Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities. (Critical Studies)

Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities Edited by Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities

Critical Studies Vol. 3 0

General Editor Myriam Diocaretz Maastricht University Editorial Board A n n e E. Berger, Cornell University Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University Marta Segarra, Universitat de Barcelona

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities

Edited by

Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

"Soviet Tanks during the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising, near Erzsebet Square, Budapest, 1956." ©Hajdu Laszlo All Rights Reserved Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 978-90-420-2406-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V, Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Acknowledgements

7

Introduction Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

9

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu: Nation, Nationality and Exilic Agency in the People's Republic of China Susette Cooke

33

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China David S.G. Goodman

57

Language, Exile, and the Burden of Undecidable Citizenship: Tenzin Tsundue and the Tibetan Experience Obododimma Oha

81

Returning from Exile: The Japanese Citizens from the Former Manchuria Rowena Ward

99

Memory and Exile: Contemporary France and the Algerian War (1954-1962) Jo McCormack

117

The Language of Exile: Haunting Desires in Djebar's La Disparition de la langue frangaise Ana de Medeiros

139

Exile: Rupture and Continuity in Jean Vanmai's Chan Dang and Fils de Chan Dang Tess Do

151

Exiled in the Homeland: Heiner Muller's Medea Yixu Lu

173

Acceptance: on 1956: Desire and the Unknowable Sue Hajdu

193

Displacement and Shifting Geographies in the Noir Fiction of Cesare Battisti Maja Mikula

209

"En hibrida mezcolanza": Exile and Anxiety in Alirio Diaz Guerra's Lucas Guevara JeffBrowitt

225

Shame, Nostalgia and Cuban American Cultural Identity in Fiction: "la cubana arrepentida" Olga Lorenzo

245

Dying in the New Country Marivic Wyndham

267

Coda: Eleven Stars Over the Last Moments of Andalusia Devleena Ghosh

277

About the Contributors

289

Bibliography

293

Index

311

Acknowledgements This collection grew out of the Institute for International Studies An­ nual Research symposium and workshop on Exile and Social Change, held in July and December 2004 at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. We owe particular gratitude to the participants at those venues for their feedback and discussion. We would also like to thank Elena Sheldon (UTS) and Manuel Lorenzo (MiamiDade College, Miami), for their respective efforts in translation and tracking down obscure sources. Thanks, too, to Patricia Hill, for her careful feedback. We gratefully acknowledge the following publications for permission to reprint revised versions, or amended portions, of previously published material: Introduction (Allatson and McCormack), and chapters three (David Goodman), ten (Sue Hajdu), twelve (Jeff Browitt) and thirteen (Olga Lorenzo): Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (vol. 2, no. 1, January 2005); chapter three (David Goodman): Asian Studies Review (vol. 29, no. 4, December 2005, pp. 325-343, http://www.informaworld.com); chapter five (Rowena Ward) Japanese Studies (vol. 26, no. 2, September 2006, pp. 139-51); chapter eight (Tess Do) Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (vol. 2, no.2, July 2005); chapter eleven (Maja Mikula) Belphegor: Litterature Populaire et Culture Mediatique (vol. 6, no.2, June 2007); and chapter thirteen (Marivic Wyndham) Hu­ manities Research (vol. 10, no.1, 2003, pp. 77-82). To our colleagues at the Institute for International Studies, in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS, goes our gratitude for their sustenance through all stages of this book. We would like to thank the many contributors for their patience, good will, and commitment. Finally, our deep appreciation goes to the General Editor of the Critical Studies series, Myriam Diocaretz, the Editorial Board members of the series, and Esther Roth, at Rodopi for their enthusiastic support of this multidisciplinary project in international studies.

Introduction Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack The late Edward Said's influential and widely reprinted essay "Reflec­ tions on Exile," which was originally published in Granta in 1984, begins with the claim that "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience" (2001: 173). Said's attitude here is itself strangely compelling. While he goes on to discuss the ambivalence by which exile is dealt with as an enabling condition in the now substantial historical body of exile literature from across the globe, and elaborates on exile's status as "a potent, even enriching, motif" of modernity itself, his meditations on the subject are anchored in a conviction that those in exile live with "the crippling sorrow of estrangement" (2001: 173). Said's take on exile may, in part, be attributed to his lifelong concern with the predicament of the Palestinian peoples, particularly since the formation of the state of Israel. His position nonetheless raises a number of questions about exile and the ways it has been, and can be, lived, metaphorized, and critically discussed in, the contemporary world. Whose exile accords with Said's conceptualization? Does exile inevitably engender sadness and ontological estrangement, the psychic consequences of physical separation from a purported "native place" and the unhealable rupture "between the true self and its true home" (Said 2001: 173)? Are there other means of living in, and imagining, exile? What can exile and its critical uses tell us about the complex imbrication of processes of identification with a particular place or multiple places? Does exile continue to have a critical use value as a descriptor for how certain communities and individuals perceive and make sense of their worldly locations? In Said's "Reflections on Exile," perhaps his key statement on such questions, exile is cast as a disturbed physical and psychic relation to space and home. Amy Kaminsky, speaking of Latin American exiles from the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s,

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Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

goes further with her claim "that without the emplaced human body, there is nothing to know or represent about exile and its aftermath" (1999: xi). However, as Said also points out, since Nietzsche, at least, western literary and philosophical responses to modernity have often used the exile trope to characterize a prevailing sense of unease, dislocation, and "spiritual" orphanhood (2001: 173). A mood of estrangement dominates western cultures, and Said attributes this by no means fatal or unproductive condition to the impact of constant exile flows, so much so that western literature can be said to be a literature of "extraterritoriality" (2001: 173-74). The western literary realm for Said is thus emblematic of wider forces, one sign that exile has proliferated in an epoch marked by cataclysmic events and far-reaching processes on a global scale: imperialism and its neoimperialist successors; decolonization and postcolonial unrest; wars on hitherto unimagined scales; competing nationalisms; entrenched ideological enmities; revolutions, dictatorships, and fundamentalisms; holocausts and ethnic cleansings; mass migration; mass starvation and poverty; AIDS and other pandemics; envi­ ronmental ruination and, in the foreseeable future, the consequences of global warming; transnational capitalism; and globalizations. Exile would seem to be an inevitable consequence of such pressures in "the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration" (Said 2001: 174). Many other terms could be deployed—and in recent scholarship have—to describe this exilic age: diaspora, nomadism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, statelessness, homelessness, deterritorialization, transmigrancy, borderlessness, transmodernity, errance, and translated/ional culture, to name a few. The current epoch thus seems, paradoxically, to be an age of dis­ placement that applies pressure to orthodox understandings of exile. Most commonly exile is defined as banishment, a physical separation and a geographical dislocation from home enacted by a state's or a regime's legal system, and intended to prevent certain social actors or groups from initiating change at national or regime levels. Accepting this definition, Thomas Pavel argues that as a form of impelled "human mobility across geographical and political space," exile must be distinguished from "voluntary expatriation," as well as from slavery and immigration (1998: 26). Exile is most commonly imposed on "those who count," the "publicly important" competitors for, and the critics (writers, artists, politicians) of, state power (1998: 27). Hamid

Introduction

11

Naficy, however, takes a less prescriptive stance in his discussion of external and internal banishment. He argues that internal banishment, or "deprivation of means of production and communication, exclusion from public life," could designate the experiences of many state sub­ jects who may not be targeted by a state's legal or policing appara­ tuses (1996: 123). Naficy's definition of internal exile indicates that a state may discriminate against internal communities and individuals so that they are exiled at home, their potential to disrupt or challenge the state's operations accordingly limited (1996). Thus, internal exile may be mani­ fested as a form of social limitation and immobility—from short term to life—within the penitentiary, the prison camp, the asylum, the house converted into a prison, and even the antipodean prison colony (internal exile transported). Beyond those sites of official dislocation, supposedly benign institutions such as the familial home, and social conditions such as enforced or prolonged unemployment, may also function as sites of exile. The flip side of legislated banishment at home is exile chosen to evade a state's legal apparatuses. Aside from millions upon millions who have fled the rise to power and operations of totalitarian, dictatorial or simply ideologically unpalatable regimes, judicial evasion characterizes the experiences of innumerable outlaws and fugitives from the law (Giacomo Casanova, Ronald Biggs, Cesare Battisti, and so on), as well as the exiles of state leaders, often dictators, who become the target of state and international legal authorities once their regimes fall. It is also possible to argue that a form of internal banishment ap­ plies to many native peoples. The doctrine of terra nullius applied by the British to Australia, for example, provides an instance of colonization that functioned by literally excising indigenous peoples from the map, a rhetorical and legalistic gesture upheld by physical dispossession, rigid assimilatory pressures, and genocide. The conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples in their homelands are not often included in exile debates. But for the Argentinean Enrique Dussel, such dispossession is a result of a dominating modernity that arose in late fifteenth century Europe, and that was in part constituted through the production of exiles. Dussel argues that prior to 1492, most of Europe had been a periphery for the Islamic world. Spain, and Portugal before it, were crucial in inverting this relationship. The defeat of Granada in 1492, the final stage of the reconquista of the Iberian Pen-

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Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

insular, ended the Islamic world's 800-year long claims to a portion of western Europe, and established a pattern of contact as conquest that would be exported to the Americas and elsewhere by Spain and its rivals (1993: 67). 1492 was also the year in which Spain expelled its Jewish population, a fate that would apply to the remaining Islamic communities over the next century. However, the key role of this conquering-and-banishing double act in the development of "the modern world system" has often been overlooked in contemporary under­ standings of modernity. For Dussel, the modernity mythotrope affirms Europe "as the 'center' of a World History that it inaugurates," while denying that "the 'periphery' that surrounds this center is conse­ quently part of its self-definition" (1993: 65). That denial enabled the "eclipse" of "whatever was non-European," including the relegation of the Iberian Peninsular to the periphery of European modernity (1995: 12). It is perhaps ironic, then, that the first Spanish targets of the modernity mythotrope still dominate discussions of exile in the 2 1 century. As Osama bin Laden has asserted on a number of occasions since 2001, Spain (Al'Andalus) exists in some Arab imaginaries as a lost homeland or exiled paradise, the only territory from the epoch of classical Islam not in Islamic hands today. For the Spanish Jews, whose descendants are scattered in North Africa, Israel, Turkey, and the Americas, the 1492 expulsion continues to inform their communal sense as an exile people. st

That particular communal memory adds an additional exilic trajectory to a long history of Jewish communal displacements out of which has arisen a resilient, and multivalent, foundational narrative of religious and cultural identity. Jewish tropes of exodus and redemptive return continue to inform exile debates in Europe and the Americas, and to influence other groups' conceptions of their own displacement. Since 1959, for example, many members of the Cuban sector in the USA have self-consciously embraced a Judaic notion of exile—replete with parallels drawn between Cuban and Jewish "chosen people" status—to designate their mass presence in south Florida (Allatson 2007: 106). A more prolonged historical influence from Jewish religious lore and intellectual production is evident in the discourses of African-American nationalism, pan-Africanism, and negritude. As Paul Gilroy points out, tropes of exodus, and the associated diaspora, were appropriated from Jewish discourses by historians of slavery in the 1950s and 1960s. But the connections run deeper, with Zionist

Introduction

13

rhetoric of exile and anticipated return to the promised land informing the work of many African American and Caribbean writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1993: 208). For the descendants of slaves, particularly in the USA and the Caribbean, exodus or diaspora and return provided a consolatory metaphor by which to comprehend and cope with a history of enforced displacement, violence, corporeal commodification, and post-slavery discrimination (Gilroy 1993: 207). A parallel example of this tendency is provided by the many postcolonial conversions of Caliban, the enslaved monster from Shakespeare's The Tempest, into the embodiment of the exile most familiar to slaves and their descendants in the Americas. For the Barbados-born George Lamming, Caliban's exile—a deprivation of language, proper name, and place—affords some pleasure. The imperial center is now confronted by the uncountenanced return of its language in new forms, and by the presence of the voiced Other, in ways that invert the exilic relations of colonization (1992: 15). In Jewish discourses, however, the terms exile and diaspora are not normally regarded as synonymous, a semantic distinction that Barkan and Shelton (1998) contend derives from a longstanding ideological contest within Zionism exacerbated by the founding of Israel and the reluctance of many Jews to live there. That reluctance incited some architects of the Jewish state to seek an alternative to exile, with its historical connotations of suffering, violent dispersal, and lack of choice (1998: 4). The Greek word diaspora provided a hoped-for solu­ tion to this semantic problem: "exile connoted suffering, a negative term evoking displacement, refugee status, and above all the myth of an eventual, and possibly soon, return. In contrast, diaspora came to mean a chosen geography and identity" (1998, 4). In Israeli state discourse exile and diaspora thus signify mutually exclusive Jewish conditions: "Exile was largely revered for the cultural stamina of the exiles, their constant loyalty to the historical memory of the communal life, rejection of assimilation, and struggle for authenticity and sacrifice. In contrast, the Jewish diaspora has been envied for its material success and simultaneously denigrated as selfish and failing to contribute to the general good" (1998, 4). Despite the complex distinction between diaspora and exile in Jewish debates, exile seems to have lost ground to diaspora in recent cultural criticism. Indeed, James Clifford argued in the late 1990s that diaspora discourse is replacing minority identity discourse as well

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Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

(1997: 255). While it is not our intention here to survey the now large body of critical work on contemporary diasporas, it is worth noting a few influential examples of diaspora's critical and conceptual ascen­ dancy. While the brief of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Stud­ ies, which was inaugurated in 1991, is to focus on the "traditional di­ asporas"—Jewish, Greek, and Armenian—its influential discussions of diaspora's applicability to other peoples have greatly assisted in the critical popularization of the term as a sign of new transnational sociocultural and discursive transformations, despite William Safran's (1991) careful attempt in the journal's first issue to distinguish between diasporas and other forms of displacement (minorities, immigrants, aliens). The British cultural critic Stuart Hall (1990) deploys diaspora as a metaphorical rather than literal term for cultural identities characterized by heterogeneity, diversity, constant renewal and morphing, hybridity, and contamination. Diaspora in Hall's usage is thus not meaningful in traditional diasporic terms as a disturbed relation to a specific place, home, or myth of origin. For his part, Clifford warns against "the tendency of diasporic identities to slide into equivalence with disaggregated, positional, performed identities in general," given that diasporic experiences are tied to "specific bodies" and "historical experiences of displacement that need to be held in comparative tension and partial translatability" (1997: 272). For Gilroy, an historicized account of diaspora helps to explain and learn from the intellectual traffics of the "black Atlantic," most notably between black and Jewish intellectual currents concerned with redemption in the face of historical oppression (1993: 211). Related to diasporic discourse are renewed workings of the exo­ dus trope. Hardt and Negri, for example, make use of the exodus trope in response to imperial postmodernity. For these authors, Empire is at once a concept of unbounded global reach, an ahistorical eternity, and a deeply penetrative and hierarchized social realm that controls people, territories, and thus its own constructed world, one that appears, due to its placement outside history, as a vast zone of "peace" (2000: xiv-xv). In surmising how resistance to this new Empire might be managed, Hardt and Negri see in the "specter" of migration the ideal subjects for an exodus that will lead to "the evacuation of the places of power" (212-13). This migration encompasses economically impelled flight from the poorest parts of the world, as well as "flows of political refugees and transfers of intellectual labor power" (213). Nonetheless,

Introduction

15

Hardt and Negri note that while "Desertion and exodus are a powerful form of class struggle within and against imperial postmodernity," such mobilities seem only to lead to "a new rootless condition of pov­ erty and misery" (213). Faced by that predicament, the authors advo­ cate two types of exodus: an "anthropological exodus" composed of resisters whose bodies are "incapable of submitting to command...of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth" (215-16); and a "machinic exodus," by which "the subject is transformed into (and finds the cooperation that constitutes it multiplied in) the machine" (366-67). Ideally, this exodus will engender a contest between claimants to the real and the virtual, the aim being the seizure "of the processes of machinic metamorphosis" (367). Hardt and Negri's machinic exodus recalls many other postmodernist responses to globalizing pressures, evident in widespread critical dependence on metaphors of displacement, deterritorialization, desertion, and their synonyms. Yet, as Kaplan points out, like "most Euro-American modernist versions of exilic displacement" that emphasize "the freedom of disconnection and the pleasures of interstitial subjectivity," the escape that postmodernist discourses promise may also conform to a colonizing logic: "The movement of deterritorialization colonizes, appropriates, even raids other spaces" (1995: 89). Hardt and Negri regard space as an ever-expanding zone of promise, of resistant potential and neo-identificatory possibility founded on mobility itself. But this utopic faith in movement is nonetheless predicated on an ability to access and profit from the technologies of virtuality that remain beyond the means of most of the planet's inhabitants. Such critical faith in mobility raises the issue of agency, particularly in an epoch when all manner of displacements, freely chosen and impelled, are challenging, and being met with counter-measures at, national borders. For whom precisely is cross-border displacement a desired end, and with what motives and rewards? Noting the critical popularization of the diaspora concept, Barkan and Shelton explain that its universalization has in part arisen because many of its main proponents are cosmopolitan intellectuals, writers and critics, for whom the term designates the postnational "'nonnormative' intellectual community" to which they belong and identify (1998: 5). For this community, Barkan and Shelton propose, the concept of diaspora provides a solution to the exclusionary practices of both nationalism and

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Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

colonialism: "Diaspora is a culture without a country, ironically the exact antithesis of the internal coherence and integration implied by the notion of national culture. Diaspora is about choice. At a political level, the choice is manifested by adopting a voice, which even though ambivalent and fragmented can provide the tools that may serve to dismantle the enduring relations of colonialism" (1998: 5). Similar claims of the counter-hegemonic credentials of cosmopolitanism were made by the editors of a special issue of Public Culture on cosmopol­ itanisms, defined as a "minoritarian modernity" practiced and lived by "the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism's upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging" (Breckenridge et al. 2000: 582). And yet, in what amounts to a dehistoricized list of disparate displacements that recalls Hardt and Negri's migrating specter—"Refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles represent the spirit of the cosmopolitan community"—the editors in­ sist that cosmopolitanism is not to be equated with a "cultural pluralism" located in or defined by a "national frame" (2000: 582). Nonetheless, the purported post-national coordinates of cosmopolitanism may deflect attention from the fact that segments of the cosmopolitan community, which might include exiles, enjoy globally legible class mobility. In her analysis of modernist and postmodernist tropes of travel and displacement, Caren Kaplan is critical of the current critical popularity of, and faith in, cosmopolitanism. She argues that the term has replaced "bourgeoisie" to signify "the emergent power brokers who know and see nothing but their own self-interest yet legitimate and rationalize their actions by recourse to the rhetoric of humanism" (1995: 126). She links cosmopolitanist rhetoric to modernist readings of exile "as an ideology of artistic production," one claimed by "Euro-American middle-class expatriates" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Euro-American modernisms celebrate singularity, solitude, es­ trangement, alienation, and aestheticized excisions of location in fa­ vor of locale—that is, the 'artist in exile' is never 'at home,' always existentially alone, and shocked by the strain of displacement into significant experimentations and insights. Even more importantly, the modernist exile is melancholic and nostalgic about an irreparable loss and separation from the familiar or beloved. (1995: 28)

As with the cosmopolitans of the globalized era, glossed over in the romanticized retreat into exile taken by numerous modernist artists

Introduction

17

and writers—in Paris, London, Berlin, New York, the south of France, the south Pacific—are the socioeconomic and other privileges (gender, racial, national) that fund and facilitate the line of flight, and permit the reformulation of displacement into a metaphor for artistic and intellectual endeavour, or political and cultural critique. Said recognized the limits to exilic agency by differentiating between voiced and voiceless exile conditions. While he concedes that the works of exiled writers "lend dignity" to exiled peoples, he also argues that their texts can only partially account for exile travails: "to concentrate on exile as a contemporary political punishment, you must therefore map territories of experience beyond those mapped by the literature of exile itself. You must first set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created" (2001: 175). Kaplan, however, argues that Said's counterpointing of the literate, literary exile intellectual or writer with the refugee masses potentially relegates the refugee outside discourses of representation and "reduces the refugee to ultimate victim, pinned in lumpen opposition to the recoverable memoirs and fictions of the exiled, bourgeois modernist" (1995: 123). Kaplan emphasizes the need for historicized attention to refugee experiences in order to "bring a previously invisible category back from the wilderness of the margins of criticism and literature" (121), and, by implication, back into exile debates as well. Refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrant workers, and so-called boat people are, Said notes, "a creation of the twentiethcentury state" (2001: 181), driven by state and global-capitalist imperatives to seek any better elsewhere, and often forced to confront the reality that "homecoming is out of the question" (1995: 179). Most observers would agree that since the 1970s the transnational movements of peoples have met increased resistance, and anxiety, in the states toward which such peoples are moving. The rise of Fortress Europe rhetoric and policies, for example, is in part attributable to a widespread belief that western Europe is not the product of waves over many millennia. The normalization in Europe of this notion of belonging to a place, and of a territorial right to be at home, is paralleled by Fortress America and Fortress Australia, two states founded on migration that, since the early 1990s, have passed a range of legislation intended to secure their (respective southern and northern) borders from the perceived threat of unregulated migratory flows.

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Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

If states are not disappearing, but reconfiguring themselves to at once facilitate and delimit the movements of peoples, the reconstructive nationalism of many exile groups also responds to such reconfigurations. Noting the nationalistic coordinates of exile, Said says, "Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to pre­ vent its ravages" (2001: 176). Such avowed commitments to national place are haunted by the possibility of state dissolution and reconstitution in new forms, a possibility that also has ramifications for the national communities in or against which exile is often conceptualized. At times, the combined weight of state practices and nationalist desire engenders a type of exile that is righteous, intractable, resolutely nostalgic, suspicious of others, and in denial over the identificatory muta­ tions of community members separated from the "original" home/land. Said attributes this atrophic tendency to a communal sense that in exile "nothing is secure," that protective lines must be drawn around the exile collective whose memories must then be jealously, passion­ ately guarded (2001: 178). For Said, the intransigent case in point is provided by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: What could be more intransigent than the conflict between Zionist Jews and Arab Palestinians? Palestinians feel that they have been turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile, the Jews. But the Palestinians also know that their own sense of national identity has been nourished in the exile milieu...where the slightest deviation from the accepted group line is an act of the rankest treachery and disloyalty. (2001: 178)

Such "deviations from the accepted group" confirm Kaplan's point that exile "triggers strong responses" (1995: 141). They also highlight the paradox of exile communal nationalism forged beyond the home/land, in what Said calls "the perilous territory of notbelonging...where in the modern era immense aggregates of humanity loiter as refugees and displaced persons" (2001: 177). For Said, the paradox of extranational liminality lies in how the exile might come to terms with "a fundamentally discontinuous sense of being" when the reconstruction of "an exile's broken history into a new whole," is at once psychically "unbearable" and geopolitically "impossible" (177).

Introduction

19

The extranational liminality of exile means that the terms home and homeland acquire enormous symbolic and emotive significance for exiled communities and individuals. Indeed, such terms, without which exile is rarely thought or lived, may introduce other axes of dispute into discussions about exile. For example, Kaminsky draws attention to the semantic challenge posed to translators by the Spanish word patria, which may signify a national home of sorts, as well as fatherland, but which cannot be easily transposed into English. Moreover, the affective uses of terms for home/land in common parlance indicate that pueblo (hometown and people) is preferred to patria when people name their place of origin, the location of the family home/hearth (casa/hogar). For Kaminsky, this amounts to a domestic identification of place with its inhabitants, as opposed to the more formal public or state registers in which patria would appear (1999: 3). The key to this linguistic contraction and expansion, then, is the domestic realm of the house/hearth, the sign that in Spanish talk of home/land is determined by a gendered ideology that naturalizes the house/hearth as feminine, as opposed to the wider masculine space of the pais (country) or patria (1999: 3-4). The implications for women, at least, are clear: how can we speak (in Spanish, in any language) of women's exile from a place (the fatherland) that traditionally has been foreclosed to them? The trouble posed by the notion of home/land is also exposed by the experiences of many freely chosen exiles, for example, the expatriates associated with imperial and colonizing projects, the "Colonial officials, missionaries, technical experts, mercenaries, and military advisers," described by Said as being "on loan," that is, living and dwelling away from home secure in the knowledge that return remains an option, even when that return is not realized (2001: 181). For many such expatriates, their exile may only become evident on the return to a place that no longer signifies or functions as home. The complex demographic legacies of the French-Algerian conflict provide a case in point, although in this case, expatriate status was more often imposed rather than freely chosen. Significant numbers of two groups to emerge from the Algerian War (1954-1962), the harkis (Algerian forces recruited into the French army but largely left to their fate after Algerian independence) and pieds noirs ("repatriated" European settlers), did manage the return to France. There they constructed nostalgic memories of the Algerian home or occluded and repressed such

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memories; at the same time, they are yet to obtain a home in France. This disturbed exilic scenario is further complicated by the postindependence Algerian community, France's largest immigrant group, which has also maintained a myth of returning for decades. That return rarely eventuated, however, given the change from the single male rotation system of the 1950s and 1960s to an immigration policy in the 1960s and 1970s intended to ease domestic unemployment by limiting the opportunities for extra-European work immigration. In reality, this policy encouraged Algerian workers to stay in France, and few immigrants took up the government's offer of a financial incen­ tive to return home. The children of these immigrants are torn between homeliness in a France that does not fully accept them, and an Algerian homeland that is alien to them, as is evident in a host of literary and artistic attempts to construct memories of Algeria despite displacement (Hargreaves 1989). Such projects of memorialization typify the work of many writers and artists who see in memory a vector for individual, communal and national validation in, or despite, exile. The central function of memory in exile processes is again related to the troubled exilic relation to home/land. As Said notes, "Exiles feel...an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives" (2001: 177), and "Much of the exile's life is taken up with compensating for disorientating loss by creating a new world to rule" (181). That desire for compensation arises with the exilic crossing of national, legal, linguistic and cultural borders, and characterizes the imaginative and recuperative work of remembering. But, however difficult, exilic memory is at imaginative work in a contrapuntal sense, located in the past and the host society's present: For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new envi­ ronment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be. (2001: 186)

As this passage confirms, exile can signal a place where past and present homes coexist pleasurably when home itself becomes the name for a perpetually shifting location.

Introduction

21

For Marianne Hirsch, however, generational factors complicate the work of contrapuntal exilic memory. Speaking of the children of Holocaust survivors, Hirsch argues that these members of the generations born away from the home/land have an "imaginative invest­ ment" in "postmemory." Unlike the first generation of exiles, newer generations have no direct experiences of a place of departure, and hence no capacity to imaginatively rely on memories of that place (1998: 420). As a consequence, "Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor recreated" (420). The reconstitution of exilic memory among second, third or later generations challenges Pavel's claim that "exiles never break the psychological link with their point of origin. Among the features of exile must thus be included the coercive nature of the displacement, its religious or political motivation, and the exiled's faith in the possibility of homecoming" (1998: 26). Indeed, as many critics have noted, the longer the period of exile the more it may resemble a "long-distance nationalism" enabled by "transnational social fields" of experience and habitation. These are Schiller and Fouron's terms for the modes by which many transmigrants regard, and remain attached to, their "home" country from a base in another state (2001: 3). For transmigrants, like many exiles, "transnational social fields" often appear to license a "claim to membership in a political community that stretches beyond the territorial borders of a homeland" (2001: 4). This notion of belonging despite distance, and despite identificatory investments in a new place, may generate new exile imaginaries and processes. Kaminsky speaks of the Latin American exiles who returned to Argentina, Uruguay and Chile after the end of dictatorship, and of how many of those exiles have constructed a "routine of travel" between the Latin American "home" and the society that hosted them as exiles (1999: 2). Exile in this instance combines a complex transnational reality with the metaphorical potential encoded in the term itself. In the introduction to his essay collection, Reflections on Exile, Said states: "Exiles, emigres, refugees and expatriates uprooted from their lands must make do in new surroundings, and the creativity as well as sadness that can be seen in what they do is one of the experiences that has still to find its chroniclers" (2001, xiv). To that state-

22

Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

ment we would add that the lived complexities of exile continue to impel critical attention in the contemporary world. It is not merely a truism to state that in our era, rapid globalizations, enhanced communication, and transnational migratory flows are ensuring that notions of home/land and identity are very much disputed on local, national, transnational, and global levels. As noted earlier, our era abounds with concepts to designate the realities and experiences of displacement, and in the critical literature on such matters it is routine to encounter moves away from the orthodox understanding of exile as political banishment enforced by a geopolitical state or regime. Yet, while exile now jostles against, and is often replaced by, such terms as diaspora, exodus, migrant, transmigrant, refugee, asylum seeker, and cosmopolitan, the contributors to this volume argue that whether imposed, compelled, consciously embraced, or pragmatically adopted, exile remains an important lived and critical issue in the 2 1 century. Many groups across the globe still look to exile narratives for ways of understanding and managing their lives and senses of emplacement in specific locales, and of identities that always already seem to be misplaced precisely because the work of (exilic, indeed any) identity production is "never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation" (Hall 1990: 222). st

The critical and creative discussions included in this book thus respond to a particular set of problems related to the exilic tension between identity, agency, and place. What factors permit and preclude exilic individual and communal transformation? Is there a need to rethink exilic agency in accord with local times, cultures and places, and to refocus attention on the impact that exile communities may have on a host society and vice versa? Do states and national imaginations still have roles to play in the production of exile? If, as Said posits, exile is "a condition legislated to deny dignity—to deny identity to people" (2001: 175), when does a people become exiled? More fundamentally, for whom is a people "a" people, and when is that status achieved? Might a notion of exile that presumes collective identificatory commonality and indissolubility be premised on an exclusionary and ultimately untenable claim to a home, a land, a bounded, finite territory? Is exilic displacement inevitably a condition of estrangement? As the contributors to this book demonstrate, there are no straight­ forward answers to these questions. Such questions also gesture to­ ward the inadequacy of a single overarching definition or description

Introduction

23

of exile. As Amy Kaminsky suggests, however exile may be lived or dreamed, it is innately unstable, "a process rather than a singular state" (1999: xvii), a dictum that also applies to the evolving, and al­ ways incomplete, constitution of cultural identities per se (Hall 1990). Indeed, all the contributions to this volume grapple with a number of unresolved issues that recur in the historical literature on the topic of exile and exile identity: the problematic location of exile and its definitional dependency on a home or homeland; the multivalent struggles to attain and maintain exilic voice, representation, memory, and identity on many fronts (individual, familial, communal, national, transnational); exile's uneasy relation to modernity, the state, and globaliza­ tions; and exile's conceptual and lived competition with other terms, such as diaspora, refugee, and migrant. In examining these matters, this volume takes a transnational and transcultural approach to exile and its capacities to alter the ways we think about place and identity in the contemporary world. With con­ tributions that explore questions of exilic identity along multiple geopolitical and cultural axes, the international span of this collection represents a significant addition to exile criticism and to debates over cultural identification. In preparing this volume, we have attempted to avoid a western European or North American bias by addressing the issue of exile and place across many continents and regions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: Europe (Italy, France, Ger­ many, Hungary, Russia), the Americas (Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, the USA), Asia and the western Pacific (Japan, China, Tibet, Vietnam, New Caledonia, Australia); north Africa (Algeria); and postcolonial Africa, the grounded context for Oha's contribution on the Tibetan poet Tsundue in this volume. More importantly, the chapters also problematize the national-origin and national-destination frames by which exile has often been discussed. That is, the contributors regard exile as a complex set of lived conditions that connect disparate places and peoples, at times along surprising axials: Cuba, the USA, and Australia; Colombia and the USA; Algeria and France; Italy, France and Mexico; non-Han minorities and Han majorities in China; China, Tibet, and India; Japan, the USSR, and China; New Caledonia, Vietnam, and France; Hungary, the USSR, and Australia; and Germany before and after reunification. The chapters balance theoretical concerns with detailed case studies that approach exile from literary studies, cultural studies, historical, and social sciences perspectives. The

24

Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

volume also includes evocative work by cultural producers who are themselves "products" of exile. The first two chapters provide a case-study retort of sorts to Said's understanding of exile as a lived experience characterized by es­ trangement and sorrow. By detailing the experiences of two communi­ ties redefined as non-Han nationalities in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the 1950s, Susette Cooke's chapter on the Tu people, and David Goodman's on the Muslim Salar people, demonstrate a fea­ ture of exilic realities rarely if ever addressed in the critical literature: that is, the capacity of a particular people or group to adapt to an arbi­ trarily imposed and/or self-consciously adopted exile status and thus take advantage of the identity directives of a geopolitical state. Cooke's study of the Tu people proposes that a sense of exilic displacement may arise from state-directed policies of inclusion rather than exclusion. She notes that when the PRC assigned an official ethnic category, or "nationality," to all its citizens in the 1950s, a group in northwest China was registered as the "Tu nationality" despite their self-designation "Monguor." Constructed as Tu in the great family of the Chinese nation by Chinese linguistic, cultural, and political determinants, the Monguors found themselves in a state of exile from their own communal references of origin, history, and identity. Cooke explores how the processes of Chinese culturalist classification of Others in the making of the modern Chinese state worked to isolate the Tu from valued aspects of their collective imaginary. But she also demonstrates how the Tu, given new opportunities in the reform period inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, have challenged official constructions to recover their own version of "misplaced" collective identity. Goodman's chapter similarly confirms that exile is a complex process in China, where a Han cultural center constructs all non-Han peoples as having peripheral status. Notwithstanding that centerperiphery logic, Goodman argues, the Salar—an Islamic Chinese community numbering some 100,000 and living along the upper reaches of the Yellow River, on the borders of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces in northwestern China—have self-consciously constructed a highly productive communal exile identity within the Chinese state. The idea that the Salar are an exile community has a long provenance, as Goodman elaborates, but he also argues that the Salar's selfembraced exilic status is not characterized by a sense of ethnic or

Introduction

25

communal victimhood. Rather, by deploying a communal exile narra­ tive to support their movements and business dealings within the parameters of the Chinese state, the pragmatic Salar have taken advantage of social and economic reforms, both as beneficiaries of such reforms and as adaptive and mobile social actors in the ongoing socioeconomic and political transformation of the Chinese economy. A less optimistic experience of exile—more in line with Said's articulation of exile as estrangement—is discussed by the Nigerian critic Obododimma Oha in his analysis of what he calls the burden of undecidable citizenship in the work of the exiled Tibetan poet Tenzin Tsundue. For Oha, Tsundue's poems confirm language as a key site in which the exile condition ruptures, recreates, and problematizes the identity and values of the exiled individual. Focusing on the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of Tsundue's poems, and drawing lessons from African postcolonial literary criticism, Oha proposes that the exilic experience engenders a crisis of identity at cultural and linguistic levels. He concludes by considering the implication of exile for a new Tibetan citizenship that has been ruptured culturally and linguistically, and that is located in what Homi Bhabha calls the "Third Space" (1994). Rowena Ward's chapter examines the little known case of the zanryu hojin, Japanese citizens abandoned and/or stranded in Manchu­ ria, in what is now China, at the end of the Second World War, and whose existence troubles the national markers by which Japaneseness is conventionally conferred and withheld. Ward also considers the zanryu hojin in light of Said's assumptions that people have a single geographical homeland and that exiles always know they are in exile. Ward argues that as a result of their exile in China, many zanryu hojin did not have the opportunity to develop a sense of Japaneseness or homeland that would allow them to be recognized as members of the imagined Japanese national community after their return migration to Japan. This effectively means that many zanryu hojin experience multiple exiles in and between China and Japan, all of which function as homeless lands. Moving from east Asia, the next two chapters deal with the legacies of the Algerian War (1954-1962)—a conflict often described as one of the hardest wars of decolonization ever fought, one that engendered numerous exiles—as represented in the novels of Dalila Kerchouche, Zahia Rahmani, and Assia Djebar. Jo McCormack's reading

26

Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

of Kerchouche's novel Monpere, ce harki and Rahmani's Moze, both published in 2003, approaches those texts as important collective memory artefacts of the Algerian War and its displacements. McCormack argues that for these authors, the challenge of finding or claiming a home, and thus ending or reconciling their exile, revolves around coming to terms with a traumatic past and being recognized in French history. McCormack reveals how the harkis (Algerian soldiers who fought for the French army during the war in Algeria) have clearly been excluded from French society for nearly half a century, enduring a form of internal exile within France in camps, occluded from official French histories, and thus silenced. Kerchouche's and Rahmani's novels illustrate the role of agency in the construction of collective memory, as the authors attempt to gain greater recognition of this group's role in French history, thus fostering better understanding of the harkis and allowing reconciliation between generations and groups. For McCormack, the work of exilic memory in these texts confirms the enduring importance of memory work in the discourses of inclusion and exclusion in wider French civil society. Ana de Medeiros's chapter also examines the enduring exilic legacies of the Algerian War as mediated through literature, in this case in Djebar's 2003 novel, La Disparition de la langue franqaise. Medeiros notes that while the novel appears seamlessly to enter Dje­ bar's ceuvre as yet another literary manifestation of the author's displaced view of the world, in one key respect the novel is uncharacteristic. Djebar's literary reputation has rested on the feminocentricity of her writings, which tend to involve a female narrator or protagonist through whose perspective the historical and contemporary situation of Algerian women, exiled or not, is explored. In La Disparition, however, the main narrator and protagonist is an Algerian man, and Algerian women are not central to the narrative. In her analysis of this shift and its exilic significance, Medeiros identifies the themes and devices in La Disparition that seem characteristic of Djebar's writing, whilst at the same time taking account of their specificity in the text. That identification enables Medeiros to examine the apparently unfa­ miliar "male" voice and perspective of Djebar's novel in order to show that it is nonetheless haunted by a female presence. For Medeiros, this haunting is consonant with the feminocentric impulse throughout Djebar's overall literary output; and, as such, haunting functions as both a trope and type of Algerian women's exile.

Introduction

27

Tess Do's contribution to this volume moves to the south Pacific and yet another exilic legacy of French colonialism. Do focuses on the work of the New Caledonian-born writer Jean Vanmai, whose first two novels, Chan Dang (1980) and Fils de Chan Dang (1983), describe the working conditions and exilic existence of the little known Chan Dang, the voluntary workers from Tonkin (later North Vietnam) who moved to New Caledonia between the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Descended himself from a Chan Dang family, Vanmai wishes to preserve the memory of the Chan Dang's past. In writing the story of the Chan Dang, Vanmai sees himself as the guardian of the Chan Dang's collective memory, a keeper and defender of their common past. Do argues that Vanmai's depictions of the Chan Dang are doubly important. First, by sharing with other Vietnamese migrants and refugees the life and experiences of the Tonkinese voluntary workers in New Caledonia, Vanmai breaks the silence surrounding colonial exile and exploitation and provides an account of the Chan Dang's exile that can be integrated into the contemporary history of the Vietnamese diaspora, a transnational grouping that has not accorded the Chan Dang a voice or a presence. Second, and more provocatively, Do suggests that by using different narrative resolutions for each of his protagonists, Vanmai stresses the need for younger Vietnamese generations to fulfill their filial duty in a place that has historically prevented the continuance of tradition and disrupted familial connections. By emphasizing the need for symbolic acts of filial duty, Do proposes, Vanmai pays homage to his Vietnamese ancestors and earns himself a honorable title, that of a dutiful "son of Chan Dang," in what amounts to a rhetorical reconciliation of the Chan Dang's displacement and identity travails. A different experience of exile emerges in Yixu Lu's analysis of the German playwright Heiner Muller's Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten (1982), his retelling of the Medea myth in the context of a Germany divided during the Cold War era. Muller's play alludes to dramatic versions of the Medea myth in both antiquity and modern German literature, but in doing so, Lu proposes, he undermines their main tendency. In Euripides's tragedy, for example, both Jason and Medea are exiles in different senses, and to each the action offers a different possibility of a return home. By marrying Kreon's daughter, Jason can regain a place of honor in Greek society, but at the cost of rejection and further exile for Medea; the tragic ac-

28

Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

tion, however, opts for a different ending, Medea's return to the realm of the gods, but at the cost of her humanity. In this and later versions of the myth, dialogue brings about meaningful change in human relations, for good or ill. Muller's adaptation negates the teleology of hu­ man action: only words move, but they set no change in motion. Muller's play, therefore, can be seen as a reversal of the prototype of meaningful return from exile established in the myth of Odysseus. Muller's reworking of the exile myth thus foregrounds the playwright's conviction that the incapacity for meaningful dialogue was symptomatic of life in the former East Germany. Lu concludes her chapter by exploring the further implications of the reversal of traditional myths of exile and the failure of the instrumental power of dialogue to reconcile the pain of separation and displacement in contemporary Germany. The contribution to this volume by the Australian-Hungarian artist Sue Hadju represents, on the one hand, an account of her relationship to her Hungarian-born father, and on the other, her response as a photographer to the photographs her father took in the last days of the October 1956 uprising before he left Hungary for exile in Australia. As Hadju says, the artwork she discusses and presents in her piece "emerges from my position as a member of the Hungarian diaspora, whereby my very existence and identity as a member of a diaspora owes itself to a historical event that I am unable to lay claim to." The chapter is thus framed by Hajdu's ambivalent experiences of diaspora, hence her concern to trace the tensions created by multiple desires: in diasporic longing, in positivist history-making, in ambivalent citizenship, and in the demands put on the photograph as unmediated historical evidence. The chapter opens with an outline of the Hungarian historical setting in which her father's original images were produced, and proceeds to elaborate on the Australian-born artist's responses to those images. For Hajdu, vernacular photographs can be used to contest and replace images and ideologies that have come to dominate memories of the past, so that the past becomes meaningful through acts of critical engagement. "1956: desire and the unknowable" was first exhibited in a solo exhibition, Little Histories, at the Sydney Col­ lege of the Arts in 2001. Later that year it was presented, together with thirty of the artist's father's original photographs, in a father-daughter collaborative exhibition at the gallery 62 Robertson, in Brisbane, called Between Ranke and the sublime: two approaches to Budapest

Introduction

29

1956. Those exhibitions, and the artist's meditations, present oppos­ ing, and ultimately irreconcilable, modernist and postmodernist views about the ability of the photograph to provide knowledge of the past and exilic displacement. Maja Mikula's chapter focuses on the complex geospatial coordi­ nates of exile at work in the novels of Cesare Battisti, an Italian author and former member of the ultra-left guerrilla group, Armed Proletari­ ans for Communism (PAC), which was active in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. As Mikula demonstrates, Battisti's situation is worthy of critical attention because he writes his novels and short stories from the vantage point of a ventennial exilic experience in Mexico and France, thus constructing a doubled national exilic realm that is haunted by memories of Italy. In Battisti's fiction, Mikula argues, there is little scope for enthusiasm and joy. His textual world is dominated by broken lives, estrangement, shady deals, violence and betrayal, and it is an all-male world in which female characters are either treacherous or purely instrumental in men's grander designs. For Bat­ tisti, exile is characterized by the absence of innocence, morality and responsibility, and dominated by the trope of relentless movement. Moreover, Battisti's vision of exile makes itself felt in, and as, a linguistic shift between Italian and French, and in geospatial settings that conjoin European displacements with the violating and blocking reali­ ties of the US-Mexico borderlands. As Mikula argues, Battisti's fiction thus demands to be read through the lenses of contemporary exile and border theory in order to better comprehend the author's problematic relation to the current Italian and European sociopolitical context. Jeff Browitt's chapter focuses on what is claimed to be the first novel of emigration to the USA written in Spanish, the little-known Lucas Guevara by the Colombian emigre Alirio Diaz Guerra. Pub­ lished in 1914 in New York, Diaz Guevera's novel provides a vivid account of early twentieth-century New York City in which immigrants from many countries have converged, only to be ontologically destabilized by their experiences of an overwhelmingly secular "American" modernity, pervasive transcultural processes involving multiple ethnicities and races living in overcrowded proximity, and unfamiliar modes of capitalist morality and liberated sexuality. As Browitt puts it, on the level of overt content, the novel is a lachrymose diatribe against US society and its supposed libertine and materialistic values. Yet, despite that frame, the novel gestures toward an exilic

30

Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

image of Diaz Guerra himself as a displaced, disenchanted intellectual who suffers an acute cultural and class anxiety in the transition from a patrician Arcadia to the heart of capitalist, industrial modernity. Yet, the threatening "melting-pot" challenges laid bare in the novel do not quite align with the experiences of the text's real-world author. Diaz Guerra's class (and gender and racial) status enabled him to integrate seamlessly into New York's diasporic-elite Latin American commu­ nity, where he took entrepreneurial advantage of the business and pub­ lishing opportunities afforded by displacement. Browitt's chapter ends with a discussion of how Diaz Guerra's representation of exile contrasts with, and provides a decidedly less celebratory alternative to, that now emblematic Latin American exile figure, the nineteenth century Cuban intellectual and independence advocate, Jose Marti. As a paradigm of Latin American, and specifically Cuban, politi­ cal exile, Jose Marti also haunts the chapters by Olga Lorenzo and Marivic Wyndham, both of whom are products of the first wave of exile generated by the Cuban Revolution. Their autobiographically modulated contributions are of note for introducing an Australian perspective to an exile condition conventionally thought of, and critiqued, as arising from the uneasy stand off between the USA and Cuba since 1959, and geospatially and culturally overdetermined by the mass exodus of some ten percent of the Cuban population across the Florida Strait to south Florida after the Revolution. Lorenzo's chapter reflects on her own and other Cuban American writers' fictional works in order to reveal how mechanisms of shame have dominated the Cuban exile imagination in the USA and elsewhere, including Australia. For Lorenzo shame does not simply generate an intense and intransigent nostalgia for the lost Cuban home. It also precludes dissent and prevents individuals, families, and communities from reconciling themselves to the past, hence the rigidity of Cuban communal attitudes to citizenship, identity, and ethnic separatism. As Lorenzo argues, these attitudes erupt at various stages in the identity discourses and cultural identities of Cuban exile. They also characterize literary products that may memorialize the homeland as a part of a broader exile project to impede, erode, or retard the process of assimilation and thus preserve cultural identity. In some cases, memorialization of the homeland goes hand in hand with degrading the majority culture and shaming those members of the minority who are suspected of moving towards assimilation. Shaming is also deployed by the majority culture to desig-

Introduction

31

nate difference and inferiority in the minority exilic culture. Faced with those antagonistic drives, Lorenzo asserts the need for writers to foreground exilic shame and thus "force it to shrivel in the glare of, for example, literary acceptance." In Marivic Wyndham's "Dying in the New Country," the author, like Lorenzo a product of exile from Cuba, and of (Australian) exile from the Cuban exile community in south Florida, embarks on a lyri­ cal personal journey through the landscapes of memory and loss caused by her multiple displacements. As Wyndham says: "Before the great Cold War diaspora wrenched millions of Latin Americans from their homelands and thrust them to the fortunes of foreign lands, most of us from the region had assumed that the land of our birth would naturally also be the land of our death. In the case of my own family, when the unthinkable happened, and my parents' ageing generation of Cuban exiles found themselves marooned indefinitely on foreign shores, the specter of death in someone else's land seemed the cruelest blow of their long years of exile. They were not the first Cuban exiles to die so near, yet so far from their beloved island. But they were our parents." For Wyndham, exile is characterized by the constant confrontation of competing claims to, and familial narratives of, the preexile past, claims exacerbated by generational differences and adaptations, and prone to semantic collapse when framed by an as yet unrealized desire for a return to a Cuban time and place after Castro. Concluding the volume is a meditation from Devleena Ghosh that maps the many forms of exile evident in previous chapters while also suggesting productive avenues for thinking further about the relationship of exile to place, and about exile as a leitmotiv of contemporary displacement in an increasingly transnational world. For Ghosh the fundamental question posed by exile is, "How does one define the multivalent, multiplex condition of exile?" For her part, Ghosh identi­ fies four nodes of exilic aspiration and struggle—exile as the future "will be"; exile as a nostalgia for privilege; exile as geography; exile as language—which either singly or in combination enable and disable the capacity for those in exile to be politically engaged. Ghosh argues that there is a global imperative for that engagement: "In the globalized present, is exile an isolated disease or the warnings of a pandemic? Perhaps the insoluble enigma in the trope of geographic displacement is the timeless and eternal hostility of the nation forced to offer hospitality to the deracinated intruder, the exile, the asylum

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Paul Allatson and Jo McCormack

seeker, the illegal migrant. What does rootedness and location mean in this context? And what is their potential?" Those questions recur in some form in all the contributions to this book. They demonstrate, in agreement with Said, that more can and must be said about exile in the contemporary world, and not simply in order to deepen contemporary understandings of the complex forms that exile can take for communities and individuals in trans- and multinational settings. This book's essays, autobiographical meditations and creative responses are thus in accord with Kaplan's call for a "re­ sponsible" desimplification of exile and the critical claims made of it. As Kaplan says: "If anything, investigating the critical uses of exile may reinvigorate activism and resistance to state-sponsored terror by fostering a politically responsible cultural criticism" (1996: 141-42). The realities of exilic pain and loss, of struggle, aspiration and identity transmutation, and the metaphorical resonances of exile for many residents of modernity, continue to endure and evolve in the twenty-first century. Those realities and resonances impel the contributors to this volume to interrogate exile's multiple lived experiences and the multivalent uses to which exile, as both fact and trope, can be put in the contemporary world.

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu: Nation, Nationality and Exilic Agency in the People's Republic of China Susette Cooke Abstract In the making of modern states, a sense of exile may be produced through the discourse and agency of inclusion as much as exclusion. In the 1950s, China assigned an official ethnic category, or "nationality," to all its citizens, among them a group in northwest China who were registered as the "Tu nationality," despite their self-designation "Monguor." Constructed as Tu in the great fam­ ily of the Chinese nation by Chinese linguistic, cultural, and political deter­ minants, the Monguors found themselves in a state of exile from their own form of self-referencing, dispossessed from their own interpretation of origin, history, and identity. This chapter explores processes of Chinese culturalist classification of Others in the making of the modern Chinese state; how these worked to isolate the Tu from valued aspects of their self-identity; and how the Tu, given new opportunities in the post-reform period since 1978, have strategized to recover their own version of who they are.

The transition from empire to modern nation-state in the postcolonial world has not occurred only in those regions formerly dominated by European powers. Empires of ethnic and cultural diversity have van­ ished, in name at least, in East and Inner Asia too, though scholarly reappraisal of them as colonial regimes has emerged only recently (Millward 1998; Hostetler 2001). In the process of reconstructing such empires into nation-states, territorial boundaries might remain virtually intact before and after the shift in political authority, as the new state claimed full political control over swathes of territory hitherto considered border regions, and inhabited by peoples whose relationship to the former empire ranged from semi-inclusive to politically associative. In the case of the People's Republic of China (PRC), founded in 1949 and successor to the less than forty year-old Republic of China, lands in this category amounted to 60 percent of the political

34

Susette Cooke

mandate it claimed. Almost all of them wrapped around three sides of the historical Chinese Han heartland and lived, in the Chinese cultural imaginary, as the frontier. While all had experienced degrees of contact with Chinese states in the past, their new inclusion within a Chinese national body could be made now only because of imperialist expansion during the last dynasty, the Qing, itself of non-Chinese (Manchu) origin. As the Qing Empire (1644-1911) became modern China, the postimperial Chinese political rulers inherited the greater national estate as it was now conceived. But for the so-called border populations, occupying the greater proportion of the PRC's landholdings but comprising less than ten percent of its population, integration into the Chinese state threw up contingencies of identity more prerogative than in the past. An assumption of core and periphery had long informed Chinese conceptualizations of both its social and geographic body. The new Chinese government faced a formidable nation-building exercise after 1949, not only in resuscitating a war-ravaged economy and society, but also in formulating a national narrative to describe its demographic inheritance and convince those in the frontierlands that they belonged within it. The linguistic parameters of the narrative's demo­ graphic dimension were built around the term minzu, variously trans­ latable as nationality, ethnicity, or ethnic group, and its binary projec­ tion into majority and minority elements. Demographic New China, as narrated by the Communist party-state, consisted of the majority Han nationality and multiple but much smaller minority nationalities, who together formed the Chinese nation. Under the new regime these binaries would be governed differentially in terms of the projected pace of socioeconomic transformation on the path to socialism: the minorities would be granted limited autonomy in their home territories under the umbrella of the central national government. Contributing to the decision for differential treatment was the absence, or precarity, of a functioning Chinese administration in many of the regions inhabited by the minorities. As a first step to constructing one, the Central Government needed to know who made up the frontier populations. In the 1950s it embarked on an ethnic classification project to determine the nature, size, and "nationality characteristics" of those who qualified for minority nationality, and therefore regional autonomy, status. The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) minzu shibie [ethnic clas­ sification] project institutionalized conditions of identity, entitlement,

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

35

and future expectations for the 35 million people who were not con­ sidered by the project's architects as belonging to the majority Han nationality. As putative citizens of the new PRC, whose essential national boundaries were uncontested internationally, they could not be seen as falling into an orthodox exilic state by way of geographic dislocation, except for those who left the PRC to become refugees in neighboring or more distant countries. Geographically non-Han peoples were to be more completely incorporated. But among those who remained, the upheavals experienced under the CCP's transformative program sometimes engendered traumatic isolation from familiar psychological sites and accustomed cultural expression, sufficient to warrant Said's description of an exile's "fundamentally discontinuous state of being" (2001: 177). Thus the most critical declaratory task the ethnic classification project took upon itself was the naming of the discrete "nationalities" it identified through its investigations. Some of the named entities felt no discontinuity between their self-conceptualization and the nationality conferred by the state. For others, the naming represented a disjuncture from how they had understood themselves in spatial or associative forms, or from the basic self-referencing of the name they called themselves. 1

2

The Tu One of the small groups to emerge in an official capacity from the project was the Tu. They numbered 53,277 in 1953 (Zhongguo 2000 2002), lived in Qinghai and Gansu Provinces in the frontier zone of Northwest China, spoke a distinct language, and practised a culture and livelihood reflecting a range of civilizational influences. From the Chinese perspective, the region was a sociocultural periphery northwest of the Chinese heartland, where many of the inhabitants stood well outside the norms of Chinese society and ethnic heritage. The Tu, whose culture included Mongol, Chinese, and Tibetan (especially Ti­ betan Buddhist) elements, were among the more integrated of the local border peoples, whose principal political loyalty had long been to s

The 1 Population Census 1953 recorded approximately 542 million Han and 35 million minority nationalities (Zhongguo 2000 2002: Table 1-1: from 1 Population Census 1953). For a striking example, see Mueggler (2001) on the Yi experience. st

2

2

36

Susette Cooke

Chinese dynasties. They had lived in the region for centuries, and the Communist victory did not dislodge them from their homeland. Under the PRC, they entered the Qinghai demographic profile as one of six main provincial nationalities, together with the Tibetans, Mongols, Hui, Salars, and the Han Chinese. They referred to themselves, however, as Monguors. Why were they not so named in the PRC's official nationality inventory? Euro­ pean observers who encountered them before 1949 also knew them as Monguors (Schram 1954; R6na-Tas 1966: 13), yet were aware the local Chinese referred to them as turen, a term normally translated into English as "natives" through its constituent parts: tu [earth, land, local] and ren [person, people]. If the Monguors and the Tu were one and the same people, what accounts for the official choice of a name apparently meaning "natives" over a self-appellation well known to outsiders? Did the Tu nationality's (Tuzu) name derive from local Chinese references to them as "natives"? Among the elements com­ piled into the nationality profile for the Tuzu during minzu shibie was a nationality-origin theory identifying an ancient border people of the Northwest, the Tuyuhun, as the Tuzu's earliest ancestors. The Tuyuhun could be cited in Chinese historical texts dating from the 5th century (Tuyuhunji 1973), though no-one in China, or anywhere, went by that identity now. A concurrence of the first syllable from this old name, "Tu," with the state-assigned name of the Tuzu seems like a sonic match, but the Chinese characters are written differently, indicating different terms. The written "Tu" component of Tuzu matches the "tu" of turen, not the "Tu" of "Tuyuhun." When local Chinese called the Monguors turen, were they inadvertently recalling the origins of the Monguors? Some prominent Chinese ethnographers made a case on these lines, and had it accepted in the official narration of the Tu nationality. During the PRC's ethnic classification project, then, a linguistic intersection, generated through the nature of the Chinese language, suspended the Monguors/Tu in a Chinese cultural framework. While the similarity between "Monguor" and "Mongol" could hardly be missed, and no-one disputed a linkage between "Monguor" 3

4

Most Tu lived in Qinghai, the only province in which they received administrative autonomy. Smaller concentrations of Tu in Gansu Province and other parts of the PRC were not granted autonomy. Zu as shorthand for minzu was appended to the designation of a nationality to indi­ cate its formal status, as in Tuzu (Tu nationality), Hanzu (Han nationality), and so on. 4

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

37

and "Mongol" on linguistic grounds, the Mongol cultural element in their society, or local folklore of their largely Mongol origin, the state registered the Monguors as Tu. Acquiring a nationality identity from the state allowed the Tuzu to take their place in New China as equal socialist citizens, but with particularities deriving from their minority nationality status. Along with the fifty-four other registered minority nationalities, the Tu were granted titular autonomy in the areas of the PRC where they were most concentrated. The entitlements enjoyed in these autonomous administrative areas, at least rhetorically, by minority nationalities in China, and enshrined in the Constitution and law, signal an amalgam of historical, strategic, ideological, and culturalist factors. It appears to place the minority nationalities at an advantage over the majority Han in certain respects. While autonomy acknowledged historical occupation by non-Chinese sectors, it also served state consolidation strategy by incorporating these regions politically and nationalistically. In the merged discourse of Marxist societal evolution and Chinese culturalism by which the CCP managed heterogeneous populations, the minority nationalities were assessed as comparatively disadvantaged in relation to the more advanced Han. Through the twin mechanisms of socialist construction and the regional autonomy administration system now brought by the Party, the minorities could rise to a level of social, economic and cultural equality with the Han majority. Their official identification thus aimed to serve state, nation, and the minorities themselves in gaining control of their own destinies. In this context of inclusive nation-building and recognition of population diversity, in what sense were the Tu having an exilic experience? 5

6

7

8

The State Nationalities Affairs Commission, the Party's executive body for imple­ menting nationalities' policy, ultimately decided on a nationality's official name. Huzhu Tu Autonomous County, founded 1954, in which 22,660 of Qinghai's 51,835 Tu lived (Huzhu tuzu 1983: 9). In the 1980s titular autonomy shared by the Hui and Tu was granted to Datong and Minhe Counties. Minority policy confers preferential or lenient positions to minorities in areas such as education quotas, financial policies, poverty alleviation programs, and family plan­ ning, with variations applying at different policy periods. See "National Minorities" (1999), Sautman (1998), and Mackerras (1994). In the Constitution of 1982 the PRC defines itself as a unitary multi-nationality state (Constitution 1986: Preamble), in which the system of regional nationality autonomy serves national unification; see also the Government White Paper on "National Minorities" (1999). 6

7

8

38

Susette Cooke

Developments in the post-Mao reform period since 1978, when the Party adopted a more liberal agenda, indicate that the Tu were in fact feeling disassociated from their own version of the past. The Tuyuhun nationality origin and name theory, suggested during minzu shibie, had been written into orthodoxy in the early 1980s, as social reforms revived nationality studies. In the 1990s, Tu intellectuals began to challenge the Tuzu-as-Tuyuhun identity formulation on the grounds of its absence from internal Monguor tradition and evidence against it in the Chinese literary corpus from which it had emerged. Their quest to reconfigure their nationality's official profile involved a deconstruction of dominant Chinese cultural discourse, a potentially sensitive pursuit in the controlled environment of ethnic relations and national narrative in the PRC. Fundamentally their intellectual activi­ ties aimed at psychological recuperation: by removing barriers to meaningful self-identity produced by a modern state project and its cultural assumptions, the Tu could reclaim their heritage as Monguors. Tu "exile" and cultural citizenship State-imposed exile, as banishment of Chinese people to remote re­ gions (liufang), has been practiced regularly and on a large scale throughout Chinese history, often as a combined mechanism for punishment and empire-building. As fringe-dwellers of the Chinese sociocultural world it had no relevance to the Monguors. I thus examine the Tu in the PRC not because they experienced physical exile, or on the grounds that they suffered the trauma of psychological exile as a result of the naming process, but rather to explore processes of Chinese culturalist classification of Others in the making of the modern Chinese state, how these worked to isolate the Tu from valued aspects of their self-identity, and how the Tu, given the opportunity in the post-reform era, have strategized to recover their own version of who they are. This focus is suggestive of the psychological appeal of ethnicity in a modernizing world where pressures to compel active belonging emanate from state authorities who formulate both proposition and practice. As pointed out in the introduction to this volume, exilic agency needs to be rethought in accord with local times, cultures, and places. The Tu story is more about exilic agency than about a people 9

See Waley-Cohen (1991) for its practice in the Qing period.

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

39

suffering Said's classic condition of exile, "the unhealable rift be­ tween a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home" but it is, as per Said, predicated on nationalism (2001: 173, 176). Exilic agency here consists of the Chinese state, its nationalistic minzu shibie project, and Han culturalism emanating from China's Confucian past and its reformulation within socialist ideology. These factors combined then determine possibilities for social change and cultural citizenship for the Tu in the Chinese context. Ironically, the Chinese nationalist project that created the Tuzu aimed at inclusiveness rather than rejection, let alone "a condition legislated to deny dignity" or "identity" (Said 2001: 175). Yet under the momentum of national belonging and development, the Tu experienced loss of dignity and identity when they were registered in the idiom of Chinese culturalism as a component of an immense and determined whole, the Chinese nation-state. In becoming Tuzu in the great family of the Chinese nation, the Monguors found themselves exiled—or at least dis­ possessed—from their own interpretation of their origins, history, and identity, by the official state narrative and its instrumental agent, ethnic classification. This form of exile by inclusion seems paradoxical until the universalizing tendencies of Chinese cultural cosmography and politybuilding are recalled. As a universalizing schema, Confucian orthodoxy visualized the world as a scaled moral order, measured in degree of adherence to wenhua [culture] that was conceived unidimensionally as the corpus of Chinese literary practice and its embodied moral norms. Culture was transcendent and encompassing, bypassing ethnic and geographic boundaries to admit all participants. A people could thus be evaluated by the relativeness of their practice of wenhua and categorized accordingly as barbaric or civilized. Empire construction, in its discursive and geopolitical dimensions, followed this ordering proposition by sitting the emperor at the symbolic and virtuous center of the world, "towards which peoples would naturally gravitate, paying homage and offering obedience" (Hostetler 2001: 205). The Chinese literary archive made clear distinctions of cultural belonging by naming those groups who lay outside the domain of civi­ lization. The naming of such barbarians-by-definition was undertaken seriously if not always accurately, just as the merging of barbarians into the civilized social body was noted in the historical record. The process implied moral progression, but in practice meant their disap-

40

Susette Cooke

pearance as distinct entities. Monguors inhabited a shadowy niche in the Chinese record of the Northwest in the sense that, while they were certainly there, they were neither (still) barbarian nor (yet) civilized. Without a name they were simply "natives" in the regional social landscape. This lack of specificity implies that they were on their way to becoming civilized and would, when the process was complete, be indistinguishable at least in literary terms from the rest of the "peo­ ple." The positive trajectory towards inclusiveness, and the moralist attraction of the center in the Confucian model, were easily appropriated by post-imperial modernizers as the conceptual basis of the "Chinese nation." The Communist project, ideologically committed to the equality of all citizens in the multiethnic unitary state, justified its un­ equal assessment of Han and minority nationalities on grounds of sci­ entific social evolution, the Marxist doctrine of progression through stages of socioeconomic development that, applied by the Party to the Chinese situation, defined most of the minorities at a less advanced stage than the Han (Harrell 1995a: 22-24). Recognition of nationality distinctiveness and consequent entitlements was nevertheless timesensitive, admitted in current circumstances but predicated on their inevitable disappearance in the final future realization of pure socialism. Functionally this operated as a unidirectional process of transformation, whereby the minorities would become increasingly like the Han, merging with them on the path to socialism and discarding those aspects of their cultures that impeded socialist development (Harrell 1995a: 27). The Han, too, were expected to lose non-progressive cultural characteristics, though fewer than the minorities because they were more advanced. The Chinese socialist model, indebted to historical Chinese culturalism, privileged the majority Han as the mainstream measure of quality, while politics, institutions, socioeconomic policies and coercive power emanating from Beijing set the framework of possible action. In that environment, where did the line lie between maintaining nationality identity and assimilation? Neither the Confucian nor the Communist cultural-national projects saw advantage in remaining outside the Chinese norm. When the PRC named its demographic components in the ethnic classification project, minority nationalities were made distinct but integral, part of the greater national whole. Unlike some minority nationalities, the Monguors had no overt resistance to

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

41

being Chinese. For them the identity disjunctive derived from the ob­ scuring power and fixating impressions of the name given to them as a distinct group under minzu shibie. As a product of the ethnic classifi­ cation project and its Chinese culturalist assumptions, the "Tuzu" category separated them from the heritage and identification symbolized by "Monguor." Producing the Tuzu Monguor ethnocultural production undoubtedly owes much to the multiethnic, multicultural frontier zone of Inner Asia, within which the Monguors lived for many centuries. The story of how the Tu got their name in the 1950s, however, is located above all in the reverential regard in which Chinese-language texts are held in Chinese society, a clear example of the way that "the practices of literary culture are practices of attachment" (Breckenridge et al. 2002: 594). NonChinese peoples have been embedded in the classical Chinese literary repertoire for millennia, meriting separate chapters in dynastic histories and are scattered through the normative literary production of annals, treatises, political compendia, and poetry (Cooke 1993). Their literary presence attached them to the Chinese worldview, in which their conceptualization was also normative, juxtaposed to the Chinese and their domain as the barbarians beyond civilization, negatively located in a geographic and moral cosmography. Boundaries could change across physical space and lived experience: Chinese political borders fluctuated significantly over time, and civilizational status could be compromised or enhanced by the degree of a people's participation in the Chinese cultural sphere. The literary trope of "beyond the passes," or "within the passes," epitomized in physical form by the Chinese Great Wall/s, reflected the dynamic of history in the actual contestation for power and resources between those inside and outside the Chinese polity. Once conquered and governed, many non-Chinese former outsiders gradually became undifferentiated from the majority Chinese population—min [the peo­ ple]—under assimilationist pressures. For those not yet among the "people," historic classification recognized them in terms of their relation to the Chinese and Chinese culture by a generalized division into shufan [cooked barbarians]—considered civilized, or sinicized, by the Chinese—and shengfan [raw barbarians], who maintained their own

Susette Cooke

42

customs and were beyond Chinese government control (Brown 1996: 38). Under these terms the frontier-dwelling Tu were cooked, due to their relative exposure to Chinese culture, their practice of agriculture, and long-term participation in the imperial border management system. Ironically, this closeness may in part have obscured their selfidentity in the PRC's administrative makeover, which proceeded in the first instance through minzu shibie [ethnic classification]. The PRC's minzu shibie project, launched in the idealistic nationfounding phase of the early 1950s, was carried out by hundreds of ethnographers who worked under the countervailing influences of political ideology and received tradition (McKhann 1995: 61-62). After conducting their research in the border region, they submitted their findings to national authorities for the final imprimatur of nationality classification. The PRC's ideological imperatives required them to work within Stalin's ethnographic blueprint when evaluating a group's qualification for nationality identity: common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup, manifesting as culture (McKhann 1995: 47). Yet as educated men (and a few women) they also worked through the intellectual heritage of the Chinese past, with the Chinese literary tradition's categories for ethnic groups. The hasty nature of the investigations driven by political pressures and often unfamiliar, unstable local conditions sometimes impelled them to include local Chinese interpretations of neighboring societies. Thus while they labored within a modernist, socialist theoretical framework, the final contours of their ethnographic map of China reflected the classic categories of border peoples from existing Chinese texts, fixing them in the administrative lexicon of the new socialist state's discourse on nation. 10

11

The Monguors qualified easily for minority nationality status under Stalin's criteria. Most of them lived in districts near Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province in northwest China. They spoke a distinct language, engaged in the subsistence agro-pastoral economy common to many inhabitants of the frontier zone, and practiced customs that, though derived from multiple sources, contained elements unique to their communities. In one respect, however, the Monguors presented an enigma: their origins. Origins were required to explain the national10

For political reasons this research was not published until the 1980s. Examples of such incomplete and derivative information from the vestigations of the Tu may be found in Qinghai tuzu (1985). 11

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

43

ity formation process, through which an orthodox Chinese national evolution could be produced (Huzhu tuzu 1993: 501-2; Lu Jianfu 2002: 2). According to this narrative, at some point in time each na­ tionality was formed after a "long historical process": in time all the nationalities collectively fused into the Chinese nation. Nationality classification legitimated the process of national construction and defined the "timeless, scientifically unimpeachable" nature of the cate­ gories defined, which in turn fed the intellectualized legitimacy of their involvement in the evolution of the Chinese nation (McKhann 1995: 47). The Tuzu's origins thus had to be discovered, but here the PRC ethnographers found the information discrepant. Earlier observ­ ers—Westerners and late-Qing Chinese—had remarked on the mysterious and multiple origins of the Monguors. The controversy involved several theories but, through the minzu shibie project, came to entail two viewpoints: the Tu were of mainly Mongol origin (hence called themselves Monguors), or they originated from an ancient frontier people, known in Chinese sources as the Tuyuhun. In this ancient Tuyuhun origin, some Chinese ethnographers saw the derivation of the local Chinese term turen. At this point we return to Chinese texts. Text and vernacular: cultural origins of a name China's rich historical record, preoccupied with government, precedent and continuity, has both confirmed and obscured the identities of its border populations. A people, called Tuyuhun by Chinese scholars, certainly lived and flourished in the Northwest from the 4th to the 7th centuries CE (Zhou Weizhou 1985; Mole 1970). Migrating from the Huluunbuir region in what is now Liaoning Province (part of former Manchuria) in the 3rd century, this proto-Mongol people established an extensive empire across present day Qinghai, Southern Xinjiang and part of Gansu, until their power was destroyed by the Tibetan Empire in 663 CE. Many Tuyuhun leaders and their followers subse­ quently moved out of their former territories to become dispersed among Chinese and other regional populations, while others were incorporated under the Tibetan imperial banner. References to the Tuyuhun, or anyone identified as ancestrally Tuyuhun, disappeared from Chinese sources by the 10th century (Yang Yingju 1988: 960-61). In 1746, however, the Qing scholar Yang Jingju published his Xiningfu xinzhi [New Annals of Xining Prefecture], in which three

Susette Cooke

44

families from Hezhou in Gansu, whose ancestors are described as turen, appeared as early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) guards at a fron­ tier post in Qinghai (Yang Yingju 1988: 411). Thereafter the turen began to show up in Chinese texts more frequently, located in the districts in Qinghai where most Tuzu live today. Yet even in Yang's work, the prime Qing treatise on the Xining region, these turen are curiously nebulous. Other local populations rated often lengthy commentaries on their society and culture, while the turen received no ethnographic citation, turning up only as "natives" distinguished from the "people," that is, the Chinese subjects of the Qing (Yang Yingju 1988: 619). Given the author's long official service in the region and intention to produce the definitive prefectural annals, this lack of detail seems puzzling until the turen's status in the Chinese imperial gaze is taken into account. By the mid-1700s, the turen had become "cooked," sufficiently integrated into the border administration and even Chinese culture that some of their tusi [chieftains] and tuguan [officials] were no different from "the people": paying the grain tax, rendering corvee, studying the Chinese classics, and living among the Han. Some no longer spoke the tuyu [local language]. These characteristics distinguished them favorably from local chieftains elsewhere along the borders, who remained nanxun [hard to tame] (Yang Yingju 1988: 619). To Chinese settlers migrating to the area since the days of Ming border colonization, these people were simply "natives," local non-Chinese of long if indeterminate historical residence. If the settlers were aware of the turen's ethnogenesis, such knowledge might not figure in the name they used for their neighbors. The 18th century author of the "New Annals of Xining Prefecture" recorded them as turen with the Chinese characters for "natives," not for Tuyuhun, and nor did he link the turen historically with this ancient and now vanished people (Yang Yingju 1988). 12

13

How can we be certain the Qing-era turen are the Monguors of today? Yang's "Annals" nowhere identified turen as Monguors. By the 19th century, late Qing works on the Northwest contained only perfunctory references to the turen, for whom the "cooking" process 12

Few Ming-era references to turen have come to light (Li Keyu 1986: 361-62). See Yang Yingju (1988: 619); also noted by Schram in the 1920s among comments on the subject by local literati (1954: 26). Both sources employ the character tu in its meaning of "local" or "native," as applied in Chinese border environments generally. 13

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

45

seems to have been so well advanced no more need be said about them. A comparison of post-imperial and Qing-era literary informa­ tion concerning them, however, leaves no doubt of their coincidence, even in the uncertainty over their ethnogenesis. In the early 20th cen­ tury, with its more modernist intellectualizations of China's border populations among Chinese ethnographers and political concerns en­ gendered by Republican state and nation-building, the Monguors re­ tained their indefinite textual presence as turen, overshadowed by more critical threats to stability from regional Tibetans, Mongols, and Hui (Zhou Zhenhe 1938; Xu Kongwu 1943). But some Chinese ob­ servers and ethnographers remarked that the turen called themselves Monguors and Western commentators also mentioned it, so the terms were designating the same people. Sources for the Tuzu simply as turen therefore abound before 1949, but the hint of a connection with the Tuyuhun had apparently appeared in the final years of the Qing dynasty among some local Chinese scholars curious about the Monguors' origins. The Belgian missionary-anthropologist Schram, who heard of this notion from such scholars while conducting research among the Monguors in the 1920s, neither supported nor rejected the theory (1954: 26). He also made no claim to finding it among either Monguor or local Chinese traditions of Monguor/turen origins, but noted it as a minor component of regional lore on the Monguors gathered by another Western explorer-ethnographer (Schram, citing Tafel, 1954: 25). Republicanera Chinese observers who encountered it also regarded it skeptically (Xu Kongwu 1943: 105). In a 1955 paper the noted Mongolist Henry Serruys, more interested in ethnohistory than the taxability of Chinese border subjects or a Chinese nation-building project, unequivocally identified the Monguors with the Mongols via linguistic, adaptive, or origin links, confining tu in Chinese vernacular and literary sources to the sole meaning of native/land (1952-1955: 257-58). The consensus from these sources pointed to a Mongol-origin theory, based on successive waves of Mongols into the region from the 10th to the 16th centuries (Li Keyu 1986). Although the minzu shibie executors 14

14

Schram's comprehensive compilation of pre-1949 Western researchers' views on Monguor origin, beginning with Huc and Gabet in 1845, overwhelmingly supports Mongol ethnogenesis (1954: 23-26).

