Writing Migration Through The Body: Emma Bond

STUDIES IN MOBILITIES,
LITERATURE, AND CULTURE
Writing Migration
through the Body
Emma Bond
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture
Series Editors
Marian Aguiar
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Charlotte Mathieson
School of English
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Lynne Pearce
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars
working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research.
The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all
kinds—ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the
everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the mate-
rial means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that
surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcoloni-
alism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary
scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/
or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cul-
tural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the
social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theo-
rizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials
of all kinds—i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as
well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms—and projects engaging
with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15385
Emma Bond
Writing Migration
through the Body
Emma Bond
University of St Andrews
St Andrews, UK
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture

ISBN 978-3-319-97694-5 ISBN 978-3-319-97695-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2
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Acknowledgements
I embarked on some of the initial research for this project while engaged
on the International Research Network, ‘Destination Italy: Representing
Migration through Contemporary Media and Narrative’. I am grate-
ful to the Leverhulme Trust for this opportunity, and to the Principal
Investigator Guido Bonsaver for his ongoing friendship and support.
I was subsequently granted fellowships at the Institute for Advanced
Study, University of Warwick, the Institute for Modern Languages
Research (School of Advanced Study, University of London), and the
Bogliasco Foundation. All of these were incredibly valuable experiences
that helped me to find the space and time to develop ideas, often in
unexpected and exhilarating ways. The friendships that I forged with fel-
lows in all three places (particularly Simone Brioni, S. A. Smythe, Gwen
Hardie, Jessica Lott, Pablo Merchante and Ni’Ja Whitson) were impor-
tant in helping me give form to and articulate my research, and have
stayed with me since.
I have presented papers on topics included in this book at the
University of Bristol, University College Cork, the University of
Lancaster, the IMLR, The British School at Rome, University of
Strathclyde, SUNY Stony Brook, Villa Vigoni, University of Würzburg
and University of Zurich, and the discussions and comments offered by
other speakers and audiences have helped me to both refine and expand
my ideas. Early versions of sections of Chapter 2 have previously been
published in ‘Il corpo come racconto: arte e mestiere nell’Educazione
siberiana di Nicolai Lilin e Bevete cacao van Houten! di Ornela Vorpsi
v
vi Acknowledgements
(Transkulturelle italophone Literatur—Letteratura italofona trans-

culturale, eds. Martha Kleinhans & Richard Schwaderer, Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2013, pp. 309–322) and ‘Skin Memories:
Expressions of Corporeality in Recent Trans-national Writing in Italian’
(Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and
Narrative, eds. Emma Bond, Guido Bonsaver & Federico Faloppa,
Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015, pp. 241–256).
My gratitude to the University of St Andrews for granting me
a period of institutional research leave in the autumn of 2015, and to
my colleagues in the School of Modern Languages and beyond for
their warm welcome and continued friendships—you have all helped to
make Fife feel more like home. Thanks to my Ph.D. students, especially
Eleanor Crabtree and Rebecca Walker, for bringing new light to shared
topics of interest—our conversations are inspirational to me. And thanks
also go to friends who have read sections of the book and offered fantas-
tic comments: Hania Elkington and Cara Levey in particular.
I am very grateful to Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Ricci Shryock and
Ornela Vorpsi for permission to reproduce their beautiful and important
visual work within this volume, and to Gwen Hardie for lending me the
luminous cover image. Thank you also to Sherif Dhaimish of Darf for
allowing me to use an extract from Abu Bakr Khaal’s African Titanics.
Thanks to the series editors Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson
and Lynne Pearce for accepting my proposal for Studies in Mobilities,
Literature, and Culture, and for their constructive comments on devel-
oping the interdisciplinary reach of my work. I am especially grateful
to the anonymous reader, whose generous, lucid and perceptive report
much improved initial drafts of the manuscript. Thanks also to all at
Palgrave Macmillan, in particular Allie Troyanos, Rachel Jacobe and the
production team.
Special thanks must go to Derek Duncan, who has been an exception-
ally kind and generous friend, mentor and source of inspiration over the
past five years. Derek has always pushed me to develop my ideas further,
can make any situation more bearable with his wonderfully dry sense of
humour, and is indefatigable in supporting younger colleagues in their
work. I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to work closely
with him at St Andrews.
Acknowledgements vii
Lastly, thank you to Dave, who means everything, and without whom
this book would not have been finished so swiftly and so calmly. This is
for you, and for Nia.
Praise for Writing Migration through
the Body
“Writing Migration Through the Body offers an insightful and compelling

analysis of contemporary narratives of transnational migrations by way of
an innovative focus upon embodied experience. Invoking a range of the-
oretical approaches to embodiment and mobility, Bond places the body as
a primary site of signification, operative as a ‘mutable, reactive and expres-
sive archive.’ By placing emphasis on agential corporeality, Bond examines
the body as a ‘liminal, multi-faceted and generative space’ which re-routes
the bounded contours of the nation and conceives identity formation as
‘in-transit,’ intersubjective and transnational. The narratives of ‘migration
and diaspora’ inflect the Italian language through descriptions of spatial
and temporal passages and movements. While these various histories of
migrant mobilities, including colonialism and violent displacements, per-
sist as bodily traces, Bond attends to the narrative capacities of the body to
re-inscribe these traces, and thereby ‘access new artistic and creative con-
stellations of mobility.’ In each chapter, Bond offers nuanced, theoretically
informed readings of embodied, migratory experiences as detailed through
bodily inscription; trans-body subversions of gender binarism and ‘catego-
ries of home and belonging’; the transnational maternal body; cosmetic
surgical enhancement and transformation; and the spectral, ghostly body.
Through an engagement with phenomenology, affect theory, and mobility
studies, Bond opens dynamic and provocative areas of inquiry in the study
of contemporary narratives of transnational migrations.”
—Shelleen Greene, Associate Professor of Cinema
and Media Studies, UCLA, USA
ix
Contents
1 Introduction: ‘Trans-Scripts’ 1
References 24
2 ‘Signing with a Scar’: Inscriptions, Narration, Identity 29

2.1 Introduction 29
2.2 Skin Knowledge 30
2.3 Skin Memory 44
2.4 Skin Stories 53
2.5 Conclusions 63
References 66
3 Trans-gender, Trans-national: Crossing Binary Lines 71

3.1 Introduction 71
3.2 Out in Public: Locating the Trans- Self 72
3.3 Vergine giurata 81
3.4 Princesa 91
3.5 Blackass Fairytales: A Drift Toward Cyborg Conclusions 100
References 105
4 Trans-national Mothering: Corporeal Trans-plantations

of Care 111
4.1 Introduction 111
4.2 Disruptive Pregnancy 121
xi
xii Contents
4.3 Interrupted Maternity 131

4.4 Substitutive Mothering 140
4.5 Conclusions 145
References 148
5 Revolting Folds: Disordered and Disciplined Bodies 155

5.2 Disordered Consumption 165
5.3 Hard Bodies 182
5.4 Conclusions 188
References 192
6 Absent Bodies, Haunted Spaces 197

6.2 Linguistic Hauntings: Specters of Nation Spaces 203
6.3 Trans-national Memory and Haunting
Commemorations 214
6.4 Conclusions 225
References 233
7 Afterword 239
References 251
Index 255
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Cover of Bevete cacao van Houten! (Ornela Vorpsi) 61

Fig. 2.2 Map picture (Ricci Shryock) 65
Fig. 6.1 End of Dreams—Portrait #1 (2016) (Nikolaj Bendix Skyum
Larsen) 228
Fig. 6.2 End of Dreams installation in Fotografisk Center,
Copenhagen (Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen) 230
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: ‘Trans-Scripts’
To all the pounding hearts

In feverish boats
I will cut
Through these paths
With my own liberated heart
And tell my soul
To shout of your silenced deaths
And fill
Palms of dust with morning dew
And song. (Abu Bakr Khaal, African Titanics)
Migration is without doubt emerging as one of the defining global

issues of the twenty-first century, and related practices of interpreta-
tion, response and representation are fast becoming increasingly pressing
concerns for a range of diverse disciplines. This volume enacts a timely
shift in analytical perspective by urging attention away from the frequent
journalistic reduction of the bodies of migrant and in-motion subjects
to images or numbers, and instead towards a reclamation of those same
bodies as potentially active, individual sites of signification. What I aim
to build here is a study of the body as a mutable, reactive and expres-
sive archive in which histories and experiences of mobility or migration
are worked through, negotiated and rearticulated in turn. Crucially, in
the chapters to come, I will locate and explore the expression of these
© The Author(s) 2018 1

E. Bond, Writing Migration through the Body,
Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_1
2 E. BOND
embodied experiences in a range of diverse creative outputs, includ-

ing autobiographical and fictionalised narratives, photography, film and
installation art. These are works that use corporeality to tell stories that
stretch beyond the map-points of their movement in order to convey
identities, emotions, memories and imaginings, and imprints from else-
where. Yet by privileging the lens of bodily expression, I will also be
able to situate these outputs within a much wider theoretical landscape
around trans-nationalism, in the hope of building productive intersec-
tional links with related critical discourses around voice, visibility, race
and gender identity.
At the core of the volume lies a selection of stories written in Italian
by people who have crossed national borders to transit through or reside
in Italy, by people who are writing in a language other than their mother
tongue, or people who have family heritage in contexts of migration or
diaspora. Through the analysis of a range of morphological body expe-
riences that are described in these texts, I want to explore the logics and
mechanics of representing subjectivities which may themselves be fluid or
in motion, and draw conclusions about how identity and self-imaginings
are affected by the often multiple shifts afforded by migration. Such sto-
ries cannot easily be classified as ‘migration narratives’ (indeed, as antic-
ipated above, some authors included in this study have a family heritage
of migration and are not ‘migrants’ themselves), rather, they might more
productively be grouped together as stories written by people whose
lives have, in one way or another, been impacted by their own or others’
complex decision to move country. Furthermore, in the spirit of extend-
ing the trans-national range of my arguments, I will—where possible—
stretch out my analysis to draw comparative links with related outputs
originating from other geographical and linguistic areas, and from other
diasporically inflected zones.
My work deliberately transits between disciplinary spaces, using a
range of theoretical tools to support and add critical flesh to my ideas. I
therefore also seek to embed the literary analysis described above within
an active conversation with key examples drawn from fields such as cul-
tural studies, social anthropology and the visual arts. Since the series
this volume appears in lies at the intersection of literary and mobilities
studies, my introduction will begin by situating my textual work within
a mobilities studies framework, identifying where it can dialogue with
existing currents of work in the field and where it might perhaps add
points of innovation in approach. Mobility is, broadly, conceived as an
1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TRANS-SCRIPTS’ 3
embodied mode of movement, and one that is imbued with a range of

meanings for both the mobile subject and for the people and places that
are encountered through such movement. I will therefore also high-
light those aspects of other related theories (such as phenomenology,
body theory and affect theory) that can best intersect with and inform
a mobilities-led analysis, and in particular those that give a critical con-
text to my use of the hyphenated trans- label. I will then expand on my
choice of textual corpus, and use this overview to highlight illustrative
topics such as those of space, home, journey, transition and becoming
that underpin the chapters to come. Throughout, I will contextualise
and interrelate recurrent themes, such as those of time, memory, lan-
guage, visibility, agency and gender, which are exemplary of the way the
body functions as an expressive medium in my work.
The representations of the body that form the backbone of the anal-
ysis here posit the various corporeal organs and pathways as a means
of acquiring and establishing knowledge and of subverting assump-
tions, about both subject and world, in a dialectical fashion. They also
function as channels of communication between subjects, thus forming
potential narrative organs of expression, as well as allowing the embod-
ied subject to enact strategies of agency and resistance toward the nar-
ratives of others. I want to transpose Ahmed and Stacey’s words about
the skin onto the bodyscape as a whole, and thus to determine how the
body becomes meaningful, how it is read, how it is written and nar-
rated, and how is it ‘managed by subjects, others and nations’ (2001,
p. 3). These are dynamic processes, socially structured and intersubjec-
tive, but—crucially—not always controlled by the subject him/herself.
For although the body provides the potential for expressing subjective
agency, it also poses a limit to that same agency through the perceptive
gaze of the other, which can assign meaning and narrative without the
knowledge or consent of the subject. Indeed, many of the actions and
processes that I argue designate the body as a mobile site of meaning may
also be experienced as uncomfortable, painful, traumatic, or unwanted by
the subject at stake. Yet an undercurrent of agency and resistance may
still be identified in such processes precisely through the narrativization
of such experiences, rather than in the physical changes and movements
themselves. Such movements are represented in the chapters that fol-
low through bodily inscriptions such as tattoos and self-harming, bod-
ies which rearticulate traditional gender allocations, maternal, fluid and
eroticized bodies, bodies controlled or distorted through privation or
4 E. BOND
excessive consumption, and expressions of fragmented, haunting or

immaterial physicality. It is the dynamic nature of such modifications and
transmogrifications that allows the body to represent and illuminate wider
processes of mobility and migration, since it both absorbs information
and reflects it back to the world, taking on a potentially collective mean-
ing-making facility. This widens the temporal and spatial reach of corpo-
real signification, and allows it to be ‘inhabited by, as well as inhabiting,
the space of the nation and the landscape. As a result, [the bodyscape] is
not simply in the present; in so far as it has multiple histories and unim-
aginable futures, it is worked upon, and indeed, it is worked towards’
(Ahmed and Stacey 2001, p. 2).
Ultimately my analysis shows that the signification of cultural rep-
resentations of the body extends beyond describing the movement
of people, and creates the conditions for configuring border-cross-
ing flows of ideas, images, memories, languages and cultures. I argue
that reconfiguring attention to representations that see the body as a
dynamic archive, a malleable and regenerative site that shifts and changes
through encounter and movement, will allow us to recuperate histori-
cal cross-currents of lived human experience that may to date have been
written out of hegemonic national narratives, and offers an original way
to imagine diverse, trans-national futures. Writing Migration through the
Body thus breaks new theoretical ground by identifying corporeality as a
vital interpretative lens to access new artistic and creative constellations
of mobility.
*
The decision to place this book within a series that builds on a mobil-
ities framework, and one that seeks to privilege a developing dialogue
with humanities-led perspectives, was a carefully considered one. The
field of mobilities studies interrogates the movement of humans and
societies, and is characterised by a critical attention to modes of travel,
transport and communications through the analysis of related social rela-
tions and ordering (see Urry 2007, p. 6). Broadly speaking, mobility has
been defined as movement that carries meaning (Cresswell 2006, p. 7).
This holds obvious importance for migration studies, too, and the
intersection between the two fields has been one of the most success-
ful nodal points of the discipline. Works by scholars such as Anne-Marie
Fortier, and more recently Thomas Nail, put the issues of home and
belonging, self-representations, memories and imaginings at the centre
of mobilities scholarship by focusing on the migrant him/herself. Yet

as Fortier says: ‘much of mobilities research has been about “mobilities
without migrants”, to paraphrase Ghassan Hage; that is, a research that
privileges virtual, technological and material mobilities’ (2006, p. 314),
and thereby erasing any attention towards those who move.1 The crit-
ical attention that Fortier and Nail, among others, dedicate to the
mobile subject relocates processes of fluidity away from the supposedly
hyper-mobile world and towards the state of being-as-becoming of the
migrant, whom Nail has defined as a ‘figure least defined by its being
and place and more by its becoming and displacement; by its movement’
(2015, p. 3).
But what fascinates me in particular is the embodied aspect of such
movement. To date, attention to the body within mobilities studies has
mainly concentrated on the corporeal frame as a mode and/or facilita-
tor of mobility, and—not so commonly—as a hindrance to the same.2
Thus, the focus of the majority of corporeal-directed research in the
field has remained centered broadly on: the motion itself that the body
enacts, or disrupts; an attention to place (be that a point of departure,
arrival, or intermediate locations on the journey itself); and an analysis
of the meaning and emotional attachment of subjects under analysis to
such embodied locations. What this book will attempt to do, instead, is
to chart what I will term ‘body journeys’. In doing so, I want to redi-
rect emphasis towards exploring representations of how the body itself
shifts and morphs over time, through acts of mobility, and how such
corporeal changes can function as an important and revealing expres-
sion of personal and societal perceptions and concerns around the topic
of migration. I am interested in work that explores how the body actu-
ally functions in mobility terms (e.g. in terms of circulation, and artic-
ulations,)3 how this is used metaphorically in discourse, and how such
1 See also Fortier (2000) and Ahmed et al. (2003).

2 See, for example, Farnell (2012).
3 Nail uses kinopolitics to explore this idea, and his key tropes of flow, junctions, and cir-
culation are all processes which can also be used to powerfully evoke the natural instability
of the bodily terrain, through conjuring the circulation of blood through the vital organs,
the redirection of flow through joints and organs, and so on. See Nail (2015). Doreen
Massey also employs the notion of articulation (and indeed double articulation) to denote
those points of contact and intersection that hinge together to construct the identities of
subjects and places. See Massey (1994, p. 118).
6 E. BOND
processes and their representation might shift through experiencing

changes in location. Mobilities-related scholarship originating from the
field of geography that privileges the sensual and performative aspect of
mobility will thus also inform my work here.4 But in the spirit of this
series, where attention to mobilities studies is filtered through a human-
ities perspective, I think there is still much important work to be done
in privileging creative expressions of migration and movement that start
with the body and retain its own maps, journeys and morphologies as the
primary site of analysis. As Merriman and Pearce have stated in a recent,
important special issue of Mobilities on ‘Mobility and the Humanities’:
‘arts and humanities expressions and articulations of movement have
the potential to trace how particular movements, experiences and sensa-
tions may be grounded in very different ontologies, embodied practices,
and cultural and historical contexts’ (2017, p. 497). One such ‘embod-
ied practice’ of mobility might be located in the body of the literary text
itself. Indeed, an article by Ian Davidson in this same special issue per-
forms a particularly useful conceptual shift, by identifying the literary text
as being ‘inherently mobile’:
Texts […] present a performative experience in the present, the experience

of the writing and reading, not re-present an experience in the past. Using
ideas of mobility to examine literary forms brings together these spatial
and temporal aspects in ‘moments’ that challenge any notion of an overall
completed structure. Narratives become an open-ended series of collisions
that occur periodically throughout a work of fiction. (Davidson 2017,
p. 551)
Davidson’s point here, that texts themselves, and readers’ experiences of

them, move in various directions through both time and space, allows for
a dynamic view of the mobile capacities of narrative, and positions the
intersection of mobilities and humanities studies as a new and exciting
juncture of enquiry. Similarly, Erin Manning has spoken of the ‘uncanny
realization that movement tells stories quite differently than does a more
4 On this point, see Tuan (1977) and Rodaway (1994). ‘Bodies are not fixed and given
but involve performances especially to fold notions of movement, nature, taste and desire,
into and through the body. Bodies navigate backwards and forwards between directly sens-
ing the external world as they move bodily in and through it, and discursively mediated
sensescapes that signify social taste and distinction, ideology and meaning. The body espe-
cially senses as it moves’ (Urry 2007, p. 48).
linear and stable historicization’ (2009, p. 8). Both standpoints thus

open up new possibilities for humanities-based research that focuses on
creative narratives to represent and understand mobility, differently.
Furthermore, I believe that creative forms of expression can themselves
have a mobilizing, or moving effect, as fictionalized and semi-fictionalized
accounts both hold great potential to recount the lives of those affected
by mobility beyond just their migration journeys and destination lives. As
Ann Rigney has claimed, creative writing and other narrative forms are
unique in their ability to foster connections between communities and
mobilize audiences, thanks to their imaginative and affective properties.
Recent research has shown how novels, thanks to the surplus aesthetic
pleasure offered by art along with the possibility of becoming immersed in
singular stories, have had a key role to play in shaping public perceptions
of a larger geopolitical world in Europe and beyond and in the emergence
of the discourse of human rights. This suggests that the arts, precisely
because of their unscripted character and imaginative appeal, can more
easily break away from inherited models and identity-ruts than other gen-
res, and hence provide an experimental space bringing into play new actors
and unfamiliar voices that fall outside dominant discourses. (Rigney 2014,
p. 353)5
In other words, the reader must choose to pick up a book and engage
with the story within, and the writer has the freedom to create a per-
sonal, imaginative account, which produces a powerful, interconnected
dynamic between the two. Not only does this act of ‘picking up a book’
recall Nancy’s elaboration of the link between carnal motion and emo-
tion, since ‘touching sets something in motion – displacement, action,
and reaction’ (Kearney and Treanor 2015, p. 3). But it also suggests that
the affective capacity of texts to move their readers sets off another chain
of mobility. In this way, ‘bottom-up’ narratives allow a creative space to
open up between reader and writer, what Rigney terms an ‘imaginative
thickening’ (2014, p. 354),6 something that ‘top-down’ narratives from
media or political sources cannot hope to achieve. Yet being ‘touched’
5 Rigney cites Attridge (2004), Moretti (1998), and Slaughter (1997) here in support of
her argument.
6 The term ‘thickening’ here is in reference to Avishai Margalit’s distinction between
‘thick’, ethical relations (with family and loved ones, for example), and ‘thin’ ones (with
strangers). See Margalit (2002).
8 E. BOND
does not collapse the difference between subject and object, since ‘prox-
imity is not immediacy’ but rather preserves difference (Kearney 2015,
p. 19), allowing for a space where things can be imagined otherwise (De
Cesari and Rigney 2014, p. 21), the sort of ‘side by side-ness of adja-
cency’ that Halberstam uses to read modes of passing (2018, p. 74).
This space is the space of art, creativity and play, but also of subsequent
interpretative interventions, as Sommer has argued, in a manner that
explains the ability of affective readings to engender and embody mobil-
ity itself: ‘Humanistic interpretation has an opportunity to trace ripple
effects and to speculate about the dynamics in order to encourage more
movement’ (2014, p. 7).
**
Working side-by-side with both a mobilities framework and corporeal
theory, then, this book develops the interpretative principle that the
individual bodies which move in contemporary migration flows are the
primary agents through which the trans-national passages of images,
emotions, ideas, memories—and also possible futures—are experienced
and enacted. My use of the hyphenated trans- here is in specific relation
to this conception of the body as situated agent of change within the
world. As I have argued elsewhere, I see the trans-national as being char-
acterised by three main features: a stretching or exceeding of national
boundaries, a sense of flexibility in the links and exchanges it permits,
and a fluidity of styles and practices in its cultural production. Each of
these interrelated aspects encompasses a kinetic sense of flow that ‘makes
the use of the hyphenated trans- crucial in its ability to muddle notions
of the national as fixed in time and space’ (Bond 2014, p. 416). I there-
fore follow Susan Stryker’s insistence on the hyphenated ‘trans-’ form as
it expresses an ‘explicit relationality’, and remains ‘open-ended’ (Stryker
et al. 2008, p. 11), shifting emphasis from suffix to prefix as well as to
the fertile space in between the two. Hyphenating the trans- allows it to
have a broad reach that stretches from the individual (body) to wider
society: ‘“Trans-” thus becomes the capillary space of connection and
circulation between the macro- and micropolitical registers through
which the lives of bodies become enmeshed in the lives of nations, states,
and capital-formations’ (Stryker et al. 2008, p. 14). This also intersects
with Merriman and Pearce’s re-positioning of kinaesthesis as a hyphen-
ated term in order to shift the emphasis of its articulation. In their read-
ing, the sensation of bodily movement described by kinaesthetics is
transformed into the aesthetics of movement as encapsulated by the new,

hyphenated form: ‘kin-aesthetics’ (2017, p. 498). Their innovation here
is immensely valuable, not least because it illustrates beautifully the bal-
anced emphasis that the middle dash manages to bestow to both ‘kin’ (in
terms of relationality), and ‘aesthetics’, as well as leaving a dynamic space
of crossing and communication between the two.
In this same way, the hyphenated trans-prefix operates in my work as a
productive hinge capable of voicing bodily mobility in multiple ways. At
the heart of my engagement with the term lies my analysis of trans-gender
embodiment in Chapter 3, and as such, it loses none of its specificity as
related to the politics of gender variance. But it also spreads outward,
becoming elastic enough to express other morphological states of flux
and becoming, a ‘capacious and fluid category rather than a diagnosis’.7
Suffixes are important indicators of meaning within my analysis too, so
balancing attention to trans-embodiments through the hyphen allows
me to read the representation of body morphologies in terms of trans-
positions, trans-lations, trans-gressions, trans-plantations, trans-formations,
trans-mogrifications, and trans-itions. The hyphen thus functions as a
sort of bodily brisure, which allows a sense of permeability and transition
between the individual (body) and the collective (national), and is there-
fore also intimately capable of denoting processes of migration.
As well as acting as a mediating joint that connects the mobile subject
to the nation (or indeed multiple nations), the body also functions as a
critical point of observation in and of itself. As Adrienne Rich entreats us
in her essay on the politics of location: ‘Begin, though, not with a con-
tinent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in—the
body’ (1994, p. 214). Indeed, I too understand the intimate terrain of
the body to be the privileged site of lived subjectivity, yet also a means of
experiencing the local and the global simultaneously. The body at once
occupies the here and now of lived embodiment, but also functions as a
carrier of memories and imprints from other times and spaces. Corporeal
7 Halberstam (2018, p. 88). Halberstam employs the asterisk in an analogous way, to
hold open the meaning of ‘trans’, since: ‘the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity
by refusing to situate a transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape,
or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty
of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or
that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the
authors of their own categorizations’ (ibid., p. 4).
10 E. BOND
expression and representation thus become an important hinge of mean-

ing within a mapping of the trans-national, since they allow for the
global to be filtered through the lens of the ‘particular’ and the ‘micro’
(Cronin 2012). The texts I analyse here all present expressions of corpo-
reality as an innately shifting field, constantly challenged by the limita-
tions of existing national, political and cultural constructions and equally
changed by encounters with external and internal imaginings. Fortier
highlights the importance of the affective qualities of such interpersonal
encounters:
In this sense, ‘migrant encounters’ are deeply felt experiences where the
subject (migrant or non-migrant) confronts, reconstructs and negotiates
boundaries between self and other. This attention to feelings calls for a
new methodology of reading the emotionality of migrant encounters that
considers ‘feelings’ […] in their bodily manifestations and in their move-
ment between bodies and within/through spaces. (Fortier 2006, p. 325)
These are all ‘situated’ mobilities that play with notions of what Anna
Tsing has termed ‘frictions’ (Tsing 2005), or what Sarah Nuttall, equally,
calls ‘entanglements’ (as the ‘condition of being twisted together or
entwined […] a human foldedness’) (Nuttall 2009, p. 1). Tsing uses the
term ‘friction’ to describe the drives that restrict, but also permit, global
connections, what she terms the ‘grip’ of worldly encounters and inter-
connections: ‘A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of
the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together
produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick’ (2005, p. 5). These
are encounters, and contacts, then, that are facilitated (but also poten-
tially restricted) by currents of humans in motion, and that are evocatively
described in turn through the dynamics of bodily grips and tangles.
In order to explore the importance of this intersubjectivity for the
representations of mobility in my analysis, I will lean on phenomenology
as my primary theoretical tool for understanding modes of bodily per-
ception of the world, and of the other. At the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s
theory of the primacy of perception is the idea that the body is never
just an object in the world, but is instead the means by which our world
comes into being, and through which we come to know both exter-
nal objects and other human beings (Merleau-Ponty 2008, pp. 43,
62). My body allows me to know others, and my perception of them is
formed through the appearance of theirs. Thus, in his analysis, the body
is granted a dual perspective as perceived and perceiving, and becomes

both subject and simultaneously an object available to the external
gaze. Husserl, whose work provides much of the theoretical grounding
for phenomenology, marked a distinction between Körper (the physical
body) and Leib (the lived body)—where the latter is emblematic of an
embodied self that ‘lives and breathes, perceives and acts, speaks and rea-
sons’. Yet Körper is also to be understood as one aspect of Leib, ‘one
manner in which the lived body shows itself’, thus retaining the impor-
tance of the material body itself. Later, Heidegger would turn from
the question of the body to the question of embodiment, so that in his
analysis ‘the body functions adverbially (we do not “have” a body, we
are “bodily”)’. Phenomenology thus becomes a mode of being, its own
(embodied) ontology (Welton 1999, p. 4).
This strand of existential phenomenology is now cast as part of what
Farnell describes as the first somatic turn in critical theory, which includes
works by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Bourdieu and a range of feminist
thinkers whose work aimed to ‘bring the body back in’ (Farnell 2012,
p. 8). She considers the second somatic turn to encompass theory that
re-positions ‘the moving body and the primacy of active, moving per-
sons’ at the centre of attention.8 This ‘primacy’ of the signifying moving
body draws the field of mobilities studies into close productive contact
with corporeal theory, and supports the notion of the importance of
the body for exploring expressions of migration. Building on works that
deal with the body, its encounters, and related affects (by Sara Ahmed,
Didier Anzieu and Elisabeth Grosz, among others), I will cast the body
as a liminal, multifaceted, and generative space capable of both repro-
ducing and subverting cultural, national and gender norms and inscrip-
tions. The body can also represent the locus of ultimate certainty or
uncertainty, depending on location and orientation, leading to sensations
of either ‘being at home’ or being ‘out of place’ (Ahmed 2000, p. 52).
Thus, I see the body as the site where subjectivity is formed (and con-
stantly re-formed), since it plays out a web of interconnected meanings
which are always subject to change and linked not only to the world in
which the subject is situated but also to the other bodies that inhabit that
same space. For this reason I pay special attention to the status of the
8 Farnell (2012, p. 8, emphasis added). However, this holds obvious problematics for
people who have mobility issues, people with disabilities, and other persons who might not
benefit from full access to mobility structures.
12 E. BOND
skin as a permeable, porous border—one that both protects and exposes,

a border that feels, allowing the constant renegotiation of the self to be
fully intersubjective. Richard Kearney draws on Husserl to expand on
this point: ‘Because flesh is this two-way transmission between inner and
outer, it is the place where I enjoy my most primordial experience of the
other. My perception of the other accompanies my perception of self’
(Kearney 2015, p. 27). A possible extension of a phenomenological per-
spective to the invisible, unconscious, and visceral dimension of flesh (or
flesh and blood) has been theorized by Drew Leder as a supplement to
Merleau-Ponty’s belief that I perceive of my own visibility through the
gaze of the other. Leder’s intervention looks beyond the perceptual func-
tion of the body identified by phenomenology, to privilege the inter-
twining and exchange that takes place through processes of eating and
consumption, in which he sees a total interpenetration of body and world
to be realised: ‘My lived body is literally formed from within that of
another. I arise out of viscerality, not visibility’ (Leder 1999, p. 206).
From a phenomenological point of view, then, the body permits pro-
cesses of intertwining both from within, and from without. Building on
this framework I will also privilege performative aspects of the self in my
analysis, looking particularly at the body’s ability to surprise, subvert and
extend existing frameworks and norms through its morphological capac-
ities as well as through mechanisms such as desire, agency and produc-
tivity. This extension of frameworks can be bound up with the notion of
‘carnal hermeneutics’, which has been defined as the ‘surplus of mean-
ing arising from our carnal embodiment, its role in our experience and
understanding, and its engagement with the wider world’ (Kearney and
Treanor 2015, p. 1).
The body’s ability to take on a surplus of meaning thus allows the
enfleshed ties of trans-nationalism to inscribe relations of proximity with
other critical categories such as gender and sexuality, race, and tem-
porality. This intersectionality is activated through the realisation that
bodies themselves have histories, and can thus function as archives of
experience.9 Much of this cultural weight and heritage will be mobilized
9 Beyond the comments relating to trans-gender identity that I have already made in this
Introduction, gender categories are also important when considering the textual corpus I
am analysing, since—as Rita Wilson writes—‘what is striking in the current literary produc-
tion by language migrants in Italy is the massive presence of female writers’ (Wilson 2011,
p. 125). See also Contarini (2010).
through processes of memory and memorialization, which, as Alison

Landsberg has claimed, are themselves embodied, even if indirectly
experienced or ‘prosthetic’: ‘memory remains a sensuous phenomenon
experienced by the body, and it continues to derive much of its power
through affect’ (Landsberg 2004, p. 8). This affective power of memory
has a transformative effect on the subject through his/her acts of migra-
tion, since ‘place is “thickened” as it becomes the setting of the variegated
memories, imaginations, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, anticipations, and
idealizations that experiences of migration, of both migrants and native
inhabitants, bring into contact with each other’ (Rothberg 2014, p. 133).
As bodies move, so texts and stories themselves migrate, creating layers of
memory and meaning, and disrupting linear concepts of time itself.
Indeed, if we read migration through the category of queerness pro-
posed by Halberstam, and thus as a ‘contrary temporal logic’, we can see
in both spheres ‘how and where and why certain bodies are perceived as
threatening, destabilizing, and aberrant’ (Halberstam 2018, p. 86). The
relation of time and place is altered in both queerness and migration, and
in my analysis, the queered time of migration is always represented as
layered, but can also splinter and fragment into the experience of time
as paralysed, disrupted, accelerated, or even fixed into the stasis of dis-
appearance and waiting. Yet such fragmentation also leads to the multi-
plicity of becoming, since—as Grosz has theorized—time functions not
only as a displacement, and difference, but also as a transformation, in its
inherent capacity to link ‘in extraordinarily complex ways, the past and
the present to a future that is uncontained by them and has the capacity
to rewrite and transform them’ (Grosz 1999, p. 8). Such links to the past
and future emerge in my analysis through the appearance of ghosts (since
‘Derrida dresses the place of spectrality up as the scene of migrancy and
transnationalism’, Cheah 1999, p. 196) and cyborgs, and as such they
permit me to stretch the meaning of spatial mobility and movement
outward through the temporal dislocation of the body of the migrant
subject. In fact, the figure of the cyborg, which encapsulates a present
narrated ‘as an opportunity to imagine that the past doesn’t determine
the future,’ thus opens up a space of creative play which allows the
reader ‘to imagine how things might be otherwise’ (Davis-Floyd and
Dumit 1998, p. 12). This space of narrative creativity permitted by the
mediated body is, we might imagine, one pathway toward what Adey
calls ‘storying mobilities’ (Adey 2017, p. 280).
***
14 E. BOND
All the works surveyed in the five case-study chapters that follow
involve a narrative thread or context of movement, but a strong tex-
tual focus means that my analysis is not anchored to migration itself as
a thematic or biographical concern. This allows me to conceive of the
texts themselves as being ‘in transit’—hence the subtitle of this intro-
duction, trans-scripts.10 By this, I mean to indicate texts, stories and
words which express transitional identities—that is, either before, dur-
ing or after a point of physical, cultural or linguistic transit—identities
which are then expressed in trans-national ways. I want to privilege a
flexible understanding of the different ways that bodies and texts cross
borders, be that in geographical, physical, social or cultural terms (Ong
1999). Locating the trans-national as a textual characteristic allows me
to delve deeper into the single most innovative way these narratives
perform and express an elastic perspective of mobility and distance:
that of writing the body. Indeed, Csordas sees textuality and embodi-
ment as dialectical partners in formulating a methodological field capa-
ble of investigating modes of presence and engagement in the world
(Csordas 1994, p. 12).
My primary corpus is mainly selected on the basis of the language
of composition, exploring texts written in Italian by authors from such
diverse countries as Albania, Algeria, Brazil, Russia and Somalia, as well
as second-generation migrant writers from Italy itself. Language func-
tions as a common thread which links such trans-national writing much
more than fixed points of location ever could. The choice of Italian is
also a deliberately de-centred one, distinct from the more familiar post-
colonial paradigms of Anglophone or Francophone writing. ‘Italy itself
is, perhaps, at once peculiarly trans-national and trans-nationally pecu-
liar: historically a space characterized by both internal and external transit
and movement, Italy itself can be imagined as a hyphenated, in-between
space created by the multiple crossings that etch its geographical sur-
faces and cultural depths’ (Bond 2014, p. 421). To emphasize the impact
of mobility on the ‘national’ space itself is, surely, of particular impor-
tance in formulating a productive definition of the trans-national, since
10 My use of this term was inspired by watching Paul Lucas’ stage play of the same name,
which is based on material assembled from interviews with people from around the world
who identify as transgender. See www.transcripts.org. Accessed 5 March 2018.
the breaching of physical borders can also work to place existing critical
boundaries and categories into question.11
Italy can also be seen as a marginal case within the supranational
context of Europe, thanks to its southern-most, outlying position on
the continent, and has even been theorized as representing ‘the subal-
tern within’ due to its location on the interior borders of an oriental-
izing European space (Dainotto 2007). Indeed, as Ulf Hannerz says,
‘the periphery is where center-periphery relationships are more intensely
experienced and creolization processes ought to be most comprehen-
sive’ (Hannerz 1996, p. 70). Italy’s fringe position lends it the poten-
tial dynamism of a ‘mobile overlapping zone’, given the possibility for
the emergence of new forms of identity and belonging along borders.
For as Étienne Balibar has argued, peripheral and frontier areas can play
a central role in the negotiation of identity, thanks also to the inherent
contradictions and the perpetual confrontation with the foreigner that
categorize such spaces (Balibar 2004, p. 3).
To this sense of Italy as a dynamic border area, as well as being a per-
ennially hyphenated cross-space, can be added the notion of an Italian
‘untimely’, to borrow Elizabeth Grosz’s term (Grosz 2004), that also
brings something new to the field of trans-national thought. The related
fields of Italian migration and (post-)colonial studies have developed
somewhat later than other European national models, but rather than
seeing this as a disadvantage or sign of backwardness, I argue that this
sense of lateness can be viewed as representing a potential supplementary
insight. As Heather Love has explained, historical ambivalence is particu-
larly charged in marginal contexts, and ‘feeling backwards’ is one way to
negotiate a modernity in arrival—a means of allaying fears for the future
while at the same time recalling the past (Love 2007, p. 6). This ties in
with Probyn’s insistence on the concomitant nature of past and present
time (Probyn 2001, p. 181), and highlights the significance of Italy’s
renegotiation of a (post-)colonial past at the very moment of an unprec-
edented contemporary im-migratory flux. These characteristics of the
Italian case can be seen to bring something new to global enquiry into
the trans-national, in constructing a charged and fluid ‘multi-dimensional
space-time able to cope with multiplicity’ (May and Thrift 2001, p. 2)
11 The importance of the ‘in-between’ in queer theories of time and space has been
emphasized in Spurlin et al. (2010, p. 3).

16 E. BOND
that might well characterize the dynamic and mobile aspect of the
trans-national in ways which have not to date been fully conceptualized.
Indeed, I was fascinated to see a tweet from Aaron Bady, an editor at
The New Inquiry, on 3rd August 2015 that ran: ‘The African novel, from
Cheik Hamidou Kane to Elena Ferrante’.12 Bady later elaborated on
this initial tweet, indicating in tongue-in-cheek fashion that he believed
Ferrante to be a pseudonym of Camara Laye, the famous Guinean writer
of the French colonial period, after he ‘faked his own death’ in 1980.
Bady’s tweet might not have meant to touch on the issues I read in it,
but the alignment of a (presumed) southern Italian writer with the post-
colonial African literary tradition is intriguing from many standpoints.
For although, in the words of Caterina Romeo, Italy self-defines as
a ‘white space’, this belies the anxieties about the stability of that very
whiteness that have characterised discourses around Italian identity since
the foundation of the national state in the mid-nineteenth century. For
a start, its geographical location within Europe grounds it firmly within
a ‘southern’ context, meaning that its own colonial conquests on the
other shore of the Mediterranean shift its sphere of historical influence
and interconnection south-ward, towards Libya and the Horn of Africa.
Furthermore, the existence of an internal ‘southern question’ gave rise
to commonly circulating discourses that ‘racialized the south by conflat-
ing the region with negative stereotypes associated with Africa and the
Middle East’ (Greene 2012, p. 3). For these, as well as other sociocul-
tural reasons, Italy is also viewed culturally as one of the belt of southern
European nations, that even back in the nineteenth century were seen
as ‘inferior’ on point of entry elsewhere (e.g. the United States), so that
Italians were subject to what Dyer terms ‘internal hierarchies of white-
ness’ along with other undesirable ‘races’ such as Irish and Jewish peo-
ples (Dyer 1997, p. 19). As Romeo has so clearly and evocatively stated,
these histories of the inadequacy and instability of a white Italian identity
both inflect and shade current attitudes and uncertainties towards race:
Race […] has “evaporated” from the cultural debate in contemporary Italy
as a result of the necessity to obliterate “embarrassing” historical events
(Italian colonial history and the racial/racist politics enacted by the Fascist
regime, intranational racism, racism against Italian emigrants to the United
12 https://twitter.com/zunguzungu/status/628239649048145920. Accessed 1 March
2018.
States, Australia, and northern Europe. The presence of race, like the pres-
ence of steam, saturates the air, rendering it heavy, unbreathable.13
Such repressed uncertainties around race, and the complex cultural reac-
tions they provoke, also saturate the writings of Black and ethnic minor-
ity writers in Italy, such as Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Gabriella Kuruvilla,
Geneviève Makaping, Igiaba Scego and Ribka Sibhatu, and fold into
more widespread cultural debates around whiteness and Blackness that
I will take up in more detail in Chapter 3. Its own liminality and history
of mass emigration might have allowed Italians the potential for racial
boundary-crossing or slippage in both directions in the past (the ‘colored
whiteness’ of emigrant Italians, for example, and the subsequent ‘whit-
ening’ of Italians through Fascist propaganda),14 but any sense of flu-
idity (and indeed social and legal recognition) is resolutely inaccessible
to Italy’s own migrant population today. We can then adapt Sharfstein’s
argument for the power and importance of self-definition (‘race is not
just a set of rules. It is also a set of stories that people have told them-
selves and one another over and over again,’15) and apply it to the sets
of stories that people also tell in order to divide, exclude, and racialize.
Yet as Halberstam would argue, processes of migration can lend a certain
fungibility to discourses around race, precisely through the adoption of a
trans* framework of interpretation:
Balanced as s/he is between nations, identities, and legibility, the asylum

seeker traces a trans* orbit as s/he moves passes back and forth between
legal and illegal, man and woman, citizen and foreigner. By naming this
space inbetween as trans*, we begin to see the importance of mutual artic-
ulations of race, nation, migration, and sexuality.16
13 Romeo (2012, pp. 221–222). Indeed, the lack of debate is seen as triggering, at least
partially, the often open racism in contemporary Italy towards public figures such as politi-
cian Cécile Kyenge, footballer Mario Balotelli, and even contributing to the possibility of,
and responses to, racially motivated attacks such as the drive-by shooting in Macerata in
February 2018 and the murder of Soumalia Sacko in Rosarno in June 2018.
14 On the topic of ‘whitening’, see Dyer (1997) and Garner (2007).
15 Sharfstein (2011). See also Arsenault (2011).
16 Halberstam (2018, p. 40). Halberstam further comments that the overlapping insta-
bility of gender identity and blackness ‘marks gender instability as part of the history of
blackness itself’ (ibid., p. 36).
18 E. BOND
And if,  moreover, we look sideways toward language as a focal point

for constructing new constellations of belonging, we can see Italian
itself functioning as the sort of inbetween space that Halberstam claims
for the trans* in recent works of Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri, an American
writer born in London to Bengali emigrants, has written about the pro-
cess both of learning Italian in adulthood, and deciding to write fiction
in the new language. Her first attempt, after moving to Rome, was the
writing of a personal diary, something that she has described as feeling
like a ‘transgression’, as if she were ‘writing with [her] left hand’, and
as a transformative process that is both ‘violent and regenerative’ (Lahiri
2015). This dual sense of translation and transformation echoes precisely
Thomas Nail’s definition of the two forms of movement that define the
migrant: first, a change of place, which he terms a ‘translation’; sec-
ond, a movement that effects a change in the whole (of society), which
becomes a ‘transformation’ (Nail 2015, p. 13). Indeed, this potential
for a transformative effect on society is maintained through a short story
that Lahiri wrote in Italian and has recently self-translated. Aptly entitled
‘The Boundary’, it raises awareness of the lack of access to a legal, social
and cultural Italian identity for resident and second generation migrants,
and its powerful denouement occurs precisely through language, or at
least, through the kind of fractured communication that passes as silence.
The second generation narrator’s father is revealed to have been the vic-
tim of a brutal, racially motivated attack that leaves his ability to speak
compromised:
Ever since, […] he garbles his words, as if he were an old man. He’s
ashamed to smile, because of his missing teeth. My mother and I under-
stand him, but others don’t. They think, since he’s a foreigner, that he
doesn’t speak the language. Sometimes they even think he’s mute. (Lahiri
2018)
Here, the father’s inability to speak is mis-translated through the body,

yet the narrative power of the daughter’s account claims back the truth,
ultimately allowing his body to function as a tool of narrative agency,
capable of responding to and subverting preconceptions of ‘foreignness’
and—through her voice—of remastering personal expression. Lahiri thus
reconfigures performative notions of talk as action, and action as talk, by
embodying discursivity within the narrative space of the migrant subject.
Indeed, the sort of transgression symbolized by the impression of writing
in one’s left hand is an indicator that Lahiri conceives of crossing language

as an embodied practice and experience in itself, and she extends the cor-
poreal metaphor to her perception of her own new (linguistic) vulnerabil-
ity: ‘It’s true that a new language covers me, but […] I’m almost without
a skin.’ Her transition here is from English to Italian, and yet the move-
ment of and between language(s) is thus seen as a physical, even bodily
act. Furthermore, these are discourses from the moving body, since not
only do ‘the human actions that constitute speech acts [signify] enact-
ments from the body, from our corporeal selves’, but they are also here
triggered and emboldened by Lahiri’s own migrations (Farnell 2012,
pp. 16, 17). Such bodily enactments of (linguistic) mobility are regarded
by Lahiri as: ‘moments of transition, in which something changes’, and
which ‘constitute the backbone of us all. Whether they are a salvation or
a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure
to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion’ (Lahiri 2015).
The transitions and transformations I have highlighted in relation to
narrativizing the migrant body thus stretch out to inform wider con-
siderations in the chapters that follow, on time, language, space and the
intersectional possibilities opened up by the term, ‘trans-’. For in terms
of space (and language), migratory flows have designated contemporary
Europe as a ‘multi-dimensional system of “translation zones”, thresh-
olds that both link and divide people’ (Rigney 2014, p. 349, emphasis
added). But I have also emphasized the risk of mis-translation that might
occur without due attention to past dynamics of slavery, exploitation and
colonialism that still scar and deform the present. Indeed, privileging the
multiscalarity inherent in the trans-national can help ‘cast light on trans-
national cross-currents which were operative at the height of national-
ism but which were subsequently written out of national narratives’ (De
Cesari and Rigney 2014, p. 7). This attention to the ‘multi-layered, mul-
ti-sited, and multi-directional dynamic’ that the mobile subject embodies,
as well as to the multivocality that is brought into play in the interlocking
social fields connecting the ‘“local”, the “national” and the “global”’ (De
Cesari and Rigney 2014, pp. 3–4) will run through the chapters to follow
and inform my analysis of these ‘travelling tales’ of the body.
****
The volume is divided into five further chapters, arranged themat-
ically to deal with interlocking narrative representations of a range
of bodily experience and expression that I argue can shed light on the
20 E. BOND
self-imaginings of the mobile subject. Chapter 2, ‘“Signing with a Scar”:

Inscriptions, Narration, Identity’, seeks to unlock the potential narrative
functions of the skin itself within migration stories. The surface posi-
tion of the skin allows it to function as an interface between subject and
world, and its unique morphological capacities, which evolve over time
and space, equip it to function equally mobile terms as a script-in-pro-
cess. As Nancy states:
Skin develops the breath, élan, push, and vibration of the body. If the soul
is the form of a living body, the skin conforms to this form: it turns pale or
blushes with it, it’s made smooth or rough, it shudders, its hairs stand on
end, and it’s shaped by its inclinations, elevations and folds. The skin tight-
ens, relaxes, creases, and toughens. (Nancy 2015, p. 79)
These characteristics and abilities of the dermal have obvious conse-

quences of metaphorical import for the (self-)representation of the mobile
subject, and can shed light on how migration is lived through ‘practices of
the skin’ (Lewis 2004, p. 122). Building on these initial ideas, the open-
ing chapter to the volume is introduced by an anthropological account
which critically re-posits knowledge as a bodily, and indeed as a specifically
dermal function and ability. Visibility, temporality and textility are then
explored in the three subsections to this chapter—sections that analyse
the complex ritualistic processes of tattooing personal or social histories
on the body, the absorption of propagandistic appropriations of body-im-
age and actions of self-harm as a creative act of agency and expression. I
use textual analysis to query what we can learn through what we see on
the body’s surface, what can be remembered, and what can be communi-
cated. And specifically, I look to answer how migration stories can express
and translate these three interlocking functions of the skin: as identity
envelope, as archive, and as imaginary, and how these dermal functions
can be used to recount stories of mobility, movement and migration. With
a focus on processes of identity transformation and the recuperation of
agency through narrative creation, this chapter explores texts by Nicolai
Lilin, Ornela Vorspi, Elvira Dones and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah that use
skin inscriptions to write movement of, through and on the body. The
chapter concludes by opening up a discussion of how contemporary work
by visual artists such as Nona Faustine reveals the potential to reverse
positions of bodily inscriptions, using the skin to tag sites and re-inscribe
personal and collective testimony back into landscapes themselves.
Chapter 3, ‘Trans-gender, Trans-national: Crossing Binary Lines’,

posits the hybrid trans- body as capable of expressing the porous quality
of the contemporary migrant experience through a complex web of gen-
der performance and cultural expectations. Taking contemporary debates
around gender and race that have recently been embodied in figures such
as Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal as my starting point, I put works
by Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque (on Brazilian trans-sexual subjects)
and Elvira Dones (on Albanian ‘sworn virgins’) into dialogue with con-
temporary African and diaspora fiction by Igoni Barrett (Blackass) and
Diriye Osman (Fairytales for Lost Children) to think about modes of in-
or hyper-visibility and mis- or pre-conceptions around race, gender and
identity. By performing close textual analysis of two narratives that pres-
ent shifting gender embodiments through the lens of cultural and linguistic
translation and migration movements, and placing these in dialogue with
current public debates, media representations and with other contemporary
texts which share the same thematics, I show how trans-embodiment of all
types can speak to issues of identity translation, self-determination (can we
decide what or who we are based on how we ‘feel’?), and possible loca-
tions of understanding (between ‘material’ truth and surface appearance).
Can dysphoria be extended to other identity projections and presentations,
and how might this open up new debates around belonging and orien-
tation? I conclude that these questions might productively be answered
through identifying and employing new hybrid or cyborg ways of reading
trans-national and trans-gender identities. Indeed, new architectures of
trans-occupation are muddling notions of home and journey in powerful
illustrative ways by critics questioning: ‘the concept of ownership implied
in the conventional equation of bodies with homes in transgender studies,’
and encouraging us to think of embodiment ‘as a series of “stopovers” in
which the body is lived as an archive rather than a dwelling, and architec-
ture is experienced as productive of desire and difference rather than just
framing space’ (Crawford 2015). This has clear implications for any align-
ment of trans- identity with the mobile subjectivity of the migrant subject,
and allows for a flexibility in interpretative praxis that further aligns the
trans- body with that of the cyborg. For as Halberstam claims, ‘trans* bod-
ies, in their fragmented, unfinished, broken-beyond-repair forms, remind
all of us that the body is always under construction’ (Halberstam 2018,
p. 135). I conclude that such a vision of ‘unfinished’ trans- embodiment
also carves out the narrative space necessary to create textual selves that can
encompass the sense of hybridity and multiplicity demanded of them.
22 E. BOND
Chapter 4, ‘Trans-national Mothering: Corporeal Trans-plantations

of Care’, explores frequent portrayals of trans-national mothering as
unwanted, problematized or disturbing, and instances of interrupted
maternity and substitutive maternalized care. It thus works to show
how these texts disrupt any traditional notions of the mothering expe-
rience as characterized by a natural sense of connection and belonging.
A discussion of the evocative new scientific discovery of microchimerism
introduces the themes of tolerance and transplantation and leads into an
analysis of stories by Gabriella Kuruvilla, Ingy Muyiabi, Igiaba Scego,
Amara Lakhous and Christiana de Caldas Brito. These show in various
ways how the split subjectivity and leaky bodily borders of the mater-
nal or mothering experience can be employed metaphorically to shed
light on the fragmentation of identity sometimes experienced by those
in trans-national states of motion. Leading away from traditional rep-
resentations of migrant motherhood as idealized and pointing towards
possible pathways of assimilation and integration, I focus instead on
narratives which align maternity and movement through shared con-
cerns around trans-plantation, pollution, and the fluidity of personal and
societal boundaries. I go on to look at scenes of abortion as well as the
complex trans-national care-ways associated with modern day mothering
which function as a lens capable of providing insight into some of the
contemporary paradigms and problematics of embodied trans-national
identities themselves. I conclude that the flexibility assumed within these
positions might also allow the trans-national maternal body to function
as a performative space, in its ability to breach borders, challenge dual-
isms and muddle strictly delineated notions of temporality and visibility.
Chapter 5, ‘Revolting Folds: Disordered and Disciplined Bodies’,
takes the concepts of hard and soft as its starting point, in order to
explore representations of the transformations in the size and surface
of the body, the tightness or smoothness that results from reducing or
sculpting its contours (seen in cosmetic surgery, body-building, and
bulimic or anorectic behavior), and the haptic folds that speak of excess
consumption. Building on the work of Michel Serres, who casts the
physical world of external reality as ‘hard’, and the world of culture and
concepts as ‘soft’, I concur with Treanor that the body ‘travels between,
translates, or otherwise mediates between the hard and the soft, through
the medium of linguistic expression’ (Treanor 2015, p. 68). My tex-
tual analysis of stories by Viola Chandra, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah,
Igiaba Scego and Ornela Vorpsi focuses on patterns of incorporation
and rejection that allow the body to stand as an analogous metaphor

for society, and designate it as an expressive map capable of n egotiating
and enacting meaning. Touching on issues of temporality, mortality and
materiality, I ask what this corporeal labor of meaning might consist
of in the case of migrant or second generation subjects: what kinds of
cultural ‘weight’ are they dealing with? What kind of societal values are
they trying to embody or deviate from? And what messages can the dis-
ordered or disciplined trans-national body communicate? Such processes
of bodily modification, expansion and reduction may indicate potential
pathways toward increased subjective visibility and agency, since transfor-
mations in the size, surface and appearance of the body allow for mean-
ing-making processes to take place, but they also highlight a heightened
attention to self-care practices and the aestheticization of the body and
self. These intersect with the instances of self-inscription already dis-
cussed in chapter two, and are here seen to operate as part of a postmod-
ern framework, where patterns of signification in identity and discourse
remain fragmented and—crucially—malleable. I thus conclude that
modes of physical exercise, food consumption, cosmetic enhancement
and fashion choices can all be ways to control one’s body image, and to
write oneself into a chosen narrative (cultural, social, national) as well as
to operate modes of resistance to those same narratives.
For Sartre, my carnal experience of myself is alienated by its depend-
ence on another’s objectivizing grasp of me as external body (Kearney
2015, p. 30). Such practices of intersubjective recognition and era-
sure inform the final chapter of the volume, ‘Absent Bodies, Haunted
Spaces’. I begin by exploring how narrative and linguistic representa-
tions of missing or absent bodies function in works by Cristina Ali
Farah, Amara Lakhous and Ornela Vorpsi. Voice persists to narrate
post-death experiences in these narratives, meaning that the ghostly fig-
ures they showcase operate as absent and present simultaneously, and
that the ghost itself can be theorized as a social figure, easily related to
other marginal and uncanny subjects. Memory takes centre stage in my
analysis here, since the absence of the body proper allows for a multi-
directional take on trans-national modes of cultural remembrance. This
is specifically elaborated in exemplary evocations of Argentinian desa-
parecidos in stories by Elvira Dones and Igiaba Scego, which relate
the figure of the missing or haunting body to contemporary deaths
in migration sea-crossings. Tapping into a strong vein of interdis-
ciplinary visual and installation art that privileges the trans-national
24 E. BOND
dimension of commemorating bodies missing in transit (by Isaac Julien,

Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Costas Varotsos, and Gustavo Aceves), I
conclude this chapter by advocating what I term a ‘by proxy’ assumption
of shared trans-cultural memory and histories in order to create a path-
way towards increased awareness and solidarity in response to contempo-
rary migration.
The volume concludes with a brief afterword that ties together the
main currents of thought explored in the previous chapters. Through
the optics of a ‘wet ontology’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015), I pay special
consideration to currents of drift, flow and stasis that both characterise
popular imaginings of migration, but that can also be re-appropriated
through bodily means in order to propose new directions for future
study. I conclude that as people move, so stories, memories, ideas,
images also cross borders to transit in new languages and cultures. And
what I hope that this book will show is how such practices can circulate
trans-nationally through the body itself. For if trans- bodies are ‘a site for
invention, imagination, fabulous projection’ then trans- texts might yet
represent ‘the art of becoming, the necessity of imagining, and the fleshy
insistence of transitivity’ (Halberstam 2018, p. 136).
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CHAPTER 2
‘Signing with a Scar’: Inscriptions,

Narration, Identity
2.1 Introduction
The skin, the skin as hide, as flesh, as envelope. As imaginary and as
archive. As a canvas or a text that holds the innate possibility to be trans-
formed, to carry personal stamps, symbols or messages, ‘the most plia-
ble medium at our disposal for displaying or communicating our internal
states of mind’ (Lemma 2010, p. 7). Sigmund Freud, in sketching the
ego as a ‘mental projection of the surface of the body’, emphasized the
functional importance of the liminal position of the ego—the seat of
subjectivity—on the skin itself.1 This bodily ego is derived from surface
sensations and projections and means that the skin acts as both barrier and
passageway simultaneously. Indeed, as the subtitle of Claudia Benthien’s
volume Skin suggests, the skin can function as the ultimate cultural or
symbolic border between self and world (Benthien 2002). Opening up
metaphorical and metonymic channels which link the bodyscape to rela-
tions of inside and outside, this transforms the skin into a porous bound-
ary that allows movement, thus powerfully evoking processes of human
mobility and migration. In the same way, Steven Connor’s Book of Skin
sees the skin as a ‘milieu’, ‘a place of minglings, a mingling of places’
(2003, p. 26). But the skin’s surface also forces a complex relation with
1 Freud (2001, p. 26). ‘A person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from
which both external and internal perceptions may spring’ (ibid., p. 25).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_2
30 E. BOND
visibility, and when tied to racializing processes that Frantz Fanon has
bracketed under the label of ‘epidermalization’ (Fanon 1967, p. 11), this
relation can cancel the positives of nuanced visibility (where seeing is rec-
ognizing) and lead to hyper-visibility (where seeing collapses into opera-
tions of surveillance, pre- and mis-conceptions and judgments). Visibility,
temporality and textility are three thematic threads that will be explored
in the three subsections to this chapter—what can we learn through what
we see on the body’s surface? What can be remembered? And what can
be communicated? How can migration stories express and translate these
three interlocking functions of the skin: as identity envelope, as archive,
and as imaginary? And how can these be used to recount stories of mobil-
ity, movement and migration? With a focus on processes of identity trans-
formation and the recuperation of agency through narrative creation, this
chapter will explore texts that use skin inscriptions to write movement of,
through and on the body.
2.2 Skin Knowledge
Of all the seven years that Kenneth Kensinger spent among the
Cashinahua people of Eastern Peru, one conversation struck the
American anthropologist as being especially significant, and ultimately
led him to form a much more profound understanding of the way his
hosts acquired their knowledge of the world around them. During a
ribald storytelling session, the headman of the community started to
recount the unlikely sexual encounter between a tapir of insatiable amo-
rous appetites and a willing but ungainly land turtle. The tale concluded
with a mishap in which the tapir lost his penis and died (the more fortu-
nate turtle meanwhile enjoying a somewhat unusual meal), a finale which
elicited the following remark from one of the audience members.
Bidu, the man sitting next to me on his turtle shell, leaned forward and
said to his young son, cradled between his legs, “My son, that’s what hap-
pens when all your knowledge is in your balls.” (Kensinger 1991, p. 38)
According to the Cashinahuan belief system, it was not the physical acci-
dent in itself that had killed the unlucky tapir, but rather that his limited
‘genital’ knowledge had left him fatally exposed to danger and death.
A true knowledge, on the other hand, was understood to extend to the
whole body, and the wise person was thought to ‘know’ in different ways
2 ‘SIGNING WITH A SCAR’: INSCRIPTIONS, NARRATION, IDENTITY 31
through various sensorial channels, including their hands, ears, genitals,

liver, eyes and skin. This knowledge, or ‘una,’ does not originate in the
brain, the Cashinahua explained to Kensinger, nor is it elaborated by any
form of cerebral process. Instead, it is produced in and through the body
itself, and is constituted from that which ‘the body learns from experi-
ence’ (Kensinger 1991, p. 39). In this system of thinking, therefore, the
whole body thinks and knows.
In bypassing the now commonly accepted Western division of mind
and body into intellectual and sensorial faculties, an idea in steady cir-
culation since the Renaissance and cemented by the founding principle
of Cartesian rhetoric,2 the Cashinahuan system provides an illuminating
example of how to re-propose the body itself as a primary haptic site of
knowledge. This in turn recalls the phenomenological theories that form
the critical backbone of the present volume, and their insistence on the
importance of sensorial perception for a holistic sense of understand-
ing, both of the external world as well as of the self. Elizabeth Grosz, for
example, makes a call for promoting the understanding of an ‘embodied
subjectivity’ or ‘psychical corporeality’ (Grosz 1994, p. 22), both com-
binations which fuse the two previously separate categories. And more
specifically, in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Anzieu, Grosz and Ahmed,
it is the skin itself which has a privileged role in the phenomenological
system. Anzieu, for one, emphasizes the paradoxically double role of
skin, in that it both shields, yet preserves the marks of its disruption, and
reveals that which it is meant to protect:
It is both permeable and impermeable, superficial and profound, truthful

and misleading, solid and fragile, allowing for both pain and pleasure […]
it has a ‘halfway’, intermediate, transitional status. (Anzieu 1989, p. 17)
This double and often conflicting nature of the skin is reflected in

its dual ability to both alter and be altered by perception and com-
munication processes and by a full range of possible encounters. As
Csordas states, the body is ‘not merely subject to external agency, but
2 Didier Anzieu also puts this in useful spatial terms: ‘Since the Renaissance, Western
thought has been obsessed with a particular epistemological conception, whereby the
acquisition of knowledge is seen as a process of breaking through an outer shell to reach
an inner core or nucleus’ (Anzieu 1989, p. 9). He goes on to ask, ‘what if thought were as
much an affair of the skin as of the brain?’ (ibid., p. 9).
32 E. BOND
is simultaneously an agent in its own world construction’ (Csordas

