018 and has won numerous awards, including Australia’s Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction, and Australia’s National Biography Prize. Since then, he’s continued to publish searing articles and interviews about the situation of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia and globally. Janet Galbraith is a writer and poet living in the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung. She is the founder of Writing Through Fences, an online project facilitating collaborations between artists and writers incarcerated in immigration detention. She is the author of the poetry collection Re-Membering (2013). Boochani and Galbraith co-edited the collection

B. Boochani (*) Wellington, New Zealand J. Galbraith Melbourne, VIC, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_28

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Writing Through Fences: Archipelago of Letters, which appeared as an issue of the journal Southerly in 2021. Behrouz Boochani: Thank you very much for the introduction. My name is Behrouz Boochani. I think I should say something about the context, which context we are talking about. We are going to talk about Australian policy toward refugees. We call it exile policy. In Australia in 2013, they announced a policy called the 19th July Policy. And according to that policy, anyone who comes to Australia by boat, they banish them to Manus Island in North Papua New Guinea in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and keep them in prison in that detention center. And also to Nauru Island, a Pacific Island. Nauru is actually the smallest republic in the world. It’s a very tiny island with only 9000 population. So according to this policy, they banished 2000 refugees to these two colonies, to Manus Island and to Nauru. They transferred men, single men, to Manus Island, and families, including children, women, and men, to Nauru Island. I myself was among the people who were banished to Manus Island. So we are going to talk about this, you know, what’s happened since 2013. And now after I think nine years or eight years they closed Manus prison, but Nauru is still on, and 100 people are in Port Moresby, which is the capital city of Papua New Guinea. And just last week they released the refugees in detention centers in Australia because some of the refugees on Manus and Nauru were transferred to Australia after a while. So that is the context; we are going to talk about this, about an exile policy. For people who are following politics in Australia, this kind of policy actually started in 2001. At that time, they stopped a boat on the ocean, and they didn’t allow the refugees to come to Australia at that time, so these refugees were on the ocean for like two months, fifty days; that is known in Australia as a “turnback.” And John Howard, the prime minister of Australia, stands up in the parliament and says that we [asylum seekers] decide to come to this country. So since that time, there was a political shift in Australia. They opened, they established, these prison camps, at Manus and Nauru. So it’s still going on. In 2007 they closed it. In 2012 they reopened it again, and in 2013 they banished another group. And I was among them. So, for two decades refugees have been part of politics in Australia, and they have used the refugees in their federal elections. And if we look at the federal election in Australia for two decades, two months before the election, a month before the election, they do something on refugees. So in 2013, they announced that policy two months before the election. In 2001, it was two months before the election, and now it’s two months before the election, and they’ve released all the refugees in detention in Australia. And they accepted the offer by New Zealand, which means they are going to transfer the refugees in Manus and Nauru to New Zealand. So always two months before the election, or a month before the election, they do something on refugees. So, we are going to talk about this, this is the context, what the refugees have done in eight years. We started a historical resistance in these islands. And this historical resistance, we did a hunger strike, we did a protest, even we did

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a riot at the beginning. But this resistance is not only that. No, the resistance we do is through writing, creating art work. And that happened as a collaboration between refugees in these islands with a part of civil society in Australia. So I’ve known Janet since that time, 2013, when I smuggled a phone into the prison, and I started to communicate with people in Australia, So I found Janet, we connected at that time, then we worked together. So, after eight years now, and my books published, and some movies, we made some movies, we have some knowledge, we have created a body of work, now, which I think is very important. And Writing Through Fences, that we are talking about, is a project of which Janet is the founder; Janet established the Writing Through Fences project, and started to work with refugees in detention in Australia, in Manus Island, in Nauru Island, in Christmas Island, and in Indonesia. And now we have a body of words … Refugees have done historical resistance, and we have a knowledge, resistance knowledge, and I think this body of writing is important historically, and also just to know [learn about] refugees and marginalized people, and also about the history of colonialism in Australia. Because the whole policy is established in a colonialist mentality, so we cannot really separate this exile policy from the history of colonialism in Australia. So, any projects we have done, and [they are] still going on and I think they are remarkable, I am just one part of it, but this resistance is historical because it’s not only refugees, we do it with a part of civil society in Australia.

Janet Galbraith Thinking on displacement and literature, I am thinking about stories and place, about what stories exist in the places we each inhabit, and what happens when someone is forced to leave. Do stories remain in place, are they carried with the person on leaving, or is it both? And perhaps in the moving, in the displacement, stories also shift, remain but change as they nudge up against stories of displacement, as these stories produce another frame, and as they inform other stories of displacement and the people that inhabit them. I am thinking too of stories as they are launched across space spoken from one place, journeying through an intermediate space until they arrive in another place, another body, which itself is filled with stories, that, in turn, will determine much of how stories are received. The leaving or launching—where I speak from: As I open my mouth, my voice begins a journey, moves toward you. I am in Naarm, in Wirundjeri-Woi Wurrung and Boon-Wurrung Country—a place you more likely know as Melbourne, Australia. This place my voice leaves from is a place named by British colonizers to designate ownership, in attempts to legitimate colonial invasion and expansion; this place is part of what became a penal colony, a prison island where convicts from Britain were transported to, and oh how that reverberates. This is a place of the oldest living culture in this world, and it is a place where prison camps were set up to contain Aboriginal people as they were forcibly removed and exiled from their lands—my own ancestors an active part

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of this violence. This is a place where Aboriginal people, including children as young as 10, continue to be imprisoned at an extraordinarily high rate; a place where the unacknowledged black wars continue; this is a place where the White Australia policy was enacted and continues to echo; a place where the knowledge that this place is illegally occupied leads to anxieties; that sees more and more violence enacted by the state/s in order to shore up this false sense of sovereignty; it’s a place where refugees are incarcerated indefinitely for no crime—some as long as 12 years and continuing; a place where the language and practices of the colonizers, of the prison makers, of the jailers, have accrued a lot of power and salience; it is a place where Aboriginal resistance to this has never ended; a place where refugees who have been freed lead others in protest for the freedom of those still imprisoned; it’s a place where the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung languages are being revived; it is a place of the creators Bunjil and Waa. The arrival or where I speak into: I know little of where and what I am speaking into, or the bodies and spaces in which my words arrive, how they may be received, what multiple and layered stories they are placed among. I have researched a little and also been told a little of the place now called Duke University. Thinking about the connections between colonization and displacement informs the context for the development of a collaborative project that both Behrouz and I will speak about today, called Writing Through Fences. Where this seminar is being held, I found that the university is situated in the lands of the Tutelo- and Sapone- speaking peoples. I send my respect to you. I am aware that you too have survived displacement, war, colonial expansion, and disease and that you too continue to live dynamically as you care for your country and tell your stories. I found too that Duke University is named after a man who enslaved people and that it was largely built by the labor of descendants of enslaved Africans. From here to there—so many layers of displacement, so many stories. Writing Through Fences (or WTF, and yes we are all aware of what the acronym is) is a series of loosely linked creative collaborations between writers and creatives in Australia with citizen-privilege and people who have been forcibly displaced, become refugees and incarcerated (or who have been incarcerated) in Australia’s immigration detention system. Writing Through Fences grows out of and builds on relationships developed through writing, music, and art, and it is these acts of creation that in themselves form a resistance to and interrupt the divisive and destructive power of what novelist and thinker Melissa Lucashenko calls the “savagery of Australian racism” grown from a “penal colony” that has spread to also harm people who have sought asylum in these stolen lands. In the face of this history, WTF holds to the idea that “acts of creation can ward off the killing effects of destruction.” So how did we start? Well, beginnings are hard to find and this beginning began before. The way WTF works grew out of another project grounded in Paakantji Country where I worked for a number of years and was part of a women’s writing group while facilitating storytelling and writing projects,

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including a young people’s story-telling/writing group largely attended by local Aboriginal people, informed by their knowledges and, of course, country. So yes, I would like to acknowledge that collaboration and the shared work that fostered this kind of creative exchange. So, WTF … I was sitting at my kitchen table, pink Laminex, looking at a Facebook feed and saw a sentence that intrigued me and viscerally pulled me in. “Hearts tendon tells a sad story of optimistic silent words.” I found it beautiful and troubling. “Are you a poet,” I typed as a comment. At the time I did not know who had written it and where they were writing from. The writer soon introduced herself responding to my “are you a poet” by saying “if only you knew you would laugh and cry.” We exchanged names and she told me she was writing from immigration detention in Melbourne, that she had written poetry in Yemen, that her father was a poet in Somalia before being killed. She also said that she had not been able to write or speak for months and that somehow this afternoon, she had eked out this sentence and sent it out in the little time she had been allowed to access a computer. Her words triggered something in me and I remembered how, when I had been very ill, writing a few words, and a few more, and more, had brought me back to life. I suggested we send a few words to each other each day or whenever she was able to access a computer—she was not allowed to have a phone. So we started sending words to each other, then lines which grew into verses and then into poems. Our shared creative process also grew into a relationship of trust, of curiosity, learning, and, over time, a loving friendship. For me, it reconnected me with what has been the life-saving practice of writing and listening to poetry. For Ahlam, it helped move her from a place of silence into a place where she could express, think, speak, and also connect again with her own writing—even within the violence inherent in imprisonment. The story goes that our exchanges became known by others also incarcerated in Australia’s immigration prison network and more and more people contacted Ahlam and I, also wanting to share such an exchange. So WTF was founded by this relationship of creative care. Over time, we made a closed Facebook group, a safe place in which people could meet, share their/our writing or artwork, comment on works posted, and encourage each other. It was such an invigorating time as a creative community based on creating a safe space to meet and share, even though we were all separated, some in Papua New Guinea, some in Nauru, some in Australia, some in Christmas Island, some in Indonesia, and most people imprisoned. Boush, who is still exiled after 10 years, says that “for most of us involved in this creative community our shared stories and poems became like food and water. Through writing and art, we found safety, family, friends, courage and love.” His short poem, “Companions,” describes the mutual support that grew: Let me be your companion We will escape like hungry birds in the morning rushing out for seed.

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In those moments when you can’t fly, I will become wings to take you into the blue sky. When you stare at the darkness, I will be your light. And when you are scared to cross that ocean, be a ship, I will be water to carry you out. (Galbraith et al. 2021, 31)

A large part of the power of our collaborations was and is [the idea that] that through creation there was/is an assertion of self. For some people it’s an affirmation of identity prior to, during, and after incarceration, for others, it’s the re-making of identity in the context of a torturous system aimed at dismantling an individual, including the practice of calling people by a number, not their name. And for others like me, it is the affirmation of self through creative relationships that grow and reinforce often derided values of respect, care, and responsibility; creative relationships that resist the division and numbing effects of the horrors inflicted by the state and a largely apathetic uncaring and rising xenophobic population. [That assertion of a self that holds different values than the surrounding world is articulated by Hani Abdile’s poem, “Listen.”] Listen Listen Listen Yes you. Who is calling me a terrorist? Because of you my home is destroyed Because of you I’m a refugee Because of you I’m seeking asylum Because of you my future is unknown. But I will not go the same route as you. It’s justice and peace I seek. Because I know, in war, no children will be born but many will die. (Galbraith et al. 2021, 135)

Another particularly generative part of these collaborations was and is that we are often working across cultural traditions where issues of translation constantly come up, where differing dynamic traditions and creative practices inform each other. But, you know, the brutality of this penal colony, the pernicious naturalization of white supremacy, and the intersecting hierarchical relations of power we embody do not allow for idealism or romanticization. This constantly produced misunderstandings, erasures, and micro-aggressions and sometimes we failed each other. The embeddedness of white supremacist ideology, in particular, infiltrates and requires constant listening, constant self-­ reflection, and re-negotiation of relationships and collaborations. One thing that has held us and continues to hold us and connect us, despite actual geographical, cultural, gender, language, and many other distances and

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differences, is the moon. In WTF we have a ritual where people in different prisons, or in homes—people in different places—look at the moon at the same time, observe and feel, listen for ourselves and each other, and send love. For example, I will look at the moon, and I will know that Behrouz and Abdi in Manus are looking at the moon, and that Elle and Rehan in Nauru and Hani and Sabda in Christmas Island and Naser in Melbourne and Anil in Perth and Boush in Indonesia (and many others) are also looking at the moon and we are thinking of each other, that we are looking to the same moon, a shared connection. Our sign-off to each other when we are writing, or chatting is always: Love through the moon. As WTF developed and grew, we started to define other aims beyond building a space of safety through a mutually supportive creative community. Many of us began to name the fight for survival as being that against an ever-­ expanding, arbitrary, and shifty system that required particular narratives to be constantly re-produced in order to feed it. So, our wider aim was to wrest narratives about refugees, displacement, and sovereignty from those in power, from those who create and circulate these narratives for their own purposes. In WTF, we have often looked to the work of Aboriginal thinkers and knowledge holders who have long experienced the excesses of colonial violence; people like Judy Atkinson, Uncle Ray Jackson, Badger Bates, and Melissa Lucashenko, and many of us are led by their work. [In her opening editorial to the volume, Lucashenko articulates her understanding of the connection:] When I was asked to respond to these stories of brave and innocent people who have been denied ordinary lives I was both daunted and honoured. Daunted, since Australia has shown for at least two decades now that refugees don’t matter, or rather don’t matter in any honourable way, to our political class and many voters. Refugee lives are currently only important for dog-whistling hatred and fear. It is in the abstract that it’s easiest to do this dog-whistling. It’s the abstract refugee, like the abstract Aboriginal person, who can be vilified, parodied and slandered. Put a face to the person, give them a name and a history and wrap a family around them, and suddenly an outback Queensland community wants a Sri Lankan refugee family to remain part of who they are. Will go to extraordinary lengths to make that happen. I was also daunted by the task, I slowly came to realise, because of my buried rage. Rage that if these people’s writings weren’t absolutely perfect, didn’t fluently convey the precise measure of suffering versus dignified protest that Australia needs in order to listen, then their words from behind prison walls might be wasted. I was paralysed by my rage that Australian ignorance can hold so much power, while these knowledgeable and brave and skilful people trapped in limbo have so little sway. (Galbraith et al. 2021, 21)

As well as collaborating artist-to-artist through fences, key roles played by non-­ refugee artists were resourcing and listening deeply to those incarcerated and then collaborating in opening spaces or promoting the knowledges produced.

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So many people were writing, creating music, making art, but these were often, as Arundhati Roy says, “deliberately silenced or preferably unheard.” Opening the ears, eyes, skin, hands, and the carefully guarded platforms of people who were not refugees, of the political class, of various citizens and residents of this occupier nation took a lot of work and a long time. It inevitably involved finding creative ways of presenting and broadcasting work and … pushing … pushing publishers, newspapers, radio, TV, social-media, artists, and poets with platforms, universities, local councils, academics, organizations with access to audiences, and those who hold positions of power, to open their gates and dismantle the fences that they preciously guard—tightly, so tightly. And we did and as Behrouz will attest we still do! When I speak of resistance it is not that people wanted to create art and writing that would directly and overtly respond to the current narratives and language of politicians, big business, and an uninterested and xenophobic populace. Although there were and are people producing reportage and the work of informants for journalists or themselves becoming citizen journalists, most people wanted to work from within their own creative language and/or create a language that did not sit within such a frame, but rather might be able to change the narrative or at least create an alternative rather than be limited to responding to or recuperated by it. Part of this meant we needed to interrupt many of the narratives produced and re-produced by some of the supporters of refugees, narratives that represent people who have sought refuge as weak, infantile, in need of leadership. This again meant being self-reflective and aware of how we who were promoting the work were framing it. Were we revitalizing or disrupting narratives of everyday white supremacism? One of the ways to challenge such narratives was to bring the art and writing out of the spaces that framed the work and the artists and writers as stories of trauma and exhibits of suffering. We aimed to find spaces that celebrated and valued the work as art generative of possibilities and meaningful engagement. In fact, the concerns that many involved in WTF had for years were frustrations around how many of those who identified as “supporters” would speak of “Giving refugees a voice” as though the writers and artists did not have voices. It was in response to this attitude that the statement we now remind people of grew: “No one can give us a voice and no one can take our voice away. Our voices are ours and we do with them what we want.” It’s probably important to mention here that there was a lot of deliberate silencing and not hearing—phones were illegal in detention for many years and access to computers extremely limited, especially for those on Nauru and in Manus Island—communication was difficult and required smuggling mobile phones into the prisons which would then be confiscated and another needed to be smuggled in. It is also important to note that many people who wrote and published were then targeted by the authorities and often punished, sometimes with isolation, arrest, beatings, interrogations, sudden movements from one detention prison

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to another without notice, and other forms of intimidation. Despite this many people still wrote, made art and music, sometimes clandestinely, and shared it. Some of the people who initially worked with WTF while incarcerated have been freed and have made careers out of their art and writing, some have moved away from writing and art because other parts of life outside of prison have taken priority, and others continue to teach, collaborate with, and encourage those still imprisoned in the life-giving practice of creation. And these people, like myself, have found that as the years go on—it’s almost 10  years now—those still imprisoned only episodically have enough energy, interest, and ability to write, make art, or produce music. Some who have been part of WTF did not make it out of the quagmire of detention and were killed by the system. You might remember earlier I mentioned sovereignty and the anxieties inherent in an occupied nation. Well, the Australian government termed some practices of the policy Operation Sovereign Borders. I remember one writer sending me a picture of a sentence he had written with his blood on a prison wall. It said: Operation Sovereign Borders, with a line through borders and the word Murders over the top. Yes, we have lost many friends, musicians, people who wrote and made art, and people who didn’t, to this savage system. WTF continues to change and evolve according to who is actively involved and what is necessary at the time. Right now, our focus is on promoting this collection: An Archipelago of Letters: Writing Through Fences; ongoing online workshops for writers still incarcerated and exiled; publishing projects; the completion of a collection of writing by women and non-binary people affected by this detention industry and various other smaller collaborative performances and projects. In case anyone is wondering: no, we are not a charity, we are not a funded arts organization, and we do not have any paid staff. We are a loose collective of artists, writers, and supporters from various places and in various situations with similar creative interests who collaborate, with the aim of dismantling the cruel systems that seek to divide us. So, yes. This is part of a story of WTF and I think I should pass this on to Behrouz who I met when Hossein, who was incarcerated alongside Behrouz sent me a message in late 2013 saying: “there is a journalist locked up here with us. Do you want to talk with him?” At the time Behrouz was working on a smuggled mobile phone while incarcerated in Manus Prison. We started talking and working together, and all these years later we continue to. Behrouz Boochani: This Writing Through Fences, we should think about the picture: there are many people who are in prison in a ring of islands, another prison in another island, some people in detention in Australia, and Australia is a big island as well, and these people get together, you know, sometimes, and they share a love, they communicate, actually, and they connect with each other through the moon, and that is a really beautiful and political picture, if we think about it. They write together, they write to each other, now after eight years, ten years, we have a body of works by these people.

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Ninety people participated in the University of New South Wales book, and it’s great work that we understand refugees through writing and literature; we have access to that life experience by refugees, and also we see [the] system, we see Australia, through their perspective; so this time we don’t see refugees from Australia’s perspective, we see Australia from [the] refugees’ perspective, and I think that’s important, and that happened only through arts and literature. And I think that’s why I say that art and literature are the most powerful languages to challenge the system, and also for the decolonization process. We know that refugees have been dehumanized, marginalized people, minorities. And I think for challenging that image, which has been created, we can use literature and art as the powerful language, to challenge that image. … In this context, which is a very surreal context, that they banish people, innocent people, to remote islands, remote prisons, that is really, a very surreal context. It’s surreal that you banish innocent people, children, to a remote prison in the middle of the biggest ocean in the world and keep them there for many years. That is cruel, but it is surreal as well. And these people in these islands, they challenge the biggest island, which is Australia, through writing. So, anything that happens in the context I think is surreal. Even if you write a poem, it’s surreal. Anything that happens in that context is political as well. That’s why I say that even writing a love poem in that island, in one of those islands, is a political act, because by writing a love poem you share your humanity, you share your human face, because the system is designed to take your, to take the detainee’s, identity. The system [has] already dehumanized people, and when you write a poem you share your love, that means you’re still keeping your dignity, your humanity, and that is a political act because you are challenging that propaganda. So, if we look at the whole, if we look at the whole story it is really remarkable. So, we are facing a tragedy that we keep innocent people in these islands—children, women, people. It is a tragedy, but I think we have a resistance as well here, so we cannot analyze this by looking at detainees as victims, because these people have challenged the system by recording this part of history.

Bibliography Galbraith, Janet, Hani Abile, Omid Tofighian, and Behrouz Boochani, eds. 2021. Writing Through Fences: An Archipelago of Letters. Special issue of Southerly, 79(2).

PART V

Migration and Media

CHAPTER 29

Migration and Media: Introduction Josephine McDonagh

In a series of lectures delivered in Oxford in 1948, the Canadian historian of imperialism, Harold Innis, examined the role of media in the development of empires from ancient times to the present. Innis’s study, later published as Media and Empire (1950), surveyed the formative work performed by communication technologies in the growth of powerful “civilizations” across history. His study ranged from ancient Egypt to contemporary North America, from clay tablets, papyrus rolls, and parchment codex to the introduction of paper, and from oral communication to printed newspapers and radio broadcasts. These different forms of media of communication, he argued, had reshaped societies across time. This early work in an emergent discipline of media studies—Innis was part of the Toronto School of Communication Theory that would later include literary critic Northrop Frye and philosopher Marshall McLuhan—identified two types of media according to their physical affordances. “Hard” or “durable” media like parchment, clay, and stone were “heavy materials … suited to the development of architecture and sculpture” and had qualities that emphasized time and duration. Media like papyrus and paper that were “less durable and light in character” were “suited to wide areas in administration and trade” (Innis 1950, 7). These “lighter” and mobile material forms, he argued, facilitated the geographical movement of people and the development of colonies. The two worked in a dialectical relation, the tension between them at any particular time holding excesses in check: when “durable” media dominated,

J. McDonagh (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_29

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they produced a centripetal force, favored by decentralized, hierarchical societies; “light,” ephemeral media, on the other hand, diffused energies centrifugally, producing geographically dispersed or diasporic states, with centralized governments. Migration is never an explicit theme in Innis’s work. The only group he singles out as migrants are printers, as though print is something like a vehicle, acting on, rather than integrated with, everyday life. Nonetheless, the work understands human mobility as a historical phenomenon fundamentally motivated by media: people are set in motion, and steered on their way, by current modes of communication. Innis’s not-always-uncritical alignment of colonies with notions of “civilization,” and his usually unreflective inhabiting of the perspective of the colonizer, may strike alarm bells in the context of our contemporary project to decolonize methods of knowledge production. Moreover, his taxonomy of “durable” and “light” media seems at best quaint when today’s digital media and virtual environments appear to possess no haptic qualities at all. Today’s media theorists focus on new media technologies in the context of the current global “crises” in human migration (De Genova 2018), often from the point of view of the migrant, making Innis’s work seem irrelevant. In their comprehensive Handbook of Media and Migration, for example, Smets et al. lay out an agenda that includes exploring more present-oriented issues: the role of media in “shaping social imaginaries” about migration in contemporary societies; the uses of digital technology in “organizing and surviving migrant journeys”; and the ways in which data functions in relation to security (Smets et al. 2020). Yet while this is far from the “durable” and “light” media that preoccupy Innis, his understanding of the constitutive role of communication technologies in the context of what we might now call globalization nonetheless offers an interesting perspective on ongoing discussions of the role of media in migration. For literary scholars of migration, claims about the constitutive role of media remain key. A growing body of critical work in literary studies, from all periods, examines the multiple ways in which literary works of the past represented the migrant journeys that shaped the era in which they were produced. Chiming with Innis, they consider how literary texts—qua media—participated in migrant journeys. This was especially the case in the era of print capitalism, in the context of a global redistribution of human labor (Anderson 2006; Osterhammel 2014). From the beginning of the nineteenth century, when people on every continent began to move more frequently and longer distances than ever before, printed texts facilitated human movement (McDonagh 2021). In Europe, new genres of informational literature about overseas colonies, some specifically targeted at emigrant readers, suffused the print sphere, stimulating emigration by disseminating data about new colonies and how to reach them (Belich 2009). At the same time, like media today, they shaped “social imaginaries” of migration more broadly. Heavy with information and fixated on the counting and measuring of bodies, space, climate, and resources, these texts participated in the emerging bureaucratic infrastructure that

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organized nineteenth-century global migration. The bio-political regime they helped to create instigated and upheld inequalities between those for whom travel was a right and a freedom, and those who were forcibly removed (Lowe 2015; McDonagh 2021). Literary texts belonged to a corpus of print that was thoroughly immersed in the doings of migration. Many of the themes that Smets et  al. have identified as being of interest to scholars of contemporary migration and media seem already evident in nineteenth-century literature: the complex ways that media shapes social imaginaries; the use of media technologies in “making, and surviving, journeys”; the “datafication” of migration, its implications for security and surveillance, as well as for evasion. Such continuities between nineteenth-century print media and migration and the contemporary mediascape suggest that bringing literature into conjunction with media and migration opens a rich seam of enquiry. All the chapters in this section explore the relationships between migration and media in the context of literature and film and range across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. While they take up different regimes of migration, and different genres of representation, they share a concern with the ways in which migration is deployed imaginatively within the formal constraints of the literary or filmic text. Briony Wickes’s focus on Italian immigrants in mid-nineteenth-century London, for instance, identifies the way that hostility to immigrants was expressed in debates about street noise. When the middle-­ class intelligentsia complained about the disturbances caused by Italian street musicians, Wickes shows, their criticism encoded judgments about immigrants as defective—and noisy—laborers, who “deviate[d] from and resist[ed] productivity.” These arguments appeared in pamphlets and newspapers, but Wickes goes on to show how in works of fiction, the very same qualities are re-imagined as “sonic modes of integration,” the basis for a more optimistic outcome for the liminal immigrant, the Italian organ grinder. Wickes’s identification of the novel as an open space of critique and potential re-imagining is a move that is also found in other chapters in this section. Kristina Gedgaudaite’s chapter takes up the representative possibilities of comics, which she sees as being as transformative as Wickes’s novels. For her, the special affordances of comics—the use of grids, the interaction of the visual and verbal, the imaginative play within the space of the page—enable the representation of repressed histories of displacement for later generations of migrants’ families. Thus, comics produced by descendants of families affected by population exchanges following the Greco-Turkish war in 1923, and by inheritors of the displacements caused by the partition of India and Pakistan, and of Palestine and Israel, provide second-, third-, or even fourth-generation migrants with the means of probing the experiences of their ancestors, and of reclaiming deeply buried yet affectively raw histories of dispossession. In a similar vein, Charlotte Sussman’s subtle analysis weighs the different forms of reparative work carried out in three recent long poems about perilous migrations across the Mediterranean Sea, while Johannes von Moltke’s chapter on migrant films demonstrates how, within the formal possibilities of film

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production, filmmakers explore questions regarding the ethics of looking at migrants. For Moltke, as in all these chapters, the creative works present the conditions in which to interrogate the restraints and possibilities presented by media technologies. Curiously, in three of these four chapters, some other medium, more opaque and less clearly a means of communication, emerges as a central preoccupation: music (in Wickes’s chapter), textiles (in Gedguadaite’s comics), and, following media theorist Melody Jue, seawater (in Sussman’s poems). In each case, these other media provide alternatives to the technologized media of the capitalist press, or of the state’s bureaucracy and surveillance. In contradistinction to the realm of communication media, then, the rich affordances of each present a version of the “aesthetic regime” (Rancière 2004), or “the work of art as a different sensorium from that of the domination of idea over perception” (Brugère and le Blanc). These are concepts that are explored in the final chapter of this section, a wide-ranging conversation between Anne-Gaëlle Saliot and philosophers Fabienne Brugère and Guillaume le Blanc, authors of the book La Fin de l’hospitalité (The End of Hospitality, 2017) and curators of the exhibit “Persona Grata” in Paris (October 2018–January 2019). For them, art is “essential” in negotiating the conflicts of hospitality that exist between the ethical “gestures” of individuals and volunteers, and the political duties of hospitality within the framework of national laws. Art shows, they say, “the imaginary of migrations,” and “create[s] a sort of hospitality with dreams, desire, imagination.” Curiously, Innis in 1950 also sought a space outside the regimes of technologized media communication. The “vitality of the oral tradition,” he argued, would be a bulwark against the dominance of the newspaper press in the United States, the accumulation of power in too few hands, and the cataclysmic future of Cold War militarization that loomed. It is not named by him as the aesthetic, but it is close to it in conception.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. edn. London: Verso. Belich, James. 2009. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Genova, Nicholas. 2018. “Crises,” Convulsions, Concurrences. Parse, 8 (Autumn). https://parsejournal.com/article/crises-­c onvulsions-­c oncurrences-­h uman-­ mobility-­the-­european-­geography-­of-­exclusion-­and-­the-­postcolonial-­dialectics-­of-­ subordinate-­inclusion/. Innis, H.A. 1950. Empire and Communications. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. McDonagh, Josephine. 2021. Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2014. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Galilée. Smets, Kevin, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn, and Radhika Gajjala. 2020. Editorial Introduction: Media and Migration: Research Encounters. In The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi. org/10.4135/9781526476982.

CHAPTER 30

Sound in Place: Italian Migrant Street Music in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Briony Wickes

Introduction In 1864, the mathematician and “father of the computer” Charles Babbage published his memoir, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, devoting a chapter to the figure he believed to be the natural enemy of London’s intellectual workers: the Italian organ grinder. The chapter, entitled “Street Nuisances,” was the culmination of a decade-long campaign by Babbage against itinerant musicians and offers an account of the “misery inflicted [...] and absolute pecuniary penalty imposed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances (Babbage 1864, 342). “Street Nuisances” excoriates various “instruments of torture” and their wielders, such as German brass bands and Indian “tom-toms,” as well as denouncing the  worst “encouragers of street music” (“tavern keepers,” “servants,” “ladies of doubtful virtue”), but it is the organ grinders, “natives of Italy, chiefly from the mountainous district,” who are at the heart of Babbage’s polemic (339; 342). He estimates that there are “above a thousand of these foreigners usually in London employed in tormenting the natives” and when accosted, “the Italians are often very insolent, and constantly refuse to depart”: This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 884951).

B. Wickes (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_30

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“the organ-player is scarcely ever acquainted with more than four or five words of our language, and these always the most vulgar, the most offensive, and the most insulting” (339; 342–43). More offensive than unpleasant epithets, however, were the sounds of the barrel organ itself, described by Babbage as “uniform,” “continuous,” and “hideously discordant noises” (354; 342). This “vile noise,” he argues, was an affront to real music but was also indicative of the declining “character of the new population” of the city (348). The only way to solve the organ nuisance, Babbage concludes, would thus be the enforced removal of migrant musicians from London’s city streets. Yet here Babbage would find himself thwarted by the eccentricities of the court: “the taste of the new magistrate,” he despairs “like that of his predecessor, is favourable to the Italian organ”: “Possibly Mr. Y—thinks that all Italian music is high art, and therefore ought to be encouraged” (354). And so, the organs played on. The refrains of the Italian barrel organ reverberate across “Street Nuisances” and body forth some of the tensions and emotions that organized perceptions of street music in the nineteenth century, and of the migrant performers who brought it loudly and vividly to life. Though he was one of street music’s most insistent critics, Babbage was not shouting into the void. The period between 1840 and 1865 saw a massive chronicling of complaints against the “organ nuisance,” as the Times dubbed it, co-signed by some of the most prominent figures of the age: Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, William Holman Hunt, John Forster, and Francis Grant. In turn, the blame for the nuisance was overwhelmingly attributed to foreign migrants, particularly working-class Italian men: “brazen performers on brazen instruments,” as Dickens writes in an 1863 letter to Parliament, “beaters of drums, grinders of organs, bangers of banjos, clashers of cymbals, worriers of fiddles, and bellowers of ballads” (Dickens 1864, 41). While the tenor of the organ nuisance discourses—hostile, violent, and freighted with xenophobia— may be unsurprising, their composition is more remarkable, emphasizing the acoustic waves of intra-European migration, rather than just geographic mobility. Music, not the musician, is the focus in these discourses, and it is sound itself that is perceived to generate negative effects within society. “The very atmosphere” of London, one “overworked citizen” explains, has been “impregnated with that thrice-cursed droning noise—that abomination of London which makes me ill, which positively shortens my life from the nervous fever it engenders” (Baune 1864, 9). Babbage’s attack in “Street Nuisances” is likewise articulated as a sonic intervention on behalf of the nation. “I am fighting the battle of every one of my countrymen,” Babbage writes, and “have obtained, in my own country, an unenviable celebrity […] by a determined resistance to the tyranny of the lowest mob, whose love, not of music, but of the most discordant noises, is so great that it insists upon enjoying it at all hours and in every street” (Babbage 1864, 345). The “battle” for the control of London’s streets as it is waged by Babbage, Dickens et al. operates along class-driven, ethnic, and racialized lines, yet it is the sound of migrant music—transposed in the organ nuisance debates as

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discordant noise—that generates fear and loathing. Noise, as Jacques Attali theorizes, is always already politicized: “the control of noise, and the institutionalization of silence of others assure the durability of power […] for this reason, musicians, even when officially recognised, are dangerous, disturbing, and subversive” (1985, 8). Attali raises the insurgent potential of sound, particularly when it is generated by unregulated groups perceived to be foreign outsiders. Yet as “Street Nuisances” signals, conceived as meaningless noise the music of nineteenth-century migrants was also prone to distortion and abstraction. Gavin Williams, discussing nineteenth-century industrial soundscapes, argues that Babbage’s “factory-like mind” listened to London as though it were itself a machine, and its inhabitants an “autonomous social system that had taken on unstoppable, destructive force” (2017, 215–216). Defined against the industrial-intellectual economy of British “brain work,” foreign noise in the organ nuisance debates is positioned as defective labor, a fault in the machine that not only deviates from and resists productivity, but can corrode social systems altogether. Seb Franklin similarly identifies migrant music in these discourses as the “sound of unupgradability”: “the sonic mark of a racialized and feminized urban surplus” (2021, 134–135, emphasis author’s own). Through their association with noise, organ grinders and organ encouragers are rendered, Franklin argues, as part of a non-value mediated population and as such are categorized as and ascribed the characteristics of abject formlessness. Street music is likewise attenuated, Franklin asserts, reduced to coarse unproductive labor, and devalued as mere “aesthetic formlessness” (131). This chapter takes a different approach to migrant street music as it endeavors to clarify and listen to the unique refrains of the Italian barrel organ as they are mediated in the aesthetic and formal realm of the nineteenth-century novel. In doing so, it hopes to hear better how Italian migration and Italian music resonated in the nineteenth century and to retrieve the figure of the migrant organ grinder from the position of uninhabitable static in which it finds itself. While many nineteenth-century discourses attempted to quell the strains of migrant music, through documentation and record, fiction offers a more ambivalent and fluid acoustic space in which to amplify the barrel organ’s disruptive and affiliative potential and to interrogate the oppressive tenors of Victorian social life. Historicizing the clamor of the organ nuisance debates, scholars have interpreted the anti-street music discourse of this period as part of a broader reaction to the changing shape, and sound, of nineteenth-century urban life. Bruce Johnson, for example, asserts that popular attacks on street music at this time were “a matter of the material and intellectual culture of modernity,” as oral cultures gave way to the hegemony of print and the dominance of the industrial bourgeoisie (2018, 68). John Picker likewise locates anxieties around street music within the shifting dynamics of modern professional work, posing a threat to the activities of “brain workers” like Babbage— inventors, artists, authors, academics—who sought to define themselves as industrious intellectuals yet lacked the formal office space to mark their status and significance concretely (2003, 55). Like Johnson and Picker, this chapter

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emphasizes the dislocating sensations of London’s mid-century soundscapes but turns its focus from the detractors of street music to its migrant performers. The organ nuisance debates of the 1850s and 1860s, I argue, must be located within the historical and cultural contexts of European economic migration into Britain, not least because of the violent, xenophobic rhetoric levied against migrant musicians within its discourses. But the tumult that circulated around Italian organ grinders during this period also lent this figure a curiously powerful resonance within the Victorian imagination, with the barrel organ, too, becoming symbolically charged as both a ubiquitous presence on the Victorian streets and a herald of itinerant migrant labor. While organ grinding, and migrant organ grinders, may appear in the anti-street music debates as sound “out of place,” in this chapter, I examine how nineteenth-­ century authors alternatively deploy the music of the Italian barrel organ to question the reproduction of social categories, challenge the value of different labor forms, expose the superficiality of Victorian social codes, relocating the reader within the thickness of uneven social worlds.1 Through form and content, Victorian fiction engages with complex questions of Italian music and migration and offers sonic modes of integration that enable greater forms of social and spatial mobility.

Intermezzos: Music, Migration, and Nuisance Between Britain and Italy Italy resonates clearly within nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and its significations in Victorian discourses are rich, complex, and manifold. In Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), for example, on hearing that Amy Dorrit has traveled to Italy, the garrulous Flora Finching presents a full repertoire of her cultural associations with that nation: “In Italy is she really?” said Flora, “with the grapes growing everywhere and lava necklaces and bracelets too that land of poetry with burning mountains picturesque beyond belief though if the organ-boys come away from the neighbourhood not to be scorched nobody can wonder being so young and bringing their white mice with them most humane, and is she really in that favoured land with nothing but blue about her and dying gladiators and Belvederes”. (Dickens 1857, 560)

As Flora suggests, for many Victorians Italy was the land of the Roman Empire, of Vesuvius, of poetry, of Renaissance Art and architecture, and of endless blue skies across the rolling campagna. Amongst these highly romanticized free associations with Italy, Flora also introduces the young Italian organ grinder, a seemingly more modest figure. Yet Italian organ music and Italian organ boys 1  I modify this term from Mary Douglas’s anthropological work on dirt in Victorian culture which she describes as “matter out of place” (Douglas 1975, 12).

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are facets of Italy with which Flora has first-hand experience, accessible on the streets of London, rather than only received imaginatively and at a distance through literature and art. Including this character within her whirl of Italian fantasies and idealizations, Flora finds in the organ boy a corporeal node through which to better understand far-off European cultures and contexts. He is not glamorous, but familiar: a recognizable and audible presence in the routine activities of everyday life that sutures together the psychological and geographical gulf between Britain and Italy. How Flora’s Italian organ boys made their way to London is impossible to describe exactly, yet a few general trends can be extracted from census figures and historical records. Italian working-class economic migrants mostly came from remote and impoverished areas of Northern Italy and were often already living itinerant lifestyles, following social and economic upheavals in the centuries prior that had made it untenable for poor workers to stay in their hometowns. In the nineteenth century, the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) meant that travel beyond Italian borders became a safer and more accessible option, but also a more necessary one, following Italy’s post-­ war economic depression. With regard to the choice of vocation, Italian towns and villages tended to specialize in one trade or craft and developed migration routes to certain destinations. The migrants who took up organ grinding typically came from the mountain districts of the Duchy of Parma, and from the hills of Chiavari in the province of Genoa (Zucchi 1992). Other Italian migrants traveled to be cooks, coppersmiths, shopkeepers, lacemakers, pedlars, plaster figurine-makers, animal exhibitors, and waiters, amongst other forms of labor, and their migrations took them across country, and beyond, to Europe, Russia, and the Americas. Importantly, these migrants did not leave indiscriminately or without support, but almost all these trades were part of a pre-existing network of labor, practiced under an apprenticeship system run by a compatriot labor agent or “padrone,” who would recruit workers, provide room and board (and sometimes basic language skills), lease tools and instruments, and take a cut (often disproportionate) of workers’ wages for the trouble (Sponza 1988; Zucchi 1992). In the short story “Morello: The Organ Boy’s Progress” (1846), Antonio Gallenga, himself an Italian political émigré living in London at the time, imagines the movements of these Italian workers as they travel across mountains and seas. Gallenga depicts the hope and excitement of young Italian migrant men, accompanied by “dancing bears, dogs, and monkeys” in a wave of music and performance: “throughout France and Germany, up to the deserts of Russia, and beyond the seas to England and America, they almost miraculously piped and drummed their way” (Gallenga 1846, 17). The cross-country movements of sound and people, envisioned by Gallenga, render music and migration as flow in constant motion, a seamless procession of potential opportunities and cultural exchange. Unfortunately, this optimism is short-lived: on arriving in England, Gallenga’s migrant musicians find it impossible to assimilate into Victorian society and become subject to the exploitation of Italian padroni.

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Organ grinding is also depicted as a deleterious profession. By the end of the tale, Gallenga describes how many of the young men’s natural “aptitude for music” has been destroyed by their labors with the barrel organ: “alas, the monotonous clink-clank of their grinding machines had utterly, irreparably, crazed and shattered their organ of hearing” (68–69). Gallenga eventually returns his organ-grinding protagonist, the eponymous Morello, back to Italy to restore both narrative and national order, rescuing, as the narrator puts it, “one of the thousand organ boys […] from the life of wretchedness which so nearly proved fatal to him, and which certainly undermined his constitution and corrupted his morals” (96). The depiction of Italian organ grinders in “Morello” raises the complicated position of these migrant figures in nineteenth-century culture. For many, like Gallenga, poor working-class organ grinders were perceived to be neither “real emigrants” nor real musicians (98). They were a subject of pity, but also a drain on respectable society. As the author of an article in Chambers Edinburgh Journal on “Music Grinders of the Metropolis” (1851) declared, with “respect to all these grinders” they are all “foreigners,” and most usually, Italians: and this fact is as welcome to us as it is singular, because it speaks volumes in favour of the national propensity, of which we have reason to be proud, to be ever doing something, producing something, applying labour to its legitimate purpose, and not turning another man’s handle to grind the wind. (Smith 1853, 17)

As the article suggests, organ grinding was figured in these discourses as the embodiment of unproductive, uncreative, foreign labor. The mechanical strains of the Italian barrel organ, looped and repeated by the turn of a hand crank, were the antithesis of the Romantic ideal of music, which upheld the art form as the most pure and transcendent mode of creative expression (Losseff and Fuller 2016). The supposed lack of skill of the Italian migrant organ grinder was emphasized all the more loudly because, as Annemarie McAllister notes, one of the most dominant stereotypes of Italian nationals was the “ascription of inherent musicality” (2013, 288). London, in particular, had played host to a myriad of celebrated Italian composers, conductors, and musical performers from the Renaissance period to the present (Palazzetti 2021). By the nineteenth century, Italy’s most famous musical export was undeniably the Italian opera, to the extent that the form became inextricable from “Italianness” (Parker 2001). From 1847 until 1892, for example, the opera house at Covent Garden was known as the “Royal Italian Opera House,” and operas in any other original language, including French, German, Russian, and English, needed to be translated into Italian before they could be performed there (Temperley 1989). As McAllister notes, English performers even adopted Italian pseudonyms in the hopes of elevating their status to that of the most

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famous and successful Italian nationals in the industry, such as Giuseppe Verdi, Grisi, Mario, and Costa.2 While Italian opera stars were lauded on the stage during this period, Italian organ grinders found themselves increasingly under attack. The first article to complain about the noise of Italian barrel organs was published by the Times in 1820; by the 1840s, the organ grinder was causing regular disturbance in the periodical press (Sponza 1988). As McAllister details, Punch magazine, in particular, led a vicious campaign against organ grinders that reached fever pitch in the 1860s, featuring titles such as “Italian Persecution,” “Our Organ-­ Grinding Tyrants,” and “Popish Organ Nuisance” alongside xenophobic cartoons illustrated by John Leech (McAllister 2013). “Solutions” to deal with migrant organ grinders, proposed by the press and the public alike, also began to escalate, ranging from verbal and legal threats to calls for vigilante action: “street musicians ought to be hanged in considerable numbers,” one journalist for the City Press suggests; “no Londoner should sally forth to business without first spiking, or hanging, or shooting one of the howlers in the streets” (1864, 110). The amplification of the debates around the organ nuisance in the 1850s and 1860s corresponds with an increasing number of Italian migrants arriving in Britain, many of whom, census figures suggest, took up organ grinding as their profession.3 But again, this alone does not explain the virulence of the campaigns, nor the kind of hostility that organ grinding, and organ grinders, generated. Living with other Italian workers in lodging houses usually maintained by padroni around Hatton Garden and Saffron Hill, Italian organ grinders were in many ways an insular community. Comparative to other migrant groups, their numbers also remained low (4608 souls living in Great Britain according to census figures), though a disproportionate number settled in London. The 1861 census records 2041 Italian migrants living in London, making up just 0.07% of the city’s total population. Moreover, as Lucio Sponza notes, in contrast to other immigrant groups, such as Irish migrants, Italian workers also did not typically compete with Britons in the labor market: [The Italian Poor] brought their original trades with them (as was the case with street performers and artisans), or they set up independent and ‘exotic’ activities (such as ice-cream making). Besides, though their number steadily increased but never reached the massive levels of the Jews. Their presence, therefore, both in qualitative and quantitative terms was sometimes regarded as an odd curiosity, sometimes as a superficial nuisance. (Sponza 1988, 7) 2  It is worth noting that while they fared better than street performers, nineteenth-century Italian opera stars were not totally exempt from xenophobia, and remained subject to the opportunities, but also critical challenges afforded by European migration. The famous composer Costa, for example, was refused membership to the exclusive Athenaeum club in 1868 based on his nationality. See McAllister 2013, 288. 3  Census figures from this period, for example, suggest that the number of Italian organ grinders performing on British streets rose from 872 in 1861 to almost 2300 by the end of the century. See Sponza 1988.

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Sponza’s use of the word “nuisance” here is seemingly unintentional, but it encapsulates the issue at hand, recalling and returning focus to the mid-century organ nuisance debates themselves. It was not the volume of Italian migration that perturbed Britons, in any proportional sense, but their volume of sound. Nuisance is a politically and aesthetically charged word. Following its nineteenth-­century legal definition, to be deemed a nuisance is to produce “that which is offensive to the senses, rendering the enjoyment of life and property uncomfortable” (Caitlin v. Valentine 1842). Nuisance law is a zoning power, a relation to property and space that is subtended by a desire for peace, order, and “the good life.” Nuisance, on the other hand, can be understood as a form of unwanted sensory encounter with external environments, as demonstrated by its diverse application in the nineteenth century to various industries, social bodies, and unruly matter including, but not limited to, feral animals, smog, organic waste, coal factories, bath chairs, and migrant musicians. “Fill[ing] the air with discordant and fragmentary mutilations and distortions of heaven-born melody,” as one Victorian commentator put it, Italian organ grinders disturbed and distort space, and made it unhomely (Smith 1853, 17). In short, they were sound out of place. The fraught relations between sound and space, and the peculiarly disorienting effect of organ grinding, are rendered clearly in the Punch illustrations by John Leech. In these illustrations, the barrel organ maintains an ominous, yet transformative, power, wielded by grotesque bodies on skewed streets. In an “Italian Quadrille” (Fig. 30.1), for example, an organ grinder is shown with ragged clothes and simian features, while “Foreign Enlistment” (Fig.  30.2) depicts a mass group of disreputable-looking organ grinders who can be identified as Italian by their instruments, unkempt beards, and broad-rimmed Savoyard hats. In “Faust and the Organ-Fiends” (Fig. 30.3), Leech depicts a vista “from a study window” in which eleven Italian organ grinders linger along an otherwise peaceful London street. An insect also features in the middle ground of the illustration, a marker of plague and infestation, which Leech implies is shared with the contaminating influence of organ noise. Sketched “from a study window,” however, Leech’s illustration also suggests concerns for his own “being out of place.” Looking out at a long line of organ grinders, the distinction between subject and object becomes fluid and indeterminate; one grinder stares directly at the viewer, signifying the ongoing disruption of social and sonic order. Raised above the street from the vantage point of a study window, Leech nevertheless remains outnumbered by the “organ-fiends” and may yet be tempted into a Faustian bargain to achieve the quiet that he desperately seeks.

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Fig. 30.1  “The Italian Quadrille,” illus. John Leech, Punch 36 (1859): 226

Vulgar Melodies: The Italian Barrel Organ in Victorian Fiction Leech’s illustrations, alongside the various social commentaries, newspaper articles, ethnographic accounts, and letters of complaint that made up the mid-­ century organ nuisance discourses, can be conceived of as an attempt to give orderly form, via tables, statistics, anecdotes, images, and text, to a community historically rendered as itinerant, dissonant, and dangerously formless. The nineteenth-century novel on the other hand offers a more capacious representational space in which to map out a variety of shifting Victorian responses to

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Fig. 30.2  “Foreign Enlistment,” illus. John Leech, Punch, 27 (1854): 262

the dislocating experience of intra-European migration and to the various social and sonic upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century. Typically, in nineteenth-century fiction, the Italian barrel organ is associated with communities that are more likely to find themselves outside: the working-­ classes, the poor, the homeless, and the unemployed. In a number of novels, street music becomes a shorthand for social class. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), for example, Fanny Price, the poor relation of the cruel aristocratic Bertrams, is reminded by her brother William how they used to dance together as children “when the hand-organ was in the street” (196). Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) also depicts barrel organ music as a form of working-­ class entertainment, with Miss Benson and Sally remembering how they danced to a “lively tune on the street-organs” (168). In these instances, migrant music is shown in a positive light, generating brief moments of joy and connection amongst characters and communities more susceptible to hardship and isolation. Dickens likewise aligns the barrel organ with simple but honest pleasures, as well as with characters who have been struck by misfortune. In Little Dorrit, his most extra-national novel, Mr. Nandy, “a poor little reedy piping old gentleman,” entertains his daughter by singing some “pale and vapid little songs”: “he would discharge himself of these ditties, like a weak, little, broken barrel-­ organ, ground by a baby” (Dickens 1857, 386–387). To Nandy’s daughter Mrs. Plornish, however, these “internal flutterings and chirpings” have greater

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Fig. 30.3  “Faust and the Organ Grinders,” illus. John Leech, Punch, 46 (1863): 53

emotional resonance than any Italian “Opera” (387). Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White (1860) also uses the figure of the migrant organ grinder to satirize class distinctions imposed on Victorian society. The novel stages a brief encounter between the villainous Italian political émigré, Count Fosco, who is on his way to see Lucrezia Borgia at the opera, and a compatriot organ grinder

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and his “miserable little shrivelled monkey” (Collins 1860, 581). Ignoring the “piteous pleas” of the organ grinder, Fosco, “with grotesque tenderness,” breaks bread with the monkey instead “in the sacred name of humanity” (581). The passage emphasizes Fosco’s ruthlessness, underlined by his choice of Italianate operatic fare, and evokes a xenophobic slippage between organ grinder and monkey, yet there is also a subtle jab at Fosco’s own status as immigrant, through vague descriptions of the two men simply as “Italian(s)” standing “before the shop” (581). Marian Holcombe, earlier in the novel, has also raised this connection, describing Fosco as having “all the dexterities of an organ-boy in managing his white mice” (223). The comparison between the two migrant figures (and the monkey) is sharpened further in the first American edition of the novel, published by Harper and Brothers, via an illustration by John McLenan (Fig. 30.4). The organ grinder and his monkey wear shabby long coats and hats in the Savoyard style, while Fosco is dressed in a top hat and tails for the opera; yet they are nevertheless strikingly similar, and the implication is that these are just the cultural trappings of society. Fosco may have the financial, social, and cultural capital to move between the genteel spaces of Victorian polite society, yet like the organ grinder, he is nevertheless marked as a foreign outsider. Rather than using the Italian barrel organ as a sign of distance and difference, George Gissing deploys organ music to transport his reader into the middle of other social worlds. In Workers in the Dawn (1880), for example, Gissing’s working-class protagonist Arthur Golding enjoys “hackneyed street ditties” performed by an Italian barrel organ, “partly because it was almost the only kind of music he ever heard, partly because it recalled to him many happy hours of his childhood, when his toil in Little St Andrew Street had been lightened by some heaven-sent organ grinder’s strains” (Gissing 1880, 37). Emphasizing the cyclical and inescapable nature of life for those trapped in a system of poverty, Golding watches a “little band of miserably clad children” who avail “themselves of the Italian’s good offices to enjoy a dance on the street” like Golding himself had once done (37). In Thyrza (1887), another one of Gissing’s working-class heroes, Gilbert Grail is similarly depicted walking through a slum area of London when an Italian “street organ began to play in front of a public house.” As Grail stops to listen, the narrator interrupts the flow of the narrative to directly address the reader: Do you know that music of the obscure ways, to which children dance? Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears’ affliction beneath your windows in the square. To hear it aright you must stand in the darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-­ human. Then you will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be half revealed. (Gissing 1887, 111)

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Fig. 30.4  Fosco and the Organ Grinder, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White [1860], American edition, illus. John McLenan (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865)

As Gissing’s narrator suggests, the barrel organ maintains a peculiarly affective power, entangled with notions of space. Played beneath the windows in a well-­ to-­do square, the music of the barrel organ is a nuisance, a grating “affliction” for middle-class ears. Yet heard in London’s working-class districts, the barrel organ inspires sympathy, rather than distaste, and throws light on the city’s poorest quarters, making visible its joys and sorrows, and “giving voice” to communities that are supposedly unable to advocate for themselves. In both novels, street music is part of authentic urban experience, and an opportunity for transformative encounter with new social and sensory environments. Sound situates the hearer within the thick of social existences, something that Thyrza

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suggests other sensory affects would be unable to do. Sight, for example, is shown to be limited, represented by the descriptions of the working-class neighborhood as a “dim burrow” shrouded in “darkness” and composed of “blear-eyed houses.” If the figure of the Italian organ grinder appears as a minor, or transitory, character in the examples given by Collins, Gissing, and Gaskell, George Manville Fenn’s 1890 novel Lady Maude’s Mania: A Tragedy in High Life (1890) offers a more sustained engagement with migrant organ grinding. Fenn’s work is little read now, but in his time, he was a prolific and popular author, most known for writing juvenile adventure fiction. Set in London amongst British high society, Lady Maude’s Mania is an outlier in Fenn’s literary oeuvre, focused not on the grand adventures and outward journeys of boy heroes to the colonies but reflecting instead on the inward movements of working-class European migrants into Britain and the effect that these migrations have on Victorian social life. As its subtitle suggests, Lady Maude is a social satire written in the melodramatic mode, combining many of the tropes and expectations of that form to explore the tensions of class, gender, and nationality in nineteenth-century high society. Music is also an integral part of its narrative rhythm, content, and structure—its overall melos—and is used in a similar manner to its theatrical counterpart: as a means to propel the action, elicit and heighten emotion, convey mood changes, and reveal the intents and moral value of characters (Vorachek 2004; Piasani 2014). Few, if any, literary scholars have analyzed Lady Maude. In the absence of a long plot summary, I offer a contemporary review of the novel, published in The Critic magazine: “Lady Maude’s Mania” by George Manville Fenn, is a kind of ride-to-hounds book, full of lively, breezy incident, the game being a rich husband. All the situations, characters, and intrigues are on this one theme, and if it had not been for a very absurd ruse, poor Lady Maude would, like her sister before her, have been sacrificed to her mother’s sordid ambitions. As it was, however, an absorbing devotion to Italian hand-organ music saved her from impending doom. The story is humorously and lightly told, and Lady Maude, while she may not be the first heroine to be wooed to the tune of the prison song in “Trovatore” is perhaps the only one who carried her admiration so far as to marry the grinder thereof. (1891, 109)

This review accurately captures the light-hearted tone of the novel, as well as the importance of Italian organ music to the narrative which, as the author suggests, saves Lady Maude from “impending doom” by providing a furtive means to communicate with her lover despite her being under house arrest. The reviewer inaccurately recalls, however, that Maude’s lover is the organ grinder himself, an Italian migrant named Luigi Malsano. Though Malsano assists Maude in her escape, the man that she actually marries is a middle-class Englishman named Charley Melton. The confusion is a deliberate machination on Fenn’s part, who deploys the seductive promise of music to bait readerly

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expectations that Maude will fall in love with Malsano, before switching to the less subversive romantic choice—the Englishman Melton—at the final moment. Yet the reviewer’s misremembering of the novel’s conclusion, made blatantly and offhandedly, serves as a reminder of how quickly melodramatic fiction is often dismissed as hackneyed and superficial, and how often migrant characters in nineteenth-century fiction are pigeonholed into categories or stock types: the thief, the inappropriate love interest, the insidious foreign influence. From the outset, the novel signals Malsano’s more complex role within the narrative, as well as indicating the importance of migrant music-making. Lady Maude is bookended by the sounds of organ grinding, registered in both the narrative’s opening and closing dialogues. Fenn repeats this framing strategy throughout text, with several chapters beginning or ending with barrel organ music. This narrative pattern recalls the repetitive nature of organ grinding itself, evoking the instrument’s mechanical loops, which in turn contributes to the overall claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel. Yet organ music also proves to be a generative effect in the text, providing a sonic structure that connects the closeted action of the upper-class domestic space with vibrant social worlds below. In the first lines of the novel, for example, Maude’s father and brother exclaim: “Confound those organs!” said the Earl of Barmouth. “And frustrate their grinders,” cried Viscount Diphoos. “They are such a nuisance, my boy”. (Fenn 1890, 3)

Immediately, the novel raises the pervasive quality of sound, and its nature, as nuisance, but in a manner that also calls attention to the artificial structures of Victorian social codes. The event that Malsano’s grinding intrudes upon is the forced nuptials of Maude’s sister Diana to a wealthy colonial administrator. Marriage in the text is presented as a form of social and economic mobility, but one that can also be disorientating. After the nuptials, Diana is described as weeping before “being carried towards Charing Cross en route for Brindisi— the Suez Canal—India—right away out of the country and out of this story, leaving the stage clear for her sister’s important scene” (33). Juxtaposing the faux harmony of the wedding inside the family home with the tinny strains of the Italian barrel organ outside on the streets, the novel stages a deliberate opposition between emigration and immigration, absence and presence, female and male, and in doing so, questions the authenticity of such binaries. Malsano the organ grinder, though a foreign nuisance, nevertheless maintains his agency and remains resident throughout the narrative. Diana, on the other hand, is whisked away and silenced. The intersections between gender, sound, and power in the novel are also explored in the relationship between Malsano and Lady Maude, to whom Malsano gains access via his music. The organ grinder’s plaintive melodies, played under Maude’s window, become her sole connection to the outside world, having been placed under house arrest by her family. Through a sonic

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network of songs and soulful whispers, the novel parodies the sanctity of the Victorian domestic sphere and reroutes the directionality of British familial and class-driven power dynamics. Unbeknownst to her family, the barrel organ becomes Maude’s obsession—the focus of her titular mania—and she begins to refuse food and company. Through the focus on a woman experiencing a mental breakdown during domestic imprisonment, the novel prefigures many of the themes evoked later in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Yet it is not aesthetic wall patterns, but the uncanny repetitions of the barrel organ that come to symbolize the oppressive structures of society in which Maude finds herself. In turn, Maude’s frustrations align with the nuisance power of the barrel organ: wasted, vibrating female energy that is full of insurgent potential, yet ultimately restricted by patriarchal structures. Yet the barrel organ also presents Maude with a way out of her predicament. Using the refrains of particular songs as a secret code, Maude and Malsano plot her escape; when the day comes, Maude absconds from her family home dressed in Malsano’s organ-grinder’s garb and elopes with her English lover to Italy. Wearing the costume of the Italian organ grinder, Maude is able to don the unrestricted mobility of migrant figures, moving undetected through the streets and transgressing gendered, class-driven, and eventually even geographical boundaries.4 Foreignness is likewise shown to be a malleable concept, something one can co-opt in order to escape social expectations, in turn exploding the notion that to be a nuisance is limited to one ethnic or social identity. At the conclusion of the novel, social (dis)order is restored: Maude and her new husband Melton are eventually discovered in Italy by Maude’s family, who ultimately give the couple their blessing. Having provided the conditions for Maude’s liberation, Malsano, the Italian organ grinder, disappears from the narrative and is not mentioned again. The music of the Italian barrel organ, on the other hand, continues. The novel’s final few sentences read: Just then an organ sounded in the square, and his lordship [the Earl of Barmouth] stopped his ears. “No, no gov’nor, it’s only music, and I like that. Here’s Maude,” [Viscount Diphoos] said, filling his glass, “and may she never more be mad”. (Fenn 1890, 277)

Reconciled at last as “music” rather than as nuisance, the sounds of the Italian barrel organ appear to signal future harmony for Maude and her family, and act as a curtain call for Fenn’s melodrama in “High Life.” Recalling the opening dialogue, marriage plot, and organ music, however, the novel’s concluding chapter in truth ends on an ominous note. Though Maude has married a man that she loves, ultimately the marriage will put restrictions upon her life and her 4  Fenn may have been inspired by real examples of “cross-cultural dressing,” a technique used by middle-class investigative journalists to gain access to working-class and migrant neighborhoods, including by several female journalists in the 1880s and 1890s who disguised themselves as Italian organ grinders. See Vorachek 2012.

