Diasporic Subjectivity and Cultural Brokering in Contemporary Post-Colonial Literatures

DIASPORIC SUBJECTIVITY AND CULTURAL BROKERING IN CONTEMPORARY POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES

edited by

Ig o r M ave r

Diasporic Subjectivity and Cultural Brokering in Contemporary Post-Colonial Literatures

Diasporic Subjectivity and Cultural Brokering in Contemporary Post-Colonial Literatures Edited by Igor Maver

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diasporic subjectivity and cultural brokering in contemporary post-colonial literatures / edited by Igor Maver. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2970-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-2972-2 (e-book) 1. Commonwealth literature (English)—Minority authors—History and criticism. 2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. Immigrants in literature. 4. Ethnicity in literature. 5. Subjectivity in literature. 6. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Maver, Igor. PR9080.5.D53 2009 820.9—dc22 2009004315 Printed in the United States of America

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For my family

Contents

Introduction: Positioning Diasporic Literary Cultures Igor Maver 1 “Not Belonging, but Longing”: Shifts of Emphasis in Contemporary Diasporic Writing in English Canada Coral Ann Howells

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2 Canadian New Diasporic Writing and Transnational/Borderland Literary Identities Igor Maver

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3 The Diaspora Writes Back: Cultural Memory and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Smaro Kamboureli

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4 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience Timothy Weiss 5 Between the Island and the City: Cultural Brokerage in Caribbean-Canadian Short Fiction Carmen Birkle 6 The Child of New Norcia: Alf Taylor’s Poetry Susan Ballyn 7 The Englishness of Maori Writing Melissa Kennedy 8 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe: Trauma, the Law, and the Internet Chantal Zabus vii

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59 91 101

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9 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater Giulio Marra

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10 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism: How to Exploit Diaspora and Live Happily Ever After Silvia Albertazzi

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Introduction

This book brings to light ten essays that are focused on a major issue in contemporary post-colonial studies, that is, diasporic literary identities in individual post-colonial locales and societies: Canada, the Caribbean, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Africa, and New Zealand. They analyze and show the many complex ways in which contemporary diasporic writers in English use their medium to broker, affiliate and translate the places, peoples, cultures and languages to work through the ethical, political and affective ambivalences of diasporic identities. Diasporic writing simultaneously asserts a sense of belonging to the locality in which post-colonial subjects have grown up, and, at the same time, expresses the specificity of the actual historical experience of being “ethnic” in a particular society of immigration. As far as the literary texts discussed here, instead of writing back, one can perhaps rather speak of some sort of literary migrating back to their emitive home countries during the colonial expansion or migrating between individual post-colonial countries (e.g., to Canada). The term post-colonial, despite its great currency, must be used with caution and not too loosely, with a clear distinction to be made as to its historical, on the one hand, and an ahistorical use on the other (Maver 2006). The same kind of aesthetic and critical vulnerability pertains to the concept of diasporic literature itself, which should not be ascribed full stability and long-lasting value unless its chronology is fully limited. At the beginning of the new millennium a new phase of mass movements of people creating new diasporas, border(land)s, transcultural and transnational identities has been emerging globally. These new displacements and new border crossings have clearly created new diasporic discourses (Stratton and Ang). Of course, diaspora defined as a dispersal and consequent settlement of people on a given territory, too, can perhaps be seen, alongside ix

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post-colonialism, as a label bag, and perhaps yet another discourse that dehistoricizes modern migrants and has come to signify everything within this framework that is difficult to define. What is important to acknowledge, so it seems, is that living in a diasporic space today essentially signifies the forging of a new identity and a new diasporic, hybrid subjectivity. It should be borne in mind that diasporic space is a category which encompasses not only those people who have migrated and their descendants, but also those who are constructed and represented as indigenous to a geographical location. Furthermore, all diasporas are differentiated between themselves in these contested in-between spaces and are part of the process of the construction of Us vs. the Others: the problem, of course, lies in the question as how to identify the former and the latter, since binary constructions clearly no longer work today. Identify oneself with what? With “Home” which holds a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination and subjectivity and is, paradoxically, a place of no return? Even if it is actually possible to visit the actual geographical territory which is seen as the place of “origin,” the lived experience of the locality of Home is very different from that of an imaginary or imagined homeland. Ihab Hassan has recently written about a “changeling effect” in post-colonial New Literatures, as some kind of inner transformation or imaginative mutation that is shaping traditions nearly everywhere, and literatures “as metaphors of identity” and “tropes troping older tropes” in an ongoing post-colonial “chutneyfication process” (Hassan 163). The essays collected here will add to the remapping of contemporary postcolonial literatures and the reevaluation of the traditional Anglophone literary canon by including post-colonial diasporic literary discourses. The displacements and cross-border sojourns and sea voyages of the “post-colonial subjects” have started to capture the attention of the literary critics relatively late and their views have at first tried to dispel essentialist national ideologies and interpretations (e.g., Chow). Several texts featured here testify to this increasingly progressive and long-awaited deconstruction of the British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand (mono)cultural national literary containment. Some of the essays, however, address a vastly under-examined area, namely the impact of British/European traditions on indigenous post-colonial writings. As Umberto Eco said in a talk at the University of Ljubljana, where he recently received an Honorary Doctorate, hybrids were in the past essentially considered as ugly (e.g., the syrens), a deformation and a mistake of the natural form, while today they are, in contrast, seen as beautiful and intriguing. The classical view is thus literally turned upside down: diasporic literary and cultural hybrids are the newly emerging globally nomadic natural and

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hence beautiful forms, not only as regards post-colonial subjects but in abstracto. Diasporic subjectivities have always coexisted within and outside the long migrant history of a nation but their experience as text has long been disregarded. However, diasporic (trans)cultural experience and practices have become today a mode of everyday existence that several successful postnational post-colonial literary writings demonstrate, with home and abroad appearing as perpetually shifting and very marketable concepts (cf. also Gunew). As several of these essays demonstrate, the problems with politically correct perspectives on diasporic literature and those with the neat postcolonial and colonial oppositions are manifold, including the effects of official multicultural policies. Language, the basic element of dialogue, is at the same time still an inexhaustible source of conflicts, which can divide people and can result in the fact that they live in different worlds even if they live on the same street. Intercultural dialogue thus appears a sine qua non of contemporary society en route to a transcultural future, where the sheer preaching of multiculturalism may also echo the fear of majority being disturbed by the Other who can thus be kept at bay and safely contained. The Other is namely quite acceptable so long as it remains the Other, that is, that it does not become intrusive, demanding its specifying cultural difference to be accepted by the majority of the population. The idea of tolerance and coexistence also clashes with the desire of some groups to lead parallel lives, groups which, by definition, cannot easily socially emancipate themselves; it is therefore not normal and quite intolerable to ignore somebody by living alongside each other. Europe, unlike Canada or Australia, became the target of mass new immigration and post-colonial diasporization relatively late, only after World War II (and once again more recently), when the colonial system crumbled and when the former colonial imperial countries opened up for political and economic refugees from the formerly colonized countries. The proclaimed and much propagated multiculturalism, which can surely be viewed as a viable concept, however imperfect it may sometimes seem in action, still builds upon a collective (hybrid) identity, with an individual and his/her freedom(s) sometimes pushed to the background. The essays collected in the book are essentially meant to draw more serious critical attention to the post-colonial Anglophone diaspora and its literature produced in particular in Canada, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Australia, Africa, India and Sri Lanka, therefore in one way or another affiliated primarily with Britain and the countries of the former British Empire and today’s Commonwealth. Also, inter- and intra-diasporic literature and cultural relationships between

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the post-colonial countries are addressed here (cf. Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih), as well as the rather neglected issue of the European/British cultural impact on indigenous post-colonial cultural traditions such as the Maori and the Aboriginal one, which have been particularly disenfranchised. The essays further the scholarly study of diasporic writing in English, articulating its specific identities and subjectivities, models of location and affiliation, affect(ion)s and desires which implicitly and explicitly work towards dismantling the all-national container of cultural/literary production, without, however, falling into the facile interpretations and pitfalls of liberal multiculturalisms (see Radhakrishnan; Lavi and Swedenburg). In the first essay featured in the book Coral Ann Howells discusses various new shifts of emphasis in contemporary diasporic writing in Canada. Many new Canadian texts are set outside Canada and represent curiously reversed migrations back to a home place by a Westernized protagonist: Howells shows that they thus represent an important contribution to an understanding of Canadian multiculturalism by highlighting the reductiveness of any unitary national narrative in contemporary Canadian fiction. In his study Igor Maver demonstrates how the new Canadian diasporic literary production is becoming pluralized and globalized by transcending individual traditional categories of “Canadianness,” especially as regards the Canadian locale as well as cultural memory. He also offers the various possible definitions of individual concepts in the area of post-colonial diasporic writing, expressing diasporic desires and affects, transnationality, transculturalism, and borderland identity. Smaro Kamboureli likewise writes about the importance of cultural memory in contemporary Canadian fiction in a recent novel by Michael Ondaatje. Diasporic writing does not so much reproduce the desire to return home; instead, it perhaps enables, while deconstructing, the categorical imperative to write back home. This writing “back home” in Anil’s Ghost allows Ondaatje to materialize the volatility of diasporic cultural memory. Translational identities and the European émigré experience constitute the original new focus of Timothy Weiss’s analysis applied to the fiction by George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul. He argues that all entities and identities are essentially translational in the sense that they undergo consistent transformation, and for human beings this necessarily involves processes of interpretation and expression. Weiss’s analysis of the works by these authors shows that they provide different perspectives on émigré experiences and on the shifting notions of place and identity in the contemporary world. Carmen Birkle also limits her critical inquiry to the Caribbean region and the question of cultural brokerage in Caribbean-Canadian short fiction. Birkle’s reading of six short stories by three writers deals with the questions of cultural heritage, national and ethnic identity, real-life discrimination and a yearning for a

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belonging that wants to overcome the Self/Other dialectics. Indigenous literatures and the European impact represent the topic of the following two essays. Susan Ballyn writes about the Australian Aboriginal poet Alf Taylor, a victim of the Stolen Generation, whose contact with the Roman Catholic monastery of New Norcia north of Perth has been decisive for his life and professional formation as artist. Despite this experience and the explicit political agenda in his verse, his writing remains nonetheless shot through with love and tenderness. Melissa Kennedy shows very convincingly that unlike the usefulness and suitability of post-colonial theory to Maori fiction that is widely accepted, the question of the place of Maori writing within Western literature at large, and particularly the influence of its European roots, is less certain and more problematic. Chantal Zabus shows in her contribution that contemporary writing about women’s excision in Africa can and indeed should be discussed within the post-colonial context as the Afrosporic “migration” of genital alterations to Europe. Giulio Marra discusses Canadian diasporic drama and the father and mother figures in it that appear to him particularly important. The problematics regarding the family in contemporary Anglophone Canadian drama are namely strongly influenced by changing social perspectives due to different manifestations of sexuality and the contributions of immigration and ethnicity. Silvia Albertazzi, last but not least, writes about the Indian diasporic new chic literary production in the United Kingdom and the ethno-melo “exploitation” of diaspora to reach out to greater reading masses. She effectively contrasts it with a new novel by N. S. Dhaliwal, who focuses on the darker sides of the current post-colonial Indian writing in English. Igor Maver Ljubljana, 2009

WORKS CITED Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Gunew, Sneja. Haunted Nations: the Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms. London: Routledge, 2004. Hassan, Ihab. “Changelings in Janglish: Or, How Australian Is It?” English Now. Marianne Thormählen, ed. Lund: Center for Languages and Literature, Lund University; Lund Studies in English 112, 2008. 162–74. Lavie, Smadar and Ted Swedenburg, eds. Displacement, Diaspora, and Geography of Identities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

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Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Maver, Igor, ed. Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006. Radhakrishnan, Ramachandran. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Stratton, Jon and Ien Ang. Multicultural States. Rethinking Difference and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Chapter One

“Not Belonging, but Longing”: Shifts of Emphasis in Contemporary Diasporic Writing in English Canada Coral Ann Howells

The title of this essay is an echo from Ukrainian-Canadian writer Janice Kulyk Keefer’s memoir Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family (1998), and it signals my focus on immigrant and ethnic minority writing in English over the past two decades in multicultural Canada. Such writing highlights significant new trends which raise challenging questions related to definitions of Canadian identity and the concept of a national literature in an increasingly globalized context. What does it mean to call a novel “Canadian” when its main cultural and geographic reference points lie outside Canada? (This is a problem that Eva-Marie Kroller and I have been confronting as co-editors of the new Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, where a mythology of nation based on territory, origins, race or shared cultural inheritance has already been effectively dismantled in Canada.) As Kroller wrote after editing the Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature in 2004: “The parameters of the guidebooks are in need of revision almost as soon as they are formulated” (Kroller 28) because we are observing a culture-in-progress reflecting both demographic and ideological changes, with a new awareness of Canada’s heritage and present actuality as a nation of immigrants. Indeed, we are witnessing a pluralized moment when Canadian literature is literally becoming international as it includes parallel representations of other cultures and other histories which transcend traditional categories of Canadianness. Many new Canadian texts (and in this essay I shall refer to novels, short stories and life writing) are set outside Canada, or else they represent curiously reversed migrations back to a home place by a Westernized protagonist. The influence of these texts is, it seems to me, a profoundly educative one which crucially supplements their exotic appeal, for they open new perspectives on non-Western cultures at the individual human level. They are not “universal”; indeed they 1

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are very specific about their different cultural and political contexts, and as such they make an important contribution to an understanding of Canada’s multiculturalism by highlighting the reductiveness of any unitary national narrative and offering significant reconfigurations of Canadian fiction. I have chosen the term “diaspora” to embrace a diverse group of contemporary immigrant and ethnic minority writers, and this word, like “postcolonial,” and “transcultural,” needs some contextual definition if we are to avoid slipperiness and vagueness.1 Historically speaking, diaspora (from the Greek meaning “dispersion” and taking as its model the Jews’ dispersal and exile in the Old Testament and in subsequent later centuries) refers to a communal experience of displacement and relocation as an ethnic collectivity (Mishra 423, Clifford 247–50). The diaspora paradigm is explored in James Clifford’s excellent book Routes: Travels and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), where he discusses the term as representing the mobility of migration and then resettlement in a new country while maintaining cultural, religious and even political attachments with a homeland across the borders of nation states. However, in the contemporary era that paradigm of collectivity is becoming more individualized, and as a consequence Clifford notes that diasporic language “appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse” in order to describe “a predicament of multiple locations” (Clifford 255 and 266). That is the sense in which I am using the term, to describe writers who live here and remember there. And “diasporic” has the advantage of suggesting a pluralist approach which recognizes Canada’s cultural, ethnic and racial diversity.2 There is no single model for diasporic writing, though all these texts share what Smaro Kamboureli has described as “the nostalgic replay of other geographies” within the environment of Canada (Making a Difference 1). They also share the urge to encourage readers to consider further the psychological and cultural consequences of immigration, insisting on the need for readers’ imaginative attention to the diasporic subject’s condition of liminality. In order to gain a historical perspective on the new phenomenon of Canadian diasporic writing we need to ask several questions: When did immigrant and ethnic minority writing become visible as a distinctive component of the nation’s literature? When did Canadian and European critics start noticing it? And when did the “multicultural” label start to feature on Canadian and international publishers’ lists? After all, up until 1950 Canada was one of the “white” countries of the Commonwealth. Its image was that of an Englishspeaking nation with a francophone minority, though in truth Canada’s population had included immigrants from ethnic minorities since the late eighteenth century, and by the beginning of the twentieth there were small communities of Chinese, Japanese, Germans, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and

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Scandinavians mainly in the West, Afro-Canadians (descendants of Empire Loyalists and refugees from slavery) in the Maritimes, and large Jewish communities in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. However, that cultural diversity was not recognized within national discourse, and ethnic minorities continued to be marginalized by anti-Semitic prejudice and racial discrimination. Only with the influx of post–World War II immigrants did attitudes begin to change, and even in the 1950s most New Canadians were either British or Europeans. Not till the 1960s did Canada allow a much increased entry of nonEuropean immigrants, mainly from South Asia and the Caribbean, and the multiculturalism policies introduced in 1971 by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and culminating in the 1988 Multiculturalism Act were a response to the nation’s changing demographic patterns. As we might expect, there had been a scattering of immigrant writers in the period up to the 1970s: F. P. Grove (from Germany) and Laura Goodman Salverson (of Icelandic parentage) in the 1920s and ’30s, the Austrian Jewish Henry Kreisel in the 1940s, with a gradual increase between the 1950s and the ’70s of post-war immigrant writers from multiple locations of origin: A.M. Klein (generally regarded as the founder the Jewish-Canadian literary tradition), Vera Lysenko (Ukrainian), John Marlyn (Hungarian), Mordecai Richler (born in Montreal of Polish Jewish parents), Austin Clarke from Barbados (who was the first to chronicle Caribbean experience of racism in Toronto post World War II), Rudy Wiebe, the Canadian born son of Russian Mennonite parents whose novel The Blue Mountains of China (1970) is a tale of the Mennonite diaspora, and Negovan Rajic from Belgrade who settled in Quebec and whose fiction is all in French. It was also in the mid-1970s that the first anthologies of ethnic minority writing began to appear (Kamboureli, Scandalous Bodies 131–33). So, rather than saying that there was not much ethnic minority writing before the 1980s we might argue that it has been circulating within English-Canadian literature for quite a long time though not recognized even as a sub-genre. Yet these writers bear witness to Canada’s heterogeneity as a nation of immigrants, a fact long occluded by the dominant Anglo-Canadian tradition. Only in the 1980s do we start to see a procession of familiar names associated with hyphenated identities: Frank Paci “the father of Italian-Canadian literature,” Joy Kogawa whose novel Obasan (1981) exposed the scandal of wartime dispersal and internment of Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia after Pearl Harbor, Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka with Running in the Family (1982) and In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Josef Skvorecky whose novel The Engineer of Human Souls (1984) was translated from Czech into English, Rohinton Mistry from Mumbai with his first collection of short stories Tales From Firozsha Baag (1987), and M. G. Vassanji from Tanzania whose first

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novel The Gunny Sack (1989) recorded stories of the African-Asian diaspora. By the end of the decade, “multicultural writing” (as it was called) was beginning to register as a strong presence on the Canadian literary scene. Not coincidentally this heightened visibility was directly related to Canada’s new official commitment to multiculturalism as national ideology and social policy. Certainly the concept and its implementation have been issues of ongoing debate, though arguably multiculturalism has been instrumental in the revisioning of Canadian narratives of nation and identity. The response of literary critics to this new dimension may be tracked through successive issues of the International Journal of Canadian Studies since its first volume in 1990. Themed as “Research on Canada” it presents the views of both Canadians and Europeans, with W. H. New, editor of Canadian Literature, highlighting his journal’s issues on multicultural writing in the 1980s (Caribbean-Canadian Literature 1982, Italian-Canadian 1985, Slavic and European Connections 1989, and finally Native Writing 1990) as “evidence for the ongoing critical attack on received definitions of literary canon” (New 102), plus the Italian scholar Luca Codignola’s extremely knowledgeable analysis of European-Canadian studies, where he noted the impact of multiculturalism on literary studies from the mid-1980s—though he also added that few European scholars were interested in Canada before the 1970s (Codignola 235). What is so fascinating is how recently these topics have come to the forefront of discussion, and we observe critics and cultural theorists throughout the 1990s and since striving to reshape both the rhetoric of Canadian nationhood and the parameters of the literary canon. The titles of these IJCS issues tell the story with brilliant economy: “The Changing Dimensions of Ethnicity in Canada” (Vol. 3, Spring 1991), “Identities and Marginalities” (Vol. 10, Fall 1994), “Nationalism and Globalization” (Vol. 16, Fall 1997), “Diaspora and Exile”(Vol. 18, Fall 1998), “Transculturalisms” (Vol. 27, Spring 2003), and “Canada and Emerging Powers in the Global System” (Vol. 36, 2007).3 But this is to leap ahead, so I shall return in my account to the beginning of the 1990s when writing from previously marginalized minority groups achieved a critical mass which has resulted in an unprecedented diversification of the Canadian literary canon. As South Asian–Canadian critic Arun Mukherjee noted in 1998, “ethnicity and race have become important theoretical tools in the analysis and categorization of Canadian literature in the last decade” (Mukherjee 24). Other Solitudes, edited by Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, was published in 1990; it was the first explicitly “multicultural” anthology, which featured fiction and interviews with eighteen contemporary Canadian writers in English, themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants, plus interviews with a Native and a francophone writer.

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It was also the year when Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints, SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and George Elliott Clarke’s verse drama Whylah Falls were published, all of these being symptomatic of a confluence of demographic and ideological shifts in Canadian society, together with more hospitable attitudes toward “multicultural writing” by publishing houses. These are stories of immigrancy and outsiderness, of racism and social prejudice, often haunted by ghosts of past generations and their unwritten stories. Though signalling the decade in which this “new writing” assumes prominence these three writers are actually Canadian born, of Italian and Chinese immigrant parents in the case of Ricci and Lee, while Clarke is seventh generation Black Canadian from Nova Scotia (“Africadian” as he describes himself). Ricci’s is the story of an Italian boy’s migration to Canada, but it focuses on the “old country” and a scandal in a village in the Appennines from which a pregnant mother and her son escape to Canada. However, the mother dies on the ship and the boy’s arrival with his baby sister happens in a kind of feverish delirium. Everything is a blur of desolation in a bleak snowcovered country, for this story of border crossings (the first in a trilogy) is an archetypal immigrant narrative of loss and alienation. SKY Lee’s novel provides a much longer time frame for the Chinese immigrant experience over four generations in Vancouver, told by the great granddaughter of a Chinese bride who arrived back in the 1890s, and where telling becomes the exorcism of family secrets of incest and illegitimacy. In the end the narrator leaves Canada on a reverse migratory journey to Hong Kong to live with her SwissChinese lesbian partner. Like so many diasporic narratives, this one is about conflicted identities, with an awareness in the younger generation of a slippage from origins, from mothers, motherlands and mother languages as new hybridized identities are painfully forged. George Elliott Clarke’s agenda is different from these as he uncovers a social history of poverty, domestic violence and racist injustice in a long-established Maritime Black community, making visible for the first time a marginalized African-Canadian tradition, seducing readers through his fierce poetic lyrics, an effort he has continued with his opera Beatrice Chancy (1998) and his novel George & Rue (2005). By a curious logic of history, these texts offer new ways of exploring that old Canadian trope of “unhomeliness”: “If you are Canadian, home is a place that is not home to you,” as Dennis Lee remarked in 1973 (Sugars xiii). It was in the mid-1990s that the new wave peaked, and taking 1996 as emblematic, we note seven novels and short-story collections by Canadian women writers of diverse origins (I have chosen women to emphasize the importance of gendered experience, which as Clifford noted, has been neglected in diasporic studies): Tamarind Woman by Anita Rau Badami (born and educated in India), English Lessons by Shauna Singh Baldwin (born in Montreal

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Chapter One

of South Asian parents, educated in India, and now living in Milwaukee), In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand (AfroCaribbean, born in Trinidad), The Green Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer (born in Toronto of UkrainianPolish parents), Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald (born on a Canadian air base in Germany of Scottish and Lebanese parents from Nova Scotia), Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (born in Toronto of Polish Jewish parents), and Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo (IndoCaribbean, born in Ireland, brought up in Trinidad). These writers appear to be looking in different directions, no doubt as the result of their different personal histories, giving radically different inflections to diasporic writing, though every one of these fictions is about fugitives, nomads, split identities, outsiders and exiles. The very title of Brand’s novel makes the point about divided selves and estrangement for black Caribbean women immigrants, while a split narrative form is used in Michaels’s Holocaust novel which holds two male voices in counterpoint: one a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who is brought up in Greece before coming to Canada and the other a Canadian born son of Polish Jewish refugees, in their quests to discover where “home” might be when the names of home places have been erased from the map. MacDonald’s Maritime Gothic novel is a family saga where Canada’s repressed history of non-white immigrants and mixed race relations uncannily returns to unravel Anglo-Canadian myths of whiteness. It deals with “unspeakable” representations of sexuality which transcend racial barriers, showing how the old racist narratives of Empire are being revised in the next generation who are Canadian born. Mootoo’s novel on the other hand looks like a Caribbean novel, for Canada is mentioned only at the end and remains outside the text, though this novel manages to position itself “in-between” the fictive island of Lantanacamara and Canada through its narratives of desire and longing, reflecting on the immigrant’s liminal position as a significant factor within Canada’s multicultural agenda. Much of this mid-1990s writing highlights the instabilities and hidden agendas within a transcultural subjectivity, of which Kulyk Keefer, caught between Toronto’s Ukrainian community and her own middle class Englishspeaking Toronto, speaks so eloquently in Honey and Ashes: “I hope to tell a story that will speak across any number of borders, to anyone who lives in two countries of the heart and mind at once” (Honey and Ashes 7). Her memoir has its origins in a desire to “return” to a country which exists for her only through “inheritance and imagination” (202). When in 1997 she visited for the first time in her life the Ukrainian village of Staromischyna from which her maternal grandparents emigrated to Canada sixty years earlier, she was disconcerted to find that she and her English-Canadian husband were perfect strangers to the place. Instead of “home,” what she found was “a cloth of

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holes” (279) existing only in the world of fabulation, a realization of her earlier intuition of “how fraught and complex the worlds of nation and homeland are” (258). On her return to Canada, her meditation on “home” is the perfect expression of a transcultural subjectivity: Perhaps home is only this: inhabiting uncertainty, the arguments fear picks with desire. Not belonging, but longing—that we may live in the present, without craving the past or forcing the future. Sweet home, sweet home, my grandmother would say . . . home lost, home found. (328)

The point I wish to emphasize is the contrast in generations, between the grandmother’s remembered words and her granddaughter’s gloss on them as she re-reads the older woman’s traumatic immigrant experience through the lens of her own subjectivity. Canadian by birth and upbringing, still she is positioned between imagined and real worlds where the myth of home is always surrounded by an aura of impermanence. Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family is also a quest for home, though differently inflected from Keefer’s through his own immigrant consciousness. Born in Sri Lanka in 1943 (then Ceylon) into a wealthy Eurasian Burgher family, Ondaatje emigrated twice: first to England with his mother when he was eleven, and then to Canada in 1962, only returning to his homeland twenty-five years later, after his estranged father’s death. His family memoir and social history of colonial Ceylon is above all a search for the father he has never known, a synecdoche for Ondaatje’s childhood which he “had ignored and not understood” (Running 22). A remarkable passage from the beginning of his book highlights not only the double vision so characteristic of immigrant experience but also the continuities of the dream life going on beneath the fractures of daily living. It also spells out the genesis of this mazelike narrative in a terrifying anxiety dream about his father as the center of inexplicable violence: What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto. I was sleeping at a friend’s house. I saw my father, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape. . . . I became conscious again of brittle air outside the windows and howling through the streets and over the frozen cars hunched like sheep all the way down towards Lake Ontario. It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia. (Running 21)

There is confusion from the start between dream and reality, here and there, jungle and snow, and the narrative embroiders that confusion as it moves restlessly between comedy, melodrama and Jacobean tragedy. In the end, like Keefer, Ondaatje realizes that it is impossible to tell a true story of origins;

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our genealogical legacies are written into our bodies, yet these signs are ultimately indecipherable. All he has is memory, myth, and imagination, and the diasporic subject and his book are left in a condition of incompleteness. Ondaatje went on to write a novel about European working class immigrants in early twentieth-century Toronto with In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and The English Patient (1992) with its nomadic subjects in Italy at the end of World War II, only to return to Sri Lanka with Anil’s Ghost (2000) where the concept of home is even more fraught and complex than in Running in the Family. Taking that somewhat arbitrary date of 2000, we begin to recognize a shift in diasporic writing, where the transcultural mode is being refigured in an increasingly globalized context.4 Anil’s Ghost and Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk both published in 2000 offer two different examples of the new transcultural novel, where a Western-educated protagonist returns to the place where she or her parents were born, only to find that she is now the outsider. Anil’s Ghost is no replay of Ondaatje’s nostalgic reinvention of family history, but a very politically engaged novel about contemporary Sri Lanka and its culture of violence and human rights abuses during the civil wars of the late 1980s and ’90s. (As the author chillingly notes in his preface, “Today the war in Sri Lanka continues in a different form.”) Told from the perspective of his female protagonist, Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan–born forensic anthropologist who returns to her country on a seven week project for an international human rights group in Geneva, this is the story of a traumatic homecoming by a woman who can no longer comprehend the murderous local intrigues with which she becomes involved through her professional investigations. In a ghost-haunted narrative filled with the evidence of atrocities both ancient and recent, Ondaatje articulates the painful moral dilemmas of a transcultural subject, performing a delicate balancing act (his protagonist’s as well as his own) between her adopted Western culture and Sri Lanka with which she is still profoundly implicated. Badami, who immigrated to Canada as an adult in 1991, approaches the psychology of the transcultural subject differently in The Hero’s Walk, though again the intercultural encounter is presented as traumatic. This is a reverse migration story where the Canadian-born child of a mixed race marriage is brought to India after her parents’ deaths in a road accident to be raised by her grandparents. An unwilling immigrant, the little girl, Nandana Baker, desperately wants to go home to Vancouver, while her Indian family has no knowledge of Vancouver; it is simply that “America-Canada place” (Hero 226). Not surprisingly, the novel is told as a fractured narrative which cuts between a Brahmin family’s daily life in the Big House and Nandana’s memories of Canada, and it is only toward the end that any overlapping of perspectives

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occurs as the novel develops its contrapuntal theme of cultural confrontation and gradual reconciliation. Badami mixes symbols from both cultures, realized most often through the viewpoint of the “half-foreign granddaughter” who wonders whether they will celebrate Halloween, then finds that in India they celebrate Deepavali instead. Only when she is kidnapped by a mad neighbor does Nandana come to the realization that Big House really is now her only refuge, and for the first time in India she finds her voice and she screams. It is a traumatic way to begin the transcultural process, but it seems that for Badami only huge emotional traumas and elemental forces can break down closed minds and enclosed spaces. The novel ends with tentative reconciliations, but it is the difficulty of acculturation which is emphasized here. Badami works out her transcultural theme within what has come to be called the “New Sentimentalism” (Zimmermann 87), where optimism is shadowed by recognition of the hard facts of sudden violent deaths and of losses that cannot be repaired, while also acknowledging that identities may be reconfigured as human beings respond to changing circumstances. Badami develops these insights over a more extended social and temporal canvas in her most recent novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006). Borders between Punjab, New Delhi and Vancouver are continually crossed in a novel which meshes the sectarian violence between Sikhs and Hindus in India from Partition in 1947 to Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination, with their Canadian resonances in the bombing of the Air India flight 182 from Vancouver in 1982 where all 329 people on board were killed. As Badami remarked in 2006, “It’s not even history, it’s still going on” (Interview 2006), referring to the new inquiry into that explosion begun in 2007. The novel may be truly described as “diasporic” comprehending both a collectivity (one male member of the Vancouver Sikh community is actually writing The Popular and True History of the Sikh Diaspora) and the varied experiences of immigrancy and transculturation shared by the many individuals who comprise that city’s ethnic minorities: “The Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians, that barber Majid, you and me,” Bibiji said, “In this country we are all in the same boat.” “What boat?” Leela asked. “The Minority Boat,” Bibi-ji said darkly. (Nightbird 137)

Focused through characters belonging to the South Asian minority who meet regularly in the Delhi Junction Café on Main Street, the novel is concerned with history, memory and nostalgia, but at the same time it plays on the tensions between continuity and change: “Why did they all have to cling so tightly to that other world? Why were they incapable of putting it behind

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them?” (248). The most sympathetic characters are those who recognize that history is a malleable substance and that memory is unreliable: “History was a picture hanging on a wall, something of the past to spur the imagination, to write books about. It wouldn’t do to let it swallow you whole” (266). As Badami explores the lives of her immigrant protagonists who are caught between cultures, she reveals the complexities of affiliation and conflicting loyalties within transcultural subjectivities, echoing Keefer’s “not belonging, but longing” for home, but “Where was home exactly?” (391). The answer to that question depends, as the plots shows, on individual psychology, for Badami refuses any convenient simplification of the diasporic consciousness. Indeed, as she has revealed in interviews, it is her own unease at standing between two worlds which is the genesis of her fiction: “The books I am writing are part of the process of leaving one world behind and entering another.” (Interview 2006) Whereas the transcultural fictions of Ondaatje and Badami explore the in-between spaces occupied by immigrant subjects, there is an increasingly popular sub-genre of diasporic writing which is set entirely outside Canada. To call it “immigrant writing” is to register a profound shift from that traditional category with its emphasis on outsiderness and exile, for these books while still asserting their writers’ cultural difference, now assume a positive emphasis as writers tell stories of their places of origin and of the individuals who live there, for example, Shree Ghatage’s Brahma’s Dream ( 2004) set in Mumbai, Edeet Ravel’s Tel Aviv trilogy (2003-5), Nelofer Pazira’s A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan (2005) and Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game (2006) set in wartorn Beirut. Of course such writing is not a uniquely twenty-first-century product nor is it a one-way traffic, for as Canadian critic Nick Mount remarks in his study of Canadian expatriates writing about Canada while living in the United States in the 1890s, “Literary cosmopolitanism didn’t arrive in Canada with The English Patient any more than globalization arrived with the internet” (Mount 162). I am talking about a shift of emphasis, best exemplified in Rohinton Mistry’s novels: Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002), which are all set in India. His fiction is the perfect example of “the empowering paradox of diaspora” (Clifford 269) as he explained to Noah Richler in a recent interview. When asked about the importance of place in his novels Mistry replied: There are two places. There is the place where I write [Canada] and the place that I write about [India], and I think I have to consider them both as home. If either one was taken away from the equation, then it would collapse for me. (Richler 443)

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In fact, Mistry and many South Asian–Canadian writers are also published in India, so that they feature in two national literatures, making them genuinely transnational.5 They are all members of what Vijay Mishra has described as the new Indian diaspora, “whose overriding characteristic is one of mobility” (Mishra 422) though at the same time they never really lose “the essentialized narratives of exile, homeland and return” (442). These novelists insist on the linkage between personal memory and recent history, and they frequently show a political engagement with contemporary issues in their places of origin. By first publishing in Canada or with international publishers, they are able to voice their criticisms in the hope of being heard from the sanctuary of their adopted country. Jaspreet Singh’s Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir (which won the 2004 Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Award) is a good example of this new immigrant writing. His short stories are set in modern Kashmir where he grew up before immigrating to Montreal in 1991, and apart from thanking the Canada Council for financial assistance and his publisher for introducing his work to Canadian readers, there is no mention of his new country, for this is a fictionalized memoir of Kashmir as a dreamed-of place that fades on waking. Kashmir may sound exotic with its fabulous snowy mountains and its walled gardens, but that image is balanced by realistic depictions of military camps, religious tensions, and sudden unpredictable violence: “The last eleven months had taught him an alternative geography. Kashmir was neither Pakistan, nor India. Kashmir was War” (Seventeen Tomatoes 53). Indeed, it was from wartorn Afghanistan that Nelofer Pazira’s family fled as political refugees via Pakistan to Canada in 1990. Pazira is now a filmmaker, journalist and human rights activist based in Toronto, where she works for the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, and her recent memoir A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan gives readers a rare glimpse into the raw materials out of which immigrant fictions may be made. (For comparison, we might think here of a fictionalized version of the Afghan situation in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the son of an exiled Afghan diplomat whose family fled to America in 1976. His second novel—about Afghan women’s lives over the past forty years—A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published 2007.) Pazira’s family was professional, westernized and middle class—her father was a doctor and her mother was a teacher; they lived in Kabul, and she recounts what life was like before, during and after the Russian occupation 1979–’89. Before she wrote this personal history, Pazira starred in and co-produced two films based on her own life, Kandahar (2001) and Return to Kandahar (2003), so she is very aware of the blurred line between fact and fiction, as well as the different versions of history that can be told. Her memoir is filled with vividly cinematic evocations of Kabul under

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siege, as in this early eye-witness episode when one evening in 1989 there were three rocket attacks on a crowded city bus station at rush hour. She survived unhurt, then started back for a bus to try to get home: I turn around and walk back along the pavement. Something lying the dirt looks like a single finger. Yes, it is a finger. It has a ring on it. I walk backwards. The sound of people screaming mixes with car horns. (Red Flowers 8)

It is a terrible story about a city in a country that has become a war zone, where Pazira argues vehemently that the ten-year Soviet occupation had not only produced death and destruction, but “it has given birth to a militarized culture of jihad and justified violence. This invisible product of war has now cloaked every aspect of life, including education” (262). And the tragic narrative of Afghanistan still features every day in our newspapers. Pazira’s family escaped over the border in 1989, the women wearing traditional Afghan dress including burqas for the first time in their lives, and were accepted as immigrants to Canada the next year, arriving in the small Maritime town of Moncton, New Brunswick, in cold autumn weather. She describes it as a place of silence and peacefulness, the perfect sanctuary. Unlike many other immigrant writers, Pazira could not speak a word of English when she arrived; she learned it at the local high school, then studied journalism in Ottawa. Kandahar was made under difficult and dangerous conditions in an Afghan refugee village on the Iran-Afghanistan border as the Taliban refused permission to film inside the country, and it was only in 2002 after a thirteenyear absence that she was able to return to Kabul, shortly after the United Nations peacekeepers started to arrive: Stepping onto the tarmac, I do not recognize my country. . . . I have come to a place that is no longer home, to a city that is no longer mine. I long ago became a refugee—a lucky one, with my family safe in Canada. (324,328)

Canada is now Pazira’s home, but as she reported during a visit to Kandahar in 2006 as an Afghan-Canadian journalist: I’m an Afghan after all, able to speak the local languages, but still chilled by the moment a few hours ago when I had to leave my precious Canadian passport behind in Kabul. Canadian troops are now fighting the Taliban in Kandahar. I dare not be associated with my adopted country. (Independent)

The complexities of affiliation for a transnational subject which are encoded in this brief personal testimony make an important point very simply: distinctions between “immigrant,” “ethnic,” “transcultural,” and “transnational” are

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nothing like so clear-cut as these different words might suggest, for they overlap and double back in unexpected ways. The particularities of individual subjectivities challenge theoretical discourses around diaspora and official policies of multiculturalism, just as they challenge the concept of a national literary canon. In his recent revisionary study undertaken first as a CBC radio series in 2005 and published in book form a year later, This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada (2006), Noah Richler offers an interesting gloss on the present multicultural state of Canadian literature, insisting on the importance of storytelling in all its diversity: “The point of stories becomes to inform and contradict and add to one another, and in that way the community evolves”(Richler 316). He also suggests, only half ironically, that “being Canadian demands a constant effort of the imagination, a working definition of the country that must be conjured out of the ether on consecutive mornings” (455). We must conclude that in the contemporary context, diasporic writings might be read as a series of allegories for the reimagining of Canada as an “imagined community” in an increasingly globalized world.

NOTES 1. For timely advice about the need for precision of terminology see Igor Maver, “Post-Colonial Literatures in English ab origine ad futurum” in Maver, ed., Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies, 11–33. 2. I shall not be speaking about francophone immigrant writers in Quebec like Antonio d’Alfonso, Sergio Kokis and Ying Chen, nor about Aboriginal writers who write in English like Thomas King or Eden Robinson, where the language of diaspora though applicable in both cases needs to be redefined to take into account different political inflections and historical contexts. 3. Canada has produced some notable literary theorists of multiculturalism and diaspora, such as Smaro Kamboureli, Arun Mukherjee, and Neil ten Kortenaar, though I have not space to discuss their work here. 4. The new transcultural novel was first noted by John Thieme in his Editorial to Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41.2 (2006):3. Here I develop his argument through a wider range of fictional and autobiographical writings. 5. Transnationalism is a phenomenon of globalization which is being extensively researched at the present time in cultural and religious studies, politics and economics, but not yet very much in literature. Social anthropologists refer to a “transnational” kind of diaspora consciousness, marked by “dual/multiple identifications that link them simultaneously to more than one nation” in the word of Britain’s most prominent theorist of transnationalism, Steven Vertovec, Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

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WORKS CITED Badami, Anita Rau. 1996. Tamarind Mem. Toronto: Viking. Reprinted as Tamarind Woman. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. ———. 2000. The Hero’s Walk. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. ———. 2006. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. Baldwin, Shauna Singh. 1996. English Lessons and Other Stories. Fredericton: Goose Lane. Barnd, Dionne. 1996. In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. Clarke, George Elliott. 1990. Whylah Falls. Victoria, B.C.: Polestar. ———. 1999. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, B.C.: Polestar. ———. 2005. George & Rue. Toronto: HarperCollins. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Codignola, Luca. 1990. “The View from the Other Side of the Atlantic.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 1–2: 217–58. Ghatage, Shree. 2004. Brahma’s Dream. Toronto: Random House. Hage, Rawi. 2006. De Niro’s Game. Toronto: Anansi Press. Hutcheon, Linda and Marion Richmond, eds. 1990. Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. 1996. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press. The complete text is now available on website www .transcandas.ca. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. 1996. The Green Library. Toronto: HarperCollins. ———. 1998. Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family. Toronto: HarperCollins. Kogawa., Joy. 1981. Obasan. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennis. Kroller, Eva-Marie. 2004. “Cultural Inventories and Nation-Building: Editing the Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature.” Anglistik 15/2: 27–42. Lee, SKY. 1990. Disappearing Moon Café. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. MacDonald, Ann-Marie. 1996. Fall on Your Knees. London: Jonathan Cape. Maver, Igor. 2006. “Post-Colonial Literatures in English ab origine ad futurum.” In Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies, ed. Igor Maver, 11–33. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books-Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Michaels, Anne. 1996. Fugitive Pieces. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Mishra, Vijay. 1996. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora.” Textual Practice 10/3: 421–47. Mistry, Rohinton. 1987. Tales from Firozsha Baag. Toronto: Penguin. ———. 1991. Such a Long Journey. New York: Vintage. ———. 1995. A Fine Balance. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. ———. 2002. Family Matters. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Mootoo, Shani. 1996. Cereus Blooms at Night. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers. Mount, Nick. 2006. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Mukherjee, Arun. 1998. Postcolonialism: My Living. Toronto: TSAR. New, W. H. 1990. “Studies of English Canadian Literature.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 1–2: 97–114. Ondaatje, Michael. 1984 (1982). Running in the Family. London: Picador paperback. ———. 1987. In the Skin of a Lion. London: Picador paperback, 1988. ———. 1992. The English Patient. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2000. Anil’s Ghost. London: Bloomsbury. Pazira, Nelofer. 2006 (2005). A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan. Toronto: Vintage Canada paperback. ———. “Nelofer Pazira: Afghan Traffic.” The Independent 8 October. http://comment .independent.co.uk/commentators/article1814839.ece Ravel, Edeet. 2003-5. Tel Aviv Trilogy: Ten Thousand Lovers. London: Headline Book Publishing, 2003; Look for Me. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004; A Wall of Light. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2005. Ricci, Nino. 1990. Lives of the Saints. Canada: Cormorant Books. Richler, Noah. 2006. This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Skvorecky, Josef. 1984. The Engineer of Human Souls. Trans. Paul Wilson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1985. Singh, Jaspreet. 2004. Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir. Montreal: Vehicule. Sugars, Cynthia, ed. 2004. Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Toronto: Broadview. Taylor, Kate. 2006. “A tale of love and terror: Anita Rau Badami interview.” Globe and Mail, 5 September 2006: 25. Thieme, John. 2006. Editorial. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41/2: 1–4. Vassanji, M.G. 1989. The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann. Wiebe, Rudy. 1970. The Blue Mountains of China. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Zimmermann, Jutta. 2005. “The New Sentimentalism in Recent Canadian Fiction.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 25/2: 87.

Chapter Two

Canadian New Diasporic Writing and Transnational/Borderland Literary Identities Igor Maver

Contemporary diasporic writing connects the past and the present and forges new notions of fluid and transnational identities; it opens up spaces for new expressions of a transnational global culture. Thus it challenges the centerperiphery positioning central to “traditional” post-colonial studies. Canadian new diasporic literary authors have increasingly come to be seen as transcultural and transnational authors, the writers of two homelands, figuring in the global cross-border English-speaking cultural collage space and in the Canadian multiethnic society, where the so-called minority literature is in effect now part of the mainstream and no longer merely a veneer of the much coveted and publicly proclaimed, albeit not always practically effectual multiculturalism. Also, one has to consider Canadian new diasporic writing with all of its constitutive ethnic identities within the context of a new interAmerican transborder transnationalism and integration, which substantially changes the field of identity politics, the very concept of ethnicity and the need for its redefinition, as well as the various cultural/literary practices of a collective and individual dynamic identity construction. Canada has come a long way from the model of the Canadian cultural mosaic, a cliché used to express the much sought unity through diversity, and it is today quite proud of its self-image as a multicultural country. While some writers and critics are clearly supportive of the policy of multiculturalism, others again find it reached its limits in fostering some sort of self-imposed ghettoization and speak about the multicultural fallacy, which may, in fact, fragment Canadian society rather than create a Canadian nation in the global world. There is also the question of the exotic ethnic Other which, according to some critics, emerges when the marginalized minority ethnic writers emphasize exoticism to create a certain ethnic stereotype. Native Canadian 17

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authors, on the other hand, have revisioned the multiculturalism issue critically from their own standpoint of native representation and have written against exotic stereotyping, or have written on rather than just back and against the white-settler mainstream. One example of the literary developments of the new ethnic/diasporic Canadians since the 1960s, are the Caribbean expatriate writers who have, among many others, also helped to reshape Canadian literary landscape(s) and other scapes, while drawing on their place of origin for inspiration or simply dealing with quintessentially Canadian themes and locales. Prominent in this process have been the writer Austin Clarke from Barbados, Neil Bissoondath from Trinidad, Dionne Brand with her poetry and novels from Trinidad as well, Olive Senior with her poetry and short stories, Dany Laferrière from Haiti or Nalo Hopkinson originally from Jamaica, and many more. These Canadian authors of Caribbean descent mostly object to a single label to categorize them, so as to avoid literary and cultural ghettoization, and they would also distance themselves from a hyphenated identity (Canadian-and something). The same holds true of some of the Canadian authors of Indian, generally South Asian, South American and also Slovenian and other writers of Central European provenance. Another very representative author regarding diasporic/borderland subjectivity, coming from South America, is Guillermo Verdecchia with his monodrama Fronteras Americanas (American Borders), which won the 1993 Governor general’s Award for Drama. In the play a displaced diasporic subject struggles to de- and re-construct a home between two cultures, while with great humor exploding the images and renegotiating clichés built up around Latinos and Latin America not only in Canada but the USA as well. The protagonist Wideload/Verdecchia wittily ponders “Saxonian” attitudes as well as the cultural shock he experiences upon his return to South America, crossing the frontera yet again, only to come to the paradoxical conclusion in his poetic imagination that it is really the border within himself that must be crossed and embraced, for maps are really always just metaphors and not the territory: “And you? Did you change your name somewhere along the way? Does a part of you live hundreds or thousands of kilometers away? Do you have two countries, two memories? Do you have a border zone?” (Verdecchia 78). This instance of border-zone Canadian literature and his innovative use of “Hispanish,” as a language of resistance, reveals the fact that he is lost, which began in France, Paris, France, the Moveable Feast, the City of light, where I lived for a couple of years. En France ou mes étudiants me disaient que je parlais le français comme une vache Catalan(e). En France ou j’étais etranger, un anglais, un Argentin-Canadien, un faux touriste. Paris, France, where I lived and worked

Canadian New Diasporic Writing and Transnational/Borderland Literary Identities 19

illegally, where I would produce my transit pass whenever policemen asked for my papers. In France, where I was undocumented, extralegal, marginal and where for some reason, known perhaps only by Carlos Gardel and Julio Cortázar, I felt almost at home. (28)

When the speaker in the play (Verdecchia) eventually comes back to Calgary in Canada, “this Noah’s ark of a nation” from his one-time home, South America, the Other America, as he calls it, it suddenly revealingly strikes him as in an epiphany: “I am not in Canada; I am not in Argentina. I am on the Border. I am Home” (75). The monodrama ends on a prophetic note (somos todos Americanos), directly addressing the audience, his fellow Canadians. The movement forward is no longer a movement towards the center, but rather a future trajectory toward the border, which has in fact overnight become the center, so that in this case it is the border that “strikes back”: “Ladies and gentlemen, please reset your watches. It is now almost ten o’clock on a Friday night—we still have time. We can go forward. Towards the centre, towards the border” (78). Crossing borders (people, capital, information) challenge the notion that a national community is necessarily bounded by its geographic borders, which of course also applies to its culture and literature discussed here, for some people’s lives unfold in essentially diasporic settings, where class, race and citizenship play an extremely important role. Borders have acquired an increased mobility and multiplicity and there has been their continual dislocation, one that is closely linked with a differential regulation of migration and citizenship. The recent migratory diasporic spaces that the new diasporic Canadians inhabit and lend them their distinctive voice and vision mark deterritorialization and increasingly also reterritorialization (Braziel, Manhur 17), which blurs the borders of nations and nation-states, as it can be seen in Fronteras Americanas. At the same time these reterritorializations (somos todos Americanos) and transnational/borderland diasporic movements seem dangerously close to and are indeed inextricable from the (neocolonialist) reterritorializations of global capital, division of labor, production and profit. Canada has long been searching for its own national identity and this Sisyphian search was compared to “a dog chasing its own tail” (Atwood 8). The concept of the ethnic mosaic within the multicultural paradigm in Canada has resulted in artists of various ethnic backgrounds promoting their own— and thus Canadian culture of the country—as in a kind of Grand Hotel Canada (this includes such internationally renowned authors and Man Booker Prize winners as Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Yann Martel). Martel said only recently in an interview recorded at the launching of the translation of his novel Life of Pi into the Slovenian language, something that seems an interesting description of the complexity of Canadian literature and

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its “chameleon-like quality,” namely Canada and its collective flux identity which can be perceived as a state of mind: A Canadian novel does not necessarily take place in Canada. So maybe it is the chameleon-like quality of Canadian literature that makes it typical. Canadian literature is the chameleon. . . . There is something polymorphous about Canadian literature. . . . Canada is a state of mind. Canadian is whoever says that he or she is Canadian. (Furlan n.p.)