1994, p. 12). For the body is able to absorb and incorporate knowledge
through its sensorial experience of its surroundings, taking the world
in, as it were, through the sense organs, and especially so through the
skin. Yet, such a ‘skin knowledge’ functions in a dialectical motion, since
the body not only receives knowledge from external sources and stim-
uli to its surface, but also transmits information through its own dermal
appearance. Indeed, people can judge a subject’s age, gender, race, prov-
enance, even social status, through messages relayed by dermatological
details and cosmetic inscriptions available to both haptic and visual chan-
nels of perception. And as well as self-determined marks representing
signs and messages, the skin can also be inscribed, altered and affected by
such simple processes as the normal passing of time, and the particulari-
ties of its physical surroundings.
Only the skin can manifest marks of what it has perceived. The skin may be
dried by the sun and roughened by the wind; it bears the scars and bruises
of its scrapes and bumps and the imprint of what has pressed into its soft
surface. (Howes 2005, p. 33)
Such inscriptions and marks allow the body to function as a kind of text
that can be deciphered and read through a variety of visual and tactile
codes and practices. And this has, in turn, produced an assortment of
responses and adaptations of the dermal possibilities of the transmission
of meaning since the earliest of times. For example, marks impressed
on the skin can point to individual, familial or societal codes or stories
themselves.
Among the Nuba of Sudan, a woman’s back is traditionally covered with

patterns of raised scars incised to mark important events in her life. This
“Braille” of the flesh constitutes an exquisitely sensitive corporeal record of
personal development and social adherence. (Classen 2005, p. 13)
These elaborate maps trace a cultural code that tells of clan lineage and
individual rites of passage, and through the addition of new marks at
the keystone turns of puberty, marriage and childbirth, also function as
a testimony of the woman’s strength and maturity. As Classen remarks
though, of significance here is not simply the potential for a ‘legibility’
of the development and standing of the bearer, but that there is also an
added aesthetic quality to both the visual appearance and haptic surface
of the scarred subject. And that through being touched by either self
or other, the raised keloids can also provide the potential for a height-
ened dermal sensitivity for the bearer as well. Furthermore, the specific
points on body where scarification patterns occur have their own impor-
tance which invests the body itself with added significance, since it is
precisely the combination of skin and incision that creates meaning. It is
these interlocking aspects of the body’s active role as signifier in the pro-
cesses of scarification and skin transfiguration that will go on to inform
the analysis that follows.
*
In modern Western societies, the tattoo has shifted from being a marker
of extreme rebellion or societal marginality to a mainstream, popular cul-
tural practice. As such, the dermal inking of symbols, words and images
that hold specific significance for the subject (yet that may well not be
decipherable in the same way to the viewer) has perhaps become the pri-
mary means through which people use their own skinscapes to communi-
cate a sense of self, orientation, or the development of their life narrative.
Nicolai Lilin, an author born in Transnistria (present-day Moldova), who
migrated to Italy in 2004 and writes in Italian, has used his own knowl-
edge of the criminal tattoo system of the Siberian community in his
native land to form the basis of two narrative texts, Educazione siberiana
(Siberian Education: Growing up in a Criminal Underworld) and the later
Storie sulla pelle [Stories on the skin].3 In fact, beyond his work as a writer,
Lilin now also operates as a tattoo artist in a studio tucked away in a tiny
town near Padua, deep in the damp, foggy hinterlands of the Venetian
lagoon, in the prosperous north-eastern corner of Italy.
Dismissed by many as fantastical, or at least as aspirational and exag-
gerated, much of Lilin’s debut ‘novel’ (and more on this genre cate-
gorization later) was dedicated to recounting the violent yet curiously
heart-warming tale of young Nicolai’s upbringing in the town of
Bender, as a juvenile member of the displaced Siberian community resi-
dent there. But the stand-out chapter in the book, which diverts some-
what from the other blood-soaked vignettes, is called ‘Quando la pelle
3 Lilin (2009, 2011, 2012a). Lilin also published a ‘follow-up’ to Educazione siberiana,
continuing the saga of the protagonist Kolima, with the title Il marchio ribelle, Turin:
Einaudi (2018).
34 E. BOND
parla’ (‘When the skin speaks’), and together with the cover image of
Lilin’s own tattooed neck4 and the stylized drawings included at the
end of each chapter (which traditionally combine orthodox Christian
images with criminal or sexual overtones), points to the primal signif-
icance that this form of dermal communication holds for both Lilin
and his retelling of the history of his community. Indeed, the impor-
tance of this thematic is underlined by the subsequent publication of
Storie sulla pelle, which elaborates on some of the practices and symbol-
ism described in the earlier work, as well as Lilin’s own lengthy initia-
tion into the profession of a traditionally trained tattoo artist, or kol’šik,
‘quello che punge’ (2012a, p. 42, ‘he who stings’).
Tattooing in the Siberian criminal tradition is symbolic of a means of
a codified practice of communication and identification—Lilin speaks of
the necessity of reading (‘leggere’) and translating (‘tradurre’) tattoos
(2009, pp. 73, 74; 2011, p. 90). It is significant that the images can-
not simply be ‘read’ forthwith, but also need to be interpreted with the
aid of ulterior or specialized knowledge in order for their meaning to be
understood. These codified tattoos are initially described in Educazione
siberiana as being similar to letters of a foreign alphabet, where the
meaning is to be located in the links between the images (or letters) just
as much as in the images (or words) themselves. Lilin writes: ‘Insomma,
sfruttavo i simboli nella creazione delle immagini come si usano le lettere
dell’alfabeto per scrivere le storie’ (2009, p. 77, ‘I used the symbols […]
to create the image, as a writer uses the letters of the alphabet to build
up a story.’ 2011, p. 94). This idea is also confirmed by Alexei Plutser-
Sarno in his introduction to the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia:
In exactly the same way as argot is a masked language, neutral words with
coded meanings, tattoos convey ‘secret’ symbolic information through the use
of allegorical images which at first might seem familiar to everyone (a naked
woman, a devil, a burning candle, a bat, etc. (Plutser-Sarno 2009, p. 27)
Yet such familiarity is misleading, and the covert nature of the signs is
important both in terms of their legibility within the community (where
they will indicate vital personal information such as rank, provenance and
past criminal acts, thus allowing for social inclusion and recognition) but
4 The image of Lilin’s neck is replaced in the English language edition by a close-up of
his tattooed fingers partially concealing his face, but still the emphasis is on the primacy of
the symbolic images they show.
also—crucially—will guarantee illegibility outside the community (thereby

confounding both rival criminal gangs and the police authorities). The
semi-secretive nature of this symbolic process is further complicated by
the fact that, as in the above example of the Nuba, the body is far from
being a passive point of transit for the communication and decodification
of such symbols, but itself functions to add, change and deny meaning
to the images that mark it.5 And moreover, the skinscape works to put
individual symbols into communication with one another, much as how
writing joins single words together to make a sentence, and will eventu-
ally lead to a complete telling of the narrative of the bearer’s life. Lilin
describes this process as a ‘geometria precisa’ (precise geometry):
Ogni simbolo, posizionato in una parte del corpo, attraverso una rete di col-
legamenti, entrava in rapporto con un altro, che poteva trovarsi dalla parte
opposta. […] Bastava che un simbolo cambiasse posizione in uno schema
geometrico e bisognava leggerlo in tutt’altro modo. (2012a, pp. 48–49)
[Each symbol, when placed in a particular point, would form a network of
links in order to connect with others, even if they were on opposite sides
of the body. Symbols only had to change position within this geometric
framework in order to require an entirely different reading.]
As in the above analogy, this means that the symbolism of the tattoos
functions like a language, one that allows an informed communication
(the tattoos themselves ‘speak in the first person’ and ‘directly to the
spectator’, Plutser-Sarno 2009, p. 37) and the language they create even
has a physical effect on the space surrounding the bearers and the other
people within it. As Plutser-Sarno explains:
The tattooed body as a whole is involved in a constant ‘dialogue’ with

the world that surrounds it […] As a central element of the language of
thieves, tattoos subjugate all the space around them. The pakhany (body
language) of the main criminal bosses, is capable of structuring the life of
the whole country. (Plutser-Sarno 2009, p. 37)
5 Grosz discusses Lingis’ work on tattoos in similar terms. ‘Incisions and markings create
an erotogenic surface, not a map of the body but the body precisely as a map. They con-
stitute some regions on that surface as more intensified, more significant than others. In
this sense they unevenly distribute libidinal value and forms of social codification across the
body’ (Grosz 1994, p. 139).
36 E. BOND
But their intimidating visual efficacy does not guarantee comprehensibil-

ity, as explained above, and in the same way, the meanings of the tattoos
that Lilin himself bears and that he draws in both volumes remain delib-
erately hidden to the average reader. This disrupted significance may be
related to the lack of a fully available skinscape, as if a visual or textual
reproduction in isolation of the body could only ever be a falsity. As Lilin
states as a preface to Storie sulla pelle:
Nessuno dei tatuaggi riprodotti in queste pagine, anche quando a una

prima occhiata potrebbe sembrare il contrario, coincide in tutto e per
tutto con quelli descritti a parole. L’immagine non illustra il racconto e il
racconto non spiega l’immagine: piuttosto, si spiazzano a vicenda. (Lilin
2012a)
[None of the tattoos drawn on these pages coincides completely with
those described in the story, even if at first glance it might seem that way.
The image does not illustrate the story, and the story does not explain the
image: rather, they work to wrongfoot one another.]
Beyond even the strict codes of the Siberian community, this idea
of ‘wrongfooting one another’ also seems to replicate the gener-
ally ambiguous status of the tattoo (and indeed, of the skin itself) as at
once private and public, intimate and symbolic. As explained by Uta
Karacaoglan:
The image of the tattoo is visible on the skin while, at the same time, its
multi-layered, intimately personal message can only be determined in con-
text, and so its meaning remains relatively obscured. So it is ideally situated
to represent something […] that must be kept secret and yet absolutely
must find expression. (Karacaoglan 2012, pp. 22–23)
Any potential knowledge to be gained is therefore mediated by the con-

text of the bodyscape, and the corporeal canvas can add and alter the
meanings to those who possess the skills or knowledge to decode its
messages. And although meaning is never held in the individual images,
nor can it be understood by the uninitiated (here including Lilin’s gen-
eral readership), it is precisely this potential for a sense of concealment
or playful reticence to function as a source of power and agency for the
subject that will be explored in final section of this chapter.
**
Yet such dermal codes can also be ‘suffered’ in a more literal sense
than that suggested by Lilin,6 in occasions where the subject is afforded
little or no choice as to whether they participate in such strict cultural
or societal rituals. In such time-old customs as the scarification practised
by the Nuba and other peoples, having the right dermal marks is vital
for the subject to be recognized socially, and thus to be ‘appropriately’
valued. In a certain way, therefore, these inscriptions allow the subject
to be seen. Scarification is understood to have traditionally distinguished
humans from animals in societal systems such as these, and this permits
a process that has been likened to a form of ‘humanization’. But in dif-
ferent systems and practices it can also mean the opposite. The surface
of skin can provide a canvas which permits it to be the bearer of more
nefarious meanings, read through enforced inscriptions that are indica-
tive of political or power relations that have been imposed on the body
in order to mark it as inferior or subjugated, and which function as a sign
of domination, possession or punishment. One canonical literary exam-
ple of this is the infamous harrow of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (2007
[1919]), where the inscription itself functions both as sentence (since
it writes out the violated law on the body) and punishment (since the
wounds inflicted will eventually cause the prisoner’s death).
For pain deliberately inflicted on the body of the other through sys-
tems of abuse and torture is both objectified and made visible to those
outside the subject’s body (Scarry 1985, p. 28), thus displacing usual
flows of knowledge. In its objectified form (since it is no longer experi-
enced privately), it is then ‘denied as pain and read as power, a transla-
tion made possible by the obsessive mediation of agency’ (Scarry 1985,
p. 28, emphasis added). Indeed, Naomi Morgenstern has indicated how
in neoslave testimonies, for example, the scarred skins of Black bodies
have to be read in order to signify. The scars that they suffer have been
produced by the whip marks inflicted upon them by their white mas-
ters, so that the character of Sethe in Beloved is described as having a
‘chokecherry tree of history’ on her back (Morgenstern 1996). Again,
the positioning of these particular inscriptions is significant—their loca-
tion on the subjects’ backs brings them to symbolize the very weight
of history that their carriers bear, but it also provides a channel for a
6 Indeed, Lilin speaks of tattoos being ‘suffered’, not for the pain of the incision, but for
the events themselves that led to the creation of the image (usually constituted of criminal
activity or prison sentences). See Lilin (2011, p. 99).
38 E. BOND
curative sense of reciprocal recognition, since ‘the traumatised carry a

traumatised history they cannot see, thus they require another to see it
for them. Future and past are folded into present scene of witnessing’
(Kilby 2001, p. 129).
The reference here to witnessing is significant and may allow these
scars to be read as a kind of non-linguistic remnant (to recall Agamben’s
use of the term) that can function to recuperate and bear witness to past
events through the empathetic presence of the other in the here and
now. Holocaust accounts often tell of the obsessive desire of survivors
for others to bear witness to the atrocities they bore, as well as their
own need to bear witness to the memory of those who did not survive
by providing their own supplememtary testimony.7 And the witnessing
of this sort of inscribed history on the individual skinscape allows both
self and other the opportunity to experience the same sort of temporal
collapse through a multiply-formed act of recognition, or at least of the
recognition of ‘horrors beyond recognition’ (Oliver 2004, p. 79).
The skin that we have and that we witness on others is unmistakably
present in the here and now, but its layered temporality means that it
also provides an optic and haptic means of travelling both back and forth
through time—since it holds the marks and memories of the past, but
also the inherent ability to heal and regenerate, thus allowing the subject
to look toward the future. In a sense, ‘unmarked’ skin is unanchored
skin, skin that holds no temporal or personal records, which can in a
cosmetic way be seen in a positive way. ‘“Good skin” is skin unmarked
by the passage of time. “Bad skin” means skin marked both by memory
and as memorable; we do not forget bad skin’ (Prosser 2001, p. 54).
But intentional marking means (trans)fixing the body in the present, and
has also been proposed as a channel toward ontological reassurance: ‘by
irreversibly marking the body, the subject also protests against the ideol-
ogy that makes everything changeable. The body thus appears as the ulti-
mate point of the subject’s identity’ (Salecl 2001, p. 32). Thinking back
to the social and cultural fixity of the scarification processes described
above, Lilin also remarks on the unsettling effect that seeing a ‘naked’
(unmarked) body has on him: ‘il corpo vuoto […] mi sembrava una
cosa impossibile, la percepivo quasi come una malattia’ (2009, p. 80;
7 On this subject, see, for example, Levi (2005) and Agamben (2002). Beyond the physi-
cal mark of the Holocaust tattoo, Cubilié argues that it is the testimony itself that functions
as both ‘scar and trace of the experience’ (Cubilié 2005, p. 154).
‘the empty, tattooless body […] seemed to me an impossible thing,

almost like a disease’ 2011, p. 98). The lack of surface inscriptions here
points to an ontological emptiness that literally ‘infects’ the bearer in the
eyes of the other, who can therefore neither decipher nor ‘read’ him.
But whether intentional or not, bearing dermal inscriptions also means
keeping a permanent record of the past. Or indeed, of erasing the past,
and of looking forward to different futures. ‘The skin is a soft clock […]
and when we mark the skin, and await its healing, we can make time run
backwards’ (Connor 2001, p. 46).
***
Fixing the subject in the past through a forced dermal inscription is
the traumatic fate of one of the characters in Elvira Dones’ 2001 novel
Sole bruciato [Burnt Sun], which was first published a year previously in
Albanian as Yjet nuk Vishen Kështu [Stars do not dress like this].8 The har-
rowing tale of scores of girls kidnapped and sold into the sex traffick-
ing trade from Albania to Italy in the 1990s, Sole bruciato narrates the
processes of dehumanization that take place through the corporeal abuse
and commodification that they suffer. Usually, the beatings that the
girls suffer at the hands of their traffickers are specifically designed not
to mark them (at least not permanently), since this would damage the
commercial value of their flesh. The relentless physical, sexual and psy-
chological degradation that characterizes their lives allows them at least
temporary release from their own bodies, which they come to perceive as
extraneous and empty. Furthermore, their appropriation of their abusers’
sense of their bodies as ‘solo carne’ (p. 126, ‘mere flesh’) leads them to
consider their skin to be so hardened that it no longer remarks or suf-
fers pain (see p. 236). On one occasion, though, three of the girls are
apprehended by the Italian police on their nightly shift as sex workers,
and as part of the punishment that is meted out on their return (as much
for the future purpose of intimidation as retribution for their past ‘care-
lessness’), one of them, Suela, is repeatedly burnt in various parts of her
body with lit cigarettes. To the horror of the narrator and the other girls,
her abusers use the burn wounds to spell out the word ‘puttana’ (whore)
in Albanian on her stomach. ‘Quella parola sulla pancia! Con chi avrebbe
mai potuto vivere Suela, a chi avrebbe potuto mostrare il suo corpo?’
(p. 237) [‘That word on her stomach! Who would Suela ever be able to
8 Dones (2000, 2001). A translated excerpt has been published in Elsie (2006).
40 E. BOND
live with now, to whom would she ever be able to show her body?’].
The dermal inscription that Suela has suffered will constantly mark her
as (having been) a prostitute, even if she succeeds in escaping the pres-
ent and creating for herself a different future. Her dermal marking here
symbolizes more than past actions, and more than a present trauma. The
past has been indelibly inscribed in her future and the stigmata thus erase
any chance of that future. It is, as such, an act of literal mortification.
The visibility of Suela’s past, through the present and future fixity of
her skin marking, is here akin to a kind of Foucauldian process of sur-
veillance, where her abusers can control her future from a temporal
‘afar’. This disciplinary mechanism, which recalls Foucault’s concept of
the panopticon, renders Suela ‘ever-visible’, forever the passive object of
information, rather than the ‘subject in communication’ (see Foucault
1991, p. 200). As such, it functions even in the absence of those who
inflicted the inscription upon her, and—furthermore, is replicated in the
very absence of the Albanian word ‘kurva’ in the Italian text version.
The original insult is unspeakable, textually anonymous, yet the power
it exerts on Suela is evident through the extra-lingual expression of pain
she emits upon her rescue.
Il pianto è accompagnato da un lamento profondo. La voce è come

se uscisse dal suo corpo e da quello dei suoi genitori, da quello del suo
popolo e ancora più indietro, dal ventre della terra che l’ha generata centi-
naia, migliaia di anni prima. (p. 270)
[Her tears are accompanied by a profound lament. It sounds as if the voice
comes from deep in her body, and from her parents’ bodies, the bodies of
her people and still further back, from the belly of the earth that generated
her hundreds, thousands of years earlier.]
The body speaks (of) its torture, yet Suela herself is left outside of
language, reduced to emitting a primal scream, which reveals those
sounds prior to language that Elaine Scarry describes in The Body in
Pain. The torture she has been subjected to has destroyed the content
of her language, because ‘as the self disintegrates, so that which would
express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject’
(Scarry 1985, p. 35). Following this logic which devolves language
from meaning (since pain converts language into noise and idiom, and
words into wounds and screams), the code of abuse that is legible on
Suela’s body does simply not function through the meaning of the
word as signifier, but must be activated by the perceiving, determining

gaze of the other. This gaze that both inscribes and is inscribed upon
the subject is an active process of looking that can reduce the body to a
‘mere’ object, one which can be read as fully as any other text (Kaplan
1997, p. xviii). As such, this mechanism is also a fundamental contrib-
uting factor in any analysis of the shifts in perception and self-percep-
tion that are triggered by migration and movement.
****
Related to this, Sara Ahmed has shown how the figure of the ‘stranger’ is
not a pre-existing ontological category, but is instead produced through
the encounter itself—for it is through encounters that we seek to read
for signs on the body of the other, or read their body as a sign. But this
legibility is not guaranteed, so we rely on prior histories and construc-
tions in order to make sense of it. But such a reliance can lead to pre- or
misconceptions that replace ‘knowledge’ as such, and convert ‘visibility’
into an optical illusion.9 As Linda Martín Alcoff states, ‘what the visible
reveals is not the ultimate truth; rather, it often reveals self-projection,
identity anxieties, and the material inscription of social violence’ (Alcoff
2005, p. 8). In such encounters, therefore ‘bodies are both de-formed
and re-formed, they take form through and against other bodily forms’
(Ahmed 2000, p. 39).
This idea of the de-formation and re-formation of bodies through
‘strange’ encounters is explored in Ornela Vorpsi’s second volume of short
stories, La mano che non mordi [The Hand You Don’t Bite], through an
interrogation of the absolute sense of ‘foreignness’ that plagues the unac-
knowledged or misrecognized modern-day migrant. Albanian by birth,
Vorpsi moved to Italy at the age of 22, and spent seven years there before
moving to Paris in 1997. This double movement is echoed in the plot
events of La mano che non mordi, since the narrator enacts a sort of ‘by
proxy’ return to the Balkans, by travelling to Bosnia rather than directly
home to Tirana. The sense of ‘spaesamento’ [disorientation] that this
affords allows her to explore how the perception of the other as ‘foreigner’
reduces him or her to a merely visible presence, a figure that is watched,
and watches back in turn.
9 For example, when the narrator’s mother is asked ‘A quanto scopi?’ [How much do you
charge?], whilst waiting for her daughter outside a newspaper kiosk on their arrival in Italy
– the very fact of her being Albanian (or even simply foreign) is taken as an assumption of
her (sexual) availability, cf. Vorpsi (2007).
42 E. BOND
Ormai sono una perfetta straniera. Quando si è così stranieri, si guarda il tutto
in modo diverso da uno che fa parte del dentro. A volte, essere condannati
a guardare dal di fuori suscita una grande melancolia. È come recarsi a una
cena di famiglia e non poter partecipare; si frappone una gelida finestra. Di un
vetro bello spesso, antiproiettile, anti-incontro […] Le loro parole sono inu-
dibili. Il loro calore lontano. Tu rimani spettatore. (Vorpsi 2007, pp. 19–20)
[By now I am a perfect foreigner. When you are this foreign, you look at
everything differently to those who are already inside. Sometimes, being
condemned to watch from outside brings on a deep sense of melancholy.
It’s like arriving at a family dinner and not being able to join in; there is
an icy window in the way. A window made of thick glass to defend against
bullets or encounters. You can’t hear what they say, or feel their warmth.
You remain a spectator.]
The absence of any communication reinforces the dichotomy of inside

and outside positions, and is replaced by a loaded exchange of gazes that
can only serve to re-enact the power relations of inclusion and exclu-
sion.10 The migrant’s position on the wrong side of this boundary line in
turn recalls the potential of the skin to function as both impermeable but
also permeable border, but the fact that here the skin is lacking (in the
absence of a haptic encounter) means that it is replaced by a thick, artifi-
cial membrane of bullet-proof glass, whose impenetrability allows for no
mutuality or touch (‘anti-incontro’), or indeed any knowledge exchange
about either the subject or object figure.
This missing encounter allows for a surveillance process that recalls
Foucauldian circuits of power in which the othered migrant or ‘stranger’
(still using Ahmed’s term) ‘must never know whether he is being looked
at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so’
(Foucault 1991, p. 201). Pap Khouma recalls his attempts to achieve
invisibility as an undocumented, recently arrived migrant (‘provo a farmi
trasparente’ [I try to make myself transparent], Khouma 2006, p. 93)
which are constantly frustrated since his Black skin colour only serves to
guarantee hyper-visibility and mark him as other in Italy. Visibility in epi-
sodes such as these can thus become a kind of ‘trap’.11 But, conversely,
10 See also Pap Khouma’s description of the mutual scrutiny that occurs between the
immigrant community and the Italian police as ‘giochi di sorveglianza reciproca’ [games of
two-way surveillance] (Khouma 2006, p. 105).
11 Foucault (1991, p. 200). Or, as Sofia Samatar has elegantly phrased it: ‘The invisibility
of a person is also the visibility of race’ (Samatar 2015b). Web.

the inability or reluctance to be seen can lead to an equally damaging

self-perception of the subject as ‘shadow’ or ‘ghost’ which reveals the
social, legal and cultural invisibility of the foreign other. Several stories
by Brazilian-born writer Christiana de Caldas Brito emphasize the corpo-
real transparency that the invasive gaze can engender: in one, the migrant
narrator washes car windscreens at traffic lights and comments that the
drivers ‘oltrepassano con lo sguardo il mio corpo, come se io, per il mio
lavoro, fossi diventato di vetro’ [pass over my body with their gaze, as
if thanks to my work I had also become glass].12 And in a similar fash-
ion, Vorpsi’s text also likens the migration experience to being ‘skinned’
(‘scuoiare’, 2007, p. 51), a literal loss of the skin’s protective barrier
against the foreign locus and the interrogating gaze of the other. One
post-migration character in the story says on his return to his hometown
of Sarajevo:
Adesso sono un individuo che va avanti con il corpo messo a nudo,

intendo senza pelle, mica nudo così! Nudo così è niente! I miei organi
sono a vista d’occhio, fuori, come esposti a una mostra, tutti li possono
toccare, curiosare, osservare, spostare, pizzicare. Tutti possono spappo-
larmi il fegato. E lo fanno. Non ho più nessuna difesa. Te ne rendi conto,
n-e-s-s-u-n-a! (Vorpsi 2007, pp. 51–52)
[Now I am someone who walks around with my body completely exposed,

I mean without skin, not just naked! Being naked is nothing! My organs
are visible, exposed as if in a gallery, anyone can touch them, nose around,
observe, move and pinch. Anyone can feel up my liver. And they do. I have
no defences left. Can you imagine, n-o-n-e!]
This anxiety of self-awareness through the gaze of the other leads to a

loss of autonomy (a doubting of one’s own self-knowledge) that indi-
cates a borderline state, and what Anzieu would term a loss of one’s
‘secure psychic envelope’ (Anzieu 1989, p. 7). Once the skin ego has
suffered a failure in its containing function, it becomes like a colander,
through which the interior empties itself, something that is echoed in
Vorpsi’s narrative in the letters of ‘nessuna’ [none] seeping out of their
natural boundary in the final word of the above citation. In Vorpsi’s
work the vulnerability caused by this failure of containment often leads
to processes of commodification or exploitation of the migrant body,
12 De Caldas Brito (2004, p. 96). See also De Caldas Brito (1998).
44 E. BOND
something which will be explored in more detail in my analysis of

Princesa in the following chapter. In other examples, a lack of under-
standing of other cultural codes coincides with the (in)visibility of certain
bodily cuts leading to a double erasure or violence—I am thinking here
of the scars left by female genital mutilation (and male circumcision):
practices as raised by Italian-Somali writers such as Ubah Cristina Ali
Farah (in Madre piccola)13 and Igiaba Scego (in both Adua and Rhoda),
as well as the cultural violence implicit in the ‘curative’ cuts and penetra-
tion performed in Adua and in Vergine giurata that will also be exam-
ined in the chapter that follows.
2.3 Skin Memory
Thus, in the ways described above the skin can come to provide a hap-
tic channel of perception that potentially allows the subject to come to
‘know’ or understand the world (and the other within it). But as we have
seen, signs on the skin—whether these are age—or environment-related,
or caused by various kinds of marks and inscriptions—allow it also to
function as a dermal map or identity card (Educazione siberiana) which
provides knowledge or information about the subject. My analysis has
shown how this could function both through cultural and societal means
that allow the subject a positive visibility or agency (to be seen, recog-
nized and valued in certain ways), but also how processes of enforced
inscription and negative visibility (such as surveillance) can fix the sub-
ject in a position of impotence or even transfix them into a moment of
past trauma (Sole bruciato). And, finally, it explored how migration or
movement can implicate the subject in a process of hyper-visible aware-
ness or a web of misperceptions that can literally efface his or her skin,
leaving the subject in a persistent state of dermal anxiety or vulnerability
(La mano che non mordi).
But the skin also functions in a cartographic way that leads beyond
the exchange of information or knowledge. Through collective and indi-
vidual processes of elaboration, the skin is capable of absorbing cultural,
sociopolitical, and personal memories as well as working to express such
re-collections through active or passive transmogrification. Following
13 Ali Farah signals the difference between female infibulation, ‘which is truly a mutila-
tion’ (‘un vero e proprio scempio’), and male circumcision, which Domenica Axad decides
to perform on her son, ‘to mark his belonging on his body’ (‘segnare questa appartenenza
sul suo corpo’) (Ali Farah 2007, p. 258; 2011, p. 223).
Foucault and Grosz in particular, it is important to emphasize the effects

of genealogical imprints that mark the skin in this way, since ‘cultural and
historical representations and inscriptions quite literally constitute bodies
and help to produce them as such’ (Grosz 1994, p. xi). In other words,
the body is itself culturally produced in its assimilation of these imprints.
What the current section aims to explore is precisely how such cultural
and historical memories are transmitted and actively (re-)produced in
corporeal representations, and how the bodyscape is (re-)drawn within
such processes. Through looking at memory rather than knowledge, a
more metaphorical analysis of dermal representations will be necessary,
though the ongoing critical attention to elements of temporality and
agency will be maintained. For as anticipated above, the skin holds the
potential to embody a complex temporality which affords it the possibil-
ity to express multiple ‘nicks’ of time simultaneously, since our embod-
ied temporal location straddles both past and future without the security
of a stable and abiding present (see Grosz 2004). As Anzieu says, it is
like an ‘original parchment which preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased,
scratched-out, written-over first outlines of an ‘original’ preverbal writing
made up of traces upon the skin’ (Anzieu 1989, p. 105).
This ability of the skin to store content from multiple points in time
can be compared to the function of memory itself (see Anzieu 1989, p.
108), and posits it as a potentially illuminating repository for record-
ing or representing the shifts engendered by processes of movement
and migration. The following section will thus also look specifically at
bodily records of both pre- and post-migration memories, where rep-
resentations are affected by the subject’s location. For if, as Csordas says,
there are ‘interpretative consequences of being grounded in a particu-
lar embodied standpoint’ (Csordas 1994, p. 2), then what happens to
bodily representations of cultural and historical phenomena when those
standpoints are multiple and charged with holding the memories of
other, previous locations?
*
One significant form of representation in which cultural or historical
imprints converge with processes of memory within a corporeal meta-
phor is that of the body politic. The time-old analogy expressed is that of
the nation as a corporeal entity, often made up of the various people who
represent the different organs of state power, with the king, or chief of
government, figuring as its head. Traditionally used to visualize an ideal
of societal health through the harmonious functioning of the organs and
46 E. BOND
limbs together, it also employs images of disease or disorder to warn

against the potential dislocations caused by corrupting excesses such as
tyranny or anarchy. A creative and conscious act of composition in both
its written and its visual form, the body politic thus constitutes a potent
representation of power. But it functions as an image that is both dislo-
cated in itself [since it is a metaphor that slides into metonymy, express-
ing only privileged parts of the body, as Gatens (1996) points out], as
well as a fractured one, since it necessarily excludes through its own
mainstream metaphorical representation. Indeed, female, disabled or for-
eign forms of embodiment are notably ‘homeless’ in the strong, white,
male-oriented symbolic order of the body politic (Gatens 1996, p. ix).
It is significant that it is precisely the body that functions as a metaphor
for state control, and as we will go on to see, the confluence of individ-
ual and societal influence operates in a two-way flow. As Grosz says, the
body is a ‘medium on which power operates and through which it func-
tions’ (Grosz 1994, p. 146, emphasis added). Within this optic, the cur-
rent section will analyse the creative, imaginative and memorial ways that
this power dynamic is assimilated or appropriated to function in bodily
representations. In particular, I will look at textual instances that pro-
vide examples of cultural or political structures that write history on and
through the body in imaginaries or rhetoric for the purposes of ideology
and control. This takes on special significance in textual representations
(or memories) if the state or community in question no longer exists—
for in its re-presentation it must be constructed through both the body
politic itself as well as through the bodies of those subjects it invests with
images and turns into objects of knowledge (see Foucault 1991, p. 28).
Indeed, when the new People’s Republic was declared in Albania in
1946, with Enver Hoxha at its head, the government was faced with
the problem of how to construct a sense of national identity that was
felt to be crucial to its consolidation of power. Albania is a particularly
interesting example of this kind of State-created discourse and imaginary.
Described as ‘the strictest Marxist-Leninist regime on earth’, Albania
‘became a fortress state’ from 1944 to 1989 (Vickers and Pettifer 1997),
yet was still a country on the fringes of Europe, a country so close to
Italy (less than forty-five miles over the Strait of Otranto) that writers
tell of exotically unfamiliar Fanta bottles washing up on the shores of
the coast and of illegally watching programmes on the Italian national
television channels of the RAI (see Halili 2013). Up to the period of
the Second World War, Albania had seen centuries of occupation by
various foreign forces (including a military invasion by Italian Fascist

forces), and the country was composed of multiple ethnic groups with
separate languages who were not even united by one common religion.
State propaganda was widely used to fill this identity vacuum (in which
being Albanian was most easily defined as not being something else) with
an imaginary based on the Party, the State and the Leader, where all
three—in appearance at least—figured as a literal incorporation of the
wishes of the people. Hoxha’s extensive published writings and speeches
repeatedly express the image of the Albanian state as being composed of
the physical bodies, organs and fluid secretions of its people: ‘the blood
of 28,000 of (Albania’s) finest sons and daughters were poured into its
foundations’ and the country was ‘set up, raised and cemented with their
sweat and toil’ (Hoxha 1984, p. 6). This use of corporeal imagery also
functions in reverse, however—not only is the Albanian State (and hence
the Party) composed of the bodies of its people, but their own bodies are
also made up of the State (Party) itself: ‘The Party […] was and remains
forever (the people’s) powerful brain and heart’, and no harm can come
to either ‘so long as the people and the Party are linked together like
flesh to bone’ (Hoxha 1984, pp. 516, 580).
But in such cultural constructions that serve to solder the body politic
to the corporeal frames of its subjects, what happens to the physical bod-
ies that have been appropriated in the process by organs of state control?
And does this function as a double exclusion when those same body-im-
ages need to be recuperated through memorial constructs, once the states
they once represented no longer exist? In what ways can these individual
bodies be re-created in textual or visual representations, either by subjects
themselves or by a third party? What kind of images and symbols can the
subject use to insert him or herself back into the cultural imaginary, or
can they find an alternative means to express their corporeal identity?
**
Ornela Vorpsi’s 2010 short story collection, Bevete cacao van Houten!
[Drink Van Houten Cocoa!] features multiple characters whose sense
that their corporeal identities have been appropriated by the State causes
them to suffer episodes of self-alienation, and to question their ownership
or control of their own bodies. One such character, Arti, spends hours
in front of the mirror in a trance-like state, looking at his own reflection,
until he becomes nothing more than a ‘macchia nera sullo specchio’ [black
spot on the mirror] (Vorpsi 2010, p. 44), and is placed for a brief time
48 E. BOND
in a psychological hospital. There, he becomes convinced that the doctors

have stolen his ‘true’ body (Vorpsi 2010, p. 47) and then makes recourse
to plastic surgery when he discovers that he no longer recognizes his own
physical appearance. He places the blame for his condition firmly at the
hands of the institutional powers: “Mi hanno iniettato del veleno nel
sangue, mamma, i comunisti di notte in ospedale, mi ricordo! Li ho visti.
Erano rossi con le siringhe lunghe” [They injected poison into my blood,
mummy, the communists in the hospital, at night, I remember! I saw
them. They were red, with long needles] (Vorpsi 2010, p. 52). The surgi-
cal inscription of his new body and sculpted nose is like an assimilation of
the wishes of these institutional powers, powers that have distorted both
his physical appearance and his memory—indeed, his family is able to trick
him into thinking that they have also undergone facial surgery, since Arti
no longer recognizes and relates to reality, but rather to a falsified projec-
tion of reality that recalls parallel strategies of propaganda and ideological
dissemination.
The body, as Hewitt has stated, functions as a symbol of society
(Hewitt 1997, p. 12), both its projection of falsity (as seen above) and
its hyper-restrictive control system. The sense of powerlessness in front
of such an all-pervasive regime as that of Hoxha’s Albania is powerfully
evoked in other stories in the same collection, through Vorpsi’s retelling
of cases of sudden, mysterious bodily disappearances (or dys-appearances,
to borrow Drew Leder’s term14) and extracorporeal textual hauntings
(which will be explored in more detail in chapter six of this volume).
Sabrina, the dys-appeared protagonist of ‘Giorno’ [‘Day’] is ‘inghiottita’
[swallowed] (Vorpsi 2010, p. 38) by an enormous wave, which is after-
wards capitalized as ‘Onda’ in the story, thus lending it a metaphorical
value capable of illustrating the extreme constriction of the individual
body by the expansion of the societal body politic. The absurdity of the
situation is evoked thus by her boyfriend: “Avete mai visto quelle banali
magie in televisione, prima c’è un cappello o un fiore e poi qualcuno
svolazza una sorta di fazzoletto che fa scomparire gli oggetti? Ecco”
[Have you ever seen those silly magic shows on television, at first there’s
a hat or a flower and then someone waves a sort of handkerchief which
14 See Leder (1990). While Leder’s main analysis focuses on the ‘invisibility’ of the body
when it is functioning normally, it is precisely the link between a pathological dys-function

with a sense of absence that recalls his term within the context of Vorpsi’s work. For more
detail on Leder’s concept of ‘dysappearance’, see Chapter 6 in this volume.
makes the objects disappear? It was like that] (Vorpsi 2010, p. 38). This
surreal set of circumstances might well recall the sort of sudden, absurd
disappearances of regime dissidents and other prisoners during the
rule of Hoxha’s Communist regime in Albania, and has a similar effect
of bodily alienation on Sabrina’s boyfriend himself: he describes him-
self as behaving like a ‘marionetta’ [puppet], of miming his emotional
responses, and says: “non sentivo neuppure i pizzicotti che mi davo” [I
couldn’t even feel it when I pinched myself] (Vorpsi 2010, p. 39).
But the kind of hyper-constrictions enacted in these strategies of State
control can also lead beyond bodily alienation and absence, to techniques
of somatic (re-)construction. Indeed, another story in the collection
tells the tale of a simple-minded man of tiny stature called Petraq who
paints for enjoyment and is mysteriously murdered in the street. Petraq
uses his canvases as a kind of bodily representation (as opposed to using
the (appropriated) body as a canvas), thus projecting outward a reverse
kind of inscription. When the narrator recalls visiting his studio in the
past, she recounts being struck by the subject matter of Petraq’s paint-
ings: huge black and white portraits of a woman, who is always capi-
talized in the text as ‘LEI’ [HER] or ‘DONNA’ [WOMAN]. It is the
sheer enormity of the female figure which is emphasized in the story:
‘(era) talmente grande che spesso la tela non riusciva a contenerla’ [she
was so big that often the canvas could not contain her] (Vorpsi 2010,
p. 20), indeed, it seems to the painter that she grows at night to overflow
the canvases, crowding out any other detail, including Petraq’s own pres-
ence in each composition (‘per lasciare spazio a LEI si rattrappiva sempre
piú piccino sempre piú umile’) (Vorpsi 2010, p. 20) [in order to leave
space for HER, he shrunk himself, making himself ever smaller and more
humble]. The paintings are unframed, allowing the figure to seep out of
normal boundaries or confines, in a manner that recalls the overflowing
of letters outside the normal confines of words used to describe the sense
of overexposure that migration can provoke that was mentioned above
(p. 43). Described as ‘onnipotente’ [omnipotent] and ‘con lo sguardo
diretto verso l’orizzonte’ [gazing toward the horizon], this all-encom-
passing female figure is an explicit metaphor for the embodied state of
Albania, since the colour red Petraq uses sparingly to paint details such as
her pupils or fingernails is also the only colour he uses to indicate Albania
on world maps (Vorpsi 2010, p. 21). This female figure thus functions as
a sort of gigantic symbol of the mother-party, all-invasive to the extent
that she annihilates both the identity and the body of the person who
50 E. BOND
created her. ‘Da lontano la figura debordante della DONNA non lasci-
ava nemmeno intravedere l’autoritratto, chiuso in un angolo spento del
quadro’ [from afar the excessive figure of the WOMAN completely over-
shadowed the self-portrait, which languished unseen in a forgotten cor-
ner of the picture] (Vorpsi 2010, p. 21).
Petraq has internalized the State appropriation of the body as an
image employed for political ends, and endlessly reproduces that appro-
priation onto the stretched skins of his own canvases. Bodies, and
body-images, are here produced by the social order because of their per-
meable nature, becoming ‘sites of social, political, cultural and geograph-
ical inscriptions’ (Grosz 1994, p. 23), and can therefore also function
as a form of palimpsest (as seen above). And ultimately, Petraq him-
self is also consumed and assimilated by the colour red, when his skull
is smashed into a ‘poltiglia rossa’ [red mush] (Vorpsi 2010, p. 24) by a
brick, and fractured into multiple cracks through the force of its blow.
***
In a related fashion, fellow Albanian-born writer Anilda Ibrahimi’s
2008 novel Rosso come una sposa [Red like a Bride] shows how different
constrictions formed by social and political constructions (both past and
present) form layers of control in the representation of body images and
perceptions. These range from ancient Albanian cultural and religious
beliefs such as Allah writing the destiny of babies on the napes of their
necks on the third day after their birth, a literal inscription of ‘quello
che faremo, quello che diventeremo e sopratutto quello che non diven-
teremo mai’ [what we’ll do, what we’ll become, and above all what we
absolutely won’t become] (Ibrahimi 2008, p. 60), to cultural or politi-
cal labels which have a potential physical effect on the bodies they mark.
Seeing the word ‘kulak’ [landowner] scrawled next to your name in red
pen on a Party list can be as dangerous as contracting a ‘malattia mor-
tale’ [fatal illness] (Ibrahimi 2008, p. 92), and ‘kurveria’ [promiscuity] is
a term that can be equally ‘contaminante’ [infectious] (Ibrahimi 2008, p.
203), for both the girl thus labelled as well as for her entire family.
This clash between communist ideals and the moral dictates of
pre-existing cultural codes, as seen in the kulak/kurva dichotomy indi-
cated above, is also played out on the skin of the narrator’s mother. In
a country where the feminine beauty ideal still dictated the necessity of
having a complexion as fair and white as milk, Klementina’s appearance
will surely disappoint on her wedding day, since her work on the new
State railway has left her skin with a noticeable suntan:
La compagna Klementina aveva costruito per tutta l’estate la nuova fer-

rovia: i treni dovevano percorrere la nuova patria come arterie di una
nuova vita, chi aveva tempo da dedicare alla cura dei capelli e alla bellezza?
(Ibrahimi 2008, p. 129)
[Comrade Klementina had spent the summer building the new railway:
trains needed to be able to cross the new nation like arteries of a new life,
so who had time to spend on matters of hair and beauty?]
Nonetheless, she still has to be displayed in the so-called ‘stanza della

“mostra”’ [exhibition room] (Ibrahimi 2008, p. 128) for inspection by
relatives and other guests during the wedding celebrations, according
to cultural traditions that override the political codes that have dictated
her own appearance. Torn between two competing power structures, the
‘arteries’ of the new life of the nation thus underpin the dermal appear-
ances of those whose energy flowed into creating them.
Yet it is important to note that the embodied location of both Vorpsi
and Ibrahimi is now enacted elsewhere (since the authors live in Paris
and Rome, respectively) and distant from the Communist Albania that
they describe in both spatial and temporal terms. In fact, they are dou-
bly dislocated since that particular Albania no longer exists, other than
in memorial or other reconstructive forms. How does this disembod-
ied location go on to affect their ability to represent their own memo-
ries? Does memory slide into nostalgia? Or demonization? If we accept
Grosz’s statement that we ‘grasp space through our bodies’ (Grosz
1994, p. 90), does this suggest that the missing Albania described by
Vorpsi and Ibahimi is akin to a sort of memorial phantom limb?
Not exclusive to the Albanian experience, to be sure, this sense of dis-
location is a symptom of many post-migration narrative memories. We
could identify similar dynamics in representations of pre-civil war Somalia
in writings by various Italian-Somali authors, or indeed in Lilin’s descrip-
tions of the de facto, unrecognized (therefore stateless) Transnistria, and
in a whole range of second-generation stories which speak of a lack of
fixed belonging. Indeed, Ahmed speaks of a ‘migrant orientation’ as being
the lived experience of facing at least two directions: toward a home that
has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home (Ahmed 2006, p. 10).
In the space in-between a double orientation and belonging, where is the
subject’s embodiment to be found when not only can a single present
position not be relied upon, but also the location of the past no longer
exists? An illuminating response comes from Congolese writer Fiston
Mwanza Mujila, who in discussing his 2015 novel Tram 83 suggested
52 E. BOND
that: ‘When a state ceases to exist, your body becomes your own state,
the one and only state you have’ (Samatar 2015a). And the surface of the
body holds its own capacity to retain not only elements of personal, but
also of collective memory, as Prosser has suggested: ‘Skin memories may
remember, not just an individual unconscious, but a cultural one’ (Prosser
2001, p. 54).
Aside from the potential for the body to function as a receptacle in
this way, the active role of the subject in the modification of the sur-
face skin also allows for a certain sense of fantasy and flexibility in dealing
with the past:
But if skin constitutes a visual biographical record, by no means is this record

historically accurate […] skin’s memory is as much a fabrication of what
didn’t happen as of what did, as much fiction as fact. (Prosser 2001, p. 52)
This potential element of agency in the creation of ‘skin memories’ also

points to the ability of the skin itself to function as a channel to pro-
cess the effects of mobility and movement. If the skin can disappear (as
seen above in the example of feeling ‘skinned’ (‘scuoiare’) in Vorpsi’s
La mano che non mordi) or change colour (since a character in the same
tale self-describes as being ‘verde di migrazione’ [green from migration]
(Vorpsi 2007, p. 51), it can also migrate itself, through its ability to flake,
and then regenerate entirely (see Connor 2001, p. 48).
For it is true that while representations of bodies such as those of
Petraq and Klementina show the absorption and reproduction of power
relations, as de Certeau terms it, ‘making the body tell the code’, or
‘realizing a social language’, in reality, bodies ‘become bodies only by
conforming to these codes’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 148, emphasis added).
There remains one potential ‘cry’, he says, when such a code is per-
forated by a lapse in the system. Such a lapse is described by Vorpsi in
the epilogue to Bevete cacao van Houten!, where she describes seeing a
man wearing a pair of yellow shoes on the Milan metro that terrified her
because she did not understand their language (‘Non conoscevo il loro
linguaggio’, Vorpsi 2010, p. 129). Shoes in Albania were both ugly in
their functionality and so badly made that they caused the skin of the
foot to blister and deform. But the coloured hide of this stranger’s shoes
scares her not only because of its foreignness and ‘insensibilità’ [lack of
sensitivity], but also because the shoes do not fit into any of her pre-con-
structed categories (‘non trovavano posto nella struttura involontaria
della mia creazione’, Vorpsi 2010, p. 130), so provoke a bodily reaction
in her: her hands begin to shake and her body trembles. The memory of
her past skin lesions (and, importantly, of their healing) perhaps allows a
space for ‘sensibilità’ [sensitivity], through which Vorpsi’s body responds
to the ability of migration to shatter codes and power relations—perhaps
replacing them with new ones, to be sure, but leaving them with gaps
and fissures through which a ‘cry’ can escape, and the body finally speaks
itself in ‘a deviation or an ecstasy, a revolt or a flight of that which, within
the body, escapes the law of the named’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 149).
2.4 Skin Stories
Leading on from this, in the final section of this chapter I want to show
how corporeal representations are not only capable of illustrating, but
can also subvert and play with external expectations and pre- or miscon-
ceptions, twisting and exceeding previous narrowly drawn categories of
identity as well as working as a specific narrative strategy and linguistic
apparatus. Specifically, I will highlight how writing the skin can shift
agency back to the person telling the story, and in so doing, can empha-
size the inscriptive nature of authorship itself. Ahmed and Stacey have
conceptualized the skin as capable of productive communication—in
their thinking the skin is no mere canvas, but functions itself as a mode
of writing, where writing the skin can also write the self:
The skin is a writerly effect. We could also suggest that writing is an effect
of the skin […] Writing can be thought of as skin, in the sense that what
we write causes ripples and flows that ‘skin us’ into being: we write, we
skin. (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, p. 15)
What is more, dynamics of movement and migration encourage these rip-

ples and flows to be experienced in an even more visceral way, as a series of
dermal prickles and wrinkles, which leads to ‘a transformation in the very
skin through which the body is embodied’: ‘a process which is uncomfort-
able and well described as the irritation of an itch’ (Ahmed 2000, p. 90).
*
The skinscape itself becomes an instrument of acute self-expression
in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s 2007 novel Madre piccola (Little Mother),
in which the marks of the protagonist Domenica Axad’s self-harming
become a means of inscribing and achieving mastery of her relations with
her parents and of her dual heritage identity. But the self-inscriptions she
54 E. BOND
describes also allow her an agency which comes to symbolize the pro-
cess of narrative creation itself. In this way, acts of self-harm and their
subsequent narrative elaboration are both ‘acts that ask to be witnessed’
(Hewitt 1997, p. 2), acts that require the presence of the other in order
to look at, interpret and potentially also translate them.15
It is Domenica’s ties to her Somali heritage that seem more threat-
ened at the time she begins cutting herself (living as she does with her
Italian mother in Italy, and with little to no contact with her Somali
father in Mogadishu), but it is actually the relationship with the detached
maternal figure that seems to primarily trigger her episodes of self-harm.
Indeed, Domenica feels it necessary to erase as far as possible any traces
of her Somali origins in order to resemble her mother more—and in
the text the reasons for this are given as the desire to avoid causing her
mother any pain of remembrance and awareness of the absence of her
father. But it actually turns out to be more psychologically complex than
this. Domenica is trying to maintain a form of symbiotic relationship
(indeed, a shared skin) with her mother through achieving physical and
cultural similarity, and when her efforts fail to reconcile the two, it is this
trauma that makes her cut herself.
The way that she explains this in the text is particularly revealing: ‘[I
tagli] erano il trauma del ritorno mancato, l’impossibilità di incontrare
mio padre e la consapevolezza che io e mia madre eravamo due crea-
ture separate’ (Ali Farah 2007, p. 253). ‘[The cuts] were the trauma
of the unfulfilled return, the impossibility of meeting my father, and
the awareness that my mother and I were two separate creatures’ (Ali
Farah 2011, p. 218). For her mother appears distanced and damaged to
her, and will not afford her daughter the emotional stability or physi-
cal contact that she craves: ‘Desideravo che mi abbracciasse, mi cul-
lasse come quand’ero bambina, ma ero piuttosto io che l’accarezzavo,
l’abbracciavo, la cullavo’ (Ali Farah 2007, p. 245). ‘I wanted her to
embrace me, to take me in her arms, to cradle me like she did when I
was a child, but it was me, rather, who embraced her, held her in my
arms and cradled her’ (Ali Farah 2011, p. 211). Together with her
mother’s inability to actively establish bonds of physical intimacy is the
even more revealing distaste she has for physicality, fluids, and mixing,
15 And which therefore recall the processes of witnessing slave scarring mentioned above
(pp. 7–8).
that will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 5. Her horror of these
threatened boundaries, both in affective and physical terms, is aligned
with her daughter’s status as mixed race, ‘composite’ other, a status that
disturbs her mother and ultimately leads to the traumatic (but psycho-
logically overdue) break in their relationship.
The skin is both the site of this conflict, as well as of its resolution.
Going back to Anzieu’s The Skin Ego, we can note how he employs the
ancient Greek myth of Marsyas (the centaur flayed by Apollo in punish-
ment for having challenged him to a contest of music) as symbolic of a
masochistic phantasy: the image of broken or flayed skin is here invoked
to illustrate how mother and child initially share a single skin (which is
figurative of their primal symbiotic union), yet the process of detachment
and child’s subsequent attainment of autonomy involves the rending of
that common skin (Anzieu 1989, p. 42). Indeed, we are aware of the
child narrator’s persisting need to attain intimacy with her mother in
Madre piccola (as seen above, in the desire to touch the mother and be
touched), so much so that she relishes any opportunity even when it is
self-serving (Ali Farah 2007, p. 249). This symbiosis is challenged when
Domenica’s mother sends her alone to a Mogadishu teetering on the
brink of war to find out how things stand with her estranged husband,
thus subjecting her daughter to a situation of danger and opening up
the possibility for a reidentification with her Somali origins. This has the
effect of allowing Domenica Axad to break their ‘adhesive identification’,
and leads to her ultimately rejecting her mother (Ali Farah 2007, p. 251;
2011, p. 216). On catching sight of her mother in the airport in Rome
Domenica feels the need to literally cut her skin in order to detach her-
self, and to establish herself as a separate entity. ‘Andai in bagno, piansi
tutto quello che avevo da piangere, mi strappai i capelli e fu allora che
ricominciai, con le forbicine per le unghie, a tagliarmi’ (Ali Farah 2007,
p. 251). ‘I went to the restroom, I cried my eyes out, I pulled at my hair
in rage, and it was then that I started cutting myself again with my nail
scissors’ (Ali Farah 2011, p. 216). She will not see her mother again for
the rest of the narrative, until the very last page when she takes her own
son to meet his grandmother for the first time.
I see Domenica Axad’s self-harming as her way of cutting the skin
that once linked her to her mother and prevented her from attaining psy-
chological autonomy rather than as a laboured expression of her divided
identity (not a negative process, therefore, but a positive one). For in the
56 E. BOND
text itself the protagonist declares the habit as a means of establishing

herself (‘dichiararmi’), and marking her individual presence (‘segnare una
presenza’) (Ali Farah 2007, p. 246; 2011, p. 212). And furthermore, it
is important to note that Ali Farah herself does not see this cutting of the
skin as pathological, but rather as quasi-creative: ‘Per me (il fatto di scri-
vere sul proprio corpo) non è un atto autolesionista’ [For me, the idea
of writing on one’s own body is not an act of self-harm] (Ciampiglio
2008). This is something that is confirmed by psychologist Anna Motz
in her 2010 article ‘Self-harm as a sign of hope’:
The body is used as the object onto which these aspects of a divided self
can express themselves, both as aggressor and nurse, in the service of the
final aim of reinterpretation and creation of a coherent sense of self. (Motz
2010, p. 83)
Indeed, the necessity to reconnect with the body through processes

of cure and care, that follow pain and death, is highlighted in various
parts of Ali Farah’s text (Ali Farah 2007, p. 239; 2011, p. 207), and
the expression ‘scrivere sul proprio corpo’ [writing on one’s own body]
that the author uses in the above-cited interview points to an awareness
of the potential link between physicality and expression.16 I see this as
similar to the way that Domenica stops speaking after the rejection of
her mother—which she describes not as a traumatic silence but a vol-
untary, aware act (Ali Farah 2007, p. 253): ‘I deliberately lost my voice’
(Ali Farah 2011, p. 218). And indeed, when the police stop her because
they are afraid her cuts are the sign of domestic violence, she decides
to respond with a ‘sfida’ (‘challenge’), which is precisely that of writing
itself, and furthermore—writing in Italian, the language of her mother:
Tirai fuori la penna e cominciai a rispondere sulla carta. Scrivevo con le mie
lettere fitte, usando consapevolmente parole desuete e fuori dal comune.
[…] Questa lingua è il mio balbettio, è il soggetto plurale che mi ha cre-
sciuto, è il nome della mia essenza, è mia madre. (Ali Farah 2007, p. 254)
16 Freud,too, spoke of pain as playing a part in the ‘way in which we gain new knowl-
edge of our organs’ and as ‘a model of the way in which in general we arrive at the idea of
our body’ (Grosz 1994, p. 37).
I pulled out my pen and I began to answer their questions on paper. I

wrote in my narrow handwriting, intentionally using rare and unusual
words. […] This language is my childhood babbling, it is the plural subject
that raised me, it is the name of my essence, it is my mother. (Ali Farah
2011, p. 219)
Writing thus allows for a measured reintegration with the maternal

subject after the experience of self-harm has succeeded in overcoming
the trauma of separation and re-establishing a sense of self and agency
through autonomous expression. For as Gillian Straker has said, self-
harm implies the creation of an embodied identity, and can be seen as a
way of ‘signing with a scar’ (Straker 2006). Shedding blood allows the
subject a metaphorical means of crossing the barrier between inside and
out (see Hewitt 1997, p. 16), in the process creating a generative ‘onto-
logical crack between the living and the dead’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 257)
that holds curative potential.
Self-injury not only signifies – by making visible – that the process of grief
is taking place, but also produces the body as the site of signification that
allows the process to move forward. (Takemoto 2001, p. 117)
This process of writing, be it on the body or on paper, is a means of self-

creation, something that Domenica Axad explicitly desires within the narra
tive: ‘mi auguro che raccontando per iscritto la mia storia possa aiutarmi
a diventare quella persona intera e adulta che desidero essere’ (Ali Farah
2007, p. 224). ‘I hope that writing down my story will help me become
that whole, adult person that I long to be’ (Ali Farah 2011, p. 194). The
success of this exercise is confirmed by her cousin Barni: ‘ricostruire la sua
storia ha sciolto molti nodi’ (Ali Farah 2007, p. 263). ‘By reconstructing
her story, Domenica Axad was able to loosen a lot of knots’ (Ali Farah
2011, p. 226). This productive nature of self-damaging inscriptions sup-
ports Motz’s thesis, wherein the main function of self-harm is ‘to create an
autobiographical narrative and a sense of self’ (Motz 2010, p. 84).
In a similar fashion, Kilby also theorizes the act of self-harm as not so
much being beyond language, but instead constituting a potentially new
form of (self-)expression, which opens up the ontological possibility of
dialogue (Kilby 2001, p. 125). Despite breaking with language as such,
self-harm thus succeeds in rendering the site of pain a language in itself:
58 E. BOND
However, to the degree that the skin border is already rendered animate by
social and political discourses, and more specifically here by a prior violat-
ing touch, self-harm is a project of re-articulating, if not disrupting, these
processes of animation. As a project of reanimation, self-harm reworks the
conditions of possibility for the subject at the limits of language. (Kilby
2001, p. 127)
This demonstrates that what is essential here is the need for a witness, or
indeed a reader, to translate and interpret the skin markings that signal
and suggest such stories.
**
In the same way, to return to the tattoos in Lilin’s writing that opened
this chapter, skin markings can be seen to function not only as a sym-
bolic metaphor for cultural translation; a way of allowing the other access
to an unknown cultural code, but also as a way for the subject to gain
self-mastery through authorship and the self-referential display of author-
ity. The challenges involved in this process hold particular significance in
the context of migration narratives. Indeed, Bhabha has spoken of migra-
tion itself as being a ‘translational’ phenomenon (Bhabha 2000, p. 300).
In trying to describe an unknown experience to a foreign readership,
the author may find him or herself forced to employ a series of narrative
techniques that will allow for the opening of an intercultural connection.
The danger is that employing such techniques could also have the effect
of altering, downplaying or exaggerating, normalizing or justifying the
events recounted, or of constraining the writer into creating ‘a version of
another culture, producing what might be described as a form of transla-
tion, rendering the unknown and unfamiliar in terms that can be assimi-
lated and understood back home’ (Bassnett 2007, p. 22). How does Lilin
seek to counter this element of coercion in his work? As I will argue, the
narrative device of the tattoo provides him with a means of re-claiming
the skinscape both as a means of communication with his readership, but
also of recuperating authority and agency as a trans-national writer.
As established above, in Lilin’s narrative world, tattoos function as a
mark not only of social adhesion, but also of individual agency. Indeed,
the markings of the skin are described within the text as ‘firme’ (Lilin
2009, p. 77), or ‘signatures’ (Lilin 2011, p. 95), and function along-
side the tattooed image of the author on the novel’s cover as an imprint
of both authority and authorship. The corporeal importance of the
signature is similarly invoked by Ruthven, who describes it as an ‘authen-

ticatory device, a graphemic trace to evoke metonymically the bodies
who produced it’ (Ruthven 2001, p. 153). But why is this so impor-
tant for trans-national writers, and for Lilin in particular? As anticipated,
the editorial and popular success of Educazione siberiana was somewhat
marred by a vicious debate over the ‘authenticity’ of the account which
was heightened by its shifting definition as autobiography or memoir (as
it was received), or as a novel (as it is described on the back cover of
both the Italian and the English language translation).17 Indeed, Lilin
does nothing to hide the ‘novelistic’ aspects of his text, describing a pro-
cess of ‘imaginative recreations’ in the preface to the American publica-
tion and stating in an interview he gave in 2012: ‘E comunque già il
libro era deviante dalla mia vita: tutto ciò che è letterario è romanzo, non
realtà’ [And anyway, the book was already very different to my life: any-
thing narrative has to do with literature, not life].18 This debate around
the issue of ‘authenticity’ is particularly relevant to the forum of migra-
tion literature, precisely because of the marketing and editorial strategies
that are put into place around such texts—strategies that do not concern
works by more ‘mainstream’ writers. As Richter says, publishing houses
tend to foreground the sociocultural background of authors only when
they originate from marginal(ized) groups (related to gender, trauma
survival, or ethnic background):
In certain contexts authenticity still remains an important category of ref-

erence. This is particularly the case with books written by women, writ-
ers from ethnic backgrounds, or Holocaust survivors. Works written by
authors whose identity is ‘unmarked’ […] tend to be evaluated according
to their aesthetic merit. (Richter 2009, p. 60)
17 See, for example, Zafesova (2013), Rayfield (2010), and Bobick (2010). There were,
however, others who appreciated the ‘liminal’ quality of the text, including Poplak, who
in the National Post situated it in what he called the ‘no man’s land between memoir and
novel, a region more memoirists should own up to inhabiting’ (Poplak 2010). It also gar-
nered the admiration of Irvine Welsh in The Guardian (Welsh 2010), and was described
as an example of ‘semi-fictional anthropology’ by Toby Lichtig in the Wall Street Journal
(Lichtig 2010).
18 See www.nicolaililin.com. Website.
60 E. BOND
In this way, what is being marketed is not only the text, but the author
him or herself, something that recalls the cover images of both Lilin and
Vorpsi’s works—both of which feature prominent author photographs
(Fig. 2.1).
Could we therefore posit this authorial ambiguity as a sort of
quasi-subversive strategy on the part of Lilin, to divert market
expectations and avoid his work being classified as ‘just’ another auto-
biographical account of a migration journey or exotic other culture?
For Lilin seems proud of the creative-artistic value of his work, and
considers himself as a novelist rather than someone who has recounted
the factual tale of an extraordinary life. And this is precisely where the
link between tattoos and writing becomes evident, since the creation
in both cases of an aesthetic image with ink—be that with a needle or
a pen—requires the artistic input of an individual author who is capa-
ble of creating and manipulating meaning. In order to tattoo images
in the Siberian tradition, the artist (who is accepted as a kind of priest)
must draw by hand (see Lilin 2009, p. 74; 2011, p. 90). And, in the
same way, in speaking about his text Lilin evokes a sense of individual
authority, evident in his emphatic employment of personal pronouns
and his demand for creative freedom:
La mia non è un’autobiografia, i miei libri sono soggetti letterari, non cro-
nache. Sono uno scrittore, faccio rivivere persone e sentimenti. Ma è let-
teratura, quindi libertà di forma. Solo lo scrittore può decidere fino a che
punto cambiare la forma di ciò che ha vissuto. (Lilin 2012)
[This is not an autobiography, my books are literary works and not report-
age. I am a writer, I re-evoke people and feelings. But it’s literature, so the
form this takes is free. Only the writer can decide how far to go in chang-
ing the narrative form of experience.]
This claim to authority of the author-individual explains his right to

create as well as to conceal meaning, as with the symbolically hidden
secret meanings of the tattoos in the criminal tradition Lilin describes.
Furthermore, tattoos also function as a means to position the subject
as protagonist of their own life story, a transformative act that bestows
agency and control over past events.19 In psychoanalytic terms, tattoos
19 ‘Tattoos effectively transform a man into the hero of his own criminal ‘myth’. A living
person is transformed into a character in the world of tattoos’ (Plutser-Sarno 2009, p. 29).
Fig. 2.1 Cover of Bevete cacao van Houten! (Ornela Vorpsi)

62 E. BOND
function as an ‘active manifestation of an otherwise passive experience’

(Karacaoglan 2012, p. 6), such as could be a term in prison, or equally
the lack of subjective agency suffered during some migration journeys
(more of which in the conclusion to this chapter). This permits the
tattooed subject to ‘maintain a sense of authorship and initiative’ in a
manifest process of acting-out (Karacaoglan 2012, p. 13). This psycho-
analytic explanation for the desire to create (and bear) a tattoo on the
body might well also be able to explain the motivations behind writing
a literary memoir: indeed, Lilin himself describes tattoos in Educazione
siberiana as a ‘carta d’identità’ (Lilin 2009, p. 73; ‘identity card’, 2011,
p. 89), and in conversation with his teacher-maestro, posits true art as
a form of protest, capable of triggering debate, creating contradiction
and provoking change (Lilin 2009, p. 93; 2011, p. 115). It would seem
that through the international success and scandal triggered by his liter-
ary creation, Lilin has achieved this objective and firmly situates both the
tattoo and the literary text as symbols of the importance of the possibility
for narrative creation and individual agency.
This emphasis on narrative creation is essential because the authors
under discussion here are trans-national subjects writing about the body,
so the corporeal representations they employ necessarily go beyond the
strict linking of subjectivity with the somatic towards opening new paths
and potential functions of language and narrative. Thus, we can chart
them as moving beyond dualisms which may be reductive and as opening
towards a more fluid generative space capable of expressing the multi-
form nature of the trans-national experience. As Grosz has argued:
Bodies stretch and extend the notion of physicality […] they are the
centers of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency […] Bodies are
not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react.
They generate what is new, surprising, unpredictable. (Grosz 1994, p. xi)
In the wider forum of studies into migration and mobility, this means
accepting the marks of movement as signifying signs which are used in
narratives to express the fluid and ever-changing nature of body-images,
whether such marks ultimately lead in the direction of pain, or instead
toward creativity. For as we have seen, trans-national movements, and
the encounters with the other that these entail, can force a certain aware-
ness of the body which might lead to pathological irruptions, but also to
self-inscriptions with a highly generative potential. In cases of skin morti-
fication such as tattooing or self-harm, this is specifically encapsulated in
the complex dichotomy of pain and care involved.
We can, therefore, posit such episodes as a process not only of
absorption but also of narrative re-enactment, allowing the subject’s
story to be heard or read, rather than just individuals themselves to be
seen. But in both cases, such effects are created by shifts in self-per-
ception and the perceptions of others, allowing the body to become
a responsive site of regeneration. Because as Ahmed says, although
migration narratives are ‘skin memories’, in that they absorb and
respond to physical shifts in place, the permeable nature of subjectivity
and space means that the skin also has the potential itself to gener-
ate feelings of ‘being-at-home’. In turn, inhabiting the skin as ‘home’
permits a genuine sense of ‘trans-nationalism’: ‘The home as skin sug-
gests the boundary between self and home is permeable, but also that
the boundary between home and away is permeable as well’ (Ahmed
2000, p. 89). Indeed, Ali Farah herself seems to echo this possible idea
of the trans-national skin as ultimate home in the final pages of Madre
piccola, where Barni concludes: ‘La nostra casa la portiamo con noi,
la nostra casa può viaggiare. Non sono le pareti rigide che fanno del
luogo in cui viviamo una casa’ (Ali Farah 2007, p. 263). ‘We carry our
home with us, our home can travel. It’s not fixed walls that make a
home out of the place where we live’ (Ali Farah 2011, p. 226).
2.5 Conclusions
There was widespread unease within the international press and aid
organizations involved in managing the refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe when
it was reported that Czech authorities were identifying migrants in tran-
sit there by inking their hands and arms with numbers. Reminiscent of
the infamous dehumanizing techniques used to identify prisoners of the
Nazi labour camps during World War Two, these marks impressed on
the body seemed an attempt to contain and constrain the self, much
as the multiple closures of national borders served simultaneously to
64 E. BOND
contain the movement of refugees and migrants across Europe.20 But, as

Karacaoglan has explained, when—faced with similar circumstances—the
subject takes the ability of their skin to speak for them as well as of them,
through dermal manipulations, this can instead represent ‘an attempt at
direct confrontation with an object that contains and constrains the self’
(Karacaoglan 2012, p. 18).
In such a way, it was striking to see the reportage detailing the tat-
toos that Eritrean migrants showed to photographer Ricci Shryock when
she met displaced persons recently arrived in the Porta Venezia area of
Milan. Almost all of the people that Shryock spoke to had decided to get
tattoos before they made the notoriously dangerous migration journey
to Europe that takes them through the Sahara desert to Libya, and then
on boats across Mediterranean to Italy (Shryock 2015). Although none
of the migrants she spoke to wanted to be identified by name or face
(for fear of reprisals, since most have defected from the often indefinite
military service enforced by the ruling Eritrean regime), all were happy
to show Shryock their tattoos. Many of these referenced their reasons for
leaving (“Rule of Law”; “everything will pass away”), but others spoke
of that which they were forced to leave behind (“home is desert without
mother”; “I love Mum”), or transmitted hope for a safe crossing, rescue,
protection and a brighter future (through drawings of the Archangel
Michael or Jesus, and phrases such as “rely on the cross”) (Fig. 2.2).
These markers are true metonymic identifiers of identity, since they
tell the story of key moments in life stories that span outward to include
times and spaces before and after the migration journey itself. They speak
of emotions: of the fear of being drowned or killed, of love and loss, and
20 Il fatto quotidiano also reported that migrants arriving in Catania had numbers inked
on the backs of their hands for the same identificatory purposes. In an interview in the
same article, Shaul Bassi rejects any kind of facile Holocaust analogy, but aligns the two
processes in what he terms an ‘indifferenza colpevole’ [culpable indifference]. ‘È un fenom-
eno su cui riflettere attentamente, perché alcune persone sono facilmente dimenticabili e
riducibili alla non identità. Forse, i corpi neri sono più ‘scrivibili’ di quelli bianchi, perché
siamo abituati a vederli come collettività sofferente e non come soggetti portatori di singo-
larità’ [It’s a phenomenon that needs to be reflected on carefully, because some people are
easily forgotten, and reduced to a non-identity. Perhaps black bodies are ‘easier’ to write
on that white ones, because we are used to seeing them as a suffering collective and not as
individual subjects] (Brigida 2015).
Fig. 2.2 Map picture (Ricci Shryock)
hope and faith, adding a human dimension to the canvas of the body.
Marking the body in this way allows for a sense of agency and reassigns
control back to the subject, even in situations where he or she is not able
to fully determine the present or the future.21
This chapter has shown how skin can be cut, sewn up, written on and
manipulated in multiple ways that allow it to speak of the subject’s past,
present and future. But in a converse fashion, bodies can themselves be
used to mark the scars of the past on the present, by marking embodied
locations in another active manifestation of a previously passive experi-
ence. In one particularly powerful example, photographer and visual
artist Nona Faustine has used the physicality of her own body to ‘tag’
the contemporary cityscape of New York, and by posing naked at slavery
sites within the city, works to make a hidden history visible in the here
21 And we might see the sewing up of their mouths by Iranian migrants stranded on the
Macedonia-Greece border at the height of the 2015 ‘crisis’ as another attempt at achieving
visibility. See Kingsley (2015). Similar instances have also been reported in Scego (2014, p.
95), and have been evoked in narrative form in Lakhous (2006, p. 25).
66 E. BOND
and now. As she said in an interview with the Huffington Post: ‘I found
myself at the curtain of time between two eras, past and present’ (Frank
2015). Her interest was not only in recuperating the scars of New York’s
two-hundred year history of slavery, on sites such as City Hall and Wall
Street (where the first official slave market was held in 1711, and where
she stood naked in the middle of a traffic junction on a wooden box
wearing only a pair of white shoes to shoot the series ‘From her body
came their greatest wealth’ in 2013), but also in the dermal scars and
the folds of the skin itself. For here it is the landscape which becomes
‘scarred’ by the body (Jones 2015), and the body—‘the imperfect body,
the body that just gave birth, the old body, the flabby body, the black
body’ (Ford 2015)—which acts as dynamic agent to redress old power
structures. In this way, ‘Faustine demands that the narratives inscribed
on black women’s bodies be entirely rewritten on their own terms’
(Edwards 2015), and her work becomes a symbol of the body’s ability
to exceed, subvert and challenge categories through its generative and
creative possibilities. In Faustine’s work, the skinscape encompasses an
expression of identity, an imaginary, and an archive of personal and col-
lective memories and stories which allows it also to speak to and echo
the contemporary migration narratives and trans-national trajectories this
chapter has sought to explore.
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CHAPTER 3
Trans-gender, Trans-national:
Crossing Binary Lines
3.1 Introduction
The previous chapter interrogated how skin inscriptions can be employed
within cultural representations to transmit and receive information,
embody memory, and weave narratives capable of reassigning produc-
tive agency to the subject in motion. But what if the signs communi-
cated outward by the skin confound and breach accepted confines of
normative categories of belonging, such as those of race and gender? As
Linda Martín Alcoff says, ‘identity designations are clearly the product
of learned cognitive maps and learned modes of perception. Yet they
operate through visible features and characteristics’ (Alcoff 2005, p. ix).
What happens though, when visibility is not a reliable source for such
formations, and when various modes of passing entail to allow subjects
to move more freely through, alongside and beyond previously learned
concepts? This chapter will look to explore these questions by aligning
race and gender through the space opened out by their shared prefix of
the ‘trans-’. As stated in the Introduction to this volume, the notion of
the trans-national is characterized by a kinetic sense of flow or flexibil-
ity which uses the hyphenated middle space between the two words as
a dynamic passageway capable of muddling or subverting fixed notions
of identity and nationality. In the same way, Susan Stryker’s insistence
on the importance of the hyphen in the term ‘trans-gender’ (see Stryker
et al. 2008) allows us to privilege an inherent relationality in its multiple

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_3
72 E. BOND
alignments and to follow Foucault in ‘queering’1 gender and sexual-

ity as a point of departure in order ‘to arrive at a multiplicity of rela-
tionships’ (Probyn 2001, p. 181). As Probyn emphasizes: ‘the point is
how to put sexuality into play with other categories in such a way as to
highlight and encourage different relations of proximity’ (Probyn 2001,
p. 181). This attention to the dialectical motion between place and per-
spective will highlight how the trans- prefix might operate in multiple
forms of embodiment as the ultimate symbol of ‘postmodern flexibility’
(Halberstam 2005, p. 17). By performing a close textual analysis of two
narratives that present shifting gender embodiments through the lens of
cultural and linguistic translation and migration movements, and placing
these in dialogue with current debates, media representations, and other
contemporary texts which share the same thematics, I will show how
trans- embodiment of all types can speak to issues of identity translation,2
self-determination (can we decide what or who we are based on how we
‘feel’?), and possible locations of understanding (between ‘material’ truth
and surface appearance). Can gender dysphoria be productively extended
to shed light on other identity projections and presentations, and how
might this open up new debates around belonging and orientation?
3.2 Out in Public: Locating the Trans- Self

In terms of press coverage, 2015 may well have been a year preoccupied
with questions of migration and refugee flows, but there were also two
cases of individual figures which unexpectedly sparked media and cul-
tural debates of immense reach. In April, television personality and former
Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner revealed an ongoing gender transition from
male to female, opening up numerous issues around trans-gender identity
to the public in unprecedented ways. Indeed, one could say that given her
extremely high profile and the incessant scrutiny of the wider Kardashian-
Jenner family, she succeeded in catapulting the trans- body straight into
mainstream public consumption, bestowing it with celebrity-level visi-
bility and coverage. Jenner’s debut as Caitlyn was photographed for the
cover of Vanity Fair by Annie Leibowitz, she amassed one million Twitter
1 I am thinking about ‘queering’ as a concept ‘mobilized by exclusions’ here, see Kilian
(2014, p. 85).
2 ‘Sexuality’s biological base is always experienced, culturally, through a translation.’
Blackwood (1986, p. 5), emphasis added.

