Diasporic Relocations of Home in the Fiction of Gao Xingjian
Farida Chishti
Roll No. 13PHDENG01
2013-18
Supervisor: Dr. Aamir Aziz
Assistant Professor
Submission date: 07 July, 2018
Thesis submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature, University of the Punjab in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature
Department of English Language & Literature
University of the Punjab, Lahore
2018
Diasporic Relocations of Home in the Fiction of Gao Xingjian
PhD Dissertation
Farida Chishti
Department of English Language & Literature
University of the Punjab, Lahore
2018
Author’s Declaration
I, Farida Chishti, hereby declare that the PhD thesis titled “Diasporic Relocations of Home in the Fiction of Gao Xingjian” is the result of my personal research, and it is not being submitted concurrently in part or whole to any other university for any other degree whatsoever either in or outside the country.
Farida Chishti
PhD Scholar
Roll No. 13PHDENG01
Session: 2013-18
Department of English
University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
07 July, 2018
Declaration Certificate
This is to certify that the research work in this dissertation submitted by Ms. Farida Chishti to the Department of English, University of the Punjab, Lahore has been carried out under my direct supervision. I have personally gone through the raw data and certify the correctness and authenticity of all results recorded therein. I further certify that the thesis data have not been used in part or full, in a manuscript already submitted or in process of submission in partial/complete fulfillment of the award of any other degree from any other institution at home or abroad. I also certify that the enclosed manuscript has been prepared under my supervision and I declare its evaluation for the award of PhD degree through the official procedure of the University.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti i
Abstract
With the key objective to highlight the peace initiative encoded in the fiction of Gao Xingjian, this study investigates the topos of home and diaspora in the ambiguous context of the contemporary world. Where global capitalism has dissolved the boundaries between peoples and places, there exclusionary politics of ‘home’ has re-erected them as in recent world events like
Donald Trump’s election call of ‘America first’, or the ‘Brexit’, or the rise of Hindu nationalists to power in India. That’s why it becomes all the more important to highlight in Gao’s works the possibility of a home broad enough to include and accommodate others–be they of gender, class, race, class, culture or community. This is an entirely new and original perspective with which to access Gao’s diaspora fiction. To organize the core data collected from both the novels and the collection of short stories by Gao, I have built up my argument on the basis of three broad questions concerning the location of home, what forces the subjects out, and its alternative relocations elsewhere. Drawing on an eclectic theoretical template that includes the theories of diaspora, exile, home, diasporic subjectivity, nomadism, and trans-culturalism, my study has taken up the trajectory of subjects-in-becoming who having been driven out of China to the West by socio-political forces at home ultimately land in a self-expansive internal space which necessitates thinking without home and its politics of inclusion and exclusion. Passing from cultural filiation to affiliation, such a subject is willing to enter in a dialogue with contending forces both within and without. At home everywhere, he is at peace with himself as well as the world around through his ability to surmount his own impulse to hegemonise, hate or inflict violence on others. Working under a qualitative research design and critical approach, I have used close reading of the texts as major source of data collection, and for analyzing them a set of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti ii
variegated techniques like textual, formal, critical, Bakhtinian, Foucauldian and Deleuzian discourse analyses to generate meaning. The structural division of the research into six chapters has disciplined and organized the research process. After introducing the research area and placing it in a theoretical context, the study interrogates the traditional construct of home as pure and fixed, and reveals it instead as a problematic site where oppressive forces in society and state act as major push factors for exile’s dislocation. As a perpetual minority inhabiting the interstices of different cultures, east or west, the subject now relocates home in inter-subjective and transcultural negotiations. The conclusion through its interdisciplinary focus on changing contours of global culture demonstrates how even minor acts of inclusivity at subjective level may serve as vital diplomacy tools for reducing tension across people(s) and nations. Thus the present research in its action orientation anticipates a qualitative change in our psyche, as well as a vibrant debate in humanities, and social and cultural sciences regarding how to make this world a better and a safer place to live in.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti iii
Acknowledgements
I owe my deep gratitude to the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of the Punjab, Lahore for having provided me with the opportunity to pursue higher studies. My special thanks to the chairperson, Dr. Amra Raza who took a generous view of the frail signs of scholarship I displayed in the beginning, and allowed me to refurbish my knowledge as well as research skills under her superb class management. Her trust in my potential acted as a push button to keep me going in spite of the difficulties involved. The extensive coverage of theory in the curriculum, the stimulating environment in and outside the classroom, the strict watch on quality, the intensive presentations, the grilling question-answer sessions that goaded one to self- critique, reflect, re-vision and look for alternative routes, all pushed me on to undertake the ambitious project and to carry it to completion well within the stipulated time. I thank Dr. Raza for all these.
In the Department, I had the opportunity to benefit from some of the best schooling available in theoretical orientation of scholars. I find myself fortunate for having Dr. Rizwan Akhtar as a most serious, competent and committed source person in the field. To him I owe my understanding of all major theorists including Bakhtin and Foucault, to name just two. It is teachers like Dr. Akhtar who continue the tradition of quality education which the English
Department has always been known for since the times of Madam Shaista Sonnu Sirajuddin.
No less am I grateful to my adviser Dr. Aamir Aziz for having been at my back, always encouraging and helpful, particularly in the darkest hours which were not infrequent. I admire the promptness with which he would make an important research material available at the shortest notice. He had the patience to listen to my point of view. His grant for intellectual Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti iv
freedom gave me confidence to explore things on my own; his prying questions during our discussions helped me avoid detours and get back to the right track in argument. I am grateful to him for always being available whenever I needed him.
Special thanks to Dr. Babar Jamil for the time he took out of his busy schedule to painstakingly go through the initial research manuscript and give valuable feedback.
In the end I express my thanks to the person without whose support I could never have been able to undertake this project, let alone completing it. It is my worthy principal Professor Farzana
Shaheen, whose love for learning and research coupled with her dedication as an educationist served an extra impetus for me to seriously pursue my goal. As much am I indebted to my friends and colleagues as to the members of my family for their encouragement, and superhuman patience in bearing with my occasional blackouts or absent-mindedness on different occasions academic or social.
I dedicate this thesis to the memory of both my parents whose confidence in their daughter outlived them to act as a voltage stabilizer to protect me against possible power failure.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti v
Contents
Page No.
Abstract i
Acknowledgements iii
Table of contents v
List of diagrams vii
Chapter 1: The Research Preamble 1
Argument 1
Gao Xingjian: the diasporic profile 2
Rationale for present research 6
Theoretical cover 10
Conceptual genealogy of home 11
Home in China 12
Chinese culture and colonial intervention 15
Chinese diaspora 19
Chinese diaspora literature and Gao 20
Present research focus 27
Chapter 2: The Theoretical Direction 33
The critical reception 33
Hiatus in response 40
Theoretical template: home in diaspora 41
The displaced subjectivities 50 Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti vi
The deterritorialised subject 52
The progression of argument 59
Key research questions 62
Main objectives 64
Significance and scope of research 68
Research methodology 72
Chapter 3: The Problematics of Home in Exile 74
(a) Location of exile’s home 80 (b) The myth of return 95 (c) Home in exile and exile at home 99 (d) Dialogism of the third space 114
Chapter 4: Exile’s Dislocation from Home 118
Territorial imperatives at home: exile under arrest 123
(a) Societal surveillance 123
(b) Political panopticon 130
(c) Flight as deterritorialisation of the subject 148
Chapter 5: Relocating Home in a Nomadic Space 157
Shifting politics of location 166
(a) The subject in becoming: Soul Mountain 166
(b) From minority to becoming-minoritarian: One Man’s Bible 183
(c) Landing in a de-politicised space 202
Chapter 6: Home in transcultural negotiations 206
‘A great leap forward’ 206
‘At home in the world’ 210
Summing up 219 Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti vii
Works Cited 224
Works Consulted 243
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti viii
List of diagrams
Page No.
Figure 1: Becoming-minoritarian 208
Figure 2: Minority consciousness 209
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 1
Chapter one
The Research Preamble
This chapter introduces the proposed area under study along with the need and rationale for undertaking it. After placing the author in the geo-historical and cultural matrices that have gone into shaping his art, it gives an overview of diaspora and home, the key critical concepts that underpin this research. Then it frames the contention, briefly outlining the direction of the argument, and concludes with the broad relevance of this project in local and global contexts.
The Argument
The present study intends to explore the possible relocations of home in diaspora in the fiction of Gao Xingjian. A self-exile and an immigrant writer from China to France, Gao transmits his own diasporic sensibilities into his subjects. A desire for subjective autonomy drives them out of home and keeps them afloat and ambivalent everywhere. As they cross the constrictive borders of home, their fluidity helps them resist the forces of power both within and without, and negotiate relationships with others. The progression of argument entails a movement from location of home in fixed patriarchal conventions which turn the subject into exile, his physical dislocation therefrom, and its relocation in an internal psychic space which is a non-localisable sense of at-homeness the diasporist acquires during the rhizomatic growth of his subjectivity. The study thus broadens the semantic range of the concepts underpinning it, and anticipates a new culture of dialogue in the world.
Relevance
In an age of “fusions and flexibilizations” (31), Vincent B. Leitch has recommended an eclectic theoretical model for researchers in the twenty-first century: “In the interests of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 2
pragmatism, flexibility, and broad scope, I advocate open-ended critical fusions” (40). Working on a minority language literature, I fuse diaspora and other sister concepts like nomadism and transculturalism to serve as my theoretical base to explore the alternative locations of home in the context of contemporary flows of migration. The need is to ‘de-territorialise’ the concepts beyond the material fixity and narrowness of their conventional meaning. Since diaspora is a physical act of leaving home, my intention is to investigate it as a form of internal dispersion as well. In this context, home as a sense of belonging to a particular bordered space may symptomise those binary constructs which many critics have called “hegemonic regulations of identity” (Al-Ali and Koser 20) like gender, class, race, culture or nation. Diaspora in Gao’s fiction provides the subjects an opportunity to flee such confined constructions of home.
Liberated from the ‘I’dentity or ‘I’deology politics, and belonging nowhere in particular, they are able to cross borders and enter into a dialogue with gender, racial or cultural others. The need to dissolve the boundaries of home to include others is paramount particularly in the present day world replete with mutual distrust and ethno-racial violence. In highlighting this concern encoded in Gao’s fiction, the study anticipates a positive change in our thinking to initiate a culture of dialogue and mutual co-existence at local and global levels.
Gao Xingjian: the diasporic profile
Diaspora, as stated above, is as much a mental, psychological and intellectual as a physical state of displacement from home. One of the individual categories of displaced population is exile whose sense of alienation in both home and host lands turns him into a minority anywhere. Gilles Deleuze calls minority a marginal position of vantage from where to launch the subjective process of ‘becoming’. That diaspora launches this process in Gao’s fiction is the key contention of this research. However, the diasporic movements appear as a leitmotif in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 3
his real life as well. Gao’s first memories are of parents who as war refugees were fleeing the
Japanese air raids on Chinese soil during the WW II. The auto/biographical accounts reveal in him a strong streak of rootlessness characteristic of an exile. The continuous shifting from one place to another during his formative years helped him to cross borders and bridge gaps; to mediate between binaries―the rural-urban, indigenous-transcultural, Chinese-Western. He was born in the Jianxi town of Ganzhou (i.e. Canton, South China) in 1940. Mabel Lee, the scholar and English translator of his fiction, tells us that since early in his life he got an exposure to the cosmopolitan culture through “his voracious reading habit” (20). He graduated in 1962 from
Beijing University with French as Major. That gave him an opportunity to mediate between
China and the rest of the world as an official translator. When the closing down of all geo- ideological borders reached its height during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), he was found defying nationalistic norms of writing as defined by Chairman Mao himself. So he was expelled to remote countryside for ‘thought reform’ through labour. In post-Mao era, he voiced his liberalism by popularizing the European Modernism through his critical and creative writings, thus carrying forward the early twentieth century May Fourth (1919) legacy of change and reform in Chinese literature. In her extensive study of Gao as a cultural translator, Jessica Yeung relates how cautious he was in preaching and acting out his pro-Western stance. And well he might, for his career as a writer in China was punctuated by pauses and hiccups. He wrote for the stage only to be banned under the charge of imitating the West, and spreading ‘spiritual pollution’. The state drive for national and cultural purity seems to have aroused the rebel in him.
He continued to write, though in secret. However, under threat of arrest at his wife’s report to the authorities, he had to burn scores of his writings and live an anonymous existence. There was another threat to his survival. He was wrongly diagnosed as suffering from lung cancer, the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 4
disease that had killed his father. Once found negative, he undertook a 15000 km trek across the
Chinese south obviously as a token of thanksgiving but more for dodging state investigations.
The trip produced Soul Mountain, a mega piece of fiction which the Nobel Committee particularly appreciated in its announcement of the Award. Leaving home was thus highly productive; it whetted his urge to write, and through writing to re-launch his resistance against any tyrannical move to tame his diasporic subjectivity as a writer.
As a writer in exile at home, Gao could travel abroad when Deng Xiaoping’s government
(1978-1992) relaxed some state policies on cultural exchange in the 1980’s. He was still abroad when back at home the Tiananmen massacre took place. In June 1989, the state forces opened fire and killed hundreds of students demonstrating in favour of democracy at the Beijing square.
It was then that Gao chose to stay in France as a self-exile, where he has been living ever since, now a French national. At home, his deviation from the literary norms earned him the ire of the state in the form of a ban on his works. Now out of the country, he missed it; yet he refused to romanticize either home or a diasporist’s relationship with it. When he received the Nobel Prize for his writings in Chinese, the public shock at his laureateship shows how little he was known in his own country, or rather, to quote Mabel Lee, how completely the state had silenced his voice and made him invisible (20). At home, he felt debilitated by socio-cultural norms. That does not, however, mean that he was, to use JanMohamed’s phrase, ‘uncritically gregarious’ regarding the cultural policies of the West. Specific examples of his departure from the Western norms of production and reception of art prove him an exile even there. He hated his voice to be drowned in what he says “the statistics of sociology and the percentages of mass media opinion polls … and all pervasive market laws [which] have turned people into consumerist animals” (“Freedom and Literature” 13). He took writing purely as a form of self-expression, and not as a commodity Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 5
to satisfy the market pressure of demand and supply. That accounts for long pauses in his writing and limited number of his works. There are instances when he refused to comply with the wishes of a production company and even withdrew the performance of a play.
The exilic freedom and fluidity thus define his literary career which shows him switching easily from one genre of art to another, granting him a subjective multiplicity: a fiction writer, a playwright, a poet, an ink painter, a film maker and an art-and-literature critic. Though his dramatic bulk far out-numbers other forms of his creative writings, his translated fiction comprising two voluminous novels and some short stories should not belittle his stature as a fictionist. Whether published at home or in diaspora, he chose to write them all in his native language unlike his post-exile plays which he wrote first in French and later translated into
Chinese. Though he provides a rationale for this in one of his interviews with Julia Alvarez
(2007), it problematizes his position as a Chinese writer who after settling down in the West denied having anything to do with China. Fiction thus helps him maintain his dual status as a diapsora even in the host country. However, his skill in both languages again affirms the fluid position of an exile who, to quote Edward Said, simultaneously straddles two cultures. He seems rooted as well as uprooted, belonging as well as not belonging to either home or host country.
The simultaneity visible in his literary career helps him dodge all generic, territorially singular identity constructs, granting him the fluidity and multiplicity of a ‘de-territorialised’ person resisting a sedentary, majoritarian existence in the Deleuzian sense. This aspect reflected in
Gao’s fiction is what the present research undertakes to bring under critical focus.
Gao’s subjective position as a fiction writer is also problematized by the fact that he keeps on writing of home away from home. However this does not impede his artistic agency.
Each move away from home is a step forward to a broadened subjectivity. While society or state Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 6
as active agents of ‘subjectification’ at home would force one to be a compliant subject, Gao takes charge of his own subjectivity through his act of self-exile. How far his subject resists the tyranny of home is measureable in terms of how far he is able to grow out of the influence of indigenous culture. I initially draw on Edward Said to deal with the problematic relationship of
Gao’s exile with home. The notion of territory and its various inflections in Deleuze denoting the
(trans)formative process of a diasporic subject account for my reliance on Gilles Deleuze and
Fѐlix Guattari’s theory of ‘territorialisation’ in the middle of the discussion. Towards the end, the subject’s continuous growth in the expansive cultural context of the West calls for theories of transculturalism as well. Moreover, the power politics at home, and the overlapping of the personal and the national in Gao’s writings at times necessitate the broadening of the base to include other critical sources like Michel Foucault, for example. The research, thus, promises to be multi-disciplinary in the range of its argument, and carries forward the critical reception preceding it.
Rationale for the present research
As the first recipient of Nobel Prize in literature in Chinese in 2000, Gao’s fiction has since received extensive critical coverage in the world academia. Just a cursory view of the existing body of literature can identify the gap in research which this study hopes to fill. Gao’s narrative technique in using pronouns for characters has intrigued many a critic to access it from different perspectives. Some read it as a trope for subjectivity, which is multiple hence polyphonic (Ming Jian 2009; Mabel Lee; Kam Louis 2001), for others, it is gendered (Gary
Gang Xu; Rojas 2002), and for yet others self-transcendental (Kwok-kan 2001). Gao himself has explained it as a distancing device to allow objectivity, and greater psychological space and depth to the characters (“Nobel Lecture” 2000). Another aspect arousing debate is his personal Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 7
stance of ‘no-ism’ which, overlapping with his own brand of ‘third-ness’ or marginality of the artist (“Freedom and Literature” 2014), has been a recurrent subject for critical inquiry. In their separate studies, Liu Zaifu and Lin Gang have discussed his ‘no-ism’ with particular reference to the Buddhist and Daoist inspired cults of individualism and personal autonomy. The ecological concern as another recurrent theme of Gao’s oeuvre has also come under discussion in studies by
Fong (2014), Yeung (2014), and Moran (2002) etc. Like all major writers of the world, Gao has also had his fair share of controversies. Julia Lovell (2002) among others has been most vocal about doubts regarding his artistic merit and the justness of the Nobel Award Committee, and the question whether to place him in China which is his native home, or the West, his adopted home since his self-exile in 1989. Though Jeffrey Kinkley (2002) contends that Gao’s Soul Mountain is embedded in the specific Chinese tradition of near and distant past (131), the controversy about his cultural placement has opened the way to viewing his art as cross-cultural translation that a writer in a marginalized, non-Western language has been able to achieve (Yeung 2008;
Loden 2005).
If already so extensively researched, why to take up for study the Chinese fiction of a writer who having long settled in the West has not produced any fiction since 1999? Is there anything in his fictive corpus that could still engage critics? I choose to work on Gao’s fiction with a confidence in the inexhaustible resourcefulness of literature as a source material for research. By doing so, I hope to open up an alternative site for exploration in view of the fact that
Gao is still an under-explored writer particularly in the local academia which has little to offer as far as advance research on his art is concerned. But then there is hardly any in-depth study focusing exclusively on his fiction globally either. This is not the case with his dramatic repertoire where a single play like The Bus Stop (first performed, 1983) becomes the focus of an Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 8
extensive investigation by Kirkwood (2008). My project therefore addresses the need to fill this gap in literature. I find fiction more extensive in range than drama which is written for a specific time and place, and at times occasion too (Aziz 2014). Once the occasion is over, it may lose its appeal. While talking about the stir Gao’s early plays aroused in the Chinese theatre scene,
Yeung (2008) comments on another delimiting aspect of theatre thus:
… the theatre is restricted by time and space. Only those in the audience at the
time were able to experience those works. Others could only hear about them or
read commentaries on them. Gao’s contribution to these productions was
inseparable from Lin Zhaohua’s directing and production values invested in them
by the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. (4)
In comparison to his drama, Gao’s fiction remains very much relevant to the cultural debates of the present world in spite of the lapse of time since its production. Unlike drama, fiction is not a corporate production. Nor does it have to wait for an occasion to become truly active or alive, as
Aziz contends with reference to plays like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (6). Gao’s concern with home in diaspora is one such area which keeps his fiction critically alive. Interestingly, though he claims to be ‘a global citizen without borders’ in the above Interview, China remains the dominant location in his post-exile novel as well, strongly evoking mostly painful memories of the lost home. This ambiguity generates the need to investigate a hitherto under-explored aspect of Gao’s diaspora: home. Not that the topos of exile/home has not attracted critical attention yet.
Lily Li (2014), for example, has investigated the psychological process of disentanglement with home that an exilic mind undergoes in both the novels. This leaves an area still open to investigation: the status of home, and its growing or diminishing impact on the subject in diaspora. Some of the questions arising in this context are: What is home like in Gao’s fiction? Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 9
How does it become a problematic site? What forces one out of home? For a writer in his middle age, could there be something deeper to force him out of home than the simplistic notion of political oppression under the communist regime particularly during the Cultural Revolution?
The present study identifies this as tyranny or power dynamics which inheres in the very structure of home, not only the collective imaginary like home land/state where it is so obvious, but also one’s personal residence and a panoptic family set-up where it has evaded discernment. I connect this Foucauldian concern not having yet been identified in Gao’s fiction to the thematics of territorialisation and deterritorialisation in Deleuze. When the forces of power would have all individuals turn into compliant subjects of state/society, an artist acts under the strong impetus to deterritorialise, and flees home, both literally and figuratively. Dispersion thus is an avowal for his autonomy, an assertion of his subjective agency. An important issue indicated in the title of this research is the relocation of home. Since patriarchy and other hegemonic forces define the location of home in China, the larger questions the study would seek to address relate to its relocation: Where does Gao’s diaspora relocate home? Which alternative locations transcend the above constrictions? Apart from the architecturally concrete structure housing a family or the larger geo-physical territory of home country or culture, does the external location replicate an internal, psychic space that the diaspora moves in and about? The study directs its attention towards this possible dimension of home. Exile’s constant movements along geographical borders replicate a qualitative growth in his subjectivity which helps him feel at home anywhere, always willing to negotiate relationship and alliance with others. In line with the Deleuzian nomad, Gao’s subject does not settle down for a permanent alliance; that would have amounted to going back to the ‘territorial’ or ideological fixity of a majoritarian order. There is no question of going back home for exile. None of these concerns in Gao have stirred much critical activity Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 10
as yet. In addressing the existing gap, this project thus hopes to be a breakthrough in research on
Gao’s fiction. To access and assess the possiblistic range of home in diaspora from a variety of locations is an entirely original and fresh undertaking which is bound to be a significant addition to the body of literature available in the field.
Theoretical cover
What makes this study especially relevant to our times is the conceptual framework of diaspora underpinning it. In an age when global migrancy is on the increase, the political questions of who is to live where and how, or whether or not to re-fix the boundaries of home have acquired paramount importance. The purific notion of Enoch Powell’s ‘England for the
English only’ gets re-articulated now in Donald Trump’s election manifesto to put ‘America first’ and to keep so-called ‘terrorists’ out of the US (2017), the British opting for the Brexit
(2016), and the Indians electing Hindu nationalists to power again in India (2019). Such recent developments have deepened the racial and ethno-cultural ‘us/other’ divide in the geo-political and socio-cultural scenario of the present world. In this context it is not difficult to gauge why
Leitch has inventoried diaspora among twelve major theories of the twenty-first century on the flyleaf of his book Theory Renaissance (2014). Cultural critics have pointed out how the multiple flows of exiles, migrants, refugees, expatriates and constantly-on-the-move global citizens interrogate the mapping of the world along narrow nationalistic boundaries. Diaspora indeed is subversive in dissolving such constructs. It is a highly fertile site, as is evident from a whole range of world literature it has generated, a literature by what Edward Said calls ‘extra- territorial’, ‘un-housed’ or exile writers from Arab, Palestine, Africa, the Caribbeans, Ireland,
Pakistan, India and China etc. The cultural duality and ambivalence inherent in the concept may add a multi-perspectival dimension to the debate which may require the broadening of the critical Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 11
base to include other sister-concepts like nomadism, trans-culturalism and globalization. Equally relevant to contemporary debates is the position of home which is problematised by the very act of self-exile. Like diaspora, home too is a dense site which ranges from personal signifiers like one’s place of birth and residence, family and ancestral roots to the collective identifiers like one’s home-land, state, nation, culture, community etc., all of which have a key role in the
‘subjectification’ process, i.e., cultural orientation and ideological indoctrination of an individual in a society. A diasporic subject oscillates between at least two such places or territories, each holding an equal weightage for allegiance. This study intends to explore how Gao’s subjects in exile try to resolve this ambivalence by re-negotiating their relationship with home. Taking home in its geo-physical location in the beginning, it draws on the Saidian notion of exile as a complex, ambivalent state of consciousness, which is the starting point for a mobile and multiplex subjectivity. The range of discussion broadens under what Rosi Braidotti calls the
‘process ontology’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to investigate how diaspora now internalized as a state of mind enables Gao’s subjects to transcend the exclusionary politics of
‘home’ and identity tags anywhere. Though home pursues them in the form of memories and personal biases they have inherited from their native culture, their constant movement in an extra-territorial space helps them surmount their delimitations and negotiate differences with others at gender and transcultural levels. Taking diaspora as an enabling process of subjectivation, the present research in its conceptual breadth thus looks forward to the future in reconfiguring ‘home’ in a cosmopolitan space. Doing so necessitates as much taking into account the present as the past.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 12
Conceptual Genealogy of Home
Based on a critical review of literature (2004), Shelley Mallet’s discussion of home underscores the need of a multidisciplinary, hybrid approach to define this complex, multi- dimensional concept. Evoking multiple responses in contemporary discourses of criticism, home is often conflated with a house. As a referent to one’s birthplace, family or family house, one’s native land, culture or country home could signify one’s personal identity or status. To Ahmed and Somerville, it may be a non-localisable matter of affect or feeling, an at-home-ness associated with a place or a relationship. Cooper reads house as an archetypal symbol of self, and
Tucker, as “an expression of a person’s subjectivity” as well as an emotional environment, a culture, a geographic location, a political system, a historical time and place, a house, and a combination of all these (184). As a complex phenomenon, home is invested with diverse cultural meaning, evoking security, comfort and intimacy in one context, and fear, oppression and confinement in another (Mallet). In feminist discourses, those abused and violated within the family like women or children are likely to feel ‘homeless at home’ (Wardaugh). In the discourses of diaspora, a dislocation is noticeable in the very idea of home as complex, contingent spaces and inhabitance (Ahmed 340). The interdiscursive narratives of home also reveal political binaries of inclusion/exclusion, inside/outside, public/private, comfortable/uncomfortable, safe/unsafe underpinning the notion of home (Mallet).
Not only is it difficult to define what exactly home is but also to infer when the idea of home got embedded in human mind. While tracing ‘the genealogy of home’, Peter Watson
(2006) reveals how anthropologists have often conflated home with a house to refer to the sedentary way of life vis ὰ vis the earlier nomadic mode of existence in human history. Pairing agriculture with the development of villages, they consider both of them as signs of living in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 13
proper houses. Latest studies, however, divorce sedentism from agriculture. In Groube’s theory, pre-agricultural villages in Fertile Crescent appear to have started much earlier than animal or plant domestication (55). According to Mark Cohen, a population crisis threatening human existance in prehistory appears to have forced humans to discontinue their migrant pattern of life, improvise houses, and breed more often to avoid extinction (57-58). Round in structure and built half underground, early houses slowly changed to rectangular building above ground. Needless to say, similar moves towards sedentary life continued either parallel or later in other parts of the world.
Home in China
Ancient Chinese history dates back more than 5000 years. Proper housing in China, according to Watson, appeared around 3500 BC. Later history testifies the mode of collectivist living as evident from the way houses were designed. Courtyard houses, for example, have been a prominent feature of Chinese culture across the country since long. Initially meant as residences for large or extended families of the elite-class, they usually comprise a main house and a number of side houses opening into a common compound (Li 2009; Liu & Awotona 2005).
Embodied in the hierarchal structure is the idea of a joint family presided over by the parents surrounded by their children and grandchildren. Being fast replaced by the modern high rise apartment buildings to cope with the pressure of a huge population, the courtyard houses still survive even in Beijing, mostly serving as housing complexes noted for poor living conditions such as constriction of space and non-availability of independent laundry and toilet as frequently evoked in Gao’s novels. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 14
That the Chinese home houses a predominantly hierarchal structure of family is owed to the family ethos of Confucius (551-479 BCE). Confucianism still remains at the top of the three systems to shape the cultural contours of China, Taoism and Buddhism being the other two. A patri-linear, multi-generational site, the Confucian family binds the individuals in a fixed order of loyalty, filial piety and affection at home (Schuman 2015; Huang & Gove 2012; Lithrup
1996). Of all major cultures of the world, we find the Chinese unique in their tradition of addressing a person in speech as in writing: the surname precedes the forename of a person. The individual is thus subordinated, rather subsumed by the clan or the older generation. As an ethical system rooted to this world, Confucianism is now blamed for all sorts of tyranny in East
Asia whether state, class or gender, since its main assumption is that socio-political “order can be achieved only when people are organized in gradations of inferiority and superiority” (Watson
194). According to Gi-Ming, Confucius’ main stress on piety binds everyone in an ethical love for parents, brothers and sisters, friends, king, and all mankind (264). Peace and order could prevail if each is conscious about his/her position at home, in society or state. Schuman refers to
‘paebaek’, the traditional mode of saluting in Chinese societies: it is a deferential act of bowing down in full prostration before all those in authority: older family members, bosses in offices, government officials, and even senior students in universities (ix). Though tagged as authoritarian, misogynist and conservative, Confucius, as Schuman argues, was not to blame for all this: “His teachings have been so twisted and distorted by centuries of self-interested emperors, scholars and officials that in some cases they have deviated drastically from the sage’s own positions and gotten him attacked for things he never advocated and would never support”
(xxi). For example, the power that he invested to the king bound him in parental obligation to act
“as a paragon of virtue for everyone” (27). Needless to say, the kings and all those in any Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 15
position of authority conveniently disregarded this latter part of the Confucian ethos. However, the fact remains that “The societies that sprang from his philosophy are incredibly hierarchical.
Those awarded a position of superiority―fathers, husbands, rulers―have used and abused
Confucius’ teachings to exert control over those who were condemned to subordinate status―children, wives and citizens” (xx).
Buddhism and Taoism, on the other hand, are non-hierarchical and inward-directed. They both turn away from the world, teaching to kill desire of the flesh (Gi-Ming 121) for the purification of soul. Both Buddhism and Taoism call upon their adherents to seek liberation from the institutional control. While Confucius emphasized one’s duty to the family and community to ensure order in society, “Buddha turned his back on his family and possessions, put on yellow robe of the itinerant and lived by begging” (Watson 117). The difference lies in both their attitudes to life in this world. Confucius was intent on building a better world now and here, whereas Buddha favoured an escape from it (Schuman 56-57). Though Mahayana, the sect of
Buddhism dominant in China, promotes a return to the world to teach reality to mankind, both
Hinyana Buddhism and Taoism tend to be reclusive. While Buddhism and Taoism continued to have popular appeal, Confucianism firmly took hold of the government and education, thereby deeply affecting the daily life and family practices of the Chinese (57-58). This accounts for tyranny deeply inherent in the form and structure of home/land, whether before or after colonialism. The ideal of filial piety is still attractive in politics. Like their forebears, the
Communists under Mao Zedong (1893-1976) cashed on this ethical concept to launch their official discourse of home as the home country which had a fixed ‘monologic’ location behind the ‘bamboo curtain’. This, however, is not an isolated incidence of oppression. Politically, the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 16
country has remained under absolute dynasties since about 2045 BCE, a historical fact that has determined the genealogy of Chinese culture and literature to date.
Chinese culture and colonial interventions
Power exerted through socio-political institutions has serious impact on the cultural practices and products of countries. Resistance to oppression is visible in literatures of the world.
As the state uses force to silence dissident voices, leading poets and authors have often taken to flight. That way they protect their right to freedom of thought and expression. Likewise, instead of towing the official line, Gao Xingjian chooses self-exile as the only option for the artist in him who feels debilitated by the cultural oppression under the Chinese communist regimes. Coupled with this are three religious orders in China, each of which teaches in its own way to negate the individual human self before the larger social or spiritual Self. By choosing self-exile, Gao has attempted to break free from a collectivist, and, what Chen Maiping calls ‘cannibalistic’ culture, and to assert and exercise his own independence. In an oppressive society, an artist’s attempt to reclaim individual creative agency is an act of defiance, a breach of centuries’ old cultural tradition. For writings in China since earliest times show a strong streak of social orientation: most are anonymous discourses on topics of general and social concerns like religion, philosophy, history or politics. Chen observes that for long even a lyrical poem was supposed not to bear the signature of the poet. Such self-obliteration was a part of subordination of individual self to the larger Self in society. The spirit continued until quite modern times when China came under the influence of Western culture through colonial intrusions and wars. This time, it was national Self that appears to have subsumed the individual self. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 17
In contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the nation-states in the West, nationalism in
China, according to Jean-Pierre Cabestan (2006), has had its own specificity. It “took form only as a reaction to the shock of forced contact with the West. … [B]efore this historic turning point,
China was much more an empire than a nation state, a civilization, and a culture dominated by one race (Zu)—the Han rather than a society, brought together by a national project, and even less by a modern citizenship” (2-3). According to a report “China’s Future”, for two millennia the Chinese empire had remained the world’s most populous political entity and richest economy
(1). However, its sense of self-sufficiency and cultural impregnability left it unprepared for the changing complexion of the world politics. That’s why the next two centuries witnessed a reversal of fortune: colonized by multiple powers from the West, China was humiliated, enervated and pauperized. The first to land on the Chinese soil in the sixteenth century were the
Portuguese, followed in close heels by the Spanish, the Dutch and the British. In the nineteenth century, the British smuggled opium to get the Chinese population addicted to its use to overturn their trade deficit (Dawei et al 186). China fought and lost two Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-
60). Already in the first, the British not only grabbed Hong Kong but also forced the country to open its door for regular trade. It descended into a spiral of denial, defeat, semi-colonisation
(“China’s Future” 3). The worst, however, was yet to come: defeat in war (1894-95) at the hands of the Japanese, a nation once nurtured on the Chinese culture had now outshone China by attuning itself to the Western standards of modernisation. Nationalism stemmed from such specific national disasters, and kept the country busy to get back its political autonomy, economic stability and socio-cultural prestige up to the present time. Modongal (2016) traces four stages in the development of nationalism in China after independence: state controlled socialist-oriented nationalism under Mao, pro-West liberal nationalism in post-Mao era, post- Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 18
Tiananmen anti-West pragmatic nationalism, and contemporary cyber nationalism. In spite of fluctuations in its parameters, nationalism made deep inroads into the cultural landscape, infusing literature as well. There was little room for asserting and promoting the Western norms of individualism, enlightenment and liberal humanism in art.
The West has had a dialectical hold on the Chinese psyche: fascination as well as abomination. It was far superior, but could be excelled. In the midst of the Japanese and Russian invasions and occupations in the early twentieth century, the Chinese gained an access to the
European literature through an exposure to the Western culture both direct and indirect. Not only was there a larger number of Chinese pursuing higher studies abroad but the country had a more extensive body of literary translations. Modernism thus imported inspired artists to initiate the radical May Fourth Movement in 1919. Wang Gungwu reports how revolution was the key word from left, right and centre in the country. Certainly China could transform itself by liberating mind through a new language and a new literature. This newness took the form of an anti- traditionalist drive. Progressive intellectuals unreservedly accepted Europe as the ultimate model
(675). Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) called for an end to “the evils of ornateness and decadence”
(History of Modern Chinese Literature 2), while Hu Shih (1891-1962) advocated replacement of the classical language with the vernacular. However, the Chinese could not sustain the Western model of literature beyond the nineteenth century bourgeois standards of realism or true-to-life representation of life in art. They could not follow for long the concern with individualism before the national cause. Lu Xun (1881-1936), for example, started revolutionizing literature in style and content but ended up rallying for the nationalistic cause. His short story “The Diary of a Mad
Man” (1918) best exemplifies the features of Modernist writings in Chinese literature, particularly the fragmented text and the first person subjective voice. However, Lu soon had to Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 19
compromise his art for age-old socio-political commitments impregnating Chinese culture.
Sebastian Veg laments how the cultural movement soon became politicized and forced writers to assume a politically revolutionary role. Literature became a tool to transform subjects into patriotic citizens of the state. This subordination of literature to the socio-political cause had remained in effect all through Mao’s period (1949-1976) when the ruling Party used it as an
‘ideological state apparatus’ for relaying its nationalistic agenda. The movement continued even in post-Mao era until the aborted attempt for democracy in 1989, when the younger generation of writers interrogated this state ‘subjectification’ of the intellectuals many of whom later chose self-exile. May Fourth Movement, however, was important in introducing many currents of
European Modernism such as focus on the psychological and the subjective rather than the social and the ethical. The most important change it brought about was the use of the vernacular in place of the classical Chinese (Yow 459) to reach a larger audience. Literary experimentations of that period kept on influencing later writers down to the late twentieth century. Even those in diaspora were no exception.
Contrary to the general impression of China as a ‘close’ country, history shows records of cultural intermingling through diaspora which dates as far back as the second century BCE.
Using data available across fifty years, Li & Li record a total number of 39.5 million Chinese in diaspora, distributed in about 130 countries and five regions of the world (20) with South-east
Asia as having the largest concentration of their population. Lai traces the key diasporic patterns since ancient times as of trade, labour, education and profession (2-3). Yow divides these patterns along timeline of (a) merchants till 1850, (b) labour, 1850-1930, (c) China-centred
‘huaqiao’, 1900-49, and (d) Chinese descendants since 1949 (460). Madsen and Reimenschnitter
(2009) relate the ‘chronotope’ of Chinese diaspora through the changing concept of ‘old’ and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 20
‘new’ diasporic subjectivity: the ‘new’ diaspora of global capitalism and post-nationalism in contrast to the ‘old’ diaspora of indenture (4). The change in the subject position also seems to influence the migrant’s relationship with home. In the beginning, roots in another country did not mean abandoning one’s ethno-cultural identity. The term ‘huaqiao’ or ‘sojourners’ refers to the overseas Chinese having such a bond with the home-country which the state took care to strengthen in return for their economic as well as political value (Ling-Chi 181-182). For migrants over the years have not only been agents for promoting international trade and investment, and modernization of the country, but also for legitimization of the regime. Hence its emotional use of both diaspora and home: in the state discourse diasporas appear as fallen leaves or seeds sown in the foreign soil, which, however, must ultimately return to their roots back home. Racial discrimination and marginalization of the Chinese abroad assisted the state to maintain its version of the two. Jia Gao theorises about the increasing diasporisation of the new overseas Chinese who have discontinued their sojourner position in favour of “flexible identities”, maintaining their relevance to both home and host countries (7). The change in subjectivity is owed also to their increasingly powerful position as investors and capitalists abroad. As for migrants’ reasons for leaving home, Jia analyses political oppression and economic marginalization inside the country as major push factors. However, some Chinese migrate “in order to attain a certain level of self-expression and self-actualisation” (6), while others choose to live in diaspora “as an alternative way of life” (7). Thus the growing number of
Chinese diaspora has not only undergone a change in their relationship with home country but also in their subjectivity. No longer is it the ambivalent position of a sojourner drawn back to the home country while working abroad as an alien. It is now a migrant, emotionally detached from home and participating in the mainstream culture of the host society, a more active and confident Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 21
agent in promoting and shaping global capitalism. The diasporic subjectivity thus has evolved in multiple dimensions: from sojourn to migrancy, filiation to affiliation, indenture labour to capitalist investment, nationalism to cosmopolitanism.
Chinese diaspora literature and Gao
As the impulse for diaspora is discernible since the earliest record of history in China, so the spirit seems to have infused the literary products of different times. Printing began in the country around 900 AD and around the year 1000 narrative writing began and steadily developed into the form of novel. Some of the sixteenth century prose writings contained diasporic discourses such as the Buddhist pilgrimages to India or sea explorations of navigators (Lithrup
3). There appears little evidence of any literary representation of exile leaving home-country under duress. As a matter of fact, until recently there was no tradition of literary exile or expulsion to foreign countries in China. In an interview Gao has testified this: “In a real sense,
Chinese exile writers and Chinese exile literature never existed” (741). Researches about
Chinese exile narratives of the past, however, report: “China’s long history of individual banishment and mass de-territorialisation (resulting from war or natural disaster) has left deep traces in the corpus of her literary texts” (Madsen et al 11). Critics trace the history of exiled writers resisting the oppressive power of the state since Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE). There is also textual evidence of nationalism, of the exile’s changing perception of the self and the other in a foreign environment. A number of aristocratic women-poets expressed in their poetry the sense of displacement, of homesickness and nostalgia after they were married off for political convenience to barbarian chiefs (Zufferey 12). All these, however, happen to be cases of internal displacement within the country, “not exile overseas” (Min Yang 14). In olden days, dissident writers were punished through banishment to the outskirts of the country and by the eighteenth Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 22
century “the practice of deporting convicts to the empire’s remote frontier areas had become institutionalized” (Zufferey 12). Contrary to the absence of external exile in the past, Gao anticipates the future of Chinese literature as lying in exile. And well it may. With Communists in power since 1949, a strict cultural policy later becoming a part of the Cultural Revolution
(1966-76) and still much in force came to govern writing, publishing and book distribution system. Writers came under strict panoptic surveillance and control of the state. In the Yan’an
Forum on Art and Literature in 1942, Mao Zedong himself had laid down social realism and revolutionary romanticism as the only norms for his Marxist driven cultural theory. His death in
1976 promised a little relief, but things got worse with the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989. Many artists like Gao Xingjian, Bei Dao, Yang Lian and Dao Sijie opted for self-exile to the West, a move bringing in its wake a whole range of diaspora literature.
The term Chinese diaspora literature is problematic; it may not be coming straight from
China but include a variegated body of literature the ethno-lingual identity of whose writers needs clarification. It could be from the exile/immigrant writers from the Chinese background who produce literature written either in their own language, or in that of the host-country such as
English or French. Each one of the two may have sub-categories. In an article “Marginalisation
Inside-out”, Carles Prado-Fonts (2006) discusses Chinese diaspora literature in the sense of Sino- phonic literature by writers from the PRC (People’s Republic of China), Taiwan, Hong Kong and
Chinese diaspora. The critic talks about the subalternity of this literature owing to the politics of recognition in the global market which grants subjectivity to the West and objectivity to the rest.
Any favourable reception in the West is hence subject to the author catering to the market requirements prevailing there. This external marginalization of Chinese diaspora literature is matched with a ‘dual-track demarginalization’ of a part of it at home. It is convenient to divide Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 23
the diasporic literature from China into two broad categories: one sanctioned by the state and the other silenced hence doubly marginalised. Those having no ideological clash with the state are duly patronized by the government. Home appears in their cultural discourses as the ultimate fixed centre, granted in Xiaomei’s words “a privileged ontological and epistemological position”
(2). At individual level, it houses a well-knit family that is hierarchically structured with filial piety as an absolute virtue and the same values are reflected in the concept of home at collective level where each subject owes a constant loyalty and allegiance to the state. In this context, any departure from the norm is viewed as an act of revolt which incurs the displeasure of the state/society. By moving away from centre, the diaspora have already compromised their privileged position as citizens of a single unific state. Though Chinese form one of the greatest bulks of migrants’ population in the world today, it is surprising that until quite recently, diaspora has sounded rather unconventional in this seemingly conventional, ‘sedentary’ society.
In a research article, Wang Cangbai and Wong Siu-lun have explored the semantic and semiotic dimensions of some Chinese terms related to diaspora. According to them:
In Chinese the word qui (returnee) has a more subtle meaning than spatial
movements, implying also a kind of conversion of allegiance and a pledge of
obedience, especially for those who had departed from the orthodoxy but come
back again. Second, the word qiao (sojourner) is not a neutral term in Chinese
official discourse. It entails the negative meaning of being an outcast or a person
living in exile. This is largely because of the fact that China was a traditional
agrarian society. Staying on land until death had been taken as the normal state of
life and was the accepted virtue. The landless and jobless peasants were
considered potential threat to the stability and strength of the empire and Chinese Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 24
who went abroad were equated with rebels. Rootedness was thus not only the
official ideology but also an important part of mainstream Chinese culture….
