DIASPORIC SUBJECTIVITY

AND CULTURAL BROKERING

IN CONTEMPORARY POST-
COLONIAL 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

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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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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.
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For my family
 Contents

Introduction: Positioning Diasporic Literary Cultures ix

Igor Maver
1 “Not Belonging, but Longing”: Shifts of Emphasis in
Contemporary Diasporic Writing in English Canada 1
Coral Ann Howells
2 Canadian New Diasporic Writing and Transnational/Borderland
Literary Identities 17
Igor Maver
3 The Diaspora Writes Back: Cultural Memory and Michael
Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost 27
Smaro Kamboureli
4 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 39
Timothy Weiss
5 Between the Island and the City: Cultural Brokerage in
Caribbean-Canadian Short Fiction 59
Carmen Birkle
6 The Child of New Norcia: Alf Taylor’s Poetry 91
Susan Ballyn
7 The Englishness of Maori Writing 101
Melissa Kennedy
8 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the
New Europe: Trauma, the Law, and the Internet 115
Chantal Zabus
vii
viii Contents

9 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in

Canadian Theater 135
Giulio Marra
10 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism: How to Exploit Diaspora
and Live Happily Ever After 165
Silvia Albertazzi
Index 179
About the Contributors 181
 Introduction

This book brings to light ten essays that are focused on a major issue in con-
temporary post-colonial studies, that is, diasporic literary identities in indi-
vidual 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 lan-
guages to work through the ethical, political and affective ambivalences of di-
asporic identities. Diasporic writing simultaneously asserts a sense of be-
longing 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 coun-
tries (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 stabil-
ity 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 transna-
tional identities has been emerging globally. These new displacements and
new border crossings have clearly created new diasporic discourses (Strat-
ton and Ang). Of course, diaspora defined as a dispersal and consequent set-
tlement of people on a given territory, too, can perhaps be seen, alongside

ix
x Introduction

post-colonialism, as a label bag, and perhaps yet another discourse that de-
historicizes 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 loca-
tion. Furthermore, all diasporas are differentiated between themselves in
these contested in-between spaces and are part of the process of the con-
struction 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 sub-
jectivity 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 post-
colonial literatures and the reevaluation of the traditional Anglophone literary
canon by including post-colonial diasporic literary discourses. The displace-
ments and cross-border sojourns and sea voyages of the “post-colonial sub-
jects” 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 in-
creasingly progressive and long-awaited deconstruction of the British, Cana-
dian, Australian and New Zealand (mono)cultural national literary contain-
ment. 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 essen-
tially 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 intrigu-
ing. The classical view is thus literally turned upside down: diasporic literary
and cultural hybrids are the newly emerging globally nomadic natural and
 Positioning Diasporic Literary Cultures xi

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 disre-
garded. However, diasporic (trans)cultural experience and practices have be-
come today a mode of everyday existence that several successful post-
national 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 post-
colonial and colonial oppositions are manifold, including the effects of offi-
cial 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 con-
temporary society en route to a transcultural future, where the sheer preach-
ing 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 ac-
cepted by the majority of the population. The idea of tolerance and coexis-
tence 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 im-
migration 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 vi-
able 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
xii Introduction

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 es-
says 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 dis-
mantling the all-national container of cultural/literary production, without,
however, falling into the facile interpretations and pitfalls of liberal multi-
culturalisms (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 becom-
ing pluralized and globalized by transcending individual traditional cate-
gories of “Canadianness,” especially as regards the Canadian locale as well
as cultural memory. He also offers the various possible definitions of indi-
vidual concepts in the area of post-colonial diasporic writing, expressing di-
asporic 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 On-
daatje. Diasporic writing does not so much reproduce the desire to return
home; instead, it perhaps enables, while deconstructing, the categorical im-
perative 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 trans-
formation, and for human beings this necessarily involves processes of inter-
pretation 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
 Positioning Diasporic Literary Cultures xiii

belonging that wants to overcome the Self/Other dialectics. Indigenous liter-

atures and the European impact represent the topic of the following two es-
says. 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 po-
litical 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 problemat-
ics 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 ethnic-
ity. Silvia Albertazzi, last but not least, writes about the Indian diasporic new
chic literary production in the United Kingdom and the ethno-melo “ex-
ploitation” 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. Lon-
don: Routledge, 2004.
Hassan, Ihab. “Changelings in Janglish: Or, How Australian Is It?” English Now.
Marianne Thormählen, ed. Lund: Center for Languages and Literature, Lund Uni-
versity; 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.
xiv Introduction

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. Lan-
ham, 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 Ku-
lyk Keefer’s memoir Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family (1998), and it sig-
nals 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 Cana-
dian identity and the concept of a national literature in an increasingly glob-
alized context. What does it mean to call a novel “Canadian” when its main
cultural and geographic reference points lie outside Canada? (This is a prob-
lem 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 her-
itage and present actuality as a nation of immigrants. Indeed, we are witness-
ing a pluralized moment when Canadian literature is literally becoming inter-
national 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 mi-
grations 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 sup-
plements their exotic appeal, for they open new perspectives on non-Western
cultures at the individual human level. They are not “universal”; indeed they

1
2 Chapter One

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 con-
temporary immigrant and ethnic minority writers, and this word, like “post-
colonial,” 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 collec-
tivity (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 main-
taining 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 conse-
quence Clifford notes that diasporic language “appears to be replacing, or
at least supplementing, minority discourse” in order to describe “a predica-
ment 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 cul-
tural consequences of immigration, insisting on the need for readers’ imag-
inative attention to the diasporic subject’s condition of liminality.
In order to gain a historical perspective on the new phenomenon of Cana-
dian 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 in-
ternational publishers’ lists? After all, up until 1950 Canada was one of the
“white” countries of the Commonwealth. Its image was that of an English-
speaking nation with a francophone minority, though in truth Canada’s popu-
lation had included immigrants from ethnic minorities since the late eigh-
teenth century, and by the beginning of the twentieth there were small
communities of Chinese, Japanese, Germans, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and
 “Not Belonging, but Longing” 3

Scandinavians mainly in the West, Afro-Canadians (descendants of Empire

Loyalists and refugees from slavery) in the Maritimes, and large Jewish com-
munities in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. However, that cultural diver-
sity was not recognized within national discourse, and ethnic minorities con-
tinued 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 Eu-
ropeans. Not till the 1960s did Canada allow a much increased entry of non-
European 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 dias-
pora, and Negovan Rajic from Belgrade who settled in Quebec and whose fic-
tion 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 asso-
ciated 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
4 Chapter One

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 be-
ginning 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 pol-
icy. Certainly the concept and its implementation have been issues of ongo-
ing debate, though arguably multiculturalism has been instrumental in the re-
visioning 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 Cana-
dian 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 top-
ics have come to the forefront of discussion, and we observe critics and cul-
tural 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 Chang-
ing 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 Sys-
tem” (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 diversifica-
tion of the Canadian literary canon. As South Asian–Canadian critic Arun
Mukherjee noted in 1998, “ethnicity and race have become important theo-
retical 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 “multi-
cultural” anthology, which featured fiction and interviews with eighteen con-
temporary Canadian writers in English, themselves immigrants or the chil-
dren of immigrants, plus interviews with a Native and a francophone writer.
 “Not Belonging, but Longing” 5

It was also the year when Nino Ricci’s Lives of the Saints, SKY Lee’s Disap-
pearing Moon Café and George Elliott Clarke’s verse drama Whylah Falls
were published, all of these being symptomatic of a confluence of demo-
graphic and ideological shifts in Canadian society, together with more hos-
pitable 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 promi-
nence these three writers are actually Canadian born, of Italian and Chinese
immigrant parents in the case of Ricci and Lee, while Clarke is seventh gen-
eration Black Canadian from Nova Scotia (“Africadian” as he describes him-
self). Ricci’s is the story of an Italian boy’s migration to Canada, but it fo-
cuses 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 snow-
covered 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 pro-
vides 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 Swiss-
Chinese lesbian partner. Like so many diasporic narratives, this one is about
conflicted identities, with an awareness in the younger generation of a slip-
page 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 vio-
lence 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 em-
blematic, we note seven novels and short-story collections by Canadian
women writers of diverse origins (I have chosen women to emphasize the im-
portance of gendered experience, which as Clifford noted, has been neglected
in diasporic studies): Tamarind Woman by Anita Rau Badami (born and edu-
cated in India), English Lessons by Shauna Singh Baldwin (born in Montreal
6 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 Ukrainian-
Polish 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 dif-
ferent 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 es-
trangement 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” representa-
tions of sexuality which transcend racial barriers, showing how the old racist
narratives of Empire are being revised in the next generation who are Cana-
dian 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 Lan-
tanacamara and Canada through its narratives of desire and longing, reflect-
ing 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 be-
tween Toronto’s Ukrainian community and her own middle class English-
speaking 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 mem-
oir 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
 “Not Belonging, but Longing” 7

holes” (279) existing only in the world of fabulation, a realization of her ear-
lier 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 po-
sitioned 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 immi-
grant 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 nar-
rative in a terrifying anxiety dream about his father as the center of inexpli-
cable 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 con-
scious 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 On-
tario. 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 rest-
lessly between comedy, melodrama and Jacobean tragedy. In the end, like
Keefer, Ondaatje realizes that it is impossible to tell a true story of origins;
8 Chapter One

our genealogical legacies are written into our bodies, yet these signs are ulti-
mately indecipherable. All he has is memory, myth, and imagination, and the
diasporic subject and his book are left in a condition of incompleteness. On-
daatje 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 in-
creasingly 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 his-
tory, 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 anthropolo-
gist 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, desper-
ately wants to go home to Vancouver, while her Indian family has no knowl-
edge 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
 “Not Belonging, but Longing” 9

occurs as the novel develops its contrapuntal theme of cultural confrontation

and gradual reconciliation. Badami mixes symbols from both cultures, real-
ized 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 rec-
onciliations, 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 recon-
figured 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 Cana-
dian 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 de-
scribed 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 eth-
nic minorities:

“The Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians, that barber Majid, you and me,” Bibi-
ji 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 con-
cerned 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
10 Chapter One

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 be-
tween cultures, she reveals the complexities of affiliation and conflicting loy-
alties 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.” (Inter-
view 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 as-
sume 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 in-
ternet” (Mount 162). I am talking about a shift of emphasis, best exempli-
fied in Rohinton Mistry’s novels: Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Bal-
ance (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)
 “Not Belonging, but Longing” 11

In fact, Mistry and many South Asian–Canadian writers are also published
in India, so that they feature in two national literatures, making them gen-
uinely transnational.5 They are all members of what Vijay Mishra has de-
scribed 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 publish-
ers, 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 sto-
ries are set in modern Kashmir where he grew up before immigrating to Mon-
treal in 1991, and apart from thanking the Canada Council for financial as-
sistance 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 Kash-
mir 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 al-
ternative 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 film-
maker, 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 com-
parison, 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 Rus-
sian 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 be-
tween 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
12 Chapter One

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 sur-
vived 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 nar-
rative of Afghanistan still features every day in our newspapers.
Pazira’s family escaped over the border in 1989, the women wearing tradi-
tional 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 Mar-
itime town of Moncton, New Brunswick, in cold autumn weather. She de-
scribes 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 thirteen-
year absence that she was able to return to Kabul, shortly after the United Na-
tions 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 be-
hind 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: distinc-
tions between “immigrant,” “ethnic,” “transcultural,” and “transnational” are
 “Not Belonging, but Longing” 13

nothing like so clear-cut as these different words might suggest, for they over-
lap 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 in-
teresting gloss on the present multicultural state of Canadian literature, in-
sisting on the importance of storytelling in all its diversity: “The point of sto-
ries 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 work-
ing definition of the country that must be conjured out of the ether on con-
secutive mornings” (455). We must conclude that in the contemporary con-
text, diasporic writings might be read as a series of allegories for the
reimagining of Canada as an “imagined community” in an increasingly glob-
alized 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 An-
tonio 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 di-
aspora, 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 econom-
ics, but not yet very much in literature. Social anthropologists refer to a “transna-
tional” 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.
14 Chapter One

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———. 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
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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 Mul-
ticultural Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. 1996. Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Litera-
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———. 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.
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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: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press.
 “Not Belonging, but Longing” 15

Mukherjee, Arun. 1998. Postcolonialism: My Living. Toronto: TSAR.

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———. 2000. Anil’s Ghost. London: Bloomsbury.
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 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 center-
periphery positioning central to “traditional” post-colonial studies. Canadian
new diasporic literary authors have increasingly come to be seen as transcul-
tural and transnational authors, the writers of two homelands, figuring in the
global cross-border English-speaking cultural collage space and in the Cana-
dian 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 cov-
eted and publicly proclaimed, albeit not always practically effectual multi-
culturalism. Also, one has to consider Canadian new diasporic writing with
all of its constitutive ethnic identities within the context of a new inter-
American 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 mo-
saic, 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
18 Chapter Two

authors, on the other hand, have revisioned the multiculturalism issue criti-
cally 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 sim-
ply dealing with quintessentially Canadian themes and locales. Prominent in
this process have been the writer Austin Clarke from Barbados, Neil Bis-
soondath from Trinidad, Dionne Brand with her poetry and novels from
Trinidad as well, Olive Senior with her poetry and short stories, Dany Lafer-
rière 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 subjec-
tivity, coming from South America, is Guillermo Verdecchia with his mon-
odrama Fronteras Americanas (American Borders), which won the 1993
Governor general’s Award for Drama. In the play a displaced diasporic sub-
ject 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 pro-
tagonist 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 po-
etic 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), di-
rectly addressing the audience, his fellow Canadians. The movement forward
is no longer a movement towards the center, but rather a future trajectory to-
ward 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 na-
tional community is necessarily bounded by its geographic borders, which of
course also applies to its culture and literature discussed here, for some peo-
ple’s lives unfold in essentially diasporic settings, where class, race and citi-
zenship 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 citizen-
ship. The recent migratory diasporic spaces that the new diasporic Canadians
inhabit and lend them their distinctive voice and vision mark deterritorializa-
tion 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 Ameri-
canos) and transnational/borderland diasporic movements seem dangerously
close to and are indeed inextricable from the (neocolonialist) reterritorializa-
tions 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
20 Chapter Two

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 lit-
erature 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 disas-
trous 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 Disney-
land.” 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’ reintegra-
tion and (re)construction of identity and cultural adjustment after the initial
trauma caused by their sudden displacement from their original cultural and lin-
guistic 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 commu-
nication and hence integration into the new milieu. Some ten years ago the
American critic Stanley Fish tried to distinguish between two versions of mul-
ticulturalism. The first one of these is similar to Bissoondath’s understanding,
namely boutique multiculturalism exemplified “in a celebratory but only cos-
metic 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 multicultural-
ism, 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 insti-
tutionalized multiculturalism in Canada, whether perceived as a boutique or a
strong type of multiculturalism has, at least so far, represented a relatively vi-
able 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 men-
tioned essays, defines ethnic stereotypes akin to boutique multiculturalism in
the form of Canadian multiculturalism where ethnicity is seen as a commod-
ity in which ethnic groups will preserve their distinctiveness in a gentle and
insidious form of cultural apartheid. Regardless of how one sees multicultur-
alism 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 na-
tional framework, thus “a discourse of desire” (Huggan 154). Multicultural-
ism should not be dismissed as an entirely unworkable, utopian concept, al-
though 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 soli-
tudes’ monoculturalism that cramped so much creative energy in Canada be-
fore 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 “ad-
dress the diverse contexts of historical and current racial inequalities and injus-
tices” (Miki in Kulyk Keefer 1996: 250). Multiculturalism should and has be-
come 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 exclu-
sively 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 cun-
ningly disguised form of American imperialism” (Stam and Shohat 296).
22 Chapter Two

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 lan-
guages 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 lan-
guage 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 some-
thing 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 af-
ter 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 ar-
gues, 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 post-
colonial or not, for the question itself and the book are “quintessentially Cana-
dian 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 non-
hyphenated form it can and should be seen in a broader ahistorical sense re-
lating 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 cul-
tural 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 re-

sponses, which is why the overgeneralizingly used term post-colonial calls
for a detailed rethinking and revisioning now more than ever, especially as re-
gards 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 so-
ciopolitical 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, multicul-
turalism 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 Cana-
dian 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 na-
ture of identity formation, including Canada, diaspora referring to both the
voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements in the past and the pres-
ent 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,
24 Chapter Two

it is safe to say that both these two much-debated concepts essentially critique
Eurocentrism, racism, and colonial discourse. Given its various interpreta-
tions, multiculturalism (similarly to post-colonialism) represents a constella-
tion of discourses, which is why it is misleading to make sweeping general-
izations 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 na-
tionalist 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 estab-
lished and much-debated freedoms of liberal multiculturalism, are polyvocal-
ity, hybridity and also (post-colonial) mimicry. Homi Bhabha argues that the
concept of hybridity as a form of cultural difference, while sometimes re-
garded as manipulative, allows the voices of the Other/migrant, the margin-
alized and the dominated, to exist within the language of the dominant group
whose voice is never fully in control (Bhabha 1994). In recent theoretical de-
bates diaspora and its writing has been frequently connected with the con-
structed and transnational nature of identity formation, since the concept
refers to both voluntary and involuntary migrations and movements. In a sig-
nificant way the notion of the “new” diasporas and their literature also chal-
lenges the contested formulation of the dichotomy margin vs. center in post-
colonial 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 mem-
ory of a migrant and her/his own personal biography (or that of their parents
or grandparents). Indeed, contemporary Canadian diasporic literary produc-
tion is becoming pluralized and globalized by transcending individual tradi-
tional categories of Canadianness especially as regards the Canadian locale as
well as the volatility of cultural memory. There has recently emerged a pro-
nounced 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 in-
dicator 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 contempo-
rary 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. Min-

neapolis: 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, Wiley-
Blackwell, 2003.
Fish, Stanley. “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Think-
ing 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.
26 Chapter Two

Huggan, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic. London: Routledge, 2001.

Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “Who’s Afraid of Josef Skvorecky? The ‘Reactionary’ Immi-
grant 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. Water-
loo, 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 Uni-
versity Press, 2005.
Verdecchia, Guillermo. Fronteras Americanas/American Borders. Vancouver: Talon
Books, 1997.
Weiss, Timothy. Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia. Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 2004.
 Chapter Three

The Diaspora Writes Back:

Cultural Memory and
Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost
Smaro Kamboureli

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 forma-
tion of imagined communities. A marker of Québécois identity, remembering
operates as a point of suture signifying how cultural and political forces in-
terpellate 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 ref-
erent, 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 pro-
mote. 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

27
28 Chapter Three

some of its core members, would not include easily immigrants or Aborigi-
nals 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 col-
lectivities. . . . 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 in-
stitutions 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 ei-
ther 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 re-
member 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 dif-
ficulty 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
 The Diaspora Writes Back 29

Blumenberg’s investigation of myth in the modern age, namely, as “present-

time 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 coun-
ters the ‘absolutism of reality.’” Understanding mythical thinking this way,
Gourgouris argues, is “tantamount to the work of sublimation: the interven-
tion 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 di-
asporic subjectivity and citizenship entail today. Framed by critiques of On-
daatje 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 ob-
ligation to memorialize the history of the ethnic communities and nation-
states 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 au-
thenticity 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 de-
bates 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 mul-
ticulturalism, from the politics of difference and the so-called culture wars
and identity politics to postcoloniality, and more recently to a globalized un-
derstanding of what determines difference—all this has applied greater pres-
sure 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
30 Chapter Three

of allegiance directed at him” (1), that his protagonist, Anil, “is indeed fash-
ioned 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 fa-
mous phrase, the diaspora also writes back. Following the logic of this for-
mulation, 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 impera-
tive 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 On-
daatje’s case can tell us about literature, institutions, and citizenship today.