3 TRANS-GENDER, TRANS-NATIONAL: CROSSING BINARY LINES 73
followers in just four hours (a new Guinness world record, beating Barack
Obama), a two-hour televised interview she held with Diane Sawyer had
20.7 million viewers, and she subsequently filmed an award-winning
series documenting her transition, called ‘I am Cait’. But it was precisely
the nature of the documentation of her journey that caused a certain
backlash—in the end, was this more a narrative or a spectacle? What kind
of champion of trans-gender rights could or would Jenner be, as a priv-
ileged white celebrity—could she speak for the community at large, and
could they identify with her? Were they even her projected audience in
the first place? What kind of visibility would her polished transition afford
for ‘normal’ trans-gender people, without Jenner’s seemingly unlimited
access to funds, surgery and public acceptance? Some even raised the
question of whether the increased visibility of the trans- community that
Jenner’s high-profile outing might translate into increased vulnerability
for a community whose members are all too often disadvantaged by pov-
erty and exposed to episodes of violence and where external stigmatiza-
tion means that even the threat of suicide is endemic.3
Caitlyn Jenner is an interesting case to depart from for many reasons,
partly because in her former gender identity as Bruce, she once repre-
sented an unrivalled symbol of American masculinity. The peak of Bruce’s
athletic career coincided with a time when trans-gender identity was
widely unknown and unrecognized, and Christine Jorgensen may well
have been the only ‘role model’ or publicized experience of an American
male to female transition available. And indeed, Jorgensen’s case raises
some sharp questions for the response to Jenner’s transition. Stryker sees
Jorgensen as an ‘emblem of her age’, in which corporeal somatechnics
coincided with an onslaught of new technologies and the trans-national
exportation of American consumer culture (Stryker 2014). But if we fol-
low the parallel, what can and will Caitlyn Jenner represent for the con-
temporary age? In her journey from ultra-masculine to ultra-feminine, she
has more recently garnered disapproval in some activist circles because
of her attachment to cosmetics, corsetry and high-gloss glamour—her
3 In a 2014 survey conducted by Pace 48% of trans people under the age of 26 said they
had attempted to kill themselves, compared to about 6% of the general population of the
same age. See Day (2015). 2015 also saw two high-profile suicides of trans-gender inmates
placed in all male prisons in the UK. The Blacktranslivesmatters campaign was also founded
with the aim of increasing awareness of the discrimination, abuse and violence suffered by
trans- people of colour in the US, under the wider umbrella of Blacklivesmatter movement.
74 E. BOND
appearance raising questions for feminists about buying into established,

patriarchal social constructs of what it means to be a woman. Elizabeth
Day, writing in The Guardian, rightly points out that ‘at least part of the
reason we’re willing to embrace Jenner is because of a continued focus
on being ‘beautiful’ as a condition of acceptability for being female’ (Day
2015). This particular controversy has kept Jenner in the media spot-
light since so-called terfs (‘trans- exclusionary radical feminists’) such as
Germaine Greer, who has argued that surgery cannot turn a man into a
woman, take Jenner’s accolades as a proof of continuing misogyny that a
man becoming a woman is more deserving of praise than someone who is
‘just born a woman’ (Gayle 2015). The scrutiny that trans- people ordi-
narily come under for their appearance and the strategies implemented to
undermine them as a result straddle dual poles of invisibility (leading to
practices such as deadnaming and ‘deep stealth’) and hypervisibility, rais-
ing questions that will be unpicked in the analysis which follows.
The final point I want to unfold in relation to Jenner relates her case to
another media controversy involving an individual identity presentation.
Elinor Burkett’s otherwise well-argued opinion piece on Jenner in The New
York Times somewhat clumsily compared a trans- woman to a white man
‘using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair
into twists, expecting to be embraced by the black community’ (Burkett
2015). This might have seemed on publication to be a somewhat facile anal-
ogy, but shortly after, the former National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) chapter president, and teacher on Eastern
Washington University’s Africana Studies programme, Rachel Dolezal, was
publicly ‘outed’ by her parents for being white. By cosmetically cultivat-
ing a deep tan in order to mimic a darker skin tone, and adopting a series
of African American hairstyles, Dolezal had outwardly projected as well as
self-defined as on a personal and an official level as a Black woman, an iden-
tity that she continued to defend after the June media scandal exploded.
It’s taken my entire life to negotiate how to identify […] If people feel
misled or deceived […] I believe that’s more due to their definition and
construction of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or hon-
esty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m
black, and there’s a difference in those terms.4
4 Samuels (2015). Dolezal has also subsequently published a memoir entitled In Full
Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World (Dolezal 2017).

But Dolezal’s determined attempt to ‘pass’ for Black caused outrage,

particularly as it was seen as a new kind of white erasure of the histor-
ical context of slavery and ongoing experience of institutionalized rac-
ism experienced by the African American community (McFadden 2015).
‘This was a new type of white woman: bold and brazen enough to claim
ownership over a painful and complicated history she wasn’t born into’
(Samuels 2015). Many commentators raised the issue of choice—that
Dolezal might well be free to self-present as Black, but the same iden-
tity flexibility was certainly not available to all, and as such her behaviour
invoked the highest possible manifestation of white privilege, that saw
‘black as the category you can come dance in’ (Yaba Blay, cit. in Alter
2015). Dolezal’s identity narrative was seen as being a theft or fiction,
and her defiant self-presentation sparked criticism of being akin to a new
orientalist attitude, that bypassed any association with the nuances of the
‘transracial’ label. Relocating the link with Jenner’s case, Ellie Freeman
also argued that simply ‘feeling black’ is ‘not like gender dysphoria
either—the politics of race and gender are not interchangeable in this
context’ (Freeman 2015). And yet, once the media storm had passed,
the Barbadian singer Rihanna weighed into the debate unexpectedly to
call Dolezal ‘a bit of a hero’ for shaking open a debate on race: ‘Is it
such a horrible thing that she pretended to be black? Black is a great
thing’ (Robinson 2015). Others related Dolezal’s story to other stories
of personal (re-)invention that span centuries, those of Elvira Frederic,
Helen Craft (who even passed as a white man), and which function to
call ‘our contemporary sense of certitude about ‘race’ into question’.5
This evidence of a running thread of malleability in race identities across
the centuries also recalls how multiraciality means different things in dif-
ferent temporal and spatial contexts (I am thinking of the shifting value
of terms such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ in such countries as India, Brazil, and
Italy, as previously referenced in the Introduction), and can perhaps rea-
lign the notions of gender and race under the sign of the trans-. Because,
5 Jones-Rogers (2015). However, these discourses still hinge on an inequality rooted in
constructions of whiteness both in terms of perceived purity (the ‘One-Drop’ rule), as well
as its construction as a generic or invisible identity category. As Ahmed notes, ‘whiteness
is only invisible to those who inhabit it’, cit. Yancy (2014, p. 47). Ijeoma Oluo also points
out that racial ‘“Passing” is and was only available to a select few, and in that it functioned
as a ticket out of the worst injustices of racial oppression’, ‘is a story filled with pain and
separation’, not a ‘story of liberation’ (Oluo 2017).
76 E. BOND
as I will argue, the trans-gender body expresses a multiplicity of experi-

ences and so itself functions as a ‘central cultural site’ where the ‘con-
tours of racial or class experiences can shape or reshape what gender or
sexuality means’ (Valentine 2007, p. 18).
*
I have included these preliminary remarks on contemporary media
debates in this chapter on trans-national and trans-gender identities
because they speak to similar questions around embodiment and culture
that lie at the heart of this volume. The narratives that I will go on to
analyse (Fernanda Faria de Albuquerque’s Princesa [Princess] and Elvira
Dones’ Vergine giurata (Sworn Virgin) will perhaps take us in different
directions, but they depart from the very same interest in the malleability
of diverse social constructions informing self-presentation and identifica-
tion that have been discussed above. In each, the various manifestations
of the trans- body can function as a sign of disruption, of displacement,
of being ‘out of place’ that are conversely revealed to be productive when
applied in a wider forum of debate. They raise questions around corporeal
geography: the journey metaphor of transition includes—for e xample—
spatial evocations of confinement, travelling and finding a ‘home’
(Prosser 1998, pp. 116–117), and the idea of going to a foreign country
(physically and metaphorically) in order to change gender identity. They
question notions of belonging, dynamics of hyper- or in-visibility, orien-
tation practices, and the chasm between surface and depth knowledge.
They promote and encourage a certain flexibility in attitudes towards
(self-)perception and relationality. They force us to think about how bod-
ies are understood, and read, as well as how they project and narrate.
Indeed, the emphasis within the context of trans-gender studies on
questions of difference in embodiment and identity (rather than in desire
and sexuality) allows the field to speak to other ‘cross-cutting issues such
as race, class, age, disability, and nationality’.6 Trans-gender studies is
here conceived in terms of a relationality which allows it to encapsulate a
6 Stryker (2006, p. 7, emphasis added). Here we can draw parallels with the new field of
‘transability’, as defined by Arfini as a ‘progetto sul corpo che aspira all’acquisizione di una
disabilità’; ‘performance di embodiment radicale (che) si relazionano in maniera critica con
gli standard normative corporei’ [body project that aspires toward the acquisition of a dis-
ability; a performance of radical embodiment that questions normative bodily standards].
See Arfini (2010, p. 343).
broad spectrum of embodied gender identities of ‘difference’ or variance

to include:
(A)nything that disrupts, naturalizes, articulates, and makes visible the

normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological
specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and
statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjec-
tively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social
expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that
work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood.
(Stryker 2006, p. 3)
And because trans-gender studies as a field is primarily concerned with

the embodiment of ‘difference’, it places these bodies in question at the
centre of its enquiry and uses them as new pathways to interrogate the
location and role of knowledge, representation, appearance and perfor-
mance, in order to achieve an ‘understanding of how bodies mean, how
representation works, and what counts as legitimate knowledge’ (Stryker
2006, pp. 8–9).
The trope of corporeal movement picked up in trans- pathways
becomes key here and aligns sexuality and mobility in new, productive
ways. As anticipated above, theories around the self-narratives of gender
variant people often employ concepts around that of the journey, from
‘estrangement’ (being born or ‘trapped’ in the ‘wrong’ body, for exam-
ple), through a process of ‘transition’ and on towards to a resolution in
the ‘home(coming)’ and the ‘belonging’ of reassignment—as Aizura cat-
egorizes them: ‘one way narratives of “to” and “from”, with a border or
no-man’s land in the middle’ (Aizura 2012, p. 140). And indeed, such
a binary distinction can easily be mapped onto other ranges of opposi-
tion: familiar and strange; home and away; centre and periphery; West
and East (or North and South); domestic and foreign; same and other,
allowing for easy parallels with the multiple ‘journeys’ of the migrant
experience. But the linearity of this type of narrative does not allow any
room for those who inhabit more permanently liminal spaces, of the bor-
derlands, the frontera, those who Anzaldúa calls transgressors, aliens, the
prohibited and forbidden.
Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the
troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in
78 E. BOND
short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the
“normal”. (Anzaldúa 1987, p. 3)
But the border does not only function as a limit. Walter Mignolo’s con-
cept of border thinking (or gnosis) allows the liminality of the location
itself to unravel apparently fixed boundaries and to create new forms of
knowledge through the establishment of a double consciousness.7 In
a similar fashion, when speaking of the double journey of trans- immi-
grants, Kourbatova and Redfield usefully describe a movement ‘in multi-
ple directions’:
There is the actual geographic movement from one place to another and
the personal migration through which we come to redefine our social, cul-
tural, and political context. […] Finally, there is the metaphorical “jour-
ney” of transition – shifting our gender expression or physical body. As
trans immigrants, we can move in all of these dimensions at once, or one
by one, in different orders and combinations. (Kourbatova and Redfield
2014, p. 44)
Migration itself could normatively be understood to function with a

different kind of linearity, which departs from the familiarity of ‘home’
to arrive in the estrangement of ‘elsewhere’, rather than leaving the
estrangement of the unfamiliar body to achieve the ‘belonging’ of a new
gender identity. Here too, however, the multiplicity of perspective must
be maintained, otherwise we risk running the danger of perpetuating the
‘absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other’
(Anzaldúa 1987, p. 19), here or there, on either one side or the other
of the border in question. And also of amalgamating and thus effac-
ing shades of hybridity through acts of comparison: as Nael Bhanji has
termed it, ‘homogenizing all differences under the sign of “movement”’,
‘flattening’ experiences under an all-embracing label, and transforming
the transgressive into the transfixed’ (Bhanji 2012, pp. 160, 161). Trans-
gender migrations are not simple journey narratives, with clear divisions
between home and elsewhere, since they deal with ‘already in-between,
diasporic, gender liminal’ subjects (Ahmed 2000, p. 89), whose initial
7 ‘These are not counter or different stories, these are forgotten stories that bring for-
ward, at the same time, an epistemological dimension: an epistemology of and from the
border’ (Mignolo 2000, p. 52).
concept of belonging was inflected from the start, and will have to be
renegotiated at the end. This parallel is reinforced by Sara Ahmed’s use
of the term ‘orientation’ in Queer Phenomenology, a coinage that evokes
a discourse on both shifting sexuality and nationality under the auspices
of finding direction in the world (Ahmed 2006). Indeed, rather than
occupying one particular position in relation to normative frontiers, it is
again Ahmed’s more relative concept of ‘being-at-home’ (‘how one feels
or how one might fail to feel,’ Ahmed 2000, p. 89) that will inform my
readings in the chapter to follow.
**
Both of the primary texts I will focus on narrate the stories of
migrant subjects who do not culturally conform to one fixed form of
gender embodiment, albeit in very different modes and contexts. The
first, Princesa, is the memoir of a Brazilian born transsexual, written in
a Roman prison with the assistance of two of the narrator-protagonist’s
fellow inmates. The second, Vergine giurata, is the fictional account of
an Albanian woman forced to culturally and physically perform as male
in order to maintain her social independence before deciding to rene-
gotiate her gender after migrating to America. Both narratives play with
the notion of gender variance as a metaphor for the plasticity of other
aspects of modern identity, something that is aligned with the parallel
transitioning of mobility and migrancy. By placing trans-gender and
trans-national identities into dialogue in this way, they therefore both
use the trans- prefix as a spatial marker of the possibility not just of
movement across or beyond schisms, but as ‘evocative of transgressions,
transmogrifications and transmutations of established norms’ (Bhanji
2012, p. 172).
In my analysis I will focus on descriptors of motion and mobility that
support this concept, and will question the value of more common nor-
mative markers of visibility and knowledge involved in attempts to read,
translate and listen to the trans- body. The hyphen itself becomes critical
here, since it functions as a marker of relationality, something that her-
alds and maintains the ‘categorical crossings, leakages, slips around and
through the concept of “trans-”’ (Stryker et al. 2008, p. 11). But I will
further argue that it is the body itself that makes up the hyphen, as a
threshold or borderline concept that ‘hovers perilously’ (Grosz 1994, p.
23) at the zero point of binary pairs such as inside and outside, self and
other, and succeeds in inhabiting the interval between them.
80 E. BOND
Indeed, the concept of the body as border, crossing or hyphen, ties

in too with the idea of negotiating a corporeal sense of ‘being-at-home’,
since the hyphenated body is also permeable, allowing external spaces to
be absorbed into interior subjectivity: spaces that act, Ahmed says: ‘like a
second skin that unfolds within the folds of the body’ (Ahmed 2006, p. 9).
Conceiving of the skin as a permeable border allows it to embody the self’s
relation with the external world, since in this formulation it becomes a bor-
der that feels and takes on the imprints of different ‘homes’. Migration nar-
ratives (which Ahmed also terms ‘skin memories’) therefore bring about ‘a
transformation in the very skin through which the body is embodied’ since
different spaces permeate, stretch and mark the skin in turn:
The intrusion of an unexpected space into the body suggests that the expe-
rience of a new home involves an expansion and contraction of the skin.
[…] The movement of subjects between places that come to be inhabited
as home involve the discontinuities of personal biographies and wrinkles in
the skin. (Ahmed 2006, pp. 90–91)
The skin is also especially implicated in processes of perception and

identification of the trans- body, due to its status as an ambiguous,
shifting border—one that both protects and exposes simultaneously,
thereby playing with processes of visibility and concealment. And, as
Butler points out, in its ability to mimic and deceive, it also succeeds
in exposing the imitative structure of gender constructions themselves
(Butler 1990, p. 137). In Second Skins, Jay Prosser opens a critical
exploration of the skin in relation to the location of knowledge within
trans- identity. If we accept the common perception that the trans-gen-
der subject is ‘trapped’ in the wrong body, and so holds the desire to
change their surface appearance (i.e. the skin) to reflect a true gender
identity, then this presupposes a split between body image and material
reality that can only be resolved on and through the skin itself. The skin
thus comes to play an essential mediating function as the point of contact
between the ‘physical experience of body image and the surface upon
which is projected the psychic representation of the body’ (Prosser 1998,
p. 73). Ultimately, a sense of harmony between the two states must then
lead to feeling of ‘being-at-home’ in one’s skin. But as Haraway provoc-
atively asks: ‘Why should bodies end at the skin?’ Our bodies can stretch
beyond, to function as ‘maps of power and identity’ that can both con-
struct and deconstruct normative boundaries and themselves refine and
redefine the notion of ‘home’ (Haraway 1991, pp. 178, 180).
With this in mind, we must acknowledge that the term ‘home’ is

an especially loaded one for narratives of trans-gender migration, since
in these cases, as Bhanji says: ‘home is doubly inflected as the task of
finding a home in one’s body and being able to call the nation home’
(Bhanji 2012, p. 165). ‘Home’ might be dislodged from a national
context to be relocated in new forms of belongings and community, or
indeed, through the very process of writing and recuperating the self.
And it is also true that the hyphenated ‘flesh’ border might in some cases
have to assume the significance of ‘home’ in itself, as Halberstam has
said: ‘some bodies are never at home, some bodies cannot simply cross
from A to B, some bodies recognize and live with the inherent instability
of identity’ (Halberstam 1998, p. 161).
3.3 Vergine giurata

As Nancy Armstrong has shown, the body functions as an ‘image or sign
we use to understand social relationships’ (cit. Epstein and Straub 1991,
p. 3), and its epistemological value can stretch to narrate particular cul-
tural practices and societal dynamics as well. Performing socially as a man
was once a widespread cultural practice for women in Balkan countries
such as Montenegro and Albania, and was first reported by foreign visi-
tors to the region in the first half of the nineteenth century. Grémaux is
quick to point out that this practice is distinct from other long-standing
traditions of cross-dressing in Europe.
Much more was at stake here that the mere donning of male garb to attain
certain short-term goals. In the Balkans the practice enabled a more per-
manent and institutionalized social crossing or “passing” than elsewhere.
It concerned crossing gender identities rather than merely cross-dress-
ing, since the individuals assumed the male social identity with the tacit
approval of the family and the larger community. (Grémaux 1994, p. 242)
Quite the opposite to constituting any form of subversive challenge to

the existing order, the culturally recognized female-to-male body thus
supported the continuation of an extreme form of patriarchy in Balkan
society, in which women always already figured as ‘social outsiders’.8
8 Grémaux (1994, p. 243). This recalls two related, more recently reported cases of girls
performing as boys in other national contexts, one in Egypt and one in Afghanistan. In
82 E. BOND
Orphaned as a child and subsequently brought up by her uncle and aunt

in the harsh mountainous region of northern Albania, Hana Doda, the
protagonist of Dones’ (2007) novel Vergine giurata, is continuously
forced into confronting a complex map of societal, political and cultural
confines that work together to exclude women in all contexts, ‘leggi
imposte dai maschi e dalla morale comunista’ (Dones 2007, p. 82), ‘laws
imposed on them by men and communist morality’ (Dones 2014, p.
106). When her aunt dies, and faced with the fast-deteriorating health
of her uncle Gjergj, Hana is presented with the prospect of being mar-
ried off in order to protect and maintain the family honour and posses-
sions. A suggestion that Hana rejects, and that exposes her absolute lack
of present and projected future status and leverage as a woman:
“Non voglio sposarmi e stare agli ordini di un uomo, lavargli pure i piedi.
Non faccio la schiava, io.” “Resterai sola,” dice lentamente Gjergj. “Una
donna non sposata non vale niente”. (Dones 2007, p. 102, emphasis added)
“I don’t want to be married and submit to the orders of a man, wash his
feet, even. I will not be a slave.” “You’ll be left alone,” Gjergj says, slowly.
“A woman who is not married is worth nothing”. (Dones 2014, p. 133,
emphasis added)
Only one alternative seems possible, that of effacing her identity as Hana
and assuming an alternative male persona capable of affording her a cer-
tain level of protection against entering into a forced marriage. This is
not to say that her choice equals a potential independence. The practice
Hana adopts was also known as becoming a ‘sworn virgin’, and com-
mits her to enjoying the socio-economic privileges of manhood (she can
live alone in her kulla (family hut), drink raki, have a gun, and keep the
company of the other village men), yet it also prevents her from entering
Egypt, homeless women and children are reported to sometimes resort to dressing as men
in order to live their precarious and often very dangerous lives with increased freedom,
safety and opportunity. Interestingly, Patrick Kingsley suggests that presenting as boys is
also a means of ‘feeling more at home in public spaces’, which in Egypt are usually a male
domain. See Kingsley (2015). In Afghanistan, Jenny Nordberg carried out five years of
fieldwork into the practice known as ‘bacha posh’, where parents without male sons bring
their daughters up as sons until puberty. Creating a quasi ‘third’ gender category in the
country, many then have to be forcibly ‘turned back into women’, creating considerable
resistance and confusion. See Nordberg (2014).
into any form of sexual or intimate relations with either men or women
at any point in the future. Grémaux has shown how the concept of vir-
ginity was fundamental to the social functioning of this practice, since its
inherent emphasis on purity constituted a bodily marker of the preser-
vation of strict cultural codes and boundaries (Grémaux 1994, p. 245).
Yet virginity also curiously appears as a kind of third space, which is not
connected to one gender in particular, and whose asexual undertones in
a sense mean that it is actually connected to neither. Thus, it constitutes
a form of sexual anomaly, which does not fit into binaries, and recalls
the kind of bricolage and ambiguity that ‘threaten the clear-cut demar-
cation of both genders’ (Grémaux 1994, p. 246). So the figure of the
Balkan sworn virgin can be read as an odd combination of a reinforce-
ment of cultural and gender roles already in place, and simultaneously
as an inherent threat to their delimitations. As such, it recalls Bakhtin’s
‘grotesque’ body, where the ‘slipperiness’ of the ambiguously gendered
body is ‘both recuperative, a sort of safety valve in the service of domi-
nant ideology, and as subversive, that which exceeds and refuses that ide-
ology’ (Epstein and Straub 1991, p. 9).
Hana goes on to perform as Mark in the village for many years, before
making the decision to migrate to America and join other family and clan
members that have made the journey before her. ‘È bello andarsene, c’è
qualcosa di eroico nella fuga, ti perdi via ti sfumi diventi nuvola oppure
uomo. Ci vuole fegato per andarsene’ (Dones 2007, p. 99). ‘It’s good
to leave. There’s something heroic about running away: you lose your-
self, you fade away, you turn into a cloud, or maybe a man. You need
courage to run away’ (Dones 2014, p. 129). Despite her initially positive
pronouncement here, it is interesting to reflect on the subsequent tropes
of effacement (‘sfumarsi’), invisibility (‘diventare nuvola’) and disappear-
ance (‘perdersi’) that Hana employs in this reflection. And then follow
her double twist into more emphatic, male-oriented language (‘diventare
uomo’, ‘ci vuole fegato’) at the end, that reveal an identity still caught
between two poles of orientation.
But once en route Hana decides to attempt to revert to her previ-
ous female gender embodiment and undertake the double transition:
from male back to female, and from rural Albania to metropolitan
Washington, DC. This double transition speaks to the parallel position-
ing of the trans-gender and the trans-national that lies at the heart of
this chapter, and recalls Cruze-Malavé and Manalansan’s comments
that ‘queer sexualities and cultures in our globalized world’ function
84 E. BOND
as a ‘mediating figure between the nation and diaspora, home and the
state, local and the global’—as well as occupying a ‘creative site for queer
agency and empowerment’ (Cruze-Malavé and Manalansan 2002, p. 2).
Migration is therefore presented in the narrative as an opportunity for
Hana to renegotiate her female corporeality in America, through parallel
processes of reorientation and new forms of belonging. The link between
spatial movement and the body’s awakening (in its female, sexual spec-
ificity) is made explicit from the beginning of the narrative itself, when
Hana, still socially performing as a man in rural Albania, describes how
her breast started to itch as soon as she received her emigration papers:
Sente pruderle il seno sinistro. Cerca di grattarsi senza usare la mano. È un

anno che il seno si fa sentire, da quando ha ricevuto la Green Card amer-
icana e ha deciso di emigrare. Non riesce ad alleviare il prurito. (Dones
2007, p. 12)
Her left breast begins to itch. She tries to scratch herself without using her
hand. She started feeling the presence of her breasts a year ago, as soon as
she got her green card and decided to emigrate to America. She can’t seem
to stop the itching. (Dones 2014, p. 12)
This itch cannot help but recall Sara Ahmed’s suggestion cited above,
that the multiple points and positions in migration stories persist and are
akin to a series of dermal irritations that mark the individual (see p. 53
above). Yet particularly pertinent to Hana’s own trajectory is Ahmed’s
related idea of the itch as a sign of the ‘discontinuity’ of a personal
narrative through the double process of migration and the return of a
repressed form of embodiment. In the above citation, we can also note
there is also a sense of the frustration that comes from discomfort, from
always already not feeling ‘at home’. Hana tries to relieve her itch with-
out using her hand, and in the lack of mutuality of touch and skin con-
tact, leads her to persist in a lack of intimacy and interembodiment that
Merleau-Ponty characterizes within the ‘with’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001,
p. 5). This seems to express her discomfort at having to definitively iden-
tify as either one of male or female, and recalls Sofia Samatar’s recon-
figurement of ‘skin feeling’ as ‘to be constantly exposed as something
you are not’ (Samatar 2015). For as discussed above, skin can be read
as an ambiguous site, one that is capable of either ‘exposure or connect-
edness’, and thus also as constituting an unstable boundary and a site of
potential cultural conflict (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, p. 2). Yet it is also
true that the discomfort that skin sensations might invoke can be pro-
ductive, and bodily expression (also in the sense of secretion and the pro-
duction of fluids) is seen as a potential antidote to an inability to express
agency through creativity. As Hana herself says: ‘Non scrivi buone poesie
con la vulva secca’ (Dones 2007, p. 11). ‘You can’t write good poems
with a dry cunt’ (Dones 2014, p. 11).9
So while Hana’s own awareness of a potential fluidity in her gender
expression is still in development, she is caught within the confines of
accepted cultural and social roles, both before and during her dual tran-
sition. The descriptions of her decision to become a man tell of a body is
forcibly suppressed to the point of becoming inanimate: ‘Al rientro nella
kulla era diventata un pezzo di roccia, la tomba di se stessa. Era diventata
un uomo’ (Dones 2007, p. 112). ‘When she got home to the kulla, she
had become as hard as rock, the grave of her old self. She had become a
man’ (Dones 2014, p. 146). Hana has literally lost her body—since she
forgoes her sensibility (in her self-description as a rock) and ability to
express emotion (in the feeling of having become a form of tomb) until
she presents as lifeless under the weight of sociocultural expectations.
Added to the political and cultural confines that limit Hana prior to
commencing her performance as Mark, she also is constantly subject to
the scrutiny of the micro-community of the village, a sort of Foucauldian
surveillance that in her mind unites the village into a single personified
entity that observes her ‘con occhi attenti e penetranti’ (Dones 2007,
p. 12), ‘with penetrating, attentive eyes’ (Dones 2014, p. 13). This is
also transferred to the natural habitat of the landscape as well, in which
she perceives the mountains to be ‘fatte di occhi che osservano e proibis-
cono’ (Dones 2007, p. 22), ‘made of eyes that observe and forbid’
(Dones 2014, p. 25).
But migration replaces these dynamics with new difficulties to negoti-
ate in Hana’s dichotomous desire to pass, and she is afraid of her ambig-
uous appearance being misread. In Washington, the eyes of the village
are replaced with those of her cousin’s daughter Jonida, who pierces
Hana with her gaze (Dones 2007, p. 16; 2014, p. 18), in what is also an
9 This anticipates considerations I make in Chapter 4 around the ‘leaky’ nature of female
bodies and their alignment in feminist philosophy with the notion of a certain seepage or
fluidity in borders and categories which can lead to productive and creative agency. On this
topic, see, for example, Irigaray (1985), Shildrick (1997), and Longhurst (2000).
86 E. BOND
interesting anticipation of the final physical perforation she undergoes.

This mode of hyper-scrutiny is enacted by her more distant relatives too:
on her arrival Hana imagines that they must know the whole story ‘e
muoiono dalla voglia di mitragliarla di domande’ (Dones 2007, p. 19,
emphasis added); ‘and be dying to fire questions at her, like rounds from
a semi-automatic’ (Dones 2014, p. 21). The violence contained in the
term ‘mitragliare’ (literally, to shoot with a machine-gun) is also signifi-
cant here. Hana struggles with how to negotiate both external expecta-
tions as well as internal habits, and her fear of disappointing her relatives
is countered through a reliance on conventional tropes of masculinity for
strength and courage, which characterize her attempts at self-motivation
when she arrives in America for the first time.
Esci ora, dice tra sé quasi ad alta voce, esci e fai l’uomo. È quello che il
clan si aspetta. […] L’arrivo di Mark dovrebbe riavvicinarli alle montagne,
al profumo dello sterco, al crepitio delle armi, al tradimento, ai canti, alle
ferite, alla bestialità, ai fiori […] Hana dà una scossa ai pensieri. Il bagno di
Dulles International Airport è così reale e concreto, e lei si sente così estra-
nea là dentro. Ci vogliono due testicoli per affrontare tutto questo, pensa,
due testicoli grossi che lei non ha. (Dones 2007, p. 14)
Out! Now! She says to herself almost aloud. Get out and be a man. That’s
what the clan expects. […] Mark’s arrival is meant to bring them back to
the mountains, to the smell of dung, to the sputter of guns, to betrayal,
songs, wounds, flowers, to brutality […] Hana shakes her thoughts away.
This restroom in Dulles International Airport is so real and tangible, and
yet she feels so alien here. You need balls to deal with all this, she thinks,
balls she doesn’t have. (Dones 2014, p. 15)
The cultural codes that Hana has adhered to as Mark (fare l’uomo)
nonetheless expose a bodily lack when that context is no longer pres-
ent, and require her to undergo a complex process of identity rene-
gotiation. In the narrative itself, this is performed through the lens of
cultural translation and is something which presents as many challenges
for other characters as it does for Hana. Her cousin and host in America,
Lila, is not ‘at home’ with her shifting presentation at first, and points
out that the daily changes that she charts in Hana’s gender performance
also require her, as an Albanian woman, to modify her own behaviour
towards her cousin as a consequence. As Prosser says, transitions habit-
ually provoke discomfort and anxiety, both for the subject in transition
and for the other in the encounter, since they push up against the very
feasibility of identity (Prosser 1998, p. 3, emphasis added). Similarly,
Lila’s husband Shtjefën mourns the raki that Hana drunk habitually as
Mark, as if the ingestion and incorporation of the culturally loaded spirit
has somehow altered her physiognomy in his eyes.
Adesso tu vieni qua in America e io non so come spiegarti che in fondo

in tutti questi anni ti ho pensato come il Mark del villaggio e allo stesso
tempo come la cugina più cara di Lila. Con tutta la grappa che ti sei bev-
uta, Hana, con tutta la grappa… (Dones 2007, p. 34)
Now you come here to America and I don’t know how to explain that
basically all this time I’ve been thinking of you as Mark in the village and
at the same time as Lila’s favourite cousin Hana. With all the raki you’ve
drunk in your time, Hana. All that raki. (Dones 2014, p. 42)
But Hana in Mark’s clothing is even more difficult to ‘read’ for those
not aware of the cultural background to her double-gendered iden-
tity. Indeed, her niece Jonida assumes that her ‘uncle’ is gay, something
that for the fourteen year old would explain her effeminate appearance.
Jonida applies American cultural codes and assumed knowledge to a situ-
ation that simply does not support them.
“Tu non hai fatto l’operazione. Voglio dire, sessualmente sei un uomo,
no?” Hana continua a nascondersi dietro la risata. “No,” le dice poi. “Non
sono un uomo. E non sono gay, nemmeno un po’. Sono proprio donna.
Sono donna dalla nascita.” […] “Non sono gay, e nemmeno lesbica,”
ripete, “so di sembrare strana, una specie di ibrido, ma sono una donna.”
(Dones 2007, pp. 51, 52)
“You haven’t done the operation yet, right? I mean, sexually, you’re still a
man?” Hana hides behind her laughter. “No,” she says, finally. “I’m not
a man. And I’m not gay. Not even a little bit. I’m a woman. I’ve been a
girl since the day I was born.” […] “I’m not gay and I’m not a lesbian,”
she repeats. “I know I look strange, a kind of hybrid, but I am a woman.”
(Dones 2014, p. 65)
The character of Jonida functions as a narrative go-between or transit

point whose incomprehension can facilitate Dones’ account of Hana’s
story to the reader, thus also exposing the cultural differences between
88 E. BOND
rural mountains of Albania, the Washington suburbs, as well as—even-

tually—the Italian readership it is destined for. The exchanges that Hana
has underline the difficulties in these processes of cultural translation:
“Non capisco.” “Be’, ho raccontato per sommi capi.” “Non capisco”
(Dones 2007, p. 53). “I don’t get it.” “I just gave you the basics.” “I
don’t get it” (Dones 2014, p. 67). These types of narrative filter and
strategies of stilted cultural translation also perhaps speak to the fact that
this is fictionalized narrative, filtered through Dones’ at once implicated
yet ‘outsider’ perception. For born as she was in the southern coastal
town of Dürres and raised in the capital Tirana, the Black Mountains of
Albania’s north must have seemed like another world in space and time
to the author when she discovered the sworn virgin phenomenon as a
university student. Yet if this distances her from the core narrative mate-
rial at the chronological start of the novel, then her own defection and
exile in the Italian-speaking Canton Ticino of Switzerland and subse-
quent migration to Washington both evoke and echo Hana’s multiple
transitions in the text.
Perhaps for this reason, Dones allows the American experience to pro-
vide the opportunity for Hana to explore the limits and possibilities of
her own corporeality, something she enacts precisely as if embarking on
another journey, passing through and acknowledging the different inter-
nal crevices of her body and examining the emotions (or lack thereof)
that they provoke in her.
Lei dava ascolto al battito del proprio essere, viaggiava nello stomaco vul-
nerabile, si soffermava brevemente ai reni che mai le avevano creato prob-
lemi. Ma era un viaggio spoglio e sereno, si sentiva come un turista un po’
ebete monco di curiosità. (Dones 2007, p. 37)
She becomes aware of the pulse of her existence. It beats in her weak
stomach, pauses for a while in her kidneys, which have never given her any
trouble. It is a simple, quiet journey. She feels like a rather undemanding
tourist, lacking all curiosity. (Dones 2014, p. 45)
And despite her initial feeling of being a transient tourist in her own
embodiment, Hana gradually rediscovers how to present as a woman,
through a series of cosmetic and cultural changes that her migration
facilitates. In particular, Hana appreciates the anonymity that America
affords her, as contrasted against the strict codes of visibility that
operated in her previous life in Albania. ‘E poi nessuno ficca il naso nella
tua vita privata: niente domande indiscrete, sono sempre di fretta e si
fanno gli affari loro, gli americani. A Hana questa cosa degli affari loro
piace più di tutto il resto’ (Dones 2007, p. 131). ‘And then they don’t
pry into your private life. No questions asked. They’re always going
someplace else in a hurry, and they mind their own business. Hana likes
the part about minding their own business more than all the rest put
together’ (Dones 2014, pp. 170–171). Within the freedom this affords
her, and through the consequent physical and psychological processes
of renegotiating her self-orientation, Hana realizes that her feminine
expression had only been temporarily suppressed and that she can ulti-
mately regain a more sensorial relationship with her own body. After her
first sexual encounter: ‘Ha sentito il proprio corpo reagire, lo ha sen-
tito pulsare. “Benvenuto in me, cretino di un corpo,” dice a voce alta’
(Dones 2007, p. 204). ‘She has felt her body react; she felt it pulse.
“Welcome back, body”, she says out loud’ (Dones 2014, p. 270).
However, she has not lost the previous imprint of her variant,
trans- self, as we can see in her willingness to look beyond the gender of
the people around her and feel ‘at home’ reading people beyond their
physical expression.
Quando osserva la gente, Hana non vede una donna o un uomo. Cerca di
penetrare lo spirito degli individui, ne analizza i volti e gli occhi, tenta di
fantasticare sui pensieri che si celano dietro gli sguardi, ma glissa sul fatto
che quei pensieri sono legati all’io profondo di maschi e femmine. Una
donna pensa da donna. Un uomo, be’, ovvio. E lei capisce solo ora che per
lungo tempo ha pensato su entrambi i fronti. (Dones 2007, p. 122)
When she observes people, Hana does not see a woman or a man. She
tries to penetrate the unique spirit of the individual, she analyzes their face
and eyes, she tries to imagine the thoughts hiding behind those eyes […]
Women think like women. Men? Well, the answer is obvious. She’s only
just realizing now that for a long time she has had to consider things from
both points of view. (Dones 2014, pp. 158–159)
She herself has inhabited both sides of the liminal hyphen of the trans-, in
her fluid negotiation of both gender and national contexts, allowing her
the kind of double consciousness suggested above. This idea is reinforced
through various similes in the narrative, which seem to posit fluidity
90 E. BOND
as constituting an equally viable or natural way of being. For example,

Hana recounts the story told in her village of a calf that tried to mimic a
rooster’s cry and suckle a goat (Dones 2007, p. 38; 2014, p. 47), a story
that raises issues of imitations, projections and associations which pre-
empt the principal narrative arc. And indeed Hana recalls how her aunt
Katrina’s habit of wearing a turban makes her seem to her to look like the
female version of Peter O’Toole: ‘Somiglia a Lawrence d’Arabia senza il
deserto’ (Dones 2007, p. 56, ‘She looks like Lawrence of Arabia with-
out the desert’, Dones 2014, p. 71). Such associations cannot be trans-
planted successfully without their necessary context, however (here, e.g.,
the missing desert), and Katrina tellingly remarks to Hana in Tirana that
her niece has a ‘faccia da straniera’ (Dones 2007, p. 73; ‘foreign-looking
face’, Dones 2014, p. 94). The female characters in Vergine giurata are
not at home within the normative sociocultural boundaries in place either
in Hoxha’s capital city nor within the patriarchal confines of the strict
honour code of the Kanun in the rural north of Albania. And it is within
this contextual landscape that Hana’s multiple transitions sketch a new
possible embodiment of agency and opportunity.
Given this, the conclusion of the narrative might seem to constitute
an unsatisfactory capitulation to normative ideals. Frustrated by her vir-
ginity, Hana decides to make recourse to surgery in order to have her
hymen cut, thus also cutting the last bond with her ‘sworn’ state. The
perfunctory nature of this cut raises difficult questions for the narrative,
as do the implications of its implementation by a machine. The mechan-
ics of this operation might productively be aligned with a discourse
around cyborg sexuality and, in its clinical context, still risk being linked
to notions of purity that characterized her previous virginal state. Is it a
form of hetero-normative ‘cure’ of Hana’s ambiguous gender, a somat-
echnical resolution? Has the hyphen itself been cut? But, if we note that
it is Hana herself who decides to perform this course of action, who
decides to take the final step of her transition into her own hands, rather
than being sexually penetrated and marked as female, then it seems
instead to point to a greater agency. This is in stark contrast to the ‘cura-
tive’ cut that Adua, the protagonist of Igiaba Scego’s 2015 eponymous
novel, receives under duress from an Italian couple who have coerced
her into sex. When they discover her infibulation, which they describe
as resembling ‘filo spinato’ [barbed wire] (Scego 2015a, p. 123), she
explains the traditional belief that ‘Così siamo pure, siamo vergini e
lo saremo fino al giorno del matrimonio, fino a quando qualcuno non
ci amerà e ci aprirà con il proprio amore’ [This way we are pure, we are
virgins until the day of our marriage, until our husband loves us and
opens us with his love] (Scego 2015a, p. 124). Yet they dismiss this,
saying ‘“Non serve l’amore, stupida. Bastano un paio di forbici”’ [You
don’t need love, stupid. You just need a pair of scissors] (Scego 2015a,
p. 124). The difference between Adua’s enforced rupture and Hana’s
choice to enact her own sexual transition thus means that the latter can
effectively be linked back to the importance of inscription for agency and
self-narrative, particularly in the context of a gender transition: for as
Prosser says, this is more strictly ‘a matter of constructing a […] narra-
tive before being constructed through technology’ (Prosser 1998, p. 9).
3.4 Princesa
Vergine giurata recounts an identity trajectory in which the protagonist’s
corporeality is temporarily suppressed by societal and cultural codes, and
which is then renegotiated through the migratory process. A feeling of
being ‘at home’ is located in both the new gender identity and the desti-
nation country, above all through the inscriptive means of assuming sub-
jective agency that have been described above. This is in some contrast
to Princesa, where gender subjectivity is predominantly experienced by
the protagonist-narrator as a split state, which becomes further fractured
through the economic and social pressures of irregular migration. But
beyond this it is the external perception and evaluation of the foreign
trans- body as a sexual commodity, appreciated from the outside as dou-
ble and divided in its exoticness, which shatters the protagonist’s subjec-
tive stability and leads to the silence and ‘homelessness’ that characterize
the ending of the narrative. Yet once again, in a similar fashion to Vergine
giurata, we will see how this fracture is countered by the collaborative
creation of the narrative, and in its insistence on naming, on the impor-
tance of voice, and the potential of narrative as a site for resistance.
Growing up in the rural north of Brazil as a young veado,10 allowed
only temporary and clandestine episodes of transvestism, Princesa’s
10 This Nordeste region of Brazil was the first to be discovered and colonized by the
Portuguese and other European nations, and has significant links to the slave trade. The
consequent presence of a significant black population seems to be a source of disturbance
for Princesa, something which is interesting to reflect on as she herself moves through
trans-Atlantic crossings, and her physicality is ultimately commodified in turn.
92 E. BOND
self-categorization is initially represented in liminal terms: she is

described, and as a consequence describes herself as ‘maschio-e-femmina’
[male-and-female], and a ‘uomodonna’ [manwoman] (Farías de
Albuquerque et al. 1994, pp. 17, 22), thus recalling Anzaldúa’s concep-
tion of the new mestiza consciousness as ‘mità y mità’ (Anzaldúa 1987,
p. 19). This initial awareness of possessing a liminal, double identity is
transposed onto Princesa’s awareness and mapping of her spatial sur-
roundings, much as is Hana’s perception of external surveillance dynam-
ics in Vergine giurata. ‘Conosco la città, giro di notte. È buio, eppure
vedo linee e confini da non oltrepassare. Bordeggio e scanso territori per-
icolosi. Scopro percorsi e nascondigli’ [I know the city, I walk round at
night. It’s dark, but I see lines and borders that mustn’t be crossed. I
skirt the confines and avoid dangerous areas. I discover paths and hiding
places] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 40). Her move to the city,
with its subsequent processes of negotiation (‘bordeggiare’, ‘scansare’)
and discovery of ‘percorsi and nascondigli’ [paths and hiding places] are
aligned with an increasing confidence in cross-dressing, and Princesa
begins to explicitly split her sense of self into two differently gendered
names and personas: Fernando and Fernanda:
Fernanda, la mia nuova libertà, come una prima attrice occupa la scena […]
Io sono lì, scisso, inoffensivo, mentre Fernanda scintilla e si racconta, put-
tana e studentessa. La guardo, mi guardo. […] Fernando, sono spettatore di
me stessa. Fernanda mi sorprende, inaspettata, liberata. Abita il mio corpo,
inghiotte la mia coda, la biscia. (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 36)
[Fernanda, my new freedom, like a leading actress she occupies the stage.
I am there, divided, inoffensive, whilst Fernanda sparkles and speaks of
herself, whore and student. I watch her, I watch myself. Fernando, I am
a spectator of myself. Fernanda surprises me, unexpected, liberated. She
inhabits my body, swallows my tail, the snake.]
The double perspective is embodied in the contrast between pronouns

and perspective (‘La guardo/ mi guardo’) and the ambiguous paradox
of the statement ‘Sono spettatore (masculine) di me stessa (feminine)’.
The hormones Princesa consumes in order to resolve this schism work
as a kind of corporeal possession—yet her impatience to incorporate and
consume her previous self denies her the desired transformation, and the
male presence of Fernando persists/resists within her:
Anaciclin, ventotto pastiche a confezione. Non so aspettare e le bevo tutte

insieme frammiste a un frullato di carote. Dentro il letto, occhi al sof-
fitto, aspetto che ad albeggiare siano due seni di magia. […] Vomitai una
macchia rossa, mi contorsi dal dolore. Fernando mi resisteva, si rivoltava.
Durezza del suo corpo. (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 42)
[Anaciclin, twenty-eight pills in the packet. I can’t wait and take them all at
once, washed down with carrot juice. In my bed, looking up at the ceiling,
I wait for two magical breasts to emerge at dawn. Instead, I vomit a red
liquid, writhing in pain. Fernando resists me, rebels. The hardness of his
body.]
But the female hormones do eventually function to soften the ‘durezza’

[hardness] of Fernando’s resistance, and corporeal journey takes shape
in the embodiment of Fernanda. This is not just a bodily transforma-
tion, however, but also a psychological one: ‘gesto su gesto’, Fernando
shrinks, consumed by his female counterpart identity:
Fernando si consuma lentamente. Il pene rimpicciolisce, i testicoli si riti-

rano. I peli diradano, i fianchi si allargano. Fernanda cresce. Pezzo dopo
pezzo, gesto su gesto, io dal cielo scendo in terra, un diavolo – uno spec-
chio. Il mio viaggio. (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 57)
[Fernando is slowly consumed. The penis shrivels, the testicles retreat. The
hair grows more sparse, the hips widen. Fernanda grows. Piece by piece,
gesture after gesture, I descend from heaven to earth, a devil – a mirror.
My journey.]
With the insertion of silicone implants, the visual element of transfor-

mation is complete and allows Princesa to showcase and exhibit her
newfound female embodiment. Indeed, in the interview that concludes
the first printed edition, Princesa speaks of giving birth to her new body
through the process of silicone injections that foreshadows a sense of
deliberate construction, of agency. ‘Fernanda prende consistenza, ed è
spettacolo’ [Fernanda takes on substance, and it’s spectacular] (Farías
de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 112). This concept of spectacle is fun-
damental to Princesa’s sense of her own embodiment and she always
desires and conceives of visibility as a delight. The pavements where she
can display her beauty and sexuality are described variously as her own
catwalk (‘passarella’; ‘sfilata’); or striptease show (‘spogliarello’, Farías de
94 E. BOND
Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 122) and although this indicates a sense of

orientation and ownership of public spaces, the spectacle is also a source
of conflict between Princesa and any man that she enters into a relation-
ship with. ‘Lui mi voleva in pantaloni, discreto. Io in minigonna, scintil-
lante’ [He wanted me to wear trousers, to be discreet. I wanted to wear
a miniskirt, and sparkle] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 33); ‘Lui
preferiva sfilarmi i pantaloni, io tirarmi su la gonna’ [He preferred to
take off my trousers, I, to pull up my skirt] (Farías de Albuquerque et al.
1994, p. 34). The spectacle thus raises questions related to the process
of ‘passing’—while Fernanda aims to pass as a woman (and holds Sonia
Braga as a model of beauty to pursue), her male lovers want her to be
able to pass as male when together in public.
The idea of visual spectacle is also linked in the narrative to the impor-
tance of the male gaze (of desire) and its decisive function in helping
Princesa to construct her new trans-gender identity through external
perceptions. ‘Fernanda prendeva consistenza. Anche fuori di me, i clienti
me la restituivano’ [Fernanda takes on substance. On the outside too,
my clients reflected her back at me] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994,
p. 48). The male gaze is Princesa’s main desire—to be noticed, desired
and acknowledged. ‘Ma io volevo, li rivolevo addosso quegli sguardi.
Tutti quei José per me’ [But I wanted them, all those gazes on me again.
All those Johns for me] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 53).
Because it is precisely through the male gaze of desire that the coherence
of a unitary gendered identity is confirmed in Princesa, both by sexual
male attention as well as simple acts of gallant kindness.
Fernanda ora mi ritorna sempre più forte, restituita da mille attenzioni

prima sconsciute: un uomo che mi cede il passo, la gentilezza di un anziano,
l’occhieggiare di un ragazzo. […] Cambiò tutto, persino i suoni della mia
lingua vibrarono diversi. (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 60)
[Fernanda comes back ever stronger, in the shape of a thousand acknowl-
edgements I’d never known before: a man who lets me pass in front,
the kindness of an old man, the ogling looks of a boy. Everything had
changed, even the sounds of my voice were different.]
This emphasis on the process of identity ‘restitution’ and the transform-

ative effect that attention has even on Princesa’s language must remind
us of Merleau-Ponty’s statement: ‘“I am brought into being through
desire or love”’ (cit. Salamon 2010, p. 46) and emphasizes once again
that embodiment is intersubjective. Princesa is a joint performative con-
struction between Fernando, Fernanda and those others who perceive
and accept her as she decides to self-present.
However, the fragility of this constructed embodiment becomes obvious
when Princesa’s silicone implants are removed after a violent encounter.
She compares her flattened chest to ‘un sorriso senza denti’ [a toothless
smile]: ‘Guardarmi nello specchio divenne una fatica, quella cicatrice con-
torceva i miei pensieri’ [Looking at myself in the mirror became a trial, that
scar deformed my thoughts] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 63).
The desire to permanently fix her gendered embodiment and undergo a
sex change operation leads her to decide to migrate in order to raise more
money through prostitution, inspired by reports by trans-sexual workers
deported back to Brazil from Europe. These people supply an important
chain of information on potential migration routes, clients, and praxes
(Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 66), but also spread the popularity
of the idea of migrating until Princesa describes the influx of trans-gender
prostitutes as an ‘invasione’ [invasion] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994,
p. 89). Her metaphorical passing of gender borders becomes a physical
criss-crossing (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 119), from Portugal
to Spain, to France and on to Italy, moving in and out as she collects ‘fogli
di via’ [deportation orders], and lives life as a ‘clandestina’ [undocumented
migrant] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 101).
Ultimately, Princesa’s decision to migrate to Europe proves destruc-
tive to her self-perception and embodiment because while in Brazil,
Princesa’s clients perceived and desired her as female, in Italy it is pre-
cisely her liminal, double gender that attracts them.
Lungo i marciapiedi di via Melchiorre Gioia, vicino alla stazione di corso

Garibaldi, io non seppi più se ero maschio o femmina, donna o uomo.
Furono loro, i milanesi della prima notte, a precipitarmi nella confusione.
[…] Furono le loro mani, i loro bizzarri desideri che rimescolarono la mia
fragile e chirugica certezza: Fernanda, ancora uno sforzo nel finale, un
piccolo difetto da eliminare. No, per loro quell’imperfezione era decisiva.
Fondamentale. (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 84)
[Along the sidewalks of via Melchiorre Gioia, near the station on corso
Garibaldi, I no longer knew if I was male or female, woman or man. It
was them, the Milanese men of the first night, who threw me into such a
96 E. BOND
confusion. It was their hands, their bizarre desires that muddled my fragile,
surgical certainty: Fernanda, one final effort, one small defect to eliminate.
No, for them that imperfection was crucial. Fundamental.]
This schism between Princesa’s self-identification and the perceptions of

others opens up a divide in her experience of her own gender embod-
iment that weighs heavy on her. She describes her appearance as being
blighted by the ‘ombra pallida di Milano’ [pale shadow of Milan] (Farías
de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 93). And when she moves further south
to Rome, she has another experience of subjective splitting when she
returns home in the daylight after a night working the streets of EUR.
Mi ritrovai puttana in mezzo a tanta gente, la luce del sole che svelava lo
sconquasso. La disfatta, dopo tanti corpi addosso. La mezza pelliccia di
finto leopardo presa all’Upim dell’Esquilino mi inchiodava come un riflet-
tore acceso sul protagonista: un clown, una puzza di piscio a colazione.
[…] sprofondai nella vergogna […] fuori posto […] Sull’autobus tutti mi
guardavano, sentii gli occhi di mia madre addosso. (Farías de Albuquerque
et al. 1994, pp. 99–100)
[I found myself a prostitute in the middle of a crowd of people, the sun-
light revealing my collapse. Destroyed, after so many bodies. The short
leopard print coat I had bought at the Upim store in Esquilino had the
effect of a stage light shining down on a star actor: it made me a clown, a
smell of piss at breakfast time. I was so ashamed. Out of place. On the bus
back everyone stared at me, I felt my mother’s eyes watching me.]
So while the gaze of the other can be constitutive in a positive sense, as

seen above, here verbs such as ‘svelare’ [reveal] and ‘inchiodare’ [nail]
reveal their ability to expose the subject in all her vulnerability, a pro-
cess of hyper-visibility that is underlined in her perception of the ‘riflet-
tore acceso’ [stage light shining]. The imagined vision of her mother
among the gazes of judgment and surveillance seems to suggest that the
incorporated sociocultural values and ties of her family have not been
discarded, and they function here to highlight an identity conflict that
means Princesa is definitively ‘fuori posto’ [out of place].
Princesa ultimately appears to accept the caricatured, objectified image
that others have of her body, thus sacrificing her own sense of ‘home’,
and accepting darkness and silence as an abrupt conclusion to her narra-
tive. As Sharon Wood has stated, Princesa’s mis-recognized multiplicity is
‘experienced as alienation, violence, and marginalization’ (Wood 2006,

p. 161):
Mi striscio gli occhi coi colori, impasto le labbra di rossetto. Non è più il
bel rituale, profumo il corpo, lo porto alla svendita finale. […] L’Europa è
spenta, io brancolo nel buio. Non so più che voglio, perché lo faccio. Non fa
più giorno, non so più chi sono. (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 101)
[I circle my eyes with colour, smear my lips with lipstick. No longer a nice
ritual, I perfume my body, take it out for the final sale. Europe is dark, I
stumble without light. I don’t know what I want anymore, why I’m doing
it. There’s no more daytime, I no longer know who I am.]
The body is being sold off, representing a commodity that speaks to the
power systems of consumerism and capitalism that characterize Western
society and work actively to exclude those subjects of embodied differ-
ence. This in turn must recall Stryker’s insistence that embodied differ-
ence operates within same power dynamics as social hierarchies and that
both are capable of producing bodily ‘pain and pleasure, health and sick-
ness, punishment and reward, life and death’ (Stryker 2006, p. 3).
La protagonista si scontra infatti con una norma sociale e culturale che

la svaluta nello stesso momento in cui fa di lei un oggetto del desiderio
maschile, che la considera come una merce a buon mercato o come pro-
dotto “esotico” da consumare. (Sabelli 2013, p. 207)
[The protagonist clashes with social and cultural norms that devalue her at
the same time as they make her an object of male desire, that consider her
a cheap or ‘exotic’ product to be consumed.]
But despite this, the repositioning of Princesa’s voice within a framework

of narrative agency that allows her to tell her own story may still allow us
to read the conclusion of the text not as a capitulation to (self-)consump-
tion, but rather as a refusal, as a stroke of firm resistance. The narrative
already assumes an accusatory tone in its naming of the many victims
of police violence in Brazil, and in highlighting the vulnerability of the
trans- community in its exposure to AIDS and substance abuse (Farías de
Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 66). The ending, seen in this context, reads
as a further statement of condemnation for a Europe that consumes,
destroys and seeks furthermore to silence:
98 E. BOND
Senza sforzo, nelle braccia del demonio, in Europa, ci si arriva a bassa

voce, silenziosamente. Qui da voi, non si muore fragorosamente. […]
Qui si sparisce zitti zitti in sottovoce. Silenziosamente. Sole e disperate.
Di aids e di eroina. Oppure dentro una cella, impiccate a un lavandino.
Come Celma, che vorrei ricordare. Dormiva nella cella a fianco, dentro
quest’altro inferno dove ora vivo e che ho deciso di non raccontare. (Farías
de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 103, emphasis added)
[Effortless, carried by the devil, we arrive in Europe quietly, in silence.
Here, in your countries, death is not noisy. Here you disappear hush hush
in a whisper. Silently. Alone and anguished. From AIDS and heroin. Or in
a prison cell, hanging from a sink. Like Celma, who I’d like to remember.
She slept in the next cell to mine, in this other hell I live in now and which
I’ve decided not to tell.]
As Wood remarks, in contrast to other comparable migration narratives,

the text does not seek accommodation with the receiving culture; instead
it closes on the edge of the abyss of what has not been said (Wood 2006, p.
162). This is a partially imposed silence, to be sure, but is also one which
is transformed into positive action by the narrative itself. And the inclu-
sion of the ‘vorrei ricordare’ [I would like to remember] goes further still.
Princesa is using the narrative space of co-creation not only to argue for
the acceptance of her own alterity but also to carve a space of memory.
Narrative here is conceived of as actively curative: the editor, Jannelli,
speaks of the process of writing the story as a ‘medicina’ [medicine], that
Princesa and her scribe, co-prisoner Giovanni Tamponi, wrote ‘per tenersi
insieme’ [to keep themselves together] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994,
p. 7): ‘inventarono una lingua, costruirono un mondo’ [they invented a
language, they constructed a world] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p.
9). The world in which the narrative was constructed was, indeed, a pecu-
liar setting, since the prison might conventionally be seen as a kind of non-
space, a zone of transit, and of transience. And the G8 section of Rebibbia,
where the trans-gender prisoners were held, was further separated from the
cells where former Brigate Rosse [Red Brigades] terrorist Jannelli was held,
so Tamponi functioned as a kind of messenger for editor and writer, him-
self crossing further physical boundaries between the two spaces.
And what of the role of Jannelli in the construction of the narrative?
From the introductory notes, we may wonder if his own preconceptions
might add a negative filter to recounting the events of Princesa’s life. He
describes the trans-gender prisoners as inhabiting ‘corpi bloccati’ [blocked
bodies], and of having an ‘identità sessuale continuamente sottoposta a
tensione, sempre rimessa in discussione’ [an ever-shifting, always debata-

ble sexual identity] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, pp. 8–9, empha-
sis added). Yet it also seems that he himself is stuck between twin poles of
desire and disgust, and asks ‘come interpretare quei nuovi fantasmi che di
notte iniziarono ad abitare i nostri sogni?’ [how can we interpret those new
ghosts that begun to haunt our dreams at night?], going on to speak of
the ‘sentimenti contraddittori di attrazione e repulsione che quelle ambi-
guità inducevano’ [contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion that
those ambiguities evoked] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 89). This
‘reading’ of Princesa’s body as ambiguous, blocked, in conflict, and even
Jannelli’s evoking of it as a ghostly effacement seems to run the risk of col-
ouring, or even of erasing her narrative presence, thus adding to her own
perception that ‘ognuno mi voleva come io non ero’ [everyone wanted me
the way that I was not] (Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 132). This
potential narrative ‘flattening’ of Princesa’s trans- accented voice might pro-
ductively be linked to Stone’s discourse on passing as a form of (self-)era-
sure. She writes that the highest purpose of the trans-sexual is to erase him
or herself, to fade into the “normal” population as soon as possible (Stone
1991, p. 295). And, crucially, that ‘part of this process is known as con-
structing a plausible history: learning to lie effectively about one’s past,’ and
thus also losing the ability to authentically represent the complexities and
ambiguities of one’s own lived experience (Stone 1991, p. 295).
While there are aspects of this ambiguity present in the narrative of
Princesa, through the co-construction of the voice by not one but two
external contributors that have not lived the subjective experience of her
embodied difference, there are other elements that counter the sort of
‘flattening’ raised above. The most important of these is the adaptation
of Princesa’s own expression to form a sort of hybrid language: Jannelli
speaks of the three coining a ‘nuova lingua’ [new language] composed of
both oral and written memories and, ‘che risultò dalla chimica delle nos-
tre lingue materne. Il portoghese, l’italiano e il sardo.’ [that grew from
the fusion of our mother tongues, Portuguese, Italian and Sardinian]
(Farías de Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 9). The confluence of these three
languages recalls Anzaldúa’s ‘linguistic mestisaje’11 and restitutes an
11 See Anzaldúa (1987, p. 58). This expression of a linguistic hybridity is a common fea-
ture of trans-national and trans-gender narratives, for example in works by Christiana de

Caldas Brito (where the mixture of Portuguese and Italian is termed ‘portuliano’), and
Brigid Brophy’s (1969) novel, In Transit. ‘Ce qui m’étonnait c’était qu’it was my French
that disintegrated first’ (Brophy 2002, p. 11).
100 E. BOND
accent to the narrative. As Wood says, the writing succeeds in retaining a

Brazilian linguistic flavour, expressiveness and symbolism that is capable
of giving voice to Princesa’s fluid, hybrid identity (Wood 2006, p. 161).
3.5 Blackass Fairytales:

A Drift Toward Cyborg Conclusions
In the analysis of both Vergine giurata and Princesa we have been able to
witness the importance of narrative for trans- agency and authorship, a
theme which continues on from the previous chapter as well. As Prosser
says, these are narratives which allow for the body to be ‘read’ in the way
desired by the subject, and this, therefore, allows the stories that they
weave to function as a sort of ‘second skin’ (Prosser 1998, p. 101). By
tracing a personal trajectory and making connections between life events,
the subject gains coherence and intelligibility, and their ability to mark,
shape and negotiate gender is doubly translated onto the written page.
In this way, the trans- autobiography ‘melds together a body narrative
in pieces’ (Prosser 1998, p. 121). The trans- body itself is aligned with
textual practice or conceived of as a script (see Blackwood and Wieringa
1999, p. 18), or as a genre in itself: ‘a set of embodied texts whose
potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra
of desire has yet to be explored’ (Stone 1991, p. 296).
The idea of a bodily identity that has the desire and ability to morph
through a series of both cultural as well as physical inscriptions,12 leads
us to align the (textual) construction of the trans- body as a form of
somatechnical ‘brisure’: ‘a breaking and a joining at the same time, in
the same place: difference and sameness in an apparently impossible sim-
ultaneity’ (Young 1995, p. 26). Any uneasiness with the trans-formation
of the body in narratives of gender morphology may be related to the
difficulty in accepting that gender itself must then be ‘a multidimensional
category of personhood’ that fluctuates ‘between outer and inner dimen-
sions of male and female forms—a third process rather than a third cat-
egory’ (Roscoe, cit. Zabus 2013, p. 260, emphasis added). Yet it also
draws trans- embodiment into critical dialogues around the posthuman
12 ‘A story which culture tells itself, the transsexual body is a tactile politics of reproduc-
tion constituted through textual violence. The clinic is a technology of inscription’ (Stone
1991, p. 294).
and the cyborg. As Halberstam and Livingston argue: ‘Posthuman bod-

ies are not slaves to master discourses but emerge at nodes where bod-
ies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of bodies intersect to foreclose
any easy distinction between actor and stage, between sender/receiver,
channel, code, message, context’ (Halberstam and Livingston 1995, p.
2). And, similarly, cyborg subjects have been posited as ‘coded texts’ and
‘floating signifiers’ that are capable of actively rewriting the texts of their
bodies and society in turn (Haraway 1991, pp. 152, 153, 177).
This alignment is significant because it suggests that the cyborg, post-
human, trans-, and other diverse embodiments grouped together under
the umbrella of hybridity afford new possibilities not just for conceiving
of human identity, but also suggest new ways of creating a text. This is
true not just for the narrative processes of reconfiguration and cultural
translation Dones enacts in Vergine giurata, but especially for the multi-
lingual, multi-authored text of Princesa. Sabelli speaks of a:
lungo lavoro non solo di trascrizione-traduzione ma di vero e proprio

montaggio e assemblaggio con altre fonti, altri racconti e immaginazioni:
dunque non la testimonianza di un’esperienza “autentica”, ma il tentativo
di rappresentare nella scrittura il “cortocircuito” tra i differenti percorsi dei
co-autori. (Sabelli 2013, p. 204)
[long process not only of transcription-translation but also of a real assem-
bling and editing of various sources, other tales and fantasies, so that the
result is not the witnessing of an “authentic” experience, but an attempt
to represent in writing the “short circuit” between the different threads of
the co-authors.]
Both Princesa and Vergine giurata have been further transposed into film
format—aside from various documentaries, Brazilian director Henrique
Goldman made a feature film of the same name (Princesa) in 2001, and
Laura Bispuri’s film version of Dones’ novel came out to great critical
acclaim in 2015. Another embodiment of Princesa’s story can be found
in Fabrizio De André’s eponymous song on Anime salve (1996),13 a
further trans-formation on a textual itinerary that has recently inspired
something even more innovative. The various textual sources, transfor-
mations and embodiments of the story have been meticulously collated
13 On the multiple adaptations of Princesa’s narrative, see Shvanyukova (2012).

102 E. BOND
by Ugo Fracassa and Anna Proto Pisani and animated in cyber form by
Nino Calabrò and Emiliano Bonafede to constitute the Princesa20 pro-
ject.14 The product of the merging of new media and digital technolo-
gies, this is a ‘sito che fa dialogare varie forme di scrittura’ [site that puts
various written forms into dialogue] (Scego 2015b), and can be viewed
as a form of ‘cyborg’ literature in itself, since the cyborg can represent a
postmodern collective, as well as an imaginative resource capable of map-
ping our social and bodily reality (Haraway 1991, p. 50).
Digital textual projects such as Princesa20 are able to group together
a multiplicity of voices and narratives around one form of embodiment,
and echo the sort of ‘body drift’ that Arthur Kroker identifies as all-per-
vasive in today’s culture and society, in that it affects all performances
and experiences of our corporeal identity.
Body drift refers to the fact that we no longer inhabit a body in any
meaningful sense of the term but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies
– imaginary, sexualized, disciplined, gendered, laboring, technologically
augmented bodies. Moreover, the codes governing behavior across this
multiplicity of bodies have no real stability but are themselves in drift –
random, fluctuating, changing. There are no longer fixed, unchallenged
codes governing sexuality, gender, class or power but only an evolving field
of contestation among different interpretations and practices of different
bodily codes. (Kroker 2012, p. 2)
Textual manifestations of body drift can be sought in the kind of etched

surfaces which constitute the search for a language that can voice a
rejoicing in ‘illegitimate fusions’ and subversive couplings (Haraway
1991, p. 176). In this spirit, in conclusion, I would like to draw in pro-
ductive comparisons with two other trans-embodied texts which explore
questions of fluidity and hybridity between race and gender, Diriye
Osman’s Fairytales for Lost Children (2013) and Igoni Barrett’s Blackass
(2015).
Osman’s debut collection of short stories explores issues of sexual
identity and gender roles in the Somali diaspora. One of the stories,
entitled ‘The Other (Wo)man’ sees the Somali-born Londoner protag-
onist experimenting with the gender presentation of his body following
14 This innovative platform was constructed to mark the twentieth anniversary of the ini-
tial publication of the narrative. See http://www.princesa20.it/progetto20/. Accessed 5

March 2018.
an unwelcome reversal of sexual roles in his own relationship. ‘There

seemed to be no boundaries between his male and female sides and this
frightened him. Where to go next? How to embrace such complexity?’
(Osman 2013, p. 151). He decides not only to cross-dress, transform-
ing from Yassin to Yasmeen, but specifically to cross-dress as a Muslim
girl. His adoption of the hijab is paradoxically born of a desire to fit into
a cultural mould and yet simultaneously to break it, retaining this nor-
mative marker of identity, but using it for his own subversive ends. This
hunger to experiment with his gender and sexual identity is born of a
sense of rootlessness, yet the cross-dressing solution is seen as a libera-
tion, and as a bricolage process: something that is frightening in both its
intensity and limitless scope, and yet that originates in subjective agency,
leading the protagonist towards a more profound self-awakening and a
wider, more open perspective.
This subversion of cultural expectations and codes through playing
with sex and gender roles is something that Osman has spoken of in cap-
tivating terms in a recent article he wrote for VICE magazine. Discussing
his decision to wear an elaborate Elizabethan style woman’s gown for
frontcover photo of Fairytales, he questions why the robe makes him
feel at once ‘sensual and beautiful, powerful and virile’ (Osman 2015).
When being laced into the corset, he thinks ‘how strange it was that I,
an African man living in the 21st century, would willingly strap myself
into the kind of constricting garments that European women had fought
so hard to resist 100 years ago’ (Osman 2015). He concludes that a
sense of ‘effemiphobia’ that discounts female identity as weak is com-
mon to both gay culture and Somali clan codes, yet also that his own
active assumption of a specifically bonded female identity allows him to
celebrate it as a source of strength precisely because it confounds such
gender and race roles and constructs. This is an additive process that
recalls dynamics of creolization and transculturation, which in turn allow
for continuous change and the ongoing addition of new elements to
identity.
Barrett’s novel Blackass plays with and aligns such reversals of gender
and racial presentations in an even more extreme way. Borrowing from
the opening trope of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, it tells the story of Furo,
a native of Lagos who wakes one morning to discover he has become
white, all except for his backside which remains resolutely Black. Unable
to confront his family about his trans-formation, Furo sets out to relearn
and renegotiate his city and his life, as well as his own preconceptions
104 E. BOND
about race and representation. He is initially surprised by the unpleasant

scrutiny that he comes under:
Lone white face in a sea of black, Furo learned fast. To walk with his
shoulders up and his steps steady. To keep his gaze lowered and his face
blank. To ignore the fixed stares, the pointed whispers, the blatant curi-
osity. And he learnt how it felt to be seen as a freak: exposed to wonder,
invisible to comprehension. (Barrett 2015, p. 11)
His own corporeality plots against him, marking him as other, and fur-
thermore as suddenly ill-adapted to the harsh environmental conditions
of his native city.
Everything conspired to make him stand out. This whiteness that sepa-
rated him from everyone he knew. His nose smarting from the sun. his
hands covered with reddened spots, as if mosquito bites were something
serious. People pointing at him, staring all the time, shouting “oyibo” at
every corner. (Barrett 2015, p. 53)
Furo’s transformation becomes even more relevant to the present discus-

sion when it intersects with a parallel transition in the second thread of
the story, this time not from Black to white, but from male to female.
Narrated by a character named Igoni (like the author), this part of the
text voices the same issues around visibility, recognition and mis- or pre-
conceptions that are faced and negotiated in the public spaces of the city:
here, specifically around unwanted and uninvited external attention:
Like those before me who had transitioned into otherness, I was find-
ing out that appearances would always be a point of conflict. Male or
female, black or white, the eye of the beholder and the fashion sense of
the beholden, all of these feed into our desire to classify by sight. (Barrett
2015, p. 166)
The narrator concludes that: ‘No human being has ever directly seen their
own face […] we only see ourselves through external sources, whether as
images in mirrors, pixels on the screen, or words on the page, words of love
from a mother, words of hate from an ex-lover’ (Barrett 2015). This surely
recalls Princesa’s construction of her own identity through the gaze and
the desire of others, as well as Hana’s ability to shift and subvert gender
roles through adapting to malleable cultural codes and constructs. Igoni
states: ‘Long before Furo’s story became my own, I was already trying
to say what I see now, that we are all constructed narratives’ (Barrett
2015, p. 83). Being able to see through the lens of the other, or even
to become ‘other’, allows both categories of the trans-gender and the
trans-national to work towards a muddling and a contradiction of pre-
determined categories of visibility and erasure, of presence and absence,
in relation to operations of social power (Stryker 2006, p. 15). What
becomes essential here within the wider context of migration studies is
that it is precisely the mobility assumed in the process of transition which
functions as ‘that which moves us on’ (Prosser 1998, p. 3). The human
body as a potential site for multiple constructions, deconstructions
and reconstructions allows us to use such trans- narratives to approach
the notion of the ‘cyborg’ afresh and to wonder, with Haraway, what
would happen if the world itself was translated ‘into a problem of coding’
(Haraway 1991, p. 164).
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CHAPTER 4
Trans-national Mothering:
Corporeal Trans-plantations of Care
4.1 Introduction
Not all migration-related news to hit the press in recent years has
discussed human mobility within the context of geopolitical situations
of conflict and despair. One widely reported piece of scientific research
instead claimed to be able to confirm that during pregnancy, foetal cells
would ‘migrate’ to the mother’s body in ways not previously recognized.
In fact, during this particular migration, the transfer was often permanent:
the mother’s brain and other parts of her body (breast, heart and thyroid
tissue, for example) was literally hosting ‘foreign’ DNA, sometimes up
until the time of her death—even if the foetus was of a different gender,
and even if she did not carry the pregnancy to full term. Such instances
of what is known as ‘microchimerism’ can have both positive and nega-
tive effects on the host body, in some cases offering increased protection
against diseases such as cancer, but in others exacerbating vulnerability to
the very same pathologies. The cells can also work towards repairing dam-
aged tissue, for example after a caesarian operation, or can have no effect
whatsoever, simply lying dormant for years. This example of intrapersonal
migration does not simply function as an easy metaphor or analogy for the
wider questions tackled in this volume. Rather, as Amy Broddy, the prin-
cipal researcher on the project suggests, it raises powerful questions about
innate human tolerance of the foreign and around the ethics and meaning
of trans-plantation (see Broddy et al. 2015; Zimmer 2015). But for the

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_4
112 E. BOND
purposes of the present discussion, this discovery also serves to illuminate

some of the anxieties that are common to representations of maternity
and the maternal body in trans-national narratives: the sense of women
having a somehow ‘flexible’ subjectivity, of embodying an inherent divis-
ibility or split during pregnancy, and of possessing leaky or breached
personal borders, which might all potentially lead to the maternal body
provoking feelings of abjection and disgust. It suggests why trans-national
narratives use metaphors of the maternal so often in order to explore
wider societal preoccupations with ideas of fluidity, pollution, and seepage,
and raises challenging questions around the subjective nature of space and
temporality in transit.
This chapter on trans-national mothering will be divided into three
sections: the first linking experiences of maternity with issues around the
negotiation of generational passage; the second looking at representations
of ‘interrupted’ maternity, especially in the cases of terminations of preg-
nancy; and the third focusing on representations of what I term ‘alterna-
tive’ or substitutive mothering, such as that performed by care workers,
and other ‘different’ forms of trans-national mother-work.1 This is not to
suggest that the experience of maternity or the subject’s relation with the
maternal body (be that her own or her mother’s in turn) does not feature
as a metaphorical sign of significantly positive value in a great number of
trans-national narratives. Works like Cristina Ali Farah’s Madre piccola
(2007), Igiaba Scego’s short story ‘Dismatria’ (2012), Anilda Ibrahimi’s
Rosso come una sposa (2008), and Gabriella Kuruvilla’s ‘Ruben’ (2012) all
place the matrix of maternity at the very centre of their narrative action and
meaning. Often, for example in Rosso come una sposa [Red Like a Bride] or
‘Dismatria’ (‘Exmatriates’), the embodied mother figure or the subjective
experience of maternity functions to represent the potential for a connec-
tion, or a reconnection with the past, and with personal and family origins
often rooted elsewhere. ‘Dismatria’ is narrated by a second generation
Italian Somali woman, whose mother functions as an umbilical cord linking
the family to their memories of a Somalia that has been destroyed by civil
war. The tale abounds with the vocabulary of female fertility: the country of
1 This recalls the emphasis that Adrienne Rich places on the notion of care rather than
reproductive gestation in order to draw a wider definition of ‘mothering’. See Rich (1996).
‘For maternity is no longer seen as a fixed, static state; rather, it is viewed as a set of ideas
and behaviours that are mutable, contextual. To talk of “mothering” is to highlight the
active nature of maternity’ (cit. in Jeremiah 2006, p. 21).
4 TRANS-NATIONAL MOTHERING: CORPOREAL … 113
Somalia itself is described as a capricious, tormenting woman2 and the

mother figure referred to consistently as a ‘genitrice’ (‘materfamilias’), a
term which emphasizes the physical, generative function of the maternal
parent. The family live in Rome, ‘in attesa di un ritorno alla madrepatria’,
‘in a perpetual wait for a return to the mother country’, and their worst
nightmare is the ‘dismatria’ of the story’s title: ‘tagliare il cordone ombe-
licale che ci legava alla nostra matria, alla Somalia’ ‘severing the umbilical
cord attaching us to our matria, our mother country of Somalia’, even if
this Somalia now exists only in their own memorial constructions and
retention of personal objects (Scego 2012, p. 11, emphasis added; 2011,
p. 231, emphasis added). Yet through the communication made possible
between mother and daughter at the end, a new ‘matria’ is finally located
in the city of Rome (and in new channels of affective belonging forged by
the family within it) and the story concludes with the figure of the mother
being represented as a container of both past and present identity prac-
tices.3 This discourse, which explicitly links the maternal figure to a lost
sense of national belonging or origins, is evocative of multiple metaphori-
cal manifestations of the mother within such narratives: as a source of roots
(the ‘matria’) and of language (in the ‘madrelingua’). In these texts, then,
the maternal figure is configured as a physical and metaphorical repository
of identity, and embodies the crucial ability to re-evoke the past for a suc-
cessful negotiation of the present.
In a related, and markedly similar sense, narratives by other second
generation or dual heritage writers such as Ali Farah and Kuruvilla also
sometimes offer a quasi-redemptive idea of their own maternity expe-
rience as a physical state that offers the opportunity of fusing or resolv-
ing a hitherto negatively conceived or conflicted mixed identity. The
very embodiment of their personal identity conflict within a mem-
ber of a new generation that they themselves have generated serves
somehow to resolve that crisis, perhaps due precisely to its potential
externalization in another form. Kuruvilla’s short story, ‘Ruben’, is nar-
rated by a mixed race Italian Indian female protagonist, who embarks
2 ‘La nostra Somalia […] quella donna capricciosa che ci tormentava’, Scego (2012,
p. 12; 2011, p. 232).