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freedoms will never be as great as the unchecked mobility she experienced in the guise of the organ grinder. The uncanny mechanical loops of the barrel organ thus raise the superficiality of the novel’s happy ending and suggest that Maude might nevertheless be stifled in her new existence. Malsano, on the other hand, remains mobile, able to cross and recross borders physically and sonically. Similarly, the nuisance power of his barrel organ ensures he won’t be forgotten, and his influence on the text reverberates even after Fenn’s novel has come to a close.

Coda On listening to historical forms of musical mobilities, it becomes clear how often musical performance complicates, rather than enforces, cultural identities. Discussing the case of Britain and Italy, for example, Manfred Pfister argues that these two nations can only be understood in key with one another: ‘“Britishness’ and Italianità […] are staged within each culture […] in joint performances of difference across cultural borders” (2008, 10). As Pfister suggests, musical mobilities are in constant improvisation: they do not simply involve the circulation of peoples, performances, melodies, and instruments, but they are also a matter of intercultural transaction that generate new forms of interconnection, alongside modes of dissonance. In the context of the nineteenth-­century organ nuisance debates, migrant music-making is revealed to have manifold significations for migrant and host communities alike, with the Italian organ grinder emerging across various discourses as a disconcerting figure, but never a silent one. Nineteenth-century legislation against “public nuisances” sought to curb the freedoms of various social actors, but the violence and restrictions on movement effected by these measures fell unevenly on those who were already mobile and displaced: migrant, refugee, and traveler communities, perceived to be “non-citizens.” Yet nuisance—as a form of disturbance or mode of  boundary-crossing—also materializes a disagreement between a group and an existing order, and thus maintains political potential. When nuisance is imagined  - or heard  - in Victorian fiction, for example, it tends to draw attention to the inadequacies of the nineteenth-century British state. Novels by Dickens, Gissing, Collins, and Fenn all draw on the discordant noise of Italian barrel organs to expose the failures of Victorian liberal policies to protect at-risk communities from harm, and to signify that the environments one normally finds refuge in—whether physical, political, social, or economic— are in some way damaged. Listening to the refrains of the Italian barrel organ in this writing thus exposes the uneven rhythms of the nineteenth-century quotidien, but it also resituates the poor itinerant Italian musician within nineteenth-­century histories of music and migration, shifting the working-class organ grinder from a position of liminality on the streets, into the heart of Victorian text.

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Bibliography Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press. Austen, Jane. 1814. Mansfield Park. 2008 edn. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Babbage, Charles. 1864. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green. Baune, Victor. 1864. Letter to M.T. Bass, 4th May 1864. In Street Music in the Metropolis: Correspondence and Observations on the Existing Law and Proposed Amendments, ed. Michael T. Bass. London: John Murray. Collins, Wilkie. 1860. The Woman in White. 1996 edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickens, Charles. 1857. Little Dorrit. 2003 edn. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. ———. 1864. Letter to M.T. Bass, Esq. M.P. In Street Music in the Metropolis: Correspondence and Observations on the Existing Law and Proposed Amendments, ed. Michael T. Bass. London: John Murray. Douglas, Mary. 1975. Purity and Danger. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fenn, George Manville. 1890. Lady Maude’s Mania: A Tragedy in High Life. New York: John W Lovell. Franklin, Seb. 2021. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. London: University of Minnesota Press. Gallenga, Antonio [L. Mariotti]. 1846. Morello: The Organ Boy’s Progress. In The Blackgown Papers, Vol 2. London: Wiley & Putnam. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1853. Ruth. 2011 edn. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. Gissing, George, 1880. Workers in the Dawn. London: Remington and Co. ———. 1887. Thryza: A Tale. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Johnson, Bruce. 2018. From Music to Noise: The Decline of Street Music. NineteenthCentury Music Review 15 (1): 67–78. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147940981 700009X. Losseff, Nicky, and Sophie Fuller, eds. 2004. The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge. McAllister, AnneMarie. 2013. Xenophobia on the Streets of London: Punch’s Campaign against Italian Organ-Grinders, 1854–1864. In Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, ed. Marlene Tromp, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Palazzetti, Nicolò. 2021. From Street Musicians to Divas. Italian Musical Migration to London in the Age of Diaspora. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 26 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2020.1855802. Parker, Roger. 2001. The Opera Industry. In The Cambridge History of NineteenthCentury Music, vol. 1, ed. Jim Samson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pfister, Manfred. 2008. Introduction: Performing National Identity. In Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, ed. Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel. Amsterdam: Rodophi Press. Piasani, Michael V. 2014. Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Picker, John. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Recent Fiction”. 1891. The Critic, February 28, 1891. Smith, Charles Manby. 1853. Curiosities of London Life: or Phases Psychological and Social of the Great Metropolis. London: William and Frederick G. Cash.

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Sponza, Lucio. 1988. Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Britain: Realities and Images. Leicester: Leicester University Press. “Street Music”. 1864. City Press, June 4th, 1864. In Street Music in the Metropolis: Correspondence and Observations on the Existing Law and Proposed Amendments, ed. Michael T. Bass. London: John Murray. Temperley, Nicholas. 1989. Introduction: The State of Research on Victorian Music. In The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vorachek, Laura. 2004. Female Performances: Melodramatic Music Conventions and The Woman in White. In The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, ed. Nicky Losseff and Sophie Fuller. London: Routledge. ———. 2012. Playing Italian: Cross-Cultural Dress and Investigative Journalism at the Fin de Siècle. Victorian Periodicals Review 45 (4): 406–435. https://doi. org/10.1353/vpr.2012.0038. Williams, Gavin T. 2017. Engine Noise and Artificial Intelligence: Babbage’s London. In Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851, ed. James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart, 203–225. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zucchi, John E. 1992. The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

CHAPTER 31

Restorying the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange and the Partition of India and Palestine Through Graphic Narrative: Hand-Drawn Lines, Embroidered Histories, Portable Homelands Kristina Gedgaudaitė

Of Threads and Borders Kate Evans’s Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017) is only one of many graphic narratives that appeared in response to the so-called refugee crisis, which reached its peak in Europe in the summer of 2015 (see, for example, Glidden 2016, Colfer et  al. 2018, Brown 2021, PositiveNegatives n.d.). It documents the experiences of the author as a volunteer at the refugee camp of the French town of Calais, also known as the Jungle, that served as an entry point for many refugees who hoped to cross from Europe to the UK.  Her account begins on the road leading to the camp: “The first thing we see … White fences stream along the highway. Metres high. Miles long,” tells Evans (2017, 7, ellipsis in the original). A fence at a border is by now a familiar sight in Europe and beyond, but the image is striking in Evans’s narrative because the wall appears as “smooth steel lacework” (Evans 2017, 7) seamlessly woven together by women in nineteenth-century attire (Fig. 31.1).

K. Gedgaudaitė (*) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_31

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Fig. 31.1  From Kate Evans’s Threads (2017), London: Verso, pp. 6–7

While today it is known as a point of crossing, in the nineteenth century, Calais was one of the major centers of lacemaking. This history is incorporated into the graphic narrative by filling up the “gutters,” that is spaces between panels, with different patterns of lace, “material that actually comes threedimensionally off the page” (Davis 2017, 7). As we follow Evans on her journey to the Calais refugee camp, we get to know the life stories of some people who are waiting for their chance to cross the Channel: while they build shelters, share meals, and look through family photographs, lace patterns fill out the pages narrating their stories. This maneuver positions the stories within the wider framework of European colonialism and privilege with which the lace industry has been traditionally associated (Earle 2020). Yet what I would like to suggest is that the neat lace patterns are undone through Evans’s experiences and encounters to tell a different (hi)story, when strips of lace are used to connect panels of different shapes and sizes narrating those experiences as patchwork. Different moments in time are stitched together into the narrative through “little interactions, points of connection, life’s threads crossing” (Evans 2017, 8).1 Thus lace, while it might be associated with colonialism and privilege, is repurposed in this graphic novel to draw connections rather than emphasize divides. In support of this argument, commenting on her aesthetic choice to incorporate fragments of lace into the graphic novel, Evans said that 1  This patchwork aesthetic is replicated through Evans’s lettering, that resembles a bricolage from newspaper clippings brought together on the page line by line.

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when she had the idea, she began collecting different patterns in a file titled “no borders” (Davis 2017, 8). Using lace patterns as Evans does “troubles ways of knowing that are mainly about revealing structures and norms, and instead proposes a mode of producing knowledge through crafting and making” (Lindström and Ståhl 2018, 67). Lace patterns enhance the graphic novel’s materiality and, through this, bring forth the affective qualities of Evans’s narrative, encouraging readers to touch and be touched by the story, at the same time as drawing attention to its seams. It brings to the fore questions of what is stitched together in the process of telling this story and how this is done. Taking its cue from the contemporary migration “crisis” in Europe and the labor that goes into making and breaking Europe’s border regime, this chapter invites us to reconsider histories of forced migration through the lens offered by the medium of comics.2 As argued elsewhere, “a critical tool for the maintenance of this [border regime] system is a widespread regime of unseeing, which evacuates from public space and public scrutiny the traces not only of displaceable bodies and their material cultures but of the border mechanisms themselves—and, crucially, their histories” (Stroebel and Gedgaudaite 2022, xii). In this chapter, I unravel one thread of this history by examining the legacies of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey ratified in 1923, which constituted the first compulsory exchange in modern history. I further probe the paradigm that the exchange bequeathed to forced displacement after World War II via the case studies of population transfers that occurred in the aftermath of the partition of India and Palestine. While both of the latter examples take us to territories outside Europe, they rely on a model prevalent in Europe and are intertwined with European colonialism and the process of decolonization (Ther 2014).3 As this chapter will go on to show, reading the histories of forced migration through comics and attending to the ways in which the materiality of this narrative form can be used to document refugee experiences holds the power to disrupt, if ever so slightly, the regimes of unseeing that constitute past and present practices of bordering. When reflecting on the story she tells in Threads, Evans states that ultimately it is only “a tiny piece of a much bigger story, such an inadequate thread in a much, much bigger tapestry” (Davis 2017, 5). Yet the aesthetic power of such small stories and the encounters they document lies in opening a different perspective on the larger story they are part of, enabling us to see beyond the perpetual crisis narratives into which they are frequently cast.

2  The definition of the graphic novel is a contested one (García 2015). Here I employ the term “comics” to refer to the medium, and “graphic novels” to refer to book-length narratives that employ the medium to tell their story. I use the term “graphic narrative” to refer to both shortand long-form comics. 3  The fact that the British statesman Lord Curzon was at the center of all the three cases analyzed here further supports the argument that it was under the influence of European models and concepts that population transfers were executed.

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The Nation-State and Its Others: Exchange, Transfer, Partition When the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in January 1923, it ratified the obligatory exchange between Muslims living in Greece, and Orthodox Christians living in Turkey (with few exceptions and long-lasting consequences, see Hirschon 1998 [1989], 2003). Religion was used as a basis on which to conduct the exchange, as it was the organizing principle of different communities in the Ottoman Empire. Yet within the terms of the Treaty itself this religious identity was quickly transformed into an ethnic identity. Thus “the matter to be solved at Lausanne was not just ‘the unmixing of populations,’ to use the infamous phrase of High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, but in fact the making of populations” (Stroebel and Gedgaudaite 2022, xiii). While it was the first compulsory population exchange in modern history, executed with the support of international authority, namely the League of Nations, it was not unique but rather inaugurated a world-order of demographic engineering based on racialized biopolitics (Iğsız 2018), which was regarded as a necessary precondition to ensure national order, stability, and modernization. Bruce Clark writes of the Lausanne agreement: “it was taken as a proof that it was possible, both politically and morally, to undertake huge exercises in ethnic engineering, and proclaim them a success” (Clark 2007, xii). In the decade that followed, the catchword “Lausanne” served as a reference point for almost a dozen international treaties in which massive population shifts were negotiated and regulated (Ther 2019, 66–67). Even when “those upheavals were not decreed by any international agreement […] the Greek-­ Turkish example loomed large in later discussions on how to respond, and of how far the mass population movements were an inevitable consequence of old empires collapsing” (Clark 2007, xiii). Since such cases of population transfers, exchanges, and partitions are tightly linked to nation-building processes within their respective countries, comparative approaches are rare, and even more so when it comes to the legacies of these displacements (as an example, see Robson 2017, Mohanram and Raychaudhuri 2019, Ther 2019). Apart from the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, another two examples analyzed in this chapter pertain to the partition of India and Palestine. While the Greco-Turkish exchange was the first of its kind, the partition of India in 1947 constituted the largest population transfer in modern history, affecting over 12 million people (Talbot and Singh 2009). Its timeline, however, extends both before and beyond 1947, especially considering the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the establishment of Bangladesh in 1971. In 1947, as British colonial power withdrew, the borders were drawn hastily in six weeks, and unleashed unprecedented communal violence, leading to the deaths and displacement of millions. After the partition, however, memories of partition violence were displaced in the national narrative by emphasis on the end of colonial rule and establishment of modern independent nation-states (Mohanram and Raychaudhuri 2019, xiii–xiv). More recently, partition has been discussed

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as “unfinished, messy, and protracted, continuing to influence the identities of those who were the most affected by the division” (Roy 2013, 8–9). If the Treaty of Lausanne aimed to “fix” certain identities in a geographical space demarcated by the border, in the case of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, [i]dentities were produced not so much by the physical location of the border but more due to India and Pakistan’s attempt to control the movement of border crossers [by means of] a document regime of passports, visas, migration certificates, and refugee slips which aimed to count and classify border crossers into different categories of belonging vis-à-vis the new nation states. (Roy 2013, 19)

The partition of Palestine, the final example discussed in this chapter, is tied to the disintegration of both the Ottoman and British Empires. Although Jewish settlers had been moving to Palestine since the end of the nineteenth century, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain promised the Jews their own “national home” in Palestine in response to the pogroms in Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of World War I and until 1948, Palestine was under the British Mandate, which supported promises made under Balfour. Some rebellions opposing this policy ensued in several towns, but between 1936 and 1939, Arabs across Palestine revolted, leading to widespread riots and pogroms. As a solution to this violent conflict, the Peel Commission made a proposal for the partition of Palestine in 1937 as a “chance for ultimate peace” (League of Nations 1937). They made direct reference to the Greco-Turkish population exchange as a successful precedent in their proposal: A precedent is afforded by the exchange effected between the Greek and Turkish populations on the morrow of the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 […] In view of the present antagonism between the races and of the manifest advantage to both of them for reducing the opportunities of future friction to the utmost, it is to be hoped that the Arab and the Jewish leaders might show the same high statesmanship as that of the Turks and the Greeks and make the same bold decision for the sake of peace. (League of Nations 1937)

Rejected at the time, partition of the territory was proposed again by the UN in 1947 along the same lines as the Peel Commission. The proposal was rejected once again, unleashing violence and displacement that continues until the present day, with the creation of five million Palestinian refugees. One important difference emerges when the Palestinian case is considered in the context of the Greco-Turkish exchange of populations and the partition of India: while in latter cases the state sought measures to integrate refugees and grant them citizenship, Palestinian refugees were mostly left stateless “at the mercy of regional powers and their revisionist plans” (Ther 2014, 200).4 Palestinian history and 4  It is only in 2012 that the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution 67/19 recognized Palestine as a “non-member observer state,” which was taken as recognition of Palestinian sovereignty.

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identity, in turn, have been “systematically unmapped out of time and space” (Saloul 2012, 2). A note on terminology is due here. In this chapter, I use the terms “forced displacement” and “population transfer” when referring comparatively to my three case studies. In the context of Greece and Turkey, however, the term “population exchange” is most commonly used, and hence I employ this term when referring to this context. At the same time, it is important to mention that many viewed population exchange as a necessary step to ensure the security of national borders negotiated at Lausanne. In the contexts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the term partition is commonly used to refer to both partitioning of territories and the forced displacement of people living in those territories, and I use it accordingly in this chapter. Finally, legal documents in relation to Israel and Palestine also speak of the partition of territories as well as of peoples. The important point to emphasize here is that despite different terminologies, in all three cases, the plans for division of territories went hand-­ in-­hand with the forced displacement of people. Bringing into dialogue the legacies of different forced displacements offers an opportunity for redrawing the mental maps within which they are normally lodged. Each retelling of what happened holds the possibility of change in the ways these events are viewed in the present (Oikonomou 2020). Re-storying forced displacement through a comparative framework can help us see with greater clarity both the uniqueness of each historical event and some common features underlying them. These include the short-term and long-term consequences of border-making that gave rise to these displacements, and the ways in which people navigated and continue to navigate those consequences until the present day. Cultural media have an important role to play in reshaping these stories.

“Drawing to Tell”… and Documenting to Remember The comparative task in this chapter is carried out through a close reading of three different graphic narratives, viewing them as vehicles of remembrance, witnessing, and archiving. Comics critic Hilary Chute (2016) links the rise of documentary comics as a means of “drawing to tell” to an earlier function of drawing before the advent of the camera. She traces the emergence of such graphic narratives to a post-World War II context, focusing mainly on the legacies of the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And while her examples are different, the postwar timeframe that Chute engages also pertains to the legacies of forced displacement analyzed in this chapter. Chute views comics as an antidote to oversaturated media images that can offer “an absorptive intimacy with their narratives while defamiliarizing the received images of history” (Chute 2016, 141–142). The absorptive intimacy Chute mentions arises through engagement with the materiality of comics form. Comics as a form of knowledge (Barry 2008; Sousanis 2015; Davis 2020) can serve as a template to explore several aspects at the core of forced displacement. As sequential art, comics put pressure on traditional notions of time and

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can be used to examine what does not fit neatly into linear chronology (Chute 2016, 4). As a form that relies on structural arrangement of panels, grids, and gutters, comics can make an intervention into debates about border-making and border-breaking at the time of population transfers. As drawn lines leaving a visible trace of one’s body on a page, comics form enables us to visualize displacement as an embodied form of knowledge (Gardner 2011). And as a type of archiving with focus on the ephemeral and the every day, it enables the preservation of traces of knowledge that might otherwise disappear (Gardner 2012). If memory is produced on multiple scales—intimate, local, regional, national, and transnational (Rigney 2021, 12)—comics as a form that weaves together the daily and the political, the personal and the collective, the mundane and the historical is apt for recording experiences at such junctures. Comics artists’ formal experimentation, pushing the medium to its limits and looking for new narrative possibilities, enables re-storying of violent historical events, such as forced displacement, bringing into public visibility experiences that do not make into official histories. Three graphic narratives analyzed in this chapter are Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou’s Small Lives (Mikres zoes, 2015),5 a brief story narrating the journey and settlement of one refugee family from the Greco-Turkish exchange; Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (2015), a graphic memoir recounting experiences of a Palestinian refugee growing up in a refugee camp in Lebanon; and an anthology of short graphic narratives, This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition (2013), which is mostly collaboratively written and edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh to narrate experiences of partition in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Despite their different techniques and formats, these three different works unite in the “generation of postmemory” (Hirsch 2012). In each case, the authors are the descendants of the displaced; they did not experience the events first-hand, but have been surrounded and influenced by the memories of those events to such an extent that they identify with them as their own. Thus, memories narrated within those graphic narratives are mediated experiences, facilitated by family stories and reliant on archival materials to fill in the gaps where personal memories cannot reach. These stories, nonetheless, have an important role to play in opening the conversation on the legacies of displacement that continue to shape identities and notions of belonging long after redrawing political maps and dividing the populations of their territories.

Small Lives: Their Storylines and Archives It’s 1923. A group of refugees set up their tents in front of an ancient temple, unable to find shelter in an overcrowded town (Fig.  31.2). They reached Greece after several weeks of perilous journey from a village in the Black Sea littoral, which not all of them survived. Their region bore a long history of 5  I would like to thank Soloup for bringing Small Lives to my attention while in conversation about his own landmark graphic novel Aivali, addressing the legacies of the Greco-Turkish War, which I discuss elsewhere (Gedgaudaitė 2021).

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Fig. 31.2  Top panel: Asia Minor refugee camp at the Temple of Hephaestus, reproduced here from archival photograph. Bottom panel: Protest against the arrival of refugees. The banners read “Burn the Turkish spawns” and “Gallows.” From Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou’s Small Lives, Mytilene: Enati Diastasi, p. 27

Greek presence, and the refugees still spoke a Greek dialect that some say bore traces of ancient times. On embarking the ships bound for Greece, these refugees believed that they were returning to their homeland, never mind that for most of them it was the first time ever they would have stepped on Greek soil. Upon arrival, they were granted Greek citizenship. And yet the locals of Greece regarded them with suspicion, at times even contempt. They were not welcome: “Burn the Turkish spawns,” “Gallows,” angry protesters demonstrated in the streets. The scene comes from the graphic narrative Small Lives, a collaborative project of Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou. As the title

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implies, it is a small story, a 32-page narrative, reminiscent of the fanzine format. The image it presents reproduces a well-known archival photograph taken at the Temple of Hephaestus, Athens, picturing the refugee camp established there following the 1922 Greek army’s defeat in Asia Minor. Comics is an inherently archival form “selecting, sorting, and containing in boxes” (Chute 2016, 192). As such, it enables the integration of documents as evidence of the past, at the same time creating a public archive of sorts once the comic is published (cf. Gedgaudaitė 2021, 106–107). Here it acts as counter-­memory: while the site of this refugee camp is well-known through circulating archival photographs, the second image, depicting the protest against refugees, is much less so; the discrimination that Asia Minor refugees endured upon arrival, while it is also known, is frequently erased from public memory and discourse (Kritikos 2021). The juxtaposition of these two images offers an opportunity to bring this uncomfortable topic back into public view.6, 7 Each time I returned to the panels of this graphic narrative, they moved me in ways a photograph did not. There was something in their hand-drawn lines and gentle watercolors that I could not pinpoint, and yet it drew me to linger and to return to Small Lives again and again. I felt that it was the hand-drawn line itself where the affective power of this narrative resided. As Jared Gardner writes: “The physical labor of storytelling is always visible in graphic narrative […] the line compels a physical, bodily encounter with an imagined scene of embodied enunciation” (2011: 65). Embodied practices of comics production and consumption and the tactile dimensions of comics narrative result in what Katlin Orbán (2018), following Alois Riegl, calls haptic visuality. Haptic visuality invites a near-view of comics surfaces and tactile handling of boxed objects; it fosters exploratory modes of looking at images that are no longer just representations but material objects. By drawing attention to their own materiality in this way, comics diverge from photography: rather than carriers of information as traces of “having-been-­ there” (Barthes 1977, 44), comics images record “while also questioning the very project of what it means to document, to archive, to inscribe” (Chute 2016, 7). The narrative in Small Lives documents the journey of one refugee family from Asia Minor to Greece: the native village left behind, the journey by boat into Greece, and their hardships while on the lookout for a place in which to settle. The narrative’s structure is episodic, and its syncopated pace is reminiscent of the fragmented memories that reach subsequent generations: with many gaps in the story, it is the task of the generations that come after the events to weave fragments of stories they inherited into a narrative. Sometimes they do so by filling in gaps through a recourse to archival sources; other times they let the drawn line speak to, touch, and move readers in their own search for what might lie behind narrative silences. 6  The sketch of the refugee camp is based on the photograph by C. D. Morris, published in National Geographic 48:5, November 1925 (Hamilakis 2013, 158). 7  On the power of iconic images, see Hariman and Lucaites (2011 [2007]).

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Fig. 31.3  From Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou’s Small Lives, Mytilene: Enati Diastasi, p. 32

Elliptical and affective qualities of the narrative style ultimately lead readers in an open-ended journey of reckoning with the past by taking part in retelling what happened. The open-endedness is maintained throughout the graphic narrative up until the last image (Fig. 31.3). The refugee family, first settled on the island of Corfu, is relocating yet again to the village of Nevrokopi in northern Greece. As we see the family’s carriage disappear into the horizon, we don’t know what will happen next. We don’t even know if northern Greece will be their last stop or if their journey will continue, the way it did for many, as political refugees to Eastern Europe or the Middle East or as economic migrants to Germany or the USA.  Or perhaps they will take yet another, less-trodden route? By tracing this family’s small story, we are made witnesses to the larger story of border-making. We do not know what awaits the family at their new destination, but we do learn that they will settle in the house of other refugees who have relocated from Greece to Bulgaria.8

Borders, Timelines, Lines on a Page The border that partitioned India and Pakistan was drawn hastily in six weeks by a man who had never once visited the country. It unleashed unprecedented violence at the time and resulted in territorial disputes that persist until today. As well as dividing territories, borders perform important social and political functions in regulating national security, economic activities, and identity construction, and are sustained through performative and discursive practices that stretch into a borderscape beyond the dividing line (Brambilla et al. 2016). 8  On the ways in which refugee population has been used to hellenize contested Greek border territories, see Kontogiorgi (2006). On the assessment of Greek-Bulgarian exchange and the way it has been impacted by Greek-Turkish population exchange, see Jenne (2010, 132–135).

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Within this border regime, maps remain an issue of national significance. As summarized by Haimanti Roy: “Ironically, within post-1947 South Asia, accurate maps were largely non-existent because India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh restricted and continue to restrict public access to maps under claims of national security. Such cartographic anxieties, whose underlying fear is that of national disintegration, are clearly a legacy of the Partition” (2013, 18). The page layout of comics includes panel borders and grids that can be said to reproduce the architecture of containment of the border regimes (Rifkind 2020). At the same time, different aesthetic choices and formal experimentation can be used to expose, explore, and break those borders. Redrawing the borders of partition is one of the central aims of the anthology This Side, That Side, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh. As he writes in the introduction to the book, “[r]estorying Partition can never be easy. If one wants to avoid the usual revival of Mass Memory, one has to look beyond those maps lodged in our nervous systems that make nervous headlines on our televisions. To listen to the subsequent generations and the grandchildren and how they have negotiated maps that never got drawn” (Ghosh 2013, 12). The anthology is a collaborative project that brings together writers and artists from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (yet residing in many different places), to reflect on the legacies of partition. The 28 stories that comprise the collection encompass many voices, genres, and media to foreground the experiences of partition, constituting a rich resource through which to explore its legacies. Re-storying the mental maps of partition lies at the core of all the stories, and a large number of them engage the very physicality of the actual border: “perfect knife that slices through the earth / without the earth’s knowing, / severs and joins at the same instant, runs inconspicuously through modest households” (Haq and Puri 2013, 46–47). Dividing  the page, contrasting use of black and white, reproducing and manipulating maps: these are some of the devices the authors use to reflect on the legacies of partition. In many of the narratives, traditional panel arrangement is eschewed: frames break, panels are placed at odd angles, at times assuming the function of associative illustrations or replaced altogether by film stills or embroidered fabrics. Nina Sabnani’s “Know Directions Home?” illustrated through applique and motifs of suf embroidery from the region of Kutch is one such story (based on her short animation “The Stitches Speak”).9 It depicts experiences of Maru Meghwals, an itinerant pastoral community of the Banni grasslands, whose movements had to be arrested following partition (Payal and Sengupta 2020, 139). In the aftermath of the 1971 War between India and East Pakistan that led to the establishment of Bangladesh, their border village in Pakistan was annexed to India, and yet they were forced to flee and move further west to the region of Kutch (Fig. 31.4). The embroidered textile that we see reproduced on the page maps out the story of how the village community departed, while 9  The animation is available on Youtube via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfjReP7SlnA. Accessed 21 August 2022.

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Fig. 31.4  From Nina Sabnani’s “Know Directions Home?” in This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, New Delhi: Yoda Press, pp. 101–102

the text layout guides the readers in navigating this map. Upon arrival at the border, the villagers are denied entry into India, to which they respond by sitting down and refusing to move. A month passes by until the authorities finally bring them to India. Another eight years pass by until they are granted citizenship, leave the refugee camp, and begin to settle. Despite the agonizing stasis that characterizes much of this story, on the embroidered fabric reproduced here the narrative becomes dynamic: small human figures, animals, and objects disperse around the page, and zooming in and out on the same objects imbues the story with movement. The haptic visuality of the narrative enhanced through its embroidered texture invites readers’ eyes to wander and to linger on the story. A page unfolds all at once before our eyes as a piece of fabric and offers an opportunity for a less linear encounter with history. Mapping the story on an embroidered fabric that is reproduced as graphic narrative in This Side, That Side redraws not just the spatialities but also the temporalities of partition. In the words of Pramod K. Nayar, “[t]he denial of frames means that the reader can find no obvious position from which to view the historical event and suggests the illimitable and continuing impact of those events, even if they now exist only in memory” (2016, 490). Many of the narratives in the collection explore the ripple effects of the events of partition as

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they unfold into the present. More intimate maps of places that persevere in one’s memory and continue to shape who one is unfold through these stories. One of the most moving of such stories in the anthology is M. Hasan and Sukanya Ghosh’s “Making of a Poet.” The narrator of this graphic narrative goes from Bangladesh to India to meet a poet who had made the journey along the same trajectory when he was a young boy, but who had not been able to return since, as he did not have a passport or documents to prove he was born in Bangladesh. This is how the narrator describes their encounter: And as I looked at him talking to me with his smiling face, I could smell it in him. The Bangladesh inside him flowing like a small river, a very personal one, much cherished and well taken care of. 1957. He had travelled to India from Bangladesh as a small boy with his father, and life was never easy thereafter. Then, with some education and a job, he started writing: the things he had to do to survive made a poet out of him. (Fig. 31.5)

As the conversation continues, we find out that the poet’s writing is filled with the sights, places, and landscapes of northern Bangladesh. “How old were you when you went there?” asks the narrator at the end of the story. “These are places I always wanted to go to, but never could …” answers the poet (Hasan and Ghosh 2013, 145–146). This is a powerful claim. Following Ernst van Alphen, “If the cultural identity of the migrant is shaped in terms of imagined place, it means that this identity was not carried along wholesale from homeland to destination. It is, rather, actively created and recreated in an act of identification with the homeland,” an act that takes place in the present and is necessarily shaped by the time and space of that present (2002, 56). While borders map out divisions, in the anthology This Side, That Side, “aesthetics transcends map making” (Kumar 2016, 104) to accommodate what has never been drawn, and crafts a homeland as a historicizing project that outdoes geographical location as it intertwines with the migratory present and sense of self.

Portable Homelands, Comics Witnessing The prolonged displacement of the Palestinians has led to the creation of many camp cities in neighboring Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. These camps have now existed for many decades, often organized according to the village of origin of its residents, with streets carrying names of villages in Palestine. In this context, the camp is not a site of “bare life” (Agamben 1998) but “spaces of Palestine where memories are inherited from older generations and culture is transmitted” (Dorai 2002, cited in Banerjee 2021, 18), where “refugees embrace their refugee status and practice homemaking and belonging in the liminal diasporic spatiality” (Banerjee 2021, 14). Leila Abdelrazaq’s graphic novel Baddawi recounts the story of growing up in one such camp in Lebanon, as had her father, Ahmad. She traces the events that led to her family’s displacement to Baddawi, narrates episodes from Ahmad’s boyhood growing up in a

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Fig. 31.5  From M Hasan and Sukanya Ghosh’s “Making of a Poet,” in This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, New Delhi: Yoda Press, p. 141

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refugee camp, his aspirations for education, and, after several moves between Beirut and Baddawi, his eventual departure to study in the US. As emphasized by Abdelrazaq in the introduction to her graphic novel, at the same time as being personal to her father, the story is shared by thousands of displaced Palestinians. From the very outset of the graphic novel, the personal and the collective intersect and “drawings become alternative visual evidence that capture personal experiences, emotions, and subjective realities while they simultaneously document historical moments” (Cheurfa 2020, 365). This first happens on the cover image, where we see a little boy, presumably the author’s father, with his back turned to us, replicating the pose of a popular cartoon character associated with Palestinian resistance, Handala. As Abdelrazaq explains in her introductory essay, Naji al-Ali, the author of Handala, once said that when the Palestinian struggle comes to an end, and Palestinians return home, Handala will turn around and show his face. Al-Ali was assassinated in 1987, and the struggle is still ongoing. By depicting her father as Handala, Abdelrazaq thus uses the medium of the graphic narrative to emphasize the ways in which the personal and the political intersect in the life story she narrates. “Quoting” the iconic image of Handala in this way imbues the narrative with its political and affective power. At the same time, persistent emphasis on historical and political circumstances that shaped Ahmed’s life prevents easy readerly identification and instead emphasizes readers’ implication in the history that is narrated (Alfarhan 2020, 154). The cover image is framed by the traditional Palestinian embroidery, known as tatreez. Throughout the graphic novel, such traditional patterns weave different moments of the story into a narrative, they hold it together and give it shape. In the opening of this chapter, with reference to Kate Evans’s Threads, I discussed how lace is used to stitch different life stories together. Through the analysis of Small Lives, I emphasized the embodied dimension of comics narrative made visible through the drawn line. In my analysis of narratives from This Side, That Side, I observed how the mixed media aesthetic of comics form maps out of new affective geographies of displacement. All of these aspects are brought together in the narrative of Baddawi, where Palestine is constructed from fragments of memories, stories, and traditions in exile, fostering affective attachments, constructing diasporic identities, and, crucially, documenting “historical and political conditions that shape the Palestinian existence” (Alfarhan 2020, 159). “Palestine is buried deep in the creases of my grandmother’s palms,” says the narrator in the opening scene of the story (Fig. 31.6). Between the two palms, we see the tatreez pattern. In the absence of the right to return, those who once lived in Palestine bear witness to its presence in a similar way as we saw in Hassan and Ghosh’s “Making of a Poet.” In this graphic novel, it happens not only through the telling of refugee stories but also through depicting their bodies and cultural practices, be it by collecting thyme for making traditional spice mix za’atar, baking bread, or embroidering. In the absence of a

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Fig. 31.6  From Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, p. 16

physical homeland, refugee memories and traditions become a means to assert their presence and construct a homeland for themselves. Traditional Palestinian embroidery in the graphic novel is a metonymical trace of this homeland. It marks different spaces—the imagined map of Palestine, for instance, or the buildings in refugee camps—and frames panels narrating how life used to be in Palestine (see, for instance, Abdelrazaq 2015, 16, 36, 39, 48). Stitched across the narrative, traditional embroidery enhances its haptic visuality, and “with its metaphorical resonance, enacts the non-linear and iterative processes that connect, pull, draw through, knot, and loop back into themselves to make a new fabric” (Kettle 2019, 335). As something hand-­ made, wearable, and easily identifiable, embroidery creates a portable homeland which bears immense symbolic weight at the same time as it can be easily carried on the route of displacement.

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In the graphic novel Baddawi, weaving the history of Palestine through tatreez patterns is complemented by braiding the narrative’s visual images, inserting recurring visual cues to help establish a sense of unity within its fragments (Groensteen 2007, 145–149, 156–158). Three images that mark turning points in Palestinian history as well as the life of Ahmad stand out in this context. The first is a whole-page panel recounting the history of Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe (known in Israel as War of Liberation), leading to the first displacement in 1948  (Abdelrazaq 2015, 18). Embroidered patterns appear here as fragments over which a map of Palestine is laid. Human figures, chased by a soldier, cross the space of the panel into an area of clustered buildings, which, as readers will later learn, is the Baddawi camp itself. The human figures are abstractly drawn, and hence while recounting the story of Ahmad’s family, they simultaneously lend themselves for easy identification as “amplification through simplification” (McCloud 1994, 30) and stand in for other stories of war and displacement. Ahmad looks on, bearing witness to this tragic story. On the following page, this image is juxtaposed with Ahmad’s family picture, framed by a thick layer of tatreez embroidery, taking nearly as much space as the photo itself. Just like on the book’s jacket, personal and collective histories are intertwined through the juxtaposition of these two images. The maneuver of intertwining the personal and the political recurs across the narrative, implying that “the ethical visual and verbal practice of ‘not forgetting’ is not merely about exposing and challenging the virulent machinations of ‘official histories’ but is more specifically about examining and bearing witness to the intertwining of the everyday and the historical” (Cheurfa 2020, 364). A variation on the above image reoccurs again at the opening of the narrative of Al-Naksa, “The Setback,” or the Six Days War, in 1967  (Abdelrazaq 2015, 35). This time we see Ahmad on his own, looking back toward the road leading to Palestine. The road fractures as he looks, implying there is no way back. A map of Palestine appears here again, covered in tatreez patterns. Finally, the same motif recurs one last time toward the end of the story (Abdelrazaq 2015, 113). Ahmad still has his back to us, replicating the posture of Handala, but this time there are two roads in front of him, one that takes him through Lebanon, another through the US, the road that Ahmad will eventually choose, moving to study abroad. Both of these roads, however, lead further toward the horizon, where the map of Palestine glows, implying that whatever road one chooses, Palestine remains the ultimate aspiration. Palestine, in this case, is not just a geographical space but a future-oriented historicizing project intertwined with notions of identity and belonging, as well as the refugee present (cf. van Alphen 2002, 62). The experience of war and refugeehood profoundly shape the lives of the displaced. Comics as a medium is well-equipped for documenting the ripple effects of forced displacement across time. The materiality of the comics page foregrounds narrative’s affective dimension, implicating readers in the process of bearing witness to the narrated events. Accommodating different narrative

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scales, comics can easily weave individual and collective experiences that lie beneath official history, exposing both overlaps and mismatches between the two and “making tangible and perceptible the large-scale histories and social dynamics that produce implication” (Rothberg 2019, 199). When doing so, they often portray resilience and resourcefulness of individuals faced with adverse historical circumstances and “bear witness to lived experience that is often shaped by crisis but is not necessarily fully dictated by it” (Chute 2016, 29). Hope sprouts through the cracks of hopelessness, and homelands are crafted as textiles that interweave stories, traditions, and aspirations to be carried within one’s memories and one’s body wherever one goes.

Conclusion In the age of camera-mediated images, according to Hilary Chute, drawings come to tell and bear witness to the muddled timelines, feelings, and histories of war that lie beyond a line on the map. Problematizing linear chronologies and clear-cut divisions helps us see partition as a process, extending well beyond events which led to the initial “unmixing” of peoples. While displacements themselves might be swiftly executed, their consequences are far-reaching and felt for decades to come. Reworking what happened through storytelling stabilizes narrative patterns and schemata, while the cultural medium through which the story is told draws out commonalities between distinct historical events. Non-linear chronologies, border regimes and affective entanglements are some of the features that the comics architecture can help bring out and document when examining the legacies of forced displacement. Meanwhile, formal experimentation allows authors to re-story an established course of events and offer a pathway to navigate maps that in reality were never drawn. Many of the stories analyzed in this chapter use embroidered textiles, lace patterns, and traditional fabrics to draw out important narrative aspects, thus directing attention to the seams of the story, inviting readers to touch and be touched by it, and implicating them in the history that is being narrated. In this chapter, I show that implicating readers in the story by foregrounding its materiality, the authors create an antidote to the regimes of unseeing at the core of both past and present practices of bordering. Through a number of narratives encountered in Kate Evans’s Threads, Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou’s Small Lives, Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, and Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, comics, mixed media infrastructure came to be used not just to tell a story but to give shape to a portable homeland of refugee memory. Archived through the pages of the graphic narrative, small stories bearing witness to this homeland become part of the larger narrative of collective memory, resilience, and hope.

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Acknowledgments  I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the conference “Greece and Turkey, Past and Present of Forced Migrations at Newcastle University,” where an earlier version of this chapter was presented. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, where the chapter was first conceived, and Marie Skłodowska Curie individual fellowship ReCOLLECTED (Project no. 101067507) at the University of Amsterdam, where it was concluded.

Disclaimer  Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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CHAPTER 32

“Resonance is Contact Ripple”: Media and Contemporary Poems of Mediterranean Migration Charlotte Sussman

In 2013, 300 Eritrean migrants perished in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Lampedusa when the raft carrying them sank. Among them was a woman named Yohanna, who gave birth even as she drowned. The event was memorialized by the Eritrean Italian poet Ribka Sibhatu in her long poem “In Lampedusa”: all alone, and in an extreme act of love, she brought her son into the world, birthing him into the fish-filled sea: yet nobody in Lampedusa heard the seven ululations welcoming his birth!1 (Sibhatu 2016)

The passage conveys the heartbreaking difficulty of transmitting information about maritime tragedies to those on land, compounded in this case by the impossibility of conveying to the living the experience of those who have died. Sibhatu’s choice to focus on the sounds that traditionally celebrate birth in 1

 For the memorials and memory work around this disaster, see Horsti (2019).

C. Sussman (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_32

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Eritrean culture is striking for its refusal of the visuality that often dominates representations of migrant death. Crucially, she does not say that those sounds were silenced, but rather that no one heard them. The poem asks us to consider what happened to those underwater ululations, and how water might carry and transform those vibrations, with the sea itself acting as the medium of transmission. How might we open ourselves to that medium? How might we teach ourselves to hear those sounds? The English poet Geraldine Monk, discussing the inspiration for her own long poem about sea migration, They Who Saw the Deep (2016), acknowledges the way visual media tends to monopolize our understanding of sea migration. “The day began with a scintillating light show of breathtaking loveliness,” she says of a trip to the “Libyan Sea” in 2014, “but the mood of elation was suddenly crushed by the appearance of a military patrol boat on the horizon. The other reality of a deeply troubled world now inhabited that loveliness.” Seeing this military boat brought home to her “the profound contrast of the sea as life-­giver and the sea as life-taker.” Monk then muses on the difference between poetry and visual media: “It would be unthinkable for a poem to have the same impact as the photo of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian child washed up on a shore in Turkey, his tiny body being cradled in the arms of a soldier. That photograph mobilized people around the world into doing something about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.” In the face of the impact of such images, Monk insists that poetry must move beyond the “purely descriptive” and “attempt to strive for new angles or altered states of perception” (Perkins 2017).2 How might poetry achieve this? How might it allow us to understand that “other” reality from a “new angle”? One answer to these questions offered by the poets discussed in this chapter lies in a movement away from the visual and toward the aural and haptic. Like Sibhatu, Monk explores the presence and absence of sound as a way of learning what has happened at sea, evoking the history of radio as the medium of maritime knowledge. Similarly, in Drift, her book-length poem about sea voyages and contemporary migration, Caroline Bergvall explains the value of translating a narrative of migrant deaths at sea from a visual to an oral register. Reading an account of migrant deaths at sea aloud in performances of the poem, she says, will “register the event by recitation, letting the recitation become a resonating chamber, a ripple effect… a reciting voice remains simultaneously input and output. Resonance is contact ripple. Everything is connected in the vast chamber of the world, beyond the callous, brutal politics” (Bergvall 2014, 134–135). The phrase “resonance is contact ripple” brings together the aural and the haptic, reminding us that sound has a tactile element, as sound waves touch the ear. The haptic element of oceanic media is emphasized further in Aracelis Girmay’s the black maria, inspired by the tragedy near Lampedusa described above. “I am marked by the dead,” Girmay writes, “your sea-letters/ of salt & weeping” (2016, 25). Such letters are both about the sea and made out of sea; they blur the distinction 2

 All quotations in this paragraph are from this interview.

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between writer, recipient, and seawater itself: the salt that constitutes them is the salt of the ocean, the salt of the tears of drowned migrants, and the salt of the poet’s own tears. The knowledge they contain registers itself on the body. This chapter focuses on three volumes of poetry published in English between 2014 and 2016: They Who Saw the Deep (2016), by Geraldine Monk; Drift, by Caroline Bergvall; and the black maria, by Aracelis Girmay. All three collections take up the crisis of migration in the Mediterranean in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It’s not surprising that the situation in the Mediterranean at this time would draw the attention of these poets, given the sheer number of lives lost in the region: the UNHRC records that 636 people went missing or died in the crossing in 2013, 3538 in 2014, 3771 in 2015, and 5096 in 2016. The three volumes in question, however, were each inspired by specific voyages: Bergvall by the sinking of the “Left-to-Die Boat” near Libya in 2011, in which 63 people died; Girmay by the death of 300 Eritrean migrants off the coast of Lampedusa; and Monk by her trip to the Mediterranean in 2014, of which she says, “It was stunningly beautiful but tainted with the inescapable knowledge of the daily death toll of migrants and refugees being lost in its waters” (Monk 2016, vii). All three volumes place those voyages in the longer contexts of demographic and literary history through the use of specific intertexts: Bergvall with the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon quest poem “The Seafarer”; Monk with the epic of Gilgamesh; and Girmay with the eighteenth-­ century journey of Abram Gannibal, Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather, who was kidnapped in Ethiopia and given as a “gift” to Peter the Great. All three volumes focus their attention on the dead who never completed the crossing, and grapple with the question of how information about those lost in the seemingly unknowable ocean can be conveyed to those who await them ashore. They foreground the counter-intuitive quality of knowledge whose object has been altered both by political violence and by immersion in the sea. Thus, the materiality of the sea inflects these representations of migration as much as do state policies, and requires us to think differently about any knowledge we think we hold about such journeys. It also asks us to think about our own positionality with regard to that knowledge. Although Bergvall was born in Norway and lives as an immigrant in London, both she and Monk write from the position of white, northern Europeans without personal experience of the depredations of migrations in the Global South, they seek to comprehend what is to them a profoundly “other reality,” how it intersects with their own lives, and how it might affect them. In contrast, Girmay, while born in the United States, counts herself as part of the same diasporic movement as the Eritreans who perished in the Mediterranean in 2013. Many of her poems take up alternate versions of her own life, in the form of the “four Luams”— one nine-year-old girl, and three 36-year-old women who live parallel lives in New  York, Umbertide, Italy, and Asmara. The adult Luams’ knowledge of their fellow Eritreans lost at sea is based on this kinship, rather than on any explicit exchange of information. In this, the poems ask us to “[see] communication as disclosure of being rather than clarity of signal.” Doing this, the

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media theorist John Durham Peters argues, “frees up the notion of ‘medium’ for greater service… Once communication is understood not only as sending messages… but also as providing conditions for existence, media cease to be only studios and stations, messages and channels, and become infrastructures and forms of life” (Peters 2015, 14). Girmay’s sea-letters instantiate this idea of communication as a disclosure of being, as do other poems in her collection. All three collections are interested in the power of the sea to transform both bodies and knowledge. For this reason, it is useful to review the longstanding relationship of aural media to maritime information, and then to consider recent accounts of the ocean itself as a transformative medium. In her fascinating account of the recovery of bodies from the Titanic, Jess Bier reminds us how recent such knowledge of the location of shipwrecks was in 1913: “The development of wireless radio in the 1890s allowed for boats to be found before victims decomposed…Before radio, most ships lost at sea simply vanished…Often it was confirmed that a ship had been lost only when it didn’t arrive in port after several months” (Bier 2018, 639). Peters notes that “Wireless telegraphy was at first a maritime medium, making the sea a founding context for modern radio” (Peters 2015, 107). Radio, however, could only convey what happened on the surface of the ocean. From the mid-twentieth century onward, submarine activity has made the surveillance of the ocean’s depths increasingly important to the security of nation-states. Focusing on the methods by which information about submarine movements is gleaned from the depths, Jason Parry argues that “undersea surveillance is a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon, understood etymologically as a ‘capacity to make oneself sensitive’” (Parry 2019, 892). The mechanical sensors tuned to the aural traces of submarines “exploit the capacity of the ocean itself to act as an aesthetic medium—that is, as a material field capable of transmitting sensory information between points” (Parry 2019, 892). Yet, as Parry documents, that sensory information must be transposed from the aural to the visual before it becomes useful to military surveillance. The sonar information picked up by hydrophones is translated into a graph known as a Lofargram, “an image of an alien ‘aural reality’—of wavelengths typically too low for humans to hear being broadcast through water too deep for humans to dive. Reading the sea for submarines means reading a machine’s version of the sea.” It creates “an emergent cognitive system that blurs the boundaries between human, machine, sound, and sea water” (Parry 2019, 902). As Parry’s discussion makes apparent, any engagement with the sea as a medium must grapple with the changes wrought by the sea on the data forms (including sound, light, and bodies) that pass through it. For example, visiting the wreck of the kind of mid-twentieth-­ century submarine Parry describes forces the media theorist Melody Jue to confront “the contradiction of seawater as both a storage medium and a transformative force” (Jue 2020, 113). Jue argues that acknowledging the way that in “the open system of the ocean, objects do not persist in their original state but change over time through their immersion in seawater” would alter our understanding of the ocean as media because “beginning with seawater as the

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creative and organizational agent would mean having us—the interpellated human users—relinquish control over the conditions of storage” (Jue 2020, 118–119). The ocean is never a passive or neutral medium—it changes what it transmits. Bier, Peters, Parry, and Jue collectively urge us to consider three important things about maritime media: that the demands of human sea travel have given rise to significant forms of modern media; that knowledge of the sea, surface and depths, requires a form of cognition that enmeshes human cognition with machine perception; and that the sea alters any information that passes through it. None, however, except peripherally, consider how these points might look refracted through the experience of migration. Migrants have a particularly fraught relationship to the history, technology, and materiality of sea crossings. For example, like other vessels, vessels carrying migrants rely on mapping technologies like GPS, to chart their courses, and on communication devices like satellite phones to call for help if they run into trouble. Yet they often cannot afford adequate systems, or are deliberately underequipped by the people who arrange their voyages. Furthermore, such vessels, due to their putative illegality, often strive to evade maritime surveillance technology. Thus, migrant vessels are both enmeshed in the informational systems that govern contemporary maritime activity, and excluded from them. For this reason, full data on migrant sea crossings is chronically unavailable. Sometimes, this results from the necessary secretiveness of putatively illegal crossings, but sometimes it is the punitive result of governmental systems that prevent such crossings from entering official records. In either case, many of those who die on such crossings remain unidentified and unmourned (Ellingham et al. 2017). The three volumes considered here explore the ways in which maritime media shape information about migration, but also the way attention to the experience of migration might inflect our understanding of that media and its history.