Susette Cooke

46

probably had no access to Schram's or Serruys's work, many local traditions of Monguor origin were available for their consideration. The Tuyuhun theory appears principally as an elite proposition considered only by some old Chinese literati. Thus between the Ming and the modern period, the people now identified as the Tu became crystallized in Chinese vernacular as the turen, an appellation retained in Chinese texts and colloquial usage until 1949. In this accessible guise the Chinese ethnographers of minzu shibie encountered them. As related by a prominent participant in the naming project, "The Han and Hui call them turen or tumiri" (Mi Yizhi 1995). Chinese cultural imperialism had rendered these people "natives" in local and literary usage. While little is known of the final decision-making processes, over time the new state's ethnographers seem to have opted for their own texts and language to identify the group as Tu, a nationality-naming process paralleled elsewhere in the PRC (Harrell 1995b). When the choice was embellished in the 1980s by decisively connecting it with the Tuyuhun, the Tuzu became products of Chinese historical consciousness as much as of history. 16

Exilic states When the Monguors became the Tuzu, in what sense, if any, were they exiled, and if so, from what? The CCP's socialist program, ideologically and nationalistically, aimed at inclusiveness, to bring groups like the Monguors who were marginal to Chinese society, culture, and political body into the core, not remove or block them from it. But the minzu shibie project's formalizing of their identity as Tuzu via Chinese textual interpretation and colloquial Han Chinese usage constructed the framework for their future self-referencing. The state's formal identification of the Monguors as Tu inserted them into the national population management program. It also construed their past out of its own cultural heritage with its assumptive notions of Han superiority (Harrell 1995a: 26-27). Whatever the facts of the Monguors' ethnogenesis, minzu shibie fixed them in a self-serving Han-centric narrative of national evolution in which Monguor identity was deSchram's work was not published until 1954, Serruys's in 1955. Schram and other Western researchers were not mentioned in the minzu shibie publications. The Hui, like the Han, are Chinese speakers. 1 6

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

47

duced from Chinese historiography and drawn self-consciously from both upper (educated) and lower (locals) strata of Chinese society. The process dispossessed the Monguors of their name and past, laying out a space for them in which they were bound to experience something like Said's "discontinuous sense of being" (2001). This estrangement by inclusiveness in another's worldview typi­ cally happens through assimilatory pressures on indigenes. In negoti­ ating the new environment, they must evaluate the desirability of in­ clusion or distinction under the circumstances. Fitting in may require giving up one's previous identity, a morally condoned development in the Confucian model of becoming civilized (Heberer 2005). Minzu shibie formally gave the Monguors a distinguishing identity, but the authoritarian, centering, and nationalistic mode of the PRC denied them the power to self-identify. It confined them instead to a space of representation constructed by dominant Chinese linguistic and culturalist determinants, an exilic state in relation to their own form of self-referencing. For the first time in thirty years, the possibility of reconfiguring that space, within limits, opened for minority nationalities like the Tuzu when the CCP embarked on its reform and openingup policies in the early 1980s. The next section considers the impact of this new discursive space on Tuzu identity formulations. Social change: state, policy, and internal agency Rhetorically, the PRC claims that all its citizens have the right to participate in the nation's social development, through the representation of their interests by the CCP and by forms of local administration— particularized in the national minority areas by regional autonomy. As a very small nationality within the gigantic Chinese national body, the Tu may not expect to effect social change in their environment beyond a highly localized space, and in fact have been the recipients of major social change engineered outside their frame of potential influence. Nevertheless, a temporal divide based on policy changes does color consideration of their situation as exiled subjects. Periodization of PRC history now falls customarily into two distinct time frames arising from political decisions made by the CCP: pre and post reform. Briefly, after the first three revolutionary decades 1949-1978 domi­ nated by the person and policies of Mao Zedong, China retreated from its revolutionary socialist trajectory when Party leaders adopted a pro-

Susette Cooke

48

gram of relative economic and social liberalization at a meeting in December 1978. As well as restructuring key aspects of its economic practice, the CCP allowed cautious reevaluation of certain pre-reform social and cultural policies, a change particularly significant for the minority nationalities who, by the very nature of their differentiation from the Han mainstream, had experienced sociocultural dislocation since the PRC's founding. In the process of deconstructing facets of society and ideological assertions deemed orthodox in the pre-reform period, minority nationalities found themselves with expanded opportunities for identity affirmation, at least compared to the recent past. State agencies, too, found opportunities for their own reformulation of attitudes towards the minorities in the post-reform period. Administratively, regional autonomy was reaffirmed through a new Law on Regional Nationality Autonomy in 1984, followed by extension of titular autonomy for some nationalities, including the Tu who became joint title-holders with the Hui in Datong and Minhe counties in the Xining region. During the 1980s, amid the revival of nationality studies that had been defunct since the early 1960s, a series of statecommissioned works on China's minority nationalities was published, amounting to a new national project for "minorities" scholars. Much of the material in the publications drew on the ethnographic investigations made by minzu shibie scholars in the 1950s, suppressed from public view in the intervening years. Updated to the early reform era and presented in the context of China's current nationalities discourse, these concise histories and surveys of the autonomous areas provided a new and accessible orthodoxy on the history and society of each minority nationality, as well as glimpses into contested nationality identity debates left over from the defining moment of the state ethnic classification project a generation earlier. 17

18

19

Confluences and divergences revealed within the new stateminority discussion reopened the question of the Tuzu's identity. In the two principal volumes of the early 1980s concerning the Tuzu, the Tuzu jianshi [Concise History of the Tu Nationality] (1982) and Huzhu Tuzu zizhixian gaikuang [Survey of Huzhu Tu Autonomous County] (1983), the controversy over their name and origins received 17

See note 8. See Dangdai Qinghai (1991: 418) and McKhann (1995: 46, n. 12) for information on this series. The Han, as the majority nationality, were not included in the series. 18

19

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

49

extensive coverage, but again it was conducted largely through refer­ ence to Chinese texts and the burden of proof they could or could not bring to bear on the naming of the Tu. Five ethnogenesis theories were discussed in detail, but the official conclusion emphasized—caiqu [chose]—the Tuyuhun origin theory (Tuzu jianshi 1982; Huzhu Tuzu 1983). Who was the official voice, and why did it make that choice? Although ethnic Tu were among the editorial staff for the original and revised versions of these publications, the new volumes' compilers worked under the direction of the local county Party Committee and the Qinghai Province Nationalities Questions Committee, then passed their work through these agencies for authorization and revision, a process ensuring conformity to Party orthodoxies. The results also reflected resurgent scholarly activity as such, repressed and decimated in human and intellectual terms for two decades. In this changed so­ cial milieu, the assessment of China's most distinguished ethnohistorian of the Northwest seems to have decided the debate on Tuzu ethnogenesis. Mi Yizhi was among the scholars investigating commu­ nities of the Northwest during the ethnic classification project. While the Tuyu-hun origin theory for the Tuzu was mooted during this time, a draft version of the Huzhu tuzu [Survey of Huzhu], issued as an in­ ternal document in 1963, mentions it as one of several origin theories, not the most important one, and nor was the origin question finally decided (Qinghaisheng Huzhu 1963: 7-9). But when the revised works on Tu nationality appeared in the early 1980s, Tuyuhun origin was confirmed. As Mi Yizhi's own substantial studies were published during the reform period, the derivation of privileged Tuyuhun origin theory became clear: the official Tuzu volumes reproduced his arguments virtually verbatim. In a traditional Chinese cultural environment Mi Yizhi's broad scholarly reach conferred authentication on his arguments, and still carried the day after three decades of multinational, unitary state ideology, with its nod to national minority participation. His conclusions on Tuyuhun origin arose within the Chinese textual archive to reproduce a Chinese culturalist identification, the Tuzu as archaic Tuyuhun, based on the apparent convergence of the tu vernacular and the textual Tu. 20

21

Huzhu tuzu (1983: 128, editorial postscript). These include nine major collections on historical ethnography, and the edited Huanghe shangyou (1995). 21

Susette Cooke

50

Yet as the new openness produced a growing class of Tu intellec­ tuals, challenges to this identification began to appear in regional scholarly journals. Reform-era Tu scholars emphasized the Monguor name and the group's Mongol ethnocultural heritage, even refuting the Tuyuhun origin theory as a mistaken line of evidence (Li Keyu 1986; Li Shenghua 2004: 149-60). Trained in the PRC's education system, they were aware of the linguistic and culturalist processes that produced them as Tuzu, and based their rejection not only on their own cultural traditions and experience, but also by reference to the same Chinese textual archive utilized by Han scholars like Mi Yizhi (Li Shenghua 2004: 149; Li Keyu 1986: 360). Their arguments, while engaging for linguistic and historical reasons, are less salient to the present essay than the airing of internal perspective and the light cast on the broadening social and intellectual spaces of reform-era nationality discourse. Citing Harrell, Thomas Heberer (2005: 5) has noted the multiple patterns of ethnic classification in which official, scholarly, and selfidentifying discourses are performed in China today. In their public position as intellectuals, Tu scholars must stand astride all these in their reevaluation of their nationality's identity and history, but they have been able to use their familiarity with, and the dicta of, the first two—official and scholarly discourses—in the service of the third, self-identification. Post-reform openness refashioned nationality discourse from homogeneity by repression and imminent socialist transformation into a decelerated process of nationality consolidation and self-development in the nation at large. Party-state programs still set discursive parameters and developmental frameworks: the provisional granting of voice to nationalities allowing articulation of legitimate nationality consciousness remained subordinate to the goal of economic development, but even more critically to national unity and social stability strategies. Within this context, the Tu intellectuals' in­ terest in their nationality's naming process reflected the coincidence of crisis and increased self-awareness that often accounts for growing ethnic consciousness (Heberer 2005: 1). Pre-reform forced assimilation, followed by the reform-era's wider social disruptions through rapid economic change, promoted a stronger sense of ethnic identity 22

22

Inaugurated in 2000, a major state project that focused on these concerns, the Cam­ paign to "Open Up the West," included the autonomous areas and their ethnic popula­ tions in its developmental sights (D.S.G. Goodman 2004a; Li Dezhu 2000).

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

51

among many minority nationalities than had existed in pre-PRC China and prior to their official classification. In the more liberal cultural climate of the 1980s and 1990s minority scholars made vigorous ex­ plorations into their ethnicities' pasts, cultures, and even future aspirations. Reaction to processes of change in their communities directed from above by Han Chinese underpinned much of the ethnic represen­ tatives' discussion, although this could rarely be made explicit. Tu efforts at recovering their cultural heritage began with language re­ form and the revival of religious practices, along with the relatively positive assessments of Tu culture in the official compendia on the Tu nationality mentioned above. Questioning of the orthodoxy on their Tuyuhun origin appeared a decade or so after publication of the official Tuzu story, by which time scholarly and literary production in Qinghai Province had reached unprecedented levels of activity and range of permitted discussion. Their argument deconstructed the merger of tu and Tu proposed by Han scholars to explain Monguor origins, summoning evidence from the Chinese literary archive together with the sociological explanation of turen from local Chinese vernacular. Privileging instead the Monguors' Mongol links over sev­ eral centuries, these Tu scholars reconstructed their nationality's pro­ file by reference to a portfolio of evidence of dominant (Han) cultural sources and internal self-identity, a path that could lead them out of the obscuring, displacing the tu/Tu referent towards an authentic identity as Monguors. 23

Incremental changes have occurred in the social landscape since the reforms, not least the fact that nationality studies are now an approved mainstream academic field in the PRC. Discourse on Tuzu identity has also continued to evolve. In the subsequent edition of the "Huzhu Tu Autonomous County Annals," published in 1993 a decade after the early reform-period edition, Tuzu origin was presented as an amalgam of Tuyuhun and Mongol elements (Huzhu tuzu 1993: 501), while some current official channels do not even mention the Tuyuhun origin theory, opting to discuss Mongol origin and ethnocultural connection as internal claims of the Tu nationality (China Internet Information Center 2005). Among Chinese academics the debate continues.

On language and education see Zhu Yongzhong and Stuart (1999); for the Tibetan Buddhist revival see Pu Wencheng (1990).

52

Susette Cooke

While carefully affirming the benefits of official nationality iden­ tity and, for the present, accepting the registered Tuzu name as a leg­ acy of minzu shibie, the Tu intellectuals' case against Tuyuhun origin reflected deep shifts in the PRC's ideological environment. Social change directed from above allowed them enough maneuverability in the confined space of identity formulation to rediscover their history, challenge the Han-state monopoly on historical interpretation, and engage in recuperative remembering as they reconstructed their nationality's identity. Under post-reform policy these activities un­ blocked the structure that created the exilic condition of removal from self-perceived identity. It remains to be considered whether the Tu's new self-consciousness and its open expression has brought the Tu cultural citizenship in post-reform China. Cultural citizenship Conceived as social practices that claim and establish a group's distinct space in a society, wherein they feel a sense of belonging and membership (Flores and Benmayor 1997), cultural citizenship broadly encompasses the self-expressive experiences of minorities as different as Latinos in the USA and Tuzu in the PRC, though its meaning is relative and contingent. Latinos and Tuzu both live in massive national societies with mixed ethnic populations, whose national ideologies give recognition to ethnocultural diversity but whose ethnic minorities feel pressured by a dominant cultural paradigm supported by a powerful political and economic structure. Beyond that broad framework of restriction, profound contextual differences and consequent differences in possibilities for social change reveal the highly localized nature of cultural citizenship, conceptually and functionally. Under the circumstances exile, too, becomes relative and particularized. Ethnic identity in China is formalized by state system and categorization, in a polity dominated politically and culturally by the 92 percent Han Chinese majority. In 2000 the 241,198 Tuzu comprised only 0.23 percent of China's total minority nationality population, itself only 8 percent of the national total. Pressures of assimilation into the mainstream society and potential exclusion from a self-determined culture are thus extreme for the Tuzu in the PRC. At the same time, China grants titular autonomy to the minority nationalities in 60 percent of the national territory in acknowledgement of their long histori-

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

53

cal habitation of these areas. This administrative approach suggests that all of the PRC's nationalities are indigenous, since inclusion occurred not through human movement into China, but the geographic extension of political embrace. The current ideology of Chinese culture's multiple origins is a strategy for describing this process, en­ twined with the notion of the natural attraction of the advanced Han culture during interethnic relations. Minority autonomy and the Chi­ nese national narrative thus disclaim the possibility of physical exile for the Tu, already in their "homeland" on both counts. Citizenship in China, a basic term of reference in the Constitution and legal system, involves some individual rights but is also heavily concerned with duties towards the state and its goals. Any discussions or social spaces concerning culture are footnotes to key state goals of unity, stability, and economic development, including in the nationality autonomous areas. The sociopolitical environment in which minorities like the Tuzu may configure their cultural citizenship is bounded by overriding national, collective considerations as described, for instance, in the following public statement on current policy direction: "Development is the last word and stability is the most important task...The interests of the country, the interests of the nation and the interests of the people are always the number one pursuit of each citizen" (Renmin ribao 2005). The distinct timeframes dividing PRC history into pre-reform and post-reform periods allow differences of scope but not, as yet, deviation from such goals for practices of cultural citizenship. Cultural citizenship in pre-reform China, if the term had been encountered, would have meant full participation in the socialist project. In more culturally liberal post-reform China, cultural citizenship is still contingent on participating in national development plans constructed in Beijing. Minority nationality "characteristics" are now dreamed into the fabric of the plans as vectors for development through tourism, border trade, and potential for greater integration of the Chinese national whole. For segments of the Chinese population like the Tuzu, trying to maintain their cultures (in lands they have long inhabited) under the integrative pressures of unity, stability, and economic development prescribed by the party-state, the Confucian universalizing order based on cultural belonging has morphed into modernist social homogenization. Although the PRC avows itself as a unitary multiethnic state, manifested in the administrative system of regional nationality auton-

Susette Cooke

54

omy, the mechanics of economic development involve greater blend­ ing of China's diverse demographic elements, conducted through minzu tuanjie [unity of the nationalities], aka the "new socialist ethnic relations" of socialist modernization—unity, equality, and mutual aid. Cultural belonging under these conditions is measured by the degree of socialist modernization attained. By this functional assess­ ment most of the national minorities lag behind the Han, and they fear the consequences of comparatively low-level economic development. In terms of culture, however, their concern is maintenance of their distinctiveness in the face of the development juggernaut that threat­ ens to engulf them. Cultural citizenship, like exile, bears a strong relationship to na­ tionalism and power. The PRC's national ideology constrains it in three ways on the basis of permissible terms of discussion: (1) minority nationalities cannot be considered subordinate communities due to the unity and equality of the nationalities; (2) legal and constitutional limitations turn on perceived threats to the unity of the nationalities; (3) minority nationalities are seen as already enjoying the rights of all Chinese citizens, and more—entitlements in the autonomous areas take into account their perceived "backward" socioeconomic and cul­ tural stages of development. Although titular autonomy by no means assures cultural preservation for the titleholders, it may well impact on concepts of cultural citizenship acceptable to the minority nationalities, at least within the range of conceivable possibilities. But cultural citizenship for the ethnic minorities is not a decisive factor in the politics of the PRC, because the 92 percent Han majority hold political, coercive, and economic power. They are anxious to maintain that power given the regional titular autonomy of the minorities over more than half of China's state territory: national strategic concerns are at the forefront of official discourse and policy on the autonomous areas. In other words, the 8 percent minority nationalities are not an important political constituency in authoritarian, Han-dominant China; nor will their numbers grow through immigration. Their importance lies in the existence of the autonomy system that recognizes them by ethnicity, culture, and place, and theoretically offers them a limited guarantee of their distinctiveness for a long time to come (Harrell 1995a: 24

25

2 4

See Mao Gongping and Wang Tiezhi (2002: 7) and Li Dezhu (2000: 22-25). Internal migration, rather than immigration, has been the issue in historical and contemporary China. 2 51

Becoming and Unbecoming Tu

55

27). Thus in the Chinese context, their right to assert their cultural citizenship in that place would seem incontestable. Counteracting that right, however, is the formidable range of political, cultural, and demographic cards held by the Han majority in the Chinese state, not the least of which is current state ideology of national development, and the fact that the Han state remains the articulator of minzu rights. When Tu scholars began to reclaim their Monguor identity in the 1990s, the form and substance of their challenge did not transgress permissible legal or political boundaries, or current official discourse. Nevertheless it represented a bold assertion of self-identity in the interests of recovering their nationality's name, past, ancestry, and memory. Conclusion Unbecoming Tu remains an active process for the Monguors. Their identity as Tuzu has been institutionalized since the minzu shibie pro­ ject of the 1950s, an element of the genesis of a multinationality uni­ tary New China, whose nationalistic hopes and goals have weighed heavily. Aware of the sensitivities embedded in the field of nationality relations, Monguors know they must engage judiciously in discussion of their identity, history, and aspirations. They must also navigate the state's paramount developmental paradigm, which encompasses the minority nationalities and their autonomous areas as energetically as it does the rest of Chinese society. Having become Tu through the his­ torical operation of Han Chinese cultural imperialism, they may be able to claim a Monguor cultural space and identity by maneuvering through the predominant cultural stratum via its own mechanisms: Chinese textuality, legitimized post-reform nationality studies, and the nominal grants to minority nationalities of broader cultural expression. Whether the Monguor name may one day replace that of the Tu in the official register of nationalities—not an articulated goal to date—is a future question, and one which speaks to subversion of the exilic agencies that produced the Tuzu. More immediately, the place of the local in determining identity and providing a ground for its performance cannot be overstated in the case of such a highly localized people. Tu scholars are exploring an intellectual path towards dignity for Monguors within the prescribed sphere of ethnocultural identification. At issue is whether the acceptance of Tuzu as Monguors in their local

56

Susette Cooke

context will free them of their sense of historical and identity dis­ placement. The outcome will be shaped by dynamic processes underway but not concluded, in which the self-sustaining power of a sense of dignity should not be underestimated.

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China David S. G. Goodman Abstract The reform of state socialism came relatively late to Qinghai Province in the Northwest of the People's Republic of China. One of Qinghai's most dy­ namic groups in the social leadership of reform has been the Salar, one of the officially recognized nationalities identified in the PRC during the 1950s. A relatively small group of some 100,000 people living along the upper reaches of the Yellow River, on the borders of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces, the Salar are committed to both Islam and China, and believe that they live in permanent exile. While there is considerable uncertainty about their origins, my recent research in Qinghai suggests that the perspective of being Chinese citizens, yet a people in exile, shapes Salar social and economic activism.

Long before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, it had committed itself to the principle of a multinational Chinese state, in order to manage the some 6 percent of the population not regarded as Han Chinese, but who had been subjects of the Qing Empire and became (in principle) citizens of the successor Republic after the collapse of the Empire in 1911 (Mackerras 1994, 1995; Chih-yu Shih 2002). This was no small matter in Northwest China, and in particular in the region on either side of the contemporary border between Qinghai and Gansu Prov­ inces, where there had been almost interminable violence after 1780 over the search for appropriate religious and political identities amongst local Muslims (Lipman 1997). An immediate problem for those responsible for nationality policy in 1949 was the codification of the non-Han Chinese. This became a state project in the first half of the 1950s and resulted (often though not always through compromises between the state's desire for both bureaucratic neatness and manageability, on the one hand, and local demands for self-identification, on the other) in the recognition of fifty-five "minority nationalities."

David S.G. Goodman

58

The relationship between anthropological definitions of ethnicity and the PRC's nationality status is often contested, not least because PRC conceptions of nationality are employed in specific political and ideological contexts. Differences among nationalities are explained in terms of both stages in society's unidirectional development towards (Han) civilization, and appeals to hereditary and racial purity (Dikotter 1992). Thus the definition of a specific minority nationality usually identifies language and homeland within the PRC as the key determinants. One of the smaller nationalities identified in this way were the Salar. The Salar are described by the PRC as a Turkic and Islamic (Sunni) people, with the majority living in the Xunhua Salar Autono­ mous County of Qinghai Province, and a small minority in the neighboring counties of Hualong and Tongren (in Qinghai) and Jishishan and Xiahe (in Gansu). Xunhua County is near the PRC's physi­ cal center; where the upper reaches of the Yellow River cross from Qinghai Province into Gansu Province. Xunhua in general, and its largest town, Gaizi in particular—with its central Salar Alitiuli Mosque—is the population epicenter and spiritual home for the 100,000 Salar. While the Salar were one of the smallest nationalities in numbers identified in the 1950s, they were geographically concentrated, had a high degree of self-identity, and were well known outside Xunhua, if not always for positive reasons. In addition to being known as merchants and traders throughout the Northwest, in Ningxia, Gansu, and Xinjiang, as well as across Qinghai, they also had a reputation for ferocity and violence (Lipman 1991: 4). The 1950s process of codification saw the Salar become a staterecognized nationality defined in terms of their distinctive Salar language, their homeland in Xunhua County, and their origins as exiles from the Samarkand area in today's Uzbekistan (Salazu jianshi 1982: 1

2

1

The PRC interpretation of this process is outlined in Fei Xiaotong (1981). A more critical view is provided by Harrell (1995b). Qinghai is an inherently multicultural environment. Xunhua, for example, despite its Salar presence, is also heavily Tibetan. This makes the rendering of personal and place names and all proper nouns a little less than straightforward. In this chapter names are presented as far as possible in their most commonly used format; where appropriate, reference is made to Modern Standard Chinese. The term "autonomous" in PRC usage indicates the presence of a significant non-Han nationality, often involved in government and party-state activity. 2

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China

59

3). Exile is not only central to the definition of the Salar; a sense of banishment and of being outsiders is also part of common consciousness in Xunhua County and for the Salar as a whole. In addition, various underlying accounts of migration explain Salar identity, including their origin and their interaction with both the Islamic world and Chinese society. The Salar understanding of exile differs from the ways in which the term has been used elsewhere, especially in the 20 and 2 1 centuries. In the first place, it is a premodern notion of banishment that is not associated with, or the consequence of, a nationalist discourse. The Chinese word fangzhu was usually employed in imperial times for the act of being sent into exile away from the political (and cultural) center to the frontiers of civilized culture. Given that the Empire ruled "all under heaven" with control and influence stronger at the center and weaker at the periphery, there was little of the twentieth century notion of exile beyond the boundaries of the state to be found in this conceptualization. Moreover, the Salar experience now recounted as "exile" was not a state-driven legal banishment, but a migration driven by hostile conditions with a presumed point of departure. Moreover, the center of the universe for those now said to have migrated was Inner Asia, not the Imperial Court, which they moved towards, not away from. These factors help explain why the self-understanding of the Salar as exiles has not bequeathed an imperative to return, as is often the case for exiled communities throughout the world. Another, possibly more fundamental reason is that Salar identity only starts with exile. No preexile homeland provides the subject of nostalgic romanticization. Indeed, there is considerable uncertainty as to the precise point or time of origin for the Salar, or those now called by that name. The lack of an imperative to return is also presumably related to the ways in which Salar identity has been involved in the tortuous (and often violent) search for a Sino-Muslim identity, at once politically Chinese and socially Muslim. Originally, this identity was grounded in the area around Hezhou (now Linxia) in the south of Gansu, which was a major center of Islamic culture by the end of the 17 century. At times Salar interaction with the Qing Empire and its successor states resulted in violence, as in the Rebellion of 1781, the uprisings of the late 1800s, and the outbreaks of resistance during the 1950s. In the 20 century, however, interactions were also positive, th

th

th

st

60

David S.G. Goodman

including the establishment of Qinghai Province in 1928, first under Ma Qi and later his son, Ma Bufang, as a Muslim state within the Chinese political system, a process in which Salars from Xunhua played a leading role as part of Ma Bufang's military organization (Yang Xia­ oping 1986; Chen Binyuan 1986). One result of these cultural politics is that in contrast to the ex­ perience of other exiles, the Salar do not present themselves as vic­ tims. A recent survey of Salar businessmen and community leaders suggests that discourses of exile and migration are again in use as instruments of Salar mobilization and wealth generation towards the positive creation of a Sino-Muslim identity. Qinghai Province was slow to adapt to the socioeconomic opportunities presented during the 1980s and 1990s by the reform of the earlier system of state socialism. Not so the Salar, or at least a group of successful Salar community leaders and business-people, who have been in the forefront of change throughout the province for the last two decades. Xunhua and the Salar Xunhua County is located at the southern edge of the Haidong District of Qinghai Province. Haidong literally means "East of the Lake" and the lake in question is the large inland saltwater Qinghai Lake (some­ times known outside China as Kokonor). The Haidong District is the most heavily populated part of Qinghai Province (67.2 percent of the population live on 2.84 percent of the provincial land area) and contains almost all its arable land. Xining, the provincial capital and a Chinese outpost of Empire from the 7 century, is at the center of this district. While Xining is close to Xunhua in terms of the scale of Qinghai, it remains the best part of a day's travel away by road. Xin­ ing and Haidong were for a long time part of Gansu Province, and the region on either side of the Qinghai-Gansu border is perhaps best un­ derstood as China's cultural frontier in the Northwest. West to East this is where Mongols and Tibetans interact; South to North is where Chinese culture meets Central Asia. Xunhua is a county of 2,100 square kilometers that runs for 90 kilometers along the course of the Yellow River as it moves into Gansu Province, at between 1,780 meters above sea level (the low 3

th

For a general introduction to Qinghai Province see D.S.G. Goodman (2004b).

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China

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point is where the Yellow River enters Gansu Province) and 4,498 meters above sea level (the Lazi Mountains.) It is a county of mountains and valleys, poorly connected to the rest of China and poorly integrated in itself. Until 1972 there was no paved road into or out of the county. The main communication route was along the Yellow River into the Linxia District of Gansu. There is a very fertile strip along both sides of the Yellow River, with a heavy clay soil, where annual yields of 800 jin of grain per mu are normal. Yet a large part of the county is barren mountains, referred to by locals as "the land where nothing lives," not even suitable, as elsewhere in Qinghai Province, for grazing. 4

I

Map of Xunhua and environs

I

See the glossary at the end of this chapter for explanations of weights and measures.

David S.G. Goodman

62

In 2001 Xunhua County had about 120,000 people, and just under 30,000 households, living in 147 towns and villages. Jishizhen is the county town, the seat of local government and the residence of the few Han Chinese who live in the county. Xunhua's population is predomi­ nantly Salar (62 percent), but a substantial minority (24 percent) is Tibetan, largely agriculturalists living in the Tibetan villages at the east of the county. The last (10 ) Panchen Lama was a native of Xun­ hua. Relationships between the Salar and Tibetans are complex. For the most part they have long lived and even worked together. Most adult Salar speak a fair amount of Amdo Tibetan. Salar refer generally to Tibetans in extremely friendly tones as ajiou, meaning "maternal uncle," a term denoting as close a relative as can be without being parent, child or sibling (Ma Wei, Ma Jianzhong and Stuart 2001: 33), and during the 1950s the two communities cooperated on several occasions in acts of resistance to the PRC. At the same time, under Ma Bufang and the drive to emphasize Sino-Muslim identity, especially in Xunhua and neighboring (and also Islamic) Hualong, a more aggressive policy of turning Tibetans into Sino-Muslims was pursued (Cui Yonghong 1994: 71ff). The rest of the resident population in Xunhua County includes Muslim Hui (8 percent) and Han Chinese (6 percent). 5

th

st

At the start of the 2 1 century county leaders are wont to describe Xunhua in terms of its poverty. While this is not inaccurate compared to Eastern China provinces, Xunhua has been one of the more success­ ful economic stories among Qinghai counties since the early 1990s. By 2001 GDP had reached 30 million yuan renminbi (US$3.75 million). The mainstays of the local economy are energy production, the export of labor outside the county, wool, and the production of cloth and clothing with Islamic religious significance. There is a strong and growing electricity-generating industry centered on two new hydroelectric stations on the Yellow River. It is common to meet Salar all over China's Northwest. As in the past, some are traveling merchants and salesmen. Xunhua also supports numerous county-based construction companies with workers sourced from the county, and transport companies operating throughout the Northwest. Such out-migration has led to a demand for more Salar restaurants and eateries to support migrant Salars; this has also contributed to the export of labor.

Information on Xunhua County derives from my interview with Ma Fengsheng, County Head, 5 August 2002, Jishizhen, Xunhua.

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China

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The increased economic development of Xunhua is perhaps most apparent in the rapidity with which older, well-established industries have found new markets, and become mechanized and automated. In particular, the expansion of the woolen goods industry has been spectacular. Xunhua previously had one small and inefficient mill, spinning sheep wool. Since the late 1980s Xunhua has become a major center in China for washing and spinning sheep and yak wool. It now has five large-scale enterprises all recapitalized with new technology and led by native Salars. This restructured and revitalized industry has contributed to Xunhua's wealth, with the mills producing a range of products, including luxury products for export to Europe and North America. The woolen goods industry aside, mechanization and auto­ mation have also transformed older industries making religious cloth, hats and embroidery, some of which are specific to the Salar, and some of which have wider Muslim applicability. Minority nationality participation in the administration of local government and the local party-state in Qinghai Province is variable, even though most of the province is organized into areas of minority nationality residence. The degree of minority nationality representation is a function not only of each group's relationship with the partystate but also of that group's self-articulation. In the case of Xunhua County, 19 people held leadership positions in 2002 for the CCP, local government, local people's congress, and local Chinese People's Rep­ resentative Conference. Of those, nine were Salar, two were Tibetan, two Hui, and six Han Chinese. As these proportions suggest when compared to relativities in the population as a whole, the Salar people may at times have had an uneasy relationship with the Chinese state. The key to understanding that interaction lies in Xunhua's cultural geography, or more accurately that of the wider environment outside the county. Although for the Chinese Empire, and even for those Chinese who lived in the GansuQinghai border region, the region was always regarded as the extreme periphery, for other local peoples this was not the case. For local Muslims the Hezhou area was a major center of Islamic learning from the late 17 century. Hezhou (now Linxia) just across the border in Gansu from Xunhua was known as "Little Mecca" and was a center of Islamic civilization at times when the Chinese state was regarding Lanzhou (the capital of Gansu Province) and Xining as "wild-west" frontier towns. Looking at a current map for Xunhua's location might foth

David S.G. Goodman

64

cus attention on new state boundaries but its interaction with Xining and the rest of Qinghai Province is still less important than the Salars' main cultural communications with the Islamic world of Linxia Dis­ trict (Lipman 1996: 97). Hezhou's Islamic influence was such that it rapidly began to inter­ act with movements beyond its immediate hinterland. At a time when the Islamic world was awash with intellectual curiosity and new ideas about spirituality and social activism, new political and religious teachings from Yemen and Arabia began to gain ground around Hezhou. The initial result was not so much direct conflict with the Chinese state but rather religious and political violence in the local Islamic communities. The destabilizing of local society rather than any particular religious ideas brought the Salars into conflict with the Chinese state. When the Qing Empire acted to restore order it acted heavy handedly, thus ensuring even higher levels of violence. As Lipman details (1997), this was a common pattern in the 18 and 19 centuries in Xunhua, which helps explain the Salar's reputation for ferocity and violence. Islam most probably came to Xunhua during the Mongol con­ quests of the 13 century. Many Muslims saw service with the Yuan Dynasty and large numbers were settled in nearby Gansu. Until the mid-1600s, Islamic social and political life in Xunhua centered on the community and mosque. This started to change, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, with the impact of Sufism, a movement of mysticism and activism that created supra-communal and often highly competitive orders. One of the first Sufi proponents, Muhammed Yusuf, visited Xunhua in the late 1640s and converted the Salar (Mi Yizhi: 1982). During the 18 century a number of Hezhou District Muslim preachers and scholars started to travel to the Middle East, on pilgrimage and to study. One of the more charismatic of these was Ma Laichi who on his return gained considerable publicity and following for his particular ideas (known as Khafiya) by instigating and winning a court case about the correct order of prayer and eating during Ramadan: he argued that at that time it was more appropriate to eat before evening prayers as against the then current practice of eating after (Trippner 1964: 264). In 1750 Ma Laichi converted the Salar to Khafiya teachings and practices. Another similar, but slightly later traveler was Ma Mingxin, who in 1761 introduced more radical and intolerant ideas of Sufi revivalism, known as Jahriya, the "New Teaching" as opposed to th

th

th

th

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China

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Ma Laichi's "Old Teaching." His impact in Xunhua was to lead to extremes of communal violence. At stake were access to the wealth and assets of religious institutions, and control of converts and their communities. Increases in the number of law cases and the incidence of street fighting between the two schools brought the Qing legal process to Xunhua in 1781. The decision to outlaw the New Teaching and disband its communities as a threat to social security merely escalated the level of violence. A group of Salars, under Su Fortythree (Su Sishisan) raised the banner of revolt and captured Hezhou. When the Governor of Gansu sent officials to Hezhou to deal with the revolt, Su Fortythree had them killed and marched on Lanzhou in return. As was later to be the case on a number of occasions the Salar rebels found taking Lanzhou to be beyond them, and after a siege were defeated by the locally raised forces (including other Muslims) of the Chinese state (Mi Yizhi 1983; Salazu jianshi 1982: 17). Just over a hundred years later, in 1894-95, a similar sequence of events was played out again when an increase in law suites between adherents of the "New Old Teaching" and the "New New Teaching" (which by then had be­ come the polarities of conflict for Sufi adherents), as well as an in­ crease in communal violence, led the Qing legal process to find in fa­ vor of the latter (Lipman 1997: 142). After the fall of the Qing the Salar came to play a more central role, not only in Muslim China's development, but also in the devel­ opment of the Chinese state. At the turn of the 19 and 20 centuries the continued frustrations of Islamic resistance to the Chinese state gave way, at least in the minds of some activists, to the construction of more Sino-Muslim identities and courses of action. In part these were religious and intellectual in construct, but they also produced the notion of a semi-autonomous political system for Sino-Muslims that reached fulfillment through the establishment of Qinghai Province, with its capital at Xining in 1928. Its major proponent was the Muslim Hui Ma Qi, the one time Qing Commander of Xining and subsequently the local warlord, who became the province's first Governor. He was succeeded in 1931 by his son, Ma Bufang, whose support base lay in Xunhua and Hualong Counties, where he had been the district's leading official. Many Salar served with Ma Bufang, especially in the military, and he remains an important figure in the Salar pantheon. th

th

Ma Bufang's association with the Republican Government that had granted the establishment of Qinghai Province placed him on the

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side of the Nationalist Party in the Civil War, and the Salar on the outer when the CCP came to power in the PRC and the People's Lib­ eration Army (PLA) moved into Qinghai in late 1949. After the province had been secured the CCP wanted to demonstrate its human face in contrast to, in its interpretation, the more inhumane political behavior of Ma Bufang. Instead of imprisoning Ma Bufang's captured sol­ diers and the civilians who had served with the Ma Bufang regime, all were released back into the community. This proved to be a serious mistake, as these people then raised the flag of violent resistance. In Xunhua, in particular, there were a series of serious attacks on the new regime. Han Yimu led the most successful of these in 1951-52. His forces, consisting of those who had served with Ma Bufang, surrounded the local garrison of 90 PLA soldiers and wiped them out. A much larger PLA force was sent to retake Xunhua, and Han Yimu left the county town to become a guerrilla (Zhang Pu et al. 1996: 150). Han Yimu's act of resistance continued to the end of the decade. In 1958 he emerged from working underground to lead a revolt of Salar, many of whom remained Ma Bufang loyalists, in an attack on the Chinese state alongside and in concert with the wider Tibetan uprising of 1958-59, which eventually led to the Dalai Lama's exile (Chen Yunfeng 1991: 92). When rallying the troops and local Salars in Xunhua, he is reputed to have said, "Tomorrow Xunhua, after two days Lanzhou, and in three days we will take Beijing." Eventually captured and taken for trial and execution in Beijing, he is said to have re­ flected, perhaps apocryphally, on his misunderstanding of China's size and scale: "China has more people than Qinghai has yaks" (Chen Yunfeng 1991: 92). The revolts of the 1950s in Xunhua led the PRC to instigate a crackdown on the Salars in every respect in and after 1958. Those thought to be the leaders of the Salar community were imprisoned or executed. About ten percent of the male population was rounded up and sent to "Reform through labor camps" elsewhere in Qinghai. The Salar language was discouraged and religious expression was largely suppressed. An early 13 century handwritten Koran (one of only three worldwide), said to have come to Xunhua from Samarkand with the original settlers and previously kept in the Alitiuli Mosque, was th

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taken to Beijing for "safe keeping." Yet the measures employed by the state to sinicize the Salar were unsuccessful, and merely drove Salar religious and social practices underground. Repression continued for the best part of twenty-four years. In the early 1980s as the reform agenda started to emerge from the CCP in Beijing, a new approach was adopted towards all minority nationalities, including those such as the Salar who had demonstrated their opposition in the more recent past. The more tolerant approach represented a pragmatic response to the needs of economic rationalism. Nonetheless it was cautiously welcomed in Xunhua, especially when all but a few (those identified as "the leaders") of those arrested for involvement in the rebellions of the 1950s were pardoned. This in­ cluded those who were still in "Reform through labor camps" as well as those who had already been released from other state security establishments or indeed who had subsequently died or been executed. Full religious expression was permitted once again, the Alitiuli Mosque Koran was returned from Beijing (in 1982), and local mosques became operational again. Salar community institutions came out from underground and indeed in some cases became the foundation for new economic enterprises, such as those making religious products. At the same time, Salar acceptance of a more positive relationship with the PRC remains cautious, a coexistence rather than a closer integration. A small act of resistance was the Salar refusal to adopt the new state-provided script for the Salar language. Salars use three languages: the routine Salar spoken idiom, which was and remains writ­ ten in Chinese characters; the Mongolian and Turkic influenced Linxia Chinese; and Arabic, used for religious purposes. In the early 1980s at the direction of the Central Nationalities Commission of the PRC Government, Professor Han Jianye of Qinghai Nationalities Col­ lege designed a new Salar alphabet that was propagated in Xunhua (Han Jianye 1988). It was not accepted and has been quietly shelved. Another example is schooling. State school enrolments in Xunhua are some of the lowest in the PRC. A key reason for this is that the Salar, like other Muslims in the Northwest, prefer the sexes to be segregated at school and that their children should receive more religious education, as provided for by the madrasas attached to mosques.

Details of the Alitiuli Koran are provided in a conversation between Han Jianye and Ma Wei, reported in Ma Wei, Ma Jianzhong, and Stuart (2001: 11).

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The myth of exile The codification of nationalities in the early 1950s defined the Salar as exiles, and all the available evidence would suggest that contemporary Salars believe passionately in their status as a people in permanent exile. Contemporary official and less formal published accounts all stress the origins of the Salar in the act of banishment from Central Asia. Visitors to Xunhua all receive a similar introduction, and the fact of exile is usually the first thing mentioned by Salar businesspeople and officials when their nationality or ethnicity is being discussed with other Chinese or external visitors. An interesting additional aspect of their belief system, which reinforces the notion of permanent exile, is the equally strong attachment to being citizens of the Chinese state, demonstrated by the insistence on the continued use of Chinese characters in writing. One reason for this passionate belief and its clear articulation may well be because the fact of exile was central to the definition of the Salar in the early 1950s. This provides a certainty and a consciousness that overrides remaining doubts and contestations about origins. The official view of Salar origins is met by considerable uncertainty, not least about when the people now known as the Salar came to Xunhua, where they came from and who the original "they" may have been. The historical record, scholarly observation of local society and customs, and even local folk stories, reinforce the notion of Salar exile not so much as false but more as a constructed public belief, though one that predates the establishment of the PRC, even if it was formulated more clearly in the 1950s and then pursued more passionately since the early 1980s in the most recent era of Salar revival. The first recorded use of the name Salar appears to have been in Qing records. When describing the impact of the visit of the early Sufi, Muhammed Yusuf, to Hezhou and its surrounds during the late 1640s, local magistrates described his influence in converting the Salar (Mi Yizhi 1982; Lipman 1997: 59). Assuming that the Salar (whether by that name or otherwise) were regarded as a well established local feature at that time, these events might explain why prior to 1949 their presence in Xunhua was dated even earlier by one or two 7

Certainly this was my experience when conducting research throughout Qinghai during 2001-2003 and in Xunhua specifically in 2002.

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centuries. More recent accounts that followed the 1950s definition of the Salar as a state-recognized nationality have started to accept an earlier and more precise date for arrival in or about 1370 (Salazu jianshi 1982: 9). That said, earlier sources do not explain why the Salar were or are called by that specific name. The current dominant discourse of exile is enshrined in the standard PRC histories of the Salar nationality. More complex versions of the same exile story from the Samarkand region, though incorporating different elements that had sometimes been related separately, have been elaborated in still more popular accounts of Salar folk culture. In the late 1980s Han Fude and Han Derong (1988) recorded (without attribution) one such folk tale about the origins of the Salar, Camel Spring, that drew heavily on other local stories and folk practices related by other sources and observers. This story of Salar origin starts with two brothers in Samarkand, Kharimang and Ahmang (Gallima and Akhma). They felt that life in their home village had become intolerable because of discrimination against them by the village headman, so they decided to leave for somewhere more amenable. They set off from the village accompanied by various relatives, clanspeople and possibly others from the village. They took with them a white camel for porterage; a bowl of soil and a kettle of water from their home village; and a copy of the Koran. The journey was long and arduous and involved crossing many mountain ranges and rivers. They moved eastward through present day Xinjiang into present day Gansu and then into present day Ningxia. Once there, they turned back westward. Sometime after the two brothers had left their native place other of their clanspeople, villagers and relatives (about forty-five people in all) also decided to follow. They, too, had an arduous journey but, instead of following the brothers' tracks exactly, ended up going south of Qinghai Lake. Two members of this company decamped there but the others continued and eventually met up with Kharimang and Ahwang in present day Xunhua County at Mengda, from where they moved on to Alitiuli. 8

On arriving in Alitiuli they were exhausted, and the camel was tired, hungry and thirsty. Rest was called for. At midnight Kharimang woke up to find the camel had disappeared. He woke everyone else up

For example, see, Gong Jinghan (1981), Salazu jianshi (1982), Chen Yuanfang and Fan Xiangshen (1988), and, Ma Chengjun (1999).

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and they went off looking for the camel. By dawn they had not been successful but by now were very thirsty. Looking for water they found the camel had turned into stone, next to a spring; water was coming out of its mouth. This was a shock to the travelers who had become attached to the camel during their wanderings. Kharimang took up the Koran they had brought and asked for Allah's blessings for the camel and themselves. They drank the spring water and found it more than acceptable. They compared the water and soil in Alitiuli with the water and soil they had brought with and decided that they were the same and that Allah had helped them find a good place to settle. According to this folk tale, the date was the 13 day of the 5 moon in the 3 year of the Hongwu Reign of the Ming Dynasty (7 June 1370). The various elements of this version of the Salar myth of origin are not hard to place. At its core is the Camel Play (Doye oyna)that was performed regularly as part of wedding celebrations in Mengda (Munda) village of Xunhua until the 1920s, but subsequently died out as a village-based performance (Ma Jianzhong and Stuart 1996). The Camel Play is essentially a reenactment of how the Salar came to Xunhua, and was banned, along with other representations of Salar culture, from 1958 to 1982. A version based on the memory of a sev­ enty-four old Mengda native was revived in 1994 as part of the cele­ brations of the 40 Anniversary of the Establishment of the Xunhua Salar Autonomous County. The play has five performers, representing the two brothers Kharimang and Ahmang, a Mongol (to portray the local people who welcome the wanderers), and two who play the camel by covering themselves with an inverted fur-robe: "One holds a sleeve high in the air to represent the camel's head, while his partner lowers the other sleeve behind to suggest the tail. Their heads protrude underneath the fur robe, resembling the camel's humps" (Ma Jianzhong and Stuart 1996). th

th

r d

th

The action of the Camel Play is fairly limited but essentially has the brothers' recounting to the Mongol the difficult journey they had taken, and all the places at which they had stopped from Samarkand to Mengda. Interestingly this version of the Camel Play does not have the brothers traveling to Ningxia before heading back east to Xunhua. It recounts how they left, taking very little with them, but mentions the Koran, and the soil and water, all borne by the "sublime" white camel. It relates how Allah brings them to Xunhua to settle, and has the camel turning to stone, but then moves into a final act of audience par-

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China

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ticipation as befits performance at a wedding party. The Mongol sug­ gests to Kharimang that he should lead the camel around to entertain the guests. Kharimang points out that "My camel has turned to stone. He can't stand and dance unless he has food from Samarkand," and adds "Our camel shits walnuts after eating dates, dumplings and fried bread." This is the key for the wedding host and bridegroom to bring food for the camel (and presumably the acting troupe). The perform­ ance ends with the camel moving forward and showering the audience with walnuts. Several alternative accounts, drawn from documentary historical research, also appear to have found their way at least in part into the greater elaboration of the account of Salar origins. One quite clearly is the expansion of Islam into the area from today's Xinjiang through Gansu to Ningxia alongside the Mongol expansion that led to the es­ tablishment of the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongols brought with them both soldiers and administrators who were Muslims (Lipman 1997). Mi Yizhi, a senior researcher at Qinghai Nationalities Institute during the 1980s, traced a possible source of the Salar back to a people origi­ nating as the Qaluer or Saluer, an Oghaz tribe living in the Yili Region (in the Northwest of today's Xinjiang Province). Between the 9 and 12 centuries the Oghaz tribes, including the Saluer, moved into northern Iran and eastern Anatolia. Under the Selzuk Empire (10551258) the Salar were forced from the areas they had settled. Most moved westward but those who stayed in what is now Turkmenistan became known as Turkomans. Other Saluer continued eastward between 1370 and 1424, moving through Samarkand, the Turpan Basin (in today's Xinjiang), and the area of the Gansu Corridor, ending up in Xunhua (Mi Yizhi 1981: 63). th

th

Mi Yizhi also highlighted another possible documentary source providing a further potential origin for the Salar. In considering the various explanations and approaches that might be employed, he mentions a 1917 source examining the origins of the Hui, published in Kashgar by a Mullah Suleiman. This refers to two brothers, Kharamang and Akhmang, who lived near Salark, in today's Turkmenistan. According to this source, which is unidentifiable beyond Mi Yizhi's textual reference, the two brothers moved east to the area that is now Qinghai with 170 members of their tribe (Mi Yizhi 1986: 295). The oral tradition in Xunhua is also confusing, but nonetheless seems to have contributed to the elaboration of the myth of origin. Various

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Salars in Xining and Xunhua at the start of the 2 1 century provided different numbers of the original migratory Salar who came East, from 18 people to 180 households. Other versions of the exile story around Kharimang and Ahmang have the camel turning to stone and sinking to the bottom of a small lake fed by a spring in Alitiuli. Indeed, in the not so distant past, the lake in question was turned into a walled park, not least because it was said that for the faithful it was possible to see the stone camel at the bottom of the lake. For the less faithful, a replica stone camel has been erected in the park. Moreover, a much earlier observation of the oral traditions surrounding the Salar has them being thrown out of their home villages because of their violence, possibly an understandable adverse reaction from a worried headman dealing with a troublesome family (Trippner 1964: 247). These inconsistencies and confusions throw doubt upon the specific current accounts of Salar exile but not necessarily exile or migration in general, for at least some of the ancestors of those now described as Salar. The Salar language certainly has a confirmed Turkic base though it also has considerable Chinese and Amdo Tibetan modifications and additions (Dwyer 1996). The difficulties in understanding the genesis of the Salar are irreconcilable because of the rigid requirements presented by the PRC for confirmation of nationality status. In this case all those who are Salar have to share the heritage and bloodlines of having been exiled several centuries earlier. This, then, excludes other explanations, such as that while some of those whose descendants became known as the Salar might have been migrants from Turkic areas (including but not exclusively from Samarkand), others could have been local peoples with whom they intermarried or otherwise interacted. It also precludes the possibility that the different villages now regarded as part of the Salar nationality homeland might have had different origins and experiences. In the past it was not abnormal for external observers to stress the mixed pedigree of the Salar, reflecting the mixed cultural environment in the QinghaiGansu area: "Many (have) tried to describe the Salar anthropologically...Such an undertaking has very little value...the Salars, at least in the past two hundred years, are the result from a mixing pot of Turks, Mongols, Tibetans, Chinese and Chinese speaking Muslims" (Trippner 1964: 261). If more scientific certainty about the genetic background of the Salar is required, then there is an interesting re­ search project ahead for someone to examine their DNA.

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China

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Social activism While there may be no solid evidence of exile or banishment, to con­ centrate on this omission is to miss the point. Interesting as questions of historical accuracy may be, they are less than relevant for understanding the role of Salars in Northwest China today. The revival of Salar identity that started in the early 1980s in many ways exemplifies the emergence of explicitly local discourses of change that encourage and facilitate economic development, particularly beyond the boundaries of the state sector, that has been a fairly common feature of the PRC's political economy since the early 1990s (Oakes 2000: 667; D.S.G. Goodman 2002). At the same time the Salar revival is distinctive because it was not (as was the case elsewhere in the PRC) state initiated, though it has clearly gained a substantial measure of later state support (Ma Chengjun 1999). Moreover, the Salar case is particularly unusual in Qinghai where almost uniquely among the PRC's provincial-level jurisdictions the encouragement of provincial and local discourses has generally been absent from the agenda of the party-state (D.S.G. Goodman 2004b). Religion, language, and Xunhua have been key pillars in the elaboration of Salar identity, reinforcing feelings of community and solidarity and encourage individuals to economic activism. So too is exile, which helps the Salar believe they have a competitive advantage that comes from not being fundamentally native to the area in which they live and operate, despite having been born and grown up there. They see themselves as being more mobile than those around them and more dynamic elements in the development of society. The self-attributed case for Salar exceptionalism, particularly the link between the nationality's origins in exile, on the one hand, and social and economic activism, on the other, were constant themes in my interviews with both Salar community leaders and business people interviewed during 2001-2003. The following examples convey the spirit of Salar activism in the development not only of Xunhua, but also of Qinghai and China's Northwest. These vignettes demonstrate the range of motivations, and of activism and leadership, to be found among community leaders and business people. In particular, they highlight the ways in which individuals proceeded to activism from an understanding of a special Salar "outsider" status; emphasized Salar physical mobility and outwardness in outlook; and developed local

David S.G. Goodman

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products, including religious artifacts, for the wider market. The final two interviewees considered here are also interesting for the light they throw on the internal dynamics of Salar identity formation: one with a Salar folklorist, the other with a woman entrepreneur. Their approach to the shaping of Salar identity strongly suggests its malleability rather than its deeply entrenched social roots. "Ever since I was young I've been an entrepreneur," admitted Manager Ma. His group enterprise now owns a transport company with twelve trucks that shuttle between Qinghai and the Tibet Autonomous Region; and three hotels (in Xunhua, Xining and Ping'an, the Dalai Lama's birthplace just east of Xining). At a young age he had been a trader in Qinghai, the Tibet Autonomous Region, Gansu, and Ningxia, selling clothes and food products. With the money he generated from these activities in the 1980s and early 1990s he invested in hotels and trucks. When asked about the secret of his success he referred to the large spirit and high energy levels of the Salar: "As our history of exile clearly demonstrates," he said, "Salars can suffer a lot and still prosper." This was a message echoed explicitly and implicitly by other interviewees. One was another Ma, this time a village CCP branch secretary, and a long time leader of his village. A peasant in Xunhua until the 1980s, he was one of the first to harness the opportunities presented as part of the Salar revival to mobilize his fellow villagers to economic goals. His village has limited arable land (less than 0.5 mu per capita) so he encouraged others to engage in economic activities outside Xunhua: "Our ancestors were forced to leave Samarkand, so we can certainly travel less permanently for work." In the early 1980s he led a group of villagers from his home and adjacent villages to undertake odd jobs at a copper mine elsewhere in Qinghai, and then to mine gold in Sichuan. Fifty of the village's 215 households have been running restaurants outside Xunhua for many years. Eighty of the village's households have formed odd job teams that travel outside the county for work in summer and return for winter. Nine of the village's house9

10

Interviewed in Jishizhen, 6 August 2002. Ma and Han are the most common Salar surnames. Ma is usually equated with Muhammed, of which it is the first syllable. The names of interviewees in this chapter have been changed to preserve anonymity, except where identification is obvious, germane, and explicitly approved by the interviewee. Interviewed Wajiangzhuang Village, Qingshui Township, 6 August 2002. 10

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holds have been able to afford to buy trucks or buses that shift people and goods around the Northwest. Ma himself has become fairly wealthy, now has seven sons, and in 2001 opened a brick plant. A similar story was told by another Ma, also a village leader. Since the early 1980s he has led his village's 310 households to such good affect that only three households now live in poverty. Yields are good on the available arable land (1000 fin of wheat per mu; the vil­ lage also grows prickly ash and walnuts) but there is little workable land. Under Ma's influence and appeals to moving to the work (as opposed to expecting the work to come to it) the village now has twelve private trucks or buses, with about 100 villagers going to work outside Xunhua on a regular basis. Some 20 households from this vil­ lage work in Xining, 30 in Golmud and over 30 households are re­ sponsible for eateries in the coastal cities of the PRC. As Ma points out "historically, we're used to moving about [and] now [2002] Salar restaurants in coastal cities can bring in about 50-60,000 yuan each per year." 11

Manager Han has developed one of Qinghai's largest companies, based on the production of wool from sheep and yak, and attributes the success of the company to the fact of Salars being outsiders and therefore willing to go that step further in making an effort, as well as to new technology. In the 1980s Manager Han had been the manager of a small state run enterprise in Xunhua engaged in wool production. Through the 1990s he restructured and expanded the company, and turned it into a local collective. Based initially on sheep's wool—in his view "Qinghai Xunhua sheep, and their wool, are the best"—he then thought to branch out into yak's wool production. He traveled widely throughout North and Northwest China to find out about new equipment, which he eventually ordered from Italy. The company was so successful that by 2000 they had moved their headquarters opera­ tion to Xining, exporting to Italy and Europe, and North America. As with many new Salar industrialists, Manager Han's localist discourse leads him to provide jobs and economic opportunities for his local community and ensures that he is a major donor to communal causes. 12

13

Ma Yitzhak (Yisihake) is an entrepreneur of even larger scale and the effective owner of Qinghai's largest private enterprise, the 11 12 13

Interviewed Dasigu Village, Qingshui Township, 6 August 2002. Interviewed in Gaizi, 4 August 2002. Interviewed in Gaizi, 4 August 2002.

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Xuezhou Sanrong Group, whose Snow Lotus brand is familiar to many cashmere sweater-wearers outside China. This was a villagebased company established in the late 1980s as a self-help endeavor led by Ma. Though he is heavily influenced by his Salar background and upbringing, like many others of those interviewed, this is not an inward-looking perspective on the world. His stated goal has been to "Take Australia's history and economic growth on the sheep's back as a model for Qinghai's development." He has, in his own words, applied "Salar dynamism to develop pastoral products and build a business in the international market." The company exports all over the world and even imports wool from Australia. Ma Yitzhak was quite outspoken in his criticism of officials in Xining, finding offensive their repeated claims that Xunhua was one of the most undeveloped places. According to Ma, since 1989 Xunhua's growth had been one of the strongest in China's West, thanks to the Salar. He nonetheless accepted that buildings and technology change faster than people's patterns of thinking. 14

Another Han is General Manager of a Salar cloth and hat maker enterprise that has taken traditional Salar products to a wider market, largely through automation. The company grew out of a small vil­ lage factory producing animal products (leather and skins) in the early 1990s. Through bank loans and with local government support Han and his father (who runs the headquarters office in Xining) have expanded the business, with sales now going all over China, even to non-Salar. There is apparently a sizeable and growing market for minority nationalities products. Necessarily because of its output the fac­ tory is a center of community focus. In particular, designs and product ideas are provided from the community. Han's own experience had previously been that of a trader around North and Southwest China, which he said had provided him with a broader perspective than for most people in Qinghai. Manager Ma runs a chili paste production factory in Gaizi, where chili paste production is a major industry, with three competing plants. 15

Unfortunately he somewhat marred this worldliness later over lunch by remarking that he had "greatly enjoyed the thick chocolate cake and the Alps last time he visited Australia," a clear reference to the other "Australia" lying next to Switzerland and that produced Mozart. Interviewed in Gaizi, 5 August 2002. 15

Exile as Nationality: The Salar of Northwest China

11

Ma's is the biggest. He buys chilies from the nearby five villages and produces three product lines, which are marketed quite widely in Northwest China: Beef Complement, Prickly Ash paste, and Chili Paste. He sees his competition as coming from Sichuan, Anhui and Gansu. According to Manager Ma the secret of the factory's success has been the excellence of the Xunhua chilies, grown on the soil and with the special climate that exists there; and the activism of the local Salar people. At the same time, he recognizes that "chili production is part of poverty" and was driven by a need to do something to help his native village: "Like our earlier ancestors when they first arrived here, we do our best with the available resources." Han Zhanxiao was a well-known Salar folklorist before the sup­ pression of Salar customs and practices in the late 1950s. Together with his family he now produces Salar embroidery for ceremonial purposes, and other Salar musical and secular artifacts. In the 1950s he had been a music folklorist and had left Xunhua for Beijing and the Central Nationalities Institute. Amongst other activities he had been a specialist performer of, and commentator on, the Camel Play. After his release from imprisonment at the end of the Cultural Revolution he started work again with the Beijing Folklore Festival that took him around the PRC. By the time he eventually retired and returned to Xunhua in the 1990s, he had come to see the "need for creation and representation of our nationality. I had particularly come to realize this lack after a visit to Inner Mongolia. We need logos and symbols to represent Salar identity to the outside world as well as to ourselves." One result was the development of his family folklore enterprise. Han Zenaibai (also known as Han Yulan) is an outsider not only because she is Salar, but also because she is a woman, in a society that for all its progressiveness in some ways also remains fundamentalist about the role of women. She is now a well-known entrepreneur in Xunhua, and even to some extent beyond, but originally made her name as a basketball player in regional and national championship teams (1958-1964) at a time when Salar society heavily disapproved of women exhibiting themselves in public in any way. Nonetheless, she became something of a local celebrity even then, and was widely known as "Player Number Eight," a nickname that persists still. She 11

18

16

Interviewed, 6 August 2002.

11Interviewed in Gaizi, 1 August 2002. 18

Interviewed in Jishizhen, 5 July 2002.

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now owns and runs the Tangsaishan Agricultural and Livestock De­ velopment Company of Xunhua County, owning amongst other un­ dertakings a fairly sizeable hotel (Saina'er in Salar [Daughter of the Mountain] Hotel in Jishizhen) as well as several herds of sheep and cattle. Clearly a bit of a tomboy in her youth, Han Zenaibai is proba­ bly Xunhua's first feminist. She admitted to being a Salar traditional­ ist but explained that this meant in her interpretation that (amongst other things) the Salar could achieve anything they set out to do, and from the start she could not see why all of Salar customs had to privi­ lege men: "In the very beginning (of reform) men started to set up businesses. I knew there were women starting businesses in foreign countries, and I wanted to try. In 1996, I successfully applied on my own to get 400,000 yuan from the Development Bank in Xining." For her pains she became enshrined as the prototype of the Salar woman entrepreneur in a Central China Television series "The Yellow River on the Left, the River Branch On the Right." st

Salar identity in the 2 1 century Exiled by definition, revitalized by the opportunities presented by the changes of the reform era, especially those related to religious and nationality expression, the Salar have emerged as a significant economic force for change in Northwest China, and particularly in Qinghai Province since the 1980s. The extent to which Salar community leaders, the community as a whole, or individual Salars believe in the fact of their ancestors' erstwhile exile is an open question. It may have become an entrenched part of Salar socialization even before 1949. Certainly the evidence of the last two decades is that the orthodoxy of Salar identity has become more intense and focused, raising certain characteristics, of which exile is central, to even higher levels of importance. It may simply be that the Salar collectively and individually accept the need to articulate their experience and identity in terms that enable them to work peacefully within the Chinese state, and see the economic benefits of going further when circumstances permit. Thus, exile is a necessary myth for the Salar, not in the sense of a historical deception but in the sense of public belief. In many ways the Salar revival and stronger sense of communal solidarity over the last two decades seems counterintuitive. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution the removal of the strictures of that

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era on religious observation and minority nationality customs led to a resurgence in their practice around China. At the same time, economic growth and development are generally assumed to be agents of greater homogenization, and not just by the PRC party-state. At least one linguist examining the use of the Salar language in the early 1990s ar­ gued that it was in danger of disappearing (Dwyer 1994). From the Salar perspective, then, the myth of exile has another important role to play. The Salar would not be the first people to have emphasized their collective suffering and survival through participation in "long marches." The experience of the Jews, and more recently the CCP itself, demonstrates how such migrations provide legitimacy to successor generations and may help maintain the faith. Glossary 1 jin = 0.5 kilos = 1.1 pounds; 1 mu = 0.06 hectares = 1/6 acre; 1 yuan renminbi = 0.12 US$ = 0.16 AUD$ (approximately)

Acknowledgements The research here could not have been achieved without the cooperation and assistance of many local people in Xunhua County, whose participation is gratefully ac­ knowledged. Research for the chapter was conducted in Qinghai during 2001-2003 with the support of the Australian Research Council. The assistance of Guo Jing, Qinghai Nationalities Commission, Ma Chengjun, Qinghai Nationalities Institute, and Ma Jianzhong, Qinghai University, in organizing research is also gratefully acknowledged. Neither they nor any of those interviewed in connection with this project is responsible for any of the views or comments expressed in this chapter.

Language, Exile and the Burden of Undecidable Citizenship: Tenzin Tsundue and the Tibetan Experience Obododimma Oha Abstract This chapter argues that the case of Tibetan exiles confirms that language is a crucial area for determining how the exile experience ruptures, recreates, and problematizes the identity and values of the exiled individual. The chapter discusses the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of Tibetan exile as articulated by the Tibetan writer Tenzin Tsundue. The historical context of Tsundue's writing is explored, especially with reference to his concern with language and citizenship, followed by an analysis of his representation of how the exilic experience engenders a crisis of identity at the cultural and linguistic levels. The conclusion considers the implication of the exilic experience for a new Tibetan citizenship that has been ruptured culturally and linguistically, and which is located in what Homi Bhabha calls the "Third Space."

We are refugees here. People of a lost country. Citizen to no nation. Tenzin Tsundue, "My Tibetanness"

Language is experience itself, apart from being an expression of an experience of the world. In the Hallidayan systemic linguistic frame­ work, language (as meaning-making process) is organized in three macro-levels: the ideational (which comprises the experiential and the logical), the interpersonal (which involves the expression of social roles and attitudes), and the textual (which involves the internal function of organizing messages into coherent forms) (Butler 1985: 58). The experience that is encoded in, and expressed through, language is shared by language-using agents, whose relationships shape the

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choices of meaning they make. Also, the way the meaning or experi­ ence is structured (the text-making component) depends on the context of the interaction and the purpose of the communication. Following this systemic linguistic view of how language shapes our experience or is shaped by our experience of the world, it is clear that language has an important place in the experience of exile. In the first place, exiled individuals may be linguistic outsiders in the exile space, and may experience exclusions in discourse, or may agonize over being forced by circumstance to give up the languages they have always used in constructing their national or ethnic identities. It has been observed by Nina Zivancevic (2004) that in accepting to speak "the lan­ guage of the new social and cultural environment" of exile, the exiled individual is subjecting the self to a process of change that would have significant consequences. Zivancevic (2004) asks about the exiled in­ dividual: 1

When he or she returns home, that is to say to the familiar setting of a more distant past, and once again turns to and uses his/her mother tongue, can one say that he or she is the same person who left his/her country to live in exile? Or is he or she the same person living in exile who has to adapt himself or herself to the living conditions of a new 'country' however superficially familiar?