Neil Bissoondath, who arrived in Canada from Trinidad only in the early 1970s, has in his own words always struggled against the label of a Trinidadian (-Indian) writer. His views on multiculturalism in Canada are much debated; in his literary work he examines the (multi)ethnic landscape of Canada today, straddling the emitive and receptive worlds of the protagonists. In his essays he claims that the policy of multiculturalism (mosaic) has been downright disastrous for the country and for immigrants themselves and that it has now reached a point when it has to be seriously reexamined. Some degree of integration is today necessary and legitimate to expect, he claims, for ethnic/migrant groups have tended to isolate themselves, in one way or another, too much from the majority population in the midst of which they live. Bissoondath writes that Canadians encounter each other’s multicultural mosaic tiles mainly at festivals, which are reduced to “the simplest theatre” at the level of “a folkloric Disneyland.” In most of the multicultural literature, he continues, ethnic stereotypes are only reinforced. Bissoondath feels that such a situation only resulted in an identity crisis for Canadians of a different ethnic descent, that it emphasized (cultural) difference and in so doing it allegedly retarded the integration of immigrants into the Canadian mainstream and thus unwillingly damaged Canada’s national self of a (unified) collective self. The immigrants’ reintegration and (re)construction of identity and cultural adjustment after the initial trauma caused by their sudden displacement from their original cultural and linguistic setting (Sapir) is facilitated through communication, primarily through the language (and literature), but also other means of creative self-expression, such as art and even science or other forms of knowledge that enable communication and hence integration into the new milieu. Some ten years ago the American critic Stanley Fish tried to distinguish between two versions of multiculturalism. The first one of these is similar to Bissoondath’s understanding, namely boutique multiculturalism exemplified “in a celebratory but only cosmetic way as ethnic restaurants /and/ weekend festivals, and /by/ high profile flirtations with the other in the manner satirized by Tom Wolfe under the rubric of radical chic” (Fish 378). The other type, the so-called strong multiculturalism, in his view, really has “a deep respect to all cultures at their core, for he

Canadian New Diasporic Writing and Transnational/Borderland Literary Identities 21

believes that each has the right to form its own identity” (Fish 378). The institutionalized multiculturalism in Canada, whether perceived as a boutique or a strong type of multiculturalism has, at least so far, represented a relatively viable model for a national tolerance. In Neil Bissoondath’s 1994 book on Canadian multiculturalism, Selling Illusions: the Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada he, as in the earlier mentioned essays, defines ethnic stereotypes akin to boutique multiculturalism in the form of Canadian multiculturalism where ethnicity is seen as a commodity in which ethnic groups will preserve their distinctiveness in a gentle and insidious form of cultural apartheid. Regardless of how one sees multiculturalism in terms of the perception of the value of non-mainstream literatures of the ethnicized body, it is clearly today a hybrid between the actual practice and policy and the idealized view of a tolerant ethnic plurality within a national framework, thus “a discourse of desire” (Huggan 154). Multiculturalism should not be dismissed as an entirely unworkable, utopian concept, although it is today a greatly problematic issue in need of some not only cosmetic revision with a view of transculturalism and transnationalism, “but one which offers the only plausible and workable alternative to the ‘two solitudes’ monoculturalism that cramped so much creative energy in Canada before 1970s” (Kulyk Keefer 1996: 249–50). In describing the position of racial minority Canadian writers, some critical voices have denounced multiculturalism as not being adequate enough to “address the diverse contexts of historical and current racial inequalities and injustices” (Miki in Kulyk Keefer 1996: 250). Multiculturalism should and has become more all-inclusive as regards the Native, Black and Asian peoples in Canada and in the recent years it has come a long way. As early as 1996, the critic and author Janice Kulyk Keefer pleaded for a transcultural writing which goes beyond immigrant or ethnic production, because “it is not written exclusively for or read exclusively by the members of a given ‘minority’ community in Canada” (Kulyk Keefer 1996: 254), crossing the borders between different ethno-racial groups, where she sees transculturalism as a defining aesthetic of the strong multiculturalism. The concept of multiculturalism, of course, greatly varies regarding its deployment in individual national contexts. If in countries like Canada and Australia (since the 1970s) it refers to government programs designed to equalize and empower minority ethnicities, in Mexico it means the official encouragement of the identities of individual indigenous groups in the country, while in Brazil it is still treated with suspicion and an ambivalent attitude. In France social critics attack it as either “a recycling of 1960s third worldist radicalism”, for the Center/Right and for the left it represents “a cunningly disguised form of American imperialism” (Stam and Shohat 296).

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The young woman writer Nalo Hopkinson, originally from the Caribbean, is just one of the new vibrant voices in Canadian literature, who brings into her writing a new awareness of race and culture, but also gender and sexuality. Her science fiction novels can be described as post-colonial fantasy writing set in the Caribbean region or on an imaginary planet colonized by West Indians. In an essay Hopkinson describes her use of Creole in her novel Midnight Robber (2000) and she claims that a diasporic Caribbean culture is based on both the West African deities and Taino values1 rather than taking references from Greek and Roman mythology. In contrast to some other Caribbean writers in Canada she openly acknowledges and embraces her hybridity. Hybridity was a strategy for survival and resistance amongst the enslaved and indentured people. They all came from different cultures with different languages and then had an alien culture and speech imposed on them. They had to find ways to use elements of all the cultures in order to continue to exist. That hybridity is reflected in the languaging we’ve created. I’ve tried to reflect that in Midnight Robber, largely in the way the characters use language when they speak, but also in the language of the narrative. (Hopkinson n.p.)

What is particularly striking in her sci-fi writing is that she is trying to break an imposed language by remixing it to a create a special kind of language of resistance.2 By not only using an accent or Creole, by saying these words out loud is in her view “an act of referencing history and claiming space” (Hopkinson). This idiosyncratic linguistic code-sliding makes her works clearly not an easy reading, using alternatively a relatively standard English, French, Spanish or a deep Creole. The Caribbean language is something that Hopkinson sees as a possible evolution of co-existing cultures. As regards the question of the post-coloniality of Canadian contemporary fiction, one should first ask oneself whether one can at all extend the term’s usage to countries which became independent nation states relatively early after colonial rule, like Australia, Canada, even the USA. In her recent book Laura Moss questions, for example, how and if post-colonialism can at all be applied to Canadian literature. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, she argues, have a different status, because of the same “imperial” English language and original source of European culture. Non-English speaking cultures in these countries, for that matter, are post-colonial in quite a different way. One of the doyens of post-colonial literary theory, Helen Tiffin, in a review article of the book, writes that the term has been used and abused and signals the “sheer impossibility” of answering the question of whether Canada is postcolonial or not, for the question itself and the book are “quintessentially Canadian and paradigmatically post-colonial” (Tiffin qtd in Maver 2006b: 15). The term post-colonial can in extremis also be regarded as an oversimplified, albeit

Canadian New Diasporic Writing and Transnational/Borderland Literary Identities 23

most convenient theoretical tool needing to be redefined. In its hyphenated form, post-colonialism can be seen, and used, in the original narrow sense to signify a particular historical post-colonial production, that is, largely but not exclusively, post-independence writing.3 On the other hand, in its nonhyphenated form it can and should be seen in a broader ahistorical sense relating to a set of very different post-colonial, deconstructive, anti-imperial, and anti-Eurocentric methods and discursive practices as well as political and social struggles. Recently there has emerged a shift of scholarly interest away from the original historical post-colonial seen as largely post-independence writing, toward a very different kind of post-colonial, understood as a set of deconstructive discursive practices, and post-colonial cultural studies as an academic discipline as well as a form of political activism. (Maver 2006a: 3)

Post-colonialism has produced a number of very different literary responses, which is why the overgeneralizingly used term post-colonial calls for a detailed rethinking and revisioning now more than ever, especially as regards its future development. Take Canada as an example of contemporary post-colonial writing in English: just as the individual post-colonial (national) literatures written in English today are clearly not homogeneous, although they have been shaped by several common experiences and their shared sociopolitical circumstances as part of the former Pax Britannica or today’s Commonwealth, they are really extremely diverse. Put aside for a moment the possibility that like post-colonialism, multiculturalism is as problematic, contentious, and multifaceted a term as one’s likely to meet anywhere; consider only the literary practice of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Rau Badami and Ven Begamudre, Kerri Sakamoto and Wayson Choy, to name just a few prominent Canadian writers, some of them with international reputations. To treat these writers as post-colonial in Ashcroft’s terms would be to etiolate both their achievement and their primary concerns as writers. For they are all functioning as Canadian writers who are either immigrants themselves or from families recently dislocated by the fact of exile or expatriation. (Kulyk Keefer 2006: 40)

This is precisely why in recent theoretical debates the concept of diaspora has become increasingly connected with the constructed and transnational nature of identity formation, including Canada, diaspora referring to both the voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements in the past and the present alike. Diasporic literary studies, regional studies, and especially trans/ national/cultural studies now face globalization and may represent a viable alternative for the future. Comparing multiculturalism and post-colonialism,

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it is safe to say that both these two much-debated concepts essentially critique Eurocentrism, racism, and colonial discourse. Given its various interpretations, multiculturalism (similarly to post-colonialism) represents a constellation of discourses, which is why it is misleading to make sweeping generalizations about it as holding some kind of “multiculturalism promises” or “multiculturalism claims” (Stam and Shohat 296). Yet some international critiques of multiculturalism can also encode a covert nationalist agenda premised on a reified ethnonationalist conceptualization of the nation. A truly radical and polycentric multiculturalism . . . would call attention to, and try to dismantle, the vestiges of master race democracy wherever they appear. (Stam and Shohat 296)

Race and the multiculturalist movement have always been closely connected and interdependent and they represent one of the legacies of colonialism, which in the post-colonial era must today be addressed transnationally. Newly introduced critical concepts, in addition to the already well established and much-debated freedoms of liberal multiculturalism, are polyvocality, hybridity and also (post-colonial) mimicry. Homi Bhabha argues that the concept of hybridity as a form of cultural difference, while sometimes regarded as manipulative, allows the voices of the Other/migrant, the marginalized and the dominated, to exist within the language of the dominant group whose voice is never fully in control (Bhabha 1994). In recent theoretical debates diaspora and its writing has been frequently connected with the constructed and transnational nature of identity formation, since the concept refers to both voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements. In a significant way the notion of the “new” diasporas and their literature also challenges the contested formulation of the dichotomy margin vs. center in postcolonial studies. Contemporary Canadian writing by diasporic authors from a wide variety of diasporic communities traces the connections to various locales in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America or Eastern Europe etc. and perceives Home as several locales, liberated of the spatial concept of location, which is, however, at the same time deeply embedded in the collective cultural memory of a migrant and her/his own personal biography (or that of their parents or grandparents). Indeed, contemporary Canadian diasporic literary production is becoming pluralized and globalized by transcending individual traditional categories of Canadianness especially as regards the Canadian locale as well as the volatility of cultural memory. There has recently emerged a pronounced shift of emphasis in contemporary Canadian diasporic writing, for many new texts are set outside Canada and feature reversed migration back to a home place by a Westernized/Canadianized protagonist, who does not so

Canadian New Diasporic Writing and Transnational/Borderland Literary Identities 25

much want to return home as to write back home (e.g., Anita Rau Badami, Michael Ondaatje, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Rohinton Mistry, M. G. Vassanji, etc.). This points to the fact that there is no unitary national narrative tradition in Canadian fiction and that Canada today as a culture-in-process, as another diasporic switching-point (Appadurai 171) largely expresses itself today in literary texts as an imagined community (and not an imaginary homeland as in Rushdie): perhaps this is its current paramount function as an emerging indicator of the significance of place and a translational cultural identity (Weiss) in the global context, one that undergoes consistent transformation in the processes of interpretation and expression. Displacement and the fluid transnational and borderland post-ethnic diasporic identity, identity being at the very heart of the concept of Home, show a dynamic and shifting global view of some of the best Canadian new diasporic authors. Their increasingly empowered voice and vision continue to pluralize and globalize contemporary Canadian literary production.

NOTES 1. The Taino are the indigenous people who were living in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived there. 2. See also Opal Palmer Adisa from the Jamaica/USA, who describes herself as a “Ja-merican” woman writer. 3. See: Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989.

WORKS CITED Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things. London: Clarendon Press, 1995. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bissoondath, Neil. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1994, rpt. 2002. Braziel, Jana Evans, Anita Mannur, eds. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, WileyBlackwell, 2003. Fish, Stanley. “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech”. Critical Inquiry, 23 (1997) 2: 378–95. Furlan, Aleksandra. “Interview with Yann Martel.” Recording kept by the interviewer. Ljubljana, 2004. Hopkinson, Nalo. “Code Sliding”. 10 October 2006. http://www.sff.net/nalo/people /writing/slide.html.

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Huggan, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic. London: Routledge, 2001. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “Who’s Afraid of Josef Skvorecky? The ‘Reactionary’ Immigrant Writer in a Multicultural Canada.” In Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia. Ed. Igor Maver, 249–261. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. ———. “Proteus, Gertrude, and the Post-Colonial Rag.” In Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies, ed. Igor Maver, 34–47. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. Maver, Igor. “Introduction.” In Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies, ed. Igor Maver, 1–7. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006a. ———. “Post-Colonial Literatures in English ab origine ad futurum”. In Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies, ed. Igor Maver, 11–33. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006b. Moss, Laura (ed.). Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003. Sapir, Edward. The Psychology of Culture: a Course of Lectures. Hawthorn, NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat. “Traveling Multiculturalism: A Trinational Debate in translation”. In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, 293–316. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Verdecchia, Guillermo. Fronteras Americanas/American Borders. Vancouver: Talon Books, 1997. Weiss, Timothy. Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Chapter Three

The Diaspora Writes Back: Cultural Memory and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Smaro Kamboureli

I Je me souviens—I remember—the motto deputy minister of Crown Lands Eugène-Étienne Taché had carved into the façade of the parliament building in Québec City in 1883, and which appears on the province’s coat of arms and, since 1978, on Québec licence plates, is emblematic of the importance and indeterminacy of cultural memory. At once a personal and a collective declaration, je me souviens epitomizes the foundational role memory plays in the creation of collectivities or, in Benedict Anderson’s words, in the formation of imagined communities. A marker of Québécois identity, remembering operates as a point of suture signifying how cultural and political forces interpellate identity. Indeed, as an institutionalized act, je me souviens functions as an imperative that grants greater transparency to the Althusserian process of interpellation. Remembering, in Québec’s case, is posited as a condition of citizenship, a form of participatory action: Je me souviens, therefore I belong. One would expect, then, this imperative to remember to have a concrete referent, a particular historical moment. Ironically, however, remembering in this instance does not activate an agreed-upon memory. There is no record of what Taché had in mind, nor did René Leveque, the premier of Québec who changed the provincial motto La Belle Province to Je me souviens in 1978, ever explain what specific memory he wanted his Parti Québécois to promote. Nor is it clear who the subject of je is. It could be every citizen of Québec: francophone, anglophone, or allophone; Québec-born or diasporic subjects; perhaps even First Nations people in Québec—“perhaps” because the sovereignty politics in this Canadian province, especially as espoused by

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some of its core members, would not include easily immigrants or Aboriginals in this collective articulation. There is, as a result, no shortage of theories as to what Québécois citizens are to remember. Jacques Rouillard, for example, writes that The original meaning of Quebec’s motto that is found in the memorial of the Parliament is a good example of the changing and lost memory of national collectivities. . . . The motto is a construction of memory that reflects the bourgeois values of the French-Canadians at the end of the nineteenth century. It demands that we remember a past that affirms the French origins of Quebec, while also operating as a gesture of gratitude toward the British character of Quebec’s institutions that facilitated the advent of democracy, a certain political autonomy for Quebec, and the growth of French Canada. Ultimately, the motto provides a way of distinguishing Quebec from the Other (Great Britain, English Canada), while at the same time acknowledging gratitude for his liberality. (144; my translation)

This is a plausible, indeed credible, interpretation of what Québecers are to remember, but a recent documentary film, A License to Remember: Je me souviens, makes it abundantly clear that there is absolutely no concensus either in terms of who the subject of je is or what is to be remembered. Until I searched for confirmation, my own assumption had been that je me souviens referred to the 1759 battle on the Plains of Abraham, General Wolfe’s victory over the French. This must be, at least for some, one of the possible events to remember, but for the Mohawks of the Kahnawake reserve je me souviens makes a travesty of their own loss of sovereignty,1 while for a black speaker in the film the phrase is a reminder that Québec, too, practiced slavery.2 Yet another man interviewed offers a cynical explanation: “They want us to remember what they want us to remember—that Indians are bad, the English are bad and that we won’t be able to speak French unless we separate.” This case of remembering exemplifies that, even when institutionalized, cultural memory is a fluid archive at best, persistent yet variable, an archive that has a cumulative structure. Not only must the history it echoes be heard in the plural, but who remembers and why remembering is an imperative must also be seen as the result of complex discursive forces. While an attempt to resolve the contradictions of what is being remembered would inevitably end in homogenizing, and therefore further mystifying, the past, the very difficulty of determining what memory entails is also what reveals memory’s capacity for myth-making, precisely what constitutes cultural memory. Myth-making in this context is not a reference to a narrative of origins, but to the processes and practices that make up the social imaginary. Myth here is to be understood in the terms in which Stathis Gourgouris reads Hans

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Blumenberg’s investigation of myth in the modern age, namely, as “presenttime logic, as history’s scientia in the strict sense: a mode of knowledge that commands a generative domain of social symbolic forms autonomous from the generative logic of science or reason . . . a mode of knowledge that counters the ‘absolutism of reality.’” Understanding mythical thinking this way, Gourgouris argues, is “tantamount to the work of sublimation: the intervention into and appropriation of reality by society’s psychic forces, by means of its radical imagination” (2003, 107). II It is this relationship of cultural memory and myth-making, how memory and history are interrelated in ways that may often cancel each other out, that emerges as one of the central issues in the paper Professor Yoko Fujimoto presented at a recent conference in Kyoto University.3 Her highly nuanced and insightful reading of Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Anil’s Ghost, raises a host of important questions that are both timely and extremely relevant to what diasporic subjectivity and citizenship entail today. Framed by critiques of Ondaatje as a bourgeois and cosmopolitan author, a writer with a penchant to aestheticize the political and orientalize “otherness,” Fujimoto’s reading of the novel pivots on the ethical and political responsibilities often placed upon diasporic authors, especially authors that come from cultural backgrounds with colonial and postcolonial histories. Do such authors have the moral obligation to memorialize the history of the ethnic communities and nationstates they come from, to take, if necessary, a political stance against any abuses of power and atrocities that may plague their countries of origins? If yes, how should they proceed to do so? Is there a particular aesthetic they should practice, an aesthetic that may be more responsive to the politics of authenticity and representation? What are the implications of applying pressure on diasporic authors and diasporic texts to take part in the politics of a place they have long left behind? While these questions are not new, the various debates that have ensued from them have not provided satisfactory answers, nor have they resolved their complexities. If anything, the recent history of the last thirty years, the gradual shift from the paradigm of “us and them” to multiculturalism, from the politics of difference and the so-called culture wars and identity politics to postcoloniality, and more recently to a globalized understanding of what determines difference—all this has applied greater pressure to the ethics and politics inscribed in the diasporic imaginary. As Fujimoto amply demonstrates, Ondaatje’s writing is a case in point. And the fact that Ondaatje, in her own words, “thematizes the very question

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of allegiance directed at him” (1), that his protagonist, Anil, “is indeed fashioned to be an alternative image of the diasporic subject to that of the writer Ondaatje” (7), shows that, like the Empire, to echo Salman Rushdie’s now famous phrase, the diaspora also writes back. Following the logic of this formulation, if, as critics Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s study of the same title has demonstrated, “the Empire writes back to the Centre,” then the diaspora writes back home. There seems to be a categorical imperative at work here, at least an imperative accepted and sanctioned by certain kinds of critical methods. My intention here is not to question whether or not such a categorical imperative truly exists or should exist; rather, I would like to pay attention to its epiphenomena, that is to say, what such a categorical imperative entails in practice. To analyze at some length what each term in the formulation the diaspora writes back home implies would take me too far afield. Still, it would be important to briefly consider what possible meanings emerge from their conjunction in the hope that we can understand what Ondaatje’s case can tell us about literature, institutions, and citizenship today.

III To begin, writing back suggests a retort, an intentional, if not forceful, response to a status quo, to institutionalized knowledge and the power such knowledge wields. A gesture of this kind draws attention at once to the power of literature to generate critical difference and the ways in which literature, be it written by indigenous or diasporic subjects, is produced under national license. In the case of decolonized nations like Sri Lanka or India, or former settler colonies like Canada or Australia, national literature constitutes the symbolic capital through which the nation as an “imagined community,” as a constructed homogenous entity, is shaped. But literature as the cultural capital of a nation-state, as Masao Miyoshi, among many other critics, reminds us, surrenders “political and economic scrutiny” to “gesture[s] of pedagogical expediency” which, by regulating and normalizing differences, grant “students and scholars with an alibi for their complicity in” the technologies of the nation-state, processes and procedures devised in ways that conceal liberalism’s “self-deception” (98). Writing back is a response to this institutionalization of literature, this appropriation of home-grown knowledge. It questions the values and meanings memorialized in national master narratives, while it often attempts to resuscitate cultural memories that have been repressed. As Fujimoto’s analysis of the character of Palipana indicates, “the indigenous scholar’s mission today . . . is to decolonize and re-establish an ownership of the discipline as well as their historiography” (14). Her use of

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the word “mission” alludes to the categorical imperative that a writer, be she or he a creative practitioner like Ondaatje or a scholar like his character Palipana, must engage in the act of writing back home. Interestingly, the adverb back discloses that the politics of this cultural mission is not entirely free of the ideology characterizing the formation and implementation of national pedagogy. Writing back home may be an act of resistance, but it is complicitous with the logic of the symbolic capital it reacts to, with the kinds of memory sites the diasporic or decolonized subject engages with. If Palipana, as Fujimoto shows, “is a repository of the historical problematics of the state of local knowledge” (16), his attempt to salvage knowledge of the local from its orientalist and colonialist configurations recasts his method of “dissemination” in a “mode” Fujimoto calls “intimate” (16). The intimacy of this method lies in the fact that it is related to the appropriating strategies of the processes that institutionalize knowledge. As Fujomoto writes, “Palipana’s knowledge, or Lakma’s inheritance of it, . . . reveals what Ondaatje values as an alternative to the established academic disciplines . . . archaeology, anthropology, and forensic sciences, which are systematized and to a great degree controlled by the anonymous power of institutions” (16). In this context, writing back home is writing-as-reading, reading as a performative act, an act that executes and articulates the difference it seeks to make. Writing back, then, must be understood not only in terms of what writing is about, but also in terms of the methodological turns it implies. As an apostrophizing gesture, a mode of address, writing back emerges as a trope that invites us to pay heed as much to the contents of cultural memory it brings to light as to how cultural memory is recorded, interpreted, and applied. How cultural memory is reconstructed, along with the uses it is put to, has the potential to alter the present state of affairs, and hence the course of history. Significantly, Palipana’s “intimate” mode of disseminating knowledge does not need the kind of public exhortation of je me souviens to survive. Cultural remembering persists, and does so in a fashion that stresses the hybridity embedded in cultural memory, a hybridity that speaks at once to the contents of memory and the methods through which it is collected and disseminated. Thus while cultural memory is often monumentalized, in Sri Lanka it is at once suppressed and in circulation. This double mode of cultural memory reinforces not only the ineradicable presence of what is remembered, but also the historical and political vagaries that contribute to cultural memory’s palimpsestic and cumulative structure. Thus Sarath and Palipana’s disciplinary practices and critical tropes expose the instability of national myths, and capture cultural memory in a manner that mocks the atavism of national origins and its attendant savagery. But this does not

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redeem them either of their complicity as scholars or of their personal failures. What it reveals instead is that the categorical imperative of writing back home in Ondaatje’s case is inscribed by a double affect: anxiety about critical multiculturalism and academic citizenship, on the one hand, and a desire to meet, or appear to meet, some of the demands that emerge from within disciplinary structures. This is not the right place to offer a detailed account and critique of critical multiculturalism and academic citizenship, but a few words about how they operate and signify are necessary in order to understand the categorical imperative of the diaspora writing back home. Critical multiculturalism, as many critics in Canada and the U.S. have shown, has made, in the words of Henry Giroux, “a strong case for rethinking the political and pedagogical possibilities of multiculturalism within higher education” (61). As Giroux argues, it “signal[s] a new understanding of how the mechanisms of domination and exclusion work to reproduce and legitimate the entrenched nature of class, race, gender, and sexual hierarchies in” (61) postsecondary institutions. And it does that by relying on critical methods that have exposed the disinterestedness of the critical (read academic) enterprise to be yet another master narrative whose genealogy, traced back to the Enlightenment, has determined the course of modernity. In this context, academic citizenship entails professional conduct that is responsive to critical multiculturalism, that operates out of a sense of ethics and the public good. Critical multiculturalism and academic citizenship, then, have a dialectical relationship, and it is from within this dialectic that the imperative for diasporic authors to write back home emerges. To put it crudely, if the presumed raison d’être of literary critics, especially critics engaged in postcolonial criticism, is to produce knowledge that at once exposes inequities and respects and celebrates difference, then it behooves them to expect a diasporic author to be equally engaged with the politics of difference or to chastise diasporic authors who fail to do so. But as we have become increasingly and painfully aware, critical multiculturalism and academic citizenship, in their liberal and corporate manifestations, attempt to manage and contain diversity. In the words of David Theo Goldberg, they “pay lip service to the celebration of cultural distinctions” (7–8); indeed, they are more intent on celebrating difference, thereby affirming their benevolence, than critiquing how difference is constituted. In this context, the critical act exemplifies the same double affect that informs the writing of some diasporic authors: it is propelled by the anxiety to be politically relevant, and thus accountable to pressures within and outside the academe, and the desire to make a difference. Caught in this dialectic, it, too, becomes an act engaged in writing back. In this case, writing back involves, as Fujimoto implies, the inclination to see diasporic authors as native

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informants, while at the same time constructing them as subjects involved with and representing their diasporic communities. This critical tendency, however, this troping toward the other, has the tendency to reify both diaspora and community. As many scholars have shown,4 the “inflationary use” (Fludernik xiii) of the terms diaspora and community to cover just about any kind of existence away from home is highly reductive. In this light, Ondaatje seems to belong to what John A. Armstrong calls an “elite” or “mobilized diaspora,” as opposed to a “proletarian” or “victim” diaspora.5 While Ondaatje’s critics are quick to draw attention to his privileged Sri Lankan background, they expect him, paradoxically, to assume a position engaged in the class and ethnic politics that he is affiliated with. This is precisely what Ondaatje thematizes, in a fashion, in Anil’s Ghost. Writing back home allows Ondaatje to materialize the volatility of the contents of cultural memory. Be it personal or collective, national or intranational, cultural memory as inscribed in this novel simultaneously contains and confounds national origins. In this case, diasporic writing does not so much reproduce the desire to return home, a traditional trope in diasporic literature; instead, it performs, while deconstructing, the categorical imperative to write back home, a home that is not only troubled by warfare but also one that most of Ondaatje’s critics know very little about.6 Thus, ironically, Palipana’s intimate mode of dissemination may usher in new possibilities for negotiating colonialism, decolonization, and global politics, but it is a critical mode that functions away from the gaze of critics. Significantly, at a pivotal moment in the novel’s narrative, Palipana’s niece, the inheritor of this new mode of knowledge, disappears into the forest, never to be heard of again. Whereas this raises questions as to the efficacy of Palipana’s method, more relevant to my argument here is the fact that as readers and critics we have no way of knowing how his niece is going to apply, if at all, this “intimate” method of propagating knowledge. The ghost, then, in the novel’s title may very well allude at once to Ondaatje’s own spectral presence in the story and to the specter of the categorical imperative inscribed in his narrative. When the diaspora writes back home, then, it doesn’t always write back in a manner that fulfills the expectations of critical multiculturalism or academic citizenship. Thus, despite Ondaatje’s fascination with things historical— consider the colonial encounter of Mrs. Fraser with the escaped convict in the Australian outback in Man With Seven Toes, Billy the Kid’s shenanigans in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the building of the Bloor Street viaduct by Toronto immigrants in In the Skin of the Lion, espionage in World War II in the African desert in The English Patient—his concern with what he calls the “unhistorical, unofficial story” declares not so much an interest in history itself but in historiography.7 Historiography’s attention to the constructedness

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of history reveals Ondaatje’s indebtedness to the postmodern sensibility, a sensibility that, I should hasten to add, is not entirely devoid of political import. Exposing the extent to which history is imbricated in the knowledge/ power dynamic contributes to the instrumentality of writing. Nevertheless, although Ondaatje acknowledges that “determining which province is politics and which is art” is a “central question today,” this is a question that “[he] do[es] not know how to answer. . . . Novels that give you the right way to do things,” he says, “I just don’t trust any more” (Fagan 121). It is the convergence of “the personal and the historical,” where “they meet” (Fagan 120), that seems to characterize the space within which he situates his writing. In this light, we shouldn’t be surprised when he claims that “the book isn’t just about Sri Lanka; it could be Guatemala or Bosnia or Ireland” (Jaggi 7). Ondaatje’s writing back home, then, is fraught with ambivalence. While the narrative of Anil’s Ghost offers a record of cultural memory, it is not intended to be an archive of a particular history. Instead, it is an archive in the process of becoming, an archive operating in the present tense. This kind of archive, to evoke Walter Benjamin, “has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogenous and empty time” (262), and thus belongs to the syntax that comprises history as historicism, a syntax that is about “the present as that of the here-and-now” (261). It is, then, in what Fujimoto refers to as Anil’s “neutrality” that we can find the answer to how Ondaatje materializes the categorical imperative of writing back home. The Sri Lanka Anil returns to does not present her with an image of the past that “has come to a standstill” (Benjamin 262), but a specter of a past that lacks closure, hence her inability and reluctance to align herself with the official or resurgent players in the conflict she is witnessing. Though a diasporic subject, she neither plays the role of the native informant nor does she wish to be seen as a local. As her visit to Lalita and her exchanges with Dr. Perera suggest, she occupies a space that is simultaneously one of belonging and unbelonging. This is in keeping with how Anil has constructed herself as a subject away from home. Devoid of the nostalgia that often characterizes the diasporic imaginary, and having rendered her parents, sibling and ex-husband into ghostly presences, she re-invents herself as a subject that exemplifies impulses associated both with modernity and postmodernity as understood in Western terms. While she refrains from defining herself in relation to the Sinhalese diasporic community, thus affirming her individuality in terms that disavow kinship and ethnic affiliation, she still feels the need for order and a certain connectedness, a modernist impulse that she feeds by becoming highly professionalized, a woman married to her profession. It is the community of forensic anthropologists that operates as a substitute for family, and

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the insulated forensic lab, with rock music echoing inside its soundproof walls, that becomes a surrogate home, a home that presumably operates outside national discourses and local or global economies. This environment, together with the logic of scientific knowledge and the presumed certainties this knowledge entails, creates the only comfort zone she experiences. What Fujimoto calls Anil’s neutrality, then, is synonymous with a subjectivity that eschews cultural memory. Not quite a cosmopolitan subject, given her insular life, she is a subject who relinquishes the yoke of what Edward Said calls filiation. Instead, it is voluntary affiliation and her constant mobility that define who she is. She thus resists the kinds of authentication markers that are traditionally attributed to ethnic and diasporic subjects. But for a few brief instances in the narrative that occur during Anil’s years in London, she does not seem to have a racialized sense of herself. She seems to exist in a world where race, racism and racialization have become, Ondaatje would have us believe, obsolete, where she can operate as a liberal (read liberated) and universal subject. Moving between the lab and her rented apartment—no permanent roots of any kind for her—between the bowling alley frequented by her and her colleagues and the TV set on which she avidly watches Westerns, she has adopted, to borrow Aihwa Ong’s concept, a flexible citizenship. Anil’s flexibility as subject is announced by the ambiguity of her act of commerce— buying her name from her brother through a sexual act and money. This act reveals Anil to have an agency that appropriates and expropriates others, that claims what is not hers, that insinuates herself in spaces where she, as woman or diasporic subject, is not supposed to be. But this does not necessarily mean that Anil’s subject position is informed by a subversive or feminist consciousness. Ondaatje tends to grant his female characters agency, but theirs is an agency that facilitates the materialization of male desires and liberalist logic. Seen in this light, Anil’s neutrality signifies a desire to be a universal subject, a subject not held back by gender, race, or culture. When Anil arrives in Sri Lanka, she is more at home with interpreting skeletal remains than interacting with those around her. This hermeneutics of dead flesh, of abjected bodies, though it follows the strict logic of Anil’s science, reinforces her position as a subject who has access to sovereign truths, truths that remain unalloyed by ethnic conflicts and politics. The ambivalent power dynamics of her subjectivity is also manifested in the scene where she videotapes her sleeping lover, as well as the scene when she stabs him with his own knife. Stabbing here is an act of self-displacement, for Anil’s gesture displaces not so much Cullis, but herself from Cullis’s life. The violence that marks these two episodes signals the spectrality of Anil’s repressed cultural memory—memories that are forbidden, memories denied, morbidly blocked, memories forgotten. Never mind the postmodern disengagement with which

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she practices her subjectivity, the remains of the past, the debris of her personal and cultural history, continue to haunt Anil. She may be neutral, but hers is a neutrality that signals the embodiment of history into her political unconscious. In Ondaatje’s case, then, the trope of the diaspora writing back home may signify a return to a time and place, but it does not guarantee a re-encounter with originary narratives of Sri Lanka as a nation-state. Not only does this mode of writing suspend the inherited emphasis on diasporic roots and their essentialization, but it also posits the routes of diasporic subjects as fluid sites that generate a sense of origins, origins that do not always coincide with the homeland or that are concerned with the foundational narratives of the nation state. Anil, if not Ondaatje himself, is as much a product of the conflictual narratives that constitute Sri Lanka’s history as of the Western tradition. In this context, cultural memory is inscribed in the present tense, in that it unfolds as a recollection of the past that is simultaneously a translation informed by the ideological forces that shape the present. Thus cultural memory as embodied history is rarely a matter of simply delving into the past or recollecting the bare outlines of an event. It is always inflected by affect, the affect that comes from the usually unresolved dialectic structure of memories: memories of victory or defeat, of hegemonic power or shared guilt, of personal exile or national humiliation. It is the affect that accompanies the cultural archive of national and/or diasporic groups and individual subjects, as well as the affect that marks those disenfranchised by the master narratives of nation-states, that endows embodied history with the power to re-emerge as a specter that can either wield violence or exorcise the ferocity of national passions in the name of forgotten things. When the diaspora writes back home, then, it does not always convey a familiar missive that confirms the past. Rather, it writes back in a manner that reveals that diasporic subjectivities belong not only to the place of origins, but to a complexly networked world.

NOTES 1. I am referring here to the Oka crisis, March to September 1990, which brought out the Québec Provincial Police and the Canadian Armed Forces in a standoff with the Mohawks on the Kanesatake Reserve. The standoff, which resulted in one death and other violent and racialized attacks, was caused by a land dispute over the expansion of a golf course on what is sacred ground for the Mohawks in the area. 2. See Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1971, 1977). There were slaves in New France before the first recorded reference to Olivier Le Jeune, “the first slave to be sold in New France,” brought directly from Africa at the age of six. Le Jeune was still a “‘petit nègre’”

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when he converted, but, as his teacher, after whom he was named, Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune, wrote, he spoke a blunt truth in retort to the statement that all people are equal in the eyes of the Christian God: “‘You say by baptism I shall be like you: I am black and you are white, I must have my skin off then in order to be like you’” (1). By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were about four thousand slaves, both Black and Aboriginal, in New France, most of them living in and around Montreal (Winks 1–23). Throughout my argument, I employ the term history in a rather loose way, as a reference to official discourse. A fuller discussion of the relationship of memory to history as a discipline, genre, or practice would take me too far afield. 3. “Art and Other Worlds? Representations of Knowledge in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” presented at the Social Integration and National Identity Symposium, sponsored by the Centre of Excellence-Canadian Studies Joint International Program, Graduate School of Law, University, Kyoto, Japan, July 6–7, 2006. My references are to Professor Fujimoto’s manuscript. 4. See, for example, Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) and The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora, Textual Practice 10, 3 (1996): 421-47, and Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997). 5. See John A. Armstrong, “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” in Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Cheltenham: Elgar Reference, 1999): 199–214. 6. “Knowing very little” here is not meant to suggest that such criticism is marked by unscholarliness; rather, it refers to the fact that the knowledge critics rely on is, at best, secondhand, that is, knowledge that derives from scholars who, in the process of research and knowledge production, are turned by other critics into sources of “authentic” knowledge, aka native informants. Though this aspect of writing about cultures other than those critics are directly familiar with is one that virtually all critics (and I include myself here) are complicit with, it is always addressed or adequately thematized. See, for example, Marlene Goldman, “Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” in Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writing, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2005), 27–37. 7. For a treatment of aspects of this issue in In the Skin of a Lion, see my essay, “The Culture of Celebrity and National Pedagogy.” In Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars. U of Ottawa P, 2004. 35–55.

WORKS CITED A License to Remember: Je me souviens. 2002. Director Thierry Le Brun. Producer Adam Symansky. National Film Board of Canada.

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Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. (Revised edition.) London: Verso. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed., with an Introduction, Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schoken. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fagan, Cary. 1998. “Where the Personal and the Historical Meet: Michael Ondaatje.” In The Power to Bend Spoons: Interviews with Canadian Novelists. Ed. Beverly Daurio, 115–21. Toronto: Mercury. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Postcolonial Reconfigurations in the Context of Multiculturalism.” In Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments, ed. Fludernik, xi–xxxviii. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Giroux, Henry A. 2000. Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Goldberg, David Theo. 1994. “Introduction: Multicultural Conditions.” In Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell. Gourgouris, Stathis. 2003. Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1996. Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jaggi, Maya. 2000. “Michael Ondaatje in Conversation with Maya Jaggi.” Wasafiri, 32: 5–11. Miyoshi, Masao. 1996. “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State.” In Global Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, 78–106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ondaatje, Michael. 2001. Anil’s Ghost. Toronto: Vintage Canada. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rouillard, Jacques. 2005. “L’énigme de la devise du Québec: à quells souvenirs faitelle reference?” Le Bulletin Histoire Politique, 13, 2 (hiver): 127–45. Said, Edward W. 1983. “Introduction: Secular Criticism.” In his The World, the Text and the Critic, 1–30. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter Four

Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience Timothy Weiss

Emigration/immigration has become a distinguishing characteristic of the contemporary world. According to a study in year 2005 of migration and development prepared by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, three percent of the world’s population—or 191 million people—lived in a country other than the one in which they were born . . . with one third having moved from a developing country to one that is developed, one third moving from one developing nation to another, and another third originating in the developed world. (UN Statistics)

It is probably not surprising that the study, which gathered data from 228 countries and regions, places the United States at the top of the list of host countries, with 38 million migrants or almost 13 percent of its total population. Percentage wise, however, the share of the total population who are migrants was larger in Australia (19.6 percent) and Canada (18.9 percent). Furthermore, in regional terms, Europe’s migrant population of 64 million was almost 50 percent greater than the 45 million in Northern America (UN Statistics). In L’homme nomade (2003), Jacques Attali gives an even higher figure than the UN study; he estimates that today 500 million people could be considered “nomadic,” whether for political or economic reasons, or personal preference; this total includes immigrants, refugees, expatriates, people without a fixed home, and migrants of other sorts (26). Attali also estimates that 4 percent of the world population, or about 250 million people, live in countries other than the one where they were born (297). As these figures suggest, the phenomena of immigration, displacements for political or economic reasons, and expatriation have had a significant impact on European countries, 39

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altering the ethnic composition of their societies and calling into question traditional definitions of national identity, and will likely continue to be important social phenomena in the future. In England, emigrants from West Indian/Caribbean colonies, the Indian subcontinent, and the then Soviet-controlled territories of Eastern Europe began to arrive in significant numbers after the Second World War; by 1955 more than 60,000 Indians had immigrated, and by 1961, more than 172,000 West Indians, most of whom would find work in unskilled jobs.1 They came to stay, raised families and encouraged their children to better themselves economically and socially; by 1981 the West Indian population in the United Kingdom had reached an estimated 500,000 to 550,000.2 The rubric Windrush Generation has come to stand as a popular designation for this post-war emigration from the Caribbean and former British colonies in Africa and Asia to the United Kingdom; the term takes its name from the troopship/passenger vessel Empire Windrush, which began carrying West Indians to England in June 1948, an event that symbolizes the beginnings of contemporary, multiracial Britain and the reshaping of national identity (“Windrush”). Writersto-be from the West Indies/Caribbean such as Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Wilson Harris arrived in England with this surge of immigration during the 1950s, yet unlike the majority of other West Indian immigrants of this period, they came as students and intellectuals and their eventual success not only gave them professional identities but also the liberty to travel, to reside in other countries, and/or to leave England altogether. For these writers, Britain was a first stop, not necessarily a final destination, with some later immigrating to Canada and the USA; nearly all would return, at least off and on, to the Caribbean. This essay will consider émigré experiences in works of two of the best known writers of the Windrush Generation, George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul, and juxtapose these writers with Milan Kundera, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to France in 1975 and began publishing his novels in French in 1993. It will also consider the émigré experiences of two other writers, Caryl Phillips, a second-generation writer of the Caribbean/West Indian Diaspora in Britain, and Tzvetan Todorov, who emigrated from Bulgaria to France in the early 1960s and who calls himself a “circumstantial exile,” having gone to France not for political or economic reasons but simply to further his education (L’homme dépaysé 13); Todorov writes and publishes in French, a language that he did not know prior to emigration from Bulgaria. Spanning a fifty-year time period, the works of these writers, then, provide different perspectives on émigré experiences and on the shifting notions of identity in the twentieth century and contemporary world. This essay argues that all entities and identities are translational in the sense that they undergo

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continual transformation, which necessarily involves processes of interpretation and re-expression. Clearly, in today’s increasingly multicultural societies, immigration brings new opportunities and fashions new identities; it cannot be denied, though, that for many the émigré experience is anxietyfraught and painful, and in this essay I will highlight its problematic aspects and predicaments, asking the question to what extent the concept of translation might shed light on them. The essay also seeks to clarify the difference between two terms: hybridity and translational identity, making a case for the latter as a better descriptor of the process of identity making and better able to pinpoint the problematic aspects of the émigré experience. At the outset, a fundamental difference among the émigré experiences of these five writers might be postulated in this manner: for Lamming, Naipaul, and Phillips, who emigrated from British colonies to the UK, any translation of identity would seem to arise out of ethnic and cultural differences primarily and linguistic differences only secondarily, given that English is their native language; for Kundera and Todorov, who immigrated to a country whose language was not their first and who took up writing in a second language when they were already adults, the formation of a new, émigré identity would seem to be a more radical and cognitively problem-fraught construction. Here I am simply pointing to different kinds of difficulties, and am not implying that one sort is less anxiety packed than another. As Caryl Phillips recalls, “The Britain that I recognised practised discrimination in education, in housing, in employment, in all areas of social life. Us and them. Lines were not to be crossed” (A New World Order 244). For an adult, having to learn and master another language in order to fit into a culture and society is a significant barrier; however, depending on the circumstance, the color line may be an insurmountable one. For Kundera and Todorov, the concept of translation has a prominent place. In Le rideau, Kundera’s essay on the history of the European novel, he conceives of the novel genre as inherently interpretative: “The only thing that remains for us in the face of this inevitable defeat that we call life is to try to understand it. And that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel” (21).3 Kundera’s remarks are not far in spirit from Naipaul’s definition of the novel, which he borrows from Evelyn Waugh. To the question, what is fiction, Naipaul replies: “experience totally transformed” (Reading and Writing 23). Translation, transformation, transculturation: all of these words and their variants have come to the center of theories and critical studies of postcolonial and contemporary literatures. We are in the midst of understanding literature and culture from perspectives that emphasize movement and shifts—everything, we realize, is unfinished. As Todorov points out, though, the idea of a wholly nomadic identity or of multiple identities may be exciting, but it is suspect; at least for him, it is contrary to experience. There is a

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limit imposed by time on the number of cultures to which a person can belong; transculturation passes by way of acculturation (L’homme dépaysé 22).4 Or to state this in slightly different words, we must first become part of something before we can translate that something toward something else.

