Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 Journal of Global Cultural Studies
12 | 2017 The Other’s Imagined Diseases. Transcultural Representations of Health
Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/678 DOI : 10.4000/transtexts.678 ISSN : 2105-2549
Éditeur Gregory B. Lee
Référence électronique Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化, 12 | 2017, « The Other’s Imagined Diseases. Transcultural Representations of Health » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2017, consulté le 24 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/678 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.678
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 24 septembre 2020.
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SOMMAIRE
Editorial
Introduction: ‘The Intimacy of Strangers’ Lidia Curti
The Other’s Imagined Diseases. Transcultural Representations of Health
Matter Out of Place: Migrating Modernity and Unauthorised Archives Iain Chambers
Dirty, Diseased and Demented: The Irish, the Chinese, and Racist Representation Gregory B. Lee
Contrastive Approaches to the Other’s Imagined Diseases:V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Abha Dawesar’s Family Values Florence Labaune-Demeule
The Horror of Contact: Understanding Cholera in Mann’s Death in Venice Amrita Ghosh
Transcultural Psychiatry and the French Provision of Health for Migrants: Between Mediation and Misunderstanding Dafne Accoroni
Eat the Rich: Pandemic Horror Cinema Johan Höglund
The Queer Post-Migratory Writings of Christos Tsiolkas: (Re)locating Mental and Sexual Disorders of “Translated” Subjects Sophie Coavoux
Varia
“It Is (Not) What It Looks Like”: Chen Hangfeng’s Liminality Bérangère Amblard
Échanges transdisciplinaires et légitimation générique : le poème en prose et les arts plastiques Bertrand Bourgeois
Lost in Consumerism: Existential and Linguistic Wanderings in Confusion d’instants (2003) by Gerty Dambury Vanessa Lee
Translating and Mapping the Many Voices in the Work of Niki Marangou Marine Meunier
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Editorial
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Introduction: ‘The Intimacy of Strangers’
Lidia Curti
Of contagion and viruses La souillure elle-même est à peine une représentation et celle-ci est noyée dans une peur spécifique qui bouche la réflexion; avec la souillure nous entrons au règne de la Terreur.1 Paul Ricœur Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. Mary Douglas
1 The role of Western medical science in the definition of diversity has been crucial and can be extended to other sciences such as biology, anthropology, sociology and technology in general. A part of this development is drawn from social Darwinism with its view of linear progressive time with humans, inevitably white western men, at its apex above non-human living beings and plants. Recent developments in these fields have critically underlined this feature that goes from the general frame of positivism to the more specific developments of present-day (neo)capitalism and neoliberalism.2
2 A greater awareness of the urgency of resistance to the progressive devastation of the planet has also come from contemporary speculative feminism, seeking a manner of living together in a symbiotic chain between beings of every species and nature. Donna Haraway’s recent book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), refers to the art of living in deeply troubled times, surviving in discomfort, coexisting with devastation. Commencing from the mono-cellular organisms at the origins of life, we depend on one another in a necessary symbiosis. Lynn Margulis, a radical evolutionary theorist and cellular biologist, has derived from her studies of microbes and bacteria the concept of ‘the intimacy of strangers’ as the most fundamental practice of becoming-with with each other in Earth’s history.3 In biological science,
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evolutionism is considered not so much as the result of a competitive process as of cooperation between all the organisms that inhabit Gaia.
3 The essays in this volume relate the links of Western thought (and its structure of feelings) to notions of alterity and diversity, particularly, though not only, in matters of illness and medical systems. The relation to the other, the stranger, follows patterns and metaphors such as dirt, pollution, contagion, and hence borders and thresholds between differences: national and ethnic belongings, linguistic, religious and cultural formations, bodies and skins, sexuality, food. Nineteenth century anthropologists considered the relation to the threshold of cleanliness as the touchstone for differentiating primitive and advanced cultures, implying that a conservative attitude concerning the social order was a self-evident and natural phenomenon and not the result of social power relations.
4 In Purity and Danger (1966), Mary Douglas explored the cultural notion of dirt and its symbolic meanings, underlining its link to taboo and xenophobic attitudes and, ultimately, to the views we entertain of other cultures. She insisted on the relativity of the notion of dirt, showing how different cultures have their own thresholds of cleanliness. According to Douglas, the evolution of cultural patterns is an example of how Western anthropologists established a condescending approach towards other cultures, expressing their Eurocentrism and promoting distinctions between cultures as a policing of public health.
5 Dirt is an offence against the ideal order of society and is considered a danger leading to transgression. Douglas saw uncleanness as matter out of place and, against the distinction between primitives and moderns, observed that we are all subject to the same rules: “The whole universe is harnessed to men’s attempts to force one another into good citizenship. Thus, we find that certain moral values are upheld and certain social rules defined by beliefs in dangerous contagions.”4 She considered the elimination of dirt not as a negative movement, but as a positive effort to organize the environment, partly neglecting the role of a hegemonic discourse that uses definitions of pure and impure, clean and unclean, to establish social hierarchies. Her analysis of purification rites is, however, a precious guide to locating dirt and pollution as a limit, a frontier device, on the margin of order, from which symbolic patterns are derived and become social rules.
6 In a similar manner, Julia Kristeva considers abjection as an exclusion or taboo, in food and ways of life in general, and at the same time a site of ambiguity: Il y a, dans l’abjection, une de ces violentes et obscures révoltes de l’être contre ce qui le menace et qui lui paraît venir d’un dehors ou d’un dedans exorbitant, jeté à côté du possible, du tolérable, du pensable […] Frontière sans doute, l’abjection est surtout ambiguïté. Parce que […] elle ne détache pas radicalement le sujet de ce qui le menace – au contraire, elle l’avoue en perpétuel danger.5 There is, in abjection, one of those violent and obscure revolts of one’s being against that which threatens it and which seems to come from an outside or an irregular inside, thrown against the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable […] A border, doubtless, abjection is above all ambiguity. Because […] it does not radically separate the subject from that which threatens it, on the contrary, it declares it [the subject] in perpetual danger.
7 In monotheistic religions, she notices that transgression is associated with sin, as in the Christian verb. In Occidental modernity there is a return to the archaic resonance of the Biblical text, and, further back, to the concept of pollution in primitive cultures.
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The symbolic construction is based on the formation of the other: “…‘sujet’ et ‘objet’ se repoussent, s’affrontent, s’effrondent et repartent, inséparables, contaminés, condamnés, à la limite de l’assimilable, du pensable: abjects” (…‘subject’ and ‘object’ repel each other, confront each other, collapse, and set off again inseparable, contaminated, at the limit of what can be assimilated, at the limit of the thinkable: abject).6
8 Viruses and microbes are an important part of this ‘scientific’ framework and ideology as carriers of infection and disease. Their specific quality as parasitical micro- organisms, (metaphorically) infiltrating and menacing the healthy body of the nation or a community, is all the more threatening for being invisible and in constant metamorphosis.7
9 The array of scientific and symbolic terms used – infection, contagion, invasion, spread, proximity – is often borrowed to indicate strangers and outsiders. Against them disinfectants and eradications become walls and barriers that must be erected as means of restoring good health. Viruses leaping the species are a direct threat to our ‘species’ – white, human, civilized – from which the unscientific concept of race rises as a ghost. Infections associated with the other, whether African or Asian or animal, refugee or terrorist, ignore borders and invade the civilized world. Blackness becomes an issue, and so do different skin and features. This is what is occuring right now with the rise of White Panic that considers migrations as a disease, accompanied by fears of a spreading, proliferating, multiplying mass. Material walls are being erected all over our planet.
Illusions of Neutrality
10 Iain Chambers refers this discussion to the historical and epistemological framework of colonial regimes entwined in the subsequent developments of the neoliberalist economy. He calls for a different critical language as a challenge to western unilateralism, “… an assemblage of knowledge and practices that historically participated directly and indirectly in the hierarchisation and consequent racialization of the planet, via the violent imposition of Western capital in its management of planetary resources”.
11 He describes the hypocrisy of neutrality in Western thought at length, a line that is taken up in many of the subsequent essays. Within a Foucaltian framework, Chambers maintains that science ought to offer a discontinuity with the dominant vision of time and history. The existing disciplinary discourse should take into account important ‘voices’, such as those of Franz Fanon, James Baldwin, Angela Davis and Nina Simone.
12 Gregory Lee traces links between science and colonialism in the formation of a racial ideology over the last 200 years. Returning to the Victorian era, he traces the formation of a xenophobic discourse in the links between nineteenth-century anthropology and the rise of an imperial frame of thought in Britain. He underlines that, alongside the African and the Chinese, the Irish were at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy. The anti-Irish discourse found a powerful correlative in animal imagery, with the representations of the Irish gorilla, the Monkey, aimed also at confirming the superiority of the English as the epitome of the human. He notices that racial considerations passed before capitalist interest, limiting immigrant intake in spite of
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very low local nativity rate; conditions that are reproduced today in the arguments and the strategies to curb migrations.
13 We encounter here the basis for the expulsion of difference, whether physical, mental, sexual or ethnic, leading to reclusion and incarceration in securitized spaces. The scientific establishment of mental institutions is a major example of relocating mental and sexual disorder out of sight. It has been described in many literary works from the Victorian period down to the present. Two major examples here are Jack London’s The Star Rover (1915) and Madge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Both narrate the alliance between ‘scientific’ systems of cure in mental institutions and the attendant imprisonment of those who fall out of socially accepted categories.8 Angela Davis, in much of her work, has consistently denounced the majority presence of black people, and the conditions they face, in USA gaols. Both medical health and judicial systems concur in guaranteeing the repression of diversity.
14 In her essay in this volume, Florence Labaune-Demeule, looks at mental disease and ‘dis-ease disorders’ in colonial and postcolonial situations. This is represented in two novels, V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Abha Dawesar’s Family Values (2009). Her analyses locates them in the frame of (post)colonial trauma, referring to the literature on medical colonial discourse and imagery, particularly in relation to the imperial medical system in British India. “Biswas’s mental breakdown has to be understood not just as any breakdown but as the consequence of the colonial system’s attempt at submitting any desire for personal independence and rebellion against colonial power and domination”).
15 Both novels deal with the opposition between rational, aseptic Western-style medical practices and traditional Indian therapies. The antagonism and mixture of the two are the emblem of a society in constant flux between the influence of Occidental ways and the rituals and lore of its own culture, perched as it is on the cusp between modernity and tradition. Naipaul’s novel provides an image of illness operating in a contradictory role; on one side as the metaphor of colonial rule and on the other of rebellion and independence from it: materially represented in the profusion and accumulation of bottles and drugs of diverse origins on the same table in the house. In both novels houses are microcosms in which the two worlds are reflected, and somehow interact, as in Family Values where the thin partition between the private space and the medical practice room is a partial filter between two worlds, separate but in constant communication.
16 Amrita Ghosh again reads the link between an infectious disease and Eastern otherness in Mann’s Death in Venice; that great story of European decadence and death. The stigma and the fascination of alterity is expressed in the description of a luxuriant natural landscape, in the nostalgia for a primordial wilderness.9 In Ghosh’s analysis, the trope of cultural and ethnic difference emerges through referencing medical systems: “Venice, in Mann’s text, becomes a liminal space that opens up to a “contact” with the East – within this space two binaries are set up – the sanitized trope of the West against the source of unclean bodies in the East”. Venice, as the more ‘amiable’ South, stands as a liminal zone between the West and the dangerous East, from which the epidemic has spread, though in reality, as Ghosh underlines, infections and diseases often moved in the opposite direction, from West to East.
17 Cholera works as the symbolic representation of difference: “how meanings of diseases become projected onto the world” as Susan Sontag puts it in Illness as Metaphor. It
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enables a discourse that sees the colonized space as a space of disorder, needing the supervision of modern medicine. The opposition of a tropical world as primitive and dangerous to a sanitized [European] world was at the basis of the emergent Nineteenth- century medical science. In reality, British doctors borrowed heavily from Indian medicinal practices in prescribing similar drugs. In the end, germs, viruses and infections stand for miniature representations of the ills affecting the Indian macrocosm.
18 In “Transcultural Psychiatry and French Provision of Health for Migrants”, Dafne Accoroni looks at a similar opposition in our times and our part of the world. She sees it in the gap between the French healthcare system and the Muslim population of migrants in France. She references ethnopsychiatry as a discipline formed at the end of the last century as a way of solving the ‘African problem’ in postcolonial times. In the case studies she analyses as a participant observer, Accoroni finds that attention to the cultural and religious background of the patients would be of help but is rarely found in state institutional practices of assistance to migrants.
‘The Thing from Another World’
19 For a long time popular genres have been inspired by the fear of biological and chemical contagion, of something impalpable and invisible that like smoke – sometimes smoke itself – passes borders, frontiers, walls. This has become an obsession today, from the USA to Israel and Fortress Europe. In the fifties and sixties American sci-fi films portrayed these threatening entities sometime taking over our own bodies and infiltrating them from the inside. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1958) is a sort of model and inspiration of a theme that, in many variations, has become a staple metaphor in horror and fantasy cinema, from Alien (1979), by now a classic with its many sequels and remakes, to recent Netflix productions. In Annihilation (2018), the monstrous entity remains obscure and more threatening because it is invisible and ghost-like.10
20 It is precisely a ‘ghost’, somebody coming from the other world, that appears consistently in Johan Höglund’s analysis of the South Korean film Train to Busan (2016), a recent example of a zombie movie. Commencing from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979) with its many sequels and remakes, this genre has epitomised the fear of the other, in this case of the undead. The zombie is a revenant, the one who comes from the realm of the dead, spreading death as a contagion, a mutant moving between two states, a motif recurrent in other horror genres such as vampire tales and ghost stories. In this case, the violent visual image of flesh-eating evokes more materially the attack on our body, and hence the pandemic fear of contagious diseases, cholera, the plague, smallpox. The zombie can also be understood as the vengeful subaltern which, according to Höglund, entails a combined focus on race and class.
21 In Romero’s first film, the main character was a black man in a group of white, bourgeois individuals who were all subsequently devoured by the zombies. The political undertones are evident. The black character survives the zombies just to be shot by mistake by white ‘rescuers’ at the end. Something that is still happening to black people in the USA today. He was originally scripted as a truck-driver though during the filming his working-class origin faded. In Train to Butan, the crossing of class borders
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finds a concrete visual representation, as Höglund points out, in the transformation of the middle-class characters “succumbing to a pandemic disease, rising again in the shape of the utterly tattered poor, and joining the growing pack of similarly destitute zombies that roam a crumbling metropole”. Class and ethnicity, though never too far from race, are crucial components of the exclusion or segregation in this genre; the zombie is a creature outside modernity, like most of the homeless inhabiting our cities, in the more or less advanced world, whether in Santa Cruz, California, or Naples ,Italy, or like the immigrant consigned to so-called ‘temporary’ camps.
22 While Romero’s film created a polarity between two spaces, the graveyard as the realm of death, and the house as a temporary shelter for the living, the train here is a unity between the two. It is an ambiguous space of both salvation and perdition, a mobile enclave evoking the image of the nation, a threatened enclosed space, allegory and metaphor for purity and wholeness, designed on the basis of its capacity of exclusion.11 It is here that an outsider, a young Asian woman, enters as the initial contagious agent, challenging the boundary between health and illness, security and danger, exhibited through a dramatic corporeal metamorphosis into the diseased Other. In this case gender alongside race is the cause of havoc.
23 Gender is, in fact, a crucial determinant in the representations of such others. The horror genre, from literature to cinema, associates the theme of sex, violence and death with women, while underlining their insatiable sexual drive, their proximity to the animal world, their inordinate lesbian desire.12 It was a woman vampire created by Sheridan Le Fanu in Carmilla, who gave rise to the theme of the lesbian double.13 The double Carmilla-Laura reproduces the one created by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Christabel (1799-1800), where the dove Christabel is under the spell of the magician Geraldine, a lost damsel with serpent’s eyes, a double herself. Laura is similarly defenceless faced with Carmilla’s enchantments; in both cases the spell is a mixture of fear and attraction, the matter of lesbian love. After defeating her with the help of her father, she goes back to a quiet life with him though still recalling her luscious black hair and desiring her return – each part of the double, vampire and victim, is just as duplicitous.
24 This motif returns in Neil Jordan’s remake of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Interview with the Vampire (1994). Here the male double finds a counterbalance in the vampiric little girl, first a victim and then, as an adult, a powerful lesbian antagonist. The rich popular subgenre of the many versions centred on Dracula’s brides and daughters finds an ironic exception in Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1994) where the women who spread the contagion in a literary department of a North American university use postmodern philosophy as the carrier. It is also a sarcastic comment on a certain kind of academic vampirism.
25 As Julia Kristeva notes, pollution was linked with woman in the Bible, where the parallel is often made between the impure maternal body and the dying, leprous body. She returns to Douglas’s notion of dirt as the fallen object beyond a limit – spit, blood, excrements, urine, milk, tears – and the margin. The liminal line is the body and its contaminated objects. “L’excrément et ses équivalents (pourriture, infection, maladie, cadavre, etc.) représentent le danger venu de l’extérieur de l’identité: le moi menacé par du non-moi, la société menacée par son dehors, la vie par la mort.”14
26 The link between abjection and the female body is tied to that between abjection and the maternal body, to the fear of the archaic mother, of her generative power.
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Menstrual blood represents the danger arriving from inside and threatens both social and sexual mores. This is a leitmotif of horror and sci-fi films. Both the Alien spaceship saga, from Ridley Scott to James Cameron, and David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) are good examples of an ambiguous vision of maternal horrific power.
27 Florence Labaune-Demeule refers to colonialism transposing such images to those of the colonies as gendered bodies that can be submitted to different forms of ills – the female body of the colony being subservient to the male power of Empire associated with the figure of the master or the rapist, thus combining political or social violence with physical abuse. Johan Höglund refers mortal pandemics such as avian flu, H1N1, and Ebola, to the “age of terrorism”, seeing in the figure of the zombie an effective merging with that of the terrorist. Western society itself, with its reliance on white masculinity and the uncritical belief in modernity, turns out to be the real horror that produces the illness. This latter possibility is clearly discernible in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and in much of the late director’s other works. Höglund’s analysis shows how it re-surfaces in interesting ways in Train to Busan.