3 In fact, Babic Williams points out that the prefix ‘dis’ in ‘dismatria’ is ‘used sometimes
to reinforce the meaning of the word to which it is prefixed’, so ‘‘dis’ can assume the mean-
ing of ‘double’. Dismatria thus redefined can indicate the state of being doubly mothered.’
Babic Williams (2013, p. 110).
114 E. BOND
on a pregnancy she would rather avoid, and yet through the course of
it manages to confront her own fears about her fragmented identity, and
resolves them—at least in part—through the birth of her son and, signif-
icantly, in the positive representation of his relationship with his Indian
grandfather. Since the blood relationship between these two is not visibly
obvious (the grandfather is described as ‘black’ and the grandson ‘white’),
Kuruvilla suggests that their bond goes beyond a chromatic resemblance,
and that as a result, perhaps the young child will succeed in negotiating
the Indian part of his identity more successfully than she did. ‘Forse tu,
generazione seguente, saprai avvicinarti con più spontaneità e naturalezza
al tuo quarto indiano’ [Perhaps you, the next generation, will be able to
approach your Indian quarter in a more natural and spontaneous way]
(Kuruvilla 2012, pp. 93–94). In this way, the mother achieves a recupera-
tion and increased sense of harmony herself, by way of proxy. This process
is very much in line with Julia Kristeva’s view of motherhood, which sug-
gests that it represents ‘the fantasy […] of a lost territory’ (Kristeva 1986,
p. 161), a psychological territory of plenitude and absolute fullness, where
the daughter seeks out her own self in motherhood, giving birth—as it
were—to her own adult self (see Wilt 1990, p. 1). This temporal collapse
often becomes specifically aligned in trans-national narratives with the
recuperation of a lost physical location, metaphorized in the mother fig-
ure, and in which the birth process itself reconnects mother and daughter
through the arrival of the newborn child. The child here (of either gen-
der) figures as the completion of a ‘valid’ female identity, since the daugh-
ter is able to (re-)locate herself within the maternal process and thereby
reconnect and communicate with past generations of mothers in a sort of
successful female bildung.4
But whilst acknowledging the presence of these two important strands
of maternal or mother figure representations in trans-national story-
telling, the line of argument in this chapter will take us in a somewhat
different direction. I believe that the analogies they present are fairly
straightforward, and that as such they do not need any more analysis
than that already outlined above. In a sense, they work towards a con-
ventional view of motherhood that ties in with cultural expectations
of an idealized maternal figure, thus pointing to possible pathways of
4 This dynamic can be seen especially clearly in Ali Farah (2007) and Ibrahimi (2008),
and is echoed in Rozsika Parker’s statement that ‘mothering is a multi-generational pro-

cess’ (Parker 1995, p. 73).
assimilation through integration and towards reducing difference. I

would argue that this view simply does not take into account the com-
plex trans-national care ways often associated with modern day mother-
hood. Instead, here I look to interrogate diverse and potentially more
revealing, oppositional perspectives towards maternity and care giv-
ing which challenge the unproblematized alignment of the experience
of motherhood with analogous narratives of resolution or redemption
as described above. Such blind ‘attentiveness to the positive aspects of
pregnancy’ and motherhood, as Lundquist has also argued, ‘continues to
silence women who cannot describe their experience in unambiguously
positive terms’ (Lundquist 2008, p. 152). In this vein, I will analyse
texts that challenge or expose cultural assumptions relating to the mater-
nal body, in which female corporeality struggles to exceed its function
as foetal container, where pregnancy might be seen only in clinical or
pathological terms, and the mother figure is subject to external processes
of objectification. While broadly allowing a certain level of subjective
agency for the maternal subject through channels of narrative expression,
these new portrayals of mothering might therefore not always lead to tra-
ditionally expected outcomes or positive experiences.
Indeed, recent related criticism has also paid more sustained attention to
the presence of rebellious, subversive, or ambivalent mother figures in con-
temporary narratives, most extensively in works by Barbara Almond, Rachel
Cusk, and Rozsika Parker, among others.5 In the field of trans-national
literature, Ornela Vorpsi’s most recent book Viaggio intorno alla madre
(2015) [Journey Around the Mother] is especially interesting in regard to
maternal ambivalence; it is also Vorpsi’s first work to be written directly in
French, rather than in Italian. The protagonist, Katarina, is torn between
looking after her ill, feverish son and meeting her lover, and decides in
favour of the lover. Here, in opposition to the narrative dynamic men-
tioned above, the baby is addressed as an object, a sort of newly-arrived
interloper, and—significantly—less familiar to the narrator than her own
mother. This strongly recalls Parker’s recount of the nineteenth century tra-
dition of presenting a new mother with a pincushion bearing pins arranged
to spell out the words ‘Welcome Little Stranger’ (Parker 1995, p. 36).
5 See, for example, Parker (1995), Cusk (2008), and Almond (2010). Within the more
defined context of Italian literary criticism, critics such as Katrin Wehling-Giorgi have
worked to relocate and re-evaluate pathological, voiceless or hyper-sexualised representa-
tions of subversive mother figures in narratives by authors such as Elsa Morante, Goliarda
Sapienza and Elena Ferrante. See, in particular: Wehling-Giorgi (2015, 2017).
116 E. BOND
Katarina ha deciso: andrà al nido. Ma l’espressione che le traversa la

mente è, piú precisamente, lo parcheggio al nido, lo deposito al nido.
Depositarlo, depositarlo, depositarlo, parcheggiarlo. Parcheggiarlo, come
una macchina […] Nemmeno io ti conosco, anche tu sei uno straniero. Lo
sai? Non sei qui da sempre, come mia madre. (Vorpsi 2015, p. 25)
[Katarina has decided: he’ll go to nursery. But the expression that comes
to her mind is, more precisely, I’ll park him at nursery, I’ll deposit him
at nursery. Deposit, deposit, deposit, park. Park, like a car. […] Not even
I know you, you too are a stranger. You know? It’s not as if you’ve been
here forever, like my mother has.]
The kind of maternal diffidence or ambivalence towards the child that

Vorpsi represents above has been described as ‘socially and culturally
produced, and shaped by the circumstances that define women’s lives’
(Brown 2010, p. 123). But what is perhaps even more interesting, given
Vorpsi’s background of multiple linguistic and geographical mobilities, is
the insertion of the connective conjunctions ‘nemmeno’ [not even] and
‘anche’ [too], which privilege the always-already element of the foreign
or strange that the trans-national subject might employ in self-identifica-
tory processes and their alignment with the split feelings of ambivalence
that mothering may also come to trigger.
Looking specifically at this nexus, the current chapter will seek to assess
which social and cultural circumstances specifically related to migration or
diasporic family histories might impact upon typologies of representation
and the diverse metaphorical values assumed by the mothering experi-
ence in trans-national narratives. I will argue that portrayals of ambivalent
or interrupted mothering in such texts take on additional layers of mean-
ing that are bound up with space (and visibility within spaces), time and
shifting subjectivities. Theorists and writers such as Rachel Cusk illus-
trate this imagining of a spatial dichotomy in motherhood that speaks to
the trans-national in its concern with borders and divisions in illuminating
ways: ‘I have split in two,’ Cusk says, referring to being both a mother and
being ‘herself’: ‘even in my best moments, I never feel myself to have pro-
gressed beyond this division. I merely learn to legislate for two states, and to
secure the border between them’ (Cusk 2008, p. 63, emphasis added). Cusk
expands further still on the geo-political nature of these spatial metaphors
when she describes pregnancy as a ‘dictatorship’, and her daughter’s body
as a ‘colony’ of her own (Cusk 2008, pp. 93, 101). The trope of maternal
ambivalence or the disruptive effects that mothering may have on identity
are both therefore bound up with ideas that resonate with migration
journeys and second generation identity trajectories, where the poten-
tial transformation of a woman’s subjectivity and life becomes a source
of anxiety—something that will be explored in both spatial and temporal
terms as this chapter unfolds. But beyond this analogy, I also want to draw
outward to think about how the ‘leaky’ subjectivity and breached bodily
boundaries suggested by processes of menstruation, gestation, birth and
breastfeeding play into the current eco-critical attention to ‘trans-corporeality’.
A term employed by Stacy Alaimo to indicate ‘the material interchanges
across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world’,6
‘trans-corporeality’ challenges the conception of the human subject as itself
solidly and securely bound, and aligns it with discourses around fluidity and
pollution that will be central to my argument. Cusk herself centres these
very concerns around the fluid transmission process of breastfeeding, ask-
ing ‘Is my milk polluted by its passage through my unclean self? Is it carry-
ing messages?’ (Cusk 2008, p. 111, emphasis added) Yet as Mary Douglas
has shown, fluids which breach bodily boundaries in this way can also easily
symbolize any borders (interpersonal, societal, national) which are threat-
ened or precarious (Douglas 2002, p. 142). It is therefore essential to reas-
sess representations of fluidity and flux in representations of trans-national
mothering within this wider metaphorical context of mobility.
My analysis will thus focus on the strikingly common instances in
trans-national narratives where motherhood is conceived of as prob-
lematic and problematized, and will proceed through the three dis-
tinct stages. The first section will explore texts in which the experience of
maternity acts to further disrupt an already fractured or challenged sense
of identity and reveal latent tensions and conflicts in identity. Here, I will
look at Ingy Mubiayi’s short story ‘Nascita’, in Amori bicolori, Anilda
Ibrahimi’s L’amore e gli stracci del tempo, and make reference to Scego’s
‘Dismatria’ (in Pecore nere). The second will highlight narratives in which
maternity is interrupted, usually by the decision to terminate a preg-
nancy, for example in Kuruvilla’s story ‘Aborto’, Amara Lakhous’ Scontro
di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio, Ornela Vorpsi’s Il paese dove
6 Alaimo (2012, p. 476). See also Alaimo (2010). Alaimo’s claim that a ‘transcorporeal,
oceanic ecocriticism’ that means we all ‘dwell within and as part of a dynamic, intra-active,
watery world’ does not directly reflect on, but must surely evoke, the important role of the
sea-crossing in contemporary visual imaginings of the migrant subject. Alaimo (2012, p. 490).
118 E. BOND
non si muore mai, and Scego’s Oltre Babilonia. And third, finally, I will
look at (sometimes consequent) textual instances of substitutive moth-
ering and care giving, which raise important questions about acceptable
maternal roles for migrant women in host societies. Here, I will analyse
Kuruvilla’s ‘Badante’, Christiana de Caldas Brito’s Qui e là and again
Lakhous’ Scontro di civiltà, as well as drawing on other representations
of the ‘badante’ [carer] figure in contemporary Italian society.
I want to argue that by broadening out the hitherto narrow analy-
ses of motherhood in trans-national narratives, and being more atten-
tive to the various nuances of its representation s in these texts, we can
start to see maternity experiences and representations of the maternal
body as evocative of fears related to unstable or uncertain autonomous
identities which can be linked back to wider discourses around mobil-
ity. Indeed, we can perhaps posit such instances as an interpretative lens
capable of highlighting the fact that multiple or ‘in motion’ identities
are not always a source of uncomplicated richness (in the privileged
mode of global ‘cosmopolitans’ or ‘nomads’, as theorized by Appiah
(2007), Beck (2006), Braidotti et al. (2013), Nussbaum (1994), and
others), but instead as something more likely to be adversely affected
by the uneven structures of globalization itself. As Youna Kim states,
‘cosmopolitan identity and cosmopolitan self-transformations cannot be
freely chosen and freely mixed […] it is a matter of uneven transna-
tional social conditions, global structures of differential power and hier-
archical relations’ (Kim 2011, p. 136), thereby also allowing a global
identity to potentially be experienced as unresolved, painful and con-
fusing. Engaging with critical work that emphasizes the notions of leak-
ing, seepage and fluidity (by theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Margrit
Shildrick, Iris Marion Young, and Robyn Longhurst), and purity and
pollution (by Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, primarily), will allow me
to shed light on the potentially enabling disruptions in bodily experi-
ences of menstruation, pregnancy and maternity as well as providing
the impetus for more broadly envisaging patterns of flow or fluidity
in social and cultural categorizations. I will conclude that expanding
existing readings of narrative representations of maternity experiences
in texts of mobility and migration in this way can allow them to func-
tion as a lens capable of providing insight into some of the contempo-
rary paradigms and problematics of embodied trans-national identities
themselves.
*
In theoretical terms, pregnancy and the wider experience of mother-

hood can pose something of a challenge to accepted views of embod-
ied subjectivity, and new critical works in the field have responded to
advance phenomenological understandings in this regard. Iris Marion
Young argues that this is because pregnancy calls the very unity of
the subject into question, something highlighted by the frequent
use of ‘tearing’ as a trope to describe the motherhood experience (as
seen also in the title of Roszika Parker’s Torn in Two). In ‘Pregnant
Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation’, Young speaks of a mater-
nal ‘body subjectivity that is decentered, myself in the mode of not
being myself ’ (Young 2005, p. 49). This occurs in a twofold manner:
the foetus, as part of and yet other to the mother’s body, allows for a
sense of splitting, and the physical changes that occur in the p regnant
subject shift the borders of the body and their relation to the external
world. This dichotomy is crucial: in sociological terms Arthur W. Frank
speaks of the body as both ‘a reference point in a world of flux, and
the epitome of that flux’ (Frank 1991, p. 40). This is no truer than
in processes of menstruation, gestation, birth and postpartum mother-
ing. For a start, the experience of motherhood symbolizes and embod-
ies a uniquely female corporeal reproductive capacity, and might thus
emphasize a cultural assumption that ‘women are somehow more
biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men’ (Grosz 1994,
p. 14). Pregnancy and motherhood, with their corporeal experiences
of fluidity, leakiness and seepage, bring new awareness of the processes
of the body: its capacity for changes and transformations; its strengths
as well as its weaknesses. Indeed, precisely because the maternal body,
in its fluidity, collapses the boundaries between self and other, Margrit
Shildrick thus forcefully argues that it ‘demands specific epistemologi-
cal and ontological reflection’ (Shildrick 2002, p. 56). In the present
case, such reflection is fundamental because the maternal body holds
significant metaphorical and symbolic value that can also align it with
notions of trans-nationality and human mobility. The body that proves
itself capable of splitting and leaking is on the one hand productively
flexible in the face of physical change, but can consequently also
become symbolic of the threat to boundaries symbolized by liminality.
The work of anthropologist Mary Douglas on pollution has demon-
strated how danger lies in these kinds of marginal states, suggesting
that transitions defy definitions and open up an interpretative chasm
that provokes fear.
120 E. BOND
All margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of
fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at
its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its spe-
cially vulnerable points. (Douglas 2002, p. 150)
The potential instability and uncertainty of subjective personhood that

the mothering experience entails is thus evocative of processes of shift-
ing, changing, and becoming that might also characterize the trans-
national or mobile experience. As such, it can productively represent
worries about violations of national confines and identity conventions, as
well as the fear of (both cultural and physical) pollution.7
This chapter, therefore, explores this particular nexus between moth-
erhood and trans-national identity but also works towards reassessing less
conventional representations of the maternal experience as being capable
of holding differently positive value. Conceiving of the body as a poten-
tially subversive agent for change will again be fundamental, given its
specific function here as a sensitive, regenerative barometer. To borrow
Foucault’s thought and apply it to the context of mothering: ‘the body
is no longer the marker of a single person but instead represents at once
the breakdown of identity and the coming together of composite iden-
tities’ (Kaufman 1999, p. 142). I will, therefore, conclude my analysis
by aligning such narratives under the theoretical umbrella of what has
been called ‘postmodern’ motherhood (‘where selfhood is constructed,
or reconstructed, in more complex patterns,’ Daly and Reddy 1991,
p. 12), and where the emphasis on (self-)awareness, performativity and
active curatorial practices restore agency back to the maternal subject
in motion. The performative aspect is key here as it allows us to draw
trans-national care giving and substitutive care networks into our discus-
sion. This, in turn, allows mothering itself to become an active and rela-
tional practice in diverse and innovative ways. As Mielle Chandler says:
It is my position that ‘mother’ is best understood as a verb, as something

one does, a practice which creates one’s identity as intertwined, intercon-
nected and in-relation. Mothering is not a singular practice, and mother is
not best understood as a monolithic identity. (Chandler 1998, p. 273)
7 On this, see particularly Kristeva (1982). In referencing ‘belonging’, I am thinking of
Braidotti’s elaboration of the Deleuzian use of the concept as ‘the affirmation of the posi-
tivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation. Both teleo-
logical order and fixed identities are relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple belonging’
(Braidotti 1994, p. 111).
Building on Butler’s work on gender as performance, Chandler argues

that it is by varying the repeated practices that make up a normative
category that the subject can achieve agency. This agency can be seen
in Sara Ruddick’s emphasis on ‘attentive’ love in mothering prac-
tices, as a responsive, change-oriented narrative (Ruddick 1989), and
Jessica Benjamin’s work on intersubjectivity as a developmental pro-
gression through childhood, where a resistance to the tendency to
collapse other subjects into objects, and a respect for the other’s inde-
pendent consciousness, might be learned and reproduced in adulthood
(Benjamin 1990). Performative mothering, as a set of practices that
may challenge and divert from conventional narratives, thus might also
hold the capacity to disrupt and enact change within cultural assump-
tions around related issues (such as the recognition of the other and the
potential for mutuality) as well. Here again, it will be aesthetic, creative
representations that function as a ‘key site’ for the successful reconfigu-
ration of performative, active mothering practices within an empathetic,
trans-national lens of analysis. By exploring representations of disrup-
tive, interrupted and substitutive maternal experiences, this chapter aims
to position the splitting of subjectivity as a potentially positive opening
towards the other; both on an individual and a collective level. This will
point to the potential for a re-generative ethnography of solidarity (see
Butler 2011, p. 23), which I will expand upon in turn to shed light on
interconnected issues of migration and mobility.
4.2 Disruptive Pregnancy
Pregnancy perhaps marks the only moment in a person’s life when the
body is subject to such remarkable, yet significantly non-pathological
transformation. As Myra Leifer states: ‘a striking characteristic of preg-
nancy is that it is the only period in adult life in which major bodily
changes occur with startling rapidity and under normal circumstances’
(cit. Schueneman 2012, p. 167, emphasis added). Yet as Young
explains, this corporeal transformation experienced during pregnancy
runs counter to traditional phenomenological aspirations of inhabit-
ing the body as a ‘transparent medium’. Because alongside a recogni-
tion of these significant changes, the subject’s bodily self-location also
shifts in pregnancy to be experienced doubly between the head and the
trunk (Young 2005, p. 52). Both of these processes then bring about
a heightened awareness of the subject’s corporeal presence within the
environment, also because the growing body fast exceeds previously
122 E. BOND
drawn boundaries to occupy more space than before. This has impli-
cations for the subject’s self-perception, too, since it also allows for the
experience of a mutuality of touch. ‘In the ambiguity of bodily touch, I
feel myself being touched and touching simultaneously […] The belly
is other, since I did not expect it there, but since I feel the touch upon
me, it is me’ (Young 2005, p. 50). Here, the sensation of touch works
to confirm the identity of matter, as although the mutuality of touch
here is self-referential and therefore arguably partial, Weiss explains how
for Merleau-Ponty, the ‘fission (écart) between touching and touched,
seeing and being seen, actually produces (rather than undermines) a
strong sense of self’ (Weiss 1999, p. 57). The representations and impli-
cations of these experiences of instability or uncertainty around the
location and visibility of the pregnant body will be explored in the fol-
lowing section on the disruptive yet simultaneously productive implica-
tions of gestation and birth, both in terms of space and of time.
Evidently, pregnancy highlights the physical visibility of the expectant
mother through the growth of the foetus and resultant swelling of the
abdomen. This often affords the pregnant woman a specifically positive
visibility and sense of presence. ‘As soon as I was visibly pregnant I felt,
for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmos-
phere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers in the street,
it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me’ (Young 2005, p. 54).
This might be true particularly for the migrant or trans-national female
who has not yet experienced a full sense of belonging in the host society,
yet acquires an ‘aura’ of positive connotations through her own preg-
nant embodiment. For instance, Piering has written on the inclusive cul-
tural constructions communities build around the figure of the pregnant
woman, and for the purposes of an analysis into perceptions of migrant-
pregnant women, her idea that ‘on a good day, it might feel as though
one is creating a nation within one’s bodily boundaries’ is particularly
resonant (Piering 2012, p. 186). Akjuna, the protagonist of Anilda
Ibrahimi’s L’amore e gli stracci del tempo [Love and the Tatters of Time],
arrives in Switzerland as a pregnant refugee from war-torn Kosovo, and
once she has given birth to her daughter Sarah, she reflects back on the
‘vantaggi da non svalutare’ [not insignificant advantages] that she expe-
rienced during her pregnancy there, the smiles, the sense of ‘sicurezza’
[safety], which guaranteed her a physical place of acceptance in the host
society. After giving birth, on the other hand, ‘ora nessuno la guarda’
[now no one looks at her] (Ibrahimi 2009, p. 104).
Yet such visibility can also be experienced as a heightened vulnerabil-

ity for minority or ethnic pregnant women. In Kuruvilla’s ‘Ruben’, the
mixed-race narrator definitely feels herself to be more ‘visible’ and there-
fore also more scrutinized as a foreigner, especially when the summer sun
has tanned her pregnant body ‘nero pece’ [pitch black].
Mi sento osservata. Mi butto in acqua, per cancellarmi dagli sguardi degli

altri. […] La gente mi guarda, ci guarda. […] Che palle. Da sempre non
ho voluto essere vista come un corpo estraneo e diverso, non voglio che
capiti anche a te. E adesso ci sta succedendo. (Kuruvilla 2012, p. 87)
[I feel observed. I jump in the water, to erase myself from the gazes of the
others. People watch me, watch us. It’s awful. I have always wanted not
to be seen as a foreign, different body, and I don’t want that to happen to
you either. And now it’s happening to us both.]
Such an experience must situate her both within Judith Butler’s ‘racially
saturated field of visibility’ as well as recall Wallace’s ‘“picture-taking
racial gaze” that fixes and frames the Black subject within a “rigid and
limited grid of representational possibilities”’ (Browne 2015, p. 19). Yet
the extremely visible state of pregnancy can also presuppose elements of
in-visibility—for female subjectivity in general (if she is perceived as a
mere physical container, and thus not as important as the foetus itself),8
as well as in terms of her own sexuality. Furthermore, the invisibility of
the foetus to external eyes belies her own awareness of its physicality and
movements. ‘Only I have access to these movements from their origin,
as it were. For months only I can witness this life within me, and it is
only under my direction of where to put their hands that others can feel
these movements’ (Young 2005, p. 49). As seen in the subversive actions
of the protagonist in Kuruvilla’s text above, however, methods of what
Simone Browne has termed ‘sousveillance’ (‘tactics employed to ren-
der one’s self out of sight’) can yet allow subjects to escape an external
monitoring of their corporeality by actively seeking to remove themselves
from the other’s field of vision (Browne 2015, p. 21).
8 See Shildrick (1997, p. 25), and Bordo on the pregnant subject as a ‘fetal incubator’
and the fetus as ‘super-subject’ (Bordo 2003, p. 72). Imogen Taylor has also written inter-
estingly about the invisibility of the maternal skin triggered by new technologies of fetal
photography. See Taylor (2001, p. 79).
124 E. BOND
This sense of an embodied corporeal ambiguity which straddles poles

of hyper- and in-visibility, can also be linked with sensations of disem-
bodiment, since it represents a surrender of the notion of a composite,
defined self that is replaced only by fluidity, blurred boundaries, and
fragmentation. This means that pregnant embodiment is experienced as
decentred, and the subject as both self and not self, simultaneously:
Pregnancy challenges the integration of my body experience by rendering

fluid the boundary between what is within, myself, and what is outside,
separate. I experience my insides as the space of another, yet my own body.
(Young 2005, p. 49)
This is particularly significant when discussing the experience of migrant,

trans-national or dual heritage mothers, as:
Pregnant bodies have often been represented in the social world as sym-
bolic threats and as inhabiting an ‘in-between’ or ‘liminal’ social status as a
consequence of being bodies that defy the notion of a singular, ‘rational’
subject. They are represented as socially ‘dangerous’ because these bodies
are seen to breach cultural boundaries, literally and metaphorically. (Nash
2012, p. 29, emphasis added)
Crucially, there is a distinct parallel to be drawn here between the anxi-

eties around the fluid nature of maternal corporeality and wider notions
of breaching cultural boundaries, and the inherent threat of plurality that
links discourses around migration and mobility to that of gestational
embodiment. These parallels are particularly evident in the emphasis on
the strain placed on the normally existing dichotomy between inside and
outside represented by fixed or firm borders, whose integrity is under-
mined in both states. In pregnant embodiment, as well as trans-national
mobility, the idea of boundaries is placed in a state of flux, leading
towards a greater confluence of body and world, that may or may not be
comfortably experienced either by the subject or the others around her.
Pregnancy thus becomes aligned with and almost even a m etaphorical
incorporation of a feeling of ‘hyper-visibility’ that critics such as Jan Jindy
Pettman have seen as exemplifying the female migrant condition itself.9
9 ‘Migrant and minority women fight against routine invisibility, subsumed within the
community, and hypervisibility should their words or actions not accord with the symbolic
place accorded to them in the construction of the inner space of difference and of “tradi-
tion”’ (Pettman 1996, p. 72). These discourses have become particularly fraught within
And furthermore, perceptions of the pregnant body as occupying a ‘lim-

inal’ or ‘in-between’ status and therefore constituting a form of social
‘threat’ (as seen above) provide further resonant parallels with migrant
subjects being seen as ‘space invaders’, to borrow Nirmal Puwar’s famous
term.10
*
In spatial terms, we have seen how pregnant embodiment can incor-
porate notions of the liminal, in-between, and the threat of breaching
boundaries, as well as how it can lead to the subject’s own selfhood
being experienced as split, between the dual location of head and
body. In this sense, it recalls Kristeva’s insistence on the function of the
hyphen, or ‘virgule’, as allowing ‘two universes to brush lightly against
each other without necessarily being identified as such’ (Kristeva 1982,
p. 74). I want now to look more closely at how specific trans-national
narratives explore this sense of disembodied space when describing the
experiences of pregnancy and birth, focusing on how such representa-
tions highlight an increased awareness of fracture lines in individual
expressions of cultural identity, and which may also lead to a potential
breakdown of mixed-race relationships.
A lack of fixed or reliable spatial markers is employed specifically by
the narrator of Ingy Mubiayi’s short story ‘Nascita’ [Birth], as a way
of expressing a sense of her own disorientation after giving birth to her
mixed race daughter. As she leaves the hospital, phrases such as ‘passo
nella convulsione dei non-luoghi’ [I pass into the convulsion of non-
places] and ‘mi sento catapultata in un’altra dimensione’ [I feel cat-
apulted into another dimension], express a sense of non-belonging,
alienation and hallucination, a disconnection from reality which appears
to have been exacerbated by the birthing process (Mubiayi 2008, p. 69).
The mention of ‘non-places’ cannot help but recall Marc Augé’s work
on the transitory spaces of supermodernity, in which such spaces that
‘cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with iden-
tity’ coexist without connection, allowing the subject to simultaneously
the debate around the wearing of the veil, which critics such as Yegenoglu have explained
as being tied up with the viewer’s frustration with the veiled figure’s perceived refusal to be
looked at, constituting an obstacle to patterns of visual control. See Yegenoglu (1998).
10 ‘Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as
trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically,
historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being “out of place”’ (Puwar 2003, p. 8).
126 E. BOND
experience ‘a perpetual present and an encounter with the self’ (Augé

1995, pp. 77–78). An encounter which in ‘Nascita’ is troubling, follow-
ing as it does a bodily process in which the skin container has opened out
in a moment of ‘rupture or breakage, where the subject risks its interi-
ority, where it meets and leaks into the world at large’ (Ahmed 2000,
p. 45). Longhurst explores related anxieties around notions of the preg-
nant body as being ‘out of place’, thought to ‘threaten and disrupt’
(Longhurst 2001, p. 5). This is something which becomes even more
evident through birth, where the corporeal inside literally comes out.
The birthing process entails the most extreme suspension of the bodily dis-
tinction between inner and outer […] the integrity of my body is under-
mined […] I literally do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and
the world begins. (Young 2005, p. 50)
This sense of doubling and disorientation is aligned in ‘Nascita’ with

a spatial widening in the newborn child’s cultural identity and herit-
age that is not seen as an advantage, but rather as a potential and likely
disturbance.
(M)ia figlia avrà in sé non uno ma due continenti, non due ma tre civiltà
a cui far riferimento, con cui confrontarsi o scontrarsi. A meno che non
riesca a lasciarsi tutto alle spalle, o a essere effetivamente sintesi. Non posso
dire di non aver saputo che avrei reso difficile il suo percorso aumentan-
done gli ostacoli. (Mubiayi 2008, p. 78)
[My daughter will embody not one but two continents, will have not two
but three civilizations to refer to, to face, and to clash with. Unless she
manages to leave everything behind her, to become a true synthesis. I can’t
say I didn’t know that I was complicating her life by putting such obstacles
in her path.]
The vocabulary of battle [‘scontro’, ‘difficile’, ‘ostacoli’] is employed

to illustrate the hardships that the mother envisages for her daughter
because of her multiple spatial belongings and associations. Hardships
that will soon become more evident within her parents’ relationship as
well, since the birth of their daughter highlights previously latent or
invisible tensions between them, and provides a visible proof of their
diversity rather than a sense of harmonious fusion. ‘Da quella notte
qualcosa è cambiato nel nostro rapporto di coppia. È stato come se ci
fossimo accorti di essere una coppia mista […] Ci stavamo rendendo

conto delle differenze tra noi, in lei’ [Ever since that night, something
has changed in our relationship. It’s like we suddenly noticed we were
a mixed race couple. We were recognizing our own differences, in her]
(Mubiayi 2008, p. 86).
Similarly, in Ibrahimi’s L’amore e gli stracci del tempo, the child
born to Albanian-Kosovan Ajkuna after her gang-rape by Serbian mili-
tia but recognized by her Serbian boyfriend Zlatan as his own, embod-
ies intra-national tensions rather than their resolution. ‘Sarah è la nostra
guerra, senza vincitori né vinti’ [Sarah is our war, which has no winners
or losers] (Ibrahimi 2009, p. 272). This trope of the child embodying
the subjective relation to the nation is also common to an Albanian/
Kosovan-Albanian couple Ajkuna meets in Switzerland, who name their
child ‘Unione’ [Union], because he symbolizes ‘la loro Grande Albania,
tutto qui’ [their greater Albania, in a nutshell] (Ibrahimi 2009, p. 131).
And while Zlatan’s second child, Marko, born to an Italian woman he
meets after his experiences of war and displacement, will be a child ‘senza
guerre’ [free of war], Ajkuna is left with a physical, bodily reminder of
her trauma (Ibrahimi 2009, p. 277). Initially she does not want to hold
the baby and will not breastfeed it, speaking of it as a ‘nodo sporco di
sangue che (mi) ha appena lacerato il corpo’ [dirty knot of blood that
has just ripped (my) body apart], as the symbol of everything she wants
to forget and of the ‘lacerazione’ [laceration] of her own national ter-
ritory and geographical home by diverse warring factions (Ibrahimi
2009, p. 101). This recalls the portrayal of the protagonist in Slavenka
Drakulić’s (2001) S: A Novel about the Balkans, whose unwillingness to
accept her own pregnancy, also the result of multiple gang-rapes, results
in her feeling ‘torn in two, her own body the battlefield of herself and
her aggressors’: ‘This is war, inside her, in her own womb. And they are
winning’ (cit. in Lundquist 2008, p. 142). As Longquist notes, S’s body,
as Ajkuna’s, is weighted, objectified, like an inanimate object, still held in
a kind of captivity (Lundquist 2008, p. 142).
Aside from the spatial and geographic difficulties described above,
which become embodied through the birth process and imbue the child
itself with a metaphoric value, there are still further implications for the
parents’ relationship in ‘Nascita’. After the birth, the narrator feels scru-
tinized by her partner in a new and unsettling way: he no longer takes
off his glasses in moments of intimacy, but uses them as a perceived bar-
rier as well as a tool to increase his powers of objective observation of
128 E. BOND
his partner’s face, touching on the issues of (hyper-)visibility mentioned

earlier. Both the child, and the glasses, become a sort of ‘barriera’ [bar-
rier] that further alienates the narrator from her own body: ‘Le lenti dei
suoi occhiali sono diventate una barriera sottile e trasparente ma inval-
icabile come le porte di un caveau. Spesso immagino di uscire dal mio
corpo e di guardarci dall’esterno, con gli occhi di un passante’ [The
lenses of his glasses have become a thin, transparent barrier, yet one
which is as impassable as the doors of a vault. Often I imagine going
out of my own body and looking at us from the outside, with the eyes
of a passer-by] (Mubiayi 2008, p. 71). Here, the white, male perspective
may recall Haraway’s ‘conquering gaze from nowhere’, in its status as
‘unmarked’ and its claiming of the power to represent, police, and patrol
(see Browne 2015, p. 49). Yet this racializing surveillance of the out-of-
bounds Black body of the nursing mother is perhaps subverted by her
own out-of body imaginings, also allowing the idea of this psychological
non-place to function as a positive refuge.
The narrator goes on to describe the newborn child as a ‘terza
sponda’ [third shore], something that breaches their previously dichot-
omous relationship and suggesting something foreign and unreachable
(Mubiayi 2008, p. 78). This awareness of unresolved issues within her
own mixed race identity, heightened by the birth of her daughter and
her partner’s subsequent response, triggers the need for the protagonist
to seek out her own errant birth father abroad. But here this dynamic
functions differently to Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (Little Mother), where
the birth of Domenica Axad’s son enacts a healing process that allows
her to reforge a relationship with her mother, and Ibrahimi’s Rosso come
una sposa, where the birth of the narrator’s daughter in Rome is a means
of connecting with her family history and lineage. Instead, in ‘Nascita’,
the story ends with the protagonist returning from her meeting on the
next plane back to Italy, the ambiguity of the unravelled threads of her
mixed identity still left resolutely frayed.
**
This desire for a reconnection with the older generation through
the disruptive experience of pregnancy and birth (perhaps connected
to the spatial disconnections described above) leads us on to discuss the
notion of a temporal collapse in pregnant embodiment. The same dual-
ity that we saw described in terms of pregnant embodiment (self as self
and other simultaneously), is transferred in temporal terms to a tension
between past and future. This has also been discussed by Young in the
following terms: ‘Pregnant existence entails, finally, a unique temporal-
ity of process and growth in which the woman can experience herself as
split between past and future’ (Young 2005, p. 47). Young means that
the experience of pregnancy presupposes a sense of projection towards
the future, in terms of anticipation, fantasy, and imagination, yet at the
same time offers a chance to reflect on past embodiment and identity
through the physical and psychological changes in process. Furthermore,
these temporal shifts occur within paradigms of waiting and expectation
that commonly connote discourses around the pregnancy experience
(also in the sense that others are waiting while seemingly nothing is hap-
pening day to day, which is clearly not the experience of the expectant
mother). Pregnancy can thus be explored as a sort of paradigm shift or a
transitional crisis. When the moment of birth arrives, this temporal shift
extends, so that the maternal subject may well see herself as split between
pre- and post- birth selves. At the same time, birth is inevitably seen as
a new beginning (for others around her) but is both beginning and end
(of the pregnancy stage) for the mother. This temporal split extends
beyond pregnancy too, and applies equally to motherhood itself: as Cusk
explains, in regard to watching her daughter grow up, ‘I have watched
the present become the past’ and sees her child ‘hurtling towards her
future’: ‘I recognize my ending, my frontier, the boundary of my life’
(Cusk 2008, p. 212).
These complex experiences of and shifts in temporality that occur in
pregnancy, birth and mothering are recorded in the title of Ibrahimi’s
L’amore e gli stracci del tempo, with its reference to the shredding
(or unravelling) of time. The title itself thus recalls the sensation of splitting
time during maternity, which fragments the self into multiple remnants at
the same time as highlighting the finite temporality of the subject’s own
life. This dual shift is explained thus through the optics of Ajkuna:
D’un tratto ti senti vecchia dentro, hai fatto quello che la natura si aspet-
tava da te […] Il tuo viaggio finisce qui: camminerai accanto a tuo figlio,
farai tante cose, nulla però sarà piú tutto tuo, nemmeno il silenzio.
(Ibrahimi 2009, p. 101)
[All of a sudden you feel old inside, you’ve done what Nature expected of
you. Your journey finishes here: you will walk alongside your son, you will
do many things, but nothing will be yours anymore, not even silence.]
130 E. BOND
Where the experience of a birth can sometimes suture this collapse from
a narrative perspective of maternity, the relationship with the mother
itself can embody generational tensions which split narrating daughters
between the same two temporal poles described above. In Igiaba Scego’s
short story ‘Dismatria’, for example, this is expressed in uncomfortable
generational terms, where the relationship with the mother is emblematic
of revealed tensions within the subject’s own sense of identity as fraught,
mixed between two cultures and timespans. And as described above,
the title of the short story makes this link between mother and matria
explicit, where the ‘materfamilias’ of the narrator represents a Somalia
lost in both time and space. Yet the conclusion to the story witnesses the
addition of a new matria, Rome, to the family trajectory, thus combining
a ‘here’ with an ‘elsewhere’, which means that people ‘in transit through
non-places can take root in the—still diverse—places where (they) still try
to construct part of their daily life’ (Augé 1995, p. 109).
Because as Judith Butler has shown, the re-generative aspect of the
disruptive elements of the mothering process cannot be underestimated.
As she states, pregnancy can both be viewed and experienced as an ‘ena-
bling disruption, the occasion for a radical rearticulation of the symbolic
horizon in which bodies come to matter’ (Butler 2011, p. 23, emphasis
added). This rearticulation in the becoming of pregnancy and birth allows
for an awareness of the tangibility of time, something perceptible ‘in the
passing or transformation of objects and events’, in which time ‘eras(es)
itself as such while it opens itself to movement and change’ (Grosz 1999,
p. 1). As we read in Ali Farah’s Madre piccola:
Nel dare alla luce, quello che percepisci è lacerazione che squarcia la terra,
è separazione che risucchia all’indietro, fino a quel culmine, come se la
nostra anima avesse per un istante quel privilegio di infinito, folgorazi-
one che acceca. Come se lo spazio e il tempo si divarcassero appena, solo
un attimo, pulviscolo di eterno. Quello che voglio dire è che imparare ad
accettare il dolore può essere molto piacevole. (Ali Farah 2007, p. 240)
‘In giving birth, what you feel is the laceration that splits the earth, it is
separation that sucks you back, up to that highest point, as if your soul
experienced, for an instant, the privileged sensation of infinity, a blinding
insight. As if space and time diverged very slightly, only for an instant, a
glimpse of eternity. What I mean to say is that learning to accept pain can
be very pleasurable.’ (Ali Farah 2011, p. 207)
The passage of time is thus marked by the laceration of self, but sutured
back together through an attention to caring for the self (much as in
the dynamics of self-harming and skin tattoos analysed in Chapter 2), in
the knowledge that ‘the unity of the self is itself a project’; what Young
describes as a dialectic, creative process (Young 2005, p. 48, empha-
sis added; p. 54). Thus embodying the dual valence of Derrida’s use of
‘brisure’ as both ‘break’ and ‘hinge’, something which links back to
trans-national embodiment, in its ability to forge new spaces of belonging:
‘Pregnancy roots me to the earth […] this weight and materiality often
produce a sense of power, solidity, and validity’ (Young 2005, p. 53). After
all, in Rachel Cusk’s words, ‘mothers are the countries we come from’,
holding the ability to leave the subject grounded in the past yet also open
to folding out into new, future places (Cusk 2008, p. 212).
4.3 Interrupted Maternity
One more extreme narrative consequence of the representation of
maternity as disruptive or disturbing (either in positive or nega-
tive sense) is the theme of abortion, which seems perhaps surprisingly
common within this corpus of trans-national Italian texts. Alessia Di
Giovanni’s 2015 graphic novel, Piena di niente [Full of Nothing], high-
lights the enduring difficulties faced by women seeking abortions in
Italy, due to the high numbers of conscientious objector medical practi-
tioners and obstructive bureaucratic practices.11 The illustrator explains
her artistic choices in depicting the characters in terms of a transitory
embodiment:
Tutte e quattro le protagoniste […] sembrano abitare il proprio corpo

come inquiline, come se non gli appartenesse del tutto o come se non ne
fossero le uniche proprietarie. Per questo le ho rappresentate spesso come
modellini anatomici, sezionabili, scomponibili e tremendamente infallibili
nel funzionamento fisiologico. Costrette a ‘scoperchiarsi’, a guardare e a
mostrare letteralmente le proprie interiora. (Carbone 2015)
11 Di Giovanni (2015). In a trans-national, albeit stereotypical twist, one of the four
characters (all of whose stories are based on real life tales) is a Nigerian prostitute named
Loveth, who wants to abort but cannot escape the criminal gang that controls her.
132 E. BOND
[All four main characters seem to inhabit their bodies like tenants as if it
didn’t really belong to them or they weren’t the only owners of it. For this
reason, I often drew them as anatomical models, that can be broken up,
pulled apart, and as incredibly infallible in their physiological functioning.
Forced to uncover themselves, literally to both look at and display their
interiors.]
The presence of the unwanted foetus in each case thus renders the
female characters vulnerable within their own corporeality, exposed to
both internal and external forces of pressure which distort and dismem-
ber any composite sense of self.
The disruptive effects of an unwanted pregnancy on the mother’s cor-
poreal subjectivity are central to the narration of Gabriella Kuruvilla’s
‘Aborto’ [‘Abortion’]. It tells the story of an aborted pregnancy of a
child conceived by a ‘coppia mista’ [mixed race couple] and abounds
in the metaphorical vocabulary of pollution, dirt and purity. The fear of
pollution through dirt originates in ‘beliefs that symbolize the body as an
imperfect container which will only be perfect if it can be made imper-
meable’ (Douglas 2002, p. 195). In this system, dirt is that which is:
(R)ecognizably out of place, a threat to good order, and so [...] regarded

as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage, (rejected bits
and pieces) have some identity: they can be seen to be unwanted bits of
whatever it was they came from. This is the stage at which they are dan-
gerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in
which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. (Douglas 2002, p. 197)
The relationship between that which is rejected or expelled in order

to shore up subjectivity and a fear of the confrontation with the femi-
nine (especially the mother, and her generative power) is elaborated by
Julia Kristeva in her notion of the abject, in terms which simultaneously
align it with anxieties around human mobility and borders. The abject
acknowledges the perpetual danger represented by threats to constructed
borders, and is governed by coding practices and prohibitory exclusions
which aim to limit or erase the possibility for defilement or pollution
(Kristeva 1982). In terms of mothering practices, Rachel Cusk aligns
fears around pollution with the importance that societal norms place on
sterilization, where ‘bad dirt, dirty dirt, exists on the margins of love’
(Cusk 2008, pp. 81–83).
In ‘Aborto’, the child’s (white) father is a dustman, and in the

(Asian) narrator’s eyes he seems to absorb and embody the dirt of the
Milan they inhabit together, a dirt which in turn threatens to pollute
her: in one instance, his hands touching her are described as ‘tentacoli
di sporcizia’ (Kuruvilla 2014, p. 71, tentacles of dirt). However in
contrast to this, the narrator also suggests that it is she who contami-
nates: since his job is to clean, and hers, as a writer, is to stain, or dirty.
‘sporco, invece di pulire. Prima il foglio era bianco, adesso è macchiato’
(Kuruvilla 2014, p. 71), I dirty, rather than clean. Before, the paper was
white, now it is stained.)12
Their relationship as a mixed couple is described as a contaminat-
ing device, a ‘devianza’ and an ‘errore’ (Kuruvilla 2014, p. 81, deviant,
a mistake), although this seems to be a prejudice that the narrator has
absorbed from familial and societal dictates that also affect her capacity
for agency throughout the story, and during the concluding abortion
sequence. She repeats:
Sappiamo tutti che mischiare le razze è sbagliato. Vuol dire dimenticarsi di

chi eravamo e di chi siamo per creare uomini e donne senza storia lanciati
come meteoriti impazziti, e scoloriti, nel futuro. (Kuruvilla 2014, p. 72)
[We all know that mixing races is wrong. It means forgetting who we are
and have been in order to create men and women without histories, cata-
pulted like crazed, colorless meteorites, into the future.]
The image conjured here of a de-historicized, racially ambiguous future

offspring as a meteorite hurtling through outer space holds elements of
the cyborgian in its alignment of notions of hybridity embodied by the
unborn interracial child.
(T)he cyborg is unique: not only does it represent the breach in the
human-mechanical border, but also the demolition of other barriers asso-
ciated with the body, namely gender and race, which have traditionally
contributed to the construction of identity as external markers. (Mateos-
Aparicio 2007, p. 248)
12 It may be productive to think here about the link Kristeva draws within Céline’s work
between birth-giving (yet also its miscarriage and abortion) and scription. See Kristeva
(1982, p. 159).
134 E. BOND
The mother’s anxieties about maintaining the contours of her own iden-
tity are here projected and expelled through the rejection of the child, tell-
ingly described—a process that Parker notes as common in such malignant
projection processes—as an alien or hijacker (Parker 1995, pp. 65, 69).
The unborn child the couple has conceived in ‘Aborto’ thus becomes
the embodiment of both of these paradigms of the fear of hybridity, as
related to pollution and error, and exacerbates existing anxieties on mul-
tiple levels: personal, familial (as seen in the citation below), and societal.
Un figlio meticcio è imporre la diversità, lo sgarro. È inquinare il passato

in nome del futuro, non rispettare la terra perché si vuole il cielo. È lo
sporco bianco. La macchia impressa nel corpo del nipote o della nipote,
che deride l’orgoglio dei nonni. Un segno di disprezzo, per quello che
siamo e che non saremo più. Come potrebbero abbracciare, mio padre
e mia madre, un nipote o una nipote che non è più loro ma è già altro?
Quell’altro a cui non vogliono avvicinarsi. Abbracciare mio figlio o mia
figlia vorrebbe dire accorciare le distanze con il nemico, dichiarare la resa,
abdicare. Perdersi perdendo. (Kuruvilla 2014, pp. 74–75)
[A mixed race child means imposing difference, mistakes. It’s like pollut-
ing the past in the name of the present, not respecting the earth because
you are reaching for the sky. It’s a dirty white. The stain left on the body
of a child which mocks the pride of his or her grandparents. A sign of dis-
respect, for who we are and who we will no longer be. How could my
mother and father embrace a grandchild that is no longer them, but
already another? That other which we don’t want to go near. Embracing
my child would mean closing the gap with the enemy, surrendering, abdi-
cating. Losing oneself through loss.]
The descriptions of the child as dirty [‘inquinare’, ‘sporco’, ‘macchia’,

‘segno’] thus justify its exclusion in order to maintain subjective bor-
ders. For as Kristeva states, ‘because it is excluded as a possible object,
asserted to be a non-object of desire, abominated as ab-ject, as abjection,
filth becomes defilement’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 65). Since the child comes
to embody the protagonist’s fears around assimilation, and thus losing
her identity, the body must be purged, sterilized even, since ‘purity is the
enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise’ (Douglas 2002, p. 200).
Abortion becomes the only option the narrator can conceive of to
resolve this contamination, erasing the stain of the ‘sporco bianco’ [dirty
white] presence, and being able to return to being ‘nera, unica e sola’
[black, single, and alone] (Kuruvilla 2014, p. 90), within a re-estab-

lished state of subjective unity. In order to further distance the polluting
embryo from herself, she objectifies it as an externalized physical phe-
nomenon of the body, or as an inanimate object that can easily and pain-
lessly be removed:
(M)i accarezzo la pancia, tonda e tesa. Non sento nulla. Solo fastidio
e paura per questo inaccettabile rigonfiamento. Che mi trasforma, mi
deturpa e mi umilia. Forse se bucassi quest’ignobile protuberanza con uno
spillo, come se fosse un pallone da calcio, tutto tornerebbe alla normalità.
(Kuruvilla 2014, p. 80)
[I stroke my taut, round belly. I feel nothing. Only irritation and fear for
this unacceptable protrusion. Which transforms me, disfigures me, and
humiliates me. Maybe if I could just pierce this horrible bump with a nee-
dle, as if it were a football, then everything would go back to normal.]
Pregnancy, here, has not involved the sort of ‘successful transfu-

sion’ that Hélène Rouch has theorized (cit. Shildrick 1997, p. 40),
and related mechanisms of recognition or tolerance of the other (the
embryo) have not taken place. Rather, there is the sense that ‘the
pure body is the “normal” body; hence, the “normal” woman would
destroy her foetus to return to a “normal” state of internal purity’
(Martin 1998, p. 133). Or as Haraway puts it: “The perfection of the
fully defended, ‘victorious’ self is a chilling fantasy” (cit. in Martin
1998, p. 133). This idea of pregnancy as a kind of dangerous con-
tamination also characterizes the abortion narrative in Scego’s Oltre
Babilonia [Beyond Babylon]: recounted by Mar, the ‘nus nus’ (mezza
mezza) mixed race protagonist, whose self-descriptions reveal the ten-
sions residing in her sense of multiple belongings. In her own eyes,
she is ‘una ragazza troppo nera. Con una madre bianca, argentina, ital-
iana, portoghese. Una famiglia di errori, la sua’ [a girl who’s too black.
With a white mother, Argentinian, Italian, Portuguese. Hers is a family
of errors] (Scego 2008, pp. 26, 388–389). It is Mar’s Spanish/Italian
girlfriend Patricia who decides that she should conceive a child with a
friend of hers that Mar does not know, a process which the protagonist
undergoes through a series of sexual encounters described as obscene,
‘infame’, until a ‘perforazione brutale’ [brutal perforation] (Scego
2008, p. 31), succeeds in a conception.
136 E. BOND
Finally, in the ultimate humiliation, Patricia changes her mind and

decides that she wants Mar to abort, and the scene set in the clinic is
reminiscent of the contrast Kuruvilla draws between the two characters
in ‘Aborto’: yet here the chromatic contrast is transposed to the spatial
setting of the clinical surroundings (and reminiscent of both white part-
ners) against the body of the Black protagonist. ‘Tutto era bianco. Come
la pelle di Patricia. I muri erano bianchi, i vestiti delle infermiere erano
bianchi, la barella era bianca. L’eccezione era lei, così nera’ [Everything
was white. Like Patricia’s skin. The walls were white, the nurses’ uni-
forms were white, the stretcher was white. The exception was her, all
black] (Scego 2008, p. 33). The chromatic distinction between black and
white is indeed striking, yet the irruption of the red blood of the foetus’
abortion both here and in Kuruvilla’s text links back both to the sense of
the women’s body as alien, and the bodily fluids that emerge from it as
potential pollutants. Blood links abortive practice to the non-pathological
process of menstruation, since as De Beauvoir says, it is during her peri-
ods that woman becomes aware her body is something other than herself
(cit. in Young 2005, p. 102). For despite the fact that menstrual blood is
the only blood that is not traumatically induced, and in fact on the con-
trary constitutes a sign of fertility, the menses are often conceived of in
terms of a lack of bodily control.13 Thus, menstrual blood becomes an
ulterior fluid to be expelled and abjected from normal experience, and
the menstruating woman habitually becomes closeted, ‘queer’ even, in
her need to conceal the dirt and defilement caused by her monthly bleed
(Young 2005, p. 107). This uncomfortable ambiguity relates directly
back to the relation with the mother, as Young has explained:
The meaning of menstrual blood is overdetermined. As the main marker of

sexual difference, its semiotics help secure the border of the sexualized self.
Menstrual blood reminds every subject of her origins. (Young 2005, p. 109)
Menstrual blood also marks the beginning of Oltre Babilonia, where

Zuhra’s flow starts unexpectedly and she is forced to wander around
Rome in search of a tampon. Following sustained sexual abuse as a child,
13 Grahn (1993, pp. xviii, 34). Furthermore: ‘As menstruators, women threaten psychic
security systems because female processes challenge the distinctions between inside and
outside, solid and fluid, self-identical and changing. Both men and women experience men-
struation as abject or monstrous, because both harbor anxieties about a dissolution of self
and merging with the ghost of a mother’ (Young 2005, p. 111).
Zuhra cannot see the colour red, so her menstrual flow appears to her
as grey, something which her therapist explains in terms of an over-zeal-
ous post-traumatic control of emotions. But Zuhra states: ‘mi piacer-
ebbe vedere quel filo di rosso sgorgare dalle mie gambe […] mi sentirei
potente’ [I would like to see that red stream gushing out from between
my legs. I’d feel powerful] (Scego 2008, pp. 17, 18). The disconnect
between her body’s forceful production of fluids and her psychological
inability to apprehend them is a source of ongoing frustration for her:
Immersa nel mio sangue mestruale. Immersa nei liquidi, umida, appiccicat-
iccia, sudata. Io vedo solo il grigio, però. Il mio sangue mestruale sgorga,
ma io non lo vedo bello e rosso come tutte. Vedo solo un punto di grigio.
(Scego 2008, p. 20)
[Awash with my menstrual blood. Awash with liquids, wet, sticky, sweaty.
Yet I can only see grey. My menstrual blood is flowing, but I don’t see it as
nice and red as the other women. I just see a spot of grey.]
If De Beauvoir is right in saying that menstrual blood does indeed remind

every female of her origins, then it must be significant that Zuhra’s jour-
ney towards ‘seeing red’, and thereby achieving a sense of psychological
and sexual resolution, comes via images of her mother’s native city of
Mogadishu.14 Known as ‘la città rossa’ [the red city] (Scego 2008, p. 64),
Zuhra is only able to experience the site through the medium of televi-
sion, due to the ongoing ravages of the civil war. Yet even here, the screen
itself becomes immersed in the red blood of journalist Ilaria Alpi, who was
murdered during a live report from the city in March 1994.
Stava per parlare quando dallo schermo della tv straripò sangue. Rosso.
Caldo. Innocente. Le due donne restarano ipnotizzate. Il sangue aveva
sporcato tutto: la macchina, la gente intorno e il biondo dei capelli di una
donna, di Ilaria… la loro Ilaria Alpi, che da mesi descriveva a loro somale la
Somalia che si stava liquefacendo. […] Quel sangue riguardava anche loro,
sopratutto loro. (Scego 2008, p. 57)
[She was just about to speak when blood started gushing from the TV
screen. Red. Hot. Innocent. The two women sat still hypnotized. The
blood had stained everything: the car, the people nearby, and the blond
14 This is a trope that also appears in Scego’s Rhoda: ‘L’odore di Mogadiscio è uguale a
quella della vagina’ [The smell of Mogadishu is just like a vagina] (Scego 2004, p. 35).
138 E. BOND
hair of a women, Ilaria, their Ilaria Alpi, who had spent the past months
describing the disintegration of Somalia to the Somalis. That blood was to
do with them too, especially them.]
Significantly, Zuhra had just asked her mother about the potential for
female sexual pleasure, when the blood of Alpi’s murder erupted into
their field of vision. This link is reinforced at the end of the novel, where
Zuhra finally sees the stain of her menstrual blood as a bright red con-
stellation of generations of female stories.
È rossa la sua stella. Un po’ umida. Ma bella. Emana luce. Le forme si dis-
perdono. La stella si allarga. Una costellazione. Dentro la costellazione, la
sua storia di donna. E dentro la sua storia, quella di altre prima di lei e di
altre dopo di lei. Le storie si intrecciano, a volte convergono, spesso si cer-
cano. Tutte unite da un colore e da un affetto. (Scego 2008, p. 456)
[Her star is red. A little damp. But beautiful. It shines. Its form spreads.
The star grows. A constellation. Within the constellation, her story as a
woman. And within her story, those of others before her and still others
after her. The stories intertwine, sometimes converging, often seeking each
other out. All united by colour and affection.]
Not only is the red of menstrual blood drawn as creatively productive

here, but it also aligns subjective female experience along an intergen-
erational line that forges a new order of being. Indeed, the absence of
menstruation is seen as pathological and suspect within the other nar-
rative strand of the novel. Mar doubts whether her emotionally dis-
tanced girlfriend Patricia even has her periods: ‘Mar se l’era chiesto tante
volte se il sangue scorresse davvero nelle vene di Patricia. “Le vengono
le mestruazioni?”’ [Mar has asked herself many times if blood really
flowed through Patricia’s veins. Did she get her periods?] (Scego 2008,
p. 32). The blood of Patricia’s subsequent suicide is described as a ‘lago
di sangue […] il lago rosso di Patricia. Le sarebbe piaciuto vederlo.
Avrebbe preso un po’ di quel suo sangue e si sarebbe toccata la fronte,
come l’induista del sacro fiume Benares’ [lake of blood, the red blood
of Patricia. She would have liked to have seen it. She would have taken
some of her blood and touched her forehead with it, like the Hindus do
with the sacred river water in Benares] (Scego 2008, p. 33).
Amniotic fluids, foetal tissue and menstrual blood once again merge
with the waters of the surrounding environment within similar sequences
of trans-corporeality in Vorpsi’s short story ‘Acque’ [Waters], pointing

to ‘inter-action, intra-action, co-constitution, and […] pervasive mate-
rial agencies that cut across and reconfigure ostensibly separate entities’
(Alaimo 2012, p. 479). Here, this fluid interchange takes place through
the waters of a lake in central Tirana; a notorious setting for the drown-
ing of pregnant girls who want to avoid the butchery and humiliation
of illegal abortions. That the lake ‘feeds’ on the rainwaters as well as the
corpses that adorn its bed highlights the cyclical, co-constituted nature
of its composition.15 And in a similar vein, wider conceptions of fluidity
are linked with false pregnancy in Christiana de Caldas Brito’s short story
‘Maroggia’, whose eponymous protagonist is barely able to speak and
is considered mute and simple-minded within her native Sicilian village.
She marries a local fisherman named Vittorio, who sees her as a ‘mis-
teriosa e impenetrabile moglie-grotta’ (De Caldas Brito 2004, p. 150,
mysterious, impenetrable cave-wife). She has a visceral connection with
the sea, in which he later drowns. Her response to his death is to utter
the disembodied words “lacrimare, lacrimare” (to weep, to weep) repeat-
edly until she herself cries green tears. Then, seemingly pregnant with his
child, she goes to give birth, but the doctor reports a surprise when he
goes to perform a caesarian section: ‘Dentro aveva trovato solo acqua.
L’acqua era sgorgata dalla pancia di Maroggia. “Come una fontana”,
disse il dottore, “una fontana di acqua salata”’ [Inside, he had only
found water. The water had gushed out of Maroggia’s stomach. “Like a
fountain”, the doctor said, “a fountain of sea water”] (De Caldas Brito
2004, p. 151). Finally, in a fantastical concluding sequence, Maroggia
becomes the sea herself, thus embodying the kind of ‘dynamic, intra-ac-
tive, watery world’ that Alaimo sees as characterizing the suspended state
of contemporary life tout court (Alaimo 2012, p. 490).
Abortion is a passing but constant feature too in the written account
of the Peruvian care worker Maria Cristina in Amara Lakhous’ Scontro
di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations
over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio). Maria Cristina states that she ulti-
mately desires children but undergoes multiple abortions of unwanted
pregnancies, both as the result of being raped by an Italian neighbour,
as well as of drunken encounters with her fellow countrymen. What is
15 ‘L’acqua è fatta di suoi propri misteri. Il lago sarà straripato a causa delle piogge
abbondanti di febbraio’ [The water is composed of its own mysteries. The lake must have
flooded because of the heavy rainfall in February] (Vorpsi 2005, p. 61).
140 E. BOND
emphasized here is her fear and vulnerability, as an undocumented

migrant, supporting her family back in Lima, which means that preg-
nancy is seen as real threat to her livelihood and well-being. ‘Io piango
per la paura di perdere il lavoro, della povertà, del futuro, della poli-
zia, di tutto’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 89). ‘I weep, out of fear of losing my
job, fear of poverty, the future, the police, everything’ (Lakhous 2008,
p. 65). Aside from the interlinking significance of fluids, what is inter-
esting here is the way the story links this ‘interrupted’ maternity of
abortion with the substitution of such through the role of care worker,
through Maria Cristina’s fear and unhappiness. She speaks of living ‘la
mia gioventù prigioniera tra i fantasmi della morte’ (Lakhous 2006,
p. 92, emphasis added); ‘my youth a prisoner among phantoms of death’
(Lakhous 2008, p. 67, emphasis added) and actively suppresses her own
reproductive capacities in order to care for the old in a mother-working
role. Indeed, Maria Cristina makes this link explicit when she speaks of
her role as assisting the elderly in terms of a passage from life to death—a
reversal of the temporal passage into life that her aborted pregnancies
would have otherwise signified: ‘siamo tanti, e ci unisce il destino del lav-
oro comune con gli anziani in procinto di passare all’altro mondo da un
momento all’altro’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 91). ‘There are a lot of us, united
by the destiny of our work with old people who at any moment will move
on to another world’ (Lakhous 2008, p. 66). This link between abor-
tion and the carework performed by migrants for the elderly is also high-
lighted within the very structure of Kuruvilla’s volume È la vita, dolcezza
[That’s life, sweetheart], thanks to the juxtaposition of the story ‘Aborto’,
analysed above, with the story that directly follows it, entitled ‘Badante’
[Carer]. The final section of this chapter will further align these two
aspects of migrant maternity and mothering practices—abortion and care
work—where the first is seen as morally unacceptable, yet the second is
both economically and logistically desirable to the host society.
4.4 Substitutive Mothering
In today’s increasingly globalized world, mothering itself is becoming
‘trans-nationalized’, as the ‘biology of reproduction has become frag-
mentable, with gestation and organs and gametes and intracellular ingre-
dients and genetic components now separable’ (Chavkin 2010, p. 12).
Thus, the final part of this chapter will deal with the increasing trend
towards what has been termed ‘motherwork’, a term which represents
the growing split between biology and care in the maternal context. This
emphasis on the dual meaning of labour is evident also in the title of
Rachel Cusk’s book detailing her own motherhood experience—A Life’s
Work. A further compartmentalization within the definition of moth-
ering can also be seen in the increase in practices of surrogacy, assisted
fertility, and cross-racial mothering. As Glenn point outs, mothering and
caring labour are both increasingly racialized processes, in which the
onus of work is given to other women (often from minority or ethnic
backgrounds, or with less financial security):
Instances range from wet-nursing and infant and child care to care of
the elderly and infirm. Often the women who perform these services are
mothers themselves, yet they are forced to neglect their own children and
families to take care of other women’s children or elderly parents. (Glenn
1994, p. 7)
Wong, in the same volume, speaks of such instances of ‘diverted’ mother-

ing also as an ideological construct, where ‘in a society undergoing radi-
cal demographic and economic changes, the figure of the person of color
patiently mothering white folks serves to allay racial anxieties: those who
fear the erosion of their dominance and the vengeance of the oppressed
can exorcise their dread in displaced forms’ (Wong 1994, p. 69) Such
racial fears and divides are evidently both socially and historically deter-
mined, as Eula Biss also unpicks in her retelling of an incident back in
Spring 1990, when a Long Island woman gave birth to twins—one white
and one Black, the latter having been accidentally implanted by the fertil-
ity clinic treating both her and his biological mother (Biss 2009, p. 15).
Given this, could we then posit a critical difference between trans-
national motherwork and trans-national mothering? As seen in the story
of Maria Cristina described above, in such instances the ‘care’ aspect of
maternity is diverted from actual motherhood (here, through her multi-
ple abortions) to an acceptable substitutive role of care-worker. Indeed,
such ‘privately paid migrant care workers, who fill the gap between
family care and the lack of public services, are a particularly significant
phenomenon in Italy’.16 Female migrants have arrived in various stages
16 Di Santo and Ceruzzi (2010, p. 3). Di Santo and Ceruzzi further note that ‘foreign
women, of non-European origin, who work in Italy experience “employment segregation”’

and that women make up 96% of Italian care workers (2010, p. 10).
142 E. BOND
over the past fifty years from Cape Verde, Ecuador, the Philippines
(Gabriella Kuruvilla even speaks of there being a fashion for Filipinos
(‘una moda dei filippini’, Kuruvilla 2014, p. 60), Eritrea, Ukraine and
Eastern Europe, often leaving children at home to look after someone
else(’s) in the host country. Manzanas recalls a related story reported in
a Spanish newspaper about an ‘illegal Bolivian immigrant’ (sic.) in the
United States, who would use a pre-paid phone card to call her daugh-
ter and sing her to sleep every night, and asks: ‘How many lullabies dart
across the night sky? Do voices get effectively “illegal” at some stage of
their trajectories?’ (Manzanas 2007, p. 1).
Within the broader context of migration labour, ‘il lavoro domes-
tico è visto come diverso rispetto ad altri lavori in virtù della dimensione
di intimità in cui si svolge, per la forte costruzione di genere su cui si
fonda e per l’unicità della relazione tra datrice e lavoratrice’ [domestic
labour is seen differently to other types of work, thanks to the dimension
of intimacy it involves, its gendered nature, and the unique relationship
between employer and employee] (Marchetti 2011, p. 18). Again, this
occurs precisely through the body and by means of corporeal exchanges
of work, wherein the body itself becomes the immediate site of labour.
Thus the care work that is carried out consists of: ‘intimate, messy con-
tact with the (frequently supine or naked) body, its orifices or products
through touch or close proximity’.17
Brazilian-born Christiana de Caldas Brito’s short stories are often nar-
rated by domestic carers who emphasis the corporeal nature of the work
they carry out: particularly in ‘Ana de Jesus’, and the fantastical short
story ‘Io, polpastrello 5.423’ [I, thumb no. 5,423] in which an army of
migrant thumbs detach themselves from their host bodies in order to be
fingerprinted as part of new legislation controlling immigration.
C’erano polpastrelli sporchi di pomodoro […] Altri, macchiati di sangue