THE HYBRID VERSUS THE TRANSLATIONAL T. E. Lawrence has said that any man who belongs to two cultures ends up losing his soul. That was back in the days when East was East and West was West—in other words, long before Homi Bhabha and hybridity, one of those indispensable post-colonial terms. Partly through overuse and vulgarization, the scope of the term has been extended way beyond the notion of a condition in which a person’s identity bears the mark of more than one culture or ethnic group. A hybrid is the product of the interaction of two unlike cultures. In Caryl Phillips’s A New World Order (2001), we find an example of a precise usage of the term, as well as the tendency to stretch it beyond its capacity. “History dealt me four cards; an ambiguous hand,” he writes (4). For Phillips, an African American who emigrated with his parents from Jamaica to Britain, and who now lives in the United States and travels often to the Caribbean, the pull of different heritages, places and cultures is something tangible. The situation in which he finds himself is partly inherited as well as partly a matter of choice. Phillips embraces the term hybridity when he writes of his own experiences as well as in reference to the historical situation of the Caribbean/West Indies: “cultural hybridity . . . is the quintessential Caribbean condition” (131). This use of hybridity makes sense. Broader uses of the term often do not; it would be false, for instance, to suggest that anyone no matter his/her background can become hybrid, or is hybrid simply by virtue of living in a multi-cultural society and a globalizing world. Generally speaking, hybridity is “a hand” that either one is dealt or one isn’t; the term makes most sense when applied to a product or a resulting situation. Phillips continues: “In this new world order of the twenty-first century we are all being dealt an ambiguous hand, one which may eventually help us to accept the dignity which informs the limited participation of the migrant, the asylum-seeker, or the refugee” (A New World Order 6). This is a civil attitude for persons and societies to adopt in the face of the world in which we live; however, I would like to argue that it would clarify the term/concept if we limit hybrid and hybridity to the notion of product, or the description of a heritage or a condition. When we describe the interaction or the process by which an individual negotiates his/her identity, learns new languages, adapts to new cultures, and, in short, finds a way in a world of languages and cultures, then translation or

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translational identity might be a more appropriate term. It is only through translation that a person can move from X to Y, or can understand something in Z in relation to X or Y, and can thus widen his/her cultural knowledge and sympathies. But what is translation, and what do we mean by translation in this particular sense? Translation plays a part in any interpretive activity, including our sense of personhood as well as others’ sense of our identity, and this interpretive activity involves a transformation of the foreign into the familiar. Identity formation can be conceptualized as a translation that comprises two basic operations: comprehension (i.e., deciphering a sign of whatever sort), and expression of what has been comprehended. As Marianne Lederer (1994) explains in La traduction d’aujourd’hui, “the act of translation consists of ‘comprehending’ a ‘text,’ then, in the second step, ‘re-expressing’ this ‘text’ in another language. Each of the operations that these words designate merits a full-length study, because they are of a considerable complexity.”5 To make an analogy, we can think of a person both as a text and a translator of texts. In the former sense, a person’s identity could be said to comprise not only a genetic inheritance and disposition but also a storehouse of learned information/knowledge, such as socio-cultural knowledge about conventions of behavior pertaining to a particular community, culture and society. In the latter sense, if we now think of a person as a translator of texts, any new or foreign convention of behavior would have to be comprehended in relation to his/her existing socio-cultural knowledge, and this comprehension would entail, for example, understanding the basic idea that the convention embodies. The second step in this translation process constitutes a response to the comprehended foreign convention of behavior in the form of words, gestures, or acts. Translation passes from comprehension to expression, or to use slightly different terms, from interpretation to performance. A person’s identity as storehouse of learned information/knowledge gets modified at two junctures in the process: first, at the point of comprehension or deciphering of the foreign convention; further differentiation occurs in the movement from comprehended meaning to expression. Let us consider in more detail some aspects of or concepts pertaining to the translation process as it would apply to any person in a multilingual, multicultural context: Familiarity versus foreignness. When different languages such as L1 (one’s native language) and L2 (a second or foreign language), and different cultures such as C1 (one’s home culture) and C2 (a foreign culture) interact, one side of the pair will be more familiar to the speaker/learner than the other. The directional movement of linguistic and cultural translation will be less difficult in this direction (i.e., toward the familiar language or culture) than in the other

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direction (i.e., toward the foreign language or culture). The greater the difference between languages and sociocultural conventions, the greater the resistance to comprehension and (re)expression. We typically learn something new by first comparing it to something familiar, but that is only the initial step in the process, which must pass beyond the knowledge and identity that one already has to express something new that emerges by way of the translational interaction. Resistances. Translation puts forward the basic idea of a movement across a space of resistance. This space comes into the foreground through the juxtaposition of languages and cultures, and it is constituted of differences and non-equivalences that emerge as translation passes from L2 to L1, C2 to C1, or vice versa. Translation moves across this space of resistance, reconfiguring but never eliminating it, such that the space is changed with each intervention. Broadly speaking, a barrier or an obstacle is that which does not permit easy passage from one side of the equation to the other. There may be something broadly systematic about the resistance (e.g., the conventions of counting in English versus the conventions of counting in French: “eighty” in English versus “four-twenties” in French), or the resistance may be particularized to a single element (e.g., a coffee table in Cantonese is “chah toi,” or “tea table”). Comprehension/deverbalization. How does one surmount an obstacle, or get across a barrier? The concept of deverbalization, or the process of deciphering a sign, puts forward the crucial notion that a translation does not pass directly from one language to another, or from one cultural convention to another. When one translates a text from one language (L2) to another (L1), one must deverbalize L2; that is to say, one must find the core idea that a particular word, sentence, or discourse expresses, and then (re)express that idea in L1. So, to respond to the rhetorical question, one can surmount an obstacle in linguistic and cultural translation in various ways: for instance, if I may make a banal analogy, by climbing over it (i.e., by treating a problem from a higher level of abstraction) or by going around it (i.e., reconceptualizing a problem or circumventing it). Abstraction, re-conceptualization and circumvention are aspects of deverbalization that facilitate re-expression of L2 in L1, becoming translational strategies in the second stage of the process. The concept of deverbalization implies that both similarities and differences come into play during the translation process, and that differences can be transformed into roughly approximate equivalences at a more abstract level, or when treated from other perspectives. Untranslatability. A model of translational identity is based on the premise that even foreign cultural knowledge can be learned and that all cultures are sufficiently broad to accommodate the approximation of new and “strange”

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conventions and ideas. However, the model also is based on a premise that each culture has particularities, and some aspects of these particularities remain untranslatable; those aspects will change in the course of time and according to the context and situation. The particularities can be approximated through translation, but not made exactly the same. So translation both conserves and transforms: it seeks new possibilities for establishing relationships and thinking about particularities, while acknowledging difference and otherness. Expression. If we have in mind a person’s biological and genetic make-up, then identity is something that one has at birth—it is “the hand” that each of us gets dealt; if, conversely, we are discussing identity formation, or how a person learns and adapts to different contexts and situations, to different cultures and society, then identity is also something constructed through interpretation and performance. A translational model emphasizes this through its explanation of the process of identity formation as two-stepped: comprehension followed by expression. In other words, identity not only is something, it also must do something; it shapes itself through actions. Furthermore, this process does not come to an end, but loops through cycles of re-interpretation and re-expression for each new, demanding context or situation that a person faces. Emergent reality and recursion. A translational identity is an emergent reality that arises through juxtapositions of languages and cultures, contexts and situations, and takes shape through a process of recursion, or recursive looping, that repatterns the old and familiar to the demands of the new and foreign. Fueled in part by a residue of the untranslatable that accompanies any attempt to incorporate difference and otherness in new patterns of behavior, the process itself adjusts to instabilities and incompleteness; a translational identity is incomplete in the sense that it is open to revision and is dependent, in part, on each new situation and each accompanying re-interpretation and re-expression of reality. A person’s identity is a construction as well as an inherent collection of characteristics and orientations. Given that we typically learn something new by assimilating it first to what we already know, the predicament that the émigré faces is the necessity to reshape his/her identity to meet the demands of a new place. Like anyone else, an émigré understands the world in terms of what he/she already knows (i.e., the home language and culture), yet he/she is called upon, in the new, foreign place, to be someone different, someone who fits into that new place. We find this idea expressed in an interesting way in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), whose semi-autobiographical, immigrant narrator traces his evolution from West Indian scholarship student to international author, comparing it with the uncanny tale of a traveler who

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steps through a door in time and finds that the ship that brought him to his port of call departed long ago and that he has become in effect a different person. To become an émigré is to initiate a process of self-transformation, where one will become inevitably different if one is to fit in the foreign culture and society. In L’homme dépaysé (1996) Todorov illuminates the predicament of the émigré, particularly the Eastern European émigré, in a manner that sheds light on the concept of identity as translational. Transculturation, that is, the acquisition of a new cultural code without losing the code of one’s native language and culture, must pass by way of acculturation. To state this in terms of the translation model, getting from X to Y entails both gaining new knowledge and re-adjusting old knowledge. To lose one’s original culture (i.e., déculturation) is not a tragedy, Todorov remarks, as long as one acquires another culture (22). Transculturation implies movement across a cultural space in which both X and Y are present, though not in the same proportions and varying according to the circumstances. Thus Todorov can write: “I live in a unique space, at once within and outside of it: a stranger ‘back home’ in Sofia, Bulgaria, and at home yet ‘in a foreign way’ in Paris” (23).

ÉMIGRÉ EXPERIENCES Exile or the émigré experience—the triangular relationship between a person, his/her native place or home culture, and some other place or foreign culture—involves discovery and self-transformation.6 What is discovered is not only the foreign place and culture (i.e., the stranger without) but also one’s own person and the home culture perceived and understood in new ways (i.e., the stranger within). In The Pleasures of Exile (1960), a groundbreaking and now classic study written during the end of the colonial and the beginning of the post-colonial period, George Lamming defines the émigré experience not only in terms of the colonial/metropolitan dichotomy but from a broader, existentialist perspective: “The pleasure and paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am. My role . . . has rather to do with time and change than with the geography of circumstances; and yet there is always an acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head” (PE 50). For Anglophone writers from the Caribbean, emigration/ immigration began to evolve into a principal subject matter in the 1950s, and Lamming is the first writer from the region to make it a major theme. His first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), returns to the rural West Indian landscape of his childhood in Barbados in the 1930s and ’40s, telling the story of a boy’s (G.’s) growing up in a village where people willingly give their

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obedience to the white English landlord and have only a vague sense of their own history; although its setting is wholly Caribbean, this is probably not a novel that could have been written prior to Lamming’s departure for and émigré life in England, for it is arguably the differentiating, transformative process of exile that facilitated the expression of both an affection for a West Indian community and alienation from it. The novel’s titular metaphor, which derives from a poem of Derek Walcott, another West Indian writer who has made exile one of his principal themes, would seem to show the impact of émigré experience. Toward the end of the novel, the first-person narrator says revealingly: When I reach Trinidad where no one knows me, I may be able to strike identity with the other person. But it was never possible here. I am always feeling terrified of being known; not because they really know you, but simply because their claim to this knowledge is a concealed attempt to destroy you. That is what knowing means. . . . They can never know you [though]. . . . They won’t know the you that’s hidden somewhere in the castle of your skin. (261)

If we put aside the reference to Trinidad, the entire passage would not be out of place in a novel about emigrants in London, such as Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). The word “castle” jars the reader not only because stones and flesh become poetically congruous, but also because castles are typically found in Europe and not the West Indies. The titular metaphor and the entire passage seem touched by Lamming’s émigré experience—its risks and obstacles as well as the excitement, newfound awareness, and power of expression that the process has engendered. Lamming’s second novel, The Emigrants (1954), continues where In the Castle of My Skin leaves off, tracing the voyage of the young man who leaves his native island to take a teaching post in Trinidad and after four years there makes a desperate “leap toward the sea,” traveling with an array of other passengers, chiefly West Indians, to England (7). If we consider the novel in terms of translational identities, what it especially illustrates is strangeness within familiarity, or the emigrants’ need to translate a cultural knowledge that they mistakenly believe they already possess. The experience of being emigrants carries them, unexpectedly, into the undefined regions of their own selves. The novel is existentialist, and one perhaps also influenced by film noir, where shadows, darkness and anxiety pervade almost every scene and establish the atmosphere: “[Collis, Peggy, Frederick] were eternally apart, riding the rhythm of the night that poured freely through the smoke and water of the little cage that had caught them” (223–24). The emigrants go to England looking for “a better break,” a phrase that recurs again and again, yet the opportunities and freedom that each seeks are circumscribed by the

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barriers and restrictions that they encounter (e.g., difficulties in finding lodging, unemployment, harassment by police, prejudice and racism, their own ignorance of the way of life in England) (33). Enclosed spaces, such the cabins of the passenger ship, the train that takes them from Plymouth to Paddington Station, the hostel room, a barge, and nightclubs symbolically convey their entrapment: [The room’s] immediacy forced them to see that each was caught in it. There was no escape from it until the morning came with its uncertain offer of another day’s work. Alone, circumscribed by the night and the neutral staring walls, each felt himself pushed to the limits of his thinking. . . . It was here in the room of garlic, onions and mist that each became aware, gradually, anxiously, of the level and scope of his private existence. (192)

The first fictional migrant narrative in English, The Emigrants shows the shifting relationship between a person’s identity and sense of place.7 Shared situations and circumstances (e.g., the vessel, the hostel) provide a temporary stay against disorder as long as the emigrants remain within those boundaries; beyond, in unfamiliar England, different from their expectations, they have to make new identities to fit in the new place—or risk “estrangement.” Two emigrants, Higgins and Dickson, break down, a “fate,” the narrator surmises, “awaiting . . . any man who chooses one country . . . in the illusion that it was only a larger extension of the home which he had left” (237). To the question, what is England to the emigrants, the novel responds unequivocally that it is not yet theirs, although its idea has colonized their beliefs and desires: England was not only a place, but a heritage. Some of us might have expressed a certain hostility to that heritage, but it remained, nevertheless, a hostility to something that was already a part of us. But all that was now coming to an end. England was simply a world [in] which we had moved about at random, and on occasions encountered by chance. It was just there like nature, drifting vaguely beyond our reach. (237)

The emigrants begin their voyage from the West Indies with the assumption that they already know England, for they were born in English colonies and they speak English; upon their arrival, the shock of foreignness throws them back upon themselves, to a self-exploration, and “England” (the imagined country) vanishes in the shadows. In one sense the long journey between colony and metropolis has not brought them closer to their destination, except that it has initiated the process of translation from a former identity toward a revised, new one. Winner of the Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul stands out as the most celebrated of Windrush Generation writers. Right from

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the beginning of his career, the émigré experience impacts on his 1950s novels about Trinidad and one of his masterworks, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Partly biographical, a fictional portrait of the author’s father, the character of Biswas also takes shape as well from Naipaul’s own émigré experience: in Biswas’s not-belonging is Naipaul’s; in his sense of being an outsider is also Naipaul’s. Expatriate and émigré experiences become a principal subject matter in several novels, including The Mimic Men (1967), In a Free State (1971), A Bend in the River (1979), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Way in the World (1994), and more recently, Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004). Although the main character of The Mimic Men, Ralph Kripal Singh, comes from a later generation and a higher social class than Lamming’s emigrants, the novel is similarly an existentialist meditation whose subject matter is less the society left behind, or the society immigrated to, than revelations about the self that the émigré experience engenders. Singh is at home nowhere; unable to translate his desires into action in a world that he considers irremediably flawed, he discovers his own limitations and the inability to construct a new life. A Bend in the River encapsulates many of the features of Naipaul’s portrayal of the predicament of the émigré. The novel’s narrator, Salim, likens himself to the displaced Africans he encounters: “Home was something in the head. It was something I had lost. And in that I was like the ragged Africans who were so abject in the town we serviced” (107). Salim’s nightmarish dream—a “remote vision of the planet, of men lost in space and time, but dreadfully, pointlessly busy”—transforms his sense of loss and displacement into an existential predicament of the late twentieth century (241). The most provocative of the novel’s characters, however, is Salim’s expatriate friend Indar, whose attitude toward place and identity sets him apart; abandoning the idea of home and belonging, Indar counsels Salim: The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. (112–13)

If we analyze Indar’s ideas from the framework of the translation model, it is clear that there is something both right and wrong in his approach. When he tells Salim, “We make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities,” he is certainly right; in constructing a new identity we begin with an essential aperçu, and then act upon that interpretation (152). His counsel to

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“trample on the past” is certainly wrong, though; the émigré often gets stuck, so to speak, in the past, but a new identity, a transformed identity, can only emerge from a movement through or across the past, the familiar. Moreover, the difficulty of translating pre-existing knowledge and prior experience within a new context is partially what fuels the translation cycle, and brings about a new expression or action—a revised, new identity. To translate is not to replace one thing with another, but rather, to move through something toward another something that emerges in the process. The recursive loop of translation constantly reinterprets the past; it doesn’t erase it. To trample is not to make new; it is, in part, to repress and to mask. Thus for Indar one bound (or leap away from the identity and values of his coastal Indian Muslim community) eventually leads to a rebound, and he becomes a prisoner of his own dialectic, first trampling on the past, only later to revalorize it. In the end he returns to rural India to look for “some dream village in his head” (244). The basic question that the novel poses in various forms is this: how can traditional cultures and societies become modern? The novel’s highlighting of characters’ responses to traces of the past such as African masks, monuments, and ruins explore this problem from diverse perspectives. The translation model presupposes that the past cannot be discarded; rather, it must be comprehended and then reshaped through expression and actions. The basic idea of translation is here: through or across is different from either the overly simplifying notion that the past is irrelevant and can be forgotten or the equally false notion that the past can be preserved without being reinterpreted and transformed. In L’homme dépaysé Tzvetan Todorov begins his account of his experiences as an émigré in Paris by recalling a recurring dream that he has had for many years. In this dream he is no longer in Paris but back in the city of his birth, Sofia, Bulgaria; he has returned there for whatever reason, and at first he feels the joy of seeing old friends, his family, even his bedroom. The visit comes to an end, and he is on a tram headed for the train station when he discovers that he has forgotten his ticket and that consequently he is going to miss the train that will take him back to Paris. The dream has variations— sometimes he finds his path blocked by a crowd of people, sometimes he is in the middle of a field—but in any case the result is that he is unable to return to France. Todorov notes that this dream is apparently a common one for émigrés, especially from Eastern Europe. (As an aside, we might note that Naipaul has written of the dream/nightmare that haunted him during his early years in England and, as we have seen, he incorporated a version of this dream in A Bend in the River; also, Milan Kundera incorporates a dream with imagery similar to that of Todorov’s in his novel L’ignorance.) Todorov calls himself a circumstantial exile; he traveled to France in the 1960s to continue

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his studies and ended up staying. In time, he mastered the language and successfully integrated into the society; as a result, he thought of himself as someone belonging equally to two cultures: his native culture, Bulgarian, and his adopted culture, French. His return to Bulgaria in 1981 shows him the limits of this hybridity or double belonging, however: at a conference, whose subject is the value of nationalism, he finds himself taking a position that would have been perfectly understandable in France but is incomprehensible in the Bulgarian context: “The difficulties came to the surface when I began to translate my talk, originally written in French, my adopted language, to Bulgarian, my native tongue,” he explains (15). It becomes clear to him that his audience will not understand the talk in the way that he intended; worse, what he intended as an affirmation will be viewed as a negation. Todorov finds himself split in two, unable to locate the discourse position from which he might speak and what he might say. When he tries to put himself in the place of his listeners, to speak as a Bulgarian and propose a Bulgarian solution, he is greeted with distrust for he is someone who is now French: “If things were as simple as that, my listeners’ silence seemed to say (or in fact sometimes did say), why don’t you stay here then and put your own remedy to the test?”(16) The ideas in his talk, Todorov concludes, depend for their meaning on the place in which they were written and intended (France); his double belonging has a disappointing result: it renders inauthentic both his French discourse (for he now perceives that his ideas are not universally applicable, as he had supposed) and his Bulgarian discourse, since each can correspond only to a part of his being. There seems nowhere to turn, no solution: “I took refuge . . . in an oppressive silence” (17). The lesson that Todorov draws from the experience of this return to his native land comes in part though translation, which reveals to him the significant obstacles of getting from X to Y. He concludes that having two voices, two identities, can be a real menace, leading to a sense of social schizophrenia, if they are allowed to exist in rivalry. However, if these voices, or identities, can form a hierarchy, one that is freely chosen, then the anxiety of double belonging can be overcome and, in fact, can become the fertile ground of some new integration. Todorov explains, for instance, that French has indeed become his primary language and that Bulgarian is reserved for three or four specific situations. He also concludes that one must make choices, that one cannot be all things to all persons: thus, when asked by a publishing house in Sofia to write a preface for a collection of French literary criticism, he declines: “I know how to integrate the Bulgarian voice (foreign!) into my hierarchy of French, but not the other way around; the place of my present identity is Paris, not Sofia”(21). Todorov’s account of the predicament of hybridity illuminates the limitations of this concept and shows in concrete detail what belonging to different cultures entails.

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Like Todorov, Milan Kundera is another émigré in the tradition of European writers like Conrad, Beckett, and Nabokov who opt to write in a language other than their mother tongue, and in this respect they share a situation with colonial and post-colonial writers from Africa and Asia who choose, for whatever reasons, to write in a language other than their first. These writers are perhaps aware of translation in a more profound way than Lamming and Naipaul, for whom cultural and dialectal differences would seem the primary sources of tension and estrangement in their being born into or belonging to two cultures. In Kundera’s L’ignorance (2000), part of his so-called French cycle of novels that includes La lenteur (1993) and L’identité (1998), the theme of two émigrés’ return to their native land provides the framework for a lighthearted and irreverent examination of the meaning of home and identity in the contemporary world. As adults, Irena and Josef leave the country of their birth, Czechoslovakia—he for Denmark and she for France—to embark on a new life, and several years later return to visit their native city, Prague. Neither is eager to do so, yet both are drawn back, either by the tug of family ties or an unusual turn of events. What can home mean today, the narrator ponders: The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements, which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so much that I wonder: Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of the return still pertinent to our time? (Trans. Asher 54)

Not, is the answer—not today, not anymore. We can perhaps turn to the concept of translation to consider why not. We have said that translation involves two steps: finding the essential idea (deverbalization) and (re)expression, or to use slightly different terms, interpretation and performance. The difficulties that Irena and Josef confront when they return to their native land fall into two broad categories: misinterpretation (an erroneous deverbalization), and blocked expression. In this satiric novel Kundera likens the predicaments of Irena and Josef to that of Odysseus returning home after years of wandering the Mediterranean: [Odysseus] was waiting for just one thing: for [his family and friends] finally to say ‘Tell us!’ And this is the one thing they never said. For twenty years he had thought about nothing but his return. But once he was back, he was amazed to realize that his life, the very essence of his life, his center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost, and could retrieve only by telling about it. (Trans. Asher 34)

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In fact, this is a common predicament that the émigré faces, and a truth about identity. “Vivre n’est pas suffisant: / il faut s’en souvenir et le raconter” (“Simply to live is not enough / it is also necessary to think back on one’s life and to recount it”).8 These are words of François Cheng, one of the most renowned Chinese immigrants of France and the first Asian to be elected to the Académie française. A person’s identity takes form through interpretation, expression, and actions. When Irena and Josef return to Prague, no one seems interested in their lives abroad in France and Denmark respectively; they are never encouraged, except when they meet by chance and talk with each other, to tell their stories. In short, they are prevented from narratively performing their émigré identities, and they can only feel estrangement at the expectations of their Czech family and friends that they simply slide back into their former selves. When Irena’s mother, seventeen years after her daughter’s departure from Czechoslovakia, finally travels to Paris for a visit, she takes no interest in anything the daughter shows or tells her related to life in France. Irena’s recurring nightmare of being chased by women gaily toting beer mugs in their hands represents in symbolic form her fear of having her old identity imposed on her as well as her sense of others’ refusal to allow her to express her émigré identity (15). Metaphorically speaking, the Czech identity (beer and beer mugs) pushes aside the less robust French identity (wine and wine glasses). The same predicament seems to entrap Josef: his brother and sister-in-law want to tell him of their sufferings during his absence, and do not allow him to tell them about his life in Denmark. Clearly then, expression/performance constitutes an important step in identity formation, and a translational model points this out. Errors of interpretation, or faulty deverbalization, illustrate a different aspect of identity problems when viewed from a translational model. Irena’s and Josef’s families do not recognize their respective émigré identities partly because everyone falls into the trap of thinking of identity as a permanent stamp. Ironically, Irena and Josef repeat this error themselves when they go back to Prague and expect the city to be as it was twenty years ago. Josef cannot find the cemetery he searches for; Irena’s memory of the young man who gave her an ashtray filched in a bar many years ago leads to the tragicomic tryst with Josef, who has no idea who she might be and is too polite to risk offending her by asking her name and information about where they previously have met. As for Josef, the gap between his Czech identity and his Danish identity are comically recounted in the chapters wherein he finds and rereads his diary; the events recorded, and the attitude of the young narrator recounting them, are so offensive that he throws the diary in the trash.

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Josef tries to understand the virgin boy, to put himself in his skin, but he is not capable of it. That sentimentality mixed with sadism, that whole business is completely contrary to his tastes and his nature. He tears a blank page out of the diary, picks up a pencil, and copies out the sentence ‘I wallowed in her sadness.’ He contemplates the two handwritings for a long time: the one from long ago is a little clumsy, but the letters are the same shape as today’s. The resemblance is upsetting, it irritates him, it shocks him. How can two such alien, such opposite beings have the same handwriting? What common essence is it that makes a single person of him and this little snot? (Trans. Asher 83)

To say that the past exists would be an error, but it would also be erroneous to say that it doesn’t exist. Like identity, it constitutes a trace, viewed from within the present, which ceaselessly differentiates and transforms. This theme is repeated, with variations, again and again in the novel, not only in the narrative recounting Irena’s and Josef’s errors and errant lives but also in the philosophical reflections and essays counterpointing that narrative. “Know yourself” and “know your world”—these are familiar directives of wisdom; but about identity and place, Kundera takes a middle position (neither asserting them nor denying them) while showing their transformations. The novel’s title, Ignorance, sums it all up: “We who must die so soon, we just don’t know” (Trans. Asher 122).

NEW WORLD ORDER? I would not want to give the impression that contemporary writers portray the émigré only in the manner illustrated in the novels of Naipaul and Kundera. Indeed, the “pleasures of exile” have also been explored not only by Lamming but also by others, such as Todorov in Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (On Human Diversity) (1989), which considers the many sides of being a stranger, and Phillips in Extravagant Strangers (1997) and A New World Order. Although the postwar Britain to which Phillips’s parents immigrated was often an austere and insecure place marked by prejudice, hostility and discrimination, the Windrush Generation of immigrants survived it all and passed on the challenge to the next generations: the first generation “arrived with little luggage. They . . . survived the loss of their imaginary Britain” (New World Order 246). The sons and daughters, the second generation, were often able to turn displacement into a “gift” and to see identity as less color- and nationality-bound. On the one hand, Phillips acclaims the Caribbean as a model of a synthesizing new world order, yet on the other, like Todorov, his own experiences make him cautious, revealing to him the predicaments that each place brings and the

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“high anxiety” of trying to fit in all of them. “Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state,” he asserts (New World Order 6). Be that as it may, some people do seem to be able to live normal lives within complex multi-cultural identities. When I talk with and look into the faces of the university students I teach here in Hong Kong, I know that they move with an agility across a range of two or three languages and have a stake in as many cultures, yet I also know that they do not think of themselves as hybrid, as somehow having multiple identities, or living in a state of high anxiety about their place of belonging. One might even argue, if we wish to bring in the devil for a final paragraph, that migration and strangeness have become banalities. In Une brève histoire de l’avenir Jacques Attali points out that more and more people are turning to immigration out of choice, not out of danger or hardship. He estimates that in twenty-five years, or in 2030, about 50 million people each year will opt to immigrate and that a billion people will live outside of the country in which they were born or in which their parents were born (203). The experience of immigration, when it is selfchosen, is often different today than it was during the 1950s when Lamming, Naipaul, and the Windrush Generation immigrated to England, and it will likely be even more different still in twenty-five years. Although it is true that today many people live in countries other than the one in which they were born, it is also true that many of them continue to inhabit virtually the country of their birth by way of the Internet, satellite television, and mobile telephone services. Given these trends—the commonality of immigration, the often virtual nature of twenty-first century home—we may wonder, as one of America’s most famous expatriates, Paul Bowles, did fifty years ago in Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, whether in the not so distant future there will still be some foreign place where one can become again a stranger and encounter others who are strangers. Each new generation seems to have its own sense of what it means to be foreign, and what it takes to belong in the place(s) where we live.

NOTES 1. In Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, the main character, Moses, cites the figure of 40,000 West Indians living in Great Britain in the 1950s (141). 2. The Center for African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, cited by Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_African_Caribbean_ community. 3. My translation. 4. My translation of this work.

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5. My translation, p. 13. 6. For a discussion of the concept of exile, see Timothy Weiss, On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul (Amherst, MS: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 7. For a discussion of the concepts of place and identity, see Chapter 4 of Timothy Weiss, Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004): 109–144. 8. François Cheng, Et le souffle devient signe : Ma quête du vrai et du beau par la calligraphie (Paris: L’Iconoclaste, 2001) 76. My translation.

WORKS CITED Attali, Jacques. L’homme nomade. Paris: Fayard, 2003. ———. Une brève histoire de l’avenir. Paris: Fayard, 2006. Bowles, Paul. Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World. 1957. Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1984. The Center for African American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, cited by Wikipedia, 2007, 20 July 2007, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_African_ Caribbean_community. Cheng, François. Et le souffle devient signe : Ma quête du vrai et du beau par la calligraphie. Paris: L’iconoclaste, 2001. Kundera, Milan. La lenteur. By François Ricard. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. ———. L’identité. By François Ricard. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. ———. L’ignorance. By François Ricard. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. ———. Ignorance. Tran. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2002. ———. Le rideau : essai en sept parties. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. 1953; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991. ———. The Pleasures of Exile. 1960; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. ———. The Emigrants. 1954; Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Lederer, Marianne. La traduction d’aujourd’hui: Le modèle interprétatif. Paris: Hachette, 1994. Naipaul, V. S. A House for Mr. Biswas. 1961; New York: Penguin, 1969. ———. A Bend in the River. 1979; New York: Vintage Books, 1980. ———. In a Free State. 1971; New York: Vintage Books, 1984. ———. The Mimic Men. 1967; New York: Vintage Books, 1985. ———. The Enigma of Arrival. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. ———. A Way in the World. London: Vintage, 1995. ———. Reading and Writing: A Personal Account. New York: New York Review, 2000. ———. Half a Life. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. ———. Magic Seeds. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

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Phillips, Caryl. Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ———. A New World Order. London: Vintage, 2001. Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners. 1956; New York: Longman Publishing Company, 1994. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la diversité humaine. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989. ———. L’homme dépaysé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996. “UN Statistics Show Migration As A Dynamic Force In Global Development.” United Nations Online 14 Sep 2006. http://www.un.org/esa/. Weiss, Timothy. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. ———. Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. “Windrush.” BBC History. British Broadcasting Corporation. 20 Nov. 2006, www .bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/windrush.

Chapter Five

Between the Island and the City: Cultural Brokerage in Caribbean-Canadian Short Fiction Carmen Birkle

1. MEDIATING IN-BETWEEN CULTURES Multicultural writers have often been called “cultural mediators” and—to use a term from economics—“cultural brokers.” In their fiction, they explore their cultural heritage on the one hand and their encounter(s) with their host cultures on the other. These authors and their fiction communicate to their readership cultural connections, divisions, and means to overcome the barriers of the seemingly impermeable boundaries of institutions, politics, languages, and cultural practices. Mediation between cultures—which, in many cases in both Canada and the United States, means mediation between ethnic groups and the so-called mainstream—emphasizes neither a need for a choice of one culture over the other nor the melting of both into one, but proposes interdependence and ultimately transculturation as a chance for mutual enrichment and as the ideal outcome of such a cultural brokerage. This, however, is a difficult process, as Linda Hutcheon argues in Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions: “Caught between two worlds, the immigrant negotiates a new social space; caught between two cultures and often languages, the writer negotiates a new literary space” (9). I would add to this the literary critic whose task it is to mediate between the text as a symbolic representation of experience and its readership. In that sense, not only the immigrant and the immigrant writer but also the critics become cultural mediators or brokers. One component of cultural brokerage, namely the effect of cultural productions on readers and the latter’s responses to these multicultural texts, would necessitate an empirical investigation more in line with readerresponse criticism, which I do not propose to do in this paper. Rather, I will 59

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look at how places of origin and places of living are negotiated, how authors mediate between these (at least) two spaces. Thus, I do not discard the term “cultural brokerage” in its entirety, but will focus not so much on the outcome but on the process of mediation as such as well as on what is mediated. Furthermore, the examples chosen for my analysis, namely short stories by Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, and Shani Mootoo, describe their respective protagonists’ move to major Canadian cities such as Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. As I will argue, cityscape and the urban experience play a significant role in the characters’ migratory experience. Finally, authors, texts, and my analysis of short stories written by three authors born—or at least raised—in the Caribbean and migrated to Canada constitute such an instance of cultural brokerage.

2. CULTURAL BROKERAGE AND TRANSCULTURATION The term “broker” is taken from economics and describes someone who buys and sells shares in a company and/or arranges the details of a deal. It usually is a form of transaction from which all parties want to profit financially. The term “cultural broker” suggests, therefore, that some deal is pursued but with cultural and not necessarily financial gain. Apart from economics and business, brokerage is frequently referred to in linguistics as a form of mediation that goes beyond mere translation and in sociology where the broker often is a mentor. In ethnology and ethnography, the term “cultural broker” is frequently used synonymously with “cultural mediator” or “cultural intermediaries.” In my paper, I suggest that these anthropological and ethnological terms can also be applied to literature and culture in general. Here, brokers or mediators are mostly people who either move between cultures and/or are themselves cultural hybrids, that is, of mixed heritage. This movement in space—both physical-geographical and cultural—implies the existence of borders—national, ethnic, religious, cultural—that can be read differently depending on one’s personal situation and historical context. Thus, borders can be seen as barriers that have to be overcome. Cultural brokers, however, by definition, see these borders as “pathways that link peoples rather than barriers that separate them” (Szasz 3) and cross them frequently either physically or mentally. Mediating between cultures presupposes the existence of cultures that are in some way connected, e.g., because of their direct adjoining geographical borders or because of migration movements. The cultural broker has to be curious of both (or more) cultures, receptive of cultural structures and phenomena, has to be trustworthy and determined to be actively engaged in this mediation and to believe in the existence of cultural values that

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are worth being mediated (cf. Szasz 294–300). In contrast to economic brokers who—as a third party—are not emotionally involved in this business, cultural brokers will always take sides, will be emotionally involved, and will criticize depending on the issues and people they talk about. Emotions may emerge in the form of nostalgia for the past and places that, however, turn into “imaginary homelands,” to speak with Salman Rushdie. Additionally, the mediator has to assume that all sides are interested in hearing about other cultures and has to trust in the success of his or her endeavors. But what would be successful cultural brokerage? In economics, it is easier to measure success, namely in financial and material terms. But cultural brokerage has no easy measurements. Let us take the world of literature and publication as an example to describe successful cultural brokerage. A first aspect here could be the fact that immigrants are able and allowed to publish their work; a second aspect certainly are their sales figures that have increased over the years in Canada; a third aspect is constituted by the amount of prizes their works have been awarded. Finally, a fourth aspect would be intercultural understanding—an understanding of the meaning of differences and equality, of cultural otherness without negative (or positive) stereotypification. This important result of cultural brokerage can be achieved first of all by making people curious about cultural otherness, by making clear that otherness depends on norms, that these norms are fixed based on spoken/written or unspoken/unwritten agreement of a specific group, and that these norms are culturally constructed and not given once and forever, meaning that they are flexible and subject to changes. A successful cultural brokerage will often lead to cultural intermingling, mutual adoption of cultural practices, ideally resulting in a transculturation of cultures into something new, assuming hybridity as its key characteristic. Unfortunately, however, such successful brokering is a gradual, most often also tedious, and frequently painful process, the results of which cannot easily be measured. Before discussing the specific cases of Caribbean immigrants in Canada, two more questions about this brokering process need to be addressed when talking about literature and cultural production in general. First, who could be/is the cultural broker? My suggestion is that, in the realm of literature, it can be the author, the text with its characters, as well as the critic who discusses both perhaps in an essay, book, or simply in the classroom. As Dieter Riemenschneider explains in his essay on “Intercultural Communication”: “literary texts themselves mediate culture. As symbolic representations of social practice they are themselves implicated in the mediating nature of such representation” (385). While such a text will always constitute a moment of mediation, Riemenschneider also emphasizes the function of the critic or academic teacher in this process: “My academic position is inextricably tied in

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with my intention to mediate, which means to disseminate this literature and to communicate with my students, readers, colleagues and, of course, with members of the cultural communities with whose works I am concerned” (385). Thus, authors, texts, and critics/readers—the latter group only if they pass on their insights gained through the reading process—can be considered cultural brokers. Second, where does cultural brokerage take place? Here, too, I would argue that the most obvious cultural contact zone, to use Mary Louise Pratt’s term,1 in our case is the so-called host country, here Canada, to which all three authors have moved. On another level, the text itself becomes this contact zone that re-enacts intercultural encounters. According to Pratt, the encounters that take place in these zones are never between two equal parties but are always defined by power struggles, hierarchies, and often violent confrontations. If we accept the critic as a broker as well, then the spaces of this essay, the pages of the book in which it will appear as well as the classroom in which the critic/teacher discusses such texts with students will become cultural contact zones, that is, a space of cultural brokerage. Furthermore, the cultural broker not only mediates between two (or more) places and people, but in order to do so, also between past and present, between home and host countries, between the Self and the Other, with all categories constantly shifting and changing, making mediation an even more difficult endeavor. In the following, I consider myself and assume the responsibility of a cultural broker who will first briefly look at the movement that initiates intercultural encounters in Canada, namely through migration from the Caribbean to Canada. I will look at the authors Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, and Shani Mootoo, their personal interculturality and brokerage, and finally at selected texts and their characters as cultural brokers.

3. CARIBBEAN IMMIGRATION TO CANADA “The history of Canada, as it was taught to most of us, is the history of immigration” (Hutcheon 10). This is what Linda Hutcheon rightly claims in Other Solitudes, referring to the various waves of immigration over the centuries, but also to “the history of European colonialism” (Hutcheon 10). But it was not before 1946 that major waves of immigrants from the Caribbean came to Canada, often via England. The Canadian version of the American Dream to rise to riches fast attracted many people from the Caribbean to Canada as another promised land next to the United States. In contrast to the U.S., “Canada seem[ed] more accessible because of British Commonwealth links and, from the distance at any rate, because of a favorable racial image”

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(Brown 27). Like many of their immigrant colleagues from other nations, they settled in the major cities, above all in Toronto. And it was not before the 1960s—with a “dramatic increase in Caribbean immigration to Canada” (Brown 5)—that writers of Caribbean origins were recognized in Canada. This very slow process of recognition at first only focused on a few writers such as Austin Clarke from Barbados. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the landscape of Canadian immigrant writing is peopled with writers such as Neil Bissoondath from Trinidad, Claire Harris from Trinidad, Marlene Nourbese Philip from Tobago-Trinidad, Harold Sonny Ladoo from Trinidad, or Sam Selvon who came from Trinidad to Canada via England, and many others. It is quite obvious that Trinidad is one of the Caribbean islands that has seen many of its people immigrate to Canada, among them also two of the writers to be discussed today, namely Dionne Brand and Shani Mootoo. The pressures of the British Empire on Trinidad began to loosen in 1950 “by granting the peoples of Trinidad semi-autonomous rule” (Ho, “Shani Mootoo’s Trinidad”), which led to a first wave of emigration to Canada as a former British colony and part of the British Commonwealth. In 1962, Britain “dissolved the federation [West Indies Federation], and both Jamaica and Trinidad became fully independent members of the British Commonwealth in August 1962” (Rogozi´nski 323) and subject to the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, which restricted Caribbean immigration to England and diverted it to the U.S. and Canada. In November 1966, Barbados became fully independent. “All this coincided with a liberalization in Canada’s own immigration policies” (“The Caribbean Community of Manitoba”).2 In the course of the 1960s and ’70s, Trinidadian youth experienced a politicization because of worldwide youth movements.3 When multiculturalism became part of the official politics in 1971 in Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s speech before the House of Commons (Oct. 8, 1971), after the Canada Act of 19674 and with the Canadian Multiculturalism Act5 of 1988, Canada experienced a shift from a “colonial” to a “postcolonial” country with the emancipation of both the nation and different groups within the nation, such as women and ethnic people. And “inevitably, this institutionalization of multiculturalism in Canadian society has extended to its literature” (Hutcheon 15).6 The relationship between Canada and the Caribbean lies at the intersection of two mutual heterostereotypes. From a Canadian—North American—or, more generally speaking, Western point of view, the Caribbean represents exoticism and ultimately Paradise itself. From a Caribbean perspective, first Britain, then North America is “the New World as promised land” (Brown 2). As Lloyd Brown points out: “Caribbean immigrants to Canada, therefore, stand at the intersection of two powerful

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myths: one reflects the outsider’s limited perception of the Caribbean as idyll, and the other reflects the islanders’ idealistic expectations of Canada” (Brown 2). For Caribbean immigrants both myths have long been demythified in the confrontation with the hardships of a migratory existence. What Canadian writers of Caribbean descent, therefore, often thematize is the racism that they as—usually—black Caribbeans encounter(ed) upon arrival.7 Additionally, racism as well as the general status of in-between cultures and living in a diaspora produces an emotional “tension between wanting to belong to the new society and yet wanting to retain the culture of the old one” (Hutcheon 12).8 It is this experience that may produce an idealization of the new and a rejection of the old on the one hand or a reluctant acceptance of the new and nostalgia for the old on the other, linking the old and the new through “memory and desire” (Brown 13). The actions and reactions are individually chosen, but generally cultural encounters will lead to a process of gradual transculturation, which, however, does not liberate people from actively negotiating, explaining, and preserving their cultural heritage across space and time. This process does not progress linearly but in jumps including setbacks. Literature, the writer, and the critic play a major role as cultural brokers in this process.

4. EXPERIENCING CANADA WITH AUSTIN CLARKE (*1934) Austin Clarke was born and educated at St. James Parish in Barbados before he moved to Canada in 1955 to study economics and political science at the University of Toronto. In later years, he worked as an actor, journalist, and industrial photographer, and taught creative writing. He was a writer-inresidence at various universities in the U.S. and Canada, served as cultural and press attaché to the Barbardian embassy in Washington, as advisor to the Prime Minister of Barbados, and, back in Canada, on the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. Over the years, “Clarke’s career was intertwined with political activism and public advocacy” (Brown 4) with his social and political criticism of both Canada and the Caribbean verging on polemics (cf. Brown 4). Clarke is the author of quite a number of short-story collections9 and novels.10 The prizes he has won so far are numerous and testify to successful cultural brokerage. His most recent novel The Polished Hoe is the winner of the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize, the 2002 Giller Prize (one of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards), and Ontario’s 2002 Trillium Book Award. Austin Clarke is also the winner of the 1999 W. O. Mitchell Prize, awarded each year to a Canadian writer who has produced an outstanding body of work and served as a mentor to other writers. Clarke’s books

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by now are reviewed in newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, or the Toronto Globe and Mail. While some of his early stories and novels are set in Barbados and describe the poverty and hardships of people there as motivating factors for immigration to North America, and frequently to one of Canada’s major cities, his later fiction predominantly deals with the life of Caribbean immigrants in Canada, most often in Toronto, the poverty they face, and the racism they encounter. He deals with similar issues in his autobiography Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980), in which he adds his criticism of British colonialism.11 In an interview with Marion Richmond, Austin Clarke talks about how he, as the son of a black plantation owner in Barbados, came to Canada as a student in 1955 and never intended to stay. Similar to the Chinese sojourners to the United States in the nineteenth century, who never intended to stay but expected to make enough money and then return to their families in China but ultimately stranded in the U.S. because of poverty, the idea for Clarke was to get a university education as cultural capital and then return to Barbados.12 Toronto, at the time, as Clarke presents it, was inhospitable to foreigners and “a very dull, a very provincial, a very introverted society. I think I’m justified in saying that Toronto has always been racist” (64). The difficulties of renting property and finding a job for Caribbean blacks recur frequently in Clarke’s stories and novels. But he is also self-critical enough to admit that as black Caribbean students who were considered “a special group” (65), they soon internalized “the racialist rhetoric of those who said that the black Canadian was not as well educated as the West Indian, and therefore we felt, some of us, superior to the Canadian black” (65). Forms of colonization and British colonialism are major issues in Clarke’s life and fiction. He sees colonization at work not only in the Caribbean but also in Canada when immigrants internalize the rejection by and racism of mainstream society. And “from that attitude,” as Clarke argues in this interview, “spring all of the ideas about the superiority of certain races” (65). When in 1981 he finally decided to become a Canadian citizen, he considered himself a Canadian on the legal level, but Barbadian on the cultural and biological levels: “I am Barbadian by nature—the best of me is Barbadian; the best of my memories are Barbadian” (69). In Clarke’s fiction, Barbados comes across “as Caribbean microcosm” and “the Caribbean itself both as distinctive regional culture, and as a moral and cultural analogue to Canadian society” (Brown 11). Austin Clarke has worked on many of these issues in his fiction. In the short story “Canadian Experience,” he presents the situation of a non-landed immigrant, that is, of someone who is not admitted to Canada for permanent residence at first. This man is the son of a plantation owner in Barbados who

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has not come to Canada as a student but as someone looking for new experiences and work. But during his eight years in Canada, he is only able to get low-paying and temporary jobs, and when he is finally asked for a job interview at a bank, he is too afraid to actually introduce himself. Having no job, no money, and about to be thrown out of his room, his final escape is suicide by throwing himself in front of the subway. Returning to Barbados is not possible for this young man because he left his home against the will of his father and has thus become an outsider in both cultures. “Caribbean Experience” is part of a collection entitled Nine Men Who Laughed (1986). All men in all stories, as Austin Clarke explains in the introduction to the collection, “have lived under a cloud of confusion. Under a smear of self-doubt” (1). For Clarke, it is essential that these men leave their home in Barbados full of energy, optimism, and with—from an island point of view—justified self-confidence and hope for future success in Canada. In Barbados, they belong to the colonial elite, and they expect a translation of this status to Canada. Upon arrival, however, their disappointment, disillusionment, and ultimate depression begin. In the context of cultural brokerage, these nine men could be labeled potential cultural brokers because they are first eager to get in touch with another culture and share their own background. However, clearly, the man in “Canadian Experience” fails in this endeavor. By portraying such a failure, Clarke attempts to mediate between the hopeful but uninformed expectations on the Caribbean side and the ignorant, arrogant, and also racist attitude on the Canadian side. Clarke becomes a broker first of all by simply writing the story and thus talking about his own and other Caribbean men’s Canadian experiences. On a more complex level, Clarke creates a personal narrator who communicates his thoughts and experiences in a third-person narration, almost in a stream-of-consciousness style, and who is named only once, in a Christmas card written by Pat, the actress: “To George, at Xmas” (47). Through the narrator’s point of view, the reader can identify with the young man in his early thirties and can follow his fears, hopes, and final suicide. By having the narrator fail in such a drastic way, Clarke succeeds in shocking his readers into an awareness of the Canadian experience of Caribbean immigrants.13 By looking at how Clarke manages to become such a successful cultural broker and discussing his techniques, I hope to be able to partake in successful cultural brokerage on the academic level. The narrator’s feelings of alienation, worthlessness, and despair are reflected in his living conditions (room, clothes, food), in Toronto’s anonymous cityscape with a life full of sounds, and in his laughter. The man’s mindscape is shaped by “morbidness” (31), self-disgust (cf. 31), and a discrepancy between the image he has of himself (of what or who he believes to be) and what he sees reflected in

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the mirror: “his image was incorrect” (31). While he looks at his mirror reflection, he also looks at his own eyes looking at him. All “four” eyes belong to him, and it is his self-identification that he is confronted with, finds faults with, and rejects. Clearly, when the looking glass throws back at him a “punishing reflection” (31), it is his own punishing of himself for what he has let himself become. The mechanisms of self-identification determine the man’s behavior in the following story such as his disgust with his dirty and greasy clothes unsuitable for the occasion of the job interview at a bank. His joblessness has made his life in one poorly furnished room miserable with hardly anything to eat in the refrigerator. His daily routine consists of trips to the library in order to read the advertisements for jobs. In his despair, he finally picks the one for “an energetic junior executive” in a bank that requires a “university degree in business or in finance, or the equivalent in business experience” (34). The ad contains quite a number of terms that describe the opposite of what the reader begins to see in this man: energetic, executive, responsibility, successful, university degree, etc. In his imagination, however, he believes to be a suitable candidate. When facing the world outside his mindscape, he learns a different lesson and is unable to cope with a world that is not his own (that of the son of a plantation owner). The bank is “on Bay Street in the business district of banks, brokerages and corporations. For all the time he had lived in Toronto, this district had frightened him” (32). But he hopes to become a part of the world that is based on “imagination,” which, as his neighbor, the unsuccessful actress ultimately turned waitress, tells him, “is something called a euphemism for lies” (35). On his way to the bank, he experiences the city as an anonymous and alienating place. There is no communication between people (“like sentries, silent and sullen” [40]), or they are simply hurrying from one place to another. The city seems to be sanitized; terms such as “clean,” “granite,” “polished like chrome” (40) determine his first impressions. He is out of step with the city; he “can smell only the fumes of the trains” but knows that they “run on electricity” (40). The city overwhelms him with its crowds (like “sardines of silent, serious people” [41]). While in the introductory scene, his own eyes look back at him, the eyes of the people in the city refuse to see him. As he tells the actress: “They looked on me and at me and through me, right through me. I was a piece of glass” (45). As Ralph Ellison demonstrates in his novel Invisible Man (1952), the black man simply is invisible to white society. While the mirror cuts his image “off at the neck” (31), the city’s “tall office buildings” (42) further disassemble his reflection, outward appearance, and thus identity. Although his walk “in their shadow” reminds him of “walking in a valley back in Barbados” (42), this familiar perception is destroyed by the simple statement: “The buildings look like steel” (42); they are emotionless, lifeless, and immovable.