Diasporic Diseases
28 Many of the essays in this volume refer to migration. In the present conjuncture, the migrant, any migrant (though some are in a worse situation than others), is represented as a menace, promoting a universalized ‘white panic’. Iain Chambers evokes the island of Lampedusa, in the extreme south of Italy, a small piece of land where the contradictions and limits of European modernism are exposed in the proximity of shipwrecked and illegal migrants with tourists, many of whom come from that northern part of Italy that today votes for a xenophobic party. “Today, the multiple souths of the planet infiltrate the modernity that seeks to consign their histories to silence, transforming certain human beings into ‘illegal’ objects of our jurisdiction.” On the other hand, the Mediterranean has long been the scene of waves of emigration from the South to the North of Europe and America. Chambers invites us to think not of but with migration, using it as a critical instrument to look at the world we live in and at its continuity with a colonial past based on a racial and racist subordination of the rest of the world.
29 Postcolonial art has recently looked to Lampedusa and similar sites in the Mediterranean. Two examples come to my mind, Isaac Julien’s Western Union: Small Boats (2007) and Zineb Sedira’s, Floating Coffins (2009). The audiovisual installation by Julien, who is a black British artist of Jamaican descent based in London, looks at the traces left on Lampedusa by the thousands who have drowned attempting this passage.
30 The Sicilian channel is only one of these ‘southern theatres’ of migration: from Lampedusa to the Canaries islands and the beaches of Morocco. The Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira focuses her film on other scenes of mobility and displacement. Her recent work, Floating Coffins (2009), was filmed on the coasts of Mauritania where ‘the desert meets the sea’, in a space for abandoned and wrecked ships (not unlike Julien’s long initial sequence on broken boats in Lampedusa), a sort of graveyard of broken dreams (of the migrants, of the West and its progress?) and at the same time a source for survival and hope.
31 In both cases alternative ways of looking at migration are considered: in Western Union by the apparently incongruous presence of a black androgynous witness, of her body
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and look, and in Floating Coffins by someone in Arab clothes observing this ruined archive of colonialism – both as the remembrance of other systems of colonial oppression and slavery, whether in Jamaica or Algeria.
32 From visual art to literature, we find many examples that offer an alternative look on migration, one from the other side. Sophie Coavoux adds this further dimension with her analysis of queer post-migratory literature through the writings of Christos Tsiolkas, an Australian writer of Greek heritage, ‘a suffering body, lost in translation’, as she says. She derives from Salman Rushdie the definition of ‘translated objects’, while also referring to Stuart Hall’s notion of ‘cultures of hybridity’. Hall underlined that cultural identities are both fluid and mixed, and ethnicity is a process of struggle and negotiation, crossed by differences. Cultural diaspora-ization is for him a process “of unsettling, recombination, hybridization and cut-and-mix”.15
33 ‘Translated objects’ is a term that applies to most migrant writings constantly translating the memory of other places, cultures, worlds into another language. Among them are writers in Italian who are African or Afro-descendant, whose works are examples of translation or self-translation, often an invisible, immaterial translation; not only of language, but also of geography, history, culture.16 The oscillation of identities is the basis of these translational processes inducing similar ones in the reader.
34 In the twilight area between sanity and dementia, the same and the other, Tsiolkas’ works offer a rethinking of diversity within the framework of multicultural Australia, a mix of multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious people of hybrid origins who find themselves alongside the few surviving Aboriginals and the many Anglo-Australians. He speaks of xenitia, an ambiguous concept that captures the feeling of exile and isolation as the inherited burden of second generation migrants; living as a stranger in a foreign land is specifically weighed in his case by mental and sexual diversity.
35 In one of his novels the ‘in-between-ness ‘of the vampire returns as a symbol of a being who is neither here nor there, describing, against the blanket category of migrant literature, “a queer kind of belonging”: “Homosexuality is a sickness. So, probably, being hetero. Being black is a sickness, so too is being white”. His characters, mostly gay men, have internalized ‘the sense of inferiority’, of which Frantz Fanon speaks, and introjected the racism and the hate of which they have been the object. Fanon gave an important contribution to the psychopathology of colonialism, following his experience as a doctor and a psychiatrist both in France and Algeria. In Peau noire masques blancs (1952), he writes of the interstitial space between the colonizer and the colonized, the psychic uncertain area between race and sexuality, black and white.
36 In Tsiolkas’ case, hate and self-hate pervade everything to the point of xenophobic insults; his self-representation leads to the assumption of the stereotype of hypersexual Mediterranean men. Here it is briefly fitting to refer to the role of medicine in the definition of lesbian, homosexuals and, above all, trans as wrong bodies. The contagious view of sexual difference has found a medical and symbolic expression in the stigma of Aids, seen as both a social and moral transgression.17
37 In conclusion, I would like to recall Lynn Margulis’ concept of ‘the intimacy of strangers’ as the most fundamental practice of becoming-with each other in earth’s history. Her ‘holobionts’ are the encounter and the result of host and hosted micro- organisms, including viruses, all becoming one and symbionts to one another.18 We should look at migrancy as a sympoietic condition connecting the present of the
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passage to the past of origins, and to the aspiration of the future, making subjectivity a complex contested process that involves the social and the psychic, the conscious and the unconscious. The already existing confrontation with alterity is more urgent today. Migration is not a new phenomenon in human history but today it gives rise to a new order of instability in the production of deterritorialized subjectivities. It cannot be read in a univocal manner. Hospitality if unconditioned may create a new vital assemblage in which them and us are simultaneously diverse and the same.
38 Jacques Derrida observed that in some languages, such as Italian and French, the word for host and guest, is the same, and that, even when there are two as in English, they are reversible, as in Freud’s heimlich and unheimlich. The inversion of the two makes each hostage of the other; such is the law of hospitality. The expression ‘la question de l’étranger’ must be read above all as a question/request coming from the stranger “… the one who, putting the first question, puts me in question.”19 In Étrangers à nous- mêmes (1988), Kristeva writes that the stranger as the hidden face of our identity commences with the conscience of our difference and concludes once we acknowledge ourselves as strangers and rebels.
NOTES
1. ‘Filthiness itself is hardly a representation which itself is drowned in a specific fear occluding reflection ; with filthiness we enter into the reign of terror.’ Editor’s translation. 2. Important re-readings of evolutionism have recently come from feminist philosophy. See Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2004. New work in the field of biology, ecology, and anthropology has likewise put into question past certainties, from Lynn Margulis and Donna Haraway to Anna Tsing and James Clifford. 3. See Lynn Margulis, Symbolic Planet. A New Look at Evolution, New York, NY, Basic Books, 1998. 4. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollusion and Taboo, London, Pelican Books, 1970 [1966], p. 13. Quotation in epigraph on p. 16. 5. Pouvoir de l’horreur, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1980, p. 9 and p. 17. Within an overall appreciation of Douglas’s work, she regrets her lack of reference to the subjective dimension in the symbolic systems, that seems to her a deep and originary causal element (see p. 81). Editor’s translation. 6. Kristeva, p. 25. Such is the foundation of most modern literature, from Dostoyevsky to Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Céline…. Editor’s translation. 7. In “The Gaia Hypothesis” (1974), Lovelock and Margulis proposed a view of the planet as a super-organism based on biodiversity and evolving on a system of feedback, a systemic force that Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, in Les faiseuses d’histoires. Que font les femmes à la pensée? (2011), interestingly see as a ‘mystery’ exceeding human reason and scientific thought. 8. There are numerous famous films and TV series on this argument. A recent example is that of Orange is the New Black. Commencing from its title, blackness is associated with the real colour of American jails. In the series, secluded diversity is interestingly represented both in ethnic and sexual terms. 9. The deep ambiguity of the colonizer for the colonized country has been underlined by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993, p. 162), where he refers to Kipling and his romanticized
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vision of India. In his opinion this is an extreme example of orientalism, “a cinematic version of the Indian sublime”. In White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith observes: “… the English loved India, and Africa and Ireland, and love was the problem” (p. 361). In a different way, Mann’s protagonist is torn by this ambiguous love and dies of it. 10. In this film, the menace takes the shape of a ferocious killing animal or of a beautiful flowering bush, at one time external entities and metamorphosed shapes for the self, until the final one where the apparently untouched self of the two survivors is totally occupied by another, reminding us of the emotionless duplicates first seen in Siegel’s film. Different interpretation can be given of who this other may be, perhaps the ‘disease of our times’, cancer, or the ethnic other or most probably the many components of new technologies – certainly it is invasive and aggressive and, as of usual, comes from elsewhere. 11. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948-1976), Hannah Arendt saw the dangers involved in the formation of nation-states: “sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of emigration, naturalization, nationality and expulsion” (New York, Schocken Books, 2004, p. 354). Being founded on a notion of purity and wholeness, every national formation leads to exclusion and statelessness in order to legitimize itself. It creates a series of stateless subjects, as Judith Butler says: “…those who are incarcerated, enslaved, or residing and labouring illegally… contained within the polis as its interiorized outside” (Who sings the nation-state?, London, Seagull Books, 2007, p. 16). Migrants do not find a space, whether material or mental, in the processes of national formations. 12. Not by chance are horror films of the 1950s and 1960s are centered on monstrous women, such as Wasp-Women, Cat-Women, or The Woman who is Fifty Yards Tall. 13. It reappears in the remakes, Roger Vadims’s Et mourir de plaisir (1961) and Roy Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970). 14. Kristeva, p. 86. 15. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities”, Anglistica, Vol. 1, 1, 1992, p. 22. He defines the diasporic space as a “syncretic dynamic” set in motion by de-colonization and global migration, adding that the ‘post’ in postcolonial is not so much what comes ‘after’ as the aftermath of colonization/ decolonization pushing people into exile due to poverty and hunger, civil war, illness, ecological disaster or political persecution. In her ‘cartographies of intersectionality’, Avtar Brah extends the issue of diaspora specifically to transnational feminism and the necessary intersection of gender, race, class and generation. See Cartographies of Diaspora. Contested Identities, Routledge, London, 1996. 16. They are mostly coming from the ex-Italian colonies in North and East Africa. Among them, Ubax Cristina Ali Farah, Gabriella Ghermandi, Igiaba Scego. Their language is always traversed by the presence of indigenous African words (mostly referring to material objects, food, smells, customs, tastes) as well as by the echoes of syntax, images, sounds from ancestral poems. The co- presence of two or more languages, of two or more mothers, is a constant stylistic character. 17. In Antigone’s Claim (2000), Judith Butler has written of the impossibility of mourning for those killed by Aids, and in Precarious Lives (2004), of the divide between the lives worth saving and those who are not, recalling Emmanuel Lévinas’ notion of ethics as founded on the ‘precarity of life commencing with the Other’s precarious life’. 18. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway recalls that “the core of Margulis’s view of life was that new kinds of cells, tissues, organs and species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers” (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 60). Haraway’s book is a sustained comment on how such vital symbiogenetic assemblages are extended to the lively arts, in particular to women’s sci-fi speculative literature. 19. J. Derrida, Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantlle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, Stanford, CA, Stanford Univeristy Press, 2000, p. 3. The question of the stranger is intolerable as s/he is a
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stranger to language, law, ethics. Further ambiguity comes from the Latin ‘hostis’, which is also the root of ‘hostility’.
AUTHOR
LIDIA CURTI Lidia Curti, Honorary Professor of English at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, is a cultural critic and a feminist. Among her books: Female stories, female bodies (Macmillan 1998), La voce dell’altra (Meltemi 2006, republished 2018), The postcolonial question (with I. Chambers, Routledge 1996), La nuova Shahrazad (2004), Shakespeare in India (2010). Her present interests are Italian diasporic literature, migration in artistic practices and counter-genealogies in feminist contemporary theory. Among her recent publications: “Transcultural itineraries” (Feminist Review 2011); “Voices of a Minor Empire,” in The Cultures of Italian Migration (Farleigh Dickinson 2011); “Dreaming in afro: Stuart Hall on black art” (Estetica 2015); “The House of Difference: Bodies, Genres, Genders” (de genere 2015); “Literary Citizenship and Migrating Belongings” in Postcolonial Matters (Unipress 2015); “Il soggetto imprevisto. Simone de Beauvoir tra femminismo e postcoloniale” in Genealogie della modernità (Mimesis, 2017).
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The Other’s Imagined Diseases. Transcultural Representations of Health
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Matter Out of Place: Migrating Modernity and Unauthorised Archives
Iain Chambers
1 Matter out of place is what historians would call an anachronism, and anthropologists a taboo. In a more prosaic language it is what everyday racial thinking and practices identify as the disturbance of a supposedly preordained social and cultural order. In the following pages I wish to explore how these apparently separate realms are actually stitched into a shared political and cultural register. This leads us to understand how specialised abstract languages and institutional knowledge contribute, notwithstanding their ‘distance’ and scientific status, to the configurative flows of daily definitions and sense. I wish to suggest that the analytical languages we deploy and the paradigms that anchor their valency may also be part of the problem, blocking a richer and more complicated series of understandings. The refusal to dig deeper into the Occidental archive, dirtying its premises and crossing its particular temporality with contemporary concerns – anachronisms – in the end becomes the refusal to take critical responsibility for the present.
2 Let us start simply from the question of considering theory and critical thinking as a device of power. For we are dealing with an assemblage of knowledge and practices that historically participated directly and indirectly in the hierarchisation and consequent racialisation of the planet, via the violent imposition of Western capital in its management of planetary resources. Thinking about the current historical moment and the explicit return of a white supremacist ideology, from the framing of the modern immigrant as illegal to Brexit and the politics of Donald Trump, it becomes more and more urgent to adopt a critical approach capable of radically re-evaluating not only one's own culture, but also the critical tools – even in their most radical variations – that have supported the assumptions and languages of racial power.
3 Further, in the increasing return to racial distinctions and cultural defence by the organs of government and their press, we today find ourselves propelled into the abyss of the colonial archive. We are increasingly confronted not simply with a history that
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refuses to pass (racism and the subjugation of the rest of the world to our needs), but also with the explicit colonial constitution of the present in which capitalism, colonialism and modernity become one. Where an earlier liberal order could pretend to insist on the distinctions and point to a progress that would eventually slough off the terrible accretions of an earlier stage in the Occidental framing of the world, today we are forced to acknowledged the bottom line of a ‘global colonial archive’ that continues to promote the syntax of the present.1 We have not, and cannot, reason our way out of the formula that reveals capitalist modernity as colonialism without adopting a more radical cut and critique. The continuous necessity of capital to expand its circuits of production, reproduction, consumption and extraction through reducing all of nature and technology to its standing reserve, accepts no limits. The breakdown of a planetary order is inevitable as it fractures into increasingly limited access to resources and riches. Of course, if we are unwilling to seek salvation in a deity, we can drily conclude that the story of humanity is simply a blink in the time scale of the universe. But to live this situation as a challenge, rather than a destiny, what is the solution? Perhaps there is none precisely to degree that we continue to think and practice our activities in a manner of thinking that remains subservient to a teleology of time. After all, today considering our planetary framing was the earlier moment of Occidental liberalism, despite an explicit appeal to humanism and Christian morality, any less vicious, brutal and cruel?
4 This implies adopting a very different understanding of time – both as memory and history. It is means to insist, against the prevailing premises of historiography, that it is precisely the anachronistic, matter out of place disturbing its designated location in a linear and progressive temporality, that inaugurates a necessary analytical cut and the inauguration of a diverse critical configuration.
5 If we were to take seriously, for example, the critical voices that come from the margins of yesterday’s colonial world, from the Caribbean of Aimé Césaire, CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Derek Walcott and Stuart Hall (black Jacobins whose masculinity also lead to further discussion), and insert them into the canon of Western philosophy, their very presence, once acknowledged, undermines the premises and protocols of philosophy itself. The parable that begins on the Mediterranean shore (although we know that the Western logos commenced in the Greek colonies in Asia, with a major debt to the Persian and Egyptian world), and arrives in today's university departments would have to be interrupted and rethought in altogether more worldly terms, and not exclusively European. Here we need only recall the famous verdict of Frantz Fanon in The Damned of the Earth, where a European humanism continually massacres human beings in every corner of the globe in order to affirm itself as a universal measure.
6 It would also be significant to trace a distinction between the disciplined concept of history, as an institutional practice of narrating and explaining the past, and the more unruly evidence that arrives from archives read against the grain, held up to the light to expose their colonial formation, and registered as practices that both display and discriminate, collect and censure. While history apparently takes care of the past, registering and affirming its truth, the turbulent archive, posing questions of ownership and authority, promotes a more extensive critical space composed in practices and powers that are always contested and under construction. Here the past, not yet fully defined, recognised nor interpreted, must still arrive from the future. This
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distinction frees the archive from the disciplined domain of the historiographical apparatus. The materials and the lives that constitute an archive exceed any chronological narrative pushing towards the coherence that a stabilised history seeks to impose. The discrete, the singular and the exception, in combination and in discontinuity, sting and punctuate the linear assumptions of time, through deepening, multiplying and dispersing it. Moreover, the tools of the story – its languages and its prose (and therefore its poetics, both ugly and beautiful) – are themselves also governed by the boundaries of the spatial temporality in which they are elaborated. It is still a limited, confined, historical act.
7 Insisting on the idea of culture as a mobile configuration of social practices, irreducible to the stability of an object or an isolated text, means grasping the historical complexity of its formation precisely through insisting that its premises are also historical. This, too, turns out to be a historical challenge: rendering cultural definitions and verdicts currently in vogue foreign to themselves; in other words, exposing them to questions they have not authorised. If this is a methodology – but of course this term, like that of historical ‘facts’ and the social ‘sciences’ is, in turn, still to be elaborated and defined – it's premises lie in unstable and fluctuating procedures, which, being historically situated, cannot be established once and for all.
8 At this point, through transforming what has been inherited and understood as normative, both in everyday life and in specialised knowledge practices, we find ourselves close to the cut proposed by Michel Foucault. In Foucault definition, ‘science’ is not in compliance with the rules of disciplinary protocols, as these tend merely to reconfirm the starting point of the research. On the contrary, science lies in the cut that establishes a discontinuity capable of dismantling and reassembling the rules of a previous disciplinary discourse.2 Once shattered, and therefore made vulnerable to other horizons and other questions, it is possible to promote traversal paths across the existing settlement of the social sciences and their domestication of the world.