Though times have changed, the cultural residues still exist. (204)
In the face of rapid globalization and post-Mao softening of the ‘bamboo curtain’ policy of the state, the connotations of a migrant acquired some sort of a positive valence in the context of nationalistic discourse. However, the national ‘virtues’ such as love and loyalty to the family and country have long remained constant for those who go out. As late as the 1990s, the editor of a collection of short stories by diaspora writers states:
No matter how westernized they might seem to become, they inevitably revert
back to being Chinese, they are Chinese at heart. For all the “suffering they had
endured”, they cannot forget China, because they are the children of the land.
They are rooted there. Nobody who is brought up in this “ancient Asiatic”
civilization can completely tear himself away from it. (Jianing Chen 321)
This is the emotional, uncritical stance of the first category of diasporic writers. It may include those who went overseas for higher education or better cultural presentation or economic prospects under state sponsorship. Emotionally and ideologically rooted to the home country and culture, their representation of home as a powerful centre loses its broad cosmopolitan base, though its propaganda value for the state stands it in good stead. For example, in the story “An
Offering Gathered from that Cherished Homeland” (Jia Baoquan 1993), the returnee feels grief rather than anger at the immense suffering and bereavements of the poor during “the Great Leap
Forward”, a socio-economic campaign initiated by the Communist Party in 1958-62 which is said to have caused famine and killed around 45 million people. The author shows the hard Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 25
labour the farmers were subjected to as culminating in the ultimate prosperity of the people, and hence moral triumph of the People’s Republic before which the cost of individual human loss pales into insignificance. All suffering is made to appear heroic in the dazzling light of the revolution rhetoric: “See what we eat today? We even feed our chickens with golden corn flour.
… These years we have had good weather and people have been contented. And we’ve had a bumper crop of wheat every year” (84). Similarly another fictionist Wu Qing lets his diasporic narrator sing of China from a stereotypical collective ‘country’ of Africa in “The Civilisation of
Straw Hats and Cloth Shoes”. Notice the exaggerated, artificial ring in the nationalistic discourse: “Standing beyond the equator I looked back and found China a land of wonders”
(360). A little later, he again indulges in similar grandiloquence about his “native land lying in the midsection of the northern hemisphere … a veritable giant-sized treasure bowl… resplendent to a dazzling extent” (363). Such fiction receives due recognition in the form of publication inside China as well as circulation outside through translations in lieu for authors’ loyalty to the state. The celebration of home as a singular, unitary centre, and the unequivocal loyalty the diasporists bear for it become the official norm. Any deviation from the norm results in forced silence and erasure.
Seen from the perspective of the Chinese state and the peculiar geo-political situation
China had emerged from, things may appear different. Unlike most of the colonised Asia, the
Chinese had to grapple simultaneously with multiple issues: multi-colonialism, foreign interference and aggression, tussles for power among warlords, widespread banditry; in short, virtual anarchy. In the post-independence period, the decolonized nations of Asia conveniently put the blame on a colonial legacy for all that goes wrong: abuse of power, widespread institutional inefficiency and mismanagement, corruption, lawlessness and ideological turmoil. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 26
India was fortunate enough to build on the existing British model of governance; not so the case with China. Building on an imported system from the West that promised equality and rule of law, China tried to restore all that the West had wrenched from it. On the face of it, the
Communist experiment seems quite effective in ensuring not only peace and unity within but also sustainable economic growth of an emerging power without. The imperative to discipline and organise a huge population which the British had tried to subdue through the use of drugs seems to have driven the Revolutionary Government in Beijing to act strictly in line with a single unitary ideology. In a research article (2016), Shameer Modongal terms it the success of the communists to have kept the country united: in contrast to the Han-centric ethnic nationalism of
Kuomintang, “[i]t was a great achievement of CPC to create a multinational PRC though the Han
Chinese constitute approximately 93 percent of the population and the remaining non-Han communities are divided among 55 minority nationalities” (3). Though the population still lacks basic rights of freedom to speak, and the report goes that the country still has more poor people at home than any other country except India, China has built up a soft image of itself as an emergent power whose policy towards the world is transactional rather than imperial (“China’s
Future”). No doubt its lack of engagement in resolving the major world problems irks the West which itself has a key role in aggravating many of them. The purpose of this research, however, is not political. It does not aim at pitching the two parties―in this case a self-exile writer and his home-state―against each other. As a literary project, my concern is to investigate how far an artist/subject from a conventional, ideologically rooted society has been able to transcend the pull of his native home and indigenous culture after his physical dispersion therefrom. This is what forms the thesis statement of this research. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 27
As evident from his centrifugal dispersion, Gao falls in the second category of diasporists, the dissident writers who migrated for creative freedom denied in China. The shift in his status from a self-exile to an immigrant and then a nomadic globe trotter problematizes the intentionality which appears to have varied from a need for what Jia Gao terms “self-expression and self-actualisation”, to living in “diaspora as an alternative way of life” (2). In spite of the language barrier, the fact that Gao’s fiction won recognition in the Eurocentric host community has raised controversies both in and outside home. Much critical attention has gone in sifting and resolving the issues regarding his merit, the authenticity of the Nobel Academy or the standard of translations through which his works have reached us. My concern here is not to revive old controversies, but to highlight those comparatively new aspects which are relevant to my preoccupation in this research: how a diasporic subject disperses from native home and seeks reterritorialisation elsewhere.
Present research focus
The contention of this research rests on the problematic relation of an exile with home.
Distance enables a negotiation with home and a re-adjustment in one’s relationship with it. Not only that; it also helps the subject relocate home in a space other than its geo-physical or ideological one. The first part of the discussion as such deals with a close-up view of home located simultaneously in Confucian stasis and Buddhist movement, in patriarchal tyranny and exilic freedom. Within the ideologically monologic macronarratives that silence the micronarratives of cultural history, a sensitive person alive to the need of dialogue with others as well as himself turns into an exile. Gao often expresses this dialogic urge through a sexual interaction between a male and a female. The next focus is how a physical dislocation manifests exile’s resistance of hegemony imposed by multiple forces at work at personal and national Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 28
levels which try to objectify him under their panoptic gaze. In Writing New Identities (1997),
Brinker-Gabler and Smith contend that in the nationalistic discourses, family serves as a trope for the nation, symbolizing “the homogeneity of citizens” (12). According to them, “the traditional hierarchical relationship of children to parents, wife to husband provides a familial metaphor through which to legitimate socio-political hierarchies, or differences within the nation” (12). In “Freedom and Literature”, Gao has articulated a similar predicament of individuals under subjection of multiple forces in a totalitarian state/society, depriving them of basic human rights:
The individual living in a specific society is continually subjected to a variety of
regulations from politics, ethics, customs and religion and also from family,
marriage, sexual relationships that impose numerous restrictions on the
individual’s action. … The totalitarian politics and ideology … [regulate]
people’s actions and further shackle their thinking. …” (11-12)
When I-narrator in Soul Mountain recounts how the doctor suspected that he was suffering from lung cancer, it may refer to the suffocation in environment in which it is difficult for a scholar- artist to breathe and survive. For an artist to live under tyranny of the state and its exacting cultural norms is like condemning him to death. Gao and his artist-subjects react to this through their exilic dislocation from home. The contextual details already reveal their native home under a collectivist cultural order with a high degree of institutional oppression. They both have a literal dispersion on two occasions, once from Beijing to the South, and then from China to the
West. After the excerpt quoted above, Gao moves on to ask significantly: “In democratic system, does the individual necessarily enjoy freedom of speech and thought, and does democracy necessarily guarantee the freedom of the individual” (12)? In the host society as well, a general Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 29
restlessness is discernible through the subjects’ shifting from place to place. I relate this subjective fluidity to the motif of de-territorialisation in Deleuze and Guattari. In dislocating from any centre East or West, they refuse to submit to the territorializing pressure of any society, thereby asserting their subjective autonomy. In both his critical and meta-fictive discourses, Gao has used other variants of the term such as escape, fleeing, abandoning, absconding, all of which when seen inter-discursively refer to a psychological retreat or withdrawal; a cowardly reaction to frustration; an un-heroic retreat in ethical discourse. However, embedded in Gao’s theory of
‘cold literature’, it becomes synonymous with freedom and individualism, a virtue he highly prizes in an artist: “Cold literature is literature that will flee in order to survive, it is literature that refuses to be strangled by society in its quest for spiritual salvation” (“Nobel Lecture”). A little later he says: “… silence is suicide, a sort of spiritual suicide. For those who refuse to suicide, there is only one option of absconding” (1996a 21). What raises the scale in favour of the absconder is a refusal to be an object, or be subjected to ‘territorialisation’. Attaching great importance to the writers’ state of exile, Gao once declared in an interview: “… as far as future facing Chinese literature is concerned, it is exile, la fuite” (740). However, he adds, it’s not so much a flight from political circumstances as a need “to flee from oneself” (743). The pursuit is
“for freedom not simply from forces external to oneself, but rather the enticements from the self”
(“Towards an Aesthetics of Freedom” 128). Compromising one’s artistic freedom for survival is suicidal. Mabel Lee refers to Lu Xun’s act of suicide of his creative self in order “to live a half- atrophied physical existence” (2003 6). Gao could not do this. He fled from the scene of oppression as well as from self-interest. I identify this ‘flight from self’ not as self-negation but a re-articulation of the Deleuzian concept of nomadic ‘deterritorialisation’. The ‘line of flight’ in
Deleuze’s theory is a self-expansive move; it is the constant movement of a subject from being a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 30
‘majoritarian’ to a ‘minority’ and then ‘becoming’ minoritarian. Being an exile both at home and abroad is a minority position. From here emanates the tendency to relate to other minorities. This is where Gao’s subjects ultimately relocate home: an open and inclusive psychic space where to engage in a dialogue with oneself and others. This is the priviledged nomadic space; within it is ample room for qualitative growth and progression; from, what Deleuze theorises, ‘being’ a molar, male, mainstream and majoritarian to ‘becoming’ a molecular, female, marginalised and minoritarian subject. None of these concerns in Gao have so far aroused any debate in critical circles. Relocation either back home or in another land does not make much difference; it only triggers the nomadic impulse for crossing borders of gender, country, culture, race or nation.
Diaspora in this context refers to a constantly fluid, de-territorialised subjectivity.
The contention of present research thus lies in the very ambiguity of home, exiles’ ambivalence towards it and their movement in and out of multiple borders. Within the theoretical context, the study purports to trace the progression of home from a materially demarcated territory to an internal sense of at-home-ness anywhere which however keeps the subjects paradoxically at home nowhere. This progression is measurable in terms of the change in their attitude towards their cultural roots or to the issue of putting down roots at all. Oscillating in- between home and abroad, Asia and Europe, past and present, Gao’s exile ends up being a subject in process who passes from his majoritarian to minoritarian position, from cultural filiation to transcultural affiliations, from the status of a ‘sojourner’ to a migrant and a rootless, stateless ‘doctrineless’ (Liu Zaifu) citizen of the world, without any notion of ‘home at last’.
Since territorialisation is equivalent to physical and intellectual stagnation, he remains in a constant process of subjective development called ‘becoming’. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 31
The methodology and research design rest on the structuring of the argument onto three broad concepts of home in diaspora: location, dislocation and relocation, which sound parallel to the Deleuzean notions of territorialisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. In its contextual variation home ranges from a concretely built, centrally-located family house to the deep-rooted cultural matrix, a residue of which the exile appears to carry along in memory and in the form of his/her indigenous subjectivity. We need to see how far Gao’s subject while fleeing from multiple forms of ‘domestic’ oppression is able to resist the tyranny of home while relocating elsewhere. The study initially works on the concept of exile and diaspora as theorized in Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. The excessive attachment with home gradually gives way to a critical detachment thanks to the ‘duality of vision’ now attained through distanciation. This progression of argument necessitates a close-up view of home as embodied in the Confucian family structure. Built on monologic patriarchal lines, it necessitates the use of Bakhtin’s discourse analysis to underscore the dialogic impulse repressed in the subject. At home, the subject finds himself marginalised on the bases of generation, occupation and ideology both inside and outside the proverbial four walls. A young writer rendered helpless to protect his right for self-expression, he dislocates from home and the hegemonic forces inherent in its texture, little realizing that he himself is carrying along germs of power. As the semantic range of home enlarges to home country and culture, the study now needs to broaden the theoretical base to draw on theories of power, which may include Althusser’s ‘interpellation’, Foucault’s panopticon’ and ‘territorialisation’ in Deleuze and Guattari. Foucauldian discourse and
Deleuzian statement analyses are the possible tools for generating meaning here. As the hegemonic forces particularly in the larger context intensify their efforts to interpellate and territorialise the subject to the dominant norms, he takes to flight. The multi-layered-ness of this Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 32
act calls for a multiple method of textual, Bakhtinean and critical discourse analyses in line with the thematics of research which takes a turn towards reterritorialisation of the subject in a nomadic, and a transcultural space.
Though underlying each chapter is a practical purpose, the broader rationale for the present research is knowledge production about the constriction of home as an ideologically exclusive territory, and to enlarge it in favour of an all-embracing transcultural global ‘citizenry’.
The politics of ‘home’ as a nation-state or a cultural milieu has been responsible for a lot of bad blood, violence and terrorism across the globe including Pakistan. Homes built along narrow ideological fences create fixed Manichaean binaries which enforce a culture of intolerance, hatred and persecution of others in the form of ethnic cleansing or silencing of the minorities.
This research thus is directed to serve a powerful, practical function. Centred round an author who calls himself “a global citizen without borders” (3), it hopes to disseminate awareness about the need for a home large enough to include and accommodate other lands, nations, peoples, cultures and identities. The very ambiguity of his status as a self-exile and his re-presentation of home as a multi-layered construct may have caused the forcible silencing and erasure of Gao’s works at home, yet it reveals the independent nature of his art. His preference to lurk in the periphery of the mainstream anywhere grants him tremendous freedom of movement and a subjective autonomy of going places (Zhang 129). Continuous shifting from one place to another is equal to transcending fixed notions of identity and belonging; it signifies a sense of at-home- ness in not belonging to a particular territory, be it a region, nation, gender, ethnicity or culture.
Gao’s art thus disrupts the monologic narratives of home which are again gaining currency in the present world. Add to the ‘war-against-terrorism’ scenario many instances of violation of human rights such as in Myanmar recently. Never before was there the need so strong as now to Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 33
investigate and highlight in a writer’s oeuvre diasporic features which have remained almost invisible.
The present project is delimited by the fact that all primary material under study is translated version of the original. Since translation is not transliteration or a “one-to-one linguistic transfer of text” (Yeung 10), I base my reading of the texts mainly on hermeneutic rather than linguistic equivalence of meaning.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 34
Chapter Two
The Theoretical Direction
This part of the research first takes up for review some of the main currents of literature on Gao’s fiction produced since 2000, an important date in his personal biography when he received the
Nobel Prize. Besides providing a background to the debate in the ensuing chapters, the sample literature helps to identify the gap as well as ascertain how far this study is able to fill it up, and carry the critical current to new directions on the basis of the research questions it seeks to answer. The chapter then proceeds to elucidate the theoretical cover for this study, and concludes with key objectives, possible scope and significance of research, and the methodology through which it hopes to work itself to completion.
The Critical Reception
The turn of the century saw a sudden influx of writings on Gao’s art including fiction. He seems to grow into an important field of inquiry, attracting a host of literary discussions, interviews, seminars, conferences, and compilation of books from Soul of Chaos edited by
Kwok-kan Tam in 2001 to Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings under the editorship of
Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens in 2014. The first is a collection of articles most of which were written before the Award and as such present a genealogy of Gao’s reception in
English language (Soul of Chaos vii). Covering both his pre- and post-exile writings, the book is important as the first consolidated attempt to collect a series of reviews and analyses on Gao’s art. Prior to this, the critical interest in him seems sporadic. Most of the writings place Gao in between China and the West, focusing on his talent to synthesise the Chinese heritage with
Western cultural and literary traditions (2). His unique identity as a French citizen who writes in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 35
Chinese (6) helps him not simply to adopt the Western ideas and techniques but to go beyond the the Western experiments, and re-vision the theatrical space from the perspective of Chinese aesthetics of performance (6-7). Interestingly only four out of a total number of sixteen contributions in the collection are given over to the study of fiction. There too, the pronouns as fictive protagonists are an extension of the debate on the multiple perspectives of a split self in his drama. The book thus foregrounds Gao’s position as a dramatist rather than a fictionist. It is when the Nobel Committee highlighted the creative potential in Soul Mountain (December 2000) that the critical gaze is directed more emphatically towards his fiction. The other volume mentioned above comprises presentations in an international conference under the head “Gao
Xingjian: Freedom, Fate and Prognostication” held in 2011 at University of Erlangen-
Nuremberg, Germany. As compared to the former, the focus of interest here is varied. While Gao in his paper restricts the notion of freedom to the possibilities of human action under the restraints of existential conditions in real life (11), other critics explore it in light of different frameworks of the East and the West to present a myriad of opinions and interpretations of freedom with reference mainly to his dramatic and narrative art, and at times painting and film making, too. I shall incorporate some of these readings in my main discussion.
Part of the response after 2000 was a debate triggered by Gao’s unexpected winning of the Nobel Prize that year. The controversy about the political implications of the Award kept the critics engaged at home as well as across the world including the ethnic Chinese living in diaspora. In an article Kam Louie, for example, refers to the decision as generally termed ‘highly politicized’ (145), an issue taken up most prominently among others by Julia Lovell a little later
(2002). While Lovell sums up the response to Gao’s laureateship mostly from intellectuals inside
China, Kam Louis looks at the scene from a Western perspective, weighing the validity of some Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 36
of the explanations provided by the Swedish Academy for its ‘controversial’ decision, and concluding that the Prize, after all, was valid because the writer’s “visions are culturally accessible to a Western reader” (148). In a lengthy discussion against the backdrop of the
Chinese Nobel complex, Lovell investigates a cross-section of possible critical responses in
China to Gao’s winning of the Award, which vary from joy, jealousy, resentment, disappointment, hurt national pride to indifference. In her book The Politics of Cultural Capital
(2006) as well, she refers to the hostility that developed between writers still working in China and those in exile, regarding who best represents China on the world stage in order to deserve the coveted Prize (144). She locates the root of the controversy in the intellectuals’ obsession with
China, and the cultural complex of the country which suffers from an anxiety of recognition by the imperial West to prove the global contours it claims its culture has acquired now. Lovell’s act of disguising the critical voices under the assumed titles of critic A, B, C and D gives a fictive rather than a factual look to her arguments, while her inclusion of other anonymous sources like
“internet users” and “commentators in internet chat rooms” (27) cast a doubt about the seriousness and authenticity of her critical inquiry. However, most of the objections she mentions being leveled against Gao’s art fall short of a genuine understanding and appreciation of literature. For example, the complaint that as an exile writer, there is limited audience of
Gao’s works in China; that he has sacrificed his aesthetic neutrality and no-ism in exchange for his political stance on Mainland; that Gao is derivative of the West as well as the indigenous writers; that by using China to survive in the West, he has subscribed to the Western demand for
“the Hollywood Style Resistance Hero Challenges the Commie Devils” formula; that he lacks experience of Chinese life and as his art is “unconnected with contemporary China”, Gao is not Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 37
“good enough” (30) to represent China; that his language is ‘washed’ and ‘simplified by French’
(32), etc.
A dialogic engagement with many of the above issues ensues in the critical circle. For example, Mabel Lee’s article “Nobel in Literature 2000: Gao Xingjian’s Aesthetic of Fleeing”
(2003) seems to address some of the above questions. Herself an ethnic Chinese based in
Australia, she defends Gao’s exilic flight in relation to his concept of ‘cold literature’ as encapsulated in his philosophy of ‘no-ism’, and his creed of author as a non-hero. Focusing on his play Fleeing, she points out the general significance of flight from the author’s perspective; it is a flight from all political and ideological moorings: “The tragic event of Tiananmen Square … made him realize that for the writer to achieve total creative freedom required more than simply an environment where freedom of artistic expression existed. The writer needed to be in a constant state of abstract fleeing” (5), which, Lee quotes the author, is also a fleeing from ‘the enticements of the self’ (6). In “Freedom and Literature” Gao states that in view of the all- engulfing fanatical ties of the times, the only solution is to flee (16). He explains further: “… more difficult to flee are the dark shadows of the inner mind of the self…” (16). Lee reminds us of Gao’s own assertion that the right to discuss politics in writings does not necessarily tie him or his literature to the war-chariot of a particular camp; that the only loyalty he as a creative writer owes is to the artistic truth. As for the problematic of placing the laureate against the Chinese
Nobel complex, Yingjin Zhang (2005) among others has positioned Gao as ‘a cultural translator’ who migrating back and forth across linguistic and ethnic boundaries has integrated diverse cultural elements in his writings (127). Critics such as Carles Prado-Fonts (2006) have also critiqued the politics of recognition while talking about the marginalized position of literature written in Chinese or from China itself. That the West has got the authority to judge and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 38
canonize the rest has led to the erasure of many a non-Western voice in literature. The controversy about the political intentions behind the Award seems to have worn itself out; so does the doubt about Gao’s merit. The poetic depth and quality in his art that scholars have discovered ever since are a proof strong enough for the worth of the awardee.
Most of the early post-Nobel Award critics are intrigued by Gao’s art of characterisation and his study of self. The year 2002 is important in producing a variety of criticism on the same concern from different perspectives. His use of pronouns remains the key interest for studying his concept of self. Kwok-kan, for example, reads Gao’s narrative technique as symptomatic of the fluidity of an exile. It reflects a self-transcendent subjectivity which is based not only in
Chinese language where the subject of a sentence is often missing, but also in Chinese Daoism which sees language as a barrier in communication and human perception (12). The same interest in self engages Ming Jian to analyse the writer’s study of self on the basis of two incidents in Soul Mountain (2009). Taking pronouns as a trope for multiple subjectivities of the protagonist’s self, Ming notices a tension between the conscious and collective goal orientation of the Existentialist-Maoist discourse of self and the goal-less disorientation in the protagonist’s journey inspired by Zen-Buddhism. The critic asserts Gao’s stance as a doctrine-less individualist who rejects the socialist-realist doctrine popularised by the state, and believes that
“the elusive meaning of life is peculiar to each individual, realised in everyday life, and actualised in ‘living in the moment’” (97).
In a journal article (2002), Gang Gary Xu addresses the issue of self and its splitting into multiple pronouns of both genders to present a thesis on gendered subjectivity in Gao’s novels.
Addressing the question of gender instability in his use of pronouns, and relating it with the self- purification motif common to many Chinese texts including Gao’s, Gang deconstructs an earlier Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 39
reading of self beyond psychoanalysis by Terry Yip and Kwok-kan Tam (2001). Their concept of a non-gender-specific, asexual self is what Gang contests on the basis of Judith Butler’s notion of gender as a construct. Since the symbolic involves moral consciousness, the critic reads Gao’s ethics as based on a moral introspection and an understanding of the relationship between the self and the other. And through a metafictive discourse, this self also becomes an embodiment of literary imagination, and not “pre-symbolic” or “prelinguistic” as Yip and Kwok-kan would understand (114). Also drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, and the theory of sadomasochism,
Gang concludes that the pronouns in Gao represent a morally conscious, gendered subjectivity.
Gender and feminism form the base of another probe by Carlos Rojas (2002) who uses diaspora as one of the critical bases for an intensive, psychoanalytical/Oedipal study of the
‘issues of maternity, femininity, and ideology’ informing One Man’s Bible. Interpreting Gao’s without-ism as without-[femin]ism, Rojas argues about the ambivalent relationship Gao’s narrator has with the memory of his mother and past life in the novel. Defining diaspora as an act of displacement from “homeland” or “motherland” (171), the critic builds up the contention that the male narrator in exile looks back and negotiates with a maternalised landscape in a bid to come to terms with his own sexual identity. While doing so, he uses his heterosexual masculinity as a dominant space to marginalize the gender other, seeking in diaspora a sexual freedom unfettered by the ties of family or home. The narrator locates women in a series of displacements rooted in his early sexual interest in his mother. The prohibited erotic attraction for her is first transferred to other women who are the objects of his desire and then this desire is sublimated into the act of writing. This double displacement is reinforced by the narrator’s own doubly displaced position as a Chinese exile to the West now placed in Hong Kong. So writing becomes a substitute for the absent women the way women do so for the absent mother. The maternal Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 40
fantasy thus keeps on haunting him not only in his sexual relations with other women but in his writing as well.
The last few years have seen Gao becoming a focus of critical debate as a cosmopolitan writer. Jessica Yeung’s Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writings as Cultural Translations
(2008) appears the first extensive study of the whole literary corpus of Gao as a writer in exile.
The critic bases her study on the translation theory of the Tel Aviv School of Itamar Even-Zohar,
Gideon Toury and Ovidio Carbonell. The Polysystem theory of Even-Zohar emphasises the position of a translated work within the target culture; Toury integrates cultural and contextual details into the linguistic constructions of translated texts while Carbonello stresses the cultural- contextual dimensions only (10-11). Yeung’s purpose is to trace a close intertextual relationship between Gao’s works and European writings, a concern also shared by Mabel Lee, Tatlow
(2014) and earlier by Yingjin (2005). Yeung refers to Gao’s writings as “a translation of the
Modernist and Postmodernist writings paradigms” (10) into the Chinese polysystem. She takes translation as a ‘creative’ process of adaptation and transformation which generates different meanings in different cultures. According to her, a translated work fulfills the needs and requirements of the target culture rather than the source culture. Because Gao produced his fiction for the diasporic Chinese community, she argues, he is writing ‘a Chinese subjectivity’ under the conditions of writing prevailing in the West. This is what gives a global colour to his art. At another place (2014), Yeung has called Gao a ‘translated man’ “whose life is constantly exposed to different cultures and whose subjectivity is heavily inscribed with the traces of cultural negotiations and transfers” (100). She also mentions the power manipulation and other pitfalls of a translated text. However, her semantic extension of the term ‘translation’ seems to answer objections raised by some critics such as Weili Fau (2003) who attributes a number of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 41
mistakes in the English translation of Gao’s fiction to the translator’s negligence, ignorance and lack of contextual understanding of Chinese language (308-312).
Hiatus in response
As evident from above, the diasporic aspects of Gao’s writings have already become a recurrent debate among critics. Home appears in these studies only in terms of home country, and its psycho-emotive pull for exile, not as a cultural matrix shaping subjectivity, or a sense of at-home-ness a diaspora may seek abroad. That creates room to probe the same subject from a fresh perspective. What is new about this research is the thematic of home which changes its location with the change in the position of the subject as an exile and an immigrant. This is an angle which has not received much critical attention as yet. Lily Li (2014), no doubt, has discussed the complex relationship an exile develops with home in both of Gao’s novels. I find many of her views quite relevant to a discussion of Gao’s diaspora. For example, she reads the shift between the main narratorial voices in Soul Mountain as a shift from an emotionally crippled ‘you’ protagonist to a critically distanced ‘I’ narrator; i.e., a progression in an exilic mind from its obsession with home to freedom from that obsession. However, she restricts home to a singular construct, and discusses it through “a network of recurring ideas and metaphors central to the experience of exile” (205), some of which are open to re-interpretation. For instance, her reading of ‘the new born babe which cannot cry’ as the distress and helplessness of a writer in exile who is rendered speech-less in the host land. Taken in the context of Gao’s own beliefs as well as his born-again literary subjectivity, we find that he continued to write fiction in
France even in his own language and won the Nobel mainly on the strength of those writings. He wrote with the creed that a writer writes only for himself. Whether or not there is someone on the receiving end is none of his concern. In fact, the very act of writing vindicates his position of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 42
having re-claimed a powerful voice, a voice that could be heard all over the world in spite of the language barrier. By creating space for a minor language like Chinese in Europe, Gao seems to contest the linguistic hegemony of the colonial powers besides retaining his indigenous identity.
Since home in diaspora forms an important preoccupation in his fiction, and a recurrent motif in criticism, it requires a broader and a more intensive and multi-dimensional range of reading.
Exploring it in light of some of the key theoretical concepts of exile and diaspora, I hope I shall take the discussion forward to certain new dimensions of meaning. However, before defining my own research premise and the sources which form the conceptual framework underpinning it, it is advisable to give an overview of diaspora and home as conceptualised over years.
Theoretical Template: diaspora and home
The term diaspora is Greek in origin―dias, meaning ‘apart’, and ‘speirein’ to ‘spread out’; it particularly refers to the agricultural activity of scattering of seeds (McClennen 15).
Traditionally the term came to have a close association with the Jews for reasons simple enough; there have been recurrent patterns of exile and expulsion from the holy land in the early Jewish history since long (Safran 36). They were first expelled from their homeland by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and latest in the mid-twentieth century during the religio- ethnic cleansing of the German Jews by Adolf Hitler. Hebrew history, however, is not the only source of recording human displacement. Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic histories also provide the forms of physical dispersion from home. Rama, the avatar of Vishnu, chose self-eviction from
Ayodhya to spend fourteen years in ‘bunbaas’ (exile) to honour his father’s words to his step- mother (Ramayan). Siddhartha Gautama abandoned his comfortable home and family in
Kapilvastu and took to the roads in a bid to embrace an existence which, according to Karen
Armstrong, was “wide open” (1). The Holy Prophet Muhammad’s migration along with his close Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 43
companions from Makkah to Madinah became the first major case of migration in Islamic history. Settlement in Madinah, in Deleuze’s view, turned the pattern of society from tribal nomadism to the rooted, sedentary mode of life. However, all three religions encapsulate the idea of self-purification and spiritual regeneration in a ritual journey or pilgrimage. From the forced dispersion of the Jews as the diasporic prototype (Safran), the term has travelled in modern times to mean any kind of dispersal including trade or labour migrations such as of the Chinese, the
Turks or the Mexicans, to name just a few of the diasporic communities from across the world visibly present in the West now (Baubock and Faist). A sub-category of post-colonial cultural studies, diaspora thus refers to any displacement at international level, a part of what James
Clifford sums up as “the 20th century post-World War II process of decolonization, increased immigration, global communication and transport―a whole range of phenomena that encourage multi-locale attachments, dwelling, and traveling within and across nation” (306). Though directly or indirectly related to a movement from the erstwhile colonies towards the capitalist metro-pole, diaspora could be applied to ‘a widening range of migration phenomena’ not always bound by economic factors. Of these, particularly relevant to the present research is dispersion from home of a self-exile who seeks deterritorialisation from fixed ideological locations.
In traditional literary discourses of the West, home at first signifies a familiar place of habitation for a family which gives its inmates a sense of belonging, rootedness and psychological security. To the colonialists, it is the idealized motherland which holds each of its sons abroad into a bond of unflinching loyalty. Whatever they gain outside in terms of power, knowledge or economic gains must be carried home as spoil. Things acquire or lose their significance in their relation to home; hence the English idiomatic expression ‘nothing to write back home about’. The modernists best exemplify this ‘fetishization’ of home. At a time when Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 44
wars and decolonization movements started de-stabilising the power position of the West, modern home still connoted a pure fixed centre, a symbol of order and stability in the midst of chaos, a place where to ‘start from’ and to ‘arrive at’, to quote T. S. Eliot. This ideological centricity of home seems to have been transmitted into colonies, each of which after having long been denied recognition by the colonisers got fixated with a craving for its own ethnic roots
(Gabriel). Hence the notion of nationalism as a binding force in the decolonized world. In her thesis on the Indian diaspora, Gabriel has analysed the construction of a stable, pure, unifying national culture in these countries which by homogenizing the texture of home have perpetuated the colonial binaries of self and others within each nation-state. Threatened by the influx of labour from the erstwhile periphery, the Centre on the other hand, too, felt the need to ‘purify’ itself of alien elements (Nasta 2003). In the wake of such monologic moves, cultural theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, JanMohamed, Paul
Gilroy, James Clifford, Gloria Anzaldua and Rosi Braidotti etc. contest the formation of home on exclusive ethno-centric lines and propound the dialogic notions of ‘in-between’/‘third’ space,
‘border’ position and ‘double’, ‘mestiza’ or ‘nomadic’ consciousness all of which necessitate thinking outside home.
Home thus is re-defined by cross pollinations and cultural negotiations in the borderlands
(Anzaldua 1987), the double consciousness of ‘the Black Atlantic’ as a syncretic corrective for
Nativist discourses of Western modernity (Gilroy 1992), hybridity that resides in the interstitial spaces (Bhabha 1994), and the construct of identity as always in process, always incomplete
(Hall 1994). Gilroy’s home built on waters echoes in Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid modernity’ (2000) which undermines solidity of all forms of social construction such as home or subjectivity. Modernity for Bauman is a continuous process of ‘becoming’, of avoiding Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 45
completion, of staying underdefined. Each new structure replacing the previous one is only a momentary settlement. To be modern now means “an infinity of improvement, with no final state in sight and none desired” (82). Already the geo-political remapping of the world as a result of post-colonial diaspora has influenced the psycho-cultural contours of human mind. This is most emphatically visible in the postmodernists’ valorization of exile and migration, which destabilises the singularity, fixity and purity of home. Home is a more pluralistic, mobile and contingent construct in the new context. Still Euro-centric, its space is now being shared by a constant inflow of ethno-racial and cultural ‘others’ who form the peripheral diasporic communities. With the advent of global capitalism in the contemporary era, the transnational flows of capital, goods and peoples have further dissolved ideological borders (Madsen and
Riemenschnitter 1), compelling large scale negotiation, and re-definition of diasporas as locally and demographically non-stable communities (ibid 5), and home as provisional, contingent, or multiple.
In the secular context of the present world, the diasporic communities have been identified in variegated ways: exiles, refugees, expatriates, emigrées (Said 1984); exile, immigrants, colonialists, anthropologists (JanMohamed 1992), and exile, guest workers, overseas community and ethnic community among others (Brah 1996; Tololian 1991). Another variant of the term appearing in critical discourse is nomad (Braidotti 2012; Said 1984; Deleuze and
Guattari 1980) which in being synonymous with vagrant or vagabond (Hansen 2004) semantically relates in its roguish connotation to the classical term of ‘picaro’. Coming from different places, though the diasporic communities are conveniently huddled together under a single umbrella term (Ahmed 345), they share an internally heterogeneous profile. The circumstances forcing them out of their country may vary: war, civil unrest, ethnic conflict or Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 46
cleansing, political/ideological oppression, natural calamity, poverty etc. Of the above mentioned categories, exile and refugee imply forced dislocation whereas immigrant or emigrant implies a person who goes out more or less by choice (McClennen). In Rebecca Grinberg’s view, though exile and immigrant are overlapping conditions of expatriation, exile’s is a more unique one in that though it is voluntary, it has no possibility of return. Kaminsky, however, terms ‘voluntary exile’ as “an oxymoron that masks the cruelty limited choice imposes on the subject” (9).
McClennen quotes dictionary sources to locate the etymology of ‘exile’ in the Latin root-word
‘exilium’―‘ex’ meaning out and ‘ilium’ ground, land or soil (14-15): to uproot a plant from its original soil and replant it elsewhere. Though exile may be an internal state so one could be an exile even at home (Hong Zeng), physical dispersion from home/land is a characteristic feature in classical definitions. As one of the most reluctant displacements from home, it problematizes the position of home as both attractive and repelling. Whether externally imposed or self-willed,
Said calls it a painful and debilitating experience in the beginning. However, it has also drawn critical attention for its creative potential. Said refers to exile as a highly fertile site, quoting
George Steiner that a whole genre of twentieth-century literature is “extra-terrestrial” (137), i.e., by and about exiles. Michael Seidel also emphasizes a flowering of literary imagination making an “artistic virtue of exilic necessity” (5). One soon learns to surmount pain as one confronts the imperative of making room in the host land to survive. So beginnings, as Said theorizes, are always left behind (77). Out of this dialectic of push and pull, of rootedness and transcendence of home emerges Claudio Guillѐn’s theory of ‘exile’ and ‘counter-exile’ literatures. The first category is loaded with a personal and “direct expression of sorrow” at leaving home, while the other offers “wide dimensions of meaning” by transcending the earlier attachments to home as the place of native origin (272). Home becomes problematic in that exile may tend to embrace as Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 47
well as evade it. This very ambivalence makes it an intriguing area to investigate particularly in a self-displaced writer like Gao who attaches great importance to writers’ state of exile.
Contemporary critics seem to engage in a dialogue while defining home in diaspora. In the transcultural context of the present world where there is a greater number of migrants uprooted from home and transplanting themselves elsewhere, the question about which place to call one’s home pops up. Mallet (2004) points out the difficulty in research to conceptualize and operationalize a multi-dimensional concept like home. The post-structuralist stress on the multiplicity and indeterminacy of meaning also makes it difficult to define. The slipperiness of the term increases in relation to diaspora which itself destabilizes stable concepts: “What exactly is home?” (228) asks Kinefuchi (2010). Is it simply “a physically or territorially marked space”
(ibid), or “a lived experience of locality” (Brah 1996 192)? Sara Ahmed seeks to address the ambiguity thus: “Certainly, the definitions of home shift across a number of registers: home can mean where one usually lives, or …where one’s family lives, or … one’s native country” (338).
If it is “the originary territory from which diasporic ‘scatterings’ commence” (Meyers 132), one can see why it is defined negatively in critical discourse, i.e., in relation to the homelessness of migration and exile (Ahmed 339; JanMohamed 223). Carol Davies also affirms that it comes to have a meaning particularly when one experiences a level of displacement from it (113); so does
Friedman: “It comes into being most powerfully when it is gone, lost, left behind, desired and imagined” (201). That explains why William Safran’s (1991) “expatriate minority communities”
(83) once dispersed from their ‘center’ do preserve their group identity and solidarity with the homeland and pin their hope to an eventual return (83-84).
The diasporist’s connection with a prior home, no doubt, is very strong and deep. But one discerns a change in their attitude towards home as well as how those in the host societies look Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 48
upon them. Until recently the Jewish expulsion remained a source of spiritual anguish for the nation, the cause being a fear of racial extinction or loss of identity in strange, hostile lands. So
Safran (1991) combined a variety of collective experiences to define exiles as expatriate minority communities, which are dispersed from their center to peripheral places (83). As they pin their hope to an eventual return, their solidarity with the homeland accounts for their alienation in the host country (83-84). Literature testifies how until recently the Christian hosts looked upon the
Jews as outcasts—the homeless and the abject; a threat of economic displacement being main cause for estrangement on their side. Clifford (1994) agrees with Safran that displaced people’s connection with a prior home is strong enough to resist erasure (310). However, he contests the
Safranian ‘centered’ model in that diaspora cultures may allow constructions of other, alternative homes as well (306). The initial reading of home as a constant has thus given way to several revised versions of home even in Safran (1999). Similarly a large number of Jews settled in the
United States now hardly feel like going back ‘home’. This shift from the old to the new notion of diaspora is a journey from religious to secular reinvention of the term. Not only that; it also entails a fundamental interrogation of the nationalistic, Nativist construct of home as a pure, ethnically exclusive site, the ties once attached to it, and the identity one originally associated with it.
Exploring the spatial consequences of migrations in European cities, Nishat Awan posits:
“The diasporas living in cities such as London form constituent parts of a global condition where a simplistic notion of home no longer applies. Home can be many places or none” (1). This, she contends, particularly applies to the second or third generation of the displaced populations, where the relationship to any original home is simply not there (4). In the process of dispersion, the idea of an ‘originary’ home first dissolves into multiple homes, and ultimately gets located in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 49
a larger transcultural and more fluid psychic scape. As Benzi Zhang has stressed: “modern diaspora disrupts the apparent closure of home and generates transnational, trans-local communications and communities” (103). Thus human mobility becomes symptomatic of a mental and psychological fluidity. The grand narrative of home as “a purified space of belonging” appears an undesirable state of being in which “the subject is too comfortable to question the limits or borders of her or his experience—indeed where the subject is so at ease that she or he does not think” (Ahmed 239). Ahmed contends that in being too familiar, bordered, safe and comfortable to desire change, it is inimical to growth, maturity and critical activity. Confined inside the borders, one tends to be ethnocentric, and misses the opportunity for cross-border interaction and affiliations. Ouster in this context is liberating. Of the seven dimensions of home Somerville (1992) has categorized―shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode and paradise―almost all reinforce a sense of imprisonment within the constrictive borders. In literary and critical discourses of diaspora, bond with one’s homeland is often represented as an umblical cord binding a foetus with the mother; so longing for home/land is equivalent to a child’s fixation with mother/land, which it must surmount in the process of growing up. The English expression ‘home-sick’ for one missing home abroad connotes that fixation with home is not healthful. Friedman testifies this : “Longing for home is the body’s desire―a feeling of homesickness experienced viscerally in the flesh … But homesickness too is a cryptogram; the word opens up opposites: sick for home or sick of home” (191). To be at home in the diasporic context is equivalent to “the absence of desire, and the absence of an active engagement with others through which desire engenders movement across boundaries” (Ahmed
239). Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 50
The main barrier to an engagement with others, according to Epstein, is the loyalty one has for the “customs, traditions, conventions, which a person receives as a member of a particular group and ethnos. Among the many freedoms proclaimed as rights of the individuals, there emerges yet another freedom–freedom from one’s own culture, in which one was born and educated” (327). The regular doses of love and loyalty for home generate solidarity which forestalls deviance or departure. Little wonder that Mary Douglas calls home tyrannical (287) in regularity of its processes. In its regulatory scrutiny and control, “it cripples and stifles” (288).
That accounts for home as becoming problematic in diaspora; triggering both nostalgia and resistance. The tyranny home exerts through its regulatory bonds and later its strong pull is one of the first contentions the present research intends to address.
We have travelled a long way from the conventional location of home as a concretely built, solidly grounded house or a country, both of which are fixed referents to socio-cultural belonging or ethno-racial and national identity. It is dissolved with the emergence of the migrant
“for whom”, to quote Ray Chow, “homelessness is the only home ‘state’” (197). Diasporic mobility thus symptomizes a state of mind, a movement away from constrictive borders. It creates room for negotiating and re-negotiating relations in a spatio-temporal fluidity where “the process of home-coming–completing the story, domesticating the detour–becomes an impossibility” (Chambers 4). As Al-Ali and Koser elucidate: “Conceptions of home are not static but dynamic process involving the acts of imagining, creating, unmasking, changing, losing and moving ‘homes’” (6). In Ahmed’s words: “The challenge to the physical confinement of home leads to a home that travels with the subject that travels: a home that … is internalized as part of the nomadic consciousness which refuses to belong to a particular place, and belongs instead to the globe as such” (338). This is another contention the present study takes up: home located in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 51
an internal nomadic space which in its openness to dialogue has the potential to “bridge and abridge” (Benzi Zhang 133) differences.