III

To begin, writing back suggests a retort, an intentional, if not forceful, re-

sponse 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 li-
cense. 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 capi-
tal of a nation-state, as Masao Miyoshi, among many other critics, reminds
us, surrenders “political and economic scrutiny” to “gesture[s] of pedagogi-
cal expediency” which, by regulating and normalizing differences, grant “stu-
dents and scholars with an alibi for their complicity in” the technologies of
the nation-state, processes and procedures devised in ways that conceal liber-
alism’s “self-deception” (98). Writing back is a response to this institutional-
ization of literature, this appropriation of home-grown knowledge. It ques-
tions the values and meanings memorialized in national master narratives,
while it often attempts to resuscitate cultural memories that have been re-
pressed. As Fujimoto’s analysis of the character of Palipana indicates, “the in-
digenous scholar’s mission today . . . is to decolonize and re-establish an
ownership of the discipline as well as their historiography” (14). Her use of
 The Diaspora Writes Back 31

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 Pali-
pana, must engage in the act of writing back home.
Interestingly, the adverb back discloses that the politics of this cultural mis-
sion is not entirely free of the ideology characterizing the formation and im-
plementation of national pedagogy. Writing back home may be an act of re-
sistance, 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 en-
gages 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 re-
casts 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 ap-
propriating strategies of the processes that institutionalize knowledge. As Fu-
jomoto writes, “Palipana’s knowledge, or Lakma’s inheritance of it, . . . re-
veals 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 in-
stitutions” (16). In this context, writing back home is writing-as-reading,
reading as a performative act, an act that executes and articulates the differ-
ence 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 mem-
ory 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 knowl-
edge does not need the kind of public exhortation of je me souviens to sur-
vive. 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 dis-
seminated. Thus while cultural memory is often monumentalized, in Sri
Lanka it is at once suppressed and in circulation. This double mode of cul-
tural memory reinforces not only the ineradicable presence of what is re-
membered, 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
32 Chapter Three

redeem them either of their complicity as scholars or of their personal fail-

ures. 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 disci-
plinary 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 under-
stand 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 rethink-
ing 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 aca-
demic) 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 pub-
lic good. Critical multiculturalism and academic citizenship, then, have a di-
alectical 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 pre-
sumed raison d’être of literary critics, especially critics engaged in postcolo-
nial criticism, is to produce knowledge that at once exposes inequities and re-
spects and celebrates difference, then it behooves them to expect a diasporic
author to be equally engaged with the politics of difference or to chastise di-
asporic 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 dif-
ference, thereby affirming their benevolence, than critiquing how difference
is constituted.
In this context, the critical act exemplifies the same double affect that in-
forms 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 in-
volves, as Fujimoto implies, the inclination to see diasporic authors as native
 The Diaspora Writes Back 33

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” (Flud-
ernik 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 di-
aspora,” as opposed to a “proletarian” or “victim” diaspora.5 While On-
daatje’s critics are quick to draw attention to his privileged Sri Lankan back-
ground, 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 con-
tents of cultural memory. Be it personal or collective, national or intrana-
tional, 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 inti-
mate 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 al-
lude 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
34 Chapter Three

of history reveals Ondaatje’s indebtedness to the postmodern sensibility, a

sensibility that, I should hasten to add, is not entirely devoid of political im-
port. Exposing the extent to which history is imbricated in the knowledge/
power dynamic contributes to the instrumentality of writing. Nevertheless, al-
though 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 conver-
gence 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 in-
tended 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 ex-
changes 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 im-
pulses associated both with modernity and postmodernity as understood in
Western terms. While she refrains from defining herself in relation to the Sin-
halese diasporic community, thus affirming her individuality in terms that dis-
avow 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 commu-
nity of forensic anthropologists that operates as a substitute for family, and
 The Diaspora Writes Back 35

the insulated forensic lab, with rock music echoing inside its soundproof walls,
that becomes a surrogate home, a home that presumably operates outside na-
tional discourses and local or global economies. This environment, together
with the logic of scientific knowledge and the presumed certainties this knowl-
edge entails, creates the only comfort zone she experiences. What Fujimoto
calls Anil’s neutrality, then, is synonymous with a subjectivity that eschews cul-
tural 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 racial-
ized 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 col-
leagues and the TV set on which she avidly watches Westerns, she has
adopted, to borrow Aihwa Ong’s concept, a flexible citizenship. Anil’s flexi-
bility 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 con-
sciousness. 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 sci-
ence, 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
36 Chapter Three

she practices her subjectivity, the remains of the past, the debris of her per-
sonal 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 un-
folds as a recollection of the past that is simultaneously a translation informed
by the ideological forces that shape the present. Thus cultural memory as em-
bodied history is rarely a matter of simply delving into the past or recollect-
ing 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 ex-
pansion 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’”
 The Diaspora Writes Back 37

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 Mon-
treal (Winks 1–23).
Throughout my argument, I employ the term history in a rather loose way, as a ref-
erence to official discourse. A fuller discussion of the relationship of memory to his-
tory 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 Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) and The Protestant Eth-
nic 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 Wash-
ington P, 1997).
5. See John A. Armstrong, “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” in Migration,
Diasporas and Transnationalism, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Chel-
tenham: 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 “au-
thentic” knowledge, aka native informants. Though this aspect of writing about cul-
tures 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.

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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 Ar-
cades 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 An-
timythical Era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
———. 1996. Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Mod-
ern 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.
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elle reference?” Le Bulletin Histoire Politique, 13, 2 (hiver): 127–45.
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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 de-
velopment prepared by the United Nations Department of Economic and So-
cial 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 de-
veloped 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 popula-
tion. Percentage wise, however, the share of the total population who are mi-
grants was larger in Australia (19.6 percent) and Canada (18.9 percent). Fur-
thermore, in regional terms, Europe’s migrant population of 64 million was
almost 50 percent greater than the 45 million in Northern America (UN Sta-
tistics). In L’homme nomade (2003), Jacques Attali gives an even higher fig-
ure 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 with-
out 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 coun-
tries other than the one where they were born (297). As these figures suggest,
the phenomena of immigration, displacements for political or economic rea-
sons, and expatriation have had a significant impact on European countries,

39
40 Chapter Four

altering the ethnic composition of their societies and calling into question tra-
ditional definitions of national identity, and will likely continue to be impor-
tant 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 be-
gan 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 em-
igration 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, mul-
tiracial Britain and the reshaping of national identity (“Windrush”). Writers-
to-be from the West Indies/Caribbean such as Samuel Selvon, George Lam-
ming, 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 lib-
erty 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 writ-
ers, 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,” hav-
ing 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
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 41

continual transformation, which necessarily involves processes of interpreta-

tion and re-expression. Clearly, in today’s increasingly multicultural soci-
eties, immigration brings new opportunities and fashions new identities; it
cannot be denied, though, that for many the émigré experience is anxiety-
fraught and painful, and in this essay I will highlight its problematic aspects
and predicaments, asking the question to what extent the concept of transla-
tion 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 al-
ready 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 employ-
ment, 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; how-
ever, 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 Kun-
dera’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 post-
colonial 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 excit-
ing, but it is suspect; at least for him, it is contrary to experience. There is a
42 Chapter Four

limit imposed by time on the number of cultures to which a person can be-
long; 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 some-
thing 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 condi-
tion 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 pre-
cise usage of the term, as well as the tendency to stretch it beyond its capac-
ity. “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 liv-
ing 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 hy-
bridity 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 ne-
gotiates 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
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 43

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 ac-
tivity involves a transformation of the foreign into the familiar. Identity
formation can be conceptualized as a translation that comprises two basic op-
erations: 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 informa-
tion/knowledge, such as socio-cultural knowledge about conventions of be-
havior 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 sec-
ond step in this translation process constitutes a response to the compre-
hended foreign convention of behavior in the form of words, gestures, or acts.
Translation passes from comprehension to expression, or to use slightly dif-
ferent terms, from interpretation to performance. A person’s identity as store-
house 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 compre-
hended 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, multi-
cultural 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 di-
rectional 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
44 Chapter Four

direction (i.e., toward the foreign language or culture). The greater the differ-
ence between languages and sociocultural conventions, the greater the resist-
ance 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 al-
ready 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 jux-
taposition 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, reconfigur-
ing but never eliminating it, such that the space is changed with each inter-
vention. Broadly speaking, a barrier or an obstacle is that which does not per-
mit 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 particu-
larized 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 deci-
phering 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 an-
other. 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 partic-
ular 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 de-
verbalization 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”
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 45

conventions and ideas. However, the model also is based on a premise that
each culture has particularities, and some aspects of these particularities re-
main untranslatable; those aspects will change in the course of time and ac-
cording 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 relation-
ships 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 cul-
tures and society, then identity is also something constructed through inter-
pretation and performance. A translational model emphasizes this through its
explanation of the process of identity formation as two-stepped: comprehen-
sion 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 re-
ality 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 émi-
gré 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
46 Chapter Four

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 per-
son. 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 cul-
ture 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 ac-
quisition of a new cultural code without losing the code of one’s native lan-
guage 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 knowl-
edge and re-adjusting old knowledge. To lose one’s original culture (i.e., dé-
culturation) is not a tragedy, Todorov remarks, as long as one acquires an-
other 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 ground-
breaking 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 land-
scape 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
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 47