One: On the Airwaves The group of poems that give Geraldine Monk’s collection its title proceed in tightly patterned sequences. Ten poems named after zones of the British Shipping Forecast alternate with ten “shanties” named after the empty “seas” of the moon. Each of the Shipping Forecast poems contain information about the weather in England in December 2014, the month Monk was writing them, a passage from Gilgamesh, a moment in the history of sea voyages, an account of the ingredients the poet is preparing for Sunday dinner, and remarks on the migration of birds. The elements of each poem repeat in this way, even as the content varies, generating cumulative lists of different kinds of mobility—atmospheric, historic, avian—across the poems as a whole. This iterative progress—something perhaps more available to poetry than narrative—allows Monk to juxtapose the everyday and the epic, the global and the local. The interspersed shanties are even more incantatory, each ending with a list of elements from the Periodic Table. These interlocking patterns of words and

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frameworks produce a kaleidoscopic vision of trans-historical and global human migration that results, in Monk’s words, with the reader being “spooked by an avalanche of coincidences being thrown up in the mix of verbal ectoplasm” (Perkins 2017). In the discussion that follows, however, I focus on the well-­ known list of place names that Monk uses to organize that avalanche: those iterated by the British Shipping Forecast. This list gives all the ten non-shanty poems their titles; the first, for example, is called “Viking. North Utshire. South Utshire,” the tenth, “Faeroes. Southeast Iceland.” It may seem an odd choice to structure a poem explicitly inspired by the migration crisis in the Mediterranean around the maritime locations surrounding the British Isles, but the poems’ constant reference to the Shipping Forecast focuses our attention on how information about conditions in maritime regions reaches the shore. The Shipping Forecast, which provides information about a set sequence of areas surrounding Great Britain, itself encapsulates the history of maritime media. Begun in 1861 as a warning service for shipping after 450 people died in the wreck of a steam clipper off Angelsey, it was first delivered by telegraph, but moved to the radio in 1911, where it is broadcast four times a day on BBC Radio 4. It has only been interrupted by World Wars I and II, and, briefly, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since most ships now receive weather information instantaneously through the internet, the Shipping Forecast is probably now valued more as a symbol of national identity than a tool of navigation. In that role, however, it has been deemed such an iconic expression of Britishness that a version was played in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. “To the non-nautical, [it]…reinforces a sense of being an island nation with a proud sea-faring past,” says Zeb Soanes, a BBC announcer; “Whilst the listener is safely tucked up in their bed, they can imagine small fishing boats bobbing about at Plymouth, or 170ft waves crashing against Rockall” (quoted in Hudson 2012). A relay of information once essential to nautical safety is now associated with the stability of a national identity declining toward the soporific.3 Furthermore, the words of the Shipping Forecast have become an “aesthetic phenomenon” as well as a national icon, in Stefan Collini’s words, “radio’s most regular poetry slot” (Collini 2007). Small wonder, then, that they have moved from news to lyric at least twice before Monk’s appropriation of them.4 These poems emphasize the way the information conveyed by the shipping forecast traverses the boundary between inside and outside, between the safety of being “tucked-up in bed,” and knowledge of the danger of being exposed to crashing waves. To this end, Seamus Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnet VII” (1979, 39) describes a “strong gale warning voice” first “conjur[ing]” “Dogger. Rockall. Malin. Irish Sea / Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux,” before 3  In 2018, the podcast 99% Invisible included a story on the Shipping Forecast in an episode devoted to auditory sleep aids. 4  This is not to mention their use in popular music, by bands including Radiohead, Blur, Chumbawamba, Tears for Fears, and the Mekons.

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“collaps[ing] “into sibilant penumbra/ Midnight and closedown.” These “sirens of the tundra” “raise their wind-compounded keen behind the baize.” Carol Ann Duffy’s 1993 sonnet, “Prayer,” describes the forecast’s penetration of the border marked by the baize curtain even more pithily, concluding with the couplet, “Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer—/ Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre” (2000, 52). In both poems, the tight structure of the sonnet form seems to pay tribute to the brevity of the shipping forecast itself, which binds the fury of maritime weather to a nearly invariable 370 words. Monk, too, invokes the Shipping Forecast to suggest the way that radio allows news of the greater world to permeate and affect our lives, even the part of those lives lived “behind the baize.” The poet appears to be listening to the radio as she prepares Sunday lunch. Forsaking the lyric concision of the sonnet for the iterative sprawl of the saga, however, They Who Saw the Deep suggests that the information transmitted by the airwaves, rather than revealing, through contrast, the poet’s own safety, draws her deeper into a north-south circulation of air that connects her domestic setting to the dangerous seas faced by migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The medium of radio, in both its historical connection to maritime hazards, and its capacity to cross national and affective borders, reflects and instantiates this connection. The last Shipping Forecast poem in Monk’s sequence ends with an unsettling meditation on what moves through the air and what the air moves. It places us firmly in the present by remarking, “It’s very low key this World War Three,” and listing some of the nations whose migrants “traverse the Mare Nostrum”: “Syria. Afghanistan./ Libya. Bangladesh. Nigeria. Mali. Somalia. Eritrea. Et…” The poem ends with the unsatisfying completion of the poet’s home-cooked meal: Seabed sunken cites tenderly catch the daily fall of new inhabitants. Lampedusa awaits its loggerhead turtles. Deeply meandering jet stream. An inconsolable fog of steam rises from the almost-ready Sunday lunch. Old Saharan air. A Spanish Plume rents asunder. Severe atmospheric underbellies. doves have had enough. They perform a no show. That’s it. Dishing up. (25)

The section takes us first to the Mediterranean, calling our attention to migrants who drown before they can reach their destination, while Lampedusa awaits sea creatures who can better (and more legally) navigate its waters. The internal rhyme linking the jet stream and the steam coming off the Sunday lunch then connects those distant events to the activities of the speaker’s kitchen. A single letter differentiates the watery stream from the vaporous steam, and the near repetition of the sound reminds us that water takes many forms as it “meanders” through the world. The “inconsolable fog” rising from the lunch might

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be mourning its kinship (and mourning in kinship) with the deadly waters of the Mediterranean. The next section mines meteorological terms for their symbolic resonance to reinforce this connection between the Global South and the Global North. “Old Saharan air” seems to refer to the Saharan Air Layer, a mass of dry, dusty air that forms during the spring and summer, and that, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA 2022), “can travel and impact locations thousands of miles away from its African origins,” by carrying sand from Africa and depositing it over Europe. A Spanish Plume is a weather formation that involves very warm air moving north from the Iberian Peninsula, bringing with it an increased threat of thunderstorms (Met Office 2022). Even if one doesn’t know the technical meaning of the terms, the place names combined with the violent action of being “rent asunder” suggest the way the movements of both air and people in the south reverberate in the north. Birds—swifts, herons, jays, and others—appear in all the previous poems; here, however, the doves fail to show up—presumedly, their associated value of peace fails to show up as well. The terse sentence that closes the poem—“Dishing up.”—suggests that the speaker is finished with contemplative domestic listening, and is ready to act. In the “Sea of Crises Shanty” that follows this poem to end the “They Who Saw the Deep,” this move toward action escalates into water-powered destruction: “Shattered the churn shattered the cup/ shattered the junk shattered the ocean-going/ In the first water in the very first water” (26). If, historically, one of the first and most important uses of radio telegraphy was to warn ships of approaching storms, and, conversely, to allow ships to broadcast distress calls, that use has faded as faster forms of media have come to perform that function (Ilcev 2018).5 The poems of They Who Saw the Deep, however, reference these obsolete uses of the medium to create a space of contemporaneity in which Britain’s seafaring past coexists with present-day migrant crossings of the Mediterranean. This radical simultaneity both foregrounds radio’s origin as a maritime medium, and undermines the separation between the illusory peace of the Global North and the storms of the Global South. They Who Saw the Deep’s immersion in the aurality of radio and the tactility of seawater, steam, and fog allows it to generate an unexpected intimacy of sound and touch between the settled poet and people migrating across the Mediterranean.

Two: Surface Surveillance Like They Who Saw the Deep, Bergvall’s Drift uncovers an occulted intimacy between Britain’s maritime history and contemporary sea migration. Both poems, too, are preoccupied with bad weather (Hood 2018). Furthermore, and central to my discussion here, both engage with the question of how 5  Both Popov and Marconi conducted some of their earliest experiments in ship-to-shore communications, so sea travel and radio were entwined from the beginning.

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technological media inflects our understanding of migration. Yet, whereas Monk is concerned with the way information about migration travels through the air, including on radio frequencies, Bergvall directs her attention to how such information is collected from the ocean’s surface, through surveillance systems that track the movements of vessels. Drift engages with the collection and interpretation of such evidence, particularly about those who have been lost at sea. The poem begins with a series of grid-like images that gradually becomes distorted. Some of these lines are scribbled over; some are smeared. The blocks of lines can be read in many ways: as abstracted poetic lines, as waves or seascapes, or as standing for “the disorientation of indecipherable sign systems” (McMurtry 2018, 135).6 In Drift, Bergvall suggests a resemblance between the way her lines track her even as she traces them and the Lofargrams Jason Parry discusses, which make graphs out of the aural information gathered by undersea sensors: Bergvall’s lines “refuse the ruler, refuse their line state, thicken and deepen and engage in short dances that release other spatial rhythms. They start to behave like the faint trackings of sounds or movements, imaging sonars or spectrographs, in their capacity to adjust and respond to my movements and drops in attention” (146–147). In this way, too, the lines evoke the history of mapping technology as described by Philip Steinberg in The Social Construction of the Ocean; “By the early seventeenth century, maps featuring sea monsters representing marine nature and ships representing the social activity that transpired in the area of ocean-space began to be replaced by maps portraying a grid over an essentially featureless ocean” (2001, 105). The way these lines both evoke and challenge the idea of a grid links the beginning of Drift to the “Report” that provides the center of the volume, which quotes directly from the document produced by the group Forensic Architecture about the so-called “Left-to-Die Boat” (Heller et al. 2014). This document investigates an event from 2011, in which 72 people left Tripoli in an inflatable boat, hoping to make it to Lampedusa. Instead, they ran out of fuel and drifted for 14 days. All but nine of them perished. The Forensic Architecture report debunks claims by various national organizations that no one knew the boat was there by demonstrating how heavily surveilled the waters in which it drifted were, reproducing the surveillance grids that captured movement in that area of the Mediterranean. Bergvall quotes Forensic Architecture’s “estimate that at least 38 naval assets had been in operation in the waters off the coast of Libya” during the time the migrant ship drifted (Bergvall 2014, 74). The project describes a dense informational culture of “NATO/ coalition naval and aerial assets… equipped with technologies that offered an extremely high sensing capacity geared both towards combat operations and to the monitoring of the Maritime Surveillance Area” of the Libyan embargo (Bergvall 2014, 75). In the film that grew out of the report, Liquid Traces, this information gathering about the sea’s surface is represented as the 6

 See also Kerrigan (2021).

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lines of a grid (Heller and Pezzani 2014). Both report and film devastatingly reveal that the invisibility of the migrant boat was a result not of an informational deficit, but rather of a politicized choice about what information is valuable, and what is not. Bergvall makes a similar point about the potential for information to both reveal and occlude when she associates the line blocks in Drift with invisibility. She has said that she “wanted to start Drift [with the blocks of lines] because I was dealing with different types of disappearance: historical disappearance (of a language), and then political disappearance with the migrants being left to drift across the Mediterranean… A lot of my work is interested in disappearance, ghostings, in making visible traces of evidence of events” (Fitch 2018). This drive to make the traces of lost lives visible undergirds the kinship between Bergvall’s project and Forensic Architecture’s. Both invest in what Bergvall names, in the “Log” portion of Drift, “The forensic principle: that every action or contact leaves a trace” (134). The process of assembling such traces is not neutral or passive. As Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman explain, Forensics is, of course, not simply about science but also about the presentation of scientific findings, about science as an art of persuasion. Derived from the Latin forensis, the word refers to the “forum,” and thus to the practice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. (2012, 28)

To this end, Forensic Architecture takes information gathered for one use (military surveillance of the Libyan Sea) and examines it in a different forum (migrants in need of humanitarian aid) to reveal that invisibility is politically constructed. Miren Gutierrez calls Forensic Architecture’s work “counter-­ forensic” because it focuses not only on data collection but also on digital epistemology. “FA documentaries not only tell a story that counters official discourse (what happened), but they tell the story of how we know it happened” (2021, 7). Bergvall might be understood to be doing the same thing in a poetic register, by juxtaposing this information to literary examples, she brings this question into the forum of poetry. As Adalaide Morris puts it, she “turns the resources of poetic language to investigative use” (2017, 79). Bergvall makes her case in that forum in a number of different ways, two of which I want to highlight here. The first method uses the European literary tradition to forge analogies between the history of European sea travel and the experience of migrants in the contemporary Mediterranean. Thus, the “songs” that make up the first section of the poem, entitled “Seafarer,” echo the language of their Anglo-Saxon predecessor of the same name. These poems explore the experience of being lost at sea, and the unreliability of ancient navigation strategies in implicit and sometimes explicit relationship to present-day navigation. “North 3,” for example, describes, Going north by needle and stone from ireland to orkney to shetland to faroe Going north for stockfisc from lynn to scotland to bergen to the lofot isles Going northlike casting lead off greenland thinking

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it be thule Shoring up in vinland taking it for greenland islandhopping To the island of Sheep To the isle of joy To the land of women To the soporific well To the fiery mountain Circling round the crystal pillar Setting camplike on a hump Back down to the isle of madeira thinking it be faroe Laughing all the way to charing cross thinking it be bank. (30)

The poem cascades across the line breaks, unimpeded by grammar or punctuation, replicating the movement of a journey on which navigational instruments (needle and stone) do not seem to make much impact. Names bear little relation to the places where the voyage touches down. The poem’s sense of the fantastical (“Setting camplike on a hump Back”) slides without warning from an ancient maritime setting to a contemporary subterranean one, ending with the giddy confusion of mistaking one London tube station for another (“Laughing all the way to charing cross thinking it was bank”). People, the poem implies, have gotten lost throughout history. Bergvall explores states of being lost in each section of Drift, though few of them are as joyous as the ones in “North 3.” The first poems in the section entitled “Hafville” (the title itself derived from the Old Norse word meaning “lost at sea”) ends, “They were tossed about at sea for a long time and failed to/ reach their destination. We embarked and sailed but a fog so thick/ covered us that we could scarcely see the poop or the prow of the boat” (36).7 These visions of being lost at sea in the ancient world are mirrored by accounts of the experience of being lost in the contemporary Mediterranean in the “Report” on the “Left-to-Die Boat” in Drift’s middle section. The ineffectiveness of navigational technology suggested in “North 3” recurs when the people aboard the “Left-to-Die Boat” attempt to reach help; “There were several calls exchanged because the driver was not able to read the boat’s GPS instrument and could not provide the exact GPS coordinates of the boat” (73). In the final section, “Log,” the poet links the physical condition of being lost at sea to “[t]he fog in my mind, my life, my heart” (139) that afflicts her personal life as she writes the poem. By constructing these analogies, Drift makes evocative connections between these three voyages—the literary voyage of the “Seafarer,” the documented voyage of the “Left-to-Die Boat,” and the poet’s own voyage of self-discovery. The parallels between these stories of difficult navigation and unreliable technology reveal that disastrous sea voyages (both real and symbolic) are not unique to present-day migrants from the Global South, nor are they due to their desperation and incompetence; people from the nations of the Global North have also lost their way at sea. These analogies strive to construct a relationship of empathy between inhabitants of the Global

7  McMurtry analyzes the gradual decomposition of words in the “Hafville” section: “letters are buffeted and displaced from words, merged with other words, repeated emphatically and engulfed entirely” (2018, 135).

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North and migrants from the Global South, an understanding based on imagining a shared experience. At the same time, however, the implicit equation of literary, physical, and psychological fog threatens to naturalize the fate of the people on the “Left-to-­ Die Boat,” eliding the differences between their situation and those to which it is being compared. The mariners of the Seafarer songs contend against the impersonal forces of the weather and the sea, the poet with the vagaries of sexual desire—but the migrants who die in the Mediterranean are deliberately underequipped by people who do not value their lives. “The vessel was equipped with a Yamaha motor of 37 horsepower,” we learn. “Twelve tanks with a capacity of 20 litres of petrol each were provided. The migrants were told that this amount of fuel should allow them to reach Lampedusa and that the trip should have lasted around 18 hours” (72). The passive voice of the “Report,” however, does not hide the fact that the deadly navigational failure that befell the “Left-to-Die Boat” did not result from human error or ignorance, but rather from a deliberate withholding of adequate resources from an overcrowded migrant vessel. The things that they “were told” about the technology required to make the crossing turn out to be false. In the face of this mismatch between meteorological mishap and deliberate human cruelty, analogy falls short as a method of allowing those on shore to understand what has happened to those lost at sea. While the affective experience of being lost might be the same, the causes are radically different. I would argue that Drift more successfully expands our understanding of migrant death at sea when it engages directly with the technology that purports to capture that information. This intervention is perhaps most visible when the poem is performed. For these performances, the artist and programmer Thomas Koppel designed a “projected language-mass, the visual accumulation of the entire finished textual material. All of it laid out, then overlaid, set in motion and active through a generative pattern of sequences. The sequences turn the text into a deep-moving, slow-changing multidimensional hypnotic wave. A vast open syntax of textual mass” (140). This use of media is precisely counter-forensic in that it wrests the technology from its original uses and re-­ deploys it in a different forum; “the technologies used to create [the text projections in the performance],” McMurtry tells us, “were adapted from programs used by nautical scientists tracking boats that got lost on the way from Africa to Europe, which were—in turn—taken from those employed by Western states for tracking the movement of freight on major commercial shipping lines” (141). Against this digital landscape, Bergvall reads the Forensic Architecture report, along with the poems that make up Drift, with the goal, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, of “letting the recitation become a resonating chamber” (Bergvall 2014, 134). Morris says of this juxtaposition that it “re-create[s] both ‘the skaldic shout-out traditions of poetic delivery’ (Bergvall 2014, 128) developed by cultures that store information orally and the immersive, flowing, flickering, machine-mediated forms of poetic delivery developed by cultures

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that store information digitally” (Morris 2017, 84). In other words, Bergvall’s performances show us the poem mediated by two infrastructures: digital storage and the poet’s body. Morris goes on to argue that these performances “use the affordances of sound to dissolve, and, as far as possible, reconceive the premise of legal, political, military, economic, and ethical stories in which some lives matter and some lives don’t” (87). Yet while this epistemological transformation is certainly operative in the performances, in Drift, Bergvall describes her aim as something more corporeal, as intervening at the point where the aural verges into the haptic. “I remind myself that this text was made for speaking,” she writes of her work. “It will again be spoken, it will again resonate, exhale, be sung. It will again dissipate in the vibratory rhythms of the percussion, it will again disperse in the skull, in the live space, in the responsive skin of the audience” (152). This image of the story of the “Left-to-Die Boat” dispersing into the “responsive skin” of the audience suggests that Bergvall, like Monk, imagines her poem as a medium that makes a physical connection between the Global South and the Global North.

Three: Through the Depths Both Those Who Saw the Deep and Drift reveal an intimacy between those who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean and those receiving information about them in the seemingly tranquil Global North, an intimacy that permeates even the most enclosed domestic spaces and troubles the most everyday activities. In neither poem is the reception of information a passive event. In both poems, that intimacy is constructed through sound—radio waves in Monk’s poem, the human voice in Bergvall’s. Bergvall moves that aurality toward the haptic, asking us to consider the material impact of sound. The title of the first part of Girmay’s black maria, elelegy, also announces its concern with sound: “‘elelelele,’ if repeated enough,” Girmay writes in the notes to the volume, “conjures the ululatory sounds people make in many places (Eritrea, a central location of the project, and my father’s homeland, among them). elelegy means to place itself in the English elegiac tradition and the ulalatory traditions of grieving and joy in cultures of North and East Africa” (108). The title, then, places the poems at the intersection between oral and textual media. The poems that follow, however, are less concerned with media as technology than those in Drift and They Who Saw the Deep. Instead, like Sibhatu’s tribute to Yohanna’s unheard ululations, they explore the way knowledge, particularly the living’s knowledge of the dead, can be conveyed by elemental media like water itself. The poems might be said to refract Peters’ assertion that “the media of sea, fire, star, cloud, book, and Internet all anchor our being profoundly, even if we can’t say what they mean” through the losses and dislocations of migration (Peters 2015, 14). Thus, in the first poem of elelegy, “prayer & letter to the dead,” the poet speaks to those drowned on the voyage across the Mediterranean and pledges

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“to build//a shore for you here, a landing place, here/ where the paper dreams” (15). Because they can no longer speak for themselves, she becomes both author and recipient of their story, saying, “The sea delivers/ your letters, the reams of paper,// the ink & messages/ & shells telling us ‘goodbye’” (17). The origin of these letters challenges conventional ideas of correspondence. The sea, rather than any individual human, is the agent of the exchange; it provides its own information technology, shells that hold a farewell message from the dead. These sea letters do more than convey information; they alter those who read them. “I am marked by the dead, your sea-letters/ of salt & weeping,” the poet states. The speaker in “luam to the dead—umbertide” describes a similarly tactile connection to a family member who has “slipped through the seam/ of one realm into another” (36, italics in original). This Luam describes listening as “The news announces/ your last place://a picture of rocks & sand” (36), but ends the poem with an image of more corporeal intimacy: At night I run the shower to warm me. The water, it comes suddenly, cousin, my hand through you. (36)

The water creates a congruence between Luam and the drowned cousin, the shower’s sudden burst reminding her of the sea flooding a migrant boat. But the cousin also seems to have become the water, so that by touching the water Luam also touches them—the permeability of the water to her hand reveals her loss, but also a kind of contact that is “existential not informational,” as Peters would say (14). Water is imagined as a medium here, allowing fragile connections between the living and the dead. This exploration of water as an immersive medium distinguishes Girmay’s representation of sea migration from Monk’s and Bergvall. She is interested not just in surface navigation or weather patterns, but in what happens to human beings when they enter its depths. The poem “Inside the sea there is more” brings an archeological gaze to the question of how we understand those lost at sea. Inside the sea, there is more than sea: rockets amphora debris

shoes in pairs Icarus the photographs

though it seems, from this distance, a flat blue line—actually, a purling there:

luam gold earrings his once wings

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the dead move mammalian through its buried light, & a graveyard is built out of history & time (40)

Here, Girmay imagines the sea as a heterogeneous archive that jumbles useful objects (shoes) together with useless ones (debris), new technologies (rockets) with old (Icarus’s “once-wings”), and mythical figures (Icarus) with ordinary ones (“luam”). Girmay focuses our attention on the distinction between surface and depth; the black lines setting off (or perhaps containing) the catalog of the sea’s contents are replicated in the poem’s own line describing the “flat blue line” of the ocean’s surface, a line that unexpectedly “purls” with the motions of the submerged dead. If we want to understand the tragic consequences of migrant crossings of the Mediterranean, the ways in which the sea has become a “graveyard,” the poem suggests that we need to find a way to access not only the knowledge gleaned from the sea’s surface, or its effect on the weather, but also the information about migration held in its depths. As Girmay’s enjambed line makes clear, this graveyard is both constructed out of the materials of history, and pushed out of conventional ideas about history and time by virtue of its location. But the sea is a confounding archive. As Melodie Jue explains, “While the chill of the ocean sometimes preserves shipwrecks and cultural artifacts, at other times it seems more of an archival limit, washing away and erasing the traces of human lives” (2020, 142). Seawater’s capacity “as a substance that simultaneously archives and reconfigures” (Jue 2020, 113) has perhaps always been best captured by poetry, starting with Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s Tempest, which tells us that “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Derek Walcott famously described “locking up” of knowledge about the transatlantic slave trade in the “grey vault” of the ocean in his poem “The Sea Is History.” The poem envisages the skeletons of enslaved people as “Bone soldered by coral to bone,/ mosaics/ mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow” (2007, 137). In its interest in the ocean’s depths, Girmay’s poem follows in this lineage, but elelegy can also be read as an enjoinder to the tradition. Girmay’s sea is no vault; instead, it offers “sea-letters” from the migrants that have drowned in its depths, information those on shore can receive, as long as they are willing to accept the sea’s capacity to reshape that which resides within it, and to embrace seawater’s unusual qualities as a medium.

Conclusion Girmay titles her volume black maria, explaining, via the Merriam-Webster definition, that “maria, plural of mare: any of the several mostly flat dark areas of considerable extent on the surface of the moon or mars…though mare

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means ‘sea’ in latin, they lack water” (71, lack of capitalization in original).8 Monk interleaves a series of “shanties” named after the seas of the moon with her Shipping Forecast poems. While the poets use these lunar seas for different purposes, it is striking that both poets invoke the vast distance between the earth and the moon, and the historical misprision of labeling areas of the waterless moon “seas,” to underscore the ethical and epistemological problems of representing migrants traveling across terrestrial oceans. The distance between those at sea and those ashore is vast. The distance between the dead and the living more so. The migrant ship crossing may always appear very far away to those safely ashore, liable to misapprehension or, worse, deliberate invisibilization. The fate of those who perish on such journeys is hard to comprehend. The poems considered here, however, suggest that there are ways to combat the perilous ethics of distance, and to allow those dead to touch us, to communicate with us, and to shape our very beings, if only we can learn how to receive their knowledge. Such radical comprehension, they suggest, requires bypassing the forms of media that have dominated the representation of migrant lives and migrant deaths, including journalistic photography and digital surveillance technologies. Instead, these poems engage with older media— oral recitation, radio—and even the mediating capacity of the sea itself. Such media, they reveal, have the capacity to create intimacies even across such seemingly great distances.

Bibliography Bergvall, Caroline. 2014. Drift. Brooklyn, NY: Nightboat Books. Bier, Jess. 2018. Bodily Circulation and the Measure of a Life: Forensic Identification and Valuation after the Titanic Disaster. Social Studies of Science 48 (5): 635–662. Collini, Stefan. 2007. Mainly Fair, Moderate, or Good. Review of David Hendy’s Life on Air: A History of Radio 4 (New York: Random House, 2007). The Guardian, September 22. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/22/radio.bbc. Accessed 13 June 2022. Duffy, Carol Ann. 2000. Mean Time. Cambridge, England: Chadwyck-Healey; London: Anvil. Ellingham, Sarah Theresa, Pierre Perich Dorothea, and Morris Tidball-Binz. 2017. The Fate of Human Remains in a Maritime Context and Feasibility for Forensic Humanitarian Action to Assist Recovery and Identification. Forensic Science International 279 (October): 229–234. Fitch, Andy. 2018. The Black Pages, the White Script, the Maps, the Constellations: Talking to Caroline Bergvall. Blog//Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15. https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/black-­p ages-­w hite-­s cript-­m aps-­ constellations-­talking-­caroline-­bergvall/. Accessed 14 June 2022. Girmay, Aracelis. 2016. The Black Maria. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions. 8  The second part of Girmay’s volume, titled the black maria, following the elelegy poems I’ve discussed here, is a moving meditation on the question of blackness, misidentification, and violence.

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Gutierrez, Miren. 2021. Data Activism and Meta-documentary in Six Films by Forensic Architecture. Studies in Documentary Film. https://doi-­org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/1 0.1080/17503280.2021.1908932. Accessed 17 December 2022. Heaney, Seamus. 1979. Field Work: Poems. Faber: London and Boston. Heller, Charles, and Lorenzo Pezzani. 2014. Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case. Mp4. https://vimeo.com/89790770. Heller, Charles, Lorenzo Pezzani, and Situ Studio. 2014. Forensic Oceanography: Report on the “Left-to-Die Boat.” https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/06/FO-report.pdf. Accessed 17 December 2022. Hood, Kate Lewis. 2018. Clouding Knowledge in the Anthropocene: Lisa Robertson’s The Weather and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 22 (2): 181–196. Horsti, Karina. 2019. Digital Materialities in the Diasporic Mourning of Migrant Death. European Journal of Communication 34: 271–281. Hudson, Alex. 2012. The Lull of the Shipping Forecast. BBC News 17. https://www. bbc.com/news/magazine-­17065521. Accessed 13 June 2022. Ilcev, Stojce Dimov. 2018. The Development of Maritime Radio Communications. International Journal of Maritime History 30 (3): 536–543. Jue, Melody. 2020. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keenan, Thomas, and Eyal Weizman. 2012. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Kerrigan, John. 2021. Lampedusa: Migrant Tragedy. Cambridge Core. https://www-­ cambridge-­o rg.proxy.lib.duke.edu/core/journals/cambridge-­j ournal-­o f-­ postcolonial-­literary-­inquiry/article/lampedusa-­migrant-­tragedy/48B721129C4F 464BC2FE961D8E07C614. Accessed 14 June 2022. McMurtry, Aine. 2018. Giving Syntax to the Cry: Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (2014). Paragraph 41 (2): 132–148. Met Office. 2022. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-­about/weather/ types-­of-­weather/storms/spanish-­plume. Accessed 12 June 2022. Monk, Geraldine. 2016. They Who Saw the Deep. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Morris, Adalaide. 2017. Forensic Listening: NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and the Contemporary Long Poem. Dibur Literary Journal 4: 77–87. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 2022. https://www.nesdis.noaa. gov/news/the-saharan-air-layer-what-it-why-does-noaa-track-it. Accessed 12 June 2022. Parry, Jason. 2019. An Underwater World of Walls: Machine Sensing, Maritime Sovereignty and the Aesthetics of Undersea Surveillance. Theory & Event 22 (4): 891–910. Perkins, Sarah. 2017. A Lot of Uneasily Placed Exacting Words Floating in Alien Space: A Conversation with Geraldine Monk on They Who Saw the Deep. Word for Word 29. http://www.wordforword.info/vol29/Perkins.html. Accessed 13 June 2022. Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sibhatu, Ribka. 2016. Lampedusa, trans. Andre Naffis-Sahely. https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/in-­lampedusa/. Accessed 18 June 2022.

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Steinberg, Philip E. 2001. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations Human Rights Council. https://data.unhcr.org/en/dataviz/95. Accessed 15 June 2022. Walcott, Derek. 2007. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

CHAPTER 33

Ways of Seeing: Ethics of Looking in European Refugee Films Johannes von Moltke

No ‘we’ should ever be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain. —Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others) Every image embodies a way of seeing. —John Berger (Ways of Seeing)

The Look of Refugee Film In 2016, the Berlin Film Festival’s coveted Golden Bear went to Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea), a patient, understated documentary that captured life on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, one of the key choke points for migration from Northern Africa to Europe (Rosi 2016).1 The same festival saw the premiere of Les Sauteurs (Those Who Jump), a first-person documentary in which Abou Bakar Sidibé chronicles his attempts to “jump” the 20-foot fence that separates Europe from Africa in the Spanish enclave of Melilla (Sidibé et al. 2016). The inclusion of these two films in the festival

1  Many of the thoughts in this chapter were first generated in the classroom and in conversations with students, to whom I am grateful. A special thanks to Hannah Hussamy for her comments on an earlier draft. Thanks also to Webb Keane for a helpful conversation on ethics.

J. von Moltke (*) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_33

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lineup marked the arrival of a new spate of European refugee films during the second half of the 2010s. The year 2015 had seen a renewed surge of Afghan and Syrian migrants along the Balkan route, mounting deaths in the Mediterranean passage, Angela Merkel’s consequential three-word utterance “Wir schaffen das” (we can do it), and the erection of miles of razor wire fencing on Europe’s southeastern borders. In response, filmmakers took to the migration routes, camps, and checkpoints, while migrants—many of them amateurs prompted by producers, others professional filmmakers themselves— took cameras and cell phones in hand. Part of an expanding audiovisual archive of migration, their films amount to a new cycle of refugee films that have begun to redraw the cinematic landscape of migration and draw scholarly attention (Celik 2015; Bayraktar 2016; Castro 2019; Rossipal 2021; Bayrakdar and Burgoyne 2022; Osman and Redrobe 2022). Ranging across the spectrum of fiction and documentary, short and feature lengths, experimental and generic, the evolving set of films challenges us to refocus our gaze and reconsider the implications of looking at refugees on screen (Castro 2019; Rossipal 2021). Key among these is the way in which any given film orchestrates looking relations: the gaze of (and at) the camera, looks exchanged, the averted gaze. The present chapter seeks to map some of the coordinates on this shifting terrain by asking how the renewed cinematic engagement with and by the figure of the migrant involves an ethics of looking. As early entries into this cycle, Rosi’s and Sidibé’s films share a concern with northward migration to Europe and its flashpoints around the Mediterranean. And yet, for all their thematic overlap, they make entirely different aesthetic choices that index the diversity of films and approaches in the new cycle. For Rosi and Sidibé adopt a different look in both senses of the word: as artworks, their films manifestly look different from one another, and as forms of documentary witnessing, they look differently—their cameras and subjects adopt, encode, and convey distinct forms of the gaze that in turn implicate different types of spectatorship. The first of these looks, then, is largely a matter of film form: of decisions about image capture and shot selection, cinematography, editing, voice-over, and narration. In all these respects, the almost-contemplative images that Rosi captured in long, static shots recorded during extended periods of residence on Lampedusa could hardly look more different from Sidibé’s shaky, hypermobile images with their GoPro aesthetic. Where Sidibé narrates his own voice-over, Rosi observes and lets his subjects speak. Where Sidibé splices ghostly, anonymous surveillance footage into his film, a particularly captivating sequence in Rosi’s film instead watches on as individual refugees have their ID photographs taken as they are booked one by one into Lampedusa’s camp system. That moment stands out in part because of the way Rosi arranges his own film camera right next to the photographer’s. Although we are not shown the still images captured for the immigration authorities’ documentation, we can infer that they are all but indistinguishable from those captured by Rosi’s camera—save for the two additional properties that cinema confers on the

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photographic process: time and movement. While the latter remains barely perceptible (if palpable) as the subjects hold still for their photo, the extended duration of their gaze directly at the camera implicates the spectator of Rosi’s film in the relay of looks by and at refugees. This is the second sense in which the “look” of the refugee film matters. To be sure, such looking relations take on different forms and are inflected by the aesthetic choices of any given film— depending, for example, on whether the camera adopts a third-person observational stance as in Fuocoammare or a first-person flight pattern as in Les Sauteurs. Indeed, which forms of looking an individual film privileges is enormously consequential. For this relay of looks, I argue, constitutes the refugee film cycle’s center of gravity. Revolving around this central concern with the gaze of, at, and with refugees are questions of ethics that I seek to unpack through brief discussions of four films’ different approaches to the cinematic relay of looks. Some of these questions are inherent to the dynamics John Berger described in his influential 1972 BBC series and subsequent book, Ways of Seeing: the intentionality of the gaze (“we only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” (Berger 1972, 8)) and the inherent reciprocity of looking relations (“the eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world” (Berger 1972, 9)). Other questions are familiar from the history and theory of documentary film as a form, or what Bill Nichols termed its “axiographics:” the need to reckon with documentary’s “implantation of values in the configuration of space, in the constitution of a gaze, and in the relation of observer to observed” (Nichols 1991, 78). Similar questions animated Susan Sontag’s lifelong and influential interrogation of photographic representation, particularly as it concerns the depiction of suffering and pain. Revising her early, influential stance on photography— “images transfix. Images anesthetize” (Sontag 1977, 20)—Sontag eventually came to emphasize the “ethical value of an assault by images” (Sontag 1977, 104). Her later work on photography explicitly valorizes acts of countenancing and confronting representations of others’ suffering in what she calls the “co-­ spectatorship” of photographer and viewer—a relationship that Ariella Azoulay would go on to theorize in terms of photography’s “civil contract” (Sontag 2003, 54; Azoulay 2008). Though photographic representation is not a form of repair in itself, widely reproduced and viewable images are always “an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers” (Sontag 2003, 104). But who are “we” to adopt such a detached, quasi-experimental look of attention, reflection, and learning? Even where that distance seems to shrink as medial reflexivity gives way to “immediations” (Rangan 2017) and affect floods the viewer, the subjectivity of the look remains very much in question. “Let the atrocious images haunt us,” Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, a book whose very title begs the question of who is included in the unmarked “we” looking at “others’” suffering (Sontag 2003, 102). As she herself recognizes elsewhere in the same book-length essay, we all too easily regard the

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other “only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees” (Sontag 2003, 65). The problem of othering is as central to any ethics of photographically mediated looking relations as it is to the question of ethics in general (Keane 2015). But there is an added specificity to the ethical questions raised by the refugee film, situated as it now is within a European “crisis” discourse where anti-­ immigrant sentiment is stoked by a resurgent right and even well-intentioned liberal responses become ensnarled in the paradoxes of humanitarian “emergency thinking” (Rangan 2017, 3; cf. Celik-Rappas 2017). As the members of the “New Keywords Collective” argued in an early and prescient response to talk of a “refugee crisis in Europe,” such rhetoric unduly narrows our gaze on one moment in a longer history of migration. It implicates migrants rather than the complex causes of migration as those responsible for the alleged “crisis,” and it detracts from the fact that the crisis in Europe is also a crisis of postand neocolonial Europe (New Keywords Collective n.d.). Meanwhile, humanitarian responses to this situation risk perpetuating the crisis by seeking temporary, local redress while requiring “innocent sufferers to be represented in the passivity of their suffering, not the action they take to confront or escape it” (Celik-Rappas 2017, 83). Under these circumstances, the films under discussion face specific ethical trade-offs as they look at refugees, whether from an outside, objectifying third-­ person perspective or from the inside, hewing close to a first-person, phenomenological account. Given the challenges of refugee representation, these films inescapably confront the risk of offering a mere “humanizing prosthesis for [the] dehumanized subjects” that humanitarian discourse both produces and addresses in their irrecuperable otherness (Rangan 2017, 2; on the question of humanitarianism, see also Celik-Rappas 2017; and Keane 2015, 256–259). On the other hand, as filmmakers and critics have emphasized, the new cycle of films simultaneously holds out the promise of “another kind of ethics, which is prior to the rift between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’” (Rossipal 2021, 41). How a given film navigates these trade-offs depends as much on its aesthetic as on its ethical choices. Indeed, as the following discussion aims to show, these choices implicate each other. In ways that are at once pragmatic and consequential, the films discussed below all confront the question of how to look at refugees on the interlinked planes of ethics and film form: how and when (not) to train cameras on refugees, how to acknowledge hierarchies of looking, when to seek and when to avert the gaze. As we will see, even questions as basic as camera mounts and positions become ethically charged as these films explore who gets to look from where at whom, who becomes the subject of the gaze, and who are its objects. In this sense, I consider questions of visual ethics to cut across the heterogeneity of the emerging corpus of refugee films since 2015. Even though my principal focus here will be on the implications of four different documentary approaches to refugee representation, I argue for the need to develop a critical ethics of looking across received demarcations between documentary and fictional formats, between films made on big and shoestring

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budgets, between deeply personal and dispassionately distanced approaches. Accordingly, my discussion distinguishes not among genres or types of film but among four different gazes: the view from above, the eye-level view, and the experimental and the reciprocal gaze. While these four modes hardly constitute an exhaustive typology to which one could (or should) reduce the great diversity and creativity of contemporary audiovisual representations of the refugee experience, I hope that my analysis of the specific ethical trade-offs incurred by these various approaches can provide a road map for further investigation.

Where Is Ai Wei Wei? The View from Above in Human Flow Filmed in 23 different countries over the course of a year, Ai Wei Wei’s Human Flow weaves a wealth of mesmerizing images around its themes of flight, migration, and refuge (A. Weiwei 2017). From the opening shots of an azure sea to errant figures in a sandstorm, from bombed-out landscapes, burning oil wells, and depopulated villages back to the sea, now tinged blood-red by the sinking sun, the film creates a compelling canvas on which it establishes the record of humans on the move. As so many visual metaphors, these images also make an insistent humanitarian appeal to both countenance and alleviate the many forms of suffering that forced mobility engenders. The human flow of the title, Robert Burgoyne implies in his analysis of the film, is at once a human right “to be ‘at home’ anywhere in the world”—a right that entails powerful appeals to empathy and hospitality (Burgoyne 2022). And yet, as critics such as Georges Didi-Huberman have noted, Human Flow undercuts its own best intentions by adopting a strangely distanced perspective, looking from a “high vantage point” even if and when Ai Wei Wei deliberately mingles with refugee groups and treks, smartphone camera in hand (Didi-Huberman 2018). Like other recent high-profile depictions of refugee plights such as the Oscar-nominated Flee (Rasmussen 2021), Human Flow consequently raises questions about “the hierarchies of power involved with giving and taking voice, … whose perspective the film privileges, why, and to what effect” (Osman and Redrobe 2022, 23). One shot stands out for the way it encapsulates Ai’s aesthetic approach (Fig. 33.1). Precisely at the halfway mark, we cut from standoffs between refugees and the police to a view that is initially so abstract as to seem illegible: in what appears to be a protracted zoom, we move toward a patterned surface resembling a map or grid, riddled with tiny dots. It takes a second glance and the continuing forward momentum for the viewer to realize that instead of zooming in the camera is in fact descending vertically toward the ground. Eventually, the teeming dots below become discernible as humans: people craning their necks as they form a circle where the camera drone is about to land in an open space amid the rectangular barracks of a refugee camp.

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Fig. 33.1  Drone shots render abstract views in Human Flow (dir. Ai Wei Wei, 2017)

Shots like these don’t just make use of drones—a surveillance technology if ever there was one—for mapping human migration, they also literally look down upon refugees (on the genealogy of drone photography, see ChoiFitzpatrick 2020, Chap. 4). In this sense, the (con)descending drone shot encodes the film’s defining gesture, an aesthetic signature established right from its opening, where the editing progresses, Godlike, from overhead shots of the ocean to beach-level views of migrants arriving at Greek shores. As the film unfolds, Ai Wei Wei often reestablishes the synoptic high-angle point of view, eventually coming full circle as Human Flow ends by retreating from ground level to the view from above: Mohammad Fares, a former Syrian astronaut, has just offered the film’s closing dialog, reminiscing about his view of the planet and our common humanity from space when the final shot pulls back from a pile of discarded life jackets, the camera now mounted on a rising drone. As it ascends to dizzying heights, the objects in its view again flatten into abstraction, and the mounds of orange life jackets, visual icons of the refugee crisis, begin to look like the continents we have just imagined the astronaut viewing from space. Human Flow, this final shot confirms, adopts a planetary view. That perspective is not Ai’s alone, of course, nor is it new. In evoking planetary life as the frame for all stories of migration, mobility, and flight, Human Flow taps into a powerful synoptic universalism with prominent antecedents in photographic history ranging from Sebastião Salgado’s Exodus (1999; Salgado 2016) all the way back to the 1950s blockbuster exhibit The Family of Man (Sandburg 2002). With these shows, Ai’s film shares a universalizing gesture that both expands our horizons and threatens to normalize and depoliticize the plight of refugees: after all, humans have always been on the move, humans “flow” by virtue of being human. Seen from too great a distance, flight becomes migration and migration becomes an anthropological fact.

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The normalization of migration as a human constant can of course be a powerful reframing move. For as Zygmunt Bauman notes in a searching essay to which we will return, “We are still unable to raise our awareness, intentions, and deeds to the … globality of our species-wide interdependence” (Bauman 2016, 72). And yet to foster such awareness requires not just a synoptic view but also an ethics that eschews Ai’s aestheticization of otherness. Indeed, it requires a politics that grapples with the experience of “refugeetude” (Nguyen 2019), rethinks the definition and function of borders (Achiume 2019), and reconceptualizes citizenship and political agency. As Stefan Jonsson puts it, “A ‘normalization’ of the position of migration … requires that we reframe established models of the polity, which are often bound to the nation-state model, and develop less territorialized notions of sovereignty, citizenship and belonging”(Jonsson 2020; cf. Agamben 1995). It also requires that we descend from the heights of a planetary view to the level of politics as the form through which humans organize their lived relations. This is not to say that Ai fails to show us individuals, or indeed to get close to the subjects before the camera. For he does: sprinkled in with the iconic drone shots is cell phone footage that shows him walking alongside a trek on the Balkan route; mingling with migrants in an encampment at the Macedonian border in Idomeni where he offers to exchange passports with one of the refugees; or aiding a young woman for whom the interview situation has become overwhelming by handing her a bucket to vomit. To be sure, such moments can offer powerful anchors for empathy and an appeal to hospitality as some critics have argued (Burgoyne 2022). And yet, these encounters also convey a troubling condescension that is part and parcel of his globalizing approach: a cosmopolitan world traveler, albeit with a refugee background of his own (A. A. Weiwei 2021), Ai in this film embodies the ubiquity and mobility of his cameras, which far outstrips the mobility of his subjects. The film fails to offer any reflection on the fact that it can move where refugees cannot. For such reflection would require to give refugees voice and subjectivity in ways that move beyond the high-angle view.

“What a scene you’re in!” The View at Eye Level in Midnight Traveler If Human Flow’s planetary vision objectifies refugees and migrants (even if thereby offering them up as potential objects of humanitarian compassion), Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler reinstates them as subjects (Fazili 2019). It does so by claiming the means of production—in this case, three mobile phone cameras—for self-representation. The film chronicles the Fazili family’s flight from Afghanistan to Europe. Combining older home video with cell phone footage of their years-long northward journey, the film adopts a strong first-­ person perspective on and of the refugee. While this decision has its own ethical trade-offs in privileging the phenomenology of experience over synoptic

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assessment, the film is aesthetically, ethically, and politically antithetical to Human Flow. Where the latter anthropologizes, Midnight Traveler personalizes; where Ai Wei Wei universalizes, Hassan Fazili specifies. Again, this distinction is a matter of how to look, of the camera’s gaze as much as that among the film’s subjects or protagonists. Though the award-winning Midnight Traveler was created by two accomplished filmmakers (and their two daughters) behind the camera, professionally edited and scored, and internationally distributed to festivals, theaters, and streaming platforms, the film in many ways retains the look of an amateur home movie, closer in this sense to Les Sauteurs than to the polished look of Fuocoammare. This is not only a matter of including older footage, largely shot on video, that predates the Fazilis’s flight. A certain home movie aesthetic also informs their filming on the road, infusing the palpable urgency of each situation with an aesthetic of the everyday that only heightens its impact. With no rig or tripods and not a thought of drones, the smartphone camera operators— Hassan, Fatima, or one of their two daughters—will often hold the aptly named mobile unsteadily in front of themselves. Like a home movie, the film captures familial highpoints (the children experience snow for the first time; fireworks ring in another new year; Fatima learns to ride a bike—and falls!—as her daughter films with the phone). But we also witness the small altercations of the everyday, from the children’s boredom to the parents’ arguments, to Nargis’s momentous negotiation with her parents whether she must cover her hair when she grows older (it’s up to her!). Like many a home movie, Midnight Traveler gravitates toward the exhibitionism of small performances, such as Nargis’s memorable rendition of Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us.” By virtue of its form, the film redirects such exhibitions toward the familial and avoids the voyeurism that would have characterized any external look. And yet, by virtue of its subject matter, this is of course a home movie without home: with the family on the move from Tajikistan to Afghanistan to Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary, the camera takes us inside cars and vans packed with migrants, it tracks refugees dashing across open ground and making their way, single file, through unguarded fencing, across border zones hastily traversed, into camps surrounded by barbed wire. The film’s “look” is due principally to its recording device, the smartphone. Cell phones have emerged in recent years as a key refugee technology, and their cameras as a medium of choice. Refugees identify “charging my phone” as the most important aspect of their journeys, as the smartphone allows them to navigate, to communicate, to access vital information (it is, of course, also a surveillance technology; cf. Gillespie et al. 2016). And it serves as a recording device, whether for migrant selfies or for the filmed documentation of certain aspects of the migrant journey. Recognizing the power of this technology, some European producers have sought to equip refugees with cell phones in order to procure “first-hand” footage. In contradistinction to the Fazilis, who bring their equipment and professional backgrounds to the project, this is in fact how Sidibé first acquires

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a camera on which to shoot the footage for Les Sauteurs; it is also how the BBC launched Exodus, a project that provided seven Syrian refugees with smartphones and edited their footage into a three-part miniseries (Exodus: Our Journey to Europe 2016). Exodus apparently democratizes image production by empowering refugees to become cinematographers of their own experience. But it thereby incurs the risks that Pooja Rangan pinpoints in participatory documentaries “whose guiding humanitarian ethic—giving the camera to the other—invents the very disenfranchised humanity that it claims to redeem” (Rangan 2017, 1). Les Sauteurs arguably functions in the breach of this dilemma: instrumentalized to a degree by the European producers, Sidibé does also come to articulate a medial subjectivity for himself: “I started to express myself with images,” he notes in his voice-over, “I feel that I exist when I film.” By contrast, in Exodus the producers ultimately retain a form of control that replaces direction, authorship, and such a reclamation of subjectivity with curation and renarration, as Bruce Bennett has observed (Bennett 2018, 16). For the BBC series, the material shot by the migrants was subtitled and supplemented with television news footage, animated maps, and interviews conducted after their arrival in the UK. In this sense, Exodus engages in and extends the “symbolic bordering” that characterizes Western media use of migrant selfies—a practice that negates self-representation (whether photographed or filmed) as a sovereign act and reduces it instead to “forensic material for the study of digital authenticity.” Such media productions, Lilie Chouliaraki argues, “‘ventrilocate’ the migrants by ‘speaking their voice’ in glamorous self-­ representations of distant suffering” (Chouliaraki 2017, 91). Midnight Traveler avoids the pitfalls of this form not only because it is the project of professional filmmakers rather than benevolent European producers (Rossipal 2021, 38). It also circumnavigates the threat of “symbolic bordering” by virtue of its greater reflexivity, which it literalizes early on. Having barely established the diary structure of the film and the Taliban threat the family is fleeing, the film shows the older of the two daughters, Nargis, combing her hair in a broken mirror; capturing her reflection, the camera moves into the green plastic frame of the mirror as Nargis’s father announces: “this is our camera, a smart phone” (Fig.  33.2). Throughout the ensuing film, the filmmaker-­refugees implicitly build on this mirror motif as they repeatedly interrogate the relationship of experience and representation. Significantly, this includes reflection on when to stop filming, what not to show. Dropped by a smuggler alongside a busy road at night, Hassan films Fatima in the light of his camera phone until she tells him to turn it off, lest the police discover and arrest them. Though we have no way of knowing whether Hassan obliged or whether the corresponding footage was left on the editing room floor, the scene ends once the relationship of filming and fleeing has been (re)established, and we learn from Hassan’s voice over that the police has arrested them anyway. Similar moments arise as the couple gets into arguments about how to deal with threats by smugglers, or what is appropriate for a man to say to a woman who is not his wife, or where film ends and real life begins: in these

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Fig. 33.2  The filmmaker and his daughter captured in the mirror in Midnight Traveler (dir. Hassan Fazili, 2019)

exchanges, though, the smartphone continues recording, and we are reminded strongly that it is not just an impersonal, neutral, or third-person camera, but the tool in the hands of one of the two people engaged in the altercation. By the end of the film, we have traveled a great distance with the Fazilis, not just from Afghanistan to the edge of Europe and across time, but also away from the planetary “high angle” of Human Flow, and into the familial looking relations of refugee-filmmakers. Perhaps the most compelling of these various reflections on seeing and experiencing migration in Midnight Traveler does away with representational images altogether. As Hassan recounts in voice-over how the couple’s younger daughter Zahra had gone missing at one point during the move to a new room in a camp, the screen goes black, except for a distant moon visible behind silhouetted leaves at the center of the image. The event is narrated in the past, but the real fear of abduction and even murder is palpable even in the retelling. The family mobilizes the camp to help find Zahra but can’t locate her. Meanwhile, Zahra’s father cannot disassociate himself from Hassan Fazili, the director: “What a scene you’re in!” he remembers thinking. As the image goes entirely black, the narrative sketches a vivid, shocking scenario: Hassan sees himself discovering his own daughter’s body in the bushes as Fatima comes running from a distance. “I have my camera in my hand, and I am filming that moment,” he imagines, “this will be the best scene in the film.” Appalled by his own thought process, Fazili nonetheless decides to integrate the memory into the fabric of the film, reflecting explicitly on the cinema’s noxious potential before cutting from black to sunlit images of Zahra. Now the camera is

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centered on the young girl, who engages it directly and playfully. She laughs, trying to evade the lens but she can’t outrun the reach of the mobile phone, which easily pans, tracks, tilts to keep her centered. Having probed the limits of the first-person perspective by reducing the image to blackness moments before, the film resumes its home movie look with a renewed sense of the stakes for refugee representation. Other films, meanwhile, have gone on to explore in depth the abstraction that Midnight Traveler only hints at here.