Being in exile, therefore, is not just a removal from a cherished geographical space, but a removal from a context of culture within which language plays an important role as "social semiotic" (Halliday 1978) and means of inventing identity and creating solidarity. Given that individuals often have strong emotional attachment to their native languages or dialects, being exiled from one's native language may be psychologically devastating. The case of Tibetan exiles very clearly illustrates the fact that language represents a crucial area for determining how the exile experience ruptures, recreates, and problematizes the identity and values of the exiled individual. In this chapter, therefore, I discuss the linguistic

The term "exile" is multi-accentual. As Buchung Sonam (2005) explains, it is "a state of physical displacement and longing for the native land...place of birth, or of origin or sometimes just the idea of home. At a more subtle level an exile is some sort of a social outcaste, an outsider—one who intentionally remains outside the main­ stream social intercourse." Exile, therefore, is used in referring to both (dis)place(ment) and person in this chapter.

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and semiotic dimensions of Tibetan exile, as articulated by the Tibetan writer, Tenzin Tsundue. I also explore the historical context of Tsundue's exilic writing, with particular reference to his concern with lan­ guage and citizenship, followed by an analysis of his representation of how the exilic experience engenders a crisis of identity at the cultural and linguistic levels. The conclusion considers the implication of the exilic experience for a new Tibetan citizenship that has been ruptured culturally and linguistically, and which is located in the "Third Space" (Bhabha 1995). The historical context The People's Republic of China (PRC) invaded Tibet in 1959, after an initial defeat of the Tibetan army by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the signing of a 17-point agreement in which Tibet was intimidated into agreeing that it was part of China. The agreement also stated that China should neither tamper with Tibetan traditional institutions nor disrespect the spiritual and secular authority of the Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama. However, China violated the agreement through its imposition of socialist reforms in eastern and north-eastern Tibet and the gradual erosion of the authority of Tibetan spiritual and traditional institutions. With the assumption that Tibet was part of China, which since 1 October 1949, had become communist, the Chinese were uncomfortable with having a Tibetan province that was not in line with the Communist Revolution. The Tibetans, who were also uncomfortable and angry with Chinese hegemony and desecration of their traditional institutions, staged a violent resistance in March 1959, in Lhasa. In the subsequent Chinese crackdown, some 1.2 million Ti­ betans were killed in central Tibet alone, and thousands sought refuge in neighboring countries, notably India. Tibet's spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, also went into exile in India, where, along with other Tibetans, he set up a government-in-exile. Many Tibetans who could not go into exile (but were exiled at home under Communist Chinese control) committed suicide. Tibetan spirituality, culture, language, and indigenous ways suffered a serious setback. Gyalpo (2005) observes that with the Chinese invasion, All publishing in Tibetan language ceased and literary activities were reduced to mere translation of Chinese propaganda. [The relatively relaxed environment of the early eighties afforded some space for the

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Obododimma Oha Tibetan literati to flex their intellectual muscles while remaining within the limited confines of Party policy.

Tibetan writers have written about the catastrophic Chinese invasion, the despoliation that followed, and the trauma of exile. Lhasang Tsering, a member of the CIA-trained Tibetan Resistance Force that operated from exile in Nepal and former president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, for instance, articulates the pain of the Tibetan experience in his poem, "Even the Stones Remember": Your Dying soldiers Groaning, Vanquished men Wailing, Ravished women Weeping, Your Orphaned children Crying -Even the Stones Remember! Your ancient Temples Crumbling, Your holy Scriptures Burning, Ten thousand Monks Dying, Defiled Idols Decaying -Even the Stones Remember! Your abundant Land Plundered, Vast, green Forest Denuded, Clean, clear Waters Polluted, Pure, Pristine Air Poisoned -Even the Stones Remember!

Memory is not just a source of pain; it is also a means of raising consciousness about the Tibetan holocaust and quest for liberation. Remembering home, especially because one has been forced to leave it, is an inevitable inclination for exiled people. In the case of the Jew­ ish exile in Babylon, the psalmist writes about how the Jews, having been asked by their captors to sing their Zion song, sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept when they remembered Zion (Psalm 137). As with the exiled Jews, Tibetan poets in exile write about their lost homeland and their longing for it. They also write about their exile identity problems, and language and cultural struggles. As Sonam (2005) explains: Confronted, early in life, with the terrible truth of being exiles, compounded by the need to survive in a testing world, Tibetan youths venture into many avenues to relieve their angst; writing seems to be the primary pressure valve. The literary works of young exile Tibetans are a raw and unpolished burst of energy that springs from their deeply wounded souls. These are sharp, youthful shrieks unchained by convention and colored by their imagination of a Tibet most of

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them have never seen. Their outcry is poetry—reflections on woes of exile, an acute sense of displacement and a direct challenge to a freak reality...They crave to bombard the state's bigoted mechanism to ashes with their burning words. The pen is not stronger than the gun yet. Thus, writing remains a challenge and a tool to hold onto their moral strength. Poetry, for them, is a more subtle defiance and the language reflects a veiled response to the agonizing life under everwatchful eyes of the state's apparatus.

Tenzin Tsundue, one of the Tibetan writers living in exile in India, has been particularly committed to the Tibetan exile experience and is part of the Tibetan struggle for liberation from Chinese rule. An award-winning poet, Tsundue has written both literary and critical pieces on the Tibetan experience. Some of these are available online both in Tibetan Review (http://tibetan.review.to/index_htm) and on the official website of Friends of Tibet (India) (http://www.friends oftibet.org). Born in a makeshift tent as his parents were escaping with other Tibetans to India in 1959, Tsundue was educated at Tibetan Children's Village, Pathlikuhl, and later in Dharmasala, as well as the University of Madras in India, and is the General Secretary of the Friends of Tibet, India. The website of Friends of Tibet states that he braved snowstorms and treacherous mountains, broke all rules and restrictions, crossed the Himalayas on foot and went into forbidden Tibet! The purpose? To see the situation under Chinese occupation for himself and find out if he could lend a hand or two in the freedom struggle. He was arrested by the Chinese border police, and after cooling his feet in prison in Lhasa for three months, was finally pushed back to India.

He has been arrested by the police several times in India for staging protests intended to embarrass Chinese authorities, and to call attention to Tibet's political problem. His poetry collection Crossing the Border (2000) presents a disturbing account of Tibetan exile. The title poem, "Crossing the Border" attempts to recapture the travails of the Tibetan exodus to India from the perspective of a mother. Language is an important aspect of the discourse on the exilic experience of the Tibetans in two respects: first, being in exile entails being subject to the languages of the host country and subjecting the self to the cultural politics, humor, etc that often go with language use; and second, language (in this case the style used by the exiled writers in their works) enables us to have a glimpse into the Tibetan experi-

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ence as reflected in their written accounts about their exile. Sonam (2005) draws attention to how exiled Tibetan writers try to use language to capture the pain and bitterness of exile, as well as to achieve some purgation of emotion: The experience of being driven from home, and the uncertainty of ex­ ile life, is emotionally daunting. Writing eases the pain. It salves the fear of extinction and rejuvenates the survival instinct. While the ma­ jority of the exile populace accumulate wrinkles on their faces and bitterness in their hearts, due to gross historical maltreatments, the poets and the writers chisel the bitterness into enduring images. They let their pens dance to the sorrowful music of time's treachery to produce rays of warmth. Words, however disturbing, lighten up the burden.

These two aspects of language in the experience of exile are interwoven because the decision to use either Tibetan or a language encountered in exile brings up the pain and bitterness of displacement and cultural dislocation. The historical context sketched above is also important for comprehending why and how a Tibetan writer like Tsundue would, as he says, have "three tongues" but "the one that sings" is his "mother tongue." He writes in "Celebrating Exile I: Edu­ cation and Outlook" (2005a): "One significant change the 45 years of exile saw was in our language...Yes, though I am most comfortable speaking in Tibetan, I write in English. Because much of our school education happened in English, the literary language is naturally the English learned from Indian teachers." As style and communicative code, language thus represents a key site of the Tibetan struggle for the restoration of the homeland and its cultural and spiritual values. Tsundue and the crisis of Tibetan cultural-linguistic identity The Tibetan exile faces a crisis of identity, and this crisis is not only mediated by language, it is also intensified by a cultural process of deTibetization that exiled Tibetans appear to be experiencing. In his es­ say, "My Kind of Exile," which won the Outloo/Picador Non-Fiction Competition in 2001, Tsundue writes about himself: "I like to speak in Tibetan, but prefer to write in English, I like to sing in Hindi but my tune and accent are all wrong" (2005b). As an exile, Tsundue's cultural-linguistic identity has become plural. Indeed, the self in the modern globalized experience is inevitably

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plural and even ambivalent, which is why Edward Said writes: No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind...No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. (1994: 336)

Exile, as a removal from home, orchestrates an in-betweenness: the exiled person is neither here nor there, even in the choice of language to express self. Exile is somewhere, but, psychologically, the exiled person is nowhere. In Tsundue's experience, the Tibetan exile could be imagined as being between the dragon and the elephant: "If China is a fire-breathing red dragon, India is a giant elephant. In between this, Tibet is once again straining to raise its head as the lost buffer state that it was" (Tsundue 2005c). China and India, culturally and historically, articulate their national identities through the semiotics of dragon and elephant respectively. The Chinese "fire-breathing red dragon" is an image of violence, violence that is, incidentally, com­ munist, as suggested by the red color. Being between this destructive monster and the elephant offers no respite. It also means an undefined cultural identity, for the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet has caused a serious destruction of Tibetan cultural and religious values. Tsundue (2005c) further narrates this transformation of Tibet: In 1997 I went to Tibet after graduating from the Madras University. I was seeing my homeland for the first time in my life. It was no longer the Tibet my parents told me about. Everywhere there are Chinese, Chinese and more Chinese. The cities looked like the Chinatowns we see in Jackie Chan films.

Thus, not even the homeland could be said to retain its Tibetanness, which shows the tremendous semiotic shift that exiling entails. Although the exiled person may design coping strategies to deal with in-betweenness, including trying to assimilate the culture of the context of exile, the nowhereness persists with the performance of memory and longing for home. This linguistic aspect of his identity crisis as an exile is articulated in Tsundue's poem, "The Tibetan in Mumbai" (n.d.), as follows:

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Obododimma Oha The Tibetan in Mumbai abuses in Bambaya Hindi, with a slight Tibetan accent and during vocabulary emergencies he naturally runs into Tibetan. That's when the Parsis laugh.

The "vocabulary emergencies" are moments of crisis, which remind the Tibetan exile that s/he is linguistically and culturally different. It is interesting that the Tibetan facing such crisis "naturally runs" back to mother-tongue Tibetan, which is in symbolic relation with his or her motherland (Tibet). Unfortunately, this running home is temporary and even utopian, for the exiled Tibetan cannot, in reality, return to Tibet to overcome the traumas of exile. Quite painfully, too, running into Tibetan makes the Tibetan exile appear comical, a figure of amusement. Laughter in this case is a symbolic language that is used in subduing the other: to be laughed at as a poor speaker of the new language of the exile space is to be alienated through a shibboleth, to be reminded about one's difference. Dhompa (2005), commenting on Tsundue's "The Tibetan in Mumbai" maintains that in the poem, the streets of Mumbai are the refugee's 'other' where he is found to be without voice. He is neither Indian nor is he ever mistaken for a Tibetan. He can speak the language but lacks the right accent. He is, ironically, mistaken for a Chinese or a Nepali—someone representing someone else to those around him and even to himself—thus he is thrice removed from what he is. He is a historical and a political figure swallowed in a stranger's land and a stranger's language. From this place, comes a text of continual negotiation. How does one negotiate, through language, the philosophy of impermanence we all ascribe to, (in theory at least) with the rigidity of our memories?

The contexts of education and literary communication open up the problems, challenges, and rewarding dimensions of linguistic difference in the life of the exiled Tibetan. India, as a former British colony, is English-speaking, and its formal education takes place mostly in this colonial language. It is interesting that, through exile, Tibetans have had to receive this colonial language, perhaps with an Indian accent, being thus twice removed from the original British English. English-language education for Tibetans in exile in India has affected their outlook and attitudes, such that for many it is now a mother tongue, the variety Tsundue (2005a) identifies as Tibetan English.

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Yet, while Tibetan exiles in India are multilingual (a reflection of their multiple identities), in many cases this multilingualism is incipient and unbalanced, as can be seen in the poem cited above, in which the exile is said to "run into Tibetan" in cases of "vocabulary emer­ gencies." As Tsundue (2005a) explains: Most of us in exile are bilingual, some even trilingual. But among the youngsters I have noticed that their spoken Tibetan isn't very good. It's blunt, poor, interspersed with inji or Hindi words, and some even speak a constipated Tibetan; directly translating foreign expressions, much to the consternation of sanjorwas.

These linguistic attributes are not peculiar to Tibetans in exile in India, or even to persons in political exile. They are common, for instance, in postcolonial African contexts where the colonial language has had to coexist with indigenous languages over time. Colonization could be viewed as entailing cultural and linguistic exile, in which case one could find features of mixing of codes and domestication of the colonial language as attempts at dealing with linguistic exile. Linguistic exile (by which is meant a situation whereby individuals are put under conditions in which they are unable to make use of their cherished languages, particularly their mother-tongues), can, of course, take place without a removal of individuals from their cultural spaces or homes. It could, along this line of thinking, be argued that colonization and imposition of the language of the colonizer (which led to the discouragement and neglect of the culture or language of the colonized) is a forced exile from one's linguistic and semiotic space. Such an exile has profound implications for knowledge production and transmission. Tsundue, in the case of Tibetans internally exiled in Tibet through Chinese cultural and political hegemony, rather perceives a positive deconstructive implication of Tibetans speaking Chinese for that language of internal exile itself: for him "the Tibetans' Chinese tongues are setting the (Chinese) red flag on fire" (2005a). This perception of the positive consequences of linguistic exile appears to derive from a consolatory adjustment to the reality of Chinese cultural domination and impact on Tibetan citizenship. Using the master's cultural tool of domination as a weapon to fight back is a common orientation in anti-colonialist discourses. In the African case, writing African literatures in the languages of the former European colonial masters has been seen by some African

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scholars as an exile from African cultural and semiotic worlds. Wali (1963), for instance, understood the writing of African literatures in the languages of the former colonial masters as ensuring no future for such literatures. For some scholars, the linguistic exile entailed in using the colonial language to express the colonized self may even appear fascinating because of the experimentations and hybridizations of meaning involved. Nonetheless, the struggle to accommodate local meanings in a foreign language is not a comfortable one. Some writers forced by circumstances to use the colonial languages would have wished to write in their indigenous languages. For some African writers, for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, ceasing to write in the language of colonial exile is a way of returning from exile, a position that Ngugi eventually abandoned. In spite of the Tsundue's perception of the reverse impact of Tibetanness on Chinese culture and language in Tibet, one could read his anxiety over Tibetan education in exile, in terms of linguistic and cultural dislocations that create further distance from the Tibetan identity. This type of anxiety, as Bhabha theorizes, is linked to perceived endangerment of the national familiar familial: The citizen subject held in the temporality of the national present, constituted in this fraught game of fatherlands and mother-tongues, turns amor patriae into a much more anxious love. Explicitly so, when you realize through some of the readings of Samuel Weber that the psychoanalytic genealogy of anxiety is a sign of danger implicit in the threshold of identity.. .Anxiety emerges as an articulation of inbetween, 'between identity and non-identity, between internal and ex­ ternal,' continually raising that in-between as an agential problem, a problem of agency. I am not just saying that the in-between is something somehow disavows any kind of fixity of position, but it becomes the place for interrogation, the place for critical reflectiveness. This anxious boundary that is also a displacement of the peripheral has a specific relevance to the national identification when we realize that what distinguishes fear from anxiety in the psychoanalytic sense is a certain occlusion of the naturalness of the reference. Anxiety emerges, Freud says, in response to its perceived danger, and loss of perception attached to familiar and familial images, situations, and representations. (1998: 11)

Both the spatial and linguistic forms of the Tibetan exile engender a psychological exile that involves being removed from values that one is emotionally attached to, or modes of expressing an experience of the world, including one's identity.

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In crossing national and linguistic borders exiled subjects embody borderlessness, which in speech sometimes involves "vocabulary emergencies." Indeed, such emergencies symbolize the anxiety to be one/self at once while being the other. It is an expression of the anxiety to achieve linguistic communion and community with the other, who is equally a subject of British linguistic imperialism. The failure of the linguistic "at-one-ment" with the host would intensify anxiety over the double hegemony faced by Tibetan culture and language, both within the Chinese-occupied Tibetan homeland and in exile. As a transmitter of cultural heritage—in fact, of the familiar images and meanings of the familial—Tibetan language, as a language in exile (both within Tibet and outside) is already an endangered language, and this endangerment is a source of anxiety to Tibetan exiled writers like Tsundue who have "three tongues," but "the one that sings" is the "mother-tongue." The fact that Tsundue is more comfortable speaking in Tibetan, but preferring to write in English may be related to a number of fac­ tors including the perception of English as a language of prestige and the need for wider readership (since English has become a global language). As Zivancevic (2004) observes: There are, invariably, two possibilities for a writer in exile: either to accept writing in the language of the community that he (sic) lives in, or continue writing in his (sic) mother tongue. The latter option could prove an extremely lonely and unrewarding process that might entail the loss of the readership and the writing community that the author used to inhabit prior to his (sic) exile. Alternatively, for those authors with enough courage and inner resilience this option can open new possibilities of self-expression.

In the Tibetan case, writing in English is a necessity, since they have to tell the world about the problem of Tibet and their struggle for freedom (Shakabpa 2005). In spite of the fact that Tsundue has had to write in a language that is not his mother-tongue, one still finds that his meanings are not totally English. It would not be easy, as Zivancevic explains, for me, as a non-Tibetan-speaking person to detect these meanings within Tsundue's writings, except those that have been glossed. One may find evidence of this embedding of Tibetan mean­ ings in English discourse in Tsundue's strategic code mixing, for in­ stance in "Losar Greeting," in which he uses the Tibetan greeting, "Tashi Delek!" To greet in Tibetan in a discourse (a poem) written in

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English suggests an orientation towards foregrounding his (linguistic and) cultural hybridity. It is also an attempt at deconstructing the sup­ posed Englishness of the discourse (and thus his own identity as an addresser), a practice typified by using Tibetan-language concepts in his essays. As a form of negotiating feelings of ingroupness (with fellow Tibetans), a Tibetan greeting inserted in a non-Tibetan language discourse reveals the struggle that goes on at the discursive level to identify the exiled self with home, identifying with the mother-tongue as a way of signifying identification with the motherland. Shakabpa (2005) has argued that what is essential for the Tibetan poet is to try to express "in precise English what his (sic) Tibetan heart feels." Since this is an onerous task, a useful strategy would be "to first write down what the heart feels in whatever language the writer feels most comfortable with and then use the English language to interpret that feeling." Yet some forms of language like "Tashi Delek" cannot be translated into English without their cultural and pragmatic meanings being sacrificed. Moreover, mixing English and Tibetan is a strategy for calling the attention of the global, Englishlanguage audience to the presence of the travailing cultural and political identity of Tibet. 2

Writing images of exile How does Tsundue stylistically represent the exile environment? How are exile and the Tibetan homeland perceived or configured? What Among the Tibetan-language concepts Tsundue uses are: "Semshook," which he explains as "the courage and determination it takes for the truth to prevail. The will­ ingness to make any sacrifice the truth demands, and finally the act of achieving it"; "Chosi-Sung-Drel," or "the harmony of spiritual and temporal principles"; "Mangsto," Tibetan democratic vision; "Sonsta," the power of Tibetan youth to create a future for the country; and "Gyami," a Tibetan negative stereo-type for the Chinese, part of an anti-Chinese discourse of derogation explained as follows: "In Tibet, there is...an exclusive racial term 'Gyarik,' meaning Chinese race. Since their imperial claims made over Tibet and subsequent occupation of land and suppression, Gyamis are looked at as the 'Tendra' enemy of Buddhism, a cunning race, untrustworthy, unethical and absolutely cruel.the Gyamis eat anything: all creepy-crawlers, insects and animals; their children are named after throwing utensils on the floor, therefore the Chinese names: Ching Chong Ling Zing. On our exile theatre stages, we never saw any Chinese other than soldiers. They are just gun-brandishing brutal soldiers, and not individual characters" (Tsundue 2004a).

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sense can be made from such representations about the problem of living and constructing cultural citizenship in exile in India? An inter­ esting representation of the exile environment occurs in Tsundue's poem mentioned earlier, "Losar Greeting" (Tsundue: n.d.), which is addressed to a fictitious sister. In the poem, the exile space is a "bor­ rowed garden" on which this sister grows: Though in a borrowed garden you grow, grow well my sister. Send you roots through the bricks, stones, tiles and sand. Spread your branches wide and rise above the hedges high. Tashi Delek!

Growing in a "borrowed garden" is a risk, for the owner of the garden may take the garden any time, in which case the plant may be uprooted or forfeited to the owner. Exile is therefore an uncertainty, a life of unsettled mind. It is difficult to imagine how the sister could grow "well" in such a borrowed garden. The Tibetan festival, Losar, provides a context for the expression of the sense of cultural and religious dislocation orchestrated by exile. The addressee in the poem, referred to as "my sister" (a Tibetan woman who has converted to Catholicism and is in a convent), is configured as a tree growing in this "borrowed garden" of exile, and is therefore nourished in values not Tibetan; in fact, she, like many Tibetans in exile, face a danger of being de-Tibetanized. It is significant that the addresser chooses to greet her in the way that Tibetans have to greet themselves at the feast of Losar. The greeting is a strategic reminder of shared cultural semiotic and identity. In a sense, the greeting remembers the shared cultural value and the Tibetan homeland (to which they hope to return); it remembers to remember Tibet and Tibetanness. Dhompa (2005) has pointed out that nostalgia, such as Tsundue expresses in his poem "Losar Greeting," characterizes Tibetan exile poetry, and this nostalgia is political in the Tibetan experience. The act of greeting is recognized in sociolinguistics and discourse studies as "phatic communion." In this regard, greeting the Tibetan "Losar" way is an important ritual through which (Tibetan) relationship is serviced. "Tashi Delek!" thus is, pragmatically speaking, more about relationship than the idea

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the actual content of the words of the greeting. The poem, which is now framed as a greeting, is thus tenor-marked, and this tenor appears to be wider tenor rather then immediate tenor. Tsundue's representation of the Tibetan-exile living environment in India as a decaying, dilapidated place that is fast being claimed by the jungle rhetorically evokes pity about the Tibetan exilic condition. 3

grass on the roof, beans sprouted and climbed down the vines, money plants crept in through the window, our house seems to have grown roots. The fences have grown into a jungle, now how can I tell my children where we came from.

The poem, "Exile House," ends in despair, which is in agreement with the depressing environment already described. If the "home" in exile is depressing, it cannot be a place of respite. One could read the psy­ chological implications of the exilic experience, especially the squalor of the living environment. Exilic narrative, as seen in the poems of Tenzin Tsundue, rhetorically exposes the trauma and stress that constitute the major sources of the pained expression that we must expect from Tibetans who were forced out of their homeland when it was invaded and about a million of their people killed by Chinese soldiers. The exile house that Tsundue writes about thus reminds the exiled Tibetan about displacement and the painful loss of the home/land. The whereness and weirdness of the location of self Exile is first of all a relocation of self (or of community, as in the Ti­ betan case), which amounts to a dislocation, especially for people like Tsundue whose identities have been pluralized and problematized by the exile experience. Being displaced and emplaced are important stylistic issues for Tenzin in his representation of the Tibetan experience, and a closer look at his textual strategies in this regard would help to elucidate the orientations he maintains in trying to communicate the predicament of the Tibetan exile community with reference to their Immediate tenor refers to "personal relations established face to face," while wider tenor is "the expected roles that society allots to the speakers" (Haynes 1992: 14, 15).

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sense of place. Using the self as a locus, he addresses the weirdness of his whereness as follows in his poem, "My Tibetanness": I am a Tibetan. But I am not from Tibet. Never been there. Yet I dream of dying there.

The problem of emplacement is captured in Tsundue's exile poetry through the spatial deixis of "here" and "there," which, in their contrasting locative meanings, underline the idea of strandedness. The exiled individual's home is neither "here" nor "there," especially in the Tibetan case where Tibet as a homeland has been defamiliarized by the Chinese invasion and occupation. Tibet now has acquired a Chineseness that makes its cultural and national identity ambivalent, and cannot be recognized as its former self, even though exiled Tibetans imagine their attachment to it and hope to return to and rebuild it someday. Tsundue himself is ambivalent in his perception of the whereness of home. In "My Kind of Exile" (2005b), he asserts: "Home for me is real. It is there, but I am very far from it. It is the home my grandparents and parents left behind in Tibet. It is the valley in which my Popola and Momo-la had their farm and lots of yaks, where my parents played when they were children" (italics mine). Yet in his poem, "My Tibetanness," he asserts that he is "a Tibetan... / not from Tibet" Even in "My Kind of Exile," he begins by saying, "Ask me where I'm from and I won't have an answer. I feel I never really belonged anywhere. Never really had a home" (italics mine). Home, therefore, is merely imagined for an exile like him. Home is a lost heritage that he seeks to recover, hence the instability of this whereness, as reflected in the poem, "Horizon": From home you have reached the Horizon here. From here to another here you go. From there to the next next to the next horizon to horizon every step is a horizon.

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The exiled self travels from "here" to another "here," and the "here" is "there," every "here" is a "there." The "here" of the Tibetan exile appears to be a receding horizon. Tibet is a "t/here" for Tsundue because, while he identifies with it as his "home/land," he was not born there, is not physically located there, and is not purely Tibetan. His claim to a Tibetan "hereness" is psycho­ logical, which seems to demonstrate that we choose our homes; they do not choose us. As a "there," Tibet is culturally and physically dis­ tant for Tsundue. The "hereness" of India in his poem is, at one level, normal as we would expect him to point to and differentiate physical locations in the discourse. Yet his Indian "hereness" is a distancing from his Tibetan homeland, and so could be properly represented as a "t/here'; that is, a "here-there." India, therefore, is his "t/hereness," an ambivalent emplacement that is replicated in migrations of Tibetans from exile to other places, other "t/herenesses" of exile. Cultural/ Geographical Space Psychosocial Identity differen­ tiation Spatial/locative deixis Specific linguistic description

Tibet

India <-»

Other migra­ tions from/in exile <-»

Home/land

Exile

Exile

T/here

T/here

"the valley in which my Popo-la and Momo-la had their farm and lots of yaks, where my parents played when they were children"

"the horizon here"

T/here ("an­ other here") "the next horizon"

Figure One: Analysis of Here-There Spatial Differentiation in Tsendue's Exile Poetry. (—> and <-> indicate directions of exilic movement)

Although Tsundue suggests a unidirectional exilic movement in his poem when he says, "From here to another/here you go," "From there to the next /next to the next," his other narratives indicate hopes of, or attempts at, returning home to Tibet to rebuild it, and thus rewrite the movement into a bidirectionality. From such bidirectionality one can glean the rupture of the Tibetan sense of place: the hope of returning to Tibet is remote and frustrated, especially given the Chinese transformation of the country, looking for alternative homes be-

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comes an option. If the alternative homes become elusive, the search continues, a condition that consolidates the idea of modern homelessness as an ideology, instead of a mere welfare crisis. Sura Rath (2000) has analyzed the problematic in this kind of rupturing of home, using an Indian-American identity to illustrate how "living in the Third Space" becomes inevitable. For Rath, the "Third Space" is a "Third (Dis)Place" in which "Here," "There," and "Where" converge. Home, in the "Third (Dis)Place" framework, is plural and undecidable: as a place, it is "where I began, and where I shall return"; as time, it is "the reservoir of public myths and private memories"; and as a virtuality, it is a quest as captured in the experience of Trishanku who, in the Indian epic, The Ramayana, is frozen and retained in a virtual heaven by Viswamitra, since Indra, the king of gods, would not allow him, a mortal, to share heaven with the gods (Rath, 2000). The virtual home is neither heaven nor earth, neither here nor there. The "Third Space," for Bhabha (1995: 39), is a liberatory space, which enables us to escape "the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves." Some concluding remarks Exiled Tibetans wrestle with the dual problem of maintaining their political and cultural identities. In Tsundue's case, the problem is intensified by the fact that he was born in exile and cannot be accepted in the Chinese-controlled Tibet as a Tibetan, even when he is not accepted in India as an Indian. He is neither here nor there, neither Tibetan nor Indian, a paradox he captures in his poem, "My Tibetanness" when he says of himself, "I am a Tibetan/ But I am not from Tibet." Externally exiled Tibetans are subjects of the cultures of/in their host communities, whereas those who are internally exiled in Tibet itself are subject to the cultural and linguistic imperialism of China. Given that the Tibetan culture and language have in themselves become sites of exile, the project of negotiating a Tibetan political citizenship through affirmations of Tibetan cultural citizenship (and vice versa) already possesses elements that deconstruct it from within. Anxiety over the Tibetan mother-tongue as the memory and the memorial of the motherland only increases the frustration of the exiled individual who is yet to accept and adjust to the Third Space, which language very well performs.

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Temporal and spatial types of deixis are strategic in capturing the significance of locations in time and place and as being part of the meaning of exile, as we find in Tsundue's exilic poetry. Being another place (an other-place) and therefore a dislocation, the exile space turns the home(land) into a "there" for the exiled individual. The implica­ tion is that both homeland and exile space coalesce as "t/here" for the exiled Tibetan who is neither here nor there, whether in the homeland or in exile. Similarly the exilic present is a dislocated moment that makes it difficult for exiled persons to relate to their cultural pasts. The Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet was not intended to produce citizens-of-no-nation, but it did. If anything, the Chinese wanted to assimilate Tibet and to transform the Tibetan cultural identity, to produce not just "Tibetan-Chinese" but Chinese in Tibet. Tibetans have, however, ended up at the hyphen of cultural citizenship, just as the country itself seems to have geographically and politically become a punctuation mark between India and China. Crossing and recrossing the Himalayas into the hegemonic cultural spaces of India and China is indeed, a voyage to suffering, but it has produced resilient Tibetans who appropriate the language of the other to articulate their plural and hybrid presence in the Third Space that is neither India nor Chinese-occupied Tibet. Yet this Third Space is the zone where discourse can afford to be pragmatically interrogative. Unlike the In­ dian king, Trishanku, that Rath (2000) theorizes about, the exiling of Tibetans, on the one hand, transforms them culturally, especially in their verbalization of their values and creative engagement with other cultures. Tenzin Tsundue's literary attention to language in the Tibetan exilic experience thus does not suggest language as simply one casualty of political displacement, and as the site where exiling continues beyond the initial action of displacement from the homeland, but also where what appears to be a cultural disadvantage is being turned to a useful weapon for subverting cultural imperialism and tool for creating a new, dynamic, Tibetan identity.

Returning from Exile: The Japanese Citizens from the Former Manchuria Rowena Ward Abstract This chapter examines the case of the zanryu hojin, Japanese citizens who were abandoned and/or stranded in China at the end of World War II, in terms of the markers of Japaneseness. The chapter considers the zanryu hojin case in light of Said's assumption that people have a geographical homeland and that exiles know they are in exile. It is argued that as a result of their exile in China, many zanryu hojin did not have the opportunity to develop a sense of Japaneseness that would allow them to be recognized as members of the Japanese nation after their return to Japan. This effectively means that many zanryu hojin experience multiple exiles in and between China and Japan.

Over the last three and a half decades or so, chugoku zanryu hojin (Japanese citizens abandoned and/or stranded in China at the end of the Pacific War in 1945) have been migrating or returning to Japan. Among these zanryu hojin are zanryu koji (stranded war children) who were not aware that they had Japanese ancestry until they were adults. Yet, according to Noda they "long for their country (of Japan) as they long for their (Japanese) parents. They all wish to step on the land of their own country" (cited in Tamanoi 2000: 176). In this chapter, I explore the markers of Japaneseness in terms of their role in the offi­ cial acceptance of the zanryu hojin as members of the Japanese na­ tion. I also examine the case of the zanryu hojin in the context of Said's concept of exile, in particular, his apparent assumption that an 1

Chugoku zanryu hojin [Japanese citizens abandoned/stranded in China] covers both the zanryu koji [abandoned war children] and the zanryu fujin [stranded war women]. For ease, I use zanryu hojin throughout this chapter but acknowledge that the term covers all Japanese citizens who were stranded—including those in Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands—at the end of the Second World War.

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exile has a consciously known "native place" (2001: 173) or single geographical homeland. As most of the zanryu hojin do not speak or read Japanese fluently and have a limited understanding of Japanese cultural practices at the time of their migration to Japan, I argue that their arrival essentially means swapping exile in China for a different form of exile in Japan. I refer to this condition as multiple exile. 2

Exile and the Zanryu hojin? Japan is both a country from which people are in exile (e.g. members of the Japanese Red Army) as well as a one that is becoming a site for people in exile. For instance, the small number of Indo-Chinese refugees and some members of the long-term zainichi (resident in Japan) Korean and Chinese communities are exiles. Among the newcomer Chinese population, it is probable that there are a number of postTiananmen Square exiles. But it is another group of newcomer Chinese-Japanese—zanryu hojin—that is the subject of this chapter. The zanryu hojin and their families have been migrating to Japan since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Japan in 1972. For some, this migration has meant an immediate "return home" but for many it has not. For these returnees (zanryu hojin and their families after their migration to Japan), migration means displacement to a new site of exile. Among the returnees are a number who learnt as adults that the Chinese people they knew as their biological parents were, in fact, adoptive parents. With this knowledge came the realization that China was not their ancestral "homeland" as they had assumed. 3

The zanryu hojin are the descendents of Japanese emigrants to the former state of Manchukuo that was established by the Japanese in March 1932. It is estimated that the Japanese population in Manchuria was around 233,000 in 1930 (Young 1999: 314) and had grown to about 2.15 million by the time the Soviet Army invaded on 9 August

Some of the early returnees also had limited written literacy in Chinese. "Newcomer" is used to distinguish between the recent Chinese migrants to Japan and members of the "old-comer" long-term Chinese communities, many of whom have lived in Japan since the 1940s or earlier. The Japanese government was criticized by Human Rights Watch and other organizations for its heavy-handed treatment of requests for political asylum by participants in the Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement of 1989. 3

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4

1945. Roughly 320,000 of the Japanese population in Manchuria are believed to have been farmers who emigrated in response to a 1937 Japanese government plan to relocate one million farming households to Manchuria as part of the country's development. Male settlers were initially exempted from military duties but as the war situation deteriorated, many were conscripted. Consequently, at the time of the Soviet invasion, the civilian Japanese population in Manchuria was overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly, particularly in the rural areas where many of the farming families lived. Although a substantial military presence remained in the area, it seems that the Kwantung Army had been aware of the dire nature of the war and had started sending their families back to Japan in early 1945 (Tomozawa 2001: 135). In contrast, some emigrants were arriv­ ing in Manchuria not long before the Japanese surrender. For example, Okumura Kiyoaki and his family left Osaka on 27 March 1945 as members of the Oto Pioneer Group (Okubo2004: 123). In their flight from the advancing Soviet forces, an unknown number of people were killed or became separated from their families or the groups with which they were traveling. Kurihara Sadako, for instance, became separated from the group she was with when the train they were on was attacked and everyone on board headed for the hills (Oba and Hashimoto 1986: 63-64). Some children who were sickly and not expected to live were deliberately left to die whilst others were entrusted to Chinese neighbors or friends. Others were sold to brokers or were abducted from refugee camps. Han Zhi Zhong, for instance, said that he saw the Japanese children in a nearby refugee camp as presenting him with a "good chance" to have a child and so one day went to the camp and "took" his adopted daughter (Mitome 1988: 244). In some cases, the zanryu koji survived mass suicide attempts aimed at preventing their capture by enemy forces. Between 1946 and 1948, over one million Japanese were repatriated from Manchuria and a further 1.4 million returned from China. 5

6

4

Manchuria refers to the former puppet-state of Manchukuo and is not recognized as a place name by the Chinese government. In China today, the region is known as Northeast China. The 1945 figure is based on an estimate of 600,000 military person­ nel and 1,550,000 civilians (G. McCormack 1991: 121). In line with Japanese conventions all names are listed with surname first. The repatriation of the Japanese in China at the time of Japan's surrender was complicated because different countries had responsibility for the repatriation of people in various locations until 1946. China was responsible for the repatriation of Japanese 5

6

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Over 200,000 Japanese are believed to have died, committed suicide, or been killed in the months after the surrender. A semi-private repatriation program, run jointly by the Chinese and Japanese Red Cross was in place between 1953 and 1958 but no repatriations occurred between 1958 and 1972 when there were no diplomatic relations be­ tween Japan and the PRC. As of 31 October 2007, 20,344 people (in­ cluding 2,520 zanryu koji and 3,834 zanryu fujin) have migrated to Japan. Another 5,627 (1,177 zanryu koji) people have visited Japan for short periods. The total number of returnees is not known since records are not kept on those who return privately. Under the Japanese government's initial policies on the return of the zanryu hdjin* it was decided that a person who was 13 years and over at the time of the Soviet invasion was thought to have been old enough to choose whether to stay in China or return to Japan. Since many of the adult males left in Manchuria at the time were either killed or captured and taken to labor camps, only women fell into this category. These women are popularly referred to as zanryu fujin [stranded war women]. In contrast, anyone under thirteen years was viewed to have been too young to make a decision on whether to stay in China or return to Japan. On the basis of this decision, anyone who was under thirteen years of age, was listed in a mainland family register, and who had lived continuously in China since the end of the war, was entitled to receive government assistance in helping them identify their biological families (Tomozawa 2001: 135). In 1959, the number of years a person was listed as missing before they could be declared legally dead was cut. As a result, the number of officially listed non-repatriated civilians fell from 77,000 to 31,000 (Trefalt 2003: 32). Therefore, anyone who was assumed to be dead lost their Japanese citizenship. This means that many zanryu hojin wishing to migrate to Japan must do so as foreigners. According to one estimate, the names of over 50 percent of the zanryuu koji were 7

9

from within China, but those in Manchuria were under the jurisdiction of the USSR. The repatriations of civilians and military personnel were under separate jurisdictions 7Trefalt 2003: 25-27). These figures exclude one Russian zanryu koji who visited in 2004 but include those from the PRC who have visited Japan more than once (Sien Center 2007a). The Ministry of Labor, Health, and Welfare definitions of zanryu hdjin are available in Japanese from the Sien Center (2004). The registration of births, deaths, and marriages of Japanese citizens is recorded in family registers held at local municipal offices. 7

8

9

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erased from the family register (Manshu 1986: 189). Once in Japan, some returnees have undergone the Japanese citizenship process in order to reclaim their Japanese citizenship. Benitani Torao, for instance, was told that he needed to undergo the full citizenship process in order for him to hold a Japanese passport, even though his name remained in the family register (Okubo 2004: 126-127). Immigration to Japan and Japanese "blood" The immigration of the returnees constitutes the first group of "mi­ grants" officially accepted into Japan after 1945. The arrival of the early returnees and their families predates the 1979 decision to accept up to 10,000 Indo-Chinese refugees and the 1989 enactment of major revisions to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (ICRRA) that allowed nikkeijin (people of Japanese descent) to work in Japan for up to three years. An official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained the decision to allow the nikkeijin to work in Japan as follows: The descendants of emigrants to South America cannot be catego­ rized as 'foreigners' because of their lineage. The world trend is to­ ward treating those carrying the blood of one's own country the same as nationals of one's own country to the third generation. The descendants of those who have succeeded in the country they settle are the ones who come, so there is little likelihood of their settling in Japan—this is the difference between them and other Asians. (Hirowatari 1998: 97)

At one level this rationale is similar to that which underpins the acceptance of the zanryu hojin as Japanese. That is, they are not foreigners because they have Japanese "blood." The difference is that the zanryu hojin were accepted as permanent residents whereas the nikkeijin were expected to return to their countries of origin. Nevertheless, once in Japan, the zanryu hojin have to prove their Japaneseness in order to be recognized as Japanese. The ICRRA also permits the returnees to enter Japan on teijuu (Long-term Resident) visas whereas before they arrived on haizokusha (Spouse or Child of Japanese National) visas. The requirements for 10

1 0

Subsequent amendments to the ICRRA have made it easier for teijuu visa holders to remain in Japan.

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the teiju visa are less stringent than those for the haizokusha visa, partly because the latter is similar to a permanent residency visa. The introduction of the teiju visa also made it easier for members of the extended families of the zanryu fujin and zanryu koji to enter Japan. According to the Ministry of Labor, Health, and Welfare's "2002 Sur­ vey on the Lifestyle of the Chinese Returnees," for every zanryu koji who migrates to Japan, an average of 9.9 family members accompany them. In the case of the zanryu fujin, the figure is 12 people (Kinoshita 2003). Family members are often referred to as "returnees" but in reality most are immigrants rather than returnees and Japan is not their "home" but a different country altogether (Kinoshita 2003: 67-68). Identification of the zanryu hojin The normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and China in September 1972 provided the first opportunity for the zanryu hojin— who by that time were at least in their late twenties—to migrate to Japan since 1958. Despite the migration of a small number of zanryu fujin after the establishment of diplomatic relations, many zanryu hojin did not have the opportunity to establish contact with their families until the Japanese Government initiated a survey into the number of Japanese in China in March 1975. At the time of the signing of the Japan-China Peace and Friendship Treaty in August 1978, the Japanese government estimated there were around 2-300 zanryuu koji still alive in China (Nakano 1987: 18-19). In comparison to the figure of over 2,000 zanryuu koji who have migrated to Japan, the government's figure has proven to be a major underestimation. Initially, the Japanese government limited the number of people who could migrate in a fiscal year and only allowed those who could prove their identity and had a guarantor (mimoto hoshonin). The latter two requirements were problematic, as few zanryu koji knew their Japanese names, let alone the whereabouts of their relatives. Even in cases where the identity of relatives were known, the relatives were not always willing to act as guarantors because of the embarrassment of having to admit they had abandoned their child(ren) and/or the financial burden involved in supporting the returnees until they could establish themselves in Japan. A further complication to the identification process was that it was carried out across borders with the zanryu hojin living in China and

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the biological families trying to identify their child or siblings from Japan. The result was early returnees were primarily zanryu fujin and their families because they were older and were able to recall information that could help them in identifying their biological families. In recognition of the difficulties involved, in 1981 the Japanese govern­ ment began sponsoring groups of zanryu koji to visit Japan to help them in identifying their biological families. Between March 1981 and the end of October 2007, 2,199 zanryu koji visited Japan as members of one of these groups. These visits resulted in 682 (31 percent) positive identifications. Early groups had positive identifications as high as 75 percent but as time passed and both the zanryuu koji and the members of the biological families aged, the ratio of positive identifications fell. The precise number of returnees is difficult to estimate since the government does not keep figures on the number of privately funded returnees. The number of privately funded returnees is possibly higher than that of publicly funded returnees. It is thought that the number of privately funded returnees increased after July 1989 when a "special sponsor scheme" was introduced. Adopted in recognition of the diffi­ culties experienced by guarantors in providing financial support because of their advanced age, applicants for migration under this scheme are only required to have a sponsor who does not have the financial obligations of a guarantor. Together with the introduction of the teijuu visa in 1990, the elimination of a need for a guarantor made the migration of zanryu hojin and their families much easier. 11

12

Markers of the Japanese ethnic nation Until the early 1980s, the markers of membership of the Japanese na­ tion were "blood," cultural and linguistic competency, Japanese citi­ zenship, and territoriality. Of these, "blood" was not only the most 11

The official number of people to have visited Japan as one of these groups is 2,200 but this includes one person who was later proven to have made a fraudulent applica­ tion (Sien Center 2007b). 45 of the 60 members in Group No 2 (Feb/March 1982) were positively identified whilst only three of the fortyfive members in the 1997 group received similar results. In an attempt to improve identification rates, since 2000 the government has under­ taken more intensive checks and publicized more widely the personal details of the zanryu hojin prior to any visit to Japan. Despite these checks, the number of positive identifications has not exceeded 20 percent (Sien Center 2007b). 12

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important but was also patrilineal in that children born of nonJapanese fathers were not eligible for Japanese citizenship. A number of scholars, such as Brown (1957), Lehmann (1982), and Stronach (1994), have noted the ethnic and racial tones of the markers but do not consider other markers. Mouer and Sugimoto (1995: 243-46) on the other hand, nominate a combination of citizenship, native level language competence, residency, biological pedigree, and a certain level of cultural literary as the criteria defining who is and who is not Japanese. From another perspective, Fukuoka suggests just three markers, or to use his terminology, "variables": lineage, culture, and nationality (2000: xxix-xxxv). Based on these three variables, Fukuoka identifies eight degrees of Japaneseness, from "pure Japanese" who have all the variables, to "pure non-Japanese" who have none of the variables. Fu­ kuoka suggests that the only variable that the zanryu koji possess is lineage; therefore they are more than half way along the line to being non-Japanese. Yet, he argues that most Japanese would consider the zanryu koji as Japanese because they possess that variable (Fukuoka 2000: xxxiii). That said, while many Japanese may abstractly view the zanryu koji as Japanese because they have ethnic lineage, it is prob­ able that if they met a zanryu koji who did not display the linguistic and cultural competencies associated with being Japanese, they would argue that the zanryuu koji are not real Japanese. Central to the marker of Japan's ethnic lineage is the fictive kinship relationship between Japanese people based on blood relations. Intrinsic to this process is the deliberate Meiji era construction of the ideology of the myth of homogeneity that portrayed the Japanese as linked via blood relations back to time immemorial as well as a belief in the naturalness of hierarchies among people. Throughout Japan's modern era, this belief has applied to all members of the official nation. The colonized populations of Korea and Taiwan, for instance, were officially Japanese; but they were not as Japanese as homeland Japanese because they did not possess Japanese "blood." In this way, blood relations does not mean equality; rather it has been restricted to Japanese of 'Yamato" descent—the original inhabitants of Japan— and excluded member of all minority groups. One of Fukuoka's eight groups, for example, is the indigenous "Ainu" of Hokkaido. Almost all Ainu now speak Japanese as their first language, yet their distinct ethnic lineage ensures that they are not viewed as full Japanese.

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As these examples demonstrate, whilst "Japanese" blood has been largely divested of the ideological connotations of superiority and strength that underpinned the pre-1945 kazoku kokka [family state], it continues to have a mythical connotation of linking the Japanese people to one another. This fictive relationship is more important at the national ideological level but is not as important at the day-to-day person-to-person level where the ie (household) is more important. In this way, it is at the core of the Japanese relations to one another. For instance, the possession or non-possession of "blood" was, until the early to mid-1990s, closely associated with the ability to understand the nuances of the Japanese language and Japanese culture. Although the ability of non-Japanese to speak Japanese is now more accepted, it is still often assumed that non-Japanese do not understand the subtleties of the language because they do not have Japanese blood. The nikkeijin hold an ambiguous position in this framework. On the one hand, they are expected to speak Japanese because they have Japanese "blood." Yet, their acquisition of Japanese as a foreign language is viewed more harshly than that of Caucasians because of an assump­ tion that the language is in their genes (Befu 2001: 72). Similarly, returnees are assumed to be culturally and linguistically competent because they are "Japanese." 13

Territoriality Territory has always played an ambiguous role in the construction of the modern Japanese identity. The continual shift in the country's borders through to 1945 meant that territory was always in a state of flux and therefore could not easily be used to delineate who was, and who was not, a member of the nation. Moreover, the geographical proximity of Japan's colonies meant that there was a difficulty in delineating the border between naichi [Japan proper] and gaichi [the external colonies] (Morris-Suzuki 2001: 646). Despite this ambiguity, a hierar­ chy that placed the inhabitants of the three main islands of Japan at the core, and Hokkaido and Okinawa and other territories in a graduated periphery away from the core, helped to overcome the lack of defined territorial borders (Morris-Suzuki 1998: ch. 2). In the post-war years, despite the US administration of Okinawa until 1972 and the ongoing

Yoshino (1992: 27-30) discusses this issue in some detail.

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dispute over the sovereignty of the Kurile Islands, territory has been one of the primary markers of being Japanese: Japanese lived within these boundaries (kokunai) and non-Japanese lived outside (kokugai). This dichotomy meant that the existence of non-Japanese within Japanese "territory" was often ignored. Nevertheless, the zanryu hojin were acknowledged as Japanese despite their residency outside Japan. The acceptance of the zanryu hojin as Japanese suggests that ei­ ther Manchuria remains within the boundaries of the "imagined" borders of Japan or that a distinction between the nikkeijin as people who voluntarily left Japan, and the zanryu hojin as people who were invol­ untarily unable to return, was made. Interestingly, the definition of the zanryu hojin requires them to have lived continuously in China since August 1945, thus excluding any zanryu hojin living in other countries, such as Russia and North Korea. Nakano (1987: 178), for instance, infers that there are a number of zanryu fujin living in North Korea. The zanryuu koji, therefore, represent an interesting anomaly. That is, despite their lack of residence within the territorial boundaries of Japan, they were permitted to migrate to Japan because were considered to be Japanese because they have Japanese "blood." In contrast, until the enactment of the ICRRA, the nikkeijin were not Japanese because they resided outside Japan and could not migrate to Japan. The nikkeijin could however become Japanese if they lived within the boundaries of Japan. In this way, the acceptance of the zanryuu koji as Japanese highlights the importance of blood relations as the main determinant of Japaneseness but also suggests that the former colonial territories remain within the boundaries of the contemporary imagined community. 14

15

Irrespective of the ambiguity over the boundaries of the imagined community, residency within Japanese territory began to lose its role as an identity marker in the 1980s. The internationalization of Japanese business at that time saw an increased number of Japanese people living overseas, as well as an increasing number of non-Japanese residents in Japan. Until that time, most overseas Japanese were emigrants

In reality many of Japan's emigrants moved as part of the Japanese government's policy to use emigration as a means to overcome overpopulation. In this context, many were not voluntary emigrants. The Japanese government continued to encourage emigration until the 1960s. A zanryu koji who had grown up in Russia ostensibly as a person of Chinese de­ scent visited Japan in November 2004 to search for her family (Japan Times 2004). 15

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and their residence offshore deemed them not to be "real" Japanese. In the case of these new overseas residents however, many were only residing overseas temporarily and as representatives of Japan's rising economic power, they could not be excluded from the Japanese na­ tion. As a consequence, overseas residency began to lose its role as an indicator of who was not Japanese, although it was not until the early 1990s, and the rapid increase in the number of nikkeijin living in Japan, that Japan-based residency lost most of its strength as a marker. Life in China as a Japanese-Chinese The lives of the zanryu hojin in China are as varied as their stories of how they came to live with their adoptive families. Some zanryu hojin tell of being treated like slaves by their adoptive parents and/or being bullied by their classmates because they were Japanese. Yamamoto Tonan, for instance, tells that from the time he started school, the other students would throw stones at him and yell "Japanese Devil. Japanese Devil." at him (Okubo 2004: 66). Other zanryu koji have only kind words for their adoptive parents and feel responsible for their welfare in their old age. Yet others speak about how their adoptive parents protected them from harassment by the authorities and people in the villages by moving the family away from where it was known that one of their children was Japanese. Stories about harassment during the Cultural Revolution also abound. Li Zhi, for instance, tells how her adoptive father was driven to suicide in 1968 rather than confess that his eldest daughter was Japanese (Mitome 1988: 201-5). Some of the zanryu fujin and zanryu koji (mainly the older ones, who remembered their biological families) grew up knowing they were adopted and longing to be reunited with their biological families. In order to survive, these people were forced to deny their Japaneseness by adopting a Chinese name and learning a new language. 16

But not all the zanryu fujin and zanryu koji knew they were "Japanese," and some zanryuu koji did not learn about their Japanese heritage until well into adulthood. Stories about being told by their The responsibility for the care of one's parents is enshrined in China's Marriage Law. In 1982, the PRC requested that the Japanese government take measures to ensure that adoptive parents are provided for. The Japanese government agreed on the proviso that the PRC continued to cooperate with the identification process (Nakano 1987: 141-42).

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adoptive parents on their parents' deathbed about their true identity are common. Upon learning of their ancestry, some zanryu koji wanted to learn more about their background, while others yearned to migrate to a Japan they now regarded as their homeland. Ironically, their Japanese nationality had already been taken away from them years before. Yet, for those zanryu koji who began to think of themselves as Japanese and migrated to Japan convinced as such, their lack of the markers of cultural and linguistic literacy often meant that they were not acknowledged as members of the social nation. Language Throughout their lives in China, most of the zanryu hojin had no opportunity to use or even learn the Japanese language. Consequently, most zanryu hojin who visit or migrate to Japan have little or no Japa­ nese language skills. Since 1984, publicly funded returnees have been eligible to receive four months of intensive Japanese language tuition at the "Chinese Returnees' Arrival Support Center" in Tokorozawa, Saitama Prefecture on their arrival in Japan. Initially, this was the only language assistance that the returnees were to receive but it soon became obvious that they needed ongoing assistance. In response, a supplementary language system that allows the returnees to receive a further eight months of free tuition at designated language schools across the country was established. Returnees who have lived in Japan for at least two years may also attend an additional four-month intensive language program in Tokorozawa. The importance of developing returnees' language skills cannot be underestimated. It not only provides them with the opportunity to interact with Japanese society on a broader scale and also helps them to be acknowledged as Japanese. Nakano, for instance, suggests that the inability of the zanryuu koji to understand Japanese language and customs had some relatives questioning whether the zanryu koji were really their children (1987: 110). The relatives assumed that as Japa17

Until 1994 the Tokorozawa Center was called the "Chinese Returnee Children's Reception Center." Initially, the Tokorozawa Center received all returnees but as the numbers grew, a further six reception centers were opened across Japan. Four of these have since closed. Some have been replaced by "Independence Training Centers," which offer language courses and other assistance to help returnees adapt to life in Japan.

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nese, the zanryu koji should speak Japanese. At the same time, it was assumed that the returnees would be literate in Chinese and therefore able to read kanji. In reality, many returnees had received only a bare minimum level of education. Many were illiterate. This affected their ability to learn Japanese. One study found that when the returnees left Saitama, only 2 percent were able to perform daily transactions such as shopping or going to the post office in Japanese. Unable to speak or read Japanese the returnees could not communicate with their families or neighbors and therefore lived in exile in their "homeland." The returnees were trying to deal with a new language and way of life, as well as living with people whom they had known only as children, if at all. Cut off from people who understood them linguistically and socially, many returnees found life in Japan very difficult. 18

Returning to the "homeland" During the 1980s, each time a group of zanryu koji visited Japan on a government-sponsored tour, their every move was recorded by the media. The cameras panned in on the faces of the zanryuu koji as they made their joyful return to, or, in some cases, took their first steps in, the Japanese homeland. During a group's visit, the same cameras occasionally showed scenes of happy reunions between the zanryuu koji and their biological families, but in many cases the zanryuu koji returned to China without being positively identified or having met their biological families. At the time of each group's arrival, the newspapers published brief biographies of the members. These biographies are now available on the web. The following are two examples: Chinese name: LIN Shuyun; Gender: female; Estimated age at War's End: 3-4 years; Location of separation: Mudanjiang City, Mudanjiang Prefecture; Blood Type: B; Year of Visit: 2004. Was found crying in mid-August 1945 at Military Horse Stables in Mudanjiang City and was taken in by her adopted father, Lin Guojun, and adopted mother, Lin Lushi. At the time she was found, Lin was filthy and was wearing an old pink coat. (Kikokusha Center: n.d.) Chinese name: WANG Guizhen; Gender: female; Estimated age at War's End: about 3 months; Location of separation: Ning'an Province; Blood Type: A.

Ministry of Public Welfare 1997, cited in Yashiro (1997: 180).

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Rowena Ward During the evacuation in August 1945, Wang was entrusted to a Ko­ rean, Kim Jingfu in the village of Laojiazhan, Mudanjiang Province. She was later taken in by her adopted father, Wang Zhanwu. Wang has a scar in the middle of her forehead at the hairline. (Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare 2005)

Irrespective of the life they led in China, the returnees experience considerable problems adjusting to life in Japan. As noted earlier, most do not speak Japanese; nor do they understand Japanese customs. For the early returnees in particular, this caused some problems as many Japanese people were unaccustomed to dealing with nonJapanese, especially anyone who did not speak Japanese. This situation was exacerbated by the assumption that the returnees were Japanese but did not display the markers associated with being Japanese. Nakano notes that early returnees were flummoxed by having to sleep on tatami, or use vacuum cleaners and the telephone (1987: 119). At a time when sleeping on tatami was deemed a typical Japanese custom, the returnees' lack of knowledge about tatami would have thrown their Japaneseness into disrepute. Moreover, many early returnees were unaccustomed to the capitalist way of life. One early returnee, for instance, was surprised when staff at the Reception Center paid the taxi driver for taking them to the Center, as they had never before seen a person being paid for driving someone (Nakano 1987: 120). And because the guarantors bore much of the financial costs of the returnees' immigration, many returnees were initially forced to live with their guarantors after having studied Japanese for a few months. This often caused friction for both sides. Many of the biological families lived in the country where people were less used to dealing with nonJapanese, and the returnees had limited communicative capabilities. 19

The following quotes from Tamanoi highlight some of the experi­ ences of the zanryu koji: Speaker 3: [On returning to Japan] my living environment changed overnight. At first, I found everything novel. I could not speak a word of Japanese. I did not know which way to go. I was afraid of everything. I did not have any friend either. Everyone was a stranger to me. I felt like crying all the time. Why did I return to Japan, I asked myself. I regretted [my decision] a lot then. I wanted to return to China. The kikokushijo [school aged returnees] and the problems that they face in adjusting to school and life in Japan after living overseas are well documented (see R. Goodman 1990).

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Speaker 4: Everyone on the street [in Japan] is energetic. The Japa­ nese people wear nice clothes and they are clean. They are not arrogant, but they do not have big hearts. They do not treat us as Japanese. They look at us from a strange angle. (2003: 533)

The linguistic and cultural problems faced by the returnees also im­ pact on their ability to find and maintain employment. Most of the returnees work in small enterprises with less than ten employees (Sakamoto 1994: 62). Jobs in these enterprises are often characterized as "3-k" or kitanai, kiken, and kitsui [dirty, dangerous, and difficult]. The employment prospects of the early returnees were also negatively affected by their having to live near their guarantors. Often the guarantors lived in regional areas where there were few employment opportunities for those with limited language skills and fewer opportunities for them to study or improve their Japanese. These circumstances meant the exclusion of the zanryu koji from the local society and their "exile" in their "homeland." In short, whilst their Japanese heritage enables the returnees to migrate to Japan, once in Japan, their lack of the markers of language and cultural literacy and Japanese citizenship, that is their Japaneseness, serves to exclude them from being acknowledged as Japanese or as members of the social nation. At the same time, their Japaneseness serves to differentiate them from the long-term kakyo [overseas Chi­ nese] and the newcomer Chinese communities that view the zanryu koji as Japanese rather than Chinese (Tomozawa 2001: 137-38). The returnees are excluded by the Japanese community because of their "Chineseness" and excluded by the Chinese community because of their "Japaneseness." In this context, the returnees live in exile between China and Japan. 20

Multiple exiles and Japaneseness The life of an exile may result in estrangement from, among other elements, self, language, family, and culture. To use Said's words, exile "is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between self and its true home" (2001: 173). At the heart of this description of exile lies an assumption that a person has a single

2 0

Emigrants to Manchuria were overwhelmingly from prefectures with strong agricultural economies. Many guarantors appear to have lived in rural areas.

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geographical homeland. Said also describes exile as having "torn mil­ lions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geogra­ phy" (174). Undeniably, the separation of the zanryu hojin from Japa­ nese traditions, their biological families, and Japanese territory, has had a profound effect on their lives. As a result the zanryu hojin have lived lives that are essentially a series of multiple exiles. Some, by being born in a gaichi began their lives in exile from the naichi Japa­ nese homeland. For these members of the colonial population, their true "homeland" was the Japanese mainland and not the territory of their birth. After the collapse of the Japanese empire, these exiles, together with some who were born in the naichi but had migrated to the Manchurian gaichi, lived, due to circumstances over which they had little, if any, control, a life of exile in China. This exilic experience is probably closest to Said's notion of exile. The zanryu koji who learnt in adulthood that they were of Japanese descent, however, had different experiences of exile. They did not know they were in exile but believed that they were living in their true homeland. In learning that they were Japanese, some began to believe that their homeland was in Japan. In the process, their former homeland in China became a place of exile. Nonetheless, the question of when the China exile of these zanryuu koji began needs to be considered. It isa arguable that their exile did not begin until they knew their parents were Japanese. In this case, the assumption is that an exile needs to be consciously aware that they are in exile in order for them to be in that situation. Said appears to have assumed that was the case. Yet, irrespective of whether these zanryu koji realized they were in geographical exile in China or not, they were in that position as a result of their adoptive parents withholding information on their birth. In this context, the zanryuu koji may be viewed as being exiled from their "true self" psychologically rather than geographically. In many cases, exile in China meant that the zanryu hojin had little opportunity to develop the Japaneseness that would allow them to be recognized and acknowledged as Japanese on migrating to Japan. This exilic life is only temporary for those who acquire cultural and linguistic literacy but is permanent for those who do not. Put another way, as a result of a lack of development of their Japaneseness due to their exile in China, when the zanryu hojin migrate to the Japanese "homeland," they do not necessarily return "home" but move from a geographically external exile in China to an internal exile in Japan.

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Finally, it is not only the zanryu hojin who are migrating to Japan but also their extended families. Most of these people do not have Japanese ancestry and in migrating with their "Japanese" family members to Japan, they become separated from their biological families in China, their traditions and their geographical homeland. That is, in the process of one group returning to their geographical homeland, another group is being separated from theirs. The migration of family members may not necessarily entail exile, but it does mean separation from their homeland and the possible production of a generation of Chinese-Japanese unable to develop their Chineseness. The zanryu hojin are a legacy of Japan's colonial policies of the 1930s and 1940s. As a consequence of the end of the Japanese empire, some have lived in exile in China and then in Japan. In effect, the life experiences of the zanryu fujin and zanryu koji are not necessarily characterized by a single geographical "homeland," but rather by multiple exiles in and between Japan and China.

Memory and Exile: Contemporary France and the Algerian War (1954-1962) Jo McCormack Abstract This chapter examines French collective memory of the Algerian War (195462), a conflict that engendered numerous exiles, with a particular focus on Dalila Kerchouche's Mon pere, ce harki and Zahia Rahmani's Moze. Pub­ lished in 2003, these novels about the experience of harkis (Algerian soldiers who fought for the French army during the Algerian War) and their families, confirm that part of finding home and ending exile revolves around coming to terms with a traumatic past and being recognized in French history. The harkis have clearly been excluded from French society for the last forty years, enduring a form of internal exile in camps, occluded from French history, and thus silenced. Kerchouche's and Rahmani's novels illustrate the role of agency in the construction of collective memory, as the authors attempt to gain greater recognition of this group's role in French history, thus fostering better understanding of the harkis, allowing reconciliation between generations and groups, and allowing us to comment on discourses of citizen inclusion and exclusion in contemporary French civil society.

The Algerian War came to an end in 1962, and with it closed some 130 years of French colonial presence in Algeria (and North Africa). With this outcome, the French Empire, celebrated in pomp in Paris in the Exposition coloniale of 1931 and exalted in de Gaulle's descrip­ tion of "la France de Dunkerque a Tlemcen" [Greater France stretch­ ing from Dunkerque to Tlemcen], received its decisive death blow, something unthinkable a few years previously, as Algeria was effectively the jewel in France's colonial crown. The conflict had been extremely hard, and it continues to be a difficult historical episode to remember and represent in contemporary France. The Algerian War arguably engendered numerous exiles. Some one million Pieds-Noirs [European settlers] left Algeria in 1962 in

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what is often described as an exodus, hence the title De I'exode a I'exil. Rapatries et Pieds-Noirs en France [From Exodus to Exile. Re­ patriates and Pieds-Noirs in France] of a 1993 study by Jean-Jacques Jordi, a leading French scholar in the area. Another group to be exiled were the supporters of the Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS; Secret Armed Organization), a far-right movement created towards the end of the war. The OAS drew mainly on European settlers and disgrun­ tled army officers, and sought by increasingly violent means to keep Algeria French and to oppose de Gaulle's plans for Algerian inde­ pendence. Given that de Gaulle prevailed, despite numerous attempts on his life, OAS members, many of whom had been very prominent in the French state apparatus (e.g. General Raoul Salan, Head of the Army in Algeria), chose exile after 1962 in order to avoid facing treason charges in France. In the Franco-Algerian case, the exile condition also applies to some Algerians in France, a community that in the early 1980s was the single largest immigrant group, numbering around 800,000. Alge­ rians who originally came to France to work temporarily in the 1950s and 1960s often settled on a permanent basis; yet they and their children face discrimination, some of which emanates from legacies of empire, particularly the trauma of the Franco-Algerian War (MacMaster 1997; Stora 1999). Additionally, it is precisely forgetting which has sustained French participants in the war in exile, understood more as exclusion, silence. Over two million French men fought in Algeria; most were drafted, sometimes for up to twenty-seven months. Although expecting to undertake peace-keeping roles to put down a small rebellion, they were thrust into one of the hardest fought wars of decolonization, one marked by atrocities and human rights violations on both sides. Another group arguably exiled from Algeria are the harkis, "Algerians" who fought in the French army. In 1957 there 1

2

1

At the time the French government used euphemisms such as les evenements d'Algerie [events] or le maintien de I'ordre [peace-keeping] to describe what was, in fact, a savage war. The term war was only officially recognized by the French parliament in the late 1990s, and has since been used officially, on plaques for example. Harkis is a generic term describing Algerian soldiers who fought for the French army during the Algerian War. The exact term is forces suppletives since harkis were only one of many groups of indigenous soldiers (groupes d'auto defense, moghazins, and so on). Nonetheless, harkis is the term commonly used in France to refer to all of these forces. Terminology is thus both important and difficult here. Technically there were no Algerians before 1962. Moreover only a relatively small percentage of people 2

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were 42,000 suppletifs [supplementary soldiers] in the French army, a figure that rose to 88,000 a year later. At the end of the war, in 1962, the soldiers were disarmed and abandoned. Many were massacred; others escaped in dramatic conditions to France, to be confined to camps for decades. This chapter focuses on the harkis since its members were exiled in Algeria and then to France, where they have been marginalized and excluded ever since. Their position is particularly difficult and complex. The silence of the fathers has been especially prevalent in this group. They have struggled to make France home, yet their situation is changing at present. One identifiable development is the emerging corpus of writing by children of harkis, typified by Dalila Kerchouche's Mon pere ce harki (2003b) and Zahia Rahmani's Moze, published in 2003. These novels reveal important things about exile, memory, and exclusion in contemporary France. The case of the Algerian War thus enables an investigation of the nexus between exile and memory, given that the conflict ended merely a little over four decades ago. Indeed, French President Jacques Chirac fought there as a conscript, and his generation, currently of retirement age, lived through the war. Memory consists of remembering, individually or in groups (collectively). There are different understandings of how individual and collective memory function, which are discussed below. For many years the Algerian War was a taboo subject. It was not forgotten; rather its memory was repressed and occluded (Frank 1990). Towards the end of the 1990s, this situation was challenged in numerous significant ways. Memory battles have taken place, as elements of an extremely divisive past are reinterpreted. There is still a considerable amount at stake in talking about the Algerian War due to the fact that the participants in the war are numerous and still alive. Benjamin Stora (1999) estimates there are four or five million people 3

in Algeria had French citizenship. Therefore in many domains (such as the harkis) numerous names have been applied: Franjais de souche nord-africaine, rapatrie d'origine nord-africaine, and Franjais musulmans d'Algerie. As a starting point we can note that for Rousso: "Somewhat like the unconscious in Freudian theory, memory which we call 'collective' exists first and foremost in its manifestations, in those elements through which it exteriorizes itself, explicitly or implicitly" (1991: 19), and, "The collective memory of an event is shaped by all rep­ resentations of that event—whether conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit" (1991: 219). 3

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in France who retain vivid memories of the conflict, which was an extremely hard, traumatic one, that called into question Republican principles and human rights. Battles take place since there is no national consensual memory of the conflict, rather a set of mutually antagonistic group memories. Notable recent disputes have centered on the French army's use of torture during the Algerian War and remem­ bering the events of 17 October 1961. In France, such battles can partly be understood as attempts by exiled groups, or more often their descendants, to be included in French history, and the outcomes of such battles enables us to better comment on, amongst other things, the place of ethnic minorities in France. As Pierre Nora points out: 4

What is today commonly called memory.. .in fact marks the advent of historical consciousness of defunct traditions, the reconstructive recovery of phenomena from which we are separated and which are most directly of interest to those who think of themselves as descendants and heirs of such traditions. Official history felt no need to take account of these traditions because the 'national group' was generally constructed by stifling them or reducing them to silence, or because they did not emerge as such into history. Now that such groups are being incorporated into national history, however, they feel an urgent need to reconstruct their traditions with whatever means are available, from the most ad hoc to the most scientific because for each group tradition is part of its identity. (1996-98: 626)

This understanding of collective memory draws particularly on a so­ cial agency approach, such as that defended by Jay Winter in his coedited War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (1991). Such an approach can be allied with a pluralist model, in which various groups compete for a place in the collective memory. The focus here is on the actions of individuals and groups (writers, activists, associations) in shaping collective memory rather than on the State top-down imposing a collective memory. Other theories of memory, however, are also important to understanding exilic memory. A Freudian approach would involve the working through of difficult memories to

4

Torture was discussed at length in the media in 2000-1, particularly in Le Monde (interviews with soldiers and victims of torture, readers' letters, editorials, etc). Some 200 articles on the Algerian War were published in the newspaper in 2000, and another 300 in 2001. On 17 October 1961, dozens of Algerian demonstrators, protesting against a curfew imposed on them, were killed in Paris by French police.