9 The price of the critical refusal to face such questions is central to the failure of historiography that leads to the victory of historicism. Here is the difference, for example, between ‘gender history’, practiced almost always and exclusively as an extension of the historiographical apparatus, thereby adding a further element to the inherited picture (as happened when feminist critique was translated into ‘women's history’), and the requirement ‘to queer’ that history, cross the confine and confute the power of that knowledge apparatus.
10 At this point two intertwined trajectories emerge. One is related to a positioning in the existing fields of knowledge and their disciplinary protocols. Foucault famously explored the historical and epistemological elaboration of these fields and their modern transformation into autonomous disciplines. The other dimension, which in my opinion was less explored by Foucault, is that of the prospect of trans-disciplinary studies that propel us to evaluate not only the limits of modern knowledge revealed in European and Occidental practices, but also to register the structural removal of the rest of the planet from the equation, basically reduced to an inert object that reconfirms the centrality of our subjectivity. Here the other becomes part of history, of the social sciences, of the juridical system and of philosophy, only after being recognised and registered, after struggling through the brutal passage from the state of an anthropological object to becoming a historical subject. This passage – accentuated and accelerated in the present historical moment – puts in serious difficulty the
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disciplinary parameters (anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical, juridical) that until now have made the world exclusively the object of our knowledge.
11 All of this suggests that the violence of historical linearity needs to be diverted, subverted, torn apart. The anachronistic, that is historiography as a contemporary practice and configuration, must be acknowledged as a critical device. Discontinuity is practiced to interrupt the history that subjects us. In the bending of space-time, objects, stories and lives, once physically and temporally detached, are rendered proximate. Such folds in time record the depths of the stratified and complicated present, and its debt to a blocked and unacknowledged past. The refusal to elaborate this unruly past and recognise its place in the meaning and making of the present can only nourish a melancholic stasis, as Paul Gilroy so well explains in After Empire.3 The past continues to question us, interrogating our denial, rendering our knowledge and lives vulnerable to those unsuspected questions not authorised by the current languages and logics of the disciplines. Or, to use the words of the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, “I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me.”4
12 Such a friction between recognition and removal disseminates a doubling of the historical archive, exposing its duplicity with an existing order. Against the unilateral setting of the history of Europe and its particular worlding of the world, other histories suspended in water, in the islands and in the planetary processes supported by the maritime traffic of bodies and ideas, continue to erode the claims of the West as the sole guarantor of the globe. It is not necessary to travel far to touch the vitality and violence of the question. Remaining within the national borders of a European country we can find ourselves 200 kilometres south of the cities of Tunis and Algeria on the island of Lampedusa. Here in southern Italy, in Europe, in the so-called First World, geographical distance is cancelled by a dramatic political and cultural immediacy. Following the suggestion of the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari we can consider this particular landscape an archive. Among shipwrecked and illegal migrants, fishermen and government officials, tourists and owners of shops and restaurants, this is an area of volatile contact, in which the south of the planet impacts, often fatally, against the (over) developed world.
13 At this point, we can insist on the accumulated memories of migration that make up the Mediterranean. Yesterday, there were not only the poor of the peripheries of rural Europe who departed for the Americas, but also those who travelled to other colonial spaces in North Africa. At the beginning of the Twentieth century more than one million Europeans - largely French, but also with sizeable Spanish and Italian communities – lived in Algeria, while in Tunisia there were at least 100,000 Italians. In Libya in the 1930s some 13% of the population was made up of Italians. Today, the Mediterranean is traversed in the opposite direction by those coming from Africa and Asia looking for a better life. Today, the multiple south of the planet infiltrate the modernity that seeks to consign their histories to silence, transforming certain human beings into ‘illegal’ objects of our jurisdiction. If the current Mediterranean cemetery is witness to the necropolitics (Achille Mbembe) of global capital and its management of migrant flows, it is also the place where the limits of a European humanism and its historical order are registered.5 Although an illusory universal value it continues to subordinate the needs of the rest of the planet to its political and cultural will, allowing to sink beneath the waves, delivered to the abyss between the law and justice.
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14 In the montage of intersecting temporalities and territories that come together in considering migration, modernity and the Mediterranean we need to remember that contemporary Mediterranean crossings constitute only a moderate percentage of the so-called illegal immigration into present-day Italy. Increasingly it is composed of refugees fleeing the killing fields of Syria, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa (particularly Eritrea and Somalia). Most of the migrants, particularly those fleeing war zones, do not arrive in Europe at all. The biggest concentration of such displaced persons are to be found in Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Kenya and Turkey.6 European media and political attention is of course fuelled by the drama of the escalating figures of drownings and death at sea. Behind these representations there exists another narrative that is rather less about the contemporary and planetary significance of modern migration, and altogether more to do with the construction and defence of local, national, European and Occidental framings of the world. So, what does present-day migration say about our understanding of modernity and ourselves? To answer this suggests that we think not so much of migration as with migration, as the latter becomes a critical instrument and interrogation. This leads into a deeper and altogether more extensive history of our time.
15 The contemporary figure of the migrant and refugee does not simply represent a juridical and socio-economical figure, often destitute and temporarily stateless. She carries within herself a series of historical and cultural interrogations that invest modern forms of belonging: from the nation state and citizenship to what we understand when we speak of democracy and rights. These are questions sustained within a modernity that seemingly awards the mobility of capital, labour and production, and therefore inevitably, even if it is ideologically reluctant to do so, the migration of bodies, histories and cultures…
16 Inscribed on the body of the modern migrant is not simply the power of European law regulating her situation, and frequently transforming her subjectivity into an ‘illegal’ objectivity, but also the indelible watermark of a colonial past. Here the altogether more preponderant, systematic and violent migration of Europeans towards the rest of the planet in the course of several centuries, invariably forgotten and repressed, is re- ignited in the clandestine histories of today’s migrants who return to shadow the complex coordinates of the modern world. Here we confront the intricate making of a constellation called modernity in which the past does not simply pass. Here, migration as a central element in the making of the West renders unstable, even unsustainable, the linear explanation that would consign the colonial migrations of Europe – realised through the racial and racist subordination of the rest of the world to its economical, political, religious and cultural will – to a closed and obsolete chapter in the narrative of its ‘progress’. To re-open these histories, allowing them to spill into the present, means to propose profound interrogations of the historical and political nature of the modern nation state, its modalities of democracy and government, and the pretensions of its juridical premises and practices. For migrant bodies, invariably considered ‘out of place’, put in question the very sense of location and belonging upon which these definitions depend: in the ongoing processes of globalisation who has the right to define and direct this ‘place’?
17 To consider contemporary migration, and the racism that invariably accompanies it, as being woven into the web of Western democracy, is to consider far more than a set of emergencies. With death spilling out of the headlines – from drownings in the
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Mediterranean to shootings in America’s inner cities and the violent surveillance of territories and lives in Palestine – the limits and hypocrisies of the moral economy of the Occident are continually exposed. These are the limits of a precise history and its structures of power. They speak of the critical and political responsibilities for those processes that have brought us to where we are today. This means to understand the present movement of migration from the multiple souths of the planet, or the consistency of racism, as a historical condition, not simply as an ‘emergency’ that require exceptional measures.
18 For these are not temporary phenomena or accidental pathologies; they are structured, historical processes. If such processes are hidden behind the fetish of global commodification they nevertheless consistently ghost the making of the modern world. The spectral presence of invisible lives and anonymous labour in the global logistics of capital is both there in yesterday’s slave ships plying the Atlantic and in today’s overcrowded boats crossing the Mediterranean. Insisting that such questions are central, and not peripheral, brings us to confront the very mechanisms of knowledge and power that legitimate the present state of affairs. The presumptions that surround and sustain such concepts as the ‘individual’, ‘citizenship’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are themselves the products of such mechanisms. While they continue to be presented as neutral ideals and universal values, their practices tell us a very different story. Precisely here, the figure of the migrant exposes the present to unauthorised questions and opens up another archive. This produces a radically diverse critical horizon.
19 What is repressed in the representation points us to other maps and temporalities in a planetary modernity that is never merely ‘ours’ to define. If the politics of explaining and managing the modern world can only be sustained though maintaining unequal relations of power and the negation of other voices and histories, then we should ask ourselves in what precisely does this universality and its modernity consist of? All of this implies extracting the discussion and understanding of contemporary migrations from its more predictable coordinates. This means to insist, against prevailing representations, that migration is neither merely a marginal socio-economical phenomenon nor a social ‘problem’ or political ‘emergency’. On the contrary, migration is one of the constitutive processes in the making of modernity, both in its Occidental inception and its subsequent planetary realisation. The centrality, and not marginalisation, of migration to the making of the modern world was already passionately argued for more than 40 years ago by John Berger in A Seventh Man.7
20 As a structural and historical condition, intrinsic to the political economy and violent cartographies of the modern world, migration is a cultural, historical and epistemological challenge. The modern migrant with her history, culture and life actively questions the citizenship, national belonging and understandings of the European polity precisely to the degree that she invites us to consider their colonial fashioning and postcolonial configurations. Such considerations open up deeper historical temporalities and altogether more extensive and unstable archives than those associated with the homogenous time of national belonging. Clearly all of this cuts into and interrogates our very understanding of the present, forcing us to register the limits of a certain European and Occidental exercise of modernity.
21 At this point, and thinking with migration, we can begin to elaborate a different critical key with which to open and interpret the archives of modernity. This is an invitation to consider the rhythms and configurations that resist and persist in the folds of a deeper
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historical time. Here migration turns out to be the very motor of modernity itself. Given that the West insists on globalisation and its necessary worlding of the world then points of origin and ownership begin to evaporate. Or, rather, there opens up an epoch characterised by the explicit struggle for its definition and management. All of this suggests the necessity of adopting a diverse critical compass with which to navigate these emerging questions. Giving attention to subordinated, subaltern and subjugated memories we confront a politics and poetics that exceeds our reasoning and the presumption that we are always able to render the world transparent to our premises, needs, knowledge and power.
22 In this context it becomes pertinent to propose certain contemporary art practices in terms of a critical activity. Involving historical and cultural research, secured in an incisive postcolonial re-narration of modernity, this art deliberately pursues a significant political mandate and proposes a postcolonial turn within contemporary art. Challenging the existing geography of powers it leads to the dissemination of a semantics, with its sentiments and affects, that escapes the mechanisms of institutional narration to propose other affective understandings, other maps of knowing, other ways of seeing. With this in mind it becomes possible to repeat the dominant narration of the nation and belonging to its polity in an altogether more critical key. The radical revaluation, sustained by migration, exposes the institutional tale to those histories and cultures that have been structurally excluded and negated, reduced exclusively to objects of our knowing gaze. The exhibition of our ‘progress’ and the power of our modernity to reduce the world to a series of objects that reconfirm the centrality of our subjectivity – continually on display in national museums and history text books – is now intercepted by a series of unauthorised questions that persist and resist. These critical prospects, precisely because they are still largely unregistered and unrecognised, constitute a postcolonial archives destined to arrive from the future.
23 Here in the intersection of broken territories and interrupted narratives, the Mediterranean itself proposes a seascape that is both a liquid archive and a laboratory of modernity. How do can we traverse this space and its associated temporalities? To cross and conceive them requires the dis-assembling of a belonging guaranteed in a fixed, stable and rooted identity. We are pushed into a journey in a mobile geography, composed of movement, slippages and interruptions: both space and time become discontinuous, cut up by the heterogeneity of conflicting forces and desires. Moving between the representations of such spaces and the repression that shadows the act of being represented we find in postcolonial art an unsuspected anthropology, history and sociology of the present. Clearly, such art does not provide us with a stable object to analyse and explain according to the abstract logic of artistic canons – the institution of aesthetics, the history of art – but rather proposes a critical means with which to live and interrogate the discursive order – aesthetics, art history – that simultaneously constructs and explains the art object.
24 In this situation the past, with its memories and archives, proposes a diverse archaeology and a different manner of comprehending its presence in the present. The isolated and authentic object no longer exists, nor does a definitive explanation of the past. In the counter-histories and counter-memories that inhabit the image we can now register that the image itself contains more time and horizons of meaning that any one of us can ever absorb or understand.8 Here we pass from a formal archaeology of objects to an ongoing genealogy composed in relations, ruptures and discontinuities,
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where the past works up new critical configurations of the present. For what counts is not so much an object discovered as the processes exposed in the excavation.
25 The frontiers, borders and confines registered in steel walls, barbed wire, documents and bureaucracy, produce a wound, a scar that will never heal and is destined to remain open as an interrogation. Here we also touch the epistemological limits of an idea of citizenship and belonging articulated exclusively in the terms of the nation state which, and not by chance, is also the privileged place holder of modern historiography. Postcolonial art – in its literatures, visual arts and poetics – narrates a very different critical landscape. The echoes and spectres sustained in these works cut up time and refuse the simple linearity of ‘progress’ and the unilateral beat of the Occident. Here we find ourselves insisting, in the wake of Walter Benjamin, that historical time does not pass but rather accumulates. The past insists in the present in the form of ruins. Our silence in their presence is a hole in time. Here there emerge other histories and other lives, the others. The dissolution of institutional time into multiple rhythms and accents sustains critical spaces that lie at our side: frequently unregistered and unrecognised. These are the heterotopias that a postcolonial art practices and promises.9 They propose a folding of time, its simultaneous deepening and extension to render proximate other places and bodies in a cartography that exceeds the more predictable maps of modernity. Here, in the interruption and discontinuity of a uniform temporality and space, the syntax of art announces a world yet to come.
NOTES
1. Carmine Conelli, ‘Challenging the Domestic Colonial Archive: Notes on the Racialization of the Italian Mezzogiorno’ in Lars Jensen, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Christian Groes, and Zoran Lee Pecic (eds.), Postcolonial Europe. Comparative Reflections after the Empires, London and New York, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017. 2. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977. 3. Paul Gilroy, After Empire. Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, London and New York, Routledge, 2004. 4. Derek Walcott, ‘The Schooner “Flight”’, in Collected Poems, London, Faber & Faber, 1992. 5. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001. 6. UNHCR figures for mid-2013, reported in The Guardian, 10 June 2014. If the figures are now clearly out of date the tendencies remain in place. 7. John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man London, Verso, 2010 [1975]. 8. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoires de l’art et anachronisme des images, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2000. 9. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics 16, n°1, 1986.
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ABSTRACTS
This article seeks to unwind a series of premises that corroborate the premises of social sciences, arguing that their implicit role in the formation of modernity structurally renders their claims of neutrality and scientific questionable. Through considerations of contemporary migration and postcolonial art, the essay seeks to demonstrate the need for more flexible and provisional critical languages that, aware of their own historicity, are able to challenge the unilateralism of Occidental historicism.
AUTHOR
IAIN CHAMBERS Iain Chambers teaches Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Mediterranean at the University of Naples, ‘Orientale’. He is author of Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008), and Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017).
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Dirty, Diseased and Demented: The Irish, the Chinese, and Racist Representation
Gregory B. Lee
Chinese Japanese Dirty knees Look at these Popular American ditty1
1 That the poor, the marginalized, and the foreign are dirty, contagious, and mentally inferior is a longstanding commonplace. The nineteenth-century rise of science saw the invention of scientific hygiene and the modern preoccupation with cleanliness. It became obsessional with the twentieth-century transformation of science into technology and the emergence of the mass consumer society, with dirt becoming "matter out of place", dirt being "the label we attach to what we perceive as disorder".2 Indeed, Baudrillard spoke of “functional” cleanliness.3 What was new was necessarily clean, and the old ‘naturally’ associated with decay. The privatization of daily life that technological consumerism ushered in, the individualization of consumption of all types, could only aggravate clean individuals’ fear of the "dirt of the mass," and their loathing for "anything that throngs or sprawls, any mass in which they might become caught up and irretrievably lost."4 Dirt, then, would become "anything that impinges...on the person's anxiously guarded autonomy."5
The Irish
2 In the bourgeois dominant imaginary of the nineteenth century the poor, the working class, the common people were depicted as sickly and dirty with an array of metaphors and commonplaces which were easily transferable to immigrant ethnic groups, first among whom were the Irish poor who found themselves starved into taking refuge in Britain in horrendous insanitary conditions as bad as or worse than that of the
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northern English workers we may read of in such novels as Gaitskell's Mary Barton (1848). Ill-health and a lack of hygiene were no inherent trait of the Irish working class, but simply a corollary of a social condition to which they had been condemned.