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The specific building which he has to enter for his job interview is “built almost entirely out of glass” and “shimmers like gold” (42). Without even entering, the glassy and shimmering surface of this building tells him that he has no business there: “Its reflection of his body tears him into strides and splatters his suit against four glass panels, and makes him disjointed” (42). By enlarging his body image (“strides”), the building asks him to face the fact that he is about to undertake something that goes beyond himself; by splattering “his suit against four glass panels,” the building tears his body into fragments that no longer reflect wholeness but are “disjointed” (42). The building, the city of Toronto, and thus Canada destroys his means for self-identification, deconstructing him into separate pieces with no means for reconstruction. As Homi Bhabha calls it: “Black skin splits under the racist gaze” (92). The young man never goes to his job interview because he feels out of place in all “that glass and steel and chrome” (45). As Lloyd W. Brown suggests, “Toronto’s post-modern architecture literally reflects George’s crippled sense of self” (102). This alienation and rejection makes him turn away from Canada toward his past, his home in Barbados, and his family through “an unframed colour photograph” (47)14—described in the story—that is already fading as he is out of touch with them as well, a phenomenon that is also suggested through the absence of a frame. The photograph reveals plenitude (“well-fed Barbadians” [47]), property (“proprietors in front of a well-preserved plantation” [47]), a natural environment, familiarity (“The name of this house in Barbados is Edgehill House” [47]), and contrasts with the absence of names, the loss of individuality (all houses look alike), and the omnipresence of dirt in Toronto. The photograph rejoins him across space and time with the community of his family that he voluntarily gave up upon departure. Looking at the photograph restores to him a family presence—however incomplete—and his own absence in that comforting circle, as if he had been erased and displaced permanently. Thus, the photograph speaks to him simultaneously of unity and separation. Marianne Hirsch sees this discrepancy as a general dilemma of “the family photograph” that “can reduce the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images that real families cannot uphold” (7). Yet, as Marianne Hirsch proposes, family photographs are “coded and conventional” and contain “ideological power” (10). In the young man’s look at and description of the photograph, the use of “strangles” strikes as unusual. In the picture, the plantation house is “covered in vines so thick that their spongy greenness strangles the windows and the doors” (47). While the photography stores memory for George, the reader cannot explicitly notice any positive emotions toward the representation. Strangling windows and doors could suggest both a suffocating

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atmosphere in this house and the family’s desire to hold him back, to keep him, and to neither let him go through the door nor look through the windows onto something new, onto a Canadian experience. Unfortunately, breaking away from this prison house only leads him into the prison of Canadian society and shuts him out; Canadian society is forced into letting him in at death. He is reminded of his father’s warnings that being your own employer on your own property even if the work is dirty, is worth more than being anyone’s employee in a foreign country: You call yourself a son o’ mine? You, a son o’ mine? With all this property that I leaving-back for you? You come telling me you going to Canada as a’ immigrant? To be a stranger? Where Canada is? What is Canada? . . . Canada is no place for you, man. The son of a Barbadian plantation owner? This land was in our family before Canada was even discovered by the blasted Eskimos and the red Indians. . . . Your fortune and your future is right here! In this soil. In this mud. In this dirt. (48)

But the young man realizes that his failure to succeed has made it impossible to return. The little that is left of his pride prevents him from returning home like the prodigal son. Instead, he goes walking around the city until he gets to a subway station where the trains are southbound to Toronto’s financial district. But all the way South there is also the Caribbean. He is reminded of the moments the elevator in the glass building of the bank took him downstairs alone, almost in a free fall. In this solitude, he had room for his imagination which offered him oneness with the city as a huge living organism that had swallowed him whole; he was part of the city and was “comfortable and safe and brave . . . and so free” in “the bowels of that glassed-in building!” (50). To reach the bowels of the city, to repeat this experience, this Canadian experience, he has to become part of the subway system: “He sees the driver’s face, the driver’s happy eyes and his relief that this is his last trip; and he himself laughs to an empty platform and station that are not listening, and he steps off the platform, just having seen his own eyes, and the driver’s, makes four” (51). This final passage is significant in at least three ways. First, it reconnects to the beginning of the story when he sees his own reflection in the looking glass (31). Four eyes are involved in this act of seeing but they are all his, his own two and their reflection. Thus, his perception remains limited to his own body and mind. In the final scene, we also encounter four eyes, but only two are his and two are those of the driver. For the first time in his life in Canada, he is able to leave his inner self, to move beyond mere self-reflection, and to connect to a Canadian. In his death, he becomes part of the city and its people. Second, the emphasis on the driver’s happy eyes before the man jumps off the platform sharply contrasts with the

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driver’s—implied—recognition of killing this man who jumps in front of the subway train. For the first time, the man is not invisible and cannot be ignored; the driver cannot avert his eyes. They will remain inextricably linked forever. With the driver’s trauma of having killed another human being, the man no longer is the anonymous immigrant who is only a burden to the city and the nation, but an individual for whose death a Canadian is responsible. One could almost claim that the man’s suicide makes him a martyr who dies for all immigrants and who shocks the Canadian nation into recognition of its responsibilities. Third, the final sentence concludes with one of the major leitmotifs of this story, namely the laughter.15 Laughter can denote humor and fun, which it does not in this story. It can also be read as defiance toward a Canadian system that is forced to see its immigrants. At the same time, it is a means of dealing with unbearable situations. Austin Clarke explains the function of laughter in his introduction: All these men have forgotten, at that most crucial point in their lives, the moment of their contact with hostility . . . the misery that results from imitating a way of life they do not know. Because they have forgotten their first contact, they have become numbed into thinking that these facets of life in Toronto, aspects of the Canadian culture, now deserve laughter. But to laugh at this late state is to commit suicide. (2)

The immigrants laugh both at their own worthlessness—as they believe—in Canada but also because “they represent the powerless and the colonized. . . . And their laughter is therefore a ‘tick,’ an idiosyncratic adaptation to the society” (4). For the system, the laughter is harmless; for the laughing individual in this context it destroys self-worth; it is a demeaning criticism of him and ultimately leads to a loss of identity through the absorption into a system of racism that has succeeded in making its immigrants internalize their own inferiority based on racial difference. “The men are black,” as Clarke claims in his introduction, “only because they live in Toronto, in a society which has officially branded them ‘immigrants’ from the West Indies” (7). Laughter, therefore, is also a release of energy created by unfulfilled expectations, a tension that could just as well erupt into protest, rebellion, and violent revenge. Laughter may be provoked by the inconsistencies between expectations and reality. And laughter, in Clarke’s story, certainly is, as Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein suggest in their general introduction to a collection of essays on postcolonial laughter: “laughter is . . . considered a device which is selfconsciously employed and strategically positioned in textual constructions” (1–2), and laughter in such a post-colonial context as Clarke’s story offers is

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always “a struggle for agency, an imbalance of power, and a need, a desire, for release” (Reichl and Stein 9). In many contexts, laughter is rightly considered a means for empowerment in a hierarchically structured society. While Reichl and Stein emphasize the “contextual circumstance” on which “the power wielded by laughter over its objects depends” (11), I do wonder about the power the young man has gained in Clarke’s story. Although his decision to commit suicide and the ultimate act for once put him in control of his life in Canada, this control is transitory and leads to death. While this act will certainly have a lasting impact on the Canadian train driver and many motivate a gradual change in society, it is more a desperate cry for help than an empowered act of agency. Laughter here is not an act of defiance, rebellion, or of laughing back. Rather, it is “self-deprecating” and “a resigned comment on a status quo” (Reichl and Stein 12). The young man laughs at himself various times in the course of the story when he recognizes his own difference from Canadian society, which is symbolically visible not only in his darker skin color but also in his brown suit that is out of place in the surrounding black and grey colors people are wearing in the financial business district. Even more, he mocks his desperate but futile attempt at merging with that society. What Clarke presents here may be described, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, as “colonial mimicry” that “is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (86). It is thus the discrepancy, the ambivalence, or, as Bhabha calls it, “its slippage, its excess” (86) that makes power relations as well as the appropriation of the Other visible. It is at this slippage that the young man laughs derisively. Ultimately, as Austin Clarke explains in a 1991 interview: I am concerned with determining or defining an identity for the Caribbean man who has lived in Toronto for some time, in such as way that he will no longer consider himself an immigrant, an outsider, or a minority person; but would come to understand that his presence here, and the ease with which he continues to live here, is caused by the solid foundation that he got from the West Indies. In other words, what I am going to do next is to draw a character who despises and disregards the national controversy around federalism and a national cultural identity involving the two solitudes,16 a character who because he has lived here for so long—it might be ten years or three decades—is able to see that this is where he belongs. (Clarke, “Caribbean-Canadians” 101)

With his stories—as with his other work of fiction and his essays and autobiographical writing—Clarke communicates to his readers the desire of Caribbean immigrants in Canada for belonging, for an acceptance in Canadian society without having to assimilate, without having to give up their

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Caribbean cultural heritage. Immigrants have to come to terms with a tension between their “strong need to achieve and to belong” and their feeling of “exclusion and rejection,” as Lloyd Brown explains (57). Although, after all, Canada is a nation of immigrants, and Canadian identity is to a large degree shaped and defined by this migratory process and its official politics of multiculturalism, the tension between the ideal and real-life or “Canadian” experience is not—and most probably cannot be—resolved in Austin Clarke’s fiction.

5. TRAVELING IN-BETWEEN WITH DIONNE BRAND (*1953) Dionne Brand, who was born in Guayguayare in Trinidad in 1953 and has lived in Canada since 1970, is an example of a rather successful Caribbean woman writer and filmmaker who writes essays, poems, short stories, novels, and makes films. She was educated at the University of Toronto (BA in English and Philosophy in 1975) and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (MA in History and Philosophy in 1989) and has taught at the Universities of York and Guelph where she has a position as Professor and University Research Chair (cf. Butling 66). In the 1970s and 1980s, she also worked as a cultural critic and community worker, for example, for the Black Education Project. She has been the recipient of two of the most prestigious prizes in Canada, namely the Governor-General’s Award for poetry and the Trillium Award. Her books have been reviewed with high praises in such newspapers as The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, The Women’s Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post. While Austin Clarke thematizes the tension between assimilatory desires and rejection, Brand shares the concern of most diasporans in Canada “with preserving her distinct Afro-West Indian identity and resisting assimilation” (Ramraj 227). She sets up new paradigms of margin and center: “I’ve heard other writers talk about being on the margins of Canadian writing. I find myself in the middle of black writing. I’m in the centre of black writing, and those are the sensibilities that I check to figure out something that is truthful. I write out of a literature, a genre, a tradition, and that tradition is the tradition of black society” (“Interview by Dagmar Novak” 273). Black poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Don Leome, Amiria Baraka, and Gwendolyn Brooks have been major influences in her writing career. Brand expresses in her own writing “the relation of one cultural voice to another” that “becomes a dialectic of power and appropriation, of Black and White,” and warns of “the necessary silencing and erasure of the former to the rule of the latter” (Sturgess 224). Her early and so far only collection of short stories,

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Sans Souci (1989), can be considered a map to the Caribbean immigrant woman’s transgression of borders and her traveling between places in search of a space of belonging. The titles of some of the stories such as “Sketches in Transit . . . Going Home” and “Train to Montreal” already indicate spatial movement within Canada and between Canada and the Caribbean.17 The stories in this collection are set either in the Caribbean, Canada / North America, or the in-between space of an airplane. North America or England as places abroad play a major role in all stories, even in those situated in the Caribbean, since there is usually a character who has left the Caribbean, stays abroad, or has returned. In her short story “Sketches in Transit . . . Going Home,” Brand describes various Caribbean men and women on an airplane on their way “home” to the Caribbean, among them a young woman, Ayo, who proposes what Nicole Waller has called “contradictory violence”: “the depicted violence is understood by its perpetrators as a counter-violence opposing systems of brutal oppression. In this way, it is a violence of contradiction. At the same time, violence against violence becomes contradictory in the sense of ‘ambiguous,’ a strategy which incessantly questions the views and moral codes of its perpetrators and turns on itself in its wish to eliminate violence” (3). In the story, Brand looks at her female characters’ motives both for leaving their home islands and going to Canada and for returning “home” either as tourists for short family visits or, as Ayo does, for joining a rebellion in Grenada. For authenticity’s and reliability’s sake, Brand chooses to represent each person’s thoughts through third-person interior monologue, interspersed with direct speech. Racism and sexism are the key issues in the stories in Brand’s Sans Souci. Jasmine is one of the women whose life stories Brand tells. Jasmine goes home to Trinidad for Carnival, and she will pretend for two weeks that she is rich, that her dreams have come true in Canada, and she will not tell her family how she is a slave at work and even subject to sexual harassment: In the plane, now up above the office buildings she had cleaned for the last twenty years, she was going home. Like the rest on the plane, she’d saved for the trek every five years. Home! To be rich for two weeks and then back to the endless dirty floors at night and the white security guard trying to feel her breasts as she left the building. (132)

At the end of the two weeks, “she’d head back to Toronto, to starvation for the next six months and her back bending over a mop, burning against the naked fluorescent lights as payday crawled toward her” (132). She is one of many Caribbean women who have come to Canada ever since 1955. Because of a labor shortage, “the Canadian government inaugurated its Domestic

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Immigration Scheme, in co-operation with the English-speaking Caribbean territories, to recruit maids from the region” (Brown 23). Because they have all been disillusioned by their Canadian experience, they have turned their increasing alienation from “home” into a sign of gradual assimilation to Canadian society. Jasmine calls it “new idiosyncrasies” (132) such as her own pretense: “‘I can’t stand the heat now you know, I just break out in a rash; that is why I can only spend a week or two in Trinidad.’ This she said to herself, rehearsing her excuses for running out of time and money at the end of two weeks” (132). From a Caribbean perspective, this performance is interpreted as a sign of prosperity and improved class whereas it really is a means of veiling disillusionment with the Canadian promised land on the one hand and personal failure on the other. The “talk in the streets [of Port-of-Spain] about oil dollars” (132) is an indicator of the materialist as well as stereotypical foundation of the Canadian dream. This island optimism contrasts with the rather desperate attempt of Caribbean immigrants “to forget their past” (132–33). The irony is that nowhere in the story does Brand suggest that this past was anything but miserable and poor. What these people really try to suppress is the nostalgia for an idealized home that increases almost proportionally with the misery in Canada. Furthermore, as former inhabitants of the Caribbean islands they also shared this hope for an improvement in life at emigration. The memory of this hope is something else they need to suppress. The airport as point of departure and arrival define these people’s in-betweenness—“Here in the baggage line they were half here and half there, half reserved and half jubilant” (133)—their desire for a home and their need to leave it, their constant movement between two places in which they consider themselves outsiders; they are neither here nor there, or, as the title of one of Brand’s novels suggests, In Another Place, Not Here. Home is eternally deferred, both because people in the Caribbean refuse to see the reality of discrimination and poverty of their country people in Canada and want to believe in and be proud of their success in the metropole, as is also the case for Clarke’s young man in “Canadian Experience,” and because people in Canada reject Caribbean immigrants as Other, as inferior, and simply cannot and do not want to offer them the prosperity they have dreamed of. As Dionne Brand states in an interview: “I realized that home, that whole thing that makes us feel warm and possible or whatever, it’s really not something that any of us have experienced” (Butling 84). But the immigrants cannot return to the Caribbean and admit their failure either: “It was a sign of prosperity to lose the taste for homemade bread and to feel like fainting in the heat. . . . It was a sign of improved class to live in a neighbourhood without Black people” (133). And people wonder: “Did they look good enough to have lived here, did they look good enough to return and not have someone notice that

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life here wasn’t all that rosy. Did they look good enough to inspire envy” (134). Life in Canada has required from all of them adjustment to codes of behavior originally alien to them. While being noisy, open, and enjoying loud music is presented as common behavior in the Caribbean, it is punished in Canada and has made them cautious, hesitant, and reserved. The irrevocable loss of their home “there” is paired with no home “here.” The airplane shuts them off from their lives in Toronto but also from the confrontation with a Caribbean life that they have left: “Behind the doors [of the plane] they would breathe out the relief of leaving Toronto, that uncomfortable name of a city, where their lives were tight and deceptive. What a joy it would be to talk and have people answer, to settle into gregariousness and frown on reserve” (134). Boarding the plane, therefore, is a change of location that also entails a shift from controlled performance to letting erupt whatever behavior and identity patterns might emerge. On the plane, they are no longer the Other that is asked to assimilate and at the same time prevented from doing so by a racist perpetuation of this status of Otherness. Assimilation—as in Clarke’s young men—can only be approached but never completed and is, therefore, endlessly deferred, to speak with Jacques Derrida. In contrast, to release this tension in this neither/nor status, the woman Ayo is going back to the Caribbean to dispel the myth about Canada, but does not succeed either: “No one back home believed that things were not better out here and no one could be convinced of it. People home would look rather nastily and accuse her of liking good things for herself and not for others” (135). While those who return to Trinidad as tourists for Carnival long for temporary forgetting of their strained relations with here and there, Ayo no longer wants to keep up “the myth of easiness and prosperity in the metropole” (135). This metropole, a metonymy of Canada, is represented as a homogenous group in the pronoun “they.” “They” seem to devise all kinds of tests to expose the immigrant Other through their ignorance of Canadian food as markers of cultural belonging. Ayo, who is a rather serious, “humourless woman, short and severe-looking” (140), feels superior to the crowd on the plane enjoying themselves with the sound of calypso music. Ayo “thought it was affected” (140). She would go to Grenada to participate in a rebellion,18 not to Trinidad, which used to be her home. While a transformation sets in for most people on the plane—“Canadian anonymity was giving way to Trinidadian familiarity” (141)—Ayo sees this behavior as a performance, which is a key pattern for those people without homes and belonging. They perform assimilation through a suppression of Otherness in Canada; they perform sameness on the plane, trying to be as Trinidadian as possible; they perform Otherness in Trinidad by pretending to

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become Canadian. However, none of their performances are satisfying; in all cases, they only adjust to expectations from outside, to identification through their environment and not through themselves. They are all, from Ayo’s point of view, “other-identified” and have forgotten—or perhaps never known— who they are. Performance is always fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity about places, people, and selves. When in Canada, they desire to return to Trinidad; when in Trinidad, they would rather return to Canada. If anything, the plane as the space in-between becomes empowering through a group identity. Ayo is trying to find her “home” in the revolution: “Ayo continued her journey to Grenada. She was going to a new home. Home had already begun, even though she didn’t like Barbados. . . . The sun coming up between the rain convinced her that she was home” (143–44). But even for her, home is ambivalent; home is a place but it is also the revolution and the almost guaranteed death: “She was going home to own some place, before she died. She was determined to end the ambiguity. What had she said for years. When the revolution comes, I’m going to be there” (145). Her participation in the revolution seems to come close to suicide that seems to be the only means for Ayo to assume agency and control of her life. Like Clarke’s young man in Toronto who jumps off the subway platform, Ayo jumps into sure death in Grenada. For both, death seems to represent a home, empowerment, and selfidentification. Brand’s stories are about “drifting” (Goldman 13), a term Marlene Goldman has applied to Brand’s work, about drifting between places, between Canada and the Caribbean to “underscore . . . the inadequacies of the nationstate” (Goldman 13). But Brand also “promotes drifting as an equally legitimate resistant practice” (Goldman 13) so that the women’s flight can also be considered a journey of initiation not only because these women become aware of their differences as black women, but also because they understand the racism and sexism in Canada as well as the hypocrisy in the Caribbean. Black women in Canada are doubly “ex-centric,” to use Linda Hutcheon’s term (3), twice removed from the center and, therefore, need to become brokers on their own behalf through language, voicing, as Dionne Brand does, their concerns and communicating them to their readers. The subaltern, to use Gayatri Spivak’s terminology, has to learn how to speak in order to resist the positionality of subalternity itself—which is always defined by its difference from the elite and potentially contributes an essentialism made permanent. However, Brand and many other Caribbean writers in North America have to come to terms with the fact that if they speak, if they become cultural brokers through language, they need to use the former colonizer’s language—an act that in itself is already a process of assimilation. Nevertheless, it is through

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an awareness of linguistic possibilities and political dangers and the use of “emancipatory strategies” (cf. Birkle, “We Are an Internally Colonized People”) that a process of transculturation can be set into motion that leaves the colonial(ized) legacy behind (cf. Birkle, “Comparing Caribbean and Irish (De)Colonizations”). Brand reveals that Canada’s political affirmation of multiculturalism has not affected black women’s everyday lives. However, it has made it possible for writers such as Brand to publish their works and thus be heard and read by a larger audience. In this sense, literature becomes a broker in the liberation and emancipation of ethnic groups. As Brand states in an interview: “We are the new wave of Canadian writing” (“Interview by Dagmar Novak” 277).19 Transgressing ethnic, gender, and national spaces in fictional space, Dionne Brand fights the idea that the “relationship to . . . whiteness” decides about “inclusion in or access to Canadian identity, nationality and citizenship” (“Notes for Writing Thru Race” 174). With her narratives as cultural brokers, Brand mediates between black and white, between the Caribbean and Canada, between her stories and her readers and asks for a process toward mutual respect and recognition that does not need a revolution.

6. REMEMBERING INDIA WITH SHANI MOOTOO (*1958) In contrast to Brand and Clarke, Shani Mootoo was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1958 and raised in Trinidad, and is of mixed Indian and Nepalese origins. When she was nineteen, she moved to Canada (1977) and became a videomaker, painter, and multimedia artist. In 1980, she received a fine arts degree (BFA) from the University of Western Ontario, and has since worked for the radio and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta in 2002. Mootoo began her literary career in 1993 with the publication of a collection of short stories entitled Out on Main Street,20 continued in 1996 with her first novel Cereus Blooms at Night, and in 2001 with her collection of poems The Predicament of Or, and in 2005 with her most recent novel He Drown She in the Sea.21 In her work, Mootoo explores human hybridity as well as gender and sexuality and exposes the frequent sexual abuse within families, an experience she herself had as a child. Her grandparents, however, told her never to speak about it, which, as Mootoo herself claims, instead of silencing her completely turned her into a visual artist and only then into a writer (cf. Dias). Additionally, “Mootoo’s experiences as a multiple immigrant—an individual whose family has traversed the cultures of India, Ireland, England and Trinidad, and as an immigrant in Canada—emerge as central themes in her work” (Dias). Thus, Shani Mootoo’s own status as an outsider in any of the societies

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she has lived in because of ethnic and gender differences (she is a lesbian) has motivated her to question any form of fixed identity. Her books were shortlisted for several prestigious prizes and have been reviewed and highly praised in newspapers such as The New York Times Book Review, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Vancouver Sun, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The London Times, and many others. In the following, I will look at two short stories taken from the collection Out on Main Street (1993), in which we recognize some of Mootoo’s own multicultural and living-in-between experiences, but, more significantly, the stories negotiate questions of Indian-Trinidadian-Canadian identity that ultimately render any fixed and singular notions of individual or cultural identity inadequate. Furthermore, the stories expose the human drive for categorization as a structuring and explicatory device that does not recognize the Other in his or her own right but as a construction of one’s own (imaginary) understanding of what the Other has to be like to keep one’s world view intact. The city of Vancouver, more precisely its Main Street, becomes a cultural contact zone in which multiple cultural, ethnic, and sexual origins and affiliations have to face and somehow come to terms with each other. These affiliations, however, are never stable and permanently fixed, but change according to context, as the stories “Out on Main Street” and “Sushila’s Bhakti” nicely demonstrate. In contrast to Austin Clarke’s and Dionne Brand’s earlier short fiction, Shani Mootoo’s prose and poetry no longer focus on the binary opposition of minority vs. mainstream cultures or non-white vs. white ethnicities. Moving away from Hegel’s dialectics, I would suggest to use the Barbadian poet and theorist Kamau Brathwaite’s term “tidalectics,” which Wayde Compton applies to black British Columbian literature and orature. “Tidalectics,” according to Compton based on Brathwaite, “describes a way of seeing history as a palimpsest, where generations overlap generations, and eras wash over eras like a tide on a stretch of beach. . . . In tidalectics, we do not improve upon the past, but are ourselves versions of the past” (17). In this sense, the past is always present, and identity is shaped by the past like a palimpsest that adds layer of layer, motivating change but never completely erasing any of the layers. Mootoo’s stories foreground characters with multiple ethnic and gender identities with which they attempt to come to terms. The title story “Out on Main Street,” with its setting on Main Street in Vancouver, is written in what Marlene Nourbese Philip calls “‘Caribbean demotic’” (qtd. in Billingham 78), which “constitutes a language of, for and by the people, a variant of English bearing the history and experience of diaspora in a way that the ‘Queen’s English’ never can” (Billingham 78). This variant of English is still very much recognizable as English—even though it is

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harder to read and understand—in order to ensure the brokering function of the story. The unnamed I-narrator, a young lesbian, and her girlfriend Janet feel like outsiders on Main Street because in spite of their brown skin and their Hindu ancestors, they have no close affiliation with India; they are, as the narrator tells us right at the beginning of the story, “watered-down Indians—we ain’t good grade A Indians” (45) but “kitchen Indians” who—in terms of food as an ethnic marker—have remained “overly authentic” (45) ever since her ancestors arrived in Port of Spain more than 160 years before.22 On the ethnic level, “Out on Main Street” is about how to be(come) authentically Indian but also about the impossibility of this process. While the I-narrator believes to be “a Hindu par excellence” (47) in Trinidad, her confrontation with shop-owners in Vancouver, who claim authentic Indianness for themselves, tells her a different story. For them, language and food are clear indicators that she is not authentically Indian: “Yuh ask dem a question in English and dey insist on giving de answer in Hindi or Punjabi or Urdu or Gujarati. How I suppose to know de difference even! And den dey look at yuh disdainful disdainful—like yuh disloyal, like yuh is a traitor” (48). Language is coupled with food when the two women go into “Kush Valley Sweets” to eat some of the sweets. The I-narrator tries to remember the names for some of them as she knew them in Trinidad. However, while her memory works fine, the terms she knows have a slightly different usage in Canada. For her, “meethai” is a specific kind of sweets, but for the waiters it is a generic term for all sweets. And immediately, the question of origins is posed: “‘Where are you from?’” (51). Instead of considering it simply as a difference in usage, the young woman begins to doubt her own Indianness, as she says to Janet: “‘Cultural bastards, Janet, cultural bastards. Dat is what we is. . . . All a we in Trinidad is cultural bastards, Janet, all a we. Toutes bagailles! Chinese people, Black people, White people. Syrian. Lebanese. I looking forward to de day I find out dat place inside me where I am nothing else but Trinidadian, whatever dat could turn out to be’” (51–52). Trinidad, as a metonymic island of the Caribbean, is presented as a crossroads of cultures, as a cultural contact zone where cultures meet and mingle. This constitutes a definition of a hybrid Trinidadian identity, but the narrator cannot accept it as such for her because she has internalized a concept of identity that is not shifting and hybrid but fixed and pure. She believes that there is somewhere in her an essence that—when and if found—once and forever tells her who she is. The relativity of such a definition, however, is almost ironically exposed to the reader of the story in the next scene when two drunken white Canadian men enter the shop and greet everyone with what they believe to be an Indian greeting (as they must have seen on TV or read in fairy tales): “Alarm o salay koom” (52), and then one asks the owner: “Are you Sikh?” (52–53), to which

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the latter cleverly answers: “No, I think I am fine, thank you. But I am sorry if I look sick, Sir” (53). The two white men are confused because their stereotypes do not seem to fit, and immediately they ask the question of origins: “Where are you from?” (53). The response, “Fiji, Sir” (53), is an eye-opener for the informed reader. None of these men is actually from India, but all of them believe that they are authentically Indian. Indianness, as a consequence, becomes a matter of subjective perception and a desire for authenticity. Considering oneself “authentically Indian” within an Asian community assures cultural superiority. Purity is considered to be far superior to hybridity, but the irony is that they are all mixed. While before, the two young women were outsiders in the community of the café, the two white men now take this position. The words of one of the female customers reveal this loyalty: “I hate this! I just hate it! I can’t stand to see our men humiliated by them, right in front of us” (53). But loyalties change immediately when a group of young good-looking women comes in. The previously established community splits apart along gender lines. The waiters “begin to behave like young pups in mating season” (54). When one of the waiters calls another woman customer “‘dear’” (55) and “put[s] his hand on she back” (55)—even though she was sympathetic just minutes ago, she erupts indignantly and tells the I-narrator: “Whoever does he think he is! Calling me dear and touching me like that! Why do these men always think that they have permission to touch whatever and wherever they want! And you can’t make a fuss about it in public, because it is exactly what those people out there want to hear about so that they can say how sexist and uncivilized our culture is” (55). This shift from ethnic loyalty (“our men”; “us”) to gender loyalty (“they”; “our culture”) is carried further when Sandy and Lise come into the store. They are not secret about their lesbianism. Women and men “stare them down from head to Birkenstocks, dey eyes bulging with disgust” (56). The I-narrator and Janet are finally included in this disgust when the newcomers greet them lovingly and they hug and kiss. The woman who just minutes before spoke to her about the men’s sexism gives her “a face dat look like it was in de presence of a very foul smell” (57). The conflict has shifted from racism via sexism to one of sexual orientation. These changing allegiances reveal the instability of fixed terms of belonging to any group and the impossibility of defining identity according to one category only. The Indo-Trinidadian Canadian women are Indian and not-Indian, are women yet not heterosexual but homosexual. Depending on the category under attack, allegiances shift. The term “tidalectics” seems to be quite applicable to what the story presents. Depending on when and how the waves (i.e., new customers in the story) come in, different layers of identity are exposed for a while and then covered again when a new wave comes in exposing another layer.

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None of the characters in any of the stories by Clarke, Brand, and Mootoo are really at ease with their identity and their position in their respective societies as immigrants. All are constantly trying to come to terms with their desire for belonging and the rejection by Canadian society. This rejection takes away any self-confidence in defining who they believe they are and in finding a space of home in their social, ethnic, and geographic hybridity. In my final discussion of another of Mootoo’s stories, I will focus on a character who is not only uneasy about her identity and longing for some form of recognition, but who finally makes an effort to find out by bringing herself in close contact with her ancestors’ cultural heritage which, as she finds, is deeply rooted in hybridity as well. With ancestors from India and with herself being born and raised in Trinidad and now living in Vancouver, Canada, Sushila describes her dilemma as follows: For ten years she had been floating rootlessly in the Canadian landscape, not properly Trinidadian (she could not sing one calypso, or shake down her hips with abandon when one was sung—the diligence of being a good Brahmin girl), not Indian except in skin colour (now, curries and too many spices gave her frightful cramps, and the runs, and in her family a sari had always been a costume), certainly not White and hardly Canadian either. (60)

None of the cultural and ethnic markers (such as food, clothes, religion, and music) apply to her. The only marker that puts her into the Indian category is skin color. Sushila clearly reveals that identity is multi-layered, that its definition is multiple with some categories being mutually exclusive, others dependent upon customary usage. What Sushila also discovers is that her identity up until now is defined both in the negative—everything that she is not—and by other people. The final sentence of this quotation, however, indicates that she is on her way toward becoming Canadian since “Canada was a country full of rootless and floating people” (60) and thus being Canadian by definition means being hybrid. As the title of the story suggests, Sushila attempts to practice “bhakti,” a term coming from Sanskrit and meaning love and devotion to a personalized god. She performs the act of bhakti in order to find out “why it is that all that she has of her Indian heritage are her name, Sushila, and her skin colour, both of which are like lies about her identity” (61). To do so, she buys “mendhi,” which is actually henna and used to be applied to color skin for decoration, usually for brides. She mixes mendhi with water, just like her grandmother back in Trinidad used to do when beginning to knead the flour and water for baking. Her grandmother’s devotion to family is a first connection to what identity might mean. Sushila’s act of bhakti triggers all kinds of memories in

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her, often in the form of colors and decorative forms such as the swastika.23 She continues to treat all the ingredients as if she was making art. This creativity helps her glimpse “the core of her identity” (62), as she believes. She wants to connect this core to her “point of origin” (63), but understands that there is not one point of origin: God could be one; the biological turn from animal into human could be another. But even when she narrows her search down to “the origin of Indian-ness” (64), she realizes that Indians in India have different points of origin and did not originate in India. She muses: “‘How far back need I go to feel properly rooted? I must be looking for an Indian Cro-Magnon’” (64).24 Ultimately, there are three insights that Sushila’s act of bhakti reveals to her and that can be applied to Caribbean immigrants in Canada. First, through her own “videographic memory” (66), she is able to remember moments in her life of the past in Trinidad. But, as “she trie[s] to unblur details, to sort out which festival is which, the act of forgetting and remembering and inventing remind[s] her of her grandmother, who, like so many other Trinidadian Hindus and Muslims she knows, refused to eat either beef or pork because she couldn’t remember which one it is that she, as a goodBrahminwoman, wasn’t supposed to eat” (66). In her attempt at being purely Brahmin, her grandmother imposes limitations on her life that has nothing to do with any idea of authenticity. In her forgetting, her grandmother invents a new lifestyle for herself. Second, hybridity seems to be part of identity since her grandmother’s identity is already hybrid, and the further she goes back the more hybrid each memory becomes. Third, memory and the act of bhakti as art help Sushila become creative; she understands that her identity is not something that she can find somewhere in the past, but that she needs to create and invent it herself: She was beginning to recognize in the painting, in herself, an identity being excavated. She played and fretted and worked and invented until she came to a junction where she could take a turn that skirted needing to be pinned down as Hindu, or as “Indian,” or as Trinidadian (in themselves difficult identities to pin down) in favour of attempting to write a story of her own, using her own tools. There were brief moments, brief but empowering, when she felt one with her past. (66–67)

The result of creating one’s own identity in one’s own way is self-identification that brings about empowerment and reconciliation with one’s past that cannot and should not be erased like the tidal waves of the ocean add layer of layer of sand.

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7. BROKERING ACROSS NATIONS Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, and Shani Mootoo are caught between two or more worlds that, at times, seem to exclude each other. As cultural brokers, they recreate these worlds in writing, for example, Barbados, Trinidad, Grenada, and Canada, and thus connect life in the Caribbean with that in Canada. In these literary as well as social and national spaces, they see colonizing and discriminating forces at work, based on ethno-racial and gendered Otherness. Through their characters they expose the mechanisms of Othering that are often based on a collaborative internalization and mimicry of colonial forces. All characters have trouble coming to terms with identification through others, with a politics of recognition that is not their own. In all cases, the stories communicate the need for self-identification that is independent from ethnic and cultural markers such as food, music, clothes, skin color, rituals, etc. Identity does not come across as something that one can find once— as the search for one’s roots might suggest—and keep forever; identity is flexible, forever changing, multiple, hybrid, and created and invented by each individual. Its creation draws from transnational, transethnic, and transcultural sources that are like layers in a palimpsest or like waves on the beach. Memory, both individual and collective for all characters, is an important means to reconnect to their past and to make sense of it and its influence on the present. But memory also means to accept not just the nostalgic element in remembering but also the one that hurts, acknowledging that home perhaps never truly existed, that life in the Caribbean was not Paradise, that illusions about Canada were not founded on reality. Yet, even if identity is subjective and floating and even if ethnic identity is a matter of perspective, what is a fact in all characters’ lives is racism and, in many women’s cases, sexism. Self-identification is a first step toward self-confidence, but courage to stand up against discrimination is a political act that needs tools and voices. The authors use precisely that, their voices in literature and language, the stories as means and spaces to engage in cultural brokerage, by mediating and moving between cultural groups and geographical spaces, transgressing the borders of ethnicity, gender, and nation, in order to suggest difference and the process of transculturation as constitutive even if differently encoded phenomena of all societies and cultures. Through writing they can be seen as participating in a form of postcolonialism that Leela Gandhi has called “a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath” (4). Remembering the forgotten, the suppressed, as we have seen in “Sushila’s Bhakti,” is an important tool for the understanding of the postcolonial subject as both

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consequence of and resistance to colonialism, and, in the case of Caribbean immigrants to Canada, as troubled with the experiences of a migratory existence. My own reading of these six stories by three Caribbean-Canadian writers is meant to convey a sense of what it means to many Canadians of Caribbean descent to deal with questions of cultural heritage, national and ethnic identity, real-life discrimination, and a yearning for a belonging that wants to overcome the Self/Other dialectics. The home that most characters desire is, however, elusive and will not exist unless it can be located in one’s own creativity. Therefore, cultural brokerage through writing can be one way of finding a home. NOTES 1. Mary Louise Pratt defines “cultural contact zones” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (“Arts of the Contact Zone” 530). 2. “First in 1962, and then more extensively in 1966, reforms in Canadian policy abolished the old discriminatory regulations, which included area quotas, and tied entrance to Canada only to the ability of prospective immigrants. Families of landed immigrants were automatically admitted, and a new category enabled citizens and landed immigrants to ‘sponsor’ prospective immigrants who might not otherwise qualify. The result was a shift in West Indian migratory patterns, so that thousands began arriving in Canada each year.” (“The Caribbean Community of Manitoba”) 3. The “Trinidad February Revolution of 1970” was “a show of solidarity with the West Indian society in Canada whose members had allegedly rioted at the Sir George Williams University. The students [in Trinidad] were arrested by Trinidadian policemen the next day, which only incited further protests. . . . The turmoil grew and grew with labor union strikes and army mutinies, culminating in the Trinidad government’s declaration of a State of Emergency that was in force until November 1970” (Ho, “The Caribbean Artists Movement”). 4. With the Canada Act, the British Parliament transferred complete control over the constitution of Canada to the Canadian federal government. 5. “the Government of Canada recognizes the diversity of Canadians as regards race, national or ethnic origin, colour and religion as a fundamental characteristic of Canadian society and is committed to a policy of multiculturalism designed to preserve and enhance the multicultural heritage of Canadians while working to achieve the equality of all Canadians in the economic, social, cultural and political life of Canada” (qtd. in Hutcheon 370). 6. In her foreword to the collection Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent, Ayanna Black similarly emphasizes the relevance of African descent for black writers as “a new generation of griots—town criers, or spiritual messengers” (xi). The quote continues: “whose stories have been transferred to the printed page. Despite the diversity

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of our cultural backgrounds, we write out of a collective African consciousness—a consciousness embodied in the fabric of oral traditions, woven from one generation to the next, through myths, storytelling, fables, proverbs, rituals, worksongs and sermons meshed with Western literary forms” (xi). 7. While racism is part of an immigrant experience in Canada, in 1989, Neil Bissoondath put “such Canadian racial intolerance in context: ‘racism is as Canadian as maple syrup,’ he writes, but ‘it is also as American as apple pie, as French as croissant, as Jamaican as ackee, as Indian as aloo, as Chinese as chow mein’” (qtd. in Hutcheon 8). 8. Frances Henry claims that both “cultural retention and racism together create a situation in which Caribbean people are differentially incorporated in Canadian society,” meaning “the inequitable treatment of members of this community by Canadian society” (x). Because of cultural retention, Caribbean immigrants appear as Other in Canadian society. The implication in Henry’s claim is that both sides have to give up elements of their behavior. Giving up racism seems to be a legitimate claim. However, giving up cultural heritage is not something that can be legitimately asked for unless it is threatening Canadian society. None of the stories to be discussed in the following makes that suggestion. 9. Such as Among Thistles and Thorns (1965), When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks (1971), When Women Rule (1985), Nine Men Who Laughed (1986), In this City (1992), and There Are No Elders (1993). Many of these collections give voice to Barbadian immigrants to Canada. Frequently written in the vernacular or demotic English of Barbados, the stories present men and women who can hardly adjust to their new Canadian environment because of poverty, unemployment, and racism. While Clarke has become best-known for his novels, he has also been a quite successful short-story writer, as Anthony Boxill can demonstrate: “His [Clarke’s] excellence in this genre is indicated by the fact that in 1965 he was awarded the University of Western Ontario President’s Medal for the best story in Canada that year” (128). 10. Such as Survivors of the Crossing (1964), The Meeting Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1971), The Bigger Light (1975), The Prime Minister (1977), The Origin of Waves (1997), and The Polished Hoe (2002). 11. In parts written in the vernacular English of the island, this autobiography depicts Clarke’s boyhood in Barbados, the influences of British colonialism on language, institutions, history, and world view, mostly during the 1940s, i.e., during World War II. He mockingly points to the absurdities of English education in schools. The book ends with his transition from Combermere School to Harrison College. He describes the hardships of everyday life in Barbados, but also people’s and his own dreams of a better future, for some in England, for others in America. 12. It was not even because he or his family thought that Canada offered excellent education—it would rather have been Oxford and Cambridge or Harvard and Columbia—but moving from one British colony to another was easier (cf. 66). 13. In an autobiographical essay, entitled “In the Semi-Colon of the North,” Austin Clarke describes his train ride to Timmins, a city in the northern part of Ontario, where he was a reporter for a while. In this essay, the young man describes

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the journey in detail, both people and landscape, and gives an exact account of the different stages and stops. On the way, the readers learn that he will take a job in Timmins with $35 as wages. While he hopes that with time and experience, his wages might increase, he is quite pessimistic about this kind of Canadian experience: “So, the wage may be a small wage. I cannot ask questions about its size simply because I have the immigrant’s surrealistic optimism that says that larger wages will come with larger experience, even if, for the moment, that experience is called ‘Canadian experience.’ I wonder if I can get the larger knowledge without the larger insults and the larger unhappiness?” (35). 14. According to Marianne Hirsch, the short story becomes an “imagetext” through the inclusion of photography (cf. 11–12). 15. For a detailed discussion of the intricate relationship between laughter and the postcolonial, see Reichl and Stein, eds., Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (2005). 16. “Two solitudes” is a reference to Hugh MacLennan’s novel Two Solitudes (1945), in which he describes the two so-called founding nations, the British and the French, as the two solitudes. In contrast, Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond’s collection Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (1990) claims that Canadian writing has always been ethnic and, therefore, multicultural writing because of Canada’s constitution of Native and immigrant peoples. (Im)migration, miscegenation, and transculturation are phenomena that have shaped the North American continent since the arrival of the early Native peoples and their later European followers. 17. In her later work, she has her characters move across national borders (cf. also her novel In Another Place, Not Here [1998]), as she herself does in her semiautobiography A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001), in which she moves between Canada, Trinidad, Europe, and Africa. Like Paul Gilroy, Brand “adopt[s] the figure of the ship at sea as a metaphor for the continuing impact of the Black Diaspora” (Goldman 13) and thematizes the consequences of the slave trade and the Middle Passage, not only in A Map to the Door of No Return, but also in the novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999). 18. In 1983, Dionne Brand spent a year in Grenada to assist in a revolution (among various communist—and partially pro-Cuban and pro-Russian factions) there as an information Officer for the Caribbean People’s Development Agencies and the Agency for Rural Transformation until the U.S. invaded the island. 19. Cf. the choice of transcultural writers for the Governor General’s Award: Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry. 20. This short-story collection “explores the complexity of culture, sexuality, and memory for Indo-Caribbean women characters primarily in Vancouver and Trinidad” (Smyth 146). 21. Here, Mootoo joins a romantic love plot to a political criticism of rigid and impermeable class structures in the Caribbean as well as to the story of a Caribbean immigrant from the fictional island of Guanagaspar to Vancouver, Canada, and his social and economic rise there. 22. Her ancestors must have arrived in Trinidad in the 1830s after the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies (1834). The resulting labor shortage “led to the

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importation of indentured workers from India and other parts of Asia” (Henry 5). Economic “push factors” led to their later emigration to Europe, the U.S., and Canada (cf. Henry 6). 23. The story here reminds us a symbol such as the swastika is always culturally defined and may mean different things in different cultures depending on its usage. For Sushila in her tradition, the swastika is a “symbol of life and celebration before it was stolen, tipped over and further sullied” (62). 24. This is a human skeleton found near Cro-Magnon in Southern France dating back as far as 28,000 to 30,000 years.

WORKS CITED Algoo-Baksh, Stella. 1997. Austin Clarke: A Biography. Toronto, ON: ECW; Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago: Press of the University of the West Indies. Bhabha, Homi. 1997. The Location of Culture. 1994. London: Routledge. Billingham, Susan. 2002. “Migratory Subjects in Shani Mootoo’s Out on Main Street.” In Identity, Community, Nation: Essays on Canadian Writing, ed. Danielle Schau and Christl Verduyn. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press. Birkle, Carmen. 2001. “‘We Are an Internally Colonized People’: Emancipatory Strategies in Dionne Brand’s Short Stories.” In Femmes et écriture au Canada, Hg. Danièle Pitavy, 117–30. Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon. ———. 2004. “Comparing Caribbean and Irish (De)Colonizations: Dionne Brand’s and Eavan Boland’s Recovery of the ‘Lost Land.’” In Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, ed. William Boelhower, Rocío Davis, and Carmen Birkle, 347–60. Heidelberg: Winter. Black, Ayanna. 1992. “Foreword.” In Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent, ed. Ayanna Black, xi–xiii. Toronto: HarperCollins. Boxill, Anthony. 1986. “Austin C. Clarke.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Canadian Writers since 1960. First Series, vol. 53. Ed. W. H. New, 124–29. Detroit, MI: Bruccoli Clark. Brand, Dionne. 1989. “Sketches in Transit . . . Going Home.” In Sans Souci and Other Stories, 131–45. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. ———. 1990. “Interview by Dagmar Novak.” In Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, 271–77. Toronto: OUP. ———. 1993. “Who Can Speak for Whom?” Brick: A Literary Journal 46 (Summer): 13–20. ———. 1994. “Notes for Writing Thru Race.” In Bread out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics, 173–80. Toronto: Coach House Press. Brown, Lloyd W. 1989. El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke’s Fiction. Parkersburg, Iowa: Caribbean Books. Butling, Pauline. 2005. “Dionne Brand on Struggle and Community, Possibility and Poetry.” In Poets Talk, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, 63–87. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.

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Clarke, Austin. Survivors of the Crossing. London: Heinemann, 1964. ———. The Meeting Point. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. ———. Storm of Fortune. Boston: Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ———. The Bigger Light. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. ———. The Prime Minister. London: Routledge, 1978. ———. 1982. “In the Semi-Colon of the North.” Canadian Literature 95 (Winter): 30–37. ———. 1986. “Canadian Experience.” In Nine Men Who Laughed, 31–51. Markham, ON: Penguin Canada. ———. 1986. “Introduction.” In Nine Men Who Laughed, 1–7. Markham, ON: Penguin Canada. ———. 1990. “Interview by Marion Richmond.” In Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, 63–70. Toronto: OUP. ———. 1996. “Caribbean-Canadians.” In Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, ed. Frank Birbalsingh, 86–105. London: Macmillan Caribbean. ———. The Origin of Waves. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. ———. Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack. Oxford: Signal Books, 2003. ———. The Polished Hoe. New York: Amistad, 2004. Compton, Wayde. 2001. “Introduction.” In Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature, 17–40. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Dias, Candice. 2005. “Shani Mootoo.” http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Mootoo .html (7 March). Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995. Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilroy, Paul. (1993) 1996. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldman, Marlene. 2004. “Mapping the Door of No Return: Deterritorialization and the Work of Dionne Brand.” Canadian Literature 182 (Autumn): 13–28. Henry, Frances. 1994. The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ho, Kathleen. 2005. “Shani Mootoo’s Trinidad: The ’60s and ’70s.” 25 November 2003. http://www.postcolonialweb.org/canada/literature/mootoo/4.html (7 March). ———. 2005. “The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) and the Trinidad February Revolution of 1970.” http://www.postcolonialweb.org/caribbean/trinidad/ho2.html (7 March). Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press. ———. 1990. “Introduction.” In Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, 1–6. Toronto: OUP. ———, and Marion Richmond, eds. 1990. Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions. Toronto: OUP.