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alleviate the pain and loss of exile. This can be linked at the public level with Habermas's theorization (1998), drawing on Adorno, of "Working Off the Past." A Halbwachsian approach would lead us to focus on social frames of memory, the present, the group. This can be allied with a social constructionist school. Language, time, and space are the social frames of memory, hence the need to regard "remember­ ing and forgetting as inherently social activities" (Middleton and Ed­ wards 1990: 1), since remembering is seen as "une activite sociale, qui passe par le discours et qui se construit en relation avec d'autres individus" [a social activity, which depends on discourse and is con­ structed in relation with other individuals] (Billig and Edwards 1994: 742). Memory is constructed, not reproduced. Looking at exile and the Franco-Algerian War necessarily pre­ cludes an exhaustive study of exile. It is evident that the exile experience has changed over time, and currently differs significantly between countries, and even within countries. This chapter is not claiming that all exile in France follows the model of the exile engendered by the Franco-Algerian War. Even within this case study myriad exile conditions merit further work than I can achieve. However this particular case study does shed new light on the exile condition, and confirms that interpreting the legacy of the Franco-Algerian War from the standpoint of exile helps better understand the current position of these groups in postcolonial France. The Franco-Algerian case is specific in so far as Algeria was a part of France from 1830-1962, although global migration patterns have often evolved after Empire and from the colonized countries to the colonizers' countries. In the French case memory battles are particularly fierce in terms of their recency, the numbers involved and the traumas they evoke, and revolve around France recognizing its colonial history. History and memory in this particular context have particular saliency, but I argue that memory and history have an important part to play for all exiled groups due to their role in identity construction. War is a traumatic legacy for many exiled groups, although there are many sources of trauma for exiles. Memory again has a role here in overcoming trauma and working through loss or engaging in the "work of grieving." The legacy of the colonial period in the French case has led to more collective exile—exoduses—whereas other exiles may still be more individual in nature. The Franco-Algerian case is not, however, the only example of recent exodus.

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Memory and exile It is worth exploring in some depth the link between memory and ex­ ile. As Said notes: "Exile is...the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted" (2001: 173). In this day and age, the question arises: what is a native place, and for whom? In the age of migration and transnational capitalism, hasn't native place become increasingly elusive for an ever growing number of people? (Allatson and McCormack, 2005) In societies where groups and indi­ viduals are marginalized, surely they are internal exiles, as Naficy (1996) convincingly argues. As a legacy of colonialism, nearly one million settlers left Algeria. Although they are often referred to as rapatries [repatriates], many bitterly rejected this term, since they were born in Algeria, not in France, insisting therefore that they cannot have been repatriated. While, Algeria and France were undoubtedly very different societies, technically Algeria was French, and comprised three French departments. And what might be a native place for young people born of Algerian parents in France? As I will argue below, making a country one's native place can be linked to the "work of memory" and the necessary construction of native place. 5

In the case of the Algerian War, the various exiles were very different. How was the rift forced? OAS members were exiled, in so far as they were imprisoned or fled to avoid jail. The rift was forced in the sense that they felt betrayed, and were unable to live in their homeland (France) for fear of arrest. The rift that occurred was less geographic or locational than on the level of belief in a certain idea of France and Algeria and their future together (I'Algerie Frangaise, French Alge­ ria). Pieds-noirs [European settlers] fled in an exodus, but they were not strictly speaking forced to flee, since the Evian peace accords afforded them, in theory at least, protection in the newly independent Algeria. Nonetheless, one million Pieds-Noirs left Algeria in what is often described as an exodus. Colonial Algeria was their native place. Harkis were forced to flee in the sense that they would have been The Oranais, Algerois and Constantinois departments, the capitals of which were Oran, Algiers and Constantine. Algeria, in fact, never functioned like France. For example, politically the electoral system was inequitable as 10 percent of the population (European origin) elected the same number of members of parliament, as did 90 percent of the population (native), since there were two electoral colleges.

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6

massacred if they had not left. But when did their native place cease to exist? Was it when Algeria gained independence, or prior to that when colonial French Algeria was torn apart? The Franco-Algerian war was amongst other things a civil war, one that pitted Algerians against other Algerians. Yet, while escaping to France was incredibly difficult, in many ways their plight in France over the last forty years has been even more dramatic. They are internal exiles, forced to live in camps for decades and marginalized from French society. Particularly interesting here is the generational angle, as the parents have tended to be silent regarding their involvement in the Algerian War, yet "autant les par­ ents se sont tu...autant le fils aujourd'hui se rebellent" [the more the parents have not talked...the more the son today rebels] (Kara 1997: 158). As Jordi and Hamoumou note: Depuis trente-six ans, episodiquement, des hommes et des femmes barrent les routes, font des greves de la faim, s'enchainent aux grilles de prefectures ou de ministeres, pour attirer sur eux le regard des autorites et celui des . Pour demander reparation aussi, pour qu'on reconnaisse leur place dans l'histoire de France, pour etre enfin traites comme tout citoyen francais. (1999: 11) [For thirty-six years, periodically, some men and women block roads, go on hunger strike, chain themselves to the gates of prefectures or ministries, to attract the attention of authorities and of 'other French peo­ ple.' To try and obtain compensation, to secure recognition of their place in French history, lastly to be finally treated as French citizens.]

And then there are Algerians living in France. Algerian workers in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s supported Algerian inde­ pendence—while they were in the metropole on a single-male rotation (temporary) system of work—yet ended up settling in France. While until the 1970s there was a myth of return, which emerges clearly in the testimony collected by Benguigui (1997), and the literature of Begag (1986), Nini (1993) and others, this myth was replaced gradually by the recognition of the necessity of settling in France due to a number of push-pull factors. Many commentators claim their children are stuck between two cultures, the host society, which rejects them (racism, discrimination, spatial exclusion in the banlieues, the run6

Many harkis fled Algeria in 1962 to avoid the massacres that were taking place; it is estimated that upwards of 100,000 harkis were abandoned by French forces and massacred.

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down outer suburbs of French cities), and Algerian culture. For some commentators—although according to Liauzu (1999) a tiny minority of Franco-Algerians are engaged in this process—finding a place in France involves foregrounding occluded and repressed aspects of Franco-Algerian history. It consists of combating the narratives Ross criticizes in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (1995): the separation of the two narratives of decolonization and modernization, in which decolonization is portrayed as ancient history: [It is as if] France's colonial history was nothing more than an 'exte­ rior' experience that somehow came to an abrupt end, cleanly, in 1962...colonialism itself was made to seem like a dusty archaism, as though it had not transpired in the twentieth century and in the personal histories of many people living today, as though it played only a tiny role in France's national history, and no role at all in its modern identity. (Ross 1995: 19)

As Hargreaves has noted: writers and film-makers of Algerian immigrant origin have turned more openly to their historical roots, and memories of October 1961 have been pivotal in this process. Brief and sometimes more extended references to the events of October 17 are made in many of the narra­ tives which they published during the 1980s...By the early 1990s, several organizations dedicated to the memory of France's immigrant minorities had been established by young members of minority ethnic groups, foremost among which were Generiques and Au nom de la memoire. (Hargreaves 2006)

Some work on memory insists on the therapeutic process of re­ membering and working through traumatic memories. Much of this work focuses on loss and grieving. This might be at the individual, group, or national level. If exile is intended to deny identity to a people (Said 2001), how might exiles attempt to reforge an identity? Exiles might have more capacity for agency than Said suggests. Resistance ought not be simply limited to political activism while exiled, or upon return, but in a new "home," in the very process of securing a place in a new homeland. For Kaminsky, however exile may be dreamed or lived it is innately unstable, "a process rather than a singular state" (1999: xvii). Can this process be equated with changes in 7

Obviously working in a Freudian perspective. See Billig (1999).

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memory over time? When Pierre Nora (1996-1998) and Henry Rousso (1991) try to differentiate between memory and history in their respective works, they concur that memory is inherently grounded in the present. "Memory battles" can be viewed as attempts by exiles or their descendants to secure a place in the collective memory. Writers such as Assia Djebar are clearly challenging dominant narratives of the Al­ gerian War, as are beur authors and film makers (such as Yamina Benguigui). Descendants of harkis (Dalila Kerchouche and Zahia Rahmani) and pieds noirs (Alexander Arkady) are also rewriting and (re)presenting Franco-Algerian history and memory. As exiles are denied an identity, their memory work into history is important in forging a new identity on individual or group lines. David Thelen highlights the way individuals use memory to support their identity in the present: 8

The starting place for the construction of an individual recollection is a present need or circumstance.. .Since an individual's starting points change as the person grows and changes, people reshape their recollections of the past to fit their present needs...and select from the present material that supports deeply held interpretations from the past. (1989: 1121)

For Said: "Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past... Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives" (2001: 177). Perhaps what emerges above all from the case study of exile and the Franco-Algerian War is a sense that exile has continued to evolve. As noted above, the exile categories, types and experiences have evolved. At the heart of the change is the shift to internal exile. The exile condition seems to have shifted from a focus on individuals (often elites), political motivations for exile and political activism while in exile, with a concomitant attention on returning home, to a new paradigm of making or finding home, more often than not collectively, and attempts to overcome economic, political, and cultural internal exile. Memory and history have a large role here. The shift to "finding home" means that memory work involves achieving recognition—often of a group rather than an individual—in a new national framework. Whereas the individual or group previously lacked social frames of memory (the language, time, and space of the other 8

Beurs is a term that has often been used in France to describe young people of Algerian descent, children of North African immigrants.

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country), these are now more readily available. Memory ceases to sus­ tain the individual in a new (temporary) environment; it becomes the means through which to find a place in a new home, but that identity construction inevitably comes into competition with other groups and national memories. This is because memory and history also play a key role in national identity. This is particularly the case in France. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1992) highlight the role of history and memory in nation building. Eric Hobsbawm cites the example of the French Third Republic and how it was "maintained" and "safeguarded" by reference to the past, and more precisely to the French Revolution. Hobsbawm cites three major uses of invented traditions: primary education, public ceremonies and public monuments. Bhabha (1990) shows the way nations are narrated, and Anderson (1991) the way communities, particularly national, are imagined. Arguably, then, the recuperative work of memory is difficult, but not impossible. This difficulty might be due to the lack of "social frames of memory" (Halbwachs 1976). Further difficulties arise if we take into consideration the role of memory and forgetting in coming to terms with a traumatic past. Ricceur (2000) insists on the "work of memory," drawing on Freud's "work of grieving" (Freud 1984). These are long and arduous processes. It is necessary, however, since through this work of memory exiles recreate identity. As memory is grounded in the present, selective use is made of the past. Hence exile is so often presented as a site of memorialization since it is linked to (individual, group, and national) identity, healing and dealing with trauma, inclusion and exclusion. A concrete example of this work of memory in France, within the harki group, is literature used to chal­ lenge dominant narratives and construct "home." I want now to further contextualize two novels that use literature to work through difficult memories of exile from Algeria in France, and from France as well: Dalila Kerchouche's Mon pere ce harki and Zahia Rahmani's Moze (2003). Both authors are women, children of harkis, living in France. Harkis Harkis are one of the many groups whose exile was engendered by the Algerian War. They were exiled within Algeria, as they were forced to

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leave their fertile lands during the colonial period by settlers, and they were literally torn from their compatriots, and even family members, by the war itself, as they chose (or were forced), for myriad reasons, to fight in the French army. They were then exiled to France due to a very real fear of persecution in Algeria in 1962; in France they were marginalized to the extent that they are only just being integrated into French society, yet are still officially unable to return to Algeria. Arguably, the current process of integration is dependent on memory, that is, their inclusion in French history. This emerges quite clearly in the way in which harkis have held French nationality since the end of the Algerian War (and even before), yet have been excluded from life in France and from recognition in French history. The situation is changing, for various reasons, one of which can be argued to be activism, including writing, hence my detailed discussion of two recent publications by Kerchouche and Rahmani. There are similarities between the situation of harkis and that of Algerian immigrants and their descendants in general. They are on the face of it two very different groups in terms of reasons for coming to France, experience in France since the 1960s, and position during the Algerian War, but the positions are not radically different since both groups are attempting to find a place in French society, a large part of which resolves around history and memory, and inclusion in French history: Frequemment, de la part d'un ex-suppletif, c'est le silence qui accueille toute question portant sur la nature des operations auxquelles il lui fut donne de participer durant la guerre d'Algerie. Que les questions soient posees par les enfants ou par un etranger ne change pas grande chose a l'affaire...Toutefois on aurait tort de mettre ce silence sur le compte d'une demarche d'autocensure resultant d'un sentiment de culpabilite. En effet, on peut retrouver la meme discretion chez les Algeriens ayant adhere au FLN [Often, one is confronted with silence from harkis when a question is asked about the operations they par­ ticipated in during the Algerian War. It matters little whether the questions are asked by a child or a stranger...However it would be wrong to account for this silence by reference to feelings of shame. Actually, one can find the same silence amongst Algerians who belonged to the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN)] (Roux 1990: 2425).

As is indicated in the above quotation, transmission of memories in the families of harkis has been a problem. Indeed, the evidence of lit-

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tie transmission of harki memory through the family is overwhelming. Muller refers to "des silences qui continuent a planer au sein de la plupart de ces familles" [silences that continue to hang over most of these families] (1999: 16). He describes the second part of his study as an attempt to "analyse[r] un element commun et caracteristique de la majeure partie des familles d'anciens harkis: le silence du pere au sujet de son passe" [analyze a common element, typical of most families of harkis: the silence of the father concerning his past] (1999: 73). Similarly, Jordi and Hamoumou describe "une histoire tue autant que refusee" [a history not told as well as denied] and "une memoire refoulee et un dialogue difficile" [a repressed memory and difficult dialogue] (1999: 115, 120). Faced with such silence, as well as poor living conditions, discrimination and general indifference and lack of recognition, there is clearly a difference in behavior across generational lines. There is undoubtedly an abundance of evidence concerning the activism by children of harkis, which can take various forms and has evolved over the years. These forms of activism vary from hostage taking and violence to militancy in associations. Muller, author of Le Silence des harkis (1999), states that there are about 450 harki associations in France, some one third presided over by members of the second generation. One form of activism is clearly writing. This is a specific "vector of memory." Of our two authors, arguably, it is no surprise that Dalila, the youngest of the children, is well established as a journalist and therefore has the possibility (as well as the skills) to undertake such an experiment. Nonetheless, both authors' method also represents a different approach to identity, one that has been underestimated: the role of history and memory in identity, and the importance of identity to individuals and groups in France. As Abrial reminds us: 9

L'integration a la franjaise, batie autour de l'heritage republicain, a toujours eu pour but de faire acceder les individus au rang de citoyens. Le cas des harkis semble symptomatique; il montre que la reussite de l'integration n'est jamais acquise au seul fait de la nationalite; d'autres dimensions telles que la reconnaissance de l'histoire et de la culture des individus intervenant dans le processus. (Abrial 2001: 73) [The French model of integration, built around the Republican heritage, has always sought to make individuals into citizens. Kerchouche reflects well on her own position. She is aware of the difficulties of speaking in an other's place, as well as the difficulty of representing this history.

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The case of the harkis appears to be symptomatic; it shows that suc­ cessful integration is not simply a function of nationality; other ele­ ments such as recognition of one's history and culture also count.]

Kerchouche's text was published by Seuil in September 2003. It is very difficult to establish its genre. To some extent it's a novel, but it has a very strong historical and autobiographical/biographical content. It reads like oral history in part, with use of interviews, archives, and press coverage. The narrative oscillates between journalism/history (description of conditions, context etc.), first hand experience (her journey), and imaginative reconstruction of her family's history, the latter related in the third person "She," "Mohamed" and in the present tense (as if at times we were in the 1960s or 1970s reliving the fam­ ily's history). Rahmani's novel also includes elements of different genres: autobiography, poetry, and even contemporary history. The latter is evident in the way Rahmani includes documents (a death certificate, a memo from Louis Joxe) in her story. The poetry can include evocative use of language. She writes of her "pere-soldatmort-fauxfrancais-traitre" [father-deadsoldier-false-French-traitor]—underlining the father's status in France as he is viewed as a traitor and not really French, and is someone who never got over the war—who was threatened in Algeria by "freres-heros-devenus" [brothers-become heroes], compatriots who became heroes upon Independence, claiming resistance status and turning upon the harkis. 10

Dalila Kerchouche is the youngest of eleven children, the daughter of a harki, an Algerian who became a soldier in the French army and subsequently fled to France in 1962. Her book relates a journey she decided to undertake, retracing her family's steps through many exiles: exiled from Algeria, exiled within France since they are marginalized in numerous camps for over a decade, and exiled through silence and language. The journey takes her first around France and then in to Algeria. Zahia Rahmani is also the daughter of a harki. Her writing takes the form of a novel that is heavily autobiographical and biographical. Her father committed suicide in 1991 and the novel is an attempt to come to terms with his gesture. Both authors want to fore11

Assia Djebar adopts a similar style, for example in Le Blanc de l'Algerie (1996) as she represents the deaths of friends of hers in Algeria. She often uses italics to highlight the direct work of remembering, and shifts between historical narratives (of the Algerian War or colonial Algeria), personal reflection, and life histories of friends. She has also published Destins de harkis 1954-2003: aux racines de l'exil (2003). 11

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ground a number of aspects of the plight of the harkis and to under­ stand their family history more. Rahmani also travels to Algeria, but large parts of her narrative are conversations (fictional or otherwise) with her family, including the dead father and her mother who is still alive. She also introduces an enqueteur [detective] that allows her to write in the third person about her family's history and the experience of the harkis so as to foreground aspects of their condition. Kerchouche's main aim seems to be to understand her history, to create an identity, for as she says "Ici je dis adieu a la jeune femme insouciante que j'etais avec la promesse d'une identite neuve a redessiner" [Here (Marseille, beginning of journey) I say goodbye to the carefree young woman I was, in return I have the chance to rework a new identity] (33), to better understand her family, particularly her parents, and to draw the public's attention to the plight of the harkis and their terrible treatment. She says at one stage: "Eux ont souffert. Pas moi...J'aimerais pourtant, a travers ce livre, abolir cette frontiere avec les miens, toucher du doigt ce passe que je n'ai pas vecu. Pour me sentir, enfin membre de ma famille a part entiere" [They suffered, I d i d n ' t . H o w e v e r , through this book, I would like to overcome this barrier with my family, find out and experience this history which I didn't live through, in order, at last, to feel fully like a member of the family] (26). For Rahmani "Par l'ecriture je me defais de lui et vous le remets" [By writing I untangle him from me and hand him to you] (23), since "Ce regard insoutenable, cette figure extreme de la culpabilite, je veux m'en defaire" [The unbearable look, this extreme figure of guilt, I want to escape and overcome it] (24). 12

Similar concerns guided Yamina Benguigui in her book and documentary Me­ mories d'Immigres, which focus on the broader Maghrebian group, essentially work­ ers who came to France in the 1950s and 1960s and subsequently settled, thus playing a crucial, and grossly underestimated, role in French reconstruction after World War II, and specifically during the "30 glorious years" of economic growth. Benguigui interviews such people. Her aim is to write their history, achieve recognition for them, and understand them (reconcile generations). As she puts it: "Qu'avez-vous fait de mes parents, pour qu'ils soient aussi muets? Que leur avez-vous dit, pour qu'ils n'aient pas voulu nous enraciner sur cette terre, ou nous sommes nes? Qui sommesnous, aujourd'hui? Des immigres? Non! Des enfants d'immigres? Des Franjais d'origine etrangere? Des musulmans?" [What have you done to my parents, to make them so silent? What did you say to them, to make them not want to ground us in this land, where we were born? Who are we today? Immigrants? No! Children of immigrants? French of foreign descent? Muslims?] (Benguigui 1997: 9-10).

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Toward the end of the book, Kerchouce has certainly broken down barriers with her father and her brother. Her brother accompanied her during part of her journey and this seemed to bring them closer together. Learning important aspects of her father's history en­ abled greater discussion with her father at the end of the book, and he undertook to return to Algeria to visit family members. Similarly, de­ spite the difficulty of the task at hand—working through the past—by the middle of the book she can state "Je ne suis plus une enfant terrifiee a l'idee de grandir mais une femme qui regarde son passe en face pour se construire un avenir" [I am no longer a child terrified by the idea of growing up, rather a woman who faces up to her past in order to construct a future] (100). For Rahmani, however, this task is more complicated. Her father is dead, having committed suicide. Nonetheless, the dialogue with her father emerges towards the end of the novel, hence the fifth part of the book is entitled "Moze parle: La voix de Moze glisse en sa fille" [Moze speaks: the voice of Moze slips into his daughter]. A central concern of Rahmani's writing is clearly to understand her father's suicide. As we read on the book cover, "Plus de dix ans apres sa mort, sa fille tente de rendre compte de ce geste" [More than ten years later, his daughter attempts to understand this act]. Rahmani also engages in long discussions with her mother about the family's history. Rahmani insists on the silence of Moze about his past. Even at the end of the book, however, Moze refuses to talk. There is a clear division along generation lines that appears clearly in Kerchouche's novel when the author states: Comment faire comprendre a ma mere que j'ai besoin de connaitre mes origines? Impossible. Je connais sa reponse: 'Tu as un toit, un travail et tu manges a ta faim. Qu'est ce qu'il te manque?' L'essentiel: 'Une identite, ama,' ai-je envie de repondre. Mais je ne connais pas le mot en arabe. (194) [How can I make my mother understand that I need to understand my origins? It's impossible. I already know her reply: 'You have a place to live, a job and you have enough to eat. What is lacking?' The most important thing: 'An iden­ tity, mother,' I want to reply. But I don't know the word in Arabic]

There is a huge role for working through traumatic memories in Kerchouche's quest. For example, a central aspect of her narrative is understanding her brother's suicide. Mohamed had suffered tremen­ dously in the camps; for many years he struggled with depression and tragically he committed suicide. Rahmani also dedicates her novel to

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her brother (Mokrane) who committed suicide. One also sees through­ out Kerchouche's book how difficult this task is. For example, finding out terrible things is very hard for her to accept, but inherent to coming to terms with the past and working through it. Particularly interesting is her questioning of France and being French. Quite early in the book she says: "Au fond de moi, je commence a douter: si cette terre a rejete mes proches, pourquoi voudrait-elle de moi?" [In my heart, I am beginning to have doubts: if this country rejected my family, why would it welcome me?] (55). As the book progresses, the doubts be­ came more pronounced until "Juliette m ' a redonne confiance dans ce pays...comme elle me reconcilie avec cette partie francaise de moimeme que je commencais a detester" [Juliette has given me renewed confidence in this country...and she has managed to reconcile me with the French part of me that I was beginning to detest] (82). Juliette was one of the rare French people to be kind to her parents. The idea that a part of her is French is also noteworthy, given that the whole novel is a quest for identity. Who is she? French? Algerian? A daughter of a harki? Rahmani's view of French society and its treatment is also no­ table. She is highly critical of French administration in particular; she mentions "la logique des reclamants" [the logic of claimants] to describe the way the state made harkis demand everything in writing via the Administration: "Moze ne parlait pas et il bougeait peu...Il les noyait de plaintes. Des plaintes ecrites. Il y en a plein les armoires de l'Etat" [Moze didn't talk and he didn't go anywhere.. .He submerged them in complaints. Written complaints. The state's filing cabinets are full of them] (52). Rahmani also criticizes heavily the army's and politicians' treatment of the harkis. The issue of generation in both texts is also fascinating. Rahmani asks "Comment sortir seule d'une culpabilite endossee? Cette vie donnee au berceau" (23) [Alone, how can one overcome guilt that is shouldered. This life given at birth], because harki is "Le mot que ses enfants doivent dire, pour dire qu'ils sont ici par ce pere qui l'est; parce qu'ils sont enfants de... " (22) [The word that the children have to say, to state that they are here because of the father who is one, because they are children o f . ] . There is a clear sense in the novel that the exile of the harkis has clearly affected their children—to the extent that in some ways the children can be considered exiles—because the memory and identity issues related to exile are unresolved, or not worked through. As Kerchouche states: "Au mieux, un harki suscite la

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pitie, au pis, le mepris. Et cela vaut pour moi, sa fille, que je le veuille ou non" (14) [At best, people pity harkis, at worst, they feel contempt for them. Whether I, the daughter of a harki, like it or not, they see me in the same light]. Throughout the novel she introduces herself to peo­ ple as a fille de harki [daughter of a harki]. Later in the novel, anxious about her impending interview with a director of a camp, she states "Ils m'ont transmis leur peur" (100) [They (parents) transmitted their fear to me] (100). The nature of the exile(s) of the harkis is very well described throughout the book. The exile to France is central—although Kerchouche's journey to Algeria, which comes at the end of the book, clearly shows how her family was exiled previously, through colonialism (forcefully removed from their lands) and the war (forced to take sides): Ce-matin-la, lorsqu'ils ont pose le pied sur l'asphalte marseillais, leur vie a bascule. Mes parents ont survecu, mais ils ont abandonne une partie d'eux-memes, la-bas, en Algerie. C'etait il y a quarante ans. Ils sont sortis du bateau, mais leur histoire, elle, croupit toujours a fond de cale, rejetee par les deux rives de la Mediterranee. (23) [That morning, as they stepped onto the tarmac in Marseille, their life changed radically. My parents survived, but they abandoned a part of themselves, 'over there,' in Algeria. It was forty years ago. They left the boat, but their history lies rotting in the ship's hold, rejected by both sides of the Mediterranean.]

Memory is crucial to this novel. Much if not all the text is itself an act of memory, or based on memory. A stated aim is not to forget. Implicit in the approach is working through memories. One senses that a first step in reconciling the harkis with French society is recognition. However, there are numerous examples throughout the book of the divisive nature of this past. Upon interviewing the camp director, and ending on a note of conflict, Kerchouche states "j'ai un peu venge ma famille" (118) [I have avenged my family somewhat]. The whole book is extremely critical of the treatment of harkis. Groups particularly singled out for criticism include the pieds noirs (many of the camp workers were pied noirs), the general population (indifference), various governments, and the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF: French Communist Party). A hitherto little known fact emerges from the book, in the shape of claims the harkis were spolies [despoiled] by the French government, in so far as money due to them was withheld

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and put into the cost of running the camps. The extent of the camp controllers' corruption or bribery also surfaces, highlighting how much is still at stake in discussing the treatment of harkis. Silence is also a clear way in which exile is lived. Both authors grew up hearing very little about the Algerian War. For Rahmani: "Moze n'a pas parle...De ce qui l'a tue, de ce qu'il a compris, il n ' a rien dit" [Moze didn't talk...He didn't say anything about what killed him or what he had experienced] (20). Rahmani states concerning her father that "Il nous avait emmenes loin de ce qui aurait pu nous sig­ naler ce qu'il etait, ce qu'il avait fait ou ce qu'il avait perdu" [He took us far away from what could have indicated to us what he was, what he had done or what he had lost] (73). Silence of the parents has clearly been a motivating factor in Kerchouche's desire to find her roots. One example concerns her father, who learns of the death of his mother through a photo sent in the post. On his realization that his mother is dead: "Il s'enferme dans la chambre, cloitre dans une douleur muette que partagent avec lui bon nombre de familles de harkis dechirees par l'exil...Mon pere garde sa souffrance pour lui" (87) [He shut himself in the bedroom, cloistered in a silent pain that many families of harkis, destroyed by exile, experience. My father keeps his pain to himself.] Rahmani's father is also described as alone in his suffering: "Le jour, quand sa tristesse l'envahissait trop, il se cachait. Il s'isolait" (74) [During the day, when his sadness became too much to bear, he hid. He withdrew]. Similarly, language is a huge part of the exilic condition of harkis. Indeed, both daughter's educational success (Kerchouche is a journalist) has itself given a voice to the harkis. The parents are virtually unable to speak French and this has maintained them in a state of exclusion from French society. This exclusion is also gendered. As Kerchouche points out, talking of her mother: "Elle vit un double enfermement: au camp s'ajoute une deuxieme barriere, celle de la langue. Elle ne peut pas communiquer" (109) [She is imprisoned in two ways: not only in the camp but also through language. She cannot communicate]. This emerges in many spheres (mostly dealings with French administration), undoubtedly most tragically in the hospital where she has a miscarriage and the nurses and doctors are unable to communicate, or rather console her, over her loss. She is very much alone. The mother occupies a central place in the narrative. The gendered nature of the exilic condition, ethnicity, and memory, is particularly well drawn out in this novel.

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The lived reality of the male children is very different to that of the girls, who have to assume a huge amount of responsibility in the household. Exclusion from French society cannot be overestimated. Life in the various camps was financially, psychologically, and physically hard. The camps are variously described as "une horrible machinerie d'exclusion sociale et de disintegration humaine" [a horrible machine of social exclusion and human destruction], a "univers carceral cerne de barbeles" [carceral universe surrounded by barbed wire], where there is a "tutelle administrative, militaro-coloniale et destructrice" [administrative, military-colonial, and destructive supervision] (backcover and 15). Much of this treatment replicates colonialization, and the contradictions of French Algeria in that it was part of the French Republic but never functioned as such. This affected the children in many ways, not least through schooling. One example is given of the children who every Saturday are taken to the library by the father to study, and who at the end of the day watch French children playing sport. Kerchouche relates that: "Ils restent muets d'admiration: ce monde leur parait inaccessible, comme si une barriere quasi physique les separait. Parce qu'ils sont les <enfants du camp>, ils se sentent a part, differents, exclus" (139) [They stood there in silent admiration: this world seemed inaccessible to them, as if an almost physical barrier seperated them from it. Because they are 'children of the camps,' they feel separate, different, excluded]. 13

Throughout the novels one senses that both daughters are trying to come to terms with negative images of their parents, dominant in French and Algerian societies, that have shaped their own views of them. For Kerchouche's father, this is the charge that he is a traitor. For both parents, it is their apparent deference to authority. Hence we see in the imaginative reconstruction of their past a salient example of resistance to the camp authorities. Very interestingly, the end of the novel throws up the revelation that her father had supported the FLN while fighting for the French army. This is perhaps true. It certainly makes sense in so far as the war, being a Franco-Algerian, FrancoFrench and Algero-Algerian conflict, was extremely complicated, with clear cut positions often difficult to ascertain. For Rahmani, the In numerous ways this is similar to the gendered nature of immigrant conditions in France, well highlighted in Soraya Nini's novel Ils disent que je suis une beurette (1993).

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central issue, often absent, is what the father did during the Algerian War. Rahmani begins her quest by stating that she does not want to pardon her father when she states "Je ne veux pourtant pas l'innocenter. Qu'en est-il de cette faute? Celle que je porte, qui n'est pas mienne et que je ne peux pardonner?" (23) [I don't however want to excuse him. What about this fault? That which I carry, which is not mine and which I can't pardon?]. Later she suspects her father of dis­ sembling when answering a question from the detective, and says: "Aucun homme dans cette condition n'est innocent. Ca c'etait le pire pour nous, on avait honte tout le temps" (64-65) [No man in this state is innocent. That was what was worst for us, we were always ashamed]. Her father's crime emerges dramatically in a conversation with the mother towards the end of the book (171-72). It consists of murder by drowning of five men (wrongly) suspected of involvement in the death of Rahmani's grandfather (killed for allegedly collaborating with the French). Again we see the difficulty of working through memories. The mother has extreme difficulty talking about the subject. Zahia asks her, "Ils les ont jetes vivants ou morts? Ma mere ne me repond pas. Ils etaient morts?...J'insiste...Elle ne veut plus me parler...Elle prie et je lui demande encore qui etaient ces hommes et s'ils avaient des enfants. Elle me dit, Oui" (172) [Did they throw them in alive or dead? My mother does not answer. Were they d e a d ? . I insist...She no longer wants to talk...She prays and I ask her again who these men were and whether they had children. She says, Yes.] It is also significant that Kerchouche went to Algeria. She is clearly scared of going there initially, assuming people might be cruel to her. The very fact that Algeria was inaccessible to so many people who grew up there—due to civil war and a general disdain for France and the French—has hindered remembering the Algerian War. As President Bouteflika showed during his June 2000 visit to France, harkis are still viewed as traitors in Algeria. Bouteflika himself met some porteurs de valise (the metropolitan French who helped the FLN) in Paris during his visit, but refused to meet harkis, whom he described as collaborators. While the president spoke of pieds-noirs being able to return to Algeria, this was not to be the case for ex-OAS members or harkis. Yet, the author's desire to understand and reconcile with her father, as well as more generally to understand her origins, means that what took place in her trip to Algeria is central to her quest. While there she gets to the center of her concerns, with long

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passages describing the Algerian War, her father's engagement in the French army, and his actions during the war. Also significant is her realization of the complexities of the war, exemplified in the fact that her father helped the FLN as well as the French army, and her increased understanding of contemporary Algeria, with significant atten­ tion given to the civil war that raged in the 1990s and the place of women in society. The idea of retracing the steps of one's family also points to the importance of place to memory, as exemplified by Pierre Nora's con­ cept of "lieux de memoire" [sites or realms of memory] (1996-98) and Maurice Halbwach's social frames of memory (1997). Interestingly, in the case of the harkis, while it is true that the central aspect of their life took part in Algeria (war and reasons for exodus), there are many sites of memory in France—as there are for other groups, such as the people killed on 17 October 1961—and these sites, at least in the case of the Paris demonstrators, are becoming focal points for memory. Conclusion The case of the harkis shows that questions of nationality pose enormous difficulties in France and in French history. The children of harkis are also struggling to make France home despite the fact that the Algerian War ended over forty years ago. Both Kerchouche and Rhamani are very much involved in trying to heal the damage that has been done by their families' exiles at personal, family, and group levels. Through their writing they are attempting to make France home by highlighting the plight of their family and by actively creating identities. Writing can be seen as healing trauma (in a Freudian perspective), as an example of agency in collective memory (in a pluralist perspective), and as constructing memories that provide group cohesion in the present (in a Halbwachsian perspective). It constitutes a vector of memory and, on a personal level, aids in the working through of difficult memories and/or a traumatic past. Historical fiction in this sense also functions as a discourse, with the writing by children of harkis setting out to challenge dominant discourses. As with other developments in French collective memory of the Algerian War, these texts can be seen as stepping stones in a long and arduous (always incomplete and evolving) working through of the past, which is still at a fairly early stage in France. Kerchouche and Rhamani's

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writing shows the importance of agency to collective memory in the choice, and possibility, of writing and representing history, and therefore of intervening in the contemporary public sphere debate about this traumatic aspect of the past.

The Language of Exile: Haunting Desires in Djebar's La Disparition de la langue frangaise Ana de Medeiros Abstract Assia Djebar's La Disparition de la langue frangaise (2003) seems to belong unproblematically in Djebar's ceuvre as another example of the author's ex­ ilic worldview. However, in La Disparition the main narrator and protagonist is an Algerian man, making the text apparently at odds with the feminocentricity of Djebar's writings, which tend to involve a female narrator and/or protagonist through whose perspective the situation of Algerian women, past and present, is explored. This chapter examines the themes and devices in La Disparition that seem typical of Djebar's writing, yet takes account of their specificity in the text. The chapter discusses the apparently unfamiliar "male" voice and perspective in order to show that it is, in effect, haunted by a female presence that is consonant with the feminocentric impulse throughout Djebar's overall literary explorations of Algerian women's exile.

Assia Djebar's La Disparition de la langue frangaise (The Disappear­ ance of the French Language) was published in 2003. Readers of Djebar will find many of its technical and thematic features familiar; they will recognize its experimentation with narrative form, and its treatment of themes such as exile, identity, and language. In these respects, La Disparition may seem to belong unproblematically in Djebar's ceuvre: one further exemplification of the author's view of the 1

All translations from the French in this chapter are mine. A collection of essays, Algeria in Others' Languages (2002), includes a number of texts that shed light on the linguistic, and, by extension, the political, turmoil of the Algeria that forms the backdrop for Djebar's novel. I refer to one study in particular in my analysis of Djebar's treatment of the link between exile and language: "The Algerian Linguicide" (2002), written by the Algerian-born academic Djamila Saadi-Mokrane who now lives in exile in Lille, France and teaches at the university of Lille 3.

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world. However, in other respects, the work seems uncharacteristic. In particular, Djebar is known for the feminocentricity of her writings, which tend to involve a female narrator and/or protagonist through whose perspective the situation of Algerian women, past and present, is explored. In La Disparition, however, the protagonist is an Algerian man named Berkane and the situation of Algerian women is not foregrounded. But if these aspects of the work render it "unfamiliar," it is in a Freudian sense, in that the unfamiliar turns out to be based in the familiar. For in spite of the (pseudo-)masculine perspective of the narrative, the reader can still detect a feminocentric tendency. This chapter discusses both the familiar and the unfamiliar aspects of Djebar's text. Exploring the familiar is a relatively straightforward matter, justified by the fact that the work is of recent date. Approaching the unfamiliar, however, is more complex, as the "male" voice and per­ spective of Djebar's text is effectively haunted by a female presence. This in turn renders it consonant with the feminocentric and so, in a sense, familiar after all. 2

The familiar La Disparition does not offer the reader a "traditional" narrative structure in the form of a first- or third-person narrative observing conventions of vraisemblance inherited from the nineteenth century, but involves experimentation with narrative form. Admittedly, there is a principal narrator whose voice and perspective command the major part of the narrative. However, there are a number of intercalated and/or parallel narratives, resulting in a polyphonic text. Such a struc­ ture can be used to stabilize a narrative, if one voice reliably and con­ sistently "contains" another (the precedent of The Thousand and One Nights comes to mind). However, Djebar subverts convention by de3

I am using the terms "familiar" and "unfamiliar" to allude to the German term unheimlich, which is often translated as "uncanny." In her groundbreaking workAssia Djebar, la resistance de l'ecriture [Assia Djebar: Resistance and Writing] (2001), Mireille Calle-Gruber asserts: "c'est donc a la scene de l'ecriture nomade que l'oeuvre d'Assia Djebar sans cesse, a nouveau, convie—une oeuvre vouee a deplacement par le proces d'une fabuleuse transmission. La conteuse des Mille et Une Nuits en est figure paradigmatique: Sheherazade la narratrice est deux, ne survivant que grace a Dinazearde la soeur, laquelle veille et l'eveille et lui souffle les mots. Elles sont deux, autant dire mille et une, voix differentes differees" [It is therefore to the scene of nomadic writing that Assia Djebar's work calls us 3

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stabilizing the voice of the main narrator. The novel opens as a firstperson narrative in which Berkane tells his own story; however, whilst Berkane's story continues it suddenly becomes a third-person narra­ tive in the second section of the first chapter. The reverse happens in the third subsection of the first chapter, as Berkane resumes the telling of his own story. Such switches in voice and perspective serve to "fracture" the containing narrative voice, and so to destabilize novelistic conventions. A similar effect is achieved by other variations in nar­ rative perspective as the text incorporates letters, poems, a novelwithin-a-novel, and journal entries. These aspects of the text render it self-referential, in the sense that they oblige the reader to reflect critically on the conventions that tend to govern narrative form and the generation of textual meanings. Readers who are familiar with Djebar's earlier works will recognize these various devices as being characteristic of the author. It is also worth noting the numerous intertextual references and paratextual epigraphs which in most cases have, as a common thread, the topos of exile, and are representative of a number of languages and cultures. Djebar's experimentation with narra4

5

ceaselessly, repeatedly—this is a work destined to displacement by the process of a fabulous transmission. The female narrator of the Thousand and One Nights is a para­ digmatic figure of this process: Sheherazade the narrator is two people, as she only survives thanks to Dinazearde, her sister, who stays awake watching and wakes her and tells her what to say. They are two, in other words a thousand and one deferred different voices] (2001: 256). Indeed in La Disparition, Djebar deploys her wellestablished modus operandi of allowing a multitude of voices to invade the text in order to keep the discourse alive and to bear witness to historical developments. This time, however, it is not her countrywomen's oral tradition that she wishes to preserve, but the relationship to the French language of her Algerian countrymen and countrywomen. Although the alternation between first- and third-person narrative is generally clear throughout the text, the section where Berkane retells the tale about the French headmaster of his school who punishes him for drawing the Algerian flag and demands to see his father, is somewhat obscure. For the most part Berkane is telling the story to his friend Rachid, but towards the end of the story an impersonal narrator takes over and describes Berkane telling the story as he continues to describe what happened. In 1988 Djebar, as if anticipating "the 1990 law, which generalized the exclusive use of Arabic in institutions and public service" (Saadi-Mokrane 2002: 52), spoke against the enforcement of one language over another in the wish to annihilate not only French but also Berber. "Aujourd'hui? Il me semble que le risque de durcissement, pour ne pas dire de sterilisation, pointe lorsque les pouvoirs culturels, en affichant un monolinguisme arabe tout theorique, rameutent un faux bilinguisme subi et mal vecu .. .La vitalite d'expression se bloque dans une dualite illusoire, dans un face-a-face de deux langues (tantot franco-arabe, tantot arabo-berbere)" (Djebar 1999: 57) [Today? It 4

5

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tive form is thus linked (as in other works) with her interest in the in­ terconnected themes of heterogeneity, exile and identity. Another recognizable aspect of Djebar's writing is her exploration of the theme of language, both native and acquired. This is highlighted by Djebar's somewhat enigmatic title, which seems to proclaim the disappearance of the French language. As we begin to read, we under­ stand who wants to see French disappear, and why. For Berkane's story is written against the pressures introduced by the Arabization of Algeria, which aims to suppress the use of French (and, for that matter, Berber). In such political circumstances, it is dangerous to write in French. Berkane's brother clearly links his disappearance to the fact that he writes a text in French: "En somme, c'est pour finir ce texte qu'il est alle au-devant du danger!" (2003: 262) [In brief, it is to finish this text that he ventured into danger!]. To write as an Arab, but in the colonizer's language, represents a threat to life. It is thus not the French language but one of its users that disappears. The threat of disappearance is enacted on the user of the language as the language itself survives. Indeed, in its closing stages La Disparition (2003) foregrounds the extent to which various characters nurture, embrace or protect French as the medium of Berkane's story. For instance, we are told that Berkane's last lover Nadjia awakened in him his desire to write in French, and her own (French) writing is included in the text; that Berkane's brother Driss will continue writing his story in French; and that Marise, Berkane's ex-partner, takes the majority of his work back to France and so safeguards it. There is a heroism in these characters' attempts to protect (Berkane's) French against the threat of disappearance, and so we might infer that Djebar wishes to show that any attempt to have a language and its associated culture "disappear"—whether it be a question of Berber, Arabic, French, or some hybrid—is an instance of oppressive hegemony. This places modern Algeria at risk of imitating the colonizer's tendency towards the imposition of a single language and culture on a diverse and complex cul6

seems to me that the risk of a certain hardening, indeed sterilization, comes into being when the powers that dictate culture, whilst promoting an entirely theoretical Arabic monolingualism, stir up a false bilingualism that is entered into passively without being truly assumed...Vitality of expression is blocked in an illusory duality, in a confrontation of two languages (French-Arabic and Arabic-Berber).] The link between writing and danger is explored by Djebar in her previous works; Le Blanc de I'Algerie (Algerian White, 1996), in particular, provides the reader with a long list of writers who died prematurely or were found murdered. 6

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tural heritage. Djebar weaves heteroglossia into her representation of the cultural and historical background of her country. In La Disparition, as in previous texts, hegemony in all its forms is presented as undesirable and unlikely to succeed, be it led by the French colonizers or by Algeria's post-independence leaders. The implication is that lin­ guistic and cultural hybridity must be celebrated and harnessed rather than discouraged. The question of language takes on other forms in La Disparition, recalling once again previous works by Djebar. Although the text is in French, a number of dialogues between Berkane and other characters are designated as having taken place in vernacular Arabic, and Berkane needs to use the various languages and dialects at his disposal to communicate with other characters. The French-language surface of the narrative thus repeatedly enters into tension with the idea of a nonFrench "original" that it "translates." This situation inevitably raises a question of reliability for the reader, who cannot know what has notionally been lost (and gained) in translation. In a sense, this places the reader in the situation of the (monolingual) colonizer; s/he must listen to a hybrid voice that can only imperfectly convey the perspective and experience of the colonized. Berkane emphasizes the problem of language when he becomes Nadjia's scribe and emphasizes that the French he uses to write down her story has to be an approximation of what she has said; though it is his only means of remaining close to her, it incorporates an inevitable distance. Moreover, not only is the original speaker's meaning jeopardized in this process; the translator/narrator figure suffers a loss of his own (Arabic/French) voice as he finds himself occupying a linguistic and cultural entre deux: "a cause de tous ces mots ecrits ou rememores, j'avais perdu ma propre 8

7

As Saadi-Mokrane puts it: "The Arabic, French, and Berber languages are all con­ nected to the country's history, but in different ways. They exist as a collision of words, and endure all the fractures that destabilize society....To use a brutal metaphor, the leaders of Algeria would like to linguistically castrate the people, and, to do this, have used the resources of the state to recreate a lost image of the Orient" (2002: 47). John Neubauer argues that, "Heteroglossia is the dialogic coexistence of dialects, jargons, social speech types, and professional and other discourses. For Bakhtin, the life of a language is a perpetual struggle between centripetal institutional forces that strive for standardization and language's inherent centrifugal tendency to diversify and fragment, thereby producing a linguistic and ideological heteroglossia" (1998: 272). 8

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voix, mes deux langues soudain brouillees, confondues, emmelees, comment lui expliquer ce nceud en moi" (2003: 140) [Because of all these written or remembered words, I had lost my own voice, my two languages suddenly confused, blended, mixed together, how to ex­ plain to her this knot inside me.] After Nadjia's departure, as her words seem more distant, Berkane continues to write as if from her perspective but is even more troubled now by the disparity between her (spoken) words and his (written) text: "Je ne peux qu'ecrire, avec une deformation inevitable: lorsqu'elle parlait arabe, comment, me rappelant ses phrases et les rapportant dans l'autre langue, mon ecriture pourrait-elle etre vraiment un baume a son absence?" (2003: 167) [I can only write, and my writing inevitably brings distortion: when she spoke Arabic, how could my writing, which recalled her sentences and reported them in the other language, really comfort me in her absence?] The narrator's difficulty can of course be assimilated to the experience of those in Algeria who communicate in spoken Arabic but are unable to use a corresponding written form. Such Ara­ bic speakers are obliged to use French to express themselves when they write. Berkane is in such a situation. When he imagines Nadjia he does so using Arabic words and concepts, but when he writes he writes in French. This leads him to wonder if his words can become a deadly veil, comparable to a shroud separating him from Nadjia even as he tries to capture their relationship in words. "J'ecris dans votre ombre, dans une langue de solitude dont la lumiere me blesse! Ce francais va-t-il geler ma voix? Tandis que ma main court sur le papier, serais-je en train de tendre un linceul entre toi et moi?" (2003: 172) [I write in your shadow, in a language of solitude whose brilliance is painful to me! Is this French going to freeze my voice? Whilst my hand guides the pen rapidly across the page, might I be in the process of drawing a shroud between you and myself?] 9

Just as the text can be said to be haunted by the disappearance of the protagonist, the character himself is haunted by the violent past of his country, and by the languages that make up its rich history. "Elle [Nadjia] trouvait des mots d'hier, de l'autre siecle, de nos communs ancetres oublies et elle me les offrait, ces vocables, l'un apres l'autre, a chaque scansion, a chaque rebond de notre volupte: ce fut comme si sa langue, soudain inconnue meme de moi, creusait un long et sinueux parcours" (2003: 149) [Nadjia found old-fashioned words, from the previous century, the words of our common, forgotten ancestors and she offered them to me, these words, one after the other, at every turn, at every jump of our [sexual] pleasure: it was as if her language, of which suddenly even I was ignorant, were forging a long and twisting path.]

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Another theme characteristic of Djebar's writing (and one which is linked to the question of language) is the difficulty of achieving a stable identity, especially where cultures overlap and modify each other across history. From the start Berkane reminds us that Algerians have a choice of ancestors, which renders any kind of collective identity problematic. Berkane evokes the Casbah to convey this idea: Notre univers d'enfant restait limite a ce vieux coeur de la capitale, et nous appelions «Imazighen,» les Ancetres—non ceux de mon pere (il se sentait fiere d'etre Chaoui), ni ceux de ma mere (nee a la Casbah, mais de parents descendus du Djurdjura, elle ne parlait point kabyle et se voulait citadine, jusque dans son arabe raffine); ces «Imazighen» devinrent pourtant nos heros, eux, les corsaires turcs qui avaient ecume la Mediterranee, ces «rois d'Alger» du seizieme au dixhuitieme siecle... (2003: 14) [The world of our childhood remained limited to this old heart of the capital, and we called our Ancestors 'Imazighen'—not those of my father (he was proud of being Chaoui), nor those of my mother (who was born in the Casbah, but of parents descended from the Djurdjura; she did not speak kabyle and wished to be a city-dweller in all kinds of ways, including the refined Arabic she spoke); these 'Imazighen' nevertheless became our heroes, those Turkish pirates who had ploughed up the Mediterranean Sea, those 'Kings of Algiers' from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.]

Nevertheless, it is to the Casbah that the narrator is repeatedly drawn. Initially he returns to the Casbah in his imagination, nostalgically, using it to found a fragile sense of identity rooted in childhood experi­ ence. Eventually, however, he physically returns to the Casbah. He hopes that this will mark his return not just to his home country but to the neighborhood of his childhood, which he sees as the "real" return to be achieved: "enfin le jour du veritable retour" (2003: 67) [At last the day of the true return]. But he is assaulted and treated like a for­ eigner and/or a rich man by the generation of boys who have replaced him and his friends in the Casbah. He thus finds himself exiled from his own past in the very place in which he seeks that past (a case of the familiar turning out to be unfamiliar). He had gently teased Marise, whose head was full of literary references to the mythical Casbah. However, once he has been assaulted, the Casbah of his youth turns out to be as unreal as the Casbah of westerners like Marise. Nonetheless, even when Berkane is faced with this realization, he continues to be haunted by the images of the events he has witnessed in the area, both pleasant and violent. It is as though these images might

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permit him the "real" return to the "real" home he so desperately craves. Another key theme connecting La Disparition with earlier works is the topos of exile. The first sentence of La Disparition, which is pronounced by Berkane, stresses the importance of language and its relation to exile: "Je reviens donc, aujourd'hui meme au pays...'Homeland,' le mot, etrangement, en anglais, chantait, ou dansait en moi, je ne sais plus" (2003: 13) [So it is today, today that I re­ turn to my country...'Homeland,' the English word, oddly enough, sang, or perhaps danced in me, I can no longer know which]. The text's opening gives the reader the impression that Berkane is speak­ ing of his arrival in Algeria, but as he continues it becomes clear that the day of his return home was the day he started to write. As the story progresses we learn of Berkane's past desire to write and that when he retired early he told his colleagues it was in order to write. However, the act of writing does not in itself provide the hoped-for return. Rather, the text is punctuated with a number of false "returns home" or premature announcements of the end of exile. For instance, when Berkane hoped his return to the Casbah would be his true return home, this turns out to be a false hope. Finally the return to the (childhood) Casbah (and perhaps the end of exile) are achieved through writing after all. Thus, when he writes about and for Nadjia he declares: "Je me reinstalle en territoire d'enfance, meme si ma Casbah s'en va en poussiere...Toi, [Nadjia, tu es] ma Casbah retrouvee" (2003: 180-81) [I am settling back into my childhood territory, even if my Casbah is crumbling to dust...You, (Nadjia, you are) my Casbah rediscovered]. 10

Haunting is a particularly striking element of Djebar's writing. In Le Blanc de l'Algerie she states: "Oui, tant d'autres parlent de l'Algerie, avec ferveur ou avec colere. Moi, m'adressant a mes disparus et reconfortee par eux, je la reve (1996: 261) [Yes, so many others speak of Algeria, with fervor or with rage. As for me, I address myself to my lost ones and, strengthened by them, I dream Algeria]. As Calle-Gruber points out, Djebar's link with the revenants who comfort her and allow her to dream of Algeria is not expressed in a macabre manner but rather in a celebratory way which imbues writing with the "pouvoir de revenance et de survivance" [power of coming back to life and surviving] (2001: 256). Similarly, in La Femme sans sepulture (The Woman Without Burial Place, 2002) the narrator identified as Assia Djebar finds it impossible to return to the ancestral home and wonders why it has taken her over twenty years to tell the story of Zoulikha started in 1981 in Paris and only finished in 2001 in New York. However, in La Disparition (2003) this impossibility is overcome with the return, in 1991, to Algeria of Berkane who has spent the past twenty years living and working in France.

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The theme of exile is thus intimately connected with Djebar's treatment of love. Indeed, it is not in relation to one but two objects of love that the problem of exile is set up and resolved. At first, having returned from France to Algeria, Berkane's writing seems to be lim­ ited to composing letters to Marise. These letters prolong their relationship and give him the impression of conversing with the absent object but he never posts them and does not intend for them ever to be read. After having been separated for nearly a year from Marise, Berkane meets Nadjia. It is immediately after having made love to Nadjia that Berkane is able to start writing the novel about himself that he had planned. When Berkane meets Nadjia he stops writing his 'dead letters' to Marise and it is as if he is only able to break with his recent past and with his exile in Paris when he falls out of love with Marise and falls in love with Nadjia. His prolonged exile in France then is to be understood in terms of his need to be with Marise and with his impossibility to write. Berkane does not admit this to himself, but he imagines that his mother must have thought as much and projects the following as having been declared by her: "Pour nos fils la-bas, il faut le comprendre et l'accepter, on ne peut faire autrement, la France, c'est, bien sur, une femme-en-France! La France, insistait-elle avec un pale sourire, c'est forcement une Francaise" (2003: 57-58) [For our sons over there, we must understand and accept this, we cannot do otherwise, France is, of course, a woman-in-France! France, she would repeat with a wan smile, is necessarily a Frenchwoman]. 11

The unfamiliar If the themes and devices examined so far characterize Djebar's writing, the use of a male narrator and principal character seem at first to represent a break with her tendency towards the feminocentric. How might this new departure in her writing be interpreted? In fact, when we attend closely to the male narrator's voice, we realize that he is subtly feminized by a network of associations to his own mother. This suggests that in spite of his claim to have adopted the "Imazighen" as his Ancestors, his identity is inherited to a great extent or entirely A part of the unfinished novel entitled L'adolescent [The Adolescent] is found by his brother after his disappearance and given to Marise. It is only then that the reader realizes that the third section of the second chapter in La Disparition (2003) entitled "L'adolescent" may be read as a part of Berkane's own novel.

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from his mother, who was, as already noted, "nee a la Casbah, mais de parents descendus du Djurdjura" [born in the Casbah, but from parents descended from the Djurdjura]. In the course of his writing Berkane refers to a number of family members, siblings and parents, relatives who were all a part of his life in Algeria as he grew up. However, it is only his mother, who passed away while he was in France, who is seen to be alive in him. He refers to the image of his father (who also died) haunting him (2003: 51), but his mother's words and language are constant companions which were especially important to him in exile: "Ma mere, Mma Halima, c'est vrai qu'elle m ' a suivi, par la pensee, tout le temps, en France" (2003: 57) [My mother, Mma Halima, it is true that she followed me, in thought, always, in France]. In contrast Berkane says that he cannot bring himself to mention his father while he lives in France: "Durant les jours passes avec Marise, a Paris, j ' a i evoque souvent ma mere; jamais mon pere, comme s'il m'etait difficile de le transporter, par memoire, jusqu'en France" (2003: 51) [During those days spent with Marise in Paris, I often spoke of my mother; never of my father, as if I found it difficult to transport him, in my memory, into France]. It would therefore seem that in the depaysement of exile he clings to the memory of his mother to provide a sense of home. Curiously, though, Berkane also seems to identify himself with his mother (and/or as his mother's child ) in a sexual way. Having re­ turned to Algeria, he recalls his time with Marise, in France, in the following terms: Un trouble m'a saisi. La nostalgie de ta voix, de nos propos, de nos dialogues de la nuit, de ton corps que je ne caressais pas seulement de mes mains, te souviens-tu, mais avec mes mots, brises, proferes entre nos baisers.. .mes mots d'enfant, ceux de ma mere, tu ne comprends rien a ce babillage arabe que j'adresse a ta peau...j'invente des diminutifs pour toi, jusque dans la langue maternelle, tu ris, tu te courbes pour les entendre, je te les glisse au creux de l'oreille, je les coule le long de ton cou, tu vas les comprendre, ils te penetrent, sans que je les traduise. (2003: 29-30) [I felt unsettled. I was missing your voice, our conversations, our nocturnal dialogues, your body which I caressed not only with my hands, do you remember, but with my words, broken words, uttered between our kisses.my childhood words, those of my mother, you understand nothing of this Arabic babble that I speak to your s k i n . I invent diminutives for you, even in my maternal tongue, you laugh, you arch yourself to hear them, I slip them into the hollow of your ear, I run them along your neck, you

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will understand them, they penetrate you, without my needing to translate them.]

Here, Berkane speaks "mes mots d'enfant" [my childhood words], which are also "ceux de ma mere" [those of my mother], during lovemaking; this lends a peculiar resonance to "la langue maternelle," so that it might mean "mother's language" as well as "mother tongue." It is as if for Berkane the mother's words are a necessary condition for the act of penetration and that he is never truly separated from her. Infantilization and feminization seem here to coincide. If the narrator identifies himself with his mother, he also identifies Marise with her. As he continues to remember both women their two voices become indistinguishable: "il ne savait plus si c'etait vraiment sa mere ou la voix de Marise (elle aimait chantonner en espagnol) qui l'accompagnait jusqu'au cceur de la nuit" (2003: 21) [he no longer knew if it was really his mother or the voice of Marise (she liked to sing softly in Spanish) that accompanied him deep into the night]. The numerous references to these haunting maternal tones are contained in the first two sections of the text before Berkane returns for the first time to the Casbah and is made to accept that it is not as he remem­ bers. Until that somewhat traumatic moment the image of the Casbah was linked primarily with the image of the mother, so that the "veritable retour" was also a return to the mother: "celle-ci, pour toujours, assise dans son humble patio de la maison d'enfance, rue Bleue, a la Casbah" (2003: 35) [She, for ever more, seated at her humble patio of my childhood home, in the rue Bleue, in the Casbah]. For him, therefore, home and mother are fused together and the relationship with Marise is linked to his original relationship with his mother. In this way, the narrator is feminized as his deepest yearnings and motivations seem to emanate from his mother. Admittedly, when he meets Nadjia there is a sense that he has finally found his "home," but here too there is a hint of the mother's presence. For (in the quotation we have already examined) Berkane remarks: "Je me reinstalle en territoire d'enfance, meme si ma Casbah s'en va en poussiere.. .Toi, [Nadjia, tu es] ma Casbah retrouvee (2003: 180-81) [I am settling back into my childhood territory, even if my Casbah is crumbling to dust...You, [Nadjia, you are] my Casbah rediscovered]. As Nadjia becomes the rediscovered Casbah she allows him to return to his childhood territory; she too has been cast as his lost mother. In these ways, then, the mother constitutes a haunting presence in the narrative

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and serves to feminize the narrator. The narrator is "invaded" by his mother's language and culture, which he carries with him everywhere. La Disparition de la langue frangaise (2003) explores many themes and uses many devices that are characteristic of Djebar's ear­ lier work. Her use of a male narrative voice raises the question of whether or not this marks a departure from Djebar's feminocentric tendency. However, the male narrator is haunted by the language and voice of his own mother, and is therefore feminized, thus confirming that Djebar wishes to use the narrator's problematic "maleness" to explore from yet another perspective the familiar themes of exile, identity, and language.

Exile: Rupture and Continuity in Jean Vanmai's Chan Dang and Fils de Chan Dang Tess Do Abstract This chapter focuses on the novels of the New Caledonian-born writer Jean Vanmai, Chan Dang (1980) and Fils de Chan Dang (1983), which describe the working conditions and exilic existence of the little known Chan Dang, the voluntary workers from Tonkin (North Vietnam) who moved to New Caledonia in the late 19 and early 20 centuries. Descended from a Chan Dang family, Vanmai wishes to preserve the memory of the Chan Dang's past. In writing their story, Vanmai sees himself as the guardian of the Chan Dang's collective memory, a keeper and defender of their common past. The chapter argues that in his depictions of the Chan Dang, Vanmai breaks the silence surrounding colonial exile and exploitation and provides a full account of the Chan Dang's exile that can be integrated into the contemporary history of Vietnamese migration. Moreover, Vanmai also stresses the need to fulfil one's filial duty among the young Vietnamese generations. With this symbolic filial act, Vanmai pays homage to his Vietnamese ancestors and earns himself an honourable title, that of a true dutiful "son of Chan Dang." th

th

Unlike some two million Vietnamese migrants who have settled in many Western countries, most of them being refugees who fled their country at different points in time to avoid persecution after the communist takeover in 1975, the eight thousand Vietnamese migrants and their descendants of mixed race who live in New Caledonia today did not all leave their homeland for political reasons. With only about a thousand "boatpeople" who came to New Caledonia in the 1980s, the majority of the Caledo-Viets are descendants of the voluntary workers who were recruited as early as 1891, and again in the 1920s and 1930s, when Vietnam still belonged to Indochina, a French colony composed of Tonkin (North Vietnam), Annam (Central Vietnam), Cochinchina (South Vietnam), Laos and Cambodia. According to Jean

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Vanmai (1991: 35) the first 791 workers (about fifty of them women) arrived from Hai Phong in Noumea on 12 March 1891, after a long and exhausting sea voyage. In the following decades more came and their numbers peaked in 1929 when a total of 6,400 Vietnamese workers were recorded in New Caledonia (Vanmai 1991: 48). They signed a five-year contract with the French Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and were employed by the mining companies and landowners of New Caledonia. Legally speaking, these workers were not living in exile. According to the terms of their contract they were to be repatriated after five years and have their return organized and paid for by the French government. Two factors, however, turned their temporary stay in New Caledonia into a long period of exile during which an expatriate community emerged and established itself. The first factor is a combination of geographical and cultural displacement, social isolation and exclusion from public life in New Caledonia, and mistreatment and exploitation in the workplace that made them feel their human rights and dignity had been violated. The second factor is a combination of unpredictable political events, including the outbreak of World War II, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the decolonization of Indochina, and the US military involvement in Vietnam, that put a halt to their repatriation. For the young Vietnamese who left their villages in the 1930s hoping to return five years later with enough savings to help their family and start a new life, exile was experienced as a particularly trying and painful period of change, rupture and separation. Because of the war in Vietnam, contact with loved ones back home was lost, husbands and wives suffered decades of separation, and marriages were threatened by infidelity and betrayal. In the new country family and traditions were broken and New Caledonian-born children grew up culturally uprooted. Against this backdrop New Caledonian-born writer Jean Vanmai chooses to describe the life and working conditions of the Chan Dang, the voluntary workers from Tonkin, in his first two novels, Chan Dang (1980) and Fils de Chan Dang (1983). Descended from a Chan Dang family, Vanmai wishes to preserve the memory of the Chan Dang's past. In his "Recit de vie" (2003), and in my interview with him in December 2003, he pointed out that the repatriation of nearly 5,000 Chan Dang and their families in the 1960s, leaving a mere 988 Vietnamese in New Caledonia in 1964, prompted him to write:

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je pense qu'il faudrait bien que quelqu'un de chez nous se decide, un jour ou l'autre, a ecrire l'epopee des Vietnamiens en NouvelleCaledonie. Il est inconcevable de laisser disparaitre cette periode du­ re, penible, difficile, vecue par tous ces gens, sans laisser la moindre trace ecrite. (Vanmai 2003) [I think that one of us must decide, one day or another, to write the epic tale of the Vietnamese in New Caledonia. It is inconceivable to let this hard, painful and difficult period that was experienced by all these people disappear without any writ­ ten trace.]