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 émi-
gré 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 terri-
fied 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 pas-
sengers, 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 wa-
ter 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
48 Chapter Four

barriers and restrictions that they encounter (e.g., difficulties in finding lodg-
ing, unemployment, harassment by police, prejudice and racism, their own ig-
norance 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 em-
igrants, 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
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 49

the beginning of his career, the émigré experience impacts on his 1950s nov-
els about Trinidad and one of his masterworks, A House for Mr. Biswas
(1961). Partly biographical, a fictional portrait of the author’s father, the char-
acter of Biswas also takes shape as well from Naipaul’s own émigré experi-
ence: 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 sub-
ject 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 Lam-
ming’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 in-
ability 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, how-
ever, is Salim’s expatriate friend Indar, whose attitude toward place and iden-
tity sets him apart; abandoning the idea of home and belonging, Indar coun-
sels 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 possi-
bilities,” 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
50 Chapter Four

“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 to-
ward 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 Mus-
lim 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 highlight-
ing of characters’ responses to traces of the past such as African masks, mon-
uments, 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 re-
interpreted and transformed.
In L’homme dépaysé Tzvetan Todorov begins his account of his experi-
ences 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 dis-
covers 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 re-
turn 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
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 51

his studies and ended up staying. In time, he mastered the language and suc-
cessfully 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 solu-
tion, 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 ap-
plicable, as he had supposed) and his Bulgarian discourse, since each can cor-
respond 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 ob-
stacles of getting from X to Y. He concludes that having two voices, two identi-
ties, 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 hi-
erarchy, 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 lan-
guage 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 per-
sons: 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 ac-
count of the predicament of hybridity illuminates the limitations of this concept
and shows in concrete detail what belonging to different cultures entails.
52 Chapter Four

Like Todorov, Milan Kundera is another émigré in the tradition of Euro-

pean writers like Conrad, Beckett, and Nabokov who opt to write in a lan-
guage other than their mother tongue, and in this respect they share a situa-
tion 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 writ-
ers are perhaps aware of translation in a more profound way than Lamming
and Naipaul, for whom cultural and dialectal differences would seem the pri-
mary sources of tension and estrangement in their being born into or belong-
ing 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 coun-
try 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 con-
cept 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, inter-
pretation and performance. The difficulties that Irena and Josef confront
when they return to their native land fall into two broad categories: misinter-
pretation (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 treas-
ure he had lost, and could retrieve only by telling about it. (Trans. Asher 34)
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 53

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 expecta-
tions 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 re-
curring 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 émi-
gré 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 as-
pect 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 can-
not 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 previ-
ously have met. As for Josef, the gap between his Czech identity and his Dan-
ish identity are comically recounted in the chapters wherein he finds and re-
reads 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.
54 Chapter Four

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 sin-
gle 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 (nei-
ther 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 Lam-
ming but also by others, such as Todorov in Nous et les autres: la réflexion
française sur la diversité humaine (On Human Diversity) (1989), which con-
siders 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 genera-
tions: the first generation “arrived with little luggage. They . . . survived the
loss of their imaginary Britain” (New World Order 246). The sons and daugh-
ters, 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
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 55

“high anxiety” of trying to fit in all of them. “Our identities are fluid. Be-
longing 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 peo-
ple 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 self-
chosen, 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 coun-
try of their birth by way of the Internet, satellite television, and mobile tele-
phone services. Given these trends—the commonality of immigration, the of-
ten 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 fu-
ture 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 be-
long 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 Ange-
les, cited by Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_African_Caribbean_
community.
3. My translation.
4. My translation of this work.
56 Chapter Four

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 cal-
ligraphie. 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: Ha-
chette, 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.
 Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience 57

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 Com-
pany, 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: Uni-
versity 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 barri-
ers of the seemingly impermeable boundaries of institutions, politics, lan-
guages, 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 en-
richment and as the ideal outcome of such a cultural brokerage. This, how-
ever, is a difficult process, as Linda Hutcheon argues in Other Solitudes:
Canadian Multicultural Fictions: “Caught between two worlds, the immi-
grant 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 im-
migrant and the immigrant writer but also the critics become cultural media-
tors or brokers.
One component of cultural brokerage, namely the effect of cultural pro-
ductions on readers and the latter’s responses to these multicultural texts,
would necessitate an empirical investigation more in line with reader-
response criticism, which I do not propose to do in this paper. Rather, I will

59
60 Chapter Five

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. Fur-
thermore, 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 signif-
icant 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 busi-
ness, 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 fre-
quently used synonymously with “cultural mediator” or “cultural intermedi-
aries.” 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 de-
pending 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 barri-
ers that separate them” (Szasz 3) and cross them frequently either physically
or mentally. Mediating between cultures presupposes the existence of cul-
tures that are in some way connected, e.g., because of their direct adjoining
geographical borders or because of migration movements. The cultural bro-
ker has to be curious of both (or more) cultures, receptive of cultural struc-
tures and phenomena, has to be trustworthy and determined to be actively en-
gaged in this mediation and to believe in the existence of cultural values that
 Between the Island and the City 61

are worth being mediated (cf. Szasz 294–300). In contrast to economic bro-
kers 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 me-
diator has to assume that all sides are interested in hearing about other cul-
tures and has to trust in the success of his or her endeavors.
But what would be successful cultural brokerage? In economics, it is eas-
ier 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 in-
creased 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 in-
tercultural understanding—an understanding of the meaning of differences
and equality, of cultural otherness without negative (or positive) stereotypifi-
cation. This important result of cultural brokerage can be achieved first of all
by making people curious about cultural otherness, by making clear that oth-
erness 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 hy-
bridity as its key characteristic. Unfortunately, however, such successful bro-
kering 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 dis-
cusses 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 so-
cial 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 ac-
ademic teacher in this process: “My academic position is inextricably tied in
62 Chapter Five

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 ar-
gue 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 encoun-
ters that take place in these zones are never between two equal parties but are
always defined by power struggles, hierarchies, and often violent confronta-
tions. 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 con-
tact zones, that is, a space of cultural brokerage. Furthermore, the cultural
broker not only mediates between two (or more) places and people, but in or-
der 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 follow-
ing, 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 im-
migration” (Hutcheon 10). This is what Linda Hutcheon rightly claims in
Other Solitudes, referring to the various waves of immigration over the cen-
turies, 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”
 Between the Island and the City 63

(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” (Rogoziński 323) and subject to the Commonwealth Immigra-
tion Act of 1962, which restricted Caribbean immigration to England and di-
verted it to the U.S. and Canada. In November 1966, Barbados became fully
independent. “All this coincided with a liberalization in Canada’s own immi-
gration 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 Multicultural-
ism Act5 of 1988, Canada experienced a shift from a “colonial” to a “post-
colonial” 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
64 Chapter Five

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 de-
mythified 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 ar-
rival.7 Additionally, racism as well as the general status of in-between cul-
tures and living in a diaspora produces an emotional “tension between want-
ing 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 idealiza-
tion of the new and a rejection of the old on the one hand or a reluctant ac-
ceptance 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-in-
residence 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 Immigra-
tion 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 suc-
cessful 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 out-
standing body of work and served as a mentor to other writers. Clarke’s books
 Between the Island and the City 65

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 peo-
ple there as motivating factors for immigration to North America, and fre-
quently 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 stu-
dent 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 ex-
pected 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 rent-
ing 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 Cana-
dian 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 inter-
view, “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 bio-
logical 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
66 Chapter Five

has not come to Canada as a student but as someone looking for new experi-
ences 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 inter-
view 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 pos-
sible for this young man because he left his home against the will of his fa-
ther 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 in-
troduction 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, disillu-
sionment, 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 back-
ground. However, clearly, the man in “Canadian Experience” fails in this en-
deavor. 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 bro-
ker 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 expe-
riences 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
 Between the Island and the City 67

the mirror: “his image was incorrect” (31). While he looks at his mirror reflec-
tion, 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 reflec-
tion” (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 fol-
lowing 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 re-
quires a “university degree in business or in finance, or the equivalent in busi-
ness 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 alien-
ating 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 reflec-
tion, outward appearance, and thus identity. Although his walk “in their shadow”
reminds him of “walking in a valley back in Barbados” (42), this familiar per-
ception is destroyed by the simple statement: “The buildings look like steel”
(42); they are emotionless, lifeless, and immovable.
68 Chapter Five

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 en-
tering, 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 splat-
ters his suit against four glass panels, and makes him disjointed” (42). By en-
larging 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 pho-
tograph” (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 ab-
sence 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 ab-
sence in that comforting circle, as if he had been erased and displaced per-
manently. 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 sus-
taining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating im-
ages 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 win-
dows and the doors” (47). While the photography stores memory for George,
the reader cannot explicitly notice any positive emotions toward the rep-
resentation. Strangling windows and doors could suggest both a suffocating
 Between the Island and the City 69

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 soci-
ety 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 any-
one’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’ immi-
grant? 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 dis-
trict. 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 dri-
ver’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 re-
flection in the looking glass (31). Four eyes are involved in this act of see-
ing but they are all his, his own two and their reflection. Thus, his percep-
tion 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
70 Chapter Five

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 ig-
nored; 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 sys-
tem 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 mo-
ment 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, as-
pects 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 indi-
vidual 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 ten-
sion 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 self-
consciously employed and strategically positioned in textual constructions”
(1–2), and laughter in such a post-colonial context as Clarke’s story offers is
 Between the Island and the City 71

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 ul-
timate act for once put him in control of his life in Canada, this control is tran-
sitory 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. Laugh-
ter 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 de-
sire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is al-
most 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 rela-
tions 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 contin-
ues to live here, is caused by the solid foundation that he got from the West In-
dies. In other words, what I am going to do next is to draw a character who de-
spises 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 autobi-
ographical writing—Clarke communicates to his readers the desire of
Caribbean immigrants in Canada for belonging, for an acceptance in Cana-
dian society without having to assimilate, without having to give up their
72 Chapter Five

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 “ex-
clusion 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 En-
glish and Philosophy in 1975) and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Educa-
tion (MA in History and Philosophy in 1989) and has taught at the Universi-
ties 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 Na-
tional 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 assimi-
lation” (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 truth-
ful. I write out of a literature, a genre, a tradition, and that tradition is the tra-
dition 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,
 Between the Island and the City 73