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Mootoo, Shani. The Predicament of Or. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002. ———. He Drown She. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. ———. 1996. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, 528–42. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. Ramraj, Victor J. 1986. “Diasporas and Multiculturalism.” In New National and PostColonial Literatures, ed. Bruce King, 214–29. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rashidi, Runoko. 2003. “Alexander Pushkin and the African Presence in Russia.” 3 January. http://www.kintespace.com/kp_rashidi1.html (8 March 2005). Reichl, Susanne, and Mark Stein, eds. 2005. Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Riemenschneider, Dieter. 2002. “Intercultural Communication: Minority Writing in the Post-Colonial World. The Caribbean-Canadian Connection.” In Crabtracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English. Essays in Honor of Dieter Riemenschneider, 383–400. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Rogozi´nski, Jan. 2000. A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and Carib to the Present. 1999. New York: Plume. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Smyth, Heather. 1999. “Sexual Citizenship and Caribbean-Canadian Fiction: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” Ariel 30.2 (April): 141–60. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1995. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 24–28. London: Routledge. Sturgess, Charlotte. 1993. “Spirits and Transformation in Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories.” Études Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 35: 223–29. Szasz, Margaret Connell, ed. Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. “The Caribbean Community of Manitoba.” http://www.gov.mb.ca/labour/immigrate/ multiculturalism/2_2.html#11 (18 March 2005). Waller, Nicole. 2005. Contradictory Violence: Revolution and Subversion in the Caribbean. Heidelberg: Winter.

Chapter Six

The Child of New Norcia: Alf Taylor’s Poetry Susan Ballyn

In writing about Alf Taylor’s poetry, I have used a semi-narrative mode for very particular reasons. Alf’s work, like that of many Indigenous people in Australia, is both oral and written. Indeed, in Alf’s case, the voice which underlies all his work is primordially oral. It seems appropriate, therefore, that my own experience regarding New Norcia, my meeting Alf, our long conversations, the stories he told me and his view of his own work should become a personal narrative that weaves into his own. Alf and I have journeyed through the landscape of New Norcia in two very different ways. Our paths have crossed and continue to do so, yet our sense of belonging or ways of internalizing a specific geographical site are totally different. For me, New Norcia remains a place of great beauty, a site of spiritual enrichment but also a site of dispossession for the Indigenous peoples and irrecoverable loss which, as a non-indigenous person, I can only attempt to comprehend but will never fully do so. I am not intending, therefore, to carry out a theoretical analysis of Alf Taylor’s work, but rather an approach which, I hope, will render the historical and personal context which drives his voice. In his introduction to “Mapping the Rainbow Region: fields of belonging and sites of confluence,”1 Baden Offord begins with this quotation: Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadsidebenches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had a map of his fields engraved in his soul. (Gaston Bachelard 1969, The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas, Boston, Beacon Press: 11.)

Alf Taylor’s poetry is “a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows,” a map of traumatic physical and psychological disruption engraved on his soul. 91

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When I first heard about New Norcia Monastery, some ninety miles north of Perth, I had no idea that it held a very specific historical place in Spanish history and, in particular, Galician history. Nor could I foresee that it would, at some time, become an important place in my life both through my going there and because of discovering the work of Alf Taylor, an Aboriginal writer who spent several years of his childhood at the mission. New Norcia was founded by the Spanish Benedictine monk Dom Rosendo Salvado in 1846. It was perhaps chance that led to Salvado’s arrival in Australia accompanied by Dom José Benito Serra. Both men had entered the Benedictine order in Santiago de Compostela but, in 1835, the deeply anticlerical Spanish government policies closed all men’s monasteries and confiscated their lands. Initially, it was these two young men who began to set up the New Norcia monastery, but Dom Serra was eventually to take up a full time post as co-adjutor to the Bishop of Perth, finally returning to Europe in 1859. Salvado was now left to continue the task of continuing to found the monastery and run it as a successful Benedictine community. The task was huge, but Salvado was not a man to be intimidated by hard work and enterprise. Eventually the monastery was to grow into a community of some eighty men, most of them from Spain and also lay brothers. Salvado’s original aim had been: to create, among the indigenous peoples of the Victoria Plains, a Christian, largely self-sufficient village based on agriculture. However, after the decimation of the local populations by introduced diseases in the 1860s, he concentrated his activity on giving a practical education to the indigenous children who were brought to New Norcia from all over the state. Like other missionaries of the nineteenth century, his aim was to “civilize” and evangelise according to the European ideals of the time, but he did so with a sympathy for indigenous culture that was rare in his day.2

History was to prove that Salvado was indeed unusual in his care and interest in the Aboriginal people of the area. It is at the time of Federation in 1900, the year of Salvado’s death, that a turn would come in the way in which Aboriginal children came to be in the mission. That era forms part of Alf Taylor’s life. In 2004 the Australian Studies Centre at Barcelona University organized a conference under the title (titled) “Landscapes of Exile” and, given the connections with the Benedictine Abbey of Montserrat, one of the most emblematic lay and religious sites in Catalonia, we were able to co-organize for Dom Christopher Power to come over as a plenary speaker. In 2005 I visited New Norcia for a conference organized in the monastery by Terri-ann White as the second part of “Landscapes of Exile.” This conference too, in many

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different and even unstated ways, connected Montserrat and New Norcia. It was late when we arrived and I could discern little of the lay of the land or even of the buildings. A torchlight walk around the grounds had been organized before dinner, but for reasons which will become clear later, I chose to sit on the veranda of what is now the mission Hotel. Some of the delegates were staying at the Hotel and some, like me, were in the old convent, an eerily silent night walk across dark grounds. The following morning I was up by five as I wanted to walk the grounds and watch the sun rise. I was rewarded by a cacophony of bird song and a magnificent gentle sunrise seeping across the landscape. As I walked, I became aware of just how huge the monastery was. Most of the original buildings bore a distinctly Spanish style in architecture such as the Ladies College, St. Gertrude’s and St. Ildephonsus College for boys. I passed through the cemetery, and finally reached the Abbey Church just as early morning mass was about to commence. By now I had become fully aware of the extensive area of land that belonged to the monastery, cut across by the Great Northern Highway, and which was now producing olive oil, wine, port, bread, the wonderful pan forte, honey and many other goods. The thriving religious community that Dom Rosendo knew has, however, dwindled to a dozen or so monks. The Abbot, Father Placid Spearritt, has himself pointed out the need for new vocations and for a particular type of community if New Norcia is to carry out the tasks the community has set itself: At present we are rather short of monks, and particularly young ones. Young people find it difficult to make a permanent commitment to monastic life, as they do these days to marriage. It is important for us not to panic in this situation, and certainly not to lower our standards of selection. The monastery can survive with a small number of monks if necessary; it is more likely to survive and flourish with a small number of good monks than with larger numbers of unstable characters. I like to hope that, as our community has had a multicultural history, its monks will reflect the multicultural composition of the church and world in which we live “Where we are and where we’re going.”3

The days I spent at New Norcia became a peculiarly enriching combination of stimulating academic activity, congenial communal breakfasts in the old convent kitchen, and private reflection on long walks through the grounds. Pico Iyer puts into words exactly what I felt: In thirty years of almost constantly travelling around the world, I have seldom met a place so clarifying and calm as New Norcia. It makes you think again about what matters; it returns you to a sense of stillness and community that’s hard to find in the modern world; it refreshes the soul better than any holiday. The only hardship of coming here is leaving.4

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How true Iyer’s words ring as one leaves the monastery to take on the rush and scramble of life beyond its grounds. New Norcia does refresh the “soul,” does instill peace and quiet in the mind, but the visitor can not ignore the vagaries of tragic history that pervade the place. It begs the obvious to mention the geological ancientness of the land I was walking on, but it was this ancientness, coupled with the history of the indigenous people who have lived on the continent for at least sixty thousand years and the much more recent history of non-indigenous peoples, that so often held my attention. New Norcia made me more aware than ever of the layering of history that is embedded into any landscape, but particularly so the Australian. The landscape the Aboriginal people would have known had long since become “domesticated,” but their history could never be hacked or plowed away however hard the European invader had tried. It was to this place that children like Alf Taylor were taken, torn away from their families and traditional ways to be themselves “domesticated” and civilized. By 1900, the Australian government had put into place a plan to find a solution to the so-called “Aboriginal problem.” By separating children of mixed descent, it was hoped to find a solution which would lead to the eventual breeding out of the Aboriginal people. Known as “Eugenics,” that is the social philosophy put into action to interfere in the natural course of human evolution by intervening to strengthen human hereditary traits, or in this case to commit racial genocide. The Aboriginal children brought to New Norcia to be educated were kept separate from their white fee-paying counterparts and their education was basic, aimed at training domestic and rural or lowly skilled laborers. One might wonder how nuns and monks could possibly justify taking in part-Aboriginal children to “polish” them for domestic and rural work? Their hands were tied in so much as they had to follow the government’s Aboriginal policies of the time. However, the question does still remain in terms of each individual conscience. New Norcia was no better and no worse than all the other missions in which Aboriginal children were held across the nation. I first met Alf when he came to Barcelona to give a lecture to my students. I was immediately struck by both his humble yet paradoxically strong personality and his generosity as a writer. He was totally undemanding and genuinely interested in the students who, unusually, shed their accustomed shyness to bombard him with questions. His talk, about his childhood as a member of the Stolen Generation who had been abducted from his family and forcefully taken to New Norcia, left some students numbed. “It is not the same,” they said, “to read about all this as to experience it by listening to a person who has undergone such a traumatic experience.” Alf Taylor was born in Perth sometime in the 1940s, probably in 1947, and was taken to New Norcia Mission when he was six where his brother, Benjamin, had already been

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sent. Alf would not see his father again as he died while his son was still in New Norcia and Alf would have to spend time searching for his mother once he left the mission. After leaving New Norcia, he worked as an itinerant farm worker around Perth and Geraldton. Later, he joined the Armed forces which took him to various locations around Australia. After leaving the service Alf went home and married. His marriage ended in divorce after having seven children, only two of whom survive. Alf was, therefore, institutionalized for a long period of his life, and reinsertion into the world outside the forces was by no means easy. His memories of the Benedictine Mission are far from happy. He desperately missed his mother and the dedication to his volume of poetry Winds brings that close to the reader: I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother and father, Queenie and Rossanda Taylor. I never had you as a child, nor as a man. I know you are the caretakers of God’s own garden. (Winds no page)5

Alf Taylor was the victim of forced exile and institutional violence. The whole of his life and writing is shot through with the most traumatic memories of dispossession, being released from New Norcia into a world he did not comprehend and which was hostile and intimidating. For Alf, New Norcia is not a palimpsestic site of history, but holds only one single traumatic narrative of loss and continued mourning for what he can never recover: his childhood, his family, his country. Writing, both poetry and prose, is the means by which Alf delves into his own memory and trauma, a form of continual catharsis that enables his attempt to heal wounds and inscribe personal memory as his ancestors did in stories and art. An example of how both trauma and memory coincide in his work is revealed in the representations of his mother, and his longing for her appears in various forms. As he has said on many occasions: “From the time I was a little one I had no mother to nurture me”; while in the poem “Mum,” the unpunctuated verse wells up like a child’s inconsolable grief. It is a poem which is typical of his writing which is concerned with the individual’s depth of feeling and the complexity of human relationships: In the darkness Of the night The little boy Used to pull The bed covers Over his head And cry Not a loud cry

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But softly To himself And whisper Oh Mum Oh Mum Where are you I love you Come and Get me out (Winds, 22)

While the persona may “whisper,” the impact on the reader is one of an atavistic howl of pain. The sense of loss and nostalgia, the sense of reaching out to catch something that has already escaped one, is an emotion that marbles through all of Alf Taylor’s work. As with Ruby Langford Ginibi, you can laugh uproariously with Alf, but tears and grief lie close to the surface of all his work. In his introduction to Winds Philip Morrissey notes that Taylor’s poetry is: gentle, insistence poetry moving back and forth from childhood to adulthood; occasionally jarring on a knotty rhyme but coming through like “a cool wind in a time of harvest.” (Winds viii)

This movement from childhood to adulthood also takes on another form in Taylor’s daily life: the child, that child who suffered so much in New Norcia, is always with him, a constant companion and alter ego in his spiritual and imaginative world. Alf not only allows us to “read” the child in his work, but often introduces him to us in conversation when something happens to draw his attention or his recollections come to the fore. Alf’s eyes sparkle; there is such a profound sincerity in his voice that one senses the child both as an inner and physical presence. It is the child for whom he writes; it is the child he hears and the child who still provokes sadness, compassion, love, and laughter in Alf’s day-to-day life. At the time of the conference in New Norcia, Alf had already been back there, together with other ex-internees, to make a documentary called The Habits of New Norcia. On this occasion he was, for the first time since he had left, going to actually stay on the mission, in fact, for the duration of the conference. On the first evening, as the night walking party set out with their torches, Alf sat on the veranda smoking. I wondered how he might feel being back, staying in and moving through buildings which had been prohibited to him as a barefoot Aboriginal child. I decided to sit with him and chat, share a cigarette and thoughts. He told me how memories kept surging back at him but how they would, in the course of the night, settle down. Eventually his basic feeling came down to that of actually being part of the conference precisely because of his talent and widely recognized work.

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To be back once more, now a flourishing writer, in the place where the monks and nuns had insistently and dispassionately told him: You are Not going To make it In life, How He used To dread Those words He heard So often As a child (Winds 23)

Here was the child who had grown up, made a self-admitted total mess of his life due to alcohol and who, one day, pulled himself out of a self-destructive hellhole of dole and drink, drink and dole to pick up a pen he believes he was always destined to hold. The child that longed for its mother and suffered so intensely is constantly with Alf, as he remarks “I write for him, you know the child that suffered all that.”6 Over the years the child has become Alf’s alter ego, representing not only his own childhood, but the historical devastation and ravage wreaked upon Aboriginal people across the country. Wherever Alf goes so does the child, offering him a double-sided vision, of what was and what is, the joy of life however hard it may have been and is. Philip Morrissey refers to Faith Bandler’s comment on Alf’s work when she said “[t]hat Taylor spoke as a lover” (Winds: vii). The volume Winds speaks of love in its many aspects but beneath the lines the tone of inconsolable sadness creeps in. The placing of the poem “My Little Girl: For my daughter Janice” (Winds: 34) immediately before “In Memory of Gina Rose” (Winds: 35) is not casual. The first poem is deeply expressive of the poet’s love for his daughter, his delight and pride in his child’s innocence, the knowledge that she will grow into a woman, with all the difficulties and pain that may imply but “Daddy will always be/ On your sid[e],” ends with the warning that her road will not be easy, her heart could be broken, she will often have to “[S]wim against the tid[e]” The latter poem describes the absolute grief and desolation at the loss of baby Gina Rose; the child destined never to become a woman, never to swim the tide of life, fraught as it might be with her Dad on her side. These two opposing poems of love and loss are typical of Alf Taylor’s love poetry. This poetry is couched in terms of profound grounding in love and searing loss, of the constant swing of finding and losing the beloved, be it wife, lover, child, land or his ancestral roots and Dreaming. It is almost as if his time at the

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mission, being brought up as if he were an orphan has led him on a lifelong search to recover stability through the reconstruction of a loving center to which he can adhere. Winds, however, also reveals a political agenda which is always present in all Alf Taylor’s writing, both verse and prose. The anger at what has been done to his people since British invasion is measured in tone, but nonetheless effective. His writing, while not immediately confronting and powered by defiant, but justified anger, as is that of many other Aboriginal writers, creates a distinct disquiet in the reader. Moving from his own descent into the world of chaos, dislocation and alcoholism, both Winds and Rimfire explore deaths in custody, dispossession, and degradation both of the individual as well as of the land through exploitation and the need for healing.7 Rimfire brings together three powerful but very different voices; Romaine Moreton’s The Calloused Stick of Wanting, Alf Taylor’s Singer Songwriter and Michael J. Smith’s Calling Thought. Singer Songwriter was originally released as a single volume in 1992. It is in this collection where Alf’s political agenda is clearly laid out in poems such as “Let’s,” “Elders,” “Leave us alone,” and “No Hope.” In “Makin it right,” Alf sees his writing as being a means to “[m]ake things right” but recognizes the need for both sides, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, “[t]o pull together,” to “[s]top calling each other names” and the need for open and frank dialogue to take place, otherwise nobody can “[s]art playing the game.” In playing the game, in reaching out across the gap, the poet understands that his one objective “winning and being free” might just happen (Rimfire 112). This is not a poem of capitulation, but a demand that dialogue and understanding can bring recognition and freedom to the Aboriginal people. Many other things also have to happen as expressed in “Let’s” (Rimfire 136), a call to protect and respect the environment from the ravages of human engagement in progress, while in “New beginning,” a new life, can only be made possible if alcohol is no longer the scourge of daily life for those with no hope. (Rimfire 137) Placing these two poems opposite each other in the collection suggests Alf’s holistic outlook on the future. Freedom can only come if there is respect for the land, for each individual and for the self. Without these prerequisites, then there is little hope for change. The vicious circle of alcoholism and drug abuse finds its most painful expression in “No hope”: [T]he haze of of alcohol lingers in the air. The smell of sweaty bodies and the stench of dope. These are the people

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of no life and no hope (Rimfire 125)

For Alf Taylor, the only way out of the situation in which many Aboriginal people now find themselves requires two-fold action. On the one hand the “dogooders” should leave the Aboriginal people alone. After all, he points out “[w]e have been forty thousand years on our own./Stop leading us blackfellers around,/ we want our two feet firmly on the ground.” On the other hand it is up to the Aboriginal people to “[C]hallenge problems, not running away,/ forget about the booze and family fights/ let’s stand up as individuals and make it right.” In the same poem he criticizes government handouts which lead to apathy. Education, both traditional and western, “is a must” if tradition and customs are to survive and Aboriginal people are to move into all strata of society. Having been out on grog himself and having watched how the anxiously awaited-for dole check is used within hours on binge drinking, it is not surprising that alcoholism and drug abuse surface so frequently in Rimfire. One of the most powerful poems in the volume is “No names” (110). Dealing with deaths in custody, the title takes on a double meaning, those Aboriginal people who have died and those responsible for their deaths, who remain unnamed in the text, though: The chains of silence have been broken By a Death in Custody the word has been spoken. (110)

The “word” may have been “spoken” but who listens, who attempts to find the reasons why, the truth behind the long list of names of those who have died in custody? In the last stanza, the reader is challenged to reaction and investigation: Is it a game? No one is to blame. A lot of questions but still no name. (110)

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The very notion that Deaths in Custody and the silence that has surrounded them can be conceptualized as a game of silence galvanizes the reader into posing the unspoken questions the poem itself suggests. In spite of the political agenda that comes through so strongly in Taylor’s poetry, his writing is shot through with love and tenderness, a deep caring for those who have fallen into the dark world of alcohol and drugs, a love for his people, his homeland and the Australian landscape in general. However, above and beyond every other consideration his work is one of denouncement, leaving the reader with that last, sadly eternal question, will there ever be ears to hear and wills to act?

NOTES 1. Transformations, No. 2 (March 2002). http://www.cqu.edu.au/transformations ISSN 1444–377). 2. http://www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au/monastery_history.htm. Accessed 18th April 2007, 20.45. 3. http://www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au/word_from_abbot.htm. Accessed 18th April 2007, 22.00. 4. Pico Iyer: Author and Travel Writer for Time Magazine and The New Yorker http://www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au/. Accessed 19th April 2007, 18.53. 5. Alf Taylor. Winds. Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books, 1994. 6. In Conversation with Alf Taylor. Filmed at the Universitat de Barcelona, 2005. 7. Alf Taylor. Rimfire. Broome, Western Australia: Magabala Books, 2000.

WORKS CITED Taylor, Alf. Rimfire. Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2000. ———. Winds. Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2005.

Chapter Seven

The Englishness of Maori Writing Melissa Kennedy

From its first appearance in the government journal Te Ao Hou in the 1950s through to the biennial Huia Maori Fiction in the 2000s, the genre of Maori fiction in English has grown to hold a prominent place in New Zealand literature. The arrival of Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace in the 1970s as the “first” Maori short-story writers fulfilled earlier expectations and anticipation of a significant and distinct Maori voice that would give a hitherto unknown perspective to New Zealand’s literary and cultural identity. Indeed, in his introduction to Into the World of Light (1982), the first anthology edited by a Maori, Ihimaera describes Maori writing as a “‘new’ fiction for a new world” (4). The national eagerness to embrace something new and different is clearly registered in the rapturous reception of Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning the bone people as the novel New Zealand had been “waiting for” (Cowley 60). In a recent example, the cover of Huia’s 2001 anthology triumphantly announces that this Maori fiction “could have come from no other country.” Clearly this cult of difference is inscribed in the larger context of institutionalized biculturalism which has shaped and formed Aotearoa/New Zealand’s national identity since the 1980s. On an international scale, although biculturalism is unique to New Zealand, Maori-Pakeha1 race relations have been strongly influenced by postcolonial discourse’s questions of minority cultural agency. In literature, the use of postcolonial terminology in national literary criticism, also evident in the significant body of comparative analyses with other indigenous and minority writing, inscribes Maori fiction within the contemporary postcolonial domain.2 While the usefulness and suitability of postcolonial theory to Maori fiction is widely accepted, the question of the place of Maori writing within Western literature at large, and particularly the influence of its European roots, is less certain and more problematic. 101

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While accepting the validity—some would say desirability—of arguments against reading Maori literature within the possibilities of European aesthetics, one of the advantages of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “cultural field of production” and Pascale Casanova the “world republic of letters” is that they work across time and space in a way that exposes similarities. By contrast, many of the disciplines and discourses which have influenced postcolonial literature, such as sociology, anthropology, nationalism, and indigenous oral traditions, either do not notice the confluences, or work by agendas looking only for differences. Casanova defends her perspective thus: The fact of considering literary works on the international scale leads to the discovery of other principles of contiguity or differentiation, which permits us to bring closer that which is usually separated, and to separate that which sometimes tends to be brought together, in this way giving rise to unsuspected properties.3 (242)

The suitability of reading Maori literature from an international and aesthetic perspective is by no means uncontested. Not all fiction by Maori aims to respond to an international literary scene, but may be instead motivated by local cultural, social and even political ambitions. In an attempt to recognize culture-specific objectives, many postcolonial critics shy away from looking for similarities with English literature, construed as committing the error of assuming that marginalized writers simply use European forms to describe non-European content, a stance which reinforces Eurocentric paradigms (Huggan, “Opting Out” 29). Nevertheless, in Maori fiction written in English and in the novel or short-story forms, echoes and traces of literature’s historical and international trajectory are discernable in the unique worldview of its local idiom. Foregrounding aesthetics does not mean conversely denying art value outside of its own politics. For Bourdieu, all art is intricately involved with the shifting cultural and social politics within which it is produced, a bind between art and society. Thus, the study of aesthetics is always already embedded in a politics of power relations (34), of which postcolonialism is only one of many “fields” within a literary community whose international and historical development demonstrates its cross-cultural possibilities. Graham Huggan makes a similar argument for understanding postcolonial writing as embedded in a Western literary paradigm. While he accepts the indigenous desire to take over its own literary output and production, in the African context he suggests that to reduce African literature and Western criticism to a binary insider-outsider mechanism “negates the transculturative potential inherent in a lengthy history of European encounters” (Postcolonial Exotic 55). Instead, he suggests that a way out of exoticising ethnographic fiction is to privilege aesthetics, “a hybrid amalgam of cross-fertilised aesthetic traditions that are the historical outcome of a series of—often violent—cultural

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collisions” (56). Huggan argues that aspects of Western culture and literary aesthetics have become an integral part of colonized cultures and their writing. In the following study of romanticism, social realism and rewriting in some of Ihimaera’s best-known fiction, finding the Englishness in Maori writing reveals a depth and resonance easily overlooked by an emphasis on Maori and postcolonial literature of difference. To borrow Simon During’s technique of “overreading” centers the text rather than the writer’s national cultural function in order to promote an understanding of the artist self and text as what he calls “formed partly in someone else’s terms—the terms of international and world-historical modes” (“Revision” 92). Following in the footsteps of Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, French historian Anne-Marie Thiesse, in her text on European national identity formation, describes the process by which all nationalisms use the same tools to construct their “imagined community” and unique national character. Thus, while the lyric pastoral, and sublime, mystic connection with nature that feature in much Maori fiction are often interpreted as key examples of a unique Maori worldview, they also find their precedent in English romanticism. Images of Herder studiously collecting oral folklore and peasant songs, the Grimm brothers similarly seeking legends and fairytales from rural elders, Jean-Jacques Rousseau walking through the French countryside and James Macpherson rewriting Ossian’s heroic deeds, are synonymous with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nation building and the development of national cultural identity in Great Britain, Ireland and on the continent (Thiesse 23–66). Transcribed into the antipodean context in the Maoriland writing of the turn of the twentieth century, when colonial settlers strove to make themselves at home in New Zealand, Ihimaera’s Maori romanticism is prefigured in the nation building of his antecedents, already present a century earlier, in Maori sovereignty advocate Apirana Ngata’s poem “A Scene from the Past,” written within the mode of Maoriland romanticism (Stafford and Williams, “Maoriland” 30–36). The search to establish authenticity of the past is a key feature of both the Romantic pastoral and sublime, evident in Ihimaera’s reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley in “I, Ozymandias” in The New Net Goes Fishing (see Jannetta 18). Here, the lyric poignancy of the protagonist’s rural childhood is overlaid with the harsh social reality of urban dislocation and the elevated toll of Maori crime, when, as a successful young man, he recognizes a prison inmate as his childhood friend. In mourning the gap that has developed between them as adults, the protagonist recalls their shared past, portrayed as a pastoral idyll: [R]emember? We . . . sneaked out of school and went down to the river for a swim. The water was cool, an oasis reflecting the sun which fragmented in mirror pieces

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when you dived into it. We chased each other through the sun-shafted depths of the water, under sunken logs and drifting curtains of overhanging willows. Then we skimmed our promises to each other like small stones across the water. That day was one of the best of my life, honest. (178–79)

Under the guise of the truants being found out and made to learn “that dumb poem about Ozymandias,” Ihimaera draws on the imagery in Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” in which the relentless movement of nature highlights the brevity and insignificance of a man’s life, mocking his attempts to maintain a hold of the past and its memory. Ihimaera transplants Shelley’s imagery to the context of modern Maori experience: just as all men are condemned to be forgotten or reduced to vestiges of their former glory, Maori culture of the past is fallen and crumbled and cannot be remade in the present. In the brokenness of his childhood friend, the narrator is haunted by vestiges of the past, the “shattered remains of a life we once shared” (175). Ihimaera’s romantic vision holds that a reconnection with pre-contact Maori values of land, ancestry and mythology points to a way out of the cultural desert of Shelley’s poem, providing a future for Maori culture. Ihimaera’s lyricism, collapsing emotion, land and the rural persona, follows a Wordsworthian schema. In his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, the Romantic poet describes the “essential passions of the heart,” most wholly contained in the “rustic” peasant as poetic subject (“Preface” 650). The pastoral vision is organic, growing out of the soil rather than schoolroom learning. In Tangi, Ihimaera’s narrator puts into perspective the Maori children’s difficulties with doing their schoolwork: “Dad and Mum couldn’t help us [with our homework] because they knew little of such things. That didn’t seem to matter to us; their knowledge was of the earth and of loving the earth and that seemed more important” (Tangi 79). This is reformulated in Whanau in a way that equates knowledge of the land with a strong sense of roots and, ultimately, happiness. The boy, Andrew, “env[ies]” his father who is a laborer: “You’re content; I’m not. You know about the earth; all I know about it is from books. Your life is here and you only want to stay here; I don’t know where my life will lie. But wherever it is, it will not be as happy as yours” (69). Although it is somewhat difficult to imagine a fourteen-year-old boy formulating his fears of growing up and leaving home in quite this way, Andrew clearly sees his father as a quintessential Maori man, a role model whom he knows he cannot replicate. In passages in the novel that depict these male characters at work, readers are shown a model for the way in which Wordsworth’s “essential passions” and “elementary feelings” are translated into a fundamental connection between Maori and the land: [Rongo] had felt the earth crying out for seed. He had felt the yearning of the land for peace, for it had become accustomed to the rhythm of the yearly

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planting. And there had been a crying out of his own blood too. The rhythm of the land and the rhythm of his blood had been one and the same. And he had begun the planting and both blood and land had gradually become calm. And he felt the strength of the land calling him. (Whanau 54)

The romantic heart, here represented in the blood, makes emotion the conduit between man and his natural environment, often expressed in spontaneous outpourings of love. Even the adolescent Hema in “One Summer Morning” takes time out of his fantasy of sex and Western movies to notice nature: “He looks up and sees [the wild geese], arrowing sharply through the bright cloudless morning. So beautiful they are, and they have all the sky as their dominion. Breathless with wonder and happiness, he watches them” (83). Ihimaera transfers into a Maori context the precepts of English romanticism, featuring an acute sensibility for nature and simplicity, of which the star role is the rural enclaves and inhabitants unsullied by the negative impact of encroaching modernity. Acute Maori sensitivity to the land fosters Maori claims for its restitution by citing a corresponding Pakeha lack of emotional belonging. In the Maoriland version of the romantic sublime, spectacular landscapes evoke feelings of awe and mystery. Early poet Jessie Mackay attempts to convey a spiritual connection with nature, but one which hides its meaning to the new arrivals (1903): [T]he great water scarred slopes [of Te-Marua] are like the face of a giant old Maori warrior, seamed with the sacred moko (facial tattoo) and gashed in many a long-past fight. A passion of Ossianic melancholy glorifies the Northern soul with a nameless romance. Te-Marua broods over the past; the river sings loud of ancient things. (Stafford and Williams, “Fashioned Intimacies” 38)

While Mackay points to the “melancholy,” “nameless romance” and indecipherable singing issuing from the landscape, by the mid-twentieth century, the Pakeha cultural nationalists have become insensitive to this. Hence, New Zealand is “a land of settlers / With never a soul at home” (Allen Curnow) and the landscape is a terra nullius, in which “The plains are nameless and the cities cry out for meaning” (Charles Brasch). Straining to prove their independence from both England and their colonial legacy, mid-century Pakeha poets shrug off the loftiness of romantic sensibility and replace it with realism and ruggedness. Nevertheless, John Newton finds a sublimated romanticism in mid-century poetry that pushes underground the incoherence and voicelessness that Mackay’s effeminate, awe-inspired mysticism is not embarrassed to express. In effect, for both Maoriland and cultural nationalist poets, writing landscape in New Zealand revolves around writing loss and disorientation.

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The emergence into the mainstream public eye of Maori cultural mores with the sovereignty and Maori Renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s reinserts continuity into the landscape. Ihimaera writes the Maori back into the land by centering a Maori perspective of nature in the interstices left by inchoate white New Zealanders, effectively bringing to the surface the Maori voice which was undecipherable to Maoriland writers and silent to the Pakeha nationalists. Mackay hears an “Ossianic melancholy” in the ancient song in the cliffs and river of Te Marua, which she finds haunting because she does not understand it. Ihimaera retains the anthropomorphism of nature, but Maori cosmogony functions as a rational explanation for the way things work, normalizing the sublime so that it loses the mystic overtones of Mackay’s Maori Ossian. Nevertheless, Ihimaera’s personification of the earth, like Mackay’s, corresponds to a similar naturalness of the Maori people, to the point where land and Maori—Tangata Whenua—are one and the same: [Huia’s] is a handsome face, framed with a long, black scarf. The features are sculpted of earth and sky; the chiselled planes softened by wind, rain and sun. It is a face that has seen the passing of the seasons and understands that all things decay and fall of their own accord. A calm face, which accepts the inevitable rhythms of life: that the sun rises and sets, night follows day, and that winter always comes. (Tangi 24)

Whereas Mackay’s Maori are too natural to adapt, for Ihimaera, Maori have survived because of their very naturalness. His depiction of Maori attuned to and accepting of relentless nature lends Maori a certain prosaic stoicism and earthy patriotism, reminiscent of the Russian nationalist writers. Making hardship look positive, typically through a rural setting and working class, usually male heroes, is also a feature of mid-twentieth-century Pakeha literary nationalism. Indeed, Ihimaera’s rural settings read like a roll call of rural activities common to the New Zealand masculine tradition from Frank Sargeson and John Mulgan through to Barry Crump. Examples include scrub cutting and mustering, shearing, man’s battle against the elements, living in whare, rugby, beer and pub culture. In following the Sargeson tradition which creates heroes out of the underprivileged and working class, Ihimaera makes a claim for Maori as typical New Zealanders. He reminds his readers of the values on which New Zealand national identity was built: a rural setting in which the pioneer settler and working man’s hard labor and clear sense of community values stake a claim for democratic equality. The New Zealand Pakeha and Maori masculine rural tradition constructs in a new world context the Wordsworthian or Herderian Romantic hero. A vague sense of queasiness at the above facile parallel between Maori cultural renaissance and nineteenth-century European nationalism and its local

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Maoriland and Pakeha nationalist variants may stem from a reluctance to collapse the extensive differences that separate these movements. Such circumspection is evident in the way that New Zealand literary commentators have tended not to emphasize Ihimaera’s debt to English cultural and literary antecedents, and even less to Pakeha forebears. The postcolonial perspective has altered the terrain on which literary analyses are conducted because an aesthetic consideration, which presupposes that English literature occupies an internally cohesive field, is not sufficient for writers bringing exterior cultural and literary viewpoints and strategies. Within the politics of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s term “writing back,” the postcolonial emphasis on difference undermines Western cultural and literary authority. This is most apparent in the tendency to read postcolonial fiction which rewrites earlier canonical texts as subverting Western (predominantly European) literary hegemony. Key texts read in a manner intending to deconstruct an imperial perspective include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which centers the mad Bertha Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, in which Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness journey to the interior is re-enacted multiple times until the South American jungle becomes assimilated and natural to a Creole imaginary. However, to again take Bourdieu’s and Casanova’s incitation to open the field of cultural production internationally and historically, rewriting is not only a postcolonial phenomenon: even Chaucer openly admits that his Troilus and Criseide is modelled on the work of his literary forebears (Glage 322), an acknowledgement that draws attention to the point that all rewriting to a certain extent pays homage to the previous text, and that an ambition to update, recontextualize or criticize the original presumes that it remains relevant in the present. In its evocation of similarity and difference, influence and originality, rewriting is also illustrative of the fundamental plurality and polyphony of the text as a site for refracting reformulations. This has always caused debate, concerned, as Edward Said discusses in The World, the Text and the Critic, with questions of originality and imitation, based on a conception of literary influence as filiation, a handing down through the generations. However, Said stresses the importance of chosen affiliation in order to sidestep the hierarchical relationship implicit in organic filiation. Maintaining echoes of familial connection makes Said’s affiliation more than a postmodern, indiscriminate, picking and choosing of literary influences, and more a kind of adopting into the family, of collecting writers and texts deemed meaningful.4 Affiliation allows Said to reconceptualize originality and repetition so that they are no longer linear and temporal, something which moves “backwards into lost primacy at best, and regained utopias at worst” (139). Instead of inscription, rewriting creates a “parallel script” (135), compiled as a “bibliosystem, a kind

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of activated library whose effect is to stimulate the production of forms of disciplined, gradually actualised freedom” (139). In Said’s “activated library,” literary influence is generative. In a similar vein, Judie Newman upsets the notion of historical primacy by challenging the supposition that the canonical author and text are set in stone. Her study of intertextuality and rewriting, including J. G. Farrell’s use of the Romantic poets, Nadine Gordimer’s use of Shakespeare, and Shashi Tharoor’s mimicry of Forster, Kipling and Rushdie, reveals that “there are no master narratives masquerading as eternal verities” (100). Both Said and Newman’s arguments aim to validate inter-reference and influence in a way that does not depend on colonial-postcolonial binarisms of primacy, hierarchy, or the prioritizing of difference at the expense of similarity. Peter Hulme argues a case for reading points of similarity and shared vision between postcolonial rewritings and their canonical counterparts. In “The Locked Heart: the Creole family romance of Wide Sargasso Sea,” the critic warns that the way in which many postcolonialists teach “revisionary couples,” such as Wide Sargasso Sea alongside Jane Eyre, risks instating a “pedagogical opposition” between colonial and postcolonial that is too rigid and unnuanced (72). He concludes his paper thus: [O]nce the local has been fixed, once the materials out of which a text has been made have been located and studied, the critical movement has finally to be outwards, towards the larger picture of which the locality forms only a part, for too easy a contrast between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea would risk missing that Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys do finally belong to the same world. Readings that focus on the counter-discursive strategies of Wide Sargasso Sea vis-àvis Jane Eyre, though often carried out with impeccably radical motives, have tended to set the categories of “colonial” and “postcolonial” in stone, failing to see the multiple ways in which Jane Eyre is, in its production of its materials, already negotiating matters of West Indian slavery, even if the figure of Bertha is the only obvious textual residue of this negotiation. This is not to collapse differences but to argue for the need to understand the complex trafficking that exists between texts (and their authors) in the world, even ones that seem to invite consideration in terms of oppositions. (85)

Hulme’s study reveals that the different locales of Rhys’s upbringing in Dominica and Brontë’s on the Yorkshire Moors do not mean that their respective texts are diametrically opposed. In fact, the way both writers assimilate their environments and family histories into their texts is very similar. Hulme’s search for similarity between the postcolonial and the colonial echoes that ofromanticism handed down through the history of New Zealand settlement and nation building. Indeed, just as Hulme claims that Bertha

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Rochester foreshadows postcolonial concerns, During argues that the diffusion and deployment of Macpherson’s Ossian in Scottish cultural revivalism, European romanticism and British and French colonial campaigns is both postcolonial and global (“Postcolonialism” 43–45). Hulme’s interest in how life carries over into fiction, and how fiction interacts with other fictions opens a space to illuminate “textual residue” and “complex trafficking” between colonial and postcolonial “couples” in a way that acknowledges both texts as in an unstable relationship with each other. In Ihimaera’s 1989 shortstory collection, Dear Miss Mansfield, Hulme’s concepts are revealing in the way that Ihimaera picks up “textual residues” in Mansfield and trafficks her strategies for his own uses. “A Contemporary Kezia” benefits from Hulme’s reminder not to oppose a story’s locale. The latter half of Ihimaera’s story replicates Mansfield’s “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” from her first collection, In a German Pension (1911). In turn, Mansfield was accused of plagiarizing Anton Chekhov’s story “Sleepy Head,” with which “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” shares remarkable similarities.5 Ihimaera’s story is not as close to Mansfield’s as hers is to Chekhov’s, and, of course, Ihimaera’s collection openly acknowledges Mansfield’s influence. Nevertheless, comparing the three stories highlights some of the textual “trafficking” exposed in conscious or subconscious rewriting. To recall Hulme’s incitement to consider any text locally first exposes how Chekhov’s story is essentially late-nineteenth-century Russian, Mansfield’s is English Modernist, and Ihimaera’s is unmistakably Maori of its era. Like many Russian social realist writers, Chekhov portrays a harsh world for the peasantry. In “Sleepy Head” the child employed as housekeeper and nanny is locked into a life of hardship, as both her daily routine, which allows her no sleep, and her memories of her past life with her family, are full of duress. Even in the luxury of sleep, the child’s dreams mirror a reality in which one’s lot in life is borne with stoic acceptance. Mansfield rewrites Chekhov so that the alternative to the child’s daily routine is a romantic and modernist escape into a dream world. The story begins and ends with the dreaming image of “a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all” (757). This pastoral, peaceful refuge of the mind’s eye intensifies the uncouthness of the German household, in which the child’s perhaps artistic sensitivity clashes with the inelegance of the Frau and Man. In a reversal of Mansfield’s acerbic satire—which relies on the distance between the working-class Germany depicted in the story and the middle-class London of Mansfield’s readership—Ihimaera rewrites her story with a sincere and sympathetic narrator, who suggests that the reasons for a child to be put to work may be culturally and historically acceptable. His depiction of the child called by sacred weavers to take on their

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domestic chores is contextualized in the opening paragraph, which sets the scene of mid-twentieth-century rural poverty: “[e]verybody had a role in keeping the family alive and well. Your Nani’s role was given to her when she was four” (84). In a similar manner to Chekhov’s peasant girl, the Maori child unquestioningly accepts her burdensome responsibility and punishments. Even though the story is cast in a positive light, the child still dreams of a way out of the immediate hardship of her tasks. As in Chekhov’s and Mansfield’s stories, the symbol of the child’s wish for escape is the road, although in Ihimaera this is not a dream: the child sits at the side of the road hoping and waiting for her mother to come and get her (87). Across the different environments and different artistic treatment of these three stories, the pathos remains the same. Whether played out in Russian tenant housing, in a German townhouse or a Maori whare, each story maintains the focus on the child as innocent and naïve. This provides the impact of the story’s last lines, where the child’s intense focus on escape into sleep, or in Ihimaera’s case, a way home, has her kill the baby, or the old weavers, with no understanding of her act’s repercussions. In a further layer of rewriting, in his 2000 play Woman Far Walking, Ihimaera repeats the story of Nani’s childhood as direct speech. The short story’s inclusion in the play, which compiles incidents of conflict between Maori and Pakeha from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi until the year 2000, dramatically revives Chekhov’s social criticism. Although Ihimaera ostensibly rewrites Mansfield’s story, his socio-political motivations bypass Mansfield’s satire to instead reformulate Chekhov’s couched criticism of Tsarist Russia in his own critique of the effect of colonization on Maori. Just as Hulme finds that Brontë’s novel contains elements that already configure postcolonial concerns, through Mansfield Ihimaera activates a postcolonialism already present in Chekhov. An overreading of aesthetic influence in Ihimaera’s fiction exposes cultural and imaginative overlaps with many other writers, recalling Umberto Eco’s incitement “to let the wheels of intertextuality rotate fully in order to see how the interplay of influence works in unexpected ways. Sometimes the most profound influence is the one you discover afterwards, not the one you find immediately” (133). To consider Ihimaera’s fiction in this light challenges a binary conception of Pakeha-Maori and colonial-postcolonial positions, thereby working against the overdetermination of cultural specificity common to the interpretation of much Maori and postcolonial literature. In their studies of the rise and development of the novel from across several centuries, languages and nations, Bourdieu, Casanova, Said and Eco demonstrate the genre as an assemblage of multiple influences, languages and realities. Furthermore, Said’s affiliation and Newman’s instability of canonical texts make possible an analysis of Ihimaera’s fiction alert to interanimation or “complex

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trafficking” with the English Romantics, Pakeha cultural nationalists, Chekhov and Mansfield. Rather than conceiving of Western literary tradition as a foreign form that postcolonial literature can only be engaged with from a position of exteriority and as a site of contestation, accentuating similarities demonstrates all fiction’s capacity to carry the imprint of historical “residue,” revealing new or forgotten contiguities. Ihimaera’s extensive literary influences and intertextual references suggest that Maori fiction does indeed belong to the Western literary paradigm, an ensemble of texts within which Maori fiction’s “distinctive stylistic features” may be discussed in the terminology of a shared literary tradition.

NOTES 1. Pakeha is the Maori name for white New Zealanders. Although strictly referring to those of British colonial settler heritage, the term is largely accepted to mean all non-Maori. 2. This is evident in international comparative studies such as Eva Rask-Knudsen’s The Circle and the Spiral and Michelle Keown’s The Postcolonial Body. Postcolonial terminology also features in introductions to Maori anthologies. For example, the contemporary Huia series describes Maori writing as motivated to address issues of “cultural displacements,” “imaginative autonomy,” “counter-colonised” (Huia 2 7–8), “identity, empowerment and loss,” and “appropriation” (Huia 3 7–8). 3. “Le fait de considérer les œuvres littéraires à l’échelle internationale conduit à découvrir d’autres principes de contiguïté ou de différenciation, qui permettent de rapprocher ce qu’on sépare d’ordinaire et de séparer quelque fois ce qu’on a coutume de rassembler, faisant ainsi apparaître des propriétés ignorées.” (My translation.) 4. I have oversimplified Said’s argument here. His essays go on to interrogate the complex ways that filiation and affiliation interact in response to pressure from cultural and literary biases. Said’s insistence on the fact that literature does not exist outside of the society and culture that produced it effectively foreshadows Bourdieu’s and Casanova’s arguments for seeing literature as part of and responding to wider cultural production. 5. John Middleton-Murry denies that Mansfield plagiarized Chekhov. He insists that the story is based on a personal experience and that at the time of writing she could not have had access to a translation of Chekhov’s story. Elisabeth Schneider, “Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov.”

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

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Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths (eds.). 1989. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press. Brontë, Charlotte. 1966 (1847). Jane Eyre. London: Penguin. Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil. Chekhov, Anton. 2007. “Sleepy Head.” University of Virginia Electronic Text Centre: http://www.biblio.org/eldritch/ac/sleepy.htm, accessed 28 January, 2007. Colonial discourse/postcolonial theory. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen. New York: Manchester University Press, 72–88. Cowley, Joy. 1984. Review of the bone people. The New Zealand Listener. 12 May, 60. During, Simon. 1983a. “Towards a Revision of Local Critical Habits.” AND 1: 75–92. ———. 1983b. “Postcolonialism and Globalisation: a dialectical relation after all?” Post-Colonial Studies vol. 1(1): 31–47. Eco, Umberto. 2005 (2002). On Literature. London: Secker and Warburg. Glage, Liselotte. 2002. “Rewriting or Writing Back? Witi Ihimaera’s Dear Miss Mansfield.” Crabtracks: Progress in Teaching the New Literatures. Cross/Cultures 59, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 321–29. Harris, Wilson. 1961. Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Huggan, Graham. 1989. “Opting Out of the (Critical) Common Market: Creolization and the Post-Colonial Text.” Kunapipi 11(1): 27-40. ———. 2001. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London & New York: Routledge. Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 2. 1997. Wellington: Huia. Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 3. 1999. Wellington: Huia. Huia Short Stories: Contemporary Maori Fiction 4. 2001. Wellington: Huia. Hulme, Peter. 1994. “The Locked Heart: the Creole family romance of Wide Sargasso Sea.” Ihimaera, Witi. 1972. Pounamu, Pounamu. Auckland: Heinemann. ———. 1977. The New Net Goes Fishing. Auckland: Heinemann. ———. 1982. and D.S. Long. Eds. Into the World of Light. Auckland: Heinemann. ———. 1989. Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp. Auckland: Viking. ———. 1992–1996. Ed. Te Ao Marama: Contemporary Maori Writing, Volumes 1–5, Auckland: Reed Books. ———. 1994. Tangi and Whanau. Auckland: Secker and Warburg. ———. 2000. Woman Far Walking. Wellington: Huia Publishers. Jannetta, Armando E. 1990. “Textual Strategies of Identity Formation in Witi Ihimaera’s Fiction.” Commonwealth vol. 12(2): 17–28. Keown, Michelle. 2005. Postcolonial Pacific Writing. New York: Routledge. Mansfield, Katherine. 1985 (1945). Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Constable. Newman, Judie. 1996. “The Ballistic Bard: Intertextuality and Postcolonial Fiction.”

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In Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Ken Goodwin and Wolfgang Zach, 95–102. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. Newton, John. 1999. “Colonialism Above the Snowline: Baughan, Ruskin and the South Island Myth.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 34(2): 85–96. Pearson, Bill. 1973. “The Maori and Literature: 1938–1965.” In Essays on New Zealand Literature, ed. Wystan Curnow, 99–138. Auckland: Heinemann. Rask-Knudsen, Eva. 2004. The Circle and the Spiral: Australian Aborigine and New Zealand Maori Literature. New York: Rodopi. Rhys, Jean. 1993 (1968). Wide Sargasso Sea. 1968. London: Penguin. Said, E. W. 1983. The World, The Text and The Critic. London: Vintage. Schneider, Elisabeth. 1935. “Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov.” Modern Language Notes 50 (6), June 1935: 394–97, on jstor.org, accessed 28 January 2007. Stafford, Jane and Mark Williams. 2002. “Fashioned Intimacies: Maoriland and Colonial Modernity.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 37(1): 31–48. ———. 2004. “Victorian Poetry and the Indigenous Poet: Ngata’s ‘A Scene from the Past.’” Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 39(1): 29–41. Thiesse, Anne-Marie. 1999. La création des identités nationales : Europe XVIIIe–XXe siècle. Paris: Seuil. Wordsworth, William. 2001. “Preface.” In The Lyrical Ballads. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch et al., 645–68. New York: Norton.