In writing their story, Vanmai, who did not leave New Caledonia like many of his compatriots, sees himself as the guardian of the Chan Dang's collective memory, a keeper and defender of their common past. By speaking out for them and giving his people a voice, Vanmai does more than just follow his passion for creative writing (he took a writing course in preparation for his first novel): within the French dominant culture he makes a powerful claim for a cultural space for all the Caledo-Viet citizens in New Caledonia and, as a descendant of Chan Dang, responds to their needs to be heard, to express them­ selves, to interpret their histories of migration and settlement, and to regain respect and dignity. Vanmai's courageous and transgressive act, as he himself recognizes it to be in a country known as "le pays du non-dit" [the land of the unspoken] breaks the silence that envelops this difficult colonial period and allows the younger generations of Vietnamese in New Caledonia to reconnect with their parents' and grandparents' past and country of origin, and to be proud of their cultural legacy (Vanmai 2003). As he noted in an interview with me on 3 December 2003, it is no coincidence that his foremost and dearest reader is his own daughter. "It is for her that I wrote all my books," he said, "she is a passionate reader and a good critic." Memory, however, can be painful and, whilst it is both central to the experience of exile and essential to the formation of a Vietnamese collective identity in New Caledonia, recollection of the past is an act that many Chan Dang would rather avoid. In the 1960s when, as a young man, Vanmai started collecting documents and interviewing the old Chan Dang about their experiences as migrant workers, he encountered significant resistance from his own people who had no wish to be reminded of their extreme poverty, their degrading hard labor in the colony, their physical and mental suffering at being treated like animals by their white masters, and the humiliation and indignity of being slave workers in a foreign land that Dong Sy Hua (1993: 19), an

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exiled interpreter who lived in Melanesia between 1938 and 1947, described as "ces enfers sur terre" [hells on earth]. Resurrecting such a violent colonial past was not an easy task for Vanmai, who ran the double risk of hurting the Chan Dang and offending the French Cale­ donian community by exposing the cruel exploitation of the Vietnamese workers at the hands of the "colons," the French employers and landowners in New Caledonia. It is not by chance that Vanmai only published Chan Dang in 1980, twenty years after the repatriation of the majority of the Vietnamese workers, and at a time when those who decided to stay in New Caledonia were well integrated in their new homeland. If it had taken two decades for this New Caledonian-born citizen of Vietnamese origin, now the well-known, well-respected Vice-President of l'Amicale des Vietnamiens de Nouvelle Caledonie (AVNC) [the Vietnamese Association of New Caledonia] to dig out his manuscript and finally make public the story of his parents and the Chan Dang, it is because he was well aware of the controversy and sensitivity surrounding such a topic. "Une fois que le livre etait mis en vente en librairie, je tremblais des lors en me disant que les gens d'ici n'aiment pas qu'on remue leur passe [recalled Vanmai in his interview with Hamid Mokaddem (2007: 203)]. D'ailleurs, mes compatriotes me faisaient comprendre, indirectement, que Vanmai fout la merde. Il remue la merde. On n'en veut pas! Connaissant des habitudes de l'ile, en ce temps-la, j'avais peur des reactions exacerbees et des ennuis graves." [Once the book was out for sale in the bookstore I was afraid, thinking that the people here don't like to have their past disturbed. Moreover, my fellow countrymen made me understand, indirectly, that Vanmai is making a mess of things. He is messing things up. One doesn't want that! Knowing the island's habits at that time I was afraid of some aggressive reactions and serious troubles.] As the first person to relate the life experience of the colonial workers from the point of view of the subaltern minority group, that is, the Vietnamese miners, Vanmai's book poses a serious challenge to the French dominant view of the Vietnamese migrant workers and their descendants, now all French citizens of New Caledonia. In this perspective the publication of Chan Dang can be seen as Vanmai's and the Caledo-Viets' first attempt to claim their cultural and social citizenship. According to Flores and Benmayor (1997: 18), cultural citizenship involves the ability of the members of a minority group to express themselves and their sense of belonging in a dominant culture,

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whilst "social" citizenship reflects their rights to claim "membership and entitlements in the larger society...based on the fact of contribut­ ing to the welfare of the community." The substantial contribution to the prosperity of New Caledonia made by Vietnamese migrants and their descendants left no doubt in Vanmai's mind at the time of the publication of Chan Dang as to the role they are entitled to take in today's New Caledonia: those of first-class citizens. It took, however, another decade after Chan Dang for this fifty year-old Caledo-Viet writer, now a respected member of several New Caledonian literary associations, to make a public and explicit claim for their full citizen­ ship in a history book written in response to the request made by the Vietnamese Association of New Caledonia and the Centre Territorial de Recherche et de Developpement Pedagogiques [The Territorial Center of Pedagogical Research and Development] in commemoration of the centenary of the Vietnamese presence in New Caledonia: Par son dynamisme et son esprit d'entreprise, on peut considerer que la communaute vietnamienne constitue aujourd'hui la seconde force economique du Territoire, apres celle de l'ethnie europeenne, de loin la plus forte et la plus importante...Renommes pour leur adresse et leur meticulosite, toujours presents, discrets et dynamiques, respectant les uns et les autres, ils demontrent jour apres jour qu'ils ont amplement merite leur place dans la societe caledonnienne. (Vanmai 1991: 89) [Due to its dynamism and enterprising spirit, the Vietnamese community can today be considered to be the second economic force in the Territory after the ethnic European, who make up by far the strongest and biggest force...Renowned for being both dextrous and meticulous, always present, discreet, dynamic and respectful of everyone, they demonstrate on a daily basis that they have clearly earned their place in Caledonian society.] Et tous, sans exception, esperent avec force que plus tard, leurs descendants auront conserve leurs traditions, leurs racines, d'un passe plus que millenaire. Ils esperent egalement que ces jeunes se souviendront de l'oeuvre des Chan Dang puis des Fils de Chan Dang durant un siecle, et qu'ils preserveront cet heritage. (Vanmai 1991: 102) [And all, without exception, strongly hope that later their offspring will conserve their roots and traditions, which go back thousands of years. They also hope that those young people will remember the work done by the Chan Dang and by the sons of Chan Dang, over a century and that they will preserve this heritage.] In the year of Chan Dang's publication the risk of opening old wounds and rekindling conflicts between the Vietnamese and the

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French communities in New Caledonia was real (as we will see later in the mixed reception to his first book), a fact that supports Vanmai's choice of writing a fictional novel rather than a memoir. The infamous history of New Caledonia, a huge detention camp for convicts and prisoners condemned to hard labor by the French government in the early days of colonization, is not a glorious backdrop against which to recall the arrival of the first 791 Vietnamese migrant workers after the closure of the hard labor camps in 1896, or to document their miserable life in exile. Later limits were the war between France and Vietnam, the French retreat from Indochina after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 fuelling the mounting hostility and resentment against the Vietnamese, seen as anti-French and pro-Communist. This led to violent clashes and a strong anti-Viet movement in New Caledonia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the mass repatriation of Vietnamese migrants (most originally from the North) back to North Vietnam. These events made it difficult for Vanmai, a French Caledonian citizen, to write a memoir or a documentary. Whilst a writer of memoirs or documentaries recounts real events and involves himself and real people in his narration, possibly emphasizing political cleavage between different social groups, the novelist creates plots and characters, shielding himself and others from direct connection to reality. Yet Vanmai is also aware of the need to present his fiction as an authentic and accurate piece of evidence of the past, a witness's account or testimony that is to be taken seriously and accepted by the wide New Caledonian public as part of their common history, a shared past that no one should be ashamed of. It is significant to find that, on its back cover, Chan Dang is introduced (in capital letters) as "un ROMAN, mais aussi UN DOCUMENT HISTORIQUE, et UN TEMOIGNAGE SOCIAL" [a novel, but also a historical document, a social account], a duality that Vanmai (2006) stresses again in his bi­ ography where he describes his first book as "un roman/document" [a novel/document]. Drawing from Gerard Genette (1987) this introduc­ tion functions as a paratext; it surrounds the narrative text and influences the way the reader approaches the novel. In this case, both the fictional and documentary aspects of Chan Dang are emphasized. Thus, to read Vanmai's Chan Dang and Fils de Chan Dang solely as historical documents, and to focus on the authenticity of their related events (as George Pisier does in his foreword to the book), is to ignore the carefully constructed narrative plot and to reduce the characters to

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types. As we will see later, Pisier homogenizes all Chan Dang to­ gether as a group of poor hungry Tonkinese "coolies" who migrated to New Caledonia, motivated by greed for material wealth. The ambiguity of Vanmai's books, written both as fiction and as memoir, and documented by personal photographs, underlines the dif­ ficult position of the Vietnamese-Caledonian author vis-a-vis his audi­ ence. In spite of its message of humanity, harmony, and reconciliation, Chan Dang was not well received by French Caledonians. Vanmai's bleak and disturbing description of the Chan Dang's exploitation at the hands of French foremen upset what Barbancon (1992: 57) labeled the members of "la bonne societe de Noumea [qui] continua de bouder l'auteur jusqu'a ce qu'il commette des histoires de plus en plus edulcorees et aseptisees" [the good society of Noumea [who] continued to avoid the author until he toned down his stories, producing versions that became more and more sterilized]. While many readers, themselves descendants of the foremen, received the book with enthusiasm and agreed with Vanmai (2003) that "les evenements relates a travers les 387 pages du livre etaient encore en dessous de la verite" [the events related through the 387 pages of the book were understated], and that one should acknowledge the Vietnamese people's contribution to the development of New Caledonia, Pisier (Vanmai 1980) shows a more reserved attitude toward Chan Dang, winner of the First Literary Prize from Asia in 1981. In his foreword to the novel, Pisier tries to defend French colonial policy and practice, putting part of the blame on the Chan Dang who he describes as "frondeurs et violents, et qui paraissaient hypocrites" [anti-authority and violent, and apparently hypocritical] and emphasizing the extreme poverty of these "coolies," their determination to get rich at any price, and their desperate need and willingness to apply for work in New Caledonia. Poverty and greed, suggests Pisier, were the main motives behind the Vietnamese workers' migration, and the wealth they succeeded in accumulating and taking home to Vietnam after many years in New Caledonia can be considered as a fair compensation for their mistreatment: Les partants emporterent des tonnes de biens mobiliers et de grosses sommes d'argent.. .la valeur des biens rapatries [fut estimee] a 20 mi­ llions de francs...Le moins que l'on puisse dire est que si ces gens souffrirent sur les mines ils profiterent au dela de leurs esperances de leur passage en Caledonie. (Vanmai 1980: 10) [Those who left took with them tons of furniture and large sums of money.the total value

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Thus, according to Pisier's argument, any feeling of guilt by the French side should be eliminated, and the French government could comfortably wash its hands of responsibility for the exploitation of the Vietnamese workers. My interest here is not so much to prove whether Pisier's argu­ ment is right or wrong, or whether the accounts of the foremen's cru­ elty are accurate or exaggerated. It is more relevant to the understanding of Vanmai's novels to treat them as a text and a fiction. This textual approach allows us to carefully examine Vanmai's narrative, his construction of the Vietnamese characters and his elaboration of the plot. How does he portray his compatriots and the Chan Dang, of whom he is a direct descendant? How does he construct their life in exile and present their social and cultural integration? What ending does he reserve for his protagonists and what interpretation can be drawn from such an ending? I attempt to answer these questions by reading Chan Dang and Fils de Chan Dang in their historico-cultural context, and by examining Vanmai's point of view on exile and change, guilt and betrayal. For the young Vietnamese peasants from Tonkin who had probably never set foot outside their own villages, the exhausting two-week voyage by sea to an unknown land, New Caledonia, and an unknown future constituted the first painful condition of exile: separation from loved ones and the loss of a familiar environment. The prospect of spending five years away from their family did nothing to boost the Chan Dang's morale as they realized the full meaning of their expa­ triation as soon as they landed in New Caledonia. Stuck on an island miles away from their country, surrounded by unfamiliar landscapes, trapped by their contract, defenseless in the hands of their employers, and devoid of any means of escape, the Chan Dang had little to relieve the overwhelming sense of dispossession, weariness and despair. Even the striking beauty of the New Caledonian landscape with its sparkling blue lagoons, its white sandy beaches, its green mountains could not dispel their disheartening feeling of displacement. These peasants were used to working in rice fields and living in the country: now they were confined to labor in underground mines and to live in the moun-

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tains. Under the cracking whips of their foremen, they were constantly reminded that they were slave-workers, not tourists, and even if their work brought them to some paradisiacal beach, they were unable to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings. As strangers, they did not have the same knowledge about the land as the locals and had no warning about the dangers they might encounter. For the foreign migrant workers, the beautiful landscape could turn into a deadly trap for those who did not belong. Out of ignorance, the newly arrived Chan Dang did not know, for example, that some lagoons were infested with stingrays and sharks, that sea snakes came to shore at night to nest on the beach, or that the red ants' sting could be fatal. Consequently, a young boy who went swimming was stung by a large stingray and narrowly escaped a shark attack; many Chan Dang who slept on the beach were bitten by sea snakes; a baby left under a tree whilst his parents were working nearby was later found dead, killed by red ants. By recalling these incidents, Vanmai conveys the Chan Dang's feeling of exile, vulnerability and alienation in a foreign country, and their lack of connection to the land, thus underlining the strong bond the exiles kept with their homeland. For Vanmai's characters, the home­ land is where they feel welcome and connected. This sense of belonging transcends the attachment to the place of birth, as seen in the example of Hong in Fils de Chan Dang. Born and raised in New Cale­ donia, Hong always knows where his roots are and feels at home the moment he reaches Vietnam. Another direct consequence of exile that can be considered as a form of hostility endured by the Chan Dang was their cruel exploitation at the hands of French foremen and employers. The migrant workers' rights to dignity and respect were largely ignored. In spite of their legal worker status, the Chan Dang were treated no better than the bagnards [convicts], whom they replaced in many instances. As Isabelle Merle (1995: 316) explains, the Vietnamese workers and not the Kanaks became the successors of the convicts: The rules and regulations described in the order in 1895 are so similar to the ones...applied to the convicts in the penal colony. If we set aside the question of voluntary work and that of the workers' repa­ triation, we have to underline the parallelism between the workers' conditions and that of the convicts who were recruited by the colonial government or who were employed in the mines. So, in an amazing continuity New Caledonia substitutes the convicts with the immigrant workers who were submitted to the same conditions of hard labor.

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The quasi-slave-worker status of the Vietnamese was compounded by their status as a colonized people. Merle adds that because they came from a French colony (Indochina), Vietnamese workers were treated like indigenous people and not awarded the same respect as "real" foreign workers, such as the Japanese. Restrictions on the Chan Dang that included bans on alcohol, on leaving camp, or on entering any European centers after eight o'clock in the evening, were not applied to the Japanese (Merle 1995: 318). This different treatment is a clear indication that the Vietnamese were treated as colonized people and exiles rather than free foreign workers. Upon signing their contracts, the Chan Dang had no inkling of the many indignities and losses they would suffer in New Caledonia, one of which was the dispossession of their personal names. Claiming that Vietnamese names were either "trop longs ou trop compliques" [too long or complicated] (Vanmai 1980: 25), or simply unpronouncable (a reason proposed by Pisier), the French colonial administration reserved the right to replace each worker's name with a "numero d'immatriculation" [an identification number], a practice that was still applied in 1953 (Barbancon 1992: 35). With the loss of their freedom, then their names, the Chan Dang felt increasingly deprived. After receiving his new identification num­ ber, 3141, Ming, a young migrant worker from Hanoi bitterly won­ ders: "Chacun de nous a perdu son nom, sa personnalite. Que nous reste-il donc?" [Each of us has lost his or her name, his or her person­ ality. So what do we have left?] (Vanmai 1980: 63). Ming's question is a poignant reminder of how, in a symbolic sense, the migrant worker's body was colonized. Sold to the colonial employers who could beat, starve and even kill it, the body no longer belonged to the migrant, in the same way that colonized countries no longer belong to their indigenous inhabitants. During the colonial period, for example, Vietnam—which was divided into three separate regions: the North Tonkin, the Center Annam, and the South Cochinchine—together with Laos and Cambodia, constituted the large French colony of Indochina, the land situated between India and the China Sea. The parallel between the colonized land and the colonized body points to the deep feeling of estrangement and exile experienced by Ming and his friends, not only in New Caledonia, but also back home in Indochina. A consequence of colonization, this double exile became a vicious trap from which no colonized people could escape. As Phuc, an older Chan Dang, said:

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Aurions-nous plus de bonheur, plus de liberie en ce moment dans notre propre pays? Sous le regime actuel?.. .Non! car si tout etait parfait chez nous, aurions-nous ete contraints de nous expatrier ainsi? Au bout du monde! (105) [Would we have more happiness, more free­ dom at this very moment in our country? Under the current regime?.No, because if everything was perfect in our country, would we be forced to expatriate like this? To the other side of the world!]

In these circumstances, the Chan Dang's double exile could only end with decolonization. It is no coincidence, then, that the Chan Dang waited impatiently for the day when they could go home: the day peace would be restored and their country cease being a French col­ ony. Unfortunately, for some Chan Dang like Phuc or Toan, that day came too late. Faced with his friend's death that abruptly ends all the latter's hope of going back home, Ming laments: Mon pauvre Phuc, mon ami! Tu ne reverras plus jamais notre pays, toi non plus!.. .Toi qui voulais tant confier ton corps, au dernier jour de ta vie, a la terre de ton village natal!...Tu as combattu avec acharnement pour atteindre ce but.. .Le jour de la victoire, de ta victoire, est enfin arrive et tu t'en vas, nous laissant le benefice de ton combat! (371) [My poor Phuc, my friend! You will never see our country again, either!.. .You who wanted so much to hand over your body and the rest of your life to the land of your home village!.You have fought relentlessly for this goal.Now that the day of victory, your victory, has finally come, you go away, leaving us with the fruits of your battle!]

Besides the geographical displacement of the migrant workers and their maltreatment by employers, the social isolation they encountered during their contract constituted another sad condition of exile. Upon arrival, the Chan Dang were taken to an isolated camp in the mountains and crowded into dormitories and wooden huts, away from Kanak and European communities. Normal social contact with the locals was almost impossible as the law forbade the workers to wander outside their camp after dark. Between the French employers who lived in "ces belles maisons...entourees de jardins bien entretenus" (57) [these beautiful houses.. .surrounded by well-kept gardens] and the Chan Dang, there was a world of difference. The migrants' working contract tied them to a master-slave relationship with their foremen, and the language barrier stopped their contact with other groups, such as the Kanaks, Javanese, or Japanese. Due to their isolation, their

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limited mobility and their language difficulties, the Chan Dang were cut off from the rest of the New Caledonian society, leading to more withdrawal and isolation. Thus the only social contact they had was restricted to their own community, a situation that bred misunderstanding and suspicion between the Vietnamese workers and the other sectors that regarded the Vietnamese as sly and untrustworthy. It also created difficulties in the Vietnamese community, particularly over questions of change, adaptation, and potential resistance. With a population of a few thousand workers and a ratio of one woman to five men, the Chan Dang were not a colony of settlement, even less a traditional Vietnamese one. Confined within their own community they were unable to replicate, at least in the early stage of their exile, the same extended social and family structure in the home­ land, whereby each individual is supported by strong ties of kinship and a sense of belonging. Young men and women are expected to marry, have children, whilst still living under the same roof as their parents or even grandparents. In New Caledonia where the migrant population was mostly male, many single men were not able to marry due to the shortage of women. Those few lucky enough to find a wife did not have the moral support of parents or extended family. Some of those who lived alone suffered serious depression, or became violent alcoholics. Some were tempted to have affairs with other men's wives whilst others looked for relationships with non-Vietnamese women, as described in Vanmai's books. The Chan Dang were facing serious disruption in their traditional family life and, in order to survive their prolonged exile in New Caledonia, they were forced to make changes that would allow them to adapt to their new life. Though exile provided an excuse for breaking away from traditions and principles, not all changes led to successful integration or a happy outcome, as will be illustrated later with Tuyen in Fils de Chan Dang. By reserving a sad ending for Tuyen's life and a happy one for his friend Hong, Vanmai identifies which Vietnamese ancestral moral values and traditions he believes should be preserved and respected: ancestor worship and filial devotion come first on his list. Exile can therefore be am­ bivalent, a situation that both encourages and discourages change. Often promoting resistance to change, exile becomes a moral testing ground for the protagonists. Away from the homeland, exposed to new values and principles, Vanmai's exiles have their moral achievement measured against their acts of filial devotion.

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In Vanmai's books the Chan Dang's moral test starts before they actually set foot in New Caledonia. If we analyze their motive for ex­ ile, the underlying factor behind the Chan Dang's decision to leave home for New Caledonia is filial devotion which, derived from ancestor worship, has been a fundamental Vietnamese moral code and one of the corner stones of its society. Generally speaking, filial devotion consists of several duties a son or daughter has to fulfill during his or her parents' lifetime as well as after their death: showing care, respect, gratitude, and obedience towards them. A son or daughter is therefore indebted to his or her parents, since, without them, without their gift of life, he or she would not be alive. This gratitude also extends to grandparents and ancestors. According to Vietnamese moral standards, a good person is first of all a dutiful son or daughter and anyone lacking in filial devotion will be severely criticized and condemned by society. In other words, filial devotion is a means of judging and evaluating a person as it rules the way he lives, thinks and acts. Particularly in an exile with its constant exposure to other cultures, different moral values, and change, failing one's filial duty can be interpreted as an act of betrayal. It follows that the undutiful son or daughter can be considered a traitor not only of his or her own parents and family, but also of his or her ancestors and origins. Confronted by the multiple adversities of exile Vanmai's protagonists are thus divided into two groups, those who live by the traditional moral codes of ancestor worship and filial devotion, and those who do not. To overlook this fundamental Vietnamese moral code and suggest, as Pisier does, that all poor Tonkinese peasants were motivated by the idea of going abroad to get rich and were, therefore, ready to put up with the hardest living and working conditions, is to ignore the key factor behind the Chan Dang's expatriation. For a people who set great importance on keeping face, abandoning one's home to search elsewhere for food is considered a last and shameful resort because it can be interpreted as a public acknowledgement of poverty, as demonstrated by a Vietnamese saying that cautions against "Tha phuong cau thuc" [wandering in a foreign land praying for food]. Given this attitude toward economic migration, the pain of separation and the undignified treatment of the migrant workers, we need to look beyond the motives of greed and gain, and find out what alleviated the suffering of the Chan Dang. Vanmai's description of the Vietnamese workers clearly shows that, even in their darkest moments, the exiles were

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most happy not when they made a lot of money for themselves, but when they could send money home to help the parents and family they had left behind. Thus, as the narrative outcomes of several characters reveal, filial devotion is evidently a major driving force behind the Chan Dang's efforts and perseverance. If Lien, a young migrant worker whose sepa­ ration from her lover Thang nearly makes her go insane with pain, does not resort to suicide, it is because her friend Lan has reminded her about her filial duty: no matter what happens, she must live and work hard to take care of them. Lan, the eldest daughter of a poor peasant family, also places her family interest above her own and readily sacrifices her personal comfort for her parents and siblings. Hoping that her wages will provide for her loved ones more ade­ quately than if she stays home, Lan decides to go to New Caledonia. Her unconditional love for her parents and younger siblings, and her determination to fulfill her duty towards them, give Lan the strength to suffer numerous humiliations, including verbal and physical abuse, false accusations of theft and sexual assault, in silence. Her sacrifices and selfless use of money not only make her a dutiful daughter; they also guard her against temptation and moral corruption, two evils associated with exile, especially when the poverty-stricken migrant is exposed to wealth and luxury. Courted by many men much richer than her penniless boyfriend Ming, Lan rejects them all, though she knows that marrying somebody like Ngach will guarantee her a wealthy life. Her contradictory attitude toward money (she needs money to send home but refuses the opportunity to have more of it by marrying Ngach) proves that in spite of her poverty, Lan's decision to go to New Caledonia was not motivated by greed and gain; nor does she wish to live her life by these principles. Through this highly righteous and self-respecting Chan Dang, Vanmai shows us a different aspect of filial devotion that goes beyond sending money home or taking care of aging parents. By upholding her moral principles and dignity, by being true to herself and faithful to her principles, by preserving her purity, Lan honors her parents and the family name. With the protagonist Ming, Vanmai presents us with another aspect of filial devotion. The only son of a wealthy family, Ming does not migrate out of need. His parents do not expect him to "prove" that he is a dutiful son by helping them financially or by taking care of them (at least, not when he is still living with them). What they ask of

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him is obedience, one of the key filial duties and something that Ming cannot and will not give them since it would require him to marry a woman not of his choosing. As mentioned earlier, he prefers to leave home (which causes great grief and pain to his parents) rather than sacrifice his life and personal happiness to please them. In disobeying and disappointing his parents, in placing his own interest above theirs, Ming appears at first sight to be an undutiful son, the opposite of his wife Lan or her friend Lien. However, as the story unfolds, Ming expresses his filial devotion on more than one occasion, and finally makes amends for his initial disobedience. Shame is the first sign of his repentance: he is not proud of having left his parents in such an undignified way. Though he refuses to accept his father's decision to marry him off against his will, Ming never really blames anyone, only the obsolete tradition of arranged marriage. As soon as he learns that his father has fallen ill because of him, he is overwhelmed with guilt and distress. After shame, his sense of guilt is his second step towards redemption. When his New Caledonian-born son, Hong, refuses to return to Vietnam with him and his wife, and runs away on the day of departure to stay with his (French) girlfriend, Ming feels the same pain, anger, and despair his father felt twenty years earlier when he left home. Through his suffering, Ming is able to reconnect with his father, and his life comes full circle. By coming home after a twentyyear stay in New Caledonia, Ming fulfils his parents' last and most fervent wish and takes the final step towards redeeming himself in their eyes. His return liberates him from the burden of guilt that haunts him for having defied his parents and run away "comme un voleur, comme un fils indigne" (65) [like a thief, like an unworthy son] and the renewal of filial devotion now largely makes up for his past disobedience. He has proven to be a good and loyal son and, a father himself, knows what to expect from Hong, a son he raises dutifully for many years: that Hong will not run away from his roots nor forget his filial duty toward his parents. "Il viendra nous voir un jour...J'en suis sur. C'est un bon garcon" (385) [He will come to visit us one day...I am sure of it. He is a good son], Ming assured his devastated wife from the day they left New Caledonia: like father like son. Of the second generation of the Chan Dang migrants, Hong is the only one who manages the complicated paperwork and bureaucracy to make the journey home as soon as the Vietnam war comes to an end, the only one who immediately answers his mother's urgent call.

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Though Vietnam is not his birth country, Hong's deep love for his parents extends to their homeland, a land he has never seen but to which he already feels a strong emotional attachment. It is the place where his parents were born and where they will die, like so many generations before them. Through his parents and family line, Hong traces his roots back to his Vietnamese ancestors and is proud to reclaim his place as one of their descendants. His refusal to go home with his parents, his marriage to a non-Vietnamese woman, and his Western life in New Caledonia do not mean he has betrayed his origins or become an undutiful son because he does not forget nor deny his past. Far from hindering his integration into New Caledonian society, Hong's recognition of his cultural and ethnic origins enables him to live harmoniously and happily with his French wife and his mixedrace children. He is, then, a "good boy," like his father before him. His conscience remains unburdened by guilt because he does not abandon his parents emotionally when he decides to live in New Caledonia. For Vanmai, Hong represents the good son who fulfils his filial duty to his father and his ancestors whilst also constructing a happy new life for himself and his family in his birth country. It is evident that Hong's success is not based on wealth or social status (he is an ordinary em­ ployee in a commercial industry) but rather on his willingness to preserve Vietnamese traditions of ancestor worship and filial devotion. In this light, Hong is not only worthy of the family name he carries, a name given to him by his father that he, in turn, proudly passes on to his children (he has a son), but also of the title given by Vanmai to his second book. For Vanmai, no "son of Chan Dang" deserves it more than Hong. For Hong and Ming, the fulfillment of filial duty is the key to their happiness and success in New Caledonia, a means to counter the disruption and loss that are closely associated with exile. In their friend Tuyen's case, cultural assimilation does not represent a personal achievement and his interracial marriage is not the happy outcome of successful integration. As Vanmai seems to tell us, neglecting one's filial duty and failing to maintain one's cultural and moral integrity in the face of change, as did the protagonist Tuyen, inevitably leads to a tragic ending. Compared to the other Chan Dang, such as Ming, Hong, Lan, and Lien, Tuyen's greatest sin is his greed and his refusal to return to his homeland. When the opportunity for repatriation presents itself, Tuyen

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decides to stay longer in New Caledonia with the aim of making more money, instead of going back to Vietnam with his family: his wife, their two young children, and his old parents. The desire to make more money and the decision to let money stand in the way of the return home creates feelings of guilt in both Tuyen and his wife Hoa. Deep down, they both know they are making a mistake and that they will have to bear the consequences. On the ship that takes her back to Vietnam without her husband, Hoa is sick with worry and keeps wondering "si leur separation n'etait pas en fin de compte une folie? Oui, folie que de se laisser seduire par la perspective de gagner un peu d'argent" (31) [whether their separation was not simply foolish? Yes, it is foolish to let oneself be seduced by the prospect of earning a little more money]. Separated from his family, Tuyen, on the other hand, feels "terriblement coupable et fautif envers les siens" [terribly guilty toward his loved ones] (34). However, unlike Ming, his guilt does not compel him to return to his home country or prevent him later from betraying his wife. Tuyen relies on money to ease his mind and, consequently, is caught in a vicious circle of greed and need, in which he has to accept risky business ventures and investments in order to catch up financially. By letting material gain become the driving force in his life, Tuyen loses what is most important to an exile-turned-migrant: his sense of self and his moral principles. Tuyen's acculturation and change of character, described by Vanmai through a series of transformations and transgressions, begin with him driving, then acquiring, a truck. This allows him to enter the industrial sector and the extremely competitive, ruthless world of truck drivers. But Tuyen's new status as truck-owner seems more like a failure than a success; he succumbs to the "hysterie collective" (62) [collective hysteria] occasioned by the New Caledonian economic boom and becomes obsessed with the idea of getting his share. The possession of a truck is a double-edged sword; Tuyen is not only its owner, but also its slave. He no longer controls how he lives, works or relaxes; everything is tied to his new job and, indirectly, to his truck: Tuyen tenta de conserver tout d'abord le rythme qu'il pensait raisonnable de dix heures de travail par jour. Mais il dut se rendre a l'evidence: on ne raisonnait pas dans ce metier.. .Tres vite il fut donc lui aussi happe puis entraine dans une ronde infernale. (66) [At first Tuyen tried to keep the reasonable workload of ten hours per day. But he had to face the obvious: one did not reason in this job.Very quickly he, too, was grabbed then dragged into a vicious circle.]

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Somewhat like the infernal train in Zola's La Bete humaine, Tuyen's truck acts as a demonic force that dehumanizes him and drags him into a mad race for profit. Driver and vehicle became inseparable, an extension of one another, to the point where Tuyen experiences the merest dent or puncture as a personal injury. Through Tuyen's identification with this symbol of Western technology and modernity his transformation begins and he takes his first step towards assimilation: C'est bizarre, mais je finis par m'identifier a ce vehicule.. J e souffre terriblement lorsque je le vois ainsi blesse. Sans doute parce que je suis responsable de cet outil de travail que l'on m'a confie; sans doute que nous formons tout simplement une equipe indivisible. (71) [It's weird, but I end up identifying myself with this truck...I suffer terribly when I see it wounded like this. Surely it's because I am re­ sponsible for this working tool that has been entrusted to me. But also because we simply form an indivisible team.]

Whilst the other, more dutiful Chan Dang like Lan and Ming bond with family and detach themselves from material possessions, Tuyen moves in the opposite direction and bonds with his truck, to the detriment of his wife and children. In his truck, in the company of his nonVietnamese truck-driver friends, Tuyen begins to lose his old values and principles. One day, during which torrential rains force Tuyen to remain inside his truck, he abandons his rigid moral standards and allows his friends to introduce him to alcohol and unbridled pleasure seeking. From wine to dog meat and from bat meat to women, Tuyen is transformed by the rapacious consumption of foreign food and casual sex with Kanak women. Though eating dog meat is not uncommon in Vietnam, Tuyen's real transgression lies in the fact that he eats a pet dog, and a stolen one at that: "Il oublia ou negligea ses bons principes, le respect qu'il avait pour tout animal domestique, le chien en particulier. Il avait trop faim, une faim de loup" (94) [He forgot or neglected his good principles, the respect he used to have for all domestic animals, dogs in particular. He was too hungry, as hungry as a wolf]. Tuyen may have been hungry, but this does not justify his moral weakness. If poverty and hunger caused the Chan Dang to migrate, neither Lan nor Ming abandon their moral integrity. Loneliness and grief do not turn Thang and Phuc into casual sexual partners of Kanak women. By eating unfamiliar or forbidden food and by indulging in sexual relationships with the indigenous women, Tuyen drifts

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further and further away from his old self. The road accident that de­ stroys his truck and leaves him in a long coma completes his metamorphosis. The man who wakes up to find Sylviane (his friend Robert's deserted wife) at his bedside is no longer the traditional Vietnamese peasant who arrived in New Caledonia years before with his family. And when Tuyen moves in with Sylviane and her two daughters, he is no longer the trustworthy husband Hoa left behind on the quay the day she returned to Vietnam. After his truck, Tuyen comes to associate himself with yet another symbolic figure of Western culture: Sylviane, a French woman. Judg­ ing from appearances, his new life seems to be successful and harmonious. Financially he is doing well in his clothing business and emotionally he is happy with his new partner and their newborn son. However, from a Vietnamese perspective, his achievement is flawed: not only is his happiness with Sylviane founded on betrayal, his cul­ tural integration is also achieved at the expense of broken principles. Tuyen's selfish new life cuts him off from his past and origins, leads him away from his war-torn homeland, and makes him insensitive to the suffering of his people. Through the tragic narrative outcome that ends Tuyen's life, Vanmai portrays this character as a problematic figure and a sad counterpart to Hong. Whilst both protagonists are living between two cultures, Hong recognizes his roots and is happily reunited with his parents in Vietnam, whereas Tuyen betrays his family and origins and, consequently, has to pay for his mistakes. Happily settled in his new home with Sylviane, Tuyen no longer wishes to go back to Vietnam or to see his Vietnamese wife and children. Instead he asks Hong to take a large amount of money for Hoa and to tell her to leave him alone. Money has always been the currency with which Tuyen tries to atone for his mistakes and to ease his conscience. Money, however, cannot buy him redemption for having been an undutiful son to both his parents and his ancestors. Moreover, money in this case is no longer an indication of success, as Pisier suggests, but a sign of shame, betrayal, and guilt. Stemming from a guilty conscience and not from love, the very act of sending money home, when the exiled son could have gone back, would bring more shame and grief than pride and joy, to the parents. Failing his duty, Tuyen is no longer a worthy son and, as such, also fails to be an exemplary father. This lack of filial devotion returns to haunt Tuyen in the guise of Khanh, his sixteen-year old son, who travels with his mother to New

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Caledonia to find him. Insolent, defiant, and rebellious, the teenage boy shows his father no respect. Like his father, he is greedy and cares only about money. History repeats itself as avarice breaks Tuyen's family apart for the second time. Sixteen years earlier it was Tuyen who did not return home with his wife and children because he wanted to make more money; now it is his eldest son who leaves Vietnam with the sole aim of extracting more money from his sinful father. Re­ buked by the latter, Khanh disowns Tuyen and, with a violent blow, breaks all bonds between them: Tu m'a mis au monde, ensuite tu m'as abandonne pendant des annees. Tu n'as meme pas daigne me faire venir ici. Il nous a fallu nous debrouiller par nos propres moyens. Et aujourd'hui tu me desherites!...Eh bien, moi je te renie! Je ne te reconnais plus pour mon pere! Oui! Tu es dechu desormais de tes droits parternels sur moi. (287) [You put me in this world then you abandoned me for years. You did not even try to bring me back here. We had to do it all by ourselves, on our own. And today, you disown me.. .Very well, I renounce you. I don't recognize you as my father any longer. Yes, from now on, you are deprived of any parental rights over me.]

With this dramatic breakdown of family bond and hierarchy, Tuyen's fate is sealed, even before his disappearance (suicide?), for his son has announced his symbolic death. Tuyen, who refused to board the Eastern Queen some sixteen years before to return to Vietnam, now takes his own little boat out to sea. Does this reverse sequence represent his last attempt to run away from the past, or his first real, and desperate, attempt to run back to his parents? Is his death a planned suicide or an accidental drowning? Vanmai does not elaborate. However, if suicide is the motive, Tuyen has committed yet another offence against his parents. Whilst they live, his duty is to look after them; by taking his own life he commits a shameful breach of filial duty and proves that he is, again, thinking only of himself and his own pain, not of his parents' grief or his duty towards them. In fact, since failing to care for one's living parents is a serious breach of filial duty, whatever the cause of Tuyen's death he remains an unworthy son who leaves his ageing father and mother (not to mention his wife Hoa and their two children who have migrated to New Caledonia) unattended and uncared for. In Vanmai's narrative, such neglect cannot go unpunished. In this perspective it is significant that Tuyen's body is never recovered, as if he

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will forever remain a lost son to his parents, both during his lifetime and after his death. Without a body, there cannot be any proper burial for Tuyen—either in his homeland, Vietnam, or in New Caledonia— and therefore no rest for his soul. As a person who has spiritually betrayed his ancestors and ancestral land, Tuyen's soul cannot join them after death and his body will not deserve a resting place even in a foreign land. Thus, his spirit is condemned to wander at sea, forever lost, forever trying to redeem himself by crossing the ocean and reaching the shore of his homeland. In death as in life, Tuyen remains homeless and in exile, his soul trapped in perpetuity between the two worlds, New Caledonia and Vietnam. Far from setting him free, Tuyen's death perpetuates the conditions and the suffering of exile, and precludes all possibility of redemption. Through Tuyen's tragic end Vanmai reveals his reservations about change and acculturation and stresses the duty each Vietnamese migrant has towards his/her parents. For the exile to return home to pay respect to one's ancestors is one of the surest ways to redeem oneself and to find inner peace and reconciliation. Setting up the final scene with two grieving wives (Hoa and Sylviane) on a mountain top, looking out to sea in search of their common husband, Vanmai probably wants to use the well-known Vietnamese legend of the Waiting Wife Mountain to convey his sympathy toward Tuyen's weaknesses and his humanist viewpoint on exile. By linking this character of the undutiful son to the husband of the myth, a guilty and incestuous brother who, upon discovering that his wife is his long lost sister, goes out to join the king's army never to return, Vanmai appears to shift part of the blame of Tuyen's betrayal to fateful circumstances. That the incestuous brother finally redeems himself and becomes a patriotic hero who dies in battle for his country can be interpreted as Vanmai's last wishful thinking: that his character Tuyen will be forgiven, one day, by his two families. And by his readers. In the modern Western world where individualism, independence and personal freedom are encouraged, filial duty is often neglected and parental authority questioned. Such mores are often challenging for Vietnamese migrants, since they are at odds with traditional Vietnamese moral values that subject the individual to the family, and the children, especially the sons, to the father. For Vanmai, however, a migrant who neglects his filial duty towards his parents (and his country of origin) is an unworthy son and human being. No amount of

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Westernization or assimilation should cause a son to neglect his filial duty, and no change should be made at its expense. This is the founda­ tion of his moral integrity and it is only through his relationship with his parents that he will be judged as a person. In the difficult conditions of exile, filial devotion not only safeguards the morality of the migrant but also provides continuity and an invaluable sense of belonging. Since going back to one's parents also means returning to one's origins, filial devotion provides a traditional mode that can tran­ scend political and social differences and unite the Vietnamese dias­ pora. Thus, in telling the story of the Chan Dang and their descendants as both documentary and fiction, Vanmai shares with other Vietnamese migrants/refugees the life and experiences of the Tonkinese volun­ tary workers in New Caledonia. He breaks the silence surrounding colonial exploitation and provides an account of the Chan Dang's exile that can be integrated into the contemporary history of Vietnamese migration. Furthermore, by using different narrative resolutions for each of his protagonists, Vanmai stresses the need to fulfill one's filial duty among the young Vietnamese generations. With this symbolic emphasis, Vanmai pays homage to his Vietnamese ancestors and earns himself the honorable title of a dutiful "son of Chan Dang."

Exiled in the Homeland: Heiner Muller's Medea Yixu Lu Abstract The German playwright Heiner Muller's Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten (1982) alludes to dramatic versions of the Medea myth in both antiquity and modern German literature, but in doing so under­ mines their main tendency. In Euripides's tragedy, for example, both Jason and Medea are exiles in different senses and to each the action offers a differ­ ent possibility of return. By marrying Kreon's daughter, Jason can regain a place of honour in Greek society, but at the cost of rejection and further exile for Medea; the tragic action however opts for a different ending, Medea's return to the realm of the gods, but at the cost of her humanity. In this and in later versions of the myth, dialogue brings about meaningful change in human relations, for good or ill. Muller's adaptation negates the teleology of human action, and Muller's play can thus be seen as a reversal of the prototype of meaningful return established in the myth of Odysseus. The question of the incapacity for meaningful dialogue as a symptom of life in the former East Germany had been raised already by Muller in his adaptation of Hamlet and is taken to a more radical conclusion in his adaptation of the Medea myth. The chapter explores the further implications of the reversal of traditional myths of exile and the failure of the instrumental power of dialogue. Since the collapse of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic [GDR]) in 1989, the literature produced during its forty years of existence has necessarily undergone a process of revaluation. At this remove, Heiner Muller stands out as the most original and accomplished dramatist to work in that extremely repressive state since Brecht. But the conditions under which both writers worked could scarcely have been more different. Since Brecht was already a famous dramatist, his decision to return to the GDR after World War II gave him extraordinary privileges, including his own theater. As a "living classic" his relations with the regime were frequently stretched, but, ultimately, the state needed him as a showpiece

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and treated him with kid gloves. The situation of Heiner Muller could not have been more different. While he began life with the credentials that could promise success in the GDR—his father had been put in a concentration camp on political grounds by the Nazis—he had a stubborn tendency to get on the wrong side of the regime, which made him, for considerable periods, a virtual exile within the GDR. One of the ways the regime had of dealing with dissidents was to refuse to let them leave the GDR whilst turning them into non-persons, unable to work or study legally, under obtrusive surveillance by the Staatssicherheit (Stasi, State Security Service) and dangerous to have among one's circle of friends. This amounted to an internal exile, and was to be a key influence on Muller's writing. It also appears to have been a positive irritant, necessary to his creative process. There is a strongly masochistic element in Muller's work, and when he turns to adapting Medea, the canonical Western drama of exile, to an East German background, the complex phenomenon of internal exile plays an important part. Some knowledge of Muller's career as an East German dramatist is thus essential to an understanding of his reworking of Medea. As set out in his 1992 autobiography, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in Zwei Diktaturen [War Without Battles: Living in Two Dictatorships], Muller's development as a writer appears as a constant struggle with the politically hypersensitive authorities of the former GDR. His difficulties lay mainly in his writing undiplomatically, that is, without sufficient regard for the elaborate and, at times, absurd body of taboos imposed on literary expression in the GDR. As critics confirm, this frequently led to his living in poverty (Eke 1999: 19). This was to take a turn for the worse in 1961, when he was formally excluded from the Writers' Union on the grounds that one of his plays showed "konterrevolutionarer und antikommunistischer Tendenzen wegen" [counter­ revolutionary and anticommunist tendencies] (Eke 1999: 23). The exclusion meant that he could, for some years, earn nothing for writing published in his own name and had to resort to ghost-writing with the connivance of friends. 1

Unlike many other East German writers who ran foul of a system that constantly confused mild criticism with dangerous subversion, 1

All translations from German in this chapter are by Anthony Stephens and are un­ published elsewhere. Please note that the original Muller text is unpunctuated, and to punctuate it or the translation into English would be to falsify it.

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Muller did not take advantage of his numerous opportunities to remain in West Germany, once he was allowed to travel there to assist with productions of his plays. He seems to have regarded East Germany as his chosen arena, no matter how many defeats at the hands of a dictatorial system this might mean. In his autobiography, Muller makes some interesting comments to the effect that Brecht needed Hitler in order to become Brecht: Ohne Hitler ware aus Brecht nicht Brecht geworden, sondern ein Erfolgsautor...Aber Gott sei Dank kam Hitler, dann hatte er Zeit fur sich. (Muller 1992: 187) [Without Hitler Brecht would not have be­ come Brecht, just another successful author...But thank God Hitler came to power and then Brecht had time to become himself.]

In a sense, Muller is here sketching a self-portrait, for he seems to have needed all his frustrations with the East German regime to become Muller. Things changed from the early 1970s onward, as he achieved the status of a significant dramatist in both East and West that grew until the end of the GDR and beyond. There is also the like­ lihood, as documented in the appendices to the 1994 edition of his autobiography, that Muller, whilst not becoming a spy for the Stasi, nonetheless had dialogues with that Service, which are recorded from 1978 onward and admitted by Muller in an interview. The publication of his autobiography in 1992 had been followed by the disclosure of some Stasi files in which Muller appears as an IM (unofficial collaborator) (Muller 1994: 431-70, and 477-97). This may explain in part why he was able to travel so freely to the West and even produce his plays there. Once the Wall came down, Muller largely ceased to write new plays, though he remained active as a producer. As Norbert Eke comments: Es war, als habe sich mit dem Gegensatz der Systeme, aus dem seine Theaterarbeit lebte, fur Muller auch ein wichtiger Bezugspunkt seines Schreibens verfluchtigt. (1999: 31f) [It was as if, with the vanishing of the antithesis between the two [German state] systems, from which his theatre drew its vitality, Muller also lost a point of reference that was important to his work.]

Like many writers and intellectuals who chose to stay in East Germany when they could have moved to the West, Muller claims he initially hoped that Gorbachev's reforms in the USSR would at last af-

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ford the opportunity for an experiment in "genuine" socialism, after four decades of a dictatorship faithful to Moscow: Auch fur mich war Gorbatschows Programm zu Anfang ein Hoffnungssignal fur das scheiternde Unternehmen »Sozialismus«, die Il­ lusion von der Reformbarkeit des Systems hat schon eine Weile gedauert. (Muller 1992: 348) [For me as well Gorbachev's program was initially a signal of hope for the moribund undertaking that was 'socialism,' the illusion of the system's capacity for reform lasted for some time.]

The decision by the overwhelming majority of East Germans to em­ brace Western capitalism, by voting for East Germany to be subsumed into the Federal Republic, was anything but a victory for the forces of good to many like Muller, and may account for why, between 1989 and his death in 1995, he completed only one play. Muller felt himself as much an exile in the unified Germany as he had in his worst years in the GDR. Neither system offered him the possibility of a positive concept of citizenship. If internal exile had initially been imposed on him by the regime of the GDR, the exile he professed at the end of his life was his own choice. He was not alone in this attitude, since there was a general reluctance on the part of the literary dissidents of the GDR to embrace West German values in ways expected of them. The complex reaction by citizens of the former East to the unification of the two Germanies had its first clear articulation in the writings of those such as Muller who had had the chance to sample what the West had to offer before the Wall fell and who were less than enchanted by it. In writing his adaptation of Medea, Muller was adding to a long tradition in German literature. From the late 18th century to the present, major German writers have been preoccupied with this figure to an extent not echoed in other European literatures. There is no simple reason why, but a contributing factor was the German fascination with the Hellenic world. Goethe's contemporary Friedrich Maximilian Klinger wrote two dramas in sequence centering on the figure of Medea. The first, Medea in Korinth (1786), preserved the basic pat­ tern of the plots of Euripides and Seneca. His sequel, Medea auf dem Kaukasos [Medea of the Caucusus] (1790), is most innovative in that it dispenses with the figure of Jason altogether, and has Medea leave Corinth not for Athens or the world of the immortals, but rather for a

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peak in the Caucasus mountains, from which she descends to at­ tempt—vainly—to civilize a barbaric people. Both of Klinger's dramas present a figure much more in conflict with herself than was the case in the dramas of antiquity, and this was to remain central to the German tradition. In 1822 Franz Grillparzer completed his trilogy of plays on the Medea theme, which continued to have more presence than Klinger's dramas, but which do not extend the plot beyond the endings of Eurip­ ides and Seneca. Hans Henny Jahnn's Medea (1929) brought out the sexual themes latent in the myth to an extent earlier adaptations had not. He stresses that, once Medea has given up her divine immunity to ageing as the result of fleeing her homeland Colchis with Jason, she becomes physically repulsive in the course of her marriage. In this sense she unbecomes herself, losing her identity as the beautiful barbarian princess with magical powers. Her revenge, by which she seeks to restore what she has been, is all the more violent and, once more, the plot does not continue beyond her departure for the divine realm with the corpses of her sons on a chariot drawn by dragons. These dramatizations of the Jason and Medea myth reverse the trope of the successful quest or adventure into that of unwanted exile. Jason's attempt to exchange his status as an exile in Corinth for one of new integration by discarding Medea and marrying Creon's daughter enforces a second exile on Medea and unleashes the violence latent in their situation. Suffering in exile is the obverse of the successful quest, and Jason's attempt to elude the consequences of exile—at Medea's expense—makes the tragic crisis inevitable. From Euripides' drama onward, her foreignness as a "barbarian" among Greeks is stressed. Her exile in Corinth is intensified by racial/cultural prejudice; Jahnn insisted on her being played by an actress made-up as a black woman in the first performances of his drama at the end of the 1920s. The threat of a second exile also heightens the urgency of the question: where to next? Euripides has her offered Athens as an alternative refuge; Seneca and Jahnn have her exercise her right (by virtue of her divine origin) to return to the realm of the gods. But these versions have in common that losing her preferred "home" in Jason's affections also makes her position as a refugee in Corinth untenable and thus causes the dual anguish that precipitates the tragedy. This thematic survey provides a necessary background to any understanding of Heiner Muller's 1982 work Verkommenes Ufer

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Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten [Polluted Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts]. The text abandons the traditional Medea plot in favor of three sequences, only one of which contains conventional dialogue relating to the central issues of Medea's story. Muller's notes to the text state that "Die Gleich-zeitigkeit der drei Textteile kann beliebig dargestellt warden" [The simultaneity of the three pieces of text can be staged at will] (2002: 84), and thus in any order. Yet the text is more readily interpretable by following the sequence suggested by the title. The central section, with its allusions to specific texts, assumes knowledge of the plots of earlier Medea dramas, both from antiquity and from the German tradition. The timedimension of Muller's drama presents an equally radical departure from the dramatic convention. The first sequence takes place on a lake-shore near East Berlin, which is polluted by the detritus of a modern consumer society: used sanitary napkins, (East German) ciga­ rette packets, contraceptives, and mounds of excrement. Mixed in with indicators of a scene of a natural setting ruined by the casual accumulation of garbage are voices. However these are not attributed to any specific characters. On the one hand, the voices reinforce the devastation of the landscape by stressing the futility and ugliness of existence in a contemporary European society; on the other, there are fragmentary references to myths around the figure of Medea, specifically the death of Jason. A link between the two is provided by the frequent references to sordid and conflicted sexual relationships. Here the first sequence anticipates the second, for the fact that the sexual bond between Medea and Jason no longer holds, and that bitterness and ultimately death result, is at the core of all versions of Medea's tragedy. It is to become more explicit in the second sequence of Muller's text; in the first sequence, the suggestion that hostile or dehumanized sexuality is as much part of the human condition in modern Europe as ruining a natural setting by leaving litter and garbage about, links the broader apocalyptic theme of a society destroying itself in various ways with the specific tragedy of Medea. StrauBberg is specifically the outermost suburb of East Berlin, but the devastation of the natural setting could equally be anywhere in modern Western Europe. The second sequence, a selective condensation of the tragic action centering on Medea herself, requires its own detailed commentary later in this chapter, as it explores diverse aspects of the theme of exile

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in a complex manner. The third sequence further radicalizes the time dimension, since Muller states in his notes to the play: setzt LANDSCHAFT MIT ARGONAUTEN die Katastrophen voraus, an denen die Menschheit arbeitet. Die Landschaft mag ein toter Stern sein, auf dem ein Suchtrupp aus einer anderen Zeit oder aus einem anderen Raum eine Stimme hort und einen Toten findet. Wie in jeder Landschaft ist das Ich in diesem Textteil kollektiv (Muller 2002: 84) [LANDSCAPE WITH ARGONAUTS sees those catastrophes, towards which humanity is presently working, as having already occurred. The landscape may be that of a dead star, in which an expedition from another time or another space hears a voice and finds a dead man. As in any landscape, the self is—in this seg­ ment of the text—collective]

The whole sequence is cast as a monologue, and, given the title, the sole voice appears to be that of Jason, or, given Muller's notes, the collective voice of the Argonauts. There is a disjunction between this and the preceding segment in the sense that the whole desolate and rambling monologue contains no specific references to Medea herself. There are many references to ships and voyaging, but the dominant tone is that of an even more comfortless vision of the end of human society than in the first sequence. The fact that Muller's text is devoid of all punctuation is an important factor in intensifying its ambiguity. If the voice is Jason's, then Jason seems to have forgotten who he is: Soll ich von mir reden Ich wer Von wem ist die Rede wenn Von mir die Rede geht Ich Wer ist das Im Regen der Vogelkot Im Kalkfell Oder anders Ich eine Fahne ein Blutiger Fetzen ausgehangt Ein Flattern Zwischen Nichts und Niemand (Muller 2002: 80) [Shall I talk about myself I who Who is being talked about if The talk is about me I Who is that In the rain of bird shit In the lime-fleece Or otherwise I a flag a Bloody rag hung out a fluttering Between nothing and no one]

In the absence of specific voice attributions, punctuation or any sustained discursive line, the dependence of commentators on Muller's own notes is understandable. For there are virtually no parameters,

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within the first and third sequences of the text, that may guide inter­ pretation. The overall apocalyptic message is clear enough, but a producer could, for example, use in this sequence a single speaker, a collective chorus, or else have the monologue on tape and the Argonauts as dumb mimes, all without taking any unusual liberties with the text. In both the first and third sequences, the text has the quality of a montage, with apparently direct quotations from everyday speech and parodies of well known literary quotations associatively linked with fragmentary syntactic elements relating to the dominant themes of the Medea myth. The effect of language in both these sequences is to pro­ duce, on the one hand, a strong convergence of negativity—in the sense of a society that is collapsing/has collapsed—in the tone of what is said, whilst, on the other, there is a semantic scattering that allows a reader or audience great choice as to which motifs are given most attention. Yet the second sequence, in which Medea herself speaks, is located between one time-mode in which dialogue seems still possible, if meaningless, and another in which there is only a monologue spoken from beyond death so that any events are past before they are articulated. The framework formed by the first and third sequences weakens the effect of dramatic action in the conventional sense and rules out in advance any possibilities of meaningful dramatic change. We need to subject the concept of history, as it applies to Muller's works, to a degree of critical scrutiny. As his autobiography shows, the replacement of the Nazi dictatorship first by the Russian occupa­ tion and then by the East German satellite state constituted Muller's formative experiences. As his father, a Social Democrat, had been interned by the Nazis, the young Muller, who recounts visiting his father in a concentration camp—the family had to remain outside the wire— was very far from any identification with the fascist state that had made pariahs of his family. His experiences with the regime in East Germany, as he strove to establish himself as a writer, left him with few illusions about that system either. Both Nazism and the Stalinist regime that replaced it in East Germany had their own very selective versions of "history." In one sense, then, "history" is an ideology dic­ tated by a regime with which one disagrees at one's own peril, and Muller's autobiography indicates that he took a pragmatic and skeptical attitude to the sudden ideological reversal. It is no accident that Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten had its premiere in the West, in Bochum in

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1983. It did not have a real premiere in East Germany before the Ber­ lin Wall fell. In 1987 it was given an airing in East Berlin, but only on the Probebuhne [rehearsal stage] of the Berliner Ensemble theater. For, whatever the play may do by way of changing the traditional plot of Medea dramas, it is quite clear what it does to the Marxist concept of history, namely reduce it to a nullity. If history is the version of the past acceptable to the present regime, how does it differ from myth? Muller, like other East German writers, was to use Ancient Greek myths as models that, given their distance from highly sensitive recent events, permitted a certain improvisation. The meaningfulness, or otherwise, of historical processes was to be a point of tension throughout Muller's career. In the literary climate of the GDR so dominated by censorship— both the pulping of editions and the self-censorship writers used if they wanted to get into print at all—myths possessed a prima facie innocuity, which Muller used as a cover for his working out of the theme of internal exile. In an enigmatic statement in an interview, he urged the reinterpretation of the collective experiences contained in Greek myths with a view to exploding the continuum of history (Em­ merich 1999: 143f.) If by this he meant that mythical material can be set against the officially sanctioned version of history that enforces a spurious continuity, then he probably also meant that such "history" needs to be unmasked. An East German writer could not do so explicitly or indiscreetly without risking imprisonment or expulsion to the West, but the explosive force Muller here attributes to myth clearly means that he understood the modern reworking of mythical material as an oppositional strategy. The world of Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten makes no concessions to Marxist orthodoxy, and it is worth considering that, in Muller's writing as a whole, reworked myths need not be taken at face value, that they may need to be read in counterpoint to the fictional "continuum of the East German view of history prior to 1989. If one accepts this argument, then it is hard to agree with the critic Katharina Keim's extensive treatment of the text as a "demythologization (Entmythisierung)" (1998: 103). She appears to base this judgment on the fact that this version of Medea breaks with the idea of historical progress—as do all of Muller's texts from the late 1970s. Hence the figure of Medea becomes a link in the selfperpetuating chain of violence and betrayal, such as Jason is later to

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inflict on her and she on her children (Keim 1998: 107). But the point is surely that, in this context, myth is not consonant with revolutionary ideology, and breaking with Marxist dogmas of historical progress does not equate to abandoning myth. In Muller's work, myth thus seems to be aligned with a cynical and pessimistic view of the reality of both contemporary communist and capitalist societies and opposed to a cosmetic Marxist view of recent history as exemplifying meaningful progress. In a letter, written in 1983 to the producer of the Bulgarian premiere of his recasting of Sophocles's Philoctetes and published in the same year, Muller refers to Jason as the first colonialist, who—on the threshold between myth and history—is killed by his own vehicle (Hornigk 1999: 64). This refers to a tradition in which the Argo, hung up in a sacred grove as an offering to Poseidon after the successful completion of its voyage, kills Jason by falling on him. There is a reference to this in the first sequence of Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten: Bis ihm die Argo den Schadel zertrummert das nicht mehr gebrauchte Schiff Das im Baum hangt Hangar und Kotplatz der Geier im Wartestand (Muller 2002: 73) [Until the Argo smashes his skull the no longer needed Ship That hangs in the tree the hangar and latrine of the waiting vultures]

This mythical element has a distinct quality of free application that "history," in the sense permitted by the East German regime, could never have. One may understand Muller's dwelling on the manner of Jason's death in this context as a comment on the self-destructive out­ comes of the colonial empires founded by European powers in earlier centuries. One might also read it as a gloomy prognosis of what might come of the Soviet "colonization" of Eastern Europe. The essential point is that nothing, in 1983, compels the latter, tendentious reading; it is simply there as a possibility. From today's perspective, this reading may seem obvious, but it was certainly not then, and there is no telling whether Muller had it in mind. The central point to emerge from this is that the revitalizing of ancient mythical material in Muller's practice allows a modeling of reality outside the political constraints of what the East German regime allowed to be staged.

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Thus the overlaying of the evocation of a polluted landscape with mythical elements does not detract from its realism. Muller's tech­ nique simply excludes the ritual kowtowing in the direction of the supposed achievements of "real socialism" still expected in East Ger­ man literature in the early 1980s. The first reference to Medea herself in Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten comes at the conclusion of the first sequence: Auf dem Grund aber Medea den zerstuckten Bruder im Arm Die Kennerin Der Gifte (Muller 2002: 74) [On the bottom however Medea with her dismembered Brother in her arm. The connoisseur Of poisons]

The setting is kept deliberately enigmatic, and Muller's notes make it more so. The "bottom" may be that of the lake near StrauBberg; but this may also be in "ein verschlammter Swimmingpool in Beverley Hills oder die Badeanstalt einer Nervenklinik" [a muddy swimming pool in Beverley Hills or the baths in a mental hospital] (2002: 84). The three alternatives reinforce what has been said above about the freedom afforded to Muller's dramatic practice by mythical modeling. We can read the sordid realities evoked by the first text-sequence as reflecting something of the failure of "real socialism" if we want to— but Muller deliberately evades such a fixing of reference. The scene may just as well be in Beverly Hills or in Nowhereland. We thus have the choice of reading Muller's note as a strategic evasiveness, or else as a legitimate insistence on the universality of the myth of Medea— or as both at once. There is an implicit parallel here to the episode in the mythical sources in which Jason is killed by being struck down by the Argo falling on him in the shrine of Poseidon, which so fascinated Muller. He refers to it more than once. The most detailed reference is a fragmentary film script from the early 1980s: FILM/ Im Baum die Argo/ Autowrack. Frauen aus dem Wasser. Kentauren/ Motorrad-Rocker uberfallen sie/.. .Geier versammeln sich auf der Argo/ dem Autowrack. Das Schiff kracht >JASON< auf dem Schadel (2002: 305f) [FILM/ The Argo in a tree/ Car- wreck. Women from the water. Cen­ taurs/ Bikers attack them/...Vultures gather on the ARGO/the carwreck. The ship smashes down on JASON's skull]

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Just as Jason is killed by the very means that enabled his fame as a legendary hero, so Medea is here stigmatized by having to bear the mutilated corpse of her brother. For her killing of Apsyrtos is precisely the means by which she embarks on exile with Jason and so becomes the Medea of legend and tragedy. The tableau emphasizes the finality of Medea's first exile. There can be no return for her to a Colchis, which is barred to her forever by the murder of her own brother to enable Jason's escape. That she should be holding his dismembered corpse can be interpreted in two ways. It may indicate, first, that the bloodguilt she bears has become more intense as time passes, and this is confirmed by some of her later statements. Second, it may well imply a destructive symmetry between events in Colchis and what it to occur in Corinth. If events in Corinth are about to mirror those in Colchis, the effect is to weaken the force of change in the whole text. In the Ancient Greek versions, the theft of the Golden Fleece is essentially an adventure tale in which Medea becomes involved to facilitate the plot, while the later events in Corinth explore a different set of issues, essentially the tragedy of the "barbarian" woman among Greeks who is—at the same time—a figure of power. Seneca's version goes one stage further and sees a progression from the Colchian to the Corinthian episodes: it is only by being rejected by Jason in Corinth and resolving on a terrible revenge that Medea becomes truly herself. Introducing his Medea as weighed down by the corpse of her murdered brother shows Muller intent from the outset on weakening the thematic potential of exile leading to a positive outcome in the form of a return. If Medea is doomed to bear the corpse of Apsyrtos with her wherever she goes, then she never really leaves Colchis, especially if events in Corinth are to be merely a reenactment of the destruction of her original family. Her exile is thus as much in her home­ land as anywhere else—a point reminiscent of Muller's own career. Return to Colchis in a physical sense is not a possibility in any of Muller's sources, but none of them emphasize this as strongly as does Muller's gruesome tableau at the conclusion of the first sequence. The horrific finality, with which Muller closes off this avenue of return, raises the question, in what follows, of possible alternative refuges for Medea. Her descent from the sun-god Helios allows Seneca to present her leaving the human sphere altogether as a return to an alternative "home," and Jahnn, whose influence on Muller is strong, is

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likewise inclined to see Medea's leaving the earth behind after much real suffering as regaining something of her true self. Marriage to Ja­ son has compromised her true nature—the ageing of her body is an emblem of this—and her departure with the corpses of her children for the realm of the gods is as close as she can get to a return to her real self once her marriage to Jason has changed and embittered her. One must keep in mind that Medea's whole recognition of this possibility derives from Jason's rejection of her; it is a reaction to what is done to her, not a discovery she spontaneously makes. This ambiguity is ex­ ploited from the outset in the second sequence of Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten: MEDEA Jason Mein Erstes und mein Letztes Amme Wo ist mein Mann Bei Kreons Tochter Frau AMME Bei Kreons Tochter Frau MEDEA Bei Kreon sagtest du AMME Bei Kreons Tochter MEDEA Hast du gesagt b ei Kreons Tochter Ja Warum bei Kreons Tochter nicht die Macht hat Wohl iiber Kreon ihren Vater Der Uns geben kann das Wohnrecht in Korinth Oder Austreiben in ein anderes Ausland Gerade jetzt vielleicht umfaBt er Jason Mit bitten ihre faltenlosen Knie Fur mich und meine Sohne die er liebt Weinst oder lachst du Amme (Muller 2002: 74) [MEDEA Jason my first and my last Nurse Where is my husband NURSE With Creon's daughter Lady MEDEA With Creon you said NURSE With Creon's daughter MEDEA Did you say with Creon's daughter Yes Why not with Creon's daughter who has power Over her father Creon, surely He Can grant to us the right to live in Corinth Or deport us to another foreign land Maybe right now Jason's embracing her Smooth young knees begging things of her For me and for his two sons whom he loves Nurse are you laughing or weeping]

Once more, the absence of any stage directions or punctuation tends to make these dialogues in the second sequence somewhat less enigmatic

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than the language elsewhere in the text. The dialogue is so crafted that its tones are left very much up to the producer of a given performance. The dialogue could be one Medea has had so often with her nurse that it has become a self-tormenting ritual. Medea may know perfectly well where Jason is and have no illusions left about his intentions towards her. Or else it could be her first attempt at rationalizing what she suspects; there is no way of telling. Medea's question to the nurse at the end of this passage may suggest an element of absurdity stemming from repetition: Medea's situation is desperate, but it can only be restated over and again, unchanged. Exile for Medea is very close, in one sense, to self-estrangement. Once more we are faced with a choice of interpretations. Muller's text is very close here to that of Jahnn—in fact, a few lines later he virtu­ ally quotes Jahnn's play—and he may well be taking over from him the motif of Medea's ageing in her relationship with Jason. But there is, yet again, no way of telling, and, besides, it does not really matter, since the underlying and essential point is that Medea's selfestrangement stems from Jason's lack of desire for her: MEDEA Dreimal funf Nachte Jason hast du nicht Verlangt nach mir Mit deiner Stimme nicht Und nicht mit eines Sklaven Stimme noch Mit Handen oder Blick (Muller 2002: 75) [MEDEA Three times five nights you Jason have not Called for me Not with your own voice not With a slave's voice either nor With hands nor eyes]

Medea undesired by Jason is, in a quite concrete sense, exiled from herself, exiled from what she has become since she embraced her first exile from Colchis for Jason's sake. This further complication is then introduced by the exchange: JASON Was warst du vor mir Weib MEDEA Medea (Muller 2002: 75) [JASON What were you before me woman MEDEA Medea]

Again Muller's version is very close to that of Jahnn's play of 1929, in which there was one Medea who was real before she ever knew Jason. Another Medea came into being through their love. The withdrawal of

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Jason's desire now estranges this Medea from herself so that her one wish is to die: the burden of a double exile is too great. This doubling of the experience of exile implies that there is more than one Medea— the question remains: what motivates this perception on her part? A further innovation on Muller's part is that there is no mention of either the stealing of the Golden Fleece or the later episode in Iolcos, as they are told in Muller's various sources. Medea does, however, accuse Jason of having waged a successful war of conquest in her former homeland Colchis. Jason says nothing to confirm or contradict Medea's accusations, but allows her monologue to continue un­ checked. In fact, dialogue soon fades out of the sequence, only to return very briefly at the end. This creates further uncertainty factors for understanding the rest of what Medea says here, since at times one cannot tell whether she is recounting real events, fantasizing desired outcomes or simply hallucinating. Muller seems deliberately to mix time-modes with one another. Thus Medea addresses her sons as if they were present, but they make no reply—are they present? Has she killed them? Is she in the process of killing them? She evokes the death of Creon's daughter, consumed by the bridal dress she sends her, as if it were actually taking place—has it occurred? Is it merely Medea's wish-transference that the destruction she herself has wrought upon the royal family of Colchis be now doubled in Corinth? One might well say that, for most of the monologue, reality has become virtual. This means that time sequences are layered on top of one another so that it becomes impossible to distinguish their modalities with any certainty. Linear time at best remains an undercurrent— the composition of the text seems dictated by a consciousness that superimposes the past and the future on the present in a way that is contrary to traditional dramatic plotting. The sequence reaches an end, but this is more like an exhaustion of the material (Medeamaterial) than a meaningful conclusion to a chain of episodes. This, in turn, makes it hard to discuss Medea's personality or psychology as if she were a character in a conventional dramatic setting. There is a tendency among German commentators to see her as a mouthpiece for a feminist protest against patriarchy (Steskal 2001: 233f.), but this seems to simplify grossly what Muller's technique is doing. That is, offer a collection of material stemming from the whole Medea myth, with no clear ideological line and with frequent borrowings from his sources, in such a way as to present a complex figure;

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but also blur the time-structures and not highlight the preferred vari­ ants. From the earliest versions of the myth there is a duality in the figure of Medea: she is a victim who exacts a terrible revenge. To return to Muller's main thematic innovation—the idea that Ja­ son has waged a war and won a "victory" in Colchis, rather than just stealing the Fleece and eloping with Medea—its purpose becomes clear as a means of reinforcing the idea that there are successive Medea figures in the text. For as long as Medea's and Jason's love was mutual, it both afforded her a new "home" and insulated her from the memories of the bloodshed in Colchis. Once Jason rejects her in favor of Creon's daughter, he "tears the net" and, for Medea, this traumatic act readmits the horrific past. Thus this "tearing" estranges her from what she has been and done as Jason's Medea—for she now attempts to become again the Medea she was before his arrival in Colchis. This is the sense of the claim she repeats throughout her monologue: "There is a brother that you owe me Jason" (Muller 2002: 75f.). In fact, it is Medea who has killed Apsyrtos and scattered the pieces of his body to sea. Only the radical self-estrangement, the second exile brought about by Jason's betrayal, the destruction of her second "home" by the tearing of the "net" of their love, makes this repeated claim intelligible. Muller also uses it to motivate her hostility to her children. Klinger and Grillparzer first introduced the idea of the sons' preferring Jason's new bride as a way of making Medea's killing of them more assimilable in modern terms. Muller develops it into a radical dissociation from all that she has been and done as Jason's Medea. Now she turns on her sons with vehemence: Was klammert ihr euch noch an die Barbarin Die eure Mutter ist und euer Makel Schauspieler seid ihr Kinder des Verrats Schlagt eure Zahne in mein Herz und geht Mit eurem Vater ders getan hat vor euch (Muller 2002: 77) [Why do you still cling to the barbarian Who is your mother your disgrace as well You are just actors children of betrayal Sink your teeth into my heart and go Off with you father who did it before you]

Muller has forced the division of Medea's consciousness to an extreme that exceeds anything we find in his predecessors. In this sense he has relentlessly worked out the opposing tendencies in the whole

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body of myth—Medeamaterial—rather than attempt to form a con­ ventional dramatic character. He has worked his material in such a way as to permit no resolution of the theme of double exile within the usual plots of Medea-dramas. After Jason's betrayal, Medea rejects totally the woman she has become and aspires to become once more the woman she was before Jason. But the horrible tableau at the end of the first sequence of Muller's text is already emblematic of the impos­ sibility of this. Before the conflicts within Medea begin to unfold in the second sequence, the first sequence has made clear from the outset that there is no return. Given Muller's dependence on Seneca and Jahnn, the resolution they adopt—Medea as a descendant of Helios can return to his realm—would, in principle, still be available as an ending for Muller's adaptation. But Muller works against this throughout the second sequence. Seneca's and Jahnn's texts are full of references to Medea's divine origins and to the supernatural power that is latent within her. Muller omits this dimension when borrowing from their versions. Thus, when his Medea comes to the point of crisis, escape in a chariot drawn by dragons is not an option. Rather her end is a nihilistic stasis: Will ich die Menschheit in zwei Stucke brechen Und wohnen in der leeren Mitte Ich Kein Weib kein Mann (Muller 2002: 79) [I will break humankind into two pieces, Have my home in the empty middle I No woman no man]

In one sense, Muller may here be drawing on the final consequences from Seneca. In Seneca's play a process of self-becoming takes place through Medea's acts of violence. She is most herself when, having fully indulged her revenge on Jason, she takes leave of the earth altogether. Muller neatly reverses this process so as to leave his Medea stranded in emptiness, for her return to herself is nothing but a regressive fantasy. She locates herself in a time before what she has now become, but she lacks the supernatural means to get there, or indeed to move anywhere, physically or mentally. Significantly, Muller casts the end of the second sequence as almost a parody of Seneca. Medea addresses her sons, who are apparently dead: Stellt ihr euch tot Die Mutter tauscht ihr nicht Schauspieler seid ihr Lugner und Verrater

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Yixu Lu Bewohnt von Hunden Ratten Schlangen seid ihr Das bellt und pfeift und zischt Ich hor es gut 0 ich bin klug ich bin Medea Ich Habt ihr kein Blut mehr Jetzt ist alles still Die Scheie von Kolchis auch verstummt Und nichts mehr JASON Medea MEDEA Amme Kennst du diesen Mann (Muller 2002: 80) [Pretend to be dead. You don't deceive your mother. Actors you are Liars and betrayers You're full of dogs and rats and snakes 1 hear the barking squeaking hissing Hear it well O I am clever I am Medea I Have you no more blood Now all is quiet The screams from Colchis too And nothing more JASON: Medea MEDEA: Nurse, Do you know this man?]

All of this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, because Muller sig­ nals throughout his text that he is not working in terms of a fictional modernization, a psychological portrait. Put another way, the protagonist of this second sequence is not the person of Medea, but the lan­ guage of Medea—the Medeamaterial that Muller adapted from various other literary sources, infused with an astonishing rhetorical energy but denied a triumphal ending. Hence his Medea is not someone to be wept over. If we ask what has happened to the tragedy of Medea, then, in one sense, it is fully present in the language of the second sequence; in another sense, it is a series of equations whose terms cancel one another out. Muller's play is perhaps the most bleak and unyielding exposition of the various meanings of exile in modern European literature. In all its sequences it negates the hope of return in spatial and emotional terms. In antiquity, the wanderings of Odysseus give the pattern for the purposefulness of movement and the emotional value of return. No matter how often his efforts to regain the shore of Ithaca are frustrated, his repeated attempts will ultimately succeed, and the return is made meaningful by his physical and emotional reunion with the faithful Penelope. Exile does not have to culminate in return to persist as hope, as Ovid's Tristia and Ex Ponto document, but the hope of return can maintain the positive tension of future movement. The myth of Medea sets out to ask the question: what are the possible outcomes of a voluntary exile? Euripides and Seneca both sharpen the question by adding blood-guilt to the initial displacement,

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thus excluding the idyllic outcome of Odysseus' wanderings: there have been some infidelities on his part and some persistent suitors re­ main to be dealt with, but neither he nor Penelope have changed over the twenty years, and nothing mars the triumph of his return. In all its variants, the myth of Medea introduces the element that, where previously Jason depended on her and her magic arts, once in exile she comes to depend on Jason's emotions and is changed by this. This leaves her vulnerable as a woman relying on an ambitious man's affection, and as a foreigner on the tolerance of Corinth. The tragedy also derives from a third factor: for all her vulnerability she remains a figure of power—until Muller's version removes this dimension of the plot altogether. Her power offers her an exit from her impossible situation in Corinth. This may be further exile in Athens, as Euripides suggests, or the more radical form exile takes with her in Latin trag­ edy, the dehumanized self-realization for which Seneca opts. In each case, further movement solves, in some part, the torment of exile that her love for Jason brings upon her. Muller's chief innovation is to negate movement in both senses— spatial displacement and narrative change—as an effective response to exile. This is evident in the time-structures of his work, which deny the effect of sequential change by the constant overlaying of temporal modalities and by blurring the differences between them. If movement in space and time offers no solution to the suffering of exile, then Muller's Medea must end in stasis—in the "empty middle"—between two modes of self-estrangement. For self-estrangement is the possibility of meaningful movement instigated by herself in any sense is excluded. Medea can make no move to counter Jason's withdrawal of love except to exact a vengeance that brings her no closer to herself or to him. Rather, her eviction from the temporary "home" she had found in Jason's love not only estranges her from what she has become as Jason's wife, but strands her in a helpless longing for what she was before her love for Jason exiled her from Colchis. But a return to this self is equally barred to her. The completeness of her stasis is reflected in the fact that the third sequence of the play, in which Jason/the Argonauts monologize to no conclusion, conspicuously omits all reference to Medea: with the exhaustion of her mythical "material" she loses all personal presence. Muller very skillfully manipulated the elements of the versions of Medea with which he was familiar to extract a maximum of negativity

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from them. It is important to stress that it is a manipulation, not an existential commitment to nihilism. Certainly, the modern world ap­ pears as a parallel desolation to the entrapped figure of Medea. Given Muller's obvious distaste for the official East German insistence that literature should portray history as a meaningful progression to an ideal socialist state, we may read his play as a thoroughgoing deconstruction of this. He was to quote T.S. Eliot's Waste Land as one of his sources, and his drama may be read as a programmatic denial that Western society has changed in the intervening period (Muller 1992: 304). Adapting ancient myths means interrogating them, with the freedom to arrive at new answers. Muller's new answer is to concentrate all the negative elements in a form whose logical outcome is the end of humanity in the third sequence. But again and again the text highlights its own theatrical quality, and Muller issued, from the early 1970s onward, a series of warnings about taking the negativity of his plays literally, and stressed the potential of such negativity as a "war against the audience" that might shock it into a more positive frame of mind (Muller 1992: 320). Whether this was a sophistry designed to make his works appear less dangerous or provocative in an East German context or not, Muller's powerful interrogation of the Medeamaterial is certainly the most uncompromising among the many German adaptations and radicalizes the theme of exile with stark originality.