3 At the end of the eighteenth century the size of Ireland's population, four million, was more than half of England's seven million. This was in large part due to the cultivation of the potato from the 1720s onwards; the potato increased the nutritive capacity of a patch of land by a factor of three. The population thus doubled between 1780 and 1831 when it stood at almost 8m. But Ireland's population soon went into steep decline and twenty years later had fallen to 6.5m. The potato blight of 1845, 1846 and 1848 attacked the foundation of Ireland's population growth. Famine, which the British authorities did little to attenuate, saw almost a million people starve to death between 1845 and 1855, and accounted for the emigration of two million people.6
4 As a consequence, no middle to large size English town was without an Irish community and the impoverished Irish labourer was absorbed into England's industrial development and the military expansion of its Empire. Whilst the British Army was already heavily dependent on Irish recruits, by 1830 Irishmen constituted 42 per cent of Britain's long-service army. They were employed not only in maintaining order in Ireland, but also in advancing Britain's interests in the colonies, especially in India, and in Britain's Opium War of 1839-42 against the Manchu dynasty.7
5 Irish immigrants were often the object of a racist discourse of denigration. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards the scientific evolutionary debate in Britain saw scientifically justified racists frequently comparing Irish people to monkeys. Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, famously wrote from Ireland in 1860: “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not see it so much, but their skins...are as white as ours.” In the dominant English imaginary, the Irish were indeed seen as black. John Beddoe, sometime President of the Anthropological Institute (1889-1891), wrote in his monumental an authoritative Races of Britain published in 1862, that all men of superior race were orthognathous -- had less prominent jaw bones--, while the Irish and the Welsh were prognathous. He also held that the Celt was closely related to Cromagnon man, who was, in turn, "Africanoid."8 Seventy years later, in 1934, G. R. Gair, of the Scottish Anthropological Society, could still claim that while most of the inhabitants of the British Isles belong to the "tall, stolid, phlegmatic northern race," the "Nordic race," in the "western part of the British Isles we have a branch of the Mediterranean race" and a consequently "marked distinction in mental outlook and culture." It was also held that the Irish possessed "a higher ratio of criminals", and that "possibly also to inherent racial reasons, it is also an ascertained fact that the Irish are more subject to certain diseases than the Nordics;" and "insanity, and other undesirable features, are greatest...in those classes in which the Irish form the greater section of the population."9 The Irish then were deemed mentally and physically sicker than other "races", in particular to what was called the "Nordic race-type". This is a recurrent representation of the migrant, the foreigner, the marginalized, the poor: "inferior elements (degenerate, mentally deficient: the biosocial 'waste')" threatening the cleanliness and well-being of the healthy national body.10 Contact with the alien body implied contamination and contagion. Feared most was the hybrid body, the biological product of "intermingling". Such hybridity presented a threat to the "purety of the race". In the UK, the restrictive
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immigration and segregation policies of the United States of America were seen as appropriate measures for dealing with unwelcome and unhealthy immigration: The United States, seeing her institutions likely to crumble before this menace, and with the glaring of the deleterious effects of "wops" "dagoes" and Irish, in her lower orders, has with admirable courage, closed the doors and adopted a policy which aims at the maintenance of the Nordic race-type.11
6 While economic arguments for exclusion were often deployed, the greatest concern was the threat of contamination, the fear of racial purity being diluted and resulting in "the propagation of a strongly tainted blood stream."12
7 Present-day racist and ideologues and xenophobes would recognize their own discursive flourishes in the language of 1930s Europe and America: It was a discourse in which segregation was offered as "the only solution." Were the Nordic British to have "the courage and the clear-sightedness of the Americans and introduce some race legislation," then "the heart of the one Empire", the British Empire, could be saved and thus be "of real world-service for humanity free from a cancerous decay." Once more the Other, here the Irish, is represented as an alien dangerous disease, a "cancerous decay", which impinges upon the integrity, cleanliness and virility of the national body. 13
The Chinese
8 Starting in the mid-nineteenth century and coinciding with the American post-civil war movement to exclude “Chinese” from United States territory and citizenship, we see a racist discourse, similar to that used against the Irish, being employed against those fleeing the poverty and starvation brought about by the Opium Wars. In fact, those denigrated were subjects of the Manchu dynasty. The country called China as such did not exist as a national polity as of yet, and even in the collective imaginary of the illiterate elite the idea of ‘China’, increasingly translated as Zhongguo 中國, was a recent one.14 But in the Western imaginary ‘China’ had existed since the sixteenth century, and while in earlier centuries there was a fanciful fascination with this distant Oriental country, in the era of capitalist modernity China and its people would be construed as unhealthy, and decadent.
9 There was one dominant source for late nineteenth century and early twentieth- century “ethnographic” knowledge about China and Chinese; both high-brow and popular writers on China relied on a set of stereotypes first popularized by an American missionary, Arthur Smith in his 1890 work Chinese Characteristics in which Smith is at pains to emphasize the ‘racial’ difference of the ‘Chinaman’. The depiction is largely negative. The mental capacities and mode of thought are commented on in particular by Smith. Here he describes the “deficiencies” of the Chinese mind: He does not understand, because he does not expect to understand, and it takes him an appreciable time to get such intellectual forces as he has, into a position to be used at all. His mind is like a rusty old smooth-bore cannon mounted on an old decrepit carriage… Another mark of intellectual torpor is the inability of an ordinary mind to entertain an idea, and then pass it on to another in its original shape.15
10 In true Orientalist fashion, anything positive about China was projected into its past, while its contemporary population were deemed decadent, decrepit and sickly, and unsuited to the challenges of modernity. The authentic China, which let us recall did
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not take form as a nation-state until the twentieth century, was thus constructed by dominant Western discourse as a thing of the past.16 Even, over four decades after the appearance of Smith’s book, a French China specialist who was already credited with numerous publications about China, Jean Rodes, could write: The power of control over the brain being less developed in the Chinese, he, under certain conditions of agitation, is overtaken by all sorts of subconscious and uncontrolled reflexes of dorsal column automatism … [in which can be seen] a cause of racial inferiority, which had so charmed Count Gobineau.17
11 The reference to Gobineau in a text written in the 1930s might seem from today’s perspective both ominous and perverse. When in 1932 Rodes employed those words, Hitler was rising to power, and in the following year would gain plenary powers, bolstered by the banalization of late nineteenth-century racist ideology. Arthur de Gobineau’s nineteenth-century theories of scientific racism, and his celebrated, later infamous, theories glorifying the Aryan master race, had already helped legitimize and justify nineteenth-century colonialist expansion in Africa and Asia. His writings influenced the anti-Semitic stance adopted by the composer Richard Wagner, and was later, in a redacted form, required reading for German Nazi party members and leadership. Gobineau was convinced, as was his acolyte Wagner, that China would invade Europe, and thus he was instrumental in spreading amongst the German aristocracy and beyond a fear of “the Chinese”; a fear that was constructed and reified as the ‘Yellow Peril’.
12 Western racist literary and journalistic representations thus straddled the end of the Qing and the early decades of the Republic of China. For the hawker of racist stereotypes, little if anything had changed; it was after all the West that had invented ‘China’, the ‘Chinese’ and, of course, ‘the Chinaman’. With the legitimation of racism as scientific, Europe—soon to be followed by Japan and the United States—had entered a new phase of colonialism marked by imperialist territorial and economic expansion, driven by an industrial capitalist modernity that required resources and markets, but which also needed to bolster xenophobic nationalist ideology. The nineteenth century, then, saw confrontation between imperialist powers, particularly Britain, on the one hand and the Qing dynasty on the other.
13 In the second half of the nineteenth century, a period coinciding with the Opium Wars and their aftermath, the campaign against the presence of Chinese in the USA gained momentum and would lead to the passing of the 1870 Naturalization Act and the Exclusion Act of 1882. Media representation of “the Chinese” was particularly virulent: They [the Chinese] are uncivilized, unclean, filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every [italicized in original] female is a prostitute, and of the basest order; the first words of English they learn are terms of obscenity or profanity, and beyond this they care to learn no more. […T]he Chinese quarter of the city [San Francisco] is a by-word for filth and sin.18
14 The touchstone words for establishing or reaffirming in the mind of the reader the state of abject uncleanliness that is the leitmotif of the racist stereotype, are all present in this paragraph: “unclean”, “filthy beyond all conception”, “filth and sin”; “sin” because as common ideology has it “cleanliness is next to godliness”. But the Chinese are “pagan in religion” and “know not the virtues of honesty, integrity or good faith”.19 The significance of this religious difference is made explicit in elsewhere in the same editorial: “Any of the Christian races are welcome… or any of the white races. They all
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assimilate with Americans...and are gradually all fused together in one homogenous mass.”20 The heathenism of “the Chinese” contributes to their heterogeneity and renders them incapable of fusing into the “homogenous mass”. The argument advanced in mid-nineteenth-century America was that the Chinese were too different and too numerous to be assimilated. In other words to prevent the Chinese becoming, like the "Negro" and the "Indian," an internal Other, deportation and exclusion were the only remedies.
15 In the Tribune editorial cited above, the phobia of death by drowning in an alien and unclean fluid is brought into play. The fear of fluids is imbricated with, and predicated upon, the fear of contamination, the terror of being made unclean by the filthy and sick. Foregrounding fears of dirt and contamination, the New York Daily Tribune, depicts a youthful, promising California facing the yellow contagion of "Asiatic hordes" of a politically decadent, physically decaying, and morally degenerate Celestial Empire just across the sea.
16 What is manifested here is a racism based not only on negative characteristics, but on the "absolute negation of difference." 21 What Albert Memmi describes as a biological ideology of "heterophobia".22 Heterophobia "presupposes a negative evaluation of all difference" and implies an ideal, explicit or not, of "homogeneity."23 In the text cited, "any of the white races," were preferable to the Chinese immigrant, since they "all assimilate...and are gradually all fused together in one homogenous mass".24 Heterophobia embraces a desire to "abolish the difference between Us and Them" by either assimilation, or extermination, or to erase difference by eugenic or educational means, to "efface the existence of the Other, (render the Other invisible or blind oneself to his existence) by rigorous separation of an apartheid type".25
17 Privileging the ideological over the economic, despite the need for reconstruction after the all too recent American Civil War, the New York Times of Sunday, 3 September, 1865, opined that while the "tide of Chinese emigration to America," might be "profitable to the dominant race": “[Nevertheless] we are utterly opposed to...any extensive emigration of Chinamen or other Asiatics to any part of the United States.” 26 There are "other points of national well-being to be considered beside the sudden development of material wealth," in particular, "the moral welfare of the country." The editorial continues: The security of free institutions is more important than the enlargement of its population. The maintenance of an elevated national character is of higher value than mere growth in physical power....with Oriental thoughts will necessarily come Oriental social habits.... We have four millions of degraded negroes in the South...and if, in addition...there were to be a flood-tide of Chinese population--a population befouled with all the social vices...with heathenish souls and heathenish propensities, whose character, and habits, and modes of thought are firmly fixed by the consolidating influence of ages upon ages -- we should be prepared to bid farewell to republicanism and democracy.27
Irish versus Chinese
18 Since both Irish and Chinese suffered the consequences of very similar British and American racist discourses, a show of solidarity between the two might have been expected. However, in a USA swept up in its anti-Chinese immigration campaign, the leaders of the Irish community took advantage of the situation in order to gain greater
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acceptance for themselves. A publication devoted to the Irish community, The Irish Citizen, a journal that promoted Irish immigration to the USA and the protection of Irish immigrant labour, on 9 July 1870, demanded that a policy of racial rather than ethnic discrimination be implemented as the foundation of United States immigration policy: “We want white people to enrich the country, not Mongolians to degrade and disgrace it.”28
19 The term "Mongolians" was frequently used well into the twentieth century, as a synonym for what was understood as “the Chinese”, and encompassed on occasion other East Asians and South-East Asians. The Irish Citizen's recommendation with regard to "Mongolians," would be legitimated five days later, when on Independence Day 1870, the Naturalization Act was passed. It excluded “Chinese”from naturalization as US citizens. In the same act, another clause finally allowed Americans of African descent the legal right to citizenship. The degradation suffered by African Americans was thus re-inscribed onto the body of the "Celestial" Other. This act of substitution, this institutionalizing of racist ideology, re-empowered the exclusion movement. The movement was supported by liberal and conservative, capital and labour, Anglo and non-Anglo-American, alike.
20 The supposedly liberal Irish American historian, James Gilmary Shea, writing, three years before the Exclusion Act was passed, in the American Catholic Quarterly Review of 1879, urged that alongside paupers, lechers, Mormons, and utopian socialists, the Chinese should be excluded from the United States. Shea conceded that although crime and vice could be found amongst the Irish community, such behaviour was due entirely to poverty, since by nature the Irishman was "pure, virtuous, healthy in body and mind".29 But as for “Chinese labour”, were it “a pure element, healthy in body and in morals, it would be bad enough, but it is essentially demoralizing… [and] the fact remains that the Chinese element introduces new forms of vice”.30
Mental Instability and the Hybrid “Eurasian”
21 The white man is necessarily decent, for he is white. The ‘half-caste’ is indecent because existing in an in-between state. Our Scottish anthropologist again: It is a notorious fact that really hybrid peoples are incapable of stability.... Remember that this, after all, is a biological question, and one only capable of solution in accordance with the known laws of science...mix two races and there is bound to be a falling apart, a crumbling of the national edifice, and just because the iron and clay will not amalgamate. The Eurasian, in his physical aspect alone, provides (even when social disabilities are discounted) an example of the evils arising from racial promiscuity. It is therefore clear that relative purity is something to be desired...31
22 Here, the ‘physical aspect’, the all too visible in-betweenness of the "Eurasian," is understood as reinforcing the unwelcome nature of hybridity, and its "evils arising from racial promiscuity”, sexual intercourse between different “races”.
23 In Liverpool a local parish priest, the Reverend Bates, vicar of St. Michael’s church located in the midst of Chinatown, wrote that “the question of mixed marriages, and illicit unions is very much to the fore in a quarter like this."32 Reverend Bates is particularly concerned by the specificity the cognitive capacities and hidden thoughts of “half-caste” children:
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The children… speak English, but their mode of thought is Eastern. Their real ego is wrapped in an impenetrable silence, and whilst lips speak, the face is a mask, so different from the spontaneous frankness so delightful in English children.33
24 But for the vicar of Chinatown, the problems of being of ‘mixed race’ become even more pronounced “at the marriage age”: “‘If only God had made me white' is the bitter cry of the half-caste girl in love with a decent white man.”34
25 Many of the women that Chinese men married were often poor, and many, indeed, were ethnically Irish. Often family reactions were hostile. In America, in 1922, Congress passed the Cable Act removing from a woman her nationality were she to marry an alien Chinese, Korean or Japanese. In Britain the immigration laws were just as severe. A woman forfeited her citizenship by marrying a foreigner and was required to register as an alien. This legislative, bureaucratic transformation of the white woman into an alien was a means of resolving the problem of hybridity by means of a legal sleight of hand. Women who married Chinese men simply found themselves excluded from the national body. Their deliberate act of joining themselves to an alien, this act of being “UnAmerican” or "unEnglish" was punished by excision from the white body, which was thus saved from contamination.
26 The British authorities, especially the Home Office, were always very imaginative in devising bureaucratic instruments to exclude and excise. After the Second World War, when the shipping companies and the UK government had no further need of Chinese seamen, the Home Office devised a plan to deport them that depended on their legal status, or terms of landing, being varied.35 In other words retrospectively they were to be declared to no longer have residence rights and therefore to be illegal overstayers if they failed to leave voluntarily. The recalcitrant could thus be served with deportation orders. This ruse dealt with the technical aspect, but the discursive case for their removal still needed to be made, even in committees whose minutes would remain secret for sixty years. And so the denigratory representation that was deployed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was once again brought into play: The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the repatriating the Chinese seamen onshore at Liverpool. Mr. Holmes [Immigration Officer, Liverpool] said that there were altogether 2,000 Chinese seamen there….That they were an undesirable element in Liverpool was shown by the fact that in the last three years there had been 1,000 convictions for opium smoking and 350 convictions for gaming among the Chinese. Over half were suffering from V.D. [venereal disease] and half from T.B. [tuberculosis]. The Liverpool authorities were anxious to secure the use of the housing accommodation which the Chinese occupied.36
27 Gambling, drug addiction, licentiousness leading to sexually transmitted disease, and endemic sickness are all mentioned in this Home Office minute. It builds up, insidiously but seemingly irrefutably, a picture of a contagious, “undesireable element” that needed to be removed.
28 Opium-smoking is represented here, as it commonly was in the twentieth century, as a specifically Chinese "vice", but as I ever demonstrated elsewhere, until the mid- nineteenth century the consumption of opium had been overwhelmingly a British scourge, and only became a Chinese health issue once the British had dispatched gunboats to open up China to its importation from British India.37 Thus even the accusation of "opium addict" can only be arrived at by British voices suffering from amnesia or ignorance, or worse from hypocrisy and bad faith.38
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29 In the same Home Office Chinese Seamen’s repatriation minute, we discover that not only are the seamen considered to be an “undesirable element”, but their partners were too: “117 of the [Liverpool] Chinamen had British born wives. Many of the wives were of the prostitute class”.39
30 The mass deportation of seamen from China legally settled in the United Kingdom took place in 1945-47, right after the conclusion of the Second World War. It was a war, unlike World War One, in which the USA and the UK and their allies were supposedly fighting against fascism, against the racist ideology of Nazism, and for democracy and freedom. There was much to be done after the war in the UK and the rest of Europe by way of reconstruction, so why then consecrate so much reflection and so man ressources to the eviction of these men from the UK? For here we find, a Home Office, a police force, the Special Branch, and the entire UK shipping industry working concertedly to eliminate an ethnic group by deportation. But it would not be the last time that British authorities rewarded those who had served Britain’s interests would be hounded and deported, as the Windrush generation would come to know only too well.40 Like the Chinese, and the Irish before, having served their purpose, they were ‘out of place’, and deemed ‘undesirable aliens’.
31 While this article has focussed on historical events and ideology, the representation by the media, and in the dominant collective imaginary, of the immigrant, the foreigner, the stranger as unsuited, unclean, ‘out of place’, dirty is still common currency. For instance, in addition to the widely publicized anti-black and anti-Mexican racism that is still so rampant throughout the USA today, other smaller lower profile minorities more recently arrived are likewise victimized. People from the Pacific islands, collectively known as Macronesia, are berated and insulted; “xenophobia against Micronesian people […being] extremely common in Hawaii and increasingly in parts of the mainland US.”41 As one American of Micronesian descent has said “‘You look Micronesian’ is used as an insult by non-Micronesians, which means you’re dirty”.42
32 The recently arrived, the newest strangers, are regarded with most suspicion, as most different, as most unclean, as the dirtiest. They are also, as are the refugees and asylum seekers in present-day Europe and the United States, the most vulnerable.
NOTES
1. Hundreds of contemporary renditions are to be found on Youtube. 2. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750, London & New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986, 1992, p. 157. 3. Jean Baudrillard, Le système des objets [The system; of objects], Paris, Gallimard, 1978, p. 41. 4. Christian Enzensberger, Grösserer Versuch über den Schmutz [Expanded Essay on Dirt] (Munich, 1968) 23; cited in Theweleit I, 385. 5. Enzensberger in Theweleit I, 385. 6. Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994, 2006, passim.