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 sto-
ries 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 under-
stood by its perpetrators as a counter-violence opposing systems of brutal op-
pression. In this way, it is a violence of contradiction. At the same time, vio-
lence against violence becomes contradictory in the sense of ‘ambiguous,’ a
strategy which incessantly questions the views and moral codes of its perpe-
trators 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 is-
lands 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 fam-
ily 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
74 Chapter Five

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 in-
creasing alienation from “home” into a sign of gradual assimilation to Cana-
dian society. Jasmine calls it “new idiosyncrasies” (132) such as her own pre-
tense: “‘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, re-
hearsing 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 veil-
ing 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 sup-
press is the nostalgia for an idealized home that increases almost pro-
portionally 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 eter-
nally 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 peo-
ple” (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
 Between the Island and the City 75

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 be-
havior 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, end-
lessly 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 nas-
tily 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 tempo-
rary 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 homoge-
nous 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
76 Chapter Five

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 ambigu-
ity 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 jour-
ney 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 guar-
anteed 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 rev-
olution 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 self-
identification.
Brand’s stories are about “drifting” (Goldman 13), a term Marlene Gold-
man has applied to Brand’s work, about drifting between places, between
Canada and the Caribbean to “underscore . . . the inadequacies of the nation-
state” (Goldman 13). But Brand also “promotes drifting as an equally legiti-
mate 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 bro-
kers 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
 Between the Island and the City 77

an awareness of linguistic possibilities and political dangers and the use of

“emancipatory strategies” (cf. Birkle, “We Are an Internally Colonized Peo-
ple”) 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 libera-
tion 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 citizen-
ship” (“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 video-
maker, 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 ex-
perience 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 Trini-
dad, 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
78 Chapter Five

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 short-
listed for several prestigious prizes and have been reviewed and highly
praised in newspapers such as The New York Times Book Review, Kirkus Re-
views, Publishers Weekly, Vancouver Sun, Los Angeles Times, The Washing-
ton 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 ulti-
mately render any fixed and singular notions of individual or cultural identity
inadequate. Furthermore, the stories expose the human drive for categoriza-
tion 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) under-
standing 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 ap-
plies to black British Columbian literature and orature. “Tidalectics,” accord-
ing 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 lay-
ers. 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 Van-
couver, is written in what Marlene Nourbese Philip calls “‘Caribbean de-
motic’” (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
 Between the Island and the City 79

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) au-
thentically Indian but also about the impossibility of this process. While the
I-narrator believes to be “a Hindu par excellence” (47) in Trinidad, her con-
frontation 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! Chi-
nese 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 Trinida-
dian, 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 hy-
brid but fixed and pure. She believes that there is somewhere in her an es-
sence 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
80 Chapter Five

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 sub-
jective perception and a desire for authenticity. Considering oneself “authenti-
cally 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 sex-
ist 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 lov-
ingly 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 ac-
cording 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 expos-
ing another layer.
 Between the Island and the City 81

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 so-
cieties as immigrants. All are constantly trying to come to terms with their de-
sire for belonging and the rejection by Canadian society. This rejection takes
away any self-confidence in defining who they believe they are and in find-
ing 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 recog-
nition, 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 cos-
tume), 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 defi-
nition is multiple with some categories being mutually exclusive, others de-
pendent upon customary usage. What Sushila also discovers is that her iden-
tity 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, in-
dicates 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
82 Chapter Five

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 cre-
ativity 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 In-
dian 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 Hin-
dus 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 grand-
mother 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 grand-
mother’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 in-
vent 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.
 Between the Island and the City 83

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 colo-
nizing 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, rit-
uals, 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 transcul-
tural 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 au-
thors 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
84 Chapter Five

consequence of and resistance to colonialism, and, in the case of Caribbean

immigrants to Canada, as troubled with the experiences of a migratory exis-
tence. My own reading of these six stories by three Caribbean-Canadian writ-
ers 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 cul-
tures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmet-
rical 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 en-
trance to Canada only to the ability of prospective immigrants. Families of landed im-
migrants 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 be-
gan 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 police-
men 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 pre-
serve 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
 Between the Island and the City 85

of our cultural backgrounds, we write out of a collective African consciousness—a con-

sciousness 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 Bis-
soondath 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 crois-
sant, 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 so-
ciety,” meaning “the inequitable treatment of members of this community by Cana-
dian 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 collec-
tions give voice to Barbadian immigrants to Canada. Frequently written in the ver-
nacular 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 de-
picts Clarke’s boyhood in Barbados, the influences of British colonialism on lan-
guage, 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 Co-
lumbia—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 On-
tario, where he was a reporter for a while. In this essay, the young man describes
86 Chapter Five

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 experi-
ence: “So, the wage may be a small wage. I cannot ask questions about its size sim-
ply 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 with-
out 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 Postcolo-
nial (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 Cana-
dian writing has always been ethnic and, therefore, multicultural writing because of
Canada’s constitution of Native and immigrant peoples. (Im)migration, miscegena-
tion, and transculturation are phenomena that have shaped the North American conti-
nent 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 semi-
autobiography 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 im-
permeable 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
 Between the Island and the City 87

importation of indentured workers from India and other parts of Asia” (Henry 5). Eco-
nomic “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.

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dos, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago: Press of the University of the West Indies.
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Christl Verduyn. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press.
Birkle, Carmen. 2001. “‘We Are an Internally Colonized People’: Emancipatory
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Danièle Pitavy, 117–30. Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon.
———. 2004. “Comparing Caribbean and Irish (De)Colonizations: Dionne Brand’s
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Black, Ayanna. 1992. “Foreword.” In Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent,
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Brand, Dionne. 1989. “Sketches in Transit . . . Going Home.” In Sans Souci and Other
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———. 1990. “Interview by Dagmar Novak.” In Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicul-
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———. 1993. “Who Can Speak for Whom?” Brick: A Literary Journal 46 (Summer):
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———. 1994. “Notes for Writing Thru Race.” In Bread out of Stone: Recollections,
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Brown, Lloyd W. 1989. El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in
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Butling, Pauline. 2005. “Dionne Brand on Struggle and Community, Possibility and
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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):
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———. 1986. “Canadian Experience.” In Nine Men Who Laughed, 31–51. Markham,
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———. 1986. “Introduction.” In Nine Men Who Laughed, 1–7. Markham, ON: Pen-
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———. 1990. “Interview by Marion Richmond.” In Other Solitudes: Canadian Mul-
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———. 1996. “Caribbean-Canadians.” In Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in En-
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———. 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 Lit-
erature 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: Co-
lumbia 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 En-
glish-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. Lon-
don: Routledge.
———. 1996. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writ-
ers, 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 Post-
Colonial Literatures, ed. Bruce King, 214–29. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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January. http://www.kintespace.com/kp_rashidi1.html (8 March 2005).
Reichl, Susanne, and Mark Stein, eds. 2005. Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Post-
colonial. 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.
Rogoziński, 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. Lon-
don: 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 un-
derlies all his work is primordially oral. It seems appropriate, therefore, that
my own experience regarding New Norcia, my meeting Alf, our long con-
versations, the stories he told me and his view of his own work should be-
come 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 in-
ternalizing a specific geographical site are totally different. For me, New Nor-
cia 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 his-
torical 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 road-
sidebenches; 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, Bea-
con 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
92 Chapter Six

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 Aus-
tralia accompanied by Dom José Benito Serra. Both men had entered the
Benedictine order in Santiago de Compostela but, in 1835, the deeply anti-
clerical Spanish government policies closed all men’s monasteries and con-
fiscated 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 enter-
prise. 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 decima-
tion of the local populations by introduced diseases in the 1860s, he concen-
trated 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 cul-
ture that was rare in his day.2

History was to prove that Salvado was indeed unusual in his care and in-
terest 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 Tay-
lor’s life.
In 2004 the Australian Studies Centre at Barcelona University organized a
conference under the title (titled) “Landscapes of Exile” and, given the con-
nections with the Benedictine Abbey of Montserrat, one of the most em-
blematic 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
 The Child of New Norcia: Alf Taylor’s Poetry 93

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 organ-
ized 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 be-
came aware of just how huge the monastery was. Most of the original build-
ings 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 situa-
tion, 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
94 Chapter Six

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 va-
garies 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 an-
cientness, 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 Nor-
cia made me more aware than ever of the layering of history that is embed-
ded 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 Eu-
ropean 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 nat-
ural course of human evolution by intervening to strengthen human heredi-
tary 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 do-
mestic 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 Nor-
cia was no better and no worse than all the other missions in which Aborigi-
nal 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 per-
sonality 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 Nor-
cia Mission when he was six where his brother, Benjamin, had already been
 The Child of New Norcia: Alf Taylor’s Poetry 95

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 memo-
ries 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 narra-
tive of loss and continued mourning for what he can never recover: his child-
hood, 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 at-
tempt 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
96 Chapter Six

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 mar-
bles 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 po-
etry 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 in-
ner 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 laugh-
ter 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 doc-
umentary 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.
 The Child of New Norcia: Alf Taylor’s Poetry 97

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 hell-
hole of dole and drink, drink and dole to pick up a pen he believes he was al-
ways destined to hold. The child that longed for its mother and suffered so in-
tensely 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, rep-
resenting 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
98 Chapter Six

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 effec-
tive. His writing, while not immediately confronting and powered by defiant,
but justified anger, as is that of many other Aboriginal writers, creates a dis-
tinct 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 Call-
ing 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 rec-
ognizes the need for both sides, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, “[t]o pull to-
gether,” 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) Plac-
ing these two poems opposite each other in the collection suggests Alf’s ho-
listic 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
 The Child of New Norcia: Alf Taylor’s Poetry 99

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 “do-
gooders” 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. Educa-
tion, both traditional and western, “is a must” if tradition and customs are to sur-
vive 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). Deal-
ing with deaths in custody, the title takes on a double meaning, those Aborig-
inal 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)
100 Chapter Six

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 denounce-
ment, 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 liter-
ature. 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 in-
troduction 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 an-
nounces that this Maori fiction “could have come from no other country.”
Clearly this cult of difference is inscribed in the larger context of institution-
alized biculturalism which has shaped and formed Aotearoa/New Zealand’s
national identity since the 1980s. On an international scale, although bicul-
turalism 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 con-
temporary postcolonial domain.2 While the usefulness and suitability of post-
colonial theory to Maori fiction is widely accepted, the question of the place
of Maori writing within Western literature at large, and particularly the influ-
ence of its European roots, is less certain and more problematic.