[…] Polpastrelli immigrati, stanchi di eseguire quelle funzioni disdegnate
dagli italiani […] Il numero 1606, per esempio, un polpastrello femminile,
17 Wolkowitz (2006, p. 147). The ‘invisibility’ of such ‘dirty’ hospitality labour and
domestic work was interrogated in Brendan Fernandes’ dance installation Clean Labour
(5th March 2017, Wythe Hotel, Brooklyn, New York). Six dancers shadowed three clean-
ing and maintenance staff in their daily tasks, echoing further parallels between perfor-
mance and labour, and ‘laying bare the processes through which bodies are put to work’
(Yoon 2018).
era addirittura sporco di cacca. Apparteneva ad una giovane immigrata che

passava le notti con una signora anziana. (pp. 89–93, 90)
[There were thumbs stained with tomato, others, with blood. Immigrant
thumbs, tired of carrying out work that Italians turned their noses up at.
Number 1606, for example, a female thumb, was actually covered in excre-
ment. It belonged to a young immigrant who spent her nights looking
after an elderly woman.]
Migrant workers in the domestic sector are called upon to carry stigma
of dirt through certain types of body work, so that the female migrant
care worker is ‘metaphorically racialised by her association with dirt’
(Wolkowitz 2006, p. 155):
The relationship between hatred of women (misogyny), hatred of the body

(somatophobia) and hatred of racialized groups (racism) is played out in
the use of racialized female labour to do the work of servicing the body,
and in the treatment of domestic workers by their employers. (Anderson
2000, p. 142)
However, Wolkowitz proposes an alternative reading of such work in

her coinage of the phrase ‘emotional labor’, which she uses to claim that
body work should not just be seen as ‘dirty’ (thus valorizing imagery of
bodily abjection and ‘leakiness’) but should also be seen to ‘privilege the
mutual connectedness that can be engendered through caring and touch’
(Wolkowitz 2006, pp. 148–149). Yet gender tensions around sexuality
and the assumption of maternal roles persist, so that domestic tasks and
motherhood alike blur the definitions of what such ‘jobs’ should consist
of and signify. And as anticipated above, the ‘globalization’ of moth-
erhood and motherwork (including the migration of care and biologi-
cal facilities) leads to women experiencing their fertility and mothering
potential as ‘transactional bodies’ (to borrow Shannon Sullivan’s words)
in what has been termed a form of (gender specific) re-colonization
(Sullivan 2001).
*
Within this framework of uneven power dynamics that resonate along
racial and gendered faultlines, the narrator of Kuruvilla’s ‘Badante’ ima-
gines that her charge will be a ‘vecchio disabile. Uno che ha bisogno di
essere accudito: nutrito, lavato e cambiato come un bambino’ [a disabled
144 E. BOND
old person. Someone who needs to be cared for: fed, washed and
changed like a baby] (Kuruvilla 2014, p. 81). Placed as it is straight after
the conclusion of ‘Aborto’, with the protagonist-narrator’s description of
the termination of her pregnancy, this story juxtaposes representation of
these two non-standard faces of migrant ‘motherhood’ or ‘mothering’ in
a striking fashion.18 The first is cast as socially unacceptable (promiscu-
ous, irresponsible, and undesirable), and the second socially acceptable in
host society (commodified, and therefore economically useful).
A paradigm of (albeit stunted) choice in ‘Aborto’ is replaced here in
‘Badante’ by a narrative of societal and financial coercion, which sees
the narrator forced into a caring role that she does not desire. As she
discovers, her charge will not need the maternal care that she imagined
she would be forced to provide, but rather requires a similar kind of
‘sottomissione’ [submission] based on a sexual ‘sfizio’ [fancy]. Sex and
mothering become mixed within the context, or rather, the mother-work
itself becomes sexualized: ‘Dovrò imboccarti, farti il bagnetto e sostitu-
irti il pannolino’ [I will have to feed you, bathe you, and change your
nappy] (Kuruvilla 2014, p. 81), mirroring what she would have done
were she still in India with her three young children. Again, the role of
‘badante’ constitutes a sort of ‘replacement’, only here it replaces one
gender-based power structure (her family back in India) with another
(financial gain in Italy). As the protagonist herself summarizes: ‘Tu mi
compri e io mi vendo’ [you buy me and I sell myself] (Kuruvilla 2014,
p. 81). As the elderly employer points out, her family are her real
‘padroni’ [owners]: ‘Mia cara, lei si è già sottomessa: alla volontà dei suoi
genitori, prima, e alla volontà di suo marito, poi. E non l’hanno neppure
pagata per farlo’ [My dear, you already subjugated yourself: to the will of
your parents, first, and then to the will of your husband. And they didn’t
even pay you to do so] (Kuruvilla 2014, pp. 86–87).
Yet, by building on Wolkowitz’s emphasis on the affective connected-
ness of domestic and carework, could we go further still and cast these
kinds of substitutive mothering practices in a new light, seeking positive
valence within their representative possibilities by shifting our appellation
18 This slippage in the temporality of the maternal experience is also seen within the rep-
resentation of the aftermath of the abortion sequence in Kuruvilla’s ‘Aborto’, where the rejec-
tion of the foetus equates to the subject’s own imagined return to infancy: ‘Solo il sangue mi
colora: esce dal mio corpo assorbito da un enorme pannolino’ [only blood stains me now, it is
coming out of my body and is absorbed by a large nappy] (Kuruvilla 2014, p. 80).
of ‘diverted’ to ‘queered’? Following Chandler’s call to expand ‘mater-

nal’ forms of selfhood, thereby reclaiming the maternal within the self
from one side of the bipolar sex and gender system, this would allow
for a reconnection with, ‘participation in, and responsibility for, mater-
nal ethical relations with the other’ (Chandler 1998, pp. 21, 27). This is
because: ‘binary, traditional conceptions of mothering as an individual-
ized practice cement divisions between “kin” and “stranger,” thus per-
petuating ethicalities [and] inequalities’ (Chandler 1998, p. 22). Yet if
instead we see mothering as an active, performative practice, that is not
aligned with the two-gendered system, it can itself cross dividing lines, of
flooding and unfolding binaries.
We all begin as maternally identified, ourselves engulfing the maternal.
This can be linked back to the process of microchimerism that opened this
chapter, a process of absorption which is here turned on its head: ‘The
self becomes a self through the incorporation of differently gendered oth-
ers, the first other being the mother’ (Chandler 1998, p. 27). Indeed, this
privileging of maternal modalities of selfhood might pave the way towards
all kinds of diverse proliferations of maternal practices, forms of subjec-
tivity, and ethics, into self-other relations of all kinds (Chandler 1998,
p. 31) that speak to the alternative experiences of mothering described
in this chapter and twins them with wider, interconnected experiences of
mobility and migration through praxes of welcome and solidarity.
4.5 Conclusions
This chapter has argued that representations of motherhood and mater-
nity in trans-national narratives offer a more nuanced set of insights into
selfhood than a set of simple alignments with notions of past national
and linguistic belongings or recuperations (and their evocation in terms
such as ‘matria’, and ‘madrelingua’). Instead, through examining rep-
resentations of disruptive or interrupted maternity, and instances of sub-
stitutive maternal care in the same corpus of texts, we can identify how
the mothering experience can be employed both to express a metaphor-
ical link between female embodiment and mobility but potentially also
to counter broader anxieties about identity across cultural and national
lines. We have also witnessed the capacity of such representations to
voice a more performative, ‘postmodern’ model of maternal subjectivity
and agency that breaches and upturns conventional ideas around both
female identity and motherhood, and suggests the potential for new
146 E. BOND
practices of solidarity in response to widening patterns of migration and

mobility more generally.
Looking back at the disruptive instances and experiences of preg-
nancy and mothering that began this chapter, we can thus posit maternal
ambivalence as a potentially productive condition, in the same sense that
Parker—using Bion and Ferenczi—explores how the ‘negative’ emo-
tions of ambivalence and frustration can promote thought and expand
consciousness, towards the ‘creative act of seeking reparatory solutions’
(Parker 1995, pp. 7, 64). Indeed, Parker’s conclusion is that ‘the experi-
ence of maternal ambivalence […] provides a woman with a sense of her
independent identity’ (Parker 1995, p. 137). In a related sense, the spe-
cific transformative capacities of the maternal body have also allowed us to
privilege a positive sense of leakiness or seepage which itself holds produc-
tive hermeneutical consequences. As Longhurst has stated: ‘Women are
often understood to be in possession of insecure (leaking, seeping) bodily
boundaries’ (2001, p. 2), a state which is exacerbated in pregnancy and
motherhood. Indeed, as we have seen, maternal bodies are also, spatially:
(S)een to occupy a borderline state that disturbs identity, system and order
by not respecting borders, positions and rules. The pregnant body, it is
thought, threatens to expel matter from inside—to seep and leak. Even
more […] she ‘threatens’ to split her one self into two […] The pregnant
body is neither subject nor object but rather exemplifies the impossible,
ambiguous and untenable identity of each (dangerous, to be feared and
controlled). (Longhurst 2001, p. 6)
In even broader terms, Longhurst notes that critics such as Mike

Featherstone and Bryan Turner have explained how ‘in late modernity,
the body has become the ultimate vehicle for writing one’s identity’
(Longhurst 2001, p. 19). Yet can we identify a female specifics to bodily
expression and representation that emerges from the present analysis, and
one that might be related to the regenerative aspects of trans-national
mothering? As Margrit Shildrick has argued, ‘the embodiment of the
female (can be seen) as precisely the site from which new forms of knowl-
edge might emerge’, thus embodying the ‘inescapability of the leaks
and flows across all such bodies of knowledge and bodies of matter’
(Shildrick 2002, p. 10, emphasis added; p. 4).
I propose reading this erasure of a sense of tightly defined subjec-
tive boundaries in pregnancy or maternity to function as a narrative
trope that allows paradigms of disturbance, interruption and substitu-

tion to achieve supplementary layers of meaning—that might in turn
shed light on the complex nature of hybrid and trans-national iden-
tity. Drawing on Meredith Nash’s idea of ‘postmodern’ pregnancy as a
kind of ‘performance’, which emphasizes a corporeal ability to reframe
and renegotiate the “public” presentation of the body (Nash 2012), I
also second Young’s claim that maternity thus presents a challenge to
pre-existing dualisms (Young 2005, p. 48). My conclusions thus open
up the possibility of experiencing the trans-national maternal body in
an aesthetic mode (see Gadow 1980). This aesthetic mode of moth-
ering recalls the practices of self-inscriptions and gender modification
seen in the previous chapters and anticipates the transformative pro-
cesses of body-building, dieting and excess consumption that will fol-
low in Chapter 5, thus constituting just one example of the multiple
possibilities of bodily agency explored within the volume. As Shildrick
states: ‘in performing our bodies in transgressive ways, we may subvert
the apparent fixity of both raw biological data and of our embodied
selves’ (Shildrick 1997, p. 60).
To return to the example of microchimerism that introduced this
chapter, in which cells migrate between foetus and mother during
pregnancy, this chapter has sought to argue that representations link-
ing motherhood with trans-national mobility encourage new thinking
around the notions of trans-plantation, the acceptability of the other, and
the negotiation of space (and time) across borders. As Irigaray says, the
acceptability of the embryo presupposes a:
(N)egotiation between the mother’s self and the other that is the
embryo. There has to be a recognition of the other, of the non-self, by
the mother, and therefore an initial reaction from her, in order for pla-
cental factors to be produced. The difference between the “self” and
other is, so to speak, continuously negotiated. Tolerance mechanisms.
(Irigaray 1993, p. 41)
In the metaphorical value of representations of trans-national moth-

ering, such as those analysed above, I, therefore, believe we can trace a
regenerative sense of seepage between categories that can also express a
transgressive resistance to closure and an acceptance of more fluid defini-
tions and meanings, as Irigaray has shown in her related discussion of the
trope of flow:
148 E. BOND
It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet it cannot be

decomposed. These movements cannot be described as the passage from a
beginning to an end. These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These
streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This
unceasing mobility. This life—which will perhaps be called our restlessness,
whims, pretenses, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone claiming
to stand on solid ground. (Irigaray 1985, p. 215)
Thus, the deconstruction and re-assemblage of subjectivity, be it through

mobility or maternity, ‘results not in the dead-end of permanent frag-
mentation, but in the opening up of multiple possibilities for agency’
(Shildrick 1997, p. 12) This agency itself folds into Anthony Giddens’
concept of body projects, in which both cultural and individual construc-
tions of corporeality and self-identity work together dialogically to form
a sustained and cohesive personal biography (Giddens 1991, pp. 32, 52;
Shilling 1993). This narrative combines the effects of external events with
the subject’s reflexive beliefs about their own life story in a creative way
that counters the characteristic destabilizing flux of modern-day society
and selfhood. Since in this model, the self constantly needs to be remade,
we can transpose this onto the body, seeing in its flexible praxis of adapta-
tion, the potential not only to express adaptation but also disorder, revolt
and subversion, as will be further shown in the chapter to follow.
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CHAPTER 5
Revolting Folds: Disordered

and Disciplined Bodies
5.1 Introduction
Tom McCarthy’s Booker-nominated novel, Satin Island, opens as
the protagonist U is stuck in transit in Turin’s Caselle airport. U is an
anthropologist, charged by a corporate consultancy with the task of gath-
ering data in order to compile a so-called ‘Great Report’ on the mean-
ing and practice of the social codes that underpin the contemporary age.
The premise of the book is that ‘everything connects, patterns emerge,
trends leap out, themes recur, disparate things resolve into one’ (Hogan
2015), so that when U logs on to the airport WiFi, his internet browsing
takes him from the Turin shroud to the meaning of hub airports (Caselle
is primarily a transfer stop rather than a destination in itself1), while he
fields an incoming call from his girlfriend Madison via Skype, all against
the backdrop of endlessly updating world news and events. The sort of
post-structural sampling that U (and indeed McCarthy himself) engages
with here functions as a contemporary take on the bricolage techniques
1 Drawing on Richard Sennett and Jean-François Lyotard among others, Bryan S. Turner
has written extensively on the flight departure lounge as an ultimate symbolic locus of
postmodern society, thus situating U within this particular theoretical framework. See, for
example, Turner (1999, pp. 42–43). Adey explores the mediating function of mobile tech-
nologies such as those listed by McCarthy in detail (Adey 2017, pp. 208–271), and also
includes the important point that the ‘virtual mediation of mobilities is actually dependent
upon massively fixed […] networks.’ See also Graham and Marvin (2001).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_5
156 E. BOND
that so famously fascinated the protagonist’s hero, French ethnographer

Claude Lévi-Strauss: drawing from available resources within the collec-
tive social consciousness in order to create something new.
Indeed, his ongoing research endlessly feeds into the dossiers he
is employed to produce as a commercial anthropologist, work that
‘unpick(s) the fibre of a culture (ours), its weft and warp […] and let(s)
a client in on how they can best get traction on this fibre so that they
can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically
embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying:
sell their product)’ (McCarthy 2015, p. 23). Fittingly, given the analogy
of cloth employed, the first dossier he is asked to produce is on jeans, and
leads him to explore the overlap between Levi Strauss, the German denim
manufacturer, and Claude Lévi-Strauss himself (both Ashkenazi Jews who
migrated to the United States, as it turns out), in his quest to understand
the ‘code-spectrum’ of personalized denim and communicate to his cli-
ents what this connotes. His work on denim provides the blueprint for all
of his future investigations: cherry-picking terms taken from continental
(‘vanguard’) theory and philosophy within which to frame his findings.
Here, for example, he employs Deleuze’s notion of ‘le pli’ (the fold)
to deconstruct the meaning of creases in denim: the seventeen types he
identifies describe ‘the way we swallow the exterior world, invert it and
then flip it back outwards again, and, in so doing, form our own identity’
(McCarthy 2015, p. 30). And then he leans on Alain Badiou’s use of the
term ‘rip’, as a ‘sudden temporal rupture’, that when applied to carefully
crafted tears in jeans, works to denote the ‘birth scars of their wearer’s
singularity, testaments to the individual’s break with general history, to
the successful institution of a personal time’ (McCarthy 2015, p. 31).
U’s use of such complex philosophical notions may seem parodic, or
casual at best, but the two terms and what they come to signify for him
can signal a pathway towards an understanding of the complexity of the
diverse ‘body projects’ that this chapter will analyse.2 In the same way
that clothes allow the wearer a form of personal expression, as well as the
ability to conform with or deviate from social groups and cultural norms,
I will look here at how the deliberate control of bodily size, shape and
appearance can—in a similar fashion—hold its own range of expressive
2 See Giddens (1991, pp. 32, 52). The reading of body projects through the vocabulary
of clothes is something that Weber and Mitchell have also proposed as a fruitful frame of
analysis. See Weber and Mitchell (2004).
5 REVOLTING FOLDS: DISORDERED AND DISCIPLINED BODIES 157
techniques and possibilities. As Thomas Csordas has said, the contem-

porary body has become ‘primarily a performing self of appearance, dis-
play and impression management’ (Csordas 1994, p. 2, emphasis added).
In its focus on such processes of self-display and impression manage-
ment, this chapter will explore representations of the trans-formations in
the size and surface of the body, the tightness and or smoothness that
results from reducing or sculpting its contours, and the haptic folds that
speak of excess. Textual analysis will explore patterns of incorporation
(in swallowing, as mentioned above) and rejection (in the form of sud-
den ruptures) that again activate the body as a discursive map capable of
negotiating and enacting meaning. Crucially, the link with mobility and
migration underpins the elaboration of these patterns within the texts
in question: for here too the body (and external perceptions of bodily
appearance) figures as the critical interface between self and world, allow-
ing for both assimilations of as well as diversions from shifting cultural
norms as people move.
If Deleuze’s notion of the fold will be instrumental for my under-
standing of narrative representations of ‘improper’ or disordered eating
patterns (where a sense of subjective identity may be formed, dismantled
or reconstructed through excess or excessively limited consumption),
then U’s appropriation of Badiou’s ‘rip’ may help me decode the other
focus of this chapter: what depictions of body sculpting through weight-
lifting and plastic (or cosmetic) surgery might come to signify within
trans-national narratives. At first glance, the bodily representations in
these two sections would appear to be largely differentiated along gen-
der lines: most of the disordered consumption patterns are performed
by female characters (both adapting to and rebelling against family
dynamics and societal or religious restrictions), and most of the ampli-
fication or sculpting bodily practices are male-oriented. Likewise, most
readings of anorexic and bulimic behaviour, as well as of fat itself, have
been contained within a feminist framework (Orbach’s claiming of fat
as a feminist issue, for example, and Chernin’s ‘tyranny of slenderness’,
see Orbach 1978; Chernin 1981). The first dieting books aimed specif-
ically at men actually emerged as early as the 1950s, although as Sander
L. Gilman points out, even these mainly rejected aesthetic concerns and
promoted weight loss ‘as a means of improving one’s masculinity and
competitive edge’ (Gilman 2008, p. 181). Yet, since more contemporary
studies show that men tend towards exercise increase rather than diet-
ing in order to change their body shape and appearance, recent work on
158 E. BOND
bodybuilding in particular has addressed an existing lack of critical atten-

tion to male anxieties about their own bodies from this oppositional per-
spective. As Susan Bordo has written:
Both boys and girls […] often turn to their bodies in an attempt to estab-
lish a private domain in which a sense of control and self-esteem can be
re-established. Girls may go on a strict diet and exercise regime, too often
escalating into a serious eating disorder. Boys, more typically, will turn to
bodybuilding. For neither girls nor boys is this just about “looking good”.
It’s about developing a body that makes one feel safe, respected, in con-
trol. (Bordo 1999, p. 57)
In the main, such critical work on body modifications aims to shed light
on similar patterns of corporeal anxiety that operate regardless of gen-
der: anxieties that are primarily tied up with the subject’s relation to the
external world. In Unbearable Weight, Bordo makes a strong case that
beyond individual family and ethnic factors, it is precisely the reception
and relation to societal and cultural norms and expectations that drives
the subject to develop a disordered relationship to their own body-im-
age. In her analysis, the postmodern body figures as:
increasingly fed on fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting,

limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality,
and, indeed, the very materiality of the body. In the place of that material-
ity, we now have cultural plastic. (Bordo 2003, p. xvi)
Whether these processes relate to anorexic or bulimic behavioural pat-

terns, binge eating, or excessive exercise and enhancement addictions,
Bordo argues that it is this assimilation of abnormal or hypernormal-
ized ideals that are communicated to, and subsequently perceived and
absorbed by the subject, that act as a trigger for body trans-formations.
Therefore, it is not so much a case that individuals are ‘pathological’ in
their relationships with their bodily consumption and body-image, but
rather that the surrounding cultural matrix itself is pathologized (and
therefore pathologizing in turn).
Yet once again, I argue that body modification, whether this mani-
fests in terms of reduction, expansion or sculpting, grants the subject the
ability to bestow, create and alter meaning on his or her own body, even
if this emerges from a pathological bent of excess in either direction.
Bordo continues: ‘The disordered body, like all bodies, is engaged in

a process of meaning making, of “labor on the body”’ (Bordo 2003,
p. 67). Leaving behind the sedimented historicity of the body, and tra-
ditionally conceived biological constraints relating to its gender, age,
ability and race, such ‘labor’ can thereby transform the corporeal frame
‘from object to agent’ (Csordas 1994, p. 3). Yet what might this labor
of meaning specifically consist of in the case of trans-national or mobile
subjectivities? What kinds of cultural weight are such narrative rep-
resentations dealing with? What kind of societal values are they trying
to embody or deviate from? And what messages can the disordered or
hyper-disciplined trans-national body communicate through the literary
text itself?
*
This chapter will proceed by analysing descriptions of bulimic behav-
iour and thinking, then patterns of excessive food consumption, and
finally practices of bodybuilding and cosmetic enhancement in various
trans-national texts, in order to explore what these kinds of modifica-
tion can come to signify within a context of movement or mobility. As
Elizabeth Grosz explains, the limits and borders of one’s body image ‘are
not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical “container,” the skin’.
Rather, body-image is ‘fluid’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘osmotic’, dependent on
the shifting interchange of incorporation and expulsion processes (Grosz
1994, p. 79). Fundamentally, therefore, the ability and or desire to alter
or to transmogrify one’s own body may well respond to questions about
the stability of selfhood, the subject’s place in world, their appetites and
desires, as well as interpersonal anxieties around issues of purity, tran-
scendence, security, and commodification. Because of the significant
relationship with food, my discussion in the first section will also be in
dialogue with critical ideas around ingestion, absorption, and incorpora-
tion. In this dynamic, the site of interface between subject and world is
primarily the mouth, rather than—as has been the case in previous chap-
ters of this volume—the skin. In such works, ‘locating the mouth as the
site of the body/world interface (taking things in, spitting them out),’
dramatizes a ‘transition from the private and the domestic to the pub-
lic’ (Schieff 2001, p. 225). Not only is the passage of the mouth impor-
tant in its evident link to language and speech production (of which
more later), but also because it functions as a metaphor to describe the
trans-national subject’s relation with society, representing as it does
160 E. BOND
a form of liminality. For the relationship we have with such a point of

ingestion and expulsion allows it to take on the meaning of an inhabited
border, characterized by issues of visibility, acceptance and adaptation.
And as we saw previously in regard to cultural anxieties surrounding the
porosity of the maternal body: ‘all margins are dangerous. Any struc-
ture of ideas is vulnerable at its margins’ (Douglas 2002, p. 122). Yet as
Mary Douglas goes on to say: ‘The mistake is to treat bodily margins in
isolation from other margins. To which particular bodily margins (each
culture) attributes power depends on what situation the body is mirror-
ing’ (Douglas 2002, pp. 122–123). Thus, the significance of what and
how one takes in and expels through bodily orifices and boundaries also
conjures up those same more general thematics of rejection (self-)abjec-
tion, and disgust that link up with social discourses around mobility and
movement and which run through this volume as a whole.
But deliberately controlling or increasing intake also has a visual effect
on the body, so the corporeal map of meaning I will activate in the first
sections of this chapter will also once again extend to the flexible folds
of the skin. Here I will engage with work by Rosi Braidotti and others
who, inspired by Deleuze, see the folding in and out of subjectivity as
a pathway to ontological becoming: ‘Deleuzian becoming is the affir-
mation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant
process of transformation. Both teleological order and fixed identities are
relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple becoming’ (Braidotti 1994,
p. 111). And in terms of body-image, specifically, Weiss has pointed out
how changes ‘occur not only in response to actual, physiological changes
in the body and/or physical changes in the situation, but (are) greatly
(and often lastingly) affected by psychical and social changes in the
body/situation that may not be grounded in or tied to a current state of
affairs’ (Weiss 1999, p. 9). This emphasis on becoming and change thus
in turn highlights the role of the individual’s imagination and fantasy
in creating an ‘almost unlimited’ multiplicity of subjective body-images
that are themselves by nature then in a constant state of flux and change.
Folds thus figure, as in Erin Manning’s analysis, as ‘potential directions,
potential elasticities, potential preaccelerations’ that link such morphol-
ogies back to a mobilities framework precisely through their emergence
within movement: ‘Folding undoes the finality of form. Form becomes
a folding-into, a force-toward that is a threshold, a becoming-spiral, a
becoming turn, a becoming-triangle’ (Manning 2009, p. 33).
**
Also central to my argument in this chapter will be the role of affect

and emotion in configuring such narrative representations as responses
to anxiety, fear, disgust and othering that may be triggered by trans-
national mobility and the subsequent contact dynamics between differ-
ent bodies. Here, Paul Schilder’s work on body-image (how the body
appears to the self, as well as to the other) will be central to a prelimi-
nary decoding of the complexities of such relationships. Schilder argues
that body-image is not ‘a mere sensation or imagination. There is a self-
appearance of the body (that is) not a mere perception’ (Schilder 1999,
p. 11). Our own body-image is affected by impressions and actions, plus
our own emotions about our bodies, and the bodies of other persons,
making this a complex inter- and intra-personal dynamic.
We experience the body-images of others. Experience of our body-image

and the experience of the bodies of others are closely interwoven with each
other. Just as our emotions and actions are inseparable from the body-
image, the emotions and actions of others are inseparable from their bod-
ies. (Schilder 1999, p. 16)
The interplay between our own body-images and the body-images of

those around us is also consistently and constantly shifting, leading to
what Schilder terms a ‘body-image intercourse’: ‘there is from the begin-
ning a very close connection between the body-image of ourselves and
the body-images of others. We take parts of the body-images of others
into others and push parts of our body-images into others’ (Schilder
1999, p. 235).
This circulation of affect has, crucially, been figured in more forcefully
corporeal terms in the work of William McNeill, whose phrase ‘muscu-
lar bonding’ allows for the actual motion of the body to trigger emo-
tional encounters with and reactions to the bodies of others (McNeill
1995, p. 2). Similarly, the interface of bodily surfaces, and particularly
the encounter with different surface textures (such as soft and hard), is
tackled specifically by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotions.
Ahmed is concerned with interrogating ‘how emotions work to shape
the ‘surfaces of individual and collective bodies’, since she posits that ‘(b)
odies take on the shape of the very contact they have with objects and
others’ (Ahmed 2012, p. 1). Using the ‘soft touch’ label appropriated
by certain fascist groups to characterize Britain, in order to deconstruct
162 E. BOND
fears around the ‘vulnerable’ white body, Ahmed explores how such dis-
courses transform ‘soft’ into a national character(istic):
Indeed, the metaphor of ‘soft touch’ suggests that the nation’s borders
and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped
or even bruised by the proximity of others. […] The demand is that the
nation should seal itself from others […] for a nation that is less emotional,
less open, less easily moved, one that is ‘hard’, or ‘tough’. The use of met-
aphors of ‘softness’ and ‘hardness’ shows us how emotions become attrib-
utes of collectives, which get constructed as ‘being’ through ‘feeling’. Such
attributes are of course gendered: the soft national body is a feminized
body, which is ‘penetrated’ or ‘invaded’ by others. (Ahmed 2012, p. 2)
This fear of passivity is tied to a fear of emotionality, in which w eakness

is defined in terms of a tendency to be manipulated or moulded by
others—both on a national and an individual level. As such, it might
explain a drive towards hardening the body through muscle development
and definition, or indeed even contribute to cultural fears around the
pliability of fat. Yet still, softness is not the only state to be character-
ized by emotion; as, conversely, ‘(h)ardness is not the absence of emotion,
but a different emotional orientation towards others’: ‘Indeed, attending
to emotions might show us how all actions are reactions, in the sense
that what we do is shaped by the contact we have with others’ (Ahmed
2012, p. 4). Different emotions thus shape what diverse bodies can do,
and their own interpersonal movement (‘how emotions circulate between
bodies’, and ‘how they ‘stick’ as well as move’, Ahmed 2012, p. 4) can
mimic and shed light on the functioning of such processes within the
wider field of mobility and migration more generally. Yet such discourses
around contact, circulation and change must not efface the impor-
tance of the sticking and marking capabilities that bodily impressions
can make.3 Within the framework of an analysis of representations of
trans-national and mobile corporealities, elements of heft and sharpness
forefront the capacity of bodies to enact such impressions, proximities
and attachments to, as well as connections between, diverse subjectivities
and embodiments.
3 ‘We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience
of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves
its mark or trace’ (Ahmed 2012, p. 6). See also Adey on the link between motion and emo-
tion. Adey (2017, pp. 192–199).
Emotions are after all moving, even if they do not simply move between
us. […] (T)hey are also about attachments or what connects us to this or
that. The relationship between movement and attachment is instructive.
What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place,
or gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the body off
from the ‘where’ of its inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies:
attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the
proximity of others. (Ahmed 2012, p. 1)
The affective alignment between movement and attachment sketched

out by Ahmed here is essential in bringing corporeal processes of trans-
mogrification into productive dialogue with the diverse conditions asso-
ciated with mobility itself. In similar processes of becoming, the subject
is not fixed, since as Grosz says, ‘social and subjective becomings must
invoke latencies and possibilities hitherto unelaborated or undeveloped’
(Grosz 1999, p. 9). Yet as well as privileging the potentially positive
and productive effects of mobility, such body flexibility can also pro-
voke fear, by representing the latency of threat, that might be perceived
in responses to excessively fat, thin, or hyper-muscled embodiments. For
as Sabine Coelsch-Foisner has argued, the body which enacts any such
process of transformation or metamorphosis might also visualize modes
of abjection, ‘resisting order, while struggling for boundaries’: ‘While
denying the body a stable outline, metamorphosis simultaneously rene-
gotiates its boundaries. In this, it makes possible, and often desirable, the
dialogue across species, cultures, animate and inanimate, life and death’
(Coelsch-Foisner 2011, p. 29). Nonetheless, my conclusions seek to
reinforce the idea that the kind of dialogue sparked by body metamor-
phosis might still indicate potential pathways towards increased subjec-
tive visibility and agency. As anticipated above, such transformations in
the size, surface and appearance of the body allow for meaning-making
processes to take place, but also for a heightened attention to the aes-
theticization of body and self. This recalls the already cited processes of
care that follow practices of self-harming and tattooing, as well as the
self-referential experience of pregnancy, but also signals new impulses to
picturize and curate the body for public consumption, precisely as if it
were a work of art.
The emphasis on the aesthetics of visibility is key, and points to the
importance of what Jeannine A. Gailey has termed the ‘ocular ethic’,
where seeing can reassign attention and importance to previously
164 E. BOND
overlooked bodies (Gailey 2014, p. 7). ‘One’s own eyes and those of
others thus become the tool of the body-image intercourse. The eyes
grant the possibility of establishing social relations with another per-
son’ (Schilder 1999, pp. 237–238). Gailey highlights the experience of,
for example, ‘queer persons, fat persons, persons of colour and bodies
of persons with physical differences, such as those with missing limbs,
scars, or those who engage in extreme body modification’, who may
well feel that they are visible to others (in a negatively perceived way),
but conversely have their ‘needs, desires and lives grossly overlooked’
(Gailey 2014, pp. 7, 10). Most recently, a turn to (hyper-)visibility has
been identified within the rise of the so-called ‘spornosexual’ culture,4
which entails the rigorous and enthusiastic pursuit of a physical aesthetic
at the same time as the documenting of that aesthetic via every avail-
able social media outlet. After centuries of what Rosalind Coward has
termed a ‘sheer weight of attention to women’s bodies’ (cit. Lehman
1993, p. 6), the man who coined the ‘spornosexual’ moniker, Mark
Simpson, now remarks, ‘Not only have men discovered that they like –
no love – being looked at, traditionally a “feminine” pleasure, they have
also learned that in a visual world if you aren’t noticed you just don’t
exist’ (Olesker 2015). Such a cultural shift can never be extricated from
its social context, and commentators such as Jamie Hakim have identi-
fied a link between male physical aestheticization and financial austerity
(Hakim 2016). Modifying and documenting one’s augmented corporeal
appearance thus allows for a recasting of masculinity, not through earned
income, but through social media value of the body itself. Now as never
before, both men and women are taking an active role in producing or
doctoring the cultural messages that are ‘written’ on or assigned to their
bodies, and bodies have become the ultimate means for the subject to
create value and pathways to desire and to symbolize identity tout court.
The processes of modification and enhancement that the myriad
functions of image filters and editing tools now allow on social media
outlets create a sometimes fictionalized, hyper-real body as the focus of
this desire and value. Again, this will allow us to draw the figure of the
cyborg into our discussion, in its relation to shifting folds, and imagined
fantasy. This also ties in with discourses around slimming and dieting,
4 ‘A portmanteau of “sports”, “porn” and “metrosexual”, spornosexuals are men who
go to the gym in order to share eroticized images of their toned bodies on social media’
(Hakim 2016).
where the fantasy of the future body erases the memory of the past and
present one, like a kind of personal science fiction (Schwartz 1986, p. 4).
Exercise, food consumption, cosmetic enhancement (through surgery
or through image doctoring) and fashion can all be ways to transform,
shift and control body image, and to write oneself into a chosen narra-
tive (cultural, social, national) as well as to operate modes of resistance
to those same narratives. Starting with practices of disordered consump-
tion (first privation, then excess) and moving on to corporeal sculpting
through surgery or muscle-building, this chapter will chart and explore
the range of possible meanings of these bodily rips and folds within
trans-national narrative representations.
5.2 Disordered Consumption
Within the forum of trans-national writing, food itself is often repre-
sented as a relatively straightforward cultural marker of social identity: a
light-hearted (often even humorous) way of showing difference, but also
one which provides the means to bridge a cultural gap and accept, or
even overcome, diversity. The works of Indian-born author Laila Wadia,
for example (particularly the short story ‘Curry di pollo’ [Chicken
Curry], 2005, and her 2007 novel Amiche per la pelle [Friends for Life]),
present food as a pathway towards successful intercultural expression and
communication. Much in the same way as I read certain trans-national
narratives that employ unproblematized metaphorical or symbolic rep-
resentations of maternity as over-simplistic or celebratory, I do not
believe that works such as Wadia’s require much supplementary analy-
sis to unpick their framework of reference.5 Food is often used in such
narratives as a means to communicate nostalgia for the past and trans-
mit memories and or knowledge of a particular author, narrator or
character’s culture of origin. Past belongings and associations are also
often idealized through the medium of food as an occasion for social
5 Lazzari’s comment sums up this use of food as cultural marker and interface in Wadia’s
texts and more generally in the field of so-called ‘migration’ literature. ‘Pietanze, ricette
e ingredienti possono indicare, di volta in volta, il legame affettivo con la propria terra
d’origine o la volontà di integrarsi alla nuova cultura, adottando i suoi piatti e le sue
usanze’ [Dishes, recipes and ingredients can be used to demonstrate either affective bonds
with the country of origin, or the desire to integrate into the new culture, through adopt-
ing its cuisine and habits.] (Lazzari 2014, p. 6).
166 E. BOND
exchange, and the experience and enjoyment of familiar flavours, in con-

trast to the more hurried and mechanical, less traditional (or even just
less tasty) Western modes and patterns of consumption.
But within this corpus of writing, there are also numerous texts in
which food instead figures as a source of conflict, and is intimately tied
to issues around body image, self-control and the discipline of disorder.
As Elspeth Probyn has pointed out, examining modes of food consump-
tion allows us to investigate ‘how as individuals we inhabit the present:
how we eat into cultures, eat into identities, indeed eat into ourselves’
(Probyn 2000, p. 3). Indeed, what’s ‘eating us’ also functions as a lens to
examine critical concerns: ‘questions of appetite, of excess, of fear, shame
and disgust’ (Probyn 2000, p. 3). The two particular examples of dis-
ordered consumption I want to discuss in this first section are explored
through the lens of problematic parental (specifically mother–daughter)
relations. It is important to situate the mechanisms of food revulsion
involved here as affective issues that are tied both to their intercultural
context as well as to complex familial networks of unease. For mothers
are themselves simultaneously social and cultural products and agents. In
the previous chapter, I explored how the mother figure can externally be
perceived as inhabiting or assuming a potentially abject or disgusting role
or function, and the flexible subjectivity of the maternal body might lead
to its rejection as alien or monstrous. Similarly, in the instances of food
disgust I will discuss here, it is the ‘troubling’, potentially abject-forming
role that the mother assumes as primary ‘feeder’ that might lead her to
influence and control consumption patterns, leading to patterns of resist-
ance and subversion on the part of the receiving child.
Through breastfeeding and infant nurture, the mother is established
as the primary (though not exclusive) model for feeding as well as eating,
and as such can invest everyday and life-long routines and rituals with all
the dynamic significance of the mother–child relationship itself, as well
as all that comes to signify in cultural terms as well. As the mother is
typically the first provider of nourishment to the infant and thus holds
the power to regulate his or her body, controlling its boundaries through
intake and evacuation, her role as nurturer comes to represent the sub-
ject’s lack of autonomy over his or her own body. And indeed, the
examples I will describe here demonstrate that food disgust and bulimic
thinking is symbolic of uncertain or problematized boundaries within the
mother–child relationship. This conflict over control, where the mother
is just one half (but an over-present, over-stifling half) of a mixed identity
leads to a particular sense of imbalance in the context of dual heritage or

trans-national writers. In these instances, the body must be consumed, or
self-consume, in order to be contained. For as Maud Ellmann suggests,
eating disorders dramatize fundamental, prelinguistic conflicts and priva-
tions, and that the subject rejects food because she lacks access to any
other medium through which to articulate its discontents. As my analy-
sis to follow will show, hunger thus becomes a mode of speech, and the
body itself is the text in which these discontents become encoded (see
Ellman 1993, p. 16).
*
Dieting becomes a pathway towards an imagined self-liberation in
Media chiara e noccioline,6 the 2001 novel by Viola Chandra (a pseu-
donym for Gabriella Kuruvilla), in which the author replicates her own
autobiographical dual heritage family dynamic. The first person pro-
tagonist’s mother is Italian and her father Indian, though they sepa-
rated when she was still an infant. Kuruvilla’s work (as we saw also with
‘Ruben’ and ‘Aborto’ in the previous chapter) often insists on this kind
of autobiographically inspired, conflicted, uncertain conception of iden-
tity and belonging, as well as repeating problematic relations with both
parents: an over-stifling mother, and distant father. The protagonist of
Media chiara e noccioline, Valentina, is bulimic, and her patterns of vom-
iting seem to correspond to a desire to eject/reject her (white, Italian)
mother and the control and power than she has over her, as well as estab-
lishing her need for boundaries and revealing a desire for a relationship
with her (Indian) father. This is expressed explicitly in various points
in the novel. Valentina describes the ‘wounds’ which make her vomit:
‘le stesse ferite,’ she says, ‘che vomitando cercavo di curare […] l’asso-
luta mancanza di stima da parte di mio padre, l’eccessiva considerazione
da parte di mia madre’ [the same wounds that I tried to heal through
vomiting […] my father’s utter lack of attention to me and my mother’s
excess care] (Chandra 2001, p. 18). Indeed, as Hilde Bruch has demon-
strated, this sort of ‘solicitous overprotection’ of the child by her mother
6 The title of Chandra’s novel is difficult to translate—literally, it refers to a pint of lager
and nuts. But the emphasis in the Italian words on chromatic terms of lightness (‘chiara’)
and mid-brown (‘noccioline’), as well as the perspective of mid-way or medium (‘media’)
means that it assumes a metaphorical value that must surely be linked to the protagonist’s
dual heritage as a second generation Italian Indian subject.
168 E. BOND
prevents the development of ego boundaries between the two and inter-
feres with the child’s development of initiative and autonomy (Bruch
1973, p. 75). And this type of morbid closeness of mother and daughter
is made evident right from the opening pages to the novel, where their
conversations play out against a complex backdrop of references that link
food consumption to the troubled relationship between the two:
L’altra sera […] al ristorante mi hai spiegato, con una mano unta di
calamaro fritto e l’altra che sorseggiava un bicchiere di vino bianco […]
che volevano toglierti l’utero e tu, invece, hai lottato per tenerlo. Ma non
volevo parlare del tuo utero. Forse del mio… forse… ma faccio sempre
confusione tra mio e tuo. Io e te. Io dentro di te, tu dentro di me. Io che
mangio te, tu che mangi me. Io che mangio e vomito. (Chandra 2001, p.
9)
[The other night at the restaurant you explained to me, one of your
hands greasy from eating fried squid and the other holding a glass from
which you sipped white wine, that they had wanted to remove your uterus
and that you had fought to keep it. But I didn’t want to talk about your
uterus. Maybe about my own…maybe…but I’m always confusing mine
and yours. Me and you. Me inside you, you inside me. Me eating you, you
eating me. Me eating and vomiting.]
The references to the grease of the fried food (‘unto’, ‘fritto’) are in
themselves unappealing and provoke a reaction of disgust in the narra-
tor, but their juxtaposition with the conversation topic of the womb—
as the ultimate symbol of motherhood and generation, and the place
of origin and connection between the two subjects—functions further
as an explicit signpost to the link between food and the pathological
mother–daughter relationship. Coupled with the morbidity of their inter-
changeable identities and Valentina’s rejection of the mother through her
bulimic vomiting, this conversation reveals the abnormal eating functions
this disordered relationship has contributed to her forming.7
Such specific references to food are in themselves textual rarities, as
Valentina’s bulimia stretches into anorexic tendencies, which develop
through descriptions of self-privation and purging in the novel. Still,
7 Their relationship would thus follow the model of an ‘enmeshed’ type: ‘in enmeshed
families, the individual gets lost in the system. The boundaries that define individual auton-
omy are so weak that functioning becomes handicapped, poor differentiation’ (Minuchin
et al. 1978, p. 30).
these too remain primarily connected to the desire to absorb, consume,

and then reject/eject the mother figure, ultimately using the control of
consumption in order to achieve detachment from her.
Mangio mia madre […] vomito mia madre […] vomito l’anima di mia
madre. Per ritrovare la mia. In un rito di purificazione. […] Mangiando
possiedo, vomitando rifiuto. Possiedo e rifiuto, senza sosta, mia madre […]
Un cordone ombelico mai spezzato provoca mostri: genera una coppia
perversa. Ci vorrebbe un divorzio. (Chandra 2001, p. 40)
[I eat my mother […] I vomit my mother […] I vomit my mother’s
soul. In order to relocate my own. In a purification ritual. […] I possess by
eating, I reject by vomiting. I possess and I reject my mother, ceaselessly
[…] An uncut umbilical cord generates monsters, a perverse couple. We
should get a divorce.]
It also seems that Valentina’s mother feeds her instead of engaging emo-
tionally with her, and even wants to over-feed her, in a pattern of exces-
sive bodily control. In particular, the narrator perceives that her mother
tries to feed her particularly fatty foods (though this could betray a
sense of her own suspicion or paranoia), while herself eating vegetables
and religiously going to the gym. Food is thus described by Valentina
as her mother’s ‘gustoso veleno, la sua saporita cattiveria, il simbolo del
suo amore-non amore per me’ [tasty poison, well seasoned nastiness,
the symbol of her love-non love for me] (Chandra 2001, p. 64). Bordo
would perhaps see this as a dynamic that proves the mother has absorbed
societal and cultural norms, in which the ultimate maternal ‘satisfaction
hinges on learning to feed others rather than the self – metaphorically
and literally’ (Bordo 2003, p. 47).
But this fraught dynamic is further complicated when it is brought
into relation with Valentina’s dual heritage identity, and her own prob-
lematic conception of the same. Because it appears that it is the mother
herself who does not fully accept the appearance of her mixed race
daughter. The description of their house, for example, seems to betray a
sense of chromatic control that hints at unease: the walls and ceilings are
described as being painted ‘bianco neve, in contrasto con il denso color
caffè del parquet. Netto chiaro-scuro’ [snow white, in contrast to the
dark coffee colour of the parquet floor. A sharp chiaroscuro] (Chandra
2001, p. 21). This chromatic distinction transforms the home into a
170 E. BOND
space that they both feel comfortable with, one white, one brown.8
But then Valentina has a dream that she falls down the stairs because of
their more in-between, ambiguous beige colour, stating: ‘Avevo bisogno
di confini, di bianchi e neri’ [I needed boundaries, whites and blacks]
(Chandra 2001, p. 21). Valentina thus appears to have assimilated her
mother’s discomfort with her own mixed race appearance. Indeed,
the mother goes as far as imposing the use of sun protection and hair
straighteners to try and lessen those aspects she identifies as foreign or
other (and that distance her daughter from her, crucially). ‘Quando tor-
navo dalle vacanze di mare (mia madre) mi guardava incredula e sbigot-
tita e mi diceva: “Mio Dio! Come sei nera!”’ [When I came back from
holidaying by the sea (my mother), would look at me astonished and dis-
believing and say “My God! You’re so black!”] (Chandra 2001, p. 87).
**
We can thus read Valentina’s discomfort with, and subsequent
attempts to modify and diminish her own appearance in Media chiara
e noccioline as being provoked by her mother’s distaste at her otherness,
which leads me on to a direct comparison with another morbid mother–
daughter dynamic that is textually linked to food disgust, in Cristina
Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (Little Mother). Here, as we saw in Chapter
Two, it is the mother’s over-detached behaviour that provokes an initial
response of hyper-compensation on the part of the daughter, and which
is ultimately followed by a subsequent total rejection that signals the
beginning of a new cycle of a different kind of self-harm. From the start,
Domenica Axad’s mother does not want to touch her daughter because
she states a strong dislike of physical intimacy, but she also has an even
more revealing distaste for physicality, fluids, and mixing:
Mia madre odiava impastare a mani nude, non mescolava gli ingredienti
del cibo, si limitava a giustapporli, separati. Detestava le vischiosità, gli oli,
tutto ciò che ungeva, che scivolava. Questa sua avversità era ossessiva, quasi
fosse lo specchio di ciò che ci separava. (Ali Farah 2007, p. 245)
My mother hated mixing the dough with her bare hands, she did not
mix ingredients, she simply juxtaposed them, keeping them separate. She
detested sliminess, oils, everything that was greasy, slippery. This aversion
8 And as such recalls the analysis of Kuruvilla’s short story ‘Aborto’ in the previous
chapter. See p. 111.

of hers was obsessive, as if it were the mirror image of what separated us.
(Ali Farah 2011, p. 212)
This is uncannily similar to Julia Kristeva’s descriptions of abject reac-

tions in Powers of Horror (1982), and furthermore, the fact that it is
explicitly juxtaposed with the problematics of the mother–daughter
relationship allows us to align it with the skin inscriptions discussed in
Chapter Two, as well as with the exploration of food disgust in progress
here. For Kristeva speaks specifically of a horror of bodily fluids and of
food loathing as prime manifestations of abjection, giving the example
of the lips’ rejection of the skin on the surface of milk as symbolic of
the rejection of an imaginary common skin between parent and child.9
And what is the underlying reason given for such a reaction of abjec-
tion? Because something ‘disturbs identity, system, order,’ something
‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’, something that represents
the ‘in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 4).
It would thus seem to me that—as in Media chiara e noccioline too—it is
both Domenica Axad’s inability to separate herself from her mother, and
her status as mixed-race, ‘composite’ other, that disturbs her mother and
ultimately leads to the traumatic (but psychologically overdue) break in
their relationship.
Domenica effects her own bodily transformation in order to regain
proximity to her mother: something that—like Valentina—she perceives
to have been lost because of her mixed race appearance. ‘Cominciai a
lavorare il mio corpo con perseveranza, procedendo alla completa
rimozione di tutti i gesti, i comportamenti, gli odori, i colori che potesse
non riconoscere come affini ai propri’ (Ali Farah 2007, p. 245). ‘I began
to work my body with persistence, proceeding to the complete removal
of all the gestures, the behaviors, the smells, the colors, that she might
recognize as not similar to her own’ (Ali Farah 2011, p. 211). And as
we saw previously, Domenica Axad responds to her mother’s rejection
of her mixed, composite identity with self-harm through cutting her skin
and retreating into silence, rather than Valentina’s analogous bulimic
9 Kristeva (1982, pp. 2–3). Deborah Lupton also offers some valuable analysis of the link
between food disgust and the maternal object, arguing that it is the liminal, ambiguous
quality of food as something which passes the boundaries of the body and exposes its vul-
nerability that causes it to provoke such responses of abjection. In her analysis, ‘food is
both self and non-self simultaneously’ (Lupton 1996, p. 113).
172 E. BOND
enactment of agency. I read both as stances of rejection but also of

self-assertion. Indeed, Valentina not only transforms herself physically,
acquiring a sort of agency denied to her by her mother’s previous regime
of control, but also ultimately manages to assert a new creative iden-
tity, precisely through her symptoms. ‘“Mi chiamo” Valentina. “Sono”
bulimica. Quello che gli psicologi definiscono “trovare un’identità nel
sintomo”’ [“My name is” Valentina. “I am” bulimic. What psycholo-
gists call “finding an identity in the symptom.”] (Chandra 2001, p. 96).
Similarly, Domenica Axad’s refusal to speak (as with Valentina’s refusal
to eat) is an ‘existential step’ that reveals the ‘transitive nature of “inner
phenomena”, generated, consummated, transformed into de facto situ-
ations’ (Merleau-Ponty 2005, p. 190)—a metamorphosis in which the
body itself plays a fundamental part. Thus, ‘precisely because my body
can shut itself off from the world, it is also what opens me out upon
the world and places me in a situation there’ (Merleau-Ponty 2005,
p. 191)—a situation that can in turn generate new personal agency
through the creation of a potentially curative narrative.
***
The ‘yoking of corporeality, food, maternity and writing’ explored in
Media chiara e noccioline and Madre piccola is also discernible through-
out Igiaba Scego’s Oltre Babilonia [Beyond Babylon]. One of the nar-
rative threads sees protagonist Zuhra experiencing a temporary phase
of bulimia, that may be connected to her past removal from the family
sphere and subsequent sexual abuse at school. This is a condition that
she recovers from within the temporal arc of the narrative but nonethe-
less she continues to eat ‘in modo disordinato o peggio, a dimenticarmi
di mangiare’ [in a haphazard way, or worse, forgetting to eat entirely]
(Scego 2008, p. 19). But even more pertinent to the discussion of the
links between troubled maternal relations and disordered consump-
tion here is Mar’s description in the same novel of her abortion (also
discussed in the previous chapter). Particularly striking to Mar is the
sound of the medical instrument that will surgically remove the foetus.
‘Sembrava lei bambina che mangiava la minestra di farro. Soffiava sul
cucchiaio caldo, colmo. Soffiava forte per raffreddarlo. Poi di colpo in
bocca. Un risucchio indigesto. La minestra di farro non le era mai piaci-
uta.’ [It sounded like her when she used to eat spelt soup as a child. She
would blow on the hot, full spoon. She blew hard to cool it down. And
then quickly put it in her mouth. An undigested suction. She’d never
liked spelt soup.] This grotesque double suction (inward and outward)
might suggest a symbolic link between ingestion and impregnation that
is confirmed by both Minuchin et al. and Bynum.10 Indeed, Valentina
also undergoes an abortion within the narrative of Media chiara e noc-
cioline, an experience that she represents in absolutely parallel terms to
the binge-purge cycle of her own disordered eating. ‘Io vomito materia
per soddisfare un ideale. E adesso allo stesso modo, vomito un bambino
che è realtà, e non delle più ideali […] E questa notte mangerò e vom-
iterò, la notte dell’aborto e dell’anestesia, tutto, da sola’ [I vomit matter
to satisfy an ideal. And now, in the same way, I am vomiting a baby that
is more real than ideal […] And tonight I’ll eat and I’ll vomit, the night
of the abortion and the anaesthetic, all of it, by myself.] (Chandra 2001,
p. 93). Within and by means of this cycle, time, too, must be consumed.
She also speaks of ‘minuti da consumare, inglobare, digerire, poi evac-
uare. Come cibo, indigesto e insapore’ [minutes to be consumed, swal-
lowed, digested, and then evacuated. Like food, undigested and tasteless]
(Chandra 2001, p. 96), thereby creating a direct link to Mar’s discourse
above. For if there is a link between (physical) fullness and pregnancy,
might there be a reverse parallel between indigestion and abortion?11
This idea ties back, in turn, to Anthony Gidden’s work on the link
between the body and self-identity, and the postmodern tendency to
view the body as a project in which processes of transformation and flu-
idity allow a reflexive sense of self to be projected in order to ‘lend solid-
ity to the narrative thus envisaged’ (Sweetman 2000, p. 68). Looking at
this type of bodywork through the lens of mobility further allows us to
align this desire for movement with a certain flexibility in self-image in
Media chiara e noccioline, through a cyclical configuration of what we
might term bulimic time.12
10 See Minuchin et al. (1978, p. 14). Also Bynum: ‘Like body, food must be broken and
spilled forth in order to give life. Macerated by teeth before it can be assimilated to sus-
tain life, food mirrors and recapitulates both suffering and fertility’ (cit. in Lupton 1996,
p. 109).
11 This is something suggested also by Ogden, who similarly makes the connection
between oral impregnation, fullness and pregnancy. See Ogden (2003, p. 238).
12 In a similar fashion, Martin discusses Sonia Johnson’s feminist reading of how an out-
sider status can bestow a similar sense of flexibility in terms of the: ‘unforeseen ways in
which a person unconstrained by being within a system can move and act and therefore
how this flexibility could enable someone to influence the system from outside’ (Martin
1994, p. 157).
174 E. BOND
Ho paura del mio corpo fermo in un luogo perché fermo non so stare.
Io devo almeno riempire e poi svuotare. In un finto dinamismo che vede
coincidere l’inizio con la fine. […] Nulla deve intralciare questo movi-
mento, pendolare, ipnotico, dell’andare per ritornare. (Chandra 2001,
p. 165).
[I am scared by my body staying still in one place because I don’t know
how to stay still. I must at least fill up and then purge. In a pretend dyna-
mism that sees the beginning and the end coincide. I can’t let anything
get in the way of this pendular, hypnotic movement, of leaving in order to
return.]
In this ‘pure plastic’ rhythm,13 the body narrative is caught up in pro-

cesses of mobility and becoming, as expressed through pathologized
corporeal cycles of disordered consumption (‘the way we swallow the
exterior world’) and expulsion. If, as Grosz says, ‘time (is tangible) only
in the passing or transformation of objects and events’ (Grosz 1999,
p. 1), then here temporal ruptures are enacted in order to express the
subject’s unwillingness to remain stuck in one fixed national or cultural
aspect of her identity, and a growing awareness of herself as composite.
In this configuration, her bulimic rhythms become an ‘affirmation of
the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of
transformation’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 111), a cycle that in turn metaphor-
izes the broader processes of becoming that are inherent in embodied
experiences of mobility and motion.
****
But, as Sarah Scieff points out, ‘excessive consumption can endow an
agency just as efficacious (as excessively limited intake). While the ano-
rexic’s refusal to ingest is synonymous with the refusal of her subjectiv-
ity, the compulsive eater’s refusal to distinguish between what she needs
and what she doesn’t need may be equally devastating’ (Schieff 2001,
p. 220). The narrative of Scego’s ‘Dismatria’ (‘Exmatriates’), for exam-
ple, describes an imposing matriarchal figure, who stands as a metonymic
symbol of Somalia as well as a metaphorical link to the familial past,
belonging and memory, through associations with the ‘matria’ and the
13 Manning also provides a compelling argument for bodily rhythm as becoming, pro-
posing that the dynamism of corporeal movement can allow the subject to interact with the
world in a series of moments that nonetheless resist staticity and definition. See Manning
(2009, p. 6).
‘madrelingua’. The daughter narrator has a conflictual but loving rela-

tionship with her mother, and sees her as an object of both fear and wor-
ship. ‘L’adoro. La venero. La riverisco. La ossequio. Ciò non toglie che
a tratti la tema’ (Scego 2005a, p. 7). ‘I love her. Adore her. Worship her.
Revere her. Take my hat off to her. Which doesn’t stop me being scared
of her at times’ (Scego 2011, p. 225). The protagonist wants to buy her-
self a home in Rome, but lacks the courage to confront her mother on
the subject, since the entire family are used to keeping their belongings
in a set of suitcases so as to be perpetually ready for a possible, trium-
phant return to Somalia, once the civil war is over. The denouement
of the story comes over the consumption of a traditional feast, initially
described in tempting terms.
La tavola era imbandita di ogni ben di Dio. Di ogni leccornia presente

in Oriente e in Occidente. Sembrava qualcosa tra il pranzo di Natale e il
pasto serale che rompe il digiuno nel mese sacro di Ramadan. … Anche
Zainab aveva fatto la suà specialità: uno stufato di ceci e carne, qualcosa
che riconciliava con il divino. (Scego 2005a, p. 15, emphasis added)
The table was groaning with good things. With every delight known
to East and West. It looked like a cross between Christmas dinner and the
evening meal that breaks the fast during the holy month of Ramadan. […]
And Zainab had made her great speciality too: a meat and chickpea stew, some-
thing guaranteed to make you hear angels carolling. (Scego 2011, p. 237)
The scene is notably described with the reverent language of religion