“A strange, strange sight”: The Experimental Gaze in Havarie The rhetoric around refugees is rife with nature metaphors that both naturalize and catastrophize the “crisis”: even casual journalistic references to “waves” of migrants who “flood” train stations and processing centers, if not entire countries, are easily mobilized by xenophobic and ethnonationalist discourses on territory and belonging and by conspiracy theories about demographic “replacement.” Visual representation functions alongside such discourse, from the choice of motifs down to formal decisions on framing, cropping, and image composition. Drawing on biblical tropes of flight and exodus, an increasingly stereotypical repertoire of images shows foil-covered migrants on crowded boats and long treks that often overflow the boundaries of the frame (cf. Wright 2002). As one commentator wrote already at the end of 2015, “For Europeans, photographs and television footage of migrant arrivals, of rescues at sea, of overloaded boats, discarded life-jackets, lost objects and dead children on Mediterranean beaches are rapidly becoming commonplace horrors”(Tyler 2015). What if the flood is not one of refugees but one of images? What if “the ‘refugee crisis’ is a representational crisis” (Bennett 2018, 15) in which we become inured to suffering and “images anesthetize,” as Sontag had warned (Sontag 1977, 20)? Two responses are imaginable in this situation. One is to “let the atrocious images haunt us,” as Sontag came to argue. The other is resistance, refusal, or redirection to call out the representational crisis itself. This has traditionally been the path of the avant-gardes in their effort to defamiliarize what has become too familiar, to redirect perception and redefine the work of cultural institutions, including the cinema. Accordingly, a number of experimental films have taken up the 2015 refugee crisis precisely as a crisis of representation, outlining what Christian Rossipal has termed a “poetics of refraction” for the way in which these works allow the water of the Mediterranean, in particular, to break the light that powers the optics of the cinema. Rossipal takes as his principal example Purple Sea (Alzakout and Abdulwahed 2021), a harrowing document of near-drowning filmed almost haphazardly on the wrist-mounted GoPro camera of one of the survivors. Other examples include the experimental short Asmat: Nomi per tutte le vittime in mare [Asmat: Names in Memory of All Victims of the Sea] (Yimer 2014), or Philip Scheffner’s Havarie, which

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constituted an early and particularly forceful rejoinder to the glut of stereotyped refugee images (Scheffner 2017). A formal experiment in documentary filmmaking that at one point also took the form of a gallery installation, Havarie requires viewers to radically decelerate their perception. Excluding the title and credits, the film’s image track consists entirely of a three-and-a-half-minute YouTube video that has been stretched out to last for 90 minutes: the duration not only of a feature film but also of a 2012 maritime rescue operation in the Mediterranean as documented by the radio traffic between a cruise ship and the Spanish coast guard. The cruise liner, Adventure of the Seas, had come across a rubber dinghy carrying 13 refugees who had lost their engine. The camera keeps this diminutive vessel in its sights for most of the film which advances at the rate of approximately one frame per second (rather than the usual 24), rendering the film experience somewhat hypnotic and a quintessential instance of a contemporary aesthetics of slowness (Koepnick 2014). As Brigitta Wagner puts it, “Havarie almost feels like watching or contemplating a painting that’s accompanied by a soundscape”(Wagner 2016). The Mediterranean looks flat and tranquil, its azure sheen at times seeming almost solid, at others evoking an expressionist painting (Fig.  33.3). The tiny vessel that floats on this canvaslike surface changes as the camera operator zooms in and out, occasionally losing it out of sight. When he does zero in on it again, some digital artifacts on the original recording can produce a mirage effect, where the dinghy appears doubled. There is only one moment around the film’s midpoint when this constellation is disrupted and the operator pans right and left to reveal his position

Fig. 33.3  A life raft carrying refugees on the reflective Mediterranean, as seen from the deck of a passing cruise ship in Havarie (dir. Philip Scheffner, 2017)

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aboard the cruise ship. The pan is formally spectacular as compared to the hypnotizing monotony of the blue seascape with the rubber dinghy. It also concretizes the camera’s viewing angle, which is every bit as high and distanced as that of Ai Wei Wei’s drones, and yet functions here in a different register entirely. Scheffner submits the “high vantage point” to reflection not by replacing it with a first-person view as do Sidibé or the Fazilis, but by abstracting it almost beyond recognition. Significantly, he does so without denying the hierarchical relations that structure the look—in this case: a tourist’s gaze that stands in for Europe and the West—at refugees. But that gaze is not offered up for identification or for reflection as in Rosi’s shots of the documentation center, let alone for the kind of facile reversal that Ai engineers momentarily with the exchange of passports. Not only does the radical aesthetic form thus thwart any kind of spectatorial mirroring by refusing it a foothold in the close-ups, editing patterns, and soundscapes that can suture the viewer to audiovisual representation; but the complexity of looking relations also deepens through the commentary by Terry Diamond, the Irish tourist aboard the Adventure of the Seas who uploaded the short video of the boat to YouTube in the first place. Toward the end of the film, we hear him reflect on his own act of capturing the “strange, strange sight” of the refugee vessel. “To a certain extent,” he reflects, “you start to try and put yourself in [the refugees’] position. But you can never replicate that. You can only assume that it has been something that’s drastic enough to drive people to do that sort of thing.” Or, as Warsan Shire writes in a widely circulated poem, “no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark” (Shire 2011, 65). Diamond’s commentary offers a vernacular summary of Havarie’s aesthetic of estrangement and the film’s response to the crisis of representation, which also undercuts the possibility of identification. His recognition of radical alterity (“you can never replicate that. You can only assume”) marks an ethical position for refugee films that evokes the limits on representations of trauma, where identification fails and even to “assume” understanding of the other’s suffering becomes problematic. This is perhaps one reason for the growing recognition in recent scholarship that the sheer scale of human migration and displacement in some senses moves the refugee crisis beyond representation (Andrew 2022; Burgoyne and Bayrakdar 2022). Havarie reflects on this predicament by aesthetic means and through abstraction. By the same token, however, the other remains utterly foreign, unknowable, and it is in keeping with this radical separation that the 13 refugees on the rubber dinghy remain mere ciphers on the blue canvas of the Mediterranean throughout Scheffner’s film. Meanwhile, the voices on the soundtrack remain wholly disembodied. Two vessels cross paths on the open sea, but no encounter ensues. Fully abstracted, the audiovisual gaze at refugees in Havarie remains external, without any hope for reciprocity. What would it mean to visualize an ethics of the encounter instead?

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“I feel like Paul is my guest”: The Reciprocal Gaze in When Paul Came Over the Sea The opening shot of When Paul Came Over the Sea reverses the looking relations that predominate in Human Flow: from a low angle, we see a man perched precariously high up on a utility pole (Preuss 2017). He is looking down at some commotion audible on the soundtrack but outside of the frame. If there is a high vantage point in this shot, it is the subject’s, not the camera’s. Only with the second, long shot do we understand the situation: the pole is part of a tall border fence guarded heavily by police while refugees seeking entry straddle the top. Like in Les Sauteurs, we find ourselves in Melilla, the Northern African Spanish enclave where “borderless Europe ends,” as the voice-over informs us. On the one side is Morocco and on the other a lush, palm-studded golf course. These opening images capture the subject that Jakob Preuss, the director of When Paul Came Over the Sea, had originally intended to explore with his film: the increasingly fortified border around “Fortress Europe,” its enforcement, its legal, political, and ethical ramifications, and its perception by those who seek to cross into the carefully guarded European territory. However, as becomes evident over the course of the documentary, Preuss’s focus shifted during his research. Soon we see him explore the camps of refugees in the Moroccan hills surrounding Melilla, where he encounters the Cameroonian Paul Nkamani, whose story will carry the film. In significant ways, however, the film and its director will also carry Paul. When Paul Came Over the Sea turns on the relationship between the filmmaker and his subject, making it explicit, reflecting upon, and deconstructing it at every turn. This is partly a matter of concrete, material support, intimated by an early question from a camp resident and prospective interviewee who asks, a bit suspiciously, “can the film bring us to Europe?” This support, which threatens to instrumentalize the documentary project much as it does in Les Sauteurs, culminates in Jakob giving Paul a ride for the final leg of his four-year journey from Cameroon to Berlin, and—in the film’s final, surprising twist— helping him secure lodging with his parents in his own childhood room. As viewers can’t help but notice—and reviewers did note—such decisions raise questions of documentary ethics. Accordingly, the film’s reflexive approach to the reciprocal relationship between filmmaker and subject that When Paul explores offers a fourth type of cinematic engagement with migration that is as distinct from Human Flow’s high-angle perspective as it is from the first-person view of Midnight Traveler or from the experimental abstraction of Havarie. Instead, the gaze in Preuss’s film is increasingly reciprocal. Though Paul does not look often directly into the lens, Jakob’s presence behind or alongside the camera is always palpable (Fig. 33.4). This presence is both questioning and self-questioning: Preuss wants to understand how Paul’s journey fits into the European refugee regime, and what motivates Paul; but he also asks how his own presence inflects Paul’s

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Fig. 33.4  Images of refugees projected onto the titular Paul Nkamani in When Paul Came Over the Sea (dir. Jakob Preuss, 2017)

journey and becomes part of the documentary process. And Paul speaks back. Although he certainly maintains authorial control throughout the film, Jakob also delegates the narrative to Paul, who fills in details about his past, provides commentary on his ongoing journey, and even reflects on the film itself in retrospective voice-overs that match those provided at other times by the director. The resulting story consequently has two subjects: Paul in front of the camera and Jakob behind it. In a very real sense, the two figures mutually constitute one another. “I suppose I’ll never be able to say whether he chose me or I chose him,” Preuss comments even before the credits roll. But there is a clear moment at which “my film became Paul’s film,” as Preuss describes it in his director’s note (“Als Paul Ueber Das Meer Kam” n.d.). When he doesn’t hear from Paul for a while, the filmmaker becomes concerned. Friends recommend that he search the internet—where he indeed rediscovers his acquaintance from the Moroccan encampment in a news story about a Spanish coast guard rescue. The boat on which Paul made his way off the African continent three years after leaving Cameroon, and across the Mediterranean strait that separates Melilla from the Spanish mainland, veered off course. Several passengers died at sea, children among them. The news cameras capture a traumatized Paul making his way off the rescue boat with trembling hands. This news image jolts the filmmaker, himself a producer of images, who later asks himself whether “the trembling of Paul’s hands was instrumental for my role on Paul’s further path. Do we need the drama of survivors in emergency blankets to act?” For Preuss does act—not only by making the film, documenting Paul’s plight, and thereby helping audiences to reflect upon Europe’s border regime and the treatment of refugees, but also by intervening directly to help Paul, arranging for lodging during a stopover in Paris and eventually giving him a lift

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to Berlin once he has made it across the German border: “in Germany,” Preuss notes in voice-over, “I feel like Paul is my guest.” Such acts of hospitality, which culminate with Paul moving in with Jakob’s parents, mark the particular trade-offs that Preuss engages in pursuit of his film. They muddy the waters of documentary objectivity, to be sure, not to mention the complex assumptions that underly the rewriting of refugee plights in terms of host/guest relations, since “to offer welcome is ‘always already’ to have the power to delimit the space or place that is being offered to the other” (Berg and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2018, 1.1:3). As Preuss notes, for both ethical and legal reasons, “it’s one thing to document Paul’s journey, quite another to organize his future.” And yet, short of abandoning the project, there is hardly any alternative, as the very decision to film and the act of documenting represents a subjective investment by the filmmaker. Even the seemingly dispassionate, patient observational stance of Rosi’s Fuocoammare with which we began radiates a commitment on the part of the filmmaker to watch, to listen—and indeed to live with those whom he films, as Rosi did for long stretches prior to shooting. What distinguishes Fuocoammare from When Paul Came Over the Sea, then, is not a greater or a lesser degree of objectivity, but the explicit reflexivity on the reciprocal construction of subject and object, self and other, the story of the filmmaker and that of the refugee. Over the course of some three years that the film chronicles in diary form, Paul, Jakob, and his family clearly become more than partners in a documentary film project; its Facebook page, indeed, documents the continued friendship, chronicles setbacks, and celebrates Paul’s wins as he ultimately gains a special dispensation to remain in Germany. In this sense, the film is as much one about refugees, borders, and migration, as it is a (self-) searching inquiry into hospitality that mutually implicates host and guest. A key sequence toward the end of the film tests this mutual involvement by way of negation when Jakob proposes to Paul that “today we won’t help you.” Paul distractedly responds “ok” but eventually finds himself short of one Euro needed to catch a bus to a shelter to which he has been assigned. He turns to the film team for help, but Jakob stubbornly continues the experiment and refuses to engage other than by keeping his camera trained on Paul. The scene is painful to watch, and in the context of the film’s overall readiness to query the boundary between the documentarian and his subject, it appears downright cold and cruel. But even as it seems to demean Paul by teaching him a gratuitous lesson in self-sufficiency, it is rather the spectator who is taught to understand that there is no neutrality in documentary ethics. Paul eventually manages to secure his bus fare with help from a stranger. Over an image of Paul riding the bus, he and Jakob take turns reflecting on the experiment. Jakob asks himself whether it makes any sense at all to set “rules” of engagement for telling a story like Paul’s; and Paul asks himself whether Jakob was trying to teach him something about “German reality.” The experiment in nonintervention, separation, and “neutrality” has clearly failed, as if to prove the inextricable reciprocity of filmmaker and filmed, of host and guest, self and other. If Sontag simply posits otherness in regarding pain, When Paul Came over the Sea makes this

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othering reflexive, allowing it to rebound on the filmmaker and confounding the distinction between the subject and object of the gaze. In this sense, Preuss’s film takes the “reciprocal nature of vision” (Berger 1972) as the starting point for its own look, thereby gesturing toward the ethics Rossipal discerns in the refugee film’s “poetics of refraction:” an “ethics which is prior to the rift between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’” (Rossipal 2021, 41). This is, again, an ethical concern that cuts across the modes of refugee film discussed here and also informs films that do not adopt refraction as an aesthetic program in Rossipal’s sense. Even a film such as Flee arguably works through these questions by adopting a “collaborative mode of narration” that flip-flops between first and second person narration, as Wazhmah Osman and Karen Redrobe point out in a wide-ranging, critical conversation on the Oscar nominee. However, where that film “romanticizes certain Western and Northern European cultural norms in an assimilationist and reductive manner” (Osman and Redrobe 2022, 29), Preuss repeatedly and explicitly allows Paul to question and undo his own assumptions, thereby also realigning (though not fully reversing) the refugee film’s hierarchy of looking relations, its identification of self and others, and its treatment of subject and object. In Rossipal’s terms, Preuss and Nkamani go a long way toward suspending “the unbridgeable ethical divide that follows from the cultural production of ‘strangers’ …, without erasing the singularity of those who have to flee” (Rossipal 2021, 41). The medium for undoing the opposition between filmmaker-subject and refugee-­object is not simply the photographic image or documentary form, but the film itself as process and as encounter.

Conclusion: Filming the Encounter When Paul Came over the Sea signals the importance of encounter already in its subtitle, “Tagebuch einer Begegnung” [diary of an encounter]. Arguably, though, all refugee cinema turns on the notion of the encounter as a representational fulcrum. What differentiates individual films, I have been arguing, are the ways in which this encounter plays out and is structured by looking relations. As I have suggested, the camera can encode or deconstruct hierarchies, reinforce or undercut distinctions between subjects and objects of the gaze, and it can ultimately render refugees more or less visible. This is the ethical terrain that filmmakers have been traversing with increased intensity and in response to the new rhetoric of a migration “crisis” since 2015. Finding that rhetoric to be “as vague as it is portentous and intentionally alarming,” the late philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman weighed in with a book-length essay entitled Strangers at Our Door, written concurrently with the production of some of the films discussed here. Identifying populism, globalization, and securitization as underlying dynamics of the “migration panic,” Baumann turned to philosophy from Kant to Gadamer to work through patterns of scapegoating, dehumanization, and us-versus-them attitudes toward others perceived as strangers. The only guardrail to prevent this crisis discourse from spiraling ever further, Bauman held, was the “counterforce of the

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phenomenon of the encounter,” which, he hoped, could lead to dialogue and to what Gadamer describes as a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) (Bauman 2016, 113). Calling up notions of our “common humanity,” such a fusion of horizons remains utopian as long as humanity is decidedly not common to all. Nor can documentary filmmaking will such common humanity into being through representation; rather, as Pooja Rangan reminds us, “documentary, especially in its most benevolent, humanitarian guises, is thoroughly implicated in the work of regulating what does and does not count as human” (Rangan 2017, 8). While they may be unable to avoid such implication, the aesthetic choices they make incur different trade-offs that individual films disregard at their peril. This is what makes Ai’s gestures of walking with refugees and offering, tongue in cheek, to swap passports with one of them in a camp, appear so facile—an attempt at Horizontverschmelzung that goes awry. And while the film does open up that horizon to a synoptic, planetary view, its con-descending gaze from above undermines any attempt to ground its third-person perspective in the reciprocity of first and second person. Better then, it seems, to either assert a first-person, familial point of view without any clear horizon for fusion as in Midnight Traveler, which ends on an image of the sky above a razor wire-­ topped wall, as the filmmakers’ older daughter insists on the negation of memory, and by extension humanity (“I absolutely won’t want to remember this in the future”). Better, too, than false anthropological universals and the assertion of eternal “human flow,” may be to foreground unreconciled, radical alterity, as Havarie does through abstraction and its own kind of distanced gaze. At best, it appears, refugee films hold out not the wholesale “fusion of horizons” but the promise of their mutual reflection or “refraction.” For this, the encounter of self and other, homeless and homed, host and guest remains a precondition, if not in itself the solution Baumann would envision—an insight that is adumbrated by the reflexive aesthetics of When Paul Came Over the Sea. Eschewing the alternatives of either the facile “fusion of horizons” or the insistence on irreconcilable alterity, the film self-consciously explores “mediation as an ethically fraught but dialectically generative process at the heart of the humanitarian encounter” (Rangan 2017, 9). In this encounter as in others chronicled by refugee films, lacunae remain: all too rarely do these films inquire into horizontal encounters at eye level among refugees, which would allow them to explore both differences and solidarities; and the “look” of the refugee film remains predominantly male, and gendered difference is all but erased (Castro 2019; Osman and Redrobe 2022). And yet, the utopian framework of the encounter that Baumann invokes retains its relevance so long as we heed Sontag’s admonition that “no ‘we’ should ever be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain” (Sontag 2003, 6). In the best cases, such a “we” is instead produced aesthetically and ethically out of difference, through a “reciprocal regard” (Bauman 2016, 116), and in the new ways of seeing that the refugee film affords us as viewers, whoever “we” may be.

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Bibliography Achiume, E.  Tendayi. 2019. The Postcolonial Case for Rethinking Borders. Dissent Magazine (blog). https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-­postcolonial-­ case-­for-­rethinking-­borders. Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. We Refugees. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 49 (2): 114–119. “Als Paul Ueber Das Meer Kam.” n.d. Accessed 16 June 2022. http://www.paulueberdasmeer.de/. Alzakout, Amel, and Khaled Abdulwahed, directors. 2021. Purple Sea. Documentary. ZDF/Arte. Andrew, Dudley. 2022. Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media. In Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, ed. Deniz Bayrakdar and Robert Burgoyne, 27–49. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463724166_ch01. Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bayrakdar, Deniz, and Robert Burgoyne, eds. 2022. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bayraktar, Nilgün. 2016. Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving-Image Art: Cinema beyond Europe. New York: Routledge. Bennett, Bruce. 2018. Becoming Refugees: Exodus and Contemporary Mediations of the Refugee Crisis. Transnational Cinemas 9 (1): 13–30. Berg, Mette Louise, and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, eds. 2018. Hospitality and Hostility Towards Migrants: Global Perspectives 1(1). Migration and Society. https://www. berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/migration-­and-­society/1/1/migration-­ and-­society.1.issue-­1.xml. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Books. Burgoyne, Robert. 2022. Abstraction, Bare Life, and Counternarratives of Mobility in the Refugee Films of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei, Incoming and Human Flow. In Bayrakdar and Burgoyne (op. cit.). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463724166_ch03. Burgoyne, Robert, and Deniz Bayrakdar. 2022. Introduction: Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media. In Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, ed. Deniz Bayrakdar and Robert Burgoyne. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463724166_intro. Castro, Joy. 2019. “The People Are Missing”: New Refugee Documentaries and Carceral Humanitarianism. Senses of Cinema 90 (March). http://sensesofcinema. com/author/joy-­castro/. Celik, Ipek Azime. 2015. In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Celik-Rappas, Ipek. 2017. Refugees as Innocent Bodies, Directors as Political Activists: Humanitarianism and Compassion in European Cinema. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Sobre Cuerpos, Emociones y Sociedad 9 (23): 81–89. Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin. 2020. The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://thegooddrone.mitpress.mit.edu/ pub/lju9yt4i/release/1.

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Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2017. Symbolic Bordering: The Self-Representation of Migrants and Refugees in Digital News. Popular Communication 15 (2): 78–94. https://doi. org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1281415. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2018. From a High Vantage Point. Eurozine, October 12. https://www.eurozine.com/high-­vantage-­point/. Exodus: Our Journey to Europe. 2016. Television Series. Fazili, Hassan, director. 2019. Midnight Traveler. Gillespie, Marie, et  al. 2016. Mapping Refugee Media Journeys: Smartphones and Social Media Networks. The Open University / France Média Monde. https:// www.statewatch.org/media/documents/news/2016/may/ou-­mapping-­refugee-­ media-­journeys.pdf. Jonsson, Stefan. 2020. A Society Which Is Not: Political Emergence and Migrant Agency. Current Sociology 68 (2): 204–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392119886863. Keane, Webb. 2015. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Ethical Life. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873593. Koepnick, Lutz. 2014. On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary. New York: Columbia University Press. New Keywords Collective. n.d. Near Futures - Europe at a Crossroads. Accessed 16 June 2022. http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-new-keywords-of-crisis-inand-of-europe/. Nguyen, Vinh. 2019. Refugeetude: When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee. Social Text 37 (2): 109–131. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-­7371003. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Osman, Wazhmah, and Karen Redrobe. 2022. The Inclusions and Occlusions of Expanded Refugee Narratives. Film Quarterly 76 (1): 23–34. https://doi. org/10.1525/fq.2022.76.1.23. Preuss, Jakob, director. 2017. Als Paul über das Meer kam. Weydemann / ZDF. Rangan, Pooja. 2017. Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. Durham: Duke University Press. Rasmussen, Jonas Poher, director. 2021. Flugt. Documentary, Animation, Biography. Final Cut for Real, Sun Creature Studio, Vivement Lundi. Rosi, Gianfranco, director. 2016. Fuocoammare. Stemal Entertainment, 21 Unofilm, Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Rossipal, Christian. 2021. Poetics of Refraction. Film Quarterly 74 (3): 35–45. https:// doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.74.3.35. Salgado, Sebastião. 2016. Exodus, New edn. Köln: Taschen. Sandburg, Carl. 2002. The Family of Man, ed. Edward Steichen. New  York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Scheffner, Philip, director. 2017. Havarie. Documentary. Pong, Blinker Filmproduktion, Worklights Media. Shire, Warsan. 2011. Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. London: Mouthmark series. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Tyler, Imogen. 2015. In a World of Commonplace Horrors, How Do We Talk about the Refugee Crisis? OpenDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-­ europe-­make-­it/in-­world-­of-­commonplace-­horrors-­how-­do-­we-­talk-­about-­ref/.

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CHAPTER 34

Curating Hospitality: Toward a More Sensitive Perception of Vulnerability Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Fabienne Brugère, and Guillaume le Blanc

A-GS. You both have engaged with the question of hospitality quite extensively in recent years. Your writings about the end of hospitality during the 2015–2016 “refugee crisis” have been consequential. And you have also curated the exhibition “Persona Grata” that questioned the notion of hospitality through the prism of contemporary art. According to you, after Derrida’s seminal text Of Hospitality why is a contemporary reflection on hospitality still necessary? How can the notion of hospitality overcome the biopolitics of rescue? Derrida’s entire seminar on hospitality has only now been published for the first time in France and we do acknowledge that his main question concerns the challenge that arises from trying to intertwine the two main meanings of hospitality. On the one hand, hospitality should be understood as an absolute ethical imperative, unconcerned with considerations other than the pure fact of hospitality. On the other hand, thinking about hospitality implies taking into

A.-G. Saliot (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. Brugère University Paris 8, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] G. le Blanc University Paris-Diderot, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_34

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consideration the laws of the welcoming nation. How can we resolve the tension inherent in these two contrasting notions of hospitality? How can we account for both the law of hospitality and the limits to hospitality present in national laws? Our own reflection takes place in a biopolitical context: now, the duty and consequences of hospitality fall on an entire population, rather than a single individual. This new framing has significant consequences for the concept of hospitality. We certainly must take into account the fact that the political argument for hospitality remains relevant and involves new considerations of the institutions that still make hospitality possible, although in Europe and almost everywhere else in the world it continues to be made impossible. We tried to develop this new approach in our book, The End of Hospitality. We can point out several consequences of this framing. First of all, our work takes place in a geopolitical framework. It proposes a reflection on practices of hospitality and of inhospitality, considering the very vulnerable situation of migrants and refugees all over the world. We know how wars, dictatorships, and climate disasters cause migration and how the governments of rich countries are increasingly unwilling to welcome foreigners. The current situation in Europe itself is quite complex: when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan after the US’s retreat from the country, Europe opened its doors to Afghan refugees. But as uncertainty persists, refugees remain in limbo across the continent. Likewise, the advent of the war in Ukraine brought millions of new refugees to the border with Poland and elsewhere, and the European Union mobilized to welcome them. We have refugees from Afghanistan since the Taliban are the new leaders of that country, and migrants who are homeless in the cold, at the border between Belarus with Poland. Secondly, it is important to describe the experiment of two philosophers curating an exhibition on hospitality in Paris (October 2018/January 2019). The point of the exhibition is the tension between art, politics, and philosophy considering the migrant’s unique position: when refugees arrive in a new place, they are in a very vulnerable situation, but at the same time they carry with them a lot of dreams, especially when migrating to democratic countries. Do we have the right to present both vulnerability and dreams in an exhibition? And how can the relationship between artistic practices and what comes from an experience such as exile, which can be traumatic, be represented? The challenging relationship between aesthetics, on the one hand, and ethics and politics on the other, has been at the center of many debates in the history of philosophy, going as far back in history as Plato and Aristotle. A-GS. What are the origins of this project? What were the methods you put in place to create forms of curation around hospitality? We had the opportunity to explore further this issue of the encounter between art and philosophy with regard to migration when two museums made us a proposal: to organize an exhibition of contemporary art on the theme of migration based on our book, La Fin de l’hospitalité / (The End of

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Hospitality), published in France in 2017.1 This book was a prompt response to Europe’s mismanagement of the refugee crisis in 2015–2016: the surveillance of the Mediterranean, the reinforcement of borders, and the building of walls, camps, and centers where refugees were categorized and their life projects changed as their immigration plans were directed elsewhere. The exhibition was the product of a close collaboration with its curators, Anne-Laure Flacelière and Isabelle Renard from Mac Val Museum (in the southern suburbs of Paris) and Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (National Museum of Immigration History at Palais Doré in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris). After meeting on a regular basis, we constructed the exhibition as a journey through five moments that correspond to the chapters of the book. Then we discussed which works of art and artists to feature based on a list selected by the two curators and drafted the texts corresponding to the five moments. These texts provided a description of the various stages in a refugee’s journey of exile, from their departure from their home to the possibility of belonging to the host country. A-GS. How did you manage to render visible those who are often made invisible, the very people who are, through coercion, neglect, or necessity, living outside the reach of the visual frame; or worse, whose own visibility is always already saturated with a negative ideological reification? Merleau-Ponty tries to show how the visible and the invisible are intertwined. As a matter of fact, one of our main questions with the “Persona Grata” exhibition was: How can we pay attention to the forms of life lived by foreigners? How can we welcome them? How can we make truly visible the foreign lives that we usually don’t want to see at all? How can we go beyond the negative judgments by which a foreigner is made a stranger, an outsider and even an alien? So, our question is twofold. On the one hand, we wanted to investigate the social and national forms of how foreigners are invisibilized. On the other hand, we wanted to highlight an ordinary art of welcoming the other that can be described as hospitality. The first question is a critical one: How can someone become invisible? How can someone become a ghost? The second question is an aesthetic and political one: can an exhibition be a political scene of welcoming and hospitality? A-GS. How do you articulate this exploration of new forms of visibility and their relation to the ethical question of hearing the voices of those who are not only made invisible but are also silenced? If, according to Berkeley, to be is to be perceived, and if, therefore, not to be is not to be perceived, then not seeing or hearing a person is precipitating 1  For a review of the book in English, see “Corina Stan reviews La fin de l’hospitalité,” Critical Inquiry online, 19 April 2018.

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this person into nonbeing, into social death. If this is the case, ethical or political violence can be understood as the simultaneous refusal to see and hear someone who is our neighbor because we don’t want to recognize them as such. Someone’s face disappears as soon as someone’s voice is no longer heard. In a close register, someone’s voice is lost as soon as someone’s face is no longer apprehended. To no longer see the other is to constitute him or her as undead, as a zombie or as a ghost. For this kind of being, their apprehension can only remain spectral and cannot give rise to any form of acknowledgment. To no longer hear the other is to constitute him or her as a stranger: they may appear in my field of vision, but their voice is no longer perceived as a significant voice, it is not the object of any transactions. Worse still, it is a question of constituting the other as an undesirable stranger whose vocal presence must above all not give rise to any kind of translation. In this process, a foreigner is metamorphosed into a stranger. On the flipside, hospitality should be seen as the art of metamorphosing the stranger into a foreigner and the foreigner into a neighbor. The refusal to recognize a life as a dignified, decent, legitimate life, as a fully lived life is made possible by the refusal to perceive it as a life worthy of being apprehended, of being narrated. Ethical violence is at its height when the disqualification of certain subjects is made possible by the decision not to perceive them. Not to hear a voice, not to see a face, is to deprive a subject of any actual capacity, of any artistic craft as well as of any narrative practice. The unlivable life is then the life made unlivable, impossible, by the absence of perceptive consideration and even more of perceptive care that should be granted to it: this is indeed the heart of ethical violence. In “Persona Grata,” we paid attention to the narrations and voices through which foreign artists describe their own experiences in their own works. There is a strong link between visibility and voices. In fact, visibility appears to be a narration and, even more importantly, a voice. Pictures are voices. Rather than speaking for the foreigner, we have decided to show artistic journeys related to exile and hospitality in order for voices to emerge beyond our national and political framings. The voice of the stranger is a real one, but we refuse to hear that voice, we refuse to consider it as a voice. Not hearing a voice is not taking it into account. So that voice disappears not because it does not exist but because it fails to find ears that might listen to it, because it does not find other voices to take it into account. Rather than speaking for the stranger, we have decided to listen to his or her voice. A-GS. How do you achieve this “perceptive care” more specifically? Is it the result of the apparatus of curation? Or rather an act of translation? And is translation always a gesture of hospitality, humility, and empathy, or rather an ambivalent and equivocal one, subtended by potential tensions, transfers, displacements, appropriations, betrayals, and ­misinterpretations? As Tiphaine Samoyault reminds us in Traduction et Violence, translation is a practice that is itself also related to a history of

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violence. Both the confrontation with otherness and the very otherness itself are at work within the passage from one language to another. How did you confront such issues in your exhibition? The purpose of the exhibition “Persona Grata” is for it to be a device, a mechanism to welcome foreign narratives, voices, and life forms. To let the stranger speak implies an art of hospitality which can be, at the same time, an art of translation. The exhibition was such an art of hospitality. Translating does not imply defeating the other voice. A translation depends on the possibility of annihilating the superiority of one’s language over another. If hospitality is the art of taking into account the voice of the stranger, it is of course not reducible to translation. It also depends on the capacity of welcoming new arts of language and strange linguistic uses. Hospitality is to constitute a linguistic stage within which the voice of a stranger becomes a powerful one. What does it imply for a voice to resonate within a linguistic stage as a hospitable scene? When a voice can find opened ears, then someone can, contrary to assimilation, continue to exist, that is to say, can maintain his or her way of life. It was perfectly clear to us that the scenography of the exhibition itself had to be a device for hospitality, one capable of rendering the artistic proposals as fully intelligible voices. These voices have to be listened to which means to consider otherness as the possibility of a strange voice coming from another world. The presupposition of another world is a way of attenuating all sorts of violence. A-GS. Let’s go back to the very notion of hospitality that is at the core of your reflection. It is a very fraught concept, as you know. In his reflections, Derrida constantly underlines the “irreducible pervertibility” of the general concept of hospitality as always being underpinned by an already-existing mastery and hostility, reminding us that the hostis is both host and enemy. He hence famously coined the term “hostipitality.” What are the valences of this concept for you? How do you differentiate it from that of Derrida? So  at the very core of our exhibition, there was this word: “hospitality.” It could be problematic as this word is worn out. Firstly, because it is associated with ancient cultures (such as those of Greece, Rome, or Persia, Gaul or Germania, American Indians according to the article “Hospitality” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia) and reputedly absent from our postmodern world. Secondly, because there are strong and asymmetrical positions between the host and the welcomed. Should we always maintain this asymmetry? Democracy must go beyond asymmetry in order to create relations of equality. Thirdly, hospitality is also tied with a dark history of colonization. On this point, it was the value through which American Indians had to receive Europeans; failure to do so became a justification for war. Kant in his famous text Perpetual Peace has strongly criticized the idea of leading war under conditions of hospitality. This notion was not very popular in the twentieth century, given the historical moment of decolonization in the world. Hospitality would

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be on the side of the colonizers, equipped with social codes that would guarantee their domination (Rosello 2001). We analyzed the return of the concept of “hospitality” in our book The end of Hospitality and also in a special issue for the magazine Esprit, “The Courage of Hospitality,” at a historical time marked by both the globalization of the world and the renationalization of nations. The fact that migrants are an increasing political reality makes necessary a new reflection on hospitality. The fact that political, economic, and climatic conditions of certain territories all over the world precipitates populations out of countries where they can no longer live creates the obligation to question hospitality anew. We prefer to insist on the conditions of hospitality, the places of welcome where an exile’s position is elaborated. Derrida is more concerned with the foundation of the concept of hospitality, its unconditionality, even if he doesn’t obliterate the description of a conditional hospitality. A-GS. I want to return to this interrelation between creating new forms of hospitality and creating new forms of visibility. How can you overcome the tensions between a political hospitality that is so worn out and fragilized and an ethical hospitality that tends to be de-realized? How do you rearticulate forms of visibility with the very forms of migrants’ everyday life? Would you agree with Derrida that an act of hospitality can only be poetic? There is a politics of visibility that we must criticize. Migrants become intelligible because they become visible, but their visibility is fabricated by cameras that film the flow of migrants trying their luck in rich countries. The problem is, those moments are filmed when migrants, exiled or seeking refuge, are about to leave for the countries in the North and speak about their dreams of their life there once arrived. The Syrian camps in Lebanon or Turkey or the journeys of sub-Saharans to Morocco or elsewhere are not filmed. We do not have images of them in Europe because they do not seem to concern us. Or, if we have images, these are always images of desolation and lawlessness. Hospitality is therefore the art of questioning the welcoming of the so-­ called other in national contexts. But this word is not only an ordinary word. It has a political history. First, it becomes a way, on the one hand, of collectively reminding us of what we had elaborated after the Second World War with the 1951 Geneva Convention for Refugees, a refuge for persecuted populations. It holds therefore a political meaning that intersects with a fundamental demand to help those who are stateless, without political community, naked in a way as explained by Hannah Arendt in The Origin of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1951). On the other hand, it is also the name of the practices that have emerged within societies to welcome those asylum seekers who cross borders without rights or papers, risking their lives. Hospitality has become the rallying word for those who undertake to reach out in the name of an idea of what it means to be a human being, taking the risk of the “crime of solidarity.”

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There can be a conflict between these two forms of hospitality. On the one hand, hospitality takes the forms of ethical gestures made by individuals or associations of volunteers; this kind of practice is very present in Europe, both in its villages and in its cities. On the other hand, hospitality is a political category defined by Kant as a right for every life threatened with death;2 today, governments are increasingly reluctant to practice political hospitality, citing unfavorable public opinion and the need to protect nationals in times of crisis. The proponents of the practice of hospitality invoke a duty of hospitality, an ethical hospitality that is becoming increasingly politicized. The conflict of hospitality becomes more and more explicit. If so, art becomes essential: it is not dogmatic, it is not limited to slogans, messages. It shows concrete and hidden forms of life, it makes the invisible visible, it also shows at the same time the imaginary of migrations, the contradictions of individuals and societies, the state of globalization. All these characteristics make art create a sort of hospitality with dreams, desire, imagination. And we can add that acting for hospitality has to do with poetry, with a sort of depth of hospitality. A-GS. I would like you to tell us a bit more about the concrete work of curation. How have you been able to transpose, or rather to materialize, your philosophical reflections? What is your relationship to art (indeed art and philosophy is another of these very fraught relations)? How did you choose which works of art to display and how to present them ? We, artists and philosophers, have tried to retrace the paths of migration, to make narratives out of them. With the curators, we have delimited five rooms respectively entitled: “Emergency calls,” “Disenchantment,” “The (Dis) Extended Hand,” “Should I stay or should I go?,” and “Desires of Horizon.” The title of the exhibition, “Persona grata,” was provocative as foreigners are often portrayed as undesirables. But, furthermore, it is an invocation of hospitality: refugees are welcome; they are desirable beings. “Persona grata” poses the refusal of a vertical vision of hospitality. Admittedly, hospitality as a “concept” hovers over the exhibition. But the method adopted is not to give an “artistic illustration” of hospitality. We are very far from the approach of Heidegger using Van Gogh’s Old Shoes to defend his vision of the tension between the earth and the world, very far also from the classification of works of art done by Hegel (Heidegger 2002). On the contrary, our conception of philosophy, and of its relationship to the arts, is based on a critique of this conception of art as an illustration of a discourse, even a philosophical one. In the book itself, we have practiced a philosophical-­ ethnographic methodology, that is, a philosophy concerned with the places 2  Kant, Perpetual Peace, third article: “Here, as in the proceedings articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.”

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where hospitality is practiced in spite of the difficulties, including sometimes hostile neighborhoods. We started from migrant experiences in Berlin, in the “Jungle” of Calais, in Ventimiglia, on the border between Greece and North Macedonia. The idea has always been to build a concept of hospitality from observations, meetings, discussions of current events in what has been called “the crisis of the reception of migrants” in 2015. Our perceptions on the spot then echoed texts and concepts. This is how a philosophical perspective is born. From this point of view, the choice of exhibiting the work of photographer Bruno Serralongue is symptomatic: he spent a lot of time in Calais (especially in 2006 and 2016), took an incredible number of photos which he exposes in series on white walls without any comment. The photos show the living conditions of migrants but also mutual aid and solidarity. It could be called documentary art. Just as this philosophical-ethnographic enterprise reveals the knots of hospitality, its often conditional character, contemporary art produces a visibility inhabited by forms of life. The artistic proposals, whether metaphorical, poetic, critical, or committed, make something known; they do not show the concept as always floating, but they express something of the world in situ as it develops with the artist’s gaze, his dreams, his universe of objects, his history, both individual and collective. The Chilean artist Enrique Ramirez presents a video that makes us imagine the fragile dreams of migrants: his work is haunted by the ocean he left behind, which he had to cross to reach Europe. He uses the image of a lighted house, a floating island in the middle of an ocean at night: Does the house indicate a new life? A-GS.  It seems to me that the exhibition is trying to create sensorial spaces, to engage with the materiality of the hospitality as an experience, a locus, and an act of passage. Would you agree with such a rendering of your curation work? Our perspective has been that of correspondences. Baudelaire’s correspondences take place between both the arts and the senses that carry them, intertwining listening and looking, but also between sensitive forms and ideas (Baudelaire 1975). Art presents this paradox: it is both material and immaterial, it touches us and makes us think at the same time. Thus, along with the artists, we have sought correspondences rather than illustrations and put forward all the ambiguities, opacities, and contradictions of our societies. The correspondences invite us to put forward analogies, relationships to myths, dreams, desires, and reality, of course. At the very beginning of the exhibition, a work by the artist Sarkis presents a big liner in a beautiful luminous black. Next to it there is a very small warship, looking almost fragile by contrast; everything is illuminated by a set of light bulbs which are called “treasures.” What is leaving if not to imagine a life that defies wars and all disasters? This work of art evokes the passage of the sea, the cost of the dream. Another work by artist Moataz Nan is also important: in the

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middle of the exhibition, a beautiful yurt made of wooden slats on crystal refers to the necessity and beauty of shelter. At the same time, the shelter has no door, you can’t see inside. Yet the word “love” in Arabic is reflected on the ceiling. The act of welcome is always threatened by its reversal and weakening, especially in periods of history when fears predominate. The crystal is in pieces just as a life can be in tatters. There are also all these hands stretching out or relaxing and this superb film by Zineb Sedira at the end of the exhibition. We make a journey between the two shores of the Mediterranean; this journey is so blue and at the same time so long. The boat is empty; a man is alone on this boat and seems to reflect on his life. Visitors wonder what one can make of this solitary traveler. A-GS. Judith Butler argues that one cannot understand vulnerability outside the social and material relations that make life possible. What did you want to achieve politically and ethically by exhibiting vulnerability? Weren’t you worried, in showing the vulnerability of displaced populations, that you might indirectly reinforce a paternalistic sovereign discourse? How can you make sure that the agency of migrants was being restituted in the process of exposure? In the exhibition, the artists show, each in their own way, these micro-scenes in unsettled neighborhoods, these assemblages of lives from here and elsewhere, or these dramas of the refusal of others. They suggest that the vulnerability of displaced lives is amplified by the fragility of the bonds of hospitality. Artists have wanted to show the world as it is, to give shape to what happens to us, to provoke reflection or affect, to cry out, to bear witness to this uncertain and disturbing world. Humanity is vulnerable. The recognition of the other, otherness, encounters, or good feelings are absent from a globalization that seems suspended above the void. The artistic proposals, by their power of suggestion and their capacity to exist by themselves, testify to a fragility that touches us to the bone. Are we still human? Can we still take care of those more vulnerable than ourselves? Do we still know how to invent political systems based on freedom and equality? Beware, the world is fragile and human people are more or less vulnerable. Knowing in what sense vulnerability can be a common value is one of the great challenges of democracy (Butler 2004). Recognizing vulnerability does not mean establishing a decontamination zone around everything that is fragile so that the world at its heart and the empire at its center emerge solidified and even more majestic. To recognize the vulnerable is to opt for the opposite: to bring all the highly inflammable and vulnerable peripheries back into the center, to dismiss the borders between the inside and the outside when they facilitate not passage but exclusion. The arts, and specifically visual arts, create a reflective  distance by highlighting the question of migration and the impossibility of a paternalistic sovereign discourse.

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A-GS. Would that not be close to a form of utopia? And if so, what is its political efficacy? If this thinking is utopian, the fact that such a utopia is carried by philosophy, the arts and sciences is enough to make it exist as a critical form of power, as an alternative to the madness of expulsion. To recognize that one’s own life is connected to unknown, foreign, strange lives, to recognize that we are connected to lives that a priori have no connection with our own, is to feel part of a vast humanity and to suddenly feel that our own lives depend on other existences that we did not know but that have chosen us as their recipients. Our perspective has been to establish a correspondence between art and philosophy on the question of hospitality, convinced that this is the best way to provoke reflection and make the spectators consider the traces of their own journey in them. The exhibition is not at all conceived in a moralizing way. Rather, the aim is, echoing the places of welcome that exist or do not exist, the devices that can be listed or desired, to encourage the spectator to question the notion of welcome, the migratory life courses. Finally, we insisted on the capacity for action of the refugees, who leave and try to arrive elsewhere (with the echo of the Clash’s song: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”). We wanted to show the “normality” of migration, in the sense that it is not only about flows but also about individuals with dreams, desires, a will to make a place for themselves, to work, to educate children. Political efficacy would be to give capacity for action to the refugees in order that they become inhabitants of the place where they arrive. A-GS. In what ways can an exhibition create new conditions for the perception of the vulnerability of migrants and make it a palpable reality? If we want to raise public awareness of the issue of hospitality, it is best to go through affects, emotions, everything that presents a sensitive construction of hospitality. In general, people who begin to welcome exiles do so because they meet this or that person, who comes from elsewhere, in a fortuitous way. They experience emotions, and then decide to act. Conversely, those who hold nationalist discourses do not play on the same emotions and with the same use of affects, but they have understood their capacity to push for action. Such an exhibition is inhabited by an ethical and political requirement, to apprehend the lives that are hidden from view, to find, under the question of migration, a face, a hand, a smile, or a word. Human beings do not develop on their own, without help, without accompaniment, without support. People without rights are also people who are denied a place. Their situation is not only juridical; it is also material: their sensitivity is tested in the form of great vulnerability. Ethics is concerned with the forms of life of individuals, the fairest construction of the sensitive, as are art and philosophy too. This is where it meets politics. Artistic experimentation, while showing forms of life, is utopian. It conjures up the heterotopia of segregated places where those seeking refuge live without being apprehended or recognized. It makes something else of it.

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A-GS. What kind of specific interactions between ethics, politics, and aesthetics did you want the exhibition to foster? Do you think you succeeded in creating forms of visibility that would produce understanding, empathy, and even ethical actions? And why the title? From a philosophical point of view, artistic and cultural productions by and about refugees allow us to analyze with more precision the relationship between politics and aesthetics. They make it possible to take seriously artistic forms because the political message delivered considers the opacity and complexity of the situations and existences at stake. Works of art thus highlight the interweaving of thought and perception. They make it possible to put together without hierarchy the rights, the migration policies, and the singular existences of asylum seekers. Lives in exile are complex; memories of the past mix with dreams of the future. Art and culture provide the necessary depth and singularity for the understanding of all these experiences. These experiences are acknowledged. Such cultural productions participate in what Jacques Rancière calls the “aesthetic regime,” which asserts the establishment of the work of art as a different sensorium from that of the domination of idea over perception. Form does not prevail over matter, intelligence over sensations (Rancière 2004). The aesthetic regime cancels hierarchies, rankings, and produces a new sharing of the sensitive part of the world. It apprehends the truth out of prejudices, out of the violent classifications of society which make of “others” “strangers.” We chose “Persona Grata” as the title of the exhibition. Why did we choose this title? To show the positivity and complexity of this experience: dreams, desires, despite vulnerability. The visual arts develop a poetics of the migratory experience, a perception of vulnerability which is very personal. In the book, we also tried to think of this poetics in the least dogmatic, most literary way possible: as a gift to all those who leave to find a livable future.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books. Baudelaire, Jacques. 1975. Fleurs du mal, « Correspondances », OEuvres complètes, vol. 1. Paris: Pléiade, Gallimard. Brugère, Fabienne, and Guillaume le Blanc. 2017. La fin de l’hospitalité. Paris : Flammarion. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Diderot et d’Alembert. 1751–1772. « Hospitalité. » Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Paris. Heidegger, Martin. 2002. The Origin of the Work of Art. In Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Galilée. Rosello, Mireille. 2001. Postcolonial Hospitality. Stanford University Press. Stan, Corina. 2019. Review of Fabienne Brugère and Guillaume le Blanc, La fin de l’hospitalité. Critical Inquiry (Winter): 570–575. https://criticalinquiry.uchicago. edu/corina_stan_reviews_la_fin_de_lhospitalite/.

PART VI

Migration and Experimentation

CHAPTER 35

Migration and Experimentation: Introduction Corina Stan

Collaborated by Rita Sakr

In Ailbhe Darcy’s “Alphabet” (analyzed in this section by Ailbhe McDaid), the formal acceleration of the lines reflects the awareness of imminent ecological collapse. The poem, however, also records a hopeless resilience:               it isn’t really        about the end of everything, this;        it’s about iterations        by which living        becomes more difficult        until unbearable by intervals        in which we will nevertheless persist;

These lines echo the ending of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, “I can’t go on I must go on I will go on” and, in a more general register, the existential anxiety of the protagonist of the modern novel according to Georg Lukács

C. Stan (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Sakr Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_35

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(1974). This “transcendental homelessness” is felt perhaps most acutely and poignantly, the following chapters suggest, by those untethered from everything that used to be their world: the exile, the refugee, the displaced.1 The novels, film, play, and poems analyzed here dramatize through formal experimentation the condition of being and feeling unsettled in the world.2 The effort to suture it back again, to give life a shape, a new context and meaning, is fundamentally a quest for form. The chapters record the centrifugal affects accompanying various forms of migration, including the “error and confusion, in which God’s grace is not allowed” felt by political prisoners and exiles (Ileana Orlich), the terror of war violence and refuge (Claire Gallien), migrant melancholia (Laura Sarnelli), and “existential anxiety about the state of all things—human, environmental, technological, aesthetic” (Ailbhe McDaid). The homelessness is, in most cases, both physical and transcendental. “Good God, why am I laughing?,” the atheist protagonist released from prison in Matei Vișniec’s novel asks himself anxiously. He is eating an apple—just like Kafka’s Joseph K. on the morning of his arrest— but the question must remain rhetorical because this is a world with no reliable scripts for living. Just as K. is “the empty signifier of a ruptured self […], a grotesque quest for an unabridged individuality” in exile (Orlich), the words and typographic spaces in Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s “A is for ‫[ العرب‬Arabs]” amount to an “encyclopedia of migrant loss:” “lost your mind / head / breath / temper / patience / memories / lost sleep” (McDaid). What is readily accessible to the authors discussed is a symbolic community of fellow writers and artists—often, as Jean-Luc Nancy might put it, a “community of those without community”—invoked for support and solidarity across time, languages, and cultures. Notably, all the artifacts analyzed in this section rely on a preexisting master text or master form—Kafka’s The Castle, the Quran, Antigone, the Fibonacci form—to provide a source of borrowed authority and/or a container holding the migrant’s shattered world. Paradoxically, however, this master text or form either revolves around a principle of self-destruction or marks an ideal of wholeness that can only be grasped in splintered fragments. In other words, the forms literature has to offer are both indispensable and ruthlessly self-conscious. 1  They elicit the question asked by Rilke about Picasso’s Family of Acrobats (1905): “But who are they, tell me, these travellers, even more / transient than we ourselves…” (Duino Elegies, V). 2  What counts as “experimental” in literature? In the “Introduction” to the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale include “[u]nfettered improvisation and the rigorous application of rules, accidental composition and hyper-rational design, free invention and obsessively faithful duplication, extreme conceptualism and extreme materiality, multimediality and media-specificity, being ‘born digital’ and being hand-made—all of these, and many others, are ways of being experimental in literature” (2012, 1). For a volume that uniquely addresses the relation between literary experiment and migration, see Forms of Migration: Global Perspectives on Im/migrant Art and Literature edited by Jennifer A.  Reimer and Stefan Maneval, who argue that “aesthetic forms are in the vanguard of migration studies and transnational literary-artistic trends” (2022, 12).

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In “Reading the Politics of Exile: Matei Vișniec’s Mr. K Released,” Ileana Orlich situates Vișniec in the company of other Central and East European exiles such as Milan Kundera, Herta Müller, Paul Celan, Norman Manea, and others. The chapter is a close reading of Vișniec’s inscription of the totalitarian carceral space familiar from his native Communist Romania in the highly recognizable matrix of Kafka’s fictional world (The Trial and The Castle). The return of Joseph K as Kosef J. results in a reconfiguration of K.’s quest in the context of “a larger East-West order,” with the border between the prison world of Communism and the free world of capitalism dissolved. Orlich highlights the novel’s reconsideration of the relation between detention and freedom of movement, as well as its provocative engagement with autocracies’ and democracies’ similar rhetorical mechanics and spectral politics. Implicit in Orlich’s analysis of Vișniec’s rich intertextual apparatus are the workings of an economy of cultural capital only too familiar to non-Western literary figures who write among, and for, a Western European audience. This is also the case of Hassan Blasim, whose experimental text God 99 “embeds Iraq in Europe,” documenting the “violence of war and sectarian conflicts, state brutality, terrorist bombing in post-invasion Iraq, and the violence of forced migration, post-traumatic stress disorder, encampment, racism and dehumanisation in contemporary Europe.” In her chapter, Claire Gallien argues that Blasim’s partly autofictional account of the journey from Iraq to Finland is structured by the 99 Names of God in the Islamic tradition, following “the theological principle that behind and beyond multiplicity there is unity, beyond fragmentation, there is a striving for wholeness, and that beyond dispersal, literature offers the possibility of a different return, elsewhere and otherwise.” Gallien delves into Blasim’s innovative writing, highlighting his dystopic surrealism, dark humor, irony, “filthy” language, disorienting spatial and temporal shifts, patchworking, mise en abyme, typographical experimentation, use of emails, interviews with other migrants, and blogs. The text’s polyvocality is also instantiated by emails from the author’s friend, the late Iraqi writer Adnan al-Mubarak, which “delineate numerous trails of affiliation” with writers who become, Gallien suggests, “an under-community” of literary experimentation and solidarity. Literature, argues Gallien, develops “a type of discourse that does not reproduce the grammar of the nation-state.” This insight is central to Laura Sarnelli’s chapter, which zooms in on the affordances of Italy’s peninsular position in the Mediterranean, at the crossroads of migratory routes to and from Europe. “Melancholia of Migration in the Transnational Italian Imaginary” analyzes the creative potential of “migrant melancholia” in La linea del colore (The Color Line), a novel by Italian writer of Somali origin Igiaba Scego, Asmat: Names in Memory of All Victims of the Sea, a short film by Ethiopian filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer, and Antigone Power, a theatrical adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy by Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and Sicilian director Giuseppe

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Massa. These three works experiment with temporal and memorial narrative frames rendered through a syncretic blend of historical fiction, social novel, and photography (Scego)3; fragmentary and poetic multimedia montage and translational voice-over (Yimer); and radical adaptations of the dramatic mise-­ en-­scène in a revolutionary collective performance (Ali Farah). In Sarnelli’s meditation on the reparative powers of art in Scego’s creative engagement with the Fountain of the Four Moors, Yimer’s poignant burial ritual in the intermedial Asmat, and Ali Farah’s retelling of forbidden burial in Antigone, migrant melancholia is an “imaginative space in which forms of individual and collective life can be reconfigured.” Whereas in Sarnelli’s chapter aesthetic forms serve as containers akin to Keats’s Grecian urn, in Ailbhe McDaid’s chapter, the Fibonacci sequence is a form “intent on its own destruction [that] ultimately wrenches itself out of the poet’s control and into oblivion.” Entitled “‘Not Safe Any Where Anymore’: Biopolitical Poetics and Irish Migration Poetry,” the chapter analyzes Ailbhe Darcy’s collection Insistence (2018) and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s debut collection Auguries of a Minor God (2021) as poetic experimentations with the Fibonacci sequence, which originates in nature and is most closely associated with Danish poet Inger Christensen’s influential 1981 collection alphabet, “a poem about nuclear holocaust and the impinging collapse of natural and human systems.” Darcy’s work about environmental catastrophe and Eipe’s meditation on the “migrant crisis” lay bare “the catalogue of catastrophe deriving from the capitalist compulsion […] in the erosion of empathy, mass (and imminent) human displacement, environmental destruction and overwhelming individual suffering that puts societal survival beyond reach.” McDaid argues that “the Fibonacci form is a most apt vehicle to depict how the accumulations of capitalism inevitably author its own demise, for the Fibonacci form is similarly yoked to its own destruction through excess.” In pairing up Darcy’s and Eipe’s engagement with planetary issues, McDaid proposes a framework for studying “contemporary poetry of migration written by poets in, of, and/or from Ireland” that challenges ethnonational literary categorizations (“new” Irish, black Irish, hybrid Irish). All four chapters discuss their artifacts in a connective or comparative framework, which suggests that writing about migration challenges the very notion of national literature, uncovers the fundamentally intertextual nature of all writing, as well as the transnational strands at the intersection of which any national literature, and more broadly world literature, takes shape. Intertextuality conjures the symbolic space of the library as a utopian space of camaraderie, solidarity, borrowing, exchange, translatability, and serendipitous discovery. Orlich connects figures shaped by Romanian culture (Vișniec, Manea, Celan, and Müller) with Edward Said’s meditations on the “creative angst” of exile. Gallien traces, with Blasim, premodern instances of Arabic speculative fiction 3  For a wide-ranging engagement with Scego’s work, see also Saskia Ziolkowski’s interview with the author in this volume.

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(The Thousand and One Nights, the twelfth-century theological and philosophical tale Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, and narratives of travel to other planets in Sumerian, Assyrian, and Egyptian literature), often unacknowledged in accounts that situate the origin of speculative fiction in nineteenth-century Europe. Sarnelli follows, with Scego, legacies of slavery studied by artists with “weak passports.” Ailbhe McDaid shows that experimental poetry is “often pursued by Irish poets living outside, and in conversation with literary practices beyond, Ireland” and traces the use of the Fibonacci sequence both to the Danish poet Inger Christensen and to Sanskrit literature. The section closes with K. Bellamy Mitchell’s wide-ranging interview with the British-born writer Bhanu Kapil, “Possible Instructions.” Responding to the question of what it means for their conversation to be commissioned for this handbook, Kapil provides five “instructions” ending with the tentative inference that “[m]igration literature is everything from no book to all these possible books, perhaps.” Reflecting on political contexts from the partition of the Indian subcontinent to Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, Kapil synthesizes this section’s interests by asking: “Is repair the work of the book? Is a book another kind of ruined or abandoned home?” The interview addresses Kapil’s note-taking as “an art form,” the prompts for producing each of her works and the materials used in the process, the significance of (in) completion, radical “ultra-linearity,” and documentary experimentations, among other striking issues. Its most provocative statement that opens new horizons for thinking of the political work of literary experimentation with respect to the history of migration is perhaps its concluding one: “Poetry has become a tool, you could say, something like an archaeological tool rather than an activity of form.”