101
102 Chapter Seven

While accepting the validity—some would say desirability—of arguments

against reading Maori literature within the possibilities of European aesthet-
ics, 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 dis-
covery 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 marginal-
ized 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 out-
side 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 be-
tween art and society. Thus, the study of aesthetics is always already em-
bedded 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 con-
text he suggests that to reduce African literature and Western criticism to a
binary insider-outsider mechanism “negates the transculturative potential in-
herent 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 tradi-
tions that are the historical outcome of a series of—often violent—cultural
 The Englishness of Maori Writing 103

collisions” (56). Huggan argues that aspects of Western culture and literary
aesthetics have become an integral part of colonized cultures and their writ-
ing. 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 Euro-
pean national identity formation, describes the process by which all nation-
alisms 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 inter-
preted 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 leg-
ends 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 build-
ing 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 ro-
manticism (Stafford and Williams, “Maoriland” 30–36).
The search to establish authenticity of the past is a key feature of both the Ro-
mantic 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 pro-
tagonist 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
104 Chapter Seven

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 for-
gotten 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, col-
lapsing emotion, land and the rural persona, follows a Wordsworthian schema.
In his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, the Romantic poet describes the “essen-
tial passions of the heart,” most wholly contained in the “rustic” peasant as po-
etic subject (“Preface” 650). The pastoral vision is organic, growing out of the
soil rather than schoolroom learning. In Tangi, Ihimaera’s narrator puts into per-
spective 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 reformu-
lated 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 for-
mulating 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 char-
acters 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
 The Englishness of Maori Writing 105

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 cloud-
less morning. So beautiful they are, and they have all the sky as their domin-
ion. 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 ru-
ral 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 con-
vey 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 inde-

cipherable 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 in-
dependence from both England and their colonial legacy, mid-century Pakeha
poets shrug off the loftiness of romantic sensibility and replace it with real-
ism and ruggedness. Nevertheless, John Newton finds a sublimated romanti-
cism 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.
106 Chapter Seven

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 na-
tionalists. 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, nor-
malizing 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 al-
ways 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 work-
ing 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, liv-
ing 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 set-
ting 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 cul-
tural renaissance and nineteenth-century European nationalism and its local
 The Englishness of Maori Writing 107

Maoriland and Pakeha nationalist variants may stem from a reluctance to col-
lapse the extensive differences that separate these movements. Such circum-
spection is evident in the way that New Zealand literary commentators have
tended not to emphasize Ihimaera’s debt to English cultural and literary an-
tecedents, 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 em-
phasis 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) liter-
ary hegemony. Key texts read in a manner intending to deconstruct an impe-
rial 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 pro-
duction 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 acknowledge-
ment 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 hierar-
chical relationship implicit in organic filiation. Maintaining echoes of famil-
ial connection makes Said’s affiliation more than a postmodern, indiscrimi-
nate, picking and choosing of literary influences, and more a kind of adopting
into the family, of collecting writers and texts deemed meaningful.4 Affilia-
tion 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
108 Chapter Seven

of activated library whose effect is to stimulate the production of forms of dis-

ciplined, 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, in-
cluding 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 bina-
risms 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 vi-
sion 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 out-
wards, 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. Read-
ings that focus on the counter-discursive strategies of Wide Sargasso Sea vis-à-
vis 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 dif-
ferences but to argue for the need to understand the complex trafficking that ex-
ists 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 Do-
minica and Brontë’s on the Yorkshire Moors do not mean that their respec-
tive 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
 The Englishness of Maori Writing 109

Rochester foreshadows postcolonial concerns, During argues that the diffu-

sion 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” be-
tween colonial and postcolonial “couples” in a way that acknowledges both
texts as in an unstable relationship with each other. In Ihimaera’s 1989 short-
story 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 Mans-
field’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 house-
hold, in which the child’s perhaps artistic sensitivity clashes with the inele-
gance 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 ac-
ceptable. His depiction of the child called by sacred weavers to take on their
110 Chapter Seven

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 Ihi-
maera 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 envi-
ronments and different artistic treatment of these three stories, the pathos re-
mains 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 inclu-
sion 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 re-
vives Chekhov’s social criticism. Although Ihimaera ostensibly rewrites Mans-
field’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 con-
tains 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 com-
mon 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. Fur-
thermore, Said’s affiliation and Newman’s instability of canonical texts make
possible an analysis of Ihimaera’s fiction alert to interanimation or “complex
 The Englishness of Maori Writing 111

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 influ-
ences and intertextual references suggest that Maori fiction does indeed be-
long to the Western literary paradigm, an ensemble of texts within which
Maori fiction’s “distinctive stylistic features” may be discussed in the termi-
nology 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 cul-
tural and literary biases. Said’s insistence on the fact that literature does not exist out-
side 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 cul-
tural 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.”

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Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
112 Chapter Seven

Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths (eds.). 1989. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Rout-
ledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity 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?”
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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 Ihi-
maera’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. Lon-
don: Constable.
Newman, Judie. 1996. “The Ballistic Bard: Intertextuality and Postcolonial Fiction.”
 The Englishness of Maori Writing 113

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 Colo-
nial 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 ti-
tans 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 newfan-
gled “cities of refuge,” its revised laws, and its awkward grappling with “glo-
calization.”2 This autobiographical impulse turns out to be more of a “com-
pulse” (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 cor-
poreal 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,

115
116 Chapter Eight

the “I” writes her autobiography when the cohesion of that “I” is most uncer-
tain, 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 first-

person 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 ex-
cision and infibulation were at first mentioned “in passing” and with circum-
spection 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 simulta-
neously published with Senegalese Khady’s Mutilée (2005), further propel
the issue of genital alterations into the literature of exile whereas Ivorian Fa-
tou 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 Litera-
ture(s) constitute a possible new discursive category, Sabrina Brancato ob-
serves with regret that “high sales usually concern sensationalist narratives
reinforcing negative stereotypes about immigrants (especially African or
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 117

Muslim groups). These texts usually take the form of testimonials or autobi-
ographies authored by a Western ghost writer, feed a Western white reader-
ship eager for third-world victim stories. One widely known example is for-
mer 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 de-
exoticized through the contextualization of her culture and the author herself
seeks self-representation as in an autobiography.5 Also, it is dangerous to con-
fuse a ghostwriter with an amanuensis. One should indeed distinguish be-
tween 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 appar-
ent 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 no-
body 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 any-
thing 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)
118 Chapter Eight

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 si-
lence 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). Infibula-
tion thus functions as a twisted form of sexual education and as the bodily im-
position 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 ad-
ditional, sensational fodder for Western consumption but, more to our pur-
pose, 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). In-
fibulation and marriageability being causally linked, Dirie also evokes mar-
riage as a way of disciplining the “rebel” that she has become and of trans-
forming 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
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 119

dried on the jagged edge of the broken razor blade. Then her mother blind-
folds 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 talk-
ing 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 un-
controllably, and I prayed, Please, God, let it be over quickly. Soon it was, be-
cause 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] hov-
ered 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 experi-
ence to her German amanuensis Leo Linder, Nura Abdi remembers being cu-
rious 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 gen-
ital infection to the passive condition of an admittedly essentialized African
120 Chapter Eight

womanhood, hypocoristically reduced to “the passive, selfless manner of a

child” (48).
Waris’s later exposure to European, American, and African feminisms and hu-
man rights, as well as her work as a UN Ambassador against excision, are inter-
vening 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 re-
member 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 bare-
bones image. The actual details have often been lost, so the brain creates a
‘probable scenario’ based on general knowledge or present-related imagery bor-
rowed 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 sub-
ject into recognition of both the trauma and the survival itself. This recogni-
tion can start, as in the other cases of Somali Nura Abdi and Fadumo Korn (in
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 121

Born in the Big Rains [2006]) and of Senegalese Khady (Koïta), in their (re-
spectively) British, German, and French homes for asylum seekers.
Waris Dirie, like Kesso Barry before her, is painfully aware that the reve-
lation 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” charac-
teristic 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 patri-
archy. 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, mas-
culinist 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 fol-
lows that African women’s self-writing is doubly relational or relational
squared. That “relationality” is established not only through the targeted fe-
male 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 sto-
ries” 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.
122 Chapter Eight

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 ten-
uous. 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 oper-
ation. Her labia and clitoris are indeed still missing and only an expensive, so-
phisticated surgery akin to a transgender surgery could restore her lost geni-
tals, 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, com-
pounded by the bipolar category of “whole” vs. excised.
The defibulation operation, performed in a clinic by a male Western doc-
tor, 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 un-
der 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 quack-
ery 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 cov-
erage 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 Burk-
ina 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
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 123

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 im-
age, Waris Dirie completes her gradual disidentification with infibulated So-
mali 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 mod-
eling 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 West-
ern (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 Euro-
pean legislation on excision. Unlike the other two, Fatou’s novel is a third-
person 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 be-
tween the diasporic and ancestral notions of “home” complicates the post-
colonial 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 ob-
server of a love scene between the young hunter and the village exciser. Mal-
imouna then literally and figuratively falls off her tree into an inextricable im-
broglio 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
124 Chapter Eight

excision. Keïta unambiguously favors the eradication of genital excision but

imaginatively attempts to probe the minds of “people who continue to prac-
tice 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 de-
bauchery 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 “mu-
tilation,” Malimouna invokes human rights, realizing, however, that she is us-
ing “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 en-
tails, 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, fol-
lowing the case of mentally unstable Frenchwoman Danièle Richer, who had
forcibly removed her daughter’s vulva. In May 1988, excision was criminal-
ized 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
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 125

attempts by the three main monotheistic belief systems—Judaism, Christian-

ity, 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’ im-
prisonment 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 Fon-
fana. 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 de-
fended, for two court cases, the prevalence of French law over African cus-
tom 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. Al-
ice 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, infuri-
ated by Walker’s neo-colonial crusade on African soil and her falsely syllo-
gistic 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 ex-
cision. 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 cir-
conciseuses 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 haz-
ards inherent in ancestral genital alterations. Keïta’s novel is therefore to be
gauged against this collective pledge against the practice, which involves the
126 Chapter Eight