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7. While large but unquantified numbers moved to the British 'mainland' between 1841 and 1925 there was massive emigration beyond Britain's shores: four and three quarter million to the USA, around 75,000 to Canada and almost 400,000 to Australia. By 1911, one third of all people born in Ireland were living abroad. 8. John Beddoe, The Races of Britain, London, Trübner & Co., 1885, Chapter XIV passim. 9. G. R. Gair, "The Irish Immigration Question" in The Liverpool Review Vol IX, Nos.1-3 (January- March 1934). 10. Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé : Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: Éditions La Découverte (Gallimard/tel), 1987) 351. 11. Gair, The Liverpool Review Vol IX, No.3 (March 1934) 13. 12. Gair, The Liverpool Review Vol IX, No.3 (March 1934) 88. 13. Gair, The Liverpool Review Vol IX, No.2 (February 1934) 49. 14. See Gregory B. Lee, China Imagined: From Western Fantasy to Spectacular Power, London, Hurst, 2018. 15. Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, Shanghai: North China Herald office, 1890; London: Kegan Paul, 1892, p. 133. 16. See Gregory B. Lee, China Imagined, passim. 17. Jean Rodes, À travers la Chine actuelle, Paris: Fasquelle, 1932, p. 172: ‘Le pouvoir de contrôle du cerveau étant ainsi moins développé chez le Chinois, celui-ci, en certaines circonstances d’excitation, est livré à tous les réflexes inconscients, incontrôlés, de l’automatisme médullaire … [on voit] dans ce fait, une cause irrémédiable d’infériorité de race, qui eût enchanté le comte de Gobineau.’ 18. New York Daily Tribune, September 29, 1854, page 4. 19. New York Daily Tribune, September 29, 1854, page 4. 20. New York Daily Tribune, September 29, 1854, page 4. 21. Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: Éditions La Découverte (Gallimard/tel), 1987) 29. 22. Albert Memmi, Le Racisme (Paris: Gallimard, collection "Idées," 1982) 118. Cited in Taguieff 29. 23. Taguieff 29-30. 24. New York Daily Tribune September 29, 1854, page 4. 25. Taguieff 30. 26. New York Times, September 3, 1865, page 1. General Lee surrendered to General Grant on 9 April 1865. 27. New York Times, September 3, 1865, page 1. 28. The Irish Citizen [New York] 9 July 1890. 29. American Catholic Quarterly Review, 1879, IV, p. 249. 30. American Catholic Quarterly Review, 1879, IV, p. 253. 31. G. R. Gair, The Liverpool Review Vol IX, No.1 (January 1934) p. 12. 32. The Liverpool Diocesan Review [formerly The Liverpool Review] Vol. X, No. 8 (August 1935), 589. 33. The Liverpool Diocesan Review, Vol. X, No. 8 (August 1935), 590. 34. The Liverpool Diocesan Review, Vol. X, No. 8 (August 1935), 590. 35. During the war Chinese seamen were paid around half the wage paid to white seamen. This was a vast improvement on the situation that pertained before the war. After the end of hostilities, the shipping companies resumed paying the seamen a much lower wage, one on which they could not support a family. Many former seamen now established in the UK thus abandoned the profession. See Home Office papers in National Archives of the UK (TNA), HO 213/926 C491519. 36. The National Archives of the UK (TNA), HO 213/926 C491519 "Note of Meeting held at Home Office Oct. Nineteenth 1945: Repatriation of Chinese Seamen at Liverpool".
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37. Gregory B. Lee, Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of Chia and Chineseness, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, HI, and London, C. Hurst & Co., 2003. See Chapter 3: Addicted, Demented and Taken to the Cleaners, pp. 24-54. 38. See Virginia Berridge, Opium of the People: Opiate use in nineteenth-century England, London: Allen Lane, 1981. 39. TNA, HO 213/926 "Note of Meeting held at Home Office Oct. Nineteenth 1945: Repatriation of Chinese Seamen at Liverpool". 40. The Windrush generation refers to overseas British Caribbeans encouraged to come to the UK in the 1940-1960s for essential employment; the first of those to come did so on the HMT Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948. In 2018 in came to light that a number of the Windrush immigrants hand been wrongly detained and threatened with deportation, and, in some 60 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Many of those affected were born British subjects and were thus perfectly entitled to live, work and retire in the UK. See Harriet Agerholm, "Windrush generation: Home Office 'set them up to fail', say MPs". The Independent, 3 July 2018, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/windrush-home-office-set-them-up-fail-mps- affairs-select-committee-a8428041.html,accessed 10 September 2018. 41. Kate Lyons, The Guardian, 6 Oct 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/06/ beingmicronesian-online-hatred-spurs-positive-fightback, last accessed 7 October 2018. 42. Kate Lyons in interview with Ongelungel.
ABSTRACTS
The alien, the foreigner, the outsider have been historically represented as unclean, sick, contagious, and mentally unsound. In the nineteenth century, the British and American imaginaries framed both the Irish and the Chinese in such terms, even though it was primarily the Irish who staffed Britain’s imperial armies, and the Chinese who manned its merchant ships, washed it sailors’ clothes, and dug its trenches. The sexual union of both Irish and Chinese with British or American women was particularly feared, and the hybrid child seen as especially mentally unstable and undesirable. The discursive and institutional treatment of “the Irish” and “the Chinese” was not an isolated practice, and would be reapplied to other ethnic groups in both the USA and the UK right into the present century, as the UK Home office’s treatment of the British citizens of Caribbean origin has illustrated.
AUTHOR
GREGORY B. LEE Gregory B. Lee is Professor of Chinese and Transcultural Studies at the University of Lyon 3. He is a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and of Peking University. He previously taught at the universities of Cambridge, London, Chicago and Hong Kong. His research interests include cultural and intellectual history, Chineseness, the postcolonial, ‘minor’ and ‘marginal’ cultures, diasporic memory and the impact of globalization on all of these. His most recent book is China Imagined: From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power, London, Hurst & Co., 2018.
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Contrastive Approaches to the Other’s Imagined Diseases:V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Abha Dawesar’s Family Values
Florence Labaune-Demeule
1 Commenting on the parallels to be found in Che Guevara’s and Fanon’s lives and commitments, Robert J.C. Young1 notes how deeply interconnected colonialism and medicine were for both personalities: This apparent paradox, an ethics of healing through revolutionary violence, remains at the heart of the lives and works of both Guevara and Fanon. They thought of this by analogy with the practices of medicine itself: to cure the open wound of colonial rule by surgical intervention rather than the earlier Gandhian strategy of a therapeutic ayurvedic medicine. (Young, p. 128-129)
2 If not all colonial or postcolonial writers have adopted such a view, many critics have highlighted the links that can be established between colonialism or postcolonialism and the medical discourses and imageries, thus emphasizing the parallels that could be outlined between colonial rule and diseases as well as postcolonial disorders and maladies, as exemplified by David Arnold’s book Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies,2 or by such titles as Postcolonial Disorder3 (Delvecchio Good, Hyde, Pinto, Good), Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness4 (Megan Vaughan), Aesthetics of Dislocation in French and Francophone Literature and Art5 (Daisy Connon, Gillian Jein, and Greg Kerr, who insist on colonial or postcolonial experiences of dis-location and psychological dislocation), or The Intimate Enemy. A Critical Reader: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism6 (Ashis Nandy), to mention but a few. The dichotomy between colonial disease and colonial dis-ease has also been highlighted (Stephanie Hilger),7 and Ania Loomba also shows that the relationships between mind and body, individuation and subjectification, or group-classification and objectification –all referring to power– are related to colonial discourse in general and to medicine in particular: Colonial discourse studies, however, seek to offer in-depth analyses of colonial epistemologies, and also connect them to the history of colonial institutions. […]
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Megan Vaughan shows how medicine in colonial Africa constructed ‘the African’ in particular ways which were intrinsic to operations of power. David Arnold (1993) has analysed the imperial medical system in British India in an analogous vein. More generally, colonial discourse studies are interested in how stereotypes, images and ‘knowledge’ of colonial subjects and cultures tie in with institutions of economic, administrative, judicial and bio-medical control. (Loomba, p. 51)8
3 Postcolonial critics are therefore familiar with such concepts as physical or mental dislocation or mental alienation, madness, sanity or insanity, psychiatry and trauma. Yet, other more implicit and more metaphorical references are associated with the medical field, with such images as those of the colonies and metropolis as gendered bodies which can be submitted to different forms of ills –the female body of the colony being subservient to the male power of Empire associated to the master’s figure or the rapist, thus combining political or social violence with physical abuse.9 Furthermore, the process of depersonalisation of the colonized, carried out through such means as the use of a plural or collective form to refer to groups rather than individuals, of onomastics to blur the process of personal individuation for slaves, of forms of objectification or infantilisation, contributed to turning colonized people into figures of the “other”, even in their own eyes, a fact which can be associated with medical discourse and metaphorical forms of quarantine: The ‘mark of the plural, Albert Memmi tells us, is a ‘sign of the colonised’ depersonalization’: ‘The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner ; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity.’ […] These associations between European male adulthood, civilisation and rationality on the one hand, and non-Europeans, children, primitivism and madness on the other, are also present in Freudian and subsequent accounts of the human psyche. […] (Loomba, p. 118) Vaughan argues that […] whereas Foucault outlines how modern European states created normative as well as ‘abnormal’ subjects in order to police both, ‘the needs to objectify and distance “the Other” in the form of the madman or the leper was less urgent in a situation in which every colonial person was in some sense, already “Other”. The individuation of subjects that took place in Europe was denied colonised people. (Loomba, p. 49)
4 Fanon, among others, showed at large how colonisation could produce long-lasting effects on the human psyche, far exceeding the disorderly moments of political independence.
5 Therefore diseases affecting body, spirit or soul are a recurring theme in many postcolonial novels, although their purposes may be different. Two novels will be focused on in this paper –the first one, A House for Mr Biswas,10 being V.S. Naipaul’s first fictional masterpiece, published in 1961, while the second novel, Family Values,11 was published by a young Indian woman novelist, Abha Dawesar, in 2009. Although both fictions deal with the Indian community, the settings are different: A House for Mr Biswas is set in Trinidad and tells the story of Mohun Biswas, a young man who is more or less forced into marrying one of the Tulsi daughters, Shama. After his wedding, he discovers that the Tulsis are a powerful clan led by the matriarch, Mrs Tulsi, and her henchman, Seth. Their aim is to suppress any form of individuality within the extended family. On the contrary, Family Values is set an unnamed contemporary Indian town, which could be any town, just as the family described, which remains nameless to the very end of the novel, could represent any Indian middle-class family. The story focuses on a young child, also unnamed and called “the boy”, and who is often sick with malaria and fevers and spends most of his time at home, next to his parents’
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rudimentary medical offices in a two-roomed flat rented from an unpleasant and rude owner nicknamed Mrs Cowdung. Both his parents being doctors, the child inhabits a world characterized by diseases –the others’ diseases, whether imagined or “real”, and his own illnesses.
6 After showing how sickness and illnesses are represented in both novels, their metaphorical meanings will be highlighted. Then the conclusive part of this paper will focus on the authors’ contrastive aims in using such diseases as narrative motivation.
7 In V.S. Naipaul’ novel A House for Mr Biswas, two major characters are regularly described as sick people: Mohun Biswas, and Mrs Tulsi, his mother-in-law. Early in life, when Biswas is still a child, and like most children of his condition, he is described as tormented by eczema and is introduced as a different, unfortunate and fated child, “born in the wrong way” (p. 16), with six fingers, with good teeth but an “unlucky sneeze” (p. 17), and a boy who “will eat up his own father and mother” (p. 17). Thus, he seems to be fated by illness and a disabled body, which are both associated with superstition in the Indian community of Trinidad. Later on, as a newly married man, Biswas is recurringly described as suffering from stomach ache, his wife Shama regularly preparing Beecham’s powder for him. This affection is used in the novel as an illustration of his somatic symptoms, of his nervousness at having to submit to Tulsi authority, and it thus becomes the objective correlative of his anxiety. Yet, in some climatic episodes, his health deteriorates and leads to complete collapse and nervous breakdown, notably in the chapter entitled “Green Vale”, which also marks the structural middle part of the novel, thus highlighting the correlation that can be established between the storm breaking out and Biswas’s madness since he surrenders to his own inner darkness at the same time.
8 This downfall results from a gradual alteration of Biswas’s mental state, as is illustrated by the fact that he becomes obsessed with the newspaper sheets plastered on the walls of his barracks, notably when the first line of a newspaper story, “Amazing Scenes Were Witnessed Yesterday When”, seems to haunt his mind. The latter is finally perceived by the protagonist as a threat to his physical integrity. Sickness is then introduced explicitly as a slow process of othering which transforms the protagonist’s personality and identity insidiously, in many different scenes of increasing intensity, the climax being reached when the storm destroys both Biwas’s embryonic house –an attempt to gain independence from the Tulsis–, and his mind. The storm, therefore, symbolizes madness and the fact that the character’s body and mind surrender to obscurity and despair, a fact which echoes King Lear’s madness when the tempest rages over the moor: Lightning ; thunder ; the rain on roof and walls ; the loose iron sheet ; the wind pushing against the house, pausing, and pushing again. Then there was a roar that overrode them all. When it struck the house the window burst open, the lamp went instantly out, the rain lashed in, the lightning lit up the room and the world outside, and when the lightning went out the room was part of the black void. Anand began to scream. […] But Mr Biswas only muttered on the bed, and the rain and wind swept through the room with unnecessary strength and forced open the door to the drawing-room, wall-less, floorless, of the house Mr Biswas had built. (p. 292)
9 The house, which is the material representation of Biswas’s personality, has been torn to pieces as the juxtapositions in the first sentence of this quote show. Similarly the
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enumeration of phrasal verbs emphasizes the new chaos characterising both inner and outer worlds, leading to the void.
10 Later on, when Biswas decides to leave the Tulsis, he goes to a specialist’s surgery in Port of Spain. This scene, described both through Biswas’s perception and the receptionist’s point of view, clearly hovers between moments when he seems to be comng back to his senses on the one hand –in an attempt at finding his integrity and identity back again–, and moments when he surrenders to complete madness on the other hand. Indeed, the episode shows how deeply schizophrenic he has become.
11 The surgery is an immaculate place reflecting clinical rationality and stiffness, as illustrated by the receptionist’s spotless uniform. In this luxury atmosphere, illness is given a new image, a very unfamiliar one for Biswas, since “[the people didn’t look sick: there was not a bandage or an oiled face among them, no smell of bay rum or ammonia. […] and it was hard to believe that in the same city, Ramchand and Dehuti lived in two rooms of a crumbling house.” (p.313-314) Biswas has become aware of the co-existence of two worlds through the two types of medicine introduced –the rational, scientific, sanitized Western-style medical practice– and the traditional Indian cures he had been used to up till then, surrounded by a halo of prejudice and superstition. Yet, the scene has reached a turning-point: although he is convinced that he is not sick, the juxtaposed depiction of his own internal point of view and of the perspectives of the receptionist and of other patients, who stare at him, clearly shows that his illness is still very serious.While he believes that he is speaking to himself in his own mind and can’t be heard by the other patients, the reader understands that he finally utters the words aloud, provoking interrogation and anxiety among the other patients, especially when they realize that his physical behaviour is clearly at odds with what their own expectations of sanity: Fish-face, he commented mentally. The receptionist stared. Mr Biswas realized with horror that he had whispered the word. […] Fish-face. The receptionist looked up. Mr Biswas smiled. […] Mr Biswas decided to wait. […] The surgery door opened, a man was heard but not seen, a woman came out, and someone else went in. A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers. Mr Biswas saw the lame man’s eyes on him. […] He smiled at the memory of Huckleberry Finn […]. He chuckled. When he looked up he intercepted an exchange of glances between the receptionist and the lame man. […] You know, I am not a sick man at all. The lame man cleared his throat noisily, very noisily for a small man and agitated his stiff leg. Mr Biswas watched it. […] Concentrating on his English, he said, ‘I have changed my mind. I am feeling much better, thank you.’ […] ‘What about your letter ?’ the receptionist asked, surprised into her Trinidad accent. ‘Keep it,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘File it. Burn it, Sell it.’ (pp. 314-315)
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12 This accumulation of very short sentences expressed in a broken rhythm, and the use of italics in the original text show how deviant his mind is for others. The protagonist, therefore, is unambiguously depicted as a mad man in this scene.
13 The second major character who is regularly described as a sick character in the novel is Mr Biswas’s mother-in-law, Mrs Tulsi, who is also the head of her extended family, over whom she rules almost uncontested. The way she behaves asserts the role she wants to play in the medical field –she is either introduced as the family’s healthcare provider, for instance when she administers drugs (sulphur, condensed milk) regularly to prevent diseases or epidemics from breaking out, or when she compels the children them to wear painful medical equipment (185) ; or as the victim of diseases herself: Mrs Tulsi is indeed an old woman who is regularly subject to fainting fits whenever she is annoyed, and she reacts to any form of opposition or counter-power by falling ill and locking herself in the dark Blue or Rose Rooms of Hanuman House, looked after by her widowed and childless daughter, Sushila, whose role is to nurse Mrs Tulsi since she has no family of her own. But the children always think of these rooms as of places to be regarded in awe, and they are frightened or intimidated by what can be found there since an impressive quantity of products ismentioned, and they sometimes find it difficult to identify the purposes of certain utensils, which terrify them: Knowing that to protest was to make herself absurd, Savi went to the Rose Room, with its basins and quaint jugs and tubes and smells, and complained to Shama. (p. 298)
14 In this general atmosphere of cures and medicines, Mrs Tulsi’s fainting fits and illnesses are always associated with different forms of rituals, such as having her head massaged with bay rum, her back relieved by having young children walk on it, and taking a whole paraphernalia of Indian and Western medicines and cures which add to the dramatization of the setting. As Meenakshi Bharat writes, “these fits set a complex and esoteric ritual in motion” (Bharat, p. 120): They went to the Rose Room. Sushila admitted them and at once went outside. A shaded oil lamp burned low. The jalousied window in the thick clay-brick wall was closed, keeping out the daylight ; cloth was wedged around the frame, to keep out draughts. There was a smell of ammonia, bay rum, rum, brandy, disinfectant, and a variety of febrifuges. Below a white canopy with red applique apples Mrs Tulsi lay, barely recognizable, a bandage around her forehead, her temples dotted with lumps of soft candle, her nostrils stuffed with some white medicament. The marble topped bedside table was a profusion of bottles, jars and glasses. There were little blue jars of medicated rubs, little white jars of medicated rubs ; tall green bottles of bay rum and short square bottles of eye-drops and nosedrops ; a round bottle of rum, a flat bottle of brandy and an oval royal blue bottle of smelling salts ; a bottle of Sloan’s liniment and a tiny tin of Tiger Balm ; a mixture with a pink sediment and one with a yellow-brown sediment, like muddy water left to stand from the previous night. (pp. 199-200)
15 Looking like a mummified corpse, Mrs Tulsi is reduced to being the embodiment of sickness itself: her whole personality seems to have disappeared behind all the medical equipment used to relieve her. But most of the time, Mrs Tulsi’s fainting fits and illnesses are also described as key elements in a strategic, well-orchestrated staging in a grand, artificial scheme. They are thus introduced mostly as sham illnesses, a fact not lost on Biswas, the rebellious son-in-law who ironically laughs at such grotesque artificiality:
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‘Which foot you rub ? Mr Biswas asked. ‘You should be glad they allow you to touch a foot. You know, it does beat me why you all sisters so anxious to look after the old hen. She did look after you ? She just pick you up and marry you off to any old coconut-seller and crab-catcher. And still everybody rushing up to rub foot and squeeze head and hand smelling-salts’ (p. 128)
16 For here truly lies Mrs Tulsi’s secret power: sickness is used as a form of matriarchal power exerted over all the other family members and most of the time, her fits are imaginary ones, as will be explained later.