Chapter Eight

The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe: Trauma, the Law, and the Internet Chantal Zabus

As if to break down the insider/outsider debate and to dwarf the clash of titans like universalism and cultural relativism, African women started,1 in the last three decades, to write experientially about the genital operations such as excision and infibulation, which they had undergone as children, and to speak from their private memories about how their bodies were indelibly marked by the somatic societies to which they belong. Such an autobiographical impulse is not fortuitous; it is generally triggered off by contact with “the West,” very often through elected or imposed exile in the new Europe, with its newfangled “cities of refuge,” its revised laws, and its awkward grappling with “glocalization.”2 This autobiographical impulse turns out to be more of a “compulse” (Rosen, 86), as these African diasporic or Afrosporic women writers and their autobiographical surrogates rehearse a private trauma as a result of an ancestral, local practice, which has now migrated and received global attention. Many women autobiographers mention their excision,3 as an operation, to quote Egyptian Alifa Rifaat in her short story “Bahiyya’s Eyes,” which “left me with a wound in my body and another deep inside me, a feeling that wrong had been done to me, a wrong that could never be undone” (Rifaat 8). Trauma, one should remember, is the Greek word for “wound.” Excision is a “double wound” inflicted on both the body and the mind, and women’s corporeal writing flows from that double wound. Interestingly, Alifa Rifaat was never exposed to Western mores and yet wrote about this issue before it was conceptualized as a “wound” in the Western psyche. However, Rifaat is an exception and most women authors wrote about the procedure from their Western platform—Britain, France, Germany, the United States. Tellingly,

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the “I” writes her autobiography when the cohesion of that “I” is most uncertain, as in exile. Excision in women’s texts at first functioned as what one might call an “unclaimed experience,” which is a central concept in trauma theory. Taking her cue from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Cathy Caruth writes about trauma as the wound in the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world— [it] is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. . . . Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on. (Caruth, 3)

Like autobiographies around illness, as in Western pathographies, such firstperson accounts around genital alterations foreground the role of pain, as “the most powerful aids to mnemonics;” “the ‘unforgettable’ is etched on the body itself” (Nietzsche, qtd Deleuze, 10).

AFROSPORA AND TRAUMA Afrosporic women have indeed emphasized the role of pain in the creation of self-writing out of trauma. I have elsewhere outlined the process whereby excision and infibulation were at first mentioned “in passing” and with circumspection in African literature, later to be featured in auto-ethnographies, such as that of Kenyan Charity Waciuma’s Daughter of Mumbi (1969), until they become the very stuff of autobiography, as in Guinean Kesso Barry’s Kesso (1987) and in Somali Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower (1998) and Desert Dawn (2002).4 Dirie’s third autobiography, Desert Children (2005), almost simultaneously published with Senegalese Khady’s Mutilée (2005), further propel the issue of genital alterations into the literature of exile whereas Ivorian Fatou Keïta’s Rebelle (1998) returns the issue, after a wayward migration in France, back “home” in Ivory Coast, where women seek empowerment and local agency. In her otherwise illuminating article on whether Afro-European Literature(s) constitute a possible new discursive category, Sabrina Brancato observes with regret that “high sales usually concern sensationalist narratives reinforcing negative stereotypes about immigrants (especially African or

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Muslim groups). These texts usually take the form of testimonials or autobiographies authored by a Western ghost writer, feed a Western white readership eager for third-world victim stories. One widely known example is former top model Waris Dirie’s series of best-sellers (Desert Flower, Desert Dawn, Desert Children), which have generated worldwide public debate around female genital mutilation” (Brancato 3). My contention here is that one cannot speak of “negative stereotypes” when the “African woman” is deexoticized through the contextualization of her culture and the author herself seeks self-representation as in an autobiography.5 Also, it is dangerous to confuse a ghostwriter with an amanuensis. One should indeed distinguish between the ghostwriter, that is, the real author who writes in lieu of the legal author and the amanuensis who writes, often from dictation or transcription (complicated by translation) of tapes, on behalf of the author. Without getting into the particulars of the quasi-ethnographic relation between taper and taped, the person who knows and the person who is known, it remains apparent that most texts around genital excision illustrate the tensions experienced by the Afrosporic woman autobiographer, who is caught between impulses toward exposure and concealment. Early in Desert Flower (1998), Waris Dirie, then a nomadic camel herder, remembers her rape at age four by her older cousin Guban: Next I felt something hard and wet pressing against my vagina. I froze at first, not understanding what was happening, but I know it was something very bad. The pressure intensified until it became a sharp pain. . . . Suddenly, I was flooded with a warm liquid and a sickening acrid odor permeated the night air. “You pee-peed on me!” I screamed, horrified. I jumped up and rubbed my scarf against my legs, mopping off the foul-smelling liquid. (Dirie 1999, 24)

In Desert Dawn, published some four years later, Dirie adds more graphic and sartorial details about her struggle. he was pulling at my guntino and he grabbed me and untied the knots. He pulled me underneath him even though I yelled and told him to get off. Of course nobody could hear because we were so far away from the camp. He reached down and pulled up my dress and rolled on top of me. His maa-a-weiss, the cloth he wore wrapped around his waist, was open and he pushed my legs apart and sprawled on top of me. He was poking my vagina with this thing and I screamed, “Stop it, stop it! What are you doing?” He put his huge hand right on my little mouth and the next thing I knew he squirted something. He rolled off then started laughing and I had this sticky stuff all over me. I never smelled anything like that in my life and I still hate that smell, I hate that smell. I stood up, wiped myself and ran all the way home. (Dirie 2002, 27)

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When silence is forced upon her by Guban putting his hand over her “little mouth,” her early psycho-social identity is checked since Waris goes by the nickname “Afdokle, Little mouth” (Dirie 2002: 69). From age four onward, her lips are sealed. The memory of Guban’s smiling face in the firelight while he is lying to her mother will haunt Waris until she fights her embarrassment and breaks the silence in Desert Dawn. But even then, some twenty-five years after the event, while “settled” in the new Europe, words, which she “didn’t have” in Desert Flower, for she “didn’t know what he’d done,” fail her. She is left with abstract musings about the emotional pain of being “sexually violated and hav[ing] everyone ignore it” (Dirie 2002: 25). Faced with her mother’s silence around Guban’s violation of her bodily integrity, Waris concludes: “If you aren’t allowed to talk about sex, you better sew the girls shut because then, like me, they won’t know what is happening to them” (166). Infibulation thus functions as a twisted form of sexual education and as the bodily imposition of silence around a taboo subject. A sewn vagina is the bodying forth of sealed lips, with the silent complicity of the mother. Mum is definitely the word. One could cynically argue that Dirie, as Brancato suggests, is providing additional, sensational fodder for Western consumption but, more to our purpose, both versions of the rape illustrate Dirie’s diasporic self, as it evolves towards a type of conflicting, introspective selfhood, more commensurate with European models of personal identity. Waris Dirie seeks to grapple with the horror of that memory by committing it to writing and making it public in the paradoxical form of a private exorcism. The same holds for her varied recollections of her infibulation. In Desert Flower, Dirie emphasizes the secrecy and mystery around infibulation, which aimed at “fixing” the “bad things between a girl’s legs” (1999: 40) and at making girls into marriageable brides rather than “unclean sluts” (42). Infibulation and marriageability being causally linked, Dirie also evokes marriage as a way of disciplining the “rebel” that she has become and of transforming the androgynous, “sassy and fearless” “tomboy” (56) into a reproductive wife. Infibulation has not succeeded, however, in making Waris docile and tractable and she challenges her father’s authority by running away, thereby exposing herself to a family ban. Throughout her infibulation, Waris recalls her mother’s ambivalent role, as she is callously complicit with the exciser, yet is solicitous and caring. Waris remembers being held in the arms of “her poor mother” (46); yet is forced to admit to herself that she “had been butchered with [her] mother’s permission and [she] couldn’t understand why” (48). From behind her mother’s legs straddling her body, Waris peers at the exciser, who spits on the blood that has

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dried on the jagged edge of the broken razor blade. Then her mother blindfolds her, leaving her other senses to record the “torture”: The next thing I felt was my flesh, my genitals, being cut away. I heard the sound of the dull blade sawing back and forth through my skin. When I think back, I honestly can’t believe that this happened to me. I feel as if I were talking about somebody else. There’s no way in the world I can explain what it feels like. It’s like somebody is slicing through the meat of your thigh, or cutting off your arm, except this is the most sensitive part of your body. However, I didn’t move an inch, because I remembered Aman [her sister] and knew there was no escape. And I wanted Mama to be proud of me. I just sat there as if I were made of stone, telling myself the more I moved around, the longer the torture would take. Unfortunately, my legs began to quiver of their own accord, and shake uncontrollably, and I prayed, Please, God, let it be over quickly. Soon it was, because I passed out. (45)

As Waris seeks solace from the punctual pain by fainting, passing out makes it difficult for her older self or present-tense Afrosporic identity to reincarnate that disembodied self at the time of committing things down to writing. She remembers feeling dissociated from her body and seeing herself “floating up, away from the ground, leaving [her] pain behind, and [she] hovered some feet above the scene looking down,” as the exciser is sewing up the edges of her vulva up with acacia tree thorns. She is not so much the “body in pain” of torture chambers, which Elaine Scarry so aptly analyzed in The Body in Pain (1985), as the body-beyond-pain, which is incapable of moans, groans and primordial cries. This experience of aberrant abjection continues, as Waris is made to lie on the rock stained with her blood, “as if an animal had been slaughtered there” (46). This analogy to an animal sacrificed for the common good is pushed to its deadly extremes. Just as the skin of a slaughtered animal is dried and the resulting leather stretched over stools, Waris sees “pieces of [her] meat, [her] sex, [lying] on top, drying undisturbed in the sun” (46). She plans, after her convalescence, to retrieve her lost genitals in a pilgrimage to “the rock where [she]’d been sacrificed” (49). Likewise, when entrusting her Somali experience to her German amanuensis Leo Linder, Nura Abdi remembers being curious about the location of “what had been sawed off all of us” and learns later that “someone had dug a hole and buried them somewhere in the courtyard” and that “It’s long gone to where it belongs. In the ground” (Abdi, 25, my translation). Predictably, the shards of Waris’s or Nura’s flesh have forever disappeared, but not their memories, however fragmented they have become. The older Waris extends the forced immobility in the dark as a result of genital infection to the passive condition of an admittedly essentialized African

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womanhood, hypocoristically reduced to “the passive, selfless manner of a child” (48). Waris’s later exposure to European, American, and African feminisms and human rights, as well as her work as a UN Ambassador against excision, are intervening events that have memorial consequences on her retrospective alignment of infibulation with other traumatic experiences like rape. Also, her aberrations in memory, as evidenced by her different accounts of the same event, certainly compare with the clinical symptoms diagnostic of post-traumatic stress disorder. Although there is no clinical evidence that Dirie exhibits any such symptoms, she fixes, through her writing, the experience of delayed recall, in the way that adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse remember, through psychotherapy, their traumatic past after years of silence and secrecy.6 Waris Dirie’s confessional writing to her amanuensis acts as a kind of (psycho-)therapy and, what is more, as a form of revenge, since, short of using her position(ing) in Europe and then in the United States to file charges against Guban,7 she exposes him to a vast readership as a deceitful caretaker, who abused her, unbeknownst to her mother, an ally-turned-anti-mom in the employ of patriarchy. Recent research has shown that memory is reconstructive and that we remember only the “gist” of things in what scientists call memory traces: when we need to review an event from the past our brain first receives a barebones image. The actual details have often been lost, so the brain creates a ‘probable scenario’ based on general knowledge or present-related imagery borrowed from our surroundings, or movies, books, and personal accounts we have been exposed to since the event. We fill in the gaps with more recent memories. (Wassil-Grimm, 127)

What is more, people do call up memories which are congruent with their present mood so that “people do rewrite their personal history based on their mood at the time of recall” (Wassil-Grimm, 129). As Dirie tries to flesh out the original “bare-bones image” with a “probable scenario,” the remembering process confuses our expectations of linearity so that rape, defloration, and infibulation are discursively aligned. They share the same vocabulary, the same syntax, and the same grammar of pain. Exile from Africa to Europe triggers off memory. As Caruth reminds us, Freud insisted, from his exile in England, on having his final book on trauma—Moses and Monotheism—translated into English before he died: “For those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but the passing out of it that is traumatic . . . survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis” (Caruth, 9). The function of Europe is to jolt the traumatized subject into recognition of both the trauma and the survival itself. This recognition can start, as in the other cases of Somali Nura Abdi and Fadumo Korn (in

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Born in the Big Rains [2006]) and of Senegalese Khady (Koïta), in their (respectively) British, German, and French homes for asylum seekers. Waris Dirie, like Kesso Barry before her, is painfully aware that the revelation of intimate experiences may definitively sever ties with “home,” the personal and political costs being incommensurable for the autobiographer of exile. Generally, Afrosporic autobiographers writing from their European platform fear displaying exaggerated individuality in the “relational” characteristic of collectively inclined African societies, the “I” functioning as some sort of first-person plural. Such first-person accounts, indeed, run counter to communal values and to the self-effacement condoned by religion and patriarchy. Kesso Barry, for instance, mentions the lack of modesty (Fr: pudeur, 124, 183) and Dirie breaks with the Muslim principle of a´ql, or social sense, by talking about taboo sexual matters. In Kesso, princesse peuhle, Barry breaks with both the African “relational” discursive rules that preempt female agency, as well as with the African, masculinist conception of autobiography. In its place she substitutes a community of women, starting with her own daughter, as an attempt to oust the lineage of male ancestors, and usurp the griots’ recitations, which convey “the history of a country . . . from father to son since times immemorial” (14). If we hold to the twin-postulate that women’s self-writing is generally more “holistic” and other-oriented than male self-writing, and that African subjectivity is more “relational” than its “individualistic” Western counterpart, then it follows that African women’s self-writing is doubly relational or relational squared. That “relationality” is established not only through the targeted female readership and the sorority (verging, in its most enthusiastic form, on “global sisterhood”) inherent in such narratives but also through the cathexis between the Westernized daughter and the often Western-illiterate mother, who represents the motherland, orature, religion, lineage. The mother also embodies a tactical self-effacement, which clashes with Dirie’s (and Barry’s, for that matter) flaunting of themselves as European fashion models through photography, the retelling of their “extraordinary” life-story for worldwide consumption,8 and, in Dirie’s case, her defibulation in a London clinic.

LONDON AND BODY MODIFICATION The Western reader eager for what Brancato termed “third-world victims stories” is not quite satiated when Waris Dirie gets “opened up,” as the catchy short-hand phrase for defibulation goes, for the details of the actual procedure are shrouded in mystery. Inevitably, the imminent surgery brings back painful memories of her infibulation.

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As the “crude scars” of her genitals are “opened up,” we may surmise that Waris Dirie also undergoes scar revision by means of surgery rather than laser treatment, that is, that the keloids or thick scar tissue that form the healing wound, are removed. That the doctor “did a fine job” (157) and earns Waris Dirie’s grateful admiration raises the much vexed issue of “reconstructive” vs. “aesthetic” surgery, as the line between the two is historically rather tenuous. One is more inclined to talk of Dirie as a “patient” rather than a “client,” as with surgically altered individuals, since there is a “gain from illness” (Gilman, 4). Indeed, after her surgery, she can enjoy the freedom of urinating and menstruating without pain. Waris Dirie is, however, not restored to the pristine state of the “whole woman,” after Germaine Greer’s (1999) apt phrase. When Dirie writes that she is “more like a woman who hadn’t been circumcised” (158), she is exaggerating the reconstructive aspect of the operation. Her labia and clitoris are indeed still missing and only an expensive, sophisticated surgery akin to a transgender surgery could restore her lost genitals, yet not necessarily their original erotic functions, through flap or pedicle grafting. Waris Dirie, however, enters a new community that is physically and erotically defined as “whole,” but that notion of wholeness is, itself, compounded by the bipolar category of “whole” vs. excised. The defibulation operation, performed in a clinic by a male Western doctor, undoes what the exciser, a non-Western female, has done. Proud of his ability to transform, the surgeon catalogs the similar cases that have come under his scrutiny, mostly from the Sudanic belt—from Senegal to the Horn of Africa—and congratulates himself by saying, “I do my best”(158). Doing his best in the late 1980s in England is certainly not a type of surgical eugenics that would contribute to the “health” of the sceptered Isle, by carrying out an excision-related operation of any kind. Admittedly, he is not excising women but opening them up, which is more legally acceptable in the West. Oddly, the surgeon’s lips are sealed. Dirie takes care not to mention any medical quackery in her book, and the doctor’s name is kept secret “to protect [his] privacy” and, we assume, his business as well. Also, there is no mention of health coverage or his fee, which he is likely to have claimed in the British context. This is very much unlike Parisian urologist Pierre Foldes, who has, since 1996, been repairing the damaged vulvas of several hundred excised women, free of charge, following his humanitarian exposure to the practice in Burkina Faso. The French state health insurance scheme indeed covers part of the cost. In her third autobiography Desert Children (2005), Dirie recounts consulting that same Dr. Foldes in Paris on “the most personal and intimate [matter] possible, my clitoris, one of the parts of my body that were simply cut away” (2005, 70). Although the French doctor’s expertise is not called into question, Dirie is nauseated by the very clinical video approach to the

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reconstruction of clitorises and shudders “at the thought of . . . letting them touch the wound again” (72). Dirie definitively turns down the reconstructive option. But for Dirie, back in London as a young fashion model in the late 1980s, the defibulation or “opening up” can also be seen as a reverse beautification. What was, in the Somali hierarchy of genital beauty, a “beautiful” infibulated vulva, comparable to the enclosedness of the Sudanic “womb-as-oasis” (Boddy, 682–98) with an opening the size of a matchstick or a grain of rice, is now “ugly” or no longer desirable. The “new” vulva is “beautiful” in Waris’s psyche because it is conducive to freedom. With this new body image, Waris Dirie completes her gradual disidentification with infibulated Somali women, including her mother. This re-fashioning of her body coincides with her life taking a sudden, unexpected turn toward high fashion. By the time she has booked a flight to New York in the hope of furthering her modeling career, she has shed previous relics, grown a new skin and is traveling light. Incongruously, she has become a lone nomad.

PARIS AND THE LAW Concepts of genital intactness and wholeness are bound to clash with Western (and Christian) cultures’ conception of “the whole woman” as a woman with intact genitalia. This clash reaches dramatic heights when the African mother and girl child are confronted with the law prevailing in countries such as France. In that respect, Ivorian Fatou Keïta’s Rebelle (1998), Senegalese Khady’s Mutilée (2005), and Dirie in Desert Children (2005) deal with European legislation on excision. Unlike the other two, Fatou’s novel is a thirdperson narrative, which often reads like an autobiography in the third person, which “blur[s] the lines between insiders and outsiders, Africans in Africa, and Africans in France” (Thomas, 134). Indeed, shuttling back and forth between the diasporic and ancestral notions of “home” complicates the postcolonial corollary of diaspora as dislocation. The novel’s first pages detail a scene of inadvertent voyeurism, as in Dirie’s Desert Flower. The girlchild Malimouna, the daughter of a repudiated woman, is, from the treetop branch where she has climbed, the unwitting observer of a love scene between the young hunter and the village exciser. Malimouna then literally and figuratively falls off her tree into an inextricable imbroglio around two jealously guarded taboos, that is, sexuality and excision. From then onward, Malimouna’s fate is contrasted with that of Sanita, who will be shielded from excision by her educated, urban parents, so that Keïta posits education and perforce sex education as instrumental in averting

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excision. Keïta unambiguously favors the eradication of genital excision but imaginatively attempts to probe the minds of “people who continue to practice such a ritual” (qtd Camacho, 87, my translation). Keïta’s Malimouna is spared as a result of a pact between herself and the exciser, who buys off Malimouna’s silence regarding her own sexual debauchery by only pretending to excise her. The exciser’s tacit contract thus bodies forth the use of the simulacrum, which involves a certain degree of complicity between the exciser and the excised girl and, more largely, rivals the recent medicalization of the practice. It also augurs alternative rites, such as ritual without cutting.9 On her wedding night, Malimouna’s imposed husband shrinks away in sheer horror at the sight of her complete vulva, which Keïta describes as “gaping” (43; French: béante) as if to confirm the worst insult, which consists in calling an unexcised woman “a gaping vulva.” Malimouna is forced into a harrowing quest to Abidjan, then on to France, where she is ill-treated by men, both black and white, and takes up a variety of menial jobs until she earns a degree. In Paris, Malimouna clashes with her compatriot Fanta, whose ambition is to have her reluctant daughter, Noura, excised and who remains undeterred when Malimouna reasons with her. By calling the practice a “mutilation,” Malimouna invokes human rights, realizing, however, that she is using “an empty and superficial” discourse that “she had herself heard many times from the mouths of Westerners” (125). Fanta’s stubborn decision to go on with Noura’s excision is also motivated by her disgust at learning that Malimouna is not excised and is having an affair with a white man, which entails, in her opinion, an irreversible cultural contamination by loose, Western mores. However, Malimouna is proven right when Fanta’s daughter dies of a hemorrhage in the most atrocious of sufferings. By considering the imprisonment of the parents as a result of the girlchild’s death by excision, Rebelle shows that it is attuned to late-twentieth-century debates in France about the criminalization of excision brought about by the 1993 revision of the French Penal Code. Indeed, over a five-year span (1978–’82), three African girls died as a result of excisions carried out in France. In 1983, the French Appeals Court decreed that the amputation of the clitoris was a mutilation under Clause 312–3 of the French Penal Code, following the case of mentally unstable Frenchwoman Danièle Richer, who had forcibly removed her daughter’s vulva. In May 1988, excision was criminalized as a result of this non-ritualistic act of excision. Under Clause 229–10 of the new French Penal Code, the Soninke and the Bambara families, who had their daughters ritualistically excised, were thereafter indicted as criminals. Building on Raymond Verdier’s 1992 theories, Lefeuvre-Déotte (1997) enlarges excision to “sex scarification” (17), which she locates against larger

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attempts by the three main monotheistic belief systems—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—to demarcate themselves from one another in their attitude to body markings—”marquer pour démarquer” (14). Lefeuvre-Déotte met and interviewed the Soninke mother, Dalla Fonfana, who was tried in 1989 for having her daughter excised and, as a result, sentenced to three years’ imprisonment with remission of sentence. Among the witnesses, Benoîte Groult, the French feminist author of Ainsi soit-elle (1975), and Awa Thiam, the Senegalese author of La parole aux négresses (1978), testified against Fonfana. Another famous case is that of Soninke exciser Aramata Soko Keita who, in 1991, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for having excised six girls from the Malian Coulibaly family; the parents were sentenced to five years with remission of sentence. Senegalese lawyer Madame Niang defended, for two court cases, the prevalence of French law over African custom and argued that Africa and France concurred on the human rights issue, as is obvious from Clause 24 of the Children’s Rights Charter and the African Human Rights Charter (1986), which stipulates that the state is compelled by law to protect the child.10 Rebelle takes on dithyrambic proportions toward the end, when Keïta seems to pour her heart out in a gush of fury and vitriol against excision. Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar’s film documentary Warrior Marks (1993) is mentioned without its sponsor being explicitly named (128), as if Keïta wished to legitimize the debate around excision by inserting it in a global (izing) context of sorority, however perverse. Malimouna is, however, infuriated by Walker’s neo-colonial crusade on African soil and her falsely syllogistic reasoning that “if Africans loved their children, they would not subject them to genital mutilations” (128). This raises the question of who has the moral authority to judge excision in this outsider/insider debate, which is predicated on a binary distribution of positions which Keïta is attempting to dissolve. As Malimouna, back in Ivory Coast, takes up the presidency of the Centre d’ Entraide aux Femmes, excision is brought brutally to the fore again when Malimouna is hijacked by her former husband’s family, who demand her excision. However, all is well that ends well for Malimouna who continues her work of empowering women “back home” rather than in diasporic European cities. Indeed, in 1998, Ivory Coast was teeming with excisers’ meetings such as the one held in Bangolo, some 450 kilometers from Abidjan, where the circonciseuses publicly renounced their trade. They did so after Constance Yaï, AIDF’s (Association ivoirienne pour la défense des droits de la femme) president and Malimouna’s alter ego, had explained to them the health hazards inherent in ancestral genital alterations. Keïta’s novel is therefore to be gauged against this collective pledge against the practice, which involves the

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practitioner in eradicating the rite, as attested by Salimata Këita Dembélé’s 2001 book on strategies for eradication in Ivory Coast. It would thus appear from Këita’s novel that Africa and Europe speak one and the same language in condemning the practice of excision, although it is intimated that Western cultural arrogance regarding African rites must be tamed. Except for the fact that Malimouna returns home in the end, her itinerary closely resembles that of Waris Dirie in her contemporaneous accounts Desert Flower and Desert Dawn and that of Guinean Kesso Barry. Unlike Dirie and Barry, however, Keïta writes and theorizes from “home,” that is, Ivory Coast, where, it is subtly suggested, the practice need not “migrate” to Europe. However, Senegalese Soninke Khady in Mutilée (2005) reminds us of the complexities involved when excision does migrate to Europe despite the admittedly recent enforcement of the law in African countries. In 1975, when Khady, as a fourteen-year-old married at the mosque to an absentee husband, twenty years her senior, lands on French soil, France is at first welcoming. Khady is swiftly integrated into French society via its women, such as Nicole, whom she calls “Mother,” according to the Soninke dyadic principle of addressing anyone of the same age-group as one’s mother. In Paris, Khady unconvincingly proclaims that she has never felt “the slightest rejection, the slightest shadow of racism” (94), for Nicole refers to Khady’s husband as “bamboula” (96), a derogatory word that connotes habitual dissipation and debauchery. Khady’s early integration, coupled with her proficiency in French, a modicum of education, and her quick understanding of the labyrinthine French administration, soon creates a ridge between her and Moussa, her French-illiterate, occasionally unemployed husband. He is thus symbolically emasculated both in the patriarchal, migrant Senegalese community and in the Parisian, lower-class society of the 1970s, where men are conventionally the breadwinners. The French society of then and now indeed has a vocabulary of its own, which leaves many African males estranged from their own culture and beliefs. When Moussa learns that Khady is taking “the pill,” he accuses her of “whoredom” (133). Likewise, “conjugal rape” (142) to designate a husband’s forcible sexual claim to a non-consenting wife is an unknown quantity. What is more, French law often falls foul of Soninke custom. For instance, a child is always faba rémé (in Soninke, “the child of the father”), which entitles Moussa and his second wife to cash in the family allowance when, under French law, Khady and her children are entitled to it. Also, a polygamous husband is entitled, under French law, to have another apartment allotted to him and the co-wives and their children, provided he divorces them, since French law prohibits polygamy. Conversely, even if the French tribunal ruled in his

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wife’s favor, Moussa remains wedded to her by (Soninke) custom and under Islamic jurisprudence. In 1982 when a Malian girl, Bobo Traoré, dies of hemorrhage following her excision in Paris, Khady, who has had her three daughters excised, becomes aware of the health hazards of excision. 1982 is also the year when the Inter-African Committee’s (IAC) French branch GAMS (Groupe pour l’abolition des mutilations sexuelles) is founded in Paris. When Khady joins as a Muslim activist against excision, she puts her newly acquired knowledge of French law into practice by choosing not to have her last-born girl child excised and by turning her back on arranged marriages for her own grown children. Khady’s career was crowned in 2002 with the presidency of EuroNet-FGM for the prevention of excision and, in 2003, with a prize in Italy for her militancy. From her French platform, Khady hopes that African countries will implement the Maputo Protocol they themselves ratified and added to the African Charter of Human Rights in 2003. As with Waris Dirie and other autobiographers, exile in a European country is synonymous with empowerment, albeit compounded with a spaltung in personal identity. In Khady’s case, the emergence of the “I” is delayed, just like delayed recall is part and parcel of trauma. In her 1999 testimony in the French left-wing magazine Politis, Khady illustrates the concept of “delayed understanding”: “the sense of a mutilation then dawned on me” (my italics), that is, after she had been exposed to a variety of knowledges (medical, legal, religious) on the subject. Her perception of excision as a mutilation has indeed been molded by the French media’s already mentioned 1982 report of the Malian girlchild’s death by excision, by the emergence of a legal debate resulting in revisions of the French Penal Code, and by the confirmations she gets from various religious leaders that excision is “a question of custom.” It is thus her very integration into French society and her internalization of its lay Jacobinism that contributed to the transformation of excision from a rite to a violation of human rights. The telltale title Mutilée (that is, The Mutilated Woman), published six years after the Politis testimony, carries the ideological weight of that semantic shift and presents a confident “I,” subtly refashioned by outsiders, knowledge systems, and a sororal “we,” in accordance with the tacit discursive rules of African relationality. What is strangely missing, however, from Khady’s first-person account is the Pasqua anti-immigration Laws of 1993, after the then Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua, which notably turned the clandestin into an enemy of the French Republic. What the media dubbed the “affaire des sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard” (the affair of the undocumented immigrants of the Church of Saint-Bernard in Paris) was responsible for transforming the clandestin, according to Mireille Rosello, into a sans-papiers through “one of the most

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obvious symbolic victories” of Summer 1996 (Rosello, 2). This hiatus in Khady’s Mutilée can only be understood in light of her adamant endorsement of the host country as a hospitable one, which is responsible for her “liberation” (216). This cri de coeur reeks of surveillance, for it seems that the options are few for excised women, intense activism being the price to pay in order to be “blessed” in what Dirie termed the French “island of the blessed.”

THE INTERNET In Desert Children (2005), which Dirie wrote from her new platform in Austria, where she obtained citizenship in 2005, she has considerably enlarged her earlier concern for the Somali girl child, as reflected in Desert Flower and Desert Dawn, to include not only the “desert children” of the title but also their Afrosporic homonyms, who have undergone or are at risk of undergoing one form of excision or another on the European continent. Aided by her amanuensis, journalist and human rights specialist Corinna Milborn, Waris Dirie has written her third autobiography. Appropriately, the first chapter is titled “My Third Life,” which relays her crusade against excision in Europe. For the third time, then, Dirie rehearses her traumatic infibulation, yet adding details that were not present in the first two renderings, Desert Flower and Desert Dawn. Among these details feature the root used as a bit to prevent tongue biting; the mother’s entreaty to her daughter to help her in maintaining the young Waris still; the child’s heavenward prayers; the slipping off of the blindfold; the acacia thorns meticulously piled up by the exciser’s side; the white cotton thread to close the suture. These additional details confirm the work of memory in its strenuous attempts to grapple with this indelible, heart-wrenching event at the same time that it confirms our intuition that experience is itself interpretation. More so than before, Dirie tries to exonerate her mother, this figure of ambiguity who is both her nurturing caretaker and the exciser’s accomplice. But the novelty here is that this experiential vignette serves an ideological end. Her memories, which are, tellingly, “on instant recall” (10), serve to introduce the half million women who have been excised in Europe. Sealed with the approval of Elton John, who provided the back cover blurb, and crowned by a Martin Luther King–like epilogue, “I have a dream,” this autobiography verges on propaganda. The first out of three appendices at the end of the book provides a concise definition of FGM, listing the main types recognized by the World Health Organization, as well as general data about what, why, who. The second appendix gives a country-by-country overview of the legal situation in European countries, with France being “the island of

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the blessed” and countries like Greece and Ireland ranking low because of the lack of specific legislation for the offense. The third appendix—“Who Will Help?”—provides postal addresses, telephone numbers, and Websites of some twenty-three associations and a handful of clinics across Europe. The last page invites anyone interested to send donations to the Dresdner Private Banking account of the German branch of the Waris Dirie Foundation or to the other two branches in Austria and Switzerland. In Dirie’s rating of European countries’ eradication policies, France comes first because the law is actually enforced, the subject is openly debated, and “treatment and antenatal care is free of charge” (47). It is favorably compared to the United Kingdom. Although Pierre Foldes’s British counterpart, gynecologist Harry Gordon, was the first to provide reconstructive surgery, and the Female Circumcision Act dates back to 1985, Dirie laments that “not a single case has come through the courts” (83). The reason, Dirie surmises, after meeting experts such as “FGM midwife” Comfort Momoh and Adwoa Kwateng-Kluvitse, the director of the FORWARD office in North-West London, is that the immigrant population is not well integrated in the United Kingdom, whereas “in France a big effort is made to integrate the immigrants, at least formally, with anyone born on French soil being automatically a French citizen” (82). This confirms Paris, among others, as a “city of refuge,” a phrase originally coined by the International Parliament of Writers in 1993 to refer to the hospitality extended to writers and artists facing persecution in their country of origin (Derrida 46). Derrida’s commentary on the medieval concept of the “city of refuge” or “sanctuary,” which is a response to Levinas’s Beyond the Verse (1982), can be extended to women seeking asylum in European cities on the grounds of genital excision or the threat thereof. But the increasing implementation of African legislation and the possibility of a sanctuary on African turf (Sembène Ousmane’s “Molaade” means “sanctuary in Peuhl) seems to dispense Europe of taking on the role of “universal host.” Dirie’s overall perception of France seems to ignore the infamous Pasqua Laws. By the time Dirie surveys German law in Desert Children and deemed it “a tough nut” (113) despite the two statutes (224, 226) of the German Penal Code covering “the practice of FGM as dangerous and actual bodily harm and assault,” she has moved away from her earlier country-by-country appraisal to lumping all European countries in the same ideological bag and arguing that “[i]ntegration is a matter of government policy and not of divine intervention” (121). Clearly, the tone is more doctrinaire than in the earlier autobiographies, as if Dirie had run out of patience. Like refugees who adjust their narratives of persecution in their plea for asylum, women autobiographers have started to use the politically correct language

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of abolitionist activism. For instance, in her autobiography Tränen im Sand (2003), Somali Muslim Nura Abdi, born in 1974, recounts her tribulations after leaving northern Somalia, and later Mogadishu, in the throes of the civil war. To Abdi, infibulation is connected with purity, halal, that is, “conformity to what is prescribed” but when her suture is open again after falling from a tree and she is re-stitched by the exciser or halaleiso, Abdi construes that experience as putting a definitive end to the “ownership of her body” (70). When, during her later sojourn in Kenya, Abdi recalls the virginity test, she self-consciously comments: “my mother would then have reinforced her control over my excised body” (101). These phrases “my excised body” and “ownership of my body” come closer to the abstractions of a feminist, academic discourse, which she presumably borrowed from her amanuensis Leo Linder and German activists, than to the felt qualities of the experiential account. Along the same lines of acute self-consciousness, Abdi’s later assessment, from her German platform, of her infibulation as aiming at “mutilating the brain” (105) reeks of vengeful extremism. Her narrative ends with a small chapter titled “I Am Not Ashamed,” as if an afterthought. Abdi calls excision “a barbaric practice,” “a mutilation imposed in cold blood” (279), and the last words describe this “irreversible torture” (280), customarily followed by addresses of Internet sites. Short of being propaganda, this account, as well as Dirie’s Desert Children, signals the limits of autobiography. Dirie’s “desert children” are now part of the global village and are communicating via the Internet in the first person and somewhat graphically about their various experiences of excision. In the e-mail postings, all these young immigrant women consistently use words such as “handicap(ped)” (17) and the FGM acronym to refer to the operation, whereas Dirie emphatically refers to “torture” (11, 31). One Malian e-mail testimony becomes Dirie’s “guiding light” and “beacon” (18) in the European heart of legislative darkness and dromology, or the science of speed, helps with the “migration” of these “unspeakable rites” at the speed of light. Dirie’s mission is of the redemptive kind, and her defense of these voiceless women sounds like that of the solitary savior-anthropologist of yore. Europe is Dirie’s terrain for the fieldwork of her team, which indefatigably collects legal and administrative data as well as the live testimonies of women “who have felt emboldened by Waris Dirie’s courage,” as the blurb on the back cover contends. These testimonies are given orally to Dirie in person or to members of her team or via e-mail. Access to the internet inexorably changes the status of the “informant” in this neo-ethnographic encounter since the latter is now a writing subject and a fast one at that. The texts under scrutiny project genital alterations beyond the original culture in which they were practiced into the Western metropolis—Paris, London, New

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York. Also, these capitals, short of being hospitable cities of refuge, function as enlarged hospitals. Waris Dirie’s defibulation takes place in London; Nura Abdi’s “opening up” surgery is enacted in a Düsseldorf clinic; so is Fadumo Korn’s excision-related ailment. This certainly propels these women’s selfnarrative into the Western “surgical age” of advanced body modification at the same time that the Internet brings into the open a secretive practice. The fact that genital alterations are now migrating at a higher speed than before via the Internet and future data transfer systems prove that the self— whether European or African, diasporic or not, is gradually vanishing in what French philosopher Paul Virilio has called the “aesthetics of disappearance” (1989) accelerated by the “computer bomb” (1998). The issue that now seems crucial is not that Europeans allegedly feed, through their vampiristic readings, on Afrosporic bodies and their trauma but rather that individuality itself is endangered and is being replaced by a collective consciousness, which defies geographical and socio-cultural barriers. Virilio has convincingly argued that the logic of speed, or dromology, has led to a place where speed itself is the essence. In this virtual pool of shared memory or ocean of data, which challenges notions of the self with ever-accelerating fragments of the other, Afrosporic bodies are foredoomed to be relics of a past age. Wounds, however, will endure.

NOTES 1. For a long time, relating the experience of excision was the domain of men, who were, however, sympathetic to the eradication of the practice. Somali Nurrudin Farah in From a Crooked Rib (1970) and Sardines (1981); Ahmadou Kourouma from Ivory Coast in Les Soleils des indépendances (1968); Malian Yambo Ouologuem in Le devoir de violence (1971); Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967); Malian Doumbi-Fakoly in La révolte des Galsénésiennes (1994); Nigerian playwright Ladi Ladebo in Symbolic Rites (1997); Ivorian, Paris-based Koffi Kwahulé in Bintou (1997) and African-American, Lagos-based Chuck Mike in Ipiko: Sense of Belonging (2002). This is also the case in the movie industry, from Omar Sissoko’s Finzan to Senegalese Sembène Ousmane’s Molaade (2004). 2. The term is Robertson’s, 25–44. 3. Excision was and still is a rite of passage performed on women and by women in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Mashreq, and various other countries, regardless of their social rank or religious allegiance. It marks the initiation of the girl child, aged between four and fifteen, into adulthood. But it can also be performed on infants and on dead women. In other words, excision is, in some cases, no longer a puberty rite. Yet, as a purification rite, excision often posits an original hermaphroditism and aims at removing the allegedly vestigial masculinity of the clitoris, the way male circumcision

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removes the vestigial femininity of the glans, but this is seldom pushed to its logical conclusion, i.e. the removal of men’s nipples. As such, excision involves clitoridectomy, i.e. the removal of the clitoris, sometimes accompanied by labiadectomy, i.e. the removal of all or part of the labia minora and majora. The most extreme form, infibulation, involves the removal of the clitoris, the labia minora and majora, and the stitching together or suturing of the two sides so as to leave a small aperture to permit the flow of urine and menstrual discharge but this practice has never been attested as a rite. 4. See Zabus 2007, especially chapters 3 and 8. 5. I am here reversing Eloïse Brière’s terms: “As a result [of the American tendency to focus exclusively on one corner of Africa] the information on excision tends to exoticize African women by decontextualizing their circumstances and constituting them as the West’s ‘other.’” In Brière, 166–167. 6. Clinical experience conducted at Harvard Medical School among adult survivors of childhood trauma in the early 1990s revealed that the patients who enter psychotherapy grapple with three patterns of traumatic memory, the most common one being “relatively continuous and complete recall of childhood abuse experiences coupled with changing interpretations (delayed understanding) of these experiences” (Harvey & Herman, 29). 7. Many U.S. States now allow victims of childhood trauma to file charges once they achieved majority of age or have acquired “new memories or new understandings of abuse experiences located in the distant past” (Harvey & Herman, 30). 8. Dirie first talked about her infibulation in an interview for the women’s magazine Marie-Claire in 2005. I discuss the role of Western high fashion in relation with the refashioning of the body in Kesso Barry and Waris Dirie as top models in Zabus 2003. 9. I discuss the evolution of alternative rites to excision in Zabus 2008. 10. For more detail, see chapter 9 of Zabus 2007.

WORKS CITED Abdi, Nura, and Leo G. Linder. Tränen im Sand. Bergisch-Gladback: Verlagsgruppe Lubbe, 2003. Trans. Gerald Messadié. Larmes de sable. Paris: L’Archipel, 2005. Barry, Kesso. Kesso, princesse peuhle. Paris: Seghers/Mémoire vive, 1987. Boddy, Janice. “Womb as Oasis: The Symbolic Context of Pharaonic Circumcision in Rural Northern Sudan.” American Ethnologist 9 (4): 1982, 682–98. Brancato, Sabrina. “Afro-European Literature(s): A New Discursive Category?” Research in African Literatures 39: 3 (Fall 2008), 1–13. Brière, Eloïse. “Confronting the Western Gaze.” In Obioma Nnaemeka, ed. Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, 165–80. Westport, Ct: Praeger, 2005. Camacho, Martine. “Profil: Fatou Keïta, celle qui dérange.” Jeune Afrique 1946 (1998): 87. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone Press, 1983. Dembele, Salimata Keita. Excision, douleur de femme: pour une stratégie de communication en faveur de la lutte contre l’excision en Côte d’Ivoire. Abidjan: Edilis, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Cosmopolites de tous les pays encore un effort! Paris: Galilée, 1997. Dirie, Waris. Desert Flower. The Extraordinary Life of a Desert Nomad. With Cathleen Miller. (1998) London: Virago, 1999. ———. Desert Dawn. With Jeanne D’Haem. London: Virago, 2002. ———. Desert Children. With Corinna Milborn. London: Virago, 2005. Gilman, Sander L. Making the Body Beautiful, a Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday, 1999. Harvey, Mary R., and Judith Lewis Herman. “Amnesia, Partial Amnesia, and Delayed Recall Among Adult Survivors of Childhood Trauma.” In The Recovered Memory / False Memory Debate, eds. Kathy Pezdek and Williams P. Banks, 29–40. London: Academic Press, 1996. Keita, Fatou. Rebelle. Paris: Présence africaine / Nouvelles Editions Ivoiriennes, 1998. Khady. “Khady et l’excision.” Politis 577 (December 2, 1999): 23. ———. Mutilée. With Marie-Thérèse Cuny. Paris: Oh! Editions, 2005. Korn, Fadumo. Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival. With Sabine Eichhorst. Trans. Tobe Levin and Rosa von Gleichen. New York: Feminist Press, 2006. Originally Geboren im grossen Regen. Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt Verlag, 2004. Lefeuvre-Déotte, Martine. L’excision en procès: Un différend culturel? Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Levinas, Emmanuel. L’au-delà du verset: Lectures et discours talmudiques. Paris: Minuit, 1982. Transl. Gary Mole. Beyond the Verse. London: Athlone Press, 1994. Rifaat, Alifa. “Bahiyya’s Eyes.” In Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies, 5–11. London: Quartet Books, 1983. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” In Global Modernities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, 25–44. London: Sage, 1995. Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: the Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Rosen, Harold. Speaking from Memory. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 1998. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. London: Oxford University Press, 1985. Thomas, Dominic. Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Virilio, Paul. Esthétique de la disparition. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1989. ———. La bombe informatique. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1998. Waciuma, Charity. 1969. Daughter of Mumbi. Nairobi: East African Publishing, 1969.

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Wassil-Grimm, Claudette. Diagnosis for Disaster: The Devastating Truth About False Memory Syndrome and Its Impact on Accusers and Families. New York: Overlook Press, 1995. Zabus, Chantal. “Acquiring Body: Waris Dirie, Infibulation, and New African Female Self-Writing.” In Africa and Its Significant Others. Eds. Isabel Hoving, Frans-Willem Korsten, and Ernst van Alphen, special issue, Thamyris/Intersecting Place, Sex, and Race (11: 2003), 61–76. ———. Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women’s Experiential Texts and Human Contexts. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. ———. “From ‘Cutting without Ritual’ to ‘Ritual Without Cutting’: Voicing and Remembering the Excised Body in African Texts and Contexts.” Bodies and Voices, eds. Merete Falck Borch, Eva Rask Knudsen, Martin Leer, and Bruce Clunies Ross. New York: Rodopi, 2008.