The diasporic subjectivities
While incorporating many of the above concepts, the central premise of this research locates home in the binary based structures of powers which displace the exile, forcing him to disperse outward in literal as well as figurative sense. Gao’s fiction shows the subject tending to move away from any centre of power to the margins, and by doing so, destabilize the binaries inherent in the dominant system. Since this study first deals with the ambivalence of an exile towards home, the views of Edward Said (1935-2003) on exile, home and belonging (1984) form an important source to begin with. Initiating a debate on exile’s relationship with home and host countries, Said’s notions of ‘double vision’, ‘interstitial spaces’ and ‘border-crossing’ keep on influencing subsequent critics like Bhabha, JanMohamed and Anzaldua, to name just a few. His reflections are based on his lived experience as a Palestinian self-exile who was driven from place to place before settling down as a professor of English and Comparative Literature in
Columbia University, the USA. Said was one of the founders of the post-colonial and diaspora studies. With his transnational placement as a Christian born in Jerusalem, he became a spokesman of the Palestinian cause in the West. Home in his context means the cultural environment that shapes and determines the position of an intellectual. Since it houses those who belong to it and keeps all others out, it is an exclusive site “created by the community of language, culture and customs” (139). “Beyond the frontier between us and outsiders”, Said continues, “is the territory of not belonging—of refugees and displaced persons” (139). One such category of displacement is exile which he describes as a person who has picked up a quarrel with home. It is a painful state of being torn from one’s tradition, family and geography (140). Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 52
Said starts with the sadness of an exile’s predicament but soon finds a creative potential in the experience. Indeed when an artist like James Joyce chooses to be in exile, he opines, the implicit intention is “to give force to his artistic vocation” (145). Simultaneously inhabiting at least two homes, exile exercises the right “to refuse to belong entirely” (140) to either. This generates a
‘critical detachment’ and a ‘plurality of vision’ with which to view the native as well as the adopted countries and both their cultures. Disruptive of the normative order, exile thus acquires a positive valence in terms of its liberating influence. Said valorises border crossing as it opens the door for the Bakhtinean ‘dialogue’ or negotiations in the interstitial spaces. Exiles are liberated from the ‘imprisonment’ of home (148) and know “that in a secular, contingent world, homes are always provisional” (154). Significantly enough, as Said draws to the close, he quotes a twelfth- century monk from Saxony who upholds home-lessness as the most privileged state of being.
Said places home within the borders of home and host countries, with exile simultaneously inhabiting both the territories, though equally estranged in each. However, he ends up re-contextualising exile’s real home in a homeless, borderless space, an internal territory one is able to reach by breaking the ‘barriers of thoughts and experiences’. It is that ultimate frame of mind when one learns to transcend “national or provincial limits” (148) and become homeless. Developing the Saidian notions of ‘border crossing’ and ‘homelessness’,
JanMohamed, a contemporary Indo-Kenyan professor of English at Berkeley, builds his theory of ‘border intellectuals’ in his seminal text on exile: “Worldliness-without-World,
Homelessness-as-Home” (1994). As compared to an immigrant, he conceives exile as
“involuntary or enforced rupture” (223) of an individual subject from the collective subject of a state. Carrying his indigenous subjectivity forward, an intellectual in exile eventually enters a state of ‘worldliness-without-world’ and ‘homelessness-as-home’. The former refers to the fluid Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 53
subject-position of an author in exile, and the latter to the freedom of not inhabiting a fixed space, of not belonging to any given order (231-232). According to JanMohamed, the
‘intentionality’ behind border-crossing shapes the construction of subjects as ‘syncretic’ or
‘specular’ border intellectual: the first may refer to the case of an immigrant who is able to syncretise the elements of two or more cultures, while the latter an exile who stands detached and holds both cultures to critical scrutiny, without subscribing to the fixity of either. In a book chapter, Gita Rajan finds Jan Mohamed’s definition of both the categories of intellectuals
“brilliant and powerful” (80). If syncretism is an arrival, specularity as an inability to feel completely at home in any society is possiblistic. In this context, a border intellectual is neither a traditional nor an organic intellectual in the Gramscean sense, but remains an itinerant: completely free ‘from loyalty and subordination’ to any specific ideology, culture, system, or world order. Both Said and JanMohamed could be important sources in discussing Gao’s own position as a ‘no-ist’ or a de-territorialised subject in exile.
The deterritorialised subject
The Saidian notion of exile as a constant search for alternative territories of thought and experience, and JanMohamed’s concept of formation of a homeless subjectivity take us to the notion of a de-territorialised subject in A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (1980). This opens multiple other directions for the above debate to follow. Here, diaspora is not necessarily physical uprooting only; nor is home to be, of necessity, a physical locale alone. However, since home at literal level is a territory and diasporic dispersion an act of de-territorialisation, these find their representation in the theory of ‘territory’ in the two critics.
Though they talk with reference to capitalism as “a force that de-territorialises” in terms of transfer of wealth and labour without respect to borders (Rodowick 90), their conceptualization Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 54
of the terms is applicable to the culture of power and hegemony which may turn an individual into an exile anywhere in the world. If to be at home means to belong to a particular fixed territory and be bound by its rules, a semantic inflection of the expression ‘to be territorialized’ implies an object position of being subject to the dominant norms and customs, values and ideology; i.e., submitting to the institutional control of a society or state. If home is a fixed, settled order, an exile not belonging to any settled order is beyond its pale. Simone Aurora calls it a non-territorial status, or a ‘deterritorialised’ state. As a familiar, over-protective, highly intrusive ideological apparatus of all rooted societies, home exercises a subtle coercion to territorialize individuals to the dominant system of thought, belief and practice. Diaspora in this context becomes a discursive trope for a resistant move, an ideological de-territorialization from the institutional control of a static, ‘sedentary’ socio-political order.
The Deleuzian territory is “a space delimited by stable borders, by fixed confines” of the inside and outside, thus setting up at least two separated areas of reality: one inside the border and another outside (Aurora 2). Ronald Bogue draws on animal ethology in the Eleventh Plateau to explain how Deleuze and Guattari extend the biological term of ‘territoriality’ to “a mode of social organization” (91). Birds and animals use their songs or colors to specify their individual territories and guard these against possible intrusion or encroachment to protect their line.
Similarly, humans build home as a private territory, and jealously guard the purity of its territorial borders defined by politics of family, roots, nation-state, class, race, gender or language. The conventional societies locate power in the center of a territory, and conceive individuals as ‘unified thinking’ logo-centric subjects. The Deleuzian diaspora space, on the other hand, is home to the schizophrenic, the de-centred, the marginal and the minority.
“Minority here”, as Andrew Lattas explains, “is not a quantitative phenomenon but comes from Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 55
being subordinated” (100). Migration and cross-cultural intermingling of late capitalism has punctured the grand narrative of home as a unified, homogenous social space in the same way as deconstructionism questioned the myth of humans as unified, thinking subjects. Deleuze and
Guattari conceive subjects as nomadic: having schizophrenic splits and multiplicities, and capable of spilling in multiple directions. Defined by difference and multiplicity, “a nomadic subject opposes and disrupts those processes of hierarchisation and centralization in thought which reproduce and extend the State space” (Lattas 98). This research takes up the study of
Gao’s subject as decentering from a totalitarian home/state and its hierarchal structures of family/nation. Prefering the minority status of an exile and a migrant, he relocates home in an internal space where to shake off some of the tyranny home and its culture still wield over him.
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980, tr.1986), the nomadic locality is represented as an external, open space, a space without borders or enclosures (380).
While home has fixed borders, and is rooted in terms of both a centralized family system and continuity of a family-tree or blood-line, nomadic space is averse to reproducing the tree form, and favours “the wandering rhizome which exploits the contours and fissures of the multiple surfaces it crosses” (380). The density of my argument may also require a relation between
Gao’s subject-in-process and a rhizome. Since home is one of the first ideological state/societal apparatuses, it intrudes into the process of ‘subjectification’ of individuals, denying them agency from an early stage. Buchanan elucidates two forms of subjectivation in Deleuze: one individuation “obliged by a power whose command is “you will be One”. The other consists of marking the individual once and for all, with a known and recognizable identity―you will be
White or Black, masculine or feminine, straight or gay, colonizer or colonized, and so on” (44).
Hurst Ruthof explains it thus: “Deleuze distinguishes subjectification as the formation and fixing Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 56
of subjectivity from subjectivation or the self positing of subjectivity” (185). Leaving home in this context is like going out of the externally imposed frames of self or subjectivity. Like rhizome, the nomad undergoes a continuously decentralized process of subject formation. Such a subject is not subject to the tree-like “centralised control or structure” (Norton 1448) of a particular state, society or culture, but intellectually grows outward to the margins. Conceiving subjects as being constantly ‘territorialised’ by tyrannical forces in each society/culture, Deleuze and Guattari look for “the lines of flight [by which] writers detach themselves―and their texts―from an immobilising order” (Norton 1448). Home at both individual and collective levels, as Lattas has explained, is “an apparatus of capture, regulating the exit and entry points, the gates and speeds of de-territorialisation flows” (99). To protect their artistic agency, writers
“‘deterritorialise’ themselves from and within official culture before ‘reterritorialising’ themselves elsewhere” (Norton 1449). Since re-territorialisation implies subjection to another fixed order, a nomadic subject remains in a constant process of de-territorialisation or
‘becoming’. It involves continuous movement of the subject from majority to a minority position; from being a ‘majoritarian’ to becoming a ‘minoritarian’.
As for the rationale for selecting Deleuze and Guattari as a critical source for discussing
Gao’s subject in diaspora, what Nicholas Birns says about Foucault is equally true of the two critics: their importance to literary studies is not so much in how they read the texts but in principles of reading that can inspire others to read texts in their light. Discussing the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari to literary criticism, Dan Haines calls them the “inheritors of the French way of philosophizing” (32): they elucidate their philosophic concerns through literature like
Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. Apart from the fact that each has made a number of literary studies, “the exhaustive literary references and allusions” in their texts not only bring art and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 57
literature at par with science and philosophy, but a literary character read through their concepts gets a new life within the text (33). “The ceaseless flood of references that tirelessly nourish
[their] texts” stuns the readers (Buchanan 15). They also engage in ‘the literary’ in terms of their style, characterized by “a rhetorical playfulness usually associated with literature rather than philosophy” (Haines 35). It is this playfulness which Foucault finds as the main ‘trap’ of Deleuze and Guattari: “It is through humour that something essential and highly serious takes place in their text … the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives”
(Introduction 6). Expounding the Deleuzian binaries of the molar and the molecular, Mullarkey states: “In most of his works Deleuze most often posits a multiplicity of tyrannies―human and non-human, organic and inorganic, molar and molecular … micro-fascist and macro-fascist”
(65).
The extensive range of Deleuze and Guattari covers gender politics as well. While many cultural theorists tend to forget the presence of women around, the two critics are gender inclusive, not entirely endrocentric, though their allowing women ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’ has ironically irked feminists. Luce Irigaray for one protests that by denying them ‘being’
“Deleuze and Guattari participate in the subordination, or possibly even the obliteration of women’s struggle for autonomy, identity and self-determination, an erasure of a certain, very concrete and real set of political struggle” (27). Now, in Deleuzean context, ‘being’ as a mode of stagnant, static living is peculiar to the dominant subject position. Braidotti explicates that the standardized mainstream subject is Majority: white, heterosexual, property owning and male, while ‘becoming’ entails a continuous process involving qualitative shifts from being molar or majority to becoming molecular or minority. Allowing women to move from ‘being’ to Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 58
‘becoming’ not only grants them subjective agency but also prevents them from replicating the majoritarian thought system. Herself a feminist critic, Braidotti defends the Deleuzian stance thus: “Ultimately what Deleuze finds objectionable in feminist theory is that it perpetuates flat repetitions of dominant values or identities, which it claims to have repossessed dialectically.
This amounts to perpetuating reactive, molar thinking …” (40). So the most important point to remember about Deleuzian ‘becoming’ is that it concerns as much women as men, allowing them an equal privilege of ‘becoming-woman’ of a Majoritarian woman. This to borrow
Irigaray’s own term means becoming-‘other of the Other’. In documenting such a ‘becoming’ in his literary texts, Gao subscribes to the gender balance Deleuze maintains in his philosophical precepts.
Haines complains that in spite of their prominent investment in literature, Deleuze and
Guattari have remained either totally absent in the theory readers, or under-represented; merely
“cited in passing” (41). In the scholarly projects where one “privileges the textual, and makes reading of the text as text central” (41), if ever scholars select them as a theoretical base, they tend to overlook the textuality of a text, and focus instead on the author in relation to the two theorists (54). Gilman refers to A Thousand Plateaus as a “most difficult book” (657) among the reviewers, comprising “a series of brief, seemingly random essays on hot topics” (658) which do not make an easy read. Paul Patton also calls them “as anomalous within the contemporary philosophical landscape” as they are “anonymous within literary criticism” (1). Positing their seminal text as a book whose time has not yet come, [with] its conceptual riches largely unexplored” (2), Patton comments on its density of texture as well as structure thus: “It deploys variable, local rules in order to construct a bewildering arrays of concepts such as … de- territorialisation, order-word, … nomadism and different kinds of becoming. … The conceptual Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 59
architecture of this book obeys a logic of multiplicities in which the same concepts recur, but always in different relation to other concepts such that their nature in turn is transformed” (2).
No wonder that all these various qualities of subject and style led Foucault to predict that
“Perhaps one day this century is to be known as Deleuzian” (76). This prediction becomes the titular contention of a whole volume of critical debate A Deleuzian Century? (1999) to explore multiple dimensions of Deleuze’s philosophy in various contemporary contexts.
The originality of the present project lies in that it addresses a double gap: first it explores
Gao’s home in diaspora, and secondly it draws on Deleuze and Guattari as an important alternative base for a literary study. It also stands out for making use of the two critics for interpreting the texts rather than their author. In generating fresh dimensions of meaning, I rely on Gao’s fiction as prime source of reference. I shall support my arguments with examples from the texts rather than Gao’s personal views or philosophies. In this I subscribe not only to what
Haines has laid down as a rule for a literary study, but also what Jessica Yeung holds as the correct way for studying literature:
In many instances I find Gao’s treatises to be more the writer’s own artistic
aspirations than an objective description of the texts. In some other instances, I
find his practice simply at odds with his treatises. After all, a text articulates not
only the conscious but also the subconscious and the unconscious. I see it as the
critic’s job to go beyond what the writer is conscious of in order to open up other
possibilities of interpretation. (16)
Forced by the Communist backlash in 1989, many Chinese artists took to ‘flight’ from
China, and ‘reterritorialised’ themselves in the West in the literal as well as figurative sense of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 60
the word. This research as stated earlier is going to investigate one such ‘flight’ from home. The research design, as announced earlier, covers discussion under three main heads―location, dislocation and relocation. This conceptual sequence envisages a departure from what
McClennen calls “an originally unified entity” (15) or self. The brand of subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari is nomadic—fragmented, non-unitary and multi-layered. Uprooted from home and remaining un-rooted to any single, bordered territory, it enters into alliance with the proverbial others, and embraces what Bogue calls “cooperative values of mutual enhancement and inter- dependence [rather than] the competitive values of struggle and domination” (101). This is particularly relevant to my discussion of Gao’s subject who not only moves from his gender- conscious and ethnocentric base to a more inclusive mental space, but also evades any final territorialisation or arrival at home.
The progression of argument
Taking home in its literal sense, I intend to first draw on Saidian theory of exile to measure the scale of his problematic relationship with home. As a bordered and safely guarded territory, home has an obviously Chinese location, where the subject feels trapped in both his private and public domains as member of a patriarchal family and citizen of a totalitarian state, estranged and marginalized in both. He has inherited the germs of alienation from home which ironically has centuries-old history of diaspora permeating its socio-cultural space, a fact the state does all it can to silence in a bid to homogenise the nation under one ideological umbrella.
The spirit of freedom and the parallel force to curb it inherent in the Chinese culture creates a dialogic tension which is reflected in the duality of exile’s response to home. In the second phase of my discussion, the subject’s dislocation from home comes under focus. As the hegemonic forces at home intensify their bid to territorialise him, a broadening of the critical base is needed Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 61
to include power related concepts such as of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. In the face of collective efforts on the part of both family and state to ‘interpellate’ and ‘normalize’ him, the subject exercises his right to choose, and flees from the scene of oppression. The controversial
‘flight’ is an artist’s way of resisting the ideological indoctrination at the hands of a hegemonic socio-political order. Resistance in Deleuze and Guattari, as Paul Patton (2010 138) has suggested, does not connote seizing state control or party leadership but qualitative changes or flows of transformation at the level of subjectivity. While discussing the motif of absconding in
Gao with reference to the writer’s need to be “in a constant state of abstract fleeing” (5), Mabel
Lee has also related it to his notion of ‘escape from self’. I mean to develop this idea in relation to the Deleuzian theory of a nomadic subject who is able to land in a ‘minoritarian’ space, a personal space broad enough to include and accommodate others. In the ‘process ontology’ of
Deleuze and Guattari, ‘becoming-minoritarian’ denotes a continual process of ‘becoming’―the movement of a major, molar, or territorialized subject towards a minor, molecular, or deterritorialised state of subjectivity. Liberated from what Jacob calls the need to belong, or be housed as it is the case of a refugee or a migrant, Gao’s exile chooses to remain a nomad in terms of resisting culturally pure and exclusive identity tags on his way to ‘becoming’ gender- inclusive and transcultural. Himself a minority, he is willing to enter into alliance, however temporary, with gender, ethnic or racial minorities. Home thus stands re-defined; an internal space structured around human relations rather than a concrete structure built on the binaries of common ancestry or ethno-racial, class or gender belonging. As for the rhizomic structure of the subject, it is discernible in Gao’s use of different pronouns as symptomatic of a schizophrenic split within a single self, each of its multiple sub-selves representing one dimension of experience, or one level of intensity. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 62
If home is a bordered territory mapped by gender, class or ethnic binaries, the diasporic movement away from home is first measureable in the subject’s transformation through a
‘becoming-woman’ of a man. It is relevant to quote Lattas about the philosophy of ‘becoming’ in
Deleuze here: “The universal subject to be transformed is always masculine even if the person is a woman, while the transformative operation to be performed in the subject is rendered feminine.
Women … articulate the transformative power of the margin, of the periphery…” (100). The qualitative growth continues in the subject who as “a homeless, doctrine-less world wanderer”
(Liu Zaifu 242) is now able to relate even to the Blacks, the perpetual minority in the predominantly White culture of the West. In investigating the process of ‘becoming’ at gender, cultural and ethno-racial levels, this research opens similar other areas in Gao’s fiction for subsequent critics to explore.
The broad spectrum of diaspora allows the theoretical base to expand at places to accommodate other post-colonial, geo-political, historical, sociological and transcultural concerns. The contemporary interaction and intermingling of peoples and cultures through global diaspora contest loyalty to the fixed, well-defined, ‘monolithic’ categories of identity, and generate the concept of a ‘third’, hybrid or liminal space to inhabit. In his theory of cultural hybridity (1994), Homi Bhabha has disrupted the narratives of binary constructs of identity as well as “originary, initial” (1), unitary subjectivities. The third-ness of his ‘third space’ is defined by the cultural ambivalence and ambiguity diasporas bring into being while negotiating between home and host lands. The interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibilities of a dialogue, a room for alternative readings and perspectives. As an alternative subject position, third space goes beyond the either/or dualism, and accommodates the
‘simultaneity of also/and (Ikas and Wagner 2008). Studies have also sought location of third Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 63
space in non-Eurocentric places (Shulze-Engeler). Gao’s One Man’s Bible provides one such example by setting the action in a transcultural Hong Kong.
Transcultural negotiations are specially needed for peace in the world today where “fixed cultural idenetities based on race, ethnos, religion, or ideological commitments [have] turned out to be a source of conflict and violence” (Epstein 327). Gao’s subjects in diaspora are able to
“transcend the narrowness of traditional monoculltural ideas … [and] develop transcultural understanding” (Welsch 202) of themselves as well as others. Where human desire for roots sought expression in the construction of home, which in its land-bound fixity and stability symptomizes static identity constructs, Gao highlights a parallel impulse to move, which is productive of fluid human subjectivity partaking of the global culture. The progression of these arguments shall be strictly controlled by the research questions asked at each stage of discussion.
Key Research Questions
The first set of questions I intend to address relate to the location of home and the making of an exile. They are: What is ‘originary’ home like in Gao’s fiction? How does it become a problematic site? How does an exile defy the tyranny home exercises through home rules, conventions and cultural norms? What is his response to home in exile? How does he negotiate a relationship with it at individual and collective levels?
My next points of inquiry are: What causes the subject’s dislocation from home? As a socio-political territory, how does home wield its power to territorialise individuals? What is the nature of ‘flight’ in Gao? Is flight from home a cowardly act of withdrawal or a form of resistance of the subject, his de-territorialisation? Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 64
Subsequent questions I seek to answer are: Where does exile re-locate home in diaspora?
If the minority position of diaspora involves a constant movement toward ‘becoming- minoritarian’, how does it help the exile relocate home in a non-territorial space? How far is the subject able to step out of home in terms of his gender and ethno-cultural affiliations? Is there any place in the world one could call home?
Needless to say, multiple other questions are expected to crop up in the midst of investigating the above issues. Besides a geographically bound site, how can home grow out of its physical location? Is there any possibility of home outside home or host country, of resisting the politics of identity and exclusion? Is diaspora a non-stop nomadic process with no arrivals?
Does arrival arrest nomadic flow? Is homelessness a compulsive urge against all types of territorial rootedness? These questions are relevant in assessing the subject position of Gao and many of his fictive subjects. Displaced from home and seeking relocation or settlement elsewhere, they learn to dis-place home from its geographically fixed location and re-construct it as a provisional, relational site which is both external and internal. Home can be anywhere; it is where one feels at home even if for the short span of three nights spent in a hotel with an old acquaintance. This is in sharp contrast to the essentialist assumptions about home that the state floated inside China. we have already seen how the state controlled diaspora fiction would have us believe that to whichever place in the world the Chinese might move, they remain essentially
Chinese at heart and as such rooted to China. Gao’s subjects, on the contrary, have a more complex and equivocal relationship with home/land. They carry their Sino-centred, Confucius- conscious, hetero-erotic self to a broader, more fluid cultural space and learn to enter in dialogue with hitherto invisible others―whether gender, sexual, racial, ethnic or class. With their home- fixation thus surmounted, they attain an at-home-ness anywhere and start becoming part of an Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 65
international, global community, no longer in need of rootedness to fixed territories of isms and ideologies.
While in China, Gao contested the coercive forces at home. He dissociated from politics of the state and the masses, keeping himself non-aligned through his policy of ‘no-ism’. He refused to compromise his artistic independence unlike Mo Yan (b. 1955) the resident Nobel laureate (2012) from China, whose penname meaning ‘Don’t speak’ ironically speaks of an agreed muteness about certain things in lieu for his ‘Chinese’ domicile. Similarly, unlike Dai
Sijie (b. 1954), his junior compatriot in France, Gao chooses to write his fiction in Chinese. In refusing to completely erase his ethnic identity, he retains his exilic status in the host land as well. Gao hates tyranny of all kinds, whether in the East or the West, in politics or art. His
‘deterritorialisation’ from fixed ideologies helps him guard his own ‘territorial’ prerogatives as an artist moving in a diasporic space. These are some of the premises this study seeks to explore with following objectives in mind:
Main Objectives
1. The first objective of this research is to introduce Gao Xingjian as an alternative site for
indepth investigation in view of a dearth of extensive criticism on his fiction particularly
in the indigenous academia.
2. Another objective is to place the author in the cultural context of China which upholds a
state-controlled, monologic concept of home at individual and collective levels. The aim
is to explore how Gao dismantles the ideologically located grand narrative of home as a
single, stable, pure and unific centre in communist China which silences the micro-
narratives of cross-cultural intermingling since ancient times in the name of national Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 66
unity and cohesion. The study underlines the alternative possibilities of home as an
ethnically impure and heterogeneous site that emerges in the author/narrator’s state of
exile.
3. Next I intend to analyse the exile’s initial response to home and inquire if distance in time
and place registers any change therein. The duality in response may generate a dialogic
tension, helping the exile re-adjust his relationship with native home. Gao rejects home
and loyalty as constants in the state version of diaspora literature and reveals the
possibility of a broad-based human culture which accommodates differences and
diversity.
4. The thematic preoccupation of this research prompts me to draw on some theories of
diaspora. Edward Said’s concept of exile may form an initial base to discuss the duality
of vision and multiple other privileges the exile comes to acquire in diaspora.
5. The exploration of alternative constructs of home in diaspora, however, expands beyond
concrete home and host countries to the formation of an internal dialogic space where to
negotiate relationships and differences. This necessitates an expansion of theoretical
framework to include the relevant concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. My aim
is to demonstrate how Gao’s subjects resist power structures operating at home to
territorialise them, and engage in constant flows of deterritorialisation in an increasingly
transcultural context of the present world.
6. The concern with home as a ‘regime of power’ may entail a further expansion of theory
outside diaspora: the deployment of poststructuralists like Michel Foucault and his
mentor Louis Althusser may be incumbent to measure the scale of alienation an artist
feels before he physically disperses from home. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 67
7. To conduct an in-depth inquiry into various constructs of home, the collected textual data
need to be analysed as empirically as a literary study would allow. To this end I plan to
employ multiple analytical tools such as formal, critical, Foucauldian and Bakhtinean
discourse analyses of selected textual segments. The purpose is to show how Gao’s
fiction becomes a site for negotiating contradictory impulses: as for example, craving for
lost home and the need to surmount it for relocation elsewhere; or on reaching an
alternative territory, the counter impulse for de-territorialisation again. I hope the parallel
and mutually supportive techniques shall generate sufficient meaning to prove my
research premises.
8. The study also seeks alignment between the Deleuzean concept of ‘de-territorialisation’
and Gao’s notion of ‘no-ism’. Gao resists tyranny of all sorts, whether in the form of
state/societal hegemony in China or of a relentlessly commercial cultural policy in the
West. His theory of flight re-articulated in his concept of a ‘flight from self’ could be
related to exile’s relocation in a ‘minoritarian’ space where one may extend beyond one’s
self, and negotiate differences with others.
9. Alignment also seems to exist between the Chinese and Western systems of thought. For
example, the outward-directed nomadic subjectivity of Deleuze, and the inward-directed
subjective autonomy and liberation sought in Buddhist/Daoist philosophy of self. By
integrating the two, this research seeks to answer some accusations leveled against Gao,
particularly his misogyny and his betrayal of the common cause in China. The object is to
establish the independent status of the author who says no to all fixed isms, and resists
‘territorialisation’ at the hands of tyrannical forces whether at home or abroad. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 68
10. In crossing national borders, diaspora entails crossing narrow nationalistic and communal
barriers and boundaries. Politics of inclusion and exclusion that home epitomises leads to
valorizing indigenous culture which in turn leads to cultural exclusivity and ghettoization
of others. Such tendencies rampant at present are endangering world peace. To ‘go to the
other side of the river’ is an important Daoist dictum Gao re-articulates in the diasporic
context of his fiction. Diaspora evinces how to dissolve the classical binaries, and this is
what this study means to highlight as another of its important aims.
11. In line with the above, one long term objective of this research is to establish the
possiblistic range of Gao’s fiction outside academics. Since Deleuzian theory of post-
human nomadic subjectivity espouses mutual acceptance and accommodation of others,
this study is directed to serve a crucial practical function. By highlighting the relational
content in Gao’s writing, it is bound to disseminate awareness about the importance of
human relation and alliance. Rebuilding trust at interpersonal and crosscultural level is
the need of the hour which is possible only when we broaden our thinking and accept and
embrace the minor and the marginal.
12. My project itself embraces transnationalism. I have deliberately chosen a French national
of Chinese origin for research in South Asia. Completely non-committal to any political
agenda or ideology, Goa’s fiction is equally relevant to South Asian cultures which are
fast losing their trans-communal, heterogeneous cultural contours in a dangerous
tendency to be ethnocentric and ideologically pure.
13. Yet another objective is to inspire fellow researchers how to go off the beaten track, and
to explore Gao and other writers from alternative perspectives. To read Gao’s fiction
particularly in light of Deleuze and Guattari is an entirely new and original project. It Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 69
adds a fresh dimension to his fiction besides underscoring the semantic potential of
literary texts in general. The aim is to compel the audience to read creatively, and to
venture new directions of meaning. It will also set a new trend to re-conceptualise
diaspora literature.
These then are some of the key objectives of research which my study looks forward to fulfilling, thus attaining significance in the following areas:
Significance and Scope of Research
A lot of work is already under way in Comparative and World Literatures to focus on writings in languages other than English. The marginal status of literature in Chinese language in the West as well as our academic context generates the need to bring it into critical focus as an alternative site for exploration. The present research is an important step to address this need. It significantly reveals not only the research potential of an extensively researched writer but also to facilitate a change in reception of literature in a minor language.
Since receiving the Nobel Prize, Gao has attracted a lot of attention in the West. His works are being assessed from different perspectives including diaspora and exile studies. The present study is significant in that it delves into the diasporic relocation(s) of home in Gao’s fiction, an area that has attracted little critical attention as yet. As the first intensive probe of its kind, this research may prove a breakthrough in the study of Gao’s diaspora.
Intrigued by the ambiguity surrounding the author’s status in exile, and the fact that in his fiction he seems to belong completely neither to China nor the West, I have undertaken this project to investigate the matter. The attempt is important because it does not impose any resolution from outside but seeks an answer from within the texts themselves. In privileging the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 70
text rather than the author, this study comes up to the requirement that Haines (41) sets to define a literary study.
Diaspora is one of the twelve major topos to continue to form Leitch’s inventory of theory in the twenty-first century (vi). Recommending theoretical eclecticism, Leitch has called for non-reductionist, multivariate theoretical approaches with which to explore contemporary issues in literature across the world. In making diaspora and its related concepts as the critical base, my study thus works in alignment with the critical requirements of the 21st century.
The Deleuzean theory of deterritorialisation as one of the critical frameworks to underpin this research is another landmark in literary studies; so is the choice of A Thousand Plateaus as one of the major theoretical sources to draw on. It is a book whose time according to Patton has not come yet, which accounts for its conceptual riches having remained largely unexplored (2), particularly so in a literary study. The tensions and contradictions inherent in the Deleuzian critical concepts create room for multiple perspectives. This is bound to keep the debate open- ended, and prepare the ground for further researches to enrich the area under study. Since de- territorialisation is one of the emerging concepts of the twenty-first century, it has lent the present study relevance in time for many years to come, inviting future researchers to explore similar concerns in other authors.
Diaspora questions and undermines essentialist constructs of home. Home as a trope for social, ethnic, racial or national boundaries has been responsible for exclusionary politics in the world including South Asia. In a geo-political context where nationalistic passions run high even in the playing fields, we need to dismantle home as a fixed centre and rebuild it in a broader and more inclusive space. My research thus serves a significant practical purpose. In underscoring Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 71
the author’s attempt to transcend narrow nationalistic and ethno-cultural borders, it seeks to formulate new ‘globally oriented’ human subjects for peaceful coexistence. This is what the world needs today and this is what I envisage as one most important outcome of my study at global and regional levels.
Peace in the world is possible through a trans-cultural orientation at individual and collective levels. Abandoning their home and its cultural roots, Gao’s subjects gradually learn to move in a space broad enough to include and accommodate others. They are now willing to enter into alliance, however temporary, with gender, ethnic and racial minorities. In fact the temporariness of such an alliance keeps them independent and afloat, preventing their relapse into the molar or majoritarian mold of their indigenous or adopted culture. Reading Gao from this perspective is crucial in answering many of the superficial assumptions about him still circulating in critical debates: his misogyny, his androcentricity, his anti-nationalism etc. It is the fluid and homeless status of exile, and his refusal to belong to any fixed territory that helps him resist the hegemony of all signifying orders such as nation, culture, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity etc. The study thus is important in presenting an alternative view of gender and racial power positions and relations.
Moreover, journey and homelessness as diasporic archetypes are common human experiences. My investigation into the multiple dimensions of these may ignite critical interest among future researchers to explore at length other patterns of meaning in Gao’s fiction.
Exploration of Gao’s narratives of home and border crossing entails a comparison with similar narratives in the diasporic fiction of the other parts of the world. This may help in bridging cross- cultural gaps in the world through culturally oriented literary projects. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 72
The present study is important also because besides expanding the field of research and generating new options, it opens up the possibilities of introducing other cosmopolitan writers from East Asian countries who are still under-explored in our context.
By undertaking a doctoral investigation into a major concern of Gao’s, this research may serve as an important point of reference for future researches on the author and also have a broader range of interest and relevance to the social sciences like cultural, transcultural and global studies. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 73
The Research Methodology
The proposed design is based on the critical paradigm, qualitative hermeneutic method and an open-ended inductive approach. Core data comprises both novels and the collection of short stories by Gao Xingjian, possibly cross-referenced by his works in other genres such as drama, literary criticism and ink paintings. While the existing body of literature available on Gao may help identify the gap this research addresses, the conceptual framework of diaspora will help organise and develop the argument. The dual status of a writer in exile as conceptualised by
Edward Said and its development into an interstitial ‘third’ space by Homi Bhabha, and the theory of de/reterritorialisation of Deleuze and Guattari, form key critical sources to explore the multiple layers and dimensions of meaning residing in the texts. Data analysis and interpretation entail a close and extensive reading of primary texts for textual, critical, Bakhtinian and
Foucauldian discourse analyses to generate meaning. I hope these mutually supportive techniques would systemise the research process and lead to plausible findings.
The structural division of the study into six chapters seeks to organise the collected data and facilitate their analysis. The first introduces the writer in his multiple cultural matrices that have generated the type of fiction under study. The second gives an update of the critical reception of the author since the year 2000 to date, and an overview of the theoretical framework, followed by the research questions, key objectives, possible significance and the methodology for the study. The main argument is developed in the next three chapters and rounded off in the concluding chapter followed by the lists of works cited and consulted.
Defining home as a problematic site where the subject feels alien(ated) because of its debilitating socio-cultural norms and political pressures, the study focuses on his dispersion from the centre to the periphery by way of resisting the tyranny of home. It later shows exile’s relocation in a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 74
‘minoritarian’ space, which is a fluid, dialogic space where to negotiate differences and boundaries. Moving in a transcultural space, the author/narrator ultimately emerges as a ‘de- territorialised’ or a non-territorial subject. With the key purpose to challenge the concept of home as a fixed and clearly demarcated centre, this research has a direct relevance to our own socio-cultural context where home is constructed along narrow lines of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, nation etc., and any departure from the norm is considered a threat to personal/national integrity. I hope this action-oriented literary project will help disseminate awareness and bring about a new culture of harmony, inclusion and accommodation of diversity and difference in
Pakistan as well as in the global context.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 75
Chapter Three
The Problematics of Home in Exile
Home ground, foreign territory!
Margaret Atwood
The fascination-revulsion dialectic in an exile’s response to native home is what forms the keynote of the problem addressed in this Chapter. The central premise is that exile’s home acquires a nostalgic evocation particularly because of the impossibility of its retrieval. This sharpens memory and imagination as well as the power of perception. When recalled through a distance in time and space, one becomes aware of the forces of power inherent in its structure which had remained invisible earlier. Taking home first in its literal sense of one’s personal residence housing a family, and then the larger collective body of a home country and its culture,
I shall explore the way it keeps Gao’s exile engaged in a constant negotiation with its meaning and status. That accounts for my reliance on Bakhtin’s discourse analysis as the major tool for analyzing data here.
My purpose here is to explore not only the contradictory impulses of rootedness and mobility that the subject has inherited from the Chinese culture, but also the acquired duality of vision with which he looks back to readjust his emotional aperture towards home. I also intend to debate how within the larger framework of his fiction, Gao interrogates certain myths the state had circulated about home: first, home as an absolute centre of diaspora’s attachment and loyalty, and second which forms the basis of the first, home as a pure, singular and historically homogeneous frame of reference for all. In a counter-move, multiple voices emerge and contest the hegemony of this ethnocentric, monologic official discourse. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 76
What problematizes one’s relationship with home is a self-exile’s voluntary act of leaving it for elsewhere. One may leave this familiar, intimate territory but the sense of emotional rootedness with it is difficult to uproot in the beginning. We have seen how Said reads exile as one of the categories of compulsive hence reluctant displacement which creates a sense of being torn from one’s family, geography and culture. The separation creates a vacuum that seems difficult to fill at first. Said has acknowledged the pull of home in exile yet he has also theorized about the ‘multiplicity of vision’ that one acquires while inhabiting the interstices of two cultures, which puts the subject in the privileged position of simultaneously belonging as well as not belonging to any home, originary or adopted. One of the creative potentials of exile is the ability to redefine the given constructs like home and the loyalty one associates with it. As an ambivalent state of being un-settled, exile keeps fluctuating between an emotional rootedness with the place of origin and a sense of alienation or revulsion from it. Add to it the geo-temporal distance that now lies in-between. It is this ‘deferred’ dimension of home which necessitates its re-examination here. It is the concept of exile as an ambivalent state of being that Gao subscribes to while de-centring home as the single object of one’s desire. His subject, in Stuart Hall’s sense of a nomad, keeps on “moving between centre and periphery” (234). Not only that, he commutes in the periphery of both the centres. This notion for ‘margin-al’ thinking, or to be ‘un-rooted from any centre’ (Leo Li) helps him to challenge fixed structures of power at home.
Gao’s presentation of home as a problematic site is contrary to the Chinese state policy.
We have already seen how home appears in the officially approved diaspora literature in China as the ultimate fixed centre which, in line with the Confucian ideal, houses a well-knit, hierarchically structured family upholding filial piety as an absolute virtue at both micro and macro levels. Leitch terms these virtues as “preconditions for fascism” (9), and Laura Hall “a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 77
blunt instrument wielded by those in the position of power to keep the hierarchy intact” (161). In this context, any departure from the norm becomes an act of revolt which incurs the displeasure of the state. Judged by the Safranian model, the Chinese diaspora could be seen as dispersal from a specific original centre, with the dispersed seeing China as the home they would eventually return. This forms a contention which is central to my premise in this chapter. It is here that we find a clash between home as a fixed centre that discourages absolute departure, and the irrepressible impulse of the Chinese to move out. The geo-historical narrative in Gao shows that the Chinese going out since the earliest records in history have brought change in the socio- cultural norms and practices in the country. This has kept culture always in flux; “always-already fused, syncretized with other cultural elements” (Hall 4) from outside. How the micro-narratives are made invisible is not only peculiar to the Chinese state but is common to many other Asian nations. In his fiction, Gao gives voice to such silent narratives of mobility and heterogeneity underlying Chinese society since ancient times.
Another assumption relevant to my discussion here is the official construct of the migrants remaining fixed in their loyalty to the land. I shall explore a broader meaning of the term ‘loyalty’ in Gao’s context of diaspora. As Jacob has pointed out, “Mobility compels our lives to be full of radical openness, proliferating differences and multiplying loyalties” (3).
Loyalty therefore is no longer a singular, unquestioning allegiance for one’s country, clan or culture. Nor is it only a bond felt viscerally in the flesh (Friedman 191). Instead, it is a maturity of vision; the ability acquired through dispersion to have a more honest relationship with one’s people and home. The nationalistic virtues like love and loyalty to the family and the country encapsulate a monologic world-view, silencing the dialogism which for centuries has been at work in shaping the Chinese cultural scene. Here, the home-based ethics of Confucianism has Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 78
always engaged in a dialogue with the counter current of Buddhist nomadism. In spite of this cultural indeterminacy, home has come to determine social norms in China as elsewhere in Asia.
A social institution forming the backbone of society, it presides over the system of marriage and family, protecting the purity of roots and lineage against any contamination.
What strikes us first in Gao’s fiction is the fact that his subjects are non-normative. They stand mid-way: part Confucian, part Buddhist. They seem to waver between both the impulses; now home-and-family fixated; the next moment, dislodged and itinerant. Then in the midst of their transcultural passages, they develop an acute desire for belonging. In keeping the memory of home alive, they are simultaneously at home and not at home. They carry within them the same indeterminate diasporic spirit that characterizes the history of the Chinese culture over ages. It is difficult to define these cultural contours in essentialist, reductive terms. The root of the problem lies in a clash between human impulse for free movement and the socio-political need to harness and discipline it. The official version of history inscribes home within narrow geo-political borders inside the closed pages of a textbook, silencing or erasing the presence of all whose ethno-cultural chemistry may not tally with the official aggregation of culture. Such exclusionary constructs of home/land reached its climax under the communist regime which homogenized nation under one party, one leader, one race, one ideology. What Gao does in his fiction is to subvert this linear construction by a counter narrative which creates room for mediation and dialogue between different times, places, populations and world views.
The dialectic central to my premise in this Chapter—the desire for roots and the parallel impulse for uprooting—turns home into a problematic site, evoking an ambivalent response in diaspora. Uprooted from home, the subjects cannot help being regressive. However, standing away from home gives them the advantage to look back with exile’s detachment of vision (Said Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 79
147). Simultaneously pushed out and pulled back, they are thus driven by contradictory impulses—a nostalgic fascination for, and a psychic aversion from home. This push-and-pull movement becomes a source of dialogic tension, causing multiple discourses and counter discourses which in Bakhtin’s words keep inter-animating each other in the texts. That accounts for my choice of Bakhtinean discourse analysis as one of the main tools for analyzing data in this
Chapter.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of fictional discourse centres round the concept of “polyphony” or multiplicity of voices and languages (1073) which allows a number of unheard ‘regional’ dialects to emerge and contend the hegemony of the ‘national’ language. If national language is the macro narrative of history or culture, the regional voices are the counter narratives which
‘vye for ascendency’ vis à vis the structures of power embedded in the official or national discourses. Bakhtin defines novel as artistically organized through a diversity of social speech types or perspectives. According to him:
The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects … is
the indispensible prerequisite for the novel as a genre. … The authorial speech,
the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely
those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia … can
enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide
variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized).
(1078-1079)
This multiplicity of languages in a novel de-centres power through a “centrifugal dispersion of form” (1074). The dialogic form thus becomes an argument against monologic discourses. So in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 80
Gao, set against the monologic view of home as an ideal place, and a centre to ultimately get back to, there emerge a number of heterogeneous voices audible in the micro narratives of history to contest this official view. The narrators’ ambivalent response to their home sets them apart; they appear exilic in the true sense of the world, challenging the Safranian concept of exile as being rooted to the originary home with a counter view in the contemporary context of global diaspora. Here Foucauldian theory of discourse may also become important and relevant.
According to Michel Foucault, the purpose of all discourse is power which is manifested through ideology. Foucault finds institutions as birthplaces of discourses of hegemony and power. Since home is one of the primary institutions in every society, the dominant ideology is silently transmitted across generations. These analytical tools may prove helpful in exploring this multi- discursive, problematic site which keeps an exile engaged in a constant process of negotiation and renegotiation with its meaning.
This research principally draws on textual rather than archival data. The data for analysis in this Chapter come from the first chapter each of both the novels, and the title story “Buying a
Fishing Rod for my Grandfather” (hence “BFR”) as these provide rich material for the topic under study here. However, arguments follow a conceptual rather than linear or chronological sequence. The textual excerpts shall be closely scrutinized in light of the following research questions: What is native home like in Gao’s fiction, and how does it become a problematic site?
Is there any possibility of retrieving the ‘originary’ home? Who are Gao’s subjects? How do they negotiate a relationship with home in diaspora? The multiple narrators who crisscross each others, like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘she’ and ‘he’ in Soul Mountain (hence SM) and ‘you’ and ‘he’ in One
Man’s Bible (hence OMB) may represent the dialectically opposed views of home at different times. Starting with the emotional evocation of home, I will move on to Gao’s deconstruction of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 81
the macro-narrative to demonstrate how after leaving home, the subject is able to rise above the sentimental level and re-adjust an adult’s relationship with home which is now more honest and clear-headed than before.
A word of caution here; in view of Gao’s repetitive use of pronouns for characters, I shall be using these within single commas as names but a uniform third person singular construction while referring to ‘I’, ‘you’ or even ‘he’ for pronominal usage.
