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Bodies On The Move - A Poetics of Home and Diaspora
Bodies On The Move - A Poetics of Home and Diaspora
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Literature
I'd like to begin with a common story, a tale of migration full of contra
dictions. The heart of it is so familiar that it seems more like an American
cliche than a suggestive point of departure for an exploration of the poet
ics of dislocation. Saleema is my daughter's friend, her roommate during
their first year of law school in New York City. Saleema is the eldest of
three children born in the United States to parents from an elite family in
Pakistan. Her father is a surgeon living out on the Island, and the family
goes back and forth "home" at the drop of a hat. Saleema is vibrant, full of
infectious laughter and whimsy, warm and endlessly generous. Irreverent
with her friends, she is also ever the dutiful daughter to her family, religion,
and homeland. Gleefully, she showed my daughter how she persuaded her
father to let her wear a skirt just below the knee-with tights and high
leather boots not an inch of skin showed, and yet she could take pleasure
in a stylishly short American skirt. She laughed at her ruse, at herself, at
her father-but she kept her skin covered on legs and arms, in deference
to the requirements of modesty and decorum, in accord with the necessity
to be a proper model to her younger siblings. In the week after September
1 1th, she wore her "I love Pakistan" t-shirt to the mall, not to spite griev
ing New Yorkers-she is not a spiteful person and she doesn't have a chip
on her shoulder-but to affirm goodness and humanity in Pakistan and to
defy the hate and suspicion she saw in so many American eyes.
Three years ago, Saleema's father arranged a marriage for her with a
young man she had never met. Amazed, my daughter watched Saleema's
initial shock fade and then turn into eagerness as she and the young man
fell in love. A year later, her father abruptly canceled the engagement after
a serious disagreement with the young man's family. Saleema was devas
tated but accepted her father's decision. After awhile, Saleema announced
to my daughter with some pride of independence that she would not select
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Whether or not "the streets [are] lined with gold"-and for most migrants,
they are not-diaspora is hard on intimacy.
Intimacy begins in the body, needs the body-the body of touch, the
body of sensation and feeling, the body of speech. What is the "place of
desire, pleasure, and the affective body" in our "understanding of the
ambivalent mechanisms of social authority?" asks Homi Bhabha.5 The
affective body-the body that feels-can be the site of pleasure but also of
pain; the place of resistance but also of mutilation and abjection. "One is
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Sayings are puzzle boxes of words. Opened, they tell stories. In her great
war trilogy, the American poet H.D. locates a poetics of the word in the
midst of the Nazi bombing raids over London during World War II: "I
know, I feel/the meaning that words hide;//they are anagrams, cryp
tograms/little boxes, conditioned//to hatch butterflies . . ."8 Buried in the
word Sword is the word Word-"remember, 0 Sword,/you are the younger
brother, the latter-bom,//your Triumph, however exultant,/must one day
be over,/in the beginning/was the Word" (11. 11-16, p. 17). Far from home,
she longs for home, but not the stifling home she grew up in-rather
"home" as reimagined:
Take me home
where canals
flow
between iris-banks:
where the heron has her nest. (lI. 1-6, p. 32)
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But what makes a place home? Is it wherever your family is, where you have
been brought up? The children of many migrants are not sure where they
belong. Where is home? Is it where your parents are buried? Is home the place
from where you have been displaced, or where you are now? Is home where
your mother lives? ("Home and Identity," p. 94)
If home for the migrant, the exile, the refugee, is the place of tradition, he
writes, then what is lost in the need for security is how that homeland is
ever-changing. "Tradition is fluid," he writes, "it is always being reconsti
tuted. Tradition is about change change that is not being acknowledged"
(p. 97).
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He can't go home again. But some men can. An Englishman's home is his
castle. A man's home is his castle. You've heard the sayings before. A castle
is a fortress, a retreat behind moat and walls to make one safe, a place to
ride out a siege-a haven in a heartless world. Castles are safest for the
men who rule them. If the world chews him up and spits him out, at least
a man can be a man within the walls of his castle-home. Inside the walls,
he can lord it over others. His home is no one else's castle. It's for him to
decide if the walls will protect the others from the outside. Inside the cas
tle, what walls protect people from him?
The nation too is home-the homeland as fatherland or motherland to be
defended by Homeland Defense and Patriot Acts. Domestic politics is
national politics, the govemment within, at home.13 The nation is family,
the imagined community of Us against Them. Whoever Them is, we know
they are not US. Not the U dot S dot of A dot. But if Them is Us, a part
of US, everywhere in U.S.A., doesn't the defense of the homeland become
an attack on US, all of US in the U dot S dot? Do you feel more secure
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And what is home for people on the move? Chandra Talpade Mohanty
grew up in Bombay, came to the U.S. as a student, and has stayed, with her
Indian passport and green card, to live and teach. She reflects,
I have been asked the "home" question (when are you going home?) period
ically for fifteen years now. Leaving aside the subtly racist implications of the
question (go home, you don't belong), I am still not satisfied with my
response. What is home? The place I was bom? Where I grew up? Where my
parents live? Where I live and work as an adult? Where I locate my commu
nity, my people? Who are "my people"? Is home a geographical space, a his
torical space, an emotional, sensory space? ... I am convinced that this ques
tion-how one understands and defines home-is a profoundly political
one.21
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Her poem Your Native Land, Your Life accompanies the long wail of Kol
Nidre with lamentation:
and my own
unhoused spirit trying to find a home27
For Rich, home is the long lost, forever gone-maternal body, motherland.
To live is to be away from home.