17 However in the second novel under study –Abha Dawesar’s Family Values– the theme of medical condition permeates the narrative in a more thorough way. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, the protagonist is a young child who is often sick and remains at home most of the time, as if cloistered in the very confined space of the family’s private one-roomed flatcalled “the hospital-ward home”. Indeed, the ground-floor space of the house rented from the Cowdungs who live upstairs, has been divided into two distinct parts –the private one and the public one, to be used as doctors’ offices for his parents. As Abha Dawesar herself says, “The beginning of the novel is extremely claustrophobic.”12 The partition between the private flat and the professional space is no more than a very thin wall through which the sick child can hear most of what is happening in his parents’ consulting chambers. This microcosm is characterized by many different illnesses and is suffused with suffering and death, as the novel makes clear from the very first lines: Surrounded by illness and death, the boy looks up every disease-ridden word he hears: period, hysterectomy, uterine wall, fallopian tubes, vagina. […] Voices of people caught in a moment of contemplating their own death and putrefaction, looking upon their organs and their bodies as so many pieces of rotten fruit. He is growing up with disease. Not just with malaria and childhood diseases like chicken pox that strike him but with every one else’s diseases. […] He is surrounded by the stench of mucosa and the music of laryngitis. (p. 1)
18 These unusal conditions make the child’s behaviour completely different from any other child’s, and he is a stranger to the happy, noisy atmosphere which is generally associated with children playing together. At the beginning of the novel, the boy is described as lonely, as if abandoned, although his parents do love him. Such a claustrophobic beginning clearly highlights the overwhelming thematic presence of sickness and the limited, stifling space of the house adds to this oppressive impression, a fact that the author considered essential since she even said that she had thought of creating and reproducing a visual map of the flat in her novel, space and diseases being closely entwined.13
19 Thus, the young child is a privileged witness, who, by being a patient himself, does not know how to spend the long hours of solitude he is compelled to bear. This explains why he knows so much about medical practice, since he regularly looks up symptoms, or cures in his parents’ medical books. When he meets his neighbour’s young daughters who become friends to play with occasionally, he can play doctor in a realistic and serious way, explaining symptoms and diagnosis, writing prescriptions with the difficult names of molecules and medicines effortlessly (p. 17). At other moments, he feels comfortable with attending a medical conference on large spectrum antibiotics with his parents. He is so familiar with that world that he seems to be himself the embodiment of all viruses and germs that exist and he considers illnesses to be particular landmarks by which he can measure his own way through life, as when he
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remembers being sick for his birthday, or when his parents are aware that “There is too much sickness around the boy ? They have to move.” (p. 22) Restricted space and diseases both come to define the boy’s life, to supersede his initial identity.
20 Yet, his unusual position sometimes makes him uneasy as he can listen to very personal or even confidential information given by the patients, who rob him of part of his innocence. Sometimes he even feels that, as a young Indian boy, he should not know about certain things, notably when it concerns women’s intimacy. His situation is not unlike that of a drama character in an eavesdropping scene, listening to something he is not really entitled to know, which is often disgusting to him –the imagined colour of a patient’s vomit, a woman’s periods– just as, in turn, the patients in the waiting room can listen to the disturbing sounds of his own bodily fluids or excrements, a fact which makes him feel very uncomfortable.
21 In the novel, his parents’ medical practice is also introduced as very different from traditional Indian medicine, since their approach is based on a Western-like, scientific and rational one, and a very humane one too, the doctors being ready to look after all patients, whether rich or poor, from the middle classes or from the slums. They are clearly the embodiment of modernity but also of progress, but they remain humble middle-class people, whose dedication is limitless. Money is also perceived as a means of bringing progress to their own private and professional lives, as is illustrated by the fact they they would like to move in new offices and a new house. However, paradoxically, the couple fall back into tradition whenever important decisions have to be made, as shown by the episodes when they consult an astrologer to know if the times are auspicious for such or such expenses, for such or such decisions. They are therefore introduced as characters living in a transitory society characterized by flux, half way between modernity and tradition, standing on no stable ground.
22 Then this way of representing diseases shows that the expression “the other’s imagined diseases” can be taken literally in both novels. Concerning Mr Biswas and Mrs Tulsi the meaning of the expression is different for each character: Mrs Tulsi is seen as using illnesses as an artificial means towards precise aims, while Mr Biswas’s mental illness is so profound that he is not really aware of it, believing something is wrong with other people, not with himself. On the contrary, Family Values introduces the patients’ real diseases as imagined ones because perceived by the child through the partition which separates the consulting chambers from the child’s home. The partition acts as a screen, or filter, which could be viewed as a metaphoric representation of the child’s perceptual filter. This therefore introduces a new dimension: the others’ imagined diseases can also be conceived of as more meaningful metaphors of society at large.
23 Although the extent and contents of the metaphors of diseases are different in both books, the latter introduce diseases as means of metaphorically representing some of the deepest features of Trinidadian and Indian society respectively.
24 To begin with, it can be said that A House for Mr Biswas stages Mrs Tulsi’s illnesses and Biswas’s madness as respective metaphors for colonial power and for the individual’s fight for identity. Indeed, the way Mrs Tulsi relies on her fainting fits and multiple diseases is unambiguous: she considers them to be the instruments with which she can impose her own rule and power over all the inhabitants of Hanuman House, over all the members of her extended family, or clan. She faints whenever she is annoyed, whenever some relative shows signs of rebellion, thus putting an end to problematic situations. She also relies on these well-timed illnesses to turn her own daughters and
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grandchildren into her submissive slaves, who rub her feet, soak her hair in bay rum, or massage her body. The silence which invades the house during these fits is also a way of ruling over the children’s boisterousness and of controlling the adults’ attempted acts of rebellion, and Biswas is clearly identified as the main family rebel from the start. Referring to Mrs Tulsi’s fainting fits and the accumulation of medicines placed on Mrs Tulsi’s bedside table, Meenakshi Bharat writes, When things threaten to get out of hand, the sinister declaration, ‘Mai faint’ sets a complex and esoteric ritual in motion […]. The mounting of this impressive epic catalogue of medicaments is enough to daunt even the most courageous of dissenters, and is integral to the elaborate charade on the part of the dominant party to exert emotional pressure ; to wield as an emotive lever, put to consummate political use, to intimidate and coerce. (Bharat, pp. 120-121)14
25 Mrs Tulsi, also nicknamed the old hen, the old queen, or the old she-fox by Biswas, emerges from these diseases stronger than ever, her power as a matriarch recognized by all. Her brother-in-law and henchman, Seth, is depicted as the armed hand of repression before he falls out of favour and is replaced by the younger son, Owad, who in his own turn, disregards his mother. Hanuman House, therefore, with Mrs Tulsi in the lead role, can be perceived as a metaphoric representation of totalitarianism, of a regime where absolute power is another representation of oligarchy and even of despotism –a fact which has led several critics to refer to Mrs Tulsi’s reign over the house as “Tulsidom”.15 This establishes Hanuman House as a real microcosm, suggesting that “the organisation of the Tulsi family in A House for Mr Biswas [is] ‘a microcosm of a slave society’” (Bharat, p. 120), of plantation society, that is to say a miniature reproduction of the Caribbean, and of the islands’ colonial condition, with Mrs Tulsi in the colonizer’s role, and the daughters and husbands in the roles of the slaves supervised by the violent overseer or slave master Seth: […] Hanuman House is more immediately symbolic of the slave world. Mrs Tulsi needs workers to build her empire. She, therefore, exploits the homeless and deprived fellow Hindus. She has grasped the psychology of the slave system. Like the Caribbean society, Tulsidom is constructed of a vast number of disparate families, gratuitously brought together by the economic need of the high caste minority. To accept Hanuman House is to acquiesce to slavery. Mrs Tulsi, the cunning coloniser, justified her exploitation with her foxy explanations that she is really doing her subjects good. Seth, in his blucher boots, is the slave master: a brutal and brutalising symbol. (Sandran, p. 61)16
26 Only one of the husbands, Mr Biswas, dares to oppose this form of colonisation and appears as the embodiment of dissidence and rebellion, as the image which the Tulsis associate with him is that of his “paddling his own canoe“ (p. 109), turning him into “Biswas the paddler” (p. 109). Biswas’s rebellion, verbal at first, is soon expressed through physical acts of aggression, as illustrated by the scene in which he spits over Mrs Tulsi’s spoilt sons, aptly nicknamed “the two gods”. Such a sacrilegious act against Tulsidom cannot be left unpunished, and Biswas is finally beaten up by one of the brothers-in-law who is the embodiment of colonial repressive violence.
27 Therefore, Biswas’s mental breakdown has to be understood not just as any breakdown but as the consequence of the colonial system’s attempt at submitting any desire for personal independence and rebellion against colonial power and domination. If he is not physically reduced to silence by violence, psychological pressure finally leads him to give in until, paradoxically, Hanuman House becomes a haven which offers him only “a mere colonial palliative and not a permanent cure.” (Bharat, p. 123) Yet, as a rebel,
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he emerges from it a new man, even more ready to affranchise himself from Tulsi “home rule”.
28 The second part of the novel therefore delineates his road to personal freedom, and the collapse of Tulsidom, thus staging another representation of decolonisation. Once more, diseases act as metaphorical representations of the fight for freedom and of the colonial system collapsing: Biswas’s partial awareness at his own illness when waiting at the specialist’s surgery in Port of Spain can be considered as “the agonizing throes of postcolonial awakening that Fanon, Memmi and other thinkers have discerned”, as M. Bharat has it (Bharat, p. 124). She goes on with the same idea: Without intellectually apprehending the complexities, he now distinctively arrives at the crucial postcolonial awareness that this battle is not going to be a straightforward one, simply because it is being waged on too many fronts. (Bharat p. 124)17
29 Paradoxically, Biswas’s new awareness also translates through references to his stomach pains which resume after his nervous breakdown recedes, thus becoming another physical manifestation of the difficult assertion of his own self: he is still alive, he has managed to survive, and paradoxically the stomach pains also point at his being able to face the world bravely. Biswas, the fighting rebel, finally dies when he is no more than 42 years old, shattered by his weak heart, another representation of his partially broken mind and spirit under continuous efforts at fighting against the Tulsis and at trying to come to terms with financial hardship.
30 On the other hand, Mrs Tulsi’s decline –be it political, social or physical decay– is announced in the novel as early as the “Shorthills” chapter, which shows how difficult it is to maintain family cohesion outside the initial family structure: the move from Hanuman House to the Shorthills plantation is a move from Tulsidom to anarchy,18 individualism replacing collectivism. Shorthills is then another metaphor for the process of decolonisation, in which plundering and personal enrichment lead to the collapse of collective interests, to the fall of matriarchal power and to forming new alliances. At Shorthills, Mrs Tulsi has indeed retreated into solitude (“Mrs Tulsi remained in her dark room”, p. 419), and life in the domain is affected by several deaths (p. 413).
31 In such a changing world of old patterns becoming meaningless, Mrs Tulsi’s sham illnesses seem to become real ones, even if, at times, she seems to be recovering new energy (“Since the quarrel with Seth, Mrs Tulsi had ceased to be an invalid.”, 394)19. As disintegrating family links have become more obvious, Mrs Tulsi’s illnesses can be understood as a sign of old age. From a powerful matriarch she is transformed into an old and tired person who seems to be completely overcome by maladies, in body and mind: Mrs Tulsi had no precise illness. She was simply ill. Her eyes always ached ; her heart was bad ; her head always hurt ; her stomach was fastidious ; her legs were unreliable ; and every other day she had a temperature. (p. 519)
32 The short, juxtaposed sentences highlight the accumulation of diseases. Mrs Tulsi’s reign has come to end: from a tyrannical matriarch, she has become a maudlin, impotent woman (p. 571). From make-believe the illnesses have become real, and Mrs Tulsi has come down from her position as a leader to that of a powerless old invalid. Meanwhile, Biswas’s has managed to be independent from her, notwithstanding the long-lasting illnesses that he has suffered from, which have never relented, his fragile
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constitution being another metaphor for his precarious –though real– independence at the end of his life.
33 Abha Dawesar’s novel Family Values also introduces diseases as a metaphor –although of a different sort: the author’s preoccupations have no link with the political representation of colonialism and excessive authority. This time, maladies are metaphorical representations of the modern ills of Indian society: The multiple diseases described by the little boy who is himself constantly sick can thus be seen as a metaphor for the various illnesses and decline that plague Indian society. (Guignery & Pesso-Miquel, p. 263)
34 Indeed, as the young boy’s consciousness of his surrounding world widens, his knowledge of the external world expands gradually. Since he is getting older and is in touch with more people, he also becomes confronted to, and aware of, the existence of many social ills, or illnesses, affecting Indian society, his vision expanding in a centrifugal way, from his family home to his grandfather’s house, to his neighbourhood, and to the whole town. From the claustrophobic and infected space of the hospital-ward home, where he is nonethless sheltered by his overprotective parents, he soon finds himself exposed to yet more dangerous social illnesses which affect both his extended family and the town where they all live –another representation of the social body as a whole.
35 This can first be made out from the child’s unconscious use of onomastics. Indeed the child, who himself remains unnamed to the very end of the novel and is referred to as just ‘the boy’, uses many nicknames or minimalist denominations to describe the other members in his large family. These characters are thus often reduced to one major caricatural feature which either emphasizes their social function –his father being called Father, his mother is Mother, or his cousin Cousin, etc.– or highlights their main flaws or shortcomings, as illustrated by Flunkie-Junkie, his drug-addicted cousin, or by names like Sugar Mills, Mrs Cowdung, Self-Sacrificing Sister (also called SSS), Pariah, Six-Fingers, Psoriasis, or even Paget, these last three names explicitly introducing references to eponymous diseases or disabilities, to mention but a few.20 Such generic names obviously aim at granting the novel and its characters a universal touch, which is a first element underpinning the metaphorical approach identified in the book.
36 Yet, as he is getting older the boy is led to gradually realize how many ills affect his larger family, as exemplified by the episode where his uncles want to pounce on Grand- Father’s money and impatiently await the old man’s death ; he also learns all the devious means underlying arranged weddings, and that his young female cousin, whom he considers as his sister, is sexually abused ; his older cousin, Flunkie-Junkie, a drug addict, has also become physically violent, attacking Grand-Father and threatening Mother’s life at the clinic, among other instances.
37 This echoes the world outside his own family circles: many horrible and social diseases seem to be prevalent. Thus, he mentions child harassment at school, child abduction, the killing of baby girls, the denial of women’s rights, the contamination of food by pesticides and chemicals, the lack of sanitation leading to epidemics, the existence of slums, the organised killing and dismembering of children by murderers, organ trafficking, the corruption of the police and legal systems where plaintiffs are finally considered the perpetrators of crime, or social corruption. Many other things could be mentioned, all showing how infected the whole social fabric is. The text therefore, denounces the dangers made apparent through the dominant illnesses evoking a
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society which is rotting, and even already rotten from within, as shown by the recurring images of scatological elements permeating the novel (references to bodily fluids, excreta, vomit, etc.). Therefore, when Mrs Cowdung insults Father, her verbal insults are compared to “diarrhoea pour[ing] out of her mouth” (p. 83) and she later compares the child himself to shit:21 some characters’ aggressiveness clearly materializes through these images of utmost pollution.
38 In this context, it becomes obvious that the “two-room-house-cum-clinic” (Guignery & Pesso-Miquel, p. 262) is truly introduced as a microcosm reflecting the corruption, pollution and chaos of the outside world. All germs, viruses and affections stand for miniature representations of those ills affecting the Indian macrocosm, at a time when the country is trying to find its uncertain path between modernity and tradition, as symbolized by the old house with the wheezing room adjacent to the doctors’ flat, which might soon be replaced by a more modern medical practice, as the child’s parents endeavour to do.
39 The parents’ clinic, therefore, sends back a microcosmic, mirror-like image of greater social ills. Even the broken toilet tank threatening to fall on the little boy becomes an apt metaphor for the dangers looming in the world of adults. As Brinda Bose writes in her article entitled “Relative Allegory”, The novel’s prose matches its content—as well as intent—step for step with spareness; and if there is a precarious centre at all (that does not hold, fittingly enough), it is the unlikely one of scatology. […] The family is a microcosmic representation of the larger world outside, the classic private/public mirror held up to expose the macrocosm, to illustrate the essential connectedness of human behaviour through all its diverse fancies and foibles. (India Today, Feb 13, 2009)
40 Such a strategy again aims at establishing parallels between microcosm and macrocosm, by referring to diseases as metaphoric representations of the corruption and pollution that seep into the very social, communal, political and spiritual fabric of India. Michel Angot and Louis Renou, for instance, explain how crucial these concepts of pollution or impurity are in Hindu society at large.22 M. Angot clearly draws attention to the purity of the Brahmins, a caste higher than that of the King in old times because Brahmins know the Veda, and because they are vegetarians, while people from other castes may eat animal flesh, which is associated to violence and death (Angot, p.69). The critic also explains that the Laws of Manava also establish the list of the twelve impure bodily substances, among which sperm, menstruation, urine, tears, sweat, mucus, blood, etc., most of which are regularly mentioned in Dawesar’s novel thus explicitly stating that Daesar’s world is utterly polluted. This issue is also developed by Suneela Gargh and Tanu Anand who explain, in their study of menstruation related to myths in India, In some parts of India, perceptions of Hinduism center on notions of purity and pollution. Bodily excretions are believed to be polluting, as are the bodies when producing them. All women, regardless of their social caste, incur pollution through the bodily processes of menstruation and childbirth. Water is considered to be the most common medium of purification. The protection of water sources from such pollution, which is the physical manifestation of Hindu deities, is, therefore, a key concern.