Patriarchal Location of Exile’s Home
Gao’s home owes the duality of its location to the contradiction inherent in the
Confucian-Buddhist dialogism in Chinese culture and history, causing lot of ambiguity in its status. The subjects, a product of their cultural milieu, are equally ambivalent: rooted as well as un-rooted to home. Diaspora further complicates their position, imparting not only an emotional detachment, but also an acceptance of the fact that no retrieval of originary home is possible
A fluid movement across a diasporic space permeates both the novels. Home here is the family house where the narrators spent their childhood with their parents and other members of the family. Built on Confucian lines, it is continuously set and re-set in the perspective of other times and places. We find the ‘I-you’ duo in their parallel narratives in SM suffering from a deep sense of loss and rupture from their cultural roots which is what defines the initial response of exile towards lost home as Said and JanMohamed have theorized. As an object of desire, longing and craving, home becomes fascinating for both because of its emotional association with the past and memories of people and places they held dear. It evokes in each a desire for belonging in the midst of their rootless wandering. Interestingly exile’s home itself is unstable; it keeps on changing its geographical location as one’s family is driven from place to place, thus revealing the non-fixity and unreliability of its construct. It keeps the narrators engaged in moving back Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 82
and forth in time and place, which creates a paradoxically magnifying and diminishing effect of home in diaspora. As they wander from place to place, they start ‘vernacularizing’ (Jacob 3, 26) streets, lanes and houses. Stirred by something familiar in the present, each is carried down the memory lane to a house which has a definitely Chinese location as suggested by the recurrent images of courtyards and cobblestone streets. The courtyard houses have long been a prominent feature of Chinese cultural landscape, especially of Beijing. Some are still extant in their original structure though most have been replaced by the modern high rise apartment buildings. SM is replete with many a sad evocation of such architectural remnants, reminiscent of the bygone days: “Within a half closed door is a damp courtyard, overgrown with weeds, desolate and lonely with piles of rubble in the corner… you recall the back courtyard with the crumbling wall of your childhood home” (17-18). Then later in the novel: “Once again you see the black cobblestone street … Again just like the one in your childhood, it is a small lane with mud- splashed cobblestones” (75). At another place: “You hear children laughing on the other side of the creek… a forgotten past is relived as one of the crowd of children one day recalls his childhood. … You hear the patter of barefoot on black cobblestones” (103). The frequency with which the memory of their childhood homes haunts them makes these look like loose fragments cobbled together across the text: “… you want to visit each of the places you had stayed ... the houses, the courtyards, streets and lanes of your memory as a child” (325). While memories of
‘you’ pertain to the places where childhood home was located, those of ‘I’, in comparison, are marked by the association of his parents and other members of the family who peopled those places—“I no longer seem to be walking forward while confronting an old house but am returning to my childhood, moving backward on my heels… it is as if my parents are not dead…” (131). A little later in another chunk of memory: “Street endlessly long… My deceased Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 83
maternal grandmother seems to have brought me here; I recall that she took me out to buy a spinning top” (132-133). Notice the sense of acute longing in the construction of another scene at home: “Behind this broken wall my dead father, mother and maternal grandmother are seated at the dinner table, waiting for me to come and eat. I have been wandering endlessly and haven’t joined in a family gathering for a long time. … I want to be with them again, to sit at the same table with them, I want to hear their voices, to see their eyes, to actually sit at the same table with them, even if we don’t have a meal” (211). Notice the recurrent image of the dinner table that held all the members of the family close together. In spite of the gender hierarchy, (father is the first one to be mentioned) the intergenerational inclusivity and cohesiveness within the family is what ‘I’ is missing as the key strength of his Confucian household. It throws into sharp relief the sense of insecurity that is inherent in his lonesome rootlessness at present.
The details like “mud-splashed” earthiness of a stone-paved street or rooted, grounded, raised structure of an old house again point to the fact that home, whether recalled through memory or re-created in imagination, is a construct. Wandering among strangers, such architectural souvenirs of the past become “monumental expressions” (Awan 8) of the narrators’ cultural affiliations. Here it is important to go back to a statement made earlier that both ‘you’ and ‘I’ differ from each other in the re-construction of home. For all his evocation of larger structures within public spaces, ‘you’ seems more alienated and alone; he is haunted by a sense of loss of places he alone holds dear. It is always the peculiar construction of a street housing his home—lanes, streets and such larger structures he wandered in—that haunts him. ‘I’, in comparison, appears less lonely and more family-oriented. He is sensitive to the structures of the houses he inhabited along with his people, souveniring the furnishing of the rooms like dinner table or television or a doorknob. The interiors of the house become poetically evocative spaces Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 84
for him in Bachelard’s sense of the word. While one seeks strength in his cultural roots, the other does so in the family roots. That they are two aspects of the same individual shall come under discussion at a later stage. Together they both complete the earlier definition of Gao’s diasporist as a split, complex subject simultaneously rooted to the Confucian paradigm and rootless in the
Buddhist tradition; lonely yet not reclusive, part of the mainstream society yet staying apart. That accounts for his present ambivalence toward home.
We now need to have a close-up view of one of the houses that the exile once lived in. It embodies the social space which germinated the seeds of exile in him. The abstract notion of home gets concretised in the family unit sharing the safe confines of a house. So pervasively is it etched in the memory of the narrator as to completely obliterate the sense of his present location.
The group photograph with which OMB opens shows a close-knit, multi-generational, non- nucleic family structure set in a typical Confucian context. As in case with the fishing rod in a story to be discussed shortly, the photograph acts as a souvenir with which to revive the feel of the past home and the solidity of both its culture and architecture. While it releases a number of silent, hitherto unheard voices suppressed beneath the dominant discourse, it also decentres home as a fixed object of exile’s dreams and desires. Hong Zeng includes photograph among the key semiotics of exile in literature (10), hence the first page of the novel needs to be taken out of its context and studied as an independent text in itself:
It was not that he didn’t remember he once had another sort of life. But unlike the
old yellowing photograph at home, which he did not burn, it was sad to think
about, and far away, like another world that had disappeared for ever. In his
Beijing home, confiscated by the police, he had a family photo left by his dead
father: it was a happy gathering, and everyone in the big family was present. His Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 85
grandfather, who was still alive at that time, his hair completely white, was
reclined in a rocking chair, paralysed and unable to speak. He, the eldest son and
eldest grandson of the family, the only child in the photo, was squashed between
his grandparents. He was wearing split trousers that showed his little dick, and he
had on his head an American-style boat-shaped cap. At the time the eight-year
War of Resistance against the Japanese had just ended, and the Civil War had not
properly started. (1)
A close reading for Bakhtinean discourse analysis of this visual picture in words captures the duality of home and an exile’s ambivalence towards it. It lays bare a whole range of discourses such as geo-historical, political, gender, racial, class and sexuality, to name just a few.
Jessica Yeung posits that “In music, polyphony refers to a composition structure in which different voices perform variations on the same theme” (66). So here multiple voices heard through the Barthesian discourse of photography cohere to re-write the history of ‘originary’ home as a dubious site where tyrannical structures are hidden beneath the warm exterior of a happy family. The picture resists the oppressively dominant view of home as the only place worth living in in the world. Instead it appears as a multi-faceted, ambiguous site having its own power narratives of class, gender, race, sexuality etc. The multiplicity attached to its construct defies any single simple definition in the same way as emotional association with it defies a simple categorisation. According to Ralph and Staeheli:
Like other aspects of social life, home and its relationships are intersectional,
shaped by class, gender, ‘race’, sexuality and other power-laden relationships.
While home may be some (men’s) castle, it is a castle riven with inequality,
power, as well as love and care. Class, gender and various other power relations Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 86
remain important determinants in shaping the experience of home for migrants.
(5)
Located in a political territory, the ‘originary’ home is defined by “the interplay of politics, power and space” (Awan 8). Memory, past and history play an important role in the exile’s evocation of home which is laden with unheard voices of power politics and political games. The ekphrastic technique of describing home through the lenses of a camera takes us to Barthes’ reflections in Camera Lucida (1981). Barthes points out “the co-presence of two elements” (21) in a photograph: the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’, which can easily be related to the fascination- revulsion dialectics of exile’s response to home. ‘Studium’ is the obvious meaning of a photograph open to all, whereas punctum is “an intensively private meaning that is suddenly and unexpectedly recognized and consequently remembered” (23). Barthes moves on to explain that
“it breaks or punctuates the studium. This time it is not I who seek it. … [It] is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces me” (26).
The photograph in the beginning of OMB gives a very dense picture of the past home that the narrator at present is re-visiting through memory. At the level of studium, it captures the celebratory aspects of home: its warmth, intimacy, affection. Seeming to uphold unity, togetherness and cohesiveness of the family, this home is built on Confucian lines which binds the members close together. It seems to contain all the seven dimensions of home Somerville has discussed in relation to exiles: shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode and paradise (530-
533). Of the above enumerated aspects, Wang and Wong have stressed the particular relevance of roots, heart and abode for Chinese in exile (182), all three being sufficiently highlighted in the photograph. The family is pictured outside, with full view of their abode or residence. The presence of multiple generations grouped together gives evidence of not only their roots but also Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 87
the deep attachment and bond among them all. Here the one and only child, the narrator himself, enjoys a secure centric position in the midst of his parents, grandparents and other members of the extended family. Seen from this angle, there seems no place in the world like home, as the adage goes. Indeed, what qualifies a house to be a home is the sense of homeliness or at-home- ness one feels while in the midst of one’s near and dear ones. At other places, Gao’s subjects tend to idealise home for its close association with their childhood days when all members of the family were together around, generating a sense of security and belonging. Absence of relatives from those places turns them into strange, unheimlich places. For example, the narrator ‘I’ in SM recalls how “Shanghai no longer interests me. The distant uncle I would have liked to have visited died even earlier than my father” (472). It is the sense of loss, the disruption of family ties and the discontinuity of tradition that give an additional sharp edge to the memory of home and its nostalgic evocation. However at the level of punctum, we hear a number of other, alternative voices, speaking their own micro-languages that unravel hidden tensions and contradictions. One becomes aware of the presence of binaries, of tyranny and oppression which rise from the text suddenly, puncturing the celebrated harmony and emotional security that home seemed to uphold and epitomize. This is what Derrida means by ‘différance’, the hidden and deferred meaning in the text, now emerging and displacing the initial impression.
Gao seems quite deliberate in shifting to the use of a particular pronoun. Most of his works tend to be autobiographical. He opens OMB, significantly enough, with the ‘he’ narrative.
The third person narration means to dissolve the subjective centricity of the autobiographer and creates the distance and detachment, needed particularly in case of an exile remembering past home. Nostalgia could drive him to lose control and to exaggerate. So an emotional restraint is needful and hence evident from the beginning. However, some stylistic devices need careful Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 88
reading. The litotes that opens the passage ironically subverts the effect of detachment as pretended. Just where the narrator attempts to conceal, he reveals his strong attachment with home. The fact that the narration grammatically starts with double negation rather than assertion lends it a subtle nuance. The denial of negation is an affirmation with a certain degree of reservation. The statement opens up past wounds, reviving the sense of rupture between the exile and his cultural matrix that defined his past self. Nostalgia dislocates him from his present place and relocates him in other temporal and spatial zones of experience. The past home has not disappeared. It is, in Jacob’s words, “not simply abandoned, nor is one’s former dwelling simply forgotten, nor many of its appurtenances left behind” (10). Instead, it re-surfaces at the slightest attempt to recall it and stays there with a vengeance. The house along with those who peopled it may have vanished from the earth’s surface but certainly not from memory. The old photograph may be yellowing and discoloured, yet what is important here is the fact that it is not burnt but kept resiliently alive as a keepsake. An ‘appurtenance’ that Gao like his narrator carries along is the Chinese language which he opted to use for writing fiction in spite of the fact that the home- state banned the circulation of his work inside China. His last novel appeared in 2000, written in
Chinese even some thirteen years after he had left home. So home other than the present one and located in memory “may have been displaced but not replaced” in Derridean sense of deferment of meaning (Gabriel 42).
In the given text, home and its referents keep on recurring in quick succession within a short space of just a few sentences. Family, house, garden etc. are nostalgically evoked and described: “The photograph had been taken on a bright summer day in front of the round gate- way in the garden, which was full of golden chrysanthemums and purple-red coxcombs, that was what ‘he’ recalled of the garden, but the photo was water-stained and had turned a greyish Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 89
yellow” (1). From now and here to the “Beijing home” (1) of earlier years, the shift in time and space helps the narrator to enter into a dialogue with the past. As we move on, we find further dispersion in time reinforced by a dispersion of form. This results in a multi-layered version of truth; many other ‘languages’ start emerging simultaneously, vying for dominance, yet none remaining so for long in Bakhtin’s sense. The formal dispersion hints towards the fact that there is no absolute truth about home in Gao. It is multiple and inter-discursive: historical, geo- political, ethno-racial, Marxist, colonial, postcolonial, gender, sexual, feminist etc. Thus the present-past dialectic lends the photograph a breadth and a complexity of its own.
The ‘chronotope’ of the photograph becomes a source of territorial and temporal expansion. It allows an inter-discursive fluidity in which the personal and the individual liquidate into the collective and the national. From the narrator’s Beijing home to the American cultural penetration into China, there is a whole series of geo-historical and cultural discourses set in multiple frames of times and places which stir the memory of tyranny, aggression and foreign intrusions, commenting on the hidden sources of ‘domestic’ violence home comes to signify.
The long history of political hegemony and exploitation that perpetuated a binary-based culture in China punctures the proverbial peace and harmony associated with home. The geo-historical narrative starts with the recent and moves backward and outward in time and space. The first forces of oppression identified are the Communists who after coming to power in 1949 started usurping the rights of the individuals to own private property in the name of equality and homogeneity within the nation-state. The scene then expands to include other similar narratives of violence and war that overlap each other—the Japanese invasion and occupation of the
Chinese soil and the War of Resistance (1935-47), the militant engagements of the warlords
(1916-28), the Civil Wars (1945-49), and behind them all the British colonial rule in the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 90
previous century. To add to it all is the growing cultural penetration of America up to the ordinary Chinese homes by the middle of the 20th century. This multi-layered, densely variegated historical narrative dissolves the fixed binaries of oppressor/oppressed, aggressor/victim, public/private, and Western/Chinese. It gives a sense of transnational construction of home and its culture on the one hand, and on the other, the fluidity of the power positions there in the
Foucauldian sense. For the colonial victims turn aggressors in their private, domestic domain, perpetuating the culture of hierarchy and discrimination. This is counter to the construct of the
‘originary’ home as a traditionally recognised place of shelter, security, peace, harmony and endearment. In its breadth and complexity, private home thus comes to reflect and represent national politics as much as the national politics seems to shape and govern the political makeup of the family structure. Home is far from being simple, fixed, uncontaminated and virginal.
Back to the studium of the photograph, it celebrates home as a source of family orientation. Everyone seems to have gathered round the oldest couple as guardian of domestic peace, unity and stability. Its punctum, however, reveals it as a well-guarded, fenced and fully- barricaded fortress. Its gated, walled structure implies a fear of the outside world which results in a politics of inclusion and exclusion. It also holds the possibility of inside and outside in a dialogic tension. This is in sync with what Jacob says about the architecture of the house: “… the walls of a house offer protection, managing the interface between inside and outside, the domesticated and the wild, the private and the public” (18). Let’s have a closer look at the still image. The picture is taken outside the built-in area yet inside the gate which keeps the insiders in and outsiders out. A well-to-do family such as this does not think of giving space to others; i.e., any other class, community or family. It includes only the members of the house. Friends, neighbours, servants or pets do not exist for them. The family is exclusive also in acknowledging Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 91
only paternal lineage. There is a total absence of the maternal relatives. In what appears a predominantly male, all-adult cast on the centre stage, women and children form a secondary, minority group of actors, almost invisible, and without agency. Thus a culture of hierarchy on the basis of family, gender, class and age is visible in this patrilineal, patriarchal set-up of home.
Males and elders enjoy precedence by right. Men are the centre and women, the periphery. A textual analysis of vocabulary and syntax all confirm the overwhelming majority of men in the house. Notice the order of introducing the members of the family. It starts with the grandfather.
The space given to his introduction is larger than to anyone else, which affirms his power both as the head and the patriarch of the family even though he is paralysed and unable to speak. He is reclining on a rocking chair: a visual reminder of the comfortably-positioned, restfully-grounded patriarchal order under which the house is run. The invisibility of the grandmother or mother is held in sharp contrast with the visibility of the fathers of both generations. Father as the bequeather of the property is mentioned in the beginning with reference to “the photograph left by his father” (1). The presence of both the ladies is hinted only in the collective noun
‘grandparents’ and ‘parents’. Others present besides them are “his paternal uncles and aunts and also the wife of one of the uncles”; the last one appears having been added as the farthest in the periphery. The wife of the uncle has entered the family from outside through marriage and is known by her referent, a male and a paternal relative of the narrator. Similarly, both his uncles precede his aunt here as in another description on the next page: “[h]is third uncle, youngest uncle and youngest aunt…” (2). In this traditional set-up, there is no question of any sexual deviance. Men and women are paired together in a culturally approved heterosexual relationship.
Apart from gender marginalization, minors too have an ambiguous position. The only child, though a male, is overshadowed by the elders. As the first ‘son’ to his parents and first Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 92
‘grandson’ to the eldest sire of the family, he enjoys a privilege not to be shared by any of his siblings. Notice the ring of pride in the gendered description of the child on both occasions. As in other Asian societies such as the Arab and the subcontinent, a son in a Chinese household becomes the centre of family expectations and dreams. In SM, whenever the male-conscious, heterosexual ‘you’ dreams of settling down and fathering children, it is always the male he allows to precede. For example: “You would have married a beautiful woman like one of these, who would long have borne sons and daughters” (17). So here too, a first born male child is the proud inheritor of the family traditions and the source of continuing the bloodline. After all, he is expected to one day “take the seat of his grandfather” (4). However in spite of this privileged position, the child appears to be quite oppressed by the overwhelming majority of the elders: “He the eldest son and eldest grandson of the family, the only child in the photo, was squashed between his grandparents” (1). The body discourse also reinforces his disempowerment even though he seems timidly conscious of his masculinity: “He was wearing slit trousers that showed his little dick…” (1). The use of a vulgar slang for a universal object of male pride and pleasure has an important downsizing effect. A little later, however, the sartorial image of “a boat-shaped
American cap on his head” (1) restores his centric position in the family as it connects the politics of inter-generational positions with the world power politics. The child seems to assert his power, resisting the hegemony of the adults as later during his grandfather’s funeral rites he
“adamantly refused to tie white cloth around his head” (4). He seems to assert his presence the way America is making its cultural presence felt as the emerging power of the 20th century. It has intruded into the so-called close cultural and domestic space of China. Institutions, according to
Foucault, are birthplaces of discourses. So the discourse of power, having originated at and around home is being silently relayed in the photograph. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 93
Moving on to the remaining part of the text, we find the architectural discourse equally permeated with power and tyranny on the one hand, and room for dialogue on the other hand:
Behind the round gateway was a two-story, English-style building, with a winding
walkway below and a balustrade upstairs. It was the big house he had lived in. He
recalled that there were thirteen people in the photograph–an unlucky number–his
parents, his paternal uncles and aunts, and also the wife of one of the uncles. Now
apart from an aunt in America and himself, all of them and the big house had
vanished from this world. (1-2)
The big house is a configuration of power and dominance. Its solid British structure is a text that narrates the history of colonial intrusion and encroachment on the Chinese soil. Where the
British have introduced their own “vernacular architecture” (Jacob 32) in a bid to re-create home on a foreign soil, there they have also added a hybrid, multicultural, non-vernacular look to the
Chinese landscape, allowing room for negotiation between two cultures. Politically disempowered, the Chinese nation was denied space within its own geography the way the little child feels ‘squashed’ among his elders. The fact that their house was later confiscated by the
State again connects the personal with the national, reinforcing the discourse of power and hegemony. The communists, too, like the earlier colonial masters, usurped the rights of the people and perpetuated the same tradition of oppression as reflected in the household. Home, thus, resonates with a whole range of other, polyphonic narratives. It is the tyranny inherent in its structure as well as the political order of the country that makes an exile of the narrator. Whether during self-rule or rule by others in the past, or post-revolutionary monolithic state at present, tyranny has been a hallmark of the Chinese politics as of the cultural scene at home. As mentioned earlier, the elders of the clan, so powerful inside their gated residence, become Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 94
politically disempowered in the larger power-games at national and international levels. Power, as per Foucault’s theory, is counter-productive. It produces resistance or deviance. Though the family is said to have been “decimated for being too gentle and fragile for the time” (2), the only one to survive was “a bastard like him” (2). That might be because he showed signs of resistance to power from an early age. Even as a child, he seems ill at ease, being “squashed” between his grandparents. Examples of his departure from norms and rituals such as the one mentioned earlier multiply as the narrative moves on. It was this exilic resilience that carried him through
‘the reign of terror’ that OMB exposes in ‘his’ autobiographical discourse.
Home, captured in a single photograph and having all its dimensions compressed in a single paragraph, steps out of its literal frame and attains a semiotic duality. Barthes has placed photography among those art forms which are unclassifiable; i.e., difficult to categorize. This inherent slipperiness is a subtle comment on the position of home for an exile. It directs the readers’ gaze towards the slippery construct of home as a photographically represented object.
The photograph is simultaneously mobile as well as static, alive as well as dead, mechanical as well as emotionally evocative. Just where it has preserved a moment in personal history, there it has also allowed other times, places and peoples to enter into its dialogic frame. The architectural details of the building that houses the narrator’s home, with its winding walkway and a balustrade upstairs evokes Homi Bhabha’s interstice or ‘third’ space in relation to diaspora.
While exploring the hybridity the Chinese diaspora exhibited in their architecture, Jacob analyses the stairway as one of the interstitial structures designed to facilitate flow into and through the house:
The stairway is … a kind of a passage way, a transit point within a house that
takes one somewhere else. It is not a space of permanent occupation. As an Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 95
architectural feature designed for upward and downward movement it has a
certain risk built into it. Yet it has certain features that reduce that risk like the
balustrade. And it has other features, like the landing, that provides rest points in
order to make the up and down journeying more manageable. (23)
The Bhabha-esque trope of the stairway reveals not only the existence of the colonial binaries captured through the upstairs and downstairs but also the connective interface, allowing a flow of communication between the two. It also comments on the narrator’s future mode of life, his ability to conjoin differences, as in the description of his family, he uses the Christian figure of number thirteen. As he moves out, he has already imbibed both the tendencies: the germs of power as well as the readiness to make bridges. What Edward Said means by exile as an
‘enabling’ state becomes apparent here. A Chinese by birth, training and ancestral roots but now located outside China, the diasporic position of the narrator enables him to negotiate meaningfully with his past/home as well as other cultures. Inhabiting a third space from where to enunciate, he comes to have a broader perspective with which to strip home of its conventional glory and romance. The distance in time and space has sharpened his vision and helped him deconstruct the earlier construction of home and bring to light certain other, hitherto unnoticed
‘unhomely’ aspects. A dialogic re-engagement with the past thus has made it possible for him to subvert the grand narrative of home as a pure, unific and homogenous site representing complete peace, security and stability amidst its Confucian fixity, order and protocol. So now it emerges as a complex, changeable and heterogeneous construct. A product of this diversified cultural matrix, the subject has inherited all the clashes and contradictions which could prevent him from settling down at one place, keeping him always on the move, always at the threshold of discovering new lands en voyage. Hence relevance of the ‘language of fashion’ in the boat- Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 96
shaped American cap worn by the child in the photograph, which because of its implicit association with water, suggests not only the trans-nationality of home and the fluidity of its culture as Gilroy has theorized in Black Atlantic, but also the exilic mobility of the narrator, all three elements which the State was bent on denying through its repressively unific policies. This is what the central preoccupation in OMB is and this is what enhances the functional indexicality of the photograph in the first paragraph of the novel.
Gao the author failed to return home for political reasons. So did his narrators. The impossibility of return gives an extra sharp edge to memory and imagination which become the only tools with which to retrieve lost home.
(b) The myth of return
Diaspora is a complex, multivariate state of being, replete with contradictions.
Strangeness characterizes experience at each step. It is a sense of estrangement at home that drives one out. Out in a strange, unfamiliar setting, one feels a stranger again and longs for the once familiar environment back home. It is then that one starts re-constructing it as an ‘originary’ centre, the seat of origin, and the source of original identity. The craving for return seems insurmountable at first. However, as the counter impulse to move on comes to gain ascendency, home moves farther back, its gravitational pull getting weaker each day. Eventually to the question whether it is possible to retrieve an ‘originary’ home, the answer is a flat ‘no’. Bhabha refutes the possibility on the grounds of one’s location in the interstices of here and there, home and host cultures. The negation however, needs to be logically worked out through textual evidence. For a house to be termed ‘originary’, either one must be born in it, or it must hold testimony of one’s ancestral roots having originated there. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 97
As in case of the author, what problematizes the status of native home in his fiction is the subjects’ act of self-exile. The tyranny home exercises is evident from the fact that despite their having left home, it keeps on exerting its presence in absence. However, since exile is a privileged position, the diasporic space allows them to inhabit simultaneously multiple spatio- temporal locations, enabling them to constantly move back and forth to negotiate between different times and places, confounding, in Awan’s words, the traditional conceptions of “three- dimensional space, linear time and static ideas of scale” (15). Textual analysis of the story
“BFR” reveals that the narrator inhabits such an in-between space, blurring the boundaries between the two zones of now and then, here and there. The border is constantly blurred through his gliding back and forth in quick succession. At one place, delving deep into the past for ancestral roots and the live commentary of the World Cup football final in the present get imperceptibly interwoven in narration, creating a fusion of the contras that the word confusion connotes. This simultaneous inhabitation in homes located in different times and places is a dense experience, and requires a close up view of the psyche working in and out of it.
In her thesis on the politics of home in Indian diaspora fiction, Sharmini Gabriel has discussed the building and structure of an Indian house etched in a diasporic memory. The construction is an indication of the constructiveness of home. Similarly, exploring the diasporic agencies expressed through the architectural variety in a modern cosmopolitan city like London,
Awan posits:
For those in diaspora, home is a deliberate construction that includes nostalgia for
the place left behind and the need to replicate some of its customs, traditions and
spaces. Knowing an exact replication is impossible, this hybrid practice aims Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 98
instead to create similar atmospheres, achieved through the deployment of
souvenirs. (7)
“BFR” best exemplifies the above premises. The story highlights the construction of an ancestral, ‘originary’ home, which through its gendered location gratifies the psychological need of a male exile. The narrator is located at present in the city where he feels alienated for both his rural background and a subordinate position at home. This generates the need for nostalgia to reconstruct a patrilineal home, built and sustained through male line—“his [grandfather’s] home, which was also my father’s home, so it was my home too” (80). In this convenient location, the grandfather, the grandson and their dog form a nexus against the grandmother who is reduced in terms of her visibility and space in the narration. The impulse to go back to the village to revive some of its patriarchal traditions intensifies as the narrative proceeds. Notice its compulsive hold relayed through a shift in the auxiliary verb: “I should visit my old home to get over my homesickness” (69) is shortly followed on the same page by: “No matter what, I must go back to the village to get rid of this homesickness, which, once triggered, is impossible to shake” (my emphasis). However, once having reached there even though in imagination, he feels equally alienated. He appears a stranger, a non-local (71) for having lost the accent of his ‘originary’ dialect. As for the village, it has changed beyond recognition. It is ‘Home ground, foreign territory’ in the literal sense of the word. That women of all ages have started wearing bra which they show off through their flimsy tops cannot escape his hetero-erotic gaze. Not only that: “The dirt roads are now asphalt, and there are prefab buildings, all new and exactly the same”, all boasting television aerials which make them look like forests with bare branches (69). “You are lost in these barren branches and can’t find your old home” (ibid). Negations multiply, adding to Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 99
his bewilderment. There is no road sign, no clear cut route, no direction to lead to his ancestral house:
If I know where the lake was, it will be easy to find the stone bridge, and when I
find the stone bridge, it will be easy to find Nanhu Road, and when I find the
Nanhu Road, I’ll be able to feel the way to my old home. … You understand that
what used to be no longer exists. … I ask everyone and search street after street
and lane after lane. … If I can find the Guandi Temple, it won’t be hard to work
out the location of my home (71-73)
To rephrase Friedman’s ironic comment ‘There is no place in the world like home’ to there is no possibility of a place like an ‘originary’ home, let alone its retrieval. As the sense of futility increases, so does his desperation to hold on to the myth: “It is futile to ask about a street and street number that used to exist, you will have to rely on your memory. … I know it’s futile to keep asking people. … No matter how much you keep going around them you can’t see it. So you can only imagine it from your memories” (75).
A strong dose of memory powered by imagination conjures up the phallic image of the fishing rod. It is one of the many Awan-ian souvenirs the narrator deploys to hold on to the myth of an ancestral home and the possible retrieval of its patriarchal culture. It is only an imaginary fishing rod that the narrator ‘buys’ for the now long dead grandfather, whom he idealizes for having improvised his own fishing and hunting instruments. However the de-mythicising starts all too soon; so does the realization that seeking inhabitation in the past home is a futile venture.
The fishing rod, a symbol of grandfather’s power and skill had earned him no big yield: “My grandfather never caught any decent sized fish in the net” (64). Similarly, in spite of owning a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 100
shotgun, “he didn’t bring home anything except for a rabbit” (66). A gradual detachment thus reveals the futility, rather the absurdity of the venture, which is highlighted by a series of contrasts. The ‘dead’ past encapsulated in the skeleton of a fish (84) is set against the ‘live’ broadcast of the World Cup Football final between Argentina and West Germany at Azteca
Stadium, Mexico City. The cross-border spatio-temporal expansion of the present is significantly contrasted with the static exclusivity of the village community in the past. The present communicability at global level throws into relief the sharp rural and urban divide resulting in a lack of communication between the two before. However hard or deep one may dig into the ruins of Loulan, it yields nothing except the giant spear of a fishbone which hurts. The narrator’s placement in an airplane flying above the ancient ruins, “drinking the beer served by the stewardess” (85) is a strong reminder of the Bhabhaesque ‘third space’. Suspended midair between the earth and the sky, intoxicating dream and reality, past and present, East and West, he has the privilege to move dialogically between multiple times, places and homes. The fluidity of movement has helped him come to terms with the pulsating reality of the present. He has learned to be self-extensive and accommodative, not only to other times and places but also other people(s). Just as Maradona dedicates his victory to “all the children of the world”, so he includes in his narration his wife’s “aunt and uncle who have come from far away” (88) to pay them a visit.
(c) Home in exile and exile at home
Since Buddhist mobility is out of sync with the Confucian norm of a settled life, we find
Gao’s subjects moving in a dialogic space; they seek simultaneously attachment with and detachment from home, and keep negotiating between two opposite views of life. If the narrator in OMB did not burn the archival evidence of his past, it shows his psycho-emotive need to Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 101
preserve the memory of his home and family. This along with an intellectual need to leave home takes us to another set of questions. Who the narrators are? What is the spirit that keeps them afloat even at home? How does Gao contest the macro narrative of home as a fixed, purific centre? These are some of the questions to be addressed now mainly with reference to the cultural construct of home in China as deconstructed in the first chapter of SM.
Seen in an emotional context, home exercises tyranny in appearing as the only place in the world worth living in. Viewed from afar, there no doubt is a yearning to go back home.
However, one gradually starts seeing the hidden structures of power not visible at the time of one’s residence there. We have just witnessed how the patriarchal base of home makes one aware of the hegemony on the bases not only of gender and sexuality but class, race and nation as well. This is what Said and subsequent critics have called the duality or multiplicity of vision acquired in diaspora, and this is what problematizes the construct of home in Gao’s texts.
Tyranny, whether physical, ideological or intellectual, makes an exile of an artist. Moreover, for its singularity, fixity and rootedness in a particular geo-historical place and time, home becomes particularly undesirable, whether the artist is in exile or not. Displacement and alienation as parts of an artistic temperament contest the formation of home along narrow, rigid, nationalistic lines.
Almost all of Gao’s fictive subjects duplicate their author’s creative impulse and field of activity.
The ‘I-You’ duo in SM is on an archival study of the past culture and history. The ‘You’ of OMB is a playwright of international repute. The story “In an Instant” is preoccupied with the business and process of writing. So off and on we might hear the author’s own voice in the polyphonic form of his oeuvre.
To start with a truism, Gao wrote Soul Mountain as an account of an actual 5-month,
15000 kilometre journey he undertook in 1983 from Beijing to the far flung southern countryside Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 102
which happens to be his birth-place as well as his ancestors’ home. On the face of it, he seems another of the ‘search-for-roots’ writers. Leo Lee describes this brand of Chinese writers as those who in the early 1980’s moved away from the Communist centre in order to uncover peripheral regions “as authentic centres of Chinese civilization” (224) which were “so severely ruptured by the Communist ideology” (221). Leo sums up this socio-political ideology as “based on territorial and ideological grounds, of a single China represented by a single government” (238).
He appreciates the ‘search for roots’ writers as far as “[t]he ancient myths and rituals they have uncovered invariably impart a sense of grandeur and vitality against which the official
Communist ideology pales into insignificance” (221-2). However, he laments that in a bid “to
‘decentre’ the oppressive political culture of the Party” (222), these writers tend to demarcate new boundaries: “Their search for roots stems from a psychological need for an alternative center” (225). And they find this centre in the periphery of China. Jessica Yeung is right in her view that Gao is not a ‘search for roots’ writer (83). Judged by Leo’s theorizing, SM is more than the writer’s movement from the center to the periphery. It is neither an attempt to reclaim his roots, nor to find an authentic reality. Rather, breaking away from his roots, Gao seeks alternative routes, thereby contending the possibility of any single absolute version of truth (50).
Instead of capturing the grandeur and vitality of ancient myths or legends, he questions (14-15) and de-mythicizes their validity as represented in the mythicised figures like ‘Grandpa Stone’
(435-438). Moving away from the politics of the centre or periphery, he thus subjects different aspects of home culture and history to a critical re-examination.
A rebel-writer in exile, Gao destabilizes and subverts the myth of home as a solidly grounded social institution. That both the novels and most of the stories open with displacement as the strongest common strand of the narrative proves his deliberate subversion of the normative Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 103
order in the Chinese society and cultural representations. The desire of his subjects for a
Confucian rootedness overlaps with a dialectically opposed Buddhist or Bohemian impulse to uproot themselves and go out. Many of them are out-door by temperament, unsettled and protean in physical and mental habits. Action even in his early short fiction is mostly located out of doors; the narrators out on a city road (“Accident”), along the railway track (“Temple”), or on a solitary beach (“Cramp”). The male protagonists in both his novels are rootless wanderers, under compulsive urge to flee from their place of birth and residence. Though emotionally attached to home, they all are restless, mobile figures, dodging any long term emotional investment that could lead to a settled way of life. Family history of both ‘I’ in SM and ‘he’ in OMB contains records of dislocations during war or fear of investigation. In the face of a threat from outside, home thus fails to provide the proverbial shelter or protection, driving its inmates out as refugees or absconders. Nor can it tackle the subversive forces from within. In SM, ‘she’ steals a few days out of the drudgery of her life at home and workplace and ventures out all alone, on a prohibitive holiday trip to the mountains: “… she told her family the hospital has organized an excursion and told the hospital her father was ill and she had to look after him and so she has leave for a few days” (68). Since settled life in a domestic set-up is the norm, all these characters, male or female, live outside the pale of conventional society, rebelling against the home-bound domestic order.
Along with photograph as discussed earlier, Hong Zeng has included “displacement, disjointedness, loneliness, a sense of not belonging” (10) among the key semiotics of exile.
Gao’s narrators strike us immediately as lonely and solitary individuals, internally disjointed and split in personality, sliding between alternative modes of life, and belonging nowhere in particular. This is registered thematically and formally as well as at the level of characters. In Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 104
both the novels and the story “BFR”, one single character sub-divides into many other narrators to underline this schizophrenic split, an aspect that I shall discuss later with reference to the
Deleuzian nomadic subject. Through abrupt shifts and disruptions in the narrative, fragmentation and fragmentariness of the text, Gao has demythicised Chinese novel as well as individual human self as one coherent unified whole. In their movement away from home, ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’ and ‘she’ in SM actually enact a centrifugal dispersion. In shifting from Beijing to the open woods and mountains, they decentre and marginalise the centre itself, privileging the chaos and disintegration of the periphery represented by the ancient hills and primeval forests. As the seat of the government, Beijing is home to all confining orders and ordinances. With a jingoistic and panoptic gaze, it forces all art towards serving the cause of the nation and the revolution only.
That accounts for the persistent presence of socialist-realist tradition even in diaspora literature already discussed before. The Chinese nationalist state at different times since 1949 has duly protected and patronized intellectuals at different fora (Goldman) in return for their loyalty. By controlling the media representation of the Chinese diaspora, the state could manipulate the world opinion about the ‘unitariness’ of the Chinese culture and get a political mileage in the world forum (Kirkwood). However, the literature produced under official dictation loses its broad human base and spectrum. In a journal article, Ling-chi Wang has debated the questions of loyalty and bond of the overseas Chinese to their home and nation-state. For quite some time,
Ling-chi writes: “Chinese in the US rarely perceived themselves as a racial minority. Planting one’s roots in the US… hardly meant abandoning one’s racial and cultural identity in favour of total assimilation into the dominant society” (183). Leo Lee also critiques the Chinese exile writers for their obsession with and imaginative imprisonment in homeland: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 105
The omniscient nationalism easily capitalized upon by every Chinese government
to legitimize itself at the centre has so dominated the modern Chinese everywhere
that it is virtually impossible to imagine … an art that transcends national
boundaries. … [In the diaspora fiction] the stories take place, as in real life, in the
Chinese communities; American culture and characters make only an occasional,
peripheral appearance. Needless to say, the Chinese characters’ obsession
continues to be with China. (232)
Now Gao is an exile writer with a difference. He refuses to romanticize, dissociating from the prescribed standards of a debilitating cultural forum. In both his novels, he re-writes the history of home vis à vis the simplistic, reductionist image of China as ethnically pure and one, single, homogeneous whole under one party and one leader. He exposes the superficiality of this construct at many places. We have already noticed the transcultural elements constituting home in China. In SM, we hear the ravages of the Cultural Revolutions when the narrator tells us that the state considered the ancient artifacts superstitious objects. The Public Security Bureau confiscated many such relics and locked them away. Most of these belonged to the Qing
Dynasty, and came from a region “inhabited by a mixture of Han, Miao, Tong and Tujia nationalities” (142). This is a deliberate erasure and silencing of the archaeological evidence of
Chinese culture as diverse and multicultural. OMB recounts how the state took care not only to deny difference but misconstrued diversity as a threat to political stability and tried eliminating it through purging drives within the Party. The nationalist frenzy relayed through public platform demanded all dissidents–called ‘Ox-demons and Snake-spirits’– to be relentlessly dragged out:
“We must safeguard the purity of the Party and not let the glory of the Party be sullied!” (35).
Gao rejects the constrictive revolutionary fervour in favour of a broad-based study of human Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 106
culture that has gone in the formation of the very nation the state is reducing in size and stature.
Contesting this rigidity, he relocates home and domestic culture in a setting characterized by cross-cultural exchanges and intermingling since ancient times.
The first chapter of SM uses the motif of journey to reinforce a fluid, multi-disciplinary, inter-discursive approach required for engaging in a cultural debate. Through a dialogue between
‘you’ and a fellow traveler ‘he’, the all-encompassing, encyclopedic scope of the debate is conveyed. It is to cover a whole range of disciplines such as ecology, biology, anthropology, archaeology, folk customs, sociology, ethnography, ethnology, journalism, adventure and much more. Though an expert amateur in all of these, ‘he’ like Gao is “more interested in living people” (2). The inter-discursive formal dispersion of the novel is evident from the beginning.
Multiple discourses start running parallel within the fictive narrative, de-centring the dominant discourse of autobiography. As we hear a proliferation of voices, we find a centrifugal dispersion at the level of characters as well. One single person appears to have multiplied into many, each journeying parallel with the other. Together they comment on the multiplicity of the subject which in its multi-layered complexity could be called man-y. They all share common human tendencies and seem to be extension of one another. One of them ‘I’ introduces the autobiographical discourse. Another takes the ‘name’ of ‘you’ who gives way to yet another, the third person masculine ‘he’ as well as feminine ‘she’. Besides maintaining the distance from the first person autobiographer, this inter-personal and inter-gender dialogic move also relates to the interpenetrating ‘yin-yang’ principle of the Chinese philosophy, which here could also indicate the working together of the male and female principles within the creative artist. Judged by their common as well as heterogeneous impulses, ‘you’ and ‘she’ respectively serve as tropes for the creative-imaginative and emotional aspects of the protagonist/author. Meanwhile ‘he’ adds a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 107
spiritual dimension by proposing ‘Lingshan’ as the ultimate target of the journey. However illusive the destination may be, it connects a modern secular undertaking to the ancient cult of
Buddhism. But unlike the Buddhist norm of self-obliteration, the road to self-enlightenment in
Gao passes through the sensuous human world which accounts for the complexity of the experiences recorded here. It all replicates the journey the author actually undertook partly as an attempt to escape state intervention—“I am wandering everywhere to avoid being investigated”
(335) —and partly as a thanksgiving ritual after having been cleared of the suspicion of lung cancer (73). Together the four pronouns encapsulate ‘I’’s imperative to leave home located in the politically charged world of Beijing, and create room for himself to roam freely about in a temporally, spatially fluid world of his own making. The dispersion lets loose his repressed creative imagination, emotional energy and spiritual longing to work in a dialogic frame of embodied experiences. It is indeed an artist’s declaration of independence against the norms of a police state and the fixed literary traditions it dictates.
The rebellious intent of the narrative is conveyed through the way SM opens. As opposed to the customary first or third person narrative voice in the Chinese fiction, it is ‘you’ the imaginative self who starts the narration in chapter one; the distance between him and ‘I’ being shorter than that of the farther removed and mostly absent figure of ‘he’ the spiritual self: “The old bus is a city-reject. After shaking in it for twelve hours on the potholed highway since early morning, you arrive in this mountain county town in the South” (1). On board a public transport,
‘you’ has uprooted himself by moving away from an elitist home in Beijing, the centre of ‘I’’s social life, to the non-elitist periphery in the southern countryside which happens to be the home of their ancestors. He does not have any prior planning for where exactly to go and what exactly to do. He appears to have no clear-cut, fixed destination or tour itinerary. The pretended role of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 108
‘I’ as a researcher of folk songs is assumed later on. The spiritual purposefulness of the journey is also added later as an ambiguous afterthought “at a certain place” (2). The randomness of the journey marks him quite unconventional and non-normative. The movement to the South itself is a departure from the traditional Buddhist norm of taking the proverbial ‘narrow road to the deep
North’. Gao’s subjects are postmodernist in their subversive impulses; they subscribe to a convention only to subvert it. To borrow Homi Bhabha’s terms, they are, more conflictual than consensual with the traditional order. Their ambivalence makes them stand out as exilic individuals. So in chapter one, ‘you’ the traveler appears different in his get-up as well as the station he has chosen to disembark from the bus:
You walk down the road looking around the little town. … There were no tourists
like you amongst the other passengers who got off the bus. Of course you are not
that sort of tourist, it’s just what you are wearing: strong sensible sports shoes and
a bagpack with shoulder-straps, no-one is dressed like you. But this isn’t one of
the tourist spots frequented by newlyweds and retirees. (4)
Notice how ‘you’’s difference from both an ordinary tourist and a passenger of this particular bus is highlighted through his appearance as well as his present location. Belonging to neither group, he seems to have a unique, free floating vagabond-ish air which does not allow him be rooted down to a particular mode of existence—something not in sync with the prevalent norm in China even in the late 20th century. The place he is visiting is defined by negation. Far from being “transformed by tourism” (4) as a modern commercially developed resort, it is “only a stopover for the village peddlers and craftsmen” (4). The non-elitist, negligible status of the town as ‘only’ a ‘stopover’ and not a permanent habitat is important. As a common component of the unitary culture of China, it seems to remain invisible on any road map, and unnoticed, and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 109
unrepresented by any government gazetteer, local or national. What has attracted ‘you’ to get off here is the peculiar milieu of the village: “To be leisurely and carefree is endemic to the place”
(1). It offers a life which is simpler and less-constrained. Though it does have its fair share of burdens, it is free from the humdrum and fast pace of an elitist urban centre like Beijing. Besides,
‘you’ also feels safe from any surveillance at the hands of a public or private authority policing around. Of the fellow passengers and the passers-by he notices—“men humping sacks and women carrying babies” (1), he is intrigued by “the crowd of youths, unhampered by sacks or baskets, hav[ing] their hands free” (1). We shall return to these men, women and youths a little later. Here we become aware of the polyphony or multiplicity of voices in the text. Unlike
Roland Barthes for whom the author is ‘dead’, Bakhtin concedes the author’s as one of the multiple voices within the text, though not always the dominant one. So here we hear the author’s own perspective temporarily gaining ascendency over that of the narrator/character. The assumption has its base in the subject’s field of interest that reflects upon Gao’s occupation as an artist. Art is a leisurely activity that demands complete intellectual freedom and detachment from fixed systems and ideologies. ‘You’ excels in inventing and reinventing tales; ‘I’ is a collector of folk songs. Let’s go back to the just quoted lines of men humping sacks, women carrying babies and youths crunching sunflower seeds on the opening page of SM. It presents men burdened with the necessity of labour to earn a living for the family, and women as housewives who must give birth as well as bear the burden of children’s upbringing. Both work and family root one down to a home located in particular place and time. We notice that marriage, home, wife and children are almost always undesirable liabilities for Gao’s subjects. However, social expectations in
China have their own compulsive hold and one going against them is bound to incur disapproval.