Stranger Bodies
is someone who refuses to remain confined to the "far away" land.... S/he
is physically close while remaining culturally remote. Strangers often seem to
be suspended in the empty space between a tradition which they have
already left and the mode of life which stubbornly denies them the right of
entry. The stranger blurs a boundary line. The stranger is an anomaly, stand
ing between inside and the outside, order and chaos, friend and enemy. (pp.
101-02).
The body as a sight of cultural determination first marks someone as
"the stranger"-it might be the skin, the eyes, the hair, the shape, the sex;
it might be the walk, the posture, the angles of movement; it might be the
clothes, the jewelry, the shoes, the decorations, adornments, and accou
trements of the body; it might be the sounds that come out of the mouth,
off the pen or keyboard-the cultural materiality of speech, accent,
rhythm, style, writing.
"In Europe today," Sarup writes, "it is largely black migrants who per
form the function of marking the boundary. Harsh sanctions are taken
against migrants who, feeling threatened, often emphasize their cultural
identity as a way of self-protection" (p. 103). Sarup's Europe is home to the
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Home Lost
Home comes into being most powerfully when it is gone, lost, left
behind, desired and imagined. "Home," Carole Boyce Davies writes, "can
only have meaning once one experiences a level of displacement from it"
(p. 113). June Jordon quips in her poem, "Notes towards Home": "every
body needs a home / so at least you have someplace to leave."34 Home is
what you imagine, she continues, when you're "on the road" (p. 47).
On the Road one longs for home. That's Odysseus to a T. He's on the
road and on the sea for ten years. And when he gets home, the story stops.
The story about home is the story of trying to get there.
"Benkn A Heim: Yearning for Home." So writes Grace Feuerverger,
daughter of Holocaust survivors, about her first language, her mamaloshen,
her mothertongue, her "comfort and home."35 Yiddish is the lost home, the
motherland that tongues the body of a people lost. "To look back at
Yiddish," she reflects, "represents the tortured landscape of my people's
exile and ultimate genocide-linked inexorably to the concept of 'home'
and the (im)possibility of return" (p. 11). She yearns for the lost home of
Yiddish but distances herself from its "woundedness" at the same time (p.
19). "My relationship with Yiddish is one of excruciating pain and precious
delight," she writes (p. 12). "This is not sentimental nostalgia. It is the fac
ing of the evil that tore apart my family, my people, my culture, my lan
guage-my home. I cannot ever return because it was razed to the ground"
(p.19).
The story of home making is often the history of home razing-that is,
the razing of some one else's home to clear the way for one's own settle
ment. The end of one people's wandering can be the beginning of another's
diaspora. "My feet are lacerated, homelessness has exhausted me," wrote
the Palestinian poet Taufiq Sayigh in 1960.36 Home making built upon the
unmaking of the homes of others; it's history's return of the repressed. It
happens again and again-the uncanny repetitions of a territorial species,
of peoples yearning for home and making others homeless out of the force
of their own desire and suffering. Feuerverger aims to break the cycle in
Oasis of Dreams, her ethnography of the schools teaching peace in a Jewish
Palestinian village in Israel.37 Will the cousins ever kiss?
Homeland lost becomes the dream of the land as home. America's
heartland was once other peoples' homelands-stolen, now lost, now
shrunk to a fraction of its early range.
Oh, Dorothy, Dorothy, what history of loss does your Kansas home
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Lost at Home
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"Freedom." How to get "free," Going Home asks: "Freedom from what?
From our selves. From this 'mediocrity' that binds us, restricts us. We
should grow. Grow bigger than this cage that is our body, bigger than the
kraal that is this cage-body. We should grow bigger than our fate, our des
tiny. Kick against the shackles of the body, escape from it.... " (p. 22, ellip
sis in original). Kannan breaks the the utopic pattern of the Bildung plot:
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Some might say that Gayatri's fantasy of flight from the enclosure of
home is bourgeois Western feminism, reflecting the author's successive res
idences at the University of Kent in England, University of Iowa's
Intemational Writing Program, University of California-Irvine, and insti
tutions in the north and south of India. Shirley Geok-lin Lim raises this
issue in thinking about the blending of her Chinese-Malaysian childhood
and her adult life in the United States: "My Westernization took place in
my body," she writes. "Every cultural change is signified through and on
the body."45 But in Dislocating Cultures, the Vassar College philosopher
Uma Narayan defends her feminism as the product of the home in Bombay
she can't return to rather than the result of her exposure to Western femi
nism in the United States. "My mother," she writes,
She wants to tell her mother but cannot: "'My earliest memory'... is of see
ing you cry. I heard all your stories of your misery. The shape your 'silence'
took is in part what has incited me to speech" (p. 7).
A poetics of dislocation may begin for some in recognizing "home" as no
place they want to be, as a place where the heart may be, but a place that
must be left, as a place whose leaving is the source of speech and writing.
Writing Home
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And Saleema?
NOTES
This essay has been presented in various versions at the Symposium on Poetics of
Dislocation: Writing Selves at City University New York Graduate Center, March
2002; the University of Tulsa, March 2003; National Cheng Kung University,
Taiwan, May 2004; American Lebanese University, Lebanon, June 2004; as the
Chancellor Jackman Distinguished Lecture at the University of Toronto, March
2004; also at Purdue University, October 2004; and University of Bologna, Forli,
and University of Macerata in November 2004. For their invitations, challenges,
and suggestions special thanks go to Meena Alexander, Patricia Clough, Kate
Adams, Holly Laird, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Kai-ling Liu, and Ken Seigneurie. I am
indebted as well to many others who stimulated my thoughts about home and else
where long ago, especially R. Thomas Foster, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Biddy Martin,
and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
1 Jyotirmoyee Devi, The River Churning, a Novel of Partition, trans. Enakshi
Chatterjee (1967; rpt. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995), p. 107. Subsequent ref
erences will be cited parenthetically in the text.
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