Chapter Nine

Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater Giulio Marra

The aim of this essay is to illustrate how the phenomena regarding the family, in its traditional unity and in its modern diaspora, are situated at the very core of the Canadian theatrical writing. The economical and ideological developments which have affected Canadian society since World War II can be read in the light of a diasporic wandering of the family who is, in many cases, forced to pull up stakes and leave the original dwelling place and to face new and unknown existential situations. From such migration a geopathological process is generated, which fluctuates between the necessity to find a new home and the anguish of loss, when the migrant experiences the incapacity to recreate his homeland. The original home is then, as I shall later show, both the cause and the goal of exile, the lieu of two contrasting desires: that of finding a receptacle for one’s identity and that of deterritorializing one’s being. What is lost is the solidity and clarity of relationships within the family and, in the inevitable flexibility which accompanies fluid living situations, the paternal figure is weakened, generational and cultural conflicts emerge, as well as the problematics tied to the rise of female perspectives and sensibilities. Theatrical situations and styles of writing abandon the traditional scenes and styles of bourgeois comedy and drama in order to meet situations, often on the way of definition, where individual needs prevail and determine social, linguistic and theatrical constructions. It is, in my view, useful briefly to remember how the father figure is described in classical times when it covers two roles: he is, on the one hand, the pater familias and, at the same time, he is a social entity which participates actively in the life of the city, of the community and of the nation. This is a figure that strengthens its prerogatives with the coming of Christianity thanks to its assimilation to the paternal figure of the Deity, and it is a figure which 135

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continues in the context of modern European civilization as a symbol of cohesion and as guarantor of social stability. Both John Locke and Edmund Burke (two very different British empiricists) consider the father as a central reference figure for society; they both affirm the patrilinear heritage with regard to the possession of the patrimony, according to a bourgeois ideology which continues in modern times. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century that the paternalist ideology is contested by the feminist movement which replaces the idea of the patrilinear heritage with the matrilinear one, and pays novel attention to the figure of the mother. Besides, the problematics regarding the family are strongly influenced by changing social perspectives due to different manifestations of sexuality and the contributions of immigration and ethnicity. The tradition of Canadian English–language theater reflects these ideological developments. In a number of plays of the first half of the twentieth century the presence of an authoritative and conservative father figure, from moral, religious and economic points of view, dominates the scene. Merril Denison’s Marsh Hay (1923) emphasizes the hard conditions the settler has to face in order to survive: these are due to an unproductive farm and to debts with the banks, but at the same time the play deals with a tyrannical father figure exercising oppressive control of the morality, money and politics of his seven sons. The father dominates also in Gwen Pharis Ringwood’s Still Stands the House (1939) and Pasque Flower (1939).1 Here, the heroic resistance of Bruce and of Hester, his sister, to violent natural conditions is founded on the tenacious tie they maintain with their father, who has cleared the land and has built the house in which they live. The arrival of Ruth, whom Bruce has married, upsets the balance in view of changes in the house connected with the birth of her child. This causes a irreconcilable conflict with Hester. The play ends in tragedy. Bruce goes out into the storm with an empty oil lamp, and so does Ruth, who has followed Bruce in order to help him. The fault is Hester’s who, after shutting the door of the house behind her, enters her father’s room carrying a Bible from which she reads words that glorify her loyalty to the house to which she has sacrificed her life: “And the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.” In the same way, Pasque Flower reflects the diverging life views of Jake and Lisa. Jake leads the hard life of the settler; Lisa is afflicted with an incurable mal de vivre. The coldness Lisa manifests towards Jake after the loss of her first baby pushes Jake to devote himself entirely to his farm and to the power he derives from it. The accusation Lisa levels against her husband is that he loses a piece of his soul with each piece of land he succeeds in possessing. The situation reaches its climax with the arrival of David—Jake’s brother—who wants to take Lisa away with him. It is a dream she cherishes

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for a time but which withers when she realizes that the pasque flower she finds on the kitchen table is her husband’s and not David’s. Lisa recognizes the force of the tie that unites her to Jake, a sort of blind need to belong somewhere, a need in which Ringwood recognizes the presence of the paternalistic ideology. Coexistence within the family appears thorny in these early examples. The father figure who should be able to lead and regulate family life does not really succeed in achieving this aim. It remains positive in the limited function of representing the sacrifice and the hard work of the settler and colonizer, but it is at the same time the spokesman for an authoritarian attitude that inevitably leads to family diaspora. In the plays I shall quote next the father will definitively lose his position of authority in the family as well as in society. From the numerous examples from which a reader may choose, I shall first mention the dark pictures of William Cook, William Fruet and David French and, then, the more sentimental reprise of Joanna McClelland Glass and of Sharon Pollock;2 finally, the amusing representation of a father figure will show how small his importance in family life has become, almost a figure of fun in Joan MacLeod’s play Toronto, Mississippi. Very dark indeed are the father figures depicted by Michael Cook. Set in Newfoundland and focused on dysfunctional family situations are The Head, Guts and Soundbone Dance (1973) and Jacob’s Wake (1974), plays in which Cook contradicted the family myth of a romantic Newfoundland (Conolly 1995: 120). The Head, Guts and Soundbone Dance presents three major characters: Skipper Pete, his son-in-law Uncle John and his sixty-year-old son, Absalom. They live an alienated life in a poor and chaotic room which itself renders their psychological condition. The crisis arises when the three men, while totally preoccupied with the daily routine of their fishing activity, do nothing to save the life of the young Jimmy Fogarty, who has fallen into the sea. Neither does the Skipper answer the questions that inspectors Lew and Aiden ask him about the tragic event. The world of the three men appears to be a blindly ritualistic one: the fish refuse, hinted at in the title, symbolically indicates a past which has withered away, and the very words with which the three men comment on their work speak of survival from a death that sooner or later will overtake them. They are unable to imagine a positive future and interpret poor Jimmy’s death as a timely sacrifice, something due to the ocean deity. The question, therefore, that the play forces on the reader is that of comprehending the reason why Skipper Pete ignores all requests to help save Jimmy’s life. One answer may well be suggested by Pete, who sees in Jimmy’s death a kind of exorcism requiring a sacrificial victim. Fish is scarce, fishing does not any longer offer any possibility of survival, and when young Jimmy drowns, Skipper Pete superstitiously deifies the sea: “the sea wanted him. Old molly. She took him in her good time.” These are situations which

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can be explained through the economic decay of Newfoundland. But, at the same time, the Skipper’s incapacity and refusal to imagine a viable future brings us back to the subject of the father figure, whose authority has become null both in the family and in society. It is an authority, though, which Skipper Pete does not wish to renounce as he still sees in it the essence of his being: in the play it tragically becomes the power to decide on life and death, a power which backfires on the Skipper and leads him to alienation and madness. The play is devoid of any sense of “grace” and the sacrifice of young Jimmy is as painful as that of Cordelia in King Lear. The journey Skipper Pete imagines to leave for, the obsessive rituality in the preparation of the boat, the sensation that cruel gods are playing with his life, all these evoke in the spectator the idea of an invincible fate, which reminds him of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Family conflicts reappear in Cook’s following play, Jacob’s Wake, where the split between Skipper Elijah Blackburn and his family is presented visually. Skipper Elijah occupies the top floor of the house while his sister Mary, his son Winston and his wife Rosie live on the floor below with their three children, Alonzo, Brad and Wayne. They all meet on Good Friday in a juncture which sees an unrelenting sequence of retaliation and hate, finishing with Elijah’s final delirium. In the background, the roaring of the sea and violent winds seem at one point so fierce as to rip out the house, which Skipper Elijah imagines in the form of a ship adrift. What Cook presents is a directionless self-destroying vitality. The old Skipper fools himself by thinking he has always remained on his ship since when he had lost the use of both his legs forty years before. At the end, in the somber light of a hallucinated fantasy, the spectator sees a figure enter the scene—the young Elijah himself—who imagines to sail the ocean with no final goal. Critical reaction frowned on Cook’s plays. Myron Galloway did not agree with the picture of unmitigated violence which presented “Newfoundland as inhabited exclusively by hideously venal mini-monsters.” Other critics pointed out the religious symbolism and the biblical quotation which accompanied the development of the action (Conolly 1995: 187; G. S. Walker, 107–34). It seems to me that Cook tries to overcome the risk of appearing marginally relevant by trying to catch vast ideological and historical trends concerning Newfoundland. Following the economic tendency to move economic concerns from north to south, and following the changes produced by the entry of Newfoundland into the Confederation, Cook in a radical way underscores the lack of sincerity of religious conviction and the loss of quality in the social life of the region.3 The father figure traumatically situated between unreserved significance and utter degeneration finds in other playwrights, such as Joanna McClelland Glass, a more sympathetic treatment. In Play Memory (1983) Glass looks into

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the past and into family secrets in the conviction that “The way we see ourselves reflected in what we leave behind becomes more and more important.” In Play Memory she recalls the figure of her father (which has already appeared in Canadian Gothic and in Reflections on a Mountain Summer), a man of Scottish origin who could move Joanna by quoting Robbie Burns by heart. A positive father figure was also the protagonist of a previous play, Artichoke (1975) set in the vast Saskatchewan plains. Play Memory develops along several decades, from 1939 to 1968. She describes the life of a man from success to failure, from happiness to tragedy. At the beginning Cam is a positive figure, tied to his family and to the company for which he works. He is able to relieve the sadness of the times through romantic songs, thanks to his innate humor and to his amiable manner of reading his beloved Robbie Burns. The story will subsequently show painful situations Cam will not be able to accept. His little illegalities—by which he got possession of petrol coupons from people who did not use them—are finally discovered and he is made a kind of scapegoat. Cam changes radically. He gives himself to drinking, becomes irritable and violent. He regains his humor only when his friend Like brings him smuggled liquor for which he pays with anything valuable that has been left in the house. He refuses to go out, does not accept what he considers humiliating jobs, hates the smell of grease his wife Ruth takes home after a day of hard cleaning in firms and houses. He is proud of being a fourth-generation Scot whose family goes back to Wellington and the battle of Waterloo. Cam is a complex character, proud, sensitive, capable of irony. In passing from winner to loser, his very qualities prevent him from humiliating himself by asking for help. What remains for him to cherish is literature, the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Burns. He gradually isolates himself and, almost unwilling to leave his room, he relives his life. His remembrances become a kind of prison and, as an actor on his own private stage, he performs away from the eyes of the world. What principally torments him is the loss of faith in his fellowmen, the treason his very friends perpetrated against him. His disillusion is defined as the “crime of man.” He finally isolates himself even from his own family. Miss Halverson, a social assistant, suggests to Ruth and Jean to leave him to himself and find a job in a family who can offer them lodging, but Ruth does not accept the proposal and does not want to give up the idea of having a husband and of Jean having a father. The conclusion is tragic. At the funeral Ruth remembers the happy days of the past and the significant words are Jean’s: “The truth of people isn’t where they are. It’s in the space between that and where they came from.” Cam has obviously lost all the prerogatives of the father figure. In the same way and for different reasons, the same happens in plays where the father is

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seen along a geographical journey moving from province to province and from north to south, a journey during which he loses the qualities of solidity and authority which had distinguished him in the past. The ’70s have been for Canada years of difficult internal transmigration, usually from the periphery to the cities. Such movement is the cause of family disintegration and the father figure appears unable to adapt to untried situations, a victim of the difficulties that new ways of life entail. In order to understand these events from a theatrical point of view it is useful to take into consideration what is generally defined as the domicentric perspective. B. O. States reminds us that the movements of entering and of leaving one’s home have always been, and continue to be, the two fundamental movements in theater. In the contemporary context they are defined as the heroism of departure and the victimism of place. They are movements associated to a desire to escape, on the one hand, and to a nostalgia for return, on the other. When they are wrongly lived they produce symptoms of “geopathology.” This means that the “here” is contraposed to “elsewhere,” the necessity of belonging to the reality of alienation. (Chauduri 1997). It is generally recognized that the more or less heroic departure from one’s home is a central element of most modern literature. As Italo-Canadian dramatist Vittorio Rossi writes, such departure generally involves a conflict with one’s family and with society, which often appears in negative terms: as crowd it involves casualness and chaos from which the original house functioned as shelter.4 For this reason the movement away from home is described as geopathological since the house is seen as the cause and the goal of exile, the lieu of two contrasting desires: that of finding a container for one’s own identity and that of deterritorializing one’s being. As Edward Said and Edward Soja (Said 1990, Soja 1996) write, man’s wandering possesses metaphorical and mythical significance connecting modern and classical literature, since it represents human life in its essentiality. So the journey away from home involves one’s own land, the country, the world itself. What emerges is a domicentric vision which indicates that the wandering and the loss of roots are defined as pathological and schizophrenic for the fact that man feels “dispossessed” and expropriated from both the place of origin and the haven of destination. It often happens that the homeplace is substituted by the surrogate image of the motel, in the several rooms of which melodramatic episodes take place. It is the setting of Suburban Motel (1997) by George Walker, of Hotel Room Trilogy (1995) by Barry Gifford and of Johnnyville (1997) by Drew Carnwath. David French’s Leaving Home (1972) starts a saga in which the Mercer family has to face momentous transformations when forced to leave Newfoundland in 1945, in order to transfer to the more promising city of Toronto. Unfortunately, the hopes of success do not realize and consequently the father figure of

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Jacob Mercer denounces its impotence. What happens within the family is a conflict of power. Jacob would wish to keep his family united but his manners are so coercive and unpleasant that his sons are driven away. The situation appears even more critical when Jacob comes to know that, while he was laid up owing to an accident, the family had survived on his son Ben’s scholarship. Not even this event works as a possible means of reconciliation between father and son, and when Ben announces his decision to leave, Jacob turns violent and strikes Ben. The play is an example of a geopathological movement describing a family that leaves the original home and aims to reconstruct it elsewhere. The change is a complete failure and the father figure loses the traditional qualities of protection and economic sufficiency. French rightly emphasizes also the failed marriage between the second son, Bill, and a Catholic girl, Kathy, an interreligious marriage which could have indicated that the family had successfully integrated into the urban scene. On the contrary, in the play, we do not perceive the multicultural dimension of the city, the action being endogenically closed within the family walls. This increases the feeling of unsolved frustration. The father could give grounds for his failure. Jacob Mercer was forced by circumstances beyond his power to control, to leave the homeland and to meet unknown conditions in the unfamiliar Toronto. (Conolly 1995: 87) French, though, chooses to emphasize the violent and hostile traits of the father figure, which prevent the establishment of positive dialectic between father and sons. The negative trend continues in David French’s subsequent play, Of the Fields, Lately (1973), again dealing with the Mercer family. Here the dramatic conflict centers on the cultural difference that inevitably divides fathers, who have spent their life working for survival, from sons who have had better chances of education. It is again the protagonists’ incapacity and unwillingness to communicate, and their stubborness which prevents them from overcoming, as Ben says, “the wall” that separates them, which Ben recalls even at his father’s death. The play is, in fact, dominated by the presence of death: Ben’s favorite aunt, Dot, dies and then it is Jacob’s turn. A friend of Jacob’s, Wiff Roach, explains the meaning of the title: “the flowers don’t smell of the fields, lately, only of funerals.” French rounds the action up by inserting a final quotation from Psalm 103: 15–16: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Only death puts an end to conflicts and Ben recognizes death as the universal “leveller.” But, when all is said and done, the characters’s inner truth remains an unsolved mystery. In a number of plays the crisis of the home and of the family is represented through the desecration of events around which life is traditionally centered, such as Christmas, which becomes the manifestation of the family’s disintegration. The theme was dealt with as early as 1973 by Hrant Alianak in

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Christmas, which Alianak defines a “play without a dialogue” where a humanized Christmas tree is “spiritually” crushed by its failure to communicate the symbolic meanings it stands for to the people he meets and eventually lets himself die. The theme was taken up by Eugene Stickland in Some Assembly Required (1996), where again the celebration of Christmas acquires disturbing connotations in the presence of a traditional Christmas tree. It is an old tree, worn out by time, difficult to assemble, whose branches have gone lost in the same way in which the children of the family have, a family divided by misunderstandings and resentment. In the final appeasement, after many failed attempts at it, parents and children find a momentary reconciliation in the common effort to put together the family’s Christmas tree. The father had lost all hope in miracles; still, a positive solution seems possible when Gordon, one of the three children, opens the basement and makes the old tree reappear. There’s a faint hope of renewed harmony, but things get thorny around the Christmas tree when Walter invites everybody to sing a Christmas song. Either for embarassment or forgetfulness nobody remembers the words, not even before the gun of enervated Walter. It is the father who unravels the psychological knot by playing an old record of Händel’s Christmas music. And so Christmas is celebrated by pouring the traditional “eggnog” in the various glasses. The festivity of Christmas is central also in Vigil (1996) by Morris Panych where the protagonist, Kemp, remembers his father’s peculiar ability to eliminate the sense of magic even from the fable of Father Christmas. For Kemp, the coming of Christmas bears no sense of rebirth; rather, it serves to communicate a grotesque image of family life. Each of the thirtyseven short scenes ends in a Beckettian darkness, thus underlining the existential loneliness of the protagonist. In the above mentioned plays the figure of the father is either melodramatically diminished or physically absent: in the plays that follow he rather appears a character dispossessed of its role of guiding figure by becoming “a figure of fun,” a kind of ironic memory of what he used to stand for. The first dramatist to offer a fractured view of the father figure was Mavor Moore, a distinguished playwright, well-known for the finesse of his psychological analysis and the intelligence of the dramatic construction. In a play called Inside Out (1971) the relationship between father and daughter is enacted in a series of “plays” in which a father and his daughter, Marina, assume different parts. At the beginning Father appears in the traditional protective role, wanting to save his daughter from her terribile husband. Marina, on the other hand, soon rejects the image of a vindictive and challenging father, a kind of Saint George, and proposes that they leave the stage, choose a different role and behave as “two mature adults.” Marina re-enters wearing a pair of modish trousers and a stylish peruque; Father wears a dolcevita jumper and a

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colorful sports jacket. His attitude is that of the man of the world who speaks of his daughter’s relationship with her husband in a detached, casual way, in terms of personal freedom. The play progresses with further changes till eventually father and daughter ask themselves who they really are. The “substance” of both characters appears to be chameleon-like in its undecidedness. Is there any real possibility for them to communicate? The two characters wallow in a sort of Pirandellian fluidity where father and daughter lose the rigidity of a role; particularly the father shows the loss of a recognizable identity, of its familiar and social function. A long absent father, who has chosen to ramble through North America as an imitator of Elvis Presley, is the protagonist of Joan MacLeod’s Toronto, Mississippi (1987). After years of absence he has come back to his home, where his handicapped daughter, Jhana, lives with her mother and Bill, a pensioner and educator. He tries to recuperate his place by indulging his daughter’s admiration for Elvis Presley but fails when he wants to reinstate himself as the traditional father, particularly when he wants to control and curb Jhana’s exuberant sexuality. He sings for her and changes his home address in Toronto, Mississippi, even hits Bill, clearly misinterpreting a kiss of his to Jhana, but eventually his fatherly function shows inconsistent. Even if his wife, Maddie, is adolescently attracted to him when impersonating the King, she will in the end choose to stay with Bill, who has long cared for her and Jhana. The figure of the father and husband as a clownish and uncommitted character reappears in Cat Lover (1990) by Janis Spence. Here Edwin returns home after nineteen years of absence followed by a TV troupe who is supposed to narrate his story. Edwin is undoubtedly an amusing and original character, who loves to justify his disappearance from home by referring to an irresistible artistic impulse of his to travel and see the world. He now intends to recuperate his role as husband and father. Hester has not much to tell, having devoted her life entirely to her son, Roddie, and to her father-in-law, Archie. So it happens that when, after collecting his suitcases, the enthusiastic Edwin knocks at the door, he finds an empty house. Henry Bergson’s Shylock syndrome seems to apply. As in Shakespeare’s play, the apparently weaker character prevails upon the manifestly stronger one. The weak character is, in fact, a solid female character, tied to her family, and capable of adjusting to unfavorable circumstances. Edwin, as we said, an extrovert, sympathetic male character, shows, in Janis Spence’s view, how unsubstantial his dreams of freedom and glory are. A question nevertheless remains unanswered which regards the reason for Edwin’s compelling desire for freedom. Comedy, as we know, is often a veil stretched over a problematic reality: here comedy hides the truth of a figure who has lost its traditional density and function.

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Totally elusive is the father figure in the collective play My Three Dads (1992). In a kind of Hamletic beginning, a figure of authority reveals to John that the person he has believed to be his father, in fact, is not. Thus an adventurous journey begins which has to do with looking for and re-constructing one’s roots, a journey during which John has the chance to meet several father figures much more benevolent than his natural father, an unsympathetic plastic surgeon he eventually meets in a Houston luxury medical clinic. John travels through North America and his wanderings become interesting when, at the U.S. border, he is asked by the frontier policeman to declare his identity. The policeman, quite unexpectedly, draws a distinction between “people with roots” and people without roots and thus poses an intriguing question: how can a man without roots know what his future will be and, moreover, what kind of future may he have? The awareness of lacking roots poses John the absolute necessity to find them, even if he gains very little from the final discovery of his natural father. The play, in fact, seems to put forward a fluid idea of fatherhood and to refuse the idea of an omnipresent and powerful father. On the one side, the frontier policeman appears to be the spokesman for a gerarchical and highly structured society by stating the necessity to connect one’s roots to one’s future. On the other hand, we envisage a possible stateless and nomadic condition which eludes the idea of cultural and political determination. On the one side, the idea of one’s roots determining one’s future reminds the reader of literature of Harold Bloom’s well-known “anxiety of influence” and, previous to this, of Francis Bateson’s the “burden of the past,” an idea here acquiring the dramatic reality of an unsympathetic father figure; the recognition of one’s genetic roots, but also of cultural and political ones, suggests a deterministic view of life. On the other hand, it is common knowledge that the history of civilization is made by individuals who lose and re-create their roots. As Said often writes, and as, before him, Seneca wrote in his Letters to Lucilius, we are all exiles and migrants. In the family viewed from an Oedipal perspective, a son tends to become autonomous from the father; on the other hand, the daughter rather identifies with the father and, when incapable of acquiring her own independence, finds herself in deep conflict within herself and with the male universe. A variety of representations of the father-daughter relationship go from the sentimentally comic to the tragic. A purely sentimental perspective is taken up by M. C. Blais in L’Océan (1976) where the daughters debate about the artistic inheritance of a father writer. In the more recent The Attic, the Pearls & Three Fine Girls (1999) by J. Brewin, L. Chernial, A-M. Macdonald, A. Palmer, M. Ross, three sisters—Jayne, Jojo, and Jelly—again dispute and quarrel, sometimes humorously, over the sentimental value of the objects their father has left them. A quite different picture is, instead, presented by Marie

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Laberge, a well-known and fine Québécois writer, in several of her plays. By adopting a feminist point of view she presents a father unable to understand the drama his daughter is living, generally owing to old-fashioned ideas regarding personal honor and social propriety. A first example is L’homme gris (1984) a play in which the main characters are Roland and Christine. Christine comes from a failed marriage, has become anorexic, lives in her own world. Roland, while trying to find a point of contact with his daughter, indulges in long and exhausting monologues about his own life, his wife, the disappointment of not having had a son he had so much desired. He is an aggressive figure in the very prolixity of his speeches to which Christine answers in monosyllables. In fact, he showers his own frustrations on the silent Christine, thus increasing her anguish. Christine, on the other hand, is only able to nibble a morsel of food, closes herself in the bathroom, bangs her head against the wall and against the mirror, shows her rebellion by breaking a bottle and flinging it at her father. This extreme act is not a sign, although traumatic, of a desire to clarify the situation. In fact, Christine’s act is accompanied by a howling shriek, saying non, when her father tells her he has decided to take her home. An insensitive father figure is again central in Jocelyne Trudelle trouvée morte dans ses larmes (1989), but there is here an interesting change of perspective. The mother-daughter relationship tends to replace the traditional father-son relationship of English-Canadian theater, where the ever-returning dramatic conflict is that between generations in a moment of quick social, political and economic change. In Laberge’s play, Jocelyne has attempted suicide and is dying. A series of characters parade before her bed: first of all her father, who is visibly annoyed, since having committed suicide is negative for the reputation of the family; then her mother who shows contrasting reactions; the nurses who try to understand the reasons of Jocelyne’s extreme act; Carole, Jocelyne’s dearest friend, who sympathizes with Jocelyne to the point of choosing to commit suicide herself. This tragic conclusion puts Jocelyne’s singular choice in a larger perspective and refers to the woman’s predicament in modern society. In a comment on the play, Laberge indicated that it is Jocelyne’s relationship with her silent mother that is the one that needs explaining. Jocelyne has in fact, from the beginning, renounced having an understanding with her father, who never says anything meaningful to her. The spotlight is then directed toward her enigmatic mother. She has lost the traditional role, that of a nursing and loving figure capable of constructing an autonomous and sympathetic female world. A mother can represent the epitome of patriarchal oppression or an example of shared affection and love which is in itself an act of resistance. The insensitive mother seems to justify the dramatic presence of Carole, who has a double function: that of indicating

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Jocelyne’s absolute need to understand if her mother loves her and that of communicating to the spectator that the mother’s ambiguity and silence cause Jocelyne’s suicide. The relationship between mother and daughter is more explicitly central in Laberge’s Oublier (1987), a well-designed play made of skillfully interweaving voices. The central figure is that of Juliette, the mother, affected by Alzheimer’s disease, who cannot but surrender to her four daughters’ care, who, in the past, have differently loved her without having ever been loved back. Laberge describes the figure of an imperious and egoistical mother and, at the same time, of a fascinating and unfriendly woman. The relationship she has had with her four daughters follows closely the relationship she has entertained with her several admirers: she had seduced them without yielding to them, she has made herself desired without loving them. This has given her an emotional supremacy which her daughters have passively accepted in the hope of being acknowledged and loved. The oldest, Jacqueline, expresses such hope in an explicit way and thus functions as a dramatic look-out point for the spectator. She declares her decision to be at her mother’s total disposal, she identifies with her, she adopts her habits and tastes; she has always tried to lead an irreproachable life in order to obtain her mother’s approval. Jacqueline never rebels, never thinks of leaving home as her sister Judith has done; her whole life is contained in the wish to be accepted and loved by her mother. She is disturbed by the idea that Juliette may have loved only the youngest sister, Micheline: “Y avait jusse Miche pour elle” and then she lets herself go when she says “J’amerais ça qu’a mer’connaisse avant d’mourir. J’amerais ça qu’a dise mon nom.” She consequently fears her mother’s illness, refuses the idea of her final departure, and throws Joanna a threatening look when Joanna suggests putting Juliette in a nursing home: “j’pense que j’te tue.” She has different feelings towards her sisters: she utterly refuses Judith, ignores Micheline, shows no interest for Joanna who has become an alcoholic after the breaking up of her marriage. Judith has not seen her mother for thirteen years and, even on the present occasion, she chooses to stay at the hotel rather than sleeping at the family home. She plies Jacqueline with censure: “Je l’vivrai pas pour elle, çartain,” she says and then concludes: “Tu veux sauver ta mère comme se c’tait ta vie qu’tu sauvais.” But, although Judith refuses to climb the stairs toward her mother’s room for a final hug, she has come back to the family home to measure herself against her memories. She is a sensitive woman who fights her own sensitiveness. Perhaps she, unwillingly, shows an aspect of Juliette since, as Juliette, she refuses to love. She severely criticizes Jacqueline’s abnegation, but even in this she repeats her mother’s uncompromising decision to always maintain her personal independence. Judith shows sincere affection only toward Micheline and perhaps

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this feeling has kept her a responsive and lively woman. Micheline has had a relationship with her mother. She does not resemble her sisters, she is neither aggressive, nor obsessed with a desire to please. Years before, she had suffered a serious accident which had caused her a loss of memory, and ironically this allows her to have a different relationship with her past. The play develops dramatically along these lines. Each sister possesses a fragment of truth. Even the defeatist Joanna illuminates the situation when, suggesting to help their mother to die and meeting with Jacqueline’s disgusted refusal to do so, she remarks that Jacqueline is more tied to those who die rather than to those who live: “Mes soeurs vivantes sont parties. Tout c’qui reste icitte. C’est les cadavres.” Joanna herself feels a yearning for death: “J’ai envie d’mourir, Jacqueline,” and the only thing she is able to do is try to survive. It is a challenge for the spectator to see where the truth lies in Laberge’s plays. Her dramas lead us to dramatic regions which appear easily readable at first sight, but as the action develops, the psychological situations of the characters defy simple categorization. The loss of memory suffered by Micheline, for example, immediately complicates the situation since she can afford to be “polie, gentile, froide, et reconnaît personne” and this is the reason why Judith envies her: “Vous . . . vous pourriez choisir une famille, prendre les soeurs que vous voulez, la mère que vous voulez;” she says. Judith recognizes in Micheline a freedom that has been denied to her, but, obviously, Micheline’s mental condition is not a conscious choice; rather, it serves to indicate the interior drama Judith is living. And, behind Micheline’s amnesia, there is also another fragment of truth which refers to the figure of her father, a pianist, a diseased person, a cardiopath; in fact she remembers the misery of her parents’ separation. Two sisters leave home, Judith and Micheline, and two sisters remain. Life faces death, or we could better say that life and death are defined by the relationship the characters establish with their mother, life and death being determined by acknowledgement or refusal. Beside those of Marie Laberge, Québécois theater presents a variety of dramatic realizations where the relationship among mothers and children play the major role. Before passing to plays by Michel Tremblay and Marc M. Bouchard, well-known playwrights across North America and in Europe, I would like to mention two perhaps not so well-known, but noteworthy plays, by Manon Beaudoin and Hélène Pedneault. La Maison Rouge (1997) by Manon Beaudoin is a memory play which develops around the amorous life of the mother who, after leaving her husband, has entertained herself with the company of several “visitors,” represented in the play by five pairs of slippers. Rose, the daughter, carries the heavier weight of the family memories, since one of the visitors sexually abused her and she reacted by shooting him

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with her father’s gun. Her mother, feeling guilty, had put the blame of the assassination on herself: “C’est moi, Rose, que t’aurais dû abattre,” she says. These words continued to weigh on Rose’s conscience; she would have much preferred to take her own responsibility for the act she had committed (“T’aurais pas dû prendre ma place mamam”). In fact, neither Rose nor Rostand, her brother, succeed in overcoming the obstacles that prevent them from communicating with their now dying mother. Her self-sacrifice has caused in Rose a conflict to which she cannot find a solution. And Rostand is convinced that also his other sister’s death was, in some way, consequent upon his mother’s behavior, since Blanche’s fall into the icy lake is announced by a gun shot. The play is astutely constructed; there are no long dialogues or heavy monologues, rather fragmentary hints at the past which are perfectly capable of weaving together the threads of the story. The house itself, which appears in the title, red with blood, opens the action of the play, a house where the characters discover “Tous les souvenirs emmurés, Les réminiscences logées dans les fissures” and it also symmetrically closes the play in the Epilogue: Des retrouvailles inespérées Ils sont tous revenus Se perdre e se retrouver Leur histoire est gravée, ici.

A presumed matricide is the protagonist of La Déposition (1988) by Hélène Pedneault. But Léna Fulvi never admits that she has committed the crime, even if she has been caught handling a syringe with which she is supposed to have provoked her mother a fatal embolus. The police inspector tries to face the case in an atypical way by showing less interested in the crude application of the law than in understanding the impulse which has led Léna to kill her mother. This procedure poses the problem of explaining the presence of contradictory feelings of love and hate in Léna’s heart. Gradually, we come to understand that the lovehate feeling of Léna toward her mother is in fact the motif on which the play is built and that needs to be explicated. While in jail, Léna’s anger and cynicism leaves space for heartfelt pain. On that occasion, the inspector acts like a midwife for Léna’s feelings, or rather, like a zen master or even, he says, a punching bag. He pig-headedly continues to ask her if love may have had a significant role in what she has done. He is all the more convinced that the act Léna has committed was not due to hate; it was rather a manifestation of unconditioned love. Léna herself will in the end confess that she has seconded her mother’s desire to die since that action of hers would have been interpreted by the dying mother as an absolute demonstration of love. This final disclosure unites the inspector and the offender in a relationship which goes well beyond a banal application of the law. The inspector himself, when in front of Léna’s house, asks her

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to open the door, of course a symbolical request that indicates the necessity of a psychological reading of the facts. As we have seen, the figure of the mother is central both in francophone and anglophone theater. In francophone theater the mother figure is often physically absent; still, she leaves her children a heritage of memories and of conflicting psychological attitudes; in anglophone theater she constitutes, for better or worse, a unifying element of the family and has a very active role in determining its destiny.5 These two perspectives can be clearly seen in perhaps the most representative playwrights of the francophone and anglophone theaters, Michel Tremblay and Mark Michel Bouchard, on one side, George Walker and Judith Thompson, on the other. An excellent example of the mother’s continuing presence as bearer of traditional views is Michel Tremblay’s The Impromptu of Outremont (1980).6 Here the spectator is brought into a chekovian atmosphere made of memories, psychological analysis, domestic conflicts, subdued tones, semi-darkness, which characterize the maternal house. Four sisters meet on the occasion of the fortieth birthday of one of them, Lucille. The central role is, though, given by Tremblay to Fernande. She is the successful woman, the daughter who has fulfilled her family’s and her mother’s expectations both as regards her marriage and her role in society. She has also dutifully and economically kept the maternal house, making it possible for Yvette and Lucille to live in it. Totally unthinkable to Fernande, her sister Lorraine has, instead, married an Italian and has thus renounced the elitarian and refined life to which she was naturally destined, the mundane social gatherings, the sophisticated taste, art. After fixing this dramatic situation, Tremblay is very skillful in inserting a countermelody to it. Gradually, a subtle game made of insinuations and accusations gathers momentum to the detriment of Fernande. She is rebuked for her personal pride, her lack of esteem for her sisters, her stilted and self-conscious linguistic and moral purism. Fernande has herself her weak sides; her confidence cracks and she confesses she finds it demanding to bear the emptiness of the gilded cage in which she lives, she even indulges in drinking, and neglects her family. She, then, tries to fill her personal void with memories of her mother, the ideal woman in her mind, to whom she hopes to bear comparison, and she specifically recalls her as a superb social entertainer. She recalls her genial nature, praises her drawing-room which she could enliven with a witty remark, which was attended by clever men and by genteel women ready to listen and smile. Her sisters, and particularly Lucille, of course, hold quite different opinions and consider her mother in the class of a “précieuse” worthy of Molière, a woman who has oppressed her daughters without even being aware of it. Tremblay, then, ironically makes of Fernande the spokesperson for his own criticism which he directs to the Québécois intelligentsia of the ’50s. It

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appears “affected by rheumatism which makes it babble like a moaning old man” in Fernande’s own words. Such comments are to be read with reference to the social and artistic situation in which Tremblay lived and wrote; what is implicitly wished by Tremblay is the coming of a new generation of artists capable of replacing the old, exhausted elite to which Fernande belongs. She in fact loves writing, has continued to write letters for decades and thinks she has written something valuable for society since hers is an elitarian literature carefully eschewing the vulgarity of the modern world. Yet, Lucille cannot take “la littérature de Fernande” seriously. And Lorraine’s perspective is of open rebellion to the caste to which she socially belongs. Her marital choice has clearly made away with social, cultural and racial prejudices. Tremblay chooses, in the end, a conciliatory conclusion when the four sisters, in compliance with their mother’s advice, remember her exhortation always to find a way to re-establish harmony among them beyond all differences of opinion. In any way, one must generally recognize that Tremblay invests the female figure with the role of representing the driving force of change. Contrary to Tremblay, in Les muses orphelines (The Orphan Muses) (1988) M. M. Bouchard draws the picture of a family where the central character is the non-conformist figure of the mother, Jacqueline Tangay. We are in 1965, twenty years after Jacqueline has abandoned her family in the company of a Spanish lover, Federico Rosas, whom she had invited to her house. Ostracized by the inhabitants of Saint-Ludger-de-Milot au Lac Saint-Jean, where she lives, for flaunting her infidelity, she eventually deserts her children to follow her beautiful lover to Spain. A father who abandons his family, says Bouchard, is an event we are accustomed to, but a woman who does so breaks a taboo in order to follow her destiny. Bouchard’s are often marginalized and socially alarming characters, in search of an identity which is manifold and unstable from an emotional and sexual point of view, as one can see in his other plays, such as Les feluettes (Lilies) (1986), La contre nature de Chrysippe Tanguay, écologiste (1983), Le chemin des passes dangereuses (1995), L’Histoire de l’oie (The Tale of Teeka) (1991), Les grandes chaleurs (1991), Les manuscrits de déluge (2003). Les muses orphelines deals with the difficulties that Jacqueline’s unconventional behavior has caused her four children, three daughters and a son. At the time she left them, soon after the Second World War, the youngest, Isabelle, was only four and the oldest, Catherine, was seventeen. Later, Luc went to live in Montreal, the lesbian Martine became a soldier in Germany thus identifying with her father who had died in the war, Catherine took on herself the role of the mother with Isabelle, the “retard” of the family. To spare her grief, Isabelle was told that her mother had died, but through a chance encounter she has now discovered that this is not true. The plot develops around Isabelle who has devised a trick to

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take revenge on her sisters for the lie they had told her, by announcing that their mother is coming back home. So they all meet in the family house of Lac Saint-Jean on the Easter Saturday of 1965. It is the scorching feeling of absence that dominates the family rendezvous. The title refers to the characers as orphan muses, but their voices are vibrantly poetic. The wounds of childhood are manifestly difficult to heal since they harm a child’s innocence. The action starts with Catherine and Isabelle who are determined to get rid of a couple of suitcases containing Jacqueline’s dresses, which on the contrary Luc—just come back from Spain—insists on keeping. He even wants to wear his mother’s Andalusian skirt in contempt of the hostility that the people of the village had shown her. He shouts his hate at those he considers country bumpkins. The action, therefore, develops against the background of the meanness and paltriness the people of Lac Saint-Jean have showered on the distressed family. Luc sees in this hostility the reason of what he ironically calls their little domestic drama. Of course, Bouchard keeps emphasizing that the cause of the social alienation and of the unsolved psychological conflicts of the characters is to be found in the moralistic bigotry of the little town. Luc has himself adopted an eccentric behavior and spends his time trying to write a book on the story of his fabulous mother. Isabelle has suffered from a severe trauma that has kept her at an infantile stage in the use of language, so much so that she often is in the uncomfortable position to forget the meaning of words. This is, of course, a skillful device Bouchard uses to highlight the situation: that is, the case with the word “macabre” which describes the characters’ present predicament, and of the word “remords” which exactly applies to Martine, who has spent her time rethinking the past. And it is Isabelle who accuses her sisters to hide behind their mother’s death, as an alibi for not facing their personal problems. And so, they relive their past. Luc would like to indulge his desire to revenge his mother by entering the church on Easter Saturday dressed as a Spanish woman and reading from his book about his mother and Federico Rosas’s encounter. Catherine plucks up her courage and speaks of the tragedy her life has become, somehow softened with taking care of her sister Isabelle, a lifelong devotion which she interprets as a surrogate for the twelve children she would have liked to have, in order to show the world a happy family. Martine talks about the feelings of guilt and self-punishment which continue to torture her. It is Isabelle in the end that offers a way out. She announces she has understood her mother’s truth: not simply “mother” but “maternity” is her truth. When the distressed Catherine suggests she have an abortion, Isabelle refuses and calls her future child her “muse.” Only Isabelle succeeds in breaking the imprisoning chrysalis constituted by the stifling Catholicism and the bigoted society in which she lives by declaring the existence of a profane “muse.” As

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in Tremblay’s theater, Bouchard directs a severe criticism against Québécois society. Both Bouchard and Tremblay level their criticism at social and moral ultra-conservatism. Such conservatism is manifested in the plays through the figure of the mother who plays a decisive role in the definition of her children’s world views, and in determining their weaknesses and sexuality. A dense substratum of ethical and political reflection on society and the modern world is a distinctive feature of the theater of George Walker—the most celebrated English-language playwright of the last decades and the author of a number of plays which have become Canadian classics—a playwright who chooses to cast an unprejudiced, often censorious look at the central ideas of Western civilization. The ideals of progress and of the good life are put to the test both in a series of plays which go under the name of The Power Plays, where Walker exposes the moral ambiguity, the ill will and even the vindictiveness of those wielding power, and in The East End Plays where the hard life of the lower and poorer classes of Toronto’s East End is measured against abstract ideals and the corruption of institutionalized power. Such persistent concerns are convincingly realized on the stage through comic situations verging on the grotesque and the paradoxical, which, while requiring from the spectator unreserved attention, offer him gripping cases on which to ponder. The challenge for the spectator is finding the right balance between pathos and farce. Walker is an acute social satirist and his questions regard basic aspects of life in society: the possibility, in the first place, for any ordinary human being to believe in a just and ethical society while at the same time nurturing a genuine distrust towards the authority which rules over it, patently applying moral relativism and personal interest; the doubtful realization of social ideals in a world that has shown the folly of such ideals when conceived by following abstract models; and, again, the difficulty one feels in sustaining a government which shows to be insensitive to the many aspects of the popular culture. Starting from the belief that contemporary history has definitively shown the failure of the humanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, Walker poses crucial questions on the political and cultural procedures of the present while, at the same time, declaring the necessity to overcome one’s pessimistic, even cynical, disposition in order eventually to propose positive values and viable perspectives for a better future (G. S. Walker, 266). In other words, we could say that Walker’s vision is coherent, but the world he critically observes is not. His plays reflect such incoherence both in the construction of the characters and in his non-lineal and often baffling plots. Many of the above-mentioned preoccupations are filtered through the presentation of family groups. The family constitutes for Walker an essential look-out point of mediation between the individual and the world; it is regarded as the natural setting where personal and social values come into

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conflict and where personal aspirations are realized or frustrated (G. S. Walker, 321). We do not, therefore, expect from Walker an intimistic type of play or even a play circumscribed within the domestic walls. His plays, on the contrary, live thanks to the continual intrusion of the outside world into the domestic space, of external entities, specifically of those untrustworthy powers of the world such as the police, the law, the economic system, the press, the media. George Walker, as we shall see Judith Thompson, chooses to stage his views by bringing onto the stage marginalized sectors of the population and this goes hand in hand with the choice of a colloquial, slangy and racy language, in the same way as Michel Tremblay had adopted the Joual instead of standard French. But differently from Tremblay, there is little subtext in his plays where characters speak what they feel and express themselves with immediate honesty. I shall mention two plays by G. Walker, Better Living (1986) and Escape from Happiness (1991) which constitute—together with Criminals in Love (1984)—a sequence presenting the story of a working-class, dysfunctional, self-consciously insular family, that debates on how it is possible to lose and conquer happiness. In both Better Living and Escape from Happiness the figures of the father and of the mother are central and, at the same time, poles apart, since they are bearers of opposed world-views. Better Living opens with Nora, the mother, who pursues the apparently insane project of digging an underground room to accommodate her daughter Mary Ann, who has left her husband and little daughter. She arrives with her sister Elizabeth, a successful lawyer and a sexually unprejudiced woman. The situation changes dramatically when their father, Tom—a violent ex-police officer who had left the family after abusing all of them and trying to kill them by setting the house on fire ten years before—returns home a deranged person suffering from mental disorders. Nora insists that her husband has died and that that “interesting” stranger only looks like him. The youngest daughter, Gail, acknowledges her father, but her two visiting sisters do not. Mary Ann is still terrified by her father and Elizabeth rejects him. It seems that the family is gradually brought to accept Tom’s paranoic obsessions, and Nora’s digging project acquires a defensive aim since Tom is haunted by the idea that the poor third-world people of the neighborhood are ready to assault them. Nora’s room becomes a kind of bunker and the house is surrounded by barbed wire. While Tom’s authoritarian attitude escalates into a defensive and extreme idea of relational life, Nora becomes a wiser woman full of sage advice. For Nora, Tom’s attitude amounts to a condemnation to unhappiness, which she envisions in the shape of a punitive image of God she even dreams of: “And God appeared in the sky. . . . Then God beat me to death with a hammer.” What seems to be a very peculiar familiar situation reflects Walker’s generalized preoccupation with

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social disintegration. This is a homeplace the outside world bursts into, in the sense that the family exists in the midst of a lot of problems of the contemporary world: crime, police corruption, family challenges, lack of money, family separation. Nora, for example, among other issues, talks about the lack of a national supporting program for young mothers. Through Nora’s erratic reflections we understand that the play is about the basic things of life and about the necessity to change our lifestyles. Walker invites the reader to relate the fixations and the anxiety that disturb the characters to social instability. It is Nora, in the concluding monologue, who suggests an unpresuming way to happiness, saying that happiness is a condition one reaches slowly, gradually, little by little changing the situations that create unhappiness. The Dawson family is certainly “dysfunctional” but the play suggests, in its title, that one has to find the way toward “better living.” Escape from Happiness continues the opposition between Nora and Tom. Nora stubbornly pursues happiness and Tom, a weak figure in this play, continues proclaiming his philosophy of survival, in the end becoming a figure of ridicule. The setting is, again, the popular Toronto East End made of underprivileged working-class people and petty crime. The play opens with Junior lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Detectives Dian and Mike arrive on the scene to investigate the brutal assault. But, far from finding Junior’s assailants, the detectives discover drugs stashed in the basement. Nora is arrested for drug possession. Happiness again slips away, but the reasons seem to be the hostility of the police against Elizabeth, who had openly accused them of corruption. The theme of the play is then also police brutality. Fearing a denunciation by Elizabeth, Dian Black plants drug in her house. Yet, although the play renews a pessimistic sense of discomfiture, it stops short of despair. Nora in fact will react to injustice and will in the end reach an optimistic conclusion. In the course of the play Mary Ann poses the central question regarding happiness. She asks why her familiy is doomed to disaster as if oppressed “under some enormous shadow.” Why does her family seem to escape happiness? Lets us remember that Mary Ann is at a crossroads in her own selfobsessed world and keeps leaving her husband and daughter in order to find herself. At this point of the play, she entertains a Calvinistic belief which makes her think that God hates them: hers is a punitive God, represented as fate, necessity, shadow, a God against whom man sins unknowingly. She, then, regards her misfortunes as a “justification” for the evil she has possibly committed. Yet, the plot reveals a less metaphysical truth. These characters appear to be the victims of the police’s malice and animosity. Walker leads us to discover what is contained within the looming shadow of destiny. In the course of this clarifying journey Nora’s presence is vital in order to pass from

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the pessimism of the title to a more positive perspective. Nora is aware that they are fatally escaping happiness because they do not fight enough and do not suffer enough for it, since happiness is not a given condition of life. And it is, again, Nora who concludes, suggesting to Tom what to look for: money, a job, certainly, but above all “a job that makes you happy.” The play ends on this optimistic note, with Nora who tries to indicate to her newly found husband what kind of job would be better and she speaks as if she was telling a fable on a winter night, the story of a possible happiness, “suggestions. You know . . . hints.” And, as in Better Living, Nora was concerned about young mothers lacking government support, in Escape from Happiness it is the maternal figure of Gail nursing her baby that expresses sufficient power to win over the evil intentions of petty criminals, Rolly and Stevie Moore. Like George Walker, Judith Thompson is seriously concerned about contemporary society, but differently from Walker, Thompson focuses her attention on the psychological condition of her characters following Freudian psychoanalysis. Thompson is interested in the repressed contents of the psyche, in the irrational impulses of the id and in its destructive violence, which the super-ego is unable to check. Against this emotional view of the human being Thompson hints at a possible “transcendence” which has no religious connotation and which is described as a condition of “grace”: a word which could be understood to indicate a deeper awareness of things reached by the character. Judith Thompson directs her attention to society and, within society, to father and mother figures, which appear with a central role in many of her plays, such as Tornado (1987), I am Yours (1987), Lion in the Streets (1990), Sled (1997). I will here comment on White Biting Dog (1984), a play which contains a subtext of references to Oresteia and Hamlet. Its unlineal plot is often challenging, and in order to make sense of its structure it is perhaps useful to select a few focal events: the attempted suicide of the protagonist, young Cape, whom we see on the point of jumping from a bridge; a mysterious white dog that succeeds in turning Cape from his fatal intention by telling him that his mission is to save his father’s, Glidden, life, seriously endangered by a virus he has contracted handling sphagnum moss; Cape’s gradual awareness that his survival is in some way tied to his father’s recovery, since whenever his father suffers from a collapse Cape feels drawn towards the fatal and hellish bridge: “If I save him, I save myself,” he says; the presence of Cape’s mother’s, Lomia, and of her lover, Pascal; finally, after Glidden’s death, the re-constitution of the unity of mother and son. A second female figure is that of young Pony, a kind of saving angel (“I guess an angel,” is Cape’s comment) who falls in love with Cape. Things get complicated when Glidden’s survival seems to depend on Lomia’s returning into the family, which she has no intention to make happen. Pony, who tries to convince

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Cape to go and live with her, notices the morbid attraction Cape nourishes toward Lomia, which in some ambiguous way Cape confesses: “I never could leave a room she was in.” As in Hamlet, the action seems to revolve around Cape’s confrontation with his father’s death. Glidden’s safety would reassure him, while his premature death would prevent any positive psychological development toward personal autonomy. Cape is caught within a complex emotional situation he tries to clarify. He, first of all, turns against Pascal, who is severely attacked and, terrified, leaves the scene. Secondly, Cape’s relationship with Pony is described by Cape in the following way: “You—you know if we—win—then I’ll be able to—love—you.” But things do not turn this way. When Lomia seems to go back to her husband, trustful Pony pronounces the word “GRACE,” a word indicating a spiritual condition that would allow Cape to feel relieved and free. But Cape declares his unwillingness to keep up his relationship with her. He is crystal clear about it: “I did it all for myself—I never thought of you once.” As a consequence, Pony hangs herself out of love for Cape. On the other hand, Glidden realizes that Lomia has not gone back to him of her own will. Feeling disappointed, he embraces a bag of peat moss, thus accelerating his end. When, later, mother and son ask themselves why Glidden and Pony have died, Lomia answers: “Because they . . . loved . . . us, I guess.” Cape adds: “we’re not . . . WORTH.” At the end the dramatic situation is indeed “clarified”: Cape and Lomia, alone, remain on the stage, appearing an inseparable couple who wins over all. Around them the stories of Glidden, Pascal, Pony, rotate. Glidden is made fun of; Pascal is a victim of Lomia and Cape; Pony feels that the tie between Lomia and Cape does not allow of any future for her with Cape. In fact, the centrality of the mother figure is felt since the beginning of the play. A spectator may then ask why Cape seems to save himself by saving his father’s life. Perhaps, at one point of the play, Cape sees a reconciliation between father and mother as the only viable way to express his love for Lomia. From all perspectives, the figure of the mother dominates the scene. On the one side, Cape does not see in his weak father a viable model by which to enter the symbolic order of society and, on the other, he refuses Pony’s love. What remains is the very egoistical “transcendence” of Cape who finds in the tie with his mother an answer to the fears of inadequacy that the human being is doomed to feel from the very moment he is born into the world. On the wake of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which allots the artist the task of reaching total self-knowledge in comprehending man’s tragic existential situation, comedy has become a key term. Schopenhauer writes that the life of any individual when considered from a overall perspective is always tragedy; but when viewed from the perspective of single details it is comedy.7

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The topics of comedy are the vexations, inconveniences, displeasures which every day pester life; while the ever-betrayed hopes, the persistent pain, and death seen as man’s final goal point at tragedy. Comedy deals with the trivial facts of life, eschews reflection, it works on the level of perception, but at the same time the confines within which it exists sometimes become ambiguous since they conceal what lies beyond comedy, which could be tragedy. We, therefore, nowadays approach comedy with the awareness of the presence of tragedy. One interesting example is the theater of Eugene Ionesco who, rethinking his life as a dramatist, recognizes he has reached at least the one unmistakable result of denouncing the “inanity, vacuity, unreality of ideologies” (Ionesco 235); and also of denouncing the crisis of philosophical thinking, which becomes the crisis of language shown by means of characters who appear mad, unhappy, lost and who speak in a broken and absurdist way; finally, of denouncing the failure of theology and philosophy in explaining why man exists (Ionesco 248). As a consequence, one sometimes feels he is watching a strange kind of comedy verging on the sardonic. Comedies, therefore, are the result of two distinct intertwining awarenesses: the evanescence, the unreal transparency, the lightness and, on the other hand, the heaviness, the opacity, the deep darkness. One is caught by anguish and, in this perspective, human behavior shows its ridicule and history its absolute inanity (Ionesco 155). Toward this comic text one can be sentimental, but in order to avoid sentimentalism a dramatist constructs a clownish interpretation of life which underscores its tragic substance. There is, in the end, no difference between the tragic and the comic; on the contrary, since the comic is, in fact, an intuition of the absurd, it appears even more despearate than the tragic (Ionesco 29–30). Undoubtedly these reflections constitute a premise from which to look at modern comedy. We could add what Luigi Pirandello wrote in his Saggio sull’Umorismo (1909) regarding the feeelings he felt when meeting an old much made-up lady: a smile at first sight, followed by sadness. This modern sensitiveness can be translated into the distinction Eric Bentley traces between the “harmless joke” and the “purposive joke,” between “wit” and “humour” (Bentley 1964, 300ff). Comedy plays with irony and shows the many ways in which man is not free. “Humour” tries to remedy such feeling of alienation; it then means flexibility, the capacity to see things from several points of view. Comedy is the right instrument to illustrate the infinite shades of familiar and social relationships, when the so-called normality borders on displacement and alienation.8 In describing the dynamics of family life, even in the “brilliant” pieces a spectator may trace the need for serious reflection. In Fashion, Power, Guilt— and the Charity of Families (1995) Carol and Catherine Shields present the

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condition of solitude which typifies modern man’s life. In a society which appears broken-up for the lack of moral values and endemically suffering from disconsolate solitude, what better means to change the situation than that of reinventing the family? The play starts from the realization that the family is a universal institution and, at the same time, the most secret and mysterious. The beaurocrats of the future intend to revitalize family life in order to overcome the invincible solitude afflicting the man of the technological age. And so they start from scratch, from a man and a woman who constitute the core of the family (“fee-mal-ie”) and from a house in which they are supposed to live with a son and a daughter sharing rights and obligations. The experiment does not seem to work: the four characters fail to communicate and a desire to evade prevails in them. The life of a family is not founded, in other words, on a purely functional project. But things change one night, thanks to a prolonged blackout, when the characters feel free to talk of their secret personal pains. It is in the sharing of each member’s existential difficulties that the family finds its unifying agent, and it is specifically the possibility it gives its members to communicate that is able to resist in time. The play’s final exhortation is to “carry on” overcoming inevitable difficulties, since: A house is more, Than a metaphor. A house encloses, comforts, keeps you warm, From virtual reality storms. Solid walls, and substantial floors, Water pipes, slamming doors. A house is more, more than a metaphor.