So in the midst of his travels, a middle-aged ‘I’ reminds himself that “Confucius talked about Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 110
establishing oneself at the age of thirty” (210). In a similar vein ‘you’ too issues himself a warning amid his aimless wanderings:
You have learned through experience everything you need to know. What else are
you looking for? When a man gets to the middle age shouldn’t he look for a stable
and peaceful existence, find a not-too-demanding sort of a job, stay in a mediocre
position, become a husband and a father, set up a comfortable home, put money in
the bank and add to it every month so there’ll be something for old age and a little
left over for the next generation? (9)
As a heterosexual male, Gao’s subject would like to indulge in a real or imaginary sexual escapade with a female yet he would never let it culminate in marriage, let alone have children.
Marriage, home or family as socio-cultural trappings arrest the flow of an artistic mind, hindering its creative pursuit. So of the people gathered in the village street, what fascinates
‘you’ the amateur teller of the tales is a crowd of youths. He gives them a larger space in description, especially for their freedom from the drudgery of daily life: “They are unhampered by sacks or baskets, have their hands free. They take the sunflower seeds out of their pockets, toss them one at a time into their mouths and spit out the shells. With a loud crack the kernels are expertly eaten” (1).
The idleness of youths is an ideal state of being. Like the returnees to be discussed shortly, they are under no compulsion to work or carry burdens or even to follow a fixed schedule. The narrator envies them for the relaxed manner with which they are eating the kernels of the seeds on the roadside. He would like to do likewise. Symbolically speaking, in the course of the journey of life, he already has some hand carry; he would like to add more to it; to absorb Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 111
the experiences of life one by one at an easy, leisurely pace and reproduce the kernel in writing.
A rootless wanderer, he cannot afford to carry the load of domestic liabilities like wife or children to hamper his movement. This creates a dialogic tension between the narrator and society, establishing his status as an exile at home just like that of the author.
Himself in diaspora and intent upon retaining his artistic independence and individuality,
Gao is aware of the diasporic spirit imbuing China since ages. He contests the generally propagated view of China as a homogeneous, self-sufficient country with culturally closed borders, and presents a micro version of the country’s culture and history. Change, mobility and heterogeneity have always been there, part of the local life even in a seemingly close, static county town ‘you’ is visiting in the opening chapter. As earlier, we get a multi-discursive view of this invisible Chinese culture, formed through cross-cultural intermingling of the peoples in diaspora over ages. The scene becomes geo-historically expansive in spite of the small scale and location of the village:
The earliest to leave the place travelled by river in black canopy boats and
overland in hired carts, or by foot if they didn’t have the money. Of course at that
time there were no buses and no bus stations. Nowadays, as long as they are still
able to travel, they flock back home, even from the other side of the Pacific,
arriving in cars or big air-conditioned coaches. The rich, the famous and the
nothing in particular all hurry back because they are getting old. After all, who
doesn’t love the home of their ancestors? (1)
The passage provides a commentary on the local scene which stretches out to other times and places, lending it the simultaneity of the local and the global. The account is enriched with a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 112
dispersion of melting discourses at socio-cultural, historical, anthropological and psychological levels. Comparison means to date diaspora in the earliest history of the Chinese intermingling with other races and nations. It has been a regular feature of all societies in every age and place, bringing in mobility, hybridity and ethno-cultural diversity. The economic imperatives of displacement have been underlined as a common motive behind dislocation of people in different ages. As at present so in the past, material status played an important role in choosing a particular mode of travel. Compared to the present when journeys are technologically mediated, the minimal options available in the past could not deter people from leaving home. The diasporic communities were responsible for change as much in the host as home society. Away from home, they contributed to the economic productivity. And back home, they were responsible for a revision in the hierarchical segments of society, repositioning many a returnee in the social scale. Gao does not deny the emotional hold that home has on the Chinese abroad, particularly the compulsive desire of returning home in old age. Notice the syntactical order of the rich, the famous and the nothing in particular; though they all are equated in their old-age vulnerability for home, the hierarchy remains the same at present as it did in the past. The writer seems to corroborate the pull of home for all the migrants as for example in the sociological account given below:
In the past, the Chinese migrants had … a clear-cut concept of home as their
village of origin, where their ancestors were buried and where they were supposed
to return to, either physically or spiritually. It was not uncommon that bodies, or
at least bones of Chinese migrants who died overseas were sent back to China for
proper burial. (Sinn 71) Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 113
This pull of the homeland remains strong even now as Jacob (2004), Anthias (2001) and
Werbner (2000) affirm in their studies of the migrants’ relationship to the ancestral home. Jacob, for instance, talks about the collective memory “(often mythologized)”of the original homeland which the dispersed retain, seeing it as “the place which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return” (11). However, Gao contests the state-sanctioned myth which builds up the romance of the natives returning home as essentially unchanged and undivided in their loyalty as before. Not only this; he also challenges the reductive, linear construct of home based on homogeneity of culture. His picture of the returnees is more complicated for it sets them apart from the resident villagers on the basis of class and gender as well. It subverts both home placed in a conventional monologic setting, and the uni-dimensional relationship of diasporists with their country. Whereas the ancestral home is rooted, fixed, and as Heller says “geographically monogamous” (2), the returnees with their “geographically promiscuous” (1) experience re-enter the scene as already estranged from their once familiar ancestral abode to which they have brought cultural diversity. They are well-to-do now and can afford to relax as compared to the local population whom we have already seen burdened with their daily responsibilities. This is not the only home for them; there is another home holding them back elsewhere. Commenting upon the radical transformation contemporary diaspora brings in one’s status in and attitude towards home, Jacob states: “Mobility compels our lives to be full of radical openness, proliferating differences and multiplying loyalties. It produces flows of information, people, and things that do away with, or render residual, what might be thought of as monogamous modes of dwelling” (3). A little later, she describes how the returnees return home in the midst of their experience of a “geographically promiscuous world, defined by movements, networks of association and multi-local loyalties” (31). Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 114
So the returnees in SM have come back not to settle down in the hometown: “They don’t intend to stay so they walk around, looking relaxed, talking and laughing loudly, and effusing affection for the place” (1). As their sense of belonging to the place and its culture seems to have been attenuated by spatio-temporal distance, they try to overact their fondness for both. This is manifest in their loud behavior and mannerisms of their native culture: “When friends meet they don’t just give a nod or a handshake in the meaningless ritual of the city people, but rather they shout the person’s name or thump him on the back. Hugging is also common, but not for women” (1-2). Moving in a more spacious, less purific social space, they themselves are heterogeneous as a group. Gao traces the class- and gender-based diasporic patterns in this community. The gender discourse shows men and women segregated from each other. Back home either from abroad or from the city, each is made to follow set norms of behavior which the sexually segregated, heterosexual native society has carefully fixed for them both. Men’s way of greeting each other differs from that of women. The one cannot be applied for the other.
Men can hug each other but not women. Similarly, women hold each other’s hands but not men’s. Both genders are equally bound to follow the unwritten rules of public behavior. When men move out of home, they do so for trade or labour or similar economic reasons. This is because the conventionally patriarchal society in China as elsewhere in Asia has imposed on them the compulsion to earn to support ‘their’ family. This accounts for men “humping sacks”
(2). Women, in comparison, are forced out under another social imperative; that of getting married, leaving their maiden homes and shifting over to the domicile of their husbands. They seem to bear the full responsibility of children as in the street scene it is only women who are seen carrying babies. Dislocation in their case has a restricted range; so is the range of their social life: “The two young women who hold hands as they chat on the street … are probably Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 115
recent brides seeing relatives and friends, or visiting parents” (2). Shifting in their case seems local and not all that profitable in terms of improving their economic status. They seem to belong to the lower middle class as is evident from their “red coarse hands and strong fingers” (2), and the headscarf one of them is wearing. In spite of being steeped in traditions, this village society is not static; it is in a process of transition. As people go out or come back from outside, they influence certain social norms and practices to be discontinued at home; for example: “[t]his type of scarf, and how it’s tied, dates back many generations but is seldom seen these days” (2). Far from being fixed and static, home thus remains in a continuous process of change and adjustment.
Apart from being culturally informative, this part of the text also reveals the character of the author/narrator. The voice is definitely male; and so is the perspective. Though coming from a modern metropolitan city, he has the same tendency to look at women as men usually have in any primitive masculinist-heterosexual society. His male gaze fixes them as objects of sensuous pleasure. They are beautiful to hear and look at: “The women here have lovely voices and you can’t help taking a second look. …You find yourself walking towards them … [One of them] has a beautiful face. Her features are delicate, so is her slim body” (2). The narrator’s standard of beauty for a woman is masculinist/heteroerotic; it is the delicacy of her face and form and figure which makes her attractive in his eyes. Had she been stout or masculine in her build-up as on a later occasion in SM to be discussed shortly, she may not have attracted his senses. His sensuousness is revealed also in his report about the Chinese culinary delights available in this far-flung area. Interestingly, ‘you’ feels perfectly at home and rooted while gratifying his “hefty appetite” (8). Though not “academic about food …[y]ou savour this food of your ancestors and listen to the customers chatting with the proprietors” (8). In spite of a sense of his ancestral roots Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 116
here, he is made to feel isolated in this small community where everybody knows everybody else; those little known are on the other side of the social divide; they are made to feel alienated:
“They are mostly locals and know each other. You try using the mellifluous local accent to be friendly; you want to be one of them. You’ve lived in the city for a long time and need to feel that you have a hometown” (8).
(d) Dialogism of the third space
The above diasporic discourse again problematizes the present position of the narrator.
Like the author, ‘you’ too seems to have an ambivalent relationship with places. In spite of having resided long in the city and travelled wide—“You’d been to lots of places” (2)— he has not been able to surmount the wish to belong to an ‘originary’ home, to reclaim his cultural roots, to cure the deep sense of absence or lack in his life. Does this Confucian need for belonging belie the earlier claim of a Buddhist free-floating, nomadic spirit? Certainly not; the two co-exist in the same person, holding him in a dialogic tension. His sense of not belonging is sharpened by the familiarity with which the locals are talking with the proprietors. Judging by his difference, others may have looked at him with distaste or even hostility. As he does not belong to the soil, to their accent, culture or time, he is marginalized, ‘minoritised’. They, in comparison, acquire the position of power that goes with the majority. It is this present position of not-belonging, of being a minority that generates in the narrator the desire for a hometown to belong to. It is relevant to quote Lily Li’s comments on this predicament here:
The protagonist (“you”), as a tourist and an outsider appearing at a small town in
southern China, envies the locals because they live on their native land (1). The
author closely shows his view on the notion of the root and the notion of home, Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 117
through the narrator, by disclosing his envy of those who are always rooted in the
native land and also those who have returned home after leaving. (207)
“Revealed here is the attachment to the roots”, she continues, quoting an old Chinese adage of
“fallen leaves returning to the roots” (207). I argue that the situation under discussion in Gao is not all that simple as it appears here. Nor can the view be ascribed solely to the author. Now the locals do have an advantage over ‘you’ in being part of the community, yet where the difference in his accent isolates him from this mainstream society, there it also empowers him. It saves him from the necessity of belonging or putting down roots. It singles him out of the crowd. Un-rooted and unassimilated, he has the freedom to move on; backward or forward. Like the returnees, he too brings hybridity and enrichment to the local culture. Though born around the same place, he has been replanted in Beijing. His residence and schooling over there must have been responsible for his different accent so now he adds to the cultural complexity and pluralism of the place. In the diasporic context, belonging and being rooted to the soil suggest an entrapment, a constriction of space to move about, and not to belong is given a positive valence as in Edward
Said’s theory of exile or the concept of de-territorialisation in Deleuze. Next we find ‘you’ near a bridge by whose side he finds lodging for the night in an inn (8). While the temporariness of the abode reinforces his rootlessness, the nearby bridge acts as an interstitial or ‘third’ space.
Bhabha’s third space is a dialogic space where to negotiate differences. Trying to take up an in- between, marginal position in relation to the two defined places of urban north and rural south, both Gao and his subject appear truly marginal, apolitical figures, liberated from the politics of centre and periphery. They belong nowhere.
Exile as a form of diaspora has been under focus in this Chapter. The complex nature of originary home problematizes the exile’s response to it, imbuing it with a certain duality. The Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 118
contradictory forces in his culture pull him back to the Confucian values of blood and lineage as strongly as they push him out in line with the Buddhist cult of mobility and freedom. Exile is a state not only of being uprooted from the centre but remaining un-rooted in the periphery as well.
The rupture between exile and home proves ‘enabling’ in terms of artistic productivity that both
Said and Seidel have discussed in their respective texts. In Gao’s fiction, it has enabled the subjects to pass from an ‘exile’ to a ‘counter-exile’ status in relation to home, the Guillѐn’s terms used here with a slight modification. In this non-static, progressive state of being, one re- negotiates a relationship with home based on emotional detachment as well as intellectual honesty. Life in the periphery appears intriguing for its relative calm, simplicity and freedom, yet the subjects do not seek a settlement there either. Thus standing midway between here and there, present and past, center and periphery, they dislocate themselves from the power-base of centre or counter-centric politics, for “there is no uncontaminated location free of power” (Braidotti
20). This dislocation on the part of the subject is a manifestation of a desire for a non-aligned, independent, continuously mobile subjectivity, an area to be explored in the ensuing pages.
With the help mainly of textual and Bakhtinean discourse analyses, I am sure this
Chapter has adequately addressed the research questions raised in the beginning. The presence of multiple discourses demonstrates that there is no single, fixed version of home in China. Like elsewhere in the world, it has always been provisional, multiple and changeable. Similarly, there has never been any singular, monolithic Chinese culture but a culture in flux that has remained in dialogue with heterogenous elements defining its contours since ages.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 119
Chapter Four
Exile’s Dislocation from Home
The exile knows that in a secular, contingent world, homes are always
provisional. Borders and barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar
territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or
necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.
Edward Said
This chapter expands the meaning of home from one’s personal residence/country to the larger construct of a socio-political territory that houses a whole community supposedly defined by the homogeneity of language, dress and living style. Located in a space-and-time bound context, this territory plays a major role in shaping the psyche of an individual to become the compliant subject of a particular society or state. So home in this context becomes synonymous with the socio-cultural matrix which is a site for generating indigenous subjectivity. We have seen how power dynamics inherent in the family structure turn the author as well as his narrator an exile at home. In the broader context as well, he is alienated for his difference and comes to have a problematic relationship with society as well as state. Here, multiple forces of oppression represented by the elders of the family and the ruling party have been continuously at work to reduce him to a flattened subjectivity. Thus persecuted and terrorized, he resists the external pressures and finally opts out. This territorial dispersion from the centre is an attempt on his part to exercise his right to choose and by doing so reclaim his agency.
Mansfield defines subjectivity as the sum total of human experiences (1). Compared to the traditionally conceived self which is private and evolves intrinsically towards a coherent Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 120
whole, subject is a product of social interaction, and may never attain completion, or coherence in its multiple aspects. “It is the self mediated through discourse” and the process one goes through is critically termed as ‘subjectivation’ or ‘subjectification’ (1). We have already seen how Rodowick differentiates between the first as individuation of self, and the other as the process of imposing identity tags on individuals (44). Diaspora subjectivity in Deleuze is a slippery, ambivalent state of being in which an individual slips out of home, the seat of power. In this Foucauldian territory, institutions collude to homogenise individuals and thus arrest their mobility. Dislocation in this context is a form of resistance, an assertion of agency to choose one’s own trajectory. At individual level, Gao’s protagonist as a child felt ‘squashed’ by the hegemonic presence of the elders around him (OMB 1); now a sensitive grown up, he feels equally hedged in and stifled at socio-political level. I extend the autobiographical account of ‘I’ under threat of dying of lung cancer in SM as a trope for the de-oxygenating process of
‘subjectification’ that ‘he’ the artist undergoes at home in OMB. Both the novels recap the desperate struggle of the artist to survive the onslaughts of tyranny in the form of various forces of power. Faced with two options―either to die, or live and be ossified, neither of which is acceptable to the subject―he creates a third option, and flees. Now whether to call flight an act of passive or active subjectivity is open to question. It suffices here at present to assume that instead of being pushed to the walls, a self-exile takes the initiative and acts on his/her own.
As a cultural phenomenon, since exile is a “rupture between the collective subject of the original culture and the individual subject” (JanMohamed 223), we need to investigate what powers this rupture in Gao’s fiction. This necessitates the broadening of the critical base of diaspora to include other theories such as those of subjectivity and the power that goes in constituting it. And that accounts for my reliance on a group of Western critics here who have Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 121
theorized subject formation in their own context of liberal capitalism. Though most of the twentieth century theories from Freud to Lacan, and Nietzsche to Foucault have had their conceptual base in the capitalist West, these can be brought, suggests Mansfield, equally in relation to a discussion of the socio-cultural systems anywhere in the world: “Subjectivity is made by the relationship that forms from the human context. To psychoanalysts, dominant among these are the family relationships defined in terms of gender and sexuality. For Foucault they are the broad relationships of power and subordination that are present everywhere in all societies” (51). Power is an extra-territorial phenomenon. Those in power often tend to oppress and do violence to individuals anywhere. The difference lies only in the mechanism adopted.
While oppression under capitalism has been subtle and psychological, exerted more through civic administration or “ideological state apparatuses” (Althusser 1341), that under communism in the Central and East Asia has been more visible, and expansive in the use of ‘repressive’ state machinery (1341) on bodies as well. In discussing exile’s relationship to the socio-cultural systems or ‘regimes of power’ in China, I find Althusser’s “interpellation” (1356), Deleuzian concepts of “territorialisation” and “de-territorialisation” (1449), and Foucault’s panoptic
“carceral” (1490) most relevant here. Drawing on the Gramscian concept of hegemony and ideology, Louis Althusser conceptualizes the dominant social system, capitalism in his context, as ‘hailing’ or ‘interpellating’ individuals to its ideology through ‘ideological’ and ‘repressive’ state mechanisms both of which end up being equally coercive: “All state apparatuses function both by repression and ideology” (1344), he writes, thereby enabling the structures of power to reproduce themselves and persist. He elucidates this with the help of a most common example of an individual spontaneously turning round to a police call: “As when a policeman in the street hails ‘Hey, you there!’ By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 122
becomes a subject” (1356). The law of a repressive state or society subjectifies individuals to comply with the rules and regulations under command of the system. Deleuze and Guattari also theorise the state/societal ‘subjection’ of individuals as ‘territorialisation’ or ideological indoctrination which one can counter with an “emergent subjectivity” (1449), possible only through repeated acts of ‘deterritorialisation’. The two critics also conceptualise ‘slipperiness’ as a subject’s irreducibility to the binaries constructed by power, and ‘flight’ in the sense of resistance through a subjective fluidity. Foucault’s concept of subjectivity is socially constituted by “the historical discourse of power and knowledge” (1471). The system in power uses knowledge to allocate different slots of identity to individuals so each could ‘choose’ whether to be tagged normal or abnormal, healthy or sick. This is how repressive states or societies
‘subjectify’ individuals.
Foucault takes subject as one’s changeable subject-position in a sentence as well as one under subjection to power. In “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” he perceives modern society as a ‘panopticon’, a term he borrows from the 18th century British reformer
Jeremy Bentham’s blue-print of a prison house the details of which shall come later. The model fits modern society where a central invisible power subtly exercises authority through social institutions which in turn discipline individuals through their discursive control. I find all above concepts relevant to an intensive discussion of Gao’s subjects located in a socio-political territory under a communist regime from where they deterritorialise. The discursive control of patriarchy at home and ideological violence in the street turn them into refugees and exiles. Out of this matrix emerges the writer’s doctrine of flight which is more than simply an exile’s physical dispersion from home. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 123
Exile according to Edward Said is one who has picked up a quarrel with the home- country. The root of the dispute lies in the clash between the hegemonic domestic culture and the subject’s need for self-expression. The immediate problem faced by the dispersed is how to negotiate with the indigenous subjectivity in order to acquire a broad-based subject position elsewhere. This entails “a continual return to events, to their re-elaboration and revision”
(Chambers 3). In both novels and the short story “BFR” Gao’s subjects return to the past, personal as well as collective. SM has an epic scale; it keeps plugging back in time and place to a past that stretches as far back as primitive history that is not only Chinese but also human. We can discuss the constitution of a human subject against this larger backdrop. OMB is comparatively smaller in terms of its spatio-temporal location. Most of the events recalled in it relate to the near past. It, therefore, serves well as a major source of textual data for the second part of this chapter, where my main focus is how a Chinese subject in exile repositions himself against the particular political scenario of the Cultural Revolution. This specifically Chinese frame of reference is directed towards a “retelling, re-citing and re-siting of what passes for historical and cultural knowledge …” (Chambers 3). To Gao, the ten-year Revolution was an experiential reality. SM demanded the author to be more cautious and discrete in his critique of the state apparatuses since it was written mostly during his residential status in China. Away in the ‘liberal’ West long after he renounced his Chinese nationality, Gao could afford to be blunt and more direct in OMB to share the experience of how the subject braced the political pressure to flatten his subjectivity. So from the proverbial ‘third space of enunciation’, ‘you’ the protagonist launches a third person venture into the past to re-document personal as well as national history and thereby put right what has so far passed as historical truth both at home and abroad. For the then regime in the country not only controlled the production of knowledge and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 124
its inland circulation but also created a Chinese mystique from behind the ‘bamboo curtain’ which led the West to construct an exotic view of China as the centre of world revolution
(Kirkwood 53). Only an exile with the Saidian double vision could dismantle this curtain. The greater part of this chapter thus will focus on the state-and-societal surveillance in both novels which keeps the exilic impulse under arrest for quite some time before becoming the strongest impetus for resistance and ultimate flight. I shall scrutinize selected excerpts from the texts first with the help of Foucauldian discourse analysis, and later Deleuzian order/statement analysis.
Territorial Imperatives at Home: Exile under arrest
(a) Societal surveillance
In its tendency to control and oppress, one may align home with both the Deleuzian
‘territory’ and the Foucauldian panopticon. Of the social institutions wielding power, I include home as the earliest domain of power to ‘territorialise’ and ‘subjectify’ individuals, putting them to rest in an environment which is either all too familiar and too secure for them, or too tyrannical and brutalising to question their indoctrination to the dominant ideology. Clearly defined in territory and constrictive in range as a ‘regime of power’, home assigns a uniform subjectivity to those within its confines “by reducing all differences to identity, plurality to unity, otherness to selfness, and movement to stability” (Aurora 4). In the present theoretical context, home-sickness thus comes to acquire an ambiguous connotation. It means a stage when the subject gets sick of home and opts out.
To Foucault, social institutions play a key role in defining the subject positions of power and subservience. Home is the first power-base that presides over the process of a child’s subjectification. Similarly, contained within its lineal borders, family happens to be the first Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 125
ideological apparatus through which the society exerts force to subjectify individuals for a culturally approved way of life. So in Gao, we find the narrator ‘I’ in SM and ‘he’ in OMB under constant panoptic gaze of over-anxious, extra protective parents and other relatives. As a child, each becomes an object, properly looked after at every step, protected with charms, strictly forbidden from overstepping the boundaries. The narrator in SM remembers himself either in the arms of his mother or wet nurse. While learning to walk as a toddler, “my mother sternly forbade me to play near the river. It was only when the grown-ups went to the riverbank to fetch water that I could go and dig in the sand…” (211). A little earlier, he mentions the barriers and obstacles they erected to hinder his process of independent learning even inside the house: “… to get to the back courtyard I had to cross a high sill and after crossing, there was also a step. I couldn’t crawl over it on my own so the back courtyard remained a mysterious place for me”
(211). This gets close to Foucault’s premise that “Modern societies intervene from day one to shape, train and normalize individuals” (1471). As in the family photograph in OMB discussed earlier, the child in SM feels himself a minority, “squashed between the grownup’s legs and luggage” (103) during a truck journey to safety from air bombardment. Thus dependent on external help and closely monitored, the individual grows into a docile and dependable subject, obedient to authority and fully conscious of what to do and what not to. This process of social orientation, of homogenization of the subject continues the whole life. Not only that; even after their death the parents and elders of the family interestingly keep wielding authority to prescribe the standards of a proper and normal life. In spite of the distance in time and space, ‘I’ in SM still has a strong sense of their presence in the midst of his wanderings. They keep on haunting him, watching over him from across the other world, as if to interpellate and territorialise him to the culturally approved way of life: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 126
I am aware that at this moment I am surrounded by a world of dead people and
that behind this wall are my dead relatives…. I know right now they are
discussing me in another room in these ruins. They don’t approve of how I am
living my life and are worried about me. There’s really no need but they insist on
worrying. ... They say I can’t go on like this, I need a normal family. They should
find me a good intelligent wife, a woman who can tend to what I eat and drink
and manage the home for me―they think my prolonged illness is from improper
eating and drinking. They are plotting how to arrange my life. (211-12)
I have selected the above passage from SM for a detailed analysis as it is most relevant to the topic under discussion here. Drawing on social constructionism and discursive methodology gleaned from the works of Foucault, I divide my analysis into two broad lines of arguments, i.e., where home keeps on exerting a powerful influence to ‘territorialise’ or ‘subjectify’ an exilic individual, there it also produces resistance in the form of a deterritorialisation on the part of exile. The aim is to demonstrate how power at home manipulates discourse to construct and circulate a particular version of truth, and to marginalize or silence any other alternative as falsehood. This it does by performing certain significant acts of inclusion and exclusion, positioning and framing, articulation and muting, foregrounding and back grounding and normalizing and pathologising (Foucault). The excerpt shows a solitary individual surrounded by his home community. However, the material existence and first person narrative voice of the narrator vis-ὰ-vis the ghostlike presence and third person plurality of the dead relatives problematize the numerical/vocal base of both their power positions. The passage towards the end starts interrogating the discursive intrusions of an abstract hegemonic order that objectify Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 127
and subjugate the individual, and shows the latter empowered through resistance and counter- discourse.
The selected text starts with phrases like “I am aware” and “I know” which appear to affirm the narrator’s position as a powerful and knowledgeable subject. However, once he introduces the collective body of his dead relatives, they take over as the dominant party, objectifying him as the subject of their discourse. Significantly enough, he does not individualise or identify them even by their common name as parents, grandparents or other members of the extended family. That way they remain abstract and invisible; a strongly present collective entity with one voice, one speech, one mindset. Their collectivity negates their plurality. Faceless and disembodied, they seem to represent the abstraction called society which Gao as a power- resistant individualist distrusts as evident from his avoidance of all collective pronouns from his fictive personae in SM. No wonder, the scenario amidst the ruins adds a Gothic element to the narrative. Like the dilapidated ‘Temple of Perfect Benevolence’ (9) the newly wedded couple is honeymooning around in the short story “The Temple”, these ruins could serve as a reminder of the conventional socio-cultural systems like marriage, home and family now breaking down, at least for the exile if not the society at large.
The fact that “they are discussing me” (212) empowers them as their discussion generates an interdisciplinary gendered discourse, drawing on social sciences such as psycho-pathology, sociology, ethics, social works (voluntary match-making), health, nutrition and household management. In their discursive practice, they position themselves as self-appointed authority to judge, approve, sanction and discipline in case a deviance occurs. They keep trying to constitute him as a docile, compliant subject of society. In the discussion, they foreground the care and concern they feel for his wellbeing which automatically backgrounds their nosy intrusiveness: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 128
“They are worried about me… they insist on worrying…” (212). They avoid giving details of how “I am living my life” and refer to it as living “like this” (212 emphasis added). This is how they silence any life-style counter to their own, leaving no room for anyone to explore alternative routes and territories. We are watching here what in Foucauldian sense constitutes a norm. In full discursive control, the relatives exert power to normalize and pathologise at will; they determine and categorise the binaries of orderly/disorderly, proper/improper, healthful/ unhealthy, normal/abnormal ways of living. Only what they do is the norm while they conveniently problematize what others do as non-normative. Upholding compulsory heterosexuality, they conceive a settled, married life as the one and only solution to his ‘problems’. Not only that; they take upon themselves as beholden in duty to provide him with a “good, intelligent wife”, who they stereotype as a woman who can perform set roles of a cook, a caretaker and a house- manager all-in-one as per the male needs. In “plotting how to arrange my life”, these ghostlike presences assume a dubious authority to discipline and control the narrator in submitting to their whims. The constituted object of their discourse emerges as a misguided hence marginalized male who needs doctoring for a re-inclusion in the mainstream society. This indeed is the powerful trick of the Foucauldian discourse.
In Foucault, subjectivity is a grammatically fluid position, subject to the inter-subjective power dynamics. In the second part of the above passage quoted below, the narrator reverts to his first person subject position from where to launch a counter-discourse. Already, he has enjoyed and kept this privilege to himself, not letting them an access to direct speech. Now he displaces them from their position of grammatical and discursive control and contests the hegemony they exert through their home-based, family-oriented ideology. They have favoured marriage as a means to ensure the biological continuity of their line. His freedom as a bachelor renders him Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 129
socially unserviceable hence their categorization of him as a ‘problem’ case. However, their attempt to locate him within the borders of home seems to have powered his urge for deterritorialisation. Notice the narrator’s act of asserting his self through an emphatically repeated use of the first person pronoun as the theme or the “starting point of the message”
(Halliday 38) of almost every sentence. In contrast, he deliberately relegates the relatives to the object-position, pushing them farther off in the rheme of each utterance:
I should tell them there is no need for them to worry. I am already middle-aged
and have my own way of life. It’s what I have chosen and I am not likely to go
back to what they have in mind for me. I can’t live the life they lived, and in any
case their lives weren’t particularly wonderful. (212)
By using various action verbs in the affirmative and the negative the speaker asserts his discursive control. He can devise and follow his own dos and don’ts, and take full responsibility for any ramifications arising therefrom. Privileging his own exilic position as an aging bachelor, a loner and a drifter, the narrator dismisses their conventional life-style as well as any possibility of his ever reverting to it. It is a declaration of independence, an assertion of his right to autonomous subjectivity. He has seceded from the clan culture of a settled life, and the fixity and flaccidity of its cultural norms.
At home, the self thus is located in an extremely intrusive social space where it is constantly monitored by others. Apart from parents and a host of other relatives, there are neighbours, fellow students, co-workers etc. to intrude upon its privacy. The conventional architecture is a visual reinforcement of this super surveillant social scene. Notice the way courtyards are built in China to render one open to the constant public gaze: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 130
Sometimes my family’s courtyard is a passageway for families living at the front
and at the back, and I can’t do anything that others won’t know about, I am never
able to experience the warm intimacy of just being myself. Even in my room the
partitions either do not go to ceiling, or the papered walls have holes or one of the
walls has collapsed. (231)
That much monitoring is enough to estrange anybody from home, let alone an artist. We get a sense of entrapment, of being incarcerated in this congested, over-intrusive social space where one cannot express oneself fully, or be oneself: “To start with, you come fearlessly shouting and yelling into the world, then you are stifled by all sorts of customs, instructions, rituals and teachings” (419). Through autobiographical accounts dispersed across Gao’s oeuvre, we come to know that for all their rooted, grounded, home-centred ideology, no member of his family could live long. That a “bastard like him” (OMB 4) was the only one to survive is ironic. Since assimilation is death of individuality, he jealously guards his personal territory from an encroachment by “the family ISA” (Althusser 1341). His resilience manifest in the repeated acts of deterritorialisation points towards an emergent subjectivity.
Out of their Chinese locations, Gao’s ‘I’ or ‘you’ may stand for any sensitive human being who is denied space to exist in a society on her own. The de-oxygenating process of one’s
‘territorialisation’ at the hands of social institutions, customs and rituals is common to other
Asian societies as well. Social forces particularly in this part of the world are powerful enough to intervene in all matters: from the purely private decision of whether to marry or stay single, to the question of speaking or acting one’s mind in a public space, individuals have no choice but to submit to the norm. One long term objective in this chapter is to disseminate awareness about one’s right to autonomous subjectivity, an area neglected in most of the Asian cultures. It is this Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 131
consciousness of one’s right to territorial autonomy which seems to have carried Gao’s subject through the fixed territories and settled isms of the Cultural Revolution, an area I am going to focus now as a crucial phase in the genealogy of his subjectivity at home.
(b) Political incarceration
This part of the chapter conducts an in-depth investigation into the ‘quarrel’ or the troubled relationship the exile develops with the home-state in OMB. It is here that Gao deconstructs the grand narrative of history of the Chinese Proletariat Cultural Revolution through an alternative micro-narrative. The dominant political order of one-party, one-man rule converts the country into a police state. After outliving its mass popularity, the communist party resorts to street activism to keep itself in power. Its military style rule unleashes a wave of violence to
‘hail’ and territorialise people into submission and acquiescence to its consistently changeful policies. With its purific, monologic agenda, it holds the whole population under arrest, enforces unquestioning compliance to its orders, and with its panoptic gaze penetrates into the most private and secret corners of a person’s life. It is this tyrannical use of power that not only turns the narrator ‘he’ into an exile at home but also triggers his self-exile to the West. This accounts for my reliance on Foucault’s concern with power and subjectivity, Louis Althusser’s concept of
‘interpellation’, and Deleuze and Guattari’s role of language in the domain of power as key theoretical bases for discussion here. I shall use the Deleuzian analysis of the ‘order-words’ as a major tool for analyzing some of the selected data from the text.
As stated earlier, Foucault in “Discipline and Punish” conceives modern society as a
‘carceral’ after the image of a prison-tower proposed by Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher and social reformer. In his utilitarian theory of punishment of crime, Bentham envisaged a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 132
restructuring of the prison system to ensure the socio-economic serviceability and productivity of the reformed criminals after their return to normal life. He drew on the ‘surveillance machine’ designed by his architect brother, Samuel Bentham. ‘Panopticon’, the proposed inspection house, was a circular building with a central watch-tower surrounded on all sides by tiers of separate prison cells all of which came under direct observation of the guard above who himself remained unseen. Since the prisoners were to know that the guard was constantly watching them, they could become responsible for their behaviour and appear to be penitent and reformed. Seen from the perspective of modern Surveillance Studies, Bentham’s panoptic model could be an effective monitoring tool to maximize civic discipline and security. However, on the basis of care/control paradox of intention behind its use, it acquires an ambiguous status; and that’s what makes it especially relevant to Foucauldean theory of power. In “Discipline and Punish”, Foucault relates panopticon to the invisibility and optimum efficiency with which the modern capitalist society exercises power and coercion to discipline its subjects and punish deviance. This it does through an over-organized, sophisticated network of institutions which he calls “the carceral archipelago”
(1493). These physically present yet invisible and perennially watchful agencies arrange the subjects spatially, allot them individual slots and ‘save’ them in their separate data files, thus keeping them all permanently visible. Aware thus of their visibility, the subjects remain within the bounds of ‘normality’. As for the norm, it is established through an inter-discursive relay of knowledge which terms even a slight difference as an aberration that must be normalised through punishment. Bentham’s panoptic schema, thus, becomes a trope for the most cost-and-energy effective mechanism of modern capitalist society with which to bring a whole population under subjugation, keeping the subjects “docile and useful” (1499), and dissidents tamed and territorialised to a ‘normal’ social order. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 133
In the present theoretical context the word ‘order’ has three possible semantic variations: it could refer to an overall socio-political system as above; or an arrangement of things in a particular line or order, or one may use it grammatically in terms of a command one issues to someone for something. Taken together, all these variations show an internal relation between power and subservience. Those in authority issue orders which those below must obey to ensure normalcy of law and order situation which a system needs for its continuation. This interplay of words and their semantic possibilities take us back to the territorial theory of Deleuze and
Guattari. In their politics of ‘subjectification’, language is the “main instrument to transmit power functions and to impose power relations” (Aurora 7). The two critics believe that
“Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (Deleuze 75).
They further state: “The elementary unit of language—the statement—is the order-word. …
Every order word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death sentence” (107) in that it inflicts immediate death to the receivers of order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict (107). This certainly is death of individuality. When the child receives continuous dictation from outside, s/he loses the initiative to act independently. The same process continues outside home: “When the school mistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or arithmetic, she … does not so much instruct as ‘insign’, give orders or commands” (107). Every ordering authority uses the force of language to territorialise or indoctrinate the subjects to its order. However, the same order-word acts, both critics believe,
“like a warning cry or a message to flee”; the option to flee is inherent in the order as the two critics quote Elias Canetti’s invocation of “the lion’s roar which enunciates flight and death simultaneously” (107). The Deleuzian order-word could also be related to the compulsive force of Althusserian interpellation or ‘hailing’ through which a power structure is able to repeat itself Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 134
over time. As stated earlier, Althusser explains it through the example of a policeman, the guardian of law, obstructing individuals in the street: “There are individuals walking along.
Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out, “Hey, you there!” one individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he who is meant by the hailing” (1365). Althusser asserts that the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subject are one and the same thing. Further details shall come during the textual analysis. The power-play manifest in all these concepts underpins my present thematic concern in Gao’s fiction: the subjectivation process of individual at home which powers his dispersion from there.
A close reading of some portions from OMB reveals how the narrator is being interpellated and territorialized, fixed under a panoptic gaze and transfixed to a set norm at home as well as in street activism during the Cultural Revolution. The aim is to explore the process of
‘subjectification’ of the protagonist in the home country which pursues with a vengeance “Mao’s goals of ‘continuous revolution’ and utopian equalitarianism” (Kirkwood 60). The terrorizing effect on a young artist creates a stronger impetus for a physical as well as intellectual dislocation from home. Narratorial dispersion reinforces the territorial displacement in the novel from the Beijing home on the first page to the border area of Perpignan facing the Mediterranean on the last. Time and again, ‘you’, now a French national at present located in the multicultural
Hong Kong, gives way to ‘he’, his past self, to recount his past experiences across the border in the Mainland. Thus the mobility in crossing the spatio-temporal borders keeps his present subject position in a state of constant fluidity. Along with this, the discursive multiplicity decentres individual self from any dominant uni-centric state/societal territory of influence. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 135
The fact that a large part of OMB is given to an account of how power forces a subject to ultimately opt out testifies the extent of the loss of home for exile. The book joins a whole body of exile literature written on communist excesses in the Near, Central and Far East at different times. Compared to The Animal Farm by a non-exile writer which employs parodic element and animal fable mode to record the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and its later ramifications,
Gao’s is a more direct and open record of experiential history. Its definite frames of references generate little poetic possibility of an alternative reading. As such it offers hardly any relief from gloom and horror that power-politics at the top causes for those below. However, the diasporic status of the author and the third person narration of the crucial events creates a distancing affect as compared to the subjective bias possible in reporting in a uniformly autobiographical ‘I’ narration in Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1993).
Through a textual and critical discourse analyses of selected segments of the novel, this part of the chapter highlights the way a panoptic political system ‘hails’ and ‘recruits’ an intellectual hence marginal subject to participate in the culture of violence that comes to dominate the
Chinese street politics during the “anti-cultural Cultural Revolution” (OMB 143) in 1966-76. So pervasive was the hold of its command-words that it transformed the very nature of his subjectivity, rendering him ‘docile and serviceable’; not only harmless to the state but also pliantly serving the cause, interest and ideology of the Party in power. The irony throws into relief the consequences of a system gone awry because of the force with which power attempts to maintain and expand its territory. To shake off the power-effects, one needs a new form of
‘deterritorialised’ or ‘counter’ subjectivity which both Deleuze and Foucault evoke and which is symbolically manifest in the physical act of ‘flight’ from home. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 136
In Foucault’s theory, power centres round various social institutions which operate through an inter-discursive production of knowledge. Human subject is the dominant object of analysis in the scholarly debates of various academic disciplines which divide human population according to their own defined categories of normal and abnormal behavior. These disciplines thus help power to evolve strategies to discipline and normalize the deviant/non-normative. In
OMB, we notice power concentrated in the hands of the collective body of the state. Through a trickery of the official discourse, the state becomes synonymous with the ruling party. The party, spelled with a capital ‘P’, has absolute authority to determine the construction of political and ideological norms as well as socio-moral values. It as such equates loyalty to the state with the unquestioning loyalty to the Party, to socialism and to Chairman Mao. Through a chain of bitter memories narrated by ‘he’, we learn that the Cultural Revolution was in fact an oppressive move to ‘hail’ and ‘territorialize’ the subject within narrow monologic bounds. It was a move to close down all ideological borders for negotiations with others in the name of party interests concealed under the patriotic notions of national integration and unity. The notion of one nation, one land, one party, one leader meant complete unanimity which denied the possibility of any difference or disagreement. The novel is a graphic account of how after remaining long in power since 1949, the ruling party succeeds in reproducing its structure of power by interpellating a new generation of docile ‘consumers’ of its myths of greatness. To this effect, it manipulates almost all the ideological state apparatuses listed in Althusser’s ISAs—education, family, law, politics, media, and culture (1341). Notice the ‘bang’ of rhetoric hammered from public platforms: “The great, glorious, correct party, more glorious, greater than God! Forever correct! Forever glorious!
Forever great!” (OMB 49). Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 137
A mega institution with its panoptic machinery of power, the Party renders null and void the working of all other institutions. Home, schools, police, law, and public media, all have to suspend their traditional routine functions before the Party which takes over the parental, pedagogical or judicial responsibility to teach, train, discipline or punish individuals to serve its cause. What in Foucault is an interdisciplinary network of knowledge production shrivels into a single discipline of political criminology in China. The Party Centre initiates an endless series of public debates, discussions, reports and opinions to identify, define and categorise new subjectivities of the criminal and the innocent, in order to decide in public whether one is guilty or not guilty on the basis of how one stands in the eyes of the Party. The inter-discursive production of ‘truth’ leads to irreconcilable ‘us/them’ binaries loaded with ideological baggage—communist/capitalist, leftist/rightist, loyalist/traitor, revolutionary/reactionary or counter-revolutionary, comrade/enemy etc. The constructed identities acquire grave connotations as for example: “… the word ‘comrade’ assumed extreme importance, and everyone used all means to ensure that the word would remain attached to his or her name” (148-9). Otherwise, “a whole series of crimes could be listed for anyone” to be declared an enemy and must be purged or exterminated (104). As in Foucault’s theory of inter-discursive constitution of the subject by society, it becomes a psycho-political necessity for power to constitute the ‘enemy’ in bulk; the larger the production and proportion of deviance, the greater the chance for the Party to intervene and exercise control: “The enemies had to be found; without enemies how could the authorities sustain their dictatorship?” (79). This monologic discourse acquires horrific proportions when it comes to purging the Party of the impure and the unclean elements. The term becomes wider, and more aggressively militant in description as those in power get increasingly fearful of possible counter-moves. Notice the degrading and sub/de-humanising variety of invectives Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 138
gaining currency in the Party epithets for ‘others’: scoundrel capitalists, scheming careerists, despicable worms, Ox Demons and Snake Spirits etc. Also notice the evocative range of psychological violence that a demagogue is capable of inflicting on the audience to harass it into subjection and subjugation. It is in one of the public meetings, where the narrator notices the entrance to the venue being guarded by soldiers and Party security personnel:
I warn comrades to note that they want to restore capitalism. I am talking about
the Ox Demons and Snake Spirits; high up and down below, from the Party
Centre down to provincial cadres! Where they exist in the Party, we must
relentlessly drag them out, we must safeguard the purity of the Party and not let
the glory of the Party be sullied! Are there any here among you? I would not dare
to vouch that there are not. Aha, you thousand gathered at this meeting, are all of
you so pure and clean? Are there none groping to fish in muddy waters, colluding
with higher ups and jumping down below? They want to confuse the battle lines
of our class struggle; I urge all comrades to be on the alert and to sharpen their
eyes. All who oppose Chairman Mao, all who oppose the Party Centre and all
who oppose socialism must be dragged out!