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 ad-
mittedly 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 ad-
dressing anyone of the same age-group as one’s mother. In Paris, Khady un-
convincingly 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 com-
munity 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 be-
liefs. 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 hus-
band 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
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 127

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, be-
comes 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’abo-
lition 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 ex-
cised 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 coun-
try 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 in-
deed 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 ideologi-
cal weight of that semantic shift and presents a confident “I,” subtly refash-
ioned 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 In-
terior 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
128 Chapter Eight

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 “libera-
tion” (216). This cri de coeur reeks of surveillance, for it seems that the op-
tions 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 Aus-
tria, 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 exci-
sion in Europe. For the third time, then, Dirie rehearses her traumatic infibu-
lation, 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 in-
tuition 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 expe-
riential 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
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 129

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, gyne-
cologist 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 Lon-
don, 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 Lev-
inas’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 inter-
vention” (121). Clearly, the tone is more doctrinaire than in the earlier auto-
biographies, as if Dirie had run out of patience.
Like refugees who adjust their narratives of persecution in their plea for asy-
lum, women autobiographers have started to use the politically correct language
130 Chapter Eight

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 so-
journ 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 presum-
ably 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 ad-
dresses 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 com-
municating 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 em-
phatically refers to “torture” (11, 31). One Malian e-mail testimony be-
comes 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 “in-
formant” 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
 The Afrosporic Migration of Genital Alterations to the New Europe 131

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 self-
narrative 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 read-
ings, on Afrosporic bodies and their trauma but rather that individuality itself
is endangered and is being replaced by a collective consciousness, which de-
fies 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, how-
ever, 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 vi-
olence (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); Niger-
ian 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 Sis-
soko’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 so-
cial 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 remov-
ing the allegedly vestigial masculinity of the clitoris, the way male circumcision
132 Chapter Eight

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 clitoridec-
tomy, 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, infibu-
lation, involves the removal of the clitoris, the labia minora and majora, and the stitch-
ing 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 ten-
dency 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 sur-
vivors 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 understand-
ings 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 re-
fashioning 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.
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 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 fam-
ily, in its traditional unity and in its modern diaspora, are situated at the very
core of the Canadian theatrical writing. The economical and ideological de-
velopments 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 be-
ing. 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 sensibili-
ties. 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 de-
scribed 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
136 Chapter Nine

continues in the context of modern European civilization as a symbol of co-

hesion 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 re-
gard 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 twenti-
eth century that the paternalist ideology is contested by the feminist move-
ment which replaces the idea of the patrilinear heritage with the matrilinear
one, and pays novel attention to the figure of the mother. Besides, the prob-
lematics regarding the family are strongly influenced by changing social per-
spectives due to different manifestations of sexuality and the contributions of
immigration and ethnicity.
The tradition of Canadian English–language theater reflects these ideolog-
ical 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 poli-
tics 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 re-
sistance 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 con-
nected 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 pos-
sessing. 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 137

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 re-
ally 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 in-
evitably 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 char-
acters: 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 com-
prehending 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
138 Chapter Nine

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 Skip-
per Pete does not wish to renounce as he still sees in it the essence of his be-
ing: 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 mad-
ness. 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 Shake-
speare’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 visu-
ally. 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 junc-
ture 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 Eli-
jah imagines in the form of a ship adrift. What Cook presents is a direction-
less 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 sym-
bolism 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 Con-
federation, Cook in a radical way underscores the lack of sincerity of reli-
gious 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 139

the past and into family secrets in the conviction that “The way we see our-
selves reflected in what we leave behind becomes more and more important.”
In Play Memory she recalls the figure of her father (which has already ap-
peared 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 sev-
eral 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 fig-
ure, 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 ac-
cept. 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, be-
comes 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 con-
siders 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 sig-
nificant 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
140 Chapter Nine

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 fa-
ther figure appears unable to adapt to untried situations, a victim of the diffi-
culties 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 gener-
ally 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 con-
tinue 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 contra-
posed to “elsewhere,” the necessity of belonging to the reality of alienation.
(Chauduri 1997). It is generally recognized that the more or less heroic de-
parture from one’s home is a central element of most modern literature. As
Italo-Canadian dramatist Vittorio Rossi writes, such departure generally in-
volves 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 wan-
dering 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 it-
self. What emerges is a domicentric vision which indicates that the wander-
ing 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 fam-
ily has to face momentous transformations when forced to leave Newfoundland
in 1945, in order to transfer to the more promising city of Toronto. Unfortu-
nately, the hopes of success do not realize and consequently the father figure of
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 141

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 ap-
pears 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 in-
terreligious marriage which could have indicated that the family had success-
fully integrated into the urban scene. On the contrary, in the play, we do not per-
ceive the multicultural dimension of the city, the action being endogenically
closed within the family walls. This increases the feeling of unsolved frustra-
tion. 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 edu-
cation. It is again the protagonists’ incapacity and unwillingness to communi-
cate, 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 fu-
nerals.” 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 disin-
tegration. The theme was dealt with as early as 1973 by Hrant Alianak in
142 Chapter Nine

Christmas, which Alianak defines a “play without a dialogue” where a hu-

manized 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 disturb-
ing 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 Gor-
don, 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 Christ-
mas. 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 thirty-
seven short scenes ends in a Beckettian darkness, thus underlining the exis-
tential loneliness of the protagonist.
In the above mentioned plays the figure of the father is either melodramat-
ically diminished or physically absent: in the plays that follow he rather ap-
pears 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 In-
side 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 mod-
ish trousers and a stylish peruque; Father wears a dolcevita jumper and a
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 143

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 “sub-
stance” 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 iden-
tity, 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 pen-
sioner and educator. He tries to recuperate his place by indulging his daugh-
ter’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 sup-
posed 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 in-
tends 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 enthusias-
tic Edwin knocks at the door, he finds an empty house. Henry Bergson’s Shy-
lock syndrome seems to apply. As in Shakespeare’s play, the apparently
weaker character prevails upon the manifestly stronger one. The weak char-
acter is, in fact, a solid female character, tied to her family, and capable of ad-
justing to unfavorable circumstances. Edwin, as we said, an extrovert, sym-
pathetic male character, shows, in Janis Spence’s view, how unsubstantial his
dreams of freedom and glory are. A question nevertheless remains unan-
swered 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.
144 Chapter Nine

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 adven-
turous 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 plas-
tic surgeon he eventually meets in a Houston luxury medical clinic. John trav-
els 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 fa-
therhood 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 civ-
ilization is made by individuals who lose and re-create their roots. As Said of-
ten 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 sentimen-
tally 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 145

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 re-
garding personal honor and social propriety. A first example is L’homme gris
(1984) a play in which the main characters are Roland and Christine. Chris-
tine 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, in-
dulges 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 an-
swers 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 bot-
tle and flinging it at her father. This extreme act is not a sign, although trau-
matic, of a desire to clarify the situation. In fact, Christine’s act is accompa-
nied 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, po-
litical and economic change. In Laberge’s play, Jocelyne has attempted sui-
cide 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 reac-
tions; 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 ex-
plaining. Jocelyne has in fact, from the beginning, renounced having an un-
derstanding with her father, who never says anything meaningful to her. The
spotlight is then directed toward her enigmatic mother. She has lost the tradi-
tional role, that of a nursing and loving figure capable of constructing an au-
tonomous 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
146 Chapter Nine

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 interweav-
ing 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 en-
tertained 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 dis-
posal, 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 ill-
ness, 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 Ju-
dith, ignores Micheline, shows no interest for Joanna who has become an al-
coholic 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 cen-
sure: “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 Ju-
dith 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, un-
willingly, 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 inde-
pendence. Judith shows sincere affection only toward Micheline and perhaps
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 147

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 suf-
fered a serious accident which had caused her a loss of memory, and ironi-
cally 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 dis-
gusted 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 eas-
ily readable at first sight, but as the action develops, the psychological situa-
tions of the characters defy simple categorization. The loss of memory suf-
fered 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. Ju-
dith recognizes in Micheline a freedom that has been denied to her, but, ob-
viously, 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 rela-
tionship the characters establish with their mother, life and death being deter-
mined by acknowledgement or refusal.
Beside those of Marie Laberge, Québécois theater presents a variety of dra-
matic 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 slip-
pers. 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
148 Chapter Nine

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 Ros-
tand, 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 fis-
sures” 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 love-
hate 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 mid-
wife for Léna’s feelings, or rather, like a zen master or even, he says, a punch-
ing 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 de-
sire 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 in-
spector and the offender in a relationship which goes well beyond a banal appli-
cation of the law. The inspector himself, when in front of Léna’s house, asks her
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 149

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 per-
haps 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 Trem-
blay’s The Impromptu of Outremont (1980).6 Here the spectator is brought
into a chekovian atmosphere made of memories, psychological analysis, do-
mestic conflicts, subdued tones, semi-darkness, which characterize the ma-
ternal 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 soci-
ety. 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 so-
cial gatherings, the sophisticated taste, art. After fixing this dramatic situa-
tion, 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 es-
teem 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 specif-
ically 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
150 Chapter Nine

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 ca-
pable 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 com-
pliance 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. Ostra-
cized 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 Is-
abelle, 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 151