In the same perspective Wendy Lill maintains that there is no solution of continuity between the nineteenth-century view of the family which represented a microcosm of the society and of the nation and the modern conception of it. In her play, Corker (1998), the family offers a privileged perspective on individual and social problems. The family she depicts is mostly occupied with financial enterprises until old Serena dies. At this point the situation changes since Serena had secretly cared about a handicapped person, Corker, who now appears in the house without warning. It is thanks to Corker’s limited perspective that both Merit and her husband, Leonard, realize what a family is about, particularly regarding the sense of the community of feelings which qualifies the notion of economic interest centered on the family. Family situations had already been the source of fine humor in Robertson Davies’s The Voice of the People (1949) and At My Heart’s Core (1950). While The Voice of the People deals with inegenuous Shorty Morton’s comic

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difficulties in understanding verbal communication, At My Heart’s Core brings us to an exciting “log home” situated in Douro where, in the context of the Louis Riel’s rebellion of 1837, an Irish man, Cantwell, acts as a tempting devil for three famous and sophisticated women, absolutely dissatisfied with their pioneer condition. Mrs. Taill is tempted by science; Susanna Moodie by literature; Mrs. Stewart by the romance of the past. In a play which reminds the reader of G. B. Shaw, Davies seizes on the opportunity to deal with one of his favorite themes, that is, the function of the artist in society.9 Comic situations are also those presented in Elsie Park Gowan’s Breeches from Bond Street (1949) where the author deals with marriages by proxy in the Canadian West of the nineteenth century. More recently Frank Moher’s The Broken Globe (1976) deals with fathers and sons and the generation gap. The old Ukrainian father, Solchuk, is a deeply religious character who much evaluates his personal dignity and parental power. He finds himself at odds with his sons who do not believe that the earth is flat as says the Bible, but the apex is reached when Solchuk realizes that on the globe his sons show him Ukraine is situated in the bottom part of it—exactly where Hell is, according to his beliefs. The farcical destruction of the globe both indicates the distance between father and son but also the inevitable end of the farming activity pursued by the father. More recent comedy tends to shun facile humor when describing aspects of ordinary life, which in fact show individual frustration and dysfunctional family situations. As I said above, it is a feature of modern comedy—that of presenting contrasting states of mind, situations which are only seemingly comic, while originating in grievous and painful events, as is the case of A Guide to Mourning (1998) by Eugene Stickland, where the action revolves around the death of a father. The humor derives from the lack of any common idea within the family, composed of mother and three children, on how to proceed with the funeral rites. Deidre covers everything with Kleenex (“What kind of ritual is that? Covering up everything with Kleenex?”), Rex pretends he has come home to collect his boots, Lewis wants a big ceremony “just in case” there is a Heaven, Sandra is preoccupied with the Anne Klein dress she will wear at the ceremony. And besides, the organist chooses the wrong music, the coffin is the wrong measure, the officiating priest is drunk. Still, behind the sequence of farcical situations, one perceives the will of the family to communicate the grief for the loss of dear husband and father. The funeral rite remains one of the central events even in a dysfunctional family. The globe-trotter Rex remembers his father’s trips, the coins he used to slip into his pocket, his advice about work, their informal encounters: “I realize now that I was always looking out of the corner of my eye for his car, waiting for him to come by and get me out of it, even just for an hour or so. I’ll miss him.

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That’s all.” Stickland had played on the comic incongruence between reality and desire in his Sitting on Paradise (1996) where Roy and Wolf indulge in the utopian project of realizing a community of families in uncontaminated nature. Roy starts by disposing of what he considers superfluous commodities, gradually embracing a kind of thoroughgoing idealism which peters out as irreconcilable with social and familiar cohabitation. On the same incongruity between reality and expectation are often constructed Norm Foster’s comic characters, with which I choose to end this sample review of Canadian comedy on the family. Foster is a successful metropolitan dramatist and his comedy derives from a unique rapport he is able to establish with his public, who is made well aware that behind comedy hide personal mishaps and that frustrating circumstances originate laughter. Opening Night (1988) is cleverly constructed on the coincidence/difference between theater and life. It is “romantic” actor Clayton who, by courting Ruth, succeeds in making Ruth and Jack conscious of their differences and expectations, also from a sexual point of view. The site of The Affections of May (1990) is a remote house, Grogan’s Grove, where disingenuous characters try to construct a new life for themselves by forgetting their past, which they are unable to do. On the one hand, Brian soon gives up the hope of solving his marriage problems with May in total loneliness and excessive familiarity of cohabitation; on the other, May opens herself up to new and humorous experience when meeting Quinn, with which she entertains herself with a game of Scrabble with sexual undertones. Located in an urban environment are both Wrong for Each Other (1992) and Office Hours (1997). In Wrong for Each Other Rudy and Norah meet by chance at a restaurant and feel willing to speak about the unsolved knots of their failed marriage. Thus doing, they relive their story: the first romantic encounters, the moments of crisis, the life in the family, the betrayals, finally perhaps reaching a possible reconciliation. Office Hours is composed of several episodes giving a cross section of urban society. The action revolves around a family composed of Ronda, the exuberant and domineering mother, and Lloyd, the father, who writes erotic novels with the pseudonym of Margaux Kenyon; their firstborn son, Richard, shocks his mother by declaring himself an homosexual, and Neil is a depressed character, who plans to commit suicide. The action takes place in different locations: a TV studio, a film studio, a literary agent’s office, a legal office, a horse club and a psychiatrist’s office. The comment that unifies the six episodes is Lloyd’s dedication on the cover of one of his novels: “Here’s to escapism. Best wishes. Margaux Kenyon.” The dedication furnishes the perspective from which to read the play, which presents the neurosis of urban life deriving from a total lack of freedom and originality. The writer is, in fact, the only character that manages to save himself from such syndrome, by

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glorifying escapism which he truly does by adopting a pseudonym. Modern life, in Foster’s play, is characterized by the lack of imaginative spaces. This is acknowledged by the once famous film director who reinvents the Tarzan story, by the compulsive seller of organizers de luxe who arranges life to the last detail, by the fat jockey imprisoned in an impossible hope of victory. In fact, the characters’ dreams are subjected to the logic of profit, success, or consumerist pleasure. Laughter is, then, produced by the astute interplay of real events and desire, by linguistic ambiguities, by misunderstandings which provide even the spectator with a surrogate freedom. Foster’s plays, though, allow the spectator the possibility to recuperate the liberating potentiality of dramatic art: “here’s to escapism” as Lloyd Penny, alias Margaux Kenyon, writes.10

NOTES 1. It is useful to compare this with the novels Settlers of the Marsh (1925) and Two Generations (1939) by F. P. Grove. In these the conflicting relationships between the father and children dominate; while in The Daily Bread (1928) the mother’s death marks the beginning of the family diaspora. 2. Sharon Pollock, as Joanna M. Glass, deals with the character of her own father, Dr. Everett Chalmers, a greatly estimated doctor by the community of Fredericton; a man, though, who neglected his family thus causing his wife’s alcohol dependency and suicide. In the play, the protagonist figure splits between the mature Catherine and the young Katie. Both speak of the father, Ev, and of the mother, Bob, and try to appease regrets and familiar problems. 3. At the beginning of the ’70s, Michael Cook returned with Terese’s Creed (1973) about the difficulties of life in Newfoundland. It highlights the philosophy of life of Teresa, a widow. Her principal preoccupation is to reflect on her late husband, Pat, a man she never fully understood. The climatic conditions correspond to the psychological conditions in which she finds herself. The first snowfall of the season could well be the epitome of the dramatic climate evoked by Cook, a vitality pregnant with a sense of death. ’Tis like the winter settling down on yer like an ould coffin lid and ye still alive, banging away inside.” 4. Rossi’s plays—The Chain (1989), Little Blood Brother, Backstreets (1988)— dramatize life situations in the Ville Emard quarter of Montreal, concentrating on sex, love, death, marginalized characters. 5. In anglophone theatre the figure of the mother appears mostly a positive figure. Placed beside a conflictual or inconsistent father figure, she is given a mediating role in safeguarding the unity of the family. We see her in this capacity in Maureen Hunter’s Footprints on the Moon (1988), where she appears a sensitive, sympathetic and sentimental character placed in the difficult position between her daughter, Carol-Ann, and Carol’s husband, Boon, who has reappeared after a long absence. In

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Visiting Hours (1985) by Murray MacRae the family assembles around mother Anne’s bed, who is waiting to undergo major surgery at the heart. While those present are on the point of uncorking a bottle of champagne to celebrate the success of the operation, Anne silently dies. The spectator is left with the sensation that the mother figure represents a centripetal force in the family while the father—always a source of incomprehension, jealousy and hostility—a centrifugal force. In the melodramtic Marion Bridge (1999) by Daniel MacIvor the dying mother is the reason for a family gathering: Agnes is an actress and lives in Toronto; Theresa has become a nun; Louise has lived in the maternal house, in Nova Scotia. At Agnes’s unwanted pregnancy, her mother had recourse to adoption. The drama of the past comes back in the present and the three sisters share the common intention to look for and find the young Joanie. A memory play is Good Mother (2001) by Damien Atkins, a play in which two images of the mother coexist, the invalid she has become and the central, authoritative figure of the past. The action of the play is generated by the difference between the Anne of the past and of the present since her husband Ben, sister Louise, daughter Nancy and Nancy’s fiancée, Richard, have to live up to new responsibilities. 6. The reader may refer to other plays by Michel Tremblay, such as Les bellessoeurs (1968), Le vrai monde? (1987), En pièces détachées (1966), La Duchessse de Langeais (1970), Bonjour, Là, Bonjour (1974). 7. The World as Will and Representation (1819), Book IV, 54–70; Book I, 51; Book II, 37. See also G. Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, New York, 1905; E. C. Wilson, Shakespeare, Santayana and the Comic, Alabama University Press, 1973; F. Dürenmatt, Four Plays 1957–62, Preface, London 1964; G. B. Shaw, “Tolstoy: Tragedian or Comedian” (1921) in Platform and Pulpit, London, 1962. 8. Fine examples of theatrical humour are Mavor Moore’s pieces, such as Getting in (1969), The Argument (1970), The Store (1970) and the slightly absurdist Babel Rap (1972) by John Lazarus; sober irony can be found in Clay (1982) and Tower (1983) by L. Jeffery; sometimes the dramatist plays metatheatrically on the genre of comedy as in Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii (1980) and The 101 Miracles of Hope Chance (1987) by Alan Stratton; many are the examples of “black comedy”: Cold Comfort (1981) by Jim Garrard; Western (1972) and Brandy (1973) by Hrant Alianak, Theatre of the Film Noir (1981) by George Walker, Joggers (1982) by Alan Stratton, El Clavadista (1984) by Colleen Curran, Never Swim Alone (1991) by Daniel McIvor, House (1984) by Nick Mitchell, the collective play On Edge (1989), and Westbound 12:01 (1970) by Brock Shoveller. And many other could be cited. 9. Funny comedies on the waned pioneer age are also Stampede (1945) and Widger’s Way (1952) by Gwen Pharis Ringwood. 10. I have not touched upon the vast chapter of homosexual theater, which obviously involves the role of father and mother figures, a chapter, though, which needs a specific space beyond the limits of this essay. The reader may refer to playwrights such as Michel Tremblay, Marc M. Bouchard, J. Wilson, D. MacIvor, H. Rintoul, Sky Gilbert, Brad Fraser.

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WORKS CITED Alianak, Hrant. Christmas. Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada, 1973. Bentley, E. The Life of the Drama. New York: Atheneum, 1964. ———. The Theater of Commitment. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Beaudoin, Manon. La maison rouge, in Staging Alternative Albertas. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2002. Bouchard, M. M. Les muses orphelines (The Orphan Muses). Montreal: Scirocco Drama, 1995. Brewin, J., L. Chernial, A-M. Macdonald, A. Palmer, M. Ross, The Attic, the Pearls & Three Fine Girls. Montreal: Scirocco Drama, 1999. Carnwath, Drew. Johnnyville. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1997. Chauduri, U. Staging Place. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan UP, 1997. Cook, Michael. Jacob’s Wake. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1975. ———. The Head, Guts and Soundbone Dance. Portugal Cove, NF.: Breakwater Books, 1977. Davies, Robertson. The Voice of the People, At My Heart’s Core, in Major plays of the Canadian theatre : 1934-1984. Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984. Denison, Merril. Marsh Hay. Toronto : Simon and Pierre, 1973. Foster, Norm. Opening Night. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1991. ———. Wrong for Each Other. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1992. ———. The Affections of May. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1993. ———. Office Hours. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1996. French, David. Of the Fields, Lately. Concord: Anansi, 1991. ———. Leaving Home. Toronto: Stoddard, 1995. Gifford, Barry. Hotel Room Trilogy. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Gowan, Elsie Park. Breeches from Bond Street, in Prairie Performance : a Collection of Short Plays. Edmonton: Newest Press, 1980. Ionesco, E. Note e contro-note. Torino: Einaudi, 1965. Laberge, Marie. L’homme gris, suivi de Eva et Evelyne. Montreal: V.L.B., 1986. ———. Oublier. Montreal: Boréal, 1993. Lill, Wendy. Corker. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1998. L’océan, in Théâtre, Les Éditions du Boréal, 1998. Macleod, Joan. Toronto, Mississippi. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1987. McClelland Glass, Joanna. Play Memory in NeWest Plays by Women. Play Memory. The Occupation of Heather Rose. Inside Out. Whiskey Six Cadenza, edited by Diane Bessai and Don Kerr Alberta, Newest Press, 1987. Moher, Frank. The Broken Globe, in Prairie Performance : a Collection of Short Plays. Edmonton: Newest Press, 1980. My Three Dads, in Stars in the Sky Morning, Collective Plays of Newfoundland and Labrador, St. John’s: Killik Press, 1996. Panych, Morris. Vigil. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996.

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Pedneault, Hélène. Evidence to the Contrary (La déposition). Montreal: Nuage Editions, 1993. Pirandello, Luigi. Saggio sull’umorismo (1908), in M. Adelaide Caponigro, Sull’umorismo di Pirandello e altri saggi di teatro. Roma: Aracne, 2005. Ringwood, Gwen Pharis. Still Stands the House, Pasque Flower in The Collected Plays of Gwen Pharis Ringwood, ed. Enid Delgatty Rutland, with a biographical note by MarionWilson and preface by Margaret Laurence. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1982. Said, E. “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Shields, Carol and Catherine. Fashion, Power, Guilt – and the Charity of Families. Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1995. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Expanding the Geographical Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. States, B.O. Great Recollections in Little Rooms. On the Phenomenology of Theatre. Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1985. Stickland, Eugene. A Guide to Mourning, in Two Plays. Alberta: Red Deer Press, 1999. ———. Sitting in Paradise, in Two Plays. Alberta: Red Deer Press, 1999. Thompson, Judith. White Biting Dog. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1984. ———. Tornado, I am Yours, in The Other Side of the Dark. Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1989. ———. Lion in the Streets. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1992. ———. Sle., Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1997. Walker, George. Better Living and Criminals in Love, in The East End Plays. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1988. ———. The East End Plays. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1988. ———. Escape from Happiness, in The Power Plays. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994. ———. The Power Plays. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994. ———. Suburban Motel, Burnaby. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1997. ———. The Buried Astrolabe. Montreal; Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.

Chapter Ten

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism: How to Exploit Diaspora and Live Happily Ever After Silvia Albertazzi

Of the various sub-genres that characterize post-colonial literature, surely diasporic writing is the most influenced by the infamous principle of “political correctness.” To avoid any charge of racism or offense to minority groups, migrant stories have to underline the pain, suffering and victimization of migrant people, even at the risk of sentimentalizing their reality and/or stereotyping it. Novels like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, the most successful testimonies of this trend in recent years, have set the boundaries for what has been labelled “migrant ethno-mélo.”

1. “MY DREAMS ARE RUN-OF-THE MILL” (MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ) This is why it is so refreshing to be confronted with a work like Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism, which is a virulent attack on politically-correct white English liberal society launched by a second-generation Asian. “A dirtyminded description of multicultural London now,” as the reviewer of the Evening Standard, David Sexton, defined it, Tourism is the story, narrated in the first person, of a cynic and nihilist young man whose only goal in life is to have fun at the expenses of the hated whites. As a reader observed in an online book review: “To use the term politically incorrect is an understatement, this guy is downright offensive.”1 Nor did the author in any way distance himself from his main character after receiving such reviews: “I always thought I was a disgusting douche-bag and now it’s official,” he commented in The Observer, and went on to recount a dream he had as a way of explaining his poetics. 165

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I dreamt . . . that I was in a fancy restaurant, sitting on a toilet, taking a big steamy dump in full view of everyone. I am no Freudian, but the connection with life was uncanny. Writing is about emptying your guts in front of polite society. It’s the literate middle classes who buy all the books, a fact not lost on a working-class boy who draws on events and voices from his past for his work.2

Actually, this “working-class boy” draws on events that, for the English reading public, are notorious. Married to a confessional columnist in her late forties, the (white) anorexic Liz Jones, who refers to him as a young “pup” in her articles (and Puppy is the name of the protagonist of Tourism), Dhaliwal, now in his mid-thirties, acquired an infamous notoriety much earlier than the publication of his first novel through his now ex-wife’s Sunday reports of their then married life, where she described him as the epitome of the bad husband: a smelly, good-for-nothing, idle, compulsive eater. Luckily, although the Dhaliwal-Jones ménage still makes up a soap opera that the English eagerly follow in the columns of the Mail on Sunday, to the point that “Their relationship, viewed from the outside, looks more like a media meal-ticket than a marriage,”3 readers in the rest of the world can approach Dhaliwal’s book “innocently,” that is to say without looking for his response to her charges. Thus, read without thinking of the personal situation of the author, the novel appears as an upsetting representation of second-generation Asian youth, owing more to early Kureishi than to the more recent Smith and Ali. Like Tourism, Kureishi’s novella With Your Tongue Down My Throat, and his novels The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album as well as his scripts for the English director Stephen Frears—My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid—deal with the Asian diaspora to the UK in an unsentimental way, uncovering the dark side of the Anglo-Pakistani community, and stressing the transgressions of second-generation migrants: drug abuse, unconventional sex, blasphemous attitudes towards religious traditions or, on the other hand, a dangerous fascination with fundamentalism. Moreover, like Dhaliwal after his glamorous marriage, Kureishi, suburban working-class child himself, entered into that stardom he had yearned for since his teens when My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for a Best Screenplay Academy Award: the world of pop stars, models, top publishers, fashion designers that Puppy is eager to meet in Tourism. When Kureishi was in his early forties, just a little older than Dhaliwal is now, he could affirm that with his films he wanted “to induce sexual excitement,”4 a purpose that Dhaliwal might subscribe to, as far as his only novel so far is concerned. Yet while Kureishi, like the main characters of his first works, is an in-between, the son of an English

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mother and a Pakistani father, not completely British and not really Oriental, “an Englishman bred and born—almost,” as the beginning of his first novel states, Dhaliwal like Puppy, is a second-generation Asian, born into a family of Indian immigrants brought together in an arranged marriage. Consequently, while like Kureishi’s in-betweens, Puppy “ha[s] no illusions to fall back on; [he is] doubly exiled, doubly lost,”5 unlike Kureishi’s Karim, the main character of The Buddha of Suburbia, he does not want to emerge into white society. He wants to exploit whites, not to be one of them. In this sense, whereas Kureishi “soon found that being in-between was a good place to be [that he] could be anything he chose [and have] access to areas of social discontent from which white liberals were debarred,”6 all that people like Dhaliwal (and Puppy) want is to escape from those same areas of social discontent where the whites relegate them, to get into their shiny world and live at their expenses. Much more than Kureishi’s anti-heroes, second-generation Asians like Puppy feel estranged both from British and Indian reality: born in England, they no longer have roots in the Indian subcontinent, yet, coming from the immigrant working class, they are refused by the English society. And while they are “acutely aware that they’d been blessed by the simple fact that their parents had got on a plane seeking a better life,”7 they have no great expectations, only the cynical purpose of reaching a higher status in life exploiting someone else’s riches. A sort of Indian Portnoy, Puppy lives a life that is the opposite of his mother’s “hopes and immigrant zeal.”8 His main goal in life seems to be to find an affluent woman to support him, and then to lie in bed, have fun, booze, take drugs and have sex (or at least masturbate) “in every conceivable space.”9 He has no dreams, no wishes. His existence is characterized by a “lingering, lifelong sense of incompletion,”10 a sense of vacuum which comes directly from his wish to share the pleasures of capitalistic consumerism. In fact, if “the purpose of capitalism is endlessly to stimulate desires that can never be fulfilled,”11 leaving one in a state of constant dissatisfaction, his only skill is “the acceptance of disappointment.”12 In his opinion, “Mediocrity and paranoia . . . are the basic principles of human condition, and the basic principles of consumerism.”13 London, the city that Kureishi’s Karim, like a modern Rastignac, dreams of conquering, for Puppy is “the gorgeous, faithless old whore that bore [him],”14 a mother that had “never shown [him] any love, but had shown [him] the world and its workings.”15 Therefore, he could never say, like Kureishi, “I’m no Brit, but a Londoner”:16 being unwilling to establish constructive relationships with the others, Puppy lives in it as if it were a sort of huge non-place. He does not want to belong anywhere: “I am a tourist,” he proclaims. “I’m just a fucking tourist . . . I look at the view.”17

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2. “WHAT I REALLY WANT, BASICALLY, IS TO BE A TOURIST” (MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ) The idea of passing through one’s life as a tourist is taken by Dhaliwal from one of the most controversial novels of the last decade: Platform by the French author Michel Houellebecq. In this highly contentious work, which gained a huge succès de scandale the world over, the protagonist, Michel, affirms: “what I really want, basically, is to be a tourist. We dream what dreams we can afford.” Dhaliwal has never denied his debt to Houellebecq: his views on sex and race as well as his critique of Western consumerism and narcissism are clearly modelled on those of the French novelist. Indeed, Puppy, with all his cynicism, could describe himself, as Houellebecq did some time ago, as one “who ordinarily spits on money, the freedom of the individual, human rights, democracy and non-smoking areas.”18 For him as for Houellebecq’s non-heroes, sex is just a commodity, to be consumed without passion, joylessly, compulsively: and if the protagonists of Platform or Lanzarote take advantage of exotic journeys to practize extreme sex, thus turning the typical Club Med ambience into unashamed sexual tourism, Puppy’s self-identification as a “tourist” allows him to assume toward Britain the attitude of a person away from home, who looks at the world around him/her with detachment and takes advantage of his/her spatial estrangement to indulge in activities that he/she would never do at home. Moreover, since, while holidaying in faraway exotic resorts even the dullest man-in-the-street turns into a sort of neocolonizer for whom the natives are only colonial subjects to be exploited, it is not so far-fetched to affirm that Puppy wants to be a “tourist” in Britain in order to “colonize” British society, believing that “taking advantage of [its] postcolonial melancholia can lead to some form of reparation.”19 For Houellebecq sex tourism is the industry of the future, because of Western woman’s neurotic incapability of enjoying sex, on the one hand, and the willingness of the women in developing countries to help unsatisfied Western men who pay for their services to (re)discover the joys of sex. For Puppy, there is no need to leave the Western world to practice sex tourism. As one his friends—an artist who seems to act as a black mouthpiece of Houellebecq—says: Mass immigration . . . turned these white boys into a bunch of pussies. . . . When the spades, the Pakis, and the rest of them got off the boat with their big dicks and their beautiful faces, the white boys shit themselves. That’s why they bring their women cups of tea in bed, and listen to their bullshit. It’s the only way they can get laid. . . . Niggers don’t have to do that.20

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In the light of similar considerations, it is apparent why Tourism can be seen as a step ahead in the representation of the children of the Indian diaspora: the young second-generation Asian does not want to achieve success in the whites’ world any longer nor does he live as an in-between, like Kureishi’s characters. He does not look for nor feel any kind of belonging: he just wants to take advantage of the whites, invade their own territory and colonize it by way of using and abusing their women and their things. It is not superfluous here to stress that a “tourist” is the opposite of a diasporic subject: while the first leaves home for pleasure, knowing that sooner or later he will come back, the latter is compelled by political, cultural, professional or economic reasons to abandon home, very often for good. Therefore, identifying himself with a tourist, Puppy refuses both to acknowledge his belonging to a minority who will never be part of the status quo and to take into account the traditions, beliefs and customs of his parents and ancestors. In this sense, Puppy appears to have nothing in common with the two categories defined by Kit and Port, the protagonists of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky. Their famous distinction between “traveller” and “tourist” is carried out on the basis of a relationship with the concept of time: whereas a tourist hurries back home at the end of a (short) period abroad, a traveller moves slowly, over a long time, from one end of the world to the other, since he does not belong anywhere. Puppy has no place to go back to nor to leave from: while Kit and Port, despising tourism, travel to find themselves, oblivious of the world around them, Puppy’s tourism is the apotheosis of that suspension of any risk that, according to Eric J. Leed, characterizes today’s mass travelling. As a matter of fact, being a tourist is easy, predictable, uncompromising: the only risk is to turn your movement, almost unaware, into that of a prisoner. Nowadays a tourist, according to Leeds, is more and more similar to a captive pacing up and down his cell, treading in the steps of those who occupied his jail before him.21 Not by chance, almost at the end of his story, feeling “tired with [his] emotional life,”22 Puppy leaves London for good, only to find himself involved in the project of a New Age tourist complex in a Sinai beach resort. As in Houellebecq’s Platform, a terrorist attack gatecrashes this project of spectacularization of the world, based on the elimination of every unwanted contact with the natives, on the transformation of nature into a consumer commodity and on a rigid division between spectator (the tourist) and spectacle (the Other). Mass tourism is also stigmatized in the work of other contemporary authors, such as Murray Bail and J. J. Ballard. From such short stories as “Portrait of Electricity” (1975) all the way through his novel Homesickness (1990), Bail writes ironically about tourists driven like flocks of sheep through museums, galleries and the houses of famous persons, looking for

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risible memorabilia, while in Millennium People Ballard defines tourism “the great soporific,” justifying this concept as follows: Tourism is the great soporific. It’s a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there’s something interesting in their lives. It’s musical chairs in reverse. Every time the muzak stops people stand up and dance around the world, and more chairs are added to the circle, more marinas and Marriott hotels, so everyone thinks they’re winning. . . . Today’s tourist goes nowhere. . . . All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. The tourists smile at their tans and their shiny teeth and think they are happy. But the suntans hide who they really are—salary slaves, with heads full of American rubbish. Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.23

That tourism is the opposite of migration appears quite clearly in the definition of the World Tourism Organization, according to which tourists are people who “travel and stay in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited”24. In the light of pronouncements like Ballard’s this opposition is even more apparent. We all remember Salman Rushdie’s famous statement on the migrant’s status: A full migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own. And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human.25

It is easy to observe that the typical mass tourist does not lose his/her place, almost always goes on speaking his/her own language while abroad, demanding that natives use it too, and does not take into account in any way the customs and behavior of the alien people who surround him/her. Bowles’ Port had already noted that while the traveller compares his own civilization to the others, the tourist accepts it without question, often using it as a sort of anaesthetic against isolation. This attitude leads to that “delusion of reinventing yourself” Ballard is writing about: while the migrant has to reinvent himself if he wants to survive in the new society and the traveller, in the attempt to adapt his interior landscape to the exterior one, turns his own travelling into

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a private experience, the tourist keeps on the surface on things, neither changed nor moved by the outer world.

3. “ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN LIFE, ESPECIALLY NOTHING” (MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ) Paradoxically, for a tourist-at-home like Puppy, “home” is a word devoid of sense. For him even home is a non-place, in Marc Augé’s usage: a place where he cannot find his identity (his relationship with himself) nor establish any meaningful relations with other people; a place that seems to suggest the solitude and anonymity of the individual lost between a trackless past and a shapeless future26. Not being part of a community, not having a role in social life, and, above all, not being a member of the working population, Puppy cannot feel the imaginative and symbolic potential of his city: as stressed by Augé, possessing a social sense is the sine qua non for developing art’s imaginative metonymic and metaphoric processes.27 One of the most important results of migrant literature is that it has given the literary foreground back to the working classes. While “Nineteenth century novels are awash with clerks, lawyers, engineers, medical men and parliamentarians whose professional lives exist off the page”28 and twentieth century fiction “[t]hat purports to be about work and working people [is] generally about work’s absence, the search for it and the disabling psychological consequences of its being withheld,”29 diaspora fiction often concentrates on the working environments of migrants and the description of their manual jobs. In a sense, migrant writing is the new frontier of working-class fiction. Therefore, it is no surprise if a tourist of life like Puppy not only does not have a job, but despises the people of his community who strive to earn a little money. Work means responsibility, and, as a tourist, Puppy refuses to take responsibility. Work means rules to follow, and Puppy scorns rules. Work builds social identity, and Puppy’s only identity is that of the careless tourist passing by. It is not by chance that Puppy gets sexually involved with a model, Sophie, a girl who sees herself only in terms of how she looks: in this way, he constructs a relation with the image of the other, not with her self. For him, Sophie has no more identity than the images he continually looks at on television. His attitude toward her is that of the tourist towards the native: sex with her is sexual tourism. Therefore, it is not surprising that Puppy’s only business project is, in the wake of Houellebecq, a tour operation called BigFun Holidays [which] would provide package holidays exclusively to fat people [and] a singles venture, BigFun Xtra, catering for

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fat swingers and perverts who fuck them. Based on Club 18-30, it would be an intense rota of near-orgies, fuelled by an abundance of alcohol and simple carbohydrates . . . with the staff urging them to new depths of prurience, turning a blind eye to the high jinks that ensued.30

BigFun Holidays and, to a much greater extent, BigFun Xtra, are grotesque rewritings of Houellebecq’s idea of “friendly tourism” as conceived in Platform: “the kind in which well-heeled Westerners visit third world countries and pay impoverished new ‘friends’ to have sex.”31 For Puppy, like Houellebecq’s Michel, “Tourism is considered the biggest single industry on the planet, a pure locus of supply and deliberately massaged demand.”32 Moreover, for both of them “the primary, obvious link between sex and tourism is the carnal, interpersonal (and impersonal) one,”33 and, finally, they share the idea that “both sex and tourism exemplify the free market at its most free.”34 Seemingly, identifying themselves with tourists is a way to escape from the Western consumerism via sexual liberation. On another level, accepting the philosophy of tourism, which is based on the emotional estrangement from the sites one visits—the “mise à distance” that, according to Augé, prefigures a “mise en spectacle” of reality35—both Puppy and Michel agree to a spectacularization both of time and space, of their own worlds and of history. Yet as far as politics are concerned, Michel’s view are much more attuned with his creator’s than Puppy’s. In fact, while Houellebecq’s views coincide with those of his alter egos (who, not by chance, are all called Michel), to the point that it is almost impossible to guess if a statement like: “For the West I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt”36 has been uttered by the French author or by one of his creatures, Puppy would never talk about Great Britain like Dhaliwal, who admits that: In this country, we have the most sophisticated, humane society the world has ever seen. You go to India and you see a country taking the most outrageous steps to emulate what we have here: constitutional democracy and freedom of expression and the rule of law. People come here for the freedoms that this country allows them, not just for the economic benefits.37

Consequently, it is not so easy to guess whether some very politically incorrect views of Puppy and his friends are shared by Dhaliwal or whether they are nothing but a reprisal of those rants against Islam that gained Houellebecq a charge for inciting religious hatred brought by France’s Human Rights League, the Mecca-based World Islamic League and the mosques of Paris and Lyon. See, for instance, what Michael, himself black, says: Eastern Europeans. . . . They make niggers look smart. . . . The best thing that’s happened to black people in this country was letting these idiots in. . . . There’s

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nothing better for the people at the bottom than having a bunch of other saps brought in and dumped beneath them. Niggers won’t catch so much flak now these dummies are here. You already see it in the media. The papers don’t make a big deal about Yardies anymore, they’re obsessed with these Albanian gangs now. . . . These dummies are making life easy for black people. Same as Muslims are good for black people. 9/11 was a break for niggers. White people are cutting us some slack, now we’re not top of their shit-list. Right now they need all the friends they can get. . . . Niggers might rob you and rape your girlfriend, but they won’t land a fucking plane on you. Another stunt like that, and we’ll be in the clear.38

It is superfluous to note that Puppy and his friends lack that sense of identity which comes from the acknowledgement of a common history and common roots together with an awareness of the difference between oneself and the Other, and a willingness to enrich the world that one lives in by adapting all those elements to a life of mutual give and take. Puppy tells: Identity was a hot topic in today’s society and Michael was keen to jump on the bandwagon. . . . Michael’s idea for an artwork had been commissioned and lottery money was being fed to him through a funding body. His concept was for a multi-screen video installation . . . called Niggers . . . “I just gave them a lot of crap,” he said, talking about the application process, “I wrote about how this idea deals with the white paradigm and the appropriation of the black subject.” “What does that mean?” “Fuck knows. . . . White people are mad. . . . You’ve got to tap into their madness, if you want to get anywhere.”39

The concept of identity implies a relationship with others. Moreover, identity is not unchangeable, it changes with the mutations of history and society. This is why one of the main preoccupations of diaspora writers is to let their readers appreciate the positive aspects of hybridization, cross-breeding and contamination of identities in a multicultural, global world. Yet secondgeneration young people like Puppy fail to understand that identity starts with the oblivion of oneself, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote. This is to say that you have to care for the Other if you want to shape your own self. Unfortunately, for Puppy as well as for Michael, the others are there only to be exploited and despised. This applies not only to the whites and the wealthy ones in general, but also to one’s own family. This is how Puppy describes his mother: Behold!, my mother: matriarch and fulcrum, proud bearer of sons, stately in her new sari, her one eyebrow draped across her forehead like a trophy pelt, her moustache downy like an adolescent boy’s. . . .

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She was five feet tall, weighed as much as a man and sported a beard; her bulky plait trailed down her arse. . . . Some idiot told her that the truly devout did not pluck or trim a hair on their body; it was her calling. . . . The beard, the thick adjoining eyebrows, became bullish assertions of faith, admired, even coveted, by her peers. . . . She had rheumatism and angina; she was fifty years old and called on God just to get out of bed, or climb the stairs. Stooped, hands on hips, she hobbled finding her balance. . . . The waist of her sari was drawn needlessly tight; a tyre of crinkled fat bulged from it.40

As for his father, who left his family when he was fourteen, Puppy calls him a “desperate no-good bastard,” who left him, “the desperate first-born son” to “pick up the tab,” even though “he couldn’t afford the bill.”41 The result is that, at that tender age, Puppy realizes that “There was no God. If there was, He was a shit and not to be trusted.”42 The refusal of religion, expressed, again, in a very Houellebecq-like tone, together with the scorn for family, institutions and ethnic communities, allow us to define Tourism an “insolent” novel, using this attribute in the sense that Mario Vargas Llosa and Julian Barnes applied to Houellebecq’s Platform: “as a term of praise [for] certain books—sardonic and acutely pessimistic—that systematically affront all our current habits of living, and treat our presumptions of mind as the delusions of the cretinous.”43 It is once again Julian Barnes who warns that “Fictional insolence is a high-risk venture; it must . . . convince you with the force of its rhetoric and the rigor of its despair.”44 Maybe Dhaliwal’s insolence does not maintain this force and this rigor throughout the novel; yet it surely gives a shock of recognition not only to immigrants, but also to all those readers who have experienced immigration through literature and cinema. An Italian columnist who specializes in Indian matters, Federico Rampini, wrote that in this novel generations of immigrants “can find something of themselves: yellowish photographs from a family album, mementoes of the traumas of integration, and transition between the ancestors’ traditions and the new Western models.”45 What Barnes and Llosa call “insolence,” Rampini identifies with an ability to disassemble and reassemble the usual materials of migrant writing, adding a grotesque, excessive, larger-than-life tone, and a limitless, unrestrained self-irony. The debate on authenticity and representation, which always comes to the fore when considering works produced by authors of “ethnic” descent, has to be reconsidered in the light of the categories proposed by Dhaliwal. As there is a tourist approach to life, there is also a tourist approach to literature: it is the attitude of those second-generation writers who, having grown up in middle class England, look at immigrant reality from a distance, exploiting it for the pleasure and the curiosity of their (white) readers. In this sense, the fortunate novels of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith can be labelled “tourist fiction,”

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while Dhaliwal’s, in spite of its title, can be listed among the best works of diaspora writing of the last decade. To the politically correct spectacularization of migrant life proposed by Ali, Smith and their epigones, a new breed of second-generation authors who tell of immigrant enclaves and their dissatisfactions from the inside, contrasts a very politically incorrect but extremely “authentic” picture of reality. Not by chance, in the same year that Tourism appeared, another book came out that shocked the English literary establishment, describing the violence and machismo of Hounslow’s young Anglo-Indians: Londonstani, by Gautam Malkani. Similar to Dhaliwal’s Puppy, these young men—who are not proletarians, but come from a relatively prosperous Indian lower middle class—refuse any assimilation with the English society. Yet, unlike Dhaliwal’s anti-hero, they strive to create their own identity as “desis,” a term that, for Malkani, while it implies the acceptance of one’s own Indian origins also marks the passage to a more permeable identity, which requires a new language to be told, a hybrid jargon where Punjabi text messaging, gangsta rap, and Bollywood patois are mixed with heavy obscenities. While Puppy refuses assimilation both with the English people and the Indian community and despises all talks about roots, traditions and religion, the “Londonstani” boys reclaim their ethnic origins with the violence of ghetto dwellers, holding their status symbols (mobile phones and BMWs). Although accused of stereotyping—with his somewhat predictable references to arranged marriages, interfaith relationships and “the occasional slip into Ali G-sms”46— and although leaving his book “open to troubling debates about hybridity and authenticity,”47 Malkani has the merit of representing the children of the Indian diaspora from inside, without concessions to mainstream migrant writing. On the contrary, “where Tourism does succeed is in writing about an Asian character that manages to avoid a reductionist debate about authenticity . . . a particular desi identity [where] ‘Asian’ is just one axis in . . . many complicated intersections.”48 Finally, the appearance of characters like Puppy, Jas (the narrator-protagonist of Londonstani) or the detective Tommy Akhart in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights, shows that it is high time for Europe to accept the idea that, as the FrancoTunisian writer Tahar Ben Jelloun has it, “the European landscape will no longer be ‘uncontaminated,’ but composed by many mixtures, that is to say, enriched, transformed and more and more open to the outer world.”49

NOTES 1. C. Mapletoft, “Liberal-baiting, selfish sponging waster makes big splash,” http://www.bookmunch.co.uk/view.php?id=1693.

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2. N. Singh Dhaliwal, “My week,” The Observer, 12 March 2006. 3. H. Eyre, “Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal: Me & Missus Jones,” The Independent on Sunday, 2/4/2006. 4. H. Kureishi, quoted in I. Hamilton, “Life in-between,” Vogue, September 1995, p. 366. 5. Hamilton, “Life in-between,” p. 366. 6. Hamilton, “Life in-between,” p. 366. 7. N. Singh Dhaliwal, “My week.” 8. N. Singh Dhaliwal, Tourism, Vintage, 2007, p. 8. 9. Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 86. 10. Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 162. 11. See Anon., “Postcard from the Edge,” New Statesman, 28/7/2003. 12. N. Singh Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 162. 13. Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 85. 14. Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 240. 15. Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 240. 16. H. Kureishi, “Film Diary” in Granta, 22, 1987, p. 67. 17. N. Singh Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 85. 18. M. Houellebecq in A. Riemer, “A nihilist’s hope against hope,” http://www .smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/27/1056683892274.html. 19. A. Saha, “Londonstani by Gautam Malkani; Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal,” http://www.darkmatter101.org.site/2007/06/14/. 20. N. Singh Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 160. 21. See E. J. Leeds, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, New York, Basic Books, 1991. 22. Leeds, Mind of the Traveler, p. 182. 23. J. J. Ballard, Millennium People, London, Harper Perennial, 2004, pp. 54–55. 24. See http://unwto.org/. 25. S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, London, Granta Books, 1991, pp. 277–78. 26. See M. Augé, L’impossible voyage. Le tourisme et ses images, Paris, Editions Payot et Rivages, Rivages Poche, 1997, p. 109. 27. Augé, L’impossible voyage, p. 157. 28. D. J. Taylor, “Working Title,” in Time Out: 1000 Books to Change Your Life, London, Random House, 2007, p. 125. 29. Taylor, “Working Title,” p. 127. 30. N. Singh Dhaliwal, Tourism, pp. 97–98. 31. J. Maslin, “Tourism, Sex and a Generous Dose of Contempt,” The New York Times, 21/07/2003. 32. J. Barnes, “Hate and Hedonism. The Insolent Art of Michel Houellebecq,” The New Yorker, 7/7/2003. 33. Barnes, “Hate and Hedonism.” 34. Barnes, “Hate and Hedonism.” 35. Augé, L’impossible voyage, p. 32. 36. M. Houellebecq quoted in J. Maslin, “Tourism, Sex.” 37. N. Singh Dhaliwal in H. Eyre, Me & Missus Jones.”

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38. N. Singh Dhaliwal, Tourism, pp. 67–68. 39. Dhaliwal, Tourism, pp. 157–158. 40. Dhaliwal, Tourism, pp. 34–35. 41. Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 138. 42. Dhaliwal, Tourism, p. 138. 43. J. Barnes, “Hate and Hedonism.” 44. Barnes, “Hate and Hedonism.” 45. F. Rampini, “Emigrante italiano in best seller,” D. la Repubblica delle Donne, 8/372008, p. 60 (my translation). 46. A. Saha, “Londonstani and Tourism.” 47. A. Saha, “Londonstani and Tourism.” 48. Perhaps it is worth while noting that the year before the publication of Malkani’s and Dhaliwal’s books, an English author, Patrick Neate, published a very politically incorrect thriller, City of Tiny Lights, starring a Uganda-born detective of Indian descent. Like Tourism and Londonstani, his novel is an attack on the idea of Britishness launched by a former fundamentalist who has lost his faith in Islam. 49. T. Ben Jelloun, “Quei nuovi europei senza identità,” L’espresso, 16/8/2007, p. 11 (my translation from the Italian version by M. Baccianini).

WORKS CITED Anon. “Postcard from the Edge,” New Statesman, July 28, 2003. Augé, M. L’impossible voyage. Le tourisme et ses images. Paris: Editions Payot et Rivages, Rivages Poche, 1997. Ballard, J. J. Millennium People. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. 54–55. Barnes, J. “Hate and Hedonism. The Insolent Art of Michel Houellebecq,” The New Yorker, July 7, 2003. Ben Jelloun, T. “Quei nuovi europei senza identità,” L’espresso, Aug. 16, 2007:11. Eyre, H. “Nirpal Singh Dhalival: Me & Missus Jones,” The Independent on Sunday, 2/4/2006. Hamilton, I. “Life in-between,” Vogue, September, 1995:366. Kureishi, H. “Film Diary” in Granta, 22, 1987. Leeds, E. J. The Mind of the Traveler. From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York, Basic Books, 1991. Mapletoft, C. “Liberal-baiting, selfish sponging waster makes big splash,” http://www.bookmunch.co.uk/view.php?id=1693. Maslin, J. “Tourism, Sex and a Generous Dose of Contempt,” The New York Times, July 21, 2003. Rampini, F. “Emigrante italiano in best seller,” D. la Repubblica delle Donne, 8/37 2008. Riemer, A. “A nihilist’s hope against hope,” http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/ 27/1056683892274.html. Rushdie, S. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books, 1991.

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Saha, A. “Londonstani by Gautam Malkani; Tourism by Nirpal Singh Dhalival,” http://www.darkmatter101.org.site/2007/06/14/. Singh Dhaliwal, N. “My Week,” The Observer, March 12, 2006. ———. N. Tourism. New York: Vintage, 2007. Taylor, D. J. “Working Title,” in Time Out. 1000 Books to Change Your Life. London: Random House, 2007.

Index

Badami, Anita Rau, 5, 8–10 Bail, Murray, 167–68 Bissoondath, Neil, 18–19 Bowles, Paul, 167 Brand, Dionne, 70–75 Clarke, Austin, 62–70 Clarke, George Elliott, 5 Dhaliwal, Nirpal Singh, 163–74 Dirie, Waris, 115–21

Kundera, Milan, 49–52 Kureishi, Hanif, 164–65 Lamming, George, 44–46 Malkani, Gautam, 173 Martel, Yann, 17–18 Maver, Igor, ix, 13n1, 21 Michaels, Anne, 6 Mootoo, Shani, 6, 75–80 Mansfield, Katherine, 107–8

Hopkinson, Nalo, 20 Houellebecq, Michel, 166, 169–70, 172 hybridity, 20, 22, 39–40, 171, 173 Hulme, Peter, 106 Hutcheon, Linda, 60–61

Naipaul, V.S., 47

Ihimaera, Witi, 101–4, 108–9

Saïd, Edward, 105–6, 109n4, 138

Kamboureli, Smaro, 2 Keefer, Janice Kulyk, 1, 6, 19, 21 Keïta, Fatou, 121–24 Khady, Soninke, 124–26

Taylor, Alf, 89–98 Todorov, Tzvetan, 44, 48–49

Pazira, Nelofer, 11–12 Ricci, Nino, 5 Richler, Noah, 13

Verdecchia, Guillermo, 16–17

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About the Contributors

Silvia ALBERTAZZI is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Bologna in Italy. Susan BALLYN is Professor of English and Executive Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona in Spain. Carmen BIRKLE is Professor of English at Philipps University of Marburg in Germany. Coral Ann HOWELLS is Professor Emerita of English and Canadian Literature at the University of Reading and Senior Tutor at the University of London (NILE) in the United Kingdom. Smaro KAMBOURELI is Professor of English, Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies of Canadian Literature and Director of the TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph in Canada. Melissa KENNEDY is Assistant Professor of English at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business in Japan. Giulio MARRA is Professor of English at the University Ca’Foscari of Venice in Italy. Igor MAVER is Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies Doctoral Programme at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. 181

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About the Contributors

Timothy WEISS is Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong. Chantal ZABUS is Professor of British and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Paris 13, Researcher at the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle and Senior Scholar at the Institut universitaire de France.