As the voice of the official on the platform died down, everyone started shouting
slogans. “Exterminate all Ox Demons and Snake Spirits!”
“I swear to protect Chairman Mao with my life!”
“I swear to protect the Party Centre with my life!”
“If enemy refuses to capitulate, it must be destroyed”. (35-36) Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 139
I have taken a longer piece from OMB for a textual-cum-stylistic analysis in the light of the concepts of Althusser and Deleuze, incorporating some of the elements of critical discourse analysis. The density of the text generates the need to draw on the ideas of “subjectification”
(Deleuze 78) and “interpellation” (Althusser 1355), with the Deleuzian interpretation of ‘order- word’ as an alternative analytical tool. It shows how the demagogue establishes the power positions and relations between the two parties, he as the sole speaker and his audience as the responsive listener; so each statement made by him becomes an order-word, meant “not to be believed but to be obeyed, to compel obedience” (Deleuze 97). I shall focus first on the individual responses of the audience at the end of the speech above and then that of ‘he’ the narrator’s beyond the quoted text. Both their responses demonstrate how the discursive intrusion of a hegemonic order interpellates and territorializes the individuals collectively as well as singly, converting each from their usually neutral to a Party-line position, from concrete individual human beings to what Deleuze calls an obsequious mass of ‘non-corporeal’ collectivity. The fact that each slogan repeats the contents of the leader’s speech testifies how complete this psychological brainwashing or “incorporeal transformation” (80) of the audience is in the Deleuzian sense of the word.
Loaded with performative utterances, the speech shows how power generates false consciousness by controlling the discourse. In terms of establishing the positions and relations of the interlocutors, it validates the Deleuzian observation that “A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker” (76). The public speaker uses language to perform multiple functions: to simultaneously assure, warn, coax, intimidate, threaten and command. The opening statement “I warn comrades to note” is an illocutionary speech act even though its base is a fear of reaction. The self-referentiality in the theme positions the speaker as the person in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 140
charge, hailing the audience as the recruited subjects, the passive receivers of orders in the rheme. Notice how the speaker addresses the listeners as ‘comrades’ rather than ‘you’. That way he keeps them in a third person common noun ‘absent’ position so they do not expect any share in the power of speech which is due to ‘you’ the direct addressee. He grants them such a position only when he has psychologically subjugated them with a number of very unsettling questions such as “Are there any [Ox Demons and Snake Spirits] here among you?” and “Are all of you so pure and clean?” Such ‘perlocutionary’ speech acts must have forced the audience to look around in panic; intimidated and trapped into the role of fearful listeners. The word ‘comrade’ also problematizes their position and relation to the Party. ‘They’ as comrades are a separate entity vis-ὰ-vis ‘I’ who is an individual representing the Party elite. Where the word gives them a sense of assurance and belonging to the Party, there it also causes their alienation as a group to work on. They are thus a part as well as apart from the Party. In view of the political nuance the term
‘comrade’ has acquired in the context of the Revolution, when the leader calls them ‘comrades’, not only does he give them an equal status of acceptability to the Party, but he also reduces them all to a collective, uniform subjectivity which is their greatest vulnerability.
As for the death-inflicting power of the ‘order-word’, we need to pick up just a couple of examples from the given text. While pointing out the presence of the ‘Ox Demons and Snake
Spirits’ among the crowd and condemning them to a political death, the demagogue issues two order-statements. First, he warns his audience to note such demonic elements around. Since according to him they are everywhere, the audience cannot ‘not’ note them. He needs to level the ground for their help to rid the Party of the ‘enemy’, so he tactfully uses the collective ‘we’ to project it as a common cause—it is “our class struggle”—to be undertaken jointly in the name of the purity and the glory of the Party. Prompt action is what he needs: “We must relentlessly drag Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 141
them out”. The ruthlessness in language is augmented by the deliberate choice of the auxiliary
‘must’ which enforces his order as a law, compulsorily obligatory, and having high probability factor in terms of results. The audience is compelled to obey, to do his bidding. Between the first and the last command, there seems a dramatic interlude, as mentioned earlier, when the speaker places them in the line of fire with his disturbing questions, setting the moral and ethical norm of the pure as against the impure, clean vs. unclean. Assured now of his complete authority, he changes the voice of the order-word: from an active speaking voice ‘we must drag them out’ to a passive speech structure minus the subject: ‘they must be dragged out’. This is what Deleuze stresses when he comments on the way power permeates the linguistic expressions:
... it must be observed how thoroughly politics works from within, causing not
only the vocabulary but also the structure and all of the phrasal elements to vary
as the order-words change. A type of statement can be evaluated only as a
function of its pragmatic implications, in other words, in relation to the implicit
presuppositions, immanent acts or incorporeal transformations it expresses and
which introduce new configurations of bodies. (83)
Once both their positions are clearly established, he the commander and audience the following, there is no need to specify as to who is to carry out his command. He has pitched the crowd to an extent where it has no choice but to obey. By making varied use of the order-words, the demagogue has linked “non-corporeal attributes” to the crowd, thus “effectuating immanent acts” of violence (83). He has extracted from them a mass of workers and activists for the Party before they exist as a body of comrades. The last command has the ring of an ultimatum, a ‘Get it done’ sort of a finality in tone. In case of non-compliance, the death-warrant is implied and enclosed therein. This is how Deleuze characterizes “the very short phrases that command life Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 142
and [that] are inseparable from enterprises and large scale projects: “Ready?”, “Yes.”, “Go ahead.” (76). Notice how as the voice of the speaker ‘dies’ down, that of the audience rises up.
They have to acknowledge the receipt of the order. After all they have to do or die! And how complete is the deadly force of the command they receive is evident through the evocation of death that they are willing now to and do inflict on subsequent occasions.
With the help of the order-words, the leader has thus executed power to “transform” the meeting place into a prison hall and the public into captives or hostages (Deleuze 83). As we turn to the narrator for a close-up view of his response, we find him a solitary individual surrounded by his ‘imagined community’ of fellow workers or comrades. He feels so completely unnerved by what he hears that there is little possibility of any resistance from him. Unlike the example given earlier when the narrator ‘I’ in SM keeps the right of direct narration strictly to himself,
‘he’ in OMB has surrendered it to both the public speaker and the audience. The two take over as the speaking subjects, completely overpowering him. The absence of the reporting parts of both their speeches shows his complete withdrawal from narration. Now Gao’s narrator in the street is tremendously under pressure of both the leader and his peers. Notice his response to both their rhetoric, neither of which directly or particularly addresses him. Still he becomes the constituted subject of both their discourses. Here is a perfect example of Althusser’s ‘interpellation’, or hailing into subjectivity of a common man in the street. Let’s re-visit the critic’s famous
‘policeman’ quote:
Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in a street, the
hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 143
the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that it was really him who was hailed’
(and not someone else). (1356 emphasis in the original)
Althusser calls it a strange phenomenon for the hailed one to always recognize himself to be the addressee, “one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilt feeling’ …” (1356). Donald Pease elucidates it thus: “In becoming interpellated to a symbolic order the addressee of an interpellation transfers the second person in “Hey, you!” into the first person (“You mean me?”) through an identification with the subject position to which the interpellation has assigned the subject” (1). As an incipient intellectual, Gao’s subject could become “a potentially radical source of resistance”, the ‘one out of ten’ misinterpellated subject that Martel takes up for study in a journal article (494). A young man who has recently graduated from the university, he has only wanted to have a room of his own where he could live, dream and be able to “groan or howl as he made wild love with a woman” (OMB 17). What magnifies his fear on hearing the public denunciation of the dissident elements is his non-committal personal stance in a volatile socio- political scenario. In an environment of emotional blackmailing and ideological extremism where ‘either you are with us or against us’ is the norm of judging people, he has the “political error” (54) of being an in-between, “an alien class element” (78): neither a proletariat nor a capitalist, neither a revolutionary nor a rebel (211). Where subjectivity is located within narrow group binaries, his irreducibility to either side problematizes his position as a subject of the state:
“Prior to that he had truly never thought to oppose the Party. He had no need to oppose anyone and simply hoped that people wouldn’t disrupt him from dreaming” (55). Now hearing the speech, he can’t help getting scared however hard he may try to mitigate the compulsive sense of himself being the sure shot target by using the adverb of uncertainty: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 144
All around him, people took the lead in shouting, and he too had to shout out
loudly so that he could be heard; … he knew at this meeting that anyone who
behaved differently from others would be noticed and he could sense that he was
being observed. Arrows were pointed at his back and he was sweating. He felt for
the first time that, maybe, he was the enemy and that very likely he, too, would be
destroyed. (36 my emphasis)
The dominant order has thus hailed, recruited and territorialised him as a subject compliant to its orders. Fear effects his body position and function. This is how power, in Foucault’s premise, effects the political construction of subjective consciousness as well as body (Zake 217). His sense of entrapment increases each day as the Party’s move to subjugate the masses gains momentum: “… the slogans rose and subsided in waves”, he reports. He feels them becoming
“more forceful and uniform … like an all-engulfing wave … an unstoppable tide that instilled terror in people’s heart. … He had to keep up with shouting and he had to shout clearly and moreover absolutely without any hesitation” (50-51). The political agencies execute their power with such an uncanny skill that they spare no room for a coherent thinking, let alone a
“meaningful resistance or independent agency” (Foucault 1473). The narrator has no choice but to submit to the dominant will. He has to repress his own self, and assume an altogether different role, in short, to let the Party ‘subjectify’ him with its discursive control. By doing so he is ironically assisting the hegemonic order in raising a new generation of ‘normal’ subjects, as
Foucault has put it, compliant and useful to the Party:
[A] political storm was raging everywhere, and if he were to preserve himself, he
had to lose himself among the common people. He had to say what everyone else
said and be able to show that he was the same as everyone else, say whatever was Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 145
stipulated by the Party, extinguish all doubts and keep to the slogans to avoid
being labeled anti-Party. (55)
Power thus has transformed a neutral individual into a pro-Party element. Not that the narrator has not tried to disengage himself from the culture of violence the Party is perpetuating in the country. He and a few like-minded youths once get together in a secret bid to de- territorialise themselves from the dominant ideological ethos: “All of us refused to take part in any movement, refused to commit to any ideology, and refused to join any group” (145). The thrice repeated refusal affirms the seriousness of the resolve, yet he is caught and trapped in spite of himself, territorialised to ‘the trash-can of politics’ as he puts it. What he could not forget is a horrific street scene he once witnessed, the brutal killing of an old “REACTIONARY
LANDOWNER’S WIFE” (70) at the hands of a crowd of teenaged Red Guards. “Mao’s public letter to the youths ‘It is all right to rebel’” (73), and his exhortation to exterminate the enemy incite the teens to such violent acts. While the people watch the gruesome scene helplessly from a distance, and a civilian policeman seems to look with unseeing eyes, the Guards cycle off, raising slogans: “Long live the Red Terror” (70). Even then the narrator could have stayed aloof but for the compulsive interpellation from the Party which ‘recruits’ him as a revolutionary subject of the State. It is Danian the leader of the Red Guards, a youth “who played table tennis with him and the two got on well” (78) who inducts him among his “revolutionary fellow travellers, confront[ing] him by calling out his name—‘of course that includes you!’ to let him know that it referred to him as well” (78). What appears to be a simple ‘assertive’ statement made by Danian comes to acquire an additional ‘directive’ category of speech act as defined by
John Searl. On the receiving end, the narrator has no legal cover to challenge this ideological arrest and imprisonment. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 146
Foucault contends the position of prison as an institution existing on the margins of the social circle. Instead, he locates it in the centre, a symbolic representation of the dominant system of a society which operates through prison-like institutions. In Gao, the communist state as the most dominant of social forces becomes a prison-tower which keeps the population under strict surveillance, arrests anybody at the slightest suspicion, deports them to far off places in the
“reform through labour” (104) camps and accepts them back only when they return ‘purged’ and
‘reformed’, i.e., normalised. Foucault underlines the stress Bentham laid on Panopticon’s function of reforming and ‘normalizing’ rather than punishing deviants and law-breakers. The new name for prisons in the nineteenth century—‘reformatory’ or ‘penitentiary’—clearly exhibited this modern focus on reform (Mansfield 60). We watch the narrator in OMB, forced against his will to follow the norm in an increasingly helpless position of a subject becoming an object of scrutiny, closely monitored as if under a surveillance camera.
The panoptic mechanism of the State works on hard, military lines. We learn, for example, that “The Cultural Revolution had just begun and senior cadres still in power from Mao
Zedong himself … all wore military uniform” (49). Everything at labour camp “was organized in military formation—squad, platoon, company, battalion— and everyone came under the leadership of the commanding officer” (103). This is reminiscent of Foucault’s description of the military-like regimentation at Mettray prison, which serves as a trope for modern society (1490).
Even at work places, there are surveillance units, keeping an eye on who is doing what. Frantic search operations by the Red Guards indicate the Party’s insecurity verging on paranoia. On one such occasion, as they ransack the narrator’s room “for reactionary criminal evidence” (76) against his roommate, they discover love poems from the drawer of the suspect and take them as
“irrefutable evidence of anti-party anti-socialist longings for the paradise of the past” (77). To Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 147
save himself from a possible implication, the narrator feels compelled to give a helping hand in the search. Not that he was safe from intrusion or investigation. Notice the scare of being intercepted on the road:
They also interrogated him.
“Get off.”
He braked suddenly, and almost fell off his bicycle. (70)
The Party’s reign thus is the proverbial reign of terror: “The very first time he was confronted … he was so frightened that he made a confession on the spot” (103). Inside or outside, nowhere could he escape the panoptic gaze of the Party. At the labour camp he is sent for reform, “[i]t turned out that even when he went to the lavatory, he was being spied on” (105). The Party keeps on screen-testing people, forcing them to own their ‘mental’ crimes against the state, i.e., harbouring anti-Party thoughts. It uses people as spy for a leak of any clue, real or fabricated, to implicate them. Husbands, wives, friends, co-workers, anybody could act as informant to ensure their own survival. It holds children answerable for the ‘sins’ of the ancestors. Old pictures of the narrator’s parents in up-to-date dresses could prove their capitalist background; hence he burns them to avoid being tagged “the stinking capitalist offspring!” (73). Dress, hair and shaving style, job description, all become tell-tale signs, rendering one vulnerable before the vigilant authorities. List of ‘crimes’ thus gathered have their entry in personal files maintained separately for each individual. Nothing escapes the all-seeing eye: “wrong words and actions, general political and moral conduct, a person’s written thought-reports and confessions, verdicts and judgments of the work unit were collected together and placed under confidential supervision by special personnel” (149). This reminds us of how power in Foucault interferes in public life Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 148
through a network of reporting agencies which keep a separate data-file of each subject. As
Mansfield puts it: “each one is individualized, separate from one another all in fear of tax audit we must face alone, or glancing nervously at the security camera that may or may not be filming us at the ATM” (62).
The panoptic power base offers little possibility of any dispersion from the centre: “The
Party gave him no choice and was intent on making him conform to a pattern, and his failure to conform meant that he was the enemy of the Party” (211).The imperative to save himself thus transforms the very nature of his subjectivity. From a non-committal, politically detached person, dreaming only of drinking and love-making, he is pushed into becoming the leader of a rebel faction of the Party; “a mean, wily fox, capable of baring its sharp fangs” with which to bite back
(103). As he chairs a meeting he must appear harsh and unsparing to all, young and old alike:
“He had to find enough evidence to get Wu [an old comrade] branded as an enemy [because] if reinstated, the old scoundrel would have sent him to hell straight away” (188). He knows “he was acting out a repulsive role, but it was better to be the judge than being judged by others”
(229). However, saving his own skin does not carry him through for long. “A chess-piece wanting to have its own way” (221), he shows signs of departure from the Party norms. While publicly cross-examining another comrade on the charge of changing loyalty, he notices that the victim is “older than his father” (231) and a heart patient, too: “He felt sorry for him now that his own faith in revolution had been destroyed and he had dispensed with the myths that the perfect new people and the glorious revolution had created” (231). It is then that in spite of the threatening crowd, he lets the old man get a seat and a glass of water and sends him home even if to write a confession there, all at his own risk. The Party faction he is heading has already Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 149
accused him of being “too soft” on enemies (190). Now comes the act of dislocation. It is the move of the subject towards counter-subjectivity or de-territorialisation.
(c) Flight as deterritorialisation
With an increasing awareness of being caught in a reeking quagmire (OMB 248), Gao’s subject comes under a strong impulse to flee. In contrast to the earlier occasion when during a public meeting he along with the audience fails to resist the construction of binaries and the subsequent violence, now his resistance is discernible through the number of negatives and interrogatives in the counter discourse he initiates:
Can’t a person’s faith change? Once aboard a Party ship, does it have to be the
whole of a person’s life? Is it possible not to be a loyal subject of the Party? Then
what if one has no faith? By jumping out of the rigid choice of being either one or
the other, you will be without an ideology, but will you be allowed to exist? When
your mother gave birth to you, you did not have an ideology. …, can’t you live
outside ideology? Is not to be revolutionary the same as counter-revolutionary? Is
not to be a hatchet man the same as being a victim of revolution? If you don’t die
for revolution, will you still have the right to exist? And how will you be able to
escape from the shadow of revolution? (232)
The internal debate is powerful enough to trigger a physical and ideological dispersion from the centre. It is symptomatic of a movement from compliance to defiance, however soft defiance might sound in his ultimate flight. Sick of the compulsive adherence to isms and ideologies,
‘you’ in the passage has started exploring alternative routes and territories. For example: change of faith as against staying loyal, right to exist in contrast to dying for the party, jumping out of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 150
the Party bandwagon and absconding vs. remaining aboard etc. From here stems a counter-move, the desire to ‘escape’ which has a special place in Gao’s philosophy of ‘no-ism’ besides being a form of Foucault’s ‘counter-subjectivity’ and Deleuze’s ‘deterritorialisation’. The narrator mentions his mother having given him birth and rooted him down to a particular family.
However, he denies having received from her any political ‘ism’ in his genes. The tropes of mother and family may refer to the mother-land, and the imagined community or nation-state to which one’s birth roots one down. The speaker takes up a defiant stance and rejects the totalizing constants like latent, inborn or given. In the infighting and the heated scuffle for power within the Party factions, he realizes that he is not made for politics; he has never been interested in “the art of empire making” (216). What interests him is to create space for his repressed artistic self.
This is impossible if he stays there and contests power: “He saw no future in the total chaos of the time so it was best for him to get out of danger” (202), “to bravely retreat while he still could” (203). And retreat he does by slipping out first to the countryside and then out of the country.
The ethical dimensions of Gao’s valorization of flight necessitate taking into account his own creed of freedom and his views about the artist as a no-ist. It aligns with Gao’s individualism and his theory of “no-ism” on the one hand, and with Deleuzian deterritorialisation on the other. As a post-Tiananmen self-exile, Gao has always proclaimed to be a politically disengaged writer. That does not, however, preclude his writing about politics at home which has a key role in forming his artistic subjectivity. In his “Nobel Lecture”, he has asserted that his act of writing about his personal experience of the Cultural Revolution does not make him “a political activist” or philosopher. Valorising the marginality or ‘third-ness’ of writers, he positions them outside all political camps, belonging neither to this nor that power base. He Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 151
states: “Once literature is contrived as … the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a class or a group, it … ceases to be literature, and becomes a substitute for power and profit”
(NL). In his quarrel with the State, he does not claim to represent any particular group opposing the ruling Party; nor does he present any ideology alternative to the prevalent one. Of the two categories of intellectuals operative in a bourgeois society as Antonio Gramsci defines— traditional and organic—the artist belongs to neither. His no-ism is an anti-ideological stance, the retreat of an intellectual into an ideological vacuum. In “Freedom and Literature” Gao has advocated that in view of the all-engulfing fanatical ties of the times, “the only escape is to flee”
(16). In answer to the politically charged, homogenising isms, the only ism he is willing to embrace is individual freedom, which means holding on to his difference or ‘otherness’.
The artist in Gao is not Jesus to atone for the sins of mankind: “You don’t play the role of
Christ, and don’t take the weight of the cross of the race upon yourself” (61). Nor is he “a superman” (198). He is only an ordinary human being whose first duty as an artist is toward himself. In the face of large scale intellectual violence around, he must flee to be able to continue his creative work. However from a safe distance, when he exposes the tyranny of the Party, he is actually serving a public cause, even though he openly denies having any duty to the masses. It does not lie in his power to correct the warp in the socio-political system. While rendering an artist’s version of the Cultural Revolution or the military action of 1989, he has done all he could; he has pointed out what is rotten in the state of China. To work out a redress is the job of other institutions.
Flight as a counter-subjective move is an act of liberation. By turning his back, Gao’s exile has set himself free; he has not only defeated the power nexus of Mao and his Party but also taken charge of his own subjectivity. This act of physical dislocation as a part of an Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 152
intellectual’s drive for freedom connects him to his fictive predecessor, the protagonist of SM.
Unable to find any private place where they could avert the constant coercive gaze of the multiple oppressive forces in society, both feel themselves refugee or exile. Suffocated in the bounded territories of fixed ideologies, they withdraw from the public space into an alternative territory of no-ism.
Merle Goldman observes that being collectivist, both the traditional and modern societies in China position the intellectuals as an elitist and a politically marginal group. The ultimate end the artists must serve is strictly utilitarian so each is beholden to strive for the greater good in society which is configured in family, kinship, local community, work unit, nation-state etc. In
OMB we get a firsthand account of the ideological boundaries that the Party fixed for the intellectuals, and kept a strict watch that these be followed in form and spirit. Like Gao, the narrator ‘he’ is a dissident writer whose “thought that had circulated in his mind from childhood determined that he would be declared an enemy” (40). In one of the many meta-fictive discourses undergirding Gao’s fiction, ‘he’ recalls that as a child he had once read a fairy tale about a man with a “flesh-and-blood heart” who stumbles upon “a kingdom of pure people”
(123). Though he was very young at that time and could not understand the implications, yet the conventional mooring of the story left him chilled and horrified. As he grows up, he is unable to find a room of his own where he could “say whatever he wanted to say” (17), and “write whatever he wanted to write” (138). While masquerading as a rebel leader during the Revolution, he is “keenly aware of his own impotence” (90). A debilitating sense of idleness is what marks his literary career (214). This is in contrast to a previous discussion when ‘you’ in SM is fascinated by a batch of idle youths in the street. There, the youth’s freedom from the societal pressure was creatively enabling. Here, framed within the political panopticism, the idleness is Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 153
morbid and enervating. The sense of impotence is an inability of the artist to give expression to his creative energy. Not that he did not try to write; he did so in secrecy. Co-incidental to Gao’s own experience, the narrator’s wife betrays him to the Party Committee of the Writer’s
Association. At this, “the street committee was asked to report on him” (18). As a result he has to burn a whole lot of manuscripts that he managed to write in his rural ‘hideout’.
This difficulty of the artist to survive under the all-penetrating gaze of the Party connects
‘he’ to the threat of ‘I’ dying of lung cancer in SM. It is this threat to artist’s subjectivity that precipitates a dislocation from home which is more than merely physical. ‘I’ in SM wishes to have “left those contaminated surroundings” (11) of his home in Beijing much earlier, in the same way as ‘he’ in OMB wishes to have “fled that arena for baiting animals to tear at one another” (151) in the home-country. Why both feel alienated and wish to leave is because they find no room for an artist who is different in theory and practice: there at home “… I was taught that life was the source of literature, that literature had to be faithful to life” (SM 11). Also notice
I’s critical reception in China: the accusation that “I wasn’t able to accurately portray life, and in the end only succeeded in distorting reality” (11), and the hostility of the publisher/critic with the writer for his departure from the accepted norms of fiction writing (452-454). Similarly, ‘he’ in
OMB is sick of the constant monitoring as a part of the process to eradicate reflective thinking
(149). Referring to the heavy curbs on imagination, the narrator at one place quotes the story of a king who while offering his bed to the strangers-guests cuts the ones taller than the bed and stretches those shorter to fit the size of the bed. Tyrannical forces thus collude to subjugate Gao’s artist through their multi-discursive control. Notice the compulsive objectification to bring ‘I’ back to the normal fold in SM: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 154
In all the fine-sounding discussions, controversies, and debates, I have invariably
been … subjected to criticism, made to listen to instructions, made to wait for a
verdict. … Everyone wants to be my teacher, my leader, my judge, my good
doctor, my adviser, my referee, my elder, my minister, my critic, my guide, my
acknowledged leader. Whether I need it or not, people want to be my savior, my
hit man (that is to say my hit-my-hand-man), my reborn parents (even though
both my parents are dead), or else grandly represent my country for me when I
myself don’t know what is country or whether or not I have a country. … (410)
This is reminiscent of the multi-disciplinary agencies of power that run their parallel discourses to subjectify individuals in Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”:
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the
teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’-judge; it
is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual,
wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior,
his aptitudes, his achievements. The carceral network, in its compact or
disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance,
observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing
power. (1499)
The artist in Gao refuses to be an object and be normalized. The threatened malfunctioning of the lungs in SM indicates the risk of the artist condemned to die as a punishment for holding a different opinion. He calls the doctor’s clearing of the risk a ‘reprieve’. At another place, he lets us see it as a conscious subjective act: “I don’t know whether I’m on the right track but in any Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 155
case I’ve extricated myself from the bustling literary world and also escaped from my smoke- filled room. The books piled everywhere in the room were oppressive and stifling” (SM 410).
Both piles of books and room occurred earlier in the ‘key story’ (chapters 60, 62, 64) in the novel. If we read the elusive tropes in the present context, things might fall into a certain semantic order: ‘you’ having an appointment can’t leave because he fails to find the key with which to open and lock the room at will. The key is all the time lying on the desk beside the letter. If the room is the private territory of the artist, it needs to be locked against any intrusion from outside which has already occurred in the form of the letter blocking the view. The piles of books could well be the instruction manuals for the artists, and the letter a warning to meet certain fixed standards before publication. No wonder he cannot see the key, his vision having been blocked. Distraught, straitjacketed and ‘out of key’, ‘you’ leaves the room unlocked and drifts out as a third person entity, a writer in exile, estranged with himself and his environment:
“He wasn’t hurrying to go anywhere, he seemed to have somewhere to go, people usually call it home, to procure this room he had even argued with the caretaker” (408). The desperation to procure and then secure the privacy of the room internalizes the location of home as a personal comfort zone where the artist could exercise his creative agency at will.
To leave home for elsewhere is a common diasporic move. When Gao’s subject escapes to the countryside or out of the country, his flight or making good his escape has multiple layers of meaning. Notice the profusion of the expressions denoting flight in both the novels: extricate, escape, leave, abandon, flee, get/jump out, retreat, abscond, desert etc. Standing on the margins of both the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary forces, the artist remains an exile to both.
His irreducibility to either of the two grants him the ‘slipperiness’ of a Deleuzian subject, who cannot be fitted into any given frame. In Foucault, power is counter-productive in generating Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 156
resistant subjectivities. Exile’s option of flight is not taking up arms against power, but a quiet withdrawal to protect his artistic agency. Gao defines ‘cold literature’ as literature “that will flee in order to survive; it is literature that refuses to be strangled by society in its quest for spiritual salvation” (NL). However, while absconding from the scene of oppression, the prisoner has dodged the detective mechanism of the ‘carceral’, and thwarted its all-penetrating command and control system to trap and territorialise him. He is no longer at the receiving end of the order- words. He has de-territorialised, as much in body as in mind. Gao’s subjects thus appear in an active state of self-subjectivation. Faced with the two traditional options―either to die, or live under intellectual servitude―each creates an unconventional third option, and flees, thus empowered in both.
In the overall diasporic context of this research, flight is an artist’s need for intellectual freedom. To break open the prison gates is to escape from the tunnel-vision imposed by military or militant regimes. By choosing to leave, the exile is able to “cross borders and break the barriers of thought and experience” as Edward Said has theorized (147). Said gives the example of two poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mahmoud Darvish, who write their way out of the tunnel by choosing self exile. Exile’s dislocation thus becomes an artist’s unilateral act of declaring independence. In setting himself free, Gao’s subjects flee from the imprisonment of powerful
‘land-locked’ constructs like home/land. When the narrator in OMB says that “he would never return to the embrace of the homeland that had nurtured him” (40), he is not only showing an adult’s dissociation from mother but also rejecting the traditional construction of land as maternal which supposedly holds the citizen with an uncancellable bond of loyalty.
We have seen how Gao attaches great significance to a writer’s state of exile as an ideologically non-committal position, a resistance against the sedentary orders of society/state. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 157
However, he also stresses that one needs not only to escape from political traps but to “flee from oneself” (743). Of the two categories of flight, to him “more difficult to flee are the dark shadows of the inner mind of the self” (“Freedom and Literature 16). This alternative reading of flight opens a new area of discussion where to relocate home. As home is a territory with defined borders, critics have read it as a trope for self or an expression of subjectivity (Mallet 97). In anticipation of a detailed discussion in the next chapter, I take Gao’s ‘fleeing from self’ as nearer in meaning to the concept of deterritorialisation in Deleuze, which involves more than simply dislocating oneself physically and relocating or reterritorialising elsewhere. Far from being a single act, reterritorialisation is a continuous process of de-territorialisation from fixed, solidified and monolithic frames of references like home, self, subjectivity or identity. Home in this context is an internal space where one acquires the ability to cross borders of self and reach out to the proverbial others. If self is a ‘power’ base or a majority, others rank as minroities. In their nomadic movements, Deleuze’s subjects remain in a state of flux; caught between ‘being’ and
‘becoming’: each moves from being a self-centred ‘majoritarian’ to becoming a self-expansive
‘minoritarian’. This turn in debate would take us to a discussion of Gao’s diaspora acquiring a non-localisable sense of ‘at-home-ness’ in an intersubjective relationship potentially free of power dynamics.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 158
Chapter Five
Re-locating Home in a Nomadic Space
Where do the subjects land after their flight? Do they find any alternative territory where to relocate home? How to measure the distanciation from home and its cultural trails of power?
These are some of the concerns under investigation now. The problematic of flight as simultaneously an act of withdrawal as well as resistance, of passive and active subjectivity generates the need to further probe the issue in the light of the ‘process ontology’ of Deleuze, which keeps a subject perpetually on the move between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. The movement becomes symptomatic of a nomadic life style in response to the fixity of all sedentary orders.
Deleuze and Guattari worked it out in their seminal joint venture A Thousand Plateaus (1980), but I shall also draw on Nomadic Theory (2011) by Rosi Braidotti, who is one of the key exponents of nomadology in the twenty-first century. My premise in this chapter is that exilic flight in Gao is a nomadic strategy to resist a sedentary, majoritarian existence. The subject’s experience of ‘being’ a minority in a dominant, collectivist majority helps him reach out to other minor, disempowered groups, and ‘become’ minoritarian.
Nomad in simple dictionary sense is someone or something that lives by wandering from place to place, defying roots or attachment to a single territory. Dwelling for nomadic people, according to Jackson, is not synonymous with “being housed or settled”; nor is home a private place clearly differentiated from the outside world (122). In abandoning home, diaspora defies family roots or attachments to the native soil. His journeys replicate an internal movement which in turn defies subjective fixity or stability. This part of research centres round the premise that
Gao’s subjects relocate home in a nomadic space. In contrast to home, the nomadic territory in Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 159
Deleuze is an open, linear space teeming with the possibility for rhizomatic growth in the subjects. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of arboreal vs rhizomatic growth of knowledge in the West, I expand its meaning in relation to the qualitative growth of a subject in diaspora. Rhizome is an underground stem of a plant that grows horizontally without any central root system. Unlike a tree which stands fixed on the strength of a centric root system, rhizome sends out multiple roots and off-shoots from its nodes. I draw on this botanical trope for a subject in diaspora who tends to grow non-hierarchically in multiple directions as against the static, vertical, neatly organized, aborescent growth of the humanist self.
As for a nomad’s growth from molar to molecular scale of subjectivity, elementary physics tells us that the development of organisms in the universe begins with the infinite process of the molecular flux and ends in finite events of molar bodies. The nomadic theory involves the subject in an on-going process of “becoming” molecular, i.e., moving continuously away from a solid collectivist molar to a fluid individualistic molecular subjectivity which tends to float from the dominant to the dominated side of the dualist binary. In other words, the self moves away from its mainstream, molar or majoritarian position of power towards ‘others’, thus becoming molecular or minoritarian. This I relate to Gao’s own concept of flight which he theorises is as much an exile’s escape from political oppression at home as from ‘dark shadows of self’. In the forthcoming textual analysis, I shall deploy this subjective scale of nomadic growth to measure the distance Gao’s diaspora traverses from home and its patriarchal culture.
The theoretical framework for this research thus has travelled to new directions in alignment with what Deleuze has posited: “It’s not enough to say concepts possess movement; you also have to construct intellectually mobile concepts” (Negotiations 122). Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 160
The rhizomatic scale of a nomadic subject is reflected both in the narrative form and the art of characterization particularly in SM. Here the textual narrative tends to spill in every direction and disperses into a multiplicity of narratorial voices. Though each operates in its own parallel, non-hierarchal fashion, together as well as apart, they create the impression of a non- unitary multidimensional subject in process without any central root, or point of origin, culmination or termination like rhizome. Subject formation in Gao remains a midway passage from being molar to becoming molecular, which in a diasporic equation is a movement from being at home or territorialized to becoming home-less or de-territorialised. If home is a collectivist, molar territory of thought or subject-hood, once rendered homeless and a minority,
Gao’s exiles seek to relocate it in a broader, more heterogeneous and inclusive, i.e., minoritarian, space. Here a distinction between ‘minority’ and ‘minoritarian’ in the Deleuzian context is needful. The terms majority and minority refer more to one’s position in the scale of power than numerical strength. When the experience of being a minority in the midst of a collectivist majority gives him an opportunity to reach out to other minor, disempowered groups, Gao’s subject becomes ‘minoritarian’. ‘Becoming-minoritarian’ is not a fixed, monolithic category of subjectivity. The adjectival gerund ‘ing’ refers to the continuous process of growth or quality enhancement in the subject during his interactions with others. His sense of at-homeness thus is relational rather than spatial or localizable. It is home realizable in ‘intersubjective relationships’ involving relation between any two subjects: man-man, man-woman, man-nature, man-God etc.
Each encounter leaves the subject richer in human resources, hence ready for another take off.
Becoming-woman is the first step of becoming-minoritarian in Deleuze. This is what becomes especially relevant to my discussion now. Gender is an important concern in Gao’s fiction. I shall discuss the case of a male subject’s movement from being Majoritarian in his Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 161
gender orientation which is a carry forward of his home culture, towards becoming minoritarian in his gender-inclusivity which he acquires in the process of his diasporic reorientations. Why I choose to focus on ‘becoming-woman of a man’ in Gao’s fiction is important to underline here.
The rationale is two-pronged: my first aim is to address the issue of widespread gender oppression in almost all Asian societies whether in the near, south or south-east. The Arab, sub- continental, Chinese, all present a poor human rights record regarding their treatment of women.
My second objective is to contest the convenient assumption so often floated in critical debates that Gao is a misogynist. I contend that far from being a misogynist, he shows sensitivity to what it means to be a woman in a gendered society. The Swedish Academy also acknowledged this when it stated: “… he is one of the few male writers who gives the same weight to the truth of woman as to his own” (99). The assumption about Gao’s misogyny lies in mistaking the subjects for the author. That the author denies the females a first person presence in the narrative is also misconstrued. I agree with Mabel Lee’s view in this regard. While assessing the transcultural aesthetics in Gao’s oeuvre, she posits: “By relegating each of the women he portrays to the position of third person, he effectively dissociates himself from speaking on behalf of the woman. Instead, based on his own objective observations, she is made to speak for herself” (30).
Now patriarchal imagination and descriptions of female body abound in both the novels. Men in both have a centric position in narration, and tend to hegemonise woman as an object of their erotic desire. Women on their side appear having a restricted vision; their stories centre round love and sex alone; their mood swings often verge on neurosis, and they end up desiring marriage as the ultimate solution to all their problems. I still argue that Gao is neither a misogynist nor a masculinist. We have already seen how within the ideologically monologic macronarratives that refuse to take into account the presence of micronarratives of cultural Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 162
history, a sensitive person alive to the need of a dialogue with himself as well as others becomes an exile. Gao often transmits this dialogic urge through a sexual interaction between the two genders. Multiple languages interwoven in the texture of home affirm as well as contest the binaries built in its patriarchal structure. His presentation of the two genders is laced with an understanding for both as a product of their socio-cultural context. In a patriarchal society which imposes heterosexuality as the only norm in life, both men and women are trapped to think and behave in a stereotypical way. So pervasive is the male domination that mothers having no control over their menfolk must teach their daughters to repress their natural self as a self- protective mechanism: “… when she grew up her mother warned her not to laugh stupidly in front of men. But she just couldn’t help laughing aloud. When she laughed like this people always stared at her and it was only afterwards that she learnt when she laughed like this it was inviting, and men of wicked intent thought she was flirting” (SM 172). I shall return to the above premises in detail during textual analysis. It suffices at present to say that as a heterosexual male victimized by the hegemonic forces at home, Gao’s protagonist, no doubt, carries the same germs of power to hegemonise the gender other. However, that does not make the author gender- biased, or anti-feminist. Had he been so, he would not have let his subjects reach the Deleuzian
‘plateau’ of ‘becoming-woman’ which is the research premise here. Not only that; he exhibits gender-balance by allowing the same privilege to a woman as in OMB. Becoming-woman in empowering in that it could open way to a non-stop process of becoming multiple others.
Escaping from the territorially bound, molar construct of self imbibed from their home culture,
Gao’s subjects display potential for what Deleuze terms a “rhizomatic” (42) and Braidotti a dynamic “non-unitary, multi-layered” (14) subjectivity. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 163
One major example of this is the author’s practice of breaking up a single character into multiple other entities in SM, my primary source in the first half of this chapter. Simultaneously internal as well as external, this self-splitting de-mythicises the grand narrative of a consistent, coherent, homogenous self on the one hand and liquidates the gender boundaries on the other.
Diaspora thus becomes enabling in that it locates the subject in a self-expansive apolitical domain where as a “subject-in-becoming” (42) he is able to transcend the narrow family ties, and engage in a dialogue as much with silent, hitherto invisible others without as contradictory elements lying within. For example, if we interiorise the action, we find that after undergoing a
‘centrifugal dispersion’ from his singular base of power as a man, the protagonist in SM discovers and comes to terms with other marginalised dimensions of his self, such as anima. In
Jungian psychology, anima is the female principle of a man’s psyche which is extremely resistant to male consciousness. Once activated, it becomes a source of dialogic tension, helping the individual to negotiate with both his multiple self and the complex and heterogeneous world outside. The individuation process in Jung requires the self to come to terms with all aspects of its personality: the persona has to confront the shadow; the male ego has to own anima. Until it happens, we find Gao’s ‘you’ in SM lost in the mountain mists. By reaching out to external others, on the other hand, the subject is able to attain an intensive state of becoming-minoritarian, manifested in his becoming-woman, becoming-animal/insect and even becoming-imperceptible in terms of having a momentary communion with God at the end. This enables him to make the whole world his home and its inmates his kin. This is one possible meaning of ascending atop the proverbial ‘soul mountain’; the goal is attainable only when one learns to surmount the ego- barriers erected by the majority within and without, and venture out to minorities. It, however, precludes the possibility of any permanent residence in or a long term commitment to a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 164
particular territory both of which engender molar compounds. One comes into contact with others, enters in a dialogue with them and then moves on, carrying along a rich residue of understanding, and sensitivity towards the human as well as the non-human others. The constriction of space, however, requires the discussion of just one category of ‘becoming’ here.
Becoming-molecular is a constant process of deterritorialisation. Transcending all ideological fixations, such a subject is able to relate to a variety of disempowered hence invisible groups without needing a permanent alliance with any. He thus remains in a perennial state of flux, constantly moving in and out of constrictive borders―home or host country, male or female territory, us or other boundary.
The second half of this chapter works on OMB as its major source of data. Here the physical act of slipping away from the scene of oppression gives Gao’s self-exile an opportunity to enter a transformative process which is a continuation of that in the first half. Instead of fighting or counteracting the forces of power, when exile chooses to flee, he in fact tries to dodge his own tendency towards molar solidification. If molar refers to the dominant subject or the static collectivities like society or state, fleeing could be the act of breaking loose from all power centres. It could be the self-liquefying move and the resultant progression of an itinerant from being molar/majoritarian to becoming molecular/minoritarian. Whether the panoptic schema of political authorities or the social pressure to marry and settle down in life in China or elsewhere,
Gao’s narrator resists being captured at all cost. Conjugality in Deleuze is just as closed a territory as embracing an ideology; both signify a territorial arrest which is opposed to fluidity and freedom the nomadic theory holds aloft.
To incorporate the basic tenets touched earlier, I draw on Rosi Braidotti as my principal critical source in the latter half of my discussion on OMB. The rationale for my choice of a Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 165
feminist Deleuzian critic is not only the presence of some feminist issues in Gao’s works but also the marginalised status of his male subjects as well as that of the author himself in China. The position appears as that of a woman writer anywhere. That’s why for all his hetero-erotic, male/masculinist exterior, Gao shows a sensitive attitude towards his female characters.
However, when he and his subjects dislocate from gender and sexual terrain, it must not be interpreted as an anti-feminist stance. With a characteristic nomadic slipperiness, Gao dodges being tagged as a feminist writer. Woman-man relationship is just one aspect of human life along with other problematic issues of global standing such as human-human, human-animal, human- nature or human-divine relationship which may capture his attention with equal force. Moreover, a nomad remains in an intensive state of subject formation in such a way as to move constantly from one frame of thought and practice to another.
Braidotti theorizes nomadic thought as replacing “the metaphysics of being with a process ontology bent on becoming” (7). Being refers to the center: the fixed and the static
Molar, Majority or dominant subject, while process is a location of marginality and rootlessness: a Molecular or Minority position. Some of the social locations of minority in the contemporary world of diaspora are exiles, migrants, refugees, itinerants, the homeless, etc. who while seeking to belong to a particular territory actually remain afloat. That allows them to remain constantly engaged in a formative process (35) of subjectivity. In the binary-based Western regime of thought, “Molar or Majority is the White, masculine, adult, heterosexual, urban-dwelling, property-owning subject” (6). However, man represents the centre, the overarching majority in both the white and non-white parts of the world. There is no possible becoming for majority unless it undoes “its central position altogether” (42). To this end, nomadic thought introduces
“an ethics of qualitative transformation” (6) possible through inducing a “privileged state of the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 166
minority consciousness” (36). The Deleuzian definition of ‘a line of flight’ as molecular in there being always something that escapes the binary organisations (237) is reworded in Braidotti thus: all becomings are minoritarian in the sense that they necessitate a movement in the direction of the others of classical dualism (34). She counts women, children, blacks, natives, animals, insects, etc. among the empirical minorities and calls them “the privileged starting points for active and empowering processes of becoming” (29-30). This is so not only in case of men but equally for women for they too need to dissolve their molar subjectivity as a Minority, and include the sub-categories of other minorities among them. A subject thus needs “constant deterritorialisation and relocation into patterns of different becomings” (21) such as becoming- minoritarian, becoming-woman, becoming-woman of a woman etc. The process of becoming- minoritarian, warns Braidotti, does not mean a simple inversion of gender or colonial roles which could repeat the master-slave pattern of the conventional power positions. Becoming- minoritarian is the acquired ability to penetrate into the consciousness of another, when the subject learns to deterritorialise from its self-centric power base. It is thus “the first move in the deterritorialisation of the dominant subject” (43), and the process continues ad infinitum from human to animals and other minor forms of being.