41 Getting clear water is indeed a daily preoccupation for the boy’s parents. In the generally corrupt background of the child’s extended family, only the child’s parents seem to be doing their best to escape corruption, “struggling to do the right thing in
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the smallest possible way in their lives to somehow keep their own hope alive.” (Dawesar, in Guignery, Pesso-Miquel, p. 272)
42 Therefore, it seems that the way in which Abha Dawesar introduces pollution and corruption in Family Values as seeping into society at large, and individuals more specifically, authorizes the reader to consider the diseases in the clinic and in the child’s life not only as metaphors for social impurity and pollution, but also as a real allegory of modern India as a whole, a fact that Abha Dawesar herself acknowledges while underlining the universality of the situation described: [The book] is definitely an allegory of India. That said, the family story and what is both sick and healthy about families is really quite universal, even though there are certain specifics in the family story like the dowry and the arranged marriage, which are very specific to India. But the larger intrigues, the greed and the jealousy are really everyone’s story. The boy is sick, the houses are sick and then the country is sick, and that is part of the same continuum. (Dawesar in Guignery, Pesso-Miquel & Speck, p. 272)
43 To conclude, it seems interesting to compare the different narrative techniques used in the two novels. First, it is obvious that, in spite of their own specificities, both books approach diseases in very similar ways, by insisting that diseases are a prevailing means used by the writers to delineate the main characters’ personalities and progress in life, even if the contexts are very dissimilar.
44 However, the writing strategies and the effects produced are very different. Indeed, the use of diseases in A House for Mr Biswas highlights two main narrative strategies: the first one relies on setting up maximal distance, when Mrs Tulsi’s illnesses are described as generating artificial scenes in which she is playing a comic, and sometimes even a grotesque part, where all the characters are aping situations which have already been rehearsed, as is the case in the scene where Biswas, tired of being a shopkeeper at The Chase, is asked by Seth to insuranburn the shop. This scene moves from excessive tragedy to extreme comedy, and the theatrical dimension is clearly highlighted as an element of distanciation (pp. 200-205). Naipaul’s constant use of irony and satire therefore transforms the Tulsis’ maladies into circus-like performances, preventing the reader from ever empathizing with Mrs Tulsi and her kin. On the contrary, the use of internal focalization giving the reader free access to Biswas’s mind, feelings and sufferings, creates much empathy on the reader’s part, who is more aware of the protagonist’s physical and mental pains, even if Biswas’s lack of lucidity at his own sickness is sometimes treated with mild irony.
45 In Abha Dawesar’s novel Family Value, other strategies are implemented to show that diseases do not always have negative overtones, and that the encompassing denunciation of social ills does not affect all the characters in the same way. Although the general position adopted in the novel is one of distance, even towards the child since he remains unnamed to the very end of the narrative, the writer’s skills are such that this very device becomes a factor of identification with the young boy, and a vector of empathy. In such polluted microcosm and macrocosm, only the child and his parents seem to take sides with the victims and appear to be dynamic elements in the midst of stasis: while the parents always run after time to solve family problems or fight against corruption of all sorts, the quiet child’s perspective and constant suffering are indirectly made perceptible to the reader through oblique suggestions, through the use of minimalist prose:23 his fears, his solitude, his fits of anguish, and numerous illnesses are all borne silently, as if the boy always tried to do his best to pass
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unnoticed, as if his presence might be viewed as a burden, as if his progress in life might disturb the corrupt world of adults, as if he had decided to make no more than ripples on the surface of water. This presence of the child, which is both overwhelming and almost erased, brings him the reader’s unconditional support. The latter, though aware of the humour or excess of some passages, cannot but feel the melancholy of the child living in a chaotic and dangerous modern world which does not seem welcoming. As Nils C. Ahl writes in his newspaper article,24 “the novel defines itself through negatives, it is defined by hollows, by everything that is not said just as it is characterized by everything that the novel contradicts.”25 Even if Ahl’s conclusions cannot all be accepted, what he says of the boy’s future can be shared here: Abha Dawesar’s accomplishment here consists in that the character of the dazed child is described in the third-person, with the absolute and fearful regularity of a metronome. The violence of what is going on around him, sharp and cold as it is, suffuses a sober and simple language, and penetrates into the reader’s mind like a blade. […] The child’s gaze is heartbreaking in that it constantly bangs against the wall of a society sick with corruption, injustice and fatalism. There is no horizon in such an India, and here lies his only heritage. (Ahl)26
46 The postcolonial representation of diseases in both Naipaul’s and Dawesar’s novel therefore aims at denouncing the social violence which affecting the individuals who live in a hostile and repressive background while enlisting the reader’s sympathy for those who fight for freedom and independence, and who try to find a place of their own.
NOTES
1. Young, Robert, J.C., Postcolonialism. A very Short Introduction, Oxford, O.U.P., 2003. 2. Arnold, David, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988. 3. Delvecchio Good, Mary-Jo, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto & Byron J. Good (Eds), Postcolonial Disorders, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 2008. 4. Vaughan, Megan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Stanford, Ca., Stanford university Press, 1991. 5. Connon, Daisy, Gillian Jein & Greg Kerr, Aesthetics of Dislocation in French and Francophone Literature and Art. Strategies of Representation. New York, Queenston, Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. 6. Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy/ A Critical Reader: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Oxford, O.U.P., 1988. 7. Hilger, Sephanie (Ed), New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies. London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 8. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, “The New Idiom“, London & New York, Routledge, [1998], 2005. 9. See for instance the concept of double colonization developed by K. Holst-Petersen and A. Rutherford, and explained as follows by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin: “ The term [Double Colonization] refers to the observation that women are subjected to both the colonial domination
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of Empire and the male domination of patriarchy. In this respect, Empire and patriarchy act as analogous to each other and both exert control over female colonial subjects, who are, thus, doubly colonized by imperial/patriarchal power.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies. The Key concepts. Third Edition, London & New York, Routledge, 2013, p. 89) See also A. Loomba’s careful analysis of gendered colonial relationships between the metropolis and its colonies, where she acknowledges that the vision of the colonies can be that of female body being raped by colonising brutes: “If the imperial project is carried out in the name of a femal monarch (in this case Elizabeth I), colonial relations cannot be projected always or straightforwardly in terms of patriarchal or heterosexual domination” (Loomba, p. 70). She also shows that the stereotype can be reversed: “But the threat of native rebellion produces a very different kind of colonial stereotype which represents the colonised as a (usually dark-skinned) rapist who comes to ravish the white woman who in turn comes to symbolize European culture.” (Ibid.) 10. Naipaul, V.S., A House for Mr Biswas, London, Penguin Books, (1961), 1969. 11. Dawesar, Abha, Family Values, London, Penguin Books, 2009. 12. Guignery, Vanessa, Catherine Pesso-Miquel, “Abha Dawesar in Conversation”, in Guignery, Vanessa, Catherine Pesso-Miquel & François Specq, Hybridity, Forms and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts, Chapter 24, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, p. 260-278, p. 271. 13. In an interview, Abha Dawesar insisted that she would have liked to propose “a whole layout of the house. The spatial layout is so important in the book that I had drawn it many times over and the boy himself in the book starts to draw a blueprint of one space or another. The architecture of the book and the architecture of where he is living are complementary in some way. At the beginning of the book, instead of having a family tree, I really wanted a map of where he lived, what room, where the sofa was, because everything is important and you now here everything is in the book, you know where every table has its place, because they are literally living in one room. […] they were building blocks of the story in a sense, they laid out everything within the story and I really wanted to have that.” (Dawesar, in Guignery, Pesso-Miquel & Speck, p. 277). 14. Bharat, Meenakshi, “Colonial Maladies, Postcolonial Cures”, in Bharat, Meenakshi, ed., V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. Critical Perspectives, New Delhi, Pencraft International, 2013, pp. 119-130. 15. See for instance Hamner, Robert, D. (Ed.), Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul, Washington, Three Continents, 1979. 16. Stendra Nandan, quoted in Bharat, p. 120. 17. The same thing has been outlined by many critics, among whom Gordon Rohlehr, who writes: “A House for Mr Biswas can be read as a book which probes the relationship between rebellion and independence. True independence, it is revealed, does not immediately follow rebellion ; true personality does not immediately follow emancipation, but must be constructed in a lifetime of painful struggle and retrogression.” (Rohlehr, Gordon. “The Ironic Approach. The Novels of V.S. Naipaul”, in Hamner, Robert, D. (ed), Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul, Washington, Three Continent Press, 1977, p. 178-193, p. 190). 18. See Rohlehr, p. 189 for instance. 19. “Here too, sickness becomes one of the effective techniques of tracing this change that time and altering equations bring about. […] Now, in the context of the crumbling power of the coloniser and the subsequent rise of nuclear family affiliations, Mrs Tulsi can no longer depend on her daughters to rally around her and take part in her charade. The link between shedding the sham postures of illness and the disintegration of the joint family and her failing stranglehold over family members, are clearly indicated in the text.” (Bharat, p. 127). 20. “The characters all have nicknames. […] Part of the reason is that the book is really about the main character. […] [Y]ou don’t see him naming them but that is how everybody is named
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because as a child I used to do that and I know a lot of kids who do that.” (Dawesar, in Guignery and Pesso-Miquel, p. 271). 21. “You are shit, you understand. Pasty dirty brown excreta! Mrs Cowdung pulls the boy’s arms above his head and grabs both his wrists in one hand.” (Dawesar, p. 83). 22. “Plus que le bien et le mal, le pur et l’impur contribuent à établir une échelle des valeurs dans la société indienne classique. […] Dans le domaine social, les hautes castes se distinguent des plus basses par des activités et des pratiques réputées pures.” (Angot, Michel, L’Inde classique, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2001. See also Renou, Louis, L’hindouisme, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, Coll. Que sais-je?, 1951) 68) “More than good and evil, purity and impurity contribute to establishing scales of values in Classical India. […] In the social field, the high castes can be distinguished from the lowest ones because they rely on activities and practices deemed pure.” [My translation]. 23. See Bose,Brinda, “Relative Allegory”, India Today, 13 February 2009, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/Relative+allegary/1/28806, Accessed November 12, 2017: “ The family that Dawesar chronicles consists of cousins and uncles and aunts known by such evocative nicknames as Mrs Cowdung, Six Fingers, Psoriasis, Sugar Mills, Flunkie Junkie. The protagonist is “the boy”, and at the novel’s most minimalist, his grandfather is Grandfather and a cousin is Cousin./The novel’s prose matches its content—as well as intent—step for step with spareness; […] The novel interrogates and critiques “family values” as we might understand it in right-wing-tainted contexts, and yet affirms and endorses its implications in some larger, dispersed sense, if we can remain cognisant of the elusive qualities of grace and love and caring that run like a tenuous thread through most families, if often near-invisibly.” 24. Ahl, Nils C., “L’Inde en Héritage d’Abha Dawesar: la violence amusée d’Abha Dawesar”, Le Monde des livres, 01.10.2009 http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2009/10/01/l-inde-en- heritage-d-abha-dawesar_1247671_3260.html#bVwpwXblBbwPcALY.99, Accessed 13 November 2017. 25. My translation for “Le roman se définit d'ailleurs par la négative, par le creux, par tout ce qu'il ne dit pas et tout ce qu'il contredit.” (Ahl) 26. My translation for: “ Le tour de force stylistique d'Abha Dawesar […] tient à ce personnage d'enfant hébété écrit à la troisième personne, sur un rythme métronomique parfait et effrayant. La violence de ce qui l'entoure, coupante et glacée, imprègne une langue sobre et simple, pénètre le lecteur comme une lame. […] [L]e regard de l'enfant a cela de déchirant qu'il rebondit constamment contre le mur d'une société gangrenée par la corruption, l'injustice et le fatalisme: il n'y a pas d'horizon dans cette Inde-là, et c'est son seul héritage.” However, one should acknowledge that if this part of the article seems convincing, the overall vision developed by the journalist is not shared here.
ABSTRACTS
Many critics have shown that the theme of illnesses is a prevalent one in colonial and postcolonial literatures, notably because the analogy between disease and dis-ease highlights the various ills affecting colonial or postcolonial societies in terms of postcolonial disorders, trauma, loss of identity, alienation, psychological dislocation, objectification, among other concepts. This article focuses on the study of the ‘Other’s Imagined diseases’ in two novels, A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and Family Values (2009), written respectively by the Nobel writer V.S. Naipaul and a young
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Indian woman novelist, Abha Dawesar. Although the contexts and general settings are very different in each narrative, this paper looks into the way diseases are represented in both texts and it analyses the metaphorical and allegorical meanings of maladies as postcolonial symptoms of trauma. Finally the authors’ respective aims in relying on such thematically recurring images will be highlighted. De nombreux critiques ont démontré la prégnance du thème de la maladie dans les textes littéraires coloniaux et postcoloniaux en mettant notamment en lumière l’analogie existant entre les termes anglais de disease (maladie) et dis-ease (le mal-être) qui permet d’insister sur les divers maux affectant les sociétés coloniales ou postcoloniales en mettant l’accent sur des concepts comme les désordres postcoloniaux, le trauma, la perte d’identité, l’aliénation, la dislocation psychologique, l’objectivation, etc. Le présent article étudie les maladies imaginées/imaginaires de l’autre dans deux romans, A House for Mr Biswas (1961) et Family Values (2009), publiés respectivement par l’écrivain nobélisé V.S. Naipaul et par une jeune romancière indienne Abha Dawesar. Bien que les contextes et cadres narratifs soient très différents pour chacun des récits, cet article s’intéresse à la manière dont les maladies sont représentées et il analyse les significations métaphoriques et allégoriques de ces maux, qui apparaissent comme autant de symptômes du trauma. Enfin, les visées de chacun des auteurs, qui s’appuient de façon récurrente sur les thématiques médicales, seront explicitées.
AUTHOR
FLORENCE LABAUNE-DEMEULE Florence Labaune-Demeule is Professor in Postcolonial Literatures at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, Lyon, France. She has more specifically specialized in Anglophone Caribbean and Indian literatures written in English. She has written extensively on writers of Caribbean origin like V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Fred D’Aguiar, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid notably as well as on Anita Desai, Anita Nair, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, etc. She has also published a few books, among which a monograph V.S. Naipaul. L’Enigme de l’arrivée. L’éducation d’un point de vue (2007), a didactic dossier about Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (2011), and a few collections of essays: Eclats de fête (2006), V.S. Naipaul. Ecriture de l’altérité, altérité de l’écriture (2010), Authority and Displacement, Volume One : Exploring Europe/from Europe (2015), Authority and Displacement, Volume Two : Exploring American Shores (2015), and Autorité, déplacement et genres dans les productions culturelles postcoloniales francophones et anglophones (2017). Florence Labaune-Demeule est Professeur des Universités en littératures postcoloniales en anglais à l’Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Lyon, France. Plus particulièrement spécialisée dans les littératures postcoloniales caribéennes et indiennes, elle a publié de nombreux articles sur des auteurs comme V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Fred D’Aguiar, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, ou Anita Desai, Anita Nair, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, etc. Elle a également publié des ouvrages, dont une monographie V.S. Naipaul. L’Enigme de l’arrivée. L’éducation d’un point de vue (2007), un dossier pédagogique sur The God of Small Things d’Arundhati Roy (2011), et des recueils d’articles : Eclats de fête (2006), V.S. Naipaul. Ecriture de l’altérité, altérité de l’écriture (2010), Authority and Displacement, Volume One : Exploring Europe/from Europe (2015), Authority and Displacement, Volume Two : Exploring American Shores (2015), et Autorité, déplacement et genres dans les productions culturelles postcoloniales francophones et anglophones (2017).
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The Horror of Contact: Understanding Cholera in Mann’s Death in Venice
Amrita Ghosh
1 Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) was published in 1912, and written during a time when cholera as a fatal disease had made its presence felt in Italy in 1911 and caused a series of fatalities. This article focuses on the notion of tropicality, and the diseased body and what it means in terms of imagining the colonized spaces as represented in the novella, through the discourse of nineteenth century imperial medicine. Thomas Mann wasn’t factually and historically incorrect when recording the presence of an “Asiatic cholera” originating from India in 1912 in his novella. The historical context of the 1911 cholera epidemic in Italy is indeed significant in the contextualization and the production of the text. Yet, the illness of cholera works in a larger metaphor (using Susan Sontag’s phrase)1 to enable a colonial discourse that serves as a cautionary reminder of barring contact zones, “the horrors of diversity” as Mann’s text states when first describing the emergence of Asiatic cholera in the text. Venice, in Mann’s text becomes a liminal space that opens up to a “contact” with the East – within this space two binaries are set up – the sanitized trope of the West against the source of unclean bodies in the East. The protagonist Gustav Von Aschenbach’s journey into Venice and contracting cholera ultimately establishes the threat of any contact with the “other” due to the “disease burden”2 that becomes a “symbolic register” to facilitate colonialism and suggests a fear of contact with the “othered” body.
2 For the structure of the paper, I would first provide a historical backdrop of the cholera epidemic that Mann encountered, and then the history of contagionism and how it impacts specific social and political imaginations within a colonial encounter. In an expansive work on the historical context of the cholera epidemic and state sanitation practices in Italy in 1911, Thomas Rütten explains that: Mann’s novella “has a solid grounding in historical and autobiographical fact, thus blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction”.3 Rütten goes on to chart what he calls “verifiable events” in
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the cholera outbreak of May 1911 which Mann himself experienced. For Rütten: “The age of narratology has not least produced a growing awareness of the fact that tellers of stories can be, and indeed often are, tellers of history as well, interweaving fiction and fact, and illuminating both in the process”.4 Thus, Rütten is interested in how a more “factual” set of events actually translate and get “represented” in reality in Death in Venice. He also emphasizes that only a very few critics have actually acknowledged how one of the last European cholera epidemics that actually happened in 1911 forms a significant part of Mann’s iconic text.