Bibliography Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, eds. 2012. Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. New York: Routledge. Lukács, Georg. 1974. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maneval, Stefan, and Jennifer A. Reimer, eds. 2022. Forms of Migration: Global Perspectives on Im/migrant Art and Literature. Berlin: Falschrum.

CHAPTER 36

Reading the Politics of Exile: Matei Vișniec’s Mr. K Released Ileana Orlich

A Few Introductory Notes In the evening of January 3, 1953 at the Théȃtre de Babylone in Paris, a small audience saw the world premiere of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot. To the Parisian spectators, the play seemed to be all things, just as in the years to come the two tramps and their endless and futile waiting became many different things to different audiences. In his notes on Waiting for Godot, Alec Reid evokes Tom F. Driver’s “Beckett by the Madeleine,” a short piece published in the Columbia University Forum (Summer 1961), that takes this view a step further when claiming that “He [Beckett] has devised his works in such a way that those who comment upon them [specifically, on Vladimir and Estragon] actually comment upon themselves. If the public sees only images of despair, one can only deduce that they are themselves despairing” (1975, 65). As a corollary to these thoughts, Reid refers to Beckett’s own remarks in his monograph on Proust that speak of “the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being” (1975, 65). In Beckett’s voluntary exile in Paris, the suffering of being might also have been, as in the case of the play’s two tramps, an expression of transcendental homelessness, that is, a condition Georg Lukács (1963) identifies as permeating the worldview of many European writers and intellectuals who, like Beckett,

I. Orlich (*) Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_36

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became alienated from their own native culture (35). This type of cultural displacement, however, acquires different nuances when heightened by the concrete forms of political exile that became an irreversible departure for the writers from the countries of the Stalinist Bloc, like Herta Müller or Milan Kundera, forced to take the path of exile to escape totalitarian regimes in the second half of the twentieth century.

A New Exile in Paris About thirty years after the premiere of Beckett’s undramatic but highly theatrical play depicting a deserted country road and a figure wearing a bowler hat and struggling with a boot in preparation for travel without destination, Matei Vișniec, a playwright little known at the time outside his native Romania, found himself in the French capital after having taken the path of political exile in 1987. Brought out abruptly from what Joseph Conrad had once called “the confused immensity of the Eastern borders” (2009, 346), the young Vișniec had moved from the borderland town of Rădăut ̦i, in Romania’s northwestern region of Bukovina, first to the Romanian capital of Bucharest and then to the Parisian exile that must have been for him a realm of epistemological wonder and confusion. Unlike Beckett and other twentieth-century writers like Ezra Pound and James Joyce, who disliked the various pressures (theocracy, censorship of books) of their native countries and left them to live abroad, Vișniec had escaped Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime and, after settling in Paris, started working on his first novel, Mr. K Released, in 1988. Since the novel was not published until 2010 and only recently became available to English readers in Josefina Komporaly’s 2020 excellent translation,1 its time of inception calls to attention not only Vișniec’s subjective account of what might have been his own response to Beckett’s play but also his keen insights, free of illusions, of both the repressive practices of communist regimes he knew and of the liberal West and its deeper values that he could observe and experience in exile.2 Could Vișniec be seen in the first year of his exile as immersed in a suffering of being after fleeing communist Romania? Could Mr. K Released be considered the anguish of Vișniec’s enhanced awareness in political exile, another zone of being in which much is suffered but about which only fiction can validly speak from the vantage point of dislocation, that is, a cri du coeur of the intellectual exile who, as Edward Said remarks, “tends to be happy with the idea of unhappiness?” (1993, 117). And, if so, could this novel that underscores the similarity between autocracy and the free world through the shared 1  The book was shortlisted for the 2021 EBRD Literature Prize. All quotations are from this edition of the book. 2  In the years following his exile Vișniec returned to playwrighting. Widely staged in theater repertoires all over the world, his plays include, among many others, Pockets Full of Bread, Old Clown for Hire, A History of Communism Told to Mental Patients, The Body of Woman as Battlefield in the Bosnian War, Horses at the Window.

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mechanics of their rhetoric, spectral ideas, disembodied ideals, and haunting violations be generated by the very condition of exile that benefits from and is fueled by what Said, in the same context, memorably called “a productive anguish” (1993, 117)?

Other Exiles in Paris A prominent figure in the generation before Vișniec, the Bukovina-born poet Paul Celan holds a distinguished place among the displaced writers plunged into new societies where the solitude and estrangement of exile continued to cast a shadow that turned into creative angst. Celan’s tormented life in Paris is evoked in the lyrics of Norman Manea, a contemporary of Vișniec, as well as a native of Bukovina and an exile from communist Romania. In his novel suggestively titled Exiled Shadow (2023),3 Manea’s own anguish as a Holocaust survivor blends into what must have been Celan’s recollections in the Parisian exile, cradled in the irreversible descent of his captive sensibility in perennial mourning for a mother murdered in distant Bukovina: Celan in mourning looks for links, returning, repeating the fragment born in hesitation, from a slaughtered mother, the adored, slaughtered mother. A black and mute, cracked sky ravenous for tragedy. In the shadow of the lost, the exile transcribes the murmur of the puddle of blood, fresh, always refreshed by the gloom. Hineni? An arrow suddenly brought back from the dead, in the zenith of the murderous chaos. (321)

For Manea, as for Vișniec, among the “poets seeking the shore/the Bukovinean migrant Celan” beckons “with his compass good for the global workshop of the sacred reparations/ suitable for the next procession/of the exiled without documents and domicile” (2023, 320). Re-exiled in the mounting confusion of life in France, Vișniec joins in “the next procession” of unaccommodated exiles separated from their native land and unable to fully adjust to the new space by calling to attention the metaphorical condition of his median state: an outsider, marginalized, and resistant to social adjustment, and thus determinedly an exile like Kafka, another writer whose unsettling world and trappings of accommodation loom large over his literary works.

3  Translated from Romanian by Carla Baricz, it is scheduled for publication by Yale University Press in August 2023. All quotations are from the unpublished manuscript.

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Kafka’s Exilic Influence On the back cover of the original 2010 Romanian version of the novel, Vișniec acknowledges his indebtedness to Kafka and the circumstances of his writing Mr. K Released: Mister K Released is first of all an homage to Kafka. However, this book is also linked to a certain moment of my life: the departure from Romania in 1987. While in Romania, I had never entertained the thought of writing a novel directly related to Kafka, I had written only theatre plays linked to the Kafkaesque world in which I was living. Nevertheless, once in Paris, I felt a shock: the shock of freedom. I was getting out of a prison and I did not know what to do with my freedom. I felt, abruptly, like Kafka’s character, Mister K., but living a reversed trauma, in other words, not the shock of being arrested, but the shock of being released.4

Shaped by the nod to Kafka’s celebrated The Trial (1998b), Mr. K Released reveals Vișniec’s shared condition of marginality and alienation sublimated in the anagrammed name of the protagonist Kosef J. The representational meaning and implied dynamics of the title generate yet another announced kinship to Kafka’s K. in The Castle, a work that Kafka intended as a first-person novel. After changing his mind while working on the third chapter, Kafka crossed each “I” and replaced it with K., but this original concept left the imprint of the narrator’s subjectivity which is also detectable in Vișniec’s novel. Like K., who remains an empty signifier and whose innermost self resists association with a full name but invites considerable closeness to the author, Mr. K. shares his emblematic connectivity with Vișniec’s ruptured self, painfully embroiled in the zone of being and problematically engaged in a grotesque quest for an unabridged individuality and reluctance to accept an effacement of his private identity following his exile. In terms of interpretability, however, Kosef J. proposes an entirely different status from The Castle protagonist. The existential implications for Kafka’s K, who learns to shift the basis of his self-definition away from the elusive Castle to the dynamics of his own subjective relation to the world, reflect K’s relationship to the Castle that has no specific realistic content and suggests an abundance of ambiguous functions and interpretations. In contrast, Vișniec’s Mr. K relates to exile as a process of political rather than existential maturation. If the Castle should be perceived as a purely rhetorical world, the penal colony and the free world in Mr. K Released trace a specific grounding in the author’s escape from the communist East to the capitalist West and provide a productive analysis of the text’s particular dynamic and strategies of signification. For Vișniec’s protagonist, the zone of being is a circulatory undercurrent that joins a previous life in the communist regime with Kosef J.’s interactions after his release into the free world. The burden of his prison experiences 4

 My translation.

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continues after his release making him feel that “the cell had somehow grown [as] part of him, had become his shell, the cell that he had gone to carry in his self, in his soul and on his back” (52). Kosef J.’s perception of his release as a mere extension of incarceration reflects Vișniec’s own feelings in exile after escaping communism: his newfound freedom is perceived as a mere extension of the former political imprisonment, a feeling that resonates with John Neubauer’s view of exile as the experience of settling into “an alien social and linguistic world that restricts the exile to solitary confinement” (2009, 11).

The Coordinates of Political Exile Reinvented as Vișniec’s own space in exile, Mr. K Released juxtaposes a pervasive intertextuality grounded in the shifting signification of the prison world, which is a penal colony emblematic of the country from which he had defected, with the free space beyond the penal colony inhabited by those who had escaped and a nearby town identified through its bread factory and beer hall (respectively corresponding to The Bridge Inn and The Castle Inn in The Castle). This structural constellation determines Kosef J.’s subjective signification both as a literary self or subject within a “historical déjà vu (Joseph K. returned as Kosef J.)” (Moscaliuc 2021) and as an agent of a social and political paradigm that expands on K’s quest in The Castle by dramatizing the released Mr. K’s essential individuality within a larger East-West order. The outside of liberty and freedom to which Kosef J. “found himself released one fine day” in the opening line of Vișniec’s (2010) book mimics the first sentence of Kafka’s The Trial (“[O]ne morning, without having done anything wrong, Josef K. was arrested”) to suggest that in the global circulation of canonical texts and displaced bodies both protagonists are associated with a condition of unspecified guilt, independent of an actual crime. Confronted with this unresolved past, critics have often turned to the original sin to explain K.’s “trial,” which the novel’s putative Christian symbolism seems to imply. Joseph K. eats an apple on the morning of his arrest while Kosef J. bites from an apple while aimlessly wandering through an Eden-like apple orchard shortly after his release: He headed towards what turned out to be an apple orchard. … It took him ages to muster the courage to stretch his hand out and pick an apple he’d so wanted. On the distant horizon, a few lights got switched on in what must have been the town. The dog barked again. ‘Quite some apples!’ Kosef J. indulged himself. ……………… Kosef J. finally brought himself near an apple, and without picking it from its branch, he took a bite. He slowly chewed that sweet and scented matter that sneakily spread out from his palate into his bloodstream and into his entire being. He kept looking at the bitten apple, still hanging from its branch, and laughed. ‘Good God, why am I laughing?’ Kosef J. wondered, also anxious of the fact that he had instinctively appealed to God. He, Kosef J. that is, was an atheist. Could he possibly turn into such a fool? (48–49)

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More explicitly stated than in Kafka’s text, the apple eating that Kosef J. shares with Joseph K. alludes not only to the moral realm of guilt and sin but also to an epistemological realm of error and confusion into which God’s grace is not allowed and free will is dormant after the long years Kosef J. spent within a system of regulated and reciprocal supervision within a “disciplinary society” (Foucault 1979, 193) that conditioned him to follow strict rules and draconic regulations. Reflecting that “he could even afford to stroll into the relatively out-of-­ bounds wings of the prison” (38), Kosef J. is cast outside the conventional space of the penal colony and wallows in a sort of displacement epitomized in his inability to find even a bed, a situation that echoes K.’s lack of reference whatsoever in the opening of The Castle, when K. enters the village and begins his search for a bed to which he does not seem to be entitled. Like K., who spends his first night sleeping on a sack of hay in the middle of a cheap taproom, unable to secure a private bed of his own that would have established his status and respectability, Mr. K., although freed from captivity, ends up sleeping in the prison’s elevator cage. From his crouching position, suspended between the two worlds and expecting that his release would be a turning point, Mr. K. begins to understand that while he is now a free man dispossessed of a legal status inside the penitentiary, he possesses no identity in the world outside either.5 As in Kafka’s The Castle (1998a) where, according to Henry Sussman, the uninvited K. is “the supplement to language” functioning “as the occasion for inscription” (1979, 129) in the Castle’s rhetorical machinery, Kosef J. is a similar signifier for the exiled author, a role that confers upon Vișniec’s text its symbolic interpretation and narration. Duplicating and recontextualizing K.’s attempts “to survey” the village community through an elaborate narrative perspective that renders him “confused with the Castle,” Kosef J. is positioned as “a recipient and an agent of signification warranted by the narrative perspective” (Krauss 1993, 7) to deconstruct the binary structure of the inside and outside realms and their people. However, his incursions after being released from prison into the free world and the town in an effort to become a member of their communities, as well as his gratifying return to the prison’s physical comfort and compliant contentment (regular meals, a tolerable cell), indicate that the rhetoric of the world outside and its deceptive promises and discourse cannot offer him any greater measure of individual freedom and moral gratification than the penal colony. Embarked upon an unsuccessful quest after his release, Mr. K. is a contemporary surveyor baffled by the prison workers’ perplexing reverence toward the authority of the Colonel (a humorous  In Mr. K’s lack of a precise identity after his release from prison, there may be a hint to the status of the political prisoners jailed by the new communist regime around 1946 and released in 1965. Following the USSR model that branded the former enemies of the people even after being released from prison or the Gulag, the Romanian communist regime attached the obligatory “former” bourgeois function to the less important name as a social stigma that made it impossible for those released from prison to find a job or hold any civil rights, in short to be counted as citizens of the new proletarian society. 5

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approximation of Klamm and the Castle supremacy in The Castle) and psychologically disheartened by the ultimate “truths” of freedom and democratic slogans hilariously upheld by the wretched free people and by the nimble carelessness of people in the gradually disappearing town outside the prison who turn a blind eye to the ongoing demolitions because, in their words, “they’ll build others” (264). Suggesting the porous border between the outside world of the fugitives and the inside confined space of the imprisoned, Kosef J.’s perceptions are minted with literary allusions and fictional impersonations that forge a symbolic connection between literature and life in general through a sustained reliance on allegorical allusions and tropes of exile. Rozette is the penal colony’s cook whose name and promiscuity echo the politically conflicted world of Western chivalry and romance and the sexual laxity of Leni (The Trial) and Frieda (The Castle). Like Frieda, who has not made her subjective self-­projection dependent on the Castle, Rozette is relatively free from the constraints of the prison life and does not seem to partake in perpetrating terror among the inmates. And like Frieda, who abandons Klamm and her guaranteed social status in the village to become K.’s lover, Rozette has a strong sense of self, seems content with her life in prison, and spares no time in starting to sleep with Kosef J. Their closeness begins with the washing of the dishes, an activity that occupies most of Kosef’s afternoons after his release.

Exile in the Aftermath of Marxism The washing of the dishes is a recurring image for Vișniec. In a poem conceptualized years later like a dramatic monologue that also gives its title to the volume At Table with Marx (2011), the exiled Vișniec acts out the historical drama of communism as a tripartite process unfolding in the liveliness and concision of three acts: a scrumptious meal with all its gourmet trimmings in the company of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, the washing of the dishes to suggest an overpowering helplessness after the meal consumption, and the persistent resentment resulting from the traumatic participation in the sordid feast announced in the poem’s Epilogue. Disguising humorously the personalized calamities and barren struggles against ideological oppression of the poet-protagonist’s autobiographical self, the poem’s first act subverts the endless cycle of political repression and totalitarian control. In Vișniec’s sarcastic depiction, these deceptively lavish courses are served to the leaders of the proletariat who had turned the whole society into a prison house similar to the penal colony featured in Mr. K  Released

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(2020).6 The third act, the Epilogue, features a self-mocking awareness of death as a necessary precondition for acquiring, only in afterlife, a post-communist identity denied in the intermediate state of the second act that consisted of the washing of the dishes spelled out in huge caps: it smelled of blood and minced meat, of vinegar and singed skin of licked plates and of sweat we were proud of ourselves after what had happened history had sat with us at the table and now was dancing barefoot on shards of broken glasses we were proud of ourselves albeit a bit tired right then the question was heard: NOW WHO’S GOING TO WASH THE DISHES? not me, said Marx me neither, Engels’s voice was heard not me by any means, said Lenin only Stalin was left, but Stalin had already fallen asleep with his head between two dirty plates and then it was me, the last comer, who had, in fact, eaten the least, rather out of politeness.7

Summoning images of disfigurement, with “Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin [who] had in fact a single eye mounted on a tank turret, an eye as big as a lighthouse beacon that rotated 360 degrees at every move of the bourgeoisie,” the dishwashing that sublimates in the poem the conceptual essence of the communist savage dictatorships turns into “a sink filled with black water” in which “hands sunk to the elbows into the black water wash cups, plates and platters and a lot of knives” (10). Enacted in the prison kitchen after Kosef J.’s release, the washing of the dishes under the supervision of Rozette is another entre actes that follows in Mr. K Released the gorging on what the poem lists mockingly as the soup, the stewed cabbage, and the carved meat passed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and for feasting “right in front of Stalin.” Communicating the endless cycle of political repression and totalitarian control that had turned a country into a prison house, the two guards in Mr. K Released, Franz Hoss and Fabius, enforce the endemic evil of the communist detention structure. The beatings and the terror they inflict on Kosef seem involuntarily natural and trigger only mild exclamations from old man Flavius 6  For an elaborate discussion of the imprisoned society see Heinrich Böll’s (1975) essay “The Imprisoned World of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle” in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials. In this context, the ease of Rozette’s employment at the penitentiary or of Kosef J.’s interaction with the two guards, as well as his frequent outings into town, highlight Vișniec’s awareness of the Gulag world as a fluid camp whose myriad of centers and its prisoners were spread all over the country and were designed to overlap with the public space and society at large. 7  All translations from At Table with Marx are my own. The poem can be found on page 10 of the Romanian edition of the book.

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after Kosef J.’s release. Remembering the cruelty of the old guardian, Kosef speaks about him as [Having] possibly been the most callous of all prison guards. Sure enough, other guards would also beat prisoners up, in fact all would give beatings, but he, Fabius, had a kind of sophistication. Franz Hoss, for instance, was more likely to swear rather than batter. Fabius would be silent, and prepared his strikes carefully. His specialty was, as everyone was aware, to strike prisoners without warning. No one would hit harder and choose less unpredictable moments. And no other guard would draw on quite so much imagination to choose a specific part of the prisoner’s body onto which to deal a blow. (55)

The off-balance world of the penal colony disorients sanity itself when the two guards offer cigarettes and throw dice with the released Kosef. Moreover, such baffling interactions foreshadow the absurdity of his emptied identity reenacted in the self-mocking reality of dying to be born again into a world of post-communist identity in the Epilogue of Dinner with Marx: Good news: my birth has been postponed I’ll never be what I was destined to be this is a certain thing, I’m on top of the world nothing I was to live through will ever be lived I’ll have another past and another future I’ll have another relation with God, with evil and good I’ll lose at other games, I’ll fall in love with other women and maybe I won’t be a man anymore maybe I’ll experience the mystery of birth too I didn’t know it was possible but lo, the moment you die everything is possible. (10, my italics)

Exile as Alienation In a nod to Becket, Franz Hoss and Fabius emulate and then diverge from the meshed universe of Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps in Waiting for Godot. Like their literary confrères Didi and Gogo who divide between themselves identifying qualities (stinking breath or stinking feet, dreaming, or being unable to dream, and so on), Franz Hoss and Fabius engage in complementary actions: one hits the prisoners, the other only swears at them; one throws dice the other does not know how to do it and curses the habit; one bellows and the other speaks in muttered tones, etc. Screwed tightly in the mechanical entrapment of their condition, both pairs enact futile routines and routinized exchanges and exclamations that convey alongside Beckett’s lonely figure in the opening act of Waiting for Godot, and perhaps as a mocking counter to Lenin’s What Is to be Done, that “Nothing is to be done” about less or more portentous matters like pulling on a stubborn boot or chasing a fugitive escaping to the freedom of the abandoned settlements outside the penal colony.

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There are, however, differences that anchor Vișniec’s post-communist experience. Unlike the two tramps dressed in rags and eating carrots, black radishes, and turnips while waiting in existential despair by the roadside, Franz Koss and Fabius are well-fed, wear clean uniforms, and help themselves to an inexhaustible supply of cigarettes. And while Vladimir and Estragon’s games (how many leaves are on the tree, how many thieves were saved, how can we hang ourselves, and so on) denote the repetitive quality of their condition and contribute to the play’s non-plot, Franz Hoss and Fabius’s endless throw of dice and vicious duties trace the spatial and structural movement of the plot by bringing into relief the special anxieties, fear, and radical materialization of terror that plague the inmates within the prison space. Suggesting the political technology of communism’s prisons, the condensed corridors of the compound hold long rows of cell-rooms, like Kosef J.’s Cell 50, where the inmates sleep under omnipresent surveillance and palpable fear. Caged within a system of oppression and punishment, they act like aggregates with no human power or emotion even when the recently released Kosef J. supervises them: The inmates were walking around in the inner courtyard in circles. ‘How meek they are,’ Kosef J. observed. The inmates were moving along in Indian file, one after the other. Everyone looked straight ahead and no one talked to their neighbour, neither in front, nor behind. Every now and then someone would look up to the sky. Some would take a deep breath of afternoon air. ‘Why are they so meek?’ Kosef J. wondered. There wasn’t a single guard or soldier in sight. The inmates could have easily chattered a bit among them. They could have come to a halt here and there, to take a good look at one another. What was wrong with them? Why were they not doing anything? Were they afraid of being beaten up? At this thought, Kosef J. swiftly placed his hand in front of his stomach because he felt as if he had been receiving a blow right there. (99)

East and West as Halves of a Whole Before leaving the prison, Kosef J. waits to be seen by the Colonel, the penal colony’s figure of authority who must issue his official release. Entranced in their fascination with the Colonel, Franz Hoss and Fabius, as well as Rozette and the little man in charge of the prison’s vast warehouse of discarded clothes, plead with Kosef J. to give a favorable report to the Colonel of the very smooth flow of the prison activities and their sustained and superior completion of duties. Resonating humorously with Klamm’s and the Castle’s untouchable eminence in Kafka’s The Castle (1998a), the Colonel too is a collective projection grounded in the political installations of communism that operate in a completely one-directional system of servitude. But while Klamm and the Castle’s authority are the outcome of the villagers’ imagination and a-­functional ideology, spreading into a multidirectional fluid and infinitely shifting system of representation and significance, the Colonel’s power over the penal colony

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through his beloved and mysterious omnipotence recalls the criminal and brutal realm of ferocious Stalin and Stalinism, and of the dreaded communist penitentiary system of the countries in the Soviet Bloc like Romania. For Vișniec, who had fled taking the path of political exile, the terror of the Kremlin-dictated party ideology annihilated one’s ability to exist. Released from the penal colony, Kosef crosses over into the free world situated within a very short distance. He perceives it with wonder as a place he would have never expected, a place that looked like an abandoned railway station. He was able to make out several rail tracks under the anthills and bushes. The carcass of a disused water tower also appeared on the horizon… Kosef J. could only see rubble, rusty rail tracks, stacks of switches, disused traffic lights and large spills of petrol … some old train engines, frozen behind one another for donkeys’ years. (177–178)

On the spot, Kosef is identified by a committee of about one hundred fugitives—many of them only recently escaped from the penal colony—faces a court-like trial, and is nearly sentenced to death on suspicion that he might be a double agent. He is finally exonerated as a result of a very loud and puzzling vote that establishes his innocence even though the votes demanding his execution exceed those in favor of clemency. With increasing stupefaction, Kosef J. realizes that here, in the free world, the memory of the two guards’ monosyllabic talk that underscored their perpetual game of dice in the lukewarm prison space is drowned in strident opposition with the piercing proclamations of the prison escapees that can only be ridiculed. Their proliferation of words shouted in a megaphone or whispered while proclaiming their “DIGNIFIED TENACITY!” (245) from a hole in the mountain of rags suffocating them in the search for patches of fabric to cover their naked and freezing bodies reaches paroxysmal tones in the acknowledgment that “‘DEMOCRACY’ was preserved,” albeit of a kind defined on the sly by a man hidden by rags as “the democracy of hunger” (246). Subordinated to a static pattern of repetition and revealed in all its absurd nakedness, the freemen’s obsession with democratic governance smacks of totalitarianism and points to the condition of its existence as a mere enunciation of opposite contentions or humorously reversed conditions with the penal colony. Their strategy of reliance on condemning vehemently “the other side” ignores and blinds them to their own problems, such as lacking the immediate means of survival: food, clothes, and the medical attention readily available in the penitentiary. Closing the circle by looping the prison with their ragged community, the freemen devise clandestine ventures that ensure their meager survival by licking the food scrapes from the dirty dishes of the prison’s kitchen while the cook Rozette is in the deep slumber that follows sexual exhaustion, by lying about medical conditions to the community and thus forcing a subversive swap of the ailing freemen with the sick inmates in the penal colony’s infirmary, and by hoarding penicillin or by procuring scraps of clothes from the prison’s

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warehouse. In the end, the committees of free people discuss in detail the morality of a possible return to the comfort of the penal colony with its yearround controlled temperature cells, a kitchen that offered three meals a day, and an infirmary that provided medical treatment and even penicillin. The effacement of the border between the two realms, the prison world of communism and the free world of capitalism, makes the two communities indistinguishable as both seem cast from the same permeable characteristics of lies, unsuspected intrigues, deceit, dishonesty, and corruption. Implied in Kosef J.’s mother’s incontrollable laughter, which suggests both her own and her townspeople’s total surrender to trauma and helplessness vis-à-vis the neighboring penal colony and nearby settlement of the escapees, the similarity of the two systems is embedded in several humorous reversals of interchangeable practices and references. Expounded in minute detail, for example, the master tropes of incessant voting traditionally associated with democratic regimes is hilariously impregnated with communist coarse exaggerations humorously embraced by the escapees while an abundance of clothes and elaborate tailoring that inform and symbolize capitalist consumerism is relegated to the prison world and its vast warehouse. To the released Kosef J., the free people’s constant voting and vocal committees are a satirical reminder of the Stalinist practices derided in books like Richard Armour’s It Started with Marx. Published in 1958 and subversively popular in communist countries, Armour’s book explains the communist voting system exported to the countries of the Soviet Bloc with which Vișniec was familiar from his personal experiences in Romania: The Russian voter was kept so busy voting that production in factories and on farms was seriously affected. The reason for so much voting was that each village elected a village soviet, which elected a canton soviet which elected a district soviet which elected a large committee which elected a small central committee which elected a chairman who refused to let things go any farther. (1958, 49)

In another nod to Kafka’s insistence on clothing that, according to Mark M.  Anderson in Kafka’s Clothes, “is not merely one motif or literary figure among many others in his work, but a matrix for reading the work as a whole” (1992, 3), Vișniec accords an extraordinary importance to the prison’s buildup of discarded clothes that require constant alterations and to the little prison tailor introduced in the snippet of conversation with Kosef J.: [T]he short, stocky and cheerful man would undo and then recompose tens of outfits. He’d turn coats into jackets, jackets into waistcoats, he’d change the lining, cut off the cuff hems on trousers and add cuff hems to other pairs that didn’t initially have this feature. He’d replace shirt collars, jacket pockets and coat ­buttons. He’d make an overcoat from two to three jackets, and a pair of trousers from an overcoat. He’d move everything that could be moved from one place to another, simplified whatever could be made simpler and, conversely, complicated whatever could be made more complex.

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“I force them to live on,” he explained. “This is the way I coerce them.” The clothes he’d just transformed were then returned to the warehouse, only to be taken out again and subjected to further transformations two or three weeks later. No piece of fabric or lining would be wasted in this upheaval. each and every patch awaited its turn in a new operation, and each and every button became indispensable at just the right time. “This is the only way,” the short, stocky and cheerful man concluded, after having generously permitted to Kosef J. to understand the significance of his labours. (180)

Unlike Kafka, however, for whom “the figure of clothing depicts the metaphysical relation between truth and appearance, the situation of being in the human world and struggling to reach a sacred realm beyond it” (Anderson 1992, 4), Vișniec uses the trope of clothing to juxtapose humorously the scarcity of the freemen’s clothes with the tailored garments available in prison. Adapting to his own context Kafka’s commitment to the world of clothing to suggest the move from the human to the sacred, Vișniec draws attention to clothes to foreground in reverse the exile’s fascination with the West’s sartorial abundance and luxury. In a comical twist, he attributes the free market’s obsession with fancy and elaborate clothes to the prison world and relegates the scraps of clothes to the escaped convicts that drown their bodies in piled up mounts of rags: [T]he rag mountain was being gradually moved night after night, until the very last patch, thread and epaulette was taken away. people would now sleep immersing themselves into this mountain, breathing at the bottom of this pile of rags and making sure that the warm air coming out of their nostrils was directed towards the lower depths, in order to preserve the heat. they would no longer freeze to death, like before, though two or three elderly men choked to death instead. their bodies were found two or three days later, huddled at the bottom. so the collective decided that rags had to be stirred on a daily basis to freshen up the air and also to find the dead bodies before they started to decompose. (253)

To the exile, both the East and the West trigger equal surprise and shock as their societies cannot defend themselves against the corrosive effects of voting (suppressed in illiberal democracies or rambling in democratic countries) and of the lure of material goods as a relentless pursuit and defining practice that suffocate life. The sense of shared misery materializes in the illicit transfer of the terminally ill patients from the prison’s infirmary to the free world and vice versa. With death and illness always in waiting, how can the exile assume that the pursuit of happiness and guarantee of freedom are more than a farce? But all this does not mean that the illusions harbored by the prisoners in the penal colony are not encouraging and even prompting them to escape. As the free people expect more prison escapees to join them from the other side, they organize in earnest:

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The most lucid minds had prepared ropes and gags for those prisoners who were about to be released. One of the abandoned cellars was prepared in advance for their reception. A rota, covering at least a week of guarding duties, was put together, as the most lucid minds estimated that it would take about this long to assimilate the newcomers. … The most lucid voices added, ‘it won’t be easy with them—they won’t accept freedom so lightly because they won’t understand what it is.’ They also noted that ‘they are all brainwashed,’ so are basically a herd of cattle and a bunch of bread-eating machines. We have to be merciless with them. (261)

In the interest of loudly proclaimed transparency, there is also a report of what becomes of the fugitives who reach the free world. Of the ten escapees who are undressed and gagged in the cellar, the tenth dies “choked by fear and the gag, only a few minutes after being thrown into the cellar where his mind was meant to be finally freed” (262). The collapse of the democratic opposition among the free people is constructed as abnormal and monstrous, and is related through morbid occurrences. When winter arrives and the free people start freezing to death, the spirit of democracy decrees that it “couldn’t abandon its dead because democracy would never abandon its people. it didn’t matter whether these people were dead or alive” (250). Once again the lucid minds take votes and organize in rambling and imposing democratic style. As the living are forced to bury the dead even after a vote to bury the dead shows that the votes not to bury the dead outnumber those in favor of doing so, many of the living are forced to keep digging in the frozen earth and are dying by the numbers “in the process of digging the graves for the dead” (251). One day, in counterpoint to his first wandering in the apple orchard, Kosef J. comes across the dangling corpse of a man of the free world who had been missing for some time. The dead is immediately branded as “a traitor and enemy of democracy” (171) in a hallucinatory scene that recalls the incident related in Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums. Published in Germany by the exiled Müller around the time when Vișniec had defected, the novel singles out young Lola, a student posthumously ousted from the Communist Party and declared a traitor after her horrid suicide with shards of glass from a bottle she had introduced into her womb to induce abortion, an illegal practice during the regime of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who had not only outlawed it but had also instated severe punishment under the law for the perpetrators. At the height of his draconic dictature, Ceaușescu had been a state guest at the Buckingham Palace, was generally regarded as a darling of the West, and deemed a reliable comrade player by both the East and the West. In a not so veiled criticism of the duplicity of political systems and naivete of statesmen old and new from the West who had embraced during the Cold War the likes of Stalin or Ceaușescu, Vișniec draws humorous parallels. When one of the free people simmering with muted dissatisfaction suggests the assassination of the penitentiary’s beloved Colonel as a solution to end the food

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shortages and lack of proper clothing and housing in the midst of a bitter winter, he is quickly rebuked: “The Colonel? No way. The Colonel was the last man that needed shooting. If they ever had an ally within, this could only be the Colonel” (247). Speaking with the same reverence for the mysterious Colonel of the penal colony for whom Franz Hoss and Fabius also show uncharacteristically emotional outbursts of semi-adoration, the free people shower unmitigated respect upon Kosef J. when it is learned that he has actually met the Colonel. Moreover, as a result of this increased admiration, bordering on veneration for Kosef J. for the great privilege of having met the Colonel, he is accorded preferential treatment and transferred back to the penal colony.

Exile as No Exit The experience of exile that Mr. K Released intimates prompts us to ask questions about our infatuation with political regimes and notions of freedom and democracy. In their game of throwing dice, Franz Hoss and Fabius enact similar routines to our guessing games about another social order that seems more democratic and more embracing, especially when conceived behind screens that flatten knowledge. Eager to reach its shores, we end up running, feeling released from captivity, only to reiterate Kosef J.’s return to captivity that loops the past into the present underscoring the sense of existential confusion with one system or another and resonating in the questions that “the short and calm man [who] smiled maliciously” asks of Kosef: But anyway, where exactly could you run? ‘Right, Mr. Kosef, where could you possibly run?’ he pressed. ‘Where indeed?’ Kosef J. babbled. Ever since the short and calm man had started to ask him those nasty little questions that didn’t even allow for a clear answer, he could no longer feel at ease. The triumphant expression he had displayed when leading them to the cellar had quickly disappeared from his face. ‘This is what I’m asking too—where?’ the short man recapped. (247)

The question takes us back in time, once again to the young Razumov in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (2009). Trapped inside the grinding machine of the tsarist surveillance system that is sending him abroad to infiltrate among the Russian exiles, Razumov contemplates a run in any other direction, only to escape the impossible mission. In baffled terror, he is then forced to hear State Councilor Mikulin, a sinister character whose scrutinizing gaze forces one’s inner thoughts into the open, ask him mockingly, “Where to?” The sobering awareness emerging from the entanglement of radicalism and autocracy in Mr. K Released points toward the attraction of different systems that rests on cautionary and troubling illusions. Enacted in a novel with Kafkaesque and absurdist existential and political implications, they inject the unfathomable complexity of exile into Vișniec’s dissident prose.

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Bibliography Anderson, Mark. 1992. Kafka’s Clothes. Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Armour, Richard. 1958. It Started with Marx. New  York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc. Böll, Heinrich. 1975. The Imprisoned World of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, ed. John B. Dunlop, Richard Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff, 219–230. New York and London: Collier Macmillan. Conrad, Joseph. 2009. Under Western Eyes. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Kafka, Franz. 1998a. The Castle, trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1998b. The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books. Krauss, Caroline. 1993. Kafka K. versus the Castle. The Self and the Other. Austrian Culture Series, ed. Harry Cohn. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Lukács, Georg. 1963. Die Theorie des Romans: ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch uber die Formen der grossen Epik. Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand. Manea, Norman. 2023. Exiled Shadow, trans. Carla Baricz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Moscaliuc, Mihaela. 2021. Released into Captivity: Matei Vișniec’s Mr. K Released. Reading in Translation. https://readingintranslation.com/2021/07/19/ released-­into-­captivity-­matei-­visniecs-­mr-­k-­released-­translated-­from-­romanian-­by-­ josefina-­komporaly/. Neubauer, John. 2009. Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century. In The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, ed. J.  Neubauer and B. Zsuzsanna Török, 4–106. De Gruyter, Inc. Reid, Alec. 1975. From Beginning to Date: Some Thoughts on the Plays of Samuel Beckett. In Samuel Beckett. A Collection of Criticism, ed. Ruby Cohn, 63–72. New York: McGraw-Hill. Said, Edward. 1993. Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals. Grand Street 47: 112–124. Sussman, Henry. 1979. Franz Kafka. Geometrician of a Metaphor. Madison: Coda Press. Vișniec, Matei. 2010. Domnul K. eliberat. Bucuresti: Cartea Romȃnească. ———. 2011. La masă cu Marx. Bucuresti: Cartea Romȃnească. ———. 2020. Mr. K Released, trans. Josefina Komporaly. Seagull Books.

CHAPTER 37

Hassan Blasim’s God 99: Staying with Fragments, Designing Other Worlds Claire Gallien

99+ Names and 1 God; Or, How to Reassemble in the Midst of Fragments? Hassan Blasim (b. 1973) is an Arabic writer and filmmaker based in Finland. He was born into a large Shi‘i family in Baghdad, spent his childhood in Kirkuk, and returned to the capital to study at the Academy of Cinematic Arts. The critical nature of his early films drew the attention of informants, forcing him to leave Baghdad in 1998 and move to Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. From there, he continued to work as a filmmaker, under the pseudonym Ouazad Osman, and made a film titled Wounded Camera, about the displacement of millions of Kurds as a result of the Iraqi army’s campaign of retaliation against the 1991 Kurdish uprisings. Blasim left Iraq in 1999 for Istanbul and traveled clandestinely through Europe, arriving in Finland in 2004. Part of this journey is re-imagined in snapshots across God 99, the novel on which this chapter focuses. In 2003, Iraq was invaded by a US-led coalition, occupied by Allied forces, and plunged into chaos and war. The population had already suffered decades of regional armed conflicts, sectarian violence, economic sanctions, and dictatorship. Blasim’s departure preceded the forced migration of millions of other Iraqis now living in camps as internally displaced people or as migrants and refugees abroad. In God 99, Hassan Owl, the author’s doppelgänger, comments

C. Gallien (*) University Paul Valery Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_37

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that “Iraqis have been living all over the world since the 1960s. They are now diaspora citizens of the world, willingly or unwillingly” (271). The migration of Iraqis fleeing bombs, guns, and knives preceded the all-out war in Syria and the displacement of millions of other people across the region, some of them taking the same Anatolian route as Blasim and thousands of other Iraqis before them. This mass migration often ended in Istanbul, while a fraction of those who left Iraq were able to reach Europe. Blasim’s fiction—from his two earlier short-story collections The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013) to the recent novel God 99 (2020; originally published in Arabic in 2018)—is haunted, thematically and formally, by these experiences of war in Iraq and migration to Europe. He returns to the same traumatic issue of civilian survival in a country at war, and depicts violent deaths, sectarian conflicts, terrorist attacks, forced migrations, sometimes in crude detail, with dark humor, or in supernatural terms. Yet, I contend that while staying with the fragments, Blasim does not relish in or feed on his or other people’s misery. Fragments are the traces left of shattered lives in a shattered world, but Blasim does not stop at them. I argue that his writing is equally preoccupied with tracing other routes to lucidly re-structure life in the midst of rubble. His career cuts across and intermeshes different linguistic and national geographies. Despite having lived in Finland for nearly two decades and now holding Finnish citizenship, Blasim is still considered ineligible for Finnish literary prizes and prevented from joining the Finnish Union of Writers because he writes in Arabic.1 This exclusion says a lot about the contemporary politics of language and national belonging in Finland and beyond. The political framework is based on the presumption of monolingual nations and exclusion of Arabic as a non-European language. Yet, despite writing in Arabic, Blasim is more popular in translation and his presence on the world literary scene in translation forces a reconsideration of the hierarchy between source and target languages. Some of his works were published in translation before they were printed in Arabic. Furthermore, he has often published his short stories piecemeal online before full collections appeared in print. His preference for “street” Arabic, compounded with the sharp political edge of his writing, means the printing of his works is difficult, if not forbidden, especially in countries like Iraq, whereas it can circulate more easily on the Internet. Finnish literary critic Olli Löytty argues that Blasim’s work is not only what Rebecca L. Walkowitz defined as a “born translated” text, but also “born digital” fiction (2020, 33). His fiction is habitually discussed by literary critics in the context of two traditions of Arabic writing, one looking toward Iraq and the literature of war and trauma (Bahoora 2015; Milich et al. 2012), and the other toward Europe and the contemporary literature of migration/refugee writing (Atia 2019a, b; 1  For a more detailed discussion of Blasim’s insider–outsider status on the Finnish literary map and the politics of belonging in Finland, see Löytty’s essays “Welcome to Finnish Literature!,” 67–82 (2017) and “Follow the Translation!,” esp. 28–33, 37–40.

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Qutait 2021; Sakr 2018 and Sellmann 2018a, b). God 99 shifts between Iraq and Europe (with a particular focus on Finland and Sweden) and places the two locations side by side: on the one hand, the traumatic experiences of war, sectarian conflicts, the death of civilians under torture or car-bombing and, on the other hand, the traumatic experiences of migration along illegal routes at the door of “Fortress Europe,” the dehumanization of migrants, racism, the duplicity of Western “democracies,” and the rise of the far right and fascism. More specifically, through the stories told in the series of interviews carried out by protagonist Hassan Owl with Iraqi and Syrian migrants and refugees for the God 99 blog project, the novel embeds Iraq in Europe. The migrant storytellers expose the violence they had to face and suffer in war-torn Iraq and Syria or en route to Europe. They also powerfully recall how conflicts carried out there and in which European countries are economically, politically, and militarily involved, have consequences here, in various cities of Northern Europe, where some of the migrants have arrived, where the interviews are carried out, where the stories are compiled. Finally, Blasim’s writing is part of what Johanna Sellman identifies as “an emergent trend of dystopian and speculative fiction in Iraqi and Arabic literature, which has become more prominent in the wake of the post-2011 ‘Arab spring’ period” (2018, n.p.). In his introduction to the 2016 collection of short stories Iraq+100, Blasim recalls premodern precedents of Arabic speculative fiction and highlights the late revival of the tradition to which he contributed (3–4). Contrary to the reductive interpretation of the genre, which places its origin in nineteenth-century Europe, coupled with the technical advancement of the industrial revolution, Blasim points to a much older presence of science fiction in Arabic literature going back to The Thousand and One Nights and to the twelfth-century theological and philosophical tale Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which he refers to as a “thought-experiment novel” (4). He quotes the writer and critic Adnan al-Mubarak (renamed Alia Mardan in God 99), who also elaborated on the presence of science fiction writing and voyages to other planets in Sumerian, Assyrian, and Egyptian literatures (4).2 Blasim’s writing is characterized by dystopic surrealism, dark humor, irony, and is at times saturated with what his detractors call “filthy” language. His literary language is marked by coarseness, directness, and the occasional use of obscenity, in particular—in God 99—sexual obscenity. He is wary of the politics of polite language and weary of the discourse around “the beauty of the Arabic language” in contexts of war and violence. In an interview with Sarah Irving published on the blog “Arabic Literature (in English),” he stated: “I’m not interested in preserving ‘the beauty of the Arabic language.’ During the civil war in Iraq, people were still talking about the beauty and sacredness of Arabic as a language. I reject writers who concentrate on the beauty of the language rather than the violence of events” (2012, n.a.). Even though he writes mostly 2  For al-Mubarak’s extended argument, see “How the Sumerians Invented Space Aeronautics” in English at https://thecommapressblog.wordpress.com.

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in Modern Standard Arabic, incorporating Iraqi Arabic in dialogues, his objective is one day to write just in colloquial Arabic. “I like film,” he explains, “because I can just use normal language. If you use fus7a (Modern Standard Arabic) you’re scared of the language all the time. When you write in fus7a you are like something from history, how can you write like Ibn Arabi about car bombs?” (2012, n.a.). Publicized as his “debut” novel, God 99 is shaped by the same concerns with content and form as Blasim’s previous works. Yet categorizing God 99 as a novel raises issues that can only be resolved if we reset all preconceptions about the genre. Not only does God 99 run against an understanding of how novels traditionally work in terms of narrative conventions, it also opens writing to other forms of art such as weaving and patchwork, music, and film. Furthermore, God 99 pushes fragmentation to the extreme and combines multiple artistic and generic filiations. It interweaves an email correspondence between the author Hassan Owl/Hassan Blasim and Alia Mardan/Adnan al-Mubarak, blog pages, and interview conversations with Iraqi and Syrian refugees. The novel is polyvocal and makes room for a multiplicity of narrators telling segments of stories (not necessarily their own) about the violence of war and sectarian conflicts, state brutality, terrorist bombing in post-invasion Iraq, and the violence of forced migration, post-traumatic stress disorder, encampment, racism, and dehumanization in contemporary Europe. The choice of title would be puzzling to more than one (Muslim) reader and could be easily but falsely interpreted as a gesture of provocation by a novelist who certainly shuns consensus and doxic discourse. To Muslim readers or any reader with a slight knowledge of Islam, “God 99” immediately brings to mind the 99 Names of God, also known as the Asmā’ al-Ḥusnā, or the Beautiful Names of Allāh. The number 99 is reported by tradition in a ḥadı ̄th transmitted by Abū Hurayrah, one of the greatest transmitter of the sayings of the Prophet of Islam, and included in all the most trusted collections of ḥadı ̄th, namely the Saḥiḥ Bukha ̄rı ̄, Saḥiḥ Muslim, Ja ̄mi‘i al-Tirmidhı ̄, the Sunan Ibn Mājah. The saying goes that the Prophet Muḥammad said: “Allah has ninety-nine names, that is one hundred minus one, and whoever knows them will go to Paradise.”3 It is also well known amongst Muslims that God possesses an infinite number of names, unknown and ungraspable within the finite nature of human understanding, and that the Names listed in the ḥadı ̄th are there as mere reminders of His glory and beauty but are in no way exhaustive. The list starts with al-Raḥmān (the Most Merciful), al-Raḥı ̄m (the Bestower of Mercy), al-­ Malik (the Owner of Dominion), al-Quddūs (the Absolutely Pure), and are followed with al-Salām (the Giver of Peace), al-Mū’min (the Giver of Security), and so forth. The Names are derivative, approximate, and not all-­encompassing, since no attribute, even the infinite addition of them, exhausts the whole. They 3  See Saḥiḥ Bukha ̄rı ̄ Book 54, Hadith 23, Book 97, Hadith 21, and Book 80, Hadith 105; Saḥiḥ Muslim, Book 48, Hadith 6; Jāmi‘i al-Tirmidhı ̄ Book 48, Hadith 139; Sunan Ibn Maj̄ ah Book 34, Hadith 3860.

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enable believers, through language and imagination, to come to a limited but still true understanding of their Lord. Therefore, the names of God are not about recognizing the power of human intellect to encompass the Divine but rather about recognizing the fragmentary nature of created human knowledge. The Names are a way to come closer to the Divine, since the Qur’ān encourages believers to call to Him using the asma ̄’ al-ḥusna ̄ (beautiful Names): “And to Allah belong the best names, so invoke Him by them” (Qur’ān, surah al-­ Isra’, aya 180). The complete listing of the 99 Names is established in full in the novel (143–144) at the beginning of the chapter-story “Ninety-Nine Swedes,” yet with no apparent connection to what comes after. The list is followed by the transcription of an interview with a prison inmate who tells the interviewer-­ writer Hassan Owl about his family and his friend Abdallah. Hassan transcribes the interview and breaks it down into subsections, with the first section, “The Leftist Father,” located in Iraq and the other sections, “The Illiterate Mother,” “The Spiritual Brother,” and “The God 99 Car,” set in Sweden. Despite the fragmentation, readers are confronted with the reality of the connections between the violence of life in Iraq, the necessity to migrate, and the relocation to Sweden, as well as between the car bomb in Baghdad and the terrorist attack that Abdallah committed against a bar in Sweden. In contrast to these related events, no connection appears between the story and the 99 Names of God introducing it. However, the narrator-author does not resort to fragmentation for fragmentation’s sake. At the very end of the story, the interviewee indicates that “He [Abdallah] was ignorant about the religion he was fighting for, and merely parroted whatever the sheikhs of hatred and ignorance said on the internet, Facebook and YouTube” (151). The lack of connection between the list of God’s 99 Names and the story in “Ninety-Nine Swedes” can be interpreted as a symbolic enactment, at a formal level, of the absence of relation between a true understanding of Islam and the terrorist attacks committed in its name. Is there, however, a link between the novel God 99 and the 99 Names of God? What would be the nature and function of this connection? Or that between an author who has fled the persecution and censorship of “religious” political authorities, one who is consciously playing with blasphemy and “dirty” language, and the belief in God as One? On the surface of it, none. However, I argue that the novel cannot be reduced to a grammar of offense, and that there is a deeper connection between God 99 and the 99 Names of God. It revolves around the idea of structure and unity, or rather seeking unity, re-­ membering unity, while living with the fragments. God 99 seems to be established on the premise of a missing name or missing structure, invisible to the naked eye and yet present underground and holding the threads of the stories and of the lives of the protagonists together. In the last part of my chapter, I unpack the hidden structure of the book based on literary affiliations and companionship, which I argue, constitute new trails holding books and lives together, against all odds. Before exploring the literary trails, I analyze the

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protagonists’ experience of the violence of fragmentation and the pain of living with fragments, their descriptions of the “debilitating anxiety … of losing continuity” (39), and their ultimate search for wholeness. Taking my cue from the interviewer/Hassan Owl’s statement that the 99 Names “are a fundamental part of the theory of the unity of God in Islamic religious thought” (143), I argue that the characters and narrators, real-life migrants and story-tellers, find solace and meaning in the theological principle that behind and beyond multiplicity there is unity, beyond fragmentation, there is a striving for wholeness, and that beyond dispersal, literature offers the possibility of a different return, elsewhere and otherwise.

“Any rational understanding of the world has shattered into fragments, like a mirror you’ve dropped on the floor”: The Dismembered and the Fragmentary Having readers witness the killing, maiming, and disfiguring of bodies is a recurring feature in Blasim’s writing, one that strikes us with its brutality, its reliance on the grotesque, and the tension between staging, performance, hyper-representation, on the one hand, and the impossibility of representing the horror of war, the dismembering of bodies, and fragmentation of lives, on the other hand.4 Nadia Atia underlines how Blasim is writing against the normalization of this horror by pushing the description of injuries and death to their extremes and by engaging with the nexus of grievable/ungrievable lives.5 Against the backdrop of the Allied invasion and occupation of Iraq led by the United States, which declared the deaths of half a million children acceptable “collateral damage,” Blasim’s short stories assert the humanity of Iraqi lives and “locate us in the uncomfortable interstices between the unreal, and the unbearable but all-too-real lived experiences of displaced people” (2019a, 1070). God 99 describes in graphic detail the dismembering and maiming of bodies on the streets of cities ravaged by car-bombings and terrorist attacks. Indeed, some of the interviewees talk about specific traumatic memories that took place in the war-torn country they left, as in “Doctor DJ,” “Face Mask,” and “An Ordinary Iraqi Life.” Doctor DJ, whom Hassan Owl meets in Berlin, narrates a macabre scene where she and her companion Muhannad witnessed the killing and beheading of a young man in the street of Baghdad below their flat. Her companion was then killed by a sniper when he did not observe the curfew and 4  Haytham Bahoora provides an in-depth analysis of Blasim’s representation of violent deaths, murdered, maimed, and disfigured bodies in “Remembering the Dismembered Nation,” esp. pp. 197–201. 5  See Butler, Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009). For Butler, a grievable life is a life with value, one that will be mourned and commemorated. The distinction between the two can be mapped on to “exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death” (2009, xiv–xv).

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went down to try and take a picture of the body. The short transcription of the interview suggests what living in a neighborhood taken over by armed groups means for civilians caught in the cross-fire and gives a sense of the surreality of the all-too real horror. Dark irony seeps through “An Ordinary Iraqi Life.” Traveling with his daughter between conflict zones in northern Kurdish Iraq, Shivan’s car falls in a terrorist ambush. Unlike previous interviews, transcribed with questions in bold and answers in regular font, Shivan’s journey from Sulaymaniyah to Kirkuk is recounted in the third person but with an internal focalization on Shivan. The reader’s access to the events through the eyes of Shivan creates a strong sense of his presence. It is only at the end of the story that the interview format with “Questions and Answers” is introduced, but the macabre irony is that it happens after the moment of Shivan’s death: You didn’t die at the scene of the explosion. I suffered horrific burns. My flesh fused with the children’s clothes and plastic toys. One day later, in hospital, I took my last breath. (75)

In the interviews, the characters tell their traumatic stories of war and terrorism. The stories have echoes and connections, which only the narrator/interviewer and readers are aware of, and which give a sense of a proliferation of violence without end. For instance, the civilian and sectarian wars in Syria are described in the story of how a Belgian woman named Charlotte lost her companion to the Daesh people in “The Principal of the Cat School.” This Syrian story finds an echo later, in “Ninety-Nine Swedes,” which confronts the historical and social environment breeding “jihadism” in Sweden. “Ali Transistor” explores the fine line between sanity, understood as stability and wholeness of being, and madness, as the result of fragmentation of the self, the horror of everyday life in times of war, and the role of art in such context. Ali repairs transistors and makes electronic sound sculptures in war-torn Baghdad, when a mosquito bite damages his brain. The presence of such mosquitoes is related to the arrival of foreign US troops said to have brought infections to the country. Here the “fictional” narrative provides a counter-narrative to “factual” stories disclosed in US media about US soldiers in Iraq infected with a parasite spread by biting sand flies. In these stories covered in the press and on TV, US rangers are said to be treated in time so that the skin form of the disease resulting in lesions does not develop into its visceral and lethal form, which untreated Iraqis, and especially children, died from. “Ali Transistor” closes on a semi-­ ironic, semi-cynical note, with Ali’s friend transforming clockwork pieces produced in a context of war into multi-media art exhibited in international galleries. The last piece is a giant reproduction of Ali’s head ticking with the buzz of a fly and placed in the middle of roundabout in Baghdad. Such stories leave readers profoundly uneasy. The stories are told in absolute earnestness, and yet, their irony, bordering on the burlesque and the farcical, cannot but remind readers of the sheer absurdity and violent madness with which the world is run.

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Other stories hint at the fragmentation caused by the violence of clandestine migration across Europe, including dehumanizing living conditions and racism. “The Grasshopper Eater” and “In the Dark Room” are autofictional, recounting Hassan Blasim’s clandestine travels in Europe, with the author split between the interviewer and the interviewee. Stories like “Barrels” and Life Streams” confront the diseases of nationalism, fascism, and racism in Europe, often with dark humor and sarcasm. “Barrels,” transcribes in a sardonic tone the short dialogue with “a middle-aged man” who came up to Hassan Owl and sat down on the same bench: The man: Me: The man: Me: The man (smiling): Me: The man: Me:

Where are you from? Iraq! Oh, I have a friend married to an Iranian. Where are you from? I’m from here. I’m Finnish! Oh, I have a friend married to a Norwegian. Yeah. Yeah. (223)

Irony and sarcasm suffuse the pages of “The Son’s Game, The Father’s Game,” where the interviewee explains the video games he designed inspired by US and Allied foreign policy: “Your journey will be clandestine, crossing the borders like migrants and refugees. You can walk, cross the sea, travel in traffickers’ trucks. You’ll face many obstacles and challenges. … And it’s Mr Rubbish, with a personality like Trump’s, who’s in charge of the obstacles that block your way” (183). The full story also includes the father’s “game,” which consists in establishing a team of “traffickers without borders” (185). Written at the border between literal and figurative meaning and resorting to constant ambivalence, the stories defiantly address the violence of governments who “play” with people’s lives.