(notable in the references to Christmas, Ramadan and the divine, ‘ben
di Dio’, ‘divino’), and also includes diverse religious descriptors, indicat-
ing the mixed cultural heritage of the characters. Yet the sense of sensory
and aesthetic enjoyment both disintegrate when the guests start to eat,
as temptation is transformed into (self-)disgust triggered by excess con-
sumption. For as Miller notes, the notion of disgust can also be linked
to a surfeit of desire (Miller 1997, p. 111, emphasis added). Any nor-
mal appreciation and appetite for the feast quickly descends into a scene
of disturbing gluttony and excess, which is now described with the
vocabulary of war and attack: ‘attaccato’ (‘assailed’), ‘bottino di guerra’
(‘booty’), ‘saccheggiato’ (‘plundered’) (Scego 2011, p. 239).
Indeed, it is the physicality of the consumption modes which is
emphasized rather than the taste and enjoyment of the food itself, which
evaporates in an ‘orgia cibesca’ (‘orgy of edibles’), Scego (2011, p. 239).
176 E. BOND
We see verbs that emphasize the ingestion of the food and drink made
available, as well as the speed, such as ‘prosciugati’ (‘drained’), ‘trac-
cannati’ (‘gulped down’), ‘aspirati’ (‘sucked up’), ‘dissolti nel gorgo di
varie mascelle in attività’ (‘destroyed in the maelstrom of various jaws
in action’), ‘mangiati, gustati, digeriti’ (‘chewed, enjoyed, digested’),
‘scomparsi in qualche intestino’ (‘vanish into various intestines’), Scego
(2011, p. 239). As such, there is an unpleasant bodily emphasis on the
motions, processes and functions of the characters’ jaws, intestines and
throats, reducing eating to a visceral, animalistic urge.
The narrator emphasizes a sense of shame and discomfort at the vora-
cious eating, which significantly is carried out by all present (including
the narrator) except for the mother, who merely sips unsweetened tea
and watches the others as they gorge. As Bordo says: ‘Demonstrating an
ability to rise above the need to eat imparts moral and aesthetic superior-
ity only where others are prone to overindulgence’ (Bordo 2003, p. 62).
This leads to a sense of the underlying power struggle between mother
and daughter, connotations of incorporation and the strength of control
and abstinence. For the meal plays out along the lines of an unspoken
generational dynamic, highlighting a clash in differing needs for distance
and boundaries, and confirming that ‘food can also reflect power rela-
tions within a family’.14 Disordered modes of consumption here seem to
once again equal a desire to overcome the morbid overdominance of the
mother. And through the process of excessive incorporation (as Falstein,
Falstein, and Judas have noted), the protagonist delineates her need for
distance and boundaries from the mother and the monocultural concep-
tion of reality that she appears (erroneously, as it turns out) to repre-
sent and embody (cit. Minuchin et al. 1978, p. 15). Indeed, after the
‘destruction’ of the traditional meal, the narrator finds the courage to
confront her mother and share her plans to set down roots in Italy, and
they reconcile in conclusion.
14 Ogden (2003, p. 74). Orbach numbers a variety of ways in which compulsive eating in
relation to the mother can express anxieties about that very relationship: ‘My fat says to my
mother: “I’m substantial. I can protect myself. I can go out into the world.” “My fat says
to my mother: Look at me. I’m a mess; I don’t know how to take care of myself. You can
still be my mother.” My fat says to my mother: “I’m going out in the world. I can’t take
you with me but I can take a part of you that’s connected to me. My body is from yours.
My fat is connected to you. This way I can still have you with me.” My fat says to my
mother: “I’m leaving you but I still need you. My fat lets you know I’m not really able to
take care of myself” (Orbach 1978, p. 33).
Because, as Orbach has frequently pointed out, mothers also function

as products of cultures themselves. And it is the conflict within the cul-
tural elements of a mixed identity rather than a familial-based conten-
tion that Scego wants to emphasize, as is also evident in the following
story in the collection, ‘Salsicce’ [Sausages]. Here, the Muslim protag-
onist, also an Italian woman with Somali family origins who has been
raised and is still living in Rome, is in crisis about her mixed identity
and national belonging following the recent change in immigration laws
requiring subjects to have their fingerprints taken. Although an Italian
national herself, she fears that her Italian identity is only ‘skin-deep’ in
some sense (even though her Black skin simultaneously marks her as vis-
ibly ‘foreign’), and decides to attempt to cook and eat a sausage in order
to prove her Italian-ness. As she herself wonders: ‘chissà se (le salsicce)
influiranno sulle impronte?’ [who knows if the sausages will affect my
fingerprints?] (Scego 2005b, p. 31).
As Deborah Lupton has argued, ‘(food and eating) marks bounda-
ries between nations, cultures, genders,’ and ‘dietary habits are used to
symbolize and establish control over one’s body’ (Lupton 1996, p. 1).
Because the act of eating itself threatens contamination and bodily impu-
rity, since by taking food into the body, we take in the world. This is a
dangerous act, one of crossing boundaries, since food is a liminal sub-
stance, which bridges inside and outside through the passageway of the
mouth.15 In this case, therefore, Scego’s narrator’s attempted incorpora-
tion of a culturally ‘foreign’ Italian food source, one entirely alien to the
religious and cultural traditions of the other component of her identity,
becomes inevitably linked to subjectivity, and the act of eating becomes
a source of great anxiety and risk. Her descriptions of the food mark it as
impure, highlighting its connotations of contamination (also moral) in
the use of words such as unclean (‘immondo’), and indecent (‘impud-
ico’) (Scego 2005b, pp. 25 and 26). In this sense, the narrator is literally
attempting to ‘ingest the West’.
But her attempt fails, as she encounters the unfamiliar stench and
the unappetising vision of the boiling sausage (she describes its ‘puzza’
[smell], ‘aspetto terribile’ [terrible appearance], ‘bruttezza’ [ugliness],
15 See also Leder (1999, p. 205). ‘As I eat, the thickness of the flesh which separates self
from world melts away. No longer perceived across a distance, the world dissolves into my
own blood, sustaining me from within via its nutritive powers. It is through visceral, not
just perceptual, exchange that the total interpenetration of body and world is realised.’
178 E. BOND
Scego 2005b, p. 31) and has a physical reaction of disgust when she tries
to eat it. Her legs begin to tremble, her pulse racing, and she vomits
her typically Western breakfast of milk, cereal and apple, before she can
even attempt to swallow the inexpertly boiled sausage. This thus prevents
any ‘violation of the body envelope’, as disgust functions as a ‘guardian
of the body, social and moral order’ (Rozin et al. 2009, p. 12). This is
seemingly a rejection (as in ‘Dismatria’) of privileging either one of the
monocultural components of her mixed identity, Somali and Italian. And
by the conclusion of the story, the narrator seems to find a sense of joy
and fulfilment in her dual heritage, accepting the coexistence of both the
traditions of her Somali upbringing alongside the Italian cultural context
in which she has grown up.
*****
In Amara Lakhous’ writing, on the other hand, we might speak
instead of patterns of consumption that remain resolutely ‘unhomely’, or
estranged. This is perhaps because we are dealing here with an entirely
different set of modes of mobility and movement. Scego’s characters
(as Ali Farah’s and Kuruvilla’s alike) are not migrants—they are Italian
second generation citizens, who might well experience an identity cri-
sis of assimilation or identification, but they certainly do not suffer the
dramatic, first-hand issues provoked by forced exile, disadvantage and
social isolation that the refugees and other migrants in Lakhous’ textual
world undergo. The Iranian refugee in Scontro di civiltà per un ascen-
sore a Piazza Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza
Vittorio), Parviz, has a visceral reaction to Italian food in general, and
reacts in a particularly violent manner to pizza, the sight of which makes
him furious as well as nauseous. On the metro, he says, ‘ho visto una
ragazza italiana che divorava una pizza grande come un ombrello. Mi
è venuta la nausea e per poco non vomitavo!’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 11).
‘I saw an Italian girl devouring a pizza as big as an umbrella. I felt so
sick to my stomach I almost threw up! […] It really was a disgusting
sight’ (Lakhous 2008, p. 13). This extreme reaction of disgust ties into
Lupton’s view of taste as ‘both an aesthetic and a moral category’, which
can be used as a ‘means of distinction, a way of subtly identifying and
separating’ (Lupton 1996, p. 95). We learn that Parviz’s distaste is tied
up with an embodied nostalgia for the Iranian food that he used to cook
in his old pre-migration profession as a chef, and thus that his disgust for
new, ‘foreign’ food functions as a mechanism of denial and repression
of past loss and trauma (Rozin et al. 2009, p. 17). This nostalgia, and
the specific fact of missing his family, makes him turn to the overcon-
sumption of wine in the hope of forgetting: ‘solo le lacrime e queste
bottiglie di Chianti spengono questo fuoco della nostalgia’ (Lakhous
2006, p. 19). ‘Only tears and these bottles of Chianti put out the fires of
longing’ (Lakhous 2008, p. 18). The preparation of Iranian food takes
on a mythical quality for Parviz even in Italy, and the smells of cooking
help him to forget where he is: ‘il profumo si trasforma in incenso, ed
è questo che mi fa ballare e cantare come un derviscio […] la cucina si
trasforma in una trance sufi’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 20), ‘the perfume of the
spices is transformed into incense, and this makes me dance and sing like
a dervish […] In a few minutes the kitchen is in a Sufi trance’ (Lakhous
2008, p. 19). In both these ways, therefore, food helps him to formulate
a complete rejection of his new (Italian) reality as well as a determination
to continue living in the past, elsewhere. And when his asylum request
is refused by the immigration authorities, he sews up his own mouth in
a further absolute refusal of Italian society (Lakhous 2006, p. 25). In
this way, if Ogden posits eating as a ‘communicative act’ (Ogden 2003,
p. 65), then Parviz waives the right to his ‘capacity for self-expression
through the mute action of eating choices’ (Furst 1992, p. 6) within his
new community; first by rejecting intake, and then by physically suturing
the channel of his mouth shut. In a way, we could identify this sort of
‘deviant’ eating (in terms of starvation) as a ‘vehicle for self-assertion’, a
‘rebellion against a dominant ethos unacceptable to the persona’ (Furst
1992, p. 5).
But the immigrants in Lakhous’ novel also react in negative bod-
ily ways to the over consumption of the newly experienced Italian cui-
sine. Maria Cristina, the Peruvian ‘badante’ (careworker) has blown up
‘like a hot-air balloon’ (Lakhous 2008, p. 20) ‘gonfiata come una mon-
golfiera’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 21), since her arrival in Italy, thanks to the
dissatisfaction and loneliness she experiences there. Likewise, the protag-
onist, Ahmed, has also gained weight due to his addiction to pizza—he
is described as being a ‘tossicodipendente’ (addict), stating that pizza
is his ‘droga’ (drug) (Lakhous 2006, p. 33; 2008, p. 28). ‘Non posso
farne a meno. […] La pizza si è mescolata con il mio sangue e così sono
diventato un alcolizzato di pizza e non di vino. Fra poco mi scioglierò
nella pasta e diventerò a mia volta una pizza’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 33). ‘I
can’t do without it. […] Pizza is mixed with my blood – I’ve become
an alcoholic of pizza, rather than wine. Soon I’ll soften into dough and
180 E. BOND
become, in my turn, a pizza’ (Lakhous 2008, p. 28). This is not a happy

fusion, but rather an assimilation, an incorporation of the individual into
the host culture in a manner that seems pathological, undesired and
unregulated.
As other manifestations of ‘disorderly’ eating, though, could the expe-
riences of these characters somehow ‘represent the last protest left to the
socially disempowered and, at the same time, paradoxically, a means for
them to attain a kind of domination’? (Furst 1992, p. 6) For although
gaining weight and dieting are habitually described through the nega-
tive use of a hyperbolic vocabulary of battles being inevitably lost, a
process of fighting, or a catastrophe (Gailey 2014, p. 2), in these cases
we might also see the taking on of bodily fat as a matter of choice, or
agency. Indeed, as Braziel and LeBesco state: ‘fat is a subject-marking
experience over which we are perceived to have some degree of control
(unlike gender or race, which are commonly – though mistakenly – taken
to be fixed, stable identifiers)’ (2001, p. 3). Fat is also thought of as
the surface representation of a subject’s inner issues and the ‘corpulent
body as an encoded surface that signifies the subtext of the psyche, mak-
ing fat “symptom-somatic”’ (Braziel and LeBesco 2001, p. 3). Indeed,
excess weight possesses a range of metaphorical value that cultures var-
iously assign to it: ‘Fat equals reckless excess, prodigality, indulgence,
lack of restraint, violation of order and space, transgression of boundary’
(Braziel and LeBesco 2001, p. 3). And as with the experience of preg-
nancy and the trans-gender embodiments analysed in previous chapters,
the fat subject similarly oscillates between twin poles of hyper- and in-
visibility. While the needs, desires and lives of fat subjects are overlooked,
their excessive physical occupation of space means that they are often
subject to heightened scrutiny or attention. ‘Fat presents an apparent
paradox because it is visible and dissected publicly; in this respect, it is
hypervisible. Fat is also marginalized and erased; in this respect, it is hyper-
invisible’ (Gailey 2014, p. 7).
Like race, fat can mean different things at different times and in dif-
ferent places, depending on how bodies are variously judged, positioned,
and valued. In a postmodern Western context, fat is seen as ‘repul-
sive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene, and above all as something to lose’
(Braziel and LeBesco 2001, p. 2). Yet the flexibility in the metaphorical
value of fat bodies can mean that it functions as something ‘revolting’ in
both senses of the word: both as something that might cause reactions of
disgust, but also as something that designates a bodily rebellion:
If we think of revolting in terms of overthrowing authority, rebelling, pro-

testing, and rejecting, then corpulence carries a whole new weight as a
subversive cultural practice that calls into question received notions about
health, beauty, and nature. We can recognize fat as a condition not simply
aesthetic or medical, but political. (LeBesco 2001, p. 75)
Maria Cristina is always described within the narrative as being severely

overweight, even though she states that she was thin when she first
arrived in Rome, and her weight gain is tied up with the unhappiness and
loneliness that she suffers as an isolated careworker: ‘divoro grandi quan-
tità di cioccolato’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 94); ‘I devour huge quantities of
chocolate’ (Lakhous 2008, p. 68). Her eating excess is also tied up with
a nostalgia for belonging, and is exacerbated on her days off, when she
goes to join the rest of the Peruvian community near the main railway
station:
Vado alla stazione Termini dove si incontrano gli immigrati peruviani […]
Saluto e bacio tutti anche se non li ho mai visti prima, poi mi siedo sul
marciapiede e divoro i cibi peruviani, il riso con pollo e il lomo saltado e
il sibice. Parlo per ore, parlo più di quanto ascolto […] mi aggrappo alle
bottiglie di birra e di pisco per mettermi al riparo da quella tempesta di
tristezza. (Lakhous 2006, p. 91)
I go to the station where the Peruvian immigrants gather: I greet
them with a kiss even if I’ve never seen them before, then I sit on the
sidewalk and eat Peruvian food, rice with chicken and lomo saltado and
ceviche. I talk for hours, I talk more than I listen […] I cling to the
bottles of beer and Pisco to shelter myself from that storm of sadness.
(Lakhous 2008, p. 66)
Maria Cristina’s appetites are unregulated also in terms of drinking,

compulsive chatter and sexual activity, as though her excessive behav-
iour allows her a presence (also an augmented physical presence, criti-
cally) that as an undocumented, normatively invisible migrant, she may
not habitually possess. This paradigm might remind us of the gargan-
tuan character of Dog-Woman in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry,
who uses her size in order to exercise influence and control over external
events and other people. ‘I was fat because I wanted to be bigger than all
the things that were bigger than me. All the things that had power over
me. It was a battle I intended to win’ (Winterson 1989, p. 141). In this
case, weight gain allows the subject to create something akin to a female
182 E. BOND
alter ego that does not disappear when the excess flesh is lost, allow-
ing her to reconjure the positively connoted force and power that her
past fatness afforded her: ‘I called on [her] when I felt myself dwindling
away through cracks in the floor or slowly fading in the street. Whenever
I called on her I felt my muscles swell and laughter fill up my throat’
(Winterson 1989, p. 142). In the same way, food for Maria Cristina in
Scontro di civiltà becomes a weapon, and her fat like an armour against
fear and loneliness. Weight gain here constitutes a bodily rebellion
against a perceived lack of agency in her undocumented situation, her
otherwise silenced status as rape victim, subject to exploitation at work
and exclusion from Italian society.16 This same sort of traumatic trans-
formation can also be seen running through Roxane Gay’s recent mem-
oir Hunger, where the Haitian-American writer details her compulsive
weight gain after suffering a horrific sexual attack as a child. Gay states: ‘I
ate because I understood that I could take up more space. I could become
more solid, stronger, safer’ (Gay 2017, p. 13, emphasis added).
5.3 Hard Bodies
Indeed, an analogous pathway towards forming or moulding the body
into a kind of armour or defence is to be found in practices of muscle
training or cosmetic surgery. These kinds of metamorphosis and trans-
formation of corporeal substance also make recourse to processes of
hardening, rather than merely increasing heft or bulk. This is particu-
larly interesting for a discussion that involves mobility and migration,
for as Coelsch-Foisner has pointed out: ‘hardness (is) an aesthetic cate-
gory suggesting contours, outlines, and boundaries’ (2011, p. 22). The
importance of such borders recalls the idea underpinning Kristeva’s the-
ory of abjection, that borders ensure survival, and can therefore function
to shore up identities in crisis (Kristeva 1982). This can function on both
an individual as well as a national level, and the parallels between the two
have been noted in turn by Ralph J. Poole. Poole suggests that images
of muscular, athleticized bodies can function to ‘counteract fears of a
16 Mar also puts on weight for the same reasons in Oltre Babilonia, though the conflict
here is played out here along family lines, between mother and daughter: ‘era ingrassata per
farle vedere che anche lei, sua figlia, la figlia nera, occupava uno spazio’ [She put on weight
in order to show her that she, her daughter, her black daughter, also occupied a space.]
(Scego 2008, p. 74).
feminized national body’ and to embody an ‘ideal that imagine(s) the

iconic body as white, male, hard and efficient’.17 Indeed, if masculinity is
‘socially etched on the body’ (Klein 1993, p. 17), then bodybuilding and
muscle training allow for the subject to practise self-control as well as to
self-create, meaning that the body itself is envisaged as a product, and
the subject as involved in active processes of self-production (see Grosz
1994, p. 143). This is a highly self-referential process, where the subject
is engaged in a sort of battle with him (or her) self, a battle of conflict-
ing body-images and image-bodies. But this battle for might and mus-
cle is primarily fought for visual or aesthetic rather than physical motives,
and Joerg Scheller has emphasized the ‘intentional or auctorial aspects
of bodybuilding’, as the gym-developed body holds the precondition for
strength but this physical capacity is nonetheless subordinated to the aes-
thetics of power (Scheller 2011, p. 219). This kind of body modification
thus repeats the emphasis also found in previous chapters on practices of
self-absorption, attention and care. ‘In fact, the bodybuilder is a museum
of the body, a body as artwork, a body curator and a body conservator in
one person’ (Scheller 2011, p. 221).
Arti, the protagonist of Ornela Vorpsi’s eponymous short story
(2010b), suffers from a psychological disturbance that derives from his
perception of his own mirror image, and causes him to be prone to vio-
lent episodes, particularly against his mother. His grandfather is thus
charged with administering sedative-type medicines to him that are hid-
den in cakes, causing him to gain weight and sleep most of the day, ‘la
pelle gli pendeva flaccida e il suo bel sorriso era sgretolato dallo zuc-
chero’ [his flesh hung flaccid and his lovely smile had been demolished
by sugar] (Vorpsi 2010b, p. 46). Arti soon discovers the deception and
decides to rehaul his physical appearance. ‘A un tratto si alzò, calmo,
risoluto, si passò le mani sui pantaloni e disse: “Farò vedere a tutti come
nel giro di due mesi, ripeto, solo due mesi!, diventerò asciutto, solo nervi
e muscoli, sarò la vostra invidia, ridete pure!”’ [All of a sudden he stood
up, looking calm and resolved, smoothed his hands over his trousers and
said “I’ll show you all, within two months – I repeat, two months! –
I will become lean, just nerves and muscles, you might laugh now but
you’ll be jealous!”] (Vorpsi 2010b, p. 47). Arti’s resolution to ‘rifarsi’
(a verb which holds the double meaning of both reinventing oneself
17 Poole (2011, p. 11). This builds on Sara Ahmed’s discussion of the affective properties
of hard and soft body representations in The Cultural Politics of Emotions, see p. 161 above.
184 E. BOND
and getting even, getting one’s own back), is successful, and soon he is
once again ‘snello e muscoloso, i suoi movimenti avevano guadagnato
qualcosa di scattante e rapace, forza maestosa’ [slim and muscular, his
movements had developed a rapidity, a rapacious, majestic force] (Vorpsi
2010b, p. 47). Arti is proud of his transformation, he wants to per-
form and display his new body, which has been transformed into a vehi-
cle for his new masculinity, as well as for ‘pleasure and self-expression’
(Featherstone 1991, p. 170): ‘sfoderava i muscoli atteggiandosi come i
body builder alla televisione, sotto la maglina consumata della canottiera
splendevano gli addominali a tartaruga’ [He would unsheath his muscles,
posing like a body builder on television, his six pack shining through his
worn t-shirt.] (Vorpsi 2010b, p. 48). His final statement is an illustration
of his understanding of bodybuilding and muscle definition as a means
to demonstrate his own self-control, and possession of his own body
project: “Io sono volontà e talento!” [“I am will and talent!”] (Vorpsi
2010b, p. 48).
These depictions of Arti’s transformed, muscular body take us back
to the introduction of this chapter, and the idea put forward by Badiou
of the rip as referring to an event which comes to signify a rip in the
fabric of being, or in the social order more generally—an event which
can be both traumatic and transformative. Because the ‘rip’ here can also
refer to the terminology of ripping muscles in bodybuilding projects. To
be ripped is understood to mean having well-defined or well-developed
muscles, with the emphasis on the clarity and visibility of the muscles
rather than their size. Ripped in this sense thus refers to the way that
the muscles and veins of bodybuilders with very little subcutaneous fat
appear to ‘rip’ through their skin. And ripped can also be a synonym for
‘cut’, as this description of the 1974 Mr. Universe winner Louie Ferrigno
demonstrates with astonishing attention to detail: ‘all of him cut to
shreds; lacerated, the skin beaten and hacked away so that only sinews
and tendons and veins and striations and unbespeakable musclemuscle-
muscle remained’ (Kay 1974).
The element of destruction (rather than construction) within the sub-
ject’s bodily transformation described here can be located in another of
Vorpsi’s stories in the same collection, ‘Piccola vita d’uomo’ (2010a).
Here, the protagonist Gazi, his ‘muscoli prepotenti di virilità’ [muscles
loaded with virility] (Vorpsi 2010a, p. 27), is desperate to leave Albania
and migrate over the Adriatic sea to Italy.
Voleva essere bello per questo futuro impossibile, perciò ogni giorno si
allenava nel suo appartamento: quattrocento, cinquecento addominali,
scolpiva le spalle, gonfiava i bicipiti. Sopra la porta della camera aveva mon-
tato una sbarra di ferro che serviva a esercitare tutti i movimenti utili all’es-
tetica. (Vorpsi 2010a, p. 29)
[He wanted to be handsome for this impossible future, so he trained
every day in his apartment: four hundred, five hundred sit-ups, he sculpted
his shoulders, exaggerated his biceps. Above the door of his bedroom he
had put up an iron bar which he used to carry out all the necessary aes-
thetic movements.]
Gazi’s physical efforts pay off and he is soon successful in both his corpo-
real development as well as his aim to reach Italy. Yet his appearance on
his infrequent return visits to Albania show that he has not managed to
maintain his peak physical condition, in fact, his migration seems to have
led to him physically wasting away. ‘Tornava a Tirana di rado solo per
abbracciare la madre […] Si vestiva con jeans capitalisti, profumava stra-
niero, si era lasciato crescere i capelli e i suoi muscoli erano deperiti, sciu-
pati’ [He returned to Tirana rarely, just to embrace his mother. He wore
capitalist jeans, and smelt foreign; he had let his hair grow and his mus-
cles had wasted away, ruined.] (Vorpsi 2010a, p. 33). Though the rea-
sons for his physical debilitation are not made explicitly clear within the
narrative, the negative transformation he undergoes evokes some consid-
eration of the hardships of migration, the dangers in crossing borders,
that are inherently contained in such a personal morphology. As Gail
Weiss explains: ‘accepting the possibility of radical bodily transformation
involves a corresponding destabilization of the body as a given’ (Weiss
1999, p. 74). Such transformations or morphologies based on fantasies
or self-projections (that might be even further destabilized by the soci-
etal and cultural restraints encountered through mobility) are revealed as
perilous and even fatal.
One time, Gazi is due back in Tirana for a visit but never arrives; his
documents are found on board the ship, but his physical person has mys-
teriously disappeared mid-ocean. The narrator has an unusual explana-
tion for this. ‘Gazi era stato divorato dai sogni […] era diventato molto
bello. Allora i sogni si svegliarono, e come donne gelose in preda alla
vendetta, nella notte dell’oltremare lo divorarono senza lasciare nem-
meno una briciola del suo corpo’ [Gazi had been devoured by dreams,
he had become extremely handsome. Then the dreams awoke, and
186 E. BOND
like jealous women in the grip of a vendetta, in the overseas night they
devoured him without leaving even one morsel of his body.] (Vorpsi
2010a, p. 34). The reversal of devouring here interests me: rather
than the practices of excess consumption that saw characters like Maria
Cristina devouring food products in order to occupy more space (physi-
cal and symbolic), here the body itself has been devoured, consumed by
an excess of desire. The inscribing of the body, perhaps the belief in its
underlying inadequacy (if, as Foucault suggests, it can be transformed
and ‘improved’, 1995, p. 136), has fed into a fiction of self-creation that
was proved to be nothing more than the ‘myth of a self-created artwork
of self’ (Scheller 2011, p. 227). Through Gazi’s disappearance, we can
thus also understand Vorpsi’s depictions of bodybuilding to be ‘self-
referential, post-ideological, extreme,’ and as Christiane Kruse states, a
practise that both crosses borders, and simultaneously closes gaps (cit.
Scheller 2011, p. 228). There is, thus, a danger in such metamorphic
body modifications, since the body, when presented as an ‘“etch-a-
sketch” for a complex set of symbols, can be so constructed and pre-
sented as to give the appearance of hegemonic masculinity with nothing
behind it’ (Klein 1993, p. 18, emphasis added). This emptiness recalls
what might be termed a kind of extreme cyborg-hacker practice, if we
understand the cyborg project to be involved in the pulling, hacking,
and ripping apart of complex sets of social identities. The figure of the
depleted or disappeared migrant bodybuilder in Vorpsi’s work thus adds
new meaning to Haraway’s sense of the cyborg as the ‘amalgamation of
complicated histories of violence, socialization, and the internalization of
the oppression that surrounds us’ (Mak 2010).
*
This element of risk and danger in the alignment of extreme corporeal
morphology with trans-national migration is also evident in another of
Vorpsi’s short stories in the same collection, ‘Della bellezza’ [On Beauty]
(2010c). The cultural implications of the cosmetic surgical procedures
that the character of Lolly undergoes here can be aligned with the paral-
lel practices of bodybuilding analysed above, following Elizabeth Grosz’s
analysis.
Makeup, stilettos, bras, hair sprays, clothing, underclothing mark women’s

bodies, in ways which hair styles, professional training, personal grooming,
gait, posture, body building, and sports may mark men’s. There is nothing
natural or ahistorical about these modes of corporeal inscription. […] (T)

hey make the flesh into a particular type of body. (Grosz 1994, p. 142)
Lolly is a ‘ragazza immagine’ (which translates roughly as a promotional

model, who is paid to make appearances at nightclubs), the embodiment
of the ‘potenza cieca della bellezza’ [blind power of beauty] (Vorpsi
2010c, p. 58), a beauty so dangerous that the narrator believes it can
make the beholder ill (‘ferire’, ‘ammalare’), and cause the subject them-
selves to die. Lolly herself dies at twenty-seven, a death that belies her
extreme appearance of self-constructed health and beauty. The narrator
speaks in wondered tones of:
il corpo biondo di Lolly disciplinato dalle ore in palestra fino ai minimi

dettagli, i suoi capelli platino, lucidi, il naso perfetto inventato dalla chiru-
gia estetica, gli occhi maliziosi, il sorriso che la sapeva lunga sugli uomini e
sulla vita, i tacchi alti. […] I suoi splendidi seni di silicone. (Vorpsi 2010c,
p. 62)
[Lolly’s fair-skinned body, honed to the tiniest detail from hours spent
in the gym, her shiny, platinum blonde hair, nose perfected by plastic sur-
gery, mischievous eyes, smile that revealed all her experience of men and
life, her high heels and splendid silicone breasts.]
Lolly also worked as a porn actress post-migration, thus succeeding

in creating economic value and pathways to desire through her own
body modifications (and reminiscent of Princesa’s transition analysed
in Chapter 3). ‘Aveva costruito ogni dettaglio, alla sua carne aveva
dato le forme del desiderio; dove la natura non aveva dato il meglio, lei
aveva rimediato’ [She had constructed every detail, moulded her flesh
in accordance with desire; where nature had fallen short, she had put
things right.] (Vorpsi 2010c, p. 63). Lolly has thus resolved the ‘tension
between the imperfection of the body in itself and the idealized body’
(Mirzoeff 1995, p. 19) through artificial means, but in so doing, has
lost control of her body project, and perhaps also the ‘identity functions’
that it communicated (see Featherstone 1991). As Mirzoeff warns: ‘Your
body is not itself. Nor, should I add, is mine. It is under siege from the
pharmaceutical, aerobic, dietetic, liposuctive, calorie-controlled, cyber-
netic world of postmodernism’ (1995, p. 1).
The message that these texts contain is, then—simply put—that
bodies operating within a new globalized world of postmodernity have
188 E. BOND
become potential conduits or pathways towards the achievement of

new, transformative identity projects, projects that are in themselves
capable of adapting and responding to, but also of subverting, socio-
cultural narratives of belonging and symbolic value. But we have also
seen that this dismembering of personal canons of belonging and value
can be dangerous in contemporary times, and the body projects that
outwardly express such morphological transformations can often be
subject to additional tensions introduced by processes of mobility and
movement. On a grander scale the postmodern era is often painted as
suffering from the erosion of grand political narratives and certainties,
and from the dissolution of traditions, losses that lead on an individual
level to ontological insecurity and a reflexive concern with identity and
the body. In contemporary times, therefore, ‘we have become respon-
sible for the design of our bodies’ (Giddens 1991, p. 102). But—as
we have seen—assuming sole responsibility for one’s own body and
body-image may well be as potentially weakening for the subject as it
is empowering. And, in narratives such as those by Vorpsi, Lakhous,
Chandra, Ali Farah and Scego analysed above, the uncertainties that
certain body transformations trigger appear to be further exacerbated
by the uneven, commodity-centred dynamics of trans-national migra-
tion and mobility.
5.4 Conclusions
In the narratives of disordered consumption and excessive bodily disci-
pline analysed above, I have highlighted elements of transformation and
transmogrification within ongoing corporeal projects that are at once
deeply destabilizing, as well as revelatory of the underpinning dynamics
and tensions of the postmodern age of mobility. To borrow Kaufman’s
words, my focus here has been on uncovering ways that the subjects of
various trans-national texts use the body ‘as a means of complicating
and overthrowing identity’ (1999, p. 142), as well as how the narratives
themselves work towards complicating and overthrowing preconceptions
and prejudices around subjectivities that may be racialized and otherwise
othered through patterns of migration or movement. The analogous
processes of identity fragmentation that postmodernism has ushered in
afford such subjects the chance to subsequently remodel and augment
their bodies, making use of available technologies that range from the
simple to the advanced:
With the appropriate contact lenses, eye colour can be changed to match
your clothes. Medical techniques allow thousands of people to live with
someone else’s vital organs replacing their own malfunctioning parts. In
less radical fashion, it is common throughout the West for people to con-
trol and change the shape of their bodies by dieting, exercise and body
building. (Mirzoeff 1995, p. 27)
The emphasis on becoming that is inherent in such postmodern

body projects also aligns with Braidotti’s definition of a ‘sustainable’,
‘enfleshed’ nomadic subject as ‘an in-between: a folding-in of external
influences and a simultaneous unfolding-outwards of affects. A mobile
entity, in space and time’ (Braidotti 2006, p. 135). Yet as we have seen,
such ‘nomadic’ transformations are painful, often disfiguring (even fatal),
and in the texts analysed above figure most often as a forced response
to the challenges mounted by dynamics of mobility. And such changes
can lead to further ‘pain’, since enacting such radical transformations
of the body may weaken the concept of fixed or solid bodily identity in
a way that can be deeply damaging to subjectivity: ‘the bodily surface,
and the complex montage of organs that composes it, is thus reduced to
pure surface, exteriority without depth, a moveable theatre of the self’
(Braidotti 1994, p. 50).
I want to conclude, then, that the kind of body transformations exam-
ined in this chapter are most usefully seen as strategic deviations, rather
than simple expressions of personal agency. Such transformations might
even be seen as deviant themselves, more as modes of trespass, or trans-
gressions of societal norms. And where ‘agency’ emerges is precisely in
the representation of the bodily image in the texts analysed. As one com-
mentator has remarked in reviewing Gay’s Hunger:
It is, however, the story of a different kind of triumph, a narrative one.

Gay wrestles her story from the world’s judgment and misrecognition and
sets off on a recursive, spiralling journey to rewrite herself. […] It dawns
on you that the writing itself is a reclaiming, an act of rehumanization.
(Chocano 2017)
Agency is not to be located in the action of altering the body project,

then, but rather in the ‘logic of representation’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 49),
in the triumph of the body-image as a represented object, as a visuali-
zation. I locate this sense of Deleuzian becoming in the act of writing
190 E. BOND
itself, as an opportunity for the ‘affirmation of positivity of difference,

meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation’ (Braidotti
1994, p. 111). If here such transformations have been identified within
the impetus to alter the size, shape and surface of the body, then they
still function in similar ways to those analysed in previous chapters, as
corporeal projects with hitherto unelaborated latencies and possibilities
(Grosz 1999, p. 9). Such latencies cast these stories into the realm of
what Grosz has termed ‘out of joint’ time (referring back to Hamlet), ‘a
positive leap into the unknown, time of subjugated positions, a time in
which that which has been precluded, subordinated, can flourish’ (Grosz
1999, p. 8).
In this ‘out of joint’, postmodern time, attending to one’s own body
project, regardless of the external impetus, can be seen as a sort of self-
care, which—as Sara Ahmed has claimed—operates as a kind of warfare
within a system where certain bodies are marginalized, rendered invis-
ible, or hyperscrutinised. Selfcare in this sense is how ‘to care for one-
self: how to live for, to be for, one’s body when you are under attack’
(Ahmed 2014). This conception of selfcare is by no means a sign of
indulgence, softness, or yielding, but is instead ‘about finding ways to
exist in a world that is diminishing’ (Ahmed 2014). The impetus here
is a response to the call to be inventive in protest against a system that
discriminates. In Gay’s work, as well as in the trans-national texts ana-
lysed in detail in the chapter, this call to invent has been answered in
narrative form. Yet such warfare can be located beyond the textual, in
other material forms of selfcare, such as those that I anticipated in the
opening comments to this chapter. In another illuminating example of
this, Abdoullaye S., a 17-year-old asylum seeker from Ivory Coast who
was interviewed by VICE in summer 2017 while waiting for new iden-
tification documents to reach him in Sicily, explains how he succeeds in
expressing his identity through style and outfit choices. ‘Io attraverso i
vestiti cerco di ribadire la mia personalità, di far vedere chi sono. A pre-
scindere da un documento, da un foglio di carta. Un modo per dire:
“Sono Abdoullaye, sono questo.”’18 [I try to reaffirm my personality,
to show who I am, through clothes. Regardless of documents, pieces of
paper. It’s a way to say “I’m Abdoullaye, this is who I am.”] Bold, stylish
18 Abdoullaye S. (2017). Fashion also provided a platform for asylum seekers to be per-
ceived differently through the medium of clothes when a Pitti Uomo catwalk show in 2016
cast asylum seekers as models. See Stansfield (2016).
and inventive, Abdoullaye has carved out a space to express his individ-
uality, and thus also to recuperate a sense of self when so many of his
fellow asylum seekers are dehumanized by a system that holds them in
perpetual transit and denies them easy access to material aid and legal
recognition.19
Yet, on this note, it is essential to recognize that such processes and
projects of bodily transformation or reconstruction are not equally open
to everyone, nor will external scrunity always allow for their expression
to be positively viewed or connoted. Most obviously, this may be an issue
for racialized or differently able bodies (but the same structures of con-
trol operate for others, such as the obese and trans-gender persons that
the texts under consideration in this volume also depict). In the words
of Mike Featherstone: ‘Racialized bodies cannot be so easily reconsti-
tuted and made into a project; there is always the problem of visibility
and passing in which the incorporated history of bodies weighs down
the potential for action’ (Featherstone 2000, p. 5). The sorts of bodies
that Martin identifies as being seen as more rigid or unresponsive, less
flexible,20 also suffer notable exclusions within the patterns and pathways
of mobility more easily accessed by others. Indeed, migration journeys
today more often than not culminate in a sense of ‘stuckedness’ (see
Hage 2009) and are characterized by waiting. As Abdoullaye himself
puts it: ‘Nella situazione in cui mi trovo, quella di straniero in attesa dei
documenti, hai un sacco di tempo libero. Anzi, un sacco di tempo vuoto.
Non puoi fare nulla, è un tempo in cui è come se fossi nessuno. Soltanto
uno che aspetta.’ [In my situation, as a foreigner waiting for documents,
you have a lot of spare time. Actually, a lot of dead time. You can’t do
anything, it’s a time in which you become a nobody. Just someone who’s
waiting.] And, as well as an inability to move or become because of
external constraints, some bodies themselves might resist transformation,
or ‘resist the very reading of bodies as transformable’ (Ahmed and Stacey
2001, p. 8). Transformation might not always be possible or desirable,
19 In a similar fashion, the photographer Salvatore Di Gregorio undertook a photo-
graphic portrait series (‘Project Mirabella: Tales of Beauty’), in which he invited residents
of the female-only refugee camp in the Sicilian town of Mirabella Imbaccari to create hair
styles that they felt represented their status as refugees. See (Keefe 2016).
20 ‘Certain social groups may be seen as having rigid or unresponsive selves and bodies,
making them relatively unfit for the kind of society we seem now to desire’ (Martin 1994,
p. xvii).
192 E. BOND
and a different form of agency or resistance might be located instead in

processes of stasis or disappearance, as anticipated in the story of Gazi
mentioned above, and of Abdoullaye. This might apply because of the
subject’s race, gender, or ability status. As King has claimed: ‘Blackness
performs the direction of indirection, the mobility that is immobility, the
reorientation that is disorientation’ (King 2008, cit. Adey 2017, p. 11).
Such practices of indirection, immobility and disorientation will be the
subject of the final chapter, as we move on to explore representations of
spectral and absent figures and the significance of the gaps that they bore
and scratch into the narratives in question.
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CHAPTER 6
Absent Bodies, Haunted Spaces
6.1 Introduction
All the previous chapters in this volume have emphasized the body as an
active site of conduit: both in its crucial role of facilitating our reception
of information about the external world, and as itself a mode of com-
munication of personal information to the others we encounter. Yet as
Drew Leder observes in The Absent Body, in everyday life our experience
is more often characterized by the disappearance of the body from our
own awareness.
Human experience is incarnated. I receive the surrounding world through

my eyes, my ears, my hands. […] And it is via bodily means that I am
capable of responding. Yet this bodily presence is of a highly paradoxical
nature. While in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable
presence in our lives, it is also essentially characterized by absence. That is,
one’s own body is rarely the thematic object of experience.1
This is because when the body functions normally, it does not tend
to demand our active attention. Therefore, an absence of bodily self-
perception actually indicates an optimum state of health, and more
1 Leder (1990, p. 1). See also Gallagher’s work on the ‘absently available body’ (2004).
This lack of awareness is also highlighted in terms of the ‘doing’ of mobility by Adey (2017,
p. 174). ‘Be aware of the fact that you are rarely aware of your mobilities.’

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_6
198 E. BOND
generally a desirable state of being. Intriguingly, this can lead to us for-

getting about the material presence of the body, or even being una-
ware of its actual appearance: Leder further notes that a psychological
experiment showed that no fewer than nine out of ten people are inca-
pable of picking out an image of their own hands from a short series
of photographs (Leder 1990, p. 9). The question driving his investiga-
tion—why the body, as a ground of experience, might tend to recede
from direct experience—will inform the analysis of this final chapter,
but will also lead us to question where any textual remnants of that
bodily experience remain, and what effects these haunting leftovers
might have on the wider temporal-spatial axes of perception and expe-
rience of those who remain. In a more metaphorical sense, what can
the re-presentation of missing, haunting, ghostly, or absent bodies
tell us about the aims and scope of trans-national narratives? How can
such bodies most successfully be re-evoked through various modes of
creative practice, and what ethical issues are involved in doing so? In
order to carve out a response to these questions, this chapter will ana-
lyse both narrative texts and a variety of different artworks that seek to
respond to the tragedy of bodies lost at sea. My focus will be on the
Mediterranean as the primary site of disappearance and loss relating to
the Italian context, but prioritizing the networks of mobility implicated
within migration journeys to and across this sea will allow me to sketch
out an interconnected map of sites of violence worldwide (to include
Argentina, Tunisia, Albania, and Syria), at different historical points,
leading to the formation of networks of what De Cesari and Rigney,
among others, have termed ‘transnational memory’ (De Cesari and
Rigney 2014; Assmann 2014).
In order to interrogate the multiple meanings generated by such
absent bodies, and their re-emergence through creative practice, my anal-
ysis here will lean on the hauntologically inflected writings of Abraham
and Torok (1994), Butler (2004), Derrida (2006), Gordon (2008) and
others. The underlying idea that many of these works share—that of the
ghost as a sign of disturbance in the present, the return or irruption of
a past issue, trauma, or injustice that has not sufficiently been ‘worked
through’ or resolved, a remnant that evokes the lost bodies of people
from different times and spaces—has obvious implications for narrativiz-
ing representations of shipwrecks and losses of life caused by the ongoing
migration ‘crisis’. Particularly, the juxtaposition of the notion of ghosts as
‘things that have been overlooked, discarded, ignored, forgotten, and so
6 ABSENT BODIES, HAUNTED SPACES 199
on’ (Pile 2005, p. 19), and the consequent ethical injunction that Colin
Davis speaks of—in which the encounter with the ghost is symbolic of the
intrusion of the Other into our world, whose sudden presence marks us as
responsible for the person before us (in a Levinasian sense) (Davis 2007,
p. 9). This social, interpersonal aspect is also important for Leder’s analy-
sis of bodily experience: he is careful to draw a contrast between the terms
disappearance (as used above) and dys-appearance, which he posits as a
very different field of experience. ‘Dys-’, he points out, is a variant spelling
of the usual Latin root ‘dis’, which originally had the meaning of ‘away’,
‘apart’ or ‘asunder’. In states of pain, fatigue, or disability, the body or
a certain part of the body emerges as an alien presence (see Leder 1990,
p. 76). The dys-appeared body thus folds back in on itself, in an absence
of absence that equates to awareness. This self-awareness is also a socially
triggered process, and thus social modes of dys-appearance can lead to
the self experiencing the body as alien through the negatively or positively
appraising gaze of the other.
The normal body is the invisible body; it is a healthy body, untroubled by

illness, discomfort, or disability, which is furthermore socialized and nor-
malized to behave within the standards dictated by its sociocultural context
and to display a neutral physical aspect through a meticulous self-regula-
tion with regard to appearance and comportment within intersubjective
encounters. (Dolezal 2010)
These complex processes of bodily absencing seem to me to recall

the Derridean ‘spectrality effect’, which describes the ghost as inhab-
iting neither a state of being nor non-being, but the contemporaneity
of both (Derrida 2006, p. 48), since while the dys-appeared body is
experienced as absent, it is still physically present (in both senses of the
word). In the analysis to follow, I am interested in linking this notion
of haunted spatio-temporalities with Avery Gordon’s theorization of
the ghost not as a dead or missing person, but as a social figure, and
haunting as:
A story about what happens when we admit the ghost – that special
instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the
living, the past and the present – into the making of wordly relations
and into the making of our own accounts of the world. It is a case of
the difference it makes to start with the marginal, with what we normally
200 E. BOND
exclude or banish, or, more commonly, with what we never even notice.
(Gordon 2008, pp. 24–25)
This conception of haunting thus conjurs up those bodies that Judith

Butler has described as ‘ungrievable’, social figures that re-emerge pre-
cisely because they were regarded as absent or otherwise negated within
society at large during their lifetimes.2 These are bodies that haunt in ways
that can reveal powerful latent meanings in texts that deal with migration,
mobility and movement. For the ghost, as the migrant, is a figure able to
‘cross over’, one that marks a ‘space of dislocation […] where thresholds
can be crossed’ (Pile 2005, p. 139). In so doing, the ghost evokes other
times and spaces, triggering active processes of memory-work in the living,
and evoking the importance of bearing witness—particularly to ‘subaltern
groups, whose stories—those of the losers—are excluded from the dom-
inant narratives of the victors’ (Labanyi 2000, pp. 1–2). Indeed, Heonik
Kwon has gone as far as classifying ghosts as ontological refugees (2008).
Building on these initial observations, in the chapter that follows
I want to explore three, interrelated aspects of what we might come to
term a trans-national haunting. By this, I mean the ways in which all the
works to be analyzed here are ‘haunted’ by scenes or memories of vio-
lence, injustice or atrocities committed or experienced elsewhere. For
although Pile states (correctly, for the cultural imagination) that ‘ghosts
rarely move far from the places associated with death, with the site of loss,
trauma and injustice’ (2005, p. 131), those who survive and remember
do move, and are able to link sites, memories and losses in a ‘cosmopol-
itan’ network of remembering.3 The first of these will be the notion of
habitation, since migration journeys open up an interval (or ‘phantastic
corridor’) within the contours of belonging, and problematize notions of
‘being at home’. Above, I introduced the idea of spectrality as occupying
a position both inside and outside, embodying a presence and an absence
2 See Butler (2004, pp. 33–34). Or, indeed, in the case of the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina to
be discussed in this chapter, subjects were rendered ‘ungrievable’ because they were literally
made absent—forcibly disappeared and all traces of their lives erased.
3 Levy and Sznaider see cosmopolitanization in this sense as ‘not replacing national
memory cultures, but reconfiguring them’, and cosmopolitan memory as implying

‘some recognition of the history (and the memories) of the “Other”’ (Levy and
Sznaider 2011, pp. 465–467). Assmann also mentions the ‘Cosmopolitan Ethos’ of the
transnational turn (2014).
simultaneously, and suggested how this might allow for a liminal posi-
tioning of the subject between the two. Given the nature of my inquiry,
it is important to emphasize the possibility for plurality that is contained
within the spectral: as we saw in Gordon’s words cited above, ghosts
oscillate between the poles of past and present, here and there. And in the
same way that ghosts muddle boundaries of time and existence, migrants
or trans-national subjects are forced to straddle and problematize spatial
and temporal borders. For as Saybasili says, the ghost is an:
(U)ncanny stranger, who has a presence that persists and cannot be

effaced. This subject is therefore quite clearly related to borders and fron-
tiers, to migrants and diasporic communities, to the colonized, to political
refugees and to the consequent refiguring of notions of home and nation.
(Saybasili 2010, p. 322)
Building on this idea then, I will first locate a series of haunting trans-na-
tional inflections or habitations within the narrative language(s) employed
by the various writers included in my analysis, and relate them back to Sara
Ahmed’s emphasis on the role that affect plays in the formation of net-
works of belonging: where, in other words, a sense of ‘being at home’ is ‘a
matter of how one feels or how one might fail to feel’ (Ahmed 2000, p. 89).
The second thing I want to privilege within my discussion is the
notion of a narrative haunting itself, particularly in relation to the social
and historical effects I mentioned above. As Gordon states, haunting is
an ‘animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is
making itself known’ (Gordon 2008, p. xvi). This sense of ‘animation’
will allow me to look specifically at spectrality as a mediation technique;
a technique which allows narrative subjects to express experiences of
invisibility, dispossession, exploitation and repression, in a process of lin-
guistic borrowing, or what Derrida terms a ‘paradoxical incorporation’
(Derrida 2006, pp. 136–137). Aside from spanning multiple national
languages, all of the texts I will look at employ strategies of non-verbal
and extra-corporeal expression, and privilege textual gaps or deviations
as a way to fracture or subvert expectations of linguistic assimilation. The
first section of this chapter will conclude that such narratives, by inhabit-
ing a position both inside and outside the national (or indeed occupying
a space between the two), carve out their own place in spatial, tempo-
ral, and linguistic terms, through precisely such a narrative haunting.
This positioning then ultimately allows them to command attention and
demand change. For a ghost, as Gordon says, always carries a message,
202 E. BOND
and within that message, ‘what goes unsaid, that which is implied and
omitted and censured and suggested, acquires the importance of a
scream’ (Gordon 2008, p. 83).
The third element of my discussion will shift attention to the question
of how the loss or absence of the physical body not only affects patterns
of memory making, but also allows for the formation of new empathetic
networks of creative imagining within a new, trans-national context.
Concentrating on the adoption of a position of ‘by proxy’ witnessing (a
term that builds on the subtitle of Susan Gubar’s seminal work on the
Holocaust, or ‘remembering what one never knew’4), the narrative elab-
orations of absence I will look at point to the possibility of interweaving
memories of trauma across national boundaries as well as of indicating
strategies for their potential resolution through social and politically
motivated artistic actions. This ‘by proxy’ position allows for the juxta-
posing of contemporary portrayals of migration with the incomplete
repression of memories of political atrocities committed elsewhere, a jux-
taposition in which witnessing provides productive context and historical
resonance to contemporary migration stories and locates them within a
politicized context of global power relations which remain profoundly
unequal and unjust. In this sense, my conclusions will point to a poten-
tially positive sociological outlook, since ‘haunting, unlike trauma, is dis-
tinctive for producing a something-to-be-done’ (Gordon 2008, p. xvi).
The physical remnant of the body remains a key trope in my analysis,
whether it is present through loss, or imaginatively re-evoked in its absence.
As Derrida states, ‘for there to be a ghost, there must be a return to the body,
but to a body that is more abstract than ever’ (cit. Auchter 2014, p. 22). This
abstraction can give rise to a number of diverse substitutive or memorial strat-
egies in which objects on a small scale (such as mementoes, or photographs)
or on a large scale (such as sculptures, installations, or memorials) can act as
metonymic re-animations of the absent body. This slippage between absence
and presence is particularly important in discussions of the dead body: in
Auchter’s words, the corpse is a ‘peculiar phenomenon: it is both human and
thing, material and ghostly’, and she goes on to refer to Marilyn Ivy’s notion
of ghosts as ‘indicators that the structure of remembering (the dead) through
4 See Gubar (2006). The Italian translation of ‘by proxy’ (‘per delega’) recalls the narra-
tive witnessing of Nazi concentration camp victim voices assumed by Primo Levi in I som-
mersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved): ‘Parliamo noi in loro vece, per delega’ (Levi
2003, p. 65); ‘We speak in their stead, by proxy’ (Levi 1988, p. 64).
memorialisation is not completely effective’ (Auchter 2014, pp. 21, 27). Yet
linguistic re-evocations can be just as problematic—Davis gives good account
of the positions of different theorists on this count, where Agamben and De
Man see speaking for the dead as a potential theft, or a fiction, but Levinas
instead conceives of the dead as a site of signification because of the effect
they have on the uncomprehending survivors left behind: ‘death is both non-
sense and a breach which opens up sense to unsuspected possibilities’. In fact,
he carries on, ‘The dead still signify because they constitute me as survivor of
their death’ (Davis 2007, p. 117) And although Agamben might see the risk
for an imposition of meaning by the living onto the wordless dead, he also
flips the notion of proposopeia, and suggests that the dead acquire a differ-
ent form of agency through the speech of the living. ‘It is not the living who
ventriloquise the dead, but on the contrary the dead who speak through the
mouths of the living’ (Davis 2007, p. 121).
6.2 Linguistic Hauntings:
Specters of Nation Spaces
If ghosts muddle notions of (linguistic) agency and presence in this
way, then we can see this slippage as operating within a structure of
visibility that is conceived as a ‘complex system of permission and prohi-
bition, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness’
(Kipnis, cit. in Gordon 2008, p. 15), a description that might also recall
the various destabilizing functions of racial passing. Anxieties about
the ability of migrants (particularly Balkan, Albanian, Romanian, but
also North African subjects) to physically and or linguistically ‘pass’ as
Italians have been widely and productively explored in numerous nar-
rative and filmic works produced in the peninsula since the 1990s. Yet
they especially dominate the narrative corpus of the Algerian-born writer
Amara Lakhous, where themes of passing and performance play a crit-
ically important role.5 What is of particular interest to my analysis here
is the relationship forged between assimilation and agency, and specif-
ically, how characters like the protagonists of Lakhous’s novels Scontro
di civilità per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations over
an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio) and Divorzio all’islamica a viale Marconi
5 On this topic, see Spackman (2011). Some films that also deal with the notion of pass-
ing include Lamerica (dir. Gianni Amelio, 1994) and Io l’altro (dir. Mohsen Melliti, 2007).
204 E. BOND
(Divorce Islamic Style) perform a kind of liminal (one could say, indeed, a
spectral) mode of passing, thereby muddling fixed or received notions of
national and linguistic belonging. Both characters assume an expert lin-
guistic disguise: Algerian-born Ahmed in Italian (in Scontro di civilità),
and Italian-born Christian in Arabic (in Divorzio all’islamica), in order
to inhabit ‘other’ communities and successfully pass as ‘natives’. Ahmed’s
passing as the Southern Italian ‘Amedeo’ relies on other Italians’ igno-
rance and racializing conflations of the complex notion of a ‘pan-
meridionale’, or ‘southern’ identity.6 ‘Una sola volta gli ho sentito dire:
“Io sono del sud del sud”. Allora ho dedotto che Roma è sud, e le città
del sud d’Italia come Napoli, Potenza, Bari e Palermo sono l’estremo
del sud!’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 107). ‘Once I heard him say, “I’m from
the south of the south.” So I deduced that Rome is the south and the
cities of southern Italy like Naples, Potenza, Bari, and Palermo are the
extreme of the south!’ (Lakhous 2008, p. 77). Christian’s infiltration of a
Muslim community as ‘Issa’ is more complex, relying—as it does—on his
layered linguistic performance as a Sicilian, pretending to be a Tunisian
native who has spent time in Sicily and who now lives in Rome: a map of
mobility that leads to him falsely assuming a halting Italian and a double
cadence, as well as suspending learned grammatical rules.
(P)er sembrare credibile devo parlare un italiano stentato, e pure un po’

sgrammaticato. A volte mi capita di dimenticare la parte che sto inter-
pretando. Mi devo identificare nel personaggio di Issa, un immigrate tunis-
ino. Cerco di ricordare la parlata dei miei cognoscenti arabi, sopratutto di
quelli tunisini. Devo imitare anche il loro accento. L’ideale è parlare un
italiano con una doppia cadenza: araba, perché sono tunisino, e siciliana,
perché sono un immigrato che ha vissuto in Sicilia. (Lakhous 2010, p. 45)
(T)o seem credible I have to speak a laboured Italian, even a little ungram-
matical. Sometimes I forget the part I’m playing. I have to identify with
the character of Issa, a Tunisian immigrant. I try to remember how my
Arab acquaintances speak, especially the Tunisians. I even have to imi-
tate their accent. The ideal is to speak Italian with a dual cadence: Arab,
because I’m Tunisian, and Sicilian, because I’m an immigrant who has
lived in Sicily. (Lakhous 2012, p. 47)
6 On various ambiguously cast notions of Southern European identities, see (amongst
others): Dainotto (2007) and Balibar (2004). Balibar suggestively casts the situation of
immigrants in Europe as the ‘specter of an apartheid […] that concerns the populations of
the “South” as well as the “east”’ (Balibar 2004, p. 9, emphasis added).
As Barbara Spackman has argued, in a metaphorical sense both of these

characters embody Lakhous’s own ‘passing’ as an Italian writer who
deftly manages both standard and dialectal Italian and employs com-
plex intertextual references to Italian culture in his works in order to
prove the same expert sense of identity flexibility.7 Lakhous himself
also has a double cadence, therefore, in his self-positioning as an Italian
writer, at the same time as he undertakes practices of self-translation
into Arabic, thus straddling multiple national canons and respond-
ing to diverse reader expectations and modes of reception. In the same
way as a haunting, therefore, we could say that Lakhous’s passing indi-
cates, in Ahmed’s words, a willingness ‘always to pass through, or move
through, the stranger’s body’, which in turn provokes a crisis of reading
that allows the expression of a spatial stretch of mobility itself (Ahmed
2000, p. 133).
The muddled temporality of passing is also present in the lacuna or
gap that stands at the point of convergence between the narrative iden-
tities of the two protagonists, and particularly in the case of Ahmed/
Amedeo. ‘(I)n the temporal lag of passing for another, we have the
potential of a difference between an image that is already assumed in
and by a subject, and an image that is always yet to be assumed’ (Ahmed
2000, p. 127). The void of the trauma that Ahmed cannot voice is
located firmly in the past: his nostalgia for his lost home country,
which is painfully conflated with the murder of his fiancée Bagia back
in Algeria. ‘La mia memoria è ferita e sanguina, devo curare le ferite
del passato in solitudine. Peccato, Bàgia si fa viva solo negli incubi
avvolta in un lenzuolo macchiato di sangue. Oh, mia ferita aperta che
non guarirai mai!’ (Lakhous 2006, p. 158). ‘My memory is wounded
and bloody: I have to heal the wounds of the past in solitude. A
shame, Bagia shows up only in nightmares, wrapped in a bloodstained
sheet. Oh this open wound that will never heal!’ (Lakhous 2008,
p. 111). Yet the eruptions of this ill-repressed trauma return to haunt
Ahmed/Amedeo bodily, manifesting a trauma that he can only express
through intestinal problems, in a series of non-linguistic ‘ululati’
(howls) that he has to confine himself within locked, private space in
order to express.
7 Spackman (2011). This is explicitly legible in the reference to the detective novels of
the Milanese author Carlo Emilio Gadda in the title Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a
Piazza Vittorio, and to Pietro Germi’s 1961 film Divorzio all’italiana in the title Divorzio
all’islamica a viale Marconi.
206 E. BOND
Il problema è che lo stomaco della mia memoria non ha digerito bene

tutto quello che ho ingoiato prima di venire a Roma. La memoria è pro-
prio come lo stomaco. Ogni tanto mi costringe al vomito. Io vomito i
ricordi del sangue ininterottamente. Soffro di un’ulcera alla memoria.’ C’è
un rimedio? Sì: l’ululato! Auuuuuuuuuu… (Lakhous 2006, p. 156)
The problem is that the stomach of my memory hasn’t digested everything

I swallowed before coming to Rome. Memory is just like a stomach. Every
so often it makes me vomit. I vomit memories of blood non-stop. I have
an ulcer in my memory. Is there a cure? Yes: wailing! Auuuuuuuuu…
(Lakhous 2008, p. 109)
In this way, his linguistic haunt signals both the destabilizing of the sign
and a crisis in its meaning (Saybasili 2010, p. 323). His howls, and the
frequent ellipses which both punctuate and perforate the narrative, both
of which corrode the performed identity Ahmed/Amedeo has put into
place and the relationships he forms around this void, may thus remind
us of what Agamben has to say on the lacuna of silence:
And this is the sound that arises from the lacuna, the non-language that
one speaks when one is alone, the non-language to which language
answers, in which language is born. It is necessary to reflect on the
nature of that to which no one has borne witness, on this non-language.
(Agamben 1999, p. 38)
Ahmed/Amedeo did not witness the primal trauma of his fiancée’s mur-
der back in Algeria, and cannot express the traumatic effect it has had on
him in language (be that Italian or Arabic). In the map of his repression,
to remember in words ‘would be like having voices inside your head’
(Jameson, cit. Gordon 2008, p. 17).
Ahmed’s silence, the traumatic story which—in its absence—
demands a presence within the text, makes me wonder about the pro-
cess of assimilation he has deliberately undergone in order to ‘pass’ as the
Italian Amedeo. For the subject’s assimilation into the accent and expres-
sion of the other implies a further absence in language, a ‘losing of one-
self’ or, as Lacan says, the undergoing of a sort of phenomenal ‘fading’.8
8 Cit. Saybasili (2010, p. 333). Indeed, this is a narrative that is made up of other peo-
ple’s voices: a series of alternative and often conflicting accounts to which Ahmed/
Amedeo’s narrative (now ghostly in itself, since he lies inanimate in a coma in hospital)
serves as a punctuating counterpart.
In the extra-lingual howls which point at his affective spectrality, there-

fore, we can perhaps see Ahmed find a sense of ‘home’ for his narrative.
In Saybasili’s words, this is ‘registering silence as the marker of another
presence, a presence that adopts a voice that does not speak or utter words
and that does not participate in the official record’ (2010, p. 328). And to
conclude with Derrida, although ‘we can think “the Other” only through
its inaudible voices’ (Saybasili 2010, p. 328) there are narrative traces of
the non-linguistic that persist through Scontro di civiltà, precisely in the
form of the ‘ululati’ (wails) that ‘haunt’ the narrative and provide alter-
native, multiple account(s) of the truth. These spectral secrets form the
‘essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think
we know’ (Davis 2007, p. 11), and carry great importance for the work-
ings of narrative, since the mysteries of ghosts echo the fundamental
secrecy of literature itself.
*
Just as verbal and corporeal passing can be evoked by such narrative
acts of haunting, so modes of mobility and migration can more broadly
confound the suggested linearity of national and linguistic belonging in
similar ways. In these cases:
(G)eopolitical boundaries and territorial identities are deeply disturbed,

and what is called “home” becomes deeply unfamiliar. The conditions of
haunting emerge when the illusion of coherence, stability, homogeneity,
and permanence is faced with the shadowy reality of displacement, dislo-
cation, and unbelonging, with all the layers of diasporic formations and
migratory flows, with the crossover and overlap of cultures, and with the
hybrid identities and new ethnicities that are constantly being formed.
(Saybasili 2010, p. 329)
The flows and layers mentioned above in relation to multiple trans-

national movements reflect the biography of Ornela Vorpsi, who
migrated to Italy from Albania in 1991 at the age of 19. She stayed there
till 1997, when she moved to Paris, where she still lives today. Aside from
geographical dislocations, Vorpsi therefore also negotiates a complex web
of linguistic belonging and identity. It is interesting, then, that until the
publication of her most recent novella, she deliberately chose Italian as
her language of narrative creation, even though it was the one she ‘inhab-
ited’ for the least time. In linguistic as well as corporeal terms, Vorpsi
therefore embodies Saybasili’s definition of a refugee or immigrant.
208 E. BOND
‘His or her body, like that of a “ghost”, is not fixed into one identity, but
searches for a meeting point in various networks of identities. He or she
inhabits an extensive “relational geography” (2010, p. 332).
In an interview I conducted with Vorpsi a few years ago, I asked her
to reflect on her choice of Italian for the writing of her narratives. She
took pains to emphasize that writing in Italian afforded her a distance
from her childhood that she felt was fundamental. It made expression
less painful, allowed her to be more flexible with language, and to avoid
melodrama. To illustrate this, she gave the example of swear-words,
which she said in Albanian had such power that if someone were to curse
her in that language, she would feel as if she were being shot (‘fucilata’),
but that the same words lose their emotional power when voiced in for-
eign languages. As she says: “Ecco cosa vuol dire in effetti togliere, fil-
trare, sottrare il vissuto, l’infanzia” [This is what it means to remove,
filter and subtract your lived experience, your childhood] (Vorpsi 2013,
p. 217). The verbs Vorpsi uses in this quote (remove, filter, subtract)
point at an essentializing function of the foreign language, but also an
idea of self-censorship, a multiple string of absences that somehow still
persist as presences in her narratives. Perhaps illustrating this, the sto-
ries that she writes often feature dismembered voices, or voices from
beyond the grave, which afford them a sense of distance from ‘real life’
(as she says in La mano che non mordi, ‘Io vivo da fuori’ [I live outside,
or beyond] Vorpsi 2007, p. 58). But they provide also a concrete sense
of the haunting I have been talking about so far. There is one story in
particular that I want to reference in this regard, from her 2010 collec-
tion Bevete cacao van Houten!, ‘Io abito al quinto piano’ [I live on the
fifth floor]. Narrated by a female protagonist who recounts her own sui-
cide, the extra-corporeal presence initially suggests a position of agency
(following the deliberate act of taking her own life), but also affords her
both perspective and peace:
Finita la stanchezza, finite le insonnie. Sento il corpo leggero e non distin-

guo piú notte e giorno. Tutto è constante nei sentimenti. So cosa amo, cosa
non amo e sarà cosí per sempre. Il film l’ho lasciato eternamente in pausa,
interrotto nel momento che mi sembrava giusto. (Vorpsi 2010, p. 91)
[The tiredness, the insomnia, is over. My body feels light and I no longer
distinguish between day and night. My feelings are all constant. I know
what I love, what I don’t love, and so it will be forever. I have left the film
in an eternal state of pause, stopped at the moment I felt was right.]
Yet the fact that the narrative voice persists, again, willing an involvement
in life and a response from those still alive, perhaps suggests a desire for
self-assertion, recognition, and agency. The eternal state of pause suggests
a stasis that in turn recalls Hage’s conception of waiting, as indicating
‘that we are engaged in, and have expectations from, life’ (2009, p. 1), a
waiting that can be stubborn or persistent enough to even function as a
form of (political) resistance (Lakha 2009, p. 121). As she sees her own
body jostled and ignored in the ambulance on its way to the morgue, the
protagonist expresses a desire to be physically noticed, and recognized.
This paradoxical desire is also present in Vorpsi’s own status as an ‘out-
sider’ inhabiting Italian as a narrative language: a position that allows her
distance from her material, and thereby affords her greater perspective
(‘distanza dal vissuto’) (Vorpsi 2013, p. 211). Crucially, this distance is
created within the production of narrative itself (‘creata nel processo cre-
ativo, nella scrittura, per poter sopravvivere’), and allows her as a writer to
bring things to light, analyse them, dredge them from hidden depths, per-
form a postmortem of motivations (‘fare un’autopsia del perché’, Vorpsi
2013, p. 214). This privileged narrative position of observation, seen
when the narrator observes her own dead body lying on the pavement
from above, is also present in an earlier collection, Vetri rosa [Pink glass]:
Adesso che conosco la morte sono molto piú tranquilla di quanto fossi in
vita. La morte è pacifica, ti lascia l’animo in quiete e, se vuoi, puoi essere
un ottimo osservatore. Da morti non si ha piú paura di dire quello che si
pensa. Il pensiero è obiettivo perché si è distaccati dal terrestre. Sono un
perfetto spettatore.9
[Now that I know death I am much more at peace than when I was alive.
Death is peaceful, it leaves your mind at rest, and if you want, you can
be an excellent observer. You no longer have to be afraid of what you say
when you are dead. I am the perfect spectator.]
9 Vorpsi (2006, pp. 6–7). The perspective of the deceased narrator also frames Dones’
Sole bruciato, where Leila is able to watch her own body being photographed by the homi-
cide police (Dones 2001, p. 14). This bird’s eye position also plays with the names given to
Italy (‘Lassù’) and Albania (‘Laggiù’) within the narrative of Sole bruciato. Similarly, Igiaba
Scego’s multivoiced novel Rhoda is part narrated by the deceased, eponymous protagonist,
who on one occasion recounts her own exhumation and the defilement of her body by a
gang of youths in Mogadishu (Scego 2004, p. 34).
210 E. BOND
Vorpsi’s haunt thus allows her to be both present and simultaneously

apart, or asunder (in the sense of Leder’s dys-), within the Italian lan-
guage. Her first-person narrative assumes the position of a social voice:
producing its own temporality through addressing the reader directly,
thus setting up a dialogue which carries the impetus for ethical action,
through recognizing and acknowledging the Other. This becomes clear
if we read the above citation through Butler’s words: ‘I cannot muster
the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you”, by try-
ing to translate but finding that my own language must break up and
yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorienta-
tion and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again,
as that which we have yet to know’ (2004, p. 49).
**
The third work I want to turn back to in relation to such processes
of linguistic and narrative haunting is Cristina Ali Farah’s Madre piccola
(Little Mother). As we have seen in previous chapters, this is a com-
plex, polyphonic novel of autobiographical inspiration, which expresses
the complexities of a mixed heritage identity stretched across various
locations. This subjective map becomes drastically more acute when
the one key nexus location for all its characters, Mogadishu, now exists
only as a spectral void. The Somali capital has, at the time of Ali Farah’s
writing, been destroyed by the ravages of civil war—leaving it unvisit-
able and unrecognizable: a place that only exists in the past and that
therefore haunts the memory of its scattered diaspora. This is therefore
a reversal of the more usual formula in which ghosts ‘possess places’
(Pile 2005, p. 143), to one in which (the memory of) places them-
selves possess those who no longer have access to them. Related to
this, in a fascinating way, is the problematic relationship that the pro-
tagonist-narrator, Domenica Axad has with her Italian mother, and the
effects this conflict has on her own language use. We might remem-
ber the characterization of Mogadishu in fellow Italian Somali Igiaba
Scego’s work as female, ‘la rossa’ (the red), a city whose scent recalls
that of a vagina (see Scego 2004, p. 35; 2008, p. 64). It is therefore
telling that Domenica’s exile from the wartorn city triggers the inter-
ruption of her relationship with her mother, as if the rupture of one
maternal relation somehow caused an analogous rift in another. The
consequence of this rupture is that the two women cease to speak, and
moreover, Domenica falls into an all-encompassing silence. This is a
silence that is not described as traumatic, however, but as an ‘arma’ (Ali

Farah 2007, p. 252), or ‘weapon’ (Ali Farah 2011, p. 218): a voluntary,
and aware act.
Quando decisi […] di ignorare mia madre, cessi di parlare. […] Se c’era
qualcosa contro cui oppormi io smarrivo, deliberatamente, la parola.
Tuttavia, così come la perdevo, la recuperavo con altrettanta facilità. Il mio
non era un silenzio traumatico, era un silenzio volontario, consapevole.
(Ali Farah 2007, pp. 252–253)
When I decided […] to ignore my mother, I stopped talking. […] If there

was something I needed to fight against, I deliberately lost my voice. And
yet, just as easily as I lost it, I also got it back. Mine was not a traumatic
silence, it was a conscious, voluntary silence. (Ali Farah 2011, p. 218)
However, when people doubt her ability to speak Italian, the language of
her estranged mother, thereby mistakenly marking her as a linguistically
dispossessed migrant tout court (and thus removing her possibility for
expressive agency), she responds to the challenge by employing a delib-
erately convoluted, complicated use of her ‘mother tongue’, as a further
way of proving her ownership of the language. Yet it is revealing that she
does not voice this challenge, but rather writes it.
Scrivevo con le mie lettere fitte, usando consapevolmente parole desu-

ete e fuori dal commune […] voglio dimostrare fino a che punto riesco
ad arrivare con la lingua, voglio che tutti sappiano senz’ombra di dubbio
che questa lingua mi appartiene. (Ali Farah 2007, pp. 253–254, emphasis
added)
I wrote in my tiny handwriting, intentionally using rare and unusual

words […] I want to demonstrate how far I can stretch my language. I
want everyone to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this language
belongs to me. (Ali Farah 2011, p. 219)
As I have argued more in depth in Chapter 2, the agency involved in this

practice of writing is linked to the twin inscription of the protagonist’s
self-harming, which is similarly seen as an act of self-expression rather
than a sign of trauma. Indeed, it is the act of writing itself—the persis-
tent presence of words—which functions as a resolution of the protag-
onist’s narrative (and her self-expressed aim to become a ‘persona intera
212 E. BOND
e adulta’, Ali Farah 2007, p. 224; ‘whole, adult person’, 2011, p. 194).
As Doris Sommer has noted about bilingual code-switchers, they ‘mark
communication with a cut or a tear that produces an aesthetic effect and
than demonstrates the contingency of meaning explored in language phi-
losophy’ (Sommer 2014, p. 93). This can be seen through the reference
to the multiple languages that have fractured Domenica Axad’s linguis-
tic belonging through her lifetime and which lie latent in the text itself
through her reflections. Yet she makes it clear that they have also worked
to suture her passage through the Somali diaspora and now point to new
constellations of relationships and solidarity.
Anche il discorrere, il mio modo di parlare, è cambiato assai. Come

dicono, siamo spugne noi mescolati. Mescolati viaggiatori. Quante lingue
ho dovuto, ho volute imparare, qua e là, per entrare dentro la gente. (Ali
Farah 2007, p. 97)
Even the way I express myself, the way I speak, has changed considerably.
As they say, those of us of mixed blood are like sponges. Mixed travellers.
There were so many languages I had to learn, that I wanted to learn, in
one place or another, to get inside people. (Ali Farah 2011, p. 86)
And this suggestion of a positive outcome to be located in the open

multiplication of the haunting migrant voice brings us back to Derrida
in the conclusion to this first part of our discussion. For as Cheah has
explained, spectrality, in Derrida’s imagining, signals the possibility also
of integration and cross-inspiration.
This is because spectrality is the originary opening up of any present being

by and to the other. It is precisely this internal vulnerability of any present
being to alterity […] that allows something to alter, change, or transform
itself in time, or to be changed, transformed, or to be changed, trans-
formed, or altered by another in time. (Cheah 1999, p. 191)
Integration here is not equal to assimilation, since it demands a dia-

lectical process of recognition, and that is where the double presence
afforded by haunting is fundamental, I think, to an understanding of
the possibility of voicing migrant or trans-national identities within an
‘other’ national language. Language may well be argued to house and
express a national sense of identity, in a way that that system, or house

itself thus becomes a mechanism of representation, or a way to define
space. But given that very mechanism, a language must also bear witness
to what is silenced or silent. As Mark Wigley has put it,
By definition, only space can be haunted, and space is understood as that

which houses. After all, the word “haunting” is etymologically bound to
that of “house”. Haunting is always the haunting of a house. And it is not
just that some houses are haunted. A house is only a house inasmuch as it is
haunted. (Wigley 1993, p. 163)
Ali Farah, for instance, is careful to permit her narrative language to be

haunted by the Somali, as well as to indicate how Somali itself has been
historically haunted by the spectre of Italian colonialism. The text opens
with a declaration in Somali, one which furthermore decrees the Somali
belonging of the protagonist: Soomaali baan ahay (Ali Farah 2007, p. 1),
“I am Somali”, and an asterisk below points the reader in the direction
of the glossary of Somali terms in appendix to the text.10 Italian is thus
bent into a ‘site of resistance’ (di Maio 2011, p. xix) through Ali Farah’s
writing, which also re-evokes and commemorates the colonial passage
of Italian through the insertion of Somali loan words such as ‘fasoleeti’,
‘barbaroni’, ‘draddorio’ and ‘defreddi’ (Ali Farah 2007 pp. 21, 28) are
marked in both glossaries as ‘dall’italiano’, ‘from Italian: fazzoletto,
headscarf; peperoni, peppers; trattoria, neighbourhood restaurant; tè
freddo, iced tea.’11 Through the spectral ‘ululati’ of Lakhous’ passing,
the bird’s eye first-person perspective of Vorpsi’s corpses, and the ghost-
ing graphemes of Ali Farah, we can thus claim to have identified the ways
in which Italian itself functions in such trans-national texts to re-evoke
the haunting languages of other times and spaces.
10 It is perhaps disappointing though that the Italian text here only offers the pointer
towards the glossary (the footnote reads: ‘I termini in corsivo di derivazione somala sono
spiegati nel glossario alla fine del volume’), whereas the English translation both translates
the Somali phrase, and provides the cultural reference for the declaration (1977 poem by
Cabdulaqaadir Xirsi Siyaad) (Ali Farah 2011, p. 1). The cultural framework of the opening
phrase will hence be lost to the Italian readership.
11 The Somali language glossary is on pp. 231–235 of Ali Farah (2011).
214 E. BOND
6.3 Trans-national Memory and Haunting

Commemorations
Just as Ali Farah describes her protagonist as a ‘sponge’, open to and
absorbing other languages and experiences through her diasporic travels,
so in the next section I will look to identify other narrative hauntings that
work specifically through the metaphor of water. Indeed, the two novels
I will analyse (Elvira Dones’ I mari ovunque, 2007, and Igiaba Scego’s
Oltre Babilonia, 2008) combine their narratives with flashbacks of stories
of the victims of the years of state terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s,
who are known collectively as los desaparecidos (the disappeared).12 The
presence of these ghostly, drowned bodies within the narratives in ques-
tion disturbs the idea of a single, linear temporality through individual
and collective processes of memory-making, and highlights the role of
creativity and narrative elaboration within these processes. The creation
of explicit links between the victims of state repression and the more con-
temporary victims of trans-national migration succeeds in globalizing
the tragedy of the all too frequent deaths that populate today’s media
channels and allows for a rhizomatic conception of collective cosmopol-
itan memory. Following on from this textual analysis, I will explore the
related role and cultural impact of memorials to victims of the contempo-
rary sea-crossings of the various Mediterranean routes. I will refer specif-
ically to two works by artist-sculptors, as well as referencing other video
and film pieces, in order to assess to what extent they collectively manage
to restore a sense of visibility and agency to these missing bodies, and
the new transcultural pathways they forge in so doing. In this way, and
thereby following the analysis of Iain Chambers and others, I will con-
clude by re-proposing the sea—and here, specifically the Mediterranean
sea—as a space for multiple pasts, stories and places, ‘a fluid and fluctuat-
ing composition’ (Chambers 2008, p. 2).
Chambers’ elaboration of an intersection between time and space
within a specific geographical location is particularly important when
trying to understand the effects of migration on trans-nationally collec-
tive memory work. For as Maria Koundoura states, trans-nationalism
itself implies a ‘negotiation of time’ and to a ‘production of space that
12 It is, however, important to note that not all of the victims of Argentina’s dirty war’
were thrown into the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic, as is the case with both Dones’ and
Scego’s narrative re-evocations; others were ‘disappeared’ in different ways.
does not nostalgically point either to that of the nation or to a future

devoid of nations’ (Koundoura 2012, p. 5). By placing the fixity of the
categories of time and space into doubt, trans-nationalism therefore pre-
supposes a certain fluidity, a continuing state of composition in which
collective meaning can be created through the sharing of stories, mem-
ories and personal narratives. And it is here that migration adds a cul-
tural element to the phenomenon of trans-nationalism, in that it unites
global factors within a network of movement, communication, consump-
tion and relations that unsettle and force a—perhaps paradoxical—re-
evaluation of the importance of the local.
With globalization and the consequential acceleration of the symbolic

exchanges generated by the migratory flows, international communications
and consumption networks, stable cultural backgrounds […] have been
displaced. On the one hand, one direction leads towards globalization […]
On the other hand, the opposite direction is marked by the rediscovery of
what is local and the redeeming of traditions and particularities. (Pompeia
Gioielli 2013, p. 3)
Referring specifically to the Italian case, it is important to note how

current modes of trans-culturality have been able to incorporate var-
ious temporal layers related to the multiple migratory movements that
also characterized the national past (see, for example, Gabbaccia 2000).
These work together with the same spatial overlappings and require,
in the same way, an approach that extends beyond a fixed, rigid notion
of ‘italianità’ (‘Italianness’).13 Migration, therefore, allows us to think
about movement and mobility in terms of both distance and proximity,
local and global, placing locations into a dialectical relation of near and
far, here and there, which is not one-way, nor fixed on either a point
of departure or of destination. This idea is expressed through James
Rosenau’s notion of ‘distant proximities’ (2003), which employs both
the global and the local, the near and the far, as equally valid and inter-
dependent prisms for looking at the same thing. To cite Stuart Hall on
the same topic:
13 Franca Sinopoli has usefully problematized the traditionally narrow concept of ‘italian-
ità’, preferring to use the wider term ‘italicità’, coined by Piero Bassetti in his volume Italic
Lessons/Lezioni italiche (2010). See Sinopoli (2014, pp. 9–22).
216 E. BOND
It would be wrong to think that you either look at one or the other,
that the two are not constantly interpenetrating each other. […] The
global works through particularity, negotiates particular spaces, particu-
lar ethnicities, works through mobilizing particular identities, and so on.
(Hall 1997, pp. 61, 62)
The emphasis on ‘particularity’ here again recalls a phenomenolog-

ical approach to the perception of place as a precise point, experi-
enced and lived by the individual subject. This evidently places
specific emphasis on the body as an instrument of knowledge and
learning. But the present discussion, focused as it is on the topos of
the desaparecidos and therefore on a corporeality that is missing, pre-
supposes the question: what happens to these processes of subjective
orientation when the body is missing, and where instead the pres-
ence of ghosts or specters of people haunt space? Because, as Jenny
Edkins claims, the paradoxical presence/non-presence of ‘missing
bodies’ constitutes a further, traumatic rift in time and space (Edkins
2011, p. 1).
The particularity of place and of the individual consciousness
within the category of the trans-national also brings us to develop
a different conception of memory as a collective instrument. In the
past, some groups have feared that the dynamics of collective mem-
ory carry the danger of cancelling or flattening out the specificity
of traumatic events in the past, if they are to be compared with or
brought into contact with other, more recent traumas. Nonetheless, if
we consider the more fluid thinking that Michael Rothberg has devel-
oped, which casts memory ‘as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-
referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative’ (2009,
p. 3), we can see that such a ‘multi-directional’ conception constitutes
not a weakening but rather a reinforcing of the memory of individ-
ual events, a platform which is capable of articulating a more inclu-
sive vision of global realities. Rothberg’s analysis concentrates on the
intersection of Holocaust memory with processes of decolonization,
yet here, we can transpose it further forward to form a juxtaposition
which highlights growing concerns over the associated violence and
dangers of migration passages. These comparisons go on to produce
new objects of study and new horizons of thought, and thus also lead
to the development of new possible forms of social solidarity and
visions of justice.
Within this context I look to recast the Mediterranean as one specific

example of Bauman’s famous notion of liquidity (2000), as a ‘habitat of
meaning (that) can expand and contract […] overlap partially or entirely’
(Hannerz 1996, p. 22), allowing it to assume the new production of a
trans-national cultural signification. In a similar way, Iain Chambers
claims the Mediterranean as a hybrid space of multiple historical and cul-
tural traces and records the fusions consequent on the manifold cross-
ings effected throughout the course of its complex past (2008). Derek
Duncan has further noted that the Mediterranean must be characterized
as a ‘political and cultural space in which a truly multicultural past can
be retrieved and projected into a post-national future’ (Duncan 2011,
p. 213) In my analysis here, the contemporary Mediterranean space that
is increasingly characterized by migratory journeys becomes aligned with
tales of other traumatic sea-crossings which are superimposed to create
a trans-national habitat of meaning in the texts themselves. As Pile has
put it, in his work on haunted cities: ‘In this procession, the dead are
juxtaposed, putting them in relation to one another – however silently
– a spectral disruption of time and space caused by putting loss, trauma
and injustice side by side’ (2005, p. 162). The following analysis of two
narratives in Italian, by one Albanian and one Italian author of Somali
origin, both of which deal with the theme of the Argentinian desapareci-
dos but through drawing parallels with more contemporary sea journeys
made by migrants from the East of Europe or North Africa towards Italy,
will thus allow me to privilege this sense of projection and elaboration of
a shared trans-national memory onto one particular space.
*
I mari ovunque [Seas everywhere] is Elvira Dones’ fifth book, and is
part of what she has termed the ‘trilogia del dolore’ [trilogy of pain].
It tells the story of Andrea Garcia, an Argentinian migrant to Canton
Ticino, in Italian Switzerland, who, haunted by the disappearance and
subsequent murder of her parents by the military regime in Argentina
in the 1970s, and plagued by chronic depression, makes the conscious
and complicit decision to commit suicide on a trip to Ireland with her
husband. The title of the work in Italian, which explicitly presents the sea
as a plural and palimpsestic space, is nonetheless different to the Albanian
title Me pas heshtja, which would be translated roughly as ‘And then
came silence’. Dones reflects on the choice of the Italian title in an inter-
view, making reference to the desparecidos:
218 E. BOND
Ne avevo parlato con alcuni amici argentini, uno di loro è di Mar Del Plata.
Ricordo che prima di iniziare a scrivere il romanzo – a quel tempo risiedevo
in Svizzera - gli chiesi come riuscisse a fare il bagno nel mare della sua
città natale, quando vi tornava in vacanza. Personalmente ero ossessionata
dall’idea delle tante anime affogate, gli dissi che era difficile trattare la baia del
Mar del Plata come un pezzo di mare qualsiasi. Mi rispose: “Infatti, io non
mi bagno lì, lo guardo solo, l’Atlantico: la sotto ci sta uno dei miei zii”.14
[I spoke to some Argentinian friends about it, one of whom is from Mar
del Plata. I remember that before starting to write the novel – at the time
I was living in Switzerland – I asked him how he could bring himself to
swim in the sea when he went back to the city on holiday. I was myself
obsessed by the idea of so many drowned souls, and told him it was dif-
ficult to think of the bay of Mar del Plata just like any other piece of sea.
He answered: “Exactly, I never swim there. I just watch the Atlantic: there
below lies one of my uncles.”]
Punctuated by a similar central void, the novel is characterized by

silences, questions, uncertainty and waiting, and the back story of
Andrea’s parents is revealed very gradually: only on p. 51 do we first
learn her parents’ names and gain our first insight into the story of their
presumed murders. Andrea appears to be the victim of what Abraham
and Torok would term a ‘transgenerational haunting’: in which ‘the
undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of
their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about their
distant causes […] In this account, phantoms are not the spirits of the
dead, but “lacunae left inside us by the secrets of others”’ (Davis 2007,
pp. 9–10). Indeed, it is the uncertainty around their deaths that seems to
constitute the main trauma for Andrea: she reflects more obsessively on
her father’s memory and the details of his disappearance for the simple
reason that she has no concrete proof about any aspect of it: as far as she
knows he could even still be alive. Her questions are therefore phrased in
a future or conditional perfect, a hypothetical, obsessive imagining about
what might or might not have happened.
14 The interview was originally published in the online Journal Kúmá. Creolizzare l’Eu-
ropa. http://www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/kuma/poetica/kuma15shehublerina.pdf.
Cosa avrà potuto raccontare al buio della sua cella, Ezequiel Ramón
García? Avrà urlato il suo terrore? Avrà pianto di liberazione affidando le
debolezze e le paure al buio della notte? […] Avrà urlato forse; avrà chie-
sto pietà; avrà maledetto; avrà cercato di suicidarsi; avrà creduto alla fine
in Dio o lo avrà disprezzato; avrà espresso un ultimo desiderio; oppure era
vivo? Oppure era vivo? Oppure è vivo? (Dones 2007, p. 52)
[What will Ezequiel Ramón García have been able to say in the darkness of
his prison cell? Will he have screamed his terror? Will he have cried for free-
dom, entrusting his weakness and fear to the darkness of the night? […]
Maybe he will have shouted, asked for mercy, cursed, tried to kill himself;
will he have believed in God until the end, or shunned him; will he have
expressed a final wish, or was he alive? Or was he alive? Or is he alive?]
In all probability, we learn, after suffering protracted torture and abuse,

Andrea’s father was thrown from the plane into the waters of the Rio
de la Plata (Dones 2007, p. 66). Haunted by this partially reconstructed
story, and by the father’s missing body, the text works to construct a
space capable of aligning this with parallel ‘viaggi senza ritorno’ (Dones
2007, p. 90, one-way journeys): both the overseas migration of Andrea’s
Albanian friend Natasha (who herself fled a parallel dictatorship via a
journey over the Adriatic sea, and who thus constitutes a sort of auto-
biographical cameo, Dones 2007, p. 85), as well as Andrea’s own jour-
ney towards death, which reaches its conclusion on a beach in Ireland
(Dones 2007, p. 134).
For as Jenny Edkins has shown, the missing person functions as a
traumatic disruption of both time and place: time is interrupted (‘stands
still’) when someone goes missing, and place is unsettled because the
missing person is nowhere to be found (Edkins 2011, p. 1). This sense
of a disturbing or haunting presence in Dones’ narrative works to coun-
ter the invisibility of victims such as Andrea’s father, as well as of more
contemporary migrants, the ‘unmissed’ people that Alessandro Dal Lago
has classed as ‘non-persone’[non-people] in his 2009 book of the same
name. Dal Lago reflects on how the hyper-visibility of today’s migrants
in Italy leads to a desire for their exclusion and expulsion, a desired
invisibility which means that frequent deaths in the sea straits of the
Mediterranean pass unnoticed and un-mourned. ‘Per effetto di queste
strategie di rimozione, agli annegati è tolta la chance di essere ricordati.
Se da vivi erano dei meri fastidi, degli ingombri corporei, da morti sono
220 E. BOND
solo cadaveri privi di storia, di identità e di biografia’ [Thanks to these

strategies of repression, the drowned are robbed of the opportunity to be
remembered. If, when alive, they were mere annoyances, bodily encum-
brances, once dead they are simply corpses with no history, no identity
and no biography].15
Indeed, before her death, Andrea reflects on Natasha’s second migra-
tion from Switzerland to the US, over the very sea where her father’s
missing body must now lie.
Natasha sorvolerà lo stesso oceano, pensa Andrea, volerà sull’Atlantico.