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 charac-
ers 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 se-
vere 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 char-
acters’ 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 fac-
ing their personal problems.
And so, they relive their past. Luc would like to indulge his desire to re-
venge his mother by entering the church on Easter Saturday dressed as a Span-
ish 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 life-
long 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 un-
derstood 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
152 Chapter Nine

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 chil-
dren’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 au-
thor of a number of plays which have become Canadian classics—a play-
wright who chooses to cast an unprejudiced, often censorious look at the cen-
tral 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 mea-
sured 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 realiza-
tion 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 Enlighten-
ment, 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 essen-
tial 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 153

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 pow-
ers 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 im-
mediate honesty. I shall mention two plays by G. Walker, Better Living (1986)
and Escape from Happiness (1991) which constitute—together with Crimi-
nals in Love (1984)—a sequence presenting the story of a working-class, dys-
functional, 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 sex-
ually unprejudiced woman. The situation changes dramatically when their fa-
ther, 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 be-
fore—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 Eliza-
beth 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 authoritar-
ian 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
154 Chapter Nine

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 contem-
porary 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 re-
late the fixations and the anxiety that disturb the characters to social instabil-
ity. 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, con-
tinues proclaiming his philosophy of survival, in the end becoming a figure
of ridicule. The setting is, again, the popular Toronto East End made of un-
derprivileged working-class people and petty crime. The play opens with Ju-
nior 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 Ju-
nior’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 ac-
cused 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 happi-
ness? Lets us remember that Mary Ann is at a crossroads in her own self-
obsessed 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 155

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 hus-
band 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 ma-
ternal 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 con-
temporary society, but differently from Walker, Thompson focuses her atten-
tion on the psychological condition of her characters following Freudian psy-
choanalysis. 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 be-
ing 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 soci-
ety, 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 per-
haps useful to select a few focal events: the attempted suicide of the protag-
onist, 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 recov-
ery, since whenever his father suffers from a collapse Cape feels drawn to-
wards 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 an-
gel,” 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 fam-
ily, which she has no intention to make happen. Pony, who tries to convince
156 Chapter Nine

Cape to go and live with her, notices the morbid attraction Cape nourishes to-
ward 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 pre-
mature 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 de-
scribed 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 re-
lationship 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 situ-
ation is indeed “clarified”: Cape and Lomia, alone, remain on the stage, ap-
pearing 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 al-
low of any future for her with Cape. In fact, the centrality of the mother fig-
ure 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 “tran-
scendence” 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 157

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, re-
thinking his life as a dramatist, recognizes he has reached at least the one un-
mistakable 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 ap-
pear 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 un-
real 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 intu-
ition 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 sul-
l’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 sensi-
tiveness 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 fa-
miliar and social relationships, when the so-called normality borders on dis-
placement 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
158 Chapter Nine

condition of solitude which typifies modern man’s life. In a society which ap-
pears 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 over-
come 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 pro-
longed 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 ex-
hortation 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 repre-
sented a microcosm of the society and of the nation and the modern concep-
tion of it. In her play, Corker (1998), the family offers a privileged perspec-
tive on individual and social problems. The family she depicts is mostly
occupied with financial enterprises until old Serena dies. At this point the sit-
uation 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, real-
ize 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 159

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 tempt-
ing 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 soci-
ety.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 gener-
ation gap. The old Ukrainian father, Solchuk, is a deeply religious character
who much evaluates his personal dignity and parental power. He finds him-
self 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 in-
dicates 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 mu-
sic, the coffin is the wrong measure, the officiating priest is drunk. Still, be-
hind 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.
160 Chapter Nine

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 commodi-
ties, 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 con-
structed Norm Foster’s comic characters, with which I choose to end this
sample review of Canadian comedy on the family. Foster is a successful met-
ropolitan 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. Open-
ing Night (1988) is cleverly constructed on the coincidence/difference be-
tween theater and life. It is “romantic” actor Clayton who, by courting Ruth,
succeeds in making Ruth and Jack conscious of their differences and expec-
tations, 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 expe-
rience 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 exu-
berant and domineering mother, and Lloyd, the father, who writes erotic nov-
els with the pseudonym of Margaux Kenyon; their firstborn son, Richard,
shocks his mother by declaring himself an homosexual, and Neil is a de-
pressed character, who plans to commit suicide. The action takes place in dif-
ferent locations: a TV studio, a film studio, a literary agent’s office, a legal of-
fice, 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
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 161

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 psycho-
logical 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
162 Chapter Nine

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 suc-
cess 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 adop-
tion. 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 belles-
soeurs (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 obvi-
ously 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.
 Diaspora in the Family: Father and Mother Figures in Canadian Theater 163

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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 di-

asporic 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 mi-
grant people, even at the risk of sentimentalizing their reality and/or stereo-
typing 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 dirty-
minded 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 understate-
ment, this guy is downright offensive.”1 Nor did the author in any way dis-
tance 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 ex-
plaining his poetics.

165
166 Chapter Ten

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 Sun-
day, 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 repre-
sentation 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 unsenti-
mental way, uncovering the dark side of the Anglo-Pakistani community, and
stressing the transgressions of second-generation migrants: drug abuse, un-
conventional 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 Acad-
emy 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 for-
ties, 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 sub-
scribe 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
 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism 167

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. Conse-
quently, 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 dis-
content from which white liberals were debarred,”6 all that people like Dhali-
wal (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 En-
gland, 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 ex-
ploiting 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 prin-
ciples of consumerism.”13 London, the city that Kureishi’s Karim, like a mod-
ern 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 estab-
lish 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
168 Chapter Ten

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 commod-
ity, 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 advan-
tage 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 neo-
colonizer 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 ad-
vantage of [its] postcolonial melancholia can lead to some form of repara-
tion.”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 un-
satisfied 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 mouth-
piece 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
 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism 169

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 dias-
poric subject: while the first leaves home for pleasure, knowing that sooner
or later he will come back, the latter is compelled by political, cultural, pro-
fessional or economic reasons to abandon home, very often for good. There-
fore, 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 ances-
tors. 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 them-
selves, oblivious of the world around them, Puppy’s tourism is the apotheo-
sis 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, pre-
dictable, uncompromising: the only risk is to turn your movement, almost un-
aware, 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 ter-
rorist attack gatecrashes this project of spectacularization of the world, based
on the elimination of every unwanted contact with the natives, on the trans-
formation of nature into a consumer commodity and on a rigid division be-
tween spectator (the tourist) and spectacle (the Other).
Mass tourism is also stigmatized in the work of other contemporary au-
thors, such as Murray Bail and J. J. Ballard. From such short stories as “Por-
trait 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
170 Chapter Ten

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 defini-
tion of the World Tourism Organization, according to which tourists are peo-
ple 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 vis-
ited”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 en-
ters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose so-
cial 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, de-
manding 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 reinvent-
ing yourself” Ballard is writing about: while the migrant has to reinvent him-
self 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
 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism 171

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 imag-
inative 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 cen-
tury novels are awash with clerks, lawyers, engineers, medical men and par-
liamentarians whose professional lives exist off the page”28 and twentieth
century fiction “[t]hat purports to be about work and working people [is] gen-
erally 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 lit-
tle 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 holi-
days exclusively to fat people [and] a singles venture, BigFun Xtra, catering for
172 Chapter Ten

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 car-
bohydrates . . . 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 Plat-
form: “the kind in which well-heeled Westerners visit third world countries
and pay impoverished new ‘friends’ to have sex.”31 For Puppy, like Houelle-
becq’s Michel, “Tourism is considered the biggest single industry on the
planet, a pure locus of supply and deliberately massaged demand.”32 More-
over, 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 coun-
try allows them, not just for the economic benefits.37

Consequently, it is not so easy to guess whether some very politically incor-

rect 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
 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism 173

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 lot-
tery 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 mad-
ness, if you want to get anywhere.”39

The concept of identity implies a relationship with others. Moreover, iden-

tity is not unchangeable, it changes with the mutations of history and soci-
ety. 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 second-
generation 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. . . .
174 Chapter Ten

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 cov-
eted, 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 need-
lessly 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 presump-
tions 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 im-
migrants, 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 al-
bum, mementoes of the traumas of integration, and transition between the an-
cestors’ traditions and the new Western models.”45 What Barnes and Llosa
call “insolence,” Rampini identifies with an ability to disassemble and re-
assemble the usual materials of migrant writing, adding a grotesque, exces-
sive, 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 mid-
dle 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 fortu-
nate novels of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith can be labelled “tourist fiction,”
 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism 175

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 Houn-
slow’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 iden-
tity, which requires a new language to be told, a hybrid jargon where Punjabi text
messaging, gangsta rap, and Bollywood patois are mixed with heavy obsceni-
ties. While Puppy refuses assimilation both with the English people and the In-
dian 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 au-
thenticity,”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 Franco-
Tunisian 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.
176 Chapter Ten

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 Dhali-
wal,” 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.”
 Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism 177

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 Ri-
vages, 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.
178 Chapter Ten

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
Hopkinson, Nalo, 20
Houellebecq, Michel, 166, 169–70,
172
hybridity, 20, 22, 39–40, 171, 173
Hulme, Peter, 106
Hutcheon, Linda, 60–61
Ihimaera, Witi, 101–4, 108–9
Kamboureli, Smaro, 2
Keefer, Janice Kulyk, 1, 6, 19, 21
Keïta, Fatou, 121–24
Khady, Soninke, 124–26
179
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
Naipaul, V.S., 47
Pazira, Nelofer, 11–12
Ricci, Nino, 5
Richler, Noah, 13
Saïd, Edward, 105–6, 109n4, 138
Taylor, Alf, 89–98
Todorov, Tzvetan, 44, 48–49
Verdecchia, Guillermo, 16–17
 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 Aus-

tralian 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 Liter-

ature at the University of Reading and Senior Tutor at the University of Lon-
don (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
182 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 Nou-
velle and Senior Scholar at the Institut universitaire de France.