Staying with the Fragmentary and the Discontinuous Fragmentation reflects on every aspect of the novel, including its treatment of form, time, and space. There is no spatial continuity between locations: the narration alternates between Northern Europe and Iraq with no tangible attention to landscapes and cityscapes. Descriptions are extremely rare, often minimal, and the locations themselves reduced to a flat or a bar, a shop or a café, a bench in a park or a seat in a taxi. The discontinuous nature of space in God 99 is all the more potent as none of the locations are made to connect with their immediate environments. Locations function as independent units, with action developing behind closed doors and thus contributing to the general claustrophobic atmosphere. The only character who could potentially link some of these locations together is Hassan Owl as he travels across Northern Europe and between Europe and Iraq for his interviews. Yet, his journeys are not described: he is moving from point A to point B with no interest in sharing

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what lies between the spots and what happens in the in-between. This treatment of space reinforces the fragmentary nature of the stories, which are snapshots of the shattered lives of Hassan Owl’s interviewees presented as mere transcripts of the conversations with little or no editing. Time is also disjointed. There is no progression, no beginning, middle, or end. The novel closes on a temporal contradiction between the death of Alia Mardan and the end of the email exchanges between him and Hassan, and the continuation of Hassan’s search for his disappeared “Uncle BBC” through the tunnels to Gaza. The end is both absolutely final and still open, bringing together the pieces of the family puzzle: who disappeared, where, and how to find them again and reunite. The treatment of time reinforces the reader’s confusion. In “The Principal of the Cat School,” Hassan waits for Raed al-Suri on the Place Louise in Brussels to interview him. This moment triggers a flashback where Hassan remembers the four cousins he visited in Brussels the year before. A change of font presumably alerts the reader to a change of narrators from Hassan to Raed (“We spent the evening in my flat. All of us were Syrian, new and old refugees” (82)), but nothing in the story confirms this plausible interpretation and settles doubts for good, as if the reader again was meant to be kept in a state of uncertainty. Then, the mention of Charlotte makes Hassan interject: “Charlotte was killed in Syria” (84), then fast-forward the time of the narrative to the present: “News of her death remains unconfirmed” (84). Raed takes the narration back to the past, using the evening mentioned before as an anchor point (“She had come that day to talk to us about her boyfriend” (84)) and moving further back in time. Raed recounts the story of Walid’s (Charlotte’s boyfriend) enrollment with Daesh in Syria, his desertion, and brutal murder, Charlotte’s flight to Syria to try and find him and her own disappearance in Syria (85–86).The story ends with a prolepsis to the present of narration: Raed informs Hassan about the documentary that Said, a close friend of Charlotte and Walid, filmed when he followed her in Syria, now presented at festivals to great critical acclaim. Each of the stories resorts to this pattern of disjointed time, with abrupt returns to the present of narration and brusque endings. Finally, fragmentation affects the form of the stories to a point of rupture. First, God 99 as printed object is presented as the draft of an ongoing blog project of 99 interviews not all conducted yet (5–6, 9–11). Its very existence seems arbitrary and “unjustified,” as if someone—it could be Hassan Owl or someone else—assembled it without much concern for the presentation, with the sole intention of keeping the written record of the interviews. Second, the interview format, with questions and answers, entails further fragmentation of the narrative. Interwoven in-between the stories are emails with Alia Mardan. The novel thus resembles a patchwork of stories assembled in no specific order in contrast to the purposiveness of interviews conducted by immigration officials or by scholars of area studies and refugee studies. In the blog project, the stories told by forcefully displaced and traumatized people defy the expectation of seamless narration characterized by unity, communicable meaning, and proper endings.

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In fact, although God 99 was marketed as a novel, it still generically owes much to the short story, precisely because the stories in God 99 function as single units and are of a short format, often ending abruptly. For instance, the story “Face Mask” is framed with Hassan’s narration of his walk in Baghdad before and after the meeting with the man making masks for the disfigured. After the interview, Hassan walks toward the statue of Kahramana and stops at a crowded street restaurant. He has a short conversation with a customer sitting next to him about living abroad, expats, and the nice meal, when the patron adds “They blew the place up three times in one year” (51). This comment reminds Hassan of the mask trade and that he might end being disfigured himself. He goes out of the restaurant and walks toward the roundabout where the statue of Kahramana has been replaced with a fountain. He then recalls the story of Kahramana and the thieves in The Thousand and One Nights, and after giving a brief outline of this story, calls a taxi and jumps inside. In this story, as in the other stories, lack of causal relation and lack of discursive justification add to the effect of narrative disjointedness and digressiveness. For instance here, the justification (if any) for the addition of the story of Kahramana is not narratological—it does not serve the development of the story—but rather meta-referential and intertextual. In embedding the story of Kahramana, the narrator flags the technique of mise-en-abyme for which the collection of The Thousand and One Nights is widely popular. In this case, embedding the Thousand and One Nights story does not help readers understand how one event leads to the next and does not respond to their sense of entitlement to meaning. By embedding the story of Kahramana, the narrator/ author foregrounds one of its essential stylistic feature—namely the mise-en-­ abyme—and creates a situation where the interview titled “Face Mask” resorts to the same stylistic feature. Similarly, the story “After the Blood, I danced with Salma Hayek” reads as a series of snapshots, flashbacks, and embedded stories that altogether create a syncopated and disconnected rhythm. “After the Blood” starts with a brief exposition written in italics of the place and time and context in which Hassan Owl meets Khadija. Confusion starts when Hassan calls her “Salma Hayek” without any explanation and then abruptly shifts the action to another time and place. They had been at the Reykjavik Literary Festival and now the narrator indicates, in regular font: “On the balcony of her house, Salma Hayek is reading to me from a book by a writer who wrote nothing else” (132). Without further indication, readers are given to read what Khadija/Salma Hayek is reading to Hassan. The new confusion is that the character in the book that Khadija/Salma Hayek is reading is also Khadija. It starts tersely with: “Khadija had just come out of the principal’s room with a face flushed with anger” (132). The story continues for four pages, when again without any clear sign that we are moving out of the story in the book that Khadija/Salma Hayek is reading, readers of God 99 re-enter the present of narration where Khadija/ Salma Hayek and Hassan sit together. Khadija/Salma Hayek is interrupted in her reading of her own life story to Hassan to pick up a phone that has just

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started ringing. Hassan reads the book cover, the title of the book After the Blood, I Danced with Salma Hayek and the name of the author, who is one of the two main protagonists in the book, namely “Wissam Mohammad… a young Iraqi writer and poet … [f]ound blindfolded with a bullet in his head and the words: OUR REVENGE cut into his skin with the tip of a knife” (135). Hassan picks up the book and reads the end of the story to himself. When Khadija/Salma Hayek returns, Hassan’s reading, and therefore our reading too, is interrupted, and we are moved back into the present of narration. The entire story is therefore built on a constant movement inside and outside of stories, a complete blurring of the lines between fiction and reality, creating a confusion for the readers who are most often unaided in the work of gathering the pieces together and reconstructing meaning. There is an ethical congruence to staying with fragmentation, discontinuity, and with what is not immediately legible when representing the experiences of war, forced migration, and clandestine life, and when reading about them from the safe and privileged side of life. Literature, in this case, develops a type of discourse that does not reproduce the grammar of the nation state and does not use the binary language of the administration, fitting people into boxes such as citizen/migrant or legal migrant/illegal migrant. For migrants, identity means being reduced to a demeaning, monolithic, and judicial category, complying with the figure of the “stranger” characterized by Sara Ahmed (2000) not as someone we care to ask about but as someone “we already know” (10, 21). Gana and Härting powerfully warn against the “narrativizing imperative,” namely the “testimonial obligation to make the violent event speak, and speak coherently in order to be witnessable, understandable, and credible” (2008, 2). Only by disturbing the grammar of the nation state does literature effectively undercut the discursive domination of migration authorities and their demands for a structured, coherent, and verifiable narrative according to their standards. Literature is precisely the space for the articulation of other types of representation, which arguably adhere more closely to the reality of lived experiences, in all its violence, uncertainty, sheer absurdity, irony, and unpredictability.

“For a long time, I’ve had a particular worry that all I do is create a collage of techniques picked up here and there”: Searching for Other Structure(s) The strand of postcolonial theory influenced by poststructuralism and deconstruction, and epitomized by figures such Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has been accused by Marxist critics of celebrating concepts such as hybridity, fragmentation, unreliability, and self-reflexivity.6 This development has been put under duress in places and literatures where decolonial struggles are still taking place, such as Palestine, or in the case of forced 6  For a late manifestation of a Marxist critique of the poststructuralist and deconstructivist strand in postcolonial theory, see Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2003).

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migrants, whose fragmented and precarious lives are clearly not a cause for celebration. While politically and ethically enjoining the reader to stay with the fragment, God 99 records the anxiety of living on shattered foundations. In one of the emails that Alia Mardan sends to Hassan Owl, he confesses his own particular struggle and anxiety as an Iraqi writer: “For a long time, I’ve had a particular worry that all I do is create a collage of techniques picked up here and there” (53). This comment, and their electronic correspondence as a whole, resonate with Hassan Blasim’s reality as a writer. First, a note added at the end of the novel establishes that Alia Mardan was the writer Adnan al-Mubarak, who died of leukemia in 2017, and that the correspondence was not invented but only selected from a larger set of emails over the span of 12 years. Since Blasim reveals the “true” identity of Alia Mardan at the end of the book, the ploy of using pseudonyms is canceled and the reader is left to wonder about the purpose of this self-defeating gesture. This decision becomes powerful, however, when considering Blasim’s strategy to be one of highlighting the theme of confusion, of the surreality of the real, and the tangible reality of what would or should normally count as unreal. Furthermore, the emails often resonate with Blasim’s reflections on writing process. God 99 is an utterly deconstructed novel, yet I argue that it also records the anxiety expressed by al-Mubarak about not wanting to be just a “collage of techniques picked up here and there” (53). It therefore intimates the possibility of reassembling the fragments into a new form of existence that would dissociate from the “border regimes,” which constitute the world order today and the predominant force used by states in order to structure societies. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson write in Borders as Method, borders are not simply blockades opening and closing circulation, they are a “method” of producing subjectivities and social worlds (2013, 17).7 Pushing against the exclusionary and unequal structures produced by border regimes and not content to stay with the fragments, the novel offers a highly wrought structure that may not be detectable at first sight but that effectively holds it together. The silver thread holding the book together is the correspondence between Alia Mardan and Hassan Owl. The author pays tribute to his friend at the end of the novel: The emails attributed to Alia Mardan in this book are in fact selections from dozens of emails that the Iraqi writer Adnan al-Mubarak sent to me over a period of twelve years. These emails brought great relief and were an important part of my education, and through them I discovered Adnan to be the kind of person I could truly admire—a mixture of the saintly and the truly demonic. Saintly in the human sense and demonic in a creative one… An email from him meant a win7  Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have been engaged in a research project since the mid2000s to study the proliferation of borders and the multi-scalar role they play in the current restructuring of working lives, the international division of labor, and in the production of the deeply heterogeneous space and time of global capitalism. See in particular the first chapter in their book “The Proliferation of Borders” in Borders as Method.

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dow had opened—a window onto a garden of light and of plants, a garden of knowledge and dreams (279).

Alia’s emails to Hassan are interleaved with the interviews/stories Hassan is conducting for the God 99 blog project, adding to the sense of discursive fragmentation. Broken and resumed electronic conversations, disparate and partial interviews cannot cohere into a novel. However, if the readers take into account its manifest level (Alia’s messages given in the text) and imagine its latent one (Hassan’s responses), it becomes possible to reconstitute an uninterrupted line of conversation at times just friendly, at others political, philosophical, metaphysical, and artistic. Without seeing it and reading it, readers still know the latent level exists since Alia’s messages are clearly responses and expansions of Hassan’s. This correspondence preserves companionship, trust, and wisdom in the midst of insanity. Furthermore, these discussions give Alia occasion to reflect with Hassan on various authors and works, which together form a community of writer-­ comrades. Indeed, in the course of their correspondence Alia and Hassan discuss the books and authors they have read or translated. Gradually, this list builds into a coherent pattern of mainly US and European white male writers productive mostly during the first half of the century (Emil Cioran, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ingmar Bergman, Italo Calvino, Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Henri Miller, H.G. Wells, John Ashbery, e.e. cummings, Don DeLillo, Robert Heinlein, and John Dos Passos). Some Russian, Mexican, South American, and Japanese authors (Mikhail Bulgakov, Väinö Linna, László Krasznahorkai, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Fernando Pessoa, Eduardo Galeano, and Yukio Mishima) are also referred to, albeit less frequently.8 This under-community9 of writers, whose connections are kept latent and not explicitly articulated, is almost entirely male, white, and from the Global North, with the exception of the Mexican and Latin American writers. Blasim appears to be unconcerned with questions of race and gender representation, and in fact Adnan and Hassan never reflect on these issues. Yet, rather than unconcerned, I would prefer using the description of “inexplicitly” or 8  The idea to unearth this trail of literary affiliations came to me during discussions I had with colleagues about the book during a Banipal Book Club organized by Becki Maddock and Maggie Obank on 30th June 2021. I thank the organizers and Rita Sakr for taking part in this event and for her contributions in critically exploring Blasim’s works. See for instance her article “The MoreThan-Human Refugee Journey: Hassan Blasim’s Short Stories” referenced in the bibliography. 9  The term under-community is inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s (2013) concept of the “under-commons,” which they present as drawn from theory and practice of the black radical tradition. The “under-commons” are understood as fugitive paths and adversarial fields from where to organize and unsettle contemporary capitalist mechanisms of control, from governance by credit to management of pedagogy. While recognizing that what I call Blasim’s “under-community” is male, white, and representative of an intellectual elite, I use the prefix “under” to underscore the fact that Blasim’s creation of a community of writers is kept underground and is not self-evident. In that sense, it is fugitive, escaping the racist expectation that an Arab novelist writing in Arabic connects first and foremost with Arab authors writing in Arabic too.

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“contradictorily” militant. Indeed, all too often, the publishing industry restricts Arabic writers to a function of representation of the Arab world; this means that they are expected to carry out the ludicrous function of standing for an imaginary whole called “the Arab world,” and to confine their creations both geographically and imaginatively, both in terms of the geography they choose to write about and the themes they broach in their writings. Thus, Blasim’s gesture of dis-affiliation from Arab or Iraqi writers—despite the many congruent points one could find between them, for instance between Blasim and the Iraqi-born German-writing novelist Abbas Khider10—and his affiliation with European and North/South-American white writers defy expectations and norms based on ethnicity and nationality. The terms of the integration to Blasim’s under-community of writers are not national or linguistic, not bound by geography and time, but are strictly literary and constitute a fugitive and defiantly antagonistic attempt to restructure life otherwise. Owl/ Blasim and Mardan/al-Mubarak do not pick up authors and works at random; rather, they delineate trails of affiliation based on shared experiences of war and displacement, similar experiments with forms and genres, in particular science fiction, the same attraction to the surreal, the enigmatic, the absurd, to sexuality and taboos, satire, and nihilism. At the time of the correspondence with Hassan, Alia was translating Cioran’s works into Arabic. Known for his nihilism, Cioran has a towering presence in the novel, which gestures toward a strong literary and philosophical influence on Blasim. The trail of writers continues with Miller, known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing the genre of the semi-autobiographical novel that blends stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, with character study, social criticism, and philosophical reflections. These features resonate most powerfully with Blasim’s own writing in God 99 as the novel blends surrealism with the all-too violently real, the semi-­ autobiographical, social criticism, explicit language, sex with story-telling and meta-discursivity. Wells is remembered for being prolific in many genres, including science fiction novels. With this co-text in mind, the lengthy description of the board game in “The Son’s Game, The Father’s Game” with rules recalling Donald Trump’s foreign policy may be interpreted as a nudge in the direction of Wells. Amongst other landmarks on the trail is Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. With this work, Ibsen tested the limitations imposed by stagecraft on drama, just as Blasim may have written God 99 testing the conventions of the novel. God 99 also shares with Sartre’s L’idiot de famille, quoted numerous times, a concern with and fascination for nihilism. Finally, Blasim finds echoing reflections on the experience and trauma of war and on disenchantment in Baudelaire’s Artificial 10  Corina Stan has written extensively and fascinatingly about Abbas Khider and what Khider’s novels do to default conceptions of language in general and the German language in particular (see “Affordances of a New Language” for Stan’s study of Deutsch für alle: Das endgültige Lehrbuch), and to conceptions of refugee and world literatures (see “Novels in the Translation Zone” for Stan’s study of Der falsche Inder and Brief in die Auberginenrepublik).

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Paradise, Bulgakov’s Diaboliad and other Stories, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Camus’s The Fall, Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier, László Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó. Against the immobility and encampment of forced migration, the novel offers a breathing space. It does not work from a preconceived notion of what the genre of the novel should look like, and it dispenses with ideas of continuity, progression, and conclusion. In “Face Mask,” the story stops when the interviewee has had enough of it and offers to play some music instead. The text of God 99 does not constrict and it does not imprison. I see it as a kaleidoscope, as an optical instrument, which offers no immobile and unique solution, but rather a multiplicity of stories, conversations, writers, works, connected and tilted toward one other at an angle. Thus, the stories, conversations, and writers are made to reflect (on) one another and in doing so mobilize other perceptions. Behind and beyond fragmentation, one aspires to regain wholeness, moving from the multiple to the One. Equally, under Oneness stand in reality 99 Names. This Oneness and wholeness is only to be approached through multiplicity, (re)building connections, and designing other worlds.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. Angoustures, Aline, Dzovinar Revonian, and Clark Maroudlan. 2017. Introduction: Écrire l’histoire de la protection des réfugiés et apatrides en France (1920–1960). In Réfugiés et apatrides. Administrer l’asile en France (1920–1960), ed. Aline Angoustures, Dzovinar Revonian, and Clark Maroudlan, 11–45. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Ashfeldt, Lane. 2015. Literary Defiance: An Interview with Hassan Blasim. World Literature Today 89 (1): 10–12. Atia, Nadia. 2019a. Death and Mourning in Contemporary Iraqi Texts. Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21 (8): 1068–1086. ———. 2019b. The Figure of the Refugee in Hassan Blasim’s ‘The Reality and the Record’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 (3): 319–333. Bahoora, Haytham. 2015. Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War. The Arab Studies Journal 23 (1): 184–208. Biwu, Shang. 2017. Delving into Impossible Storyworlds of Terror: The Unnaturalness of Hassan Blasim’s Short Narrative Fiction. Arcadia 52 (1): 183–200. Blasim, Hassan. 2009. The Madman of Freedom Square, trans. Jonathan Wright. Manchester: Comma Press. ———. 2012. Interview by Sarah Irving, “Hassan Blasim: I’m Not Interested in Preserving the Beauty of the Arabic Language.” Arabic Literature. https://arablit. org/2012/12/12/hassan-blasim-im-not-interested-in-preserving-the-beauty-ofthe-arabic-language/. ———. 2013. The Iraqi Christ, trans. Jonathan Wright. Manchester: Comma Press. ———. 2014. The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, trans. Jonathan Wright. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 2016a. A Refugee in the Paradise That Is Europe. Hassan Blasim.net. https:// hassanblasim.net/2016/01/03/a-refugee-in-the-paradise-/that-is-europe/.

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———. 2016b. Interview by Margaret Litvin and Johanna Sellman. TANK Magazine, 69, March 25. http://tankmagazine.com/issue-69/talk/hassan-blasim/. ———. 2020. God 99, trans. Jonathan Wright. Manchester: Comma Press. Blasim, Hassan, Noor Hemani, and Ra Page, eds. 2016. Iraq +100: Stories from a Century After the Invasion. Manchester: Comma Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. ———. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gallien, Claire. 2018. ‘Refugee Literature’: What Postcolonial Theory Has to Say. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (6): 721–726. Gana, Nouri, and Heike Härting. 2008. Introduction: Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East. Comparatives Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28 (1): 1–10. Heath, Vicki. 2012. An Interview with Hassan Blasim and Jonathan Wright. Threshold, 19 December. http://thresholds.chi.ac.uk/an-interview-with-hassan-blasim/. Howe Haralambous, Chloe. 2017. Suppliants and Deviants: Gendering the Refugee/ Migrant Debate on the EU Border. In Paper presented at the Refugees and Gender Violence: Vulnerability and Resistance Conference, Columbia University, NYC, February 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbSh6Zb_FIA. Löytty, Olli. 2017. Welcome to Finnish Literature! Hassan Blasim and the Politics of Belonging. Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 23, Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 67–82. ———. 2020. Follow the Translations! The Transnational Circulation of Hassan Blasim’s Short Stories. In The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders, ed. Heidi Grönstrand, Markus Huss, and Ralf Kauranen, 27–47. New York: Routledge. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Milich, Stephan, Friederike Pannewick, and Leslie Tramontini, eds. 2012. Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma, and Memory in Iraqi Culture. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. 2013. The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. Qutait, Tasnim. 2021. Dislocation in Ahmad Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad and Hassan Blasim’s The Madman of Freedom Square. In Claiming Space: Locations and Orientations in World Literatures, ed. Bo G. Ekelund, Adnan Mahmutovic, Stefan Helgesson, and Deborah Reed-Danahay, 85–110. Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures. London, England: Bloomsbury Academic. Sakr, Rita. 2018. The More-Than-Human Refugee Journey: Hassan Blasim’s Short Stories. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (6): 766–780. Sellman, Johanna. 2018a. A Global Postcolonial: Contemporary Arabic Literature of Migration to Europe. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (6): 751–765. ———. 2018b. Hassan Blasim. The Literary Encyclopedia, 16 January. https://www. litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13982. Stan, Corina. 2018. Novels in the Translation Zone: Abbas Khider, Weltliteratur, and the Ethics of the Passerby. Comparative Literature Studies 55 (2): 285–302. ———. 2021. Affordances of a New Language: Abbas Khider’s Claim to Community in German for Everyone. New German Critique 48 (3): 141–163. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2015. Born Translated. The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 38

Melancholia of Migration in the Transnational Italian Imaginary Laura Sarnelli

The Scar and Its Borders: Melancholic Forgetting In The Divided City, French historian and anthropologist Nicole Loraux proposes politikos as “the name of one who knows how to agree to oblivion” (2002, 43). She refers here to the first case of amnesty in history: in 403 BC, a new democratic government takes office in Athens to guarantee immunity to the accomplices of the old regime, the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Renouncing vengeance, Athenian citizens agree to forget the unforgettable, take their oath “not to recall the past misfortunes” of civil strife (ibid., 159), and erect an altar to Lethe, Goddess of oblivion. Through amnesty based on an act of amnesia, the city manages to get out of an impasse that was leading to the destruction of its social fabric. The city is, therefore, founded on that which it refuses, the calamity of civil war, thus revealing the fundamentally conflictual ambivalence of the civic order. The French historian is mainly interested in the ambivalent nature of voluntary forgetfulness: paradoxically, thanks to the oath, people are reminded not to remember; the monument to oblivion celebrates forgetting, while the pledge not to recall the misfortunes of Athenian citizens maintains alive the possibility of memory. It is not my concern here to retrace the folds of a complex, thought-provoking argumentative thread; rather, I would like to use Loraux’s story to suggest that the political is related to the ambivalence of

L. Sarnelli (*) University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_38

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memory. To better understand this point, it is useful to distinguish among three forms of memory setbacks: forgetfulness, oblivion, and melancholic loss. Forgetfulness is the known loss or absence of something that has become unknown: how long did the Peloponnesian War leading to the Thirty Tyrants last? This is the simplest case: I cannot remember the correct answer, and I may feel ashamed of it. Oblivion (oubli) is the strongest form of forgetfulness, the unknown absence or loss of an unknown content. That which disappears in oblivion is not a content of consciousness, but rather the consciousness of that absence: forgetting that one has forgotten. Melancholic loss is not, like oblivion, the strongest form of forgetfulness but its symmetrical opposite: keeping an object alive although it has disappeared. If forgetfulness is the known loss of an unknown content, melancholic loss embodies the unknown loss of a known content. This memory hyperbole is less straightforward than it could seem at first glance. The melancholic person does not simply resist loss by refusing to forget: my father dies and I prevent my mind from allowing his face to disappear; it is the blind resistance to the possibility of forgetting that which leads to memory loss: I keep behaving as if my father were still alive. In other words, by not forgetting him, I end up putting his very disappearance between brackets. The memory of amnesia is useful, at one and the same time, with respect to deleting an event—civil war—and bringing its presence back. In this respect, oubli as the foundation of the political resembles the denial of a melancholic state rather than the affirmation of oblivion. Civil war risks breaking out again and Athens banishes it by the oath, thus trying to enchain its memory, which turns into a ghost. There exists a haunting memory loss that leads to imaginary presences, remnants of the dead. The oubli Loraux speaks about is not just oblivion but rather the denial of melancholic loss: it is a “ghost,” “the mourning that refuses to be carried out” (Loraux, 162, 161). Melancholia, as Greek philosopher Aristotle makes clear in his first detailed analysis of the condition, produces excessive forms of behavior (perittoi) that are sometimes ill-omened, but in other cases excellent. Melancholic memory is ominous when it changes into an obstinate denial of loss or into oblivion, which paradoxically comes out of a persistent memory. Conversely, it excels when imagination prevails over memory and allows pain to be processed through forms of behavior that are “anomalous”—from the Greek word anómalos—namely unusual, multi-faceted, and extraordinary (Mazzeo 2012, 24–27). As Aristotle points out, the melancholic is represented by the philosopher, the poet, but also the anomalous politician who is capable of imagining and overcoming the insurmountable limit. According to Freud, on the other hand, melancholia is primarily related to mourning. This condition is not immediately framed in the realm of political action; rather, it is seen as a psychic deficit: “the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies […] and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (Freud, 1917 [1995], 589). This is not an improvised comparison, as it can be found in one of Freud’s early

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writings, the so-called Draft G of 1895 (Freud 1974, 206), and also at the end of Mourning and Melancholia where he insists that melancholia is a form of psychic suffering (Freud 1995, 587). This image is useful because it shows memory’s capability of incorporation as it can swallow up in its spiral any vital spur like a black hole, changing itself into its opposite: total oblivion. Yet, the idea of the wound includes a productive variant, as implosive melancholia is only one possibility. Freud overtly states that usually melancholia, like mourning, “passes off after a certain time has elapsed” (ibid., 589). How does it happen? Perhaps melancholia is worked through thanks to the second polarity of melancholic absorption: maniacal acting. This stage is not to be considered only in dysfunctional terms (the maniac dealing with delirious, unremitting actions). During the maniacal phase, which according to Freud had not been studied accurately, the melancholic person can get rid of an energetic surplus by acting. Supposedly this moment is not only a mirror-like phase to melancholic closure (what is known nowadays as depression) but also one of its remedies. As a scar can close the wound and interrupt the hemorrhage by protruding outwards, so human beings’ actions can not only intensify pain but also cure it by creating symbols, things, and imaginary representations able to soothe the obsessive memory of a lost object. It is in this framework that I situate the analysis of the three artifacts of transnational Italian literature that explore the relationship between melancholia and memory in connection with mobility and political-narrative innovation. I will address this discussion with a theoretical tool, the notion of “migrant melancholia,” which describes the chiasmus between the ethical-political activity of those who cross national borders and the imaginative activity of those who narrate accounts about migration. Those who travel, by acting, are forced to imagine new forms of life, both personal and collective; on the other hand, those who give accounts of migration can only engage in political action since they highlight the historical and, therefore, contingent and surmountable nature of the ethical-political notion of the nation-state.

Migrant Melancholia: Transnational Trajectories in Italian Literature Cultural representations such as literary and visual art forms (novels, films, monuments) are not neutral objects; rather, they contribute to the work of political memory. The literature of migration in Italy is a case in point: it leads to a necessary reformulation of the national literature, culture, and history. The country represents a significant piece in the global mosaic of people’s movement; it is one geographical entity, yet talking about migration to Italy inevitably involves bringing into discussion other places across the world (Parati 2017, 300). Indeed, its peninsular position in the Mediterranean casts it as the crossroads of migration and a gateway to Europe, as migrants and refugees from many countries choose Italy as their primary destination or as a gateway to

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other countries. The complex imbrications of multiple migrations in Italy have shaped the nation’s cultural and political profile. Italian writers of migration—being themselves at the crossroads of places and identities—look at contemporary Italy from a transnational perspective and open up a series of critical dialogues that displace European notions of culture and national identification by relocating them into larger and less definite maps. The writing and art of these authors dramatize multiple belongings and lives in translation, in constant movement between languages, cultures, and worlds. Even if Italian is the primary language in their artistic productions, the ghosts of other languages and other places, cultures, and worlds are present; their works are examples of translation even when the latter is invisible and only metaphorical (Curti 2011, 157). The fluidity of migrant identities produces counter-narratives, offering a new, unsettling vision of Italy. I use “transnational” to refer to contemporary literature, also described as postcolonial, diasporic, minor, migrant, or Italophone.1 The literary and artistic imaginaries of the works examined in this chapter are transnational in the sense that they question rigid notions of nation-state and challenge the collective imaginary of a homogeneous white Italian identity considered “more European than Mediterranean” (Curti 2021, 226).2 Reflecting a change in perspective that pays attention to the fluid circulation of people, languages, ​​and cultures across porous geographical and cultural boundaries, they also highlight a methodological approach that considers current discourses on migration from North Africa to the coasts of southern Europe as necessarily interconnected with their colonial and postcolonial histories (see Chambers 2017, 37–60). Transnational Italian literature provides a fertile ground for the exploration of the connection between migration, memory, and melancholia; it is a site where human mobility can be imagined differently and new forms of political action can be envisioned. The works selected for investigation in this chapter represent literary and artistic experiments in different genres and media—fiction, film, and theater—and are placed alongside each other in order to put forward “a connective rather than comparative approach” (Orton et al. 2021, 3). They include La linea del colore (The Color Line, 2020), a novel by Italian writer of Somali origin Igiaba Scego; Asmat-Names (2015), a short film by Ethiopian filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer; and Antigone Power (2018), a theatrical 1  The field of literature of migration has emerged at the beginning of the 1990s in Italy, when it transitioned from being a country of emigration to a destination for immigrants. The ensuing transformations of Italian culture have triggered a debate about the status of contemporary national literature and the controversial issue of admission into its canon. On the critical debate about the accuracy of definitions regarding the literature and art produced within the field of migration studies in Italy, see Grace Russo Bullaro and Elena Benelli (2014, xviii–xx). For an overview of a thematically transnational literature in Italian, see Orton et al. (2021, 1–11). On the notion of “transnational Italy,” see also Burdett et al. (2020, 223–228). 2  On the construction of a transnational paradigm for the study of Italian cultural history that questions Eurocentric notions of the nation-state in favor of alternative Mediterranean imaginaries, see Fogu (2020, 1–10).

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adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, a Brussels-based Somali Italian writer and performer. These authors—who are in different ways migrant writers at the crossroads of nations, cultures, and languages—show how the power of storytelling can inspire not just empathy but action. Their narratives promote social change and political intervention in the public sphere as they portray a revised version of national and official narratives about migrations in Italy and Europe today. I read these works as cases of migrant melancholia: no longer melancholia as oblivion of disappearance but as imaginative space in which forms of individual and collective life can be reconfigured. From this perspective, what I call “migrant melancholia” embodies the imaginative equivalent of linguistic translation. If translation represents the impossible attempt to find appropriate counterparts between mutually irreducible verbal systems, migrant melancholia looks for border passages across cultural traditions, biographical memories, and different, or even antagonistic, human historical forms. Migrant melancholia represents the imaginative power thanks to which the “trans” in “transnational” not only is a mandatory crossing point for those who are forced to leave their countries but also can be turned into a fertile innovative site that encourages new ways of political life that go beyond color lines. More broadly, migrant melancholia can unsettle not only the lines dividing individual nations but also the lines defining the very concept of nation.3 This notion of migrant melancholia takes a different route from previous theoretical accounts that see it as a condition both psychic and social, individual and collective,4 as a pathological response to loss, or a national reaction to the demise and loss of European colonial empires. In cultural and postcolonial theory, melancholia has been considered the main form of political hostility, a form of memory that ends up asserting an absurd and violent sovereignty by breaking its own limits. “Postcolonial melancholia” (Gilroy 2005, 102; Khanna 2003, 30) or “national melancholia” (Kristeva 1998, 68–69) are theoretical frameworks that refer to European national entities as fundamentally melancholic, longing for a sense of wholeness, omnipotence, or unity threatened by inassimilable immigrants and foreigners. Melancholia has also been racialized and articulated as a collective political emotion felt by ethnically and socially marginalized groups (Cheng 2000).5 It is a condition endemic to migrants, in 3  Political philosophy ranging from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt considers the nation-state as the only possible bulwark to the return of “the state of nature,” namely, the pre-political condition of human beings outside civil society. In this sense, the nation-state coincides with the concept of sovereignty, that is, the sovereign’s monopoly of decision-making and use of violence. According to Benedict Anderson, the nation-state is a socially constructed imagined political community because it is forcibly conceived as homogeneous in terms of language, culture, ethnicity, religion, heritage, and so on (Anderson 1991, 6–7). 4  For an overview of critical theories of melancholia, see Sarnelli (2015, 154–155). 5  With reference to the United States, Anne A. Cheng explores the concept of “melancholy of race”: on the one hand, the American nation swallows up the silent, amputated object of Western history, expelling what it cannot forget—slavery, genocide—as it does not fit in its democratic promise; on the other, formerly colonized subjects and ethnic minorities also risk remaining constantly suspended in the melancholic process of assimilation-identification and expulsion-denial (Cheng 2000, 9–10).

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whose lives the loss of home, language, culture, and kinship produces a melancholic “constellation of affect” (Eng and Kazanjian 2003, 3)  that provides them  with political agency resulting in a “militant refusal to allow certain objects to disappear into oblivion” (Eng and Han 2003, 365). “Melancholic migrants” refers to the way in which unwanted foreign bodies compromise happiness as a form of nation-building by exposing the social inequalities that prevent that happiness (Ahmed 2010, 121–159). In this chapter, “migrant melancholia” is not meant to signify nostalgia for what has been left behind during the migration process. Rather, it refers to the imaginative capacity to go beyond the very institution of the “nation-state.”6 The following sections examine literary case studies as concrete examples of migrant melancholia. The choice of the texts under scrutiny is not accidental; rather, the selection follows two coordinates. The first one is related to the different narrative forms the three artifacts represent in order to discuss the nexus of literature and migration in the most diverse fields of artistic expression. The second coordinate follows a temporal criterion: the selection seeks to bring to the attention of the reader recent literary works that offer a map of migrant melancholia in the contemporary transnational Italian imaginary.

Color Lines: La linea del colore The first narrative example of migrant melancholia is a novel written by Somali Italian writer Igiaba Scego.7 For Scego, writing is a political act that explores imaginative possibilities. La linea del colore (2020) is a form of writing between history and literature; it is not a traditional historical novel, as Scego points out, but a “fantasy novel with a historical basis” (ibid. 365). It fills in the gaps, reveals the unsaid of Italian history, along with its intertwined American and African histories, through the use of an alternative imaginary that remembers a forgotten past and re-signifies the nationalistic—official or canonical—narrative. La linea del colore is the last in a trilogy that includes Oltre Babilonia (2008) and Adua (2016). Scego calls it the “trilogy of colonial violence” (2020, 360), a theme that emerges as oppression, sexual and gender violence, slavery and racial segregation, and more subtle forms of racism and authoritarianism. The title is a tribute to African American intellectual W.E.B.  Du Bois, who 6  This notion departs from the one elaborated by Alicia S. Camacho in her study on the effects of the neoliberal discourses of transnational labor circuits for Mexican migrants in the United States. In her analysis of narratives of loss, disappearance, and invisible deaths taking place at the US-Mexico border, Camacho resorts to the expression of “migrant melancholia” to consider how “the border crossing implies a psychic wounding for migrants and invests their nostalgic desires for return with political significance” (Camacho 2006, 838). 7  For a wide-ranging engagement with Scego’s work, see Saskia Ziolkowski’s interview with the author in this volume.

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anticipated in The Souls of Black Folks (1903) that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line. Alongside race, in the twenty-first century, migration has become a global issue. The metaphor of the color line takes on multiple connotations that transcend the well-known reference to the racial separation between blacks and white people; it encompasses the geographical and historical ties connecting the shores of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic routes; it embodies the gender line of patriarchal violence for migrant women; it also alludes to the journey across life and death. The color line is a historical nexus, a point of view, and an interpretation, but it can also be its opposite, a limit or an insurmountable frontier. Ultimately, it symbolizes the power of writing and art to reveal the picture of a deliberately hidden or forgotten reality. At the center of Scego’s novel is the representation of a monument whose importance is marginal only at first glance. The monumental complex is the Fountain of the Four Moors in the town of Marino near Rome, built in 1632 to commemorate the victory of the Battle of Lepanto in Greece, where the fleet of the Holy League (Pope, Italian States, and Spain) defeated the Muslim fleet to prevent the expansion of the Ottoman Empire toward the West in 1571. At the top of the fountain built in lava stone, there is a column in white marble, to which four African captives, two men and two women, are enchained half-­ naked, in a pose of suffering and terror. From this fountain, during the annual Grape Festival celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, wine is poured out instead of water. Inebriated or simply unaware, the inhabitants and visitors of Marino seem blind to the color line that separates the white of the marble of the column symbolizing Christianity and civilization-humanity, and the black of the lava stone of the statues of the Moors, which are a stereotypical representation of Islam and savage inhumanity. Paradoxically, the Bacchic commemoration of the victory of a community becomes not only the artistic display of the pain of other people but also the denial of religious intolerance and oppression, the oblivion of the movement of bodies between the shores of the Mediterranean, of migrations past and present. Bringing to light a submerged version of Italian history allows Scego to re-signify the present migration to Europe as indirectly linked to past imperialistic and colonial enterprises: “Those women of the seventeenth century, perpetually chained to the fountain, tell us about what is happening to migrants today” (Scego 2020, 360, my translation). In Scego’s novel, the Fountain symbolizes a temporal doorway that narratively connects the intertwined stories of three migrant women who move, in their respective experiences, across different geographical places and historical moments connecting three continents (Africa, America, Europe) and three periods (colonialism, post-colonialism, and neo-colonialism). The first temporal level coincides with the second half of the nineteenth century and moves between different territories. The story is set in post-unification Italy in the aftermath of the Battle of Dogali (1887), a city in the overseas colony in Eritrea where the Italian army suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the Abyssinian army. In a Roman square in turmoil following the news of the massacre of 500 Italian soldiers in East Africa, Lafanu Brown appears overwhelmed by the

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crowd. She is an African American painter, the daughter of a Chippewa Native American mother and a Haitian father, who comes from a segregationist North American town (Salem, Massachusetts) after the Civil War. Thanks to a white American benefactress, Lafanu has the opportunity to study and undertake the Grand Tour overseas in Italy where she becomes an artist. She is already an established painter when she suffers insults and racist attacks in the riots of what will be later called Piazza dei Cinquecento in Rome. Even if she has nothing to do with that distant colonial war in Africa, which she had never heard of except indirectly through the history of her slave ancestors, the color of her skin is enough to mark her as a foreign enemy responsible for the bloodshed of hundreds of “innocent” Italians. Inspired by two African American women who lived in Rome at the end of the nineteenth century, the obstetrician and activist Sarah Parker Redmond and the sculptress Edmonia Lewis, the black body of Lafanu Brown allows for a comparison between the Grand Tour of Italy in the nineteenth century and present-day migrant journeys. The second time-frame is the present and revolves around Leila, an art curator whose story unfolds between Rome, the city where she was born to Somali immigrants, and Somalia, where her relatives still live. During a visit to Marino’s grape festival, Leila, the only African Italian woman at the event, is petrified in front of the sculpture because she is the only one who is able to see the color of suffering in the features of the Moors that so much recall hers. Leila’s encounter with the monument of the Fountain of the Four Moors becomes the catalyst that prompts her to study art history with the aim of discovering the traces of the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and fascism hidden behind Italian monuments and material culture. During her studies on the presence of black people in Italian art, she comes across the paintings of Lafanu Brown to whom she wants to dedicate an exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Her research on the African American artist’s biography leads her to the upsetting discovery that Lafanu too had been struck by the sight of the Fountain of the Four Moors a century earlier. She learns that the visit to Marino caused certainties and myths to collapse in the mind of Lafanu, who couldn’t believe that the Belpaese, commonly thought of as the birthplace of Renaissance and beauty, had enslaved and brutalized non-white people. The Fountain of the Four Moors is about memory and its limits: “the fountain is what historian Pierre Nora called a lieu de mémoire, a site of shared collective memory; and yet the statue is also the opposite, what Israeli historian Guy Beiner called a lieu d’oubli, a site of collective forgetting” (Riccò 2020). The value of the monument, therefore, seems to lie more in what has been disremembered than in what it tries to memorialize: the commemoration of the victory of Lepanto battle requires the amnesia of the presence of the Moors, enslaved and portrayed with stereotypical African features. From this perspective, the fountain recalls the notion of “oubli” explored by Loraux, thus symbolizing not just oblivion but rather “mourning that refuses to be carried out,” “a living memory that bears no other name than excess of grief” (Loraux 2002,  160–161). The interwoven narratives of migrant women revolving

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around the monument in different time periods thus constitute a transgenerational counter-narrative of Black Italy, a form of transnational migrant melancholia. This is a narrative that reactivates memory as a form of humanization while questioning, at the same time, the notion of nation as it is traditionally understood. A painting entitled Enchained, in which Lafanu portrays the captive women of the Fountain in a humanizing pose, becomes the thematic core of the exhibition that Leila organizes with the aim of giving voice and visibility to the artworks of young immigrants. The third storyline revolves around Binti, Leila’s cousin, a young woman, art lover, and aspiring cartoonist, who escapes from contemporary Somalia to embark on a journey to Europe. Like Lafanu and Leila, Binti is moved by a dream of freedom; however, her journey across the Mediterranean Sea is a traumatic event, as it stops over in violent and demeaning Libyan prisons. The contemporary scenario in which Leila and Binti live is experienced by thousands and thousands of migrations from Africa to Italy, where people coming from the “weak” part of the world are destined to collide with closed ports, barbed wires, and secure borders. Through the past and present stories of three migrant women, Igiaba Scego reflects on the right to migrate as the freedom to travel and mobility is still fiercely denied today, causing an injustice that, in Leila’s words, reproduces another form of color line: “We live in apartheid, this is apartheid” (Scego 2020, 192). Her project for an art exhibition involving artists with “a weak passport” (ibid., 288) is a political act, just as the novel is political because it unsettles the boundaries of national narratives. La linea del colore embodies a clear example of what is meant here by migrant melancholia: no longer just loss and oblivion but action that transforms the world. In Scego’s novel, bodies take center stage: stone bodies, bodies on canvas, women’s bodies, black bodies, and migrant bodies, bodies in constant and precarious movement. “The right of bodies to move,” as Scego declares quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates, is inseparable from the terrible fear “of losing one’s body” (ibid., 60). There are many ways of losing one’s body. Lafanu is a victim of rape in segregationist America, which causes her to lose the ability to see colors; Binti survives torture in Libyan prisons during the migration journey from Africa to Europe, which causes her to suffer profound trauma. Lafanu’s transatlantic voyage is a visionary descent toward her ancestors, among the ghosts of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which evokes today’s crossings in the Mediterranean and becomes a way to reflect on the right to travel. The color line is not merely the mark of segregation and racism; for Scego’s migrant women, the color line is above all the line of art and writing that becomes a cure for pain and a form of resistance: it makes the humanization of migrant bodies possible while it deconstructs the nation. Migrant melancholia is not the nostalgia for an impossible loss to recover, whether it is an assumed homeland or one’s body or identity. Instead, it embodies the ability to inhabit the historical experience of migration by constructing new forms of belonging

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across and beyond borders. It corresponds to the imaginative capacity that turns “the ghost” not into an engulfing abyss but into a renewed existence.

Embodied Memory: Asmat Asmat: Names in Memory of All Victims of the Sea (2014) is a short film by Dagmawi Yimer, an Ethiopian filmmaker who traveled to Italy as an undocumented migrant in 2006 and has lived there ever since as a political refugee. The video commemorates the more than 350 victims of the tragic drowning that occurred on October 3, 2013, off the coast of Lampedusa in their attempt to reach Europe from the shores of North Africa. The aim of the video is to force the institutions and civil society to “name each and every one, to make us aware of how many names lost their bodies on one single day, in the Mediterranean sea” (Yimer 2014). Rather than representing the memory of the Mediterranean as it has already been told and written down in official media and records, the short documentary poetically conveys the idea of the “Mediterranean as memory” (Cariello and Chambers 2019, 54). The Mediterranean becomes an archive of alternative narratives created by differential processes of individual and collective memory able to recreate what has been lost at sea. The short film takes on the challenging task of representing absent bodies. Asmat reconstructs an “archive of death” (ibid., 55), a visual narrative that remembers all those drowned migrant bodies which had been excluded from the realm of media representation (Wright 2018, 90). Asmat is a fragmentary and poetic multimedia montage: visual and auditory elements are intertwined in a powerful poetic dance, watercolor drawings (by Luca Serafini) are interspersed with images of the sea and the shipwreck; bodies shown only partially walking under the surface of the water intermingle with enshrouded figures floating above the sea level. A voiceover (Eden Getachew Zerihun) singing in Tigrinya, the Eritrean native language, overlaps with the sound of the sea water. The video opens with a woman’s voice paying tribute to all victims of the Mediterranean Sea. She sings over a painted sea, a stripe of painted land marking the horizon. Alternating shots of the sea intermingle with submarine sounds and bubbles. The perspective is from below the surface, with a seashell-­ like sound all around, as if the viewer has ears underwater. The bottom of a drifting boat is shot from different angles, and then the view becomes blurred and watery images gradually fade away from the frame: “You who are alive are condemned to listen to these screams / You will not cover your ears because our cry is loud and strong / Nothing can stop it / Our bodies will land on your shores” (Yimer 2014). Drawings of shipwrecked boats lying at the bottom of the sea show sketches of debris and relics. Animated watercolor drawings portray a mother holding her baby tight to her breast, and two men sinking down in a close embrace, while other bodies swim up toward the surface. Living human bodies walk on the seabed with their upper bodies above the water’s surface, while a subtitle reads: “With each victim dying in the sea / you are

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more naked and exposed.” Images of bodies drowning underwater overlap with drawings of the living dead walking on the seafloor. A father holds his child’s hand; a mother once again holds her baby in her arms. They look for their children deep down, while the female voiceover exhorts them to speak their names aloud. A disturbing and unsettling sequence closes the short film: shrouded bodies emerge from the dark depths and float; they look like corpses wrapped in shrouds, but they also appear as veiled ghosts dancing on black waters. Meanwhile, the narrating voice speaks their names, which reverberate in an endless echo, written names emerging from and inscribed on a dark sea. The list of the names of the dead is pronounced in Tigrinya and translated into Italian and English, they sound like a hypnotizing litany that becomes a vindication, a plea not to be forgotten, a refusal to be condemned to oblivion. The video intentionally does not reproduce the images of the drowned bodies previously diffused by the media in a blurred rendering in order to make them less shocking (Salerno 2015, 137); rather, the use of watercolor animation represents an alternative aesthetic language that allows those images to be watched and witnessed with a more empathetic and less disturbing approach. Yimer avoids the abject spectacularization of death—where migrants’ lives have already been deemed “ungrievable” (Butler 2009, 196) and their bodies have been shown as disposable material reduced to nameless numbers. Instead, he reworks the documentary form in favor of a narrative and visual representation that makes migrants’ traumatic voyage across life and death a more humanizing, and therefore more witnessable, experience: “we are more visible dead than alive / we existed even before October 3 / we have been navigating for years / year after year we travel / year after year we die” (Yimer 2014). The film explicitly rejects the representation of migrants as anonymous suffering bodies, as dead or dying bodies, or as contagious bodies that jeopardize the foundation of European nationalisms. In Asmat, the assembly of the dead on the stage of a public watery grave is not only persistent but also resistant to established modes of reception and perception. It shows an “undeniable archive” where the voices and the shrouds of migrants’ bodies resurface as “the enduring trace of loss that compels the ongoing obligation to mourn” (Butler 2015, 202). The most powerful aspect of the film is the endless reciting of the names of each victim followed by an adjective or a phrase that describes their meaning in several languages: “Here is peace,” “World,” “She has fulfilled,” “Blessing,” “He brings news,” “The Promise,” “Joy,” “God’s treasure,” “She is chosen.” They tell a story that is personal, familial, and cultural, thus articulating a memory that will be handed down. Through the female voiceover, bodies are reconnected to their biographies so that lives worthy of living, rather than dying, can be imagined. In order to visually “give space to these names without bodies” (Yimer), they are projected on the sea floor. Translating names without bodies on the screen is thus a historical reappropriation and a political reclamation. They represent disembodied voices that reproduce new forms of life capable of embodying a collective memory not related to the idea of the nation-state.

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They interpellate the living, they speak to the audience-spectator as melancholic reminders of a loss that cannot be denied, thus echoing Antigone’s sorrowful cry from the dawn of time.

Revolutionary Melancholia: Antigone Power The third text is the play Antigone Power by Somali Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. Like La linea del colore and Asmat, this literary work demonstrates that migrant melancholia has nothing to do with depressive sinking into insurmountable loss, but with working through one’s experience leading to narrative and political interventions. For this reason, I conclude with a contemporary and innovative revision of the classical tragedy, which is not by chance the quintessential genre that aestheticizes loss (Honig 2009, 12). The rewriting of Antigone shows how grief fosters grievance, that is, political and social action, thus revealing itself as the epitome of revolutionary melancholia. Antigone Power is a theatrical project co-authored by Ali Farah and Sicilian director Giuseppe Massa.8 The play was performed in the city of Palermo in 2018 by the theater company Sutta Scupa, which conducted acting workshops with Italian and African migrants, as well as professional and amateur actors. This adaptation explores “the idea of migration as a kind of translation” (Bertacco and Vallorani 2021, 70): it recounts the condition of asylum seekers in Italy, while it tries to imagine new forms of cultural and social belonging. The collaboration between Ali Farah and Massa and the participation of multicultural and multilingual acting companies is an example of Applied Theater, which embraces a wide range of performing practices that explore strategies to increase inclusion and create social change within and around immigrant communities. In Ali Farah and Massa’s creative project, theater plays an important role in bringing migrants and refugees into the artistic fabric of society, creating a sense of community. It also creates a syncretic space where culture, myth, and storytelling in dialogue with each other inspire new forms of artistic and political intervention, identity, and belonging (Lori 2019). As Ali Farah affirms in the synopsis of the script: “By inscribing Antigone’s struggle in a city like Palermo, which is today a major port of refuge for African migrants, we tried to investigate its representative value in its artistically and culturally diverse surroundings” (Sutta Scupa 2018, my translation). From this perspective, Antigone is reappropriated as a hermeneutical tool to reflect on present-day contradictions within the national and international legal system regulating migratory flows. The play by Ali Farah is a rewriting of the ancient myth of Antigone as portrayed in Sophocles’ tragedy. The Greek play, written around 441 BC, is about the clash between family and state in the aftermath of a civil war sparked by the exile of Oedipus, king of Thebes. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and his 8  I am grateful to Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and Giuseppe Massa for their generosity in sharing with me the unpublished work and script of Antigone Power.

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mother Jocasta, commits the crime of burying her brother Polynices who died in the fight with another of her brothers, Eteocles, in his attempt to oust the new king of Thebes, Creon. In doing so, she contravenes Creon’s edict, which had forbidden the burial. Because of her illicit act, Antigone is condemned to be buried alive in a cave, where she hangs herself. Sophocles’ tragedy represents an irreconcilable conflict between ethics and politics: in her willingness to follow the sacred rite of her brother’s burial and sacrifice her own life, Antigone embodies the moral idealist who acts in the name of justice regardless of the consequences. By contrast, in sacrificing the morally right for the pragmatically useful, Creon embodies the political realist concerned only with the interests of the state and with the achievement of immediate goals. As Ali Farah writes in the screenplay’s synopsis: Crucial in Sophocles’ Antigone is the conflict between the protagonist, who remains faithful to divine laws and her personal morality, and Creon, who believes in the superiority of state laws and public morality. Today, values such as empathy, justice and morality are pivotal to undermining the public discourse in Western countries on issues such as citizenship, migration and human rights. Antigone Power is an attempt to articulate and renew the law she introduced. (ibid.)