Forse durante il viaggio, ora che conosce la storia di Andrea, riconoscerà i
fantasmi dell’Argentina sepolti nelle acque. Forse i gemiti degli scaraventati
in mare arriveranno fino al suo orecchio. (Dones 2007, p. 81)
[Natasha will fly over the same ocean, Andrea thinks, she will fly over the
Atlantic. Perhaps during her journey, now that she knows Andrea’s story,
she will recognize the ghosts of Argentina buried in the waters. Perhaps
the moans of those flung into the sea will reach her ears.]
It is now that Natasha knows the (missing) story of Andrea’s father that
she has the chance to actively remember and engage with it, which we
could perhaps read as Dones appealing to the reader to make the same
connections in order to construct a shared trans-national space of mem-
ory. Although in the language of Abraham and Torok, Andrea herself
has constructed a cryptophore, or psychic structure in order to preserve
her dead parents within her own living unconscious, her narrative aim
has been to exorcise their ghosts by putting their unspeakable secrets
into words (Davis 2007, p. 87). I mari ovunque can thus be read as a
‘haunted text’,16 which Andrea’s suicide leaves in a state of suspen-
sion, but whose meaning is potentially recuperable through its own
narrativization.
**
15 Dal Lago (2009, p. 225). Indeed, those of the disappeared in who were murdered and
buried in Argentina were often left in graves classified as NN (nomen nescio, or no name),
thus also erasing their past lives and identities definitively.
16 See Kirss for a useful, although different definition of ‘haunted texts’, as ‘sites where
narrative is resisted, where the assumption of the adequacy or healing potential of narra-
tivization is questioned. “Haunted” texts do not pretend that people and cultures can be
“delivered” of ghosts “merely” by telling stories about them’ (2013, p. 27).
This explicit trope of the sea as a possible trans-national space of con-

structed memory is echoed in Igiaba Scego’s 2008 novel Oltre Babilonia
[Beyond Babylon]. One of the two main first-person narrators of the nar-
rative, Mar, is the daughter of an Argentine poet, Miranda, and a Somali
exile in Rome, whom she has never met. Miranda’s brother, Ernesto is a
still-missing desaparecido, and his story is interwoven through Miranda’s
narrative with that of his girlfriend La Flaca (who also migrates to Rome
to escape the dictatorship and commits suicide there), and Miranda’s
own destructive and masochistic relationship with a high-ranking army
official of the junta.
In the same way as Dal Lago has described today’s (drowned)
migrants as invisible ‘non-persone’, Miranda describes the desaparecidos
as ‘scannati rigorosamente fuori scena’ (butchered strictly off-screen,
Scego 2008, p. 43). Their story is submerged in silence, which is rep-
licated in the oblique official media reports that avoid the word ‘mur-
der’ and replace it with metaphors and allusions to dominance and defeat
(Scego 2008, p. 45). And a further layer of invisibility is constituted by
the use during torture of the infamous capucha or hood, which hampers
the victim’s co-ordinates of time and space: ‘Non sapevi cosa ti avreb-
bero fatto, non vedevi, entravi nel panico più totale. Era un gesto sad-
ico: impedire la vista della propria tortura. Destabilizzante’ [You had no
idea what they would do to you, you couldn’t see, you were struck by
total panic. It was a sadistic gesture: preventing the vision of one’s own
torture. Destabilizing] (Scego 2008, p. 48). Within the text of Oltre
Babilonia a haunting reminder of the missing bodies is also constituted
by the phantom presence of Mar’s ex-girlfriend Patricia, who remains as
an uncomfortable bodily residue in the narrative even after her suicide.17
And the silence and invisibility that surrounded the disappearances in
Argentina is reproduced and worsened by the lack of interest Miranda
finds in the desaparecidos following her escape to Italy.
17 ‘(Patricia) stava sempre lì. Indossava quella maglietta a righe nere e quelle orride scarpe
scure. […] Patricia aveva preso possesso del letto. “Lèvati di lì” le gridò dietro Mar. “Sei
morta. Sono io che devo ancora dormire, ancora svegliarmi ogni mattina”. Patricia si sis-
temò allora vicino all’unica finestra della stanza. Si rannicchiò per terra in posizione fetale.
“Non mi fai pena. Il letto è mio!” gridò ancora Mar”’ [Patricia was always there. She was
wearing that black striped jumper and those horrid dark shoes. […] Patricia had taken over
the bed. “Get off” Mar shouted at her. “You’re dead. It’s me who’s still got to sleep, still
got to get up every morning.” So Patricia went and sat by the only window in the room,
curled up in fetal position. “I don’t feel sorry for you. The bed is mine!” Mar screamed
again] (Scego 2008, p. 73).
222 E. BOND
Invece in Italia era silenzio. Quel mutismo mi offendeva. Carajo, eravamo

quasi tutti italiani in Argentina, chi la madre, chi il padre, chi il nonno, chi
un amico, come faceva proprio l’Italia a ignorare? Lei scorreva nelle vene
dei nostri corpi maltrattati, possibile che se ne fregasse altamente del nos-
tro sangue? Maledetta! (Scego 2008, p. 365)
[I was offended by that silence. Carajo, almost all of us in Argentina were
Italian, through our mothers, fathers, grandparents and friends. How
could Italy ignore us? She ran through the veins of our tortured bodies,
how could she not care about our blood? Damn her!]
‘Mar’ herself is an explicit personification of the multi-layered nature of

the sea: not only by name, but also in the mixed heritage of her parents
and the many different cities which combine to construct her past and
present identities, which is further echoed in her bisexuality (she self-
describes as a ‘semi-negra maschio-femmina’, half-black, man-woman,
Scego 2008, p. 345).18
The running trope of the sea also figures within Mar’s missing
father’s narrative, in which he evokes the multi-cultural and trans-
national space of his ancestral fishing village on the Somali coast, yet
contrasts it with the dangers of more contemporary sea crossings and
migrations (‘“Non vedono che il mare ci sta mangiando vivi?” Il mare
in effetti aveva un prezzo. In vite umane’ [Can’t they see that the sea is
eating us alive? The sea has a price, in human lives] (Scego 2008, p. 64).
And the Mediterranean context is also aligned directly with the earlier
Argentine tragedy when Mar and her mother visit the city of Tunis and
remark on propaganda posters showing the face of then dictator Ben Ali.
Mar remarks:
Era stata sua madre, da buona argentina, a spiegarle che quell’uomo non
faceva ridere per niente. Che tanta gente nel paese era scomparsa in cir-
costanze misteriose. Che anche in Tunisia era la stessa storia di sempre,
desaparecidos, torture, dolori. (Scego 2008, p. 270)
18 Alessandro Portelli has also remarked on the juxtaposition of the two devastating mod-
ern dictatorships in Somalia and Argentina within the text, and the specifically corporeal
consequences and effects of war, torture and migration. See Portelli (2008, 2013).
[It was her mother, in typical Argentine fashion, who explained that that
man was not at all funny. That many people in the country had disap-
peared in mysterious circumstances. That in Tunisia, too, it was the same
story as ever, desaparecidos, torture, pain.]
In their free time Mar and her mother leave Tunis and go to Mahdia,
where there is a beach that has a cemetery on the coast, looking out
towards the Mediterranean. This tangible presence of the dead requires
an active process of recognition and acknowledgement, as Miranda
comments:
Qui ai morti hanno dato il posto più bello. Il cimitero si affaccia sulle acque
del mare, le tombe riempiono la spiaggia e per fare il bagno devi passarci in
mezzo, devi salutarle, omaggiarle, chiacchierarci. (Scego 2008, p. 362)
[Here they have given the most beautiful place to the dead. The cemetery
looks out over the sea water, the graves fill the beach and if you want to
swim you have to walk through them, greet them, pay homage to them,
chat with them.]
But it is also important to point out that Mar’s mother, Miranda,

writes her narratives with the name of ‘La Reaparecida’ (the re-
appeared), and as she walks through the graves by the Mediterranean
sea she expresses a desire to tell her story and theirs, to fight against
the oblivion of the ‘unmissed’ (‘trasformando il pianto in una lingua, in
una ribellione’ [transforming tears into a language, a rebellion] (Scego
2008, p. 415). Formal methods of commemoration, such as muse-
ums, are useful she says ‘solo se la memoria si fa carne, se la memoria è
attiva’ [only if memory becomes flesh, only if memory is active] (Scego
2008, pp. 96–97, emphasis added), reminding us of more recent and
continuing torture practices, such as in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.
‘Non possiamo capire il dolore dei desaparecidos, non possiamo capire
il dolore di nessuno, ma possiamo non dimenticare. Per questo scrivo’
[We cannot understand the pain of the desaparecidos, we cannot
understand anyone’s pain. But we cannot forget. That is why I write]
(Scego 2008, p. 244).
***
224 E. BOND
These two texts, which showcase an alignment of stories about the

Atlantic disappearances of Argentinian dissidents with those of more recent
migrations over the Mediterranean (from Albania, Somalia, and Tunisia),
constitute an effective trans-national argument against political and media
representations which objectify and instrumentalise the non-persone, the
unmissed (who Edkins terms those who were not present to a Western
imagination in the first place, 2011, p. 5). Such interconnected stories
work to reinstate these missing bodies of the past as part of a contemporary
discussion, and of transnationalizing memory processes, precisely through
the juxtaposition of related stories. In a similar and suggestive fashion,
Cristina Lombardi-Diop has suggested that the circulation of African
migrants across the Mediterranean recalls the Atlantic Middle Passage:
These spectral presences stand for a warning about contemporary forms of

slavery and dehumanization, and constitute a trace of the cultural mem-
ory of the oceanic crossing. Moreover, they are the embodiment of future
voices in literary form and a possibility of political awareness and agency in
the present.19
Duncan has termed such alignments acts of rhetorical and temporal dis-
placement (2011, p. 214), in which I would argue that the rupture of
space is sutured by the relationality of the narratives. For as Chambers
says, ‘writing here seeks to open a fold in time to be invaded by other
times, by others’ (2008, p. 19). The power of narrative to survive and
unite disparate places into a constructed and shared space of trans-
national meaning is expressed in I mari ovunque:
Il racconto si sarebbe scompaginato, l’inchiostro avrebbe penetrato la

terra, strisciato tra le crepe del muro, lambito le rocce fino a toccare le buie
acque. E una volta raggiunto il fiume, nessuna delle parole sarebbe andata
perduta. (Dones 2007, p. 58)
[The pages of the story would lose their order, the ink would soak into
the earth, seeping through the cracks of the wall, lapping against the rocks
until they reached the dark waters. And once they did, none of the words
would ever be lost again.]
19 Cit. in Duncan (2011, p. 214). The mention of the Atlantic ocean here obviously also
recalls the work of Paul Gilroy, and specifically his conception of the ‘black Atlantic’ as a
space capable of highlighting ‘how different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cul-
tural history fail when confronted by (such an) intercultural and transnational formation’
Gilroy (1993, p. ix).
6.4 Conclusions
The narrative function of the missing or absent body in these two texts,
as well as in the examples of other narrative hauntings analyzed in the
previous section, thus point to a specific cultural value of the trans-
national and may suggest analogies with the attempt to create similar
shared, ‘cosmopolitan’ memories in recent artistic commemorations of
the drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean space. The first of these
I want to mention is called ‘L’approdo’ [The Landing], a monumental
artwork made from the shipwrecked Albanian vessel “Katër i Radës” by
the Greek sculptor Costas Varotsos. The Katër i Radës sank in March
1997, leaving at least eighty Albanian would-be migrants dead when it
collided with an Italian Navy vessel that was attempting to blockade its
entry into national waters off the coast of Puglia. Only fifty-seven bodies
were found. The remains of the boat were acquired by the town council
of Otranto (against the wishes of the victims’ relatives, who would have
preferred it to return to Albania) and the wreckage was transformed into
an artwork by Varotsos in 2011. The memorial itself has been criticized
by Daniele Salerno for removing the historical context of the sinking and
the identity of victims, in order to adapt to local narratives of ‘hospital-
ity framing’ (2016, p. 136). Salerno also points out that Varotsos’ sub-
title ‘Opera all’Umanità Migrante’, or ‘boat of all migrants’, erases the
specificities of this particular sinking and does not allow the wreckage to
‘speak for itself’.
Yet whilst agreeing with Salerno on these points, I want to see if we
can assess the efficacy and ethics of the installation in different ways. For a
start, if ‘absence is all the ways in which the body can be away from itself’
(Leder 1990, p. 26) then does the absence of specifics in the contextual-
ization of Varotsos’ work somehow re-call the disappeared bodies more
effectively than personalized memorials would or could? Does it allow the
work to point in multiple directions? Plus, other artists have effectively
used boats as metonymic canvases to re-evoke the lives—and the bodies—
of those lost upon them, suggesting that something about the physi-
cality of the vessel itself ‘produces the refugee’ and acts as a ‘discursive
figure signifying the relationship between migration and subject forma-
tion’ (Nguyen 2016, p. 71). Horsti (2016) discusses the works of fellow
Greek Kalliopi Lemos, whose work also uses the remains of actual migrant
boats to represent and witness migrant experiences. In installations such
as ‘Crossings’ (Berlin 2009), she believes that the fragile remains of the
226 E. BOND
vessels ‘still bear a palpable historical, emotional and conceptual freight

that makes the work an ode to human suffering’.20 Thus, in her instal-
lations, the boat ‘signifies a migrant body that expresses wounds of suffer-
ing’ (Horsti 2016, p. 91, emphasis added). We can locate Mexican artist
Gustavo Aceves’ recent project, ‘Lapidarium’, within a similar framework,
a work inspired by the four bronze horses of St. Mark that were displayed
in Turkey, Italy and Paris through the centuries. Aceves uses this mobile
ancestry to contribute to a historicization of the phenomenon of human
mobility, stating that the work is not an installation, but a death notice,
an obituary, a ‘new lexicon that begins with the B for Barbarous and ends
with the X for Xenophobia’.21 And here, instead of legs, the horses are
mounted on fragments of boats. Aceves wanted the sculptures to empha-
size the bodily toil of migration in their cracked, broken appearance, and
by repeating the horses’ trajectory through various cities (Rome, Corinth,
Paris, Venice, Istanbul, and Mexico City), he constructs migration as a
plastic, embodied and culturally trans-national phenomenon.
The anchored place of installation is as important for Varotsos as the
travelling nature of Aceves’ work, and both might in different ways recall
Karen Till’s notion of a ‘place-based ethics of care’ (Till 2008), as well
as Bennett’s ‘empathetic vision’, which suggests how art might facili-
tate the formation of connections with people in different parts of the
world, who are subject to different experiences (Bennett 2005). Indeed,
the aim of the ‘L’Approdo’ project was the eventual foundation of an
international atelier where migration and creativity collide, and Otranto’s
municipality also invited eight young artists from Syria, Cyprus, Albania,
Montenegro and France to work on the project as well. This makes it a
‘collective work’ (opera collettiva), whose aim is, in Varotsos’ words, to
‘aiutare a trasformare dei sentimenti negativi in energia positiva, in ener-
gia vitale’ [help to transform negative emotions into positive energy, vital
energy].22
20 See Lemos’ personal website: www.kalliopilemos.com. Accessed 19 February 2018.

21 See the project website: www.lapidarium.online. Accessed 19 February 2018.
22 Colluto (2012). Adrian Paci also elaborated on the Otranto tragedy in his 2001 work
‘After the wall there are some walls’. This involved his undertaking the same journey as the
Katër i Radës in a boat, taking empty plastic boxed on board, which he filled with seawater
throughout the journey, to recreate the moment of drowning. The video of his journey was
later projected at exhibitions onto the plastic boxes theselves (eighty, for the eighty victims
of the tragedy). See Kondi and Pistrick (2013, p. 106).
Finally, the contested installation of ‘L’approdo’ also triggered related

memorials in the vicinity of the boat, transforming the site into transme-
dial, hybrid locus of memory. Two Albanian artists who attended the the
workshop organized in Otranto (Arta Ngucaj and Arben Beqiraj) went on
to produce their own memorial, made up of pictures of the faces and names
of the victims printed on panels. These were displayed near the wreckage
installation, with the title ‘Infin che ‘l mar fu sovra noi richiuso’ [‘until the
sea closed over us’], a citation from Dante’s Inferno.23 But, importantly,
this citation also recalls the intertextual use of this episode, the Canto of
Ulysses, in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man), where it
evokes the therapeutic power of memory and recollection.24 The activ-
ist intervention of Ngucaj and Beqiraj privileged the individualizing func-
tion of names and faces (Salerno 2016, p. 148), and together with the
more ‘official’ and more visible work of Varotsos, transformed the port of
Otranto into a dynamic site of memory. In this way, ‘L’approdo’ and its
surrounding memorial apparatus have become a present and visible focal
point and have transformed it into a physical space where the working
through of necessary processes of grief and culpability from diverse stand-
points can take place. This is an active process that is repeated in the very
materiality of the monument to the shipwreck itself, which privileges a
sense of movement and dynamism—the glass used has a mineral energy,
but also an ethereal transparency that incorporates and expresses the artist’s
philosophy. It is a ‘materiale trasparente, che ti obbliga di guardare al di là,
non pellicola di separazione perché questo Adriatico torni ad essere fluido,
via di comunicazione e non frontiera’ [A transparent material, not a film
of separation, which forces you to look beyond, so that the Adriatic might
become fluid again, a means of communication and not a border].25
23 Dante Alighieri, Inferno XXVI, l. 142. See The Princeton Dante Project website for a
full text of the original and a translation by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. Accessed
23 February 2018.
24 Ulysses is a figure of great fascination for Levi, as can be seen by the inclusion of his
encounter with Cyclops in the anthology of works that the author held to have been his
greatest inspirations. (Levi 1981). This is partly because of his bittersweet attachment to
Ithaca through memory and loss, as well as his skills as an orator and storyteller. See Sodi
(1990) and Gunzberg (1986) for detailed analyses of the Dantean passage of the Ulysses
figure in Levi’s work. The association between victims of the Shoah and refugees today was
raised famously by Moni Ovadia and has been amply discussed in Duncan (2016).
25 Colluto (2012). Salerno also takes issue with this metaphorical figuration of the glass,
arguing that it ‘fosters a naturalization of the event’, appearing to ‘conceal the imprints of
the human action that caused the sinking. (Salerno 2016, p. 144).
228 E. BOND
Fig. 6.1 End of Dreams—Portrait #1 (2016) (Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen)
In bringing together agents from diverse Mediterranean countries (in

both physical and conceptual terms), Varotsos’ project offers a tentative,
trans-national response to reactions of racism and xenophobia toward the
ongoing migration ‘crisis’. The underwater installation created by Danish
artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, ‘End of Dreams’ (2015) points
in a similar conceptual direction. The initial work was made up of for-
ty-eight statues, to be submerged in the waters off the Southern Italian
town of Pizzo Calabro; statues of human figures that recall the migrants
whose bodies are too often only visible to the public eye once wrapped in
plastic sacking following shipwrecks out at sea. As Rhiannon Welch has
commented, ‘like ghosts, (the statues) occupied a liminal space between
surface and depth, at once present and absent, material and fleeting, vis-
ible and invisible, fixed and mobile, past and present’ (Welch 2016) The
sculptures were made of a material known as ‘concrete canvas’, a material
often used to build emergency shelters for disaster relief. It contains pow-
dered cement that hardens on hydration, and so is moulded and shaped
by the movements of the water as time goes by (Fig. 6.1).
The statues were due to remain in the sea for a year, and having been
sculpted by the sea and allowed to form a ‘patina of algae’, were then
to be displayed in travelling exhibitions around Italy and abroad, thus
tracing new trans-national pathways of creative voice and agency. But just
one month in, a violent storm disrupted Larsen’s plans, and damaged the
statues, almost irrevocably—only eleven of the original forty-eight sur-
vived, with just two still hanging suspended from the raft (six more have
subsequently been found, of which three are now located in Rome, and
three still remain underwater).
Undeterred, Larsen sent his assistant Giuseppe Politi, a keen local
diver, out to track the unmoored remains with an HD camera. Politi
was not a trained camera operator, and the footage he captured was
often of poor artistic quality, yet it was precisely this that began to fas-
cinate Larsen, and the two began a six-month dialogue in which Politi
dived various times with evolving instructions from the artist, who
began to see the immersions as a kind of forensic recuperation/inves-
tigation in itself, enriching the initial project in conceptual terms. As
Welch has said, the subsequent edited video work ‘intervenes to trace
the search for the spectral vestiges, the ruins of a commemorative pro-
ject, something like the afterlife of memory’ (Welch 2016). I would
argue that it also enacts a literal and figurative exhumation of ‘what
has been historically marginalized and culturally excluded’ (Chambers
2008, p. 8). It seems to me that the painstaking artistic recuperation
of the statues following their demise at sea speaks to Butler’s ques-
tioning of the limits of the human through societal exclusions: ‘It
is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established
ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical open-
ing up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might
reality be remade?’ (Butler 2004, p. 33). Reality in ‘End of Dreams’
has been remade by refashioning the absent bodies as present, yet as
faceless, shrouded as they are in their cloaks of concrete canvas. There
is no fiction here of prosopopeia (as Davis observes, prosopopeia for
de Man means to confer a face, 2007, p. 113). Rather, there is a cov-
ering up of an ontological emptiness, in a way that re-animates the
lost subjects as materially present, yet as Butler says, ‘interminably
spectral’ (2004, p. 33).
230 E. BOND
Fig. 6.2 End of Dreams installation in Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen (Nikolaj

Bendix Skyum Larsen)
So the ‘failure’ of Larsen’s original installation, and the accidents that

befell it have nonetheless added creative value to the project, beyond
the fact of its multimedia richness.26 It now speaks to the personal or
national breakdowns and geopolitical failures that trigger dangerous
migration journeys, and the incompleteness or stasis that can be their
result. Just as with Varotsos’s work, ‘End of Dreams’ has emerged as a
collaborative, collective interface between Larsen’s statues, the film work
of Politi, and the sound design and mixing of Mikkel H. Eriksen, and has
begun its own international circuit of exhibitions in Turkey, Denmark,
Belgium, Italy, England and the USA (Fig. 6.2).
By echoing the cross-national nature of the migration phenomenon
and its juxtaposition with other acts of violence elsewhere, works of
art such as ‘End of Dreams’ thus allow for the potential formation of a
26 As Halberstam says, ‘Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmak-
ing, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative,
more surprising ways of being in the world’ (Halberstam 2011, pp. 2–3).
transcultural collective memory; one that works towards those processes

of ‘cosmopolitanization’ mentioned at the start of this chapter 27:
Rather than presuppose the congruity of nation, territory and polity, cos-
mopolitan memories are based on and contribute to nation-transcending
idioms, spanning territorial and linguistic borders. The ‘national container’
is being cracked, which does not so much imply the erasure of national and
ethnic memories, but their transformation. (Levy 2010, p. 25)
This cosmopolitan cracking of the national container is, in works such as

those analyzed by Varotsos, Aceves, Lemos and Larsen, primarily related to
migration, and emerges here as a water-based metaphor that further acti-
vates the link with contemporary sea-crossings in the Mediterranean space.
This metaphorical framework is emphasized in Saybasili’s comment that:
‘As a multitude, these ghost citizens make the nation-state leak’ (Saybasili
2010, p. 331, emphasis added). If when alive (even through their absence),
migrant subjects can cause leaks within conceptions of national identity
and belonging, then when dead, their bodies can similarly ‘haunt’ space
(Grosz 1994, p. 90), and through memorialization processes are even
able to haunt iconic, or public spaces, achieving a different sense of visibil-
ity and meaning. Indeed, as Shelleen Greene has shown in her analysis of
‘Western Union: Small Boats’, Isaac Julien’s re-positioning of the swim-
ming (or drowning) migrant body within an intertextual context that evokes
processes of nation-building28 can ‘disrupt linearity’ and bring together
temporally disparate histories such as contemporary migration, Italian uni-
fication, and the transatlantic slave trade (Greene 2012, p. 257). Public art
is therefore particularly well placed to articulate the long histories that still
shadow and inflect tropes of disappearance and the non-visilibity within re-
presentations of the migrant subjects it commemorates. As Chambers explains:
In an important sense, art in its concentrated attention and affects is always

about matter out of place. The figuration of the migrant in the contempo-
rary field of vision deepens and disseminates this unhomely quality. For the
27 To lean on Beck’s definition, cosmopolitanization’ is ‘a non-linear, dialectical process
in which the universal and particular, the similar and the dissimilar, the global and the local,
are to be conceived not as cultural polarities, but as interconnected and reciprocally inter-
penetrating principles.’ Beck (2006, pp. 72–73).
28 Such as is the Palazzo Gangi, where the famous ballroom scene of Luchino Visconti’s
1963 film Il Gattopardo/The Leopard was shot.

232 E. BOND
modern migrant is not only the reminder of a colonial past that powerfully
and unilaterally made the world over in a certain fashion. She also shadows
present artistic practices with what the prevailing sense of modernity struc-
turally seeks to avoid or negate, precisely in order to secure its particular
sense of home and belonging. (Chambers 2017)
The challenges that the migrant subject poses to these notions of

belonging and being-at-home, and with which I opened this chapter, are
further problematized when s/he operates within the shadowy scale sug-
gested by Chambers above. For representations of the migrant subject as
a socially haunting figure also explain the ‘structural possibility that we
may not be able to read the bodies of others’ (Ahmed 2000, p. 8), and
urge us to re-evaluate those very questions that have driven my analy-
sis forward thus far: what the absent or ghostly body might signify for
the formation of networks of transnational memory; and how it can most
effectively be re-evoked in linguistic, narrative and artistic practice. But I
also want to raise the question of who such artworks and memorials are
for, and how we can assess the ethics of their representation, when the
subjects they “speak for” are no longer present. I believe that the ethical
dimension can be answered within Gordon’s definition of haunting, as:
(W)hen the cracks and riggings are exposed, when the people who are
meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed
feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different
than before, seems like it must be done. (Gordon 2008, p. xvi)
Again, the nautical imagery employed here allows for the re-alignment of
(hi)stories of mobility via the sea, a realignment that disturbs spatio-temporal
linearity and national boundaries through radical juxtaposition, thus expos-
ing hidden histories of exploitation and negation that still colour practices
of exclusion and racism today. This is the mode of juxtaposition that I
have identified in the various texts and artworks analyzed here, all of which
demand collective remembrance through their representation and display of
persisting presences.29 And most importantly, I want to repeat the notion
that these presences demand, through their own memorialisation, that
‘something different […] seems like it must be done’ (Gordon 2008, p. xvi,
emphasis added). In this chapter I have picked out examples of artistic and
29 As Ahmed says, such moments of unreadability also ‘reopen the prior histories of
encounter that violate and fix others in regimes of difference’ (Ahmed 2000, p. 8).
narrative elaborations on lost and absent bodies that respond to this call for
action, and which contribute to the construction of a fluid cartography of
global memory-scapes that reinforce ‘the dynamic between an insistence on
local memory and specificity and the transnational and transcultural recollec-
tion of wider historical events’ (Glajar 2011, p. 1). By so doing, I believe that
they succeed in offering new creative pathways towards configuring disap-
pearance and absence into a potentially ethical response to the challenges and
demands of contemporary networks of trans-national migration.
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CHAPTER 7
Afterword
A few years ago I was fortunate enough to spend a month at the

Bogliasco Foundation, a centre for arts research perched on top of cliffs
overlooking the Mediterranean on the Ligurian coastline of north-
east Italy. One of the fellows’ daily pleasures was to walk the famous
‘passeggiata di Nervi’ atop a Riviera pathway, where we would sit and
bask in the December sun, watching the sea changing as winter slowly
approached. On one such afternoon, we noticed a large container ship
that seemed to lie static in the middle distance, some way out to sea.
We could quite clearly make out the words stamped in bold white letters
on the side of the vessel, ‘HANJIN’. On subsequent days, the ship did
not move. It seemed beached. The longer it stayed, the more uncanny,
almost sinister it felt to us. Then, the weather finally changed, storms
arrived, and the walk no longer called to us—our time at Bogliasco came
to an end, and we all said our goodbyes and returned to our respective
homes for Christmas.
Some months later, one of the other fellows, my friend Jessica, sent
me a WhatsApp message with a link to an online article. It turned out
that the Hanjin vessel we had spotted stationary had been something of
a precursor to a much wider global issue. Indeed, the shipping company
of the same name, the seventh largest in the world, had recently filed for
bankruptcy, leaving its entire fleet of ships, along with 2500 sailors, and
an estimated $14 billion dollars worth of goods, stranded at sea, since
ports would not allow them entry without the impossible assurances

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_7
240 E. BOND
that the company would be able to pay for docking charges and cargo
handling (The Guardian 2016). I was intrigued, and did a little more
research online. What I came across seemed to me to speak to the issues
that lay at the heart of the volume I’d been working on at Bogliasco, the
same book that this afterword concludes. Issues of movement and mobil-
ity, but also stories of stasis, of physical migrations across international
seas and territorial borders that are blocked, impossible, and of embodied
journeys that start but are diverted, thwarted, or prematurely end.
The focus of media attention to the Hanjin story centred on the cargo
and goods that were left suspended through company bankruptcy, but
there seemed to be little sense in separating such material objects from
the teams of ‘invisible workers’ around the world who both manufacture
them and secure their circulation under normal circumstances. Indeed,
the term ‘cargomobilities’, as coined by Birtchnell, Savitzky and Urry,
aims to capture a sense of the ‘“orderly disorder” of all sorts of non-
human—and sometimes human—traffic that circulates the world as cargo’
(2015, pp. 1–2). This commercial flow of goods must thus be seen within
the same global framework of sea voyages that in the past was made up of
slave ship routes, and today witnesses the mass ‘containerization’ of peo-
ple in migratory flows.1 Furthermore, as Mannik points out, contempo-
rary media reports abound with metaphoric descriptions aligning people
who are forced to migrate with terms such as tides, waves, and floods, flows
and counterflows, thus exemplifying mainstream discrimination.2 It is, in
her analysis, the uncontrolled, undifferentiated, uncontrollable nature of
water flows in these metaphors that succeeds in encapsulating the fears
and anxieties surrounding migratory movements, as well as neatly effacing
any individuality of the people who embark on such journeys.
What piqued my own interest in the Hanjin story was, then, not the
capital at stake within such trans-national circuits, but the people, the
bodies that accompanied and facilitated the movement of such objects
1 See Adey (2017, p. 241). This intersection of human/cargo recalls both the title of
Moorehead (2006) (Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees) and evokes the unforget-
table opening scene of Saviano’s mafia investigation Gomorra, in which the frozen bodies
of Chinese workers fall out of a cargo container into the waters of the port of Naples. They
are being returned to China for burial so that their paper identities can be assumed by a
new influx of migrants to Italy. See Saviano (2006, p. 1).
2 Mannik (2016, p. 2). Urry, in similar fashion, describes migration in terms of waves,
with a hierarchy of eddies and vortices (2007, 35).

7 AFTERWORD 241
and commodities. Or, indeed, bodies only tangentially related to them,

bodies that happened to be associated with such journeys purely by
chance, or circumstance. Indeed, the Hanjin news was significant in the
UK because of the visibility it suddenly afforded to a rather odd collective
of individuals. For example, a group of Scottish cadets, training for a nau-
tical science course, who were stranded for weeks on one of the Hanjin
vessels. Or British artist Rebecca Moss, who was on a twenty-three day
residency aboard the Hanjin Geneva, with the aim of exploring (in her
own words) the ‘comedic potential of the clash between mechanical
systems and nature’. The absurd irony of being stranded on a ship with
no further destination whilst working on such a project was not lost
on Moss, who declared: ‘We have liberty and dignity taken away from
us while we bob aimlessly at sea’ (Kassam 2016). This idea of an aimless
bobbing speaks to the processes of stasis, waiting and drift that concluded
the previous chapter, but also adds new elements of unpredictability
and turbulence to migration journeys that might be triggered by either
human invention or natural circumstances, currents and circulations.
The other bodies on board, members of staff facing shortages in
water, food and fuel, were effaced by the world’s attention to the goods
and commodities also left on board. Hanjn’s fleet began to be termed
in the media as ghost ships, recalling the roll-call of phantom ves-
sels intermittently found floating in the world’s oceans—most notably,
over recent years, in the discovery of more than one hundred eerily
unmanned boats in Japanese waters that are presumed to originate from
North Korea. The sort of spectral suspension suggested by the Hanjin
episode might only operate as an opening metaphorical framework here,
but it raises important questions that follow on from the conclusion of
the previous chapter: most importantly, the value, visibility, and the dis-
posable nature of those who most often disappear in the sea. Today’s
global sea migration routes are doubtless the most dangerous mode of
transport for those moving from country to country, in terms of the
loss of human life. And as the seas fill with new victims of drowning,
they merge with bodies historically lost to the waters from centuries of
enforced migration and political violence, as Jenna Brager reminds us in
her recent essay, ‘Bodies of Water’:
The oceans are full of bodies. This is nothing new; the currents are imbri-
cated with centuries-old ghosts of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the geno-
cide of millions of Africans, the acceptable loss in the conversion of people
242 E. BOND
into commodities. At Cape Horn, the particles of African ghosts mingle

with the fragments of Chilean and Argentinean disappeared and whisper
together of endemic violence. They are joined by the bodies of refugees
turned away from shore, taken by the sea at the behest of state policy. The
wind and the waves are always already full of ghosts, the particles of all the
bodies rolling together with marine debris. The body is made of hydrogen
and oxygen and when the body comes apart it becomes a part of what sur-
rounds it, what consumes it. (Brager 2015)
This also speaks to Alaimo’s eco-critical notion of trans-corporeity as a

‘new sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected
with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments.’3 As she
also reminds us, the sort of suspension imagined so far can also translate
into buoyancy (Alaimo 2012, p. 478), a buoyancy that might conceiva-
bly occur when the hidden, lost or invisible body floats back up to sur-
face of perception, in the sort of disturbance that characterizes Christina
Sharpe’s first use of the term ‘wake’, as: ‘the track left on the water’s sur-
face by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in
water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed
flow’ (2016, p. 3). The sort of disturbance that the body can provoke
by drawing attention to wider phenomena is exemplary of the work that
this volume has attempted to uncover and explore through its analysis of
migration narratives. Bodies have figured in the representations looked
at here as active agents of signification, as sites of memorialization, and
of consciousness. The long historical reach of such a consciousness is also
privileged by Sharpe, as ‘to be “in” the wake, to occupy that grammar,
the infinitive, might provide another way of theorizing […] “stay[ing]
in the hold of the ship” (2016, p. 14). And the second way that Sharpe
employs the ‘wake’ is in terms of a group vigil, a ritual watching over that
mourns and accompanies the body of a dead person between the point
of death and burial. The collective nature of this ‘wake work’ speaks to
the group formations represented in Larsen’s ‘End of Dreams’, where
‘being mobile together in time’ (Adey 2017, p. 201) is transformed
into a mode of being suspended together in time. The way that the
bodies are re-figured, and exhumed to haunt the collective imaginary,
in ‘End of Dreams’ will allow me to draw fruitful comparison between
3 Alaimo (2012, p. 476). Sharpe also discusses how bodies are consumed and recycled in
the ocean. See Sharpe (2016, pp. 40–41).

7 AFTERWORD 243
this installation and Dagmawi Yimer’s short film Asmat: Nomi per tutte
le vittime in mare [Asmat: Names for all the Victims of the Sea] toward
the end of this afterword.4 First, however, I want to draw together the
threads of analysis that I have developed over the course of the volume
so far, and suggest some possible directions for future related research in
the field.
*
The individual chapters in this volume have worked to form an overarch-
ing thread of argument that privileges the body’s primary role in manag-
ing the perceptive interface between subject and world, and the agentic
value in narrating how this interface might shift or alter through pro-
cesses of migration or mobility.
Chapter 2, ‘“Signing with a Scar”: Inscriptions, Narration, Identity’,
sheds new light on the skin’s particular capacity to translate and express
bodily knowledge and subjective self-imaginings. Through the analysis of
various texts and photographic works I posited the skin as a porous bound-
ary which allows the dialectical passage from inside to outside and back
again. This capacity in turn allows the skinscape to function in a peculiarly
effective metaphorical fashion to evoke mobility practices. This is because
since skin can store content and marks from various points in time, it can
be compared to function of memory itself and, as such, is uniquely capa-
ble of recording the multiple shifts triggered by migration. The transitional
status of skin also causes potential slippages in our understanding of visi-
bility, temporality, and textility, meaning that the inscriptions, signs, and
messages that the skin bears may furthermore require new codes and read-
ing practices from us in order to be deciphered accurately. For hyper- and
invisibility can both function as a trap, engendering the potential for wit-
nessing to collapse into painful practices of surveillance, and running the
risk of reducing body to mere text. Yet the narratives that I analysed here
(Lilin 2009; Ali Farah 2007; Vorpsi 2007, 2010) all display a sense of con-
cealment and playful reticence that operates as a source of agency, suggest-
ing that the subjects they depict might yet themselves choose what (not)
to narrate, and what to re-enact through writing the skin.
4 The film Asmat: Nomi per tutte le vittime in mare (dir. Dagmawi Yimer 2014) is cur-
rently available to stream on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/114849871. The title ‘Asmat’

means ‘names’ in the Eritrean language Tigre, whilst the narrated text of the film is in
Amharic.
244 E. BOND
Chapter 3, ‘Trans-gender, Trans-national: Crossing Binary Lines’

explores the intersectional transgression of normative boundaries
of corporeal identity posed by trans-gender and trans-national sub-
jects. Opening my discussion with the sudden visibility of emblematic
trans-figures in today’s media and public life, I problematized modes
of passing, relationality, and orientations as they might relate to both
trans-gender and trans-national embodiment. I argued that the trans-
body can itself function as sign of disruption, and displacement that
raises parallels with experiences of migrant or in motion subjects. In my
analysis this was supported by an examination of narratives of transition
and of journey (Dones 2007; Farías de Albuquerque 1994), in which
the trans- body can nonetheless itself refine and redefine categories of
home and belonging. The ways in which gender variance and trans-
national mobility operate in these texts forces us to think about how bod-
ies are read, as well as what they themselves narrate. Working alongside
cyborg theory, I looked at how aesthetic and technical interventions can
help us to investigate ‘the ephemerality, the contiguity, and temporality
of human bodies, overturning essentialist notions of identity and erod-
ing the sense of the physical and mental self as finite atomized forms’
(Hawkins 2014, p. 181). My conclusions highlighted processes of cul-
tural translation, of multilingual, multi-voiced writing, and of adaptations
(or re-animations) of these texts into different formats to suggest new
ways of reading the body as text, and the text as body.
In Chapter 4, ‘Trans-national Mothering: Corporeal Trans-plantations
of Care’, I took metaphorical inspiration from the recent discovery of
bodily tolerance between host and newcomer in processes of micro-
chimerism, and used this to explore the layers of meaning contained
in episodes of transplantation, tolerance and orientation towards the
other in selected narratives of migration (Ali Farah 2007; Ibrahimi
2009; Kuruvilla 2012, 2014; Mubiayi 2008; Scego 2008; Vorpsi 2005,
2015). The maternal body is often perceived as possessing flexible or
leaky boundaries, which allows it in turn to evoke wider societal preoc-
cupations around the porosity of national borders and the instability of
trans-national identities. Using this framework, I suggested new readings
of motherhood and motherwork, which I explored though issues of the
negotiation of generational passage (which holds particular significance
for second generation writers), ‘interrupted’ maternity (or abortion),
and the sort of ‘alternative’ or substitutive mothering that I identified
in forms of care work. I thus challenged commonplace narratives of
7 AFTERWORD 245
motherhood as a state of resolution or redemption, and countered the

frequent objectification of the maternal body as a container or object.
This was achieved through taking mothering as a verb, an active state
capable of voicing complex trans-national care-ways, but also through
seeing maternity as a postmodern experience (Nash 2012) and thus as
a bodily performance that can enact change. I concluded that maternity
can be experienced in ‘aesthetic mode,’ providing the narratives in ques-
tion with new possibility for voicing bodily agency through diverse forms
and practices of motherhood.
Chapter 5, ‘Revolting Folds: Disordered and Disciplined Bodies’,
focused on processes of transformation and transmogrification that take
place in diverse corporeal projects that aim to alter the external appear-
ance of the body. I used the active metaphors of ripping and folding to
explore narratives of anorexia, bulimia, obesity and over-consumption,
body-building, cosmetic surgery and particular fashion choices. Through
an attention to such modes of impression management, I located a par-
ticular ability of the subject to bestow meaning on the body (even if this
is through pathological modes of excess or privation). The mouth here
functioned as an important metaphorical interface between subject and
world, emphasizing both the physicality of consumption (that can sym-
bolize either resistance to, or assimilation of, cultural norms) as well as
the production of language. Indeed, I introduced the notion of bulimic
time, thinking through temporal rips and ruptures (that relate back to
practices of self-harm analysed in Chapter 2), to sound out a rhythm
of incorporation/expulsion that ties in with representations of mobility
within texts such as Ali Farah (2007), Lakhous (2006), Scego (2005,
2008), and Vorpsi (2010).
The effects of excessive or privative consumption were read through
the visible hardness or softness of the body in order to shed light on
processes of becoming, in which the disordered or disciplined body can
form a site of deviation or rebellion. Postmodernist theory allowed me to
read such becomings as related to (textual) practices of sampling and bri-
colage that point to the possibility for the repeated self-construction and
re-construction of the self. The endless cycle of self-modification pro-
vides the roadmap for enacting possibilities for strategic deviations, and
I argued that there is agency to be found in the logic of such (self-)rep-
resentation when it is conceived of as ‘selfcare’ (Ahmed 2014). But
assuming responsibility for one’s own body project can also have debil-
itating effects on individual identities that may already be placed into
246 E. BOND
question by the toils of trans-national migration, and—furthermore—not

every body can be transformed, or even want to be transformed. This
final point on the inflexibility either suffered or sought by othered bodies
goes on to speak to the issues of immobility, stasis, waiting, and inflexi-
bility that lie at the centre of the final chapter.
In Chapter 6 ‘Absent Bodies, Haunted Spaces,’ I looked at the tran-
sitive roles that ghostly or missing bodies are called on to perform and
enact in spatial and temporal terms in both narrative and artistic rep-
resentations of migration. Starting from the premise that the body itself
is often itself ‘absent’ to subjective experience, I worked to re-claim
those liminal textual and physical spaces where the remnants of miss-
ing or spectral bodies persist. I used what I term narrative ‘hauntings’
to once again problematize notions of national and linguistic belonging
in texts such as Vorpsi (2006, 2007, 2010), Lakhous (2006, 2010), and
Ali Farah (2007). Yet such textual remnants also persist to open a new
cultural dialogue through cross-currents of trans-national memory, and I
identified this sense of ‘presence through absence’ in Dones (2007) and
Scego (2008). Such ‘by proxy memory’ (Bond 2016) also functions in
diverse creative and aesthetic modes, and I closed the chapter (and thus
the main body of the volume as a whole) by opening up a discussion of
recent artistic memorializations of deaths in the Mediterranean sea.
Throughout this work, my primary aim has been to re-work existing nar-
ratives around representations of the migrant body. I have insisted on high-
lighting the body’s active narrative role as a signifier of the shifts and changes
that mobility and movement might engender. In the same vein as Taylor
(1997), I ‘feel the urgency of holding onto the material body,’ and want to:
(G)uard against seeing the othered body as only the container of social
anxieties, only the negative marker of social difference and stratification,
only the embodiment of other people’s fears and passions to be annihilated
or absorbed at will. (Taylor 1997, p. 149)
My re-positioning of the body as uniquely expressive of the tactics and

deviations performed by migrant and in motion subjects to gain visibility
and voice is thus located within a framework of postmodern flexibility
that allows for practices of self-care, aestheticization, and self-narrativiza-
tion, but that also permits the body to take on the memorial function of
a repository or archive.
**
7 AFTERWORD 247
My work here has looked at a diverse range of body modifications and

transmogrifications, mainly in narrative fiction, but I believe that there
is important future work to be done by extending the reach of analysis
into related fields and genres—work that is clearly beyond the scope of
the present volume. Firstly, although I have tried to include the ques-
tion of ability where possible in my analysis, I think that the link between
(im)mobility, ability studies and crip theory (McRuer 2006) in thinking
through the body as agent of meaning could be an exciting new path-
way in future discussions of migration narratives (thus building on the
interdisciplinary work of Alison Kafer (2013) and Sami Schalk (2018)).
Secondly, although my analysis of trans- embodiment in Chapter 3
allowed me to touch on cyborg theory and practices of hacking, I am
aware that there is much more to be said on the embodiment of assem-
blages (any combination of human/animal/object; to include new body
technology and prostheses). Thirdly, the discussion that bordered bio-
medicine in Chapter 4 could conceivably be developed to include analy-
sis of representations of organ transplant,5 and of transferrable embryos,
which Merrill Squier has called ‘brave new beings’ (2004, p. 2). The
challenge that these embryos pose to both ‘the accepted time frame of a
human life’ (Merrill Squier 2004, p. 2), and its civil status, through their
transitional status would allow for productive dialogue with representa-
tions of migrant and in motion subjects, who also call for a renegotiation
of accepted categories of identity.
This final topic would also tie in with the sorts of fantasy and science
fiction representations of migration that privilege the post-apocalyptic
body, and which also lay outside of my scope of analysis here. Some
work has already been done in this field—in terms of theory, I note
Papastergiadis’ work on hospitality and zombification (2012, pp. 60, 67),
while the field of pop culture can boast Fojas’ queered alignment of zom-
bies and migrants (2017), as well as a survey of the transcultural migra-
tion of film and TV representations of vampires and zombies themselves
(Fischer-Hornung and Mueller 2016). In the field of Italian studies, the
5 Organ transplant has featured as a revealing theme in films such as The Island (dir.
Michael Bay 2005), the novel Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro 2005, and the subsequent film
adaptation), and is explicitly linked with migration in Dirty Pretty Things (dir. Stephen
Frears 2002).
248 E. BOND
2011 film Cose dell’altro mondo imagined a world without migrants, and
the subsequent economic and emotional chaos suffered in one small
town in the Veneto region. Post-colonial readings of older zombie films
have also reached productive conclusions about this kind of figuring of
the migrant body (see Brioni 2013). Such post-apocalyptic alignments
of migrants and zombies might, however, function because, as Kureishi
points out, the popular imaginary has already absorbed and reproduced
the former within a framework of displacement and exclusions that is
embodied in cultural representations of the latter:
Unlike other monsters, the foreign body of the immigrant is unslayable.

Resembling a zombie in a video game, he is impossible to kill or finally
eliminate not only because he is already silent and dead, but also because
there are waves of other similar immigrants just over the border coming
right at you. (Kureishi 2014)
Yet a new widespread awareness of the scale and impact of global migra-
tion has also triggered an acknowledgement of the need for new modal-
ities of storytelling to allow for more ethical, and even co-produced
representations of mobile embodiment. No longer can the (im)migrant
be dismissed as a ‘vacant point’ who has ‘not only migrated from one
country to another, (but) has migrated from reality to the collec-
tive imagination where he has been transformed into a terrible fiction’
(Kureishi 2014). Rather, new creative modes of writing, speaking, or
performing migration will hopefully contribute to the ‘unmaking and
remaking of human bodies in relation to the master narrative’ (Taylor
1997, p. 151). In this spirit, I will make brief mention of Flight (Vox
Motus), an immersive theatre piece from 2017 that scales down the
migration journey of two young brothers across Europe into an indi-
vidually experienced miniature world, with devastating effect; and two
Virtual Reality projects spearheaded by The Guardian, also in 2017: ‘Sea
Prayer’—a story by Khaled Hosseini inspired by the life and death of
Alan Kurdi—and ‘Limbo’, a virtual experience of waiting for asylum in
the UK. These, and other projects, show evidence of the impetus to use
traditional modes of storytelling in new creative ways to confront and
represent the embodied complexities of contemporary migration, and
might forge critical pathways for literary and cultural studies to lean
towards the fields of ‘mobile methodologies’ (see Adey, pp. 280–298)
and creative geographies (Hawkins 2014).
7 AFTERWORD 249
Such creative methods encourage critical thinking around migration,

and—likewise—academic projects such as ‘Refugee Hosts’6 argue against
the use of mainstream (journalistic) photography to tell the stories of
migrant subjects, and favour, instead, innovative representations such as
soundscapes. Disrupting traditional modes of representation can, in this
way, limit the risk of dehumanization, and work towards creating net-
works of empathy and social understanding. The involvement of migrants
here is key, as it was too in the foundation of the ‘Temporary Museum’,
a pop-up exhibition inside the Bijmerbajes in Amsterdam, where asylum
seekers presented art works to help the public understand their migrant
experience in turn (see Segal 2017). But the human body can also be
employed itself in terms of performance, and animation, to create simi-
larly affecting representations, and this is where I will return to Yimer’s
short film, Asmat, by way of a conclusion. In the mode of a wake (Sharpe
2016), or vigil, for the 369 Eritreans who died less than a mile off the
coast of Lampedusa on the 3rd October 2013, Yimer staged a flash mob
of one hundred people in the waters of the shore of Lampedusa, dress-
ing the participants in white sheets, and filming them from below hold-
ing hands underwater, so that only their suspended legs are visible to the
camera, upside down. The fluid movements of the bodies underneath the
white sheets recall the concrete canvas casings that exemplified the loss or
erasure of the migrant body in ‘End of Dreams’, and also speaks to the
visual impact of the seemingly endless mounds of life jackets discarded on
the shores of Greece in the final scene of Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow.7
Asmat opens to the sound of a woman’s humming that mingles with
the sound of crashing waves, before the camera goes underwater, cre-
ating an extreme context of claustrophobia and sense of disorientation
as the perspective is reversed to show the underbelly of a boat, before
a ghostly fade to silence. The use of watercolour montage animation
rather than lifelike photography is a visualization that succeeds in creat-
ing empathy through the use of imaginative pathways, and in its avoid-
ance of commonplace or over-direct representation. Constituting a step
backwards from Yimer’s first feature-length film, Come un uomo sulla
6 (https://refugeehosts.org/representations-of-displacement-series/) (8 March 2018).

7 Human Flow (dir. Ai Weiwei, 2017) was filmed in more than 40 refugee camps and 23
countries to give a sense of the perpetual nature of human migration. It complicates the use
of ‘flow’ in its title by emphasizing the borders, tensions, and holding patterns experienced
by today’s refugees. See Buder (2017).
250 E. BOND
terra (2008), which recounted and re-lived the Ethiopian film-maker’s

own arrival in Lampedusa some years earlier, Asmat represents an
arrested arrival, the suspension of a series of personal narratives that
remain in the sea-space and do not reach their desired destination. Yet it
also points to the potential for a recuperation of agency on behalf of the
victims, despite its tragic source material. By naming each and every one
of the people who died in the shipwreck, the film fulfils its initial prom-
ise and imperative: ‘siete condannati a sentire queste urla’ [you are con-
demned to listen to our screams], ‘il nostro grido è forte e lungo’ [our
cry is loud], ‘i nostri corpi arrivano sulle vostre spiagge’ [our bodies will
land on your shores]. Here the narrating voice speaks for these bodies to
assume the position of observer and judge of the measure of European
civilization, which will be proven by the welcome afforded to those
arriving, and the response to the deaths of those who do not survive
the journey. And, crucially, it highlights the span of their lives as stretch-
ing beyond the migration journey itself: ‘Esistevamo anche prima del 3
ottobre’ [we existed even before the 3rd of October]. In this way some-
thing of the victims’ stories does reach a destination of sorts, in that they
achieve a certain level of increased visibility: ‘Siamo più visibili da morti
che da vivi’ [‘We are more visible dead than alive’]. And because Asmat
not only recites the names of the victims (the repetition itself creating
a powerful sense of scope), but also tells the meanings of those names,
the spectator is given a sense of these people being loved and cherished
within a family context, since the names have meanings such as: jewels,
blessing, illumination, gold, light, we wanted her, my turn, paradise,
God’s word, pleasure, life, he is chosen, she is precious, saved from the
waters, peace, refuge, hope. The focus on these names, and the emphasis
on their meaning within various defined societal, religious, cultural and
family contexts, thus powerfully succeeds in talking back to the current
media and political dehumanization of the migration phenomenon.
Films like Asmat, as well as the diverse material explored in Chapter 6
that drew on representations of the sea in order to express the memo-
ries of the bodies lost there, would thus seem to confirm that ‘water is
an element that remembers the dead’ (Sharpe 2016, p. 20). And other
water metaphors can serve equally well to represent the fluidity and flows
of embodied human mobility, differently, as the chapters in this volume
attest. Boats on water, even ones as immobile as the Hanjin vessels with
which I opened this afterword, operate a dynamic link between water,
memory and history, a link that functions as ‘a vehicle for writers and
7 AFTERWORD 251
artists to […] understand the work of having to reconstruct a life and

identity in its wake’ (Nguyen 2016, p. 66). Through highlighting spe-
cific links between mobile lives and modes of their configuration in
my analysis, I aim, in conclusion, to re-position critical aqueous tropes
employed in earlier chapters such as flow (Chapter 4) and drift (Chapter 3)
away from their usual mode of representing multitudes of migrant sub-
jects, and instead towards new theoretical possibilities of interpretation
that privilege the individual body as situated, and yet as simultaneously
mobile. Hannerz, for example, reminds us that the concept of ‘flow’
functions in terms of both time and space (1992), and my analysis of
corporeal representations has consistently sought to evidence both this
sense of intersectionality, as well as to reveal other leaks and viscosity
present in flows of meaning. I have sought to use this afterword to locate
bodies within Steinberg and Peters’ (2015) notion of a “wet ontology”,
in order to harness the ‘vertical, fluidic and elemental qualities of the sea
as an especially mobile kind of materiality’ (see Adey 2017, p. 240). For
it is these flows of material meaning in mobile stories of embodiment,
the fluid currents of significance created by writing migration through the
body, that I hope to have uncovered in this volume.
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Index
A Abstinence, 176
Ability, 7, 8, 12, 18, 20, 22, 31, 38, Abu Ghraib, 223. See also
45, 51–53, 64, 66, 80, 85, 96, Guantánamo; Prison
99, 100, 104, 113, 131, 147, Abuse, 37, 39, 40, 73, 97, 136, 172,
156, 158, 159, 176, 192, 203, 219. See also Torture
211, 245, 247. See also Disability; sexual, 136, 172
Transability Acceleration, 215
Abjection, 112, 134, 143, 160, Accent, 100, 204, 206. See also
163, 171, 182. See also Disgust; Language
Kristeva, Julia Acceptance, 73, 98, 122, 147, 160.
Abortion, 22, 131–136, 139, 140, See also Tolerance; Welcome
144, 172, 173, 244. See also Aceves, Gustavo, 24, 226
Terminations (of pregnancy) Adaptation, 99, 148, 160, 247
Abraham, Nicolas, 198, 218, 220. See Adey, Peter, 13, 192, 242, 248, 251
also Haunting, transgenerational; Adjacency, 8
Hauntology; Torok, Maria Adriatic sea, 184, 219
Absence, 23, 40, 42, 48, 49, 54, 105, Aestheticization, 23, 163, 164, 246.
138, 162, 197, 199, 200, 202, See also Spornosexual
206, 225, 231, 233, 246. See also and austerity, 164
Body(ies), missing of bodies, 23, 246
in language, 206 and social media, 164
and presence, 23, 105, 199, 200, Aesthetics, 9, 163, 183. See also Art
202, 206, 208, 228, 229, 246 of body, 147
Absorption, 20, 52, 63, 145, 159, 183 of motherhood, 245
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 255

under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
E. Bond, Writing Migration through the Body, Studies in Mobilities,
Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2
256 Index
Affect, 3, 13, 51, 133, 161, 162, Fascist invasion of, 46

177, 201. See also Ahmed, Sara; migration from, 184, 207
Emotions; Feeling Alcoff, Linda Martín, 41, 71
theory, 3 Algeria, 14, 205, 206
African American, 74, 75 Alienation, 49, 97, 119, 125
hairstyles, 74 of self, 47
history, 75 through migration, 23
identity, 75 Ali Farah, Ubah Cristina, 17, 20, 22,
Afterlife, 229. See also Ghost; 23, 44, 54–57, 113, 114, 130,
Haunting; Spectrality 171, 178, 188, 210, 211, 213,
Agamben, Giorgio, 38, 203, 206 214, 243–245
Age, 32, 41, 44, 73, 76, 155, 159, Madre piccola, 44, 53, 63, 112, 128,
188, 207. See also Ageing; 130, 170, 210
Childhood Alighieri, Dante, 227
old, 18, 144 Alpi, Ilaria, 137
Agency, 3, 12, 18, 20, 23, 30, 31, 36, Alterity, 98, 212. See also Otherness
37, 44, 52–54, 57, 58, 60, 62, Ambiguity, 60, 83, 99, 122, 124, 128,
65, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93, 97, 103, 134, 136
115, 120, 121, 133, 147, 148, Ambivalence, 15, 115, 116, 146
163, 172, 174, 180, 182, 189, Amelio, Gianni, 203
192, 203, 208, 209, 211, 214, America, United States of
224, 229, 243, 245, 250 Irish emigration to, 16
and fat, 180 Italian emigration to, 16
and narration, 18, 20, 30, 62, 97, Jewish immigration to, 16
172 Amniotic fluid, 138
and self-harm, 20, 171 Amplification, 157
Ahmed, Sara, 3, 4, 41, 42, 51, 53, Anarchy, 46
63, 78, 84, 161–163, 179, 190, Animation, 58, 201, 249
191, 201, 204–206, 245. See and haunting, 201
also Affect, theory; Itch; Skin; Anonymity, 88
Wrinkle; Writing Anorexia, 245
being-at-home, 63, 79, 80, 232 Anticipation, 86, 129
out of place, 11, 126 Anxiety, 43, 44, 86, 117, 158, 161,
phenomenology, 11, 31, 79 177
AIDS, 97, 98 and transition, 86
Airports, 155 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 77, 78, 92, 99. See
Aizura, Aren Z., 77 also Frontera
Alaimo, Stacy, 117, 139, 242 Anzieu, Didier, 11, 31, 43, 45, 55. See
Albania also Body(ies), envelope
and Adriatic sea, 184 Apparition, 203
clan system of, 83 Appearance, 10, 13, 21, 23, 32,
Communist Party of, 49, 51 33, 47, 48, 50, 51, 72, 74, 77,
Index 257
80, 85, 87, 96, 156, 157, 161, Augmentation (surgical), 102, 164,
163, 164, 169–171, 177, 183, 181, 188
185–187, 198, 199, 226, 245 Authenticity, 59
and clothes, 87, 156 Authority, 58, 60, 181
as self-expression, 156 Authorship, 53, 58, 62, 100
Appetite, 166, 175 Autobiography, 59, 60. See also
regulation of, 181 Memoir
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 118 Autonomy, 43, 55, 166, 168
Approval, 81, 122 Awareness, 18, 24, 44, 54, 56, 63, 73,
and pregnancy, 122 85, 92, 119, 121, 123, 125, 128,
Archive, 1, 4, 20, 21, 29, 30, 130, 174, 197, 199, 224, 248
66, 246 of Body, 63, 119, 136
body as, 1, 4, 21 lack of, 18
skin as, 20, 29, 30 of mobility, 174
Argentina, 135, 198, 200, 214, 217,
220–222
Arrival, 5, 15, 41, 86, 114, 179, 250. B
See also Destination; Journeys Bacha posh, 82
Art, 2, 7, 8, 24, 62, 163, 226, 230, Badiou, Alain, 156, 157, 184
231, 249. See also Installation Bady, Aaron, 16
art; Memorials; Painting; Bakhtin, Mikhail, 83
Performance; Statues; Video, art; Balibar, Étienne, 15, 204
Visual arts Balkans, 41, 81
affects of, 231 Balotelli, Mario, 17
in public spaces, 8 Barrett, Igoni, 104, 105
Articulation, 5, 8 Blackass, 21, 102
Asexuality, 83 Bassnett, Susan, 58
Assemblage, 148 Bauman, Zygmunt, 217
Assimilation, 22, 45, 48, 115, 134, Beauty, 50, 51, 93, 94, 181, 186,
158, 178, 180, 201, 203, 206, 187, 191. See also Aesthetics;
212, 245 Appearance; Enhancement;
Assisted fertility, 141 Surgery, cosmetic
Assmann, Aleida, 198, 200 commodification of, 39, 43, 159
Asterisk, 9, 213 Beck, Ulrich, 118, 231
Asylum, 17, 179, 190, 248 Becoming, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 24, 50,
Asylum seekers, 190, 191, 249 74, 82, 85, 120, 130, 140, 160,
Atlantic ocean, 224 163, 174, 189, 245. See also
Attachment, 5, 73, 163, 227 Grosz, Elizabeth
Attridge, Derek, 7 and rhythm, 174
Audience, 30, 73 Being-at-home, 63, 79, 80, 232
Augé, Marc, 125, 130. See also Belonging, 4, 15, 18, 21, 22, 44, 51,
Supermodernity 71, 72, 76–79, 84, 113, 120,
258 Index
122, 125, 131, 167, 174, 177, codes, 32, 44