This chapter first places Gao’s narrators in the gendered location of their molarity and then their gradual relocation in a fluid, heterogeneous molecular spatiality. Working on SM in the first half, I shall focus mainly on “becoming-woman” of the “becoming-minoritarian” which is only the “first quantum, or molecular segment” (Deleuze 279), i.e., the symbolic first step for a man towards a general process of transformation (Braidotti 37). The second half based on OMB shall broaden the range of argument by including the becoming-woman of a woman as well.
However, the final impression is that gender/sexuality as just one dimension of life needs to be Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 167
transcended in the transformative process of a multiplex subjectivity Deleuze envisages in the
‘process’ and Braidotti advocates.
Shifting Politics of Location
(a) The subject-in-becoming: Soul Mountain
Deleuze states that all the lines of deterritorialisation go necessarily through the
stage of “becoming-woman,” which is the key, the precondition, and the
necessary starting point for the whole process. … The becoming woman is the
marker for a general process of transformation: it affirms positive forces and
levels of nomadic, rhizomatic consciousness. (Braidotti 37)
Gao started writing SM in 1982, at a ripe age of 42. The novel is autobiographical.
However, as the Moroccan poet and fictionist Tahar Ben Jelloun propounds that the only way to talk about oneself is to talk about somebody else (The Sand Child 1985), Gao externalizes his personal self onto his protagonists whom he draws after his own image. So the first scene captures ‘you’ as a middle-aged bachelor in the middle of a journey without any pre-determined goal or destination (9). A solitary survivor in a short lived family, he seems to be living in sort of an ancestral vacuum. In fleeing marriage, he evades social and sociological necessity of putting down roots, parenting children or continuing the family line; he, indeed, is a non-participant in the arborescent order of society resting on the solidity of institutions. At his age, life becomes predictably simple and rotatory, following what Deleuze calls ‘rigid segementarity’: “[d]welling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially segmented” (229). This impression, however, is negated through the very act of flight. During his wanderings, the narrator soon indulges in a romantic escapade with a female ‘she’. What matters here is not Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 168
whether this romance is real or imaginary, but that it recharges all his latent creative abilities, transforming him, in spite of his age, from a potentially ‘arborescent’ self to a ‘rhizomatic’ subject. In Deleuzian context, “the middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it’s where things pick up speed” (25). In fact SM comes very close, both in its structure and characters, to
Deleuze’s description of a rhizome. The theory in a nutshell runs like this: Trees have roots, rhizomes, multiple offshoots on a single stem which may not necessarily be of same nature. A rhizome connects any point to any other point; it is neither one nor multiple but a set of linear, non-unitary multiplicities with n dimensions. It is anti-genealogy and operates by variation, expansion and offshoots. An a-centered, non-hierarchal, non-signifying system without any organizing memory, rhizome has no point of origin, culmination or termination but always a middle from which it grows and which it overspills (A Thousand Plateaus 21). These are some of the features of both the novel and the subject-in-becoming inhabiting its narrative space. SM starts in the middle of a journey. It is apparently plot-less; having neither a starting nor a finishing point but always a middle where things get momentum. The title painting by Gao re- enforces this; its visual image of someone (?) being in the middle, neither at the foot nor top of the mountain suggests the in-between-ness of an itinerant for whom ‘soul mountain’ can only be a non-localisable internal space of multiple possibilities. The novel has no single thread of meaning. Its structure is a variation of different narratives. As for characterization, various unnamed characters, male and female, appear offshoots of a single person, though each one of them in Brechtian sense seems an ensemble of multiple contradictory impulses. Their personal history remains little known: there is no clear indication as to who they are, where they are coming from or what they are heading for, all irrelevant concerns in Deleuze’s nomadism.
Always on the move, each is pursuing its own ‘soul mountain’ which being the connective Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 169
among them all points towards a linear, non-hierarchal structure of a subject who keeps on growing and expanding in n dimensions without any predictable end to the process.
If ‘becoming-woman’ is the first step of an active process of subjectivity, where to locate
Gao’s protagonist in gender relations? This necessitates a discussion of the politics of location, a phrase I borrow from “Notes towards a Politics of Location” by the American feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich (2003). By location she means one’s placement in a particular group or class which determines one’s world view or how one looks at one-self and others. Rich owns that her location as a “white United States citizen” (29) had led her to arrogantly believe herself “at the center” (37) even while addressing the issues in her multiple marginal capacities as “a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist” (32). In assuming that ‘we’ represented the whole of womankind, she created what was a replica of “false male universal” (35), thereby perpetuating the Whiteman’s patriarchal cultural norms. It is only when she learned to include the silenced members of the female community whom Luce Irigaray calls ‘the others of the Other’ around the world, that she admits she could acquire a global vision such as Virginia Wolf had envisaged.
Similarly, born and placed in the conventional binary-based home society, with its majoritarian, male-centred, exclusionary norms, both ‘I’ and ‘you’ in SM and ‘he’ and ‘you’ in OMB are germ-carriers of male power and domination. Their Confucian upbringing at home has directed their gaze to a set norm so each looks at himself as the centre and woman as the periphery. Weak and vulnerable, she must depend on male protection (35). This initial perspective leads some critics like Kam Louie (2001) to tag Gao’s narrator in SM as a chauvinistic misogynist, and
Carlos Rojas (2002) to treat the diasporist in OMB as a no-[femin]ist. Jessica Yeung also holds similar views, which I shall bring under discussion at a later stage. I base my contention on the fact that once de-centred from home, the males in Gao’s fiction are able to broaden their Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 170
perspective and restrain to a large extent their propensity to generate and exert power over others including females. It is their own position as minority which helps them escape from their patriarchal/ molar enclave and sensitise them to the plight of gender, sexual and other minorities.
In this movement from the politics of location to its de-politicisation, I focus first on SM.
We get a clear picture of the binary-based, gendered and sexually segregationist location of the subject in SM as elsewhere in Gao’s fiction. All his stories and both novels are predominantly male narratives; ‘his-stories’. In SM as in life, it is man who enjoys the first person narrative voice and authority, a privilege obviously denied to women. In identifying his characters as pronouns, Gao keeps the gender identity of his male leads neutral—either ‘I’ or
‘you’. Not so in case of ‘she’ who is immediately identified in terms of her gender. Then what super-imposes her presence and visibility is her body. We have already noticed how the beautiful face, delicate features and slim body of a village woman are the first things to strike ‘you’ in the street (2). In such a constrictive frame, man can see woman principally as an object of gratifying his sexual/biological urge and bearing him sons and daughters to continue his line (32). The voyeuristic gaze of a heterosexual leaves no room for any departure from the frame of normativity. The sight of a flat-figured, masculine type woman repels him. ‘I’’s response to his lesbian host in Chapter 73 (456-463) is a case in point: the way she talks and “how she wheels out the bicycle and gets on is devoid of feminine grace” (457), he remarks. Subjected to what
Rich calls the “simultaneity of oppression” (7), she at first is doubly otherised for being a woman and a lesbian. Then her choice of maintaining a single, motherless status adds to her alienation.
Since she has rejected motherhood ‘the crux of womanhood’ in a conventional society, she is termed “a mean woman” (462). That she is an accountant working in a factory further disqualifies her in the narrator’s eyes. She threatens the stable notion of gender roles and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 171
positions in his mind besides posing a threat of economic displacement for fellow men. This “is not a basic trait of women” (457), his reductive vision leads him to conclude, and he rejects her completely: “I detest this ugly woman and have no sympathy for her” (461). It is relevant here to quote Judith Halberstam’s concept of “female masculinity” and the male response to it. In inverting the social order of normativity, a masculine woman is a threat to men; so she has “to be transformed into the socially useless category of the ugly woman” (2653). Further, “… heterosexual men find consolation in the noninterest shown toward them by lesbians in essentialising the category as undesirable” (2652). The “standardized mainstream” or the
“Majority Subject” in Deleuze (Braidotti 28) has a zero tolerance for any deviation from the norm. No wonder, ‘I’ refuses all polite gestures from her to drop him back home, and when he actually gets back, “I have an attack of vomiting and diarrhea. I imagine the seafood wasn’t fresh” (463). This is an inversion of the situation in Margaret Atwood’s fiction where her female protagonists often ‘throw out’ whatever they eat. If we temporarily dissociate this anorexia from the ‘body’ politics of Susan Bordo (Unbearable Weight 1993), and simply take it in the sense of those women’s inability to digest the social norms of gender and sexuality, Gao’s protagonist shows not only an inability to accept the non-normative but also an inverted affinity with
Atwood’s women.
The position of a sexually ‘normative’ woman at home and how men see her is clearly discernable in a scene when ‘I’ is on a visit to a friend’s: “Bring out some liquor, no; bring some watermelons, it’s too hot,” he calls out to his wife, a solid sturdy woman who seems to be a local. She smiles but says very little” (SM 386). Man is in authority to issue commands, the woman a serving maid to obey and satisfy his needs and whims. Notice the coloniser’s gaze that characterizes the narration: the female body being weighed and surveyed like the material Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 172
potentials of the colonised land. However, in spite of her bulk and size, she like the colonized carries no weight. She is just a mute, shadowy figure who bears no identity of her own except being ‘his’ wife, known only through his reference. When she musters up courage to participate in the conversation, she is snubbed back to silence: “‘He is only talking like this because you are here,’ his wife says. ‘Stick to listening,’ he says to his wife” (386). Thus even inside home which is the proverbial female domain, a woman is to be seen and not heard. No wonder, the feminists saw home “in crucible of gender domination” (Mallet 65). The outer social space is an equally constrictive and confined territory for woman to move about, that is, if she is allowed to move at all. There are agencies on guard to monitor her closely. A young student envies ‘I’ the male wanderer for the freedom and variety of choice and movement that he enjoys: “She also wants to wander everywhere but her parents won’t let her, they’ll only let her visit her aunt” (398).
At the level of inter-personal relations, the ‘you-she’ drama in SM best exemplifies the gender power politics shaping Gao’s subject in a man-woman relationship at home. It is when
‘you’ the imaginative self of the protagonist invents a ‘she’ to indulge his romantic fancy during his solitary wanderings in rural China that he gets an opportunity for ‘becoming-minoritarian’ or becoming-woman of a man. It is worth-remembering that becoming-woman does not mean imitating or even transforming oneself into a woman (Braidotti 37). Instead, it is a ‘topological’ position that entails developing a minority consciousness; an intensive, emotional stretch-ability to reach out to and include the other. The social situation of exile being a minority may lead one to empathize with another minor group. In SM the tension between the two genders creates ample room for a Bakhtinean dialogue during which we find a reversal of roles between them both. At the end of the day, we notice a transformative movement in ‘you’; he has moved from Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 173
his conventional masculinist outlook of women to a more sympathetic and accommodative attitude towards them.
In the beginning, no doubt, ‘you’ is logo-centric; the dominant thinking, speaking subject, representing the majority as per the norms in his indigenous culture. He is what Braidotti calls
“the dead heart of the system” (36). He casts himself conveniently in the lead role and ‘she’ the following. It is his narrative, which smacks of his arrogance of thinking himself in the center; he is the reporting subject, having agency to represent her as a subordinate. Notice his wishful thinking to subject her to an object position: she is “[l]ooking at the same direction as you” (SM
29); he would like to assume that “[s]he seems to be your echo” (33 my emphasis). He actually takes the authority to devise the subject-object positions: “You lead her round a corner into a small lane” (34); and, “You escort her to the main street” (35). Also notice his attempt to pin her down to a position of vulnerability, and the resistance that she launches. He is surprised to see
… a young woman coming to a place like this on her own.
Aren’t you also on your own?
This is a habit of mine, I like wandering around on my own, it lets me think about
lots of things. But a young woman like you …
Come on, it’s not just you men who think.
I’m not saying that you don’t think.
Actually some men don’t think at all. (52)
He still has the audacity to presume that she must be in some trouble, in need of his help which he offers unasked: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 174
I’d like to help.
Wait until I need it.
Don’t you need it now?
Thanks, no. I just need to be alone. (52)
Though an imaginary character that ‘you’ originally conceived after his male ego as a pretty young woman with an aura of feminine charm and mystery, ‘she’ soon steps out of the prescribed frame and acquires a life of her own. No doubt she soon zooms out of the plot, but not before she has launched a feminist discourse to counter his masculinist assumptions about gender, sex and femininity. The roles reverse quickly enough. At first he is the speaker, the clever inventor and teller of tales which she “listens intently. … She nods and listens childlike, so beautifully childlike” (55). At another place: “You feel wonderful talking to her like that.
She’s holding your hand, docile and compliant” (87). The two epithets particularly remind us of
Foucault’s concept of the way power reduces an individual to docility and compliance. Soon, however, the tables are turned. From her witty one-liners to running paragraphs, each of which starts with “She says” (65-66), she dislodges him from his secure perch, reducing him to the position of a silent listener. For once she starts speaking, “it is as if flood gates have opened and she can’t stop talking” (128). ‘You’ in turn can only dream about himself telling her “a children’s tale” which she could hear “like the good little girl of a family… sitting on your knee and snuggled in your arms” (192). She is an adult human being, she asserts, and others must treat her as such. Notice her emphatic denial at his attempt to reduce her to a minority:
You say she is a spoilt child. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 175
I’m not! (68)
This is one of the rare occasions that Gao has allowed his female a first person pronoun to mark her authority in word and deed. She has silenced and displaced ‘you’ completely. In her counter- discourse, she challenges the patriarchal construct of woman as kind and caring, always nursing the needs of others. In the hospital where significantly enough she works as a nurse (a stereotypically conventional and economically subordinate working position), she is sick of white sheets, white gloves, white robes, white mosquito nets, white masks (66) etc., the white being the culturally imposed color for female chastity. She punctures the bloated image of a
‘virtuous’ woman by giving voice to her dark sleeping self—her repressed memories, sexual desires, instincts, emotions, fears, Electra complex—all that is socially reprehensible yet all that makes her just as human as any man. She too has a right to sexual gratification, she insists (127).
She shocks her male audience by openly talking about sex and private parts and natural processes of the body, and by owning that she is equally promiscuous: “It’s not only men who lust. … Why can’t women do what men can? It’s natural to all human beings” (174). She explodes the myth of woman as essentially motherly and resents husbands for enforcing motherhood against wife’s will: “A woman isn’t the slave of her husband and child. ... She shouldn’t have had a child so soon but he wanted it …” (232-233 my emphasis). Far from playing “the role of listener, pleading again and again for him to “tell me a story” as Kam Louie would have us believe (148), she is bold and articulate and has her own stories to narrate, however restrictive in range or subject. Nor does she have a “frightened and beleaguered” (148) voice. On the contrary, she is a powerful woman who challenges, outwits, corners and puts ‘you’ on the defensive at every step. In the end, the transference of a phallic sign—the knife—from a male to a female completes the reversal of gender roles and positions. This transposition of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 176
characteristics from one gender to the other may suggest a crossing of the boundaries, an act of liberation from imprisoning roles, a confounding of the fixed phallocentric dualistic constructions of male/female, majority/minority, molar/molecular.
Gao’s women as individual human beings sound shocking to the conventional ears. Their confessions of sexual escapades, real or feigned, in both SM and OMB invite a response of shock and incredulity from their philandering lovers. ‘You’ in the first novel calls ‘she’ a wanton woman, a whore and “a slut” (SM 196) in the same way as ‘you’ in the other dubs Margarethe a prostitute (OMB 83). However, the fact remains that for all their conventional grooming, both males learn to dissolve their centric position on their way to becoming-minoritarian. As becoming-woman is a pre-requisite for all other becomings, both men show flexibility rather than rigidity attached to the majority. They are willing to share the rostrum with their female counterparts. For example, ‘she’ in SM starts speaking because ‘you’ has invited her to do so, letting her have agency: “You say you’ve finished telling stories. … You may as well listen to some women’s stories or rather stories women tell men” (180). Notice how he readjusts her position in the sentence from an object to a subject. Not only that; in her turn to speak, he keeps on prompting her: “You ask her to go on talking” (128; 174). When she says that it is impossible for him to understand her innate desire to suckle her baby, he says he is trying to understand
(154). Though she doubts, his attempt to understand the other is a positive move. Similarly,
‘you’ in OMB has a genuine wish to share Margarethe’s trauma of rape: “Margarethe, if you want mutual understanding, not just a sexual relationship … we should be able to talk about anything” (117). And as she narrates her experience, his reactions of horror and shock are also significant. It is for these men and their willing audience that both the women are able to move from a mute and marginalized position to where they can share the stage center. Far from Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 177
implying an “erasure of feminism” that Rojas (167) contends in his study, Gao’s attitude towards both the genders is neutral if not biased in favour of women. In his ‘no-ism’, he reveals the strengths and weaknesses in both, leaning completely to neither this nor that side. The fact, however, remains that he treats women sensitively. His insight into woman’s psych is deep: he can understand the vulnerability a patriarchal society imposes on woman. In a society that allows man to marry another woman right before the first wife, she is afraid of growing old, of losing her feminine charm, and becoming sexually useless. Since marriage to a man is the ultimate standard of social respectability as well as security, failure to marry may drive her to neurosis.
Woman, to quote Mabel Lee is “twice removed from the male author Gao Xingjian who shares with the audience his observation of the women’s psychology by coldly and clinically reporting on what the woman purportedly says” (31). The message is clear enough; women are human, and must be treated and understood as such.
Gao’s protagonists let their female companions speak. Tolerance of the other’s view generates understanding and sympathy. However, lovers part ways in both the novels. Men refuse to commit themselves to a sustainable relationship. Here Gao’s males appear to treat the females like a colonizer who fully exploits the resources of the colonized land before abandoning it. However, analyzed in the present critical context, the break-up acquires another dimension.
We already know the diasporic tendency of Gao’s subject. A free floating individual, he has fled home to escape the territorial demands of a deep-rooted patriarchal culture and political rule.
Home has got its own tyranny to exert. Conjugality or a long term emotional investment means getting re-territorialized to home and its land-locked ideology. Secondly, the tendency to tyrannize is human, not gender-specific. This becomes apparent when ‘she’ begins to oppress
‘you’ by jealously guarding all routes of escape for him. The theme of man as a victim of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 178
tyranny emerges as early as in a dream sequence in Chapter 23 where in a surrealistic scene
‘you’ feels oppressed by a powerful black tide which seems to devour him. The obsessively repetitive description of the tide emphasizes the reversibility of both their gender positions: ‘you’ feels like a frightened child at its mother’s breast while ‘she’ branded earlier as a spoiled child now comforts and caresses him like a mother. The theme of oppression also emerges subsequently in a tale ‘you’ relates about an oppressive emperor and his reluctant employee in
Chapter 25. Power concentrated in the hands of anybody male or female, at any scale great or small is undesirable. It now tends to repeat the same molar/majoritarian pattern of tyranny that
Deleuze had objected to in the feminist movement: “[I]t perpetuates flat repetitions of dominant values or identities, which it claims to have repossessed dialectically” (Braidotti 39). Moreover, as already quoted, becoming-woman does not mean a simple reversal of gender roles or positions. As a result, ‘you’ starts disengaging from his pro-feminist, sympathetic stance: “You break away from the woman, clinging tightly to you…” (SM 221). The relationship becomes more and more demanding on her side and difficult to sustain on his: “[S]he locks her arms around you tightly weeping. You try to break free but her arms lock around you even more tightly, pulling you to her breast” (273). Against his wish for freedom, a strong urge to settle down forces her back to a Braidottian “majority/sedentary/molar” (38) role, incapable of becoming. She promises him freedom but her grant of freedom is conditional: “She says she will give you freedom as long as you love her, and don’t leave her, as long as you stay with her….
She wraps herself round you… [you are] unable to free yourself” (SM 274). In spite of her earlier unconventional discourse on sex and body, she is willing to re-subscribe to the social prescriptions of marriage, home, motherhood and family. To this end, she tries to hold ‘you’ back at gun i.e., knife point (Chapter 46). “Starting from the position of empirical minorities”, Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 179
warns Braidotti, “the pull towards assimilation or integration into the majority is strong” (43).
Now ‘she’ regrets having left home (SM 196); she wants to go back and have a regular life, which in her present context means becoming a wife and mothering children (256). ‘You’ says:
“Perhaps I will never truly love a woman. Love is too burdensome. I need to live my life unburdened” (400). This is his resistance to the societal pressure to reduce him back to a molar compound. His ‘no’ to a settled way of life could also be a refusal to a patriarchal norm of subjectivity. We have seen how ‘you-she’ relationship shows an ironic reversal in their center- margin positions; as the lovers swap their roles, the female acquires a dominant position of authority. Braidotti’s trope of “the phallic woman” (ibid) is concretized in the knife-wielding
‘she’ who intimidates (218) and terrifies (272) ‘you’ to submit to her will. Time and again she emotionally blackmails him not to leave her. The power she exerts over him renders him completely helpless. This is a reversal to the old order of gender oppression. Braidotti reminds us that “there is no uncontaminated location free of power” (20). That’s why ‘centre’ is not the only one to de-centre itself but ‘margin’ also requires qualitative changes in the structure of its subjectivity. Unless ‘she’ does so, she would keep on repeating and consolidating the power structures of the patriarchal order.
Dislocating from a patriarchal culture, ‘you’ found himself re-located in an equally narrow, ‘sedentary’ feminist territory. Re-territorialisation implies attachment to a new center which leads to stagnation. The Deleuzian subject-in-process is in a state of constant de- territorialisation. Feminism as a socio-cultural movement encapsulates a female-centered, molar ideology. Forcing on him an ideological mooring, it threatens to disrupt the molecular fluidity of
Gao’s protagonist. According to Braidotti: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 180
What matters here is to keep open the process of becoming-minoritarian and not
to stop at the dialectical role reversal that usually sees the former slaves in the
position of new masters or the former mistress in the position of dominatrix. The
point is to go beyond the logic of reversibility. (43)
So where the theory of nomadology empowers “becoming-woman” as a pre-requisite for all other becomings, there it also calls for its transcendence (37). After his separation from ‘she’,
‘you’ wonders “But where can I find this Lingshan?” (SM 304) To me, this implies that he wants to resume his quest for ‘becoming’ beyond becoming-woman. He transcends the domain of gender politics to enter other minoritarian realms of consciousness that the mountain signifies.
The following statement implies his detachment from the constrictive space of a fixed political center which is now the space inhabited by a majoritarian gender Minority: “You say you can’t yield to a woman’s will, can’t live under this sort of shadow. She is suffocating you, you can’t be anyone’s slave, you won’t submit to a woman, to be a woman’s slave” (274). Repetitions and short pauses in the speech reveal the urgency with which the speaker struggles to breathe in a de- oxygenating environment. In a later scene, ‘I’ exhibits the same revulsion against ideological enslavement when he is “locked like a prisoner” along the “serpentine corridor” inside a
Buddhist temple: “I refuse to be locked up” (439), he declares, and resolutely gropes his way out of the seminary. No amount of emotional blackmailing on the part of ‘she’ can curb or enchain the independent spirit in ‘you’. He has fled Beijing for its politically suffocating panopticism; now he flees the gender territory after having had an exposure to its power politics. Traversing this region was a part of his training to “live properly” (73) as the doctor had advised. Contrary to the renunciatory traditions of Chinese religions, the road to the ‘Soul Mountain’ realized in the ultimate living standard in Gao passes through the human world. One has to be trained and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 181
sensitized to different human situations including inter-gender relations as a precondition for developing internal human resources. We now need to assess the total capital gain in this short- term emotional investment on the part of the protagonist.
The relationship between ‘you’ and ‘she’ breaks down; however, it brings about a qualitative change in ‘you’. This is evident in Chapter 66 when at the bank of the “River of
Forgetting” (419) ‘you’ descends into what he now calls “the River of Death” (420). Reference to the Styx in the Greek underworld immediately lifts the scene from its narrow Chinese location and sweeps it across other times and places. The grandeur of scale is indicative of the spiritual gain. If we relate the different threads of ruminations in the chapter, we find textual evidence of an alignment with the nomadic mode of thought and practice. At one place, ‘you’ recounts his exhilarating “experience of a never before experienced freedom” (419) along the flowing river.
In the textual excerpt given below, he sums up the process of his location first as a molar subject rooted to a majoritarian culture which in turn is grounded in a hegemonic, traditionally fixed, binary-based and homogenous society, then his dislocation therefrom, and finally the emergence of a new subjectivity relocated in some fluid and undefined, non-territorial ‘territory’:
Running and yelling, roars of joy emerge from deep in your lungs and bowels like
a wild animal. To start with, you came fearlessly shouting and yelling into the
world, then you were stifled by all sorts of customs, instructions, rituals and
teachings. Now finally you have regained the joy of shouting with total freedom.
Strangely, however, you can’t hear your own voice. (419-420)
Lily Li (2014) in her exploration of the exilic mind in SM relates the mute shouting of the protagonist with the problem of the lost voice which implies the discontinuity of a writer’s Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 182
writing life in exile (212). I read the fact that the shouting is soundless as an indication of the action being interiorised; it is a mind in the process of transformation. The syntax suggests how born free, the subject is changed into an object before finally regaining his subjective agency.
The “non-unitary vision of the subject defined by motion” (3) in Braidotti appears in the following description of the protagonist now mentally uprooted and homeless, inhabiting a no- man’s land: “You seem to glide into the air, disintegrate, disperse, lose physical form, then serenely drift into the deep gloomy valley, like a thread of drifting gossamer. This thread of gossamer is you, in an unmanned space” (420). ‘You’ feels relaxed and weightless because he is not carrying any ideological baggage now. He has been able to regain freedom as at the time of birth. In a way he is born again after the death of a majoritarian self he was trudging along so far.
Like the author, a solitary, “homeless, doctrine-less world wanderer” (Zaifu 242), having no clearly defined, fixed domicile or destination, he is a minority unto himself. The ‘unmanned space’ is an internal space free of the constituted consciousness of male power or prestige. Now is he in a position to become-minoritarian/woman. As he hears the sobbing of the drowned women in the Stygian river in the “nether world” (419-420), he is able to not only extend himself to all wronged and wretched victims of male aggression, but also own the collective guilt of men, which includes confronting his own complicity in the gender exploitation: “There is not a great deal of difference between you and wolves… ” (420), he reminds himself. The journey into the underworld thus becomes the proverbial journey into the heart of darkness:
Afterwards you hear heavy sighing. You think it is the river but gradually you
make out that it is not one but several women who have drowned in the river.
They are wretched, groaning, and their hair is bedraggled, and one by one they go Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 183
past, their faces waxen and devoid of color. There is a girl who killed herself by
jumping into the river… (420)
Drifting in “this sea of suffering” (420), he feels at one with all these weak and vulnerable creatures, doubly victimized for being kept mute, invisible and unrepresented in all major narratives of micro or macro history. He owes this sense of unity and affiliation with the wronged to his personal experience of being marginal. He is a fellow sufferer: “You have suffered many disasters and you were bitten to death by other wolves. … There is no greater equality than in the River of Forgetfulness” (420). This is the ‘affective transformation’ the nomadologists envision through becoming-woman of a man, and not a bio-engineered change of sex (Keller 8) or becoming transvestite. However, in the course of becoming-minoritarian, the acquired sensitivity towards women and their cause does not force him into the position of a feminist activist marching ahead with an ambitious personal political agenda. That would have amounted to reverting to the binary politics of the molar and molecular: “The drowned, sighing women drift by but you do not think to rescue them, do not even think to rescue yourself” (SM
420). He ends up having his subjectivity redefined: appearing as a detached third person now,
‘he’ is all alone (478), neither a leader nor a following but only a drifter still on his way to learn the fine art of ‘living properly’. Though the male subject does not claim having a changed mindset, the change is visible in the narrative. As the novel draws to its close, we find the two genders converging in a show of gender balance and neutrality. Both ‘he’ and ‘she’ are brought together by a common spiritual experience on the mountain (465-465). To the protagonist, however, the mountain as the ultimate end of the journey must remain elusive and out of reach.
What he can in the meantime do is to try to liquefy and flow across the ‘other’ side of the river. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 184
Sensitive hence minoritised through a shift in his location, he is akin and sympathetically alive to the predicament of other minorities like him.
(b) From minority to becoming-minoritarian: One Man’s Bible
… the center needs to be set in motion towards a becoming-minoritarian that
requires qualitative changes in the very structure of its subjectivity, but so do the
margins. For there is no uncontaminated location free of power. (Braidotti 20)
This part of the research intends to further investigate the various dimensions of nomadic movements in Gao mainly with reference to his second novel OMB. To revisit the central premise of this chapter, the male subject is able to become minoritarian after he shifts from his majority position in life. He thus learns to relocate himself in the marginalized space of a woman. However, in a characteristically nomadic fashion, he does not stop to rally round feminism. He does learn to share the space with others but does not allow them to control him discursively. Born in the centre of a patriarchal society where men enjoy a fixed, stable position of power, the protagonist finds himself gradually reduced to a minority in his various locations:
‘he’, in the past, a budding writer of heightened sensibility, and an apolitical individual in the politically volatile mass culture of China; and ‘you’ at present, a middle-aged Asian bachelor in the West, dodging everywhere long-term emotional and familial responsibilities since divorcing his wife. In short, in both his locations of time and place, he is an exile. A large part of OMB is replete with the memory of how the narrator comes under the constant majoritarian gaze, be it parental/societal or political. A misfit as an artist in the mainstream society under the communist cultural policy in China, he feels stripped of all rights for creative self-expression. ‘The Party’ subverts his dominant position as a male author, forcing him to move to the margins: it Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 185
“interfered in everything from his thinking and writing to his private life” (18). It is then that traditionally female attributes come to associate with him: fear, doubt, inhibition, insecurity, a sense of being imprisoned, gagged and silenced. Denied a voice in a collectivist, over-intrusive society, he desperately needs a private space one could call home. The need soon transforms into the recurrent desire for a room of his own, which also suggests the need for an independent space where to communicate or hold dialogue with himself and others in an overall monologic system of socio-political governance: “He needed a sound-proof room where he could shut the door and talk loudly without being heard so that he could say whatever he wanted to say, a domain where an individual could voice his thoughts” (17). Then again: “More and more he needed a room to protect his privacy” (18). The trope is reminiscent of a woman-writer’s need for ‘a room of one’s own’ in Virginia Woolf’s eponymous essay (1938). Later in the novel, we find him burning scores of his manuscripts (68) to avoid arrest and persecution at the hands of the regime. This connects him to all those women writers and poets who have been denied opportunity for self- expression. It is like forcing an expectant mother not to give birth as in Margaret Atwood’s poem
“Spelling”; or the sense of loss for “the books that are not there” in Woolf (892). Even when he equates writing with masturbation ― “he comforted himself by masturbating, and obtained slow release by secretly writing” (OMB 447) ―it pairs him more with Hѐléne Cixous rather than the majoritarian males. In “The Laugh of Medusa” (1971) Cixous evokes sexual stimulation while inviting the fellow women to experience the exhilaration of giving expression to their repressed energy as writers. It is this feminized reduction of his male as well as authorial subjectivity that helps Gao’s narrator to move into a ‘gyno-space’ where he enters the privileged state of not only
‘becoming-woman of a man’ but also helps his female counterpart attain ‘becoming-woman of a woman’. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 186
The status of being an exile at home terminates when the subject in OMB chooses self- exile and leaves home. This sets him in a fluid spatio-temporal location, affirmed by a continuous shift in the narratorial voice between ‘you’ and ‘he’: at first ‘he’ as a Chinese migrant in Central France (7) looking back to the past home; then ‘you’ in the immediate present as a
Mainlander in Hong Kong (9) whose difference of accent spots him out as an outsider for the
Cantonese speaking majority. He is thus minoritised everywhere. As long as he stays in China, his Western liberal and ‘pro-democracy’ frame of mind turns him into a suspect for the authoritarian nationalist regime. In the West, too, his constant exposure to the Western culture fails to completely rid him of his native subjectivity so that ‘you’ stands out not being much different from ‘he’. This is more so particularly in his dealings with women. Judged from the
‘masculinist’ norms of their indigenous culture, they both have got a gradual diminution in their
‘manly’ size and stature in gender relations. The first thing we notice about ‘he’ is that his female lovers stand higher than him in intelligence, boldness and resourcefulness. For example, even the unnamed nurse who comes to his room in military overcoat and later warns him at the airport not to come back to the country makes him realize his lacks: “Could she see more clearly? Or could she express what was in his heart? At that time he still hadn’t the courage to make this decision.
… He didn’t dare to confront it…” (25). Again it is women who take the subject position to initiate an affair and terminate it at will. Lin, the daughter of a high ranking cadre and already married to a military man, not only masterminds their nightly meetings at her place right under the nose of her parents, but is also a “fireball of lust” (88) in bed. Notice how his position in comparison is feminized: “Sometimes she was quite unreasonable but he needed to exercise self- restraint. Lin dared to play with fire, but he had to consider the consequences” (88). His masculine mentality certainly does not let him enjoy this ‘degraded’ position: “Keenly aware of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 187
his own impotence”, he wonders “how to make it a relationship between equals so that he was not simply the recipient of Lin’s love” (170). Politically more discrete than him, she is the first one to decide and ultimately breaks off (171). In his present capacity as ‘you’ the migrant in
Hong Kong, he fares no better. Margarethe, his white German-Jew lover from the West, overshadows and minoritizes him now.
In critical discourse, the general response to “the sex scenes” in OMB is open to interrogation. Repetitiveness of these scenes and a shortfall in their quality are the most common comments. I shall restrict to just one example of what Jessica Yeung has got to say here: “The consistent Othering of the women in these scenes makes this part of the text problematic rather than attractive, quite apart from the fact that even these scenes come across as repetitive and lacking in literary appeal” (138). The controversy calls for a re-reading of the text. The scenes between ‘you’ and his foreign lover deploy the dramatic technique of running dialogues. Each time they engage in a sexual intercourse, there appears room for not only negotiation between the two genders but also different historical times and places. For example, on one of the nights they are together, she suggests: “We can each sleep on our side of the bed, and we can sit up to talk”
(62). A little later, she again says: “I just want to talk with you” (67). Thus in spite of the difference between their opinions of recalling one’s past, they are able to find similarities in two events of their respective country’s history: the holocaust and the Red Terror. Parallel to the main discourse, we hear multiple other ‘languages’ entering the text, such as of body, gender, sexuality, feminism, colonialism, post colonialism, culture, history, race and ethnicity etc. The polyglot form of the narrative imbues the text with a spatio-temporal breadth and complexity outside the Cultural Revolution. Thus their engagement is creative in the sense of opening fresh routes and avenues of dialogue between different cultures, histories, and geographical contexts Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 188
for mutual understanding which helps them both in becoming-minoritarian as part of the subjective process. I contest Yeung’s view about “absence of women’s subjectivity, which almost makes the text misogynist” (137).
The ‘you’-Margarethe relationship, no doubt, is loaded with Foucauldian discourses of power and subservience. Located in their respective power positions–he a male from China and she a white from the West–their present position remains subtly fluid. When the curtain rises,
‘you’, a Chinese settler in France, is trying to silence his fear of surveillance by the Mainland government which has already bought the building that houses the hotel he is staying in. The geo-political discourse sets the time about 1997, when at the end of a century long lease, England is to hand over Hong Kong to China in June that year. As the super powers are negotiating their territorial rights and privileges, the two nation states have a reversal in both their historical roles and positions: the ex-master is surrendering its right to administer and the old colony is taking over, thus rising in power scale. The status of Hong Kong, the territory in question, is not much different from what it had been before. Its fate little known at present, it seems to have only a change of masters. However, it provides an unconventional ‘third space’ for two persons from different gender, race, culture and geography to ‘co-habit’ momentarily and negotiate a dialogue with each other. In a contributory chapter titled “Transcultural Negotiations: Third Spaces in
Modern Times”, Frank Shulze-Engler points out the concept of third space as having largely remained confined within the “normative framework of the Western Nation-states”, and stresses the need for looking up similar situations in the non-Western cultures as well (155). Hong Kong in OMB creates one such possibility.
The frailty of geo-political position of the colonial outpost the British are about to surrender to China as one of its territory comments on the subjective position of ‘you’, the lover Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 189
of women. His majority position as a man is under constant threat of being overshadowed by the gender minority, and in that it is not much different from that of ‘he’ in the past. He reacts in a complex way to this situation. He would like to maintain a dominant position. In spite of his long absence from his native home and his comparatively liberal view on sexuality, ‘you’ has a strong tendency to revert to his deep-rooted native subjectivity. However, circumstances will otherwise.
We have already seen how women in Gao emerge as dominant figures, even though they always appear via their relation to the male protagonists. The historical complex of China having been a colony of the Western powers seems to determine the attitude of ‘you’ towards Margarethe who has an advantage of being a white woman from the West. She as such dislodges the narrator from the position of authority he has inherited from his home culture. Like Adrienne Rich, her primary location as a white Western woman carries a lot of weight for both of them. The different locations of both their identity influence the way they look at each other and themselves.
Politically, she exerts the domination of a colonizer over him even though geo-historically her ethno-racial location as a German-Jew holds her permanently in the painful consciousness of her race being a holocaust victim. Like the “white despotic and pathetic face of Princess Diana”
Braidotti (47) discusses in Nomadic Theory, Margarethe inhabits a complex socio-political location as simultaneously a pathetic rape victim and a powerful, promiscuous woman from the
West thereby becoming “a contested and contradictory site where transformation must occur”
(47). On his side, a Chinese male by birth and lineage, ‘you’ has inherited an Asian psyche overwhelmed by the West and its hegemonic discourses of racial superiority and potent civilization. He seems to have internalized the orientalist view of himself as a non-white. This racial complex colors his molar vision as he subjects her “lustrous white body” (OMB 10) to his voyeuristic gaze in chapters two and four of the novel. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 190
Deleuze says that “[t]here is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular” (292). Braidotti further elaborates this: “For the majority, there is no becoming―other than in the undoing of its central position altogether. The centre is void; all the action is on the margins” (42). A male born to rule as per his cultural norms, Gao’s ‘you’ is habitually inclined to hegemonise women as the weaker, inferior sex till he learns to depoliticise his vision. His discourse of power is a residue of centuries of despotic rule and the deeply ingrained patriarchal set up of home and family in his country. Gender, sexual, body and colonial discourses contribute to the density of dialogue here. His convenient assumptions about women extend to Margarethe as well though he places her somewhere in between an average man and woman: “She is too immature to discuss politics and too intelligent to be a woman” (61). Ironically it is she who introduces sensitive political issues for debate like
Sino-German relations after the Tiananmen events of 1989. Notice his reluctance and her protest:
“Do you mind if we don’t discuss politics?” you ask. “But you can’t escape politics,” she says”
(62). Later, knowing she has a sharp mind, he owns he feels safer and more comfortable in the role of a listener: “Being interrogated by a woman is stressful” (116). Heterosexuality, the gender norm enforced in almost all Asian societies, colours his sexual vision. Woman exists for him first of all as a body which must arouse and gratify his lust. He objectifies her, subjecting her body as the object of his gaze. When Margarethe mentions the heaviness of her figure as compared to the
Chinese women, he says “[y]ou adore her breasts, their solidity, their sensuousness” (11). Again when they share a memory of an earlier visit by her along with a white male friend, his heteroerotic memory focuses exclusively on her body, making her mind, or Peter’s personality completely absent and invisible: “There stood a very beautiful young foreign woman … [with] very big breasts. Blushing white skin and bright red lips even with no lipstick. Really sexy” (14). Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 191
He further reminisces: “Her shirt collar was open and her skin was very white and those long legs in sleek black stockings were enticing” (14). Deeply attracted to the full breasts and incredibly white body (14) of a beautiful German woman, physically penetrating her could boost his male pride, injured through a century long experience of Western colonial penetration of
China: “You say you want her, too, but you also want to see how this body, so full of life, twists and turns” (14). The white female body being the most desired object must remain an object.
However, she is far from the shy, essentially ‘oriental’ woman she implies in a coloniser’s description of “a barefoot little Beijing girl who was lovely and slender” (15). This is what
Braidotti calls “micro-despotism”, or “the repetition of power concentration within the minorities” (39). In line with the coloniser’s gaze of Margarethe, his ethnocentrism gives a fixed set of meaning to white and non-white women or their bodies. ‘You’ inscribes that Chinese lover of his as a “perfect woman” (26), marginalising her human status and foregrounding her body as the only mark of her feminine identity. He remembers her as “… a sensitive delicate body that had let you do anything you wanted” (26). Margarethe in comparison poses a threat to his male pride and stature. She subverts the conventional gender positions. Instead of being coy and reluctantly submissive like ‘his’ Chinese lover, she marginalises ‘you’ with her dominant psycho-physical thrust: “The big robust body pressing hard on you with unrestrained lust and abandonment totally exhausts you” (26). He tries to cover up his inferior status by assuming authority to judge her on moral grounds: “The girl wanted only to be a little woman, and wasn’t wanton and lustful like her” (26). His gender bias now leads to ethno-racial stereotyping. He makes lustfulness sound like a male prerogative; it is immoral in women, even pathological.
Similarly, he essentialises the European women as wanton while he makes a Chinese woman indulging in sex look innocent. His conventional grooming as a man does not let him endure the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 192
humiliation of being subjugated by the gender other who also happens to be the ex-colonizer; it’s like continuation of colonial rule even after decolonization. As Margarethe keeps on “straddling you” (27), he tries locating her identity in her ethno-religious background in the West, foregrounding the historical disempowerment of the Jews in Europe, particularly their victim position in Germany. To reduce and downgrade her further in terms of maturity and sobriety, he calls her a ‘girl’ Notice how she resists this gender-colonialism by denying, correcting and questioning him:
“A very moody German girl,” you say with a smile, trying to change the
atmosphere.
“I’ve already told you that I’m not German.”
“Right, you are a Jewish girl.”
“Anyway I’m a woman,” she says wearily.
“That’s even better,” you say.
“Why is it better?” that odd ring in her voice returns. (27)
He feels better being reminded of their gender identity. That way he may have an opportunity to exert his male power as on one occasion ‘you’ scrutinises her body at whim: “You get her to part her legs so you can see clearly and have her deeply imprinted in your memory” (11). Now, she turns the table on him by returning his voyeuristic gaze. She commands him to sit before her with all his clothes off:
“Just sit in the chair, don’t come near” she commands. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 193
You obey, and you confront one another naked.
“I want to look at you and feel you like this,” she says.
You say it is like exposing yourself to her.
“What’s wrong with that? A man’s body is sexy in the same way, don’t feel so
aggrieved.” At this, her lips curl up and she looks wickedly pleased with herself.
(121)
In a counter move, it is a woman who inverts the conventional gender situation by putting a male body under her gaze and presenting her discourse on it. Against his gender bias and exclusivity, she calls for gender balance and neutrality. A man needs to strip himself off all artificial trappings such as his false pride, inflated ego, a sense of not being accountable for anything he does, his hypocrisy and his dual morality. That she has the agency to execute commands and force him to obey is evident at formal level as well. She utters all direct speeches in the given text, using a first person speaking voice. He is made to feel vulnerable and allowed to speak only once and that too in the form of a reported speech. We get the rest of his responses such as his reluctance, embarrassment, protest, anger or a sense of injured pride indirectly through her amused and ironic comments.
Margarethe remains in a commanding position and has a compelling influence to not only reduce him to a minority but also assist his becoming-minoritarian. Lest this sounds one-sided,
‘you’, too, has a role in helping her confront her repressed past and become molecular. Thus together, thanks to a dialogic move, the nature of their relationship registers a growth; from a
“flesh only” (12) or “carnal lust” (26), it comes to acquire a deeper and more sensitive, symbiotic Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 194
involvement; from not knowing they move towards knowing and understanding each other’s psychological and geo-political situations. Initially they both are skeptical about building bridges through dialogue: he refuses to talk about his past experience: “It is impossible for her to understand. It was China…. Things in China can’t be explained by language alone” (29).