In Ali Farah’s and Massa’s retelling, Polynices embodies the migrant from the Global South who embarks on the dangerous journey across the desert and the sea and eventually lands on European coasts to “invade” its cities. Polynices, unlike Eteocles who protects national borders, is a “traitor,” a “dissident,” an oblivious invader and, as such, he ought to be left to die at sea, unburied and spurned. Antigone and Ismene are two exiled black girls who arrive in a foreign city devastated by war, a city that is Thebes and Palermo, capable of ambivalent attitudes toward foreigners, hospitable and hostile at the same time. Ismene is the sister who conforms to the laws of the state: “I am not made to die for ideas, but to stay and give life to life,” “I speak to the living,” “My fate is that of those who stay” (Ali Farah 2018, my translation), while Antigone is the idealist migrant, the wanderer who follows her father’s peregrinations in exile, obeys the tribal sacrality of life even after death and defies Creon’s impossible decree: “When I was on the road, I did not know where I was going, I followed Oedipus who occupied my whole past and absorbed my entire future. There was the present, and it is always in the present that I have lived”; “I speak to the dead” (ibid.). Creon is the cynical politician whose rules are only dictated by state interest; he orders the burial of Eteocles who defended Thebes’ borders but does not intend to give proper funeral rites to Polynices, who chose to side with “the Seafarers,” and for this reason, his life has been deemed ungrievable. Creon personifies the tyrant with populist views. However, his policies are doomed to fail as they are outside the ethical sphere of humanity. While the Chorus is the voice of the border security policies of Fortress Europe (“Illegal immigrants will penetrate our borders and invade our homes, take our wives and slit our children’s throats, the sky streaked, the sun behind

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a grate”), Tiresias personifies the values of hospitality, memory, and political views against restrictive immigration laws: “The Seafarers shall arrive by the thousands, on board of sambuchi [wooden vessels], fleeing colonial ports. … Humble undocumented migrants … who like you only want to live and dream and lie in the sun with their skin fresh by dew” (ibid.). Rebelling against the laws of the state, Antigone is condemned to be buried alive in a cave. However, unlike the Greek tragedy, in Ali Farah’s rewriting, she does not commit suicide but dies suffocated in an airless tomb; she does not die alone, but in the company of Aemon, her future husband. In the staging of the play, the black body of Antigone is shown as being walled up in a glass coffin that turns clouded as she gasps for breath, while she utters in her native language how she has become “a wreck” abandoned among the rocks, thus bearing an uncanny resemblance to the exiles and shipwrecked migrants washed up on the beach like “derelicts or treasures.” The mise-en-scène of Antigone Power begins and ends with two powerful scenes that recall the women’s lamentation in ancient mourning rituals. It opens with the weeping of Tiresias and Theban women clinging on to the bloody bodies of the fallen in battle; they grieve their dead, who stand upright like statues. This act of collective mourning re-emerges in the final scene where the dead and the living dance frantically until they stand still in silence. A long line of bodies appears on stage: Theban and foreigners’ bodies; the remains of Polynices’ decaying body left for vultures on the beach after Antigone buries him; there is Eurydice’s suicidal body and those buried alive of Antigone and Aemon. They all seem to shout out Antigone’s admonition to Creon: “Death wants one law for all. Your borders have no meaning for the dead” (ibid.). As predicted by Tiresias, Creon loses everything: his power, his kingdom, and his kin. In the director’s notes, Giuseppe Massa writes: “Our Antigone … has the ability to mourn and fight injustice in a tribal and multilingual Thebes that awakens after the war and that, as the tragedy unfolds, will turn into a cemetery: its seven gates will become seven tombs. Rhythm and vitality will give way to silence, blood and Creon’s remorse. The king is no longer king. Creon, a mere man, will roam the dead city, guilty of putting state interests and lust for power before family values and his own blood. Our Antigone’s revolution is love above everything, stronger than power, money and death” (Sutta Scupa 2018). According to Massimo Cacciari, Antigone represents the tension within the Mediterranean archipelago between the laws of the oikos and philia (home, love) and those of the polis (city); she is the foreigner exiled from the polis who nevertheless provides a burial to her dead brother, an outsider, in order not to forget him. The only ethical relationship with what has been lost is not so much the reconciliation with it, which results in its oblivion; rather, ongoing mourning proves to be the only action that can guarantee a form of fidelity and commitment to the memory of loss. As Cacciari points out: “the polis remembers the dead in order to overcome them … to abandon them. The polis remembers the dead exclusively to survive. On the contrary, Antigone wants the burial to

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be perfect. But from a perfect burial there is no detachment” (Cacciari 1997, 50). As she states in Ali Farah’s rewriting: “It is not enough to ignore the past for it to remain the past” (Ali Farah 2018). Her figure is invoked to prevent erasure and amnesia and it takes on the form of political commitment and resistance against normative mourning. As a non-citizen and an exiled woman, Antigone embodies “the melancholy of the public sphere” (Butler 2000, 81), the shadowy realm of the community haunted by the voices of those excluded by the public constitution of the human through a norm, while continuing to come up on stage to ask for social recognition. This concerns all those who are in minority positions or are excluded from official public discourse, but somehow are still talking, including new immigrants, asylum seekers, the sans-papiers, ethnic minorities, in other words, those who are differentially affected by the global economy. Antigone stands for what is not represented by any symbolic law, thus embodying a “womanly state of exception” (Sarnelli 2013, 38) in an attempt to create a possible place of political action for those subjects whose juridical and ontological status is suspended. Antigone embodies the mythological-literary figure for revolutionary melancholia through which human rights and the precariousness of life in migration can be reconsidered; more specifically, what it means to consider certain lives more precarious or more worthy of living than others, and how these issues may work for an ethical and political agenda to imagine migration differently. It is in this sense that Antigone embodies what I have called “migrant melancholia.” Rather than the nostalgic and impossible return to a world that is no longer there, she symbolizes the ability to cross borders not simply by defying them but by aiming to dismantle them.

Conclusions Scego, Yimer, and Ali Farah provide an extraordinarily vibrant transnational imaginary that, however, is not free from ideological risks. The first risk lies in wishing, more or less consciously, for the re-founding of a new notion of “nation-state,” whether it is that of Somali or Eritrean people who are able to return to Africa, or of Antigone who can finally find citizenship in her city of origin. The second risk consists in pursuing the multifarious narratives that reconstruct the migrant imaginary without identifying a possible existential and political future. In this chapter, the notion of “migrant melancholia” has provided a different path: divesting melancholia of the traditional interpretation that would make this condition synonymous with “nostalgia” and a “feeling of loss,” in order to emphasize its innovative potential to imagine new ethical-political forms of life. The three texts have contributed to this project with different aesthetic tools conceived as “paradigms of human action, ways of transforming the world” (Virno et al. 2022). Through an experimental narrative form that combines historical fiction, social novel, and photography, Scego reworks a canonical literary genre of Western tradition to unveil a

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forgotten history in the Italian imaginary. In La linea del colore, the black bodies depicted in monuments or in paintings and the bodies of migrant women recalling each other across centuries and nations represent a form of unforgetting, a eulogy of transnational migrant melancholia. Asmat discards the realism and linear narrative of traditional documentary in favor of a poetic multimedia montage that evocatively gives visibility to the absent bodies of drowned migrants in the Mediterranean. Conjuring up the ancient ritual of women’s lamentation in funeral wakes, the powerful female voiceover creates in Asmat an audio-visual dirge that defies “the governance of the dead under nation state and international humanitarian law” (Remmler 2020). Antigone Power takes Asmat’s indictment forward by rewriting the myth of feminine dissident mourning and civil disobedience within the context of contemporary migrations to Italy. The synergy between playwriting, revision of mythology, and collective performance allows the authors of Antigone Power to imagine political agency while creating a feeling of belonging for migrants. The genitive in the title of this chapter, “melancholia of migration,” is not meant as a tool of objective specification pointing to the melancholia passively experienced by the migrant; rather, it is turned into a subjective genitive capable of describing how melancholia is transformed through the journey of those who leave without return. Just as migrants cross territorial borders, migrant melancholia evades the idea that state power and neoliberal capitalism are the ineluctable destiny of human beings. This notion follows up on the recent configuration of Italy as a borderless entity produced by symbolic constellations of “border imaginaries” defined as “culturally and politically constructed expressions of inclusion and exclusion” (Fogu et al. 2019, 2). In this context, Scego, Yimer, and Ali Farah offer a transnational imaginary where radical reimaginings of memory and forgetting recreate those bodies painfully obliterated by—and yet constantly resisting—the nation-state’s expulsive practices. The physical crossing of those who go beyond color lines can be the premise for the transcending of the very notion of “nation-state.”

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Ali Farah, Ubah Cristina. 2018. Antigone Power, unpublished. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed., 2006. Verso. Bertacco, Simona, and Nicoletta Vallorani. 2021. The Relocation of Culture. Translations, Migrations, Borders. New York: Bloomsbury. Burdett, Charles, Nick Havely, and Loredana Polezzi. 2020. The Transnational / Translational in Italian Studies. Italian Studies 75 (2): 223–236. Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. ———. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Cacciari, Massimo. 1997. L’arcipelago. Milano: Adelphi. Camacho, Alicia Schmidt. 2006. Migrant Melancholia: Emergent Discourses of Mexican Migrant Traffic in Transnational Space. South Atlantic Quarterly 105 (4): 831–861. Cariello, Marta, and Iain Chambers. 2019. The Mediterranean Question. Milano: Mondadori. Chambers, Iain. 2017. Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Cheng, Anne A. 2000. The Melancholy of Race. Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curti, Lidia. 2011. La condizione migrante. Nuove soggettività tra poetica e politica. In World Wide Women, ed. Tiziana Caponio et al., 155–164. Torino: CIRSDe. ———. 2021. Beyond the Canon: Women’s Italian Writings of Migration. In Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives, ed. M. Orton, G. Parati, and R. Kubati, 223–236. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. 2003. A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia. In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L.  Eng and David Kazanjian, 343–371. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian. 2003. Introduction: Mourning Remains. In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, 1–25. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fogu, Claudio. 2020. The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians. Cham: Palgrave. Fogu, Claudio, Stephanie Malia Hom, and Laura E. Ruperto. 2019. Introduction to Volume 9, Issue 1: Italia senza frontiere/Borderless Italy. California Italian Studies 9 (1): 1–12. Freud, Sigmund. 1974. Draft G.  Extracts from the Fliess Papers. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 1, pp. 200–206. London: The Hogarth Press. ———. 1995. Mourning and Melancholia. In The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, 584–589. New York: W. W. Norton. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Honig, Bonnie. 2009. Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception. Political Theory 37 (1): 5–43. Khanna, Ranjana. 2003. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1998. Contre la Dépression Nationale. Paris: Textuel. Loraux, Nicole. 2002. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books. Lori, Laura. 2019. Transcultural Trajectories in Italian Theatre. https://arts.unimelb. edu.au/school-­o f-­l anguages-­a nd-­l inguistics/our-­r esearch/research-­p rojects/ transcultural-­trajectories-­in-­italian-­theatre. Accessed 6 June 2022. Mazzeo, Marco. 2012. Melanconia e rivoluzione. Antropologia di una passione perduta. Roma: Editori Internazionali Riuniti. Orton, Marie, Graziella Parati, and Ron Kubati. 2021. Introduction. In Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives, ed. M. Orton, G. Parati, and R. Kubati, 1–11. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.  Parati, Graziella. 2017. Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy: Proximities and Affect in Literature and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Remmler, Karen. 2020. The Afterlifes of Refugee Dead: What Remains? EuropeNow, 33, April 28. https://www.europenowjournal.org/2020/04/27/the-­afterlives-­of-­ refugee-­dead-­what-­remains/. Accessed 16 September 2022. Riccò, Giulia. 2020. Reimagining Italy Through Black Women’s Eyes. Public Books, December 7. Accessed 10 July 2022. https://www.publicbooks.org/reimaginingitaly-through-black-womens-eyes/. Russo Bullaro, Grace, and Elena Benelli, eds. 2014. Shifting and Shaping a National Identity: Transnational Writers and Pluriculturalism in Italy Today. Leicestershire: Troubador. Salerno, Daniele. 2015. Stragi del mare e politiche del lutto sul confine mediterraneo. In Il colore della nazione, ed. Gaia Giuliani, 123–139. Firenze: Le Monnier. Sarnelli, Laura. 2013. Antigone’s Legacy. Some Feminist Readings. In Feminisms in a Transnational Perspective. Women Narrating Their Lives and Actions, ed. Renata Jambrešić Kirin and Sandra Prlenda, 33–40. Zagreb: Centre for Women’s Studies. ———. 2015. The Gothic Mediterranean: Haunting Migrations and Critical Melancholia. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 24 (2): 147–165. Scego, Igiaba. 2020. La linea del colore. Milano: Bompiani. Sutta Scupa. 2018. Antigone Power, unpublished script. Virno Paolo, Marco Mazzeo, & Adriano Bertollini, 2002. Generi letterari e filosofia della storia. Per un seminario, June 15. https://www.machina-­deriveapprodi.com/post/ generi-­letterari-­e-­filosofia-­della-­storia-­per-­un-­seminario. Accessed 20 September 2022. Wright, Simona. 2018. A Politics of the Body as Body Politics: Rethinking Europe’s Worksites of Democracy. In Border Lampedusa: Subjectivity, Visibility and Memory in Stories of Sea and Land, ed. Gabriele Proglio and Laura Odasso, 87–101. London: Palgrave. Yimer, Dagmawi. 2014. Asmat: Nomi per tutte le vittime del mare [Names in Memory of All Victims of the Sea]. Video. https://vimeo.com/114849871.

CHAPTER 39

“not safe any / where anymore”: Biopolitical Poetics and Irish Migration Poetry Ailbhe McDaid

Introduction The contours of global migration have sharpened dramatically in recent years with the acceleration of the climate crisis. Climate-induced migration is regularly referred to as an imminent phenomenon—a “futurology”—rather than an ongoing fact that is playing out in real time (Baldwin et al. 2014, 121). The relationship between climate instability, conflict displacement and individual and/or mass migration has been theorized in recent years, the most convincing arguments articulating how these elements are complexly interwoven (Bettini 2017; Baldwin 2014). The role and capacity of literary studies in engaging with these increasingly urgent issues continue to evolve. Foucauldian and post-­ Foucauldian biopolitics remain an important touchstone in literary migration studies but increasingly, the specific dialectics of ecocriticism and post-­ humanism in the late-Anthropocene era seem more relevant as writers attempt to reorient vulnerable subjectivities in resistance to entrenched identity politics. This chapter addresses contemporary Irish poetry as it undertakes to consider the intersections of migratory displacement and climate degradation. The tradition of migration literature, especially migration poetry, is well-established in Irish writing. A recent call for submissions for a new online platform for Irish writing declared “Irish identity is borderless; we’re living in a global village” (“Howl: A Journal of Irish Writing” 2022). The editors articulate an

A. McDaid (*) Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_39

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understanding of “how complicated and borderless Irish identity and creativity is,” and pledge to create “a publication that celebrates not only the spectacular writing coming directly from Éire, but also from Ireland’s children scattered to all corners of the globe.” The reclamation of the scattered and globalized Irish is familiar in the identity-building rhetoric of recent years, and was particularly audible in the various centenary commemorations marking the establishment of the Irish State.1 Migration has long been a preoccupation of Irish culture, and is well documented in political, historical, literary, and cultural practice (Miller 1985; Ward 2002; McWilliams 2021; De Angelis 2012; O’Neill and Lloyd 2009; McDaid 2017). While much scholarly work has traced the evolution of Irish emigration and return, there is a sparse (while growing) body of research on inward migration to Ireland (Salis 2010; McIvor 2016; Villar-­Argaiz 2014; Olszewska 2007). Scholarship to date has, in many ways, entrenched the ideological identifications around those who are really Irish (no qualifier needed), and those whose identities require an adjective: “New” Irish, “Black” Irish, or “hybrid” Irish. Appealing as it may be, the concept of a borderless Irish identity in fact brings its own limitations: namely, it applies primarily to white Irish-born people of white Irish parentage. While successive governments court those of Irish ancestry with an intergenerational claim to an Irish heritage (and passport), those hyphenated Irish identities are simultaneously treated as ethnically dubious, as suggested by derogatory cultural stereotypes of “Plastic Paddy” “The Yank,” and the “West Brit” applied to individuals who are not-quite-Irish Irish (Arrowsmith 2001; Moynihan 2019; Enright 2022). Simultaneously, thousands of others, including children born on the island of Ireland, face substantial bureaucratic barriers to the privileges of Irish citizenship, as well as structural, cultural, and institutional prejudice (Garner 2016). In this context then, the specific assumptions about Irish migrant writing require further attention. In terms of the cultural imaginary, Irish migration literature has canonically conceived itself as writings by Irish-born writers living outside of Ireland. However, as demographic developments continue to diversify the profile of the Irish population, the contemporary constitution of Irish writing reflects a more nuanced and hybrid Irish identity. For contemporary Irish poets, Irish identity is inflected with other affiliations, bringing broader cultural influences, geographical references and personal and communal histories into conversation with historically dominant Irish literary practice that traditionally addresses local and national concerns (Connolly and Howes 2020). Furthermore, the very constitution of migration poetry has changed in line with global shifts in migration practices, away from a linear homecountryto-hostcountry trajectory and toward a more fluid, rhizomatic and mobile condition of ongoing flux. Perhaps most strikingly of all, new Irish migration 1  See for example Centenary, a production by RTÉ, the national broadcaster, to commemorate the 1916 Rising. Amongst musical performances and dramatic interpretations of the events of the rebellion, Centenary culminated in a reading of the Irish Proclamation of Independence by members of the Irish diaspora, seen as a symbolic re-welcoming of the children of Ireland.

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poetry moves into a space of existential anxiety about the state of all things— human, environmental, technological, aesthetic—in works that are rooted in subjective experiences but concerned with much larger issues. In light of these emergent considerations, the very structures of Irish poetry are changing, bringing new formal approaches and stylistic possibilities to the challenge of representing the increasing irrepresentability of the twenty-first-­ century condition.

Formal Innovations While the lyric poem is, in Eavan Boland’s description, the “lingua franca” of Irish poetry, a counter-tradition of experimental poetry also exists, often pursued by Irish poets living outside, and in conversation with literary practices beyond, Ireland (Keating 2020; Fleming 2019; Lloyd 2016). Formal innovation in Irish poetry is not, however, an experiment unique to migration poetry: poets such as Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh and others have long pursued experimental poetics. In the twenty-first century, innovative poets such as Kimberly Campanello, Christodoulos Makris and Sarah Hayden are further pushing the boundaries (and media) of poetic form. As I and others have argued elsewhere, the specific experience of twenty-first-century migration also expands both theme and shape of Irish lyric poetry, in works by Conor O’Callaghan, Justin Quinn, Leanne Quinn and Sara Berkeley (McDaid 2017; Keatinge 2014). In these works, form becomes increasingly precious and yet precarious in the face of the disorientations of contemporary life. For O’Callaghan, for instance, the digital context of his own life as a migrant shapes the poem on the page in a most literal fashion—in The Sun King, the Twitter poem “The Pearl Works” flips the page orientation from portrait to landscape in an analog evocation of an iPad’s screen, while the poem’s stanzas take on the formal requirements of a tweet, each consisting of just 140 characters and stitched together on the page like a long thread (McDaid 2016, 282). An emerging ecocritical line is evident in the works of some of these poets in migration from Ireland, such as that of Sara Berkeley, Eamonn Wall and Dylan Brennan, whose work recognizes the ecological implications, as well as the indigenous dispossessions, of colonial exploitation (Sen 2022; Flannery 2015; Gladwin and O’Connor 2017; Cusick 2010). Such an explicit interaction between migration and climate crisis as that perceived in the works of Ailbhe Darcy and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is, however, only beginning to crystallize. As a means of expanding the existing critical discourse, this chapter offers a reading of two recent collections that complicate and contribute to the migration narrative in Irish poetry: Darcy’s Insistence (2018) and Eipe’s Auguries of a Minor God (2021), in whose recent poetry we encounter differing versions of the representational techniques addressing the twenty-first-century migration experience (Darcy 2018; Eipe 2021). Both collections were nominated for major awards (Insistence for the T.S. Eliot Prize; Auguries of a Minor God for

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the Dylan Thomas Prize) and both evidence a twenty-first-century anxiety directly responsive to global displacement, climate breakdown and political friction. Furthermore, the stylistic tools deployed by both poets suggest a shared investment in the possibilities (and limitations) of form to address the overwhelming degradation of humanitarian and ecological values in the Anthropocene. Darcy’s speaker embodies the professional migrant, gifted with the freedom, resources, passport, and skin color to enable a frictionless transition across borders. Contrastingly, Eipe’s narrative voice speaks from a position of forced displacement, traumatic passage and inhospitable accommodation. Both poets engage a version of the same innovative and challenging poetic form as a means of delivering their observations—the Fibonacci sequence, which originates in nature and attained its most prominent twentieth-century articulation in Danish poet Inger Christensen’s influential 1981 collection alphabet, a poem about nuclear holocaust and the impinging collapse of natural and human systems (Christensen 1981). What is it about this form that attracts Darcy and Eipe, both poets in migration whose poetic concerns circulate around the encroaching environmental and existential threats to our very humanity? In considering the formal, thematic, and aesthetic priorities of these two long poems, I argue for a new critical interrogation of the structures of Irish migration poetry that opens to hybrid, diverse influences and concerns beyond a national frame. This chapter also seeks to move the conversation away from segregated critical analyses which treat “new” Irish, black Irish and hybrid Irish writers as distinct from Irish-born and white Irish writers, by proposing an emerging paradigm for contemporary poetry of migration written by poets in, of, and/or from Ireland. Christensen’s alphabet is an experimental work that pioneers the Fibonacci sequence as a form adequate for addressing the crises of the poem’s moment, namely post-Cold War anxieties of nuclear holocaust and associated environmental fallout. The form is simultaneously ruthlessly rigid and yet ultimately uncontrollable; based on an incremental mathematical sequence, it progresses from a single line to two lines, to three lines, to five lines, to eight lines and so on, each section length equivalent to the sum of the lines of the two preceding sections. The poem proceeds through the alphabet, with the relevant letter leading the language; by “n,” at which point Christensen’s alphabet ends, the section length has reached 640 lines. Patrick Landy sees Christensen’s poem as “spiral[ing] into an oblivion of its own as a result of its formal constraints, which ultimately serve to reinforce the imagery of an environment in decay” (Landy 2021, 603). Within this relentlessly linear progression, there emerges an internal circularity, where images and words recur and reappear as insistent notes of worry. All this serves to create a disconcerting dissonance between progress and chaos, the colliding states of which define the nuclear moment in Christensen’s work. For Eipe and Darcy in the late-Anthropocene moment, it is the frenetic, unceasing reproduction of capitalist values that has propelled society to the brink of collapse. Although Eipe and Darcy’s poems concentrate on different aspects, the catalog of catastrophe deriving from the capitalist

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compulsion is laid bare by both poets, namely in the erosion of empathy, mass (and imminent) human displacement, environmental destruction and overwhelming individual suffering that puts societal survival beyond reach. In this way, the Fibonacci form is the most apt vehicle to depict how the accumulations of capitalism inevitably author its own demise, for the Fibonacci form is similarly yoked to its own destruction through excess. “We Are Not Doomed Yet”: Responsivity and Responsibility in Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence Insistence is a volume of anxieties: about parenthood and extinction, and about themes of humanity, ecology, and migration. An early poem “Stink” tells the story of the “invasive species” of the stink bug, while also documenting an unspoken shadow narrative about human migration, invoking the toxic anti-­ immigration rhetoric dominating right-wing media in the first decades of the twenty-first century (Vaughan-Williams 2015). The journey of the stink bug, arriving “in packing crates” to run the gauntlet of the American Dream, at first “hoping for mulberries, figs and persimmons / / for time to vibrate to one another” before finally they “[l]earned to prosper / on lima beans / soya beans, peaches and peppers.” The image of the entomologist at work beneath her “blank sheet / on our deck overnight, a light behind it” intimates the power disparity between those who belong and those who attempt to stay hidden. “Who was she searching for?” the poem asks, in an uncanny echo of the ICE deportations that sought to root out the undocumented, those who “hitched […] rides,” and “dodged” and “learned” all “along the road” before finally being violently expelled.   Until the day we turned up the heat, making you crazy, blowing your cover.

“Stink” ends with a simple invocation of familiar plants in North America, some of which have self-evident non-American lineages, and all of which are designated (in some cases incorrectly) as invasive. The gentle familiarity of the names is cut through with the italic typography, lending an uncertain tone to the conclusion of the poem. Asian pear and flowering dogwood, corn and cherry and apricot tree.

This conjunction of the natural and the human world recurs throughout the volume through the sub-theme of migration which pervades these poems. In the powerful poem “Jellyfish,” the inflections of personal and collective memory are probed, as well as literary inheritance in the way the poem addresses Yeats’s “Prayer for my Daughter.” Darcy explicitly acknowledges the

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influence—“You’ll steal from other poets”—but the most striking commonality between the two poems is the sense of parental ineptitude in the face of global catastrophe. Where Yeats manages to move beyond the impotent gestures of parenthood—“I have walked and prayed”—to offer hope for his own offspring, Darcy’s poem is inhibited entirely, both in narrative and form. Following the invocation of Yeats’s “murderous innocence of the sea,” “Jellyfish” stutters in an effectively precise formal articulation of the limitations of hope in the post-Anthropocene context. Four short stanzas replicate the exact syntax and typography, the effect of which is to suggest a thwarted effort to progress, trapped instead within the form: Where ice—far away but you can’t help    knowing about it—        calves and crashes— Where comb jellies—far away but you can’t help    knowing about it—        spawn deliriously Where plastics—far away but you can’t help    knowing about it—        make an island— Where ancient air—far away but you can’t help    knowing about it—        is released from pockets—

The first line of each stanza moves autonomy beyond reach—help is not an option, despite the knowledge. The poem finally manages to escape the gyre of the repressive, repetitive syntax through the central image of the jellyfish, but even that symbolism is unreliable, for “a jellyfish is a lens too slippery to hold to an eye.” When the child comes “with a shovel / to sling them back into the sea,” the image puts in mind the proverb of King Canute and the anthropogenic arrogance that suggests nature can be controlled. It is in this excruciating space of parental anxiety and poetic insufficiency within the wider contexts of global systems collapse that Darcy’s poem agitates. Having addressed species disruption, oceanic pollution and Arctic destabilization, the poem’s final image is, retrospectively, inevitable in the way it completes the catalog of catastrophe of the early twenty-first century.     Once you saw a photograph of a child—    lifeless—       On a beach— so did everybody

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The image is so instantaneously recognizable as to require no further contextualization within the poem, referring to the widely disseminated photograph of the body of two-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee who was found drowned and washed ashore on a Turkish beach in September 2015 (Smith 2015). Jessica Auchter has written on the inherent paradox of “viewing the global dead,” suggesting that the circulation of images such as that of Kurdi’s body may be intended to rehumanize, but ultimately has a dehumanizing effect (Auchter 2017, 223). Darcy’s poem gestures to this same contradiction—that the intimacy of seeing the child’s body is diluted, and ultimately defused, by the fact the body was viewed by “everybody.” Rather than inciting collective guilt at our shared complicity in the circumstances delivering the drowned child to shore, the image is commodified, the boy’s body instrumentalized in the service of competing narratives. The politics of witnessing what Boltanski calls “distant suffering” preoccupy the poem here, where questions of morals and ethics are cast into uncertainty (Boltanski 1999). The speaker is aware of the enormity of crises unfolding across the globe, and yet “can’t help.” This limited capacity to affect change is stultifying, the act of witness a mere performance in a collective charade of concern. The early innocence of the poem, wherein the image of the jellyfish “nestling in the sand” is a trigger for childhood memories and a reflection on intergenerational relationships, is tainted by the ineluctable reality of failed humanity captured in the image of the drowned child. The gentle game of etching portraits on the beach is recast into a stroke of astronomical geographical luck that permits this child to play on one shoreline while his peer perishes on another. As if in the constellation       there existed some design—      the sketch of a map—        your child’s face mapped on the sand—

The twists of fate that confer privilege preoccupy Darcy throughout the volume, whose personal migration to the United States as a white English-­speaking professional-class individual jars, quite deliberately, against the dangerous journeys undertaken by the majority of contemporary migrants. In “Mushrooms,” the speaker’s migration journey has a romantic, mystical quality, rendered as a kind of exotic adventure to be relayed in familial mythology: “We tell the night we arrived like myth, thicket of insects’ whirr, / throat-thickening heat of the air, impenetrable words / / the landlord spoke.” The indulgent excitement of the privileged journey discords with the flatness of that final line of “Jellyfish”— so did everybody—which serves to diminish the tragedy of the dead boy washed ashore. This disarmingly flat tone similarly characterizes the opening stanzas of Darcy’s long poem “Alphabet,” which comprises the second section of Insistence. Dedicated to Inger Christensen, Darcy’s version of the Fibonacci

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form is a sparse, careful work that captures the precarious human condition while recognizing the particular privilege of her situation. The first stanza signals the thematic concerns of the poem by picking up the final utterance of the earlier poem “Stink,” which ends on apricot tree. While Christensen opens her poem with the line “apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist,” Darcy’s verb choice conveys the urgency of the contemporary moment: “apricot trees insist, apricot trees insist.” To insist is to forcefully demand, to persist, to refuse to accept defeat; insistence is also a kind of coercion, simultaneously a call to action and a final desperate gesture in a planet’s death throes. Each of the eleven stanzas begin with a simple statement of insistence: apricot trees; brand-names; concrete; death-bringers; early morning; flashmobs; given prickles; human remains; I; July night; kin all “insist” in opening the stanzas. This structural predictability is quickly undermined by the spiraling Fibonacci form—in Darcy’s presentation of the form, the syntactical simplicity of the early verses, which offer a list of nouns, soon degrade toward chaos, as the form spirals into uncontrollability. The initial stanzas present an unholy incantation of the legacies of capitalism, as in stanza 3: “concrete insists; cappuccinos, cathedrals; / cancer-treatment centres, electric cigarettes, / corn syrup, cattle prods, automated cash machines.” These early stanzas are depopulated spaces, and it is only by the final line of stanza 5 that a pronoun appears, as “earth insists its way into our future.” By stanza 9, the opening phrase of “I insist” weakens, becoming intentional rather than assertive—“I will insist, / I intend to insist”—in face of the pressures under which humankind is “condemned / to exist.” It is this linguistic maneuvering, as much as the formal obligations of the Fibonacci, that accelerate Darcy’s “Alphabet” toward entropy even as it progresses as predicted, each stanza length equating to the sum of the preceding two. The steady acceleration reflects the volume’s alertness to imminent collapse, but as the poem states: […]it isn’t really about the end of everything, this; it’s about iterations by which living becomes more difficult until unbearable by intervals in which we will nevertheless persist;

In stanza 10, the guilty relief that this family’s privilege protects them is tempered by the realization that the child in this little mathematical sequence of a family will be left alone to face the environmental consequences of their parents’ actions: we are not doomed yet juggle the numbers some are doomed but not the 3 of us

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or not the 3 of us just yet or maybe 1 of us, the smallest

While human migration is not the explicit focus of Darcy’s “Alphabet,” the backdrop of personal and environmental insecurity underpins the wider human precarity brought about by climate change. Like Christensen’s original poem, Darcy recognizes the massive implications of environmental disruption and perceives its consequences in her child’s future, envisaging the potential ways of humanity’s untimely death. In a series of scenarios familiar to climate refugees, Darcy pictures how he may be “suffocated / by spiking heat” or, like Alan Kurdi, “maybe you are taken / by whatever’s hidden / in the silky water” or “maybe you are taken by another person / angry and broken when scarcity thickens.” Writing about Christensen’s poem, Darcy recognizes the contradiction of the form—even as it unspools with increasing freneticism, it accelerates toward a conclusion: “[b]ut if the form generates endlessly, it also contains a necessary endpoint: the alphabet will end” (Darcy 2017). Darcy’s “Alphabet” moves toward conclusion with a scarifying image of a post-apocalyptic world, “the ground / sick with dust; the trees / sick,” and with the dominant action of humans “walking on regardless,” unmoored and displaced in an inhospitable climate. The final section that begins with “k” for “kin” is punctuated with “okay” in its closing negotiations. If insistence is assertive, okay seems almost conciliatory, a coming-to-terms with life as it is and as it will be, as the speaker moves away from the established cerebral consolations of “sky” and “church,” “books” and “words” and instead turns to the wisdom of the earth, for it “makes more sense” to “poke beneath bracken.” In the rich space of bracken, the poem finally comes to terms with a post-human environment, one “dusty with sickness, okay” but also providing a home for the skylark waking and thinking, the sunshine hiding and thinking, the rain ticking and thinking; think what’s taken in, given nook;

It is fitting that the poem inhabiting the Fibonacci sequence, derived from its occurrence in nature, should come to rest in nature too. There is also a satisfying linguistic coherence to the stanza, as the poem comes to rest on “look,” offering a calming consonantal closure that circles back to the section’s opening. It is, however, cold comfort given the bleak vista present by Darcy throughout the poem, a temporary respite from the oncoming ecological, human, and humanitarian crises so scaringly evoked across the entire volume.

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‘Trying to Exist in a Hostile World’: Holding Space in Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s ‘A Is for ‫[ العرب‬Arabs]’ Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s debut collection Auguries of a Minor God was published by Faber in 2021 to widespread critical acclaim, as well as registering as a powerful new voice amongst “female poets of the Arab diaspora,” in whose work themes of “hungering, hunting and being hunted in return” have been perceived (Goyal 2022). Eipe’s background is appropriately peripatetic for a poet of hybrid influences: born in India, her biography describes her as growing up “across the Middle East, Europe and North America, before calling Ireland home” (Eipe 2021). Although her poetry explicitly engages with mythological, folkloric, and literary antecedents of the Irish tradition, as has been written about elsewhere, her poetry has been less often situated within this poetic lineage (Mulhall 2021; McDaid 2023). The specific (racialized) context of the Irish literary scene is beyond the scope of this chapter, but as briefly outlined in the opening sections, the requirements for publication by Irish publishing houses (not to mention canonical consideration) of non-white poets writing in, of, from, or about Ireland remain opaque. It is worth noting that both Eipe and Darcy are published by UK-based publishers, a fact that reflects the gendered, racial, and heteronormative preferences of the Irish poetry publishing scene (Keating and McDaid 2019). Auguries of a Minor God is divided into two halves: the first comprised of five sections headed under the five arrows of Kāma, the Hindu God of Love, Desire, and Memory. The poems in these sections interrogate the body and relationships, but also invoke an undercurrent of anxiety that pierces the fabric of the poems’ subjects. At times, that epistemic instability is explicit: in “formerly exotic, fruit,” the image of the split papaya spilling its seeds recalls the caviar-yielding sturgeon roe that itself invokes nature’s seasonal demands: “glistening summer shoal / swimming hard upriver / migrating for miles just to / make sure they survive.” The formal setting of the poem situates the shopper to the left, or the west, of the page, the migrating shoal to the easterly right. The stark couplets in the western recipient’s voice are mostly present tense, descriptive, and brief, while the corresponding quartets, set at a distance on the page, are evocative with sensual language bringing the body to the fore: “heavy heat”; “waiting in womb warm / flushed flesh”; “stains like an early bruise.” The unnatural context of the papaya in a supermarket far from its origin, priced at “three euro fifty for a stunted child,” proposes both the environmental and economic cost but it is the poem’s final line that properly skewers the heart of the personal compromise inherent in migration/ “nowhere close to worth it / the price that I have paid.” Elsewhere, as in “Innocent,” the congruence of capitalist whimsy—“you said you really needed coffee”—with eco-friendly initiatives—“waved my phone over the QR code which showed a / short film of José’s highland farm in Huehuetenango” culminates in a collective immolation that directly indicts the exploitations innate in the so-called fair-trade movement. The poem concludes: “the /thing is it didn’t sound like talking it sounded as if his throat was melting / and so were you and me, me too.” The invocation of fire, particularly in the context of the jargonistic language of corporate social responsibility

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(“hand-­picked fairly/traded artisan-roasted brown beans sourced direct from the farmers’ co-op”) calls to mind international news stories of rising temperatures, displaced climate refugees and the devastating wildfires of recent years, while the surreal and grotesque personalization of the melting throat redirects the larger existential concerns to a local coffee shop in Dublin, and our own individual roles in these issues. It is, however, the standout long poem “A is for ‫[ العرب‬Arabs]” which comprises the second half of the collection, that defines this volume and situates Eipe in conversation with Darcy and Christensen while simultaneously conducting a new current of electricity through the possibilities of representation in contemporary English-language poetry. Where the nuclear moment triggers Christensen’s meditation, and the environmental catastrophe tips Darcy’s work into anxiety, it is explicitly the so-called migrant crisis that hooks Eipe’s use of the Fibonacci form. Appropriately, while it reflects patterns found in nature, the literary application of the Fibonacci form is also found in Sanskrit literature, which evidently influences Eipe’s work (Parmanand Singh 1985). The title of the poem “A is for ‫[ العرب‬Arabs]” invokes the work of Jack G. Shaheen, an Arab-­ American scholar whose academic work addressed the representation of Arab people in American popular culture (Shaheen 1984, 2001, 2012). A traveling exhibition in 2012 of the scholar’s archive, which is housed at New York University, displayed a selection of these artifacts depicting negative stereotypes, as well as shifting and more positive representations, in the American cultural imaginary around Arab people. The exhibition was entitled “‘A is for Arab’: Archiving Stereotypes in US Popular Culture,” drawing its name from a popular children’s book which uses a “plump, garrulous, moustachioed Arab man on a mule with an axe hanging on his belt” as the first example for its phonic and lexical instruction (Curio 2016). This cultural background situates the poem as it begins with an epigraph from a poem by Hasan al-Qayrawani al-­Azdi al-Masili (Ibn Rashiq), written in 1282 AH, which serves to recenter the Arabic subjectivity that is placed under threat by the poem’s title. In contrast to Christensen’s and to Darcy’s versions of the Fibonacci, Eipe’s poem is hefty, even disorienting. The opening pages are packed with words, the abecedarian stanzas crowding each other even while they maintain the minimal dignity of interspersed space. Where Darcy and Christensen allow each section a page apiece, thereby imparting a measure of consideration, Eipe’s formal choices lend an intensified urgency to the poem. The crowded presentation on the page approximates the displacement and hasty rearranging of lives, often in new and unsuitable conditions. While Darcy’s speaker is located in a position of privilege that enables a certain distance from which to regard the imminent (but not yet, for her, arrived) climate catastrophe, Eipe’s narrator is long-­ immersed in the struggle to find safe harbor. The page itself becomes part of the processes of exclusion and conditionality with which precarious lives are taken up—Eipe’s deft use of the poetic form and the ostensibly democratic space of the blank page reiterates the ways in which displaced people experience white space differently. The poem opens by echoing the epigraph:

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and they used not to wish each other joy but for three things: the birth of a blessed babyblue boy, the foaling of a beautiful broadboned mare, and the coming to light of a promising poet,

The gentle generosity of these wishes promptly jars against how “these/days, Arabs are more likely to be / depicted as tyrants and terrorists, deprived of their / dignity.” The reader is collectively indicted (“us—who should know better”) for succumbing to this stereotypical messaging, as the opening stanzas try to make the case for “these people simply trying to / exist in a hostile world.” The first-person narrator of “A is for ‫ ”العرب‬documents the specifics of his newly immigrated life, as a widowed father of five children recently arrived in an unspecified Western country. Like Darcy’s speaker, Eipe presents an educated professional migrant in a new role “lecturing / on migration studies at the university,” but Eipe’s narrator has undertaken a traumatic and dangerous journey to get to this place. To live in frequent fear for your life, for those you love, to ferry five children across the fiercefoaming sea, to find yourself having to choose between home and family, to flee like fugitives until you hit another fence, to face—unflinchingly—the unassailable fact that from here on out, so much will be forgotten: language, flavour, fragrance—so fragile, this freedom you fight for;

The roiling syntax exacerbates how difficult it is to enunciate the repeated “f ” sound, and so reading this passage restages the narrator’s stuttered articulation in bringing the words to the lips as well as suggesting the trauma of the journey itself. The sonorous neologic trick seen here in “fiercefoaming” is repeated throughout the poem, coining intimately precise phrases that permit us entry to a private consciousness with its own vocabulary. Words like “sumacscatteredfreckles,” “concerncreaselined,” and “foreignbodiedwolf” open a new horizon of experience, wherein the elision of space between words is in direct contrast to the subjective migrant experience within this new society which contrives to maintain distance. The translingual quality of these words is also noteworthy: as Claire Gallien observes in her study of Anglo-Arabic poetry, heterolingual practices challenge hegemonic language boundaries by reconfiguring referential and allusive space (Gallien 2021, 69–70). Eipe’s use of sumac here—a fragrant Middle-Eastern spice of distinctive purplish hue—compounds the coinage as a new intervention in language. The racialized overtones of freckles of scattered sumac, the xenophobic undercurrent of the image of the

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bestial immigrant, and the performative pity of hurrying strangers reiterate, in deft utterances, the abiding themes of this meditative poem. Over sixty packed pages, “A is for ‫ ”العرب‬traces this process of (non-)integration through a recoding of all kinds of assumptions ranging from form, style, content, and allusion. For the narrator here, “colour means other … means / green card, black list, pentahued pentagon terror levels,” and the kaleidoscope of loss ranges from cultural hostility (the inability to recount a youngest son’s first words of Allah hu Akbar for fear of triggering an alert (“even though she / most likely wouldn’t take it the wrong way, still—you’re not / mad enough to risk it”) to personal grief transmuted into mindless marathon training in order to quieten the sorrow. At various points in the poem, language breaks down—sometimes formally as in the marathon training section which offers a sequence of kilometer counting over a full page as a means of deadening the brain to achieve sleep: km1  km2  km3  km4  km5     km6   km7   km8  km9 km10 [….] key if you are still awake at this point is to count backwards from the end as if you are racing from the beginning km41  km40  km39  km38  km37   km36  km35  km34  km33  km32

At other points, the “litany of loss” in migration begins to fragment the sequence, as spaces creep in between lines and the densely packed stanzas of the opening pages begin crumbling in tune with the speaker’s own failing capacity to make sense of an increasingly incomprehensible world: Listen

you are already starting to forget how to look at the world               in a way that makes it stay waves lapping the shore   foamy

The losses begin as minor, mundane items, Bishopian in their insignificance (“car keys and headphones and coins and notes”)—those “displaced, misplaced / things that are not really / lost because they can be found again.” However, the stanza progresses to enumerate an encyclopedia of migrant loss, from the “carelesslydumpedcarcasses of those / lions abandoned in Baghdad” to “entire / languages even so / like how in your dreams you are mute,” and running through a checklist of personal and cultural erasures: lost your mind

head breath temper

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lost sleep

patience memories

your religion lost life, breathing

In this catalog of lost things there is hope mingled with dread, for the fate of friends hoped to have walked ashore “face up and upright” and “not swollen and waterlogged / like a puffer fish,” recalling the fate of many fellow forced migrants, as well perhaps as the child Aylan Kurdi registered in Darcy’s “Jellyfish.” Although Eipe’s Fibonacci poem follows the rigid structure, its innovations are also a statement of dissent, namely of the impossibility of containing the crisis and chaos of a displaced life within narrative or even language itself. As the poem progresses, spaces on the page increase, typography diversifies and language itself yields to other sources—to borrowed Arabic phrases, an excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit, even sections from Wikipedia. The poem breaks down entirely at the interloping of a breaking news bulletin announcing the massacre at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, triggering the speaker’s inability to continue to speak. Noor is the name of the speaker’s dead wife, and the sound of her name tips the poem, always tenuous and fragile, into a protracted lament. “Noor,” meaning “light,” becomes “no more” and the penultimate stanza of “A is for ‫ ”العرب‬descends into unreadability, the overlapping typography of “no more” turns the light of “noor” into ever-darkening shadows, until the poem is rendered beyond articulation (and even representation in this essay). After approximately 130 lines comprised entirely of the same four words in layered typeset, the “n” stanza ends with clarity, the words standing alone: no more never again, no.

Eipe concludes her sequence with thirty pages directly reproduced from the Quran, the narrative exhaustion so absolute that recourse to familiar, recitational religious language is all that is left for the poem. However, the poem truly ends by shedding the Fibonacci sequence entirely and including a list of names of the fifty-one people murdered in Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019. The final dedication speaks to the specific grief of this tragedy in this place as well as to the array of private and public suffering experienced by displaced peoples across the globe: it ends with and all those who have lost.

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Conclusion As a form, the Fibonacci sequence demands much of both poet and reader. It is intent on its own destruction, and ultimately wrenches itself out of the poet’s control and into oblivion, either through abandonment (the blank page; the truncated alphabet) or rhetoric (religious quotation). Its use as a serious form appears relatively rare, beyond Christensen’s alphabet, which is exquisitely carefully crafted in content, theme, and language use. The reappearance of this form in the work of two younger Irish-adjacent female poets in a short period is, of itself, noteworthy: that both poets use the form to write about human and natural displacement and destruction suggests that the form lends itself to a profound meditation on the state of humanity in the late-Anthropocene, as Christensen first used it. Both poems wrestle with existential questions of individual, parental, and collective responsibility within a world that seems set on obliteration of difference and of hope. Neither Eipe nor Darcy explicitly allude to any Irish context in their sequences—these are poems about planetary concerns—and yet the very fact of the non-national context opens a new horizon in Irish migration poetry (Obert 2022).2 In moving away from the local, romantic, and exilic notion of traditional Irish emigration, and then moving further again from any kind of ethnonationalist framing at all, both poets open new horizons for critical paradigms of analysis for contemporary Irish poetry, and for English-language poetry of migration more broadly.

Bibliography Arrowsmith, Aidan. 2001. Plastic Paddy: Negotiating Identity in Second-Generation ‘Irish-English’ Writing. Irish Studies Review 8 (1): 35–43. Auchter, Jessica. 2017. On Viewing: The Politics of Looking at a Corpse. Global Discourse 7 (2–3, 223): –238. https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2017.1314908. Baldwin, Andrew. 2014. Pluralising Climate Change and Migration: An Argument in Favour of Open Futures. Geography Compass 8 (8): 516–528. https://doi. org/10.1111/gec3.12145. Baldwin, Andrew, Chris Methmann, and Delf Rothe. 2014. Securitizing “Climate Refugees”: The Futurology of Climate-Induced Migration. Critical Studies on Security 2 (2): 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2014.943570.

2  Insistence is the subject of an excellent recent article by Julia Obert which considers the global and biopolitical context of Darcy’s latest collection (see bibliography). Eipe’s collection was reviewed in the Irish Times (31 July 2021). Her presence on the Irish poetry scene has been remarkable—her work has featured as part of the RTÉ Illuminations series, Galway2020, and the University College Dublin Irish Poetry Reading Archive, and she has been awarded an array of fellowships and prizes, including Poetry Ireland Introductions 2020, Next Generation Artist Award in Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland, Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme 2020, and Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust 2019 Student Prize. In terms of critical attention, however, her work has yet to receive sustained scholarly analysis in the context of the shifting Irish poetic canon.

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Bettini, Giovanni. 2017. Where Next? Climate Change, Migration, and the (Bio) Politics of Adaptation. Global Policy 8: 33–39. https://doi. org/10.1111/1758-­5899.12404. Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christensen, Inger. 1981. Alphabet. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books. Connolly, Claire, and Marjorie Howes. 2020. Irish Literature in Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curio, Jonathan. 2016. A is for Arab. Aramco World. www.aramcoworld.com/Articles/ March-­2016/A-­is-­for-­Arab. Cusick, Christine. 2010. Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts. Cork: Cork University Press. Darcy, Ailbhe. 2017. Or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying: Collaborative Writing, Motherhood, and the Atom Bomb. The Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature and Culture 48. http://criticalflame.org/or-­how-­i-­learned-­to-­keep-­worrying-­ collaborative-­writing-­motherhood-­and-­the-­atom-­bomb/. ———. 2018. Insistence. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books. De Angelis, Irene. 2012. The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eipe, Nidhi Zak/Aria. 2021. Auguries of a Minor God. London: Faber & Faber. Enright, Aidan. 2022. Where Does the Term “West Brit” Come From? RTÉ Brainstorm, March 14. Flannery, Eóin. 2015. Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History, and Environmental Justice. London: Routledge. Fleming, Will. 2019. “It Isn’t Race or Nation Governs Movement”: New Writers’ Press and the Transnational Scope of Irish Experimental Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. Humanities 8 (178). https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040178. Gallien, Claire. 2021. The Heterolingual Zone: Arabic, English and the Practice of Worldliness. In Multilingual Literature as World Literature, ed. Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang, 69–90. London: Bloomsbury. Garner, Steve. 2016. Making “Race” an Issue in the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum. In Defining Events: Power, Resistance and Identity in Twenty-First Century Ireland, ed. Rosie Meade and Fiona Dukelow, 70–88. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gladwin, Derek, and Maureen O’Connor, eds. 2017. Irish Environmental Humanities. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 40 (special issue): 38–49. Goyal, Sana. 2022. The War Is Everywhere. Poetry London 101 (Spring). https://poetrylondon.co.uk/the-war-is-everywhere-sana-goyal-on-three-debuts-that-exploreterror-hunger-andbelonging-across-the-arab-world/ “Howl: A Journal of Irish Writing.” 2022. 2022. www.howlwriting.ie. Keating, Kenneth. 2020. “A Tight Mesmerizing Chain of Echoes”: The Pantoum in Irish Poetry. Irish Studies Review 28 (1): 1–19. Keating, Kenneth, and Ailbhe McDaid. 2019. MEAS: Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector. https://www.rascal.ac.uk/index.php/institutions/fired-­irish-­women-­poets-­ and-­canon/meas-­measuring-­equality-­arts-­sector-­literature. Keatinge, Benjamin. 2014. The Language of Globalization in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Studi Irlandesi A Journal of Irish Studies 4: 69–84. Landy, Patrick. 2021. Constraint and Oblivion in Inger Christensen’s Alphabet. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 25 (5): 603–610. Lloyd, David. 2016. Irish Experimental Poetry. Irish University Review 46 (1): 224.

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McDaid, Ailbhe. 2016. The Technologies of Distance: New Migrations in Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King. Irish Studies Review 24 (3): 275–290. ———. 2017. The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2023. Dubh: New Irish Poets. In  Race in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Malcolm Sen and Julie McCormick Weng (in press). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIvor, Charlotte. 2016. Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McWilliams, Ellen. 2021. Irishness in North American Women’s Writing: Transatlantic Affinities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Kirby A. 1985. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Moynihan, Sinéad. 2019. Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The “Returned Yank” in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to Present. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Mulhall, Anne. 2021. Arrivals: Inward Migration and Irish Literature. In Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020, ed. Eric Falci and Paige Reynolds, 182–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, Peter, and David Lloyd. 2009. The Black and Green Atlantic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Obert, Julia. 2022. “Everything / We Husband Is Always Shedding”: Intimacy, Distance, and the Politics of Migration in Ailbhe Darcy’s Insistence. Irish Studies Review 30: 280–297. Olszewska, Kinga. 2007. Wanderers Across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century. London: Legenda. Parmanand Singh. 1985. The So-Called Fibonacci Numbers in Ancient and Medieval India. Historia Mathematica 12 (3): 229–244. Salis, Loredana. 2010. Stage Migrants: Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sen, Malcolm. 2022. The Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shaheen, Jack G. 1984. The TV Arab. Ohio: Popular Press. ———. 2001. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. New  York: Olive Branch Press. ———. 2012. Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11. New  York: Olive Branch Press. Smith, Helen. 2015. Shocking Image of Drowned Syrian Boy Shows Tragic Plight of Refugees. The Guardian, September 2. Vaughan-Williams, Nick. 2015. “We Are Not Animals!” Humanitarian Border Security and Zoopolitical Spaces in EUrope. Political Geography 45 (March): 1–10. Villar-Argaiz, Pilar, ed. 2014. Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland : The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ward, Patrick. 2002. Exile, Emigration and Irish Writing. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

CHAPTER 40

“A historian of the soft tissue”: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil K. Bellamy Mitchell

These questions were asked and then answered asynchronously via correspondence over the months of May and June, 2022. BM: I wanted to start by inviting us to investigate our common terms. The collection in which this conversation will be published is the Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture: What does it mean to you to think of “migration literature” as a category or a genre of composition, and how do you understand your writing and its central preoccupations in relation to it? I would love to hear how you handle, or grip, the term “migration” or perhaps feel gripped by it both as an individual, and an artist and writer, or in any other sense. What does it mean to understand your work as possibly providing a “handbook” or “manual” of particular movements we call migratory? BK: Dear Bellamy, thank you. Perhaps we can begin with a handbook. What does it mean to think of our responses as material that will be logged in a manual, a reference book that is doing something differently to a textbook? How to write, then, in a place that is not the place where you began to write, or could not?

K. B. Mitchell (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_40

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 ossible instructions: 1. “What kind of paper do you want to print your P writing on?”—Larissa Lai. 2. Imagine a descendant who does not resemble you, which is to say, a non-genetic descendant. Are you writing for this descendant, or are you writing to reverse a line? 3. Keep writing, no matter what. That is how we were trained by (a) Ernest Hemingway, (b) anxious parents, whose saliva carried a toxic load of stress hormones, which was vivifying in the short term and obliterating in the long. How to keep writing, in other words, in conditions not intended or built for your flourishing, your brilliant survival, or uninterrupted thought. What might we learn from migration literature about hospitality, for example? I suddenly can’t tell what is meant by the category, other than the works that immediately come to mind. What came to mind when I first read your question was a photograph I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a few years ago: Jim Goldberg’s Home of a Boy Who Died Trying to Get to Europe, Senegal, 2008. In this image (which is not an image), a stucco wall has been resealed. A photograph of a woman is the only object or artifact on the wall, or in the space this photographer designates as the boy’s home. There’s much I want to ask about how the photographer gained access to this home, and if the culminating photograph is a possession that was extended to the family of the boy “who died trying to get to Europe.”

Migration literature: a record of images and scenes both before and afterward. Recently, I wrote a “diptych” for The Paris Review. When invited to contribute, I felt at a loss to put something together, far from my

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notebooks, which were all so faraway. So, I took two pieces from my blog, a space now closed to the public, but which I retain as a kind of notebook I can have access to, but which also, in the event of political catastrophe, might suddenly disappear. In the end, the first piece of the diptych was a description of visiting my ancestral home, in the village of Bhulan, as a young woman. Notes on decay and the color pink. The second piece was a conversation with my mother, typed straight into my blog, about her childhood in that house, just after Partition, when every room was alive and not yet ruined. In the editing process, the markers I’d used in the title (the name of the village, and the years the diptych spanned, 2008 and 1948) were deleted. I agreed with the editor that the piece was stronger without those markers, and at the same time, I was not certain that a casual reader would encounter my poem, or writing, as a description of one structure. As a descendant, I felt so lonely, tracing the paisley design on the balcony, which I did not write about. Instruction 4: Leave the orchard, tucking the seeds into a tiny envelope made by hand. I am thinking of the orchard behind the house in this story, which my grandfather planted. (Seeds carried across the border, folded in paper he’d made himself.) He kept a meticulous account (in a journal with a hard cover) of which seeds he planted when and where, subsequent purchases, and the weight of each mango or papaya, once harvested. Instruction 5: What will you carry with you? What did you leave behind? Migration literature is everything from no book to all these possible books, perhaps. BM: Focusing on the second pertinent term in the title of this collection, “European,” also opens up questions of particular and historic movements of bodies across borders, the stakes of different ways of identifying self and others across regimes of racialization, and the varieties of violence that undergird colonial boundary-setting and expansion. Your writing has always played with the relationship between the poet and the nation-state, or the formation of (and creative writing of) fictions of nationality, from your play with questions and answers in The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers to the title of your erstwhile blog, “Jack Kerouac is Punjabi.” I am specifically thinking about the answer to your twenty-first question/request in your Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, “Describe a morning you woke without fear”: “One pretends not to be free. Saying: I can’t. When he came to America, he was appalled by the inelegance of this country’s public buildings, saying: It is not my culture. Then he returned to the little glazed cakes and exquisite leaded glass portholes of Europe. As if our responsibilities to each other end at the border of our countries, or at our cities, or half-way across our cities, or at our back doors, or at our skins. No.” (33)

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Tell me more about this No? And what does nation mean to a poet, to you, in your texts? BK: For the last year, at Churchill College, I’ve been reading letters from the British public in response to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, which he gave in May 1968, a month before I was born. In this speech, Powell called for an end to immigration to the United Kingdom (UK), which is to say the intake of black and brown subjects, which is to say, legal British subjects at the time of their own births. This was the era of the “one in, one out” policy, which might find its analog in the “great replacement” theory currently gaining traction in the United States. In reading letters to Powell from self-proclaimed “ordinary housewives,” but also, on crested paper, the vice-masters of Oxbridge colleges, and fellow Members of Parliament, I’ve been struck by the many references to animals. There’s a fear, evoked in several letters, of very specific forms of animality: cockerels, for example, being beheaded then flushed down toilets, thus clogging the communal sewer line! Olfactory disgust is omnipresent: the strange, suffocating smells of diasporic cuisines (boiled goat?) wafting over the terrace wall, or through slatted windows open to the garden. Do something, the (thousands of) letters beg. Send them back. A book that’s been helpful as I titrate this research (a maximum of one and a half hours of reading/touching the thin blue or heavy cream paper of these letters, written by hand in the late 1960s or early 1970s, then out into the bright air, to stand beneath the oak tree planted by Winston Churchill, something living that has outlived the photograph of itself being set into the ground) is Nadine El-Enany’s (B)ordering Britain, which makes the argument that present-day Britain is a colonial state, and that immigrants from its former Empires are, in fact, accessing shared wealth. In counterpoint: the UK border policy of sending incoming asylum seekers directly to detention centers in Rwanda, a policy recently announced by Priti Patel, herself the child of Ugandan Indians, a population expelled from Uganda in the 1970s. Patel’s parents “emigrated” just before the expulsion, to the Britain that was their home. White supremacy: you don’t have to be white. Patel’s father stood for UKIP, a right-wing nationalist party, in 2013, for example. As a writer, I’m interested in the reverberation or amplification (resurgence) of political rhetoric that was a hallmark of my early childhood. I was born in a country and at a time when my own birth was not understood as a British birth story. Legally, I was British, but might not have been British if I had been born ten years later, for example. El-Enany is excellent on immigration law, and it’s been extraordinary to trace the biography of my birth year through the letters to Powell, and also to Lord Hailsham, who, though a Conservative MP, stood up in parliament to denounce Powell’s racialized rhetoric. In fact, what I note is not the no, but the yes. By some accounts, 80% of the British public supported Powell’s call for an end to mass immigration. I’m struck and moved by the very few letters that excrete NO. Excrete: the wrong word.