Acceptance: on 1956: Desire and the Unknowable Sue Hajdu

Abstract This chapter charts Hungarian Australian artist Sue Hajdu's response to her father's photographs of the Hungarian Uprising of October 1956. The chapter emerges from Hajdu's position as a member of the Hungarian diaspora, whereby her diasporic existence and identity owes itself to a historical event she cannot claim, and to the tensions created by multiple desires: in diasporic longing, in positivist history-making, in ambivalent citizenship, and in the demands put on the photograph as unmediated historical evidence. Hajdu outlines the context of production of the original images and of her artistic responses, before discussing the issues that influenced the creation of her own work. Hajdu argues that vernacular photographs can be used to contest and replace images and ideologies that have come to dominate memories of the past, and that the past becomes meaningful through such engagement.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. Susan Sontag, On Photography

On the afternoon of 23 October 1956, the first day of the Hungarian uprising, my father, Hajdu Laszlo, was one of the thousands of stu­ dents, intellectuals, and workers who gathered in Budapest to demon­ strate for political reform. They rallied for Imre Nagy, their chosen political leader, but when he failed to deliver the desired speech the crowd eventually dispersed. The fateful shooting that triggered the ensuing violence had already occurred outside the radio building. My father chose neither to go to the radio, nor to the Stalin statue, which was then being pulled down. Instead, he joined a group of youths anxious to have the students' demands printed. He spent the night with these strangers in a basement printery.

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The printers discovered all sorts of "technical problems" that pre­ vented them from printing up the demands. At dawn, my father left Buda, crossed the Danube and arrived at his room in downtown Pest. His immediate instinct was to reach for his camera. He went out on to Andrassy Avenue and took his first photograph—a Soviet armored personnel carrier running along the street; in the background one of the city's oldest pharmacies and a few people huddled in a doorway. For the next eleven days he wandered the streets of Budapest, his camera hidden behind his overcoat or under the sandwiches in his satchel. Officially, the uprising continued until 4 November, when several thousand Soviet tanks crossed the borders into Hungary. Stationed on almost every street corner, they shot at the first sign of human movement. This effectively put an end to my father's picture taking. In all, he had made 140 exposures. He took the films with him on his escape to Austria in December 1956, where they were subse­ quently developed and printed. I discovered these prints during my teens and would look at them from time to time. In these first experiences, what stirred me most was the presence of death. Many of the photographs are images of bod­ ies—Soviet soldiers, Hungarian citizens, and secret police (Allamvedelmi Osztaly, AVO) who died during those weeks. They lie on the streets covered in lime, flowers and flags, or rubbish, depending on their role in events. On the edges of the frame are the feet of Budapest's citizens, looking [see figure 1]. My parents were not the type to tell stories or reminisce about the past. They never explained these pictures, so I was unsure of the exact significance of such details. I knew that the photographs depicted the uprising—the "revolution," as the Hungarian emigres called it—but I could not identify anything beyond "October 1956." Yet I recognized in that date a tumultuous event that my parents had experienced and that had brought both of them to the edge of death. This was enough to make me cry over these pictures on several occasions. The experience resonates strongly with Susan Sontag's well-known encounter with photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau (1977). My emotions were also aroused by a vague sense of myself as Hungarian. The photographs represented a past (event) that cut me off from my past (ancestry). I recognized parts of myself in those photo1

He and my mother met some months later in one of the refugee camps in Austria.

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graphs. I can liken my feelings to those of Anne McDonald when viewing a photograph that her father had shot when they were tourists in New Guinea: "I find I am secretly hoping it will reveal a memory; I become immediately enthralled by evidence of my past...Urgent with longing, I accuse the image for not facilitating a return to that... memory" (1988: 61). The photograph reduces McDonald to funda­ mental questions: "Who was my father when he took that photo?" and "Why am I here now?" (1988: 61). For me, this feeling is particularly intense in my father's 1956 photographs.

As a child of Hungarian refugees who migrated to Australia—as a member of the diasporas that typified the 20 century—I feel that in many ways my past is a foreign country. This only became evident to me when I returned to Hungary in 1990 and again in 2000. Place is important here, but so too is story. The parts of Hungary that vibrate th

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strongly with spirit of place are those that my father or my relatives tell stories about. Becoming aware of the generational chain back across time makes me feel I do indeed have a long and compelling past. Meanwhile in Australia I feel rootless. We have no past there beyond the year of my parents' arrival: 1958. As the diasporic returnee, I underwent a process of resensitization to past and to place, by listening to stories and working with old pho­ tographs. Albeit in a different context, this process is beautifully ex­ pressed by Ross Gibson in the catalogue essay of Crime Scene, an ex­ hibition of forensic photography held in Sydney in 1999: You begin to feel a deep emotional charge running through your city.. .You sense that every street corner, every vacant lot, back-alley and culvert in this city is energized by past humanity. Call it history, call it spirit of place—whatever name you give it, it starts to follow you everywhere you go. (1999)

But the past is gone, and no photograph can retrieve it. What Gibson gained from viewing photographs was not the past as it was, for that is impossible. What he gained was a sense of the past; or more precisely, his sense of the past. Even without privy knowledge I recognize my father as an ama­ teur in his photographs. Perhaps the biggest clue is the safe distance of his framing. He had no professional reasons for risking his life to get a close shot. Generally he frames the entire scene, often including a wide expanse of road in the foreground. In other pictures his photographic skills betray him—sometimes the center of interest is obscure, or the photographs are blurry, or poorly exposed [see figures 2 & 3]. Photographs taken by professional photojournalists play a large part in creating and maintaining memories of historical events. Underwritten by the authority of the media, such images make a strong claim to truth. In the discourses of war photography, we rarely consider images by the unknown, fumbling amateur—the local citizen— for whom possibly much more than his own physical safety is at stake. 2

There were political reasons for his safe framing as well. He was aware that if the films were to be found by the AVO, the people in the pictures could be identified. Thus, he maintained a distance and also usually asked those in the foreground of the shot to turn around. His fears were realistic—in the aftermath of the uprising, many people were executed or imprisoned after being identified from photographs.

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But vernacular photographs can tell very different stories. There is something more ad-hoc, more subtle, in the way amateur photographs depict historical events. My father does not organize his pictures in the manner of the professional photographer, but I see the value of his work precisely in the way that it bypasses such technical and conceptual skills. As a result, his photographs pick up details that would have been deemed either too un-noteworthy or too unpalatable to be put into public circulation. This allows a more complex message about the nature of war to slip through. In the following discussion, I focus on three of my father's recur­ ring motifs, all of which work to subvert the standard etiquette of war photography. These are the dead body, the gazing crowd, and (the non-motif of) non-heroism. I have encountered multiple forms of representation of 1956— stage plays that were put on by the Hungarian community in Mel­ bourne, photographs, posters, collections of photography such as Cry Hungary (Gadney 1986). Repeatedly, the message is that the revolu­ tion was heroic and tragic. Growing up in Melbourne, I had always felt instinctively ambivalent about these depictions of the Hungarian heroes. Surely the emigres who formed my parents' social circle could not have all been heroes. The urge to represent heroism can some­ times be so strong as to override the "truth" of photojournalism. In a provocative analysis of Robert Capa's Death of a Republican Soldier, Caroline Brothers (1997) argues that this photograph, rather than cap­ turing the soldier at the moment he fell, was in fact a fake. She concludes that "the fame of this photograph is indicative of a collective imagination that wanted and still wants to believe certain things about the nature of death in war...What this image argued was that death in war was heroic, and tragic, and that the individual counted and that his death mattered" (1997: 183). This is what most of us, including the Hungarians, would like to believe about death in war. 3

My father's photographs whisper something different. They show me that caution, passivity, the mundane, and the everyday play a very large part in war and revolution. My first inklings of this came with making work prints of his negatives. These revealed details that had My father encountered a similar situation in Budapest, when he witnessed JeanPierre Pedrazzini, shooting for Paris-Match, staging a shot of one of the "freedom fighters" firing a rifle into the distance. Looking at this photograph with the critical eye that I have gained, I have no doubt that it was staged.

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not been visible on the proof sheets. I noticed the caution of his fram­ ing. I also started to see into the crowds, and instead of heroic freedom-fighters I found ordinary people wandering the streets, standing around, or peering out of apartment windows. By and large they are onlookers, not participants. Some even appear disinterested in the extraordinary events going on around them. In one photograph, a statue of a Red Army soldier is being hammered to pieces. While the noise must have been deafening, a man and a woman chat away amicably in the background. In another shot, a man pushes his bicycle across a bridge as two Soviet tanks rush by. Perhaps he was more concerned about being able to eat dinner that night, than the presence of the tanks. John MacCormac, writing for the New York Times about the uprising, called such scenes "a touch of unreality," indicative of the extent to which professional images appearing in the media shape our sense of the reality of war (Gadney 1986: 58). While my father took two or three photographs of men engaged in gestures that could be interpreted as heroic, what strikes me about his work is its lack of a constructed emotional appeal. Indeed, the physical distance of his framing is paralleled by an emotional distance in his gaze. His photographs appear cool, almost matter-of-fact. This is also true of his portraits of the dead. In contrast to his street scenes, my father tended to photograph the dead from close range. In one picture of a Soviet soldier, I can see the insides of his leg—run over by a tank—mashed and puffed up at the same time. In another photograph it is as if I can see into the dead man's skull. Another photograph frames an AVO corpse. The head is so mutilated as to be barely recognizable; cigarette butts are scattered all over the torso, mixed with dry blood and dirt. These are all enemy bodies. But whether enemies or loyal citizens, my father's photographs of the dead do not sensationalize, and in their coolness, their matter-of-factness, they resonate strongly with Barthes's argument 4

4

5

For me, there is a tension between this seemingly disinterested gaze, and my expectations about the emotions my father must have been feeling watching his capital destroyed and his countrymen dying. Interestingly, in the interviews I conducted with my father, he spoke matter-of-factly about what happened in his pictures: "You see this? Well, this happened, and then that" was his typical style of explanation. While he used the term "freedom-fighter," he very rarely used words such as "hero," not to mention "bravery" or "tragedy." His personality or his personal interpretation of the event could account for this. Nevertheless, it does not detract from what is going on in many of his photographs. 5

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that the amateur photograph stands closest to the noeme of photogra­ phy: "that-has-been" (1980: 76). They lie close to the underbelly of history. If we can filter though our distinctions of enemy/non-enemy, we are left with a compelling indication of what happens to bodies in wars. Of the logic of war, vis-a-vis the body. And always, on the edges of the picture, is the presence of the crowd. What feelings and thoughts flooded the minds of those who gathered to gaze at the dead, I am not sure, but my father's photo­ graphs tell me that they wanted to look [see figure 4]. A dozen pairs of

Figure 4: Photograph of a lynching at Republic Square, by Hajdu Laszlo, Budapest, 1956.

feet circle the dead body of an AVO, confronting its disfigurement, its smell. A man's shoulder is caught in the camera's parallax error as he takes in a scene of the black and twisted foot of a boy lying under an

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exploded vehicle. In the aftermath of the battle at Republic Square, crowds of bystanders strain for a view over the people in front of them. Clearly others are as interested in looking at death as I am. The repetition of this motif of the crowd that has gathered to look, and the intense compulsion for visuality, is of particular interest to me as an artist who works with photography. It is significant that my father chose not to take up a gun, but to wander the streets specifically to see and to record. My relationship with his photographs duplicates this desire for knowledge through the visual. Most of the images in the individual panels in 1956: desire and the unknowable are massive enlargements of tiny sections of my father's negatives. In deciding the arrangements of these panels, I worked with a photocopier over the course of three or four months, repeatedly enlarging different sections of the work prints in different scales. The final panels were created first by printing sections of his original images, and then rephotographing smaller areas of these sections in order to create final work negatives. The prints that form the panels are thus 5 generation croppings and enlargements of my father's original pictures—the final product of a compounded, compulsive homing-in. th

"The printed image excites a double desire in history: on the one hand, for the careful sifting and assembling of detailed and objective records; and, on the other, for the restoration of history as 'lived real­ ity'" (Tagg 1995: 290). Looking at my father's photographs always prompts the question: "What was it like—to be there, to experience that?" But the sheets of silver-gelatin before me yield little. I ask my father the same question, and he answers in a few terse words that fail to communicate the depth and intensity I desire. My wish for a "lived reality," for an experiential history, prompted me to visit Budapest with my father in 2000, in order for us to retrace his steps. While it was impossible to go back in time, I could at least go back in space, and walk the same streets. I found myself becoming obsessed with the minutia of noting exact addresses for buildings and becoming concerned with the exact position from which he took the pictures. I wanted to "see" the photographs in the same way, so as to "see" history in the same way. I remember the first time I stood in the precise location he had stood in forty-four years ago. Holding the print (my overriding reality of Budapest, which I had gotten to know so intimately in the darkroom) in my hands—comparing it to the scene which now stood before me, I

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was overwhelmed by a feeling that the past was about to come break­ ing through the veneer of the present. It was this "visual" experience that partly prompted me to present this work in a grid. The spaces between each image function like a mesh, through which the picture seems to want to melt and re-form itself before the viewer. At night in Budapest, I used to look over my father's photographs and write out notes about the day's findings. I wondered what "newsreel images" might be running through my father's head, what he must be dreaming of, and longed for that experience to somehow be implanted into my own mind. But as he slept peacefully beside me I realized that his memories could never be mine. There was an unbridgeable gulf between us, because my experience of walking those streets in search of those pictures was inevitably different to his. My hope that I could know what it was like to be in the historical event, by knowing his pictures as accurately as possible, failed. It was then that I came to understand the inadequacy of the Rankean will to access the truth of history through the document. For the past is ultimately unknowable, irretrievable through any medium. It has slipped by in the instant of the shutter. The sense of loss, the often inarticulate recognition that we can never return, is the "lingering laceration" produced by the photograph (Shawcross 1997: 109). I suspect that this is what compels us to keep looking at photographs. And in my case, the experience of looking at those particular photographs was layered with the inarticulate condition of diaspora experience—that that past, my past, which is not my past, cannot be returned to, cannot ever be claimed fully. I came to accept that no matter how intensely and methodically I worked with my father's photographs, the events of 1956 would re­ main like Hayden White's historical sublime (1996): ultimately in­ comprehensible: formless, irregular, absurd, grotesque; marked by disruption, dislocation, and discontinuity; lacking a center, inherently uncertain, and inherently meaningless. The traditional narrative is unable to express such a conception of the past, because requirements such as plot and narrative closure snuff out the sublime. Instead, new literary techniques such as splitting and fragmentation, and the avoidance of "narrative omniscience over events" become necessary (Burgoyne 1996: 114-15). This is particularly true post-Holocaust, because of the impasse in imagination and explanation we are brought to by this event. Thus, "anti-narrative non-

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histories" offer the "only prospect for adequate representations of the kind of 'unnatural' events—including the Holocaust—that mark our era and distinguish it absolutely from all the 'history' that comes be­ fore it" (White 1996: 32). My gradual acceptance of such theoretical issues contributed to resolving many of the formal decisions that were part of the creation of this work. My father's images are fractured as they "pass through" the grid, but the individual pieces are arranged to stimulate the human urge for continuity and unity. Depending on viewing distance, at first glance we may be deceived into seeing a complete picture. However, we soon realize that the pieces in each section do not come from one image that has been split up and spread out, but from separate images. A tension emerges between our recognition of the splintered frag­ ments, and our now self-conscious desire to join the picture up into a comprehensible whole [see figure 5]. Such tension is expressive of our postmodern relationship with history and the narrative. For while the contemporary world is clearly different to the modernist one, it is still suffused with modernist residue—the comfortable, familiar concepts in which we still wish to believe but which are no longer adequate. We long for wholeness, we long for explainability. Our minds know that this can never be the case, but our hearts persist in their longing.

Figure 5: detail from 1956: desire and the unknowable, by Sue Hajdu, 2001.

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The tension produced between the grid of 1956: desire and the unknowable and the images themselves, parallels our oscillation. The grid functions similarly to the traditional narrative in that it "excludes the irrational, the non-causal, perceptual links that lie outside of what might be called the agreeable. The grid provides a void-as-space in which form can exist in a way that is agreeable, measurable, commonsense-truth" (Loveday 1999). Yet it strains to perform this function against the irrationalities, distortions, and mysteries within the images. The prints are dark, often obscure. Traditional respect for tonal scale and shadow detail—the hallmarks of the modernist "good print"— have been abandoned. The question "what are they looking at?" can­ not be answered. It lies obscured in overly enlarged grains of silver and black lacunas that deny visuality. The work lacks a clear center of interest. Distortions in scale and perspective disorient the viewer, as do the repetitions. This kind of story-telling becomes "not an explanation, but an obsessive recounting, not a consistent description but a series of impressions, polarizing coherence and cohesion" (Scott 1999: 225-27). We are left with a relationship between photography and the historical event that is radically different to that of a documentary practice. My decision to re-photograph prints of my father's images, rather than working directly from his negatives, produces a grainy result that is clearly a copy, thereby acknowledging my essentially vicarious relationship to the past. This expresses the double-index of his/my their/our desire to know the historical through the act of looking. 1956: desire and the unknowable thus becomes my vision of 1956, rather than my father's. The question remains as to what I gained from my research trip back to Budapest with my father. The lived reality of the Hungarian Revolution proved inaccessible to me. However, I was able to stand in almost all of the locations in which he took his photographs and I was able to trace the route that he once walked, from negative to negative, as he photographed. And then there were the hours spent questioning, listening, recording, remembering. I feel comfortable saying that my knowledge of his pictures is now as intimate as his, albeit in a different way. This process has resulted in a transferal, but not only of facts and stories, which almost any stranger can gain. It is the transferal to the body—the result of all that walking side by side—that interests me

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more, because some of the knowledge that exists in his body has now been passed on to mine. I am his daughter. So this is a process of gen­ erational transferal. A diasporic inheritance of both the intellect and the body. Budapest does indeed now resonate with past humanity, with spirit of place. I can no longer look at those pavements and build­ ings innocently. This bodily transferal of historical knowledge relates closely to my discussion about looking in the second section of this chapter. I interpret the desirous looking of the crowd as the human compulsion to "take in," in an attempt to come to terms with both the biggest mys­ teries of life and the enormity of twentieth-century events. Writing about the Vietnam War in Dispatches, Michael Herr relates a scene in which a soldier, hit by a mortar round, has propped himself up against a tree, "making himself look at the incredible thing that had just happened to his leg, screwed around about once at some point below his knee like a goofy scarecrow. He looked away and then back again, looking at it for a few seconds longer each time, then he settled in for about a minute, shaking his head and smiling, until his face became serious and he passed out" (1978: 33). I do not interpret looking at the body in this way as morbid or voyeuristic. To "take in" death, to endeavor to know death in this way, is the same as the attempt to come to terms with the mystery of the human body in birth, or in the sexual act. Here I appreciate the coolness of my father's gaze the most. Because of the way he neither flinches at, nor sensationalizes, nor moralizes the scenes where crowds look at the dead, where they clearly want to look at the dead, I am able em­ brace this desire as a part of my humanness. Nevertheless, it must be a difficult task to look at scenes where one human has caused another such damage. Even among those who had good reason to hate the AVO, some must have looked away. The complexity involved in such acts of looking is discussed by Inga Clendinnen in Reading the Holocaust (1998). She quotes Charlotte Delbo, writing about a woman being dragged to the gas chamber: "Try to look. Just try and see" (1998: 63). Why? Because to look at the dead on Budapest's streets or in the concentration camps, is not only to take in death, but also to take in history—to know, in the most unmediated manner, what man has done to man. There is a moral imperative in this act. For to make oneself witness, to retain that information in one's body and to hopefully one day pass it on, was to resist

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the ultimate horror of the camps: the deliberate destruction of all re­ cords of the destruction. Visual representation of the body in war is a similarly fraught issue. While my father's photographs are discreet and respectful, they reveal rather than obscure physical mutilation. We must have access to images such as these, alternatives to press photography of war. Be­ cause governments do send bodies into war and annihilate them, whilst denying this reality in representation. Meanwhile the glorification of heroism continues. It is better to know. The act of staying attentive to the past counts. Clendinnen places that duty of attention squarely on our shoulders, and not on those of the survivors of painful historical events. Luckily for all of us, some did survive, and are willing to tell. The rest of us have the moral imperative to ask, to listen, and to look. And I agree with Clendinnen's view that these acts should be as disciplined and as critical as possible (1998: 206) We should strive to know as accurately as possible, as much as possible, even while admitting that there will be inevitable absences and lacunas. It is this tension inherent in a postmodern historiographical position that I have intended to ride in my work. As such knowledge is transferred to the next-generation body, the voice of the diaspora child becomes able to speak. If my father were of a different temperament, or had different abilities, perhaps he would have compiled his photographs and published them. That task has now become mine. 1956- desire and the unknowable was my first attempt at addressing his ceuvre, and it was a very personal statement. In the course of researching and producing this piece I realized that our cross-generational project had not yet reached its full potential. A more thorough public presentation of the work, either through full-scale exhibition or a book that presents his photographs alongside my text, is desirable and would bring a sense of personal closure. Such a text could accommodate a diasporic voice that places the past in the now, while presenting a narrative that is accepting of the fracturing, the silences and omissions, the desire to comprehend sitting against the incomprehensibility. History's dead are gone. What remains of their actions once they are gone? As Scott McQuire writes, "The permanence or impermanence of any memory always depends on others, on the extent to which the liv-

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ing are prepared to assume responsibility for the lives of the dead" (1998: 164). The dead. Not just my father, one day; but all of them. 6

6

This chapter was originally written in various forms between 2001 and 2004. My father died in Melbourne, Australia, in 2005. "1956: desire and the unknowable" was first exhibited in a solo exhibition, Little Histories, at the Sydney College of the Arts in 2001. Later that year it was presented, together with 30 of Hajdu Laszlo's original photographs, in a father-daughter collabo­ rative exhibition at 62 Robertson, Brisbane. Between Ranke and the sublime: two approaches to Budapest 1956 presented opposing modernist and postmodern views about the ability of the photograph to provide knowledge of the past and exilic displacement.

Displacement and Shifting Geographies in the Noir Fiction of Cesare Battisti Maja Mikula Abstract Cesare Battisti, an Italian author and ex-member of the ultra-left guerrilla group Armed Proletarians for Communism, which was active in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, writes his novels and short stories from the vantage point of a ventennial exilic experience in Mexico and France. In his fiction, there is little scope for enthusiasm and joy. His textual world is dominated by broken lives, estrangement, shady deals, violence, betrayal, and the absence of innocence and morality. It is also an all-male world, where female characters are represented either as treacherous, or purely instrumental. There is no escape, only relentless movement. By looking closely at Battisti's fiction, published in French and Italian, this chapter examines displacement and exile both within a broader context of contemporary exile theory and, more specifically, in the current Italian and European sociopolitical context.

Un giorno o l'altro lascero la Francia e attraversero l'oceano verso ovest, inseguendo il sole morente. In un tramonto che non finisce mai, dove la gente applaude la fine del giorno e ha gli occhi che sorridono. (Battisti 1999: 110) [Sooner or later, I will leave France and cross the ocean westwards, following the dying sun. In a sunset that never ends, where the people applaud the day's end and have the eyes that smile.]

Cesare Battisti—an Italian author and former member of the ultra-left guerrilla group called Proletari Armati per il Comunismo (PAC; Armed Proletarians for Communism), which was active in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s—writes his novels and short stories from the vantage point of a ventennial exilic experience in Mexico and France. By look­ ing closely at Battisti's fiction, published in French and Italian, this chapter examines displacement and exile in the current Italian and

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European sociopolitical context. In his preface to the collection of short stories entitled Terres Brulees [The Burnt Lands] (2000a) edited by him and featuring his short story "A la tienne, Marlo" [Cheers, Marlo], Battisti describes his own writing aesthetics as "post-1968 noir," which appropriates the "narrative virtues" of oral discourse by recounting events and staying away from any ideological or psycho­ logical judgment. The conflict is not between the forces of good and evil, he says, since "le representant du 'bien' n'est autre que celui qui combat un adversaire donne a un moment donne" [the representative of 'good' is no more than someone fighting against a given adversary in a given moment] (2000c: 8). In addition to this renunciation of moral judgment, characteristic of noir fiction in general, Battisti's fic­ tion is notably autobiographical. In his postscript to Marco Ferrari's novel En 2 CV vers la revolution [In a Citroen 2CV Towards the Revolution], he quotes the dictum attributed to the French film direc­ tor Francois Truffaut, which affirms that, "dans la creation, tout doit ressembler a ce qu'on a de plus cher dans la vie" [in creation, everything needs to resemble what one holds dearest in one's life] (1996b: 139). This principle is indeed the driving force of Battisti's storytel­ ling, in which the authenticity and intensity of the author's personal experience turn out to be a conditio sine qua non of literary creation. By probing the thin line between reality and fiction in Battisti's novels and short stories, this chapter examines Battisti in Foucauldian terms (1977) as an author-function, constructed discursively as a reference tag for a range of ideas and phenomena, such as the Italian autonomist movement of the 1970s, radical leftist thought in general, resistance to institutional power, political exile and asylum, globalization, terrorism and postmodern footlessness. I do not intend to search for the "truth" about the actual Cesare Battisti associated with this author-function. Arguments in support of his innocence or guilt, and those for or against his extradition from France to Italy, fall outside the scope of this chapter.

Significantly, only four of Battisti's novels—Travestito da Uomo (quoted in this chapter in its French translation as Les Habits d'Ombre), L'Ultimo Sparo, L'Orma Rossa and Avenida Revolution—have been published in Italy and in their original language, reflecting Italian publishers' reluctance to make his work public to a wider Italian readership. The rest of Battisti's opus was published in France and in French translation.

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From Cesare Battisti to "caso Battisti" Mitterrand est mort. Ce sont les nouvelles dispositions de l'espace juridique de l'Union. Au gouvernement, ils ne savent pas quoi faire. On nous conseille de nous cacher. Pour le moment (Battisti 2003b: 94). [Mitterrand is dead. These are the new arrangements of the juridical space of the Union. In the government, they don't know what to do. For the moment, they advise us to hide.]

Were it not for the accelerated drive towards Fortress Europe follow­ ing the Schengen Convention (1990, taking effect in 1995), and the politics of fear after 11 September 2001, there would have been no "caso Battisti" [Battisti case]. One of many former Italian militants who had found refuge in Mitterrand's France, Battisti would have continued his inconspicuous existence in Paris, as a father of two daughters and a successful author of noir fiction. His life story, which is sketched in the following paragraphs and which has recently gained notoriety beyond the Franco-Italian context, would have been known only to a selected few. Like many young Italians in the 1970s, Battisti (born in 1954 in Latina, a southern district of Rome) was drawn by the massive political unrest, which shook Italy in that period. At the age of 17, he abandoned high school and entered a world bordering between "po­ litical struggle" and "metropolitan banditism" (Evangelisti et al. 2004). This was a world where politically motivated robbery— euphemistically and somewhat romantically referred to as "proletarian expatriation"—was considered by many young people a legitimate act of wealth redistribution. Following a period in jail for a series of minor offenses in 1976, he moved to Milan, where he became involved in the then nascent guerrilla group PAC. PAC was one of many guerrilla groups inspired by the autonomist movement that swept Italy during the 1970s. The group, based in Milan, shared the principal ideological credo of the movement: a belief in decentralization of power and the non-hierarchical selforganization of labor. PAC was involved in a number of politically motivated expropriations and assassinations, targeted at prison personnel, as well as the shop owners who had responded to expropriations by killing one or more perpetrators. The assassinations claimed by PAC include those of prison warden Andrea Santoro in Udine (6 June 1978), jeweler Pier Luigi Torregiani in Milan (16 February

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1979), butcher Lino Sabbadin in Mestre (16 February 1979) and po­ liceman Andrea Campagna in Milan (19 April 1979), all of which have been directly or indirectly attributed to Battisti himself. Arrested in 1979 in a police roundup of the Autonomous Collective of the Milanese Barona district following Torregiani's assassina­ tion and detained during investigations in the special prison of Frosinone near Rome, Battisti was eventually sentenced in May 1981 to 12 years in prison for arms possession and membership of an armed gang. Only five months later, however, he escaped from prison and, after a brief period in France, settled in Mexico, where he stayed until 1990. In Mexico, he was one of the initiators of the militant cultural journal Via Libre, the name now adopted by a website that promotes Battisti's cause and publicizes his fiction (www.vialibre 5.com). In September 1990, he left Mexico for refuge in France, attracted by the promise of asylum that President Francois Mitterrand had extended to the Italian political exiles of the 1970s willing to renounce their violent past. As a result of France's protectionist stance, and despite hav­ ing been, in 1993, sentenced in Italy in absentia to life imprisonment, he was able to continue living in Paris and gain considerable prestige as a critically acclaimed author. Up to this point, Battisti's exilic experience falls neatly into the category of exile that Allatson and McCormack call the "flip side of legislated banishment," that is, "juridicial evasion," or "exile chosen to evade a state's legal apparatuses. Aside from millions upon millions who have fled the rise to power and operations of totalitarian, dictatorial or simply ideologically unpalatable regimes, this form of exile also characterizes the experiences of innumerable outlaws" (2005: 4-5). Enter Fortress Europe. While border controls between European Union (EU) member states and non-members are fortified, those within the expanding union are progressively rendered more open. This openness is "integral to [the EU's] postmodern economic and political experiment" and, therefore, any impediment to it becomes highly controversial (Stevenson 2003: 82). Indeed, only a year after the Schengen Convention had taken effect—following Belgium's re­ fusal to extradite two Basque separatists accused by Spain of member­ ship of ETA (Statewatch)—it became clear to the European legislators that the judicial basis for extraditing terrorists within the Schengen area would have to be harmonized. For Italian political refugees in France, the Schengen Convention did not bode well. In his novel Le

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Cargo Sentimental, Battisti recalls the feeling of uncertainty that spread among the Parisian group when the word "Schengen" entered into circulation. What could it mean? Laws, treatises, nothing good in any case: "La-bas, a Schengen, siege de la nouvelle inquisition, un juge sans scrupule s'etait mis en tete de nous reexpedier dans une tres democratique prison italienne" [Over there, in Schengen, the seat of the new inquisition, a judge without scruples got it into his head to send us back to a very democratic Italian prison] (2003b: 94). A reassurance for the refugees came only when, despite the developments at the European level, the then Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin declared that he would not allow their extradition (Za Repubblica, 5 March 1998). The drive towards judicial harmonization within the EU gained a new impetus at the Tampere European Council meeting in October 1999, which emphasized the importance of cooperation in both civil and criminal matters within the Union and of mutual recognition of judicial authorities of the member states. A political agreement on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) applicable to the entire EU territory was reached in December 2001, following the catastrophic terrorist attacks on 11 September. Ironically, Italy has been quite vocal in opposing the implementation of the European Arrest Warrant, despite the resurrected fear of terrorism following the murders of two ministry officials working on labor reforms, Massimo D'Antona (Rome, 20 May 1999) and Marco Biagi (Bologna, 19 March 2002), committed by the Red Brigades. The emotional charge of the word "terrorism" and its power to inspire fear, seal alliances and mobilize people for war has grown exponentially since 9/11, 2001. As Quentin Deluermoz argues, 2

'[t]erroriste' est devenu une sorte de categorie en soi, rendant inutile toute reflexion—parce qu'elle serait indecente—et accuse a l'avance celui qui est etiquete comme tel: au pire, il est coupable; au mieux, il est suspect. Cet usage complexe, international, national et meme ordinaire de cette appellation est rendu encore plus intense du fait des

France began its implementation in March 2004. Italy is now the only country out of the twenty-five EU members that has not passed domestic legislation, which would enable the application of EAW. The contentious point for Italy is the long list of crimes, which would warrant extradition, and which include fraud and money laundering—the crimes notoriously widespread among the Italian political class in the post-WWII period (Statewatch 2004).

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Maja Mikula attentats violents perpetres par des groupes que nous pouvons clairement qualifier de 'terroristes' (encore qu'eux se considerent sans doute plus comme des 'heros' ou 'martyrs'). Ils conferent en effet a ce terme et a ses usages une presence et une efficacite inedite (Deluermoz 2004: 36-37). ['terrorist' has become a kind of category of its own, which renders all reflection useless—because it would be con­ sidered indecent—and accuses a priori those who are labeled as such: at worst, they are guilty; at best, they are suspect. This complex international, national and even everyday usage of this term is complicated even further by the violent attacks by the groups we can clearly qualify as terrorist (even though they undoubtedly consider themselves as 'heroes' or 'martyrs'). They in fact endow this word and its applications with an unheard-of presence and effectiveness.]

While Cesare Battisti is often labeled as terrorist by the media, and sometimes even wrongly represented as a "member of the Red Bri­ gades" (Henley 2004), his fiction has been described by Paris-Match as "the best-written condemnation there is of the absolute impasse that is terrorism" (Henley 2004). On 10 February 2004, a month before France officially began to implement the EAW, Cesare Battisti was arrested in Paris, to spend three weeks in the Parisian Prison de la Sante, before being granted conditional freedom by the Paris Tribunal. It was at this point that Cesare Battisti became "caso Battisti." His plight was taken on by a number of artists, filmmakers and intellectuals in both France and Italy, who mounted a crusade in his defense. In France, the issue at the heart of the debate was (and still is) that of national "honor," focusing on an argument against a retraction of the promise made by Mitterrand and endorsed by the subsequent left-leaning governments. In Italy, his cause was espoused by those—including the political philosopher An­ tonio Negri and writers Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1), Giuseppe Genna, and Valerio Evangelisti—interested in restoring the autonomist movement of the 1970s, and its eventual suppression, to the Italian collective memory. Petitions and editorials in support of his release were publicized on several websites. In addition, two rather eclectic collections of documents, articles and opinion pieces related to his predicament have been published in book form in Italy and France respectively (Evangelisti 2004; Vargas 2004). 3

See, for example: www.wumingfoundation.com; www.vialibre5.com; www.carmilla online.com; www.mauvaisgenres.com; www.miserabili.com; and, www.samizdat.net.

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A decision in favor of Battisti's extradition was made on 30 June 2004 by the Investigations Chambre of the Parisian Court of Appeal. Two months later, on 2 1 August, Battisti failed to report to police as required every Saturday; since then, his whereabouts have been unknown. According to the local media (Il Giornale, 27 September), alleged sightings have been reported to the police in Milan and Corsica. An appeal by Battisti against the Investigation Chambre's deci­ sion was rejected and the Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin signed a decree authorizing his extradition on 23 October. If found and extradited to Italy, Battisti is expected to serve his sentence of life imprisonment there. If this happens, his exile will continue, albeit under a different rubric: that of internal banishment, or "isolation, alienation, deprivation of means of production and communication, [and] exclu­ sion from public life" (Naficy 1996: 123). Battisti's present displacement forecloses any possibility of alter­ native emplacement. Like Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), the protago­ nist of Steven Spielberg's film The Terminal (2004), he can only exist in a non-space, or to use Deleuze and Guattari's symbolic imagery, in a desert, the traditional home of the nomad (1987). In a world of shifting geographies, exile and its counterpart, political asylum, have come to represent a lost privilege, confined to the nostalgic memories of a recent past. The exile has become the nomad, characterized by a constant state of movement and signifying utter deterritorialization. 4

Tropes of displacement The trope of exile has figured prominently in Western narratives of cultural identity since the earliest times. In the realm of poetry, Ovid's (43 BCE-17 CE) poems written in exile have been studied extensively by scholars interested in exilic condition (Williams 1994; Claasen 2003). The most influential Western stories of origin, such as the Biblical Exodus or the abduction of Europa by Zeus, are premised on both privilege—a person or people chosen by God—and displacement, culminating in a symbolic act of creation. Italian national narratives of origin are no different: Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to the Apennine peninsula in order to fulfill his role as the founder of Rome are a By the same token, for the characters in Battisti's novels, such as Onno in Vittoria (2003c) and Fausto in Le Cargo Sentimental (2003b), homecoming equals the end of the life journey.

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case in point. Furthermore, in the Italian national imaginary, some of the forefathers of present-day cultural and civic italianita—notably Dante (1265-1321) and Mazzini (1805-1872)—are both strongly associated with their exilic experience. Displacement in general, and exile in particular, have been described by critics as the quintessential tropes of a modernist weltanschaung. According to Caren Kaplan, "Euro-American modernisms celebrate singularity, solitude, estrangement, alienation, and aestheticized excisions of location in favor of locale. Thus the 'artist in exile' is never 'at home,' always existentially alone, and shocked by the strain of displacement into significant experimentations and insights" (1996: 28). In modernist discourses, distance is taken to signify objec­ tivity and independence, that is, the ideal perspective on a subject of investigation and a precondition for intellectual creativity. From molecular science we have learnt that "it is the moment of separation that allows new elements to appear" (Ainley 1998: 19). Not surprisingly, the exilic condition—"being rootless, displaced between worlds, living between a lost past and a fluid present"—is considered the most appropriate metaphor for the "journeying, modern consciousness" (Rapport 2002: 264). A similar view of exile as a metaphor for creativity and progress has been adopted by the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri. For the Italians, says Negri, the notion of exile transcends the familiar scenarios of displacement and nostalgia for the country of origin, to become an essential part of Italy's very identity. According to Negri, exile is the "normal condition of intelligent Italians," one necessary for "reproducing creative thinking": Both literary history and social history in Italy are continually marked, in fact, by the presence of exile. From Dante to Machiavelli, from Tasso to Leopardi, from Giordano Bruno to Gramsci, from the anti-Trinitarian Socinians in the sixteenth century to the autonomous workers' movements, one always finds that exile is a fundamental element in the constitution of the real identity—the identity of the struggle—of the greatest Italian literature and philosophy. (1997: 43)

Negri thus offers a Janus-faced vision of Italy and its history, with the two opposing forces of inertia and progress represented in turn by the "master," or the "eternal" institutions and the "slave," or the productive counter-power associated with exile.

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Battisti's representation of exile in his novels and short stories does not subscribe to this optimistic, modernist agenda. For Battisti, displacement can only offer a temporary promise of advancement. In Avenida Revolucion (2003a: 99), the maxim borrowed from the Ro­ man poet Horace (65-8 BCE), that "[c]oelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt" (Epistles I: 11, Horace 2002: 195) [They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea], is taken to underscore the illusory nature of the promise of change associated with displacement. Finding oneself under an unknown, indecipherable sky offers the traveler a false impression that his or her life is going to change for the better. However, this is only a ballo di maschera [a masked ball, a travesty], since the promise of change is only shortlived and the world beyond the border is equally bleak. Generally speaking, in Battisti's textual universe, there is little scope for enthusiasm and joy. It is a universe of broken lives, estrangement, shady deals, violence and betrayal. It is also an all-male world, where female characters are represented either as treacherous, or purely instrumental. There is no innocence, morality or responsibility, and no escape, only relentless movement. Displacement, in its myriad of possible manifestations, is the cen­ tral trope of Battisti's entire opus. For a good reason, Giuseppe Genna has called Battisti an "adrenalinico zingaro dello spirito e delle geografie" [an adrenaline-driven gypsy of the spirit and geographies] (2003: 5). According to Genna, "[l]a vita di Cesare Battisti e un viaggio e, in un certo senso, i suoi romanzi possono apparire una forma innovativa e impazzita dei resoconti di viaggio" [Cesare Battisti's life is a journey and, in some way, his novels can appear as an innovative and mad form of travelogue] (2003: 5). In an introspective gesture true to his aesthetic credo, Battisti relates most of his narratives to the trajectories of his own life. The protagonists of the majority of his novels—namely, Les Habits d'Ombre (A Shadow's Clothes, 1993), Buena Onda (Good Wave, 1996a), L'Ultimo Sparo (The Last Bullet, 1998), L'OrmaRossa (The Red Track, 1999) and Le Cargo Sentimental (The Sentimental Cargo, 2003b)—move within a geopolitical landscape dominated by the three sites representing the most significant turning points in the author's life: Italy of the anni di piombo [Years 5

The misogynist streak emerges most clearly in the novel Jamais Plus Sans Fusil (2000b, Never Again Without a Gun), which focuses on the stereotype of the castrat­ ing, murderous female.

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of Lead], France, and Mexico. In these novels, the dominant theme is the estrangement of the protagonist both from "his" (the protagonists of all five novels are male) original community and from any other environment he dwells in during his quest. Like Claudio Raponi, the protagonist of Les Habits d'Ombre (1993), Battisti's heroes are deterritorialized nomads, senzapatria, who carry their homeland "on the soles of their shoes" (1993: 13). Memories of physical home—the "country of the ravioli and the man­ dolin" (1999: 41)—are suppressed, or suspended between nostalgic sentimentalism and bitterness. In Vittoria (2003c) the hero and narra­ tor, Onno, returns to Rome after thirty years of exile. During the three decades of separation, he had been imagining the "ancient whore" (a reference to the Biblical personification of Rome as the "whore of Babylon," in Revelation, Chapter 17) "dead and buried under a thick layer of dust": Inutile de la chercher, elle debouche devant toi a l'improviste. De derriere un pont, generalement, et la jupe encore retroussee. Un instant d'amour, un furtif reve de gloire, Rome ne les a jamais refuses a personne. Et moi, dans ce bordel-la, j'y suis ne, j'aurais du le savoir mieux que n'importe qui. Mais une absence de trente ans m'autorisait a croire l'antique putain desormais morte et enterree sous une epaisse couche de poussiere. (2003c: 9) [It is useless to seek her, for she appears in front of you when you least expect her. From behind a bridge, usually with her skirt still rolled up. Rome has never denied anyone a moment of love, a furtive dream of glory. And I, I was born in that brothel, I should have known that better than anyone else. But a thirty-year absence has authorized me to believe that, since my departure, the ancient whore has been dead and buried under a thick layer of dust.]

In L'Orma Rossa, Corrado—an Italian political refugee living in Paris—declares, with a salutary dose of self-irony, that the only time when he thinks of Italy is when he is expecting a money order, or yet another mandate for extradition (1999: 41). However, this denial of belonging often transgresses the boundaries of the original home, to The term refers to the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period in Italy characterized by killings and kidnappings committed by both the extreme right and left. It derives from Margarethe Von Trotta's homonymous film (1981). The 'years of lead' have been explored by filmmakers such as Guido Chiesa (Lavorare con Lentezza 2004), Marco Bellocchio (Buongiorno, Notte 2003), and Marco Tullio Giordana (/ Cento Passi 2000; LaMeglio Gioventu 2003).

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include "les autres lieux ou, dans l'intervalle, j'avais appris a garer mon cerveau" (2003c: 9) [the other places where, in the interval, I had learnt to find shelter]. Battisti's "traveling heroes'—whether exiles (1993; 1998; 1999; 1996a; 2003b), tourists (2003a), or migrants in Italy (2000a)—can be read in relation to a number of late 20th century theories of location, displacement and identity. To start with, they embody the nomadic practice of shifting location, an utter and unconditional deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). They are also reminiscent of Kristeva's "deject" who "strays instead of getting his bearings," and whose space "is never one ... but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic" (1982: 8). Collectively, the heroes of these texts can also be seen as representations of the "universal stranger," described by Bauman as "devoid of all attributes," a "true man without qualities," "having no home and no roots." According to Bauman, whatever qualities may give the stranger a body "and thus draw him out of the void are graciously bestowed and may be withdrawn at a whim": The stranger is universal because of having no home and no roots. Rootlessness relativizes everything concrete and thus begets universality. In rootlessness, both universality and relativism find their roots. Their hotly denied kinship is thus unmasked. They both, in their own ways, are products of ambivalent existence. (1991: 90)

Between the privileged exile/intellectual of the modernist myth and the empty, dispossessed nomad/deject/perpetual stranger, there is a substantial difference. Like their author, Battisti's nomadic heroes are forced to lead a life of uncertainty due to their irregular status in their host country. In L'Orma Rossa (1999), Corrado ponders over the intricacies of his precarious existence in Paris: io non sono un immigrato, ma un insolito rifugiato politico senza statuto, un residuo degli 'anni di piombo' condannato all'invisibilita in cambio di un bivacco in territorio francese. Per me non ci sono diritti civili, ma esclusivamente debiti penali che non si estingueranno mai. (1999: 4-5) [I am not an immigrant, but an unusual political refugee without a statute, a residue from the 'years of lead' condemned to in­ visibility in exchange for the permission to camp in the French terri­ tory. For me, there are no civil rights, but only outstanding penal convictions, which will never be erased.]

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His stay in France is "hanging by a thread," and can be easily sus­ pended under the international arrest warrant. Without a residence permit, Italian refugees are no more than temporary guests of the French government. Without this "maledetto pezzo di carta" [damned piece of paper], their prospects of finding a job are extremely limited. Corrado spends most of his time at home, "un detenuto in attesa di giudizio o, nella migliore delle ipotesi, un quarantenne improduttivo, appena tollerato nella sua propria casa" (1999: 5) [a detainee awaiting his judgment, or, in the best case, an unproductive forty-year old, barely tolerated in his own house]. His relationship with his Parisian girlfriend, Martine, is in profound crisis. As the main breadwinner, Martine works long hours as a cleaner, while stuffing envelopes is the only lawful job Corrado can secure. In France, the country where "anche i cani hanno diritto alla mutua, purche abbiano un atto di nascita" (1999: 45) [even the dogs are entitled to Medicare, as long as they have a birth certificate], Corrado has to suffer an excruciating toothache, because he cannot afford a visit to the dentist. In addition to these tangible aspects of dejection, Battisti's heroes are afflicted by the fraught memories of the political struggle they were once part of. Like Corrado in L'Orma Rossa (1999), they hold on to an image of their revolt in "flames" (1999: 101), but that image does not belong to them any more and they don't know what to replace it with. Exiles are like ghosts, says Battisti. For them: [l]e passe a ete remplace par un present infini, immuable. Les fantomes, comme les exiles, sont une espece destinee a peupler la dimen­ sion correspondant aux zones mortes de l'univers: un territoire ou il est presque impossible de laisser le moindre signe de vie. (2003b: 79) [the past has been replaced by a neverending, immutable present. Ghosts, like exiles, are a species destined to inhabit the dimension corresponding to the death zones of the universe: a territory where it is almost impossible to leave the slightest sign of life.]

This erasure of memory, characteristic of Italian militants in the 1970s (Negri 1997: 47), is lamented by the hero of Le Cargo Sentimental: Si chaque generation a son desert a traverser, la notre eut celui des annees 70: allez les gars, il ne s'est rien passe, par la la prison, s'il vous plait. Vingt ans plus tard—c'est le temps qu'il faut pour rendre nos histoires interessantes—il ne reste de la revolte que du sable. Nos traces ont ete effacees par le vent du nord, les reves abolis, l'histoire entierement remachee sur papier recycle pour actes judiciaires.

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(2003b: 88) [If each generation has a desert to cross, our desert is the decade of the 1970s: come on guys, nothing has happened, to the prison, please. Twenty years later—the time necessary to make our histories interesting—nothing remains of our revolt but the sand. Our traces have been erased by the Northern wind, our dreams have been abolished, our history entirely recycled for the paper for judiciary acts.]

Deprived of a historical memory, Battisti's characters are caught in a whirlpool of their own competing, yet always temporary, identities. His novels and stories present no clear-cut identities, only numerous potentialities awaiting to be triggered by events beyond the charac­ ters' control. The force of destiny is paramount. Not surprisingly, Kundera's novel The Joke (1982 [1967]) is evoked in the short story "A la tienne, Marlo." Like Kundera's narrator and protagonist, Ludvik Jahn, Battisti's characters are prey to fate's unpredictable jokes. In a given set of circumstances involving displacement and new beginnings law-abiding citizens can easily turn into villains and vice versa. The paradigm of multiple identities emerges most clearly from two of Battisti's delightful shorter novels, Copier-Coller (Copy-Paste, 1997a) and Nouvel An, Nouvelle Vie (New Year, New Life, 1994), as well as from his more ambitious and markedly complex novel, Avenida Revolucion (2003a). In Copier-Coller, which is intended for pre-teenage children, Bruno Proietti is a fourteen-year old boy, who lives at the outskirts of Milan with his parents. The entire plot is an account of Bruno's delirious dream, which involves a chance meeting, a theft, an accidental murder and a raid of the National Informatics Center, in order to shed light on Bruno's mysterious maternal grandfather. Bruno's companion in adventure is a boy of his age nicknamed Pixel. On the surface, Bruno and Pixel are very different: while Bruno has problems at school, Pixel excels; while Bruno lives in one of Mi­ lan's poorer suburbs, Pixel is obviously rather well off; while Bruno gets easily into all kinds of trouble, Pixel always seems to avoid any punishment for his transgressions. It is not until later in the novel that the reader discovers that Pixel (the name Bruno gave to his computer) is really Bruno's alter ego, existing only in the subliminal sphere of the boy's desires and activated in an altered state of consciousness. Nouvel An, Nouvelle Vie also explores the paradigm of dual identity, but this time the duality assumes a more precise allegorical mean-

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ing. The hero of the novel is Jean Cobi, a petty criminal living in a shabby Parisian hotel. He just spent three years in prison and was immediately after his release left by his girlfriend Clara, who emigrated to the USA, a country so vast that "on peut changer de saison sans presenter de passeport" [people can change calendar seasons without having to present their passports] (1994: 15). While the unfolding of the plot is in itself represented as a result of an episode of mistaken identity, the primary duality is between Jean and his alter ego, the po­ liceman Dan Lafargue. The reader learns that Cobi's father, a Jewish anarchist in the Resistance movement, had left Jean and his mother when Jean was only three years old. Dan is his adoptive son, in reality the son of one of his companions in adventure. The narrative clearly alludes to the profound rupture within the Italian political left in the post-WWII period, seen from the perspective of the disenchanted radical wing, suppressed and exiled in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. While the "natural son" (interpreted as the "true heir" to an "unadulterated" communist agenda) is banished from public life and living on the margins of society, the "adoptive son" (a personification of the Italian left subscribing to the "historic compromise") is a policeman, and thus an official representative of the state apparatus. In Avenida Revolucion, Milanese accountant Antonio Casagrande is an "accidental tourist," who leaves behind his comfortable, if somewhat boring existence after winning the first prize in a commercial competition: a return airfare and a month-long trip, in a camping car, from Mexico City to Vancouver. By a strange turn of fortune, An­ tonio comes into possession of another person's passport, and decides to assume the identity of the passport's owner, Luigi Trombetta. As it turns out, his enthusiastic performance of this new identity is a futile exercise. Both identities (his own original identity, and his new temporary identity as the writer Trombetta) are frought with danger and uncertainty and neither can secure him a safe passage across the border. Antonio's chaotic identity-switching, creative but ultimately doomed to failure, is in stark contrast with the multiple avatars—in different places and times, but always effectively the same—of the elusive border (wall) itself, representing the ever-changing sites of division in today's world; the policeman Gomez H., signifying institu­ tional power; and the archetypal female, Brigida.

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Conclusion: the borderzone Avenida Revolucion is the most multi-layered of Battisti's texts and its symbolic geography sums up his complex treatment of "exile" and "displacement." Situated in the quintessential borderzone, the one straddling the border between Mexico and the USA, Avenida Revolucion evokes Gloria Anzaldua's (1999) notion of borderlands as a space for potentially creative encounters where differences congre­ gate and interact. In Battisti's novel, the border, the wall, the "guardian angel," can only be annihilated through the combined efforts of the dispossessed on both sides. In an ironic twist, this can be done, not with the power of weapons, but with the weight and the strong smell of their excrement, since the "piu solido di tutti i muri" [the most solid of all walls] is in fact the one carried within each of us (2003a: 177-8). Battisti's treatment of the borderzone echoes Anzaldua's incisive critique of borders, encapsulated succinctly in the following quote from her Borderlands/La frontera: "Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition" (1999: 25). Battisti's border in Avenida Revolucion is "a farce," "a mirage" (2003a: 137). However, without the border, there would be no borderzone: without it, millions of people on both sides of the border would not have come to "inhabit this burnt land" and Tijuana and San Diego would have remained two gas pumps on the edge of a desert track. Like Anzaldua's "'los atravesados'—the 'squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the 'normal'" (1999: 25)—Battisti's heroes are in a constant state of transition and embody the numerous tropes of displacement that characterize today's postmodern world.

"En hibrida mezcolanza": Exile and Anxiety in Alirio Diaz Guerra's Lucas Guevara Jeff Browitt Abstract The novel Lucas Guevara by the Colombian exile, Alirio Diaz Guerra, was first published in New York in 1914, and is considered to be the earliest novel about Latin American immigration to the USA written in Spanish. A second edition was published in 2001 along with a critical-biographical introduction, which presents the novel as the precursor of a developing genre of US Latino/a immigrant literature centered on the naive Latin American mi­ grant who arrives in the USA inspired by the opportunities supposedly afforded by the metropolis, but who nevertheless suffers a series of misfortunes arising from an inability to adapt to the new culture. On the level of overt content, the novel is a lachrymose, stereotypical and conventional denunciation of the supposed evils of an amoral US society and the libertine and mate­ rialistic values underpinning it. But on a deeper level, a picture emerges of Diaz Guerra himself as a displaced, disenchanted intellectual exile who has suffered an acute cultural and class anxiety in the transition from a patrician Arcadia to the heart of capitalist, industrial modernity. The novel also provides an occasion to contrast how Diaz Guerra deals with the condition of exile, in contrast to that most emblematic of Latin American political refugees, the Cuban Jose Marti.

In 1914, Lucas Guevara, a novel of Latin American immigration writ­ ten by the Colombian exile, Alirio Diaz Guerra, was published in New York. It remained forgotten until Nicolas Kanellos, Director of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, unearthed a copy of the first edition in a New York public library in 1976. The novel has since been claimed as the earliest about Latin American immigration to the USA written in Spanish. This fact alone merits its study. But the novel is also unique, given that literature about the Latin American immigrant experience is most typically associated

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with Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Cubans, and not Colombians. Arte Publico Press republished the novel in 2001. The second edition comes complete with a critical-biographical introduction by Kanellos and Imra Liz Hernandez, which presents the novel as the precursor of a developing genre of a certain type of Latin American immigrant lit­ erature centered on the naive verde (greenhorn) who arrives in the USA inspired by the opportunities that the metropolis supposedly affords. The protagonist nevertheless suffers a series of misfortunes because of an inability to adapt to or withstand the hostility of the new culture. The price to be paid for this failure is to return home, or to remain and die. Diaz Guerra portrays such a hapless figure in Lucas Guevara. On the level of overt content the novel is a stereotypical de­ nunciation of a supposedly amoral and corrupting US society; what is thus fascinating is the insight it provides, through the narrative voice and the authorial presence, into the anxieties secular modernity occasioned for a certain kind of exilic subjectivity (masculine, heterosexual, Latin American, elite, morally conservative), which struggled to adjust to the cultural in-betweenness induced by nostalgic longings for an idealized homeland in the midst of an alienating host culture. 1

Diaz Guerra was born in Colombia in 1862 into a prominent family of politicians, his father being the federal treasurer for the Liberal Party government at one stage. He was educated at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia en Bogota, firstly in letters and then in medicine. He began to write and publish poetry at an early age. Like other Latin American letrados, Diaz Guerra early on showed a dual liking for poetry and politics. In 1884, when he was barely 22, he founded a newspaper, El Liberal, in opposition to the then conservative Colombian administration. Shortly after, the Liberals rose up in armed revolt against the proposed constitutional changes by the ruling Conservative Party. The Liberals were defeated and in 1885 Diaz Guerra was 2

Kanellos and Hernandez (2001: iv) list several novels among which Lucas Guevara seems to be the first: Gustavo de Aleman Bolanos, La factoria (1925); Conrado Espinosa, El sol de Texas (1927); Daniel Venegas, Las aventuras de Don Chipote (1928); Guillermo Cotto-Thorner, Tropico de Manhattan (1951); Rene Marques, La carreta (1952); Ivan Acosta, El super (1971); Mario Bencastro, Odisea del Norte (1999); Roberto Quesada, The Big Banana (1999) and Nunca entres por Miami (2002). A letrado was a patrician intellectual with a cosmopolitan and universalizing worldview. His credentials derived from the social authority of the scribal culture of "let­ ters," which straddled law, literature, politics and history, and which was crucially linked to nationalism and state-building in 19th-century Latin America.s 2

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obliged to flee, penniless, to Venezuela where he spent the next ten years in exile. Due to his social and political standing in Colombia and because of a Liberal-minded government in power in Venezuela, he was soon able to secure employment, firstly as Surgeon General of the Central Railroad, subsequently as private secretary to the then Venezuelan president, Joaquin Crespo. When Crespo was deposed by the political opposition, he was still able to find employment as Director of Public Education, and when Crespo returned for a second term, Diaz Guerra was appointed Secretary of State. He married the daugh­ ter of a well-to-do family and in between work and family duties, con­ tinued to publish poetry, but also, and importantly, inflammatory arti­ cles against the conservative Colombian government of the day. In 1895, Diaz Guerra wrote a series of secret letters on govern­ ment letterhead inciting a Liberal revolution against the then Colom­ bian government. The letters, which also implicated President Crespo in the "Colombian revolutionary cause," were handed over by a traitorous co-conspirator to a Panamanian newspaper for publication. Due to the acute embarrassment this occasioned the Venezuelan government and in order to avoid a major diplomatic incident, Diaz Guerra was forced to go into exile once more (Diaz Guerra 1933: 223-36). The alternative was to remain and probably face a firing squad. He sailed to New York in 1895, the same year that Jose Marti, at the time perhaps the most prominent of Latin American political exiles, left to fight (and soon die) against the Spanish colonial government in Cuba. Little is known of Diaz Guerra's early years in New York except that he was Director of the General Office of the Republic of Colombia for three years not long after his arrival and that he traveled extensively in Europe before returning to the USA to take up employment as an international sales representative for Sharp and Dohme, a pharmaceutical company. Somewhere during this period Diaz Guerra made the transition from exile to confirmed immigrant. Except for international travels for Sharp & Dohme, including occasional visits to Latin America, he spent the rest of his life in New York until the late 1930s when he died, though exact details are unknown. During his time in New York he was a foreign correspondent for several Latin American newspapers and published volumes of poetry and perhaps two novels. Only one novel has survived, Lucas Guevara, published after he had been in the city for almost 20 years.

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Shortly before he died, and at the instigation of Venezuelan friends, Diaz Guerra wrote a memoir of his life in Venezuela (Diez ahos en Venezuela, 1933), which, though post-dating Lucas Guevara, was written in an archaic, florid, romantic style. In the opening chap­ ter that relates his ignoble flight from Colombia to Caracas in a French steamboat, Diaz Guerra uncannily echoes the plot of his earlier novel, and its denouement, in the suicide of its main character, Lucas Guevara, by recalling his depressed state at being forced into exile: "Only someone born, brought up and educated in a social sphere of comfort and decency...is capable of understanding how humanity can be reduced to the category of a beast without, by beneficent providence, either losing his mind or resorting to the solution of the desperate—suicide" (1933: 10). Shortly after his arrival in Venezuela, Diaz Guerra was invited into the circles of high print culture as a member of the Venezuelan Academy of Language and by having his poems published in the most popular daily newspaper. His literary success was due to his ability to craft ornate verse in the style of Spanish and Latin American romanticism, singing the praises of the great men and deeds of the Venezuelan republic, or writing hymns about filial piety, chaste virgins, or religious devotion: "Christian faith/you are the blessed one/the magical flower of paternal dwelling/which in the rough squalls of life/conserves its verdure and fragrance" (54). But literary success was also due to the social and political capital that elite credentials afforded, capital that was transferable across national boundaries in the Americas to a social and cultural network of Creole pan-Latinity. Diaz Guerra thus ingratiated himself with the Liberal Venezuelan power elite, which ensured a succession of government postings. The Venezuelan memoirs have minor historical interest, but it is important to note how Diaz Guerra constructs his own persona in them: Christian, virtuous, maritally faithful, noble, loyal, altruistic, and nationalistic. These values embedded in his literary and autobiographical writings provide the prism through which he would judge the supposed failings of society and culture in New York in his novel. 3

Lucas Guevara follows the trajectory of a young man (Lucas Guevara) from a middle-class family who arrives in New York from Santa Catalina, a rural town in a South or Central American country. He has a stipend to support him while he studies, the idea being that

Translations into English throughout this chapter are my own.

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he will return with some sort of technological training that will be put to good use in his own country at some future date. The specific country is never named, but there are clues to suggest it is Colombia, though this has no real bearing on the structure of the novel or its interpretation. The novel's theme is common to the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in which a young man sets out for the big city in search of success and fulfillment, but only finds disillusion. There is, however, no self-development or overcoming of obstacles, no final triumph. Through the novel we get a feel for the texture of daily ex­ perience in New York and the cultural consequences of modern capi­ talism in the early twentieth century: the metropolis's feverish tempo and anonymous encounters, the play of desires unleashed by consumerism and secularism, the exploitation of newly-arrived immigrants, the Bowery as representative of the human detritus of capitalist mod­ ernity, and a skyline dominated by the wonders of modern technology, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the aerial railways, and that symbol of promise, The Statue of Liberty. Soon after his arrival, Lucas is met by Jacinto Penuela, a street­ wise New York Latino picaro, who seems to specialize in preying on the ingenuous. Penuela is not so much a swindler as a sponger who attaches himself as guide and counselor to verdes, shows them around the city and gets them to pay for everything. Penuela takes Lucas to meet the New York businessmen from Lucas's home country to whom Lucas must present his letters of introduction, the businessmen agreeing to monitor Lucas's progress as well as his monthly allowance. Penuela directs Lucas to a boarding house, to the chagrin of Guevara's businessmen compatriots, well versed in exploiting the naive. These businessmen, like Penuela, make money on the side directing novitiates like Guevara to stores, bars, and boarding houses from which a kickback is to be gained. This reflects the real sociological background of the story, since at least forty percent of the New York's inhabitants were immigrants during this period, and boarding houses and tenement slums were the principal housing options available. Penuela gradually introduces Lucas to New York life around the Lower East Side, famously the home to many a generation of immigrants, where he is quickly enthused by New York's women, espe­ cially the "siren temptresses of the Bowery" (Diaz Guerra 2001: 29). He is soon having affairs with the women at the boarding house, frequenting bars and visiting prostitutes and generally dissipating his en-

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ergies in nights of debauchery. New York, or more particularly in the novel, the Lower East Side, thus becomes a moral landscape against which Lucas's misfortunes are played out. He has a run-in with his first boarding-house proprietor and has to move to another lodging. He has a brief and disastrous (forced) marriage, manages to spend his monthly stipend too quickly, has a falling out with his father's ac­ quaintances because of his irresponsible behavior, is briefly jailed for angrily hurling a vase in the face of one of them, and is bailed out by a widow who, finding him attractive, invites him to live with her as a kept man. When his stipend is suspended, he begins to take on a role similar to Penuela, preying on newly arrived Latin American immigrants and visitors keen to know the Lower East Side. He is eventually thrown out by the widow and slides into poverty and depression, living the life of the most destitute and homeless in the big metropolis, falling victim to all kinds of abuse and exploitation. He works a sum­ mer on Coney Island, but finds himself on the street when the vacation season finishes. At the end, broke and disillusioned, he commits suicide by throwing himself from the Brooklyn Bridge. Though he is the main protagonist whose tragic suicide is supposed to command our attention as readers, by the end of the novel his self-indulgent behavior leaves the reader feeling unsympathetic. Whatever the shortcomings of the novel on the level of content, it seems to aspire to a condensed allegory of the indignities and lost dreams suffered by Latin Americans who arrive in the USA, principally men who feel themselves symbolically emasculated in what is portrayed as a hostile, godless, exploitative and racist Anglo-American culture. Nevertheless, there are limits to this allegorical dimension, most notably in terms of the class position of both the narrative voice and the protagonist. I will return to this issue in the conclusion. In their critical introduction to the novel, Kanellos and Hernandez point out how Lucas Guevara is not only the earliest known novel of immigration to the USA written in Spanish, but also that it is the precursor in structure and formula of many novels to follow throughout the twentieth century, both in Spanish and English, which deal with a similar theme: the disingenuous Latin American immigrant, victim of all kinds of abuse in the USA, including at the hands of AngloAmerican women, who personify the avarice and treachery of AngloSaxon culture and civilization. In the process, such novels establish a counter-myth in Spanish, which is:

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the opposite of the American Dream...the opposite of what occurs in the novel of immigration in English, which upholds that dream as the essence of the American bildungsroman, whose most clear examples are The American by Howard Fast, Studs Lonigan by James Farell, America, America by Elia Kazan and Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. In fact Hispanics themselves who write their ethnic autobiographies in English scrupulously follow this bildungsroman of the American Dream: Oscar Hijuelos, Edward Rivera, Esmeralda Santiago, Victor Villasenor, etc. (Kanellos and Hernandez 2001: iv-v)

Nevertheless, Kanellos and Hernandez highlight the simplistic binary on which Lucas Guevara is based: "New York is Babylon while Santa Catalina is an Eden; New York is the seat of corruption and Santa Catalina, though poor and backward, is the realm of purity and inno­ cence" (2001: vii). They also emphasize the novel's overt "misogynist vision of American women" (2001: x), who devour incautious immigrant men. Metropolitan culture and its materialism and licentiousness are thus contrasted with the supposedly more authentic and worthy spiritual and cultural values embodied in the immigrant's own "Hispanic" nation. Thus the moral to be drawn from such tales for Latin American readers is that "they should remain at home and not allow themselves to be deceived by the myth of the USA, because the Metropolis, instead of being the path to perfection, is the path to destruction" (xv). Kanellos and Hernandez's commendable critical introduction to the second edition of Lucas Guevara performs a valuable service in rescuing the book from oblivion. Yet it fails to fully separate the narrative voice from an analysis of the overt content (the storyline), missing an opportunity to engage with the contradictory tensions in the moral center through which this overt content is filtered, interpreted, and ideologized. Lucas Guevara may very well be received by the average or "non-intellectual" reader on the level of manifest content— the ideological message Kanellos and Hernandez wish to extract about the rejection of Anglo-American culture and the preservation of authentic or higher, Hispanic moral values. But a deeper conflict is at work in the stance of the narrative voice and by implication the implied author: the attempt to maintain a stable Latino masculinity in face of the secularizing and emasculating metropolis. While Kanellos and Hernandez call attention to the blatant misogyny of the novel, they do not investigate what is clearly an unconscious and ambivalent attitude on the part of the narrative voice towards sexuality, nor the 1

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class and racial anxieties unleashed by social mixing in the modern metropolis. Though Lucas Guevara is a lachrymose, stereotypical, and conventional denunciation of the supposed evils of an amoral US society, a closer reading leads away from a concentration on the main character and the storyline or recit: the least interesting personage in the novel is Lucas Guevara himself. As opposed to most other Latino immigrants from the under-classes doing it tough on the Lower East Side, Guevara lives off a stipend and has a semi-comfortable existence to return to if he so chooses. He is far removed from the fate of those hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken immigrants and exile who were flooding into New York at the same time. Nor does he arouse our sympathy because of his self-indulgence and inability to learn from bitter experience: he seems constitutionally incapable of resisting problematic relationships with women, though he seems perfectly capable of absorbing other lessons of survival in the slums imparted by the street-wise Penuela; in short, he is too much of a cardboard figure to be believable. At the end of the novel the reader herself would be quite justified in pushing him off the Brooklyn Bridge. Therefore, though the novel can no doubt be read as a cautionary tale of moral ruination within the context of an underlying Christian allegory, there is a kind of farcical quality to the story. On a deeper level, however, a picture emerges of Diaz Guerra himself as a displaced, disenchanted intellectual exile who suffers an acute cultural and class anxiety in the transition from a patrician Arcadia to metropolitan New York, thus his ambivalent experience of exile/immigration. The near obsessive concentration on sexual activity and temptation further highlights this dissonance between New York and an idealized image of a prelapsarian fatherland, an image from which class and racial hierarchies have been expunged conveniently. Through a reading of the narrative voice, and by extension of the implied author, and by juxtaposing the public persona carefully crafted through Diaz Guerra's memoirs of his ten-year sojourn in Venezuela, we witness his difficult coming to terms with a highly-charged New York society. He is not simply subject to the problems of an exile attempting to insert himself in a new society at the level to which he is accustomed (educated, middle-class, morally pious). He is also subject to the influence of sexual liberation brought on by secular modernity and the close proximity of volatile, eroticized bodies on the over-

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crowded Lower East Side of New York, the scene of the novel and Diaz Guerra's own point of entry into the USA. It is significant, for example, that the attacks on US society are carried out by the narrative voice and not by the voice of the protagonist. Because this narrative voice is an ostensibly reliable voice of authority and omniscience, and because there is no countervailing discourse to contradict or undermine its perspective, it may be assumed that certain elements in the narrative perspective are consonant with that of the implied author. This implied presence expresses a kind of "surplus," an excess that appears to escape conscious, authorial con­ trol, unaware of its own Freudian investments in the story. That dis­ cordant surplus centers on three recognizable thematic anxieties, of which the narrator/implied author seems only partially aware: first, an obsessive concern with female bodies, sexual promiscuity and uncontrollable desires (primarily blamed on stereotypical, libertine AngloAmerican women); second, an acute class, racial and cultural anxiety in relation to the social and cultural mixing in the secular, rapidly modernizing metropolis; and third, an ambivalent appreciation of technological modernity. Through narrative commentary and focalization a picture emerges, then, of a writer who initially lived a difficult relationship to New York, the tensions and negotiations of which cannot simply be banished at the end by a romanticized scene of suicide. This dissonance in the narrative paradoxically makes Lucas Guevara an open text, in spite of its stereotypical plot. How, then, is narrative perspective fashioned in the novel? The narrator establishes himself very early on as cultured via references to high European culture, as when, for instance, he names the operas from which the street musicians in the neighborhood form their repertoire: "wandering musicians who, with the greatest audacity, destroy fragments of opera and assail, in particular, Trovador, Traviata, Rigoletto and La Fille de Madame Angot" (Diaz Guerra 2001: 35); so too his reference to Guevara's wife's "letters of emotional outpouring, more eloquent, moving and passionate than all the epistles of Lord Chesterfield to his son" (63). Such nods to music and literature create an image of the cultured, ideal reader Diaz Guerra may have had in mind, and sets the novel apart from the more desperate tales of those who did not arrive in the USA with a stipend and had to endure untold hardships from the first moment of arrival. The dense use of figurative language also distances the narrator's voice from the main character

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and makes implied links with the knowing reader, since such elegant prose style is not the language of Lucas Guevara or the common, im­ migrant "man in the street." The ideal reader, then, is most likely a fellow middle- or upper-middle-class, cultured and morally pious Latin American, either in New York or a would-be immigrant at home, who have marked their class distance from their compatriots and Anglo-US culture alike. "Lewd and heaving breasts" A key feature of the narrative perspective is the repeated concern, ex­ pressed with irony and parodic humor, with sexuality and temptation and from a decidedly male, heterosexual perspective. Early on we have a characteristic, ironic aside when the narrator describes the belongings that Guevara packs for his trip to the USA, including "few clothes, but abundant scapularies, rosaries and other pious odds and ends, articles that.. .save souls from the temptations of Satan" (7). This functions as a mocking reference to what is to come, the inability of the protagonist to avoid such temptations. When Jacinto Penuela takes Guevara to a sleazy cabaret, the narrator describes a scene in which "around hundreds of small tables, men and women of all age and condition gathered in crude and licentious mix, repugnant even to the least observant gaze" (73). The narrator describes the women as made up with lipstick, "from the languidly pallid to the most intense; bare backs, lewd and heaving breasts, naked arms" (73); and focalizes through the consciousness of Guevara, who "couldn't understand how those female heads, sporting hats adorned with flowers and feathers, those busts covered with ribbons and lace, those waists wrapped in velvet and silk, could be bought with money and at cheap prices" (75). This is not exactly fictional verisimilitude, especially given the description of the bar that precedes this meditation, and given that the sons of well-to-do estate owners and other ruling-class males in Latin America had an historical reputation for availing themselves of prostitutes. Furthermore, the description of the bar and the females is eroti­ cized by the narrator, not Guevara, which leads the reader to conjecture about the implied author's own proclivities for the well-contoured female body in the metropolis. This impression of the implied author's erotic investments in the novel is reinforced by the narrator's descriptions of the rituals and financial transactions of prostitution in the

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cabarets and small hotels (72-78) as well of the interior and the work­ ers of a brothel (97-104), the minute details of which seem nothing short of a knowledge born of experience. Such knowledge may derive from the author himself having frequented the bars and bordellos of the Lower East Side, or perhaps it derives from Diaz Guerra having possibly worked as an unregistered immigrant physician in such an industry, though there is no evidence to support the latter claim. Sexuality, especially its irrepressibleness, is a constant throughout the novel. In a humorous interlude, the narrator mocks a pair of selfimportant Latin American financiers. Penuela, feeling sorry for Lucas, who by this stage is penniless and in jail for assault, asks a couple of business acquaintances and friends of Lucas's family if they might help out. His visit becomes an occasion to send up the pompous Christian morality of the bankers as they orate on family values. As the narrator, and Kanellos and Hernandez's introduction, remind us, counter­ poised to the licentiousness of US culture are more traditional, con­ servative "Hispanic" values embodied in the native language and cul­ ture, the family, Catholicism, and female chastity: Don Nicomedes, with the characteristic eloquence his admirers claim he possesses, expounded his theories of marriage and ended by advising Penuela to try and establish a home, for this is the foundation of morality, the source of love and peace and a positive base for the economy. Don Patrocinio couldn't avoid adding his five cents worth to his companion's luminous and civilizing exposition, limited, fortunately, to the passionate advice that in case he should have a family, that he not allow his children, least of all his daughters, read novels, for there exists no book of that nature that does not contain love affairs, which would be the equivalent of exposing virgin imaginations to the serpent of lust. (170)

This is Diaz Guerra at his ironic and self-mocking best, not only sending up the bankers' sham moralizing, but also gesturing tongue in cheek to his own novel, replete with sexual activity. Nor is the narrator averse to indulging in a bit of ribald Latino masculine fantasy and stereotyping when he describes how female boarding house owners are attracted to Latin men: "certain skins toasted by the sun of the tropics, certain black and somnolent eyes and certain anatomical traits, not common in the races of the North, generally impress the Eves with alabaster skin, blue eyes and blonde hair; probably a question of con­ trast" (196).