Similarly, she exclaims that it is impossible for a man to comprehend a rape victim’s predicament (84). Still she is the first one to coax and prompt him to come out of his self- induced amnesia about his traumatic past: “To understand your suffering is to understand you, can’t you see?” her voice is gentle, she wants to comfort you” (79). He has long resisted this cathartic move on the ground that “Memories are depressing”, that “You only recall pain” (58).
However, ‘you’ soon finds himself “[l]ying in the dark on bed with a woman, your bodies close to one another and you are telling her about the Cultural Revolution” (78).
The State sanctioned official version of truth allows no room for circulation of any conflicting narrative of history. Now ‘you’ carries a cartload of what Braidotti calls “negative capital” (31) ―the traumatic memories of being an exile at home, which he seems to have forcibly and diligently repressed. On her side, Margarethe carries the burden of her personal trauma which she has not shared with anyone. Braidotti terms it an “integral component of the consciousness of historically marginalised or oppressed subjects” (31-32), which is crucial to the process of becoming molecular. We have seen how selective ‘you’ has been in the beginning while sharing his past with us or his White lover: home, family, Margarethe’s visit, his Chinese lovers; most of the details remembered could boost up his ego to pose as majority. He has to undo this posture if he wants to cross over to the other side of the gender divide. Moreover, becoming-minoritarian/molecular/nomadic is a state of becoming-intense in one’s sensibilities towards others which is what Deleuze means by reaching a plateau. In Deleuzian theory, it is Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 195
equivalent to the acquired ability to “transcend external resemblances to arrive at internal homologies. … It is a question of ordering differences to arrive at a correspondence of relations”
(258). Deleuze draws on the ‘structural order of understanding’ in Levi Strauss which seeks resemblances between different groups or species. Following the structuralist model ‘lung is to human what gill is to fish,’ Deleuze argues: “A man can never say: “I am a bull, a wolf…”, but he can say: “I am to a woman what the bull is to cow” (259). This is the move that Margarethe initiates to build up a relation of mutuality of dialogue as ‘you’ starts recounting his micro narrative of the Cultural Revolution. She stitches together the parallel discourses of psycho- physical and intellectual genocides when she remarks: “That’s how it was with the Nazis” (OMB
79). Reasoning in this way, ‘you’ is led to view a closer connection between the two of them in spite of the obvious differences in their geo-political placements: the holocaust is to the Jews what the Cultural Revolution is to the Chinese; rape is to Margarethe what intellectual harassment has been to the artist-narrator. He who had been trapped in the personal trauma of his own national history comes in contact with another person traumatised in another part of the world. The common nature of both their trauma removes the gender, racial and national barriers.
It is like the proverbial hand extended across the sea to include the others. The narrator owns that
“[s]he has deeply penetrated your feelings and thoughts. When you took possession of her body, she took possession of both your body and mind” (120). Later he discovers that through her story
“She compels you, not just to enter her physically but also to enter deep into the secret recesses of her mind” (120). For a man to understand woman as a minority requires delving deep into the female psyche. Physical and mental discourses now run parallel as they converse in the midst of their sexual intercourse: “… it’s right by you …” —“That deep place?”—“Yes.”—“It is very deep, right inside to the end … may be too deep” (83). From his masculine, molar complacency, Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 196
he needs to come down to a molecular level of sensitivity. It is when she has led him to that level that she confides to him the traumatic memory of how her art teacher subjected her to rape for two years when she was just 13. Step by step ‘you’ comes to understand and empathise with the battered psyche of a raped woman from a human perspective. Forming thus a symbiotic alliance, they are now related by “empathy and affective affinity” (Braidotti 32) rather than any unitary ideological goal or agenda. Deleuze places becoming “in the domain of symbiosis that brings into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation” (238).
Like ‘you’, Margarethe too requires a molecular dispersion of her unitarian, consolidated identity as a powerful white woman from the West. Just as Adrienne Rich learns to depoliticize her molar location as an American White by including ‘the others of the Other,’ i.e., the female minorities like the poor, the Third World, black and politically silenced women within the Euro-
American fold of Minority to embrace a broad based feminism, so the power Margarethe exudes as a white majority requires her to undergo ‘becoming-woman of a woman’. This contests
Yeung’s view about “absence of women’s subjectivity [in OMB] which makes the text misogynist” (137). Like ‘you’ concealing ‘he’ as a minority under a confident exterior, she, too, has a repressed self which evokes memories she “simply forgot to forget” (Braidotti 33). One cannot eliminate this minority within the Minority by silencing it. One needs to own and embrace a rape victim or a guilty self for achieving self-individuation. At first Margarethe is reluctant to talk about this entity trapped within. In relating ‘his-story’ he has realized the change in the nature of their relationship; so now he insists to hear her story. He tells her repeatedly that he really wants to understand her as a person (OMB 94; 95; 96). He comes out of his male complacency and begs her confidence: “Margarethe if you want mutual understanding, not just a sexual relationship, then it isn’t a matter of what you want. We should be able to talk about Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 197
anything” (117). So in the end she promises: “One day I’ll tell you. I really want to communicate with you, not just sexually” (96). And when she does, it is difficult for him in the beginning to relate to her position. When she says, “Rape is rape” (118) he bluntly admits, “I’ve never experienced it.” (118) As she recounts the cold details of the incident, his reactions are important: “You shudder”; then, “You have a drink and try hard to think about something else”, and a short while later, “Left speechless, you light a cigarette” (118). Soon he is able to transfer the image of a young bruised female body to his own budding intellect battered and brutalized in the street frenzy during the Cultural Revolution. Her experience is located in body, his in mind:
You say that you have experienced the feeling of being raped, of being raped by
the political authorities, and it has clogged up your heart. You can understand her,
and can understand the anxiety, frustration, and oppression that she can’t rid
herself of. Rape is not a sex game. It was the same for you, and it was long
afterwards … that you realized it had been a form of rape. (122)
Mere transference of the image, however, is not sufficient to make ‘you’ realize the complex sense of torture suffered by a female psyche. His claim that “you understand her” is inadequate to comfort her; she bursts out in agony: “No, you don’t understand, it’s impossible for a man to understand…” Her voice is tinged with sadness” (122). He needs to empathise more intensely with the female situation; to realize what it feels like to be a frightened woman; to know and understand the whole truth from a female perspective. To this end, she re-enacts the scene of violence by re-living the pain, enforcing on him the role of the rapist. My premise is that through this inter-subjective, gender-subversive role-play, she ultimately leads both of them towards becoming-woman. “What she wants for you is to suffer” (83), to let him penetrate the anguish of the female soul under distress. Then again, “What she wanted to convey to you was the feeling Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 198
that after rape, the betrayed and alienated body no longer belonged to her” (134). What she feels here is more than a sense of having been wronged. Could the victim in any way have been responsible for the wrong perpetrated on her?
While exploring the moral implications inherent in pronouns and gendered subjectivity in
Gao’s novels, Gary Gang Xu (2002) discusses this sadomasochistic scene in the light of Freudian theorizing of the subject along with trauma. Also drawing on Slavoj Zizĕk’s concept of the theatricality of masochism, Gary argues how the traumatized self splits into two, one directing the play and the other acting it out; the super-ego presiding over the infliction of punishment and the ego undergoing it. The whole procedure, the critic demonstrates, affirms moral rectification which goes in line with moral masochism as one of the three forms Freud has categorized in his text on the subject (121-122). This self-inflicted punishment points towards a sense of guilt underlining the sense of having been wronged. So the situation Margarethe wants ‘you’ to appraise is not all that simple. The main thrust of my argument is directed towards tracing a certain moral purposefulness inherent in it. Carrying forward Gary’s contention, I mean to re- direct the discussion by relating it to the concept of a majoritarian’s becoming-minoritarian and a woman’s becoming-woman of a rape-victim.
A textual analysis of the extract from OMB reveals a variation of the theme of inverting the gender binaries: “On the last night she got you to rape her. It was not sex play, she really had you tie her up, got you to tie up her hands, got you to beat her with a leather belt, got you to beat the body that she hated” (134). The description gets close to the gender-colonial inversion in a similar scene in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of my Mother (1996). Notice how the black narrator likewise subverts the power dynamics of dominance and subservience with her white lover in Kincaid’s text: “I made him stand behind me, I made him lie on top of me, my Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 199
face beneath his; I made him lie on top of me, my back beneath his chest; I made him lie in back of me …; I made him kiss my entire body… (154-155). The two pieces pair together thematically as well as formally. Repetition of “she got you” and “I made him” symptomizes the agency both the females acquire and exert on the males. The third person narrative voice in the first example creates a distancing effect corresponding to the sense of alienation Margarethe later mentions between herself and her battered body. The first person speaking voice in Kinsaid reveals a greater degree of self-consciousness and assertion of her new found power as a black/woman/colonized. In piling up details, the speaker expresses the thrill of having discovered the power of her body over the white/male/colonizer. However, in Gao, wielding of this power is void of any triumphant show of strength in a gender/colonial contest. The sadness of the enactment belies it being a game for erotogenic excitement or thrill in celebrating the victory of one contender over another. While the gender-colonial situation in Kincaid is conventional and clearly demarcated between the White male in his absolute power and the Black female in total subordination, that in Gao is more complicated. That’s why the effect of “race and gender transvestism” (Holcomb & Holcomb 973) in the former appears less informed by a moral dimension of sadomasochism such as Gary debates in relation to OMB. Here a European woman is exerting control over an ex-colonized male from her dual position of being a White majoritarian, and a woman doubly minoritised by the memory of a personal and collective history of victimization.
Obviously traumatized, and just like ‘you’, Margarethe needs courage to re-write the history of violence inscribed on her body as well as memory. As a girl she comes under tremendous social pressure, and dares not tell it to anybody: “At first I was frightened, frightened all others would find out. He kept asking me to his studio and I didn’t dare tell my mother, Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 200
because she wasn’t well. At that time we were very poor, my parents had separated and my father had gone back to Germany, and I didn’t want to stay at home” (118). What problematises the situation here is the fact that of the many options, she chooses being raped for two years by her teacher. As ‘you’ takes the role of a conventional society and protests why “she had not resisted” (118), she tries to sublimate her non-resistance or the secrecy she attached to her affair under multiple covers: considerateness for her ailing mother, their poverty, the broken family and her need for escaping the drudgery of home, all of which, according to her, forced her into this compromising position. Here a contradiction arises between the general impressions about the Western societies being highly liberal and sexually permissive, and the reality of their being steeped in conventional morality. Hence, the guilt and shame a victim attaches to a forced sexual transgression. What contests Margarethe’s projection of herself as a victim, however, is her choice of a continuously marginal or victim position. Self-justification hides the guilt. That which started initially as a rape by force appears a rape by consent on all subsequent occasions.
Did she enjoy the taste of the forbidden fruit in a premature exposure to it? She carries the guilt and the torment of having consented to the oppressor, betrayed the parents’ trust, flouted the religio-moral code, and compromised her status as a ‘decent’ woman. Continuing the psychoanalytical discourse such as Gary identifies in the study of masochism in OMB, I notice a tension between ego and superego in Margarethe’s narration of how she ran into her doppelgänger at his studio (118). Freud would treat this identical alter ego or split personality as a personality disorder, an aberration or uncanny phenomenon. However, the concept of a divided self recurs in an anti-Oedipus, affirmative context in Deleuze and Guattari who use
‘Schizophrenia’ in the subtitle of A Thousand Plateaus as a positive sign of subjective multiplicity. It refers to the plural, multiplex subjectivity that cannot be reduced to any singular, Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 201
unitary construct. The minority selves that both ‘you’ and Margarethe hide beneath their composed exterior takes them close to what Deleuze says about himself and his co-author:
“Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (3). The presence of a ‘double’ that appears at Margarethe’s continuous violation of the moral code suggests a socially conditioned, molar part of herself vis à vis another which remains resistant to social subjectification: “It’s impossible for you to understand that look! I’m talking about the way that girl looked me over. I hated myself, not just that girl. It was only through her eyes that I was able to see myself…” (119). The morally attuned self generates a sense of guilt which transmits itself into a hatred for “the body that had prematurely become a woman’s” (119), hence the self- imposed punishment through an artificially induced violence. She may revert to her majoritarian position of a white woman in Asia, but she knows she is bound to remain a minority: “it is impossible for her “to live the life of a normal woman, because she could never be satisfied”
(135).
In the beginning ‘you’ tries to dispel the sting of bitterness by taking the whole thing as a game, a fun activity for sexual arousal. “But that was not what she wanted, what she wanted was for you to beat her” (134). The sense of guilt requires punishment. And when she finally brings this terrible enactment to an end, he immediately throws down the belt and caresses her: “You apologized… Then as you felt her tears wetting your face, your own tears began to flow. … She said she wanted you to cry, that when you cry, you are more real” (134-5). In a patriarchal society with its cultural constraints for men not to cry in public lest they appear effeminate,
Margarethe brings ‘you’ down from his high pedestal of a toughened macho man to that of a
‘raped’ woman. Through mutual sharing of their past, we have witnessed a two-way drive for a positively transformed subjectivity. When their tears mingle, boundaries blur and contraries Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 202
interfuse; the barriers erected by majority/phallocentric conventions are pulled down and the two genders enter into a symbiotic alliance. This is a moment of transformation, of becoming-woman of a man as well as becoming-woman of a woman. ‘You’ gets an ‘other-than-man’s perspective’; he is able to see what Margarethe wants him to see. He relates to her at human level where it is not difficult to see that a woman is as likely to succumb to the natural urge as a man. Nomadic memory thus becomes creative in developing “productive planes of transversal interconnections among entities and subjects that are related by empathy and affective affinity, not by some generic model or idealized paradigm” (Braidotti 33). What ‘you’ had heard and seen from a distance, he is now made to feel in all its complexity and suffers almost first hand like a woman.
He is led to move in a feminine or gyno-space where he comes to realize what it feels like to be a rape-victim by choice. The intellectual violence that ‘he’ was subjected to aligns ‘you’ to a raped girl-woman; wronged for first having been a victim of adult male violence, and then for being judged on strict moral grounds. This is coming a long way from his erstwhile judgmental stance on Margarethe, and the question about her ‘character’ which he raises from time to time. Notice the change wrought by understanding: “A one hundred per cent woman, you said. No, a wanton woman, she said. You said, no. She was a good woman” (OMB 134). A little later comes the moral recognition: “Margarethe does not need to purify herself, there is no need for her to repent, and moreover rebirth is impossible. She is, she is just like you” (137). So far he was trapped in the trauma of his personal and Chinese history. Co-habiting with Margarethe has enabled him to open out, cross the gender and cultural borders and relate to her on human grounds. If gender is a fixed territory like home, he has travelled a long way from home. He has opened out, seeking relation and affinity in spite of the difference both without and within. This is what Braidotti means by the nomadic memories being affirmative; they propel the subject towards change: Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 203
Remembering nomadically amounts to reinventing a self as other―as the
expression of a nomadic subject’s structural ability to actualize selfhood as a
process of transformation and transversality. Remembering is consequently not
about being equal to yourself, but rather in differing as much as possible from all
you had been before. (33)
If home in diaspora is any temporary mode of dwelling defined by a sense of being at home,
Gao’s narrator has experienced it during a three night stay in a hotel room. It affirms what Jacob says about home as an interiorized space: “one’s sense of being ‘at home’ is not something being bequeathed by long association with one place, but an active matter of becoming that can reach across far more complex spatialities and reflect more expansive relational ranges” (4).
Landing in a depoliticized space
Between the two of them, it has been a relation of mutual give-and-take in more than a single sense: “She said she had given much of herself to you because she liked you, and that you, too, had given much, it was equal” (OMB 135). ‘You’ and Margarethe thus part on a positive, affirmative note: both develop rhizomatically in linear and non-hierarchal fashion. By confronting the buried woman within the woman that she is, Margarethe develops into a dignified, self-respecting individual. Having been a forced victim herself, she does not force the narrator against his will to marry her even though she wants now to live a peaceful and secure life (135). Here she differs from her counterpart in SM who tries to disrupt the flow of her lover’s subjectivity by using physical as well as psychological violence to impose a molar alliance on him. Margarethe is alive to the molecular dispersion as a continuous process. So is ‘you’. On his side he is afraid of marriage not only because he has had a prior experience of a failed marriage Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 204
but because for him “freedom is more precious than anything” (135). Marrying a person even of one’s own liking is equivalent to going back to the socially grounded territory of home and its rigid segmentarity of birth and continuity of line as expressed in the family tree. Counter to this is the supple segmentarity of a rhizome which allows “a synthesis of multiplicity of elements without erasing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging even to the contrary” (Massumi xiii). If we take Margarethe as a refined version of ‘she’ in SM, we can say that the experience of diaspora has been enriching to both the genders. Their symbiotic alliance has been a source of transversal transformation. It has influenced both their personal vision of the other. Though all male narrators in Gao happen to be avowed heterosexuals, they end up being re-formed subjects or “subjects-as-space”, to borrow an expression from JanMohamed (237). In his post-Margarethe sexual reveries, instead of letting himself be at the top, ‘you’ fantasises that
“[a] young woman is lying on top of you” (288). Negotiation with one woman has enabled him to give way, to share space with the gender other. “Negotiation” as Bruce Robbins reminds us,
“is not a removal of the difference but an acknowledgement and accommodation of difference”
(76). In letting ‘you’ and Margarethe part ways, Gao rejects social norms by rejecting marriage and its rooted domesticity in favour of a desultory life style which because of its very desultoriness is possiblistic.
Conjugality as a well-planned bordered territory may continue to be the social norm but it offers no becoming (Braidotti 95). Choosing to remain single is a location outside the political territory of home. Even long after his divorce, the narrator in OMB owns that “he no longer tied himself to a woman. A wife and children were burdens too heavy for him” (34). Through a metaphoric extension, this could be related to an ideologically liberated mind which prefers infidelity to all fixed narrow notions of gender, sexuality, culture, race, nation or community Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 205
which define themselves in monologic, essentialist terms. Gao likens this freedom to a bird in flight. The limitless expanses of the skies are there for it to navigate. It could be related to the boundless imagination of an artist, one of the multiple subjective identities of both the author and his narrators. Once dislocated from the country of their birth, they relocate themselves in France which happens to be their second matrix where to pursue their artistic career in a relatively free intellectual environment. However, even the artists in diaspora have to tap their imaginative resources within the confines of a particular location. So a little later, the narrator remembers a personal experience of having visited a deep limestone cave in France inside which he could enjoy the freedom of a sperm even though trapped inside a mother’s womb: “This deep fathomless cavity created by nature was like a huge womb. In this dark natural cavern he was minute like a single sperm, moreover an infertile sperm, roaming about happy and contented; this was a freedom that exists after release from lust” (34). The tropes used here are thematically relevant. In the first place, the act of empathising with a cell is a molecular experience. The sperm is said to be in a blissful state as it is single hence infertile, i.e., in no hurry and under no compulsion to enter into an alliance with the female cell. It enjoys its molecular state of non- alliance, its freedom of swimming, sailing and floating alone, carrying no biological/ideological burdens. Sperm as the fertile component in semen heralds new birth. Its infertility does not negate the potential for creativity here. Instead it reinforces the deterritorialised state of a subject who finds social responsibility in the form of a wife and children too burdensome to carry along.
So marriage as a molar or territorial bond is a bondage. One feels trapped by the lust for continuation of one’s name or line. The nomadic subject feels exempt from all territorial bounds.
It is tied to neither home nor any molar, majoritarian ideology. That allows it freedom of a sperm to postpone fertilization so it could form an alliance with anybody or anything at will. This Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 206
release of an individual from the set, stereotypically imposed roles of society is also suggested in a short story. The fact that the ‘Temple of Perfect Benevolence’ in the story “The Temple” was a
“dilapidated ruin” (4) is symbolic of an imminent collapse of the normative, institutional order.
To the honeymooning couple always conscious of the societal gaze, a chance fellow traveler suggests alternative routes to form relations other than the ‘natural’ and socially approved re- productivity through heterosexual alliance. He also challenges the stereotypically fixed gender roles and boundaries in Asian societies: he acts a doting, mothering father on his way to adopting someone else’ son.
This chapter has explored the possibilities inherent in Gao’s diaspora in the light of
Deleuzian concept of deterritorialisation and its elaboration by Rosi Braidotti. Its contention rests on the premise that the minority position of the protagonist acts as a launching pad for transcending his personal self and becoming minoritarian. “Becoming-woman” of “becoming- minoritarian” being the first of subjective categories is certainly not the end of the road. This research thus levels the ground for future researchers to explore in Gao and other writers an inter-subjective dialogue with other ‘others’ held apart by a dualistic, Molar/Molecular structure of society. The process continues from human to animal, and even the imperceptible which apart from the figuratively invisible minorities of the planet earth such as insects could also include the physically unperceivable truths of spiritual dimension, a dominant concern in SM. Within the breadth of this study, the subjects’ relocation in a nomadic space has helped them map out routes and passages beyond the stable, fixed, centred and unitarian territories of subjectivity. We now need to see how this broadened subjectivity carries itself through while crossing other than gender borders.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 207
Chapter Six
Home in transcultural negotiations
Becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation. …
It concerns alliance. The term we would prefer for [the] form of evolution
between heterogeneous terms is “involution” on the condition that involution is in
no way confused with regression. Becoming is involu-tionary, involution is
creative.
Deleuze and Guattari
The Conclusion of this research is by no means the end of the subject’s trajectory. The key finding is that qualitative growth in subjectivity as an on-going process continues ad infinitum. How much is he able to outgrow his native subjectivity is evident not only in the expansive range of his art but also his eating habits and communicative and interactive practices.
At ease with everyone, he does not feel the need of a home. Leaving home is thus synonymous with leaving aside a power-driven, exclusive mold of subjectivity as discernible in the intergender dialogue in Hong Kong. The sustainability of the process is visible now in negotiation with other others in the interstices of the West. With the help of textual and
Bakhtinian discourse analyses, this part of the research sums up the transcultural relocations of home possible through a dialogue with gender, sexual, class, racial and cultural others. At the end of the day we find the subject having travelled a long way from a home-centred, myopic vision to an all-inclusive world view, at peace with himself as well as the world around.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 208
‘A Great Leap Forward’
To revisit a phase of Chinese history, ‘the Great Leap Forward’ was a notorious drive of the Communist leadership to revolutionise the economy during the time brackets of 1958-62.
Rapid steps to transform industry and agriculture backfired and are said to have caused the Great
Famine of 1961. I am borrowing the phrase to show how in the diasporic context of the present research, the historical term gets re-invented in connection with the qualitative transformation of the subject in the broader context of global diaspora and transculturalism.
So far we have seen Gao’s subject transcending home while inhabiting a non-Western third space. We now need to see how he fares in the interstices of the host lands in the West.
Deleuze calls the qualitative growth in subjectivity as an involutionary (260) process. One dictionary meaning of involution is shrinking of an organ in old age, or when inactive like uterus after childbirth. Becoming is a continuously aging process in terms of the subject gaining maturity and enrichment. The inter-gender dialogue has enriched and intensified the human resources of Gao’s diaspora, adding a ‘minoritarian’ dimension to his subjectivity. Each dialogic move promises a growth and a renewal if not a re-birth of the subject. In this privileged position, he learns to surmount his hegemonic tendency and forge a ‘symbiotic’ alliance. The mutually accommodative relationship between ‘you’ and Margarethe in OMB is just one example of the subject reaching one Deleuzian ‘plateau’. He now gears up for another. How he fares in the larger domain of other relationships is next in focus; for “the heightening of energies” is sustained long enough to be “reactivated or injected into other activities” (Massumi 15).
Deleuze’s way of splitting the word ‘involu-tionay’ could indicate the sustainability of the process; the ability to prolong the span of energy by reactivating and channelizing it to other directions. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 209
As already stated, leaving home is equivalent to leaving aside a hedged-in, majoritarian mold of subjectivity that promised little for “rhizomatic mode of relations” (Braidotti 101).
Fluidity of the subjective process prevents this relation from solidifying into a permanent bond like marriage. Conjugality in Deleuze denotes fixed, “well-determined, well-planned territories.
They have a future but no becoming” (195). All arrivals arrest movement and are inimical to growth. Gao’s subject keeps on changing his diasporic position from an exile and émigré to a settler and a migrant. There is no end to his crossing and re-crossing borders, hence no way putting a single identity tag on him. ‘Becoming’ thus becomes a continuous process “of avoiding completion, of staying underdefined” (Baumann 82). Gao’s protagonist partakes of the
‘slipperiness’ of liquid modernity. He is modern in terms of having “an infinity of improvement, with no final state in sight, and none desired” (82). He may return to the same place but not the same point. Deleuze describes such rhizomatic modes of travel as “proceeding from the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing” (46).
If home is the ‘initial’ or ‘originary’ self or the indigenous subject-hood, the diasporic currents have forced its hard crust to open to allow flows of interaction and communicability in all directions. Relating to the hitherto invisible minorities is part of the process of ‘becoming’; it is a self-extensive drive which destabilizes the so-called ‘natural’ differences and power boundaries. Where ‘you’ in OMB could not fully interact as in case of other sexualities or classes, he at least sensitizes himself to their predicament―e.g., he is worried as much about the fate of the gays after the Handover (61) as a possible displacement of the “Philipino maids of rich Hong Kong families” by immigrants from the Mainland (136). Later on, he is able to relate to the people from across the world including the Blacks. This flow of transformation in his Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 210
subjectivity can be explicated with the help of ray diagrams which draw on the laws of
‘refraction’ and ‘reflection’ in physics:
Fig. 1
Refraction
(Becoming-minoritarian)
The progression from ‘a’ to ‘b’ of a molar subject in the above figure is refraction of the transversal line as it cuts across different parallel lines representing gender ‘cd’, racial ‘ef’ and cultural ‘gh’ others. The subject is able to get across the other side, look at things from others’ perspective, and embrace their essential humanity. In short, in pulling down ideological barriers erected by his majoritarian mindset, he succeeds in ‘becoming-minoritarian’. Figure 2 shows the ray touching the parallel line at ‘b’ and getting reflected at point ‘c’. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 211
Fig. 2
Reflection
(Minority consciousness)
Even if not cutting across, just touching the parallel line ‘de’ representing the sexual or class deviants has changed the direction of thought in the subject. Though he remains a middle class, heterosexual male, yet the change in his personal outlook is reflected in a shift from exclusivity of self home-culture had imposed on him to a breadth and accommodativeness of vision in including others, from hostility as to a lesbian discussed earlier to self-expansiveness and sensititvity towards others such as the concern for the gays above. As he moves on to the interstices of the West, the process of acquiring a multiple, inclusive vision continues, and ‘you’ appears ‘almost’ a global citizen. The adverbial degree of uncertainty leaves room for further development as his location in the transit lounge at the end of the novel encapsulates. It places him somewhere close to, but still short of the ultimate deterritorialised subject. Some remnants of his originary male or ‘Chinese’ self may still be visible in his gender or cross cultural relations. Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 212
He is learning to disrupt binaries without eliminating differences. This is possible in an interior space where subjects tend to be “dispersed not binary, multiple, not dualistic, interconnected, not dialectic, and in a constant flux not fixed” (Braidotti 39).
‘At home in the world’: transcultural negotiations
Borrowing the above expression from Michael D. Jackson, I conclude the debate on how
Gao’s migrant in OMB relates to the notion of home in the culturally diversified space of global diaspora. The continuous remapping of the interior space has brought about a new version of home. So in both his geophysical location and subject position, he ends up becoming a citizen at large. Belonging to the ambiguous category of global citizenry, he is afloat in the interstices of every culture. Evading the ‘monolithic’ identity slots, he is willing to enter into alliance with everyone, irrespective of who belongs to which nation-state, racial or cultural group. Even if the global culture he now moves in includes a growing number of migrant communities from all over the world including China, his home-less status as a writer in exile teaches him to reach out to the whole world, to communicate with people of all colours, nations, ethnic and gender groups: “You don’t have a hometown, and in America, you don’t have to put on a play with
Chinese actors. You wanted local Western actors and had hoped they would find a uniquely
American woman to play the lead role” (421). The inclusivity of a woman as the central character of his play and the preference for an American female artist speaks of his ability to transcend his ‘originary’ self in art, as his art in its breadth of human subject helps him “remove that Chinese label from yourself” (60).
The subject exercises his diasporic agency for transcultural negotiations by keeping the doors open for extended visions, and re-visions in life. Revisions lead to further negotiations, as Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 213
much with others as with oneself. This is manifest through an alternation of narrative voices in the text. The difference between ‘he’ and ‘you’ not only symptomatizes a movement in time but also a transition from an exclusive to an all-inclusive global vision. Though each has grown considerably out of the given frame of his originary self, they still carry part of the home culture in memory and practice. This is evidenced through a culinary discourse in the text. Being the past version of ‘you’, ‘he’ is still fond of the food of his ancestral land (213). However, this does not prevent him from reaching out to multiple other cultures. This transcultural re-location of home is the major point of argument to conclude this research. The stress is on the process of outgrowing the native home-centred subjectivity, and dispersing outward for further growth and expansion.
‘Becoming’ is a process that defers conclusion. It entails emergence rather than reaching the destination. Diaspora enables one to keep on negotiating as much with others as one’s own self as ‘you’ does with ‘he’ now. Going back to the culinary discourse mentioned above, ‘he’ recounts how he reconciles on the lunch table the fondness for his native land with an eagerness to communicate with other lands and peoples. The dense, inter-discursive narration opens vistas of multiple countries, continents, cultures and classes brought together on a single dining table, which literally turns into a negotiation table for mutual co-existence of multiple regions, nationalities and ethnic groups. Owning the contradictory elements within him, the narrator confides that for all his solitary nature,
[h]e continued to eat at the hearth of human society and was fond of the food of
his ancestral land, a taste he had acquired as a child because of his mother’s
wonderful cooking. Naturally, he also liked Western food, French haute cuisine,
of course, and also Italian pasta, supposedly brought by Marco Polo from the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 214
Tang Empire, but sprinkled with Parmesan cheese that didn’t exist in China.
Japanese raw fish laced with hot raw mustard was excellent, and so was Russian
caviar, especially the black variety. Also, if Korean barbequed beef and kimchi
were served with Indian rhoti, it was a perfect dish. Kentucky Fried Chicken was
the only thing he couldn’t eat; for him it was bland and tasteless. He was fussy
about food because he had gone through some good times in his childhood. (213)
How ‘you’ grows out of ‘his’ childish fussiness is my concern now. As discussed before, the diasporic space is replete with ambiguities and ambivalences; here contraries may co-exist in mutual cooperation and reconciliation. The above narrative opens a whole range of parallel discourses which both support and contest each other in an all-encompassing artistic space. The personal, the socio-cultural, the geo-political and the historical are intermixed to capture the density and complexity of the subject in process. It is in this global space that he tries to come to terms with the contradictions within and without. The move is to accommodate the high and the low, the rare and the common, the native and the foreign, the synthetic and the natural alike. His placement in the middle stratum of society in China gives him an advantage to negotiate with both the upper and lower strata. Later, his journeys abroad place him in the interstices of every society which gives him access to the dynamism of a cross-cultural dialogue. Let’s go back to the dining table that turns into a cultural contact zone, presenting a conglomeration of international foods without seeming to privilege or denigrate any culinary taste, white or non- white. A filial incline to the motherland is discernible through the ancestral food brought at the top of the catalogue of culinary delights. However, as the first step of his cultural orientation, this filiation soon gives way to a trans-cultural affiliation. The geographical expansion captures the process of his attunement to multiple other cultures, bringing in an assortment of nations and Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 215
communities such as the Korean, the Indian and the Japanese, irrespective of their being traditional rivals to the Chinese. Multiple discourses collide as well as collude to create a third space in which to negotiate differences and rivalries. This is the broadened interior space where one could acquire the agency for transcultural communications. The ‘he’ of OMB tries to do so inside China, and ‘you’ outside.
The cultural discourse reveals that like the narrator every society has been in a state of diaspora. Continuously engaged in negotiation, each affects as much as is affected by the other(s). The multi-national corporate culture of late global capitalism has played a key role in loosening people off their territorial roots. The interdependence of nations and cultures has brought them together and enabled cultural dialogue. Deterritorialisation in Deleuze also refers to “the transfer of wealth … and labor of individuals into the hands of capital, without respect for borders” (Rodowick 48). The intermingling and close collaboration at international level is most commonly visible through the business of eateries. There are chains of restaurants in every metropolitan city, catering to multiple tastes, and promoting a cultural exchange unprecedented in human history. Nation, culture and class binaries dissolve as the above menu varies from the luxury food for the rich only―the French haute cuisines and the black Russian caviar―to the domestically prepared humbler staple items like the Italian pasta and the Indian roti. The narrator claims to have a special liking for pasta because of its supposed association with the Chinese history: Marco Polo seems having brought it from the Tang Empire. However, this nationalistic current is quickly subsumed by a cross current, the sense of lack in the native culture: pasta comes to have an excellent flavor after it is sprinkled with the Parmesan cheese “that didn’t exist in China” (OMB 213). Movement across time and space from medieval to modern global era broadens the vision. As in theories of transculturality, we get a sense of cultures always being Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 216
interdependent, owing their survival to their ability to intermingle and make compromises or re- adjustments. Thanks to this rhizomatic movement, the narrator finds his taste-buds attuned as much to the familiarity of the mother’s cooking as the exoticism of the Western, South or Far
Eastern specialties. This inter-discursive dialogism, however, is disrupted towards the end of the given text with a counter discourse of rejectionism: The Kentucky Fried Chicken is “the only thing he could not eat; for him it was bland and tasteless” (213).
This move to isolate America comes as a surprise, for the market trends show that KFC has been the largest of the American fast food chain after McDonalds. A desk report (2013) reveals it has about 20000 outlets all over the world with over 4500 in China alone. This could be a Chinese resistance to the geo-political, cultural and commercial hegemony of America in the present world. But what is more important here is to underline the existence of a gap, an attitudinal fault line in ‘he’. He certainly needs to open further out, to depoliticize his vision, and move further across nations and cultures to attain a global view.
It is in New York that ‘you’ gets an opportunity to correct the warp in ‘his’ vision. So it is crossing of the borders and going to the other side that makes all the difference. An involutionary version of ‘he’ in the past and an emergent subject at present, ‘you’ learns to embrace all differences without vernacularizing any social space which migrants often tend to do. In New
York, ‘you’ gets a firsthand experience of viewing the all-inclusivity and accommodativeness of the American culture: “There are large numbers of Chinese here, and, from time to time, on the streets, you hear the speech of Beijing, Shanghai, Shandong, and even the He’nan village dialect spoken near the reform-through-labour farm where you were once sent” (421). The text becomes poly-vocal with the literal emergence of multiple ‘local dialects’ or regional languages of other times and places, transported from their place of origin and now entering into a dialogue with the Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 217
dominant ‘national’ language of America. The reform-through-labour farm takes us back to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. This was the height of political oppression in China under
Mao’s communism. Parallel to it though a little earlier is the political psychodrama of
McCarthyism: persecution of the communist suspects in America. Not to forget though still farther back in time is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a parliamentary step to bar immigration flows of labour from China. How far the two countries have marched out of their cave-mentality is demonstrated by the openness visible in their geo-cultural ethos.
For all its hegemonic vilification of political and ideological others at state level, the global texture of American culture embraces and grants spatial accommodation to the communist
China along with its lingua-cultural diversity. Not only this; it comes as a pleasant surprise to
‘you’ that “there is every kind of Chinese food you can think of, even the crabroe dumplings and hand-shaved noodles” (421). In contrast to ‘his’ exclusivity, here is the culinary inclusivity of the
Chinese variety down to the most traditional and ritualistic. The overlapping architectural, geo- economic, and cultural discourses that follow next offer multi-discursive view of an enhanced vision of America ‘you’ acquires in New York. Presenting his micro-narrative of contemporary history, he makes us aware of the changing contours of global culture and politics. Though he denies belonging to China, he cannot overlook the subjective presence of his native home in ascendency now. It has started making routes and in-roads in the mainstream American society.
It is ironic that the country which once stigmatized all dissidents as ‘bloody capitalists’ is emerging as one of the leading participants in the open market consumer’s economy of global capitalism: “Chinatowns are everywhere, whether downtown in Manhattan or in Flushling,
Queens. This is China, more Chinese than China, as Chinese New Yorkers construct their own Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 218
virtual hometowns. … You don’t have a hometown, and in America you don’t have to put on a play with Chinese actors” (421).
The architectural presence of China on the American soil is a visual sign of a reversal of the erstwhile power positions and roles. Previously, it was the solid British structure of the narrator’s family house (1) as a historical reminder of the colonial penetration of China by the
West, and its vernacularization of the Chinese soil. History seems to repeat itself in the reverse order now; China is making its subjective presence powerfully felt on an already multinational space of American society. By mobilizing economic resources through its work force and large investments, it is contributing to the local as well as global productivity. “This is the agency as the outcome of negotiation”, Riemenschnitter and Madsen (3) argue in their study of Chinese diaspora and transnationalism. It is “a new migrant subjectivity divorced from the old one of indentured and migrant labor movements” (4). Like the two scholars, the narrator also discerns this emergent diasporic subjectivity of China contesting the earlier discourses of Western supremacy.
However, this is just one side of the picture. Going to the other side makes ‘you’ realize the tolerance and generosity the host country is according to others. By keeping its borders open for Chinese workers and investors alike, it is sharing its economic resources with an arch rival.
The host nation allows migrant communities to build their own cultural enclaves. What ‘you’ discovers about America on crossing the borders is a great leap forward; it is an enlargement of
‘his’ narrow vision in the past. As much is ‘you’ critically aware of the limitation of ‘his’ anti-
American stance as of his fellow Chinese migrants. Though they carry a hybrid identity tag–
‘Chinese New Yorkers’– they still tend to vernacularize the New York cityscape by constructing their Chinatowns which are more Chinese than China itself. They would love to receive Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 219
maximum benefits from America, yet would cherish and construct China as their only home.
‘You’ of OMB has acquired a diasporic agency with which to negotiate ‘his’ Asian consciousness. In his homelessness, he is at home in the world. Self-critical regarding ‘his’ cultural assumptions, he has developed a fresh perspective about cultures being relational and mutually cooperative rather than differential and inimical.
The main barrier to one’s engagement with others, according to Epstein, is the filial attachment to the “customs, traditions, conventions, which a person receives as a member of a particular group and ethnos” (327). ‘He’ like the Chinese New Yorkers tended to be
‘monogamous’ in his relation to places and peoples, missing mother’s cooking even while moving in a culturally heterogeneous culinary space. Still home-centred, he needed to draw a line somewhere, to oust someone from the common fold; this he does with the American cuisine.
With his ‘polygamous’ experience of places and populations, ‘you’ is able to acquire an
Epsteinian category of freedom from home and tyranny of its culture. This is the diasporic agency which allows him to open the doors, and engage dialogically with others. It liberates him from the “ties, complications, perplexities of ancestors, wife, and memories” (OMB 426). As a result, “You are light and float up as if you are weightless, you wander from country to country, city to city, woman to woman, but don’t think of finding a place that is home” (426). Since no external or internal force can territorialise him to any essentialist, landlocked view, he feels under no compulsion to return ‘home’ (443); i.e., to return to an infantile, inadequate subject- hood. Able to cross and re-cross borders, ‘you’ in OMB has developed his transcultural affiliations to the extent that “[y]ou are, in fact, no longer alone in the world, and have many friends, as well as some you’ve just made. You find it is often easier to communicate with them than with some of your fellow Chinese” (421). Towards the end, the cumulative affect of Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 220
recurrent images of freedom and fluidity concentrates in the “Jazz and the freedom of the blues”
(423). This alignment with the blacks is another instance of becoming-minoritarian, for the blacks have been a key minority in the mainstream White majoritarian culture of the West whom
Braidotti calls the “privileged starting points for active and empowering processes” (35). It is a celebration of freedom from slavish filiation to home and entering a new phase of affiliation with all. The blurred image of the title painting reinforces the mobility and dynamism of a multi- layered, transcultural, homeless subject. An Asian dancing to the tune of “the jazz of the black man” (426) is a de-territorialised person who is at home everywhere. This aligns with Ahmed’s conceptualisation of home as quoted earlier―a home that is internalized “as part of the nomadic consciousness which refuses to belong to a particular place, and belongs instead to the globe as such” (338).
The change in the narrative from ‘he’ to ‘you’ generates an alternative subject position shorn of negative human impulses. Most of all it is the human impulse to exclude and inflict violence on others which ‘you’ has learned to tame: “You are an observer and not anyone’s enemy” (444); and later: “You have no hatred and are at peace” (448). Since deterritorialisation is a continuously ‘involu-tionary’ process, the narrator ends up in Perpignan, a city in the French border area adjoining Spain (443) which, he lets us know significantly enough, is “the home of the French plane tree, a species that roots from the cuttings and has virtually spread throughout the world” (446). Here, he is waiting “for friends to take you to airport to catch the plane back to
Paris some time afternoon” (450). Back to Paris is certainly not the end of the road. It is only a pause at the transit lounge before another take-off. Even in the afternoon of life, there is no end to exploring foreign territories, to map fresh routes for self-regenerative processes.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 221
Summing up
Like the subject, we have travelled a long way from home located in a geo-physically close and ideologically confined domain of power, exile’s dislocation from it, to its relocation in an open and inclusive space where both inter-personal and transcultural negotiations are possible. Constant movement of the subject along external and internal borders necessitated not only a variation in the use of data analysis tools but a re-strengthening of its action-orientation by adding a fresh purpose at each stage. Even if visibly at work only at a minor everyday level, each purpose carries weight enough to contest and transform the fixed patterns of thought gaining strength in the world today. Quickly revisiting the key research concerns to measure the progression of argument as well as the diasporic subjectivity under study, my first concern was to investigate the nature of home and what goes in turning the subject into an exile. Within the ideologically monlogic macro-narratives that refused to take into account the presence of micro- narratives of cultural history, a sensitive person alive to the need of a dialogue with himself as well as others becomes an exile. Gao often transmits this dialogic urge through a sexual interaction. I deployed Bakhtin’s discourse analysis to underscore the presence of multiple languages interwoven in the texture of home to affirm as well as contest the binaries built in its patriarchal structure. The close scrutiny of the forces that ultimately push the exile physically out of home/country next brought into focus the regimes of power infesting the socio-political space in China as they try to pin the subject down to an object-position under their panoptic gaze.
Foucault and Deleuze were critical sources as were their methods of discourse or statement analysis effective tools to identify the tyrannical institutions at work. Tyranny gives an immediate impetus to the exile’s physical dislocation from home, a phenomenon not uncommon in many other Asian, African or Latin American societies still under oppressive rule. The Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 222
concern about exile’s whereabouts came next under focus. Empowered in his flight but reduced again to the status of a minority in the host lands, the subject now enters the privileged ‘nomadic’ space as enunciated by Deleuze and Guattari, where he undergoes a series of qualitative shifts in his subjectivity which helps him ‘becoming-minoritarian’. The debate investigated issues particularly related to gender overlapping with national and racial minorities. Widespread oppression of women in almost all developing societies, plus the critical view of Gao as a misogynist formed the rationale for this gender-specificity. Taking the Deleuzian notion of
‘becoming’ as an on-going process, the conclusion measures the distance from home in terms of the subject’s transformation in the global scenario of transcultural intermingling.
In highlighting the subject’s persistent act of crossing borders and going across the other side of the gender, cultural or racial divide, the research anticipates a qualitative change in our worldview as a result of our remapping of the psychic borders. The peace initiative encoded in
Gao’s fiction underscores the need to leave aside personal biases one imbibes from home, and to start accepting and accommodating others for a depolarized world view. A home broad enough to include other peoples, places, nations, races and culture is what we need to diffuse tension at local and global levels. Therein lie the end to the culture of hatred and violence and the beginning of peace in the world. And therein lies the ultimate significance of this research.
Diasporic Relocations of Home Chishti 223
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