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In the United States, last week, in Buffalo, a man walked into a Tops supermarket and gunned down as many black bodies as he could. In his manifesto, published today, he calls for an end to “mass immigration,” which he cites, in much the same way Powell did, as the reason for depleted national resources. In this context, what is the no of a book of poetry? I’m not sure if I can articulate, in reverse, my own contribution. At the most, I think of my work as a survey of chronic impacts, and the psychological impact of racism. I grew up nextdoor to a member of the National Front Youth League, and later, I found work in the English or creative writing departments of North American universities, where I studied what it was like to exit the corridor or enter a room in which (mostly) everyone else was white. I studied the contraction of pelvic and abdominal tissue, the way my own jaw slid back into my face. I transcribed my mother’s stories, on the sofa, which were stories of war. “Avoid spaces,” said her grandmother, an instruction that was passed to me, “in which white people congregate.” A student once asked, in Office Hours: “Bhanu, do you ever feel, when you enter a room of white people, that they could kill you?” The way that my student was embodied was not the way that I am embodied, and the way that my mother is embodied is not identical to the way I hold myself in national spaces I have the privilege of entering. Nevertheless, the idea of white supremacy as a problem related to groups, to thresholds, to what it is to enter a space, rather than inhabit one, haunts both remarks. Writing about the body like this, I’m not confused. My no does not have a political impact, though, yes, I’m in a state of constant consideration of how creative writing might be the place to think about or record a history of migration. What stops the sentence, for example? What breaks it? Is repair the work of the book? Is a book another kind of ruined or abandoned home? BM: I also want to ask you about your sense of your audience and your relationship to your readership through writing: Who do you write for, and where do you write from? Do you think of your poetry (and performance) in relationship to, or as creating, particular communities of readership? Are your different books oriented toward different readers? BK: My last book, How to Wash a Heart, was definitely written for a particular reader on a particular day. I intensely visualized what it would be for someone to pick up my book (in England) and read it in the time it took to drink a cup of tea. That idea governed the length of the book, and its form. I wrote the book in the United States, as a way to return to the UK in a way that would make me recognizable as a British author, in ways that never happened or did not seem possible when I was completing my first manuscript, in England, but projected toward the United States, where it was eventually published. I write, on the whole, for brown kindreds, queer kindreds, diasporic kindreds, working class kindreds, wherever they may be.

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BM: Your writing beautifully and strikingly frames the difficulty of taking information in, of metabolizing facts and events, and about writing them. Your works do this in part in the way they narrate processes of noticing—processing information as significant—and also by taking the form of notes: “quick notes,” “passive notes,” “performance notes,” and so on. Reading across your work I get a sense of each of these projects as variously open, as notes-toward, in Ban en Banlieue and Humanimal: A Project for Future Children, certainly, and also in the “light touch” of Schizophrene, where you write: “These notes are directed towards the region I wanted to perceive but could not. Notes for a schizophrene night, a schizophrene day, a rapid sketch.” Could you talk about when and why your writing takes the form of notes? BK: Notes, or note-taking, is a transcription of landscapes, atmospheres, and facial expressions that are fleeting, I want to say. How to be present with the thing that’s already transforming? The notes are a way of staying with the dots and breaks and textures and surfaces, while at the same time tracking the sensations in my own body. At the same time, who appears at the perimeter of the work? Perhaps the notes allow me to orient or broaden a sense of the image-­environment in ways that classical looking, or one-directional noticing, does not. Perhaps it’s also that I don’t know what’s happened until I write it down, and the notes are pragmatic, functional, in that sense. Mostly, I thought of them as holding space for the moment that I could elaborate a narrative that could think with itself in a more integrated or fluent way, for which I always thought I would need time. I never had that time in the life I was living, and when my books were published, the notes became petrified, as an art form. BM: How do you decide what you write about, take notice of? BK:  The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers: I simply began to ask questions, using a model of resemblance, and gather scrawled responses. Years of this before the idea of a book emerged. Incubation: a space for monsters: I saw a drawing in a nineteenthcentury medical textbook of “Laloo,” a sideshow performer featured in P.T. Barnum’s traveling circus. Humanimal [a project for future children]: In the library at CU Boulder, I closed my eyes, letting my hand drift along the stacks (in the anthropology section), saying, wherever my hand stops, that will be the next book. I committed to it, though it took some years to extend a project from Robert Zingg’s account of the “wolfgirls of Midnapure.” Schizophrene: I wanted to compile my research into mental health and migration, with a broader aim of writing about the trans-generational effect of Partition. I recall a large idea about an epic, and then working with the transcribed sentences I dislodged (by writing them down!) from a rotting notebook (my research notes) that I’d thrown

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into my garden then retrieved the coming Spring. To clarify, I did not throw the notebook into the garden in order to write a book. I did it because I’d reached an impasse in a project that had gone on for over ten years. Ban en Banlieue: A sound from my childhood, the far-off sound of breaking glass, heard during a riot in my neighborhood, in 1979, in London, returned to me. That sound was the chrysalis of my novel. How to Wash a Heart: I wanted to reverse-engineer a performance at ICA London, a collaboration with my sister. That influence is there, as a kind of textural memory, but the main prompt was a newspaper article on a host family in Berkeley, California. Another strong motivation was to write about toxic experience in my workplace, but without making that explicit. BM: Throughout your works, the frustrations of writing are forefronted, both in relationship to other media, and in the way you narrate your own avoidance of producing and engaging text because of its power, asking in Schizophrene, “Is it a right thing or a mad thing not to want to re-connect, to avoid reading or writing because of what those will bring?” (28) What is it that reading and writing will bring? BK: I do feel avoidant of certain kinds of writing. Perhaps this is because I write explicitly about the body, about sexuality. I come from a background where there is immense stigma, and risk, in making violence, or desire, or the history of either of these things, explicit. BM: I am interested in your relationship to failure, error, and completion: I would love to hear about your sense of the difference between a finished project and an unfinished one, and the stakes of that distinction to you? I am thinking about how Ban en Banlieue meditates on and embroiders the pose of death, defeat, and “giving up”—it is explicitly the moment when you narrate that you stopped writing at all and laid on the ground that figures the failure and success of the project: “And this was the part of the project that could not be completed in the same place that the project was held.” (Ban en Banlieue, 25) I am also considering how the book Schizophrene is centered around the warped pages of a physical notebook containing notes for a project you describe as “failed”: an “epic on Partition and its trans-generational effects: the high incidence of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on” that we only read through your rewriting of and on the water-damaged and blurred words (Schizophrene, i). BK: I’ve trained myself to be curious (in my life) when things don’t go according to plan, or when they are in transition, or when situations seem to fail. Perhaps I want to model another possibility, for myself, at these moments, and for my descendants. I’m thinking here about Lauren Berlant’s attention to infrastructure. My uncle was a civil engineer in Iraq. He described building bridges then blowing them up, or stressing them, in order to then build in a stronger way.

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BM: Certain figures and stories recur throughout your poetry, resistant images and resistant materials, especially difficult images of violence done to women in the policing of and creation of borders. I think, especially, of the inheritance of the image of disemboweled women figured in the poem “Partition” in Schizophrene, and its reiteration in The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, “(42) Tell Me What You Know About Dismemberment.” I am curious about the stakes of that haunting, and what work you do through the rewriting and repetition of images and stories in poetry, where the bedtime story becomes something else entirely, as you write at the close of “Partition”: “[S]ometimes I think it was not an image at all but a way of conveying information.” (Schizophrene, 40) BK: A crisp image, outlined, becomes a problem in contemporary poetry, precisely because it can so easily be refilled. Soon after I completed Ban en Banlieue (in Delhi), another woman was killed/destroyed in much the same way as Jyoti Singh Pandey was destroyed/killed. This was in a “nursery,” a gardening center a few yards away. It was a repetition that didn’t dominate the news cycle, precisely because this “second” woman was a laborer, perhaps, and that I only knew of because the attack happened in the same area that my aunt lived. In this context, poetry is a weak political art, precisely because it is descriptive. BM: How does something being hard to write (and hard to read) relate to your experience of that image/story/information. I wonder if you might also speak here to the material processes and circumstances of composition, and how your choice of the slightly more conservative form of the lyric project you undertake in your most recent book, How to Wash a Heart, addresses itself to the various structures and contexts that you as poet—and person—navigate? How do your poems form themselves, how do you form your poems? BK: I followed the breath, and broke the lines, because I wanted to create something that would be recognizable as poetry to an audience for whom the notebook is not a mainstream art. I also knew I wanted to create a form that was ultra-linear, and (thus) irreversible. Cross-genre experiments imply a porous border, easily crossed. Criss-crossed? In How to Wash a Heart, I wanted to create a lyric sequence that did not pretend that was true. BM: Your work is emphatically and provocatively documentary. I mean this both to reflect on the way that your work speaks to and through the documentation of particular historical events (e.g., how Ban en Banlieue writes an “auto-­sacrifice” performance for the rape and murder of Nirbhaya in 2012 and the murder of Clement Blair Peach during a protest against the British National Front) and to reflect your oeuvre as it offers a record of labor. Your lyric counter-­documentations and experiments in documentation are particularly striking in relation to ever-increasing cultures and practices of surveillance, bureaucracy,

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and data-collection that document and record motion across borders in a globalized post-9/11, post-Patriot Act world. And so much of your work involves a process of investigating the impact of movement across or the creation of borders by creating alternative ways of moving through them: not by proliferating documents such as passports and visas and not by repeating what you call “the linearity required of immigrants” in How to Wash a Heart, but by standing somewhere, by laying down, or by tracing a body in chalk, etc. (34) Would you discuss some of your experiments in the legibility of past motion or action, and how borders and boundaries figure in your work? Specifically, I wonder about your figure of the humanimal, who: “[e]ach time she crosses, in truth or fiction, she breaks the tracery of delicate glass threads that mark the border. A border is felt in the body as fear and sometimes…” (Humanimal: A Project for Future Children, 64). BK: I don’t want to write the border as a substrate for metaphor. Theorize the border as mirrored, something that affects the skin, that is easily damaged. I can’t recall the lineage of the sentence you quote. I am not sure how to discuss the variations, the experiments, or to make theory of them now, in the present, in the darkness. BM: Your writing continually challenges terms like citizen or non-citizen by engaging questions of the nonhuman through figurations of the hybrid, the humanimal, the cyborg, the camera lens, the animal eye, and even different scales of motion and migration: from movement across membranes and cell-walls to the cycles of seeds and plants and growth. What figures are central to your writing now? How did you become interested in monsters, wolves, the nonhuman? BK: I returned from a year in India, as a nine year old. I had lived in a wilderness, playing chess, reading Dostoevsky. That was it. My grandfather had been put in charge of my education. That’s as far as we got. Instead, we walked into the hills at dusk, camping with yak-herders, drinking salty tea. Back in England, I felt like an alien. One day, our dour teacher left abruptly, replaced by a loving, brilliant human called Mr. Taylor, from New Zealand. One day he asked us to write about monsters. I can’t recall what I wrote but he had me stand on a chair to read my story to class. After that, the curriculum moved on but he said: “Bhanu, keep writing about monsters.” Every week, I’d read the new story to my classmates. That’s how. As to the nonhuman, or the humanimal mixture, these figures were staples of the Mahabharat and the Ramayan, which were my bedtime stories, mixed in with stories of war, migration, and violence, which is to say, the stories of my mother, a person who had lost her home. BM: In your writing you deal explicitly with what might be considered as the generic contours and expectations of these literatures as a genre (and the acts that characterize movement and migration for particular bodies across space) if we might think of migration literature as a genre

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like “science fiction” with formal contours that can be recognized and challenged: tropes and experiences of inclusion and exclusion, host and guest, inside and outside, etc. What does poetry do (what can poetry do) in a world in which anti-immigrant rhetoric—and the lived, bodily impact of such words—operates on the level of metaphors of exchange and replacement, membranes, borders, blood? How do different forms of speech and literature engage one another? Perhaps we might consider this in relation to How to Wash a Heart, wherein you ask the question, “How do you live when the link/Between creativity/And survival/Can’t easily/Be discerned?” (30) BK: Thank you for your questions, Bellamy. I don’t know. I am not sure that I am writing poetry right now. I’m tracing invective in the archive. Sometimes I dilate then draw, in my notebook, a glitch in Enoch Powell’s syntax. Poetry has become a tool, you could say, something like an archeological tool rather than an activity of form.

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Index1

A Abate, Carmine, 322, 339–351 Abdelrazaq, Leila, 441, 447, 449, 450, 452 Abdile, Hani, 402 Achebe, Chinua, 57, 225 Actor-Network Theory, 221, 228 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, 326, 326n4 Aden, Amal, 79, 80, 82–85, 89 Adriatic Sea, 138, 139 Affect, 9, 10, 16, 134, 136, 137, 146, 177, 179, 205, 206, 210, 211, 213, 280, 428, 459, 463, 477, 505, 506, 512, 541, 554, 573, 593 Afghanistan, 289, 463, 481, 482, 484, 498 Africa, 3–5, 45, 51, 53, 57, 71, 80, 81, 86, 101, 103n17, 134, 139–141, 144, 151, 167, 236, 283, 333, 386, 391, 395, 464, 468, 475, 555–557, 563 African diaspora, 225, 227 See also specific countries Afrofuturism, 226 Agamben, Giorgio, 130, 447, 481

Agbonavbare, Wilfred, 282 Agency, 9, 20, 66, 68, 70, 87, 88, 104, 161, 168, 206, 220, 228, 229, 231–235, 260, 261, 294, 429, 481, 505, 554, 564 Aghoghovwia, Philip, 154 Agriculture, 22, 23, 157, 184, 187 Ahmed, Riz, 222, 289, 298–300, 449, 554 Ahmed, Roda, 80, 84, 86, 87, 89 Ahmed, Sara, 259n6, 543 Ahuja, Neel, 152, 156, 157 Airports, 68, 79, 81, 83, 87, 177, 222, 234n18, 287–292, 294–296, 298–300, 359 Akhmatova, Anna, 375 Alamanya: Welcome to Germany (film), 261 Albania, 138, 139, 342n4 Alduy, Cécile, 39 Algeria, 16, 38, 51n30, 51n32, 53, 54, 54n35, 54n36, 54n38, 86, 297 Al-Ali, Naji, 449 Ali, Sumaya Jirde, 79 Alphen, Ernst van, 447, 451 Althusser, Louis, 220, 290, 300

 Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Stan, C. Sussman (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3

643

644 

INDEX

Amaudruz, Gaston-Armand, 45 Amelie, Maria, 79, 79n2, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88 America, see United States (US) Anastrophe (hyperbaton), 359–361 Anderson, Benedict, 86, 553n3 Anderson, Mark M., 528, 529 Antigone (character), see Farah, Cristina Ali; Sophocles Anti-Semitism, 47, 241, 245, 246, 370, 389 Soviet, 241, 370 Anyuru, Johannes, 78, 80, 81, 85–89 Apartheid, 41, 176, 281, 320, 557 Apocalypticism, 153–156, 158, 163 Apter, Emily, 321 Arbëresh language, 322, 342, 342n4, 343, 347–351 Arendt, Hannah, 87, 132, 143, 206, 207, 211, 213, 220n2, 502 Aristotle, 498, 550 Armenia, 197, 198 Armour, Richard, 528 Arndt, Susan, 235 Asmat: Nomi per tutte le vittime del mare, see Yimer, Dagmawi Aspioti, Myrto, 329, 335 Assimilation, 52, 171, 192, 273, 293, 306, 501, 553n5 Asylum vs. immigration, 563 See also Political migration Atia, Nadia, 534, 538 Attali, Jacques, 417 Attenborough, David, 158 Auchter, Jessica, 573 Augé, Marc, 287, 292 Austen, Jane, 185, 192, 390, 424 Australia, 5, 9, 16, 19–21, 23–31, 113, 114, 186, 311, 323, 372, 397–401, 403, 405, 406 19th July Policy, 398 operation sovereign borders, 405 “pacific solution” policy, 28 Aydemir, Fatma, 221–222, 255, 257, 258n5, 260–262, 261n9, 264 Ayim, May, 225 Azoulay, Ariella, 477 Azure cards, 130

B Babbage, Charles, 415–417 Babel, Isaac, 370, 371 Baccolini, Raffaella, 154n7, 155 Bachelard, Gaston, 73, 74 Baer, Hester, 71n4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 178, 207 Baldwin, Andrew, 20, 154, 163 Baldwin, James, 313, 394, 567 Balfour Declaration, 439 Balibar, Étienne, 288 Ballantyne, Tony, 21, 25 Ballard, J. G., 159, 161–163 Bangladesh, 101, 438–441, 445, 447, 463 Banivanua-Mar, Tracey, 25 Bannon, Steve, 39 Barany, Zoltan, 113 Bardèche, Maurice, 45 Barkve, Marit Ann, 84 Barrès, Maurice, 44 Bathes, Roland, 50 Baudelaire, Charles, 504, 546 Bauman, Zygmunt, 481, 491, 492 Beck, Ulrich, 118, 119 Beckett, Samuel, 511, 517, 518, 525, 546 Beiner, Guy, 556 Benjamin, Walter, 4n3, 6, 172–175, 180, 235, 358 Bennett, Bruce, 228, 483, 485 Berger, John, 17, 61, 63–68, 64n1, 68n2, 69n3, 70, 222, 258, 259, 260n7, 262, 263, 266, 477, 491 and Jean Mohr, 61, 63–68, 64n1, 68n2, 69n3, 70, 222, 258, 259, 260n7, 262, 266 Berghahn, Daniela, 263–265 Bergvall, Caroline, 458, 459, 464–470 Berkeley, George, 499 Berlant, Lauren, 591 Bermúdez, Rubén, 222, 273, 277–283 Bermúdez, Silvia, 271 Bernabé, Jean, et al, 174 Bhabha, Homi, 543 Bier, Jess, 460, 461 Bildungsroman genre, 84 Biller, Maxim, 327n7

 INDEX 

“Blackbirding,” 25 Black Lives Matter movement, 394 Blackness, 174, 274, 276–278, 280–283, 293, 294, 472n8, 485 Blandfort, Julia, 117 Blasim, Hassan, 513, 514, 533–547 Boland, Eavan, 569 Boltanski, Luc, 573 Boochani, Behrouz, 9, 323, 397–406 Border crossing aerial, 79–82 epistemological, 78, 88, 89 symbolic, 17, 85, 89 temporal, 78, 84–87, 89 textual, 78, 88, 89 urban, 79–82 Border poetics, 77–90 Border studies, varieties of, 77 “Border thinking,” 321 “Born translated” concept, 322, 331 Bosnia, 322, 326, 330, 333 Boty, Pauline, 205 Brambilla, Chiara, 77, 87, 444 Branche, Jerome, 271, 275, 276 Brazil, 393, 394 Brecht, Bertolt, 231, 249 Breger, Claudia, 9, 221, 222, 225–238, 330n12, 332, 335n19, 335n20 Brexit, see United Kingdom Brubaker, Roger, 112, 115, 117 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 131, 184, 188–192, 194 Buell, Lawrence, 153 Buettner, Elizabeth, 50n29, 51, 51n30, 51n32, 51n34, 54n35, 54n36, 54n37 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 545, 546 Bureau des migrations pour les départements d’outre-mer (BUMIDOM), 168, 169 Burgess, Anthony, 159 Burgin, Victor, 281 Burgoyne, Robert, 476, 479, 481, 487 Burke, Edmund, 197 Bush, George W., 292, 345 Butler, Judith, 258, 505, 538n5, 559

645

C Cacciari, Massimo, 562, 563 Callus, Ivan, 202, 211 Calvino, Italo, 545 Calvo Buezas, Tomás, 275, 276 Camacho, Alicia S., 554n6 Camerarius, Rudolph, 193 Camus, Albert, 545, 547 Camus, Renaud, 37, 37n3, 38, 38n5, 56 Canada, 188, 306, 307, 310, 311, 388 Capital, see Labor Capitalism, 2, 4, 26, 33, 62, 64–66, 204, 276, 291, 410, 513, 514, 528, 544n7, 564, 571, 574 “fossil capitalism,” 154, 154n6, 158 Capuano, Leonardo, 143 Carnival, 177–178 Carr, John Dickson, 392 Carrington, Leonora, 322, 355, 362–365 “Carrying capacity” concept, 155, 156, 160 Casablanca (film), 71, 72 Castillo, Debra A., 87 Catherine the Great, 369, 380 Cavarero, Adriana, 145 Caygill, Howard, 358 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 518, 530 Celan, Paul, 341, 513, 514, 519 Cell phones, 7, 10, 177, 476, 481, 482 Centenary (RTÉ concert), 568n1 Centre for the Documentation and Museum of Migration (DOMiD), 256, 256n2 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 164 Chandler, Robert, 371 Chang, Chenguang, 277 Chao, Sophie, 207 Chaplin, Charlie, 55 Charlie Hebdo (journal), 289, 396 Cheng, Anne A., 553, 553n5 Chesney, George, 26 Chiellino, Gino, 340–342, 342n3, 351 China, 24, 25, 101, 139, 167, 301 Cho, Lilly, 113 Chouliaraki, Lilie, 483 Christensen, Inger, 514, 515, 570, 573–575, 577, 581

646 

INDEX

Chute, Hilary, 440, 441, 443, 452 Cioran, E. M., 545, 546 Citation, aesthetics of, 107 Citizenship, 20, 28, 30, 47, 108, 168, 221, 222, 226, 255, 257–260, 262, 264–267, 288, 301, 320, 328, 389, 439, 442, 446, 481, 534, 561, 563, 568 “literary citizenship,” 341 Ciuciu, Anina, 18, 118–122 Clark, Bruce, 438 Clash, the, 506 Climate change and migration “cli-fi” novels, 27 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 557 Cohen, Leonard, 297, 365, 366 Cole, Teju, 219 Collini, Stefan, 462 Collins, Wilkie, 416, 425–428 Colonialism and colonization, 5, 16, 19–33 decolonization, 3, 5, 52, 86, 406, 437, 501 France and, 17 investment theory of, 24 Italy and, 140n3, 141, 385–387, 393, 556 neocolonialism, 65 resource extraction, 154, 156 settler colonies, 5, 16, 19–33 Spain, 274 Columbus, Christopher, 273, 387 Colvin, Sarah, 227, 228, 237 Comics and graphic novels, 2, 436, 437, 437n2, 447, 449–451 Congo, 31, 43, 44 Conrad, Joseph, 42, 44n10, 46, 57, 518, 531 Conspiracy theories, 42, 49n25, 485 Constandinides, Costas, 100 Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos, 49n26 “Contact zone” concept, 320 Corneille, Pierre, 175 Cosby Show, The, 281 Cosmopolitanism, 116n9, 119, 294 “cosmopolitan gaze,” 19 Costa, Michael, 421, 421n2

COVID-19 pandemic, 462 Creoleness (and creolization), 131, 167–180 Croatia, 95, 96, 114, 333 “Cultural domain” concept, 257, 266 Cultural studies, 77, 134 Curzon, George Nathaniel, Lord, 437n3 Cuvier, Georges, 193 Cyprus, 3, 9, 18, 95–105, 98n5, 100n9, 100n10, 101n12, 107–109 D Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 389 Darcy, Ailbhe, 511, 514, 569–578, 580, 581 De Bruyn, Ben, 160, 162 De Certeau, Michel, 288, 295 De Gaulle, Charles, 174 De Lucca, Erri, 141 De Michelis, Lidia, 142 Defoe, Daniel, 183, 184 Dehumanization, 57, 228 See also Migrants, metaphors for Del Boca, Angelo, 140n3, 386, 387 Deleuze, Gilles, 118, 171, 353–356, 355n4, 365 with Félix Guattari, 118, 171 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 154 Demetriou, Olga, 102, 102n14 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 81, 340, 349, 356, 497, 501, 502 Dewitte, Philippe, 168 Diamond, Terry, 487 “Diaspora” term, 112, 117 Dickens, Charles, 230, 416, 418, 424 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 479 Douglas, Mary, 392 Drayluk, Boris, 322, 369–383 Dreyfus, Alfred, 44, 44n13, 45, 47 Driant, Émile-Cyprien, 45 Driver, Tom F., 517 Drumont, Edouard, 45 DuBois, W. E. B., 107 Duffy, Carol Ann, 463 Dystopian literature, 153, 154n7, 155n8, 159–163

 INDEX 

E Eastern European turn, 330 East India Company (EIC), 184, 186, 194, 196 Egalitarianism, 56 Ehrlich, Paul, 158 Eipe, Nidhi Zak/Aria, 38n4, 512, 514, 569, 570, 576–581, 581n2 El-Enany, Nadine, 588 Ellis, Vladislav, 380–383 Emancipation, 6, 17, 66, 67, 69, 75, 120, 255 Émïn, Joseph, 194, 196–199, 261, 264, 265 Empathy, 146, 243–248, 253, 264, 313, 467, 479, 481, 500, 507, 514, 553, 561, 570 Engels, Friedrich, 523, 524 England, see United Kingdom Enlightenment ideology, 49 Environmental movement, 156 Eritrea, 140, 395, 463, 469, 555 Ethiopia, 140, 315, 386, 459 Eurocentrism, 243, 250, 251 European Union (EU), 2, 2n1, 3, 18, 96–99, 101, 101n11, 101n12, 102, 102n16, 108, 112, 116, 135–137, 152, 203, 234, 498 Evans, Kate, 435–437, 449, 452 Evaporating Borders (film), 18, 95–97, 100–109, 101n11 Evaristo, Bernardine, 391 Evaristo, Conceição, 394 Exodus: Our Journey to Europe (miniseries), 483 “Experiential blindness,” 105 F Fall of Constantinople, 46, 49n26 Family of Man, The (exhibit), 480 Fanon, Frantz, 6n4, 52, 55, 56, 131, 177, 222, 276, 280, 282, 293, 294 Farah, Cristina Ali, 390, 394, 513, 514, 553, 560–564, 560n8 Farbotko, Carol, 19 Farrokhzad, Athena, 4–6, 17, 52, 79, 86, 87 Fazili, Hassan, 481, 482, 484, 487

647

Fenn, George Manville, 428–431, 430n4 Ferrat, Jean, 175, 179 Ferry, Jules, 50 Fibonacci sequence, 514, 515, 570, 575, 580, 581 Fielding, Henry, 184, 194, 195 Figure and figuration, 62 Fiji, 25 Filippi, Francesco, 386, 387 Film noir, 71, 72 Finland, 9, 79, 115, 388, 513, 533–535 Fiskio, Janet, 159 Flee (film), 479, 491 Flood, Christopher, 38–41, 49n25, 50, 50n28 Fludernik, Monika, 261n8, 264, 266 Forced displacement, 130, 139, 167, 225–238, 437, 440, 441, 451, 452, 570 Forensic Architecture, 465, 466, 468 Fortress Europe, 142n5, 488, 535 Foucault, Michel, 522 Fox, Julia, 296 France colonialism and imperialism by, 274 far right in, 17, 40, 41, 51 French Revolution, 45 hijab and burqa bans in, 288 “race” concept in, 17, 47 See also Replacement theory Franco, Francisco, 222, 272, 273 Franklin, Seb, 417 Franz, Philomena, 119n12 French Antilles, 167 Frenk, Marina, 221, 242, 243, 249–253, 250n9, 250n10 Freud, Sigmund (and Freudianism), 66, 355n4, 364n11, 550, 551 Frey, Hugo, 38, 39, 50 Frost, Robert, 313, 315 Fukuyama, Francis, 70 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 491, 492 Galbraith, Janet, 9, 323, 397–406 Gallenga, Antonio, 419, 420 Gallien, Claire, 9, 349, 512–514, 578 Gana, Nouri, 543

648 

INDEX

Gandhi, Mahatma, 46, 304 Gannibal, Abram, 459 García, Edgar, 354n2, 364 García, Ofelia, 321, 348 García, Yeison, 277 Gardner, Jared, 441, 443 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 424, 428 Gatrell, Peter, 3, 53–54, 54n35 Gatti, Fabrizio, 143, 144 Gellner, Ernest, 278 Gerehou, Moha, 222, 273, 277–279, 283 Germany Germanesi, 342, 343, 348, 349 “guest workers” in, 222, 256, 326, 340 Nazism, 71, 220, 220n2, 232n14, 233, 236 Ghana, 221, 225–227, 236 Ghosh, Sukanya, 447–449 Ghosh, Vishwajyoti, 441, 445, 452 Gilgamesh, 459, 461 Gill, Romeo, 80–83, 85, 86, 88, 89 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 159, 430 Gilroy, Paul, 6n4, 51n34, 226n4, 227n9, 276, 299, 553 Girmay, Aracelis, 458–460, 469–471 Gissing, George, 426–428 Glissant, Édouard, 131, 167, 169, 171, 175–177, 180, 364 Globalization, 49, 50n28, 63, 70, 86, 115, 116, 116n9, 119, 292, 319, 410, 491, 502, 503, 505 Goldberg, Jim, 586 Gone with the Wind (film), 392 Goodall, Jane, 158 “Good” vs. “bad” immigrants The Good Immigrant (anthology), 298 Graham, Helen, 273 Graphic novels, see Comics and graphic novels Greece, 80, 88, 103, 108, 140n2, 437, 438, 440–444, 482, 501, 504, 555 See also Cyprus Greene, Graham, 312 Grjasnowa, Olga, 221, 242, 243, 246n7, 247–250, 325, 326, 336 Grossberg, Lawrence, 134 Guantanamo Bay, 130

Gumilyov, Nikolay, 374, 375n3 Güngör, Dilek, 222, 257, 260, 261 Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 389 Gutierrez, Miren, 466 Gypsies, see Roma (Romani people) H Hailsham, Quintin Hogg, Baron, 588 Hall, Stuart, 134, 257, 267 Hamid, Mohsin, 219, 222, 289, 291, 292, 300 Haptic visuality, 443, 446 Hardin, Garrett, 156–158 Harrison, Harry, 159 Härting, Heike, 543 Hartman, Saidiya, 274 Hasan, M., 447, 448 Hate crimes, 271–273, 274n7, 275, 277, 278, 290–291 Havarie (film), 485–488, 492 Hayek, Salma, 542, 543 Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl), 515, 535 Heaney, Seamus, 462 Heidegger, Martin, 503 Heidemann, Birte, 203, 204 Hemingway, Ernest, 586 Herrmann, Elisabeth, 328 Heterolingualism, 349 Heteronormativity, 264, 265 Historicity, sense of, 70 Hodkinson, James, 328 Hogarth, William, 131, 184, 188, 190–194, 198, 199 Holocaust, 6, 119n12, 220, 221, 232n14, 233, 246, 246n7, 249, 263, 440, 514, 519, 570 “Home” concept, 107 Homelessness, 113, 194, 512, 517 Hospitality, 136, 142, 195, 208, 212, 213, 412, 479, 481, 490, 497–507, 562, 586 “Hostile environment,” 8, 129, 133–146, 164, 184, 201–213 UK policy on, 154, 160 Hot spots, 140, 140n2, 142, 151 Houellebecq, Michel, 38 Howard, John, 398

 INDEX 

Hughes, Robert, 29 Hughes, Rowland, 153 Humanitarianism, 205, 246, 247, 364, 478 Humboldt Forum, 236 Huntington, Samuel, 46n19 Hussain, Khalid, 78, 84, 85 I Ibn Rashiq, 577 Ibsen, Henrik, 84, 545, 546 Identitarianism, 38n5 Identité (journal), 39, 50n28 Imitation of Life (film), 392 Immigrants, see Migrants, metaphors for Immigration Removal Centres (IRC), 202, 208, 209, 211 Incorporation, 43, 44, 74, 183, 184, 188, 192, 198, 295, 300, 551 India partition of, 411, 435–453 Raspail and, 46 Roma and, 111 Indochina, 16, 38, 50, 51n30, 53 Innis, Harold, 409, 410, 412 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 152, 158 International Organization for Migration, 112 Interpellation, 220, 222, 287–301 Intersectionality, 82, 84, 321, 322 Invasion fiction, 56 Invasion novel genre, 21, 26 Invasion trope, 16, 32 Iran, 301 Iraq, 100n10, 106, 289, 295, 513, 533–540, 591 Ireland (and Irish identity), 114, 186, 187, 227, 466, 514, 515, 567–570, 568n1, 576 Islamophobia, see Muslims (and Islamophobia) Isolationism, 160, 161, 163 Italy Italian-language, 322 Italian organ grinders, 411, 415, 418, 420–422, 421n3, 428, 430, 430n4, 431

649

See also Lampedusa Ivanov, Georgy, 373, 374, 382 J Jackson, Michael, 281, 282, 482 Jameson, Frederic, 37n2, 155 Japan, 27, 30, 222, 303, 307, 312, 315, 440 Jean-Baptiste, Lucien, 131, 167–180 Johnson, Bruce, 417 Jonsson, Stefan, 481 Joseph’s carpentry tools will bring. The linear, 189 Joyce, James, 518, 545 Jue, Melody, 412, 460, 461, 471 K Kafka, Franz, 512, 513, 519–522, 526, 528, 529, 545 Kallifatides, Theodor, 78 Kan, Djarah, 394 Kana, Aviva, 361 Kanaky/New Caledonia, 25 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 192, 305, 491, 501, 503 Kapil, Bhanu, 9, 515, 585–594 Karim, Nasim, 80, 84 Keenan, Thomas, 466 Kemal, Yaşar, 263 Kenya, 80, 88, 315 Khemiri, Jonas Hassen, 78–80, 83, 85–89 Khider, Abbas, 546, 546n10 Khouma, Pap, 142, 390 Kinship, 8, 42, 131, 183–199, 223, 237, 306, 313–315, 459, 464, 466, 520, 554 Koegler, Caroline, 203 Kolb, Anjuli Raza, 290 Komporaly, Josefina, 518 Kongslien, Ingeborg, 78, 83 Koppel, Thomas, 468 Krasznahorkai, László, 545, 547 Kundera, Milan, 513, 518 Kurdi, Alan/Kurdi, Aylan, 136, 458, 573, 575, 580 Kurkov, Andrey, 371

650 

INDEX

L Labor capital’s relation to, 22 Locke on, 23 migrant labor, 22, 32, 63, 64n1, 255 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 341 Lai, Larissa, 586 Lampedusa, 130, 135, 138, 140–144, 457–459, 463, 465, 468, 475, 476, 558 Lanchester, John, 153, 159–164 Landy, Patrick, 570 Laursen, Eric, 373 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 38, 39, 39n7, 49, 49n27, 50n28 Le Pen, Marine, 38, 39, 39n7, 297 Leech, John, 421–425 Lefranc, Didier, 50n28, 51n33 Lenin, Vladimir, 45, 523–525 Leogrande, Alessandro, 139 Levine, Suzanne Jill, 361 Lewis, Marvin, 277 Li Wei, 321, 348 Liminality, 84–86, 287, 431 Linkola, Pentti, 158 Linna, Väinö, 545, 547 Linnaeus, Carl, 192, 193 Liquid Traces (film), 465 “Literariness” defined, 114n5 Locke, John, 22, 23 Loraux, Nicole, 549, 550, 556 Lotman, Juri, 78 Louis, Bernard, 45 Lovelace, Ada, 227 Lovelock, James, 158, 160 Low, Nic (Ngāi Tahu), 17, 21, 32, 33 Löytty, Olli, 534 Lucarelli, Carlo, 141 Lucashenko, Melissa, 400, 403 Lukács, Georg, 234n17, 511, 517 Lunde, Maja, 153, 159, 162–164 Lustgarten, Ander, 138 M Mackay, Kenneth, 21, 26, 27 Macron, Emmanuel, 54n38, 297 Magical realism, 226 Maiques, Carlos, 360 Malm, Andreas, 154n6, 155–157, 160

Malthus, Thomas Robert, 157 Manea, Norman, 513, 514, 519 Manus Island, 323, 397–399, 404 Marafioti, Oksana, 18, 118–122 Marcianno, Francesca, 341 Maritime media, 461, 462 Martinelli, Marco, 139, 143, 144 Marx, Karl, 21, 523, 524 Marxism, 61, 523–525 Mashinski, Irina, 371 Massa, Giuseppe, 513–514, 560–562, 560n8 Mathieu, Mireille, 175 Mauceri, Maria Cristina, 343 May, Theresa, 129, 130, 201 Mayblin, Lucy, 208 Mbembe, Achille, 40, 46, 48, 49n27, 140, 227, 228, 232n14 Mbomío Rubio, Lucía Asué, 222, 273 McAllister, Annemarie, 420, 421 McDougall, Kirsten, 16, 20, 21, 27–29, 31 McLenan, John, 426, 427 McMurtry, Aine, 465, 467n7, 468 Mediterranean Sea crossings, 140 Mare Nostrum, 137, 463 See also Maritime media Mehr, Mariella, 18, 118, 119, 121, 122 Melancholia, 512, 514, 549–564 Melandri, Francesca, 386, 387 Memory (culture/work) memory setbacks, 550 “mnemonic solidarity,” 266 Mengiste, Maaza, 386, 387 Mercer, Kobena, 299, 299n6 Méritens, Patrice de, 46, 46n19 Merkel, Angela, 476 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 499 Merolla, Daniela, 117 Metafiction, 89, 357n5 Meuse, Pierre de, 50, 50n28, 51 Mexico, 73, 311, 353, 357, 362 Mezzadra, Sandro, 77, 134, 140, 288, 544, 544n7 Mignolo, Walter, 321 Migrantization (and “migrantized” subjects), 256n3 “Migrant literature” concept, 117 Migrants, metaphors for, 15, 20, 26, 31, 37, 39–41, 43, 44n11, 45, 48, 52,

 INDEX 

54, 63, 71, 100n10, 103, 103n17, 118, 122, 139, 141, 168, 170, 175, 196, 225, 226n7, 227, 242, 245, 246, 258, 261n10, 271, 275, 289, 297, 299, 305–308, 311, 315, 372, 411, 421, 426, 459, 485, 552n1, 553, 556, 557, 560, 561, 563, 579, 588, 593 Migration economic vs. political, 61, 62 mobility vs., 7, 88, 116, 480 motives for, 24 “Migration with Dignity” plan, 28 Migratory movement, 61, 62, 64, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 250, 251 Mill, James, 23, 305 Miller, Henri, 545, 546 Miller, J. Hillis, 57 Minoritization, 112 Mitchell, W. J. T., 281 Mobility, 2, 5–7, 10, 11, 15, 17, 18, 21, 23, 31, 80, 102, 108, 112, 115, 116n9, 118, 121, 122, 134, 146, 152, 157, 163, 164, 184, 186–189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197–199, 220, 227–229, 236–238, 287, 290, 300, 319–322, 343, 348–350, 410, 416, 418, 429–431, 461, 479, 481, 551, 552, 557 Mohr, Jean, 61 See also Berger, John Moleta, Clare, 20 Monicelli, Mario, 391 Monk, Geraldine, 458, 459, 461–463, 465, 469, 470, 472 Monolingualism, 319, 320, 341, 345n8, 349 Morante, Elsa, 391 Morey, Peter, 288 Morgan, Tony, 272 Morocco, 51n30, 53, 54n35, 297, 488, 502 Morris, Adalaide, 466, 468, 469 Morrison, Toni, 225 Moten, Fred, 228, 545n9 Mrovlje, Maša, 207, 210 Mubarak, Adnan al-, 513, 535, 536, 544, 546

651

Müller, Herta, 513, 514, 518, 530 Multiculturalism, 116n9, 176, 271, 292, 298, 310 in Canada, 310 Multiethnolects, 83 Multilingualism, 100, 105–107, 114, 123, 320, 325, 336, 343, 348 Myths, political, 17, 39–41, 57 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 372 Naficy, Hamid, 101, 104–106, 106n21 Nail, Thomas, 15 Naipaul, V. S., 223, 304, 305, 307, 309, 311, 312 Nan, Moataz, 504 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 512 Nationalism (and ethno-nationalism) “green nationalism,” 155, 156 Nativism, 40 Nauru, 28, 323, 398, 399, 401, 403, 404 Nayar, Pramod K., 446 N’Diaye, Mandiaye, 139, 168 Neilson, Brett, 77, 134, 140, 346n9, 544, 544n7 Neoliberalism, 63 Neubauer, John, 521 New Keywords Collective, 137, 478 New Zealand, 5, 9, 16, 19–21, 23–29, 38n4, 45n15, 113, 186, 398, 580, 593 Māori in, 16, 21, 29, 32 Nichols, Bill, 477 Nicolini, Giusi, 141 Nielson, Brett, 288 9/11 attacks, 292 1951 Refugee Convention, 20, 129, 152, 208, 249 Nkamani, Paul, 488, 491 Noiriel, Gérard, 47, 53 “Nomad” term, 117 Nora, Pierre, 84, 556 Norway, 9, 79–83, 81n3, 85–88, 90, 153, 162, 391, 459 Notaras, Loukas, 49, 49n26

652 

INDEX

O Obama, Barack, 311 Obert, Julia, 581, 581n2 O’Callaghan, Conor, 569 Oceans and communication, see Maritime media Odesa, 322, 369–371 Orbán, Katlin, 443 Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), 38 Orientalism, 291, 297 Origins, 325 Osman, Wazhmah, 476, 479, 491, 492 Otherness, 97, 116n9, 179, 276n8, 280, 328, 331, 349, 364n12, 389, 478, 481, 490, 501, 505 Otoo, Sharon Dodua, 221, 222, 225–238 Özdamar, Sevgi, 333n15 P Pacific Islands, 19, 25, 398 Pakistan (and Pakistani immigrants), 78, 299, 289, 288, 291, 294, 295, 296, 298, 299, 439, 440, 441, 445 Palestine, 100, 411, 435–453, 543 Pamuk, Orhan, 223, 304 Papadakis, Yiannis, 99n6, 100, 103 Papadopoulos, Theodoros, 441, 442, 444, 452 Papastefanou, Fotis, 441, 442, 444, 452 Papua New Guinea, 25, 28, 397, 401 Parati, Graziella, 340, 341, 343, 551 Parenti, Chistian, 152, 153 Parry, Jason, 460, 461, 465 Patel, Priti, 588 Paull, Emily, 20 Peel Commission, 439 Pérez Matos, Lucrecia, 271, 274–283 Perfecta, 175, 179 “Persona Grata” (exhibit), 412, 497, 499, 501, 503, 507 Peters, John Durham, 460, 461, 469, 470 Petersen, Anne Ring, 329 Peterson, Brent O., 327n5, 329, 330n10 Peter the Great, 369, 459 Petzold, Christian, see Transit (film)

Pfister, Manfred, 431 Picker, John, 417 PoLiKunst movement, 340, 342 Political migration, see Migration, economic vs. political Political prisoners, 512 Ponzanesi, Sandra, 117 Poplavsky, Boris, 372, 372n2 Population exchanges, 411, 435–453 Population growth (and overpopulation), 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 163 Postcolonialism/post-colonialism, 116, 385, 555 “Postmigrant condition,” 329 “Postmigration” term, 329 Post-nation writing (cosmopolitan literature), 118–123 Pötzsch, Holger, 87 Pound, Ezra, 518 Powell, Enoch, 56, 308, 515, 588, 589, 594 Pratt, Mary Louise, 320, 321 Pretense, 73, 74 Preuss, Jakob, 488–491 Proletarization, 64 Prosa, Lina, 140, 144, 145 Proust, Marcel, 174–177, 517 Punch (magazine), 421–425 Purple Sea (film), 485 Q Queerness, 167–180 Quran, 295, 512, 580 R Rabinowich, Julya, 221, 241–247, 253 Racism anti-Asian, 16 color lines, 557 French, 46 raspail and, 47 scientific, 47 See also Apartheid; Invasion fiction Radivojevic, Iva, see Evaporating Borders (film) Radzyner, Tamar, 245, 247 Ramirez, Enrique, 540

 INDEX 

Rana, Junaid, 290 Rancière, Jacques, 89, 412, 507 Rangan, Pooja, 477, 478, 483, 492 Rasmussen, Sara Azmeh, 81–83, 85 Raspail, Jean, 17, 37–57, 49n26, 55n39 Rastamji, Nowroji, 184, 194, 196, 198 Ray, John, 192, 193 Reagan, Ronald, 46n19 Redrobe, Karen, 476, 479, 491, 492 Reeves, William Pember, 25, 26 Refugee Film, 475–492 Refugee Tales (anthologies), 132, 138 Reid, Alec, 517 Remarque, Erich Maria, 249 Remigration, 38, 45, 51 Replacement theory, 17, 44, 103 Resmini, Mauro, 69n3 Restitution, 235, 236, 238 Reynier, Alain, 117n10 Ricardo, David, 23 Rigby, Kate, 153 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 512n1 Rivera Garza, Cristina, 322, 353–366, 365n14 Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers, 111, 113 Robbins, Denise, 19–20 Robertson, Aaron, 386, 393, 395 Robertson, Thomas, 159 Roca Lizarazu, Maria, 8, 221, 251, 252 Rodriguez, Richard, 311 Rohmer, Eric, 175 Roma (Romani people), 18, 97, 111–122, 111n1, 111n2, 114n4, 114n6, 116n8, 196 Romania, 9, 112, 114, 115, 120, 518–520, 527, 528 Rosello, Mireille, 77, 82, 170, 502 Rosi, Gianfranco, 475–477, 487, 490 Ross, Catriona, 27 Ross, Eric B., 157 Rossi, Ernesto, 135 Rossipal, Christian, 476, 478, 483, 485, 491 Rothberg, Michael, 6, 220n1, 221, 228, 232n14, 246n7, 257, 260–266, 452 Roy, Arundhati, 404 Roy, Haimanti, 445 Rulfo, Juan, 362, 545

653

Rushdie, Salman, 223, 304 Russia, 3, 9, 45, 70, 102, 114, 120, 196, 241, 242n2, 251, 322, 325, 369–371, 375, 375n3, 376, 380, 383, 419, 522n5 Russian Jewish emigration, 241 Rutka, Anna, 328n8, 335n20 Rwanda, 588 S Saada, Emmanuelle, 47, 47n20 Sabnani, Nina, 445, 446 Sadoon, Ghassan, 107 Safran, William, 113 Said, Edward, 16, 97, 322, 373, 514, 518, 519, 541 Salgado, Sebastião, 480 Salzmann, Sasha Marianna, 221, 242, 243, 249–253, 252n11 Samoyault, Tiphaine, 500 Sánchez, Antonio, 273 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 358 Sandrock, Kristen, 160, 161 Sarkis, 504 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 54n38, 116n8 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 47, 55, 55n39, 545, 546 Satterthwaite, David, 158 Scego, Igiaba, 9, 322, 323, 385, 386, 513–515, 514n3, 552, 554, 554n7, 555, 557, 563, 564 “Schizophrenic” cultures, 273 Schmitt, Carl, 130, 553n3 Schofield, Benedict, 328 Schramm, Moritz, 329 Sciego, Carlo, 141 Science fiction (speculative fiction), 43, 514, 515, 535, 546, 594 Scientific naturalism, 183–199 Scola, Ettore, 391 Scott, James C., 22, 54n38 “Seafarer, The” (anonymous), 459, 466–468, 562 Sebald, W. G., 220 Second-person narration, 261n8, 264, 266 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 178, 231, 233 Sedira, Zineb, 505

654 

INDEX

Segato, Rita, 353–356, 354n1, 358, 361, 364, 365 Seghers, Anna, 71, 219, 249 Sellman, Johanna, 535 Selvon, Samuel, 223, 306, 307 Serralongue, Bruno, 504 Settler colonies, see Colonialism and colonization Shaheen, Jack G., 577 Shakar, Zeshan, 80, 83 Shakespeare, William, 161, 304, 471 Shamsie, Kamila, 222, 289, 294, 295, 297, 300 Sharif, Gulraiz, 79, 83–85, 89 Shaw, Kristian, 203 Sheller, Mimi, 152 Shire, Warsan, 487 Shklovsky, Viktor, 231 Sibhatu, Ribka, 457, 458, 469 Sidibé, Abou Bakar, 475, 476, 482, 483, 487 Sikhs, 290, 291, 299 Similarity, 243 Simmel, Georg, 78, 84 Singer, Peter, 49n24 Skaranger, Maria Navarro, 80, 83 Slavery, 5, 6, 30, 48, 112, 160, 167, 168, 228, 237, 274, 276, 387, 515, 554, 556 Smets, Kevin, 410, 411 Smith, Ali, 131, 132, 169, 201–213 Smith, Charles Manby, 420, 422 Smith-Prei, Carrie, 328 Smuggling Hendrix (film), 99 Soanes, Zeb, 462 Solomon Islands, 25 Somalia, 79, 82, 140, 289, 386, 388, 389, 391, 393–396, 401, 463, 556, 557 Sommer, Doris, 320, 321 Sontag, Susan, 3, 477, 478, 485, 490, 492 Sophocles, 513, 553, 560–563 Southern Europe, 63, 162, 391, 552 Soviet Union, see Russia Soylent Green (film), 159

Spain, 5, 9, 41, 54n35, 63, 113–115, 163, 167, 222, 271–283, 312, 374, 391, 555 “de-Africanization,” in, 277 Spinelli, Altiero, 135 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 543 Sponza, Lucio, 419, 421, 422 Stalin, Joseph, 523, 524, 527, 530 Stanišić, Saša, 322, 325–337 State violence, 71, 262, 272 Stead, Victoria, 25 Steinberg, Philip, 465 Stereotypes, 46, 106, 120, 138, 146, 170, 171, 179, 420, 568, 577 Stewart, Lizzie, 257, 261, 262, 265 Stojka, Ceija, 119n12 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 205–207 Stora, Benjamin, 54n38 Storytelling “re-storying,” 440, 441, 445 in Smith, 202, 205–207 Sunak, Rishi, 310 Surrealism, 372, 513, 535, 546 Sussman, Charlotte, 9, 157, 397, 411, 412 Sussman, Henry, 522 Sweden, 41, 78–80, 83, 89, 90, 158, 308, 388, 535, 537, 539 Syria, 1, 18, 79, 82, 100n10, 248, 249, 252, 289, 447, 463, 534, 535, 539, 541 T Taberner, Stuart, 246, 248, 249, 327n6, 328, 329 Taguieff, Pierre-André, 38 Takku Ligey Théátre, 139 Tanzania, 80, 81, 88, 89 Tarrant, Brenton, 38n4 Tertz, Abram, 45n16 Thiel, Peter, 28 Third World concept, 41, 43, 51n33, 54, 55 This Side, That Side (anthology), 441, 445–449, 452

 INDEX 

Thompson, Tulia, 20 Thousand and One Nights, The, 515, 535, 542 Toasijé, Antumi, 277 Toninato, Paola, 113, 117, 118 Toth, Hayley G., 10, 206 Tournefort, Joseph, 192, 193 Transit (film), 17, 61–75, 71n4, 219, 249 “Translanguaging,” 321, 348, 349 Transnationalism, 114, 116n9, 123, 328, 329 Treaty of Lausanne, 438, 439 Treaty of Rome, 344 Treaty of Waitangi, 29 Trudeau, Pierre, 310 Trump, Donald, 287, 298, 540, 546 Truss, Liz, 310 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 375, 377, 378, 381, 382 Turkey, 63, 96, 100n10, 103, 104, 115, 248, 252, 255, 260, 261, 345, 437, 438, 440, 458, 482, 502 Turner, Victor, 85 2015 migration “crisis,” 89 U Uganda, 80, 81, 86, 588 Ugarte, Michael, 276 Ukraine, 2n1, 9, 102, 102n16, 136, 242n2, 250, 322, 370, 371, 380, 381, 498 United Kingdom (UK), 3, 29, 114, 183, 184, 186–188, 194, 196, 203, 204, 221, 226, 227, 230, 234, 298, 304–308, 311, 312, 419, 461, 589, 593 class distinctions in, 425 in 18th century, 186 European Union membership referendum (Brexit), 201, 203, 204 street music in, 418 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 30

655

United States (US), 5, 6, 22, 112, 120, 156, 167, 273, 283, 288, 307, 310, 315, 354, 372, 419, 555, 557, 587 imperialism of, 292 Iyer on, 223 Universalism, 48n23, 49, 49n27, 236, 297, 480 Utlu, Deniz, 222, 257, 258, 258n5, 259n6, 260, 261n9, 261n10, 262, 266n11 Utopianism, 155 V Vagrancy, 186, 187, 195 Valeri, Franca, 392 Vallejo, César, 361, 362 Valsiner, Jaan, 146 Vanuatu, 25 Veille, Frédéric, 121 Venuti, Lawrence, 342, 349 Verstummung term, 339–351 Vertlib, Vladimir, 221, 241–247, 253 Victimization and victimhood, 103, 246n7 Vincendeau, Ginette, 170, 171 Vişniec, Matei, 512–514, 517–531 Visual ethics, 478 Vitti, Monica, 392 Vivan, Itala, 138, 142 W Wagner, Brigitta, 486 Wagner, Erica, 205 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 21–24, 26 Walcott, Derek, 223, 304, 309, 312, 471 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 116, 225, 321, 322, 331–337, 534 War on Terror, 154, 288, 289, 295, 299, 300 Weiwei, Ai, 479, 481 Weizman, Eyal, 466 Wells, H. G., 545, 546 Wennersten, John R., 20 Wheeler, Pat, 153

656 

INDEX

Whitehead, Colson, 394 White supremacy, 272, 402, 588, 589 White Australia policy, 26, 400 Whyte, Kyle, 154 Williams, Gavin, 417 Williams, Raymond, 134 Wilson, Rita, 341, 350 Wilson, Rohan, 16, 20, 21, 27–29 Woolf, Virginia, 225n2 Wright, Alexis, 155n9 Writing Through Fences project, 399 Wu Ming, 141 Wynter, Sylvia, 277 Y Yazell, Bryan, 21 Yeats, William Butler, 571, 572

Yildiz, Yasemin, 257, 260, 262–266, 336, 336n22, 336n23, 339 Yimer, Dagmawi, 142, 485, 513, 514, 552, 558, 559, 563, 564 Yugoslavia, 3, 18, 63, 68, 96, 100, 330, 333 Z Zahid, Sarah, 80, 83 Zahova, Sophia, 114, 114n6, 115, 119, 119n12 Zaimoglu, Feridun, 333n15 Zamora, Francisco, 275–277 Zemmour, Eric, 38 Zetkin Collective, 155–157, 160 Zingg, Robert, 590 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 371