181, 188, 200, 201, 204, 207, as conduit, 187, 197
212, 213, 231, 232, 244, 246. control, 3, 23, 156, 165, 166, 169,
See also Braidotti, Rosi; Deleuze, 177, 183, 187, 191
Gilles design, 3, 188
and folding, 131 drift, 102
linguistic, 145, 204, 207, 212, 246 ego, 29
Beqiraj, Arben, 227 envelope, 178
Bhabha, Homi, 58 healthy, 199
Bildung, 114 hypervisible, 180
Binary, 21, 77, 79, 145, 244 idealized, 187
and gender, 145 image, 20, 46, 47, 50, 62, 80,
thinking, 21 158–161, 164, 183, 188, 189
Binge eating, 158 imperfect, 66, 132
Biography, 148, 207, 220 invisible, 199, 242
Birth, 41, 50, 66, 93, 114, 117, 119, as map, 157
122, 125–130, 133, 139, 141, maternal, 3, 22, 112, 115, 118,
156. See also Childbirth 119, 146, 147, 160, 166, 244
Bisexuality, 222 missing, 23, 198, 214, 216,
Bispuri, Laura, 101 219–221, 224, 225, 246
Biss, Eula, 141 narratives, 19, 100, 174, 214, 246
Blacklivesmatter, 73 ‘normal’, 121, 135, 199
Blackness, 17, 192. See also Race; out of place, 126
Whiteness performing, 147, 245, 246
and indirection, 192 politic, 46–48
Blacktranslivesmatter, 73 post-apocalyptic, 247
Blindness, 203 postmodern, 158, 173, 189
Blood, 5, 12, 47, 48, 57, 114, 127, projects, 148, 156, 173, 184,
136–138, 143, 144, 177, 179, 189–191, 245
206, 212, 222. See also Abortion; sculpting, 22, 48, 157
Fluids; Menstruation theory, 3
Boats, 64, 225, 226, 231, 241, 250 ungrievable, 200
as art, 249 unmissed, 224
as canvas, 225 Bodybuilding, 158, 159, 183, 186. See
Bobbing, 241 also Weight, lifting
Body(ies), 2. See also Breasts; Joint; Bond, Emma, 8, 246
Limbs; Organs; Skin Bonding, 161
absent, 23, 198, 202, 225, 229, Border, 12, 15, 29, 42, 65, 77, 78,
232, 246 80, 81, 116, 133, 136, 160, 227,
as alien, 136, 166, 199 248. See also Boundary; Frontier
as artwork, 183 skin as, 12, 29, 42, 58, 80, 162
bodyscapes, 3, 4, 29, 36, 45 Border epistemology, 78
Index 259
Border gnosis, 78 Caesarian section, 139. See also Birth;

Borderlands, 77. See also Anzaldúa, Childbirth
Gloria; Frontera Cancer, 111
Border thinking, 78. See also Border Canons, literary, 188, 205
epistemology; Border gnosis; Capital, 88, 90, 210, 240
Mignolo, Walter Capitalism, 97
Bordo, Susan, 158, 169, 176 Captivity, 127
Borrowing, 103, 201, 216 Care, 22, 56, 63, 112, 115, 118,
linguistic, 201 120, 139–145, 163, 167, 176,
Boundary, 17, 18, 29, 42, 43, 63, 84, 183, 190, 222, 244, 245. See also
124, 129, 180, 243 Selfcare
Bourdieu, Pierre, 11 affective, 144
Braidotti, Rosi, 118, 120, 160, 174, carework, 140, 144, 179, 181
189 for the elderly, 140, 141
Breakage, 126. See also Brisure; Cargo, 240
Derrida, Jacques cargomobilities, 240
Breasts, 84, 93, 187 Carnal hermeneutics, 12
and breastfeeding, 117, 127, 166 Categories, 12, 15, 31, 52, 53, 66, 71,
enhancement (surgical), 158 72, 85, 105, 147, 215, 244, 247
Bricolage, 83, 103, 155, 245 Celebrity, 72, 73
Brigate Rosse, 98. See also Jannelli, Cemeteries, 223. See also Mahdia
Maurizio Censure, 202
Brisure, 9, 100, 131. See also Breakage; Chambers, Iain, 214, 217, 224, 229,
Derrida, Jacques 232
Brophy, Brigid, 99 Chandra, Viola, 22, 167–170,
Browne, Simone, 123. See also 172–174, 188
Sousveillance Media chiara e noccioline, 167,
Bruise, 32, 162. See also Skin 170–173
Bulimia, 168, 172, 245. See also Cheah, Pheng, 13, 212
Vomiting Childbirth, 32. See also Birth;
as agency, 245 Caesarian section
as self-assertion, 172 Childhood, 57, 121, 208
Buoyancy, 242. See also Bobbing; Circulation, 5, 8, 31, 161, 162, 224,
Disturbance; Floating 240
Burial, 240, 242 of blood, 127
Butler, Judith, 123, 130, 200 of goods, 240
Circumcision, 44. See also Cut;
Infibulation
C Cities
Cadence, 204, 205. See also Accent; Milan, 64, 133
Voice negotiation of, 92, 104
double, 204, 205 New York, 65
260 Index
Paris, 226 Conflict, 55, 85, 94, 96, 99, 104, 111,
Rome, 113, 204, 226 113, 166, 177, 182, 210
Tunis, 222 Consciousness, 78, 89, 92, 121, 146,
Turin, 155 156, 216, 242
Washington D.C., 83 Construction, 21, 32, 49, 74, 75, 93,
Clan systems, 32, 83 95, 98–100, 104, 124, 133, 184,
in Albania, 83 233, 245
in Somalia, 103 Consumer culture, 73
Class, social, 32 Consumerism, 97. See also Consumer
Clothes, 156, 189, 190 culture
and fashion, 156, 189, 190 Consumption, 12, 23, 72, 97, 158,
as self-expression, 156 163, 165, 168, 169, 172, 174–
Codes, 32, 36, 37, 44, 50–53, 83, 176, 215, 245. See also Dieting;
86–88, 91, 102–104, 243 Eating
of body, 32, 40, 52 anorexia, bulimia, 245
of tattoos, 34, 36 excess, 4, 22, 147, 157, 159, 165,
Code-switching, 212. See also 174, 175, 186, 188, 245
Language over-, 179, 245
Coding, 105, 132 patterns of, 157, 166, 178
Collaboration, 91, 230 Contact, 5, 11, 13, 54, 80, 84, 142,
Colonialism, 19, 213 161, 162, 189, 216
Commemoration, 223 Containerization, 240
Commodification, 39, 43, 159 Containment, 43
Commodities, 241, 242 Contamination, 134, 135, 177
bodies as, 43, 91, 97, 188, 241 Contours, 22, 76, 134, 157, 182, 200
Communication, 3, 9, 18, 31, 34, 35, Control, 23, 40, 46–48, 50, 60, 65,
40, 42, 53, 58, 113, 165, 197, 125, 136, 137, 156, 158, 165–
212, 215, 227 167, 169, 172, 176, 177, 180,
Communism, 48–51 181, 183, 184, 187, 189, 191
in Albania, 49, 51 of appetite, 181
and bodies, 48, 49 bodily, 3, 23, 46, 47, 49, 50, 65,
Community, 30, 33–36, 42, 46, 136, 156, 165, 166, 169, 187,
73–75, 81, 85, 124, 179, 181, 189
204 visual, 160
Compensation, 170 Corpses, 139, 213, 220
Composition, 14, 46, 49, 139, 214, Cosmopolitan, 118, 231
215 Counterflow, 240
Concealment, 36, 80, 243 Crawford, Lucas, 21. See also Trans-,
Concrete canvas, 228, 229, 249. occupation
See also Larsen, Nikolaj Bendix Creativity, 8, 13, 62, 85, 214, 226
Skyum, End of Dreams and menstruation, 138
Confinement, 76 and self-harm, 20, 54, 57
Index 261
and tattoos, 20, 35, 60, 62 De Beauvoir, Simone, 136, 137

Creolization, 15, 103 De Caldas Brito, Christiana
Cresswell, Tim, 4 ‘Ana de Jesus’, 142
Criminality, 33–35, 37, 60, 131 ‘Io, polpastrello 5.423’, 142
Crisis, 113, 129, 177, 178, 182, 198, ‘Maroggia’, 139
205, 206, 228 Qui e là, 118
Cronin, Michael, 10 De Certeau, Michel, 52, 53
Cross-dressing, 81, 92, 103. See also Deep stealth, 74
Transvestism Defence, 182
Crossing, 9, 17, 19, 57, 64, 80, 81, Defilement, 132, 134, 136, 209
95, 98, 117, 177, 185, 224, 244 Deleuze, Gilles, 156, 157, 160
Cryptophore, 220 De Man, Paul, 203
Csordas, Thomas, 14, 31, 45, 157, Departure, 5, 72, 155, 215. See also
159 Arrival; Destination; Journeys
Culture Depression, 217
and expectations, 21, 103, 114, 158 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 131, 198, 199,
and heritage, 12, 126, 175 201, 202, 207, 212
and practices, 6, 8, 81 Desaparecidos, 23, 214, 216, 217,
studies, 2, 248 221–223
Curation, 37, 44, 57, 90, 98, 172 Desire, 6, 9, 12, 21, 38, 54, 55, 62,
practices, 120 76, 80, 85, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100,
Cure, 56, 90, 206 103, 104, 128, 134, 144, 159,
Currents, 2, 10, 24, 241, 242, 246, 164, 165, 167, 169, 173, 175,
251. See also Sea; Waves 176, 186, 187, 191, 209, 219,
Cusk, Rachel, 115, 116, 129, 131, 223
132, 141 Destination, 7, 9, 91, 155, 215, 241,
Cut, 44, 54, 55, 65, 83, 90, 139, 163, 250. See also Arrival; Departure;
184, 212. See also Circumcision; Journeys
Infibulation; Rips Detachment, 55, 169
Cyborg, 13, 21, 90, 100–102, 105, Deviation, 53, 245
133, 164, 186, 244, 247 Diagnosis, 9
Dialect, 3, 14, 32, 72, 131, 205, 212,
215, 243. See also Language
D Dialogue, 2, 4, 21, 35, 57, 72, 79,
Dainotto, Roberto M., 15, 204 102, 159, 163, 210, 229, 246,
Davis, Colin, 199, 203, 207, 218, 247
220, 229 Diary, 18
Deadnaming, 74 Diaspora, 2, 21, 84, 102, 116, 210,
De André, Fabrizio, 101 212
Death, 16, 30, 37, 56, 97, 98, 111, Dictatorship, 116, 219, 221
139, 140, 163, 187, 200, 203, Dieting, 147, 157, 164, 167,
209, 219, 220, 226, 242, 248 180, 189
262 Index
Difference, 8, 13, 21, 44, 74, 76, 77, in narrative, 14, 88, 208, 209
91, 97, 99, 100, 115, 120, 124, and observation, 85
134, 136, 141, 147, 160, 165, and perspective, 14, 209
174, 190, 199, 205, 232, 246 Disturbance, 91, 126, 147, 183, 198,
Diffidence, 116 242
Di Giovanni, Alessia, 131 Diversity, 126, 165
Piena di niente, 131 DNA, 111
Digital technologies, 102 Dolezal, Rachel, 21, 74
Direction, 62, 79, 114, 123, 158, 192, Domination, 37, 180
213, 215, 228 Dones, Elvira, 20, 23, 83–89, 219,
Dirt, 132, 133, 136, 143. See also 220, 244, 246
Racialization I mari ovunque, 214, 217, 220, 224
and abjection, 132, 136, 143 Sole bruciato, 39, 44, 209
as defilement, 132, 136 Vergine giurata, 44, 76, 79, 82,
as pollution, 132 90–92, 100, 101
Disability, 76, 199 Douglas, Mary, 117–119, 132, 134,
Disappearance, 13, 83, 186, 192, 160
197–199, 217, 218, 231, 233 Drakulić, Slavenka
Discipline, 4, 166, 188 S: A Novel about the Balkans, 127
Discrimination, 73, 240 Dreams, 13, 99, 185
Disease, 39, 46. See also Illness; Drift, 24, 100, 102, 241, 251
Sickness Dual heritage, 53, 113, 124, 167,
Disembodiment, 124 169, 178. See also Mixed race;
Disgust, 99, 112, 160, 161, 166, 168, Second generation
170, 171, 175, 177, 178, 180. See belonging, 113
also Abjection; Revolt; Revulsion identity, 53, 166, 169, 178
and desire, 99 Duncan, Derek, 217, 224, 227
and excess, 166, 175 Dyer, Geoff, 16
food, 166, 168, 170, 171, 178 Dynamism, 15, 174, 227
Dislocation, 13, 51, 200, 207 Dysappearance, 48. See also Leder,
Disorder, 46, 148, 158, 166, 240 Drew
Disorientation, 41, 125, 126, 192, Dysphoria, 72, 75
210, 249
Displacement, 5, 7, 13, 76, 127, 207,
224, 244, 248 E
Display, 58, 93, 132, 157, 184, 199, Eastern Europe, 142
232, 243 migration from, 19, 95
Dispossession, 201 Eating, 12. See also Anorexia; Bulimia;
Disruption, 31, 76, 100, 130, 217, Consumption; Dieting
219, 244 disordered, 157, 158, 168, 173,
Distance, 14, 135, 170, 176, 177, 180
208, 209, 215, 239 disorders, 167
Index 263
excess, 157, 166, 181 Europe, 7, 15–17, 19, 46, 63, 64, 81,
improper, 157 95, 97, 98, 204, 217, 248
Écart, 122 borders of, 15, 63
Eco-criticism, 117, 242 Italy within, 15, 16, 46, 217
Edkins, Jenny, 216, 219, 224 migration to, 64, 95
Effemiphobia, 103 Excess, 157, 158, 166, 167, 175,
Ego boundaries, 168 180–182, 186, 245
Ejection, 167, 169 Exclusions, 72, 132, 191, 248
Ellipsis, 206 Exercise, 23, 57, 157, 158, 165, 181,
Embodiment, 9, 11, 12, 14, 21, 46, 189
51, 72, 76, 77, 79, 83, 84, 88, Exhumation, 209, 229
90, 93, 95, 96, 100–102, 113, Exile, 88, 178, 210, 221
119, 122, 124, 125, 128, 129, Existentialism, 11
131, 134, 145, 146, 187, 224, Expansion, 23, 48, 80, 158
244, 246–248, 251. See also Expectation, 21, 53, 60, 77, 85, 86,
Body(ies) 103, 129
as knowledge, 146 Exploitation, 19, 43, 182, 201, 232
Embryo, 135, 147 Expression, 1–3, 5, 7, 10, 18–20, 22,
Emotionality, 10, 162 36, 40, 55–57, 66, 78, 85, 89,
Emotions, 2, 8, 64, 88, 137, 146, 99, 115, 116, 146, 156, 165,
161–163, 183, 226. See also 191, 201, 205, 206, 208
Affect; Feeling non-verbal, 201
Empathy, 249 of the self, 20, 40, 53, 56, 57, 179,
Enhancement, surgical, 158, 164 184, 211
Entanglement, 10 Expulsion, 159, 160, 174, 219, 245
Environment, 44, 121, 138. See also Externalization, 113, 135
Eco-criticism
Epidermalization, 30
Epistemology, 78 F
Erasure, 23, 44, 75, 105, 146, 231, Failure, 43, 230. See also Halberstam,
249 J. Jack
Eritrea, 142. See also Horn of Africa; and creativity, 230
Shryock, Ricci Family, 2, 7, 42, 48, 50, 72, 81–83,
Italian colonialization of, 64 96, 103, 112, 113, 116, 128,
migration from, 64 130, 135, 140, 141, 144, 157,
Erotics, 3, 164 158, 167, 172, 175–177, 179,
Estrangement, 77, 78 182, 250. See also Mother-child
Ethics, 111, 145, 225, 232 relationships; Mothers
and artwork, 232 conflict, 96, 177
of encounter, 199 enmeshed type, 8
of otherness, 145 generations, 112, 176
Fanon, Frantz, 30
264 Index
Fantasy, 52, 114, 129, 135, 160, 164, as alien, 119, 136
165, 247 as invader, 125
Farías de Albuquerque, Fernanda, 92, Fibres, 156
93, 95–99, 244 Fiction, 6, 18, 21, 52, 75, 186, 203,
Princesa, 44, 76, 79, 91, 94, 229, 247, 248
99–101 and identity, 2, 75
Farnell, Brenda, 5, 11, 19 Film
Fascism, 16, 17, 47, 161 Asmat, 243, 249, 250
Fashion, 3, 16, 23, 43, 50, 57, 65, Come un uomo sulla terra, 249
78, 91, 104, 142, 144, 156, 165, Human Flow, 249
173, 189–191, 223, 224, 232, Princesa, 101
240, 243, 245 Vergine giurata, 101
Fat Fingerprints, 177
and agency, 180 Fission, 122. See also Écart
and excess, 180 Fixity, 38, 40, 147, 215
as excess, 163 Flash mob, 249
and feminism, 157 Flavor, 100, 166. See also Taste
metaphors of, 180 Flaying, 55. See also Anzieu, Didier;
and presence, 181 Marsyas, myth of
as rebellion, 180 Flesh, 2, 12, 29, 32, 39, 47, 81, 177,
and space, 180 182, 183, 187, 223
and visibility, 163 Flexibility, 8, 21, 22, 52, 71, 72, 75,
Fatigue, 199 76, 163, 173, 180, 205, 246. See
Faustine, Nona, 20, 65 also Ong, Aihwa
Fear, 64, 86, 119, 120, 132, 134, 135, Floating, 101, 241
140, 141, 161–163, 166, 175, Flow, 5, 8, 24, 46, 71, 118, 136, 137,
182, 219 147, 148, 240, 242, 249, 251
Featherstone, Mike, 146, 184, 187, Fluidity, 5, 8, 17, 22, 85, 89, 102,
191 112, 117–119, 124, 139, 173,
Feeling, 15, 18, 52, 75, 80, 82, 84, 215, 250
85, 88, 91, 124, 127, 162. See Fluids, 54, 85, 117, 136, 137, 140,
also Affect; Emotions 170, 171
Female Genital Mutilation, 44. See also Flux, 9, 15, 117, 119, 120, 124, 148,
Circumcision; Cut; Infibulation 160
Feminism, 11, 74, 85, 157, 173 Foldedness, 10
Fernandes, Brendan Folding, 160, 189, 245
Clean Labour, 142 Folds, 20, 22, 66, 80, 148, 157, 160,
Ferrante, Elena, 16, 115 164, 165, 199, 245. See also
Fertility, 112, 136, 141, 143, 173 Deleuze, Gilles; Pli
Fetal photography, 123 Food, 23, 165, 171, 173. See also
Fetus, 111, 119, 122, 123, 132, 135, Consumption; Disgust; Eating;
136, 144, 147 Mother-child relationships
Index 265
and belonging, 165 also Bacha posh; Masculinity;

and conflict, 166, 167 Spornosexual; Trans-, gender
as identity marker, 23 performance, 21, 77, 79, 86, 121
and memory, 165 representation, 157
and nostalgia, 165, 178 Genre, 33, 100
Foreignness, 18, 41, 52 autobiography, 100
Fortier, Anne-Marie, 4, 5, 10 fiction, 247
Foucault, Michel, 11, 40, 42, 44, 46, film, 247
72, 120, 186 memoir, 59
Fragmentation, 13, 22, 124, 148, 188 Geography, 6, 9, 76, 208. See also
Freud, Sigmund, 29, 56 Rich, Adrienne
Friction, 10 bodily, 6, 9, 14, 50
Frontera, 77. See also Anzaldúa, Gloria; of location, 9, 14, 16, 214
Border; Frontier Gestation, 112, 117, 119, 122, 140.
Frontier, 15, 129 See also Pregnancy
Fullness, 114, 173 Ghost, 23, 43, 136, 198–202, 208,
Fungibility, 17 231
Future, 13, 15, 24, 38–40, 64, 65, as disturbance, 198, 214
82, 83, 129, 131, 133, 140, 156, as social figure, 23, 200
165, 185, 215, 217, 218, 224, Ghost ships, 241
243, 247. See also Cyborg; Past; Giddens, Anthony, 148, 156, 188
Present; Temporality; Time Gilman, Sander L., 157
Gilroy, Paul, 224
Glass, 42, 43, 168, 209, 227
G Global, 1, 9, 10, 15, 19, 84, 118, 202,
Gabbaccia, Donna, 215 215, 216, 231, 233, 239–241,
Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 205 248
Gaps, 53, 186, 192, 201 and local, 9, 19, 84, 215
in language, 53 Globalization, 118, 143, 215
in time, 205 Glossary, 213
Gay, Roxane, 182, 189, 190 Gluttony, 175
Hunger, 182, 189 Goldman, Henrique, 101
Gaze, 3, 11, 12, 41, 43, 85, 94, 96, Gordon, Avery, 198, 199, 201–203,
104, 123, 128, 199 206, 232
of desire, 85, 94, 104 Grammar, 242. See also Language
male, 94 of body, 242
Gender, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 17, 21, 32, Grandparents, 134, 222
59, 71, 72, 75–83, 85, 89–91, Greene, Shelleen, 16, 231
95, 96, 100, 102–104, 111, Greer, Germaine, 74
114, 121, 133, 143–145, 147, Grief, 57, 227
158, 159, 180, 192, 244. See Grip, 10, 186
266 Index
Grosz, Elizabeth, 11, 13, 31, 35, 45, Heidegger, Martin, 11

46, 50, 51, 56, 62, 79, 118, 119, Heritage, 2, 12, 54, 126, 175, 210,
130, 159, 163, 174, 183, 186, 222
190, 231. See also Becoming Hierarchy, 240
untimely, 15 Hijab, 103. See also Veil
Grotesque, 83, 173. See also Bakhtin, Hinge, 5, 9, 10, 75, 131. See also
Mikhail Brisure
Growth, 122, 129 Historicity, 158, 159
Guantánamo, 223 Holocaust, 38, 59, 64, 202, 216
Gubar, Susan, 202 Home
body as, 80, 81, 96
feeling, 84, 91
H homecoming, 77
Habitat, 85, 217 in trans-gender narratives, 81
Habitation, 200 Homogenization, 78, 207
Hage, Ghassan, 5, 191, 209 Horn of Africa, 16. See also Eritrea;
Halberstam, J. Jack, 8, 13, 17, 21 Somalia
Hall, Stuart, 215 Hospitality, 142, 225, 247
Hallucination, 125 Hoxha, Enver, 46–48, 90. See
Hanjin, 239–241, 250 also Albania; Communism;
Hannerz, Ulf, 15, 217, 251 Dictatorship
Haptic, 22, 31–33, 38, 42, 44, 157. Hubs, 155. See also Airports; Transit
See also Affect, theory; Texture Human rights, 7
Haraway, Donna, 80, 101, 102, 105, Hunger, 103, 167. See also Eating
128, 135, 186 Husserl, Edmund, 11, 12. See also
Hardness, 93, 245. See also Softness Körper; Leib
as armour, 182 Hybridity, 21, 78, 99, 101, 102, 133,
and bodybuilding, 183 134
and boundaries, 182 Hyper-mobility, 5
and cosmetic surgery, 182 Hyper-reality, 164
as defence, 162 Hyper-visibility, 21, 30, 42, 96, 124,
Haunting, 4, 48, 198, 199, 202, 219
205, 207, 208, 219, 221, 225, Hyphen, 9, 71, 79, 80, 89, 90, 125.
232, 246. See also Ghost; Limbs, See also Prefix; Suffix; Trans-;
Phantom; Spectrality Virgule
narrative, 23, 198, 201, 207, 210, and asterisk, 213
214, 246
of language, 201, 213
of space, 23, 213, 216, 231, 246 I
transgenerational, 218 Ibrahimi, Anilda, 50, 114, 127, 244
Hauntology, 198 L’amore e gli stracci del tempo, 117,
Healing, 39, 53, 128, 220 122, 127, 129
Health, 45, 82, 97, 181, 187, 197 Rosso come una sposa, 50, 112, 128
Index 267
Idealization, 13 Indirection, 192

Identification, 34, 55, 76, 80, 178, Indulgence, 180, 190
190 Inequality, 75
Identity Infection, 39, 50
bodily, 100, 189 Infibulation, 44, 90
as fiction, 75 Inflexibility, 246
flexibility, 75, 205 Injustice, 198, 200, 217
and migration, 2, 117 Ink, 60, 224
self-presentation of, 75 and tattoos, 60
as theft, 75 and writing, 60
Ideology, 6, 38, 46, 83 Inscription, 37, 39–41, 44, 48–50, 91,
Illness, 50, 199. See also Disease; 100, 187, 211
Sickness Insomnia, 208
Imagery, 47, 143, 232 Instability, 5, 16, 17, 81, 120, 122,
Imaginary, 20, 29, 30, 46, 47, 66, 244
102, 171, 242, 248 Installation art, 2, 23
skin as, 20, 29, 171 Intake, 160, 166, 174, 179. See also
Imagination, 24, 129, 160, 161, 200, Consumption; Eating
224, 248 food, 166
Imitation, 80, 90, 204 Integration, 22, 57, 115, 124, 212
Immateriality, 4 Integrity, 74, 124, 126. See also Ethics
Immediacy, 8 bodily, 124, 126
Immigration law, 177 Interpretation, 1, 8, 17, 251
Immobility, 192, 246 Interruption, 147, 210
Impairment, 132 Intersectionality, 12, 251
Impotence, 44 Intersubjectivity, 10, 121. See also
Impregnation, 173 Childhood
and ingestion, 173 Intertwining, 12
Impressions, 161, 162. See also Intimacy, 54, 55, 84, 127, 142, 170
Csordas, Thomas and work, 39, 142
external, 245 Invasion, 47, 95
management, 157, 245 Inversion, 156
Imprint, 32, 58, 89 Invisibility, 42, 48, 74, 123, 124, 142,
Impurity, 177. See also Defilement 201, 219, 221
of food, 177 Irigaray, Luce, 85, 147, 148
Inbetween, 17. See also Liminality Italy, 2. See also Colonialism; ‘Southern
Incorporation, 22, 47, 87, 124, 145, Question’
157, 159, 176, 177, 180, 201, emigration from, 16
245. See also Swallowing as late, 15
Indigestion, 173 as peripheral, 15
and abortion, 173 postcolonial, 16
268 Index
and race, 17, 75 Kingsley, Patrick, 65, 82

trans-national, 14, 15, 131, 207, Kinopolitics, 5
213, 229 Knowledge, 3, 20, 30–34, 36, 37, 41,
unification of, 231 42, 44–46, 56, 76–80, 87, 131,
as white, 16, 75, 167 146, 165, 216, 243
within Europe, 15, 16, 46, 217 body, 3, 31, 32, 216
Itch, 53, 84. See also Skin skin, 30, 32, 44, 80, 243
as awareness, 63 Körper, 11. See also Husserl, Edmund;
as discontinuity, 84 Leib
Kristeva, Julia, 114, 118, 120, 125,
132–134, 171, 182
J abject, 132, 171
Jannelli, Maurizio, 98, 99 Powers of Horror, 171
Princesa, 98, 99 Kroker, Arthur, 102
Jenner, Caitlyn, 21, 73 Kuruvilla, Gabriella, 17, 22, 133–135,
Joint, 9, 95, 190. See also Articulation; 142, 144, 170
Brisure; Hyphen ‘Aborto’, 117, 132, 133, 136, 140,
and time, 190 144, 167
out of, 190 ‘Badante’, 118, 140, 143, 144
Jorgensen, Christine, 73 È la vita, dolcezza, 140
Journeys, 5–7, 62, 117, 191, 198, ‘Ruben’, 112, 113, 123, 167
200, 217, 219, 230, 240, 241. See Kyenge, Cécile, 17
also Arrival; Destination; Home;
Migration; Travel
Julien, Isaac, 24, 231 L
Junction, 66 Labour
Justice, 216 carework, 141
Juxtaposition, 140, 168, 198, 202, as dirty, 143
216, 222, 224, 230, 232 emotional, 143
Lahiri, Jhumpa, 18, 19
and self-translation, 18
K ‘The Boundary’, 18
Kafka, Franz, 103 Lakhous, Amara, 22, 23, 65, 140,
In the Penal Colony, 37 178, 179, 181, 188, 203–206,
Kane, Cheick Hamidou, 16 213, 245
Kanun, 90 Divorzio all’islamica a Viale
Katër i Radës, 225, 226 Marconi, 203, 205
Kensinger, Kenneth, 30 Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a
Khaal, Abu Bakr, 1 Piazza Vittorio, 117, 139, 205
Khouma, Pap, 42 Landsberg, Alison, 13. See also
Kin, 9, 145 Memory, prosthetic
Kinaesthetics, 8 Language, 2. See also Accent;
Kinetics, 8, 71 Cadence; Dialect; Mother
Index 269
tongue; Non-language; Silence; Lilin, Nicolai, 20, 33, 35–38, 51,

Swearwords 58–60, 62, 243
and belonging, 18, 113, 201, 212 Educazione siberiana, 33, 34, 44,
and death, 56 59, 62
English, 34, 59 Il marchio ribelle, 33
‘foreign’, 208 Siberian Education; Growing up in a
as haunted, 201, 212, 213 Criminal Underworld, 33
hybrid, 99 Storie sulla pelle, 33, 34, 36
and identity, 2, 18, 47, 83, 94, 113, Limbs, 46, 164
207, 213 missing, 51, 164
as inbetween space, 18 phantom, 51
Italian, 14, 19, 56, 59, 99, 206, Liminality, 17, 78, 119, 160
207, 209–211 Limits, 58, 88, 159, 229
and passing, 213 Linearity, 77, 78, 207, 231, 232
Somali, 210, 213 Lingis, Alphonso, 35
Larsen, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum, 24, Liquidity, 217
231 Lived experience, 51, 99, 208
End of Dreams, 228–230, 242, 249 Local, 9, 19, 84, 139, 215, 225,
Lateness, 15 229, 231, 233. See also Cronin,
Laye, Camara, 16 Michael; Global; Micro
Leakiness, 119, 143, 146. See also Location, 6, 9, 11, 14–16, 37, 45, 51,
Body(ies), maternal; Boundary; 77, 78, 80, 114, 121, 122, 125,
Flow; Seepage 210, 214. See also Place
Leder, Drew, 12, 48, 177, 197, 199, Lombardi-Diop, Cristina, 224
210, 225 Loneliness, 179, 181, 182
Legality, 17, 18, 43, 191 Loss, 19, 43, 64, 134, 157, 198, 200,
of migration, 17 202, 210, 217, 227, 241, 249
Legibility Love, Heather, 15
of body, 33, 40, 41 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 155
and perception, 41
and recognition, 34
of skin, 33 M
Leib, 11. See also Husserl, Edmund; Macerata, 17
Körper Mahdia, 223. See also Cemeteries
Leibowitz, Annie, 72 Makaping, Geneviève, 17
Lemos, Kalliopi, 225, 231 Malleability, 75, 76
Lesbian relationships, 87 Margalit, Avishai, 7
Levi, Primo Marginality, 33
Se questo è un uomo, 227 Marginalization, 97
Levinas, Emmanuel, 203 Margins, 120, 132, 160
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 156 Marriage, 32, 82, 91
270 Index
Marsyas, myth of, 55 liquid, 217

Masculinity, 73, 86, 183, 184, 186. as trans-national, 198, 217, 222,
See also Spornosexual 224, 228, 246
and anxiety, 158 Melliti, Mohsen, 203
and bodybuilding, 157 Mementoes, 202
and dieting, 157 Memoir, 59, 62, 74, 79, 182. See also
recasting of, 164 Autobiography; Genre
Masochism, 55, 221 Memorialization, 13, 231, 242
Massey, Doreen, 5 Memorials, 202, 214, 225, 227, 232
Materiality, 23, 131, 158, 227, 251 Memory
of the body, 11, 23, 80, 158, 198, body, 45, 202
246 cosmopolitan, 200, 214, 225, 231
Maternity, 22, 112, 113, 115, 117, cultural, 44, 45, 224
118, 130, 131, 140, 141, multidirectional, 23
145–148, 165, 172, 244, 245. prosthetic, 13
See also Motherhood; Mothering; by proxy, 24, 202, 246
Mothers skin, 38, 44, 52, 53, 63, 80
Matriarchy, 174 transnational, 198, 221, 224, 232
McCarthy, Tom, 155, 156 Menstruation
Satin Island, 155 as abject, 136
McNeill, William, 161 as creativity, 138
Meaning, 3–5, 9–13, 16, 23, 32, 40, intergenerational, 138
111, 112, 116, 136, 141, 147, and mother-daughter relationships,
155–160, 183, 186, 198, 200, 166, 168, 171
203, 206, 212, 215, 217, 220, pathological, 136, 138
224, 231, 243–245, 247, 250, as queer, 136
251 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 10–12, 31,
bodily, 165, 197 84, 94, 122, 172
concealment of, 60 Merriman, Peter, 6, 8
secret, 34, 60 Mestiza, 92. See also Anzaldúa, Gloria;
tattoos and, 33, 34, 36, 60 Dual heritage; Mixed race
Media, 7, 21, 72, 74–76, 102, 164, Metamorphosis, 103, 163, 172,
214, 221, 224, 240, 241, 244, 182. See also Transformation;
250. See also Press Transition
and gender, 21, 72, 75 and agency, 172
and race, 21, 75 and visibility, 163
Mediation, 37, 155, 201 Metaphors, 112, 116, 162, 221, 240,
Mediterranean, 16, 64, 198, 214, 217, 245, 250
219, 222–225, 228, 231, 239, of body, 5, 19, 45, 46, 76, 112,
246 116, 119, 125, 143, 180, 245
hybrid, 217 of fat, 180
Index 271
of journey, 76, 78, 240 174, 178, 182, 185, 188, 189,
of skin, 19, 20, 29, 45, 58, 159, 191, 192, 197, 198, 200, 204,
243 205, 207, 215, 226, 232, 240,
of water, 214, 231, 240, 241, 250 243–247, 250
Metonymy, 46 Modification, 23, 52, 147, 158, 159,
Micro, 10, 85. See also Cronin, 164, 183
Michael; Global; Local; Particular of body, 4, 23, 52, 158, 159, 164,
Microchimerism, 22, 111, 145, 147, 183, 186, 187, 247
244. See also Tolerance Mogadishu, 54, 55, 137, 209, 210
Middle Passage, 224 Monsters, 169, 248. See also Abjection;
Mignolo, Walter, 78 Bakhtin, Mikhail; Grotesque
Migrants, 2, 5, 12, 13, 63–65, Moorehead, Caroline, 240
140, 141, 178, 201, 203, 217, Morality, 82
219, 221, 224, 225, 228, 240, Morante, Elsa, 115
247–249 Morbidity, 168
Migration Moretti, Franco, 7
and debilitation, 245 Morphology, 100, 185, 186
of fetal cells, 111 Morrison, Toni
irregular, 91 Beloved, 37
journeys, 6, 7, 60, 62, 64, 78, 117, Mortality, 23, 158
191, 198, 200, 217, 219, 240, Mortification, 40, 63
241, 248, 250 Mother-child relationships
and labour, 142 and ambivalence, 115, 116
and legality, 17 and diffidence, 116
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 187, 189 Motherhood, 22. See also Body(ies),
Miscarriage, 133 maternal; Maternity; Matriarchy;
Misogyny, 74, 143 Mother-child relationships
Mistranslation, 19 alternative, 244
Mixed race, 113. See also Dual herit- globalized, 143
age; Mestiza; Second generation idealized, 22, 114
appearance, 169–171 interrupted, 116, 244
and heritage, 113, 169 queer, 136, 145
and identity, 114, 128, 169, 171 as plenitude, 114
and unease, 170 ‘postmodern’, 120
Mixing, 54, 133, 170, 230 as reconnection, 114
Mobile technologies, 155 redemptive, 115, 245
Mobilities studies, 2, 4–6, 11 substitutive, 141, 244
Mobility, 1, 2, 4–11, 13, 14, 19, 20, unwanted, 22
29, 30, 52, 62, 77, 79, 105, as work, 114, 120
111, 117–119, 121, 124, 132, Mothering
145–148, 157, 159–163, 173, in aesthetic mode, 147
272 Index
diverted, 141 cut, 184

transnational, 22, 112, 117, 140, ripped, 184
141, 146, 147, 244 wasted, 185
Mothers Museums, 223
idealized, 165 Mutuality, 42, 84, 121, 122
migrant, 22, 64, 124, 211 of touch, 42, 84, 122
rebellious, 115
subversive, 115
Mother tongue, 2, 99, 211 N
Motherwork, 140, 141, 143, 244 NAACP (National Association for the
Motion, 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 22, 32, 71, Advancement of Colored People),
72, 79, 118, 120, 161, 162, 174, 74
244, 246, 247. See also Mobility; Nail, Thomas, 4, 5, 18
Movement Nancy, Jean-Luc, 20
Mourning, 87, 242 Narration, 20, 132, 243
Mouth, 159. See also Consumption; of experience, 2, 4, 6, 19, 23, 51,
Eating; Language; Speech 60, 99, 112, 115, 116, 118,
as interface, 159, 245 123, 125, 130, 172, 173, 201,
as passage, 159, 213 214, 244–246
sewing of, 65 of the body, 3, 13, 14, 18, 21, 23,
as transition, 19, 159 39, 49, 57, 66, 81, 96, 100,
Movement, 2. See also Mobility; 105, 112, 128, 157, 173, 174,
Motion 188, 209, 225, 242, 243, 245,
as attachment, 5, 163 246
as circulation, 8, 162, 240 of the self, 33, 57, 77, 80, 91, 173
of emotion, 2, 10, 162, 163 Narrative
in migration, 1, 4, 6, 20, 29, 30, 41, and agency, 3, 18, 20, 30, 62, 84,
44, 45, 53, 72, 78, 188, 200, 90, 97, 100, 245
215 as curative, 98, 172
and rhythm, 174 perspective, 14, 130, 209
Mubiayi, Ingy, 117, 125, 127, 128, representation, 19, 23, 49, 62, 71,
244 118, 131, 157, 159, 161, 165,
‘Nascita’, 117, 125 246
Mujila, Fiston Mwanza, 51 Nationalism, 19
Multidirectionality, 23 Nationality, 71, 76, 79, 119
Multiplicity, 13, 15, 21, 72, 76, 78, Nations
96, 102, 160 and belonging, 113, 145, 177, 204,
Multi-raciality, 75 207, 231, 246
Multiscalarity, 19 boundaries of, 8, 122, 177, 202,
Muscles, 182–185. See also 232
Bodybuilding; Hardness; Weight, and identity, 46, 120, 174, 213, 231
lifting nation-building, 231
Index 273
Nature, 4, 6, 15, 31, 34, 35, 50, 53, brain, 47

57, 62, 63, 73, 85, 90, 112, 116, heart, 47
124, 129, 139, 142, 147, 159, kidneys, 88
160, 172, 181, 187, 197, 201, skin, 3, 32, 43
206, 222, 226, 230, 240–242, Organ transplant, 247
249. See also Eco-criticism; Orientalism, 15, 75
Environment Orientation, 11, 21, 33, 51, 72, 76,
Negation, 232 79, 83, 89, 94, 162, 216, 244
Negotiation, 15, 89, 92, 112, 113, Orifices, 120, 142, 160
147, 214, 216, 244 Osman, Diriye, 103
Neoslave testimonies, 37 Fairytales for Lost Children, 21, 102
Networks, 120, 155, 166, 198, 201, Othering, 161
202, 208, 215, 232, 233, 249. Otherness, 104, 170. See also Alterity
See also Kin Otranto, 46, 225–227
and technology, 102 Ovadia, Moni, 227
Ngucaj, Arta, 227 Overlaps, 156, 207, 217
Nightmares, 13, 205 Overprotection, 167
Noise, 40
Nomadism, 189
Non-language, 206 P
Non-places, 125, 130 Paci, Adrian, 226
Non-verbal expression, 201 Pain, 31, 37, 39, 40, 54, 56, 57, 62,
Nordberg, Jenny, 82 63, 75, 93, 97, 130, 189, 199,
Normativity, 78, 181 217, 223
Nostalgia, 51, 165, 178, 179, 181, and knowledge, 3, 37
205 of transformation, 118, 189, 223
Nuba, 32, 35, 37 Painting, 49
Nussbaum, Martha C., 118 Palimpsest, 45, 50
Nuttall, Sarah, 10 Panopticon, 40
Paralysis, 13
Paranoia, 169
O Particular, 3, 5, 6, 10, 14, 31, 35, 37,
Obama, Barack, 73 45, 46, 51, 58, 59, 74, 77, 79,
Obesity, 245 81, 83, 88, 111, 115, 120, 155,
Objectification, 115, 245 158, 160, 165–167, 169, 187,
Objects, 10, 46, 49, 113, 121, 130, 203, 208, 216, 217, 225, 231,
161, 174, 202, 216, 240 232, 243–245. See also Local;
Observation, 9, 127, 209 Micro
Ong, Aihwa, 14 Particularity, 216
Ontology, 11, 24, 229, 251 Passing, 8, 32, 71, 75, 81, 88, 94, 95,
Oppression, 75, 186 99, 130, 139, 174, 191, 203,
Orbach, Susie, 157, 176, 177 205, 207, 244. See also Trans-,
Organs gender; Transition
274 Index
as erasure, 99 Physicality, 4, 54, 56, 62, 65, 91, 123,

linguistic, 204 170, 175, 225, 245
spatial, 205 Pile, Steve, 199, 200, 210
and temporality, 205 Place, 3. See also Local; Micro
and visibility, 71, 191 and ethics of care’, 226
Passivity, 162 haunted, 210
and emotionality, 162 and installation art, 226
as weakness, 162 and memory, 13, 210
Past, 6. See also Future; Present; possession of, 210
Temporality; Time Play, 7, 8, 10, 13–15, 19, 53, 72,
belongings, 145, 165, 174 79, 80, 117, 168, 203. See also
and loss, 179 Cyborg
and nostalgia, 165, 205 and creativity, 8, 13
recuperation of, 38, 66, 145 Pleasure, 7, 31, 97, 138, 164, 184,
Pathology, 48, 56, 63, 111, 115, 138, 250
158, 168, 174, 180, 245 Plenitude, 114. See also Motherhood
Patriarchy, 81 Pli, 156. See also Deleuze, Gilles; Folds
Pearce, Lynn, 6, 8 Plurality, 124, 201
Penetration, 44 Plutser-Sarno, Alexei, 34, 35, 60
Perception, 10, 12, 19, 31, 32, 41, Politics, 9, 16, 75, 100, 161, 183
44, 71, 80, 88, 91, 92, 96, 99, Pollution, 22, 112, 117–120, 132,
161, 183, 198, 216, 242. See 134. See also Boundary; Douglas,
also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Mary; Leakiness; Porosity
Phenomenology cultural, 120
Performance, 85, 102, 147, 249. See fear of, 120
also Flash mob physical, 120
body, 245, 249 Porosity, 160, 244
gender, 21, 77, 86, 121 Postcolonial, 16
group, 102 Italy, 16
linguistic, 204 untimely, 15
Performativity, 120 Posthuman, 100, 101
Periphery, 15, 77 Postmodern
Permeability, 9 bodies, 147, 158, 173, 180, 189,
Permission, 203 245
Perspective, 1, 6, 11, 12, 14, 62, 72, motherhood, 120, 145
78, 92, 103, 128, 130, 158, 208, time, 190
209, 213, 249 uncertainty, 120
Phenomenology, 3, 10–12, 79. See also Power, 13, 17, 18, 36, 37, 40, 42, 45,
Ahmed, Sara; Husserl, Edmund; 46, 51–53, 66, 80, 97, 102, 105,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Sartre, 118, 128, 131, 132, 143, 144,
Jean-Paul 160, 166, 167, 176, 181–183,
and bodies, 3, 10–12, 121 187, 202, 208, 224, 227
Photography, 2, 249 aesthetics of, 176, 183
Index 275
in margins, 160 identity as, 20, 30, 86, 94, 129,

of mother, 132, 166, 167, 176 160, 188
Prefix, 8, 9, 71, 72, 79, 113. See also narrative, 35, 39, 54, 101, 174, 210
Hyphen; Suffix; Trans- Productivity, 12
Pregnancy, 111, 112, 114–119, Prohibition, 203
121–125, 127–132, 135, 139, Projection, 24, 29, 41, 48, 129, 134,
140, 144, 146, 147, 163, 173, 217
180. See also Gestation Propaganda, 17, 47, 48, 222
spatial metaphor of, 116 Proposopeia, 203
Presence, 12, 14, 17, 38, 41, 49, 54, Prosser, Jay, 38, 52, 76, 80, 86, 91,
56, 84, 91, 92, 99, 105, 114, 100, 105
115, 121, 122, 132, 134, 181, Prosthesis, 13
197–203, 206–208, 211, 212, Protection, 64, 82, 111, 170
214, 216, 219, 221, 223, 246 Protest, 62, 180, 190
Present, 4, 6, 10, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, Proximity, 8, 12, 72, 142, 162, 163,
31, 38, 40, 50, 51, 65, 66, 72, 171, 215
82, 86, 88, 95, 99, 104, 112– Psychic envelope, 43
114, 119, 126, 129, 134, 146, Puberty, 32, 82
165, 166, 176, 198, 199, 201, Public, 7, 17, 21, 36, 72, 73, 82, 94,
202, 209, 210, 212, 216, 222, 104, 141, 147, 159, 163, 228,
224, 227–229, 232, 247, 251. 231, 244, 249
See also Future; Past; Temporality; and private, 36, 159
Time identity, 72
haunted, 210 Publishing, 59. See also Canons,
perpetual, 126 literary
Press, 63, 72, 111, 162. See also Media Punishment, 37, 39, 55, 97. See also
Princesa20, 102. See also Digital Discipline; Foucault, Michel;
technologies Prison
Prison, 37, 62, 79, 98, 219. See also Purification, 169
Guantánamo; Rebibbia Purity, 75, 83, 90, 118, 132, 134,
Privation, 3, 165, 168, 245 135, 159
Privilege, 4, 12, 14, 71, 75, 116, 143, Puwar, Nirmal, 125
146, 201, 217, 247, 251
Probyn, Elspeth, 15, 72, 166
Process, 18, 31, 35, 37, 40–42, 44, Q
47, 52–55, 57–59, 62, 63, 77, Queer, 15, 77, 79, 83, 84, 136, 164
81, 84, 86, 88, 91, 93, 94, 96, theory, 247
98–101, 103, 105, 114, 117, time, 13
120, 125–131, 134–136, 145,
159, 160, 163, 174, 176, 180,
183, 190, 199, 201, 206, 212, R
223, 227, 231 Race
and belonging, 77, 84 and Blackness, 192
276 Index
as discourse, 2, 17 and identity, 47

epidermal, 30 Remnant, 38, 198, 202. See also
modes of seeing, 30 Agamben, Giorgio; Witnessing
‘one-drop rule’, 75 Renaissance, 31
and space, 17, 71 Repair, 21, 111
and whiteness, 16 Repository, 45, 113, 246
Racialization, 16, 17, 30, 128, 141, Representation
143, 188, 191, 204 as agency, 3, 45, 71, 145, 189
Racism, 16, 17, 75, 143, 228, 232 of bodies, 3–5, 9, 11, 22, 45, 47,
Rape, 127, 182 50, 52, 62, 77, 80, 118, 124,
Reading, 6, 8, 10, 21, 34, 35, 89, 157
99, 143, 146, 156, 173, 191, of gender, 73, 157
205, 243, 244. See also Codes; of migration, 4, 13, 20, 45, 246,
Mistranslation; Perception; 247
Visibility of race, 104
bodies, 3, 41, 76, 79, 99, 100, 191, of self, 4, 20, 245
205, 232, 244 Repression, 178, 201, 202, 206, 214,
gender, 83, 89 220
race, 76 Resistance, 3, 23, 82, 91, 93, 97, 121,
Rebellion, 33, 179, 180, 182, 223, 147, 165, 166, 192, 209, 213,
245 245
Rebibbia, 98. See also Prison through narrative, 3, 23, 91, 165
Receptacle, 52 through silence, 91
body as, 52, 197 Resolution, 55, 77, 90, 115, 127, 137,
Recognition, 17, 23, 34, 38, 104, 183, 202, 211, 245
121, 135, 147, 191, 200, 209, and motherhood, 115, 245
212, 223 Revolt, 53, 148
Reconstruction, 191 and resistance, 245
of self, 10 and revulsion, 166
through writing, 250 Revulsion, 166
Redemption, 115, 245 Rhetoric, 31, 46
and motherhood, 115 Rhythm, 174, 245
Refugees Rich, Adrienne, 9, 112
‘Crisis’ (2015-), 63 Rihanna, 75
representation of, 249 Rio de la Plata, 214, 219
Rejection, 23, 56, 134, 144, 157, 160, Rips, 165, 245. See also Badiou, Alain;
166, 168, 170–172, 178, 179. See Bodybuilding; Cut; Muscles;
also Tolerance; Transplantation Rupture; Weight, lifting
food, 167, 179 Ritual, 97, 169, 242
of mother, 55, 167–169, 171 Rodaway, Paul, 6
Relationality, 8, 9, 71, 76, 79, 224, Romeo, Caterina, 16, 17
244 Rosenau, James, 215
and hyphen, 8 Rothberg, Michael, 13, 216. See also
Religion, 47, 175 Multidirectional, memory
Index 277
Rupture, 91, 126, 156, 210, 224 Second generation, 18. See also Dual
heritage; Mestiza; Mixed race
and belonging, 51
S identity, 18, 117, 178
Sahara desert, 64 in Italy, 14
Salerno, Daniele, 225, 227 migrants, 14, 18, 23, 178
Samatar, Sofia, 42, 52, 84. See also narrative, 113
Skin, feeling Second World War, 46
Sampling, 155, 245. See also Bricolage; Secrecy, 207
Cyborg; Digital technologies Secretion, 85. See also Leakiness;
postmodern, 245 Seepage
Sapienza, Goliarda, 115 Security, 45, 136, 141, 159
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 23 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 57
Saviano, Roberto, 240 Seeing, 15, 30, 38, 50, 52, 64, 122,
Saybasili, Nermin, 201, 206, 207, 231 137, 148, 163, 245, 246. See also
Scarification, 33, 37, 38. See also Nuba Gaze; Hyper-visibility; Invisibility;
Scarry, Elaine, 37, 40 Visibility
Scars, 32, 37, 38, 44, 65, 66, 156, Seepage, 85, 112, 118, 119, 146, 147.
164. See also Cut; Self-, harm See also Leakiness; Secretion
Scego, Igiaba Self-
Adua, 44 assertion, 172, 179, 209
‘Dismatria’, 112, 113, 117, 130, awareness, 43, 120, 199
174 care, 23, 190, 245, 246
Oltre Babilonia, 118, 135, 136, censorship, 208
172, 182, 214, 221 determination, 21, 72
Rhoda, 44, 137, 209 esteem, 158
‘Salsicce’, 177 expression, 53, 57, 179, 184, 211
Schilder, Paul, 161, 164. See also harm, 3, 20, 53–58, 63, 131, 163,
Body(ies), image 170, 245
Science fiction, 165, 247 inscription, 23, 53, 147
Script, 100 modification, 245
of body, 100 perception, 43, 63, 76, 95, 122,
and writing, 100 197
Scrutiny, 42, 72, 74, 85, 104, 180 presentation, 75, 76
Sculpture, 202, 226, 228. See also Art; translation, 18, 205
Installation art writing of, 81
Sea, 104, 117, 139, 148, 170, 198, Selfcare, 190, 245. See also Ahmed,
214, 217–223, 227–229, 231, Sara
232, 239–243, 246, 248, 250, Sennett, Richard, 155
251. See also Adriatic sea; Atlantic Sensation, 8, 122, 129, 130, 161. See
ocean; Boats; Desaparecidos; also Feeling; Perception
Mediterranean; Shipwrecks Sensescapes, 6
crossings, 23, 214, 217, 222, 231 Serres, Michel, 22
278 Index
Sex, 39, 90, 95, 103, 144, 145 Social, 2, 4, 6, 14, 17–20, 23, 32, 34,
trafficking, 39 35, 38, 41, 43, 50, 52, 58, 74,
Sexuality, 12, 17, 72, 76, 77, 79, 76–79, 81, 83, 85, 91, 97, 102,
90, 93, 102, 123, 143. See also 105, 116, 118, 124, 125, 155,
Bisexuality; Lesbian relationships; 156, 160, 163–166, 178, 184,
Queer 186, 191, 199–202, 210, 216,
and translation, 72 246, 249
Shame, 166, 176, 205 anthropology, 2
Sharpe, Christina, 242 codes, 155
Sharpness, 162 media, 164
Shipwrecks, 198, 228 Society, 8. See also Community
Shryock, Ricci, 64 and exclusion, 182, 229
Sibhatu, Ribka, 17 and inclusion, 34
Sickness, 97. See also Disease; Illness in Italy, 118, 179, 182
Sign, 15, 37, 41, 56, 75, 76, 78, 81, and migration, 5
84, 112, 134, 136, 190, 198, postmodern, 23
206, 211, 232, 244 Softness, 162, 190, 245. See also
body as, 37, 41, 76, 81, 244 Hardness
destabilization of, 206 and becoming, 245
Silence, 18, 56, 91, 96–98, 115, 129, as weakness, 162
171, 206, 207, 210, 211, 217, Solidarity, 24, 121, 145, 146, 212,
221, 222, 249 216. See also Butler, Judith; Ethics
as agency, 97, 172 Somalia
and language, 18, 213 civil war, 51, 112, 175
and writing, 56 clan system of, 103
Sinopoli, Franca, 215 Italian colonization of, 14
Skin language, 14
and being-at-home, 63, 80 migration from, 51, 224
as border, 58, 80, 162 Somatechnics, 73
bruise, 32 Somatophobia, 143
feeling, 52, 84 Sommer, Doris, 212
itch, 53 Sousveillance, 123. See also
memories, 38, 44, 52, 53, 63, 80 Browne, Simone; Discipline;
skinscape, 33, 35, 36, 38, 53, 58, Hyper-visibility
66, 243 South, 16, 77, 96, 204
visibility, 20, 30, 243 of Europe, 16
wrinkle, 80 Italy as, 16, 204
Slavery, 19, 65, 66, 75, 224 Southern, 16, 88, 204,
Slave trade, 91, 231, 241. See also 228
Atlantic ocean; Middle Passage identity, 16, 204
Slimming, 164 question, 16
Smoothness, 22, 157 ‘Southern Question’, 16
Index 279
Space, 2. See also Global; Local; Micro; encounters with, 41

Place Stryker, Susan, 8, 71
of body, 8, 9, 11, 13, 18, 19, 21, Stuckedness, 191
22, 35, 53, 63, 80, 121, 124, Subaltern, 15, 200
186, 219 Subjectivity, 9, 11, 21, 22, 29, 31, 62,
haunted, 23, 213, 216, 231, 246 63, 80, 91, 112, 117, 119, 121,
metaphors of, 19, 231 123, 132, 145, 148, 160, 166,
negotiation of, 15, 80, 104, 147, 174, 177, 189
214, 216 Submission, 144
‘space-time’, 15 Substance abuse, 97
and visibility, 22, 71, 104, 116, 214, Substitution, 140, 147
231 Subversion, 103, 148, 166
Spackman, Barbara, 203, 205 Suction, 172, 173
Spectacle, 73, 93, 94 Suffering, 64, 173, 182, 188, 219, 226
Spectrality, 13, 201, 207, 212. See Suffix. See Hyphen; Language; Prefix;
also Derrida, Jacques; Ghost; Trans-
Haunting; Limbs, Phantom Suicide, 73, 138, 208, 217, 220, 221
effect, 199 Suntan, 50
and integration, 212 Supermodernity. See Augé, Marc
and liminality, 246 Surface, 10, 20–23, 29, 30, 32, 33,
and plurality, 201 35, 37, 39, 52, 72, 76, 80, 157,
Speech, 19, 159, 167, 203. See also 161–163, 171, 180, 189, 190,
Language 228, 242. See also Haptic; Skin
Spornosexual, 164. See also Surgery, 22, 48, 73, 74, 90, 157,
Bodybuilding; Masculinity; Self- 165, 182, 187, 245. See also
construction; Social Media Augmentation; Enhancement
Stability, 16, 54, 91, 102, 159, 207 cosmetic, 22, 157, 182, 245
Starvation, 179 plastic, 48, 157, 187
Stasis, 13, 24, 192, 209, 230, 240, Surplus, 7, 12
241, 246 Surrogacy, 141
State Surveillance, 30, 40, 42, 44, 85, 92,
belonging, 5 96, 128, 243. See also Browne,
control, 46, 47, 49 Simone; Discipline; Foucault,
statelessness, 51 Michel; Sousveillance
terrorism, 214 Survivors, 38, 59, 203
Statues, 228–230. See also Art; narratives of, 59, 200
Installation art of shipwrecks, 250
Stickiness, 162 Suspension, 126, 220, 241, 242, 250
Stigmata, 40 Suspicion, 169
Stigmatization, 73 Swallowing, 157. See also
Stone, Sandy, 99 Consumption; Ingestion
Strangers, 7, 122. See also Ahmed, Swear-words, 208. See also Language
Sara; Ethics and power of, 208
280 Index
Symbols, 29, 33–35, 47, 62, 186. See Textuality, 14

also Codes Texture, 161. See also Haptic;
and meaning, 35, 60 Hardness; Softness
Symptoms Theft, 75, 203
and body, 171, 172, 180 of identity, 75
and identity, 172 Thickness, 177
Third space, 83. See also Virginity
Thrift, Nigel, 15, 16. See also
T ‘Space-time’
Taste, 6, 175, 178 Thyroid, 111
Tattoos, 3, 34, 35, 37, 58, 60, 64, Till, Karen, 226
131. See also Lilin, Nicolai Time, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13, 15, 19, 20, 32,
artists, 33, 34 36–39, 45, 47, 51, 54, 55, 66,
meaning of, 36, 60 73, 78, 86–89, 96, 97, 100, 104,
process, 20 111, 116, 122, 129–131, 147,
symbolism, 35 156, 164, 173, 174, 180, 185,
Tearing, 119. See also Cut; Rips 189–191, 201, 204, 205, 207,
Temporality, 12, 20, 22, 30, 38, 112, 210, 212, 214–219, 221, 223,
129, 210, 214, 243, 244. See also 224, 228, 239, 242, 243, 245,
Time 247, 251. See also Temporality
expectation, 129 bulimic, 173, 245
future, 40, 45, 129 lag, 205
of passing, 205 splitting of, 116, 129
past, 45, 129 Tolerance, 22, 111, 135, 147,
of pregnancy, 129 244. See also Microchimerism;
present, 45, 205 Transplantation
waiting, 129 Torok, Maria, 198, 218, 220. See also
Terfs (Trans- Exclusionary Radical Abraham, Nicolas; Haunting,
Feminists), 74. See also Greer, Transgenerational
Germaine Torture, 37, 40, 219, 221–223. See
Terminations (of pregnancy), 112. also Abuse
See also Abortion; Interrupted Touch, 16, 42, 43, 55, 58, 84, 122,
motherhood 142, 143, 161, 162, 170, 247
Territory, 114, 127, 231 mutuality of, 42, 84, 122
Testimony, 20, 32, 38. See also Traditions
Witnessing Nostalgia for, 51
Text, 6, 29, 32, 40, 41, 43, 49, 54, rejection of, 178
56, 58–60, 62, 88, 97, 98, 101, Siberian, 34, 60
104, 123, 136, 159, 167, 206, Somali, 178
212, 213, 219–222, 227, 243, Trans-
244 autobiography, 100
skin as, 20, 29, 30, 43, 58, 243 corporeality, 4, 117, 139
Index 281
gender, 9, 12, 21, 71–73, 76, self-translation, 205

78–81, 94, 95, 98, 99, 105, Transmogrification, 44, 163, 188, 245
180, 244 Transnistria, 33, 51
gender rights, 73 Transplantation, 22, 244
and hyphen, 3, 8, 9, 79, 89 Transport, 4, 241
national, 2, 4, 8, 10, 14–16, 19, Transposition, 3, 92, 101, 136, 148,
21–23, 58, 62, 63, 66, 71, 73, 216
76, 79, 83, 105, 112, 114–118, Transracial, 75
120–122, 124, 131, 141, 145– Trans-scripts, 14. See also Lucas, Paul
147, 157, 159, 161, 165, 167, Transvestism, 91. See also
186, 188, 190, 200–202, 212, Cross-dressing
214, 216, 217, 220, 224–226, Trauma
233, 240, 244, 246 body, 3, 127
occupation, 21 and haunting, 202, 205, 218
Transability, 8 and loss, 179, 200, 217
Transcendence, 159 and memory, 202, 216, 218
Transcription, 101 Travel, 4, 63. See also Journeys;
Transfer, 111, 155 Mobility; Movement
Transfixity, 78 Trespassing, 189
Transformation Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 10
and destruction, 184 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 6
as deviation, 189 Tunisia, 198, 222–224
in pregnancy, 121, 130 Turbulence, 241
in transition, 19 Turner, Bryan S., 146, 155
Transfusion, 135 Twitter, 72
Transgression, 18, 180, 244
Transit, 2, 14, 24, 35, 63, 87, 98,
99, 112, 130, 155, 191. See also U
Airports Ulcers, 206
bodies in, 9, 14, 19, 24, 35, 77, 159 Uncanny, 6, 23, 239. See also Freud,
spaces of, 2, 14, 112 Sigmund; Ghost; Haunting;
Transition, 3, 9, 19, 72, 73, 76–78, Limbs, Phantom; Spectrality
83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 104, 105, Unconscious, 12, 52, 220. See also
159, 244 Freud, Sigmund
Transitivity, 9, 24 Unease, 63, 166, 169
Translation, 18, 19, 21, 37, 58, 59, Unhomely, 178, 231
72, 86, 88, 101, 202, 213, 227, consumption, 178
244 Unity, 119, 131, 135
cultural, 21, 58, 72, 86, 88, 101, in pregnancy, 119
244 and splitting, 119
mistranslation, 19 of subject, 119, 135
282 Index
Unreadability, 232. See also Voice, 2, 18, 23, 40, 56, 91, 94, 97,
Mistranslation 99, 100, 102, 145, 205, 207,
Urry, John, 4, 6, 240 209–212, 229, 246, 250. See
also Accent; Cadence; Language;
Silence
V Void, 205, 206, 210, 218
Value, 35, 39, 48, 60, 75, 79, 81, 112, Vomiting, 167–169, 173. See also
119, 120, 127, 147, 164, 180, Bulimia, Ejection; Purity;
187, 188, 225, 230, 241, 243 Rejection
and commodities, 241 Vorpsi, Ornela
creation of, 60, 164, 230 Bevete cacao van Houten!, 47, 52,
of goods, 241 61, 208
Values, 23, 96, 116, 159 Il paese dove non si muore mai, 118
cultural, 23, 225 La mano che non mordi, 41, 44, 52,
embodiment of, 23 208
societal, 23, 159 Viaggio intorno alla madre, 115
Vampires, 247 Vulnerability, 19, 43, 44, 73, 96, 97,
Variance, 9, 77, 79, 244 111, 123, 140, 171, 212
Varotsos, Costas, 24, 230, 231
‘L’approdo’, 225–227
Veil, 125. See also Hijab W
Video, 214, 226, 229, 248 Wadia, Laila, 165
games, 248 Amiche per la pelle, 165
Vigil, 242, 249. See also Wake Waiting, 13, 41, 129, 190, 191, 209,
Violence, 41, 44, 56, 73, 86, 97, 100, 218, 241, 246, 248. See also
186, 198, 200, 201, 216, 230, Hage, Ghassan
241, 242 and expectation, 129, 209
juxtaposition of, 216, 230 as resistance, 192, 209
Virginity, 83, 90 Wake, 242, 249, 251. See also Boats;
Virgule, 125. See also Hyphen Sharpe, Christina; Vigil
Virtual reality, 248 War, 51, 55, 63, 112, 122, 127, 137,
Viscerality, 12 175, 200, 210, 214, 222
Visconti, Luchino, 231 civil, 51, 112, 137, 175, 210
Visibility Water, 123, 138, 139, 214, 223,
of fat, 163 228, 231, 240–242, 250. See also
of gender, 3 Liquidity; Sea; Waves
and Hypervisibility, 74, 124 and flow, 240
and Invisibility, 43, 83, 123, 201, and fluidity, 139, 250
219, 221 Waves, 48, 240, 242, 248, 249
of race, 2, 71 Weakness, 162, 219
Visual arts, 2. See also Art Weight, 23. See also Bodybuilding
Visuality, 45, 163, 189, 249 cultural, 12, 23, 159
Index 283
excess, 180, 182 psychic, 39

gain, 179–183 Wrinkle, 53, 80. See also Skin
lifting, 157 Writing, 53. See also Autobiography;
loss, 157 Fiction; Memoir; Narration;
and overconsumption, 179 Narrative
Weiwei, Ai, 249 as agency, 53, 189, 211, 243
Human Flow, 249 and becoming, 57, 60, 146, 189
Welch, Rhiannon, 228 as self-creation, 57
Welcome, 89, 115, 145, 250 the self, 53, 81
and encounter, 89
ethics of, 145
and solidarity, 145 Y
Welsh, Irvine, 59 Yimer, Dagmawi, 243, 249
Wet-nursing, 141 Asmat: Nomi per tutte le vittime in
Whiteness, 16, 17, 75, 104. See also mare, 243
Blackness; Race Come un uomo sulla terra, 249
Winterson, Jeanette, 181 Young, Iris Marion, 118, 119
Sexing the Cherry, 181
Witnessing, 38, 54, 101, 202, 243. See
also Testimony Z
Wounds, 37, 39, 40, 86, 167, 205, Zombies, 247, 248
226. See also Flaying; Torture Zombification, 247

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STUDIES IN MOBILITIES,

LITERATURE, AND CULTURE

More information about this series at

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950728

Cover credit: © Gwen Hardie, “Body 08.14.08”

(Transkulturelle italophone Literatur—Letteratura italofona trans-

“Writing Migration Through the Body offers an insightful and compelling

2 ‘Signing with a Scar’: Inscriptions, Narration, Identity 29

3 Trans-gender, Trans-national: Crossing Binary Lines 71

4 Trans-national Mothering: Corporeal Trans-plantations

4.3 Interrupted Maternity 131

5 Revolting Folds: Disordered and Disciplined Bodies 155

6 Absent Bodies, Haunted Spaces 197

Fig. 2.1 Cover of Bevete cacao van Houten! (Ornela Vorpsi) 61

To all the pounding hearts

Migration is without doubt emerging as one of the defining global

© The Author(s) 2018 1

embodied experiences in a range of diverse creative outputs, includ-

embodied mode of movement, and one that is imbued with a range of

excessive consumption, and expressions of fragmented, haunting or

of mobilities scholarship by focusing on the migrant him/herself. Yet

1 See also Fortier (2000) and Ahmed et al. (2003).

processes and their representation might shift through experiencing

Texts […] present a performative experience in the present, the experience

Davidson’s point here, that texts themselves, and readers’ experiences of

linear and stable historicization’ (2009, p. 8). Both standpoints thus

transformed into the aesthetics of movement as encapsulated by the new,

7 Halberstam (2018, p. 88). Halberstam employs the asterisk in an analogous way, to

expression and representation thus become an important hinge of mean-

is granted a dual perspective as perceived and perceiving, and becomes

skin as a permeable, porous border—one that both protects and exposes,

through processes of memory and memorialization, which, as Alison

emphasized in Spurlin et al. (2010, p. 3).

12 https://twitter.com/zunguzungu/status/628239649048145920. Accessed 1 March

Balanced as s/he is between nations, identities, and legibility, the asylum

15 Sharfstein (2011). See also Arsenault (2011).

And if, moreover, we look sideways toward language as a focal point

Here, the father’s inability to speak is mis-translated through the body,

in one’s left hand is an indicator that Lahiri conceives of crossing language

self-imaginings of the mobile subject. Chapter 2, ‘“Signing with a Scar”:

These characteristics and abilities of the dermal have obvious conse-

Chapter 3, ‘Trans-gender, Trans-national: Crossing Binary Lines’,

Chapter 4, ‘Trans-national Mothering: Corporeal Trans-plantations

and rejection that allow the body to stand as an analogous metaphor

dimension of commemorating bodies missing in transit (by Isaac Julien,

Cheah, Pheng. 1999. “Spectral Nationality: The Living-On [Sur-Vie] of

‘Signing with a Scar’: Inscriptions,

© The Author(s) 2018 29

through various sensorial channels, including their hands, ears, genitals,

It is both permeable and impermeable, superficial and profound, truthful

This double and often conflicting nature of the skin is reflected in

is simultaneously an agent in its own world construction’ (Csordas

Among the Nuba of Sudan, a woman’s back is traditionally covered with

also—crucially—will guarantee illegibility outside the community (thereby

The tattooed body as a whole is involved in a constant ‘dialogue’ with

But their intimidating visual efficacy does not guarantee comprehensibil-

Nessuno dei tatuaggi riprodotti in queste pagine, anche quando a una

Any potential knowledge to be gained is therefore mediated by the con-

curative sense of reciprocal recognition, since ‘the traumatised carry a

‘the empty, tattooless body […] seemed to me an impossible thing,

Il pianto è accompagnato da un lamento profondo. La voce è come

word as signifier, but must be activated by the perceiving, determining

Fig. 2.1 Cover of Bevete cacao van Houten! (Ornela Vorpsi) 61

1 See also Fortier (2000) and Ahmed et al. (2003).

emphasized in Spurlin et al. (2010, p. 3).

And if,  moreover, we look sideways toward language as a focal point

‘Signing with a Scar’: Inscriptions,

This process of writing, be it on the body or on paper, is a means of self-

Fig. 2.1 Cover of Bevete cacao van Houten! (Ornela Vorpsi)

Fig. 2.2 Map picture (Ricci Shryock)

3.2 Out in Public: Locating the Trans- Self

Albuquerque et al. 1994, p. 122) and although this indicates a sense of