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A Latino flaneur in secular modernity Much of this satirical humor in Lucas Guevara is consonant with the picaresque style in Spanish literature. It is significant that Diaz Guerra uses many of the tropes of the picaresque form: the naive life story; the initiation of the protagonist into the corrupt underworld of vice; a genuine picaresque character in the person of Penuela; and social sat­ ire aimed at the deceitfulness and hypocrisy of a variety of class representatives of the pious and the powerful who prey on the most vulnerable, and so forth. Diaz Guerra also displays a genuine talent for such caricature and satire underpinned by a moral vision, a hallmark of the best picaresque novelists. But so too does the novel diverge significantly from the picaresque form: it does not present the life story of a low-born central character who manages to climb the social ladder, who is transformed through self-knowledge; that is, there is no happy ending. Furthermore, the protagonist is not morally indifferent; rather US society is portrayed as such. As opposed to Jose Zorilla's Don Juan Tenorio (1844), for instance, echoes of which abound in the novel, the protagonist is portrayed as victim of deceitful women, and not the reverse. In fact the novel in many ways is Dickensian in its contrast between the bourgeois gentility of the narrative perspective and the portrayal of the daily grind of lower-class survival, in its portrayal of the hypocrisy and corruption of a society supposedly dominated by utilitarian industrialism, by materialistic values, in its contrast between moral pretensions and actual behavior. But more importantly for the purposes of this essay, what is obviously under threat throughout the novel, and by extension in the authorial stance, is a hitherto seemingly stable, Latino male subjectivity, now made vulner­ able by an unfamiliar cultural and moral environment—the secular, modernizing metropolis and its devouring women and its technology, symbolized respectively by two key landmarks: the Statue of Liberty (Libertinism); and the Brooklyn Bridge (technological progress). This hitherto stable, Creole elite sense of self is also threatened by a loss of legislative hegemony by the socioeconomic modernization of society. Chapter 37 is a set piece: a mini-chronicle of Coney Island, a descriptive break in the narrative progression similar to the meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Bowery, boarding houses, New York re-

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porters, and so forth. Like Marti's Coney Island cronica, it is an am­ bivalent portrait of the incipient culture industries and the massification and democratization of "bad taste," as well as social and cultural mixing. One scene is significant for the narrative in its focus on the "brazen" bodies at the beach: In Coney Island.. .there is an agitated abandon and fearful competi­ tion, forming an indescribable labyrinth, a heterogeneous group, a drawing without profile, a figure without contour, a formless agglomeration that injures the senses, delights, tires, makes one dizzy, annoyed and crazy...[on the beach] the bathers, that is to say, the thousands of Adams and Eves of all classes and standings, romp for hours in the waves or writhe and rollick even more daringly on the sand, with a shamelessness capable of offending even the most trivial precepts of chastity, with their wet shirts stuck to their bodies and their naked arms and calves.showing off provocative shapes. (262)

This is publicly licensed sensuality, a phenomenon of New York in the late 1800s and early 1900s that, along with cabaret culture, provided an avenue of release for an urban culture in rapid transformation, a "new consumption, entertainment, sexuality," which, for Lewis Erenberg, culminates in the 1920s. This transformation was particularly vexing for cultural conservatives, who saw only "cultural decline and urban pathology. The anonymity of city life, in their estimation, produced cultural decay" (Erenberg 1981: xiv). In Lucas Guevara, metropolitan urbanization and massification provoke a cultural-nationalist rejection of Anglo-Saxons. There are constant references to the raza [espanola], a cultural and moral touchstone that aims to reinforce a perceived hierarchy of values and identity centered on the purported moral superiority of Hispanismo. From early on in the narrative, the panorama that greets the immigrant in New York is of a "seething mass of people of all races and all customs" (9). New York's population is variously described as the "multitudes," "the swarming crowd," "a human wave," and "the whirlwind." The anxiety at losing one's individuality within the crowd is expressed in a striking description of the city, in which Diaz Guerra Marti's chronicle on Coney Island appeared in a Bogota newspaper, La Pluma, on 3 December 1881 (Ramos 2001: 215). Diaz Guerra would have been nineteen years old at the time; given his place in the lettered culture of Colombian journalism and politics, one imagines he read the chronicle and was suitably impressed.

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unwittingly presages Jose Eustasio Rivera's renowned 1924 novel, La vordgine [The Vortex], where the incautious and adventurous male is overwhelmed and destroyed by the Colombian jungle. Here, it is the burgeoning metropolis that threatens masculine individuality: the future opened its maw and threatened to devour him...he found himself in the entrails of New York, the frightful vortex that envelops everything, where the value of individuals is measured by the amount of money in their pockets; where nobody knows anybody; where the beggar is pursued with more vigor than the criminal; where every job, no matter how insignificant, has thousands of candidates who struggle and submit themselves to all kinds of indignity in order to win it...where crammed into unhealthy buildings, succumb hundreds of people disinherited by luck, hungry and cold in the winter, starving and asphyxiated in summer. Thus he regarded New York, that immense, heterogeneous and hybrid mass, seat of all cultures, support of all customs, center of all vices, ocean of all passions, market of honor, barrel in which all ambitions are amassed, desert in which all souls are sterilized and with the heat of mercantile fever, all hearts are petrified. (143)

The anxieties of both the protagonist and the narrator in the face of modern life evoke Georg Simmel's attempts to come to terms with modern urban life in his classic essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," from 1903 (2002). Simmel stresses the overwhelming impact of the modern metropolis and its ethos, proscribed by the money econ­ omy, on the individual. The metropolis, as the "locale of freedom" and the "seat of cosmopolitanism," offers the possibility of anonymity and independence in comparison to the tightly knit, conformist pressures of the small town; but it also takes the form of an indifferent and unre­ sponsive juggernaut ruled by the logic of exchange value: Money, with all its colorlessness and its indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveler—irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair. (Simmel 2002:14)

For Simmel the metropolis becomes the theatre of a struggle between the individual and overwhelming social and technological forces: Here in buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the State is to be found such a

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tremendous richness of crystallizing, de-personalized cultural accom­ plishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain it­ self in the face of it. (19)

When Guevara is jailed for assault, the prison cell comes to represent the Lower East Side in microcosm: "in unruly hybrid mix [en hibrida mezcolanza], irregardless of sex or class, are gathered beings whose misfortune, desperation, hunger and vice have torn them from the bosom of society" (159). This trope of negative cultural mixing is also used to frame Anglo-American women. Chapter 36, for example, is an extraordinary diatribe against the women of New York, a negative and sexist description of incipient women's liberation: "the mixture of races, religion, tastes, aspirations, necessities and even languages has made of this woman a disaster" (252). Whereas references to the raza in Lucas Guevara are clearly cultural and refer to all Latin Americans, the novel is also noteworthy for its overt racism against Jews and Chinese, which shades into cultural anxiety, especially faced with the social and cultural mixing for which New York has always been famous. The narrator attacks racism in the US press against individuals of the raza espahola [Spanish race] (150), but is not averse to perpetuating racial stereotypes himself, as is witness the following passage: In Lucas's cell, a Chinese laundry owner was held for two or three days. He was accused of seducing a ten-year old girl, a practice to which are particularly addicted the sons of the Celestial Empire who, in spite of their apparent submissive, quiet and respectful temperament, all harbor the most artful tricks for doing away with the innocence of young girls barely out of the cradle, without the police being able, no matter what the effort, to effectively combat such appetites and customs of these sectarians of Confucius. (162-63)

As if this were not enough, the man emits "a few guttural sounds, like the barking of a dog with a cold" (164). After the accusations about child molestation, the description reinforces a negative, racist stereotype. Given that the ideal readers for a novel written in Spanish were other Latin Americans, the scene confirms a general attitude among most ethnicities, including Latinos, towards the Chinese of the Lower East Side. The narrative aside echoes the racial and cultural tensions provoked when disparate ethnicities are thrown into close proximity by misfortune and poverty.

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It is easy enough here to draw the obvious conclusion that the nar­ rative point of view is class-conscious, racist and bigoted against nonLatin Americans. But in counterpoint to his criticisms of racism in the New York press, the opportunism of US newspaper reporters (151-7), the atrocious New York slums, especially the Bowery (28-35), New York women (250-6), and mass culture in the form of the Coney Island amusement park (257-63), the narrator also ridicules what he considers the pomposity and backwardness of a parade of Latin American character types to be found around Lower Manhattan, whether it is through the ranting of the bombastic Don Cesareo holding forth about "the shameful spectacle of yet another fratricidal war," which explains why "the great nations, driven by a charitable and civi­ lizing spirit, want to conquer us!" (146); or the criticisms of the Don Juanesque pretensions of Latin American male immigrants: [It is] a rare woman who can resist their amorous advances once they look into their eyes, though not because they are seduced by youth in bloom, but because they can't help being fascinated by the way they converse by shouting in a strange language, and because each word is accompanied by all manner of gestures in a tireless gymnastics of hands, arms, legs and feet. (222)

This is a most revealing comment: the narrator has adopted one of the formal prejudices of Anglo-Saxon culture vis-a-vis Latinos: "they" speak in agitated discourse animating their speech with exaggerated bodily movements (still "too close" to Nature). A distance (both cultural and class-bound) is established with respect to the traits and mannerisms of other Latin Americans (perhaps unconsciously signaling Diaz Guerra's own acculturation in the transition from exile to settled immigrant). What is significant here is that, while the novel pretends to function as a cautionary moral, it nevertheless overflows such functional limits and is transformed into a uniformly negative image of Latin Americans—for the narrator there is no redemptive dignity or altruism, save for the chaste virgins of paradise lost. Even the Latin American political radicals who use New York as a base for their activities feel the heat of the narrator's scorn, as Lucas Guevara also provides an occasion for Diaz-Guerra to deal with a condition of exile unlike that enjoyed by Jose Marti: Lucas was honored with invitations to various Hispanic-American clubs, some literary, others political or social, which in general as-

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pired to organize or had organized furious adversaries of Yankee im­ perialism who imagine, perhaps because of some cultural atavism, that it is enough for a citizen of Santa Catalina to frown such that the government in Washington catches its breath, and that availing himself of inflammatory pamphlets, manages to recruit a few dozen tobacco workers or analogous elements so that in the name of the 'Pan American Alliance,' the 'Circle of Free Nations' or other such titles, swears to defend the privileges of religion and blood, or even of language, for reasons not hard to figure out. (244)

Perhaps the criticism is a direct reference to Jose Marti, an iconic fig­ ure of Latin American resistance to colonialism. Either way, the refer­ ence to Cuban and Puerto Rican political activists is quite clear. The image that emerges from such social satire is pessimistic; there are no counter exceptions, no altruistic political gestures by exiled Latin Americans. Diaz Guerra himself was somewhat of a radical in Co­ lombia and was ordered to leave Venezuela for this reason. However, something led to his disillusion, perhaps the perception that political radicals are part of the problem and not the solution. Perhaps his revolutionary zeal was tempered by a long residence in the USA. In spite of this swipe at the likes of Jose Marti, Diaz Guerra obvi­ ously had no compunction in reprising Marti's use of Coney Island to write an exemplary cronica [chronicle] of mass culture in the novel. A reading of Marti's chronicle and the relevant chapter in Lucas Guevara reveals many similarities, especially an abhorrence of mass cultural entertainment, indeed the massification of society in general. Both are deeply ambivalent about US modernity. As Kanellos and Hernandez point out, in Lucas Guevara the "technological marvels of their [US] 'advanced' civilization do away with humanism, dignity and respect. The immigrant is only a beast of burden or 'camel' neces­ sary for the physical construction of this technological marvel" (2001: v-vi). Nor do the parallels with Marti end there. In Divergent Moder­ nities (2001), his magisterial study of the cultural politics of Latin America's nineteenth-century intellectual elites, including their attitudes towards US cultural modernity, Julio Ramos contends that in spite of Marti's sense of alienation, he stayed in New York in order to have a base from which to prosecute his revolutionary activities and to be near a functioning "literary market" (Marti's own words, Ramos 2001: 63). Paradoxically, "The city, in the very movement that it gen5

5

See note 4.

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erated such a 'crisis,' an 'alienation,' or 'exile,' is nevertheless the condition of possibility for the intellectual's autonomy from tradi­ tional institutions, an autonomy that was indispensable for the modern intellectual (in contrast to the letrado or 'civil' writer)" (64). No doubt Diaz Guerra took advantage of such autonomy to refashion himself away from the activist letrado towards the detached, ironic literato. Conclusion Aside from its unique place as the first known novel of Latin Ameri­ can immigration to the USA written in Spanish, Lucas Guevara has sociological value because it is not only witness to the New York metropolis in one of its most expansive phases, but also to an incipient women's liberation from traditional sexual roles, which highlights the way secular modernity unshackles both desire and social mobility. Furthermore, it draws attention in almost laboratory fashion to the as­ sault on Latino male subjectivity, at least that of an elite Creole exilecum-immigrant. Male exiles found themselves in a society that protected their freedoms of expression and assembly, but that also embodied values alien to traditional Latino conceptions of family values, from filial piety and female chastity to masculinist codes of honor. The life of the Lower East Side in the novel parallels life both then and now in New York and the US in general: the desire to assimilate immigrants to the dominant cultural ethos and the immigrant's resistance to, or difficult negotiation of, such homogenization. US literature of immigration of this period stands out for its thematization, at times satirical and critical, of the problems encountered by the minority immigrant and exile (Southern Italians, Eastern European Jews, Chinese, Mexicans), including labor exploitation and racial and cultural discrimination. In the face of such hostility, native language and culture and conservative values are doubly asserted and confirmed. Modern states try to secure the loyalty of their citizens, not only through national education into juridical-rationalistic ideals of civic virtue, but also through integration into a national culture in order to provide a degree of ontological depth to national belonging. As Zacharias insists: "citizenship is a set of cultural and social processes that must be examined in the realm of everyday life.. .cultural citizenship differs from legal citizenship in that it underscores the behaviors, discourses, and practices that give meaning to citizenship as lived ex-

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perience" (2001: 32, emphasis mine). Thus the process of cultural ne­ gotiation becomes problematic for immigrants, refugees and exiles who have been socioculturally formed in different circumstances and retain a shared cultural identity or ethnic belonging that transcends the boundaries of their host societies. Cultural contact does not take place in a vacuum; rather that contact is often inflected by historical memory, for instance, of colonialism, violence, military domination, coercion, asymmetries of power, and class, racial, gender and religious hierarchies. These problems of cultural memory and difference are further complicated by a clash of world views formed by different stages of socioeconomic development, a particularly vexing issue for adults moving from less-developed countries to the floodlit streets of the capitals of high modernity. Many Latino immigrant populations in the USA, for instance, retain a sense of cultural belonging (typically regional, but also national) that transcends or lives within the more superficial US national cultural apparatus (the rituals of national belonging). The very idea of an immigrant, exile or refugee as a protofellow citizen starting from a different cultural position and cultural heritage makes integration or acceptance problematic for the host citizen and the newly arrived migrant alike. Modernity also unlocks the uneasy and fragile divide between the sexual self and the spiritual self, a divide that seems difficult to bridge within the precepts of orthodox religions. This unresolved tension is often displaced onto convenient scapegoats: licentious women, other cultures, or simply modernity itself. When these tensions are combined with the condition of exile or immigration, they can become volatile, or simply lead to welcome change. Diaz Guerra seems to be one exile who made peace with his adopted country, if not with modern sexuality. This accommodation was no doubt aided by his privileged starting point; his patrician upbringing gave him access to the social and cultural networks of Spanish-language literary and journal­ istic print culture and an elite, transnational Latino cosmopolitanism hierarchized along class and racial lines. While he probably arrived in the USA with very little money, Diaz Guerra possessed enough class status to obtain work as a correspondent for several Spanish American newspapers, to secure a senior sales position with an international pharmaceutical company, and even to act as director of the Colombian Information Office in New York, evidence that he had largely resolved his differences with the Colombian Conservative government

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and had been transformed from exile to confirmed immigrant. Thus, although Lucas Guevara touches on exilic themes of loss, isolation, incarceration, and exploitation as its protagonist descends into social and moral ruin, Diaz Guerra's ethnic and racist profiling of Jews, Chi­ nese, dark-skinned people and Anglo-Saxons, and his socially privi­ leged position, distance him (and his fictional, middle-class student protagonist) from the more typical trajectory of underclass Latino immigrants, exiles, and political refugees who entered the USA in the twentieth century. He belongs, then, to a particular fraction of a displaced, educated Latino Creole elite, and one nostalgic for the loss of status and legislative hegemony that attached to them within the class and gendered social hierarchies in their home countries, a loss that becomes sublimated into the puritanical and overweening moralism of Catholic conservatism.

Shame, Nostalgia and Cuban American Cultural Identity in Fiction: "la cubana arrepentida" Olga Lorenzo Abstract Shame and nostalgia have worked in many ways to influence cultural citizen­ ship, identity, and ethnic separatism among South Florida Cubans. These processes, reflecting various stages in the identity discourses and culture of the Cuban exile, are manifest in literary products that may work to memorialize the homeland as a part of an urge to impede, erode or retard the process of assimilation and thus preserve cultural identity. In some cases, memorialization of the homeland goes hand in hand with degrading the majority culture as well as shaming those members of the minority who may be suspected of moving towards assimilation. Shaming is also, more conventionally, used by the majority culture to designate difference and inferiority in the minority exile culture. This chapter, by the Cuban-Australian writer Olga Lorenzo, explores these conflicting and contradictory drives as they mark indelibly the experiences of Cubans made in and by exile.

In discussing modes of displacement, Allatson and McCormack medi­ tate on why, at times, "the combined weight of state practices and nationalist desire engenders a type of exile that is righteous, intractable, resolutely nostalgic, suspicious of others, and in denial over the identificatory mutations of community members separated from the originary home/land" (2005: 13) Projects of memorialization, they argue, typify a tendency among many exiles to "see in memory a vector for individual, communal and national validation," one that ambivalently recreates an age before exile (15). Memorialization by an exile culture can be employed with shaming when the purposes of the present are to impede assimilation into the host or larger community. Shame and nostalgia have worked in several ways to influence cultural citizenship, identity, and ethnic separatism among South Florida Cubans. These processes, reflecting

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various stages in the identity discourses and cultural identities of the Cuban exile, are manifest in literary products that may memorialize the homeland as a part of an urge to impede, erode or retard the process of assimilation and thus preserve cultural identity. In some cases, this memorialization goes hand in hand with degrading the majority culture and shaming those community members suspected of moving towards assimilation. Shaming is also, more conventionally, used by the majority culture to designate difference and inferiority in the minority exilic culture. The hyphen In Life on the Hyphen (1994), Gustavo Perez Firmat refers to what Cuban sociologist Ruben Rumbaut called the "1.5 generation," the generation born in Cuba but which was educated and came of age in the USA. As Perez Firmat notes, Rumbaut argued that members of this generation were marginal to both the old and new worlds and not fully a part of either (1994: 4). Perez Firmat, however, is more inter­ ested in the benefits accrued from this intermediate position. He writes that the one-and-a-halfers, having been born in Cuba but raised in Mi­ ami, have a unique ability to negotiate the new culture by virtue of their intercultural placement. "One-and-a-halfers are no more Ameri­ can than they are Cuban—and vice versa" (1994: 6): "Spiritually and psychologically you are neither aqui nor alla, you are neither Cuban nor Anglo" (1994: 7). He asserts that while this is not a choice freely made, it does create the conditions for "distinctive cultural achievement" (1994: 7), and he examines the contributions to CubanAmerican culture made by Desi Arnaz, Gloria Estefan and Oscar Hijuelos, among others. However there are also difficulties inherent in a position of uncertain, ambiguous or shifting cultural identity. These difficulties and stresses can lead to questions about identity that entail shame and processes of shaming. Perez Firmat fleetingly acknowledges the negatives of an in-between or transforming cultural identity when he writes that one-and-a halfers "may never feel entirely at ease" in either the old or new cultures (1994: 5). In a strong critique of Perez Firmat, Max Castro argues that the "deliciously seductive" Life on the Hyphen "manages to systematically underplay, elude or ignore the conflict-laden and asymmetric aspects of the relation Cuba(n)/America(n)" (2000: 293). Castro

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makes the point that much of Perez Firmat's argument about Cuban American(ness) rests on the popular assumption, seemingly accepted by Perez Firmat, that the "Cuban-American comes into existence when he is gazed at by the US public: To be (Cuban-American) is to be perceived (by the American)" (2000, 294). Castro points out that there is an unequal power distribution between the migrant group and the host country. This inequality predisposes the Cuban minority to shame and the Anglo-American majority to arrogance and shaming. Although not explicitly exploring shame or shaming, Castro refutes that there is a "carnal affair" between the two groups, pointing instead to the many instances of "unrequited love" by the non-Cuban Americans for their Cuban counterparts, as evidenced most dramatically in a 1997 Miami Herald poll that gave post-1980 Cuban migrants the most negative rating of any migrant group (2000: 299-300). Castro writes: "Cuban-Americans may believe that Cuban + American is a viable, even ideal formula, but many non-Cuban-Americans continue to voice their disagreement in the strongest terms" (2000: 302). Castro traces much of the disparagement of the Cuban culture (which is tantamount to shaming) to the economic success and political empowerment of the migrant group "in a single generation, a process probably without parallel in American history" and describes how this process amounts to "a major transgression against unstated...Anglo assumptions about immigrant and Latino subordination" (2000: 303). Castro traces several reasons for Anglo resentment of Cuban-Americans: their economic success and how that success has resulted in Cuban control over Miami's government and destiny, which in turn has led to Anglo backlash and Black anger, reinforcing ethnic lines of division (2000: 303). The resultant "disparaging view of the Latino other" (Castro 2000: 304) manifests in many small and large instances of shaming and attempts to shame. Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, in Cuban Writers On and Off the Island (1999), conceptualizes and problematizes the literary contribution to such debates made by the hyphenated Cuban-American author. She writes about the urge to idealize the past on the island through nostalgia, something explored in many novels about Cuban exile, including my The Rooms in My Mother's House (1996), Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), and Oscar Hijuelos's Empress of the Splendid Season (1999). In The Rooms in My Mother's House, I write about Consuelo's first re-encounter with her lost true love, Daniel:

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Olga Lorenzo .. .at the Miami Dade Auditorium where the first of the annual nos­ talgic extravaganzas—Anorada Cuba—was being staged...was where she saw him, in the foyer where she nervously waited for Pedro to buy the tickets. She was nervous because they should not have been there. They scarcely had enough money for two meals; they needed clothes and furniture and a million other things and she knew it was simply insane. Yet the program, Our Beloved and Much-missed Cuba, seemed to promise some relief from an even deeper hunger. So she waited desperately, hopefully, and the children felt her anxieties, as always, so that Carlos darted about her legs in a little white shirt too small for him, and Ana, in a lacy dress with many flounces that was also too small and which Consuelo had hand sewn in Cuba in another lifetime, stood staring about her and biting her nails to the quick. Consuelo wore her one good dress, a green and yellow sheath like the upholstery on a sofa, too warm for a Florida winter. Her gaze was severe and unhappy. She was calling to Carlos to come stand at her side when she raised her eyes and saw him, stared in disbelief, and then faltered, leant against a pillar, lowered her eyes and waited for Pedro. Anorada Cuba indeed. (1996: 272)

Interestingly, Webster's Dictionary defines nostalgia as something almost lethal: "Homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness." While there are no fatalities due to nostalgia in this novel, there is a greatly impaired sense of self. The night after seeing Daniel at Anorada Cuba, Consuelo has a particularly troubled and sleepless night, where she seems to fall away from time, so disconcerted is she by her situation: She has stumbled through an unknown door. She is somewhere else, not where she thought she was, but in the past. She is in Cuba, in a marble-tiled house in El Vedado.. .There is the window... She stands like this for many seconds, for minutes, for a very long time, for years that spin backward, for the erasing of years. She does not think about anything at all. She allows herself to rest in the past. The night streams past her, dreamlessly. (1996: 273-74) Here, as in Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), nostalgia for the lost homeland is coupled with lost love, accenting and intensifying the sense of life mis-lived, opportunities missed and the wrong road taken. These factors erode the migrant's self esteem and compound a sense of inferiority and "wrongness," leading to a diffuse but debilitating shame in Carl Goldberg's sense of the word as designating, among other things, such feelings as "ridiculous, humili-

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ated, chagrined, mortified, shy, reticent, painfully self-conscious, infe­ rior and inadequate" (1991: xvii). The need to mythologize the lost homeland and the lost love, to elevate these to unrealistic and glorified spheres, is part of a reaction to the shame of feeling chagrined and inadequate (i.e. shameful) in the new land. Although not referring to shame but to the related concept of guilt, Ricardo Ortiz makes the point that Cuba and culpa [culpabil­ ity or guilt] have been juxtaposed by both the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1994: 4) and the singer Albita Rodriguez (1995). Ortiz writes: "That one's Cubanness should become the marker of one's guilt, the incontrovertible sign of one's culpability, results precisely from the necessity of bearing that mark, of confessing to one's Cubanity, outside Cuba" (1997: 70). Ortiz describes "the nostalgizing practices in Cuban-exile literature and culture" arguing that "in and out of exile," Cubans are caught in a chronic addiction to "fantasies of return, reunification and restitution" (1997: 70). In the drama of nostalgia, the self, under attack in a situation for which it was not prepared, lacking in knowledge of language and cultural mores, and further facing prejudice from the "host" people, looks to a lost self, wholly idealizing it. As well, the self idealizes the country and the loves left behind as a reaction against the prevalent, amorphous and debilitating shame of the new existence. The mythologizing of the lost homeland can be seen simply as nostalgia, but nostalgia is never just a hankering for the old; it is mixed and cannot be separated from feelings in and for the present. This is illustrated in the following passage from The Rooms in My Mother's House (1996), where Consuelo drags her sick children through the Miami streets and compares those streets unfavorably to Havana's boulevards: Consuelo thought of the life she had lost. She thought of her stylish dresses and leather pumps and the pearls that had adorned her neck. She thought that she should be strolling along El Malecon at this time of the day, with Ana in an expensive stroller and Pedro holding Carlos's hand, pausing to greet friends, to buy un helado de mamey, to watch the sun set on their city. She should be ignoring the admiring glances of men, safe in her world, the world she had worked so hard to etch out (1996: 261).

Another way that the past on the island is idealized by the Miami refugees is illustrated by Daniel, who, affected by seeing Consuelo in the distance, begins to participate in counter-revolutionary activities:

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Olga Lorenzo Daniel, for his part, began to find himself once again in the company of the plotters and schemers and the desesperados—the hotheads who longed to splatter their blood in the dirt of la patria. In his mind, in his torment, Daniel's desire to regain his past with Consuelo merged with a passion to regain Cuba. In this he was not alone. The Cuban refugees found life in Mi­ ami a caricature of what they felt life should be. Their pining for home was so intense, so purely an expression of life lost, that it in­ fected everything they did. When Consuelo and Pedro took the chil­ dren to Miami Beach for the first time, all they could talk about was the beaches of Varadero. Their superlatives were so exaggerated, their nostalgia so acute, that always afterwards Ana Maria would imagine a place where caster sugar ran to greet the sea. (1996: 276)

The desperation of these "plotters and schemers" is more than just political fervor. It is also a desperate need to feel macho again, that sense of—to put it in its vulgar but culturally recognizable form— having the biggest cojones [testicles], which is a thread in the cultural legacy of the Cuban male. That is not to devalue patriotism or to be overly cynical about the cultural associations that lead to a fervor to fight for a lost homeland. It is rather to suggest that a sense of inadequacy, even of shame, about being a migrant in a new land can be one of the many factors compelling the migrant to look back towards home. Smorkaloff explores the prevalent theme of nostalgia in CubanAmerican and other Latino writing. She notes that when the Domini­ can-American Julia Alvarez was asked why her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) moves backwards in time, Alvarez responded: "Because this is how memory functions." This inverse movement, she adds, "is peculiar to those who abandon their country. You run a risk: that of falling into the constant nostalgia of idealizing the past. Like constructing a Garden of Eden in the territory of Memory. In my case that would be to imagine an idyllic childhood on that island when in truth there was an abominable dictatorship, with disappeared and terror" (Smorkaloff 1999: 8). Yet, this does not answer the question of why the immigrant has such a strong need to deny the past. What does that denial offer the self, caught in the exigencies of a new land? The landscapes of the past can be idealized through nostalgia as a means of shoring up a floundering self, a self besieged by the demands of the new land. Narcissism leads to a defense of the shamed self so that the past reality—even as brutal a reality as an abominable

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dictatorship—is made over. The lost land is idealized in the mirror reflection of the lost self. The lost land was honey and roses, and the old self dwelt in this paradise of perfection as the first man and woman did in Eden, before the shame of the fall. Smorkaloff writes that the "hyphen of her writer's existence" is described by Alvarez as "a space of conflict, rather than complacency or nostalgia. The hyphen sparked her writer's imagination precisely because it is 'the place where two worlds collide'" (1999: 8). An exis­ tentialist feeling that life in exile has impelled an untenable compro­ mise, and that the self-chosen exile has failed in "his" duty to fight for the liberation of la patria [the fatherland] the place where life—where everything—was infinitely better than it is in the USA—is part of the encoded and unacknowledged shame in the poem "Consejo al nino cubano" [Advice to a Cuban Child] by Cuban poet and journalist Ernesto Montaner (1973). In "Consejo," the narrator urges the second generation to sacrifice everything for the liberation of the homeland, to take up arms, to acknowledge the bitterness of exile. These are all things that the previous, unhyphenated generation has for the most part failed to do, or failed to do successfully, despite having had a much bigger investment in this stance by virtue of the greater material and psychic loss, of the relatively greater unfamiliarity with US customs and the English language, and of the close familial ties ruptured by the move. Yet the shame of this failure lends the poem its emotional stridency. 1

As well as the feelings of shame, mostly buried and hidden from the self, which emerge from the sense of paradise lost when speaking of the Cuban exile experience, there can also be a need to cope with another shame: that of being a member of a despised minority, threatening the homogeneous Anglo culture supposedly previously enjoyed by "native" Miamians (the indigenous people of Florida, like those of other colonized lands, were marginalized to the point of being all but invisible) before the waves of Cuban migration. Prejudice against an 1

I obtained a copy of this poem from a Miami-based exile newspaper, possibly in October 1971, when I was twelve years old. Given that Montaner was the main editor of the anti-Communist Patria [Fatherland], it is possible that the poem was published originally in that newspaper, but I cannot be sure. The poem is included in a 1973 collection of Montaner's poems, Bajo sol ajeno: versos del destierro [Under an Alien Sun: Verses of Exile] (25-27). For an analysis of the links between this publication and the Miami exile political movement see Forment (1989). My translation of the poem appears at the end of this chapter.

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ethnic minority is in some ways easier to defend against than the in­ ner, more private shame of not having fought for la patria [the father­ land] . The shame of being a member of a despised minority is also a theme in The Rooms in My Mother's House: The Caldwells who lived at the corner and who all had round sheared heads and were slow at school called out Cuban spics! whenever any of the Santiagos passed by. Pedro would have liked to get out of his car and slap their faces for them and kick them in their culos until they rolled on the ground but he didn't dare and he couldn't speak to their parents either because he was ashamed of his English. (1996: 312) At school the teachers were middle-aged and matronly and worried about what the Cubans and the blacks were doing to their town. They were scared of the blacks and couldn't believe their impudence but the Cubans were sometimes worse, with their rude chatter that you couldn't understand in your own country and their loud clothes and louder radios. They were not pleased to see Carlos and Ana in their classrooms, even such well-behaved and bright children as Carlos and Ana did nothing to please them. If anything, the fact that the two did not conform to their prejudices was even harder to handle, was quite disconcerting. When the boys scuffled in line and reached over to torment Carlos it was Carlos who was sent outside to run laps ...The teacher forgot to end the punishment, and Carlos's migraine lasted for days. (1996: 313)

Ana, like her father, is ashamed of her English: "Whenever Ana's turn came to read aloud to the class, there was always some word like yellow that Ana would mispronounce as jello. It never failed to send the class into fits" (1996: 313). For a long time Ana does not understand that the hostility directed against her and her family is nothing more than discrimination because of her ethnicity: "It was not until much later that she understood neither she, nor any of her family, were any longer welcome at the school or in the neighborhood or even in the old house on 25thStreet" (1996: 313-14). I don't remember exactly how I came across the poem by Montaner, who went into exile in Miami after the Cuban Revolution. I have a dim memory from my childhood of my father handing me a clipping from a newspaper towards the end of the sixth grade. Montaner's plea to the Cuban child to not change his broad Cuban accent, to never prefer yes to si, and to bear in mind that the homeland awaits him, is the sort of literature written for the sake of the exiled generation much more than for its offspring. It is the older generation's fond, wistful

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hope that the future generation will maintain these mythologies, but couched in the exhortation itself is the acknowledgement that this probably won't be the case. These values—of irrevocable patriotism, of duty to the homeland, of nostalgia for the past—are daily being eroded and already disappearing, and as such the poem is indulgently sentimental rather than able to express a "real" sentiment. The poem exhorts the child to resist assimilation by essentially rejecting the host US state, variously described as a warm coat gener­ ously offered (reducing the most powerful nation on earth to the status of a garment), a friend, a sister nation, a lent or borrowed country, a place where it is preferable to shed one's blood than put down roots, and finally, the best place ("pueblo mejor no existe") but still insuffi­ cient to keep a Cuban from his own homeland. The host nation is either disparaged, compared unfavorably, found lacking, or else its supposed superior virtues are acknowledged and simultaneously dismissed as of no consequence. In all of this, the poem recalls the most shameful thing a Cuban could say to another Cuban in my school days—to call him or her cubana(o) arrepentida(o). The word arrepentida suggests something slightly different from ashamed; rather it de­ notes regretful, repentant, sorry. But it was used daily to shame those perceived as in any way critical or less than proud of their Cuban background. To speak negatively of any aspect of Cuban culture, to laugh at the doings of santeros or the dead chickens and other sacrificed animals in the Miami river because of santeria (the syncretic belief system that combines the worship of traditional African Yoruban deities with the worship of Roman Catholic saints), or to sneer at the giant statues of saints or suffering and tormented Christ figures in shrines in the front yards of Hialeah, or to hang out with the Anglos or wear Levis rather than high-waisted polyester pants and gold jewelry, was to invite a cold appraisal and the scathing judgment of "cubana arrepentida." Of course, to be repentant suggests that a crime was committed in the first place, the crime, it would seem, of having been born Cuban, a sentiment also featured in a popular song refrain by Albita Rodriguez, "^Que culpa tengo yo de haber nacido en Cuba?" [what fault is it of mine that I was born in Cuba?] (1995). But as far as the coinage of the phrase, the use of repentant is more likely tongue-in-cheek, part of the black humor of Cubans, meant to be taken ironically rather than to denote a real sense of shame over being born Cuban.

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Still, the compulsion to shame and disparage the Cuban who might seem to be moving towards assimilation is integral to the putdown of "cubana arrepentida," and part of what is being dealt out in Montaner's poem. The child is reminded that a Cuban without a flag is unworthy of Jose Marti, the nineteenth-century Cuban statesman and poet who led the struggle for independence from the Spanish, often from exile in the USA. The child is also exhorted to be worthy of Antonio Maceo Grajales, another leader of the nineteenth century in­ dependence movement. He or she is instructed to say that "asi es el cubano": this is how Cubans are, and, there is, therefore, no other op­ tion than to take up arms and fight the tyrant. To do anything less would be to lose one's Cubanness, to have it summarily stripped from one like a soldier's insignia after a court martial. As a child I experienced a burst of patriotism when reading this poem, an emotion heightened by the rare experience of feeling that I belonged to something important and even precious, which I certainly didn't experience in relation to the Anglo community, from which I felt excluded and rejected. In my excitement I did not stop to wonder if the nino cubano being addressed was not the masculine-feminine amalgam of all children, but actually the male child who is also "nino." I could not have then seen that among so much else "wrong" with these lines is an implicit machismo (or rather masculinismo, without the overt bragging): an overvaluing of the masculine at the expense of the feminine. Fighters and soldiers are desirable, and when the poem was published in the early 1970s, that desire could only be for a gun-toting male. So much is at stake for the Cuban child here: he must not ever accept "otras formas de regreso" [other ways back]. "Las glorias de un pueblo preso han de ser reconquistadas"; the country is imprisoned, so its glories must be reconquered. Nothing less is acceptable. To live in a borrowed homeland is to live in agony—the Mambises, the army of Cuban national insurrection against Spain in the 1800s—taught Cubans to fight this way (and here Montaner is alluding to the line in the Cuban national anthem: "to live in chains is to live immersed in opprobrium"). Montaner's words, roughly translated as "to the Yankee who would pretend to make a Yankee of you," have particularly dis­ paraging overtones, referring to the pretence, the naive hope, of the Yankee, itself a word that is never used with entirely serious or flattering intent. The child is further told, in second person narration, that he

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must die with a gun in hand, because that is better than to stop being Cuban, a sentiment that leaves neither alternatives nor room to ma­ neuver. The exhortations continue, cascading rhythmically: tell him affec­ tionately that this is how a child feels who belongs to that "patria mambisa." In fact, one should be in a hurry to give one's blood in tor­ rents. The Cuban child is told that he cannot know how to live without a star on his forehead, a reference to the lone star of the Cuban flag. In the last four stanzas the sentiment escalates a fraction closer to the hysterical as the verses reach for the exalted: the Cuban landscape is so beautiful that the sky changes its suit in order to better reflect himself in her. Her star comes from the arcane mysteries that God himself tore with his hands for her patrimony and is the greatest pride of Cuba and Cubans. Then, in the penultimate stanza, being Cuban is likened to being Christ. The line, "si naciste en este suelo dile por Cuba tambien que Cristo nacio en Belen y siguio siendo del cielo," juxtaposes Christ's earthly birth in Bethlehem with the child born in the USA of Cuban parents. Such are the heights to which the Cuban child must strive, either a Christ-like glory or a fall from grace so complete that he should no longer even consider himself Cuban. There is nothing in between the two extremes of exaltation/death for the fatherland and apathy/shame/ceasing to be Cuban. Language, acculturation and shame Interestingly with regard to the theme of shame, Perez Firmat traces a song played in Miami as late as 1974 that made a connection between bilingualism and homosexuality. The song's protagonist is Abelardo, or Abe for short (pdjaro or ave is Cuban slang for homosexual), who avers with a lisp: No ha sido la culpa mia Haber nacido varon Pero de que yo sea bilingue De eso no hay discusion. (Perez Firmat 1994: 106)

I can't be blamed for being born male but that I am bilingual there is no doubt.

Here heterosexuality is equated with speaking one language, and the obverse is implicated in culpability. As Perez Firmat points out, "by using bilingualism as a metaphor for homosexuality, the song identi-

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fies acculturation with effeminacy. Notice that the target of derision is not someone who has forgotten Spanish but someone who has also learned English" (1994: 106-7). Perez Firmat adds that speaking Eng­ lish, by implication, makes Abe a renegade Cuban, a "cubano arrepentido" (1994: 107). The disclaimer of culpability is a repetition of the theme in the Albita song mentioned above that proclaims, "what fault is it of mine that I was born Cuban?" These protestations point to either bypassed, unacknowledged shame, or to a defense against shaming by others, or possibly both. Perez Firmat writes: "Miami Spanish includes a term that, so far as I know, is unique to the city of sun and solecisms: nilingue. Just as bilingue is someone who speaks two languages...a nilingue is some­ one who doesn't speak either: ni espanol, ni ingles" (1994, 46). He gives as an example the actor Desi Arnaz, whose Spanish deteriorated as he aged. His occasional on-screen Spanish was corrupted with Anglicisms: falta for culpa, introducir for presentar. But his English did not improve with time either. In exploring the use of the word nilingue in Miami's streets, and the claim that some Cuban-Americans have no language, Perez Firmat assumes incorrectly that two languages, spoken poorly, is tantamount to having no language. What is interesting nevertheless is the phenomenon of the erosion of the language of origin while the speaker struggles to acquire proficiency in the new tongue. Clearly what Perez Firmat is witnessing in the street when the word nilingue is heard is a sense of shame transmitted through exaggerating the loss of language. As an undergraduate at Washington University in St Louis, Mis­ souri, I met Rosa, someone in the unfortunate position of losing Spanish without fully acquiring English. A worker in the dormitory mailroom, Rosa had been born in Cuba but came to the USA when she was sixteen. If she had gone to Miami, her Spanish might have remained intact, but in St Louis Rosa had little opportunity to speak it. Moreover, at sixteen it was harder to acquire a new language than it might have been had she been younger. Rosa was left in that "shameful" no-man's land, without great fluency in either tongue. It was a striking loss. My father, despite his forty-four years in Miami, never acquired English. This failure made me acutely uncomfortable in my youth. What I felt in his presence when he commanded me to translate for him ("Olga Maria, dile...") was nothing short of shame.

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Shameful fictions There are many ways a minority culture can try to defend itself against the onslaught of the majority. Some of these involve attempts at censorship of free artistic expression, particularly of the written word, but also of critical art such as cartoons and caricatures that may lampoon or satirize cultural icons. This is especially the case when a culture does not have a long tradition of encouraging the free expression of emotions. In A Road Well Traveled (Doran et al. 1988), a collection of interviews with Cuban-American women, the researchers report the difficulty they had getting older Cuban women to express their feelings. One woman said, "In Cuba, you don't ask yourself all kinds of questions like, who am I? What do I want with my life, and why? Here (in the United States) it is natural to have a psychoanalyst, or a clergyman, or somebody you can trust, and you know, go and empty your garbage" (1988: vi). Significantly, she describes expressing feel­ ings as emptying garbage; feelings are obviously something associated with the shameful, contaminated, and abject. Smorkaloff writes that Edmundo Desnoes, in the prologue to his 1981 anthology Los dispositivos en la flor: Cuba, literatura desde la revolucion [The Devices of the Flower: Cuba, Literature Since the Revolution], declared: "no es un prologo para cubanos" [this is not a prologue for Cubans] (1999: ix). This, Smorkaloff tells us, breaks "with the old notion that a collection of Cuban narratives published in the US would, whether welcomed or denounced, necessarily circulate primarily among Cuban-Americans" (1999: ix). In fact, for a long time anything vaguely critical of Cubans written by Cubans was denounced, and "cubano arrepentido" was ritually trotted out. But Cuban-Americans no longer write just for other Cuban-Americans; the novels of Cristina Garcia have been widely translated, and The Rooms in My Mother's House (1996) was a best seller in Greece. Yet when I tried to find a publisher or agent in the USA the reply I heard most often was that they could not see how to market a Cuban-American who lived in Australia: a Cuban-American-Australian had no place in the scheme of things. I am thus a double hyphen, even a cubanaamericana-australiana arrepentida. Smorkaloff refers to the CubanAmericans who depart Miami for Paris or New York "to continue the dream of 'otherness'" (1999: 23). Paris, where Zoe Valdes has lived, Spain (as the mother country), or at a stretch London where Guillermo

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Cabrera Infante resided, are the normal entry ports if one wants to get published as a Cuban exile outside Miami. Cuba looked towards Europe as the new world looked to the old, but Melbourne has no coordinates on this cultural map; it does not exist except as the place where one falls off the edge of the world. My parents often confided to me their shame that their daughter would choose to live "so far away." Despite elements in the community who prevent free expression, there are strong traditions of unfettered creative expression in Cuban literature, and these have been manifest in the work of CubanAmericans and other Cuban expatriates. Zoe Valdes's Te di la vida entera (1996; I Gave You All I Had, 1999) pushes the boundaries of conventional literature in terms of form, style, voice, point of view, and, most of all, in the way gritty hyper-realism slides into magic realism and surrealism seemingly at whim. It captures the Cuban vernacular, with its colorful word play, witticisms and vulgarities, as well as colonial corruptions and mis-sayings. Juxtaposing floridly formal language with the absurdly vulgar and a black, camp humor, it has the earthiness of a grunge novel but is anchored in social satire. The story revolves around Cuca, a country girl abandoned by her parents and raised by her godmother, whose son attempts to rape her. The godmother arrives just in time and opens his back with a nail at the end of a board. But she doesn't save Cuca's brother, simply re­ ferred to always as the "asthmatic religious fanatic." The godmother's son rapes him in a scene of blood and excrement witnessed by Cuca, who is dismayed by the look of pleasure in her brother's face. There are, as well, instances of almost pornographic perversity. Cuca goes to Havana. She hears a romantic song on the radio; her vagina is imme­ diately moist: she is having a spiritual reaction. She meets the undeserving object of her life-long passion and the hole, as yet unexplored, of her vagina does not stop beating since the moment when his halitosis-ridden mouth explores hers. His stench is caused by onions, dental caries, and throat plaque. Henceforth the damsel recognizes her love by his mouth odor. There is very little poetry in this novel; at one point I noted "voz de brisa de canaveral," whereby a character's voice is likened to a breeze through cane fields, a relief from the relentless, if colorful, vulgarities. When the Revolution renders Cuca's life the most bitterly ridiculous, Valdes abandons any claim to realism. The farce is practically

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shameless, reveling in triviality and decadence, particularly during the Batista years leading up to the 1959 Revolution. Even after the Revo­ lution the farce continues: the narrator Cuca refers to "the shitty story of this shit-eating country." Point of view slips in and out of first and third person narrative, even sometimes twines around in the space of a single page. Eventually a plethora of narrators emerge, not only different characters, but also the unseen narrator's conscience and an­ other unknown narrator's voice, and in the final pages, the author her­ self confronts the reader from a park in Madrid where she is playing with her daughter (the only point where the book abandons its satirical edge). In the end, the novel finds its moral center in a scathing indictment of the Castro regime, but it never ceases to be shameless in its embrace of the scatological and the pornographic. It projects a sense of the author herself as posturing shamelessly. It is provocative literature. Valdes has a literary precedent in Reinaldo Arenas's Antes que anochezca (1992; Before Night Falls 1993). Ostracized and marginal­ ized in Castro's Cuba for his homosexuality, Arenas fought to express himself as a writer, paying a high price in Cuba's prisons. One of the most poignant themes in this autobiography is his fight to have a room of his own, anywhere, a place to write, to enjoy sex, to be. Despite the difficulties he faced, Arenas continued to write subversive, satirical and, one could even say, shameless literature. Much of what passes for personal anecdote in his autobiography is scarcely believable and reads much like Valdes's satire. For instance, writing about growing up in the country, on the pages where he is between six and eight and has just started school, Arenas writes: "My sexual activity was all with animals. First there were the hens, then the goats and the sows, and after I had grown up some more, the mares. To fuck a mare was generally a collective operation. All of us boys would get up on a rock to be at the right height for the animal, and we would savor that pleasure: it was a warm hole and, to us, without end" (1993: 10-11). There is, then, a sense of claiming the right to write the unspeakable throughout much of Arenas's work. It is as if, having lived outside the norms of so-called respectable society because of his homosexuality, he is free to move beyond other boundaries of "propriety." In this sense there is a shamelessness in his work that corresponds to an embracing of the abject in Kristeva's (1982) sense of "internalized pollution," which sees defilement and dirt as moving from the external

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into the internal sphere, thus becoming incorporated within the notion of the self, an idea that has very close ties with the sense of shame as accruing to the self in opposition to guilt that is more associated with an act (Lewis 1971; Pattison 2000). Arenas's writing evokes ceremonies of defilement that not only breach boundaries but also describe and reinscribe a regression to an anarchic level. Another Cuban-American writer, Achy Obejas, explores shame extensively in her novel Memory Mambo (1996). Among the sources of shame are the different expectations between the parents who consider themselves unwilling exiles and their children, the one-and-ahalfers, and the shame of not sufficiently knowing the Cuban homeland. In this case the family is in Chicago, part of a small Cuban enclave, but the cultural tensions within the exile family seem very similar to what one would have found at the time in Miami. One of Obejas's short stories takes its name from the following observations by the nameless narrator: "We left Cuba so you could dress like this? my father will ask over my mother's shoulder...And for the first and only time in my life, I'll say, Look, you didn't come for me, you came for you; you came because all your rich clients were leaving, and you were going to wind up a cashier in your father's hardware store" (1994: 121). Here one finds an example of shaming and counter-shaming. The parents attempt to shame through the suggestion that sacrifice was made in leaving the island, sacrifices that have not paid off. The child has failed to grasp the opportunity to properly prosper, to take advantage of the capitalist possibilities offered by the USA and to dress appropriately. The child responds with counter shaming: no sacrifice was made for me; you left for your own selfish interests. Smorkaloff argues that Memory Mambo "explodes false memory, nostalgia and the mythology of exile," achieving a "definite break with narratives of nostalgia and evocation" (1999: 32). What is sought instead is a series of individual truths, faced fearlessly, in order to do away with the "lies that separate, divide, and ultimately conquer the characters" (39). However Paul Allatson problematizes Smorkaloff s analysis of identity in Memory Mambo. In his discussion of the many dislocated versions of self caught in gender, cultural and political cross-currents in Memory Mambo, he writes that: "The unstable figurations of the lesbian in this family-centric environment must always be related back to the complicated web of transcultural processes en-

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coded in the hyphenated conjunction of Cuban and American" (2002: 172). Allatson suggests the need to recognize "the hyphen's inadequacy, its implication of separating, yet uniting, assumed equivalences of power and meaning. In any guise, the lesbian in Memory Mambo is like the novel's other diasporic subjects, whatever the scripts of gen­ der or sexuality allocated them in the narrative. Her body, like theirs, is never beyond, never unaffected by, the rival culturally and linguistically contingent bodily economies that meet in Juani's families and communities" (172). Allatson thus questions Smorkaloff s claim that "Juani's is a jour­ ney into historical truth." He asserts that "whether conceived as monolithic and graspable, or as plural, irresolvably complicated, and resonant beyond Cuban-US antagonisms, historical truth is one of the novel's casualties" (163). He further demonstrates how the novel is replete with characters who cannot be "unequivocally located in one or another kinship group" (165), who resist categorizing by problem­ atic gender classifications and/or national and cultural affiliations, and who above all embody an "identificatory slipperiness" (166). Allatson in particular examines these problematical identities through the lesbian narrator's (Juani's) struggles with the character of Jimmy. For my purposes of exploring how shame is implicated in problematical identity issues, Jimmy's reaction to Juani's open lesbianism, one of affront, confusion and aggression, works as a shaming mechanism that complicates his own precarious machista gender identity. Very early in Memory Mambo the ambivalent nature of the narrator's relationship with Cuba is alluded to in language that is scatological and thus touches on the abject-shameful. "I just sit at the kitchen table, playing with the edge of the plastic placemat, which says Cuba and has a map of the island, a picture of the flag, and a bouquet of palm trees. On the placemat Cuba looks like a giant brown turd" (1996: 15). As Smorkaloff observes, in Hijuelos's Our House in the Last World (1993) Cuba is similarly depicted as a source of contagion, with the word microbio appearing repeatedly, "suggesting that Cuba is also an illness, physical and mental" (1999: 46). In both cases, a sense of Cubanness as a shameful condition is implied. Another comment, this about Jimmy, Memory Mambo's shameless macho, also points to Cuban identity as shameful: "there is something disgustingly Cuban about him" (Obejas 1996: 60). Shame over racial background has been carried out of Cuba by the narrator's mother in Obejas's novel:

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Olga Lorenzo But what really kills them is when Patricia tells them that, if indeed we're descendants of Las Casas, chances are we're the spawns of an illegitimate child conceived with some Indian woman he probably raped. My mother practically faints over this—not because it so tampers with the historical image of our supposed ancestor but because it would mean that, in spite of our mother's best efforts, we're not so white after all. (1996: 34)

This mother left after the Revolution, her daughter claims, not because of Castro's communism but because he inverted the racial order that had oppressed her but that she had endorsed, just as the slave legiti­ mizes a master because of introjected shame: "When the revolution triumphed in 1959, nothing stunned my mother more than the fact that that crazy Raul and his black friends were riding on tanks with Fidel through the city...In that instant, my mother—who'd been struggling to pass her entire life—could see that the order of things had just been altered" (35). Similarly, when a black Puerto Rican musician is asked to play at her daughter's wedding, the mother is scandalized: "'Now every picture is going to have a Negro in it,' she said, rolling her eyes, as if Mario were actually black instead of mulatto, or the only black person invited—and as if any of that mattered to anybody but her" (69). The narrator is keenly aware of the different cultural values and cross-currents that hold her in an uncomfortable place. Her cousin Pauli's father is a drunkard, but this fact allows differing reactions in the two cultures: "In American terms, Pauli refused to enable her fa­ ther. In Cuban terms, she was an ingrate" (63). By US standards, she has a responsibility to not be a codependent; thus to "enable" his alcoholism entails a shameful dereliction of her responsibilities to her self and to her father. Such an attitude, however, is inconceivable in Cuban terms: her moral responsibility here is non-judgmental filial loyalty. The two cultures could not be further apart, and the judgmental, shame-laden word "ingrate" is the bullet in the crossfire. Pauli's rebelliousness adds shame to this shame-ridden extended family. "These were minor skirmishes—charges of loitering, disturbing the peace, nothing serious like drugs or assault—but the family as a whole felt great worry and shame" (66). But a key source of family stress and shame is the narrator's lesbianism: My father's worst fear, I think, is that I'll say something to him about it. Because he can think of nothing worse than having to look me in

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the eye and make a decision about whether to accept or reject me, my father creates an illusion of normalcy about the emptiness of our in­ teractions.. .Because he's afraid I won't lie, it's vital to him that I not be provoked into the truth. In my family, this is always the most im­ portant thing. (1996: 80)

Smorkaloff (1999) observes that in Obejas's story "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" (1994): the young narrator and her parents have.radically different responses to the existential question of who they are, where they have come from and where they are going...The father's immobility, his spiritual and historical stasis, causes him to paralyze temporarily the daughter, literally knocking her down with kicks and blows, since he cannot otherwise prevent her from growing away from him and into the world around her. (Smorkaloff 1999: 5)

Respect is thus a constant motif in much of the writing about the crossover generations, as is neatly encapsulated by Pablo Armando Fernandez's novel Los ninos se despiden (1971): What had to be loved and respected, to say it in family terms, was geography. We had a very poor concept of history; we were ahistorical. The important thing was being Cuban, feeling Cuban, and that could only be determined by our geography, its climate and nature. We were Cuban because we had been born here and not somewhere else. (cited in Smorkaloff 1999: 20, translated by Smorkaloff)

I find this poignant, and mystifyingly so. There is an emotional antiintellectualism about it that seems to capture something of my own experience of being Cuban-American, an appeal to a base fact (you were born in Cuba) that privileges it over all other possible knowledge, including knowledge of historical verities. Respect is demanded and must be unquestioning: this is what it means to be Cuban. But the new generation of hyphenated writers is finding ways to understand the exigencies of their parents' lives, with compassion and clear sightedness. They are moving beyond the demands for respect and nostalgia towards an appreciation of history, reality, and truth. In these slippery slopes, they are finding places to write. The poignancy in much of this inter-generational writing formed in exile lies in the to-ing and fro-ing; one can never fully detach from the parent generation and their failure and supposed, assumed, shame, nor shake off the irrational shame placed on the one-and-a-halfers for

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failing to do what our parents also didn't do. Yet we remain bound together, passing shame back and forth. Because, like it or not, as the philosopher Ray Gaita observed (1997), we are also shamed by the actions of others who are close to us; this is a part of the human condition.

Appendix Consejo al Nino Cubano Por Ernesto Montaner

Advice to a Cuban Child by Ernesto Montaner (my translation)

Ven aca, nino cubano Que estas hablando en ingles: Nunca prefieras el "yes" Al "si" de tu castellano. No cambies tu acento llano Que te viene del mambi, Y nunca arranques de ti A esa Patria que te espera, Que un cubano sin bandera Es indigno de Marti. A esta nacion generosa Que te ha brindado su abrigo, Dale tu mano de amigo Con gratitud respetuosa. Mas, al verla tan grandiosa No turbes tu mente sana, Dile a la nacion hermana Que se grabe en la memoria Que no cambias ni la gloria Por tu bandera cubana. Hazle saber que arde en ti El fervoroso deseo De ser digno de Maceo Y ser digno de Marti. Dile que Cuba es asi. Dile que asi es el cubano Y que no juras en vano Si juras que has de volver Para morir o vencer Con el fusil en la mano. Que no aceptas, tramitadas, Otras formas de regreso: Las glorias de un pueblo preso Han de ser reconquistadas.

Come here, Cuban child Now speaking in English: You never choose "yes" over The "si" of your Castillian Spanish. Don't change your broad accent Which comes to you from the Mambi And never uproot from within you That homeland that awaits you For a Cuban without a flag Is unworthy of Marti. To this generous nation That has offered you a jacket Give it a friendly handshake With respectful gratitude. And, when seeing her grandeur, Don't trouble your healthy mind Tell the sister nation To engrave in her memory That you won't even exchange For your Cuban flag. Make her know that burning in you Is the fervent desire To be worthy of Maceo And worthy of Marti. Say that Cuba is like that. Say that a Cuban is like that That you don't swear in vain If you swear that you will return To die or vanquish With a gun in your hand. That you will not accept Other forms of return: The glories of an imprisoned people Demand to be reconquered.

Shame, Nostalgia, and Cuban American Cultural Identity Dile que en patrias prestadas Vivir, es agonizar Y que tu sangre has de dar Si hay que sembrar las raices. Dile que asi los mambises Te ensenaron a pelear. Al yanqui que pretendiera Hacer un yanqui de ti Dile que cerca de aqui Hay una Patria que espera. Que no cambias tu bandera Y que iras contra el tirano Con el fusil en la mano A morir si esa es tu suerte, Porque prefieres la muerte A dejar de ser cubano. Dale tu mejor sonrisa, Pero dile con carino Cual es el sentir de un nino De aquella Patria mambisa. Ve y dile que tienes prisa Por dar tu sangre en torrente Por la Cuba independiente, Y que prefieres morir Porque no sabes vivir Sin una estrella en la frente. Dile que Cuba es tan bella Y es tan bello su paisaje Que el cielo cambia de traje Para reflejarse en ella. Dile que tiene una estrella De los misterios arcanos Que arranco Dios con sus manos Para patrimonio tuyo Y que es el mejor orgullo De Cuba y de los cubanos. Si naciste en este suelo Dile por Cuba tambien Que Cristo nacio en Belen Y siguio siendo del cielo. Dile—y dilo sin recelo— Que a este pueblo lo amaras jAy! tanto como el que mas, Que pueblo mejor no existe, Pero cubano naciste Y cubano moriras.

Say that in borrowed motherlands To live is to agonize And that your blood you must give Rather than put down roots Say that this is how the Mambises Taught you how to fight. To the Yankie who would pretend To make a Yankie of you Tell him that near here There is a homeland that waits. That you won't change your flag And that you'll go against the tyrant With a rifle in hand To die if that is your fortune Because you would prefer to die Rather than cease being Cuban. Give him your best smile But say with fondness What is the feeling of a child Of that mambisa Fatherland. Go tell him that you are in a hurry To give your blood in torrents For an independent Cuba, And that you would prefer to die Because you don't know how to live Without a star on your forehead. Say that Cuba is so beautiful And so beautiful her landscape That the sky changes its suit To reflect himself in her. Tell him that she has a star From the arcane mysteries That God tore off with his hands For patrimony with you And it is the pride Of Cuba and of the Cubans If you were born in this land Say for Cuba as well That Christ was born in Bethlehem But still belonged to Heaven. Tell him—and say it without rancour That you will love this country As much as he loves it most That a better country doesn't exist But you were born Cuban And Cuban you will die.

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Dying in the New Country Marivic

Wyndham

Abstract In this chapter, the author, herself a product of exile from Cuba, and from the exile community in south Florida, embarks on a lyrical personal journey through the landscapes of memory and loss caused by displacement. The chapter meditates on the ways that dying in the host country confronts all generations of the Cuban diaspora with the terrible truth of what Wyndham calls "the culture of denial," the narrative of temporariness by which Cuban exile has been constructed in south Florida. Before the great Cold War diaspora wrenched millions of Latin Americans from their homelands and thrust them to the fortunes—and misfortunes—of foreign lands, most of us from the region had as­ sumed that the land of our birth would naturally also be the land of our death. Cemetery plots confirmed the passing of the generations, but they also fed our expectations that one day we too would join our ancestors in that same sacred family space. Visits to these plots formed part of family life: to mark birthdays, Mother's and Father's Days, and other special anniversaries. Sadness mingled with a deep sense of belonging in those occasions as young children, parents and grandparents pilgrimaged as one in this time-honored ritual of remembrance and solidarity with our dead. Family plots were an extension of our family homes; they completed the circle of life and death. In the case of my own family, when the unthinkable happened, and my parents' ageing generation of Cuban exiles found themselves marooned indefinitely on foreign shores, the specter of death in someone else's land seemed the cruelest blow of their long years of exile. They were not the first Cuban exiles to die so near, yet so far from their beloved island. Exile movements had always been part of Cuban history (M.C. Garcia 1996: 14). But they were our parents. That the writing had been on the wall for a long time made little difference

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when the time came. At least in part, they had conspired in the culture of denial, one that prevented them from preparing themselves for this eventuality, also made no difference. These were our dead and something perverse seemed to overtake the natural order of things. Cuban exile has a history of over two centuries. Since the nineteenth century, Cubans have turned to the Big Brother to the North for political stability and economic opportunity. The wars of independence (1868-1878, 1895-1898), the struggles of the young republic, and the frequent, often sudden changes in the political life of the country of the first half of the twentieth century, all contributed to Cuban emigration to the USA (M.C. Garcia 1996: 1). The most recent wave of migration is the Cold War diaspora that began on 1 January 1959, with the overthrow of the government of Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro's revolutionary forces. By far the most lengthy of waves—forty-eight years and still counting—it also dwarfs all previous ones in numbers. By April 1961, when the Bay of Pigs invasion took place, there were 135,000 Cubans in Miami; five years later, that figure was 210,000. By 1973, more than half a million Cubans had left the island, most of them settling in Miami. The figures continued to rise. One in every eleven Cubans now reside outside the island, and of these one-and-a-half million Cuban exiles, the ma­ jority reside in the USA, mainly in or around Dade County, which houses the city of Miami (M.C. Garcia 1996: 13). The majority of the Cubans who arrived after 1959 came during distinct periods: immediately after the Revolution, from 1959-1962; during the freedom flights of 1965-1973; during the Mariel boatlift of 1980; and since the early 1990s as balseros (rafters). Typically, the first to bear the impact of the Revolution and thus to leave Cuba were the middle and upper classes. Later migrants have increasingly been more representative of Cuban society, not just in socioeconomic status but also in racial, ethnic, and geographic terms (M.C. Garcia 1996: 1). The focus of this chapter is on that first generation of Cuban exiles who fled in the period immediately following the Revolution: 1959-1962. Many were literally fleeing for their lives, implicated in the crimes committed during the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Many were not (M.C. Garcia 1996: 2). Some fled the island not out of fear of political persecution, but out of concern for "the radicalization of Cuban society" (M.C. Garcia 1996: 6). My father was one. But whatever their political backgrounds and loyalties, this group shared a

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"moment of departure" that would differentiate them from later arri­ vals. Around this moment would develop a peculiar culture of exile— a culture of denial—resonances of which can be heard and felt today: in Miami's family living rooms and its cafes and restaurants in Little Havana, in the press, and even in the pronouncements of US leaders, including President George W. Bush. Three myths, I would argue, grow of this moment of crisis; together they underpin the culture and rhetoric of denial that is the legacy of the first Cuban exile generation. First, the myth of a forced departure: they did not leave Cuba voluntarily; they were forced to leave. "We never chose to come here to the United States. Fidel Castro expelled us, and we were forced to go into exile, forced to go to Miami" (Rieff 1993: 28). Second, the myth of a quick return, courtesy, it was hoped and urged on successive US presidents, of yet another US intervention in Cuba's internal affairs. For decades, my father stood ready to join the Marines when, as he expected, the US government would finally "come to its senses" and liberate Cuba from communism. The reasons went beyond the ideological. The Castro government's nationalization of US-owned property would surely, the logic went, prompt US intervention in the island (M.C. Garcia 1996: 14). The dismal failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, an operation sponsored and financed by the US Government, may have sparked the first major wave of internal migration of Cuban exiles from Miami to other US cities, but it did little to undermine the myth of a quick return. Third, the myth of La Cuba de ayer [the Cuba of Yesterday]. Unlike those who followed them in the freedom flights of only a few years later, the departure of that early group of exiles had been typically sudden and thus unprepared. They had no time to experience and assimilate the "new" Cuba that was unfolding and continues to unfold. The Cuba they took with them into exile was frozen in time. This Cuba, La Cuba de ayer, would remain stubbornly and tragically their version of the "real" Cuba, one that would grow into mythical proportions as the years and decades of exile dragged on and on. Concrete manifestations of pre-revolutionary Cuban society alive and well in Miami—in the form of schools, businesses, and organizations that shut down in Cuba and reopened in exile—helped sustain the myth (M.C. Garcia 1996: 4). As a result, the new Cuban emigres saw themselves as exiles, not immigrants, and least of all fully fledged citizens in the new land:

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Marivic Wyndham They had no intention of beginning life anew as norteamericanos. They fervently believed they would return to their homeland once a more tolerable government replaced Fidel Castro's. In this faith, they were sustained by the long history of American intervention in Cuba's internal affairs, from the time of our wars of independence onwards. (M.C. Garcia 1996: 1-2)

As they waited to return to the homeland, these early exiles "focused their energies on survival" (M.C. Garcia 1996: 2). Theirs was the case of creating, out of what was then only a vacuum, a life for themselves and their families, and maybe a future colony for fellow exiles. My father and others like him—professional, well-to-do, with po­ litical links with previous Cuban governments—had it, in a sense, the roughest. Many had been caught by surprise by the swiftness with which the situation had changed. Unprepared for exile, some had not thought to transfer their accounts overseas. Nonetheless, it was they who built the nests that swarms of relatives and friends later made their first stop in exile. It was their newfound businesses that would later employ new arrivals. It also fell on them to establish semiofficial relations with the US Government: setting themselves up as the conscience and the voice of free Cuba. In short, they set up the foundations for the infrastructure (familial, economic, political, moral) on which the Cuban exile stands today. Most importantly, they set the tone for what was to follow. Money might be scarce and the future uncertain, but there was plenty of hope and fire here. It was only, after all, a matter of time before the situation was resolved through US intervention. This kind of confidence in a brighter future helped to ease what was proving, for many of these exiles, a difficult transition. For the head of family, it meant setting aside questions of dignity and longterm financial security and getting on with whatever job he could find. For his wife, the idea that this was only a temporary arrangement helped to ease her loss of status and of that infrastructure that had in Cuba typically provided her (in the case of my mother, for example) with a cook, laundress-cum-ironing lady, general cleaning woman, chauffeur, and gardener. Our house in Cuba stood exactly as we had left it for years after: ready to receive us at any time. Most of the staff had remained, all of our belongings were still in place: awaiting our return. As odd as it may seem to have maintained two homes (one in Cuba, one in Miami) and two identities (one of citizen, one of exile)

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these arrangements helped many to come to terms slowly, gradually, with what was happening to their lives. This blend of the practical and the idealistic—of Cuban get-upand-go, on the one hand, and blind faith in a US solution to the crisis, on the other—informs the history of today's Cuban exile community. The practical impulse ensures that life goes on, and makes the best of it. The idealistic impulse maintains the fantasy of a return home, courtesy of the knight in shining armor who once before helped rid Cuba of a foreign power. Despite barriers of language and culture, the bulk of that 135,000-odd contingent integrated quickly and seamlessly into Miami's workforce, creating a vibrant business community that lifted the local economy and drew other immigrants to the area. In practical terms, they survived admirably well. But they never assimilated. For some forty years now, these exiles have lived lives of "triumphant ambiguity" (Rieff 1993: 26). They have "camped" and they have thrived, at the same time (Rieff 1993: 26). As one exile explained: (We are) pro-American, but we are not Americans, not yet anyway. We won't even know what we are until things actually change in Cuba, until we have the possibility of going back. Once the exile is over, things will change, because we Cubans will finally have the freedom to make up our own minds about whether we want to be immigrants or go home. (Rieff 1993: 28)

That such an ambiguity could persist for over four decades has in large part to do with the fact that for this special generation of exiles (the wealthy classes of pre-Castro Cuban society) the country where they "camped" had always been part of their mental map of "home." In pre-Castro days, the Cuban and the "American" had increasingly been indistinguishable in the fabric of Cuban life; such had been the insinuation of US culture (tastes, values, assumptions, expectations) into the local culture. And not only in terms of popular culture. The fact that we grew to think of entertainers like Nat King Cole, and movie stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as our own was one thing. But more important still were the institutions that shaped our minds and our values from childhood onwards. Here Americans had, if not a monopoly, then their fair share of two of the country's most powerful forces (religion and education, church and school) that, in turn, formed the basis of the country's educational system. There were

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also the personal exchanges going on all the time between individuals of the two countries. Usually invisible and unrecorded, this kind of contact was immensely important in shaping the Cuban-US relationship at grassroots level. The endless flow of US citizens to Cuba—on business or pleasure, to study, to visit friends, even to live there for a time—made our Big Brother to the North accessible and real. This had been a two-way relationship. Before the Revolution, these exiles had traveled to the US regularly and sometimes for long periods, for business and pleasure. As Cuba had been the playground of rich "Americans," so had the USA been the playground of rich Cu­ bans. But the USA was not just a fair-weather friend. This is an important point. As well as the site of fun, frivolous times, it had also been the main comfort and refuge in times of trouble. It had been home-in-exile for generations of Cubans fleeing from the latest dictator, or the latest coup. Indeed, the first Cuban to seek political refuge in the USA did so in 1823, the priest Felix Varela y Morales who sought refuge in Saint Augustine, Florida, after being condemned to death by the Spanish authorities for demanding autonomy for certain provinces in the island. Fellow rebels eventually joined him, and they established the first real focus of Cuban opposition to Spanish rule. By the second half of the nineteenth century, their numbers had grown to some 2,000 Cubans, who were now scattered in the region between Tampa and Key West. They were mainly tobacco growers and their contributions helped to finance the war of independence. The second key wave of Cuban migration to the USA was sparked by Fulgencio Batista's coup d'etat in 1952, and it continued until 1959 when the right-wing dictator fled Cuba for Spain. By then some 15,000 of his political opponents had congregated in the USA, most in the Miami area. Plain facts and statistics only tell part of the story of CubanAmerican relations. For every individual making that crossing, brief or lengthy as it may have been, there lies a tissue of human connectedness between the two cultures. Exile, by definition, is a negation of home. But the close links between the two peoples went a long way towards mitigating the worst of the exilic condition. My own family sought political refuge in Miami for a time in the early 1950s. For over two years we lived in "Mr Billy's House." My sisters attended the local school, and my parents carried on with the business of life. When many years later we passed the street of "Mr

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Billy's House" and found it gone, it was as if something of ours had gone too. Miami and "Mr Billy's House" and the friends we made then may have been American, but they were also part of our family world. Indeed, if one were to draw my parents' generation of exiles' mental maps of "home," one would find not simply the shape of the island of Cuba. But one that looped dramatically to embrace the Flor­ ida Peninsula. Ironically, it was this close familiarity with the country and culture of exile that both softened the extremes of the exile experience and encouraged the "triumphant ambiguity" of which Rieff speaks. Cuban exiles may have been turning to the USA for political refuge for over two centuries. But there had always been an eventual return to the island. Until now. Thus, despite the prosperity of these exiles, they continued to live—metaphorically at least—with their bags packed and a strong fantasy alive in their hearts of a return to the island. The fact that such ideas "became increasingly with the passage of time chimerical did little to lessen their authority." Over the decades, "the facts of exile" had become all but inseparable from "the wound of exile": a wound that would only heal when they returned to the island (Rieff 1993: 27). Few from that first exile contemplated—or if they did, they did not dare articulate to their families and friends—the idea of "return" before the fall of Castro. A visit to Castro's Cuba would have been condemned as a betrayal not only of "the cause," but of the motherland herself. Throughout the first decade of exile, the 1960s, it was, in any event, forbidden to the Cuban Americans.. .to visit the island. For the revolutionaries, and, for that matter, in the eyes of many ordinary Cubans who had chosen to remain, the Miami community were traitors, people to be excoriated as gusanos, 'worms,' and shunned if ever they were encountered. (Rieff 1993: 14)

Though Cubans continued to go into exile in Miami, "once they had left there was no question of their ever returning even in the most extraordinary of circumstances" (Rieff 1993: 14). By the time a brief radical shift in Washington's policy towards Castro's Cuba in the late 1970s opened for a time the possibility of return visits to the island, as the Carter administration attempted a policy of detente, the cement had long settled in the political stance of Miami's exile community on such visits (Rieff 1993: 14-15). Despite the fact that in that short inter-

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lude and subsequently, the possibilities for return visits have existed, and many later arrivals have embraced the opportunity to visit their relatives in the island, the rigidly set position of that first wave of exiles on the matter continues to prevail in the dominant political culture of Miami exile. Beneath the political rhetoric of rejection of such options, there lay larger issues. To return to Cuba, even if only for a brief visit, would have been to confront impossible realities: that they could of their own will return to the beloved island, that they could of their own free will leave her again, and that perhaps after the pain of such a visit they had discovered there was no Cuba de ayer to nurture in their old age. Thus the emotional grip of the illusion of a "quick return" that no amount of disappointments—the Bay of Pigs, the behind-thescenes negotiations between the USA and the USSR after the missile crisis that left Castro more firmly implanted on the island than ever before, the collapse of the Soviet Camp that did not bring about the expected collapse of Soviet Cuba—could dispel. Forty-plus years and two major setbacks later, the rhetoric of denial remains. For these ex­ iles, "dying in a new country" was never the issue. That would be the byproduct of a larger issue, a larger tragedy, of not dying in the old country: a country they could not bear to admit they had left voluntarily, one they insisted that waited their return, a country that their collective imaginations had fashioned into a veritable paradise lost. The peculiarities of Cuban exile and exile politics have prompted some to ponder on the underlying causes. Long before the advent of Castro's Revolution, in the Cuban psyche, as David Rieff argues in his Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami (1994), the sense that one did not willingly leave the island to settle elsewhere was well entrenched in the Cuban psyche. Those who could afford it would travel widely and often. They might send their children to school in the USA. But they would always return. He quotes from one inside that culture: To leave Cuba was an admission of failure. And that took on a moral dimension as well. The person who left was somehow lessened mor­ ally, rather like an Israeli nowadays who chooses not to remain in that country. Actually, I think that one of the reasons that Cubans in Miami have been so traumatized by their exile—after all, ours is not the only exile in the history of the world; we haven't suffered more than anyone else has ever suffered—is that this sanction against leaving Cuba was already present in the Cuban psyche before the revolution. (Rieff 1993: 18)

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La Cuba de ayer, their paradise lost, would always dwarf the realities of life in the USA. As one of countless success stories of Cuban ex­ iles, an entrepreneur famous for having run the first Cuban-owned bank in the US, the Republic National Bank, declared: It will always be difficult for Americans to understand the realities as we Cubans in Miami see them. Immigrants want to assimilate because, by and large, they have brought with them unhappy memories of their native countries. But we don't have bad memories of Cuba. Before 1959, we did not think the US was better. We thought Cuba was better. And most of us still do. It isn't that I'm not grateful to the United States, or that I don't love the United States. I do. But even though this country has been very good to me, even after thirty-three years I don't feel comfortable here. And the reason is simple. I would rather be in Cuba. (Rieff 1993: 30-31)

One might ask: which Cuba? And the answer would predictably be: la Cuba de ayer. So much for the rhetoric. But what of the reality? This is as varied and complex as the individuals who compose Cuban exile at any given time. This is why I would like to share a personal anecdote of dying in the new country, one that reflects the greater complexities and ironies of the realities of Cuban exile: past and present. In my own family, an earlier political exile in the early 1950s had, as mentioned earlier, taken us to Miami. There my paternal grandmother died and was buried. This was to be her temporary resting place, awaiting the time when things in Cuba "improved" and we could transport her remains to their rightful place at the family plot at Cementerio Colon in Havana. It was never a question of " i f but of "when." As it happened, we returned and she stayed. Before too long another exile had overtaken our plans to resettle in Cuba, and in 1959, we found ourselves once again living "temporarily" in Florida. Meanwhile my grandmother remained in her resting place at Woodlawn Cemetery in Miami. Pilgrimages to her grave-in-exile were a regular part of family life. And for many decades it was understood that she—and we—were living on borrowed soil and time. The day would soon come when we both—the dead and the living exiles— would return to the land of our birth. It was only with the death of my father in the early 1990s that we realized that my grandmother's tem­ porary grave had now become her final resting place, my father's grave in the same cemetery ironically conferring permanence on hers.

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The gravestones in Cementerio Colon and in Woodlawn are wit­ nesses to the long diaspora of Cuban dead. Woodlawn Cemetery in Miami and Cementerio Colon in Havana—two pillars of one Cuban cemetery stretching across the treacherous tides of the Florida Straits—hold in their collective tombs and mausoleums a continuum of names and dates that allow us to trace faithfully the personal and political fortunes and misfortunes of generations of Cubans. Where the dates in the gravestone "there" stop, they begin "here." Often (and sadly) so does their level of care and maintenance. Many of what were once the well-tended suburbs of the dead in Colon are now grown sloppy and weedy. Some show cracked tombs and are surrounded by smelly puddles of stagnant water. The neglect is heartbreaking. The reason is obvious. These are the dead of the absent families, the exile families, the families dying in a new country. In Miami's Woodlawn, on the other hand, a veritable garden blooms in the tombs of dead Cuban exiles. Families visit regularly and tend to the graves of their dead with the same care and devotion they shower on their living. The conundrum goes to the heart of the Cuban diaspora: with heavy hearts we bury our dead in a new country, yet we know that for the moment at least, here is where we want them, safe and cared for in exile. The rituals of caring for our dead run deep in the psyche and imagination of Latin Americans all over the world. Abandoning our dead in the old country and burying our dead in the new, both are part of the diaspora of mourning and grief that is life in exile.

Coda: Eleven Stars Over the Last Moments of Andalusia Devleena Ghosh Abstract Concluding this volume is a meditation from Devleena Ghosh on the rela­ tionship of exile to place, and about exile as a leitmotiv of contemporary displacement in an increasingly transnational world. For Ghosh the fundamental question posed by exile is, "How does one define the multivalent, multiplex condition of exile?" Ghosh identifies four nodes of exilic aspiration and struggle—exile as the future "will be"; exile as a nostalgia for privilege; exile as geography; exile as language—which either singly or in combination enable and disable the capacity for those in exile to be politically engaged, hence the global imperative for that engagement.

Our tea is green and hot: drink it. Our pistachios are fresh; eat them. The beds are of green cedar, fall on them, following this long siege, lie down on the feathers of our dreams. The sheets are crisp, perfumes are ready by the door, and there are plenty of mirrors: Enter them so we may exist completely. Soon we will search in the margins of your history, in distant countries, for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves: Was Andalusia here or there? On the land.. .or in the poem? Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms are Never Finished 1

"Exile culture," writes Hamid Naficy, "is located in the intersections and the interstices of other cultures" (1993: 2). It has, according to Richard Eder, a climate, an ecology, an archaeology, a national smell (1999: 1). He adds: "Those little firm facts, stamps in our passport, 1

This is an uncredited translation of a 1992 poem by the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, "Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky" (Ali 2002). A different translation by Clarissa Burt is included in Darwish's collection The Adam of Two Edens (2000).

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accumulate and at a certain moment they become illegible lines. Then they suddenly begin to trace an inner map, the map of the unreal, the imaginary. And it is only then that they express precisely the immeasurable experience of exile" (1999: 1). Dubrovka Ugresic, a refugee from the repressive nationalist politics and culture of post-Yugoslav Croatia, writes of the subtle persistence of exile: It is the history of the things we leave behind, of buying and aban­ doning hair driers, cheap little radios, coffee pots. Exile is changing voltages and kilohertz, life with an adapter, the history of temporary rented apartments, the first lonely mornings of spreading out the map of the town in silence, to find the name of a street and mark it with a cross in pencil, repeating the history of imperialism, with little crosses instead of flags. (cited in Eder 1999: 1)

Edward Said thinks that exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience, and goes on to ask: "If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture?...Modern western cul­ ture is in large part the work of exiles, emigres, refugees" (2001: 172). Exile, by this account, is usually an outcome of unfree migration since typically, violence (potential or real) propels people into exile. Thus people in exile are living documents, obsessed with fixing an image or a moment (Octavio Armand, cited in Gener 2003: 30). For exiles home exists in the gaps and fissures between territories and time because the homeland is never one's present country. People scattered in a process of nonvoluntary displacement, usually created by violence or under threat of violence or death, have a consciousness that highlights the tensions between the common bonds created by shared origins and other ties arising from the process of dispersal and the obligation to remember a life prior to flight (Gilroy 1997). Exile contains within it a complex of values and meanings: intellectual, social, and cultural. Even if the move is a life saving necessity, the shift in location also involves major changes such as "learning how to live with, inside and through another language; adapting to the folkways of another culture, finding a place in the new land's social and economic structure and adapting to new political circumstances" (Schlesinger 2004: 46). As Schlesinger points out, an exile fleeing to another country seeking permanent domicile and citizenship will need to be "naturalized." Before this process occurs, that exile is constructed as "un-

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natural," an alien or asylum-seeker, a foreigner, immigrant, or refugee, because "exile" is not a recognized status. Thus Schlesinger describes exile as a rite of passage, a process of symbolic transition that involves stages of separation, marginality, and reaggregation. An exile enters the liminal space of "the waiting room of statelessness" by los­ ing her/his national identity and citizenship (2004: 46-47). S/he passes through time and space, crossing borders, reconstituting his/her relations to the past and the future, to the old home and the new, seeking to understand how the new ties formed in the adoptive home remake exilic identity. Bryan Turner calls this ethic of exile a "cosmopolitan virtue," one that, under the conditions of globalization, locates itself in an ironic distance from one's own traditions and respect for other cul­ tures and human rights (2002: 59). Does voluntary or imposed exile offer the "silence, exile and cunning" that such cosmopolitans require? However, exile does not necessarily produce liberal cosmopolitan citizens; it may easily create unreconstructed nationalists and fundamentalists. The crucial role of memory in constructing an exilic identity means that a renovated idealized version of the originary nation may be valorized. For example, many Japanese artists and writers ex­ iled themselves in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century to find a refuge from Japanese provincialism. But these people returned home in the 1930s to a Japanese nation that was being whipped into a mood of xenophobic hysteria. Some became the fiercest war propagandists once they returned (Buruma 2001). How does one define the multivalent, multiplex exile condition? Living in the cracks between nations, cultures, and languages means inhabiting an uncertain present and future and often an unspeakable past. Paul Tabori defines exile as an "impenetrable jungle, a kind of super-maze" for which "no perfect or complete definition is possible—or perhaps, even desirable" (1972: 26). Joseph Brodsky proposes exile as nothing beyond "the very moment of departure, of expulsion" because what occurs after that moment "is both too comfortable and too autonomous to be called by this name...If we have a common denominator, it lacks a name" (1990: 107). Exile is not a once-and-future state; it is a dynamic process with a history. An exile's status can change; mentally s/he can become an immigrant, just as in other circumstances migrants may become exiles (Shahidian 2000: 71-72). Exiles always internalize the double consciousness of their originary place and their present location, carrying

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with them "their homes: the language, customs, traditions of their countries. They transpose and translate: they live between two shores. Their homes and landscapes live within them, although they are no longer places of physical dwelling" (Armand cited in Gener 2003: 22). The condition of exile also reveals a crucial geopolitical fact. It is often created by the inability of the state or ruling power to coopt or accommodate emerging differences, changes, or challenges in their societies. Totalizing state policies may attempt to silence opponents by making them invisible or out of place. Shu-Yun Ma observes that whatever the Chinese state's intention, "exile has helped the Chinese government reduce domestic [oppositional] voice" (1993: 375). In post-coup Chile, Pinochet offered exile as a "humane alternative to prison, or a worse fate, for 'enemies of the nation,'" and relied on the mass exile of the Chilean Left to consolidate his dictatorship (Wright and Onate 1998: 171). Thus exile may reflect the power struggle over cultural and symbolic representations of society, a double consciousness that exists inside and outside the state. This double consciousness may be limiting but it also has a liberating potential, opening up spaces for different kinds of knowing, "an opportunity to view society from bottom up, through the wide angle of having seen and experienced the suffering of being exploited, oppressed, persecuted and ousted" (Shahidian 2000: 78). Many scholars have emphasized the importance of unsettling the essentialism of the Self-Other division and acknowledging that all contemporary cultures are comprised of flows, circulations, contaminations, and hybridities. Thus the notion of exile shuttles back and forth between various worlds, not in terms of opposition but rather of epistemic complicity (Bongie 1998: 13). Exile as the future "will be" As Gerise Herndon points out, the literature of migration often in­ cludes not just the departure from home, but the mythic evocation of the subsequent return to what once was home (2001: 1). Alterity is inscribed on the "native" when s/he enters exile in the metropolis. Herndon concludes that on returning home, the native undergoes a remigration, not to the home, but to a state of liminality. The feeling of being in between, without a home, neither here nor there, is the borderland that exiles inhabit. Appadurai calls this ethnoscape "the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live:

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tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers" (1990: 297). The Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat defines this border as a veil not many people can wear (1998: 264). This liminal state of being, of feeling not quite at home, is a reality for many people as territorial and ethnic boundaries become more porous, enabling the increase in legal and illegal movement. As Helene Cixous says, this sense of feeling not at home also occurs to women in patriarchal societies: There is something of foreignness, a feeling of not being accepted or of being unacceptable, which is particularly insistent when as a woman you suddenly get into that strange country of writing where most inhabitants are men and where the fate of women is still not settled...So, sometimes you are even a double exile, but I'm not going to be tragic about it because I think it is a source of creation and sym­ bolic wealth. (1991: 12-13)

But the double exile of return involves a reshaping of identity: the immigrant becomes either the prodigal daughter bearing the gift of foreign knowledge or values into the native land or the bearer of an imagination who exists as a mnemonic trace and cannot live in the present moment (Herndon 2001: 3). This layered multiplicity of locations and identities implies that "there's no place to speak from except from somewhere. But at the same time as somebody has to speak from somewhere, they will not be confined to that person or that place" (Stuart Hall, cited in Herndon 2001: 3). Trinh Minh-ha reflects on the dilemma of the writer in exile by saying that the moment the insider steps out from the inside, she is no longer a mere insider (and vice versa). She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. When she inhabits the space of the outsider, she steps back and records what she would not consider recording as an insider. But unlike the outsider, she also resorts to multivalent, nonexplicative, and nontotalizing strategies that suspend meaning and resist closure. She thus refuses alterity since her reflections are not merely an outsider's objective reasoning or an in­ sider's subjective feelings. She drifts in and out of the undetermined space of the threshold (1989: 218). Shahidian similarly describes exile as the redefining and remapping of borders, homelands, and hostlands (2000: 76). These borders become "the sites of differences between interiority and exteriority;

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they are points of infinite regressions" (JanMohamed 1992: 103). But the process of recasting borders does not eliminate the reality of geography. Borders remain real mental and physical spaces constituting a corporeal presence, emphasizing that border crossing is a protean process, a relationship of continuous concern and challenge. Displacement and disjuncture demand that a person attuned to the local pay attention to the universal cognitive map, producing a global consciousness that incorporates both home and exile, creating a personality that speaks in the spaces between these different topographies. Exile as a nostalgia for privilege Carol Bardenstein, in her analysis of Claudia Roden's A Book of Mid­ dle Eastern Food (1974), describes how Roden, a Sephardic Jewish emigre from Egypt to France, regards her engagement with food and cookbook-writing both as a direct result of the experience of being in exile and as the "fruit of nostalgic longing" for a world from which she, like others, had been absented. Roden narrates her Parisian fam­ ily's consumption of the Egyptian peasant dish ful medames in rever­ ent silence, "experiencing private ecstasy in tasting a food that meant much in the Middle East and has come to mean even more in exile" (Bardenstein 2002: 353). At first this seems to be the familiar nostalgia of migrants for a lost world, and a poignant attempt to commune with that world by partaking of a disconnected fragment of it, but as Bardenstein points out, the picture is more complicated. Roden, during her stay in Egypt, "like many similar 'cosmopolitan' elites (before nationalism's homogenizing discourse left little room for them), did not belong in any unambiguous or straightforward sense to the "poor man's Egypt" signified by the ful that is so sentimentally and sincerely evoked and consumed in exile" (Bardenstein 2002: 353). Bardenstein emphasizes that the affiliative and identificatory practices of these elites were layered and complex, including their clear repudiation of Egyptian, Arab, or even Middle Eastern identities in some instances. Roden, for example, never learnt Arabic in Egypt, because it was considered a cultural contaminant in a setting where French was valorized as the most prestigious language, and "not knowing [Arabic] even after residing in Egypt for fifty years could be paraded as a source of pride and status." Bardenstein points out that in Roden's household of privilege there were networks of servants and cooks preparing elabo-

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rate and lavish meals who had to learn to cook European ("our") dishes (353-54). Bardenstein concludes by posing the significant ques­ tion: if Roden's cook was Egyptian, what was the difference between his (Egyptian) food and our (Roden's) food, to the extent that he had to be taught to cook the latter? What are the collective and affiliative contours of the "we" as distinct from the implied "they" who are Egyptians? Thus expatriate communities may invest local dishes with value as they move into nostalgic European contexts where such food become signifiers of exilic authenticity. The complexities and ambiguities of movement between places are often blurred by the nostalgic workings of memory that present a predictable version of the originary home for people, many of whom no longer think of themselves as belonging there. In my own inter­ views with British people who migrated to Australia after India's in­ dependence, I repeatedly found these contradictory emotions; the perfection of the place left behind to which they do not want to return. As Bardenstein (2002: 353) emphasizes, this inconsistency does not invalidate feelings of exile; rather it highlights some of the unique operations of memory and collective identification in the context of radical displacement. New configurations of memory take shape and new performances and presentations of identification emerge, inflected in terms of gender, class, and ethnicities in displacement. Exile as geography According to Eder, exile is the only country with no geography (1999: 1). Identity is not based solely on genealogy or history, but also on geography, location, and space, hence the social relations of migrants and refugees are transnationally not territorially defined. Exilic consciousness foregrounds the ambiguities that arise when attempting to reconcile shared histories with relationships produced by migration and the memory of life in the homeland. This is especially so when people leave a contested place, and where memories are jolted through the "vehicles of mass media." The creation and maintenance of these transnational, cosmopolitan communities demands and celebrates geography, rather than discarding it (Cox and Connell 2003: 330). For exiles, identity and location are symbiotic. The homeland may be secured by territorial boundaries but its perpetuation lies both within the state and also beyond national boundaries (Bottomley

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1992). Exiles may find the connection between place and identity am­ bivalent and problematic because "the presumed certainties of cultural identity, firmly located in particular places which house stable cohe­ sive communities of shared tradition and perspective, have never been a reality" (Carter et al. 1993: vii). Cox and Connell (2003: 331) point out that this predicament is even more pronounced for communities like the Palestinians for whom exile is experienced without recourse to a functioning nation-state (or even a locality defined within interna­ tionally recognized boundaries), however distant, that might offer a stable center for identity. They cite an example of this conundrum. When an Israeli nationalist asserted that if Palestinians want to return to their homeland they should retrospectively declare themselves to be Israelis, Sari Nasr, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem but resident since 1958 in Amman, Jordan, replied: I am Palestinian, I was born in Jerusalem, I started out to be a Pales­ tinian, then they started calling me someone who does not have a country. They called me a refugee. After that I was stateless. Then I was called Syrian, a Lebanese, a Jordanian, what have you. Today I learned from Professor Khayutman that I am originally Jewish. (Cox and Connell 2003: 331)

Such complexities have meant that Palestinians are defined in terms of the geopolitical transformations in the Middle East. The continuous redrawing of the territorial borders in that region through war, expulsion, and overt and covert state violence constructs Palestinians as refugees, Israeli-Arabs, Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese, and even, most recently, fanatics or terrorists (Cox and Connell 2003: 331). Yet such exiles have to somehow integrate into new territory, simultaneously and deliberately restoring the cultures and practices of their homeland, food habits, clothing, religion, and language, through remembering and nostalgia. Their memories are jolted and intensified when crises occur in their homelands, especially as contemporary technology enables tangible and intangible transnational connections. Neither here nor there is imagined as it once was. Place, identity, and diaspora take protean shapes as circumstances in the originary and adopted countries change. Memory is an artifact that rusts. Just past the toll gates of the global village, Europe's displaced and dispos­ sessed—Ukrainians, Bosnians, Africans, Gypsies, Turks—peddle a tumulus of memory as objects in the global flea markets.

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Exile as language "Linguistic deprivation," according to Polish writer Horst Bienek, "is probably the most decisive factor in determining exile" (1990: 41). In effect, it constitutes a re-exiling, combining the corporeal banishment with intellectual distancing. This transition to a new language and idiom is a challenging and alienating process since language is the one tangible residue of homeland that the exile can carry, keeping the memories and roots alive. On the other hand, fluency in the language of one's adopted home can enable the making of meaning and transi­ tion to the new culture and society easier. Various exiles have re­ flected on their experience with the new language and the old. Ariel Dorfmann recounts how he renounced his mother tongue and tried to immerse himself in the English language and U.S.-Anglo culture, be­ fore realizing his visceral commitment to Spanish (1999). Nedim Gursel, a Turkish writer living in Paris, says: "The truth is, I do not live in a city or in a country. I inhabit a language. Turkish is the cave, where I live like a stone in the fruit. The French language, that ulti­ mate place of exile, is beginning to structure my phrases" (1990: 60) Lithuanian Czeslaw Milosz discovers that, after living for a while, among people who speak a different language, he senses his native tongue in a new manner with new aspects and tonalities (1994: 40). But "language," he says, "is our only homeland" (quoted in Umpierre 2002: 8). And according to Joseph Brodsky, a writer in exile "is like a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course, than a man, because they will never retrieve you). And your capsule is your language" (Buruma 2001: 5). Exile and political engagement For exiles, there is a tension between political engagement and intellectual independence. Ian Buruma claims that one way of dealing with this is an offshore kind of engagement, a detached involvement (2001: 1). For example, intellectuals abroad, an Algerian in London, a Tamil in Toronto, or a Palestinian in New York, may call for action or revo­ lution, to be carried out thousands of kilometers from their home. According to Buruma, engagements of this kind constitute "politics without responsibility" as the consequences of such exhortations may be metaphorical for the exile but not for those living in Algeria, Sri

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Lanka, or Gaza. In Buruma's opinion, politically ambitious exiles, by identifying with the plight of oppressed minorities, obtain all the pre­ requisites and privileges that go with the politics of victimhood. Buruma concludes that exiles have a responsibility to act in solidarity with the oppressed but not become symbols of the oppression, as this trivializes those who experience the actual suffering. "The soi-disant exile status might attach a certain glamour to the writer in London or New York, but it does nothing for the poor Tamil trying to get some sleep in Frankfurt Station" (2001: 8). Esmail Khoi, the exiled Iranian poet, wrote in London, "Happy the moment, When I depart from this paradise, Towards my home, Towards the heart of my own hell!" (quoted in Shahidian 2000: 77). But in the engagements with the old society and the new communication, translation, transcription, indeed speaking, cannot be trusted. Antonin Liehm, a Cold War Czechoslovakian exile, warns about the exploitation of testimony: "We are asked to testify, not because people are really interested in us and our experience, but because they want us to exorcise their own fears and obsessions" (Glad 1990: 23). According to Shahidian, Iranian exiles often face the same dilemma and find it necessary to distinguish between their criticism of Islam and the Islamic state, and racist stereotyping of Middle Easterners and Muslims (2000: 82). As Danticat says, the powerful may listen to an exile's testimony but they will use it to distort and erase your history: "You tell the story, and then it's retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours" (1998: 246). The colonizer's narratives, idioms, and history recast the crimes of imperialism and racism so that they may become easily con­ sumable products. Kincaid writes that her brother enjoyed reading the history of the West Indies; it "was primarily an account of theft and murder...but presented in such a way as to make the account seem in­ evitable and even fun...he liked the people who won, even though he was among the things that had been won" (1997: 95). Kincaid adds, "People like me are shy about being capitalists because we were once capital 'like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar'" (1988: 31). In the globalized present, is exile an isolated disease or the warnings of a pandemic? Perhaps the insoluble enigma in the trope of geographic displacement is the timeless and eternal hostility of the state forced to offer hospitality to the deracinated intruder, the exile, the asylum seeker, the illegal migrant. What do rootedness and location,

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and their potential, mean in this context? As Bruce Robbins (2002: 4) asks, "is emplacement conceivable without such bitter exclusions of the foreigner? Must community take the form, of a tendentious joke bonding those present at the expense of absent nonmembers?" Home is a problematic site for stateless people since it involves affect and praxis, emotional engagements and pragmatic needs such as safety and security. This feeling is poignantly mirrored by Palestinian author Fawaz Turki (1994: 273), who suggests that "anywhere where one above all can work without fear of retribution is homeland enough" or by Edouard Glissant who says "For we are all gathered together on just one river bank" (Bongie 1993: epigraph). In Cixous's words, exile is everywhere and nowhere: "Neither France, nor Ger­ many, nor Algeria. No regrets. It is good fortune. Freedom, an inconvenient, intolerable freedom, a freedom that obliges one to let go, to rise above, to beat one's wings. To weave a flying carpet. I felt per­ fectly at home, nowhere"(1998: 155).

About the Contributors Paul Allatson teaches and researches in Spanish Studies and US La­ tino Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Univer­ sity of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. He has published widely in the areas of US Latino cultural history and politics, as well as in trans-American, postcolonial, sexuality, media, and popular-cultural studies. He is the author of Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary (Rodopi, 2002) and Key Terms in La­ tino/a Cultural and Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2007). Jeff Browitt is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies in the Fac­ ulty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. His research has tracked the formation and function of Latin American literary writers as public intellectuals, and the impact of modernity and nation-state formation on Latin American cultural products and processes. He is co-author of Contemporary Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2002), and co-editor of Practising Theory: Pierre Bourdieu and the Field of Cultural Production and The Space of Culture: Critical Readings in Hispanic Literary and Cultural Studies (both University of Delaware Press, 2004). He is co-translator of Carlos Monsivais's A New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2007). Susette Cooke teaches and researches in China Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS, with an interest in history and contemporary society in China's multiethnic northwestern region. With David S.G. Goodman she is currently writing Qinghai under the People's Republic of China: A Social History. Ana de Medeiros is a Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Kent, UK. She has published arti­ cles on M. Yourcenar, A. Djebar, L. Sebbar and L. George, a mono­ graph on Yourcenar, Les Visages de l'autre: Alibis, Masques et Identite dans 'Alexis ou le Traite du vain combat,' 'Denier du reve' et

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'Memoires d'Hadrien' de Marguerite Yourcenar (Peter Lang, 1996), and is co-editor of Marguerite Yourcenar: ecritures de l'exil (Bruylant, 1998). She is editing a collection of essays on cultural memory and Assia Djebar to be published by Peter Lang. Tess Do teaches in the French and Italian Studies department at the University of Melbourne, Australia. After completing undergraduate studies at the University of Auckland, and her PhD at the University of Western Ontario, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Queensland. Her current areas of research interest include Francophone and postcolonial studies and Franco-Vietnamese literature. Devleena Ghosh teaches and researches in Social Inquiry in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. She is currently involved in two collaborative projects: culture and commerce in the Indian Ocean region; and, Muslim women's networks in NSW. She is co-author (with Paul Gillen) of Colonialism and Modernity: Histories and Themes (UNSW Press, 2007), editor of Women in Asia: Shadowlines (Cambridge Scholars, 2008), and co-editor (with Stephen Muecke) of Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), and (with Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Heather Goodall) of Water, Sovereignties and Borders in Asia and Oceania (Routledge, 2008). David S.G. Goodman is Professor of Contemporary China Studies at UTS. His recent publications include The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives (2008), and China's Campaign to 'Open Up the West': National, Provincial and Local Perspectives (Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2004). He and Susette Cooke are currently writing Qinghai under the People's Republic of China: A Social History. Sue Hajdu is a Melbourne-born visual artist, writer, and curator, working with photography and installation. She graduated from Sydney University with an Honours degree in Japanese (language and history) and Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, with a Masters in Visual Art in 2001. She is now based in Vietnam where she directs the artists' initiative, "a little blah blah," and lectures at RMIT International University.

About the Contributors

291

Olga Lorenzo is a lecturer in novel writing at RMIT University, Mel­ bourne, Australia. She completed her doctorate at the University of Melbourne on literature and psychoanalytic theory, focusing on shaming and the construction of the self. Her first novel, The Rooms in My Mother's House (Penguin, 1996) was a best seller in Australia and Greece and was short-listed for several Australian and international prizes. She is currently completing a second novel set in Miami and Cuba. Yixu Lii teaches and researches in German Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her main research interests are German literature in the 18th and 19th century, the rise of German nationalism in the 19th century, and German colonial writings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is the author of Fraenherrschaft im Drama des fruehen 19. Jarhunderts [Female Regimes in Dramas of the early 19th Century] (Iudicium, 1993), and a number of essays on the German writers Heinrich von Kleist, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Christa Wolf. Jo McCormack completed his PhD in French Studies at Loughborough University, UK, and now teaches and researches in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. His research examines French collective memory of the Algerian War in contemporary France, with particular emphasis on the transmission of memory among the many exile groups generated by the conflict. He is the author of Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War (1954-1962) (Lexington Books, 2007), and is coeditor (with Alistair Rolls) of a special issue on Francophone African writers for The Australian Journal of French Studies (2008). Maja Mikula teaches and researches in the Italian Studies program in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. Her research interests cover the fields of cultural studies, genre fiction, new media, popular culture, gender, national identity, and the expansion of Italian Studies to encompass studies of popular culture in relation to social and cultural change. Maja is editor of Women, Activism and Social Change: Stretching Boundaries (Routledge, 2005) and author of Key Concepts in Cultural Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

292

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Obododimma Oha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He has published over forty articles on the politics of language, gender, media discourse, and literary meaning, and in such journals as Mosaic, American Drama, Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, and Mots Pluriels. Rowena Ward obtained her PhD in Politics and International Rela­ tions from the University of New South Wales in 2001, and is now a Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UTS. She is interested in the construction of the contemporary Japanese nation and is presently researching the civilian Japanese population in Manchuria in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1945. Marivic Wyndham is a lecturer in Spanish language and culture in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. Her particular research interests are contemporary Cuban and Chilean studies. She is working on a book, with Peter Read, on custodianship of place in Cas­ tro's Cuba, which focuses on specific domestic and public sites that since the Revolution have "changed hands," and the implications of these changes to Cubans in and out of the island. She is the author of A World-Proof Life: Eleanor Dark, A Writer in Her Times, 1901-1985 (UTSePress, 2007) and, with Donald Denoon and Phillipa MeinSmith, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific: The Formation of Identities (Blackwell, 2000).

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Index Abrial, Stephanie, 128 Acosta, Ivan, El super, 226 n.1 Adorno, Theodor, 121 Aeneas, 215 Africa, 12, 13, 23, 25, 89, 90, 117, 253, 284 African Americans, 12-13 African literature, 13, 25, 89, 90 Agency, 15, 17, 22, 26, 33, 38-39, 47, 90, 117, 120, 124, 137, 138 Ainley, Rosa, 216 Ainu, 106 Al'Andalus, 12, 277 Aleman Bolanos, Gustavo de, La factoria, 226 n.1 Algeria, 19-20, 23, 25-26, 117-48, 285, 287 Algerian War, 19-20, 25, 26, 117-38 Alitiuli, 58, 66, 67, 69-70, 72 Alitiuli Mosque, 58, 66, 67 Allamvedelmi Osztaly (AVO), 194, 195, 196 n.2, 199, 200, 205 Allatson, Paul, 12, 122, 212, 245, 260-61 Alvarez, Julia, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 250, 251 American Dream, 231 Anatolia, 71 Anderson, Benedict, 126 Anzaldua, Gloria, 223 Appadurai, Arjun, 280 Arabia, 64 Arabization, 142 Arenas, Reinaldo, Antes que anochezca, 259-60 Arkady, Alexander, 125 Armand, Octavio, 278, 280 Armenians, 14 Arnaz, Desi, 246, 256 Assimilation, 11, 13, 30, 40, 41, 47, 50, 52, 87, 98, 166, 168, 172, 242, 245-46, 253, 254, 271, 275 Astaire, Fred, 271 Asylum, 17, 22, 31, 1000 n.3, 210, 212, 215, 279, 286 Australia, 11, 17, 23, 28, 30, 31, 76, 79, 193, 195-96, 07 n.6, 245, 257, 283

Austria, 76 n.14, 194, 194 n.1 Babylon, 84, 218, 231 Bagnards, 159 Balseros, 268 Banishment, 10-11, 12, 22, 38, 59, 68, 73, 212, 215, 222, 233, 285 Bardenstein, Carol, 282-83 Barkan, Elazar, 13, 15 Barthes, Roland, 199 Basques, 212 Batista, Fulgencio, 259, 268, 272 Battisti, Cesare, 11, 29, 209-23, Avenida Revolution, 210 n.1, 217, 221-23, 210, Buena onda, 217, Le Cargo Sentimental, 213, 215 n.4, 217, 220, Copier-Coller, 221, En 2 CVvers la revolution, 210, Les Habits d'Ombre, 210 n.1, 217, 218, Jamais Plus Sans Fusil,217 n.5,L'OrmaRossa, 210 n.1, 217, 218, 219, 220, Nouvel An, Nouvelle Vie, 221-22, Terres Brulees, 210, Travestito da Uomo, 210 n.1, L'UltimoSparo: Un 'Delinquente Comune' nella Guerriglia Italiana, 210 n.1, 217, Vittoria, 218 Bauman, Zygmunt, 219 Bay of Pigs, The, 268, 269, 274 Befu, Harumi, 107 Begag, Azouz, 123 Beijing, 40, 53, 66, 67, 77 Belgium, 212 Bellocchio, Marco, Buongiorno, Notte, 218 n.6 Bencastro, Mario, Odisea del Norte, 226 n.1 Benguigui, Yamina, 123, 125, 130 n.12 Berber, 141 n.5, 142, 143 n.7 Bergen-Belsen, 194 Beurs, 125 n.8 Bhabha, Homi, 25, 81, 83, 90, 97, 126 Bienek, Horst, 285 Bildungsroman, 229, 231 Billig, Michael, 121, 124 n.7 Bin Laden, Osama, 12 Black Atlantic, 14

312 Bongie, Chris, 280, 287 Borderlands, US-Mexico, 29, 223 Bosnians, 284 Bottomley, Gillian, 283 Bourgeoisie, 16 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 136 Brecht, Bertolt, 173, 175 Breckenridge, Carol, 16, 41 Brodsky, Joseph, 279, 285 Brothers, Caroline, 198 Brown, Delmer, 106 Brown, M.J., 42 Budapest, 28, 193-94, 195, 197, 198 n.3, 200-205, 207 n.6 Buddhism, Tibetan, 35 Bui, Roberto (Wu Ming 1), 214 Bulgaria, 182 Burgoyne, Robert, 202 Bush, George W., 269 Butler, Christopher, 81 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 249, 258 Caliban, 13 Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 140 n.3, 146 n.10 Capa, Robert, 198 Carter, Erica, 284 Carter, Jimmy, 273 Capitalism, 10, 16, 17, 30, 112, 122, 172, 182, 225, 229, 260, 286 Castro, Fidel, 31, 259, 262, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273 Castro, Max, 246-47 Catholicism, 93, 235, 244, 253 Chan Dang, 27, 151-72 Chen Yuanfang, 69 n.8 Chen Yunfeng, 66 Chesterfield, Lord, 233 Chiesa, Guido, Lavorare con Lentezza, 218 n.6 China, 23, 24-25, 33-79, 83, 87, 9798, 99-115, Civil War, 66, New China, 34, 37, 55, People's Republic, 24, 33-58, 62, 66-79, 83, 100, 102, Reform Period, 24, 33, 38, 48, 49, 53, Republic, 33, 45, 57, 65 Chinese, overseas, 113

Chih-yu Shih, 57 Chirac, Jacques, 119 Christianity, 228, 232, 235 CIA, 84 Citizenship, 25, 28, 30, 53, 81, 83, 89, 97, 103, 106, 113, 176, 193, 242, 278, 279, Cultural citizenship, 39, 52-55, 93, 97, 98, 155, 243, 245 Cixous, Helene, 281, 287 Claasen, Jo-Marie, 215 Class, 15, 16, 30, 50, 225, 230-37, 239-43, 244, 268, 271, 283 Clendinnen, Inga, 205, 206 Clifford, James, 13, 14 Cold War, 27, 31, 267, 268, 286 Cole, Nat King, 271 Colombia, 23, 29, 225-29, 238, 241, 243, 244 Colonialism, 16, 27, 90, 122, 124, 133, 182, 241, 243 Communism, Chinese (CCP), 34, 36, 40, 57, 83, 87, Cuban, 262, 269, German, 174, 182, Italian, 29, 209, 222, Vietnamese, 151, 156 Confucianism, 39-40, 47, 53, 239 Connell, John, 283, 284 Cooke, Susette, 41 Corsica, 215 Cosmopolitanism, 10, 15-17, 22, 238, 243, 279, 282, 283 Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo, Tropico de Manhattan, 226 n.1 Cox, Jeremy, 283, 284 Creole, 228, 236, 242, 244 Crespo, Joaquin, 227 Croatia, 278 Cuba, 12, 23, 30-31, 225, 226, 227, 241, 245-76, Independence movement, 30, 227, 241, 254, 268, 270, 272, Revolution, 30, 252, 258-59, 262, 268-69, 272-75 Cuban Americans, 30, 245-76 Cui Yonghong, 62 Cultural imperialism, 46, 55, 98 Cultural Revolution, 77, 78, 109 Czechoslovakia, 286 Dachau, 194

313 Dalai Lama, 66, 74, 83 Dante, 216 Danticat, Edwidge, 281, 286 Darwish, Mahmoud, 277 n.1 de Gaulle, Charles, 117, 118 Delbo, Charlotte, 205 Deluermoz, Quentin, 213, 214 Deleuze, Gilles, 215, 219 Deng Xiaoping, 24 Desnoes, Edmundo, Los dispositivos en la flor, 257 Diaspora, 10, 12-16, 22, 23, 284, African, 13, 14, Armenian, 14, Cuban, 267, 268, 276, Greek, 14, Hungarian, 28, 193, 195, 202, 206, Jewish, 12-14, Vietnamese, 27, 172 Diaz Guerra, Alirio, Diez ahos en Venezuela, 228, Lucas Guevara, 29-30, 225-44 Dictatorship, 9, 10, 21, 174, 176, 180, 250, 251, 280 Dien Bien Phu, 152, 156 Dikotter, Frank, 58 Displacement, 10-32, 56, 85-86, 90, 94, 98, 100, 152, 158, 161, 191, 209, 215-19, 221, 245, 167, 277, 278, 282-83, 286 Dispossession, 11, 158, 160 Djebar, Assia, 25-26, 125, 139-50, La Disparition de la langue frangaise, 26, 139-50, La Femme sans sepulture, 146 n.10, Le Blanc de l'Algerie, 129 n.10, 142 n.6, 146 n.10 Dominican Americans, 250 Dorfmann, Ariel, 285 Dussel, Enrique, 11-12 Eder, Richard, 277, 278, 283 Egypt, 282, 283, Egyptians, 284 Eke, Norbert, 174, 175 Emigres, 21, 29, 194, 198, 269, 278, 282 Emmerich, Wolfgang, 181 Empire, 14, 33, Chinese, 38, 39, 59, 60, 63, 239, French, 117, 118, 121, Japanese, 114, 115, Qing,

34, 57, 59, 64, Selzuk, 71, Tibetan, 43 Entrepreneurs, 30, 74, 75, 77, 78, 275 Edwards, Derek, 121 Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land, 192 Espinosa, Conrado, El sol de Texas, 226 n.1 Estefan, Gloria, 246 ETA, 212 Ethnicity, 24, 25, 82, 281, 283, in China, 33-54, 58, 68, in France, 120, 124, 134, in Japan, 106-7, in New Caledonia, 155, 156, in U.S.A., 29, 30, 231, 239, 243-45, 247, 252, 268 Ethnogenesis, 44, 45, 46, 49 Euripides, 27, 173, 176, 177, 190, 191 Europa, 215 European Union (EU), 212, 213, 213 n.2 Evangelisti, Valerio, 211, 214 Exile, Identity, 23, 24, 32, 81, 82, 215, 219, 243, 279, 281, 283-84, Linguistic, 13, 19, 25, 31, 81-98, 107, 110-11, 113, 129, 134, 14246, 149, 162, 180, 251, 255-56, 277, 278, 280, 282, 285, 186, Multiple, 25, 99, 100, 114-15, Trope, 27, 29, 32, 177, 215-27, 223, 286, Vietnamese, 23, 27, 151-72 Exodus, 12-15, 22, 30, 85, 118, 121, 122, 137, 215 Fan Xiangshen, 69 n.8 Farell, James, Studs Lonigan, 231 Fast, Howard, The American, 231 Fatherland, 19, 90, 232, 251, 252, 255 Fei Xiaotong, 58 n.1 Feminism, 78, 187 Fernandez, Pablo Armando, Los nihos se despiden, 263 Ferrari, Marco, En 2 CV vers la revolution, 210 Filial duty, 27, 151, 163-72, 228, 242, 262 Florida, 12, 30-31, 245, 248, 251, 267, 272-76

314 Fortress America, 17 Fortress Australia, 17 Fortress Europe, 17, 211-12 Foucault, Michel, 210 Fouron, Georges, 21 France, 17, 19, 20, 23, 26, 29, 117-38, 139 n.1, 142, 146 n.10, 147-48, 156, 209-14, 218-20, 282, 287 Frank, Robert, 119 Freud, Sigmund, 90, 119 n.3, 120, 126, 137, 140, 233 Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), 127, 135, 136, 137 Fukuoka, Yasunori, 106 Gadney, Reg, 198, 199 Gansu, 24, 35, 43, 44, 57-64, 65, 69, 71-72, 74, 77 Garcia, Cristina, 247, 257, Dreaming in Cuban, 247 Garcia, Maria Cristina, 267, 268, 269, 270 Gaza, 286 Gender, 17, 19, 30, 134, 149-50, 254 Genna, Giuseppe, 214, 217 Genocide, 11 Germany, 23, 27, 28, 173-76, 180181, 287, German Democratic Republic (GDR), 173-76, 180-81 Gibson, Ross, 196 Gilroy, Paul, 12-13, 14, 278 Giordana, Marco Tullio, I Cento Passi, La Meglio Gioventu, 218 n.6 Glissant, Edouard, 287 Globalization, 10, 15, 17, 22, 23, 32, 86, 210, 279, 286 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 176 Gong Jinghan, 69 n.8 Goodman, David S.G., 50 n.22, 60 n.3, 73 Goodman, Roger, 112 n.19 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 175-76 Granada, 11 Grillparzer, Franz, 177, 188 Guattari, Felix, 215, 219 Gursel, Nedim, 285 Gyalpo, Dhondup, 83 Gypsies, 284

Habermas, Jurgen, 121 Haitian Americans, 281 Halbwach, Maurice, 121, 126, 137 Hall, Stuart, 14, 22, 23, 281 Halliday, Michael, 81, 82 Hamoumou, Mohand, 123, 128 Han Chinese, 23-24, 34-37, 39, 40, 44, 46, 48, 50-58, 62, 63 Han Derong, 69 Han Fude, 69 Han Jianye, 67, 67 n.6 Hanks, Tom, 215 Han Yimu, 66 Han Zhanxiao, 77 Hardt, Michael, 14-15, 16 Hargreaves, Alec, 20, 124 Harkis, 19, 26, 117, 118, 119, 122, 125-37 Harrell, Stevan, 40, 46, 50, 54, 58 n.1 Hashimoto, S., 101 Havana, 249, 258, 275, 276 Haynes, John, 94 n.3 Heberer, Thomas, 47, 50 Hernandez, Imra Liz, 226, 226 n.1, 230-31, 235, 241 Herndon, Gerise, 280, 281 Herr, Michael, Dispatches, 205 Heteroglossia, 143 Hezhou, 44, 59, 63-65, 68 Hijuelos, Oscar, 231, 246, Empress of the Splendid Season, 247, Mambo Kings Play Songs ofLove, 248, Our House in the Last World, 261 Hindi, 86, 88, 89 Hirowatari, Seigo, 103 Hirsch, Marianne, 21 Hitler, Adolf, 175 Hobsbawm, Eric, 126 Hokkaido, 106, 107 Homeland, 11, 12, 19-21, 23, 25, 30, 31, 154, 187, 278, 281, 283-85, 287, China, 36, 53, 58, 59, 72, 84, 86, 87, 91, 93-96, 98, Cuba, 245, 246, 248-54, 260, 264-65, 270, France, 122, 124, 146, Germany, 177, Japan, 99, 100, 106, 110-15, Italy, 218, Latin America, 226, 267, New Caledonia, 151, 154,

315 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171 Homosexuality, 255, 259-62 Horace, 217 Hornigk, Frank, 182 Hui, 36, 37 n.6, 45, 46, 48, 62, 63, 71 Hui Ma Qi, 65 Humanism, 16, 171, 241 Human Rights Watch, 100 n.3 Hungarian Uprising, 28, 193, 204 Hungary, 23, 28, 194, 195, 198 Hybridity, 14, 90, 92, 143, 215, 280 Identity, 14, 22, 23, 81, 82, Exile, 23, 24, 32, 81, 82, 215, 219, 243, 279, 281, 283-84, Algerian, 120-28, 130-32, 139, 145, 147, Cuban American, 30, 245-46, 260-61, French, 120-28, 130-32, 139, Hungarian, 28, 193, Italy, 216, Jewish, 12-13, 18, Latin Ameri­ can, 237, new Caledonia, 153, Palestinian, 18, Tibetan, 82-87, 90, 95-98, Salar, 25, 57-60, 62, 73-79, Tu, 24, 33-56 Immigration, 10, 14, 29, 219, 279, 281, Algerian, 20, 118, 124, 127, British, 283, Chinese, 54, 113, European, 17, Japanese, 103, 104, 109, 112, Latin American, 22544, 247, 270, 271, 275, Vietnamese, 160 Imperialism, 10, 13, 14, 15, 19, 278, 286, British, 91, Chinese, 34, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 55, 59, 97, Tibetan, 43, U.S., 241 India, 23, 83, 85-89, 93-98, 169, 283 Indochina, 151, 152, 156, 160-61 Inner Mongolia, 77 Intellectuals, 12, 14, 15, 17, 30, 38, 50, 52, 55, 175, 193, 214, 216, 219, 225, 232, 241-42, 285 Iran, 71, 286 Islam, 11-12, 24, 57-59, 62-65, 71, 286, Sufi, 64-65, 68, Sunni, 58 Israel, 9, 12, 13, 18, 274, 284 Italy, 23, 29, 75, 209-19, anni di piombo, 217-219

Jahnn, Hans H., 177, 184, 186, 189 Jahriya, 64 JanMohamed, Abdul, 282 Japan, 23, 25, 99-115, 279, Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (ICRRA), 103, 104, 108, overseas Japanese, 160, 162 Japan-China Peace and Friendship Treaty, 104 Japanese Red Army, 100 Jason, 27, 173, 176-91 Javanese, 161 Jews, 12, 13, 18, 79, 84, 239, 242, 244 Jordi, Jean-Jacques, 118, 123, 128 Jospin, Lionel, 213 Joyce, James, 17 Kakyd, 113 Kaminsky, Amy, 9-10, 19, 21, 23, 124 Kanaks, 159, 161 Kanellos, Nikolas, 225, 226, 226 n.1, 230, 231, 235, 241 Kaplan, Caren, 15, 16-17, 18, 32, 216 Kara, Mohamed, 123 Kazan, Elia, America, America, 231 Keim, Katharina, 181, 182 Kerchouche, Dalila, 25-26, 117, 119, 125, 126, 127, 129-37, Mon pere ce harki, 119, 126, 129-37 Khafiya, 64 Khoi, Esmail, 286 Kincaid, Jamaica, 286 Kinoshita, T., 104 Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian, 176, 177, 188 Kristeva, Julia, 219, 259 Kundera, Milan, The Joke, 221 Kurile Islands, 99 n.1, 108 Kwantung Army, 101 Lamming, George, 13 Lanzhou, 63, 65, 66 Latinos, 52, 229, 231-44, 247, 258 Lebanese, 284 Lehman, Jean-Pierre, 106 Letrados, los, 226, 242

316 Lewis, Helen Block, 260 Liauzu, Claude, 124 Li Dezhu, 50 n.22, 54 n. 24 Liehm, Antonin, 286 Li Keyu, 44 n.12, 45, 50 Liminality, 18, 279, 280, 281 Linxia, 59, 61, 63, 64, 67 Lipman, Jonathan, 57, 58, 64, 65, 68, 71 Li Shenghua, 50 Little Havana, 269 Little Mecca, 63 Li Zhi, 109 London, 17, 257, 285, 286 Lorenzo, Olga, The Rooms in My Mother's House, 247-49, 252, 257 Loveday, Tom, 204 Lu Jianfu, 43 Ma Bufang, 60, 62, 65-66 Ma Chengjun, 69 n.8, 73, 79 Ma Jianzhong, 62, 67 n.6, 70, 79 Ma Laichi, 64, 65 Ma Mingxin, 64 Ma Qi, 60, 65 Ma Wei, 62, 67 n.6 Maceo Grajales, Antonio, 254 Machiavelli, 216 Machismo, 254 Mackerras, Colin, 37 n.7, 57 MacMaster, Neil, 118 Mambises, 254, 265 Manchukuo, 100, 101 n.4 Manchuria, 25, 43, 100-102, 108, 113 n.20, 114 Mao Gongping, 54 n.24 Mao Zedong, 47 Mariel Boatlift, 268 Marques, Rene, La carreta, 226 n.1 Marti, Jose, 30, 220, 225, 227, 237, 240-241, 254, 264 Marxism, 37, 40, 181, 182 Masculinity, 19, 140, 226, 231, 235, 238 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 216 McCormack, Gavan, 101 n.4 McCormack, Jo, 25, 26, 122, 212,

245 McKhann, Charles, 42, 43, 48 n.18 Melanesia, 154 Melbourne, 198, 207 n.6, 258 Memorialization, 20, 30, 126, 245246, Collective, 12, 13, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 55, 84, 87, 117, 119128, 132-134, 137-138, 148, 151153, 195, 206, 214, 220, 221, 243, 245, 250, 279, Freudian, 119 n.3, 120, 124 n.7, 137, Halbwachian, 121, 126, 137, Postmemory, 21, Sites of, 31, 137, 267 Merle, Isabelle, 159, 160 Mexico, 23, 24, 29, 209, 212, 218, 222, 223 Mi Yizhi, 46, 49, 50, 64, 65, 68, 71 Miami, 246-258, 260, 268-269, 271276 Middleton, David, 121 Milan, 211, 212, 215, 221, 222 Milosz, Czeslaw, 285 Ming Dynasty, 44, 70 Minh-Ha, Trinh, 281 Minority, 14, 31, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 47-55, 58, 62, 63, 67, 76, 79, 107, 124, 154, 155, 242, 245, 246, 247, 251, 252, 257 Minzu shibie, 34-48, 52, 55 Mitome, T., 101, 109 Mitterrand, Francois, 211, 212, 214 Modernity, 9-12, 16, 23, 29, 30, 32, 168, 225, 226, 229, 232, 233, 241-43, Mythotrope, 12 Mokaddem, Hamid, 154 Mole, Gabriella, 43 Mongols, 35-37, 43, 45, 50, 51, 60, 64, 67, 70, 71, 72 Monguors, 24, 33, 36-47, 51, 55 Montaner, Ernesto, 251, 252, 254, 264-65 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 107 Mouer, Ross, 106 Mueggler, Erik, 35 n.2 Muller, Heiner, 27-28, 173-92, Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten, 2728, 173-92

317 Muller, Laurent, 128 Mumbai, 87, 88 Myth, 13, 14, 68-79, 97, 106, 107, 123, 145, 171, 219, 231, 249, 253, 260, 269, 280, Europa and Zeus, 215, Medea, 27-28, 173-192 Mythotrope, 12 Nabokov, Vladimir, 17 Naficy, Hamid, 11, 122, 215, 277 Nagy, Imre, 193 Nakano, K., 104, 108, 109 n.16, 110, 112 Nasr, Sari, 284 Nationalism, 10, 12, 16, 18, 39, 54, 226 n.2, 282, Long-distance nationalism, 21 Nazism, 180 Negri, Antonio, 14, 15, 16, 214, 216, 220 Negritude, 12 Nepal, 84, 88 Neubauer, John, 143 n.8 New Caledonia, 23, 27, 151-167, 169-172 New Guinea, 195 New York, 17, 30, 146 n.10, 199, 225, 227-234, 237-244, 257, 285, 286 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 Nikkeijin, 103, 107, 108, 109 Ningxia, 58, 69, 70, 71, 74 Nini, Soraya, Ils disent que je suis une beurette, 123, 135 n.13 Nora, Pierre, 120, 125, 137 North Korea, 108 Nostalgia, 30, 32, 93, 216, 245, 247251, 253, 260, 261, 263, 277, 282, 284 Oakes, Tim, 73 Oba, K., 101 Obejas, Achy, Memory Mambo, "We Came All the Way from Cuba so You Can Dress Like This?." 260, 261, 262, 263 Oghaz tribes, 71 Okinawa, 107

Okubo, M., 101, 103, 109 Onate, Rody, 280 Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS), 118, 122, 136 Outlaws, 11, 212 Ovid, Tristia, 190, 215 Palestinians, 18, 284 Pan-Africanism, 12 Panama, 227 Paris, 17, 117, 120, 136, 137, 146 n.10, 147, 148, 211- 215, 218220, 222, 257, 282, 285 Pattison, Stephen, 260 Pavel, Thomas, 10, 21 Pedrazzini, Jean-Pierre, 198 n.3 People's Liberation Army (PLA), 66, 83 Perez Firmat, Gustavo, 246, 247, 255, 256 Pieds noirs, 19, 117, 118, 122, 125, 133, 136 Pisier, George, 156, 157, 158, 160, 163, 169 Portugal, 11 Postcolonialism, 10, 13, 23, 25, 33, 89, 121 Postmodernity, 14, 15 Proletari Armati per il Comunismo (PAC), 29, 209, 211 Prostitution, 234 Pu Wencheng, 51 n.3 Puerto Rico, 226, 241, 262 Qaluer, 71 Qing Empire, 34, 57, 59, 64 Qinghai, 25, 35-37, 42 n.11, 43, 44, 48 n.18, 49, 51, 57-58, 60-69, 7176, 78-79 Quesada, Roberto, The Big Banana, Nunca entres por Miami, 226 n.1 Race, 29, 92 n.2, 151, 166, 235, 237, 239 Racism, 123, 239, 240, 286 Rahmani, Zahia, Moze, 130-132, 134136 Ramayana, The, 97

318 Ramos, Julio, 237 n.4, 241, 242 Ranger, Terence, 126 Rapport, Nigel, 216 Rath, Sura, 97, 98 Red Brigades, 213, 214 Redemption, 14, 165, 169, 171 Refugees, 14, 16-18, 21, 27, 35, 81, 100, 103, 151, 172, 195, 212-213, 220, 225, 243, 244, 249, 250, 278, 281, 283, 284 Representation, 17, 22, 23, 30, 47, 63, 70, 77, 81, 83, 90, 93, 94, 95, 119 n.3, 143, 198, 203, 206, 217, 219, 280 Resistance, 14, 17, 32, 41, 59, 62, 65, 66, 67, 83, 84, 124, 129, 135, 140 n.3, 153, 162, 163, 210, 222, 241, 242 Ricoeur, Paul, 126 Rieff, David, 269, 271, 273, 274, 275 Rivera, Edward, 231 Rivera, Jose Eustasio, La vordgine, 238 Robbins, Bruce, 287 Roden, Claudia, 282, 283 Rodriguez, Albita, 249, 253, 256 Rogers, Ginger, 271 Rome, 211, 212, 213, 215, 218 Rona-Tas, Andras, 36 Ross, Kristin, 124 Roth, Henry, Call it Sleep, 231 Rousso, Henry, 119 n.3, 125 Roux, Michel, 127 Rumbaut, Ruben, 246 Russia, 23, 102 n.7, 108, 180 Saadi-Mokrane, Djamila, 139 n. 1, 141 n.5, 143 n.7 Safran, William, 14 Said, Edward, 9-10, 17-20, 22, 24, 25, 32, 35, 39, 45, 47, 87, 99, 100, 114, 122, 124, 125, 278, "Reflec­ tions on Exile," 9, 22 Sakhalin, 99 n.1 Salan, Raoul, 118 Salar, 24, 25, 36, 57-79 Saluer, 71 Samarkand, 58, 66, 69-72, 74

San Diego, 223 Santeria, 253 Santiago, Esmeralda, 231 Sautman, Barry, 37 n.7 Schengen Convention, 211, 212, 213 Schiller, Nina Glick, 21 Schlesinger, Philip, 278-79 Schram, Louis, 26, 44 n.13, 45, 45 n.14, 46, 46 n.15 Scott, Clive, 204 Selzuk Empire, 71 Seneca, 176, 177, 184, 189, 190, 191 Serruys, Henry, 45, 46, 46 n.15 Shahidian, Hammed, 279, 280, 281, 286 Shakabpa, Tsoltim Ngima, 91, 92 Shame, 30, 31, 127, 136, 156, 163, 165, 170, 240, 245-264 Shawcross, Nancy, 202 Shelton, Marie-Denise, 13, 15 Shu-Yun Ma, 280 Simmel, Georg, 238 Slavery, 10, 12, 13 Smorkaloff, Pamela, 247, 250, 251, 257, 260, 261, 263 Sonam, Buchung, 82 n.1, 84, 86 Sontag, Susan, 193, 194 Sophocles, Philoctetes, 182 Spain, 11-12, 212, 254, 257, 272 Spielberg, Steven, The Terminal, 215 Sri Lanka, 286 Staatssicherheit (Stasi), 174, 175 Stalin, 42, 180, 193, Stalinism, 180 Steskal, Christoph, 187 Stora, Benjamin, 118, 119 Stronach, Bruce, 106 Stuart, Kevin, 51 n.23, 62, 67 n.6 , 70 Su Fortythree (Su Sishisan), 65 Sugimoto, Yoshio, 106 Syrians, 284 Tagg, John, 201 Tampere European Council, 213 Terra nullius, 11 Terrorism, 210, 213, 214 Thelen, David, 125 Thiong'o, Ngugi wa, 90 Third Space, The, 25, 81, 83, 97, 98

319 Thousand and One Nights, The, 140, 141 n.3 Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement, 100 Tibet, Chinese invasion, 83-84, 87, 95, 98, Government-in-exile, 83, Tibetan Resistance Force, 84, Tibetan uprising, 66, Tibet Autonomous Region, 23, 74, Tibetans, 25, 35-36, 45, 60, 62-63, 81-98, Tibetan Empire, 43, Ti­ betan Buddhists, 51, Tibetan language, 72 Tijuana, 223 Tomozawa, Akia, 101, 102, 113 Transnationality, 10, 14, 17, 21-23, 27, 31, 122, 243, 277, 283, 284 Trefalt, Beatrice, 102 n.6, 103 Trippner, Joseph, 64, 72 Trishanku, 97, 98 Troy, 216 Truffaut, Francois, 210 Tsundue, Tenzin, Crossing the Bor­ der, 23, 25, 81, 83, 85-98 Tu/Tuzu, 36-39, 41-53, 55 Turkey, 12 Turki, Fawaz, 287 Turkmenistan, 71 Turkomans, 71 Turks, 72, 145, 284, 285 Turner, Bryan, 279 Ugresic, Dubrovka, 278 Ukrainians, 284 US Hispanic Literary Heritage Pro­ ject, 225 USA, 12-13, 23-24, 29-30, 52, 222275 USSR, 23, 102 n.6, 175, 274 Uzbekistan, 58 Valdes, Zoe, 257-259 Vanmai, Jean, 27, 151-172, Chan Dang, 27, 151-172, Fils de Chan Dang, 27, 151-172, "Recit de vie", 152 Varela y Morales, Felix, 272 Venegas, Daniel, Las aventuras de

Don Chipote, 226 n.1 Venezuela, 227-228, 232, 241 Vietnam War, 166, 205 Vietnam, 23-24, 27, 151-172, 205 Villasenor, Victor, 231 Von Trotta, Margarethe, 218 n.6 Waley-Cohen, 38 n.9 Wali, Obiajunwa, 90 Wang Tiezhi, 54 n.24 West Indies, 286 White, Hayden, 202, 203 Williams, Gareth, 215 Winter, Jay, 120 World War II, 130 n.12, 152, 173 Wright, Thomas, 280 Xining, 42, 44, 48, 60, 63-65, 72, 7476, 78 Xinjiang, 43, 58, 69, 71 Xu Kongwu, 45 Xunhua, 58, 59, 60-79 Yang Yingju, 43, 44 Yashiro, K., 111 n.18 Yemen, 64 Yoshino, Kosaku, 107 n.13 Young, Louise, 100 Yuan Dynasty, 71 Yusuf, Muhammed, 64, 68 Zacharias, Usha, 242 Zainichi, 100 Zanryu fujin, 99 n.1, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 110, 115 Zanryu hojin, 25, 99-115 Zanryu koji, 99, 101-15 Zeus, 215 Zhang Pu, 66 Zhou Weizhou, 43 Zhu Yongzhong, 51 n.23 Zion, 84 Zionism, 12-13, 18 Zivancevic, Nina, 82, 91 Zola, Emile, La Bete humaine, 168 Zorilla, Jose, Don Juan Tenorio, 236