3 As Rütten explains, Mann and his wife, Katia, left for Venice on 7th May 1911; he then charts the textual chronology and compares to a more specific historical chronology that coincides with Mann and his wife’s journey into Venice. Mann and his wife stayed at the island of Brioni on 9th May 1911, a place that also forms the transition island for the protagonist Gustav Von Aschenbach before he arrives in Venice. The island of Brioni was supervised by Dr. Robert Koch, a famous pathogen expert, who was extensively known in the West and the East for his work on sanitanization and contagious diseases. Koch had sanitized the island first against, malaria and then cholera, something that Rütten argues Mann would have known during the time of his travels. Brioni also became a sort of a “cult place” to showcase how contagious diseases need to be effectively curbed in the western world, something that would have not gone unnoticed by Mann.5 In the Death of Venice, this strain of attempting to sanitize and quarantine the place is noted when Aschenbach also encounters health inspectors at the ship, inspecting passengers once the ship docks at Venice, something that partakes into the historical realism of the fiction. As Rütten claims, that Mann’s writings inhabit a space where: “Alongside the fictitious and the fabulous, they also contain and articulate experiential and textual facts, and just like historiographic writings, they, too, owe their very existence to re-readings of textual forerunners that ‘represent’ reality”.6 Certainly, the historical verisimilitude is important for the medical history of transmission of cholera, and how Italy responded in order to control the disease, yet the larger question that is worthwhile to raise is – what is at stake in such a charting of the historical trajectory of the 1911 cholera outbreak through the Death in Venice? What does it mean to have a literary text blurring fact and fiction of the spread of cholera and more importantly, does it suffice to simply say that fact and fiction are thus blurred in the literary realm?
4 As mentioned earlier, the island of Brioni that Mann and his wife passed through in 1911 had been sanitized by one of the biggest names in the infectious disease world, and Rütten shows how Brioni had: presented itself as an open-air museum that showed increasing numbers of eager visitors what hygiene... was capable of achieving: nature itself could become a laboratory... – could, geographical borders notwithstanding, be modified, and hygiene, together with the military, could, via the blessings of colonisation, advance the grand project of civilisation across the globe.7
5 Beyond this defense of colonialism, what is of particular significance here, is also the underlying discourse of tropicality and the production of colonial spaces and how it imagines “other” diseases. In the quoted extract above, Rütten assumes the grand narrative of civilization and modernity as a colonial project to be transferred from the West to the East. Certainly, Mann’s novella facilitates that discourse as well, as the narrator in the text records that the strain of cholera that spreads as a specter in Italy is an “Asiatic” cholera, which was considered to be one of the deadliest contagious
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diseases, borne out of Bengal in India. What also cannot be denied is the political and symbolic framing of cholera and the relationship disease had with colonialism. Borrowing Warwick Anderson’s phrase, it becomes a case of “excremental colonialism”, that is the colonized space and its people connote a space of lack – of health, discipline and civilization”.8 Anderson in his essay titled the same, focuses on twentienth century American colonial medicinal discourse in the Philippines and argues that American bodies are imagined as clean and sanitary as opposed to the idea of filthy, “grotesque Filipino bodies”.9 His notion of trying to control and regulate unregulated matter and bodies on the basis of excremental practices, becomes a hierarchical narrative emerging a civilizing mission that is starkly similar to the nineteenth century medicinal trajectory.
6 In the novella, the first time, readers hear about the “Asiatic cholera” is after several suggestive moments when a “malady” floating around in Venice is mentioned. Finally, an Englishman at a travel agency reveals to Aschenbach what has “diseased” the city of Venice. Quoting the narrator: For several years Indian cholera had shown an increased tendency to spread and travel. Born in the sultry swamps of the Ganges delta, ascended with the mephitic odor of that unrestrained and unfit wasteland, that wilderness avoided by men, in the bamboo thickets of which the tiger is crouching, the epidemic had spread to Hindustan, to China, to Afghanistan and Persia and even to Moscow. But while Europe was fearing the specter might make its entrance over land, it had appeared in several Mediterranean ports, spread by Syrian traders, had arrived in Toulon, Malaga, Palermo, and Naples, also in Calabria and Apulia. The North seemed to have been spared. But in May of that year, the horrible vibrios were discovered in the emaciated and blackened bodies of a sailor and of a greengrocer. The deaths were kept secret. But after a week it had been ten, twenty or thirty victims, and in different quarters. An Austrian man had died in his hometown under unambiguous circumstances, after he had vacationed for a few days in Venice and so the first rumors of the malady appeared in German newspapers.10 (Italics mine)
7 This is the only time that the novella pronounces the Asiatic cholera germinating from India, the “unfit wasteland” – “a wilderness” that is to be avoided and a specter that is waiting to take over Europe. The hostility of the tropical environment is evident here, and interestingly enough, a crouching tiger hiding in bamboo thickets is even mentioned, completing the orientalist vision marking the unstable, dangerous tropics. Arnold in his study of imperial medicine also points out that the nineteenth century: “emergent discipline of ‘tropical medicine’ gave scientific credence to the idea of a tropical world as a primitive and dangerous environment in contradistinction to an increasingly safe and sanitized [European] world”.11 Mann’s representation of cholera and its genesis in the Indian subcontinent reiterates the same discourse in the text. Here, it is also important that the spread of cholera is also via Syrian traders who pass on the disease to Italy via ports. The fear of contact through land extends to the sea, which becomes a liminal space that doesn’t protect but becomes a flowing and dangerous contact zone via the Syrians. Both land and space enact a crisis of colonial imaginary through the spread of disease.
8 Sontag in her book Illness as Metaphor also charts the metaphorical significance of diseases and explains that: “any important disease who causality is murky” is then associated with the deepest dread with the subject of the disease – “ as decayed, polluted, corrupt”; thus “disease itself becomes a metaphor.12” She specifically focuses on history of tuberculosis and cancer but also briefly mentions cholera in Mann’s
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novella. Thus, according to her, disease and quarantining the disease becomes a metaphor and a symbol for “social disorder” from where it originated. That the source of the disease is the Ganges delta in India then becomes important in the way it generates the colonized space also as a space of disorder, needing supervision, medicine and civilizational modernity. Sontag’s emphasis on “how meanings of diseases become projected onto the world” is key here.13 In the context of Death in Venice, this strain of disorder, the horror of contact with a “diseased space” is noted once again when the narrator mentions the quarantine attempts in Venice: In early June the quarantine barracks of the hospital had been filling silently, in the two orphanages there was no longer enough room, and a horrific traffic developed between the city and San Michele. But the fear of general damage, regard for the recently opened exhibition of paintings in the municipal gardens, for the enormous financial losses that threatened the tourist industry in case of a panic, had more impact in the city than love of truth and observation of international agreements.14
9 This passage highlights the fear of contact with a threatening colonized space that can wreak havoc on socio-economic structures – art, economy, gardens—but also curiously enough, in a moment that seems like a slippage, it is noted that this pandemic fear even overpowers “love of truth” – that is, it is not “truth”.
10 The text also suggests that islands of Brioni and Venice were undergoing quarantine of potential sick people, travelers who were sick. In this context, the medical history of “quarantine” raises some interesting facts about how the concept of quarantine worked. Eugenia Tognotti explains, the word quarantine comes from the Italian word, “quaranta,” meaning 40. As she explains: [quarantine] it was adopted as an obligatory means of separating persons, animals, and goods that may have been exposed to a contagious disease. Since the fourteenth century, quarantine has been the cornerstone of a coordinated disease- control strategy, including isolation, sanitary cordons, bills of health issued to ships, fumigation, disinfection, and regulation of groups of persons who were believed to be responsible for spreading the infection.15
11 Tognotti also states that: “the first city to perfect a system of maritime quarantine was Venice, which because of its particular geographic configuration and its prominence as a commercial center, was dangerously exposed”.16 The only way to check the spread of infection was to cordon off the potential source and infected people. However, soon this translated into preventing minority groups, strangers, Jews, persons with leprosy from entering the cities.17 During the first wave of cholera outbreaks in 19 th century Europe, medicine was ineffective and the only way again was to cordon off the cities and use the quarantine method. Sick people and travelers from places where cholera was prevalent were inspected and separated for the forty-day period and sent to lazarettoes. But soon with the wave of cholera outbreaks, in 1836, Naples stopped the free mobility of prostitutes and beggars, who were automatically considered carriers of the disease.18 Hence, the disease started being associated with a stigma and a lower strata syndrome where certain people would be discriminated and barred from entering normative spaces within the city. The “outbreak narrative”19 of cholera (using Priscilla Wald’s term,) therefore, has significant consequences on how it affects certain subjects being controlled, limited and represented in specific light. The quarantine effect in Mann’s text works in this same way fostering a fear of limiting contact with the other, and the “blackened bodies” touched by the disease to be kept away in quarantine.
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12 Pablo Mukherjee in his study on Cholera and the British empire also makes the incisive point that the easy association of cholera with India constructs an image of India as the tropical space that leads to a case of “palliative imperialism,” in which: the medical authorities of the nineteenth century carefully created a "civilizational" discourse of "tropical" diseases that was explicitly geared towards achieving imperial or colonial success and provided a template for fiction such as Rudyard Kipling's. Here, [he] concentrates on someof the most consistent features of this discourse: the representation of India's historical and geographical environment as being "diseased"; the representation of cholera as an embodied "invasion" of the (European) body which was a problematic reversal of the historical invasion of India by the British.20
13 Thus, it is of crucial importance that Gustav Aschenbach dies of cholera or as the text suggests, he incurs the disease in Venice. That the cholera outbreak happened in Italy in 1911 is not a case of debate, or one is also not challenging the fact that Asiatic cholera or the Indian strain of cholera was a tough communicable disease to reckon with, but what I am interested in is how the idea of the disease became a dominant factor to understand native space as disease ridden and lacking civilization. The representation of cholera in the text warrants our attention to how “empire” works in layered, nuanced ways invoking the discourse of “tropicality” which becomes an essentialist one to advocate colonialism.
14 Ironically, even within the practices of Western medicine and treatments of the disease, which the imperial medicinal discourse prided itself on, in most cases the British were clueless regarding how to curb or heal a cholera ridden patient. Arnold in his investigation of British management of cholera explains that the British board of medicine set up in India was more interested in persuading the Indian doctors of the "superiority of Western medicine”.21 However, when it came to advocating treatment “the British doctors borrowed heavily from the Indian counterparts, (Indian Ayurvedic and Muslim Unani medicinal practices) in prescribing similar drugs, mostly black pepper, calomel, ginger and asafetida mixed with opium which some vaids and hakims also used)”.22 Ironically, even after lifting from indigenous medical practices and initially convinced that cholera was meteorologically caused, European doctors remained convinced of their own superiority and practices.23 The first cholera epidemics in India and later in Europe also coincided with a Western attack on Indian medicine. And later when the ideas of quarantine and germ sanitation entered the medical discourse, the gap grew wider with medicine impacting the social and racial divide. Thus, while it is easy to seek “real” narratives in Mann’s novella, this notion of tropicality locates a divide, and informs of a larger ideological construction emerging through the idea of diseased spaces.
15 At the very beginning of the text, Gustav Aschenbach’s character is established as one who is yearning to free himself from a European life of “productivity” – as the narrator states, “Too much occupied with the duties imposed by his ego and the European soul, too overburdened with the duty of production... he had contended himself wholly with that knowledge of the Earth’s surface that can be gained by anyone without ever having to abandon his circle and was never even tempted to leave Europe.”24 Here, the assumption of a collective European soul of productivity is set against the larger trope of western production, advancement and a languid sense of the other, stultified and lacking “productivity.” This dual trope further suggests how Aschenbach’s journey into Venice and to intersect with the idea of “East” is already set up to be a failure.
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16 Later in the text, walking on the streets of Germany, Aschenbach desires to travel to an exotic landscape and conjures a space in his mind’s eye that transports him to a space of alterity. As the narrator states: He saw, as a sample of all those wonders and horrors of the diversity on earth which his desire was suddenly able to imagine, an enormous landscape, a tropical swamp under a moist and heavy sky, wet, lush and unhealthy, a primordial wilderness of islands and mud-bearing backwaters that men avoid. The shallow islands, the soil of which was covered with leafs as thick as hands, with enormous ferns, with juicy, macerated and wonderfully flowering plants, ejected upwards hairy palm trunks, and strangely formless trees, whose roots sprung from the trunks and connected to the water or the ground through the air, formed disorienting arrangements. On the brackish, glaucously-reflecting stream milk-white, bowl-sized flowers were floating; high-shouldered birds of all kinds with shapeless beaks were standing on tall legs in the shallow water and looked askance unmoving, while through vast reed fields there sounded a clattering grinding and whirring, as if by soldiers in their armaments; the onlooker thought he felt the tepid and mephitic odor of that unrestrained and unfit wasteland, which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay, between the knotty trunks of a bamboo thicket he for a moment believed to perceive the phosphorescent eyes of the tiger—and felt his heart beating with horror and mysterious yearning. Finally the hallucination vanished, and Aschenbach, shaking his head, resumed his promenade along the fences of the stonecutters25.
17 This hallucination works in important ways in its larger impulse towards what tropical “othered” spaces signify – in a way, it harkens us back to a Conradian “heart of darkness” where Marlow’s first encounters with Africa also constitutes a narrative constructed by problematic underpinnings of an “primitive” space. Similarly, Aschenbach’s vision underscores a wild, primitive space, a stark reminder of the threat of contact and heterogeneity by noting the “horrors of diversity” and the tropical, unhealthy land, where even the sun, the trees, the odors, the appearance, the sky and the people are different – the space of difference confronts his European subjectivity in a discourse of extreme otherness. This radical alterity serves as an epistemological hegemony, which in this context already represents a vantage point of Aschenbach’s gaze towards this “primordial wilderness,” a dangerous space lacking civilization, science and medicine against the stable “modern” culture. Interestingly enough also, the urge to maintain the hegemonic homogenous state is embedded in the narrator’s fear in the “horrors of diversity.”
18 This kind of setting already sets in motion an understanding of the larger colonial ‘outbreak narrative’ of communicable diseases and its implications. As Mukherjee shows, epidemics under colonialism, were fostered by: “the global imperial system, spread via the very material structures of empire itself-by its communicative network of roads, railways, and canals; its forcible and violent conversion of societies into markets dedicated to maximization of private profit... the emigration of (largely western European) people, livestock and plants and their settlement process in the rest of the world; and even the entrenchment of certain knowledge systems and institutions and the marginalization of others.”26 Thus, with the emergence and peak of colonialism and European contact from late 18th to the early 20th century critics like Mukherjee and Arnold reinstate that there was a huge change in epidemiological systems impacting people in Africa, Asia and Oceania. Needless to say, the contact of peoples and sickness or a cultural contact was not a one-way process but a dual one. This is charted
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extensively by Arnold’s study in which he records how diseases spread through colonial trade and transportation.27
19 Furthermore, charting the history of sanitization and empire, Ishita Pande’s exhaustive study on medicine and race in colonial Bengal shows the critical merging of power and medicine that occurred in nineteenth century colonized spaces, and how medicine ceased to be only a curative, diagnostic tool; instead, as Pande argues, medicine became the ground and currency over which the colonial power had its foundations. As she states: “Medicine became a fundamental expression of the ideology of imperial liberalism: ‘curing their ills’ to ‘set them free’”.28 Pande focuses primarily on colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century and explains that concerns of sanitizing Calcutta or the “making of sanitary subjects” was “intricately linked with the projects of curing and civilizing the native of Bengal”29 where the segregated city with a white colonial side of the city was demarcated from the native side and ultimately this idea of the “dual city” was replaced by the goal of constructing a “sanitary city” between the 1830s and 1850s, which Pande calls the project of “empire of reform.” In the early nineteenth century, this segregated idea of Bengal and mainly Calcutta also circulated the threat of contagion which Pande argues extended to “biological and moral degradation, [and] thus became materialized in the form of filth”.30 The discourse of “filth” and its imaginary in the colonial mind is especially important, as Pande points out that it enacted a symbolic marker of otherness between Europe and its other. Mann’s “unfit wasteland” thus projects this narrative of filth which became a threatening matter and also posed as a limit, defining the self and its other, the bodies separated.
20 In this larger historical trajectory of colonial medicinal and sanitization discourse, the trope of cholera then becomes an important critical narrative within a certain cultural and political milieu to not only justify imperialism, but also to “produce” an imaginary of a space, one that becomes hegemonic in naming the tropics. Cholera becomes an essence of India and secures a space in a “worlding of the medicine and tropical world.” Arnold’s investigation on cholera also establishes the fact that the disease saw more fatalities and severe spread in a class divide – The poor and the undernourished were the worst affected in the 1817-21 epidemic. Though European residents were alarmed at the spread of cholera, they were not seriously affected. Mortality among slum dwellers of Calcutta was high, in comparison to the "higher classes of Native and Europeans." This pattern was also confirmed from observations in Bombay and Madras (Arnold, 1993).
21 Also, importantly, the spread of cholera is attributed to the caravans, railway, ships and the travelers and pilgrims have been traditionally blamed for spreading cholera (not to “unhealthy” barbaric natives and their filthy lifestyles. Tracing the history of the first anti-cholera vaccine in colonial South Asia, Rajib Dasgupta states that Haffkine, a British company brought the first vaccine for cholera in India in 1896 and the section of people given the vaccines were only the soldiers and troops to protect the British army. However, the pilgrims who congregated for fairs and large religious gatherings near rivers and ghats (embankments) and were considered a source for the epidemic outbreaks were taxed by the British regime. As Dasgupta states: “Strict control over pilgrims and pilgrimages including quarantines were instituted to protect cantonments and municipalities. Pilgrim tax was recommended to pay for additional sanitary measures”.31 Instead of having pilgims vaccinated, the policy was to ban or turn pilgrims away from fair grounds, which led to severe antagonism within the native population. So, the imperial practices were hardly geared to really target the infection
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source. Dasgupta also notes: “Even as late as 1930, the suggestion of compulsory inoculation of pilgrims for the Allahabad Kumbh Mela was rejected by the government”.32 However, though some of the epidemic increase in cases have been sought to be correlated with Kumbh and Ardh Kumbh (religious) Fairs, as aforementioned, all fairs did not inevitably lead to cholera epidemic. Resisting the colonial discourse, Dasgupta argues that: “while undoubtedly some of the Fairs were associated with epidemics, the fact remains that colonial medical history over- emphasised their role”.33 Thus, medicine became not merely a practice and implementation, but also an ideology that impacted contacts between people and the relationship between boundaries and spaces. The cholera pandemic also became a source of not just fear of contagion and mixing of boundaries and bodies, but Pande again observes that the spread of cholera in Bengal and elsewhere to other parts of the world was a matter of failure for the British Empire. She points out: “the British empire could no longer present itself as the agent of civilization, bringing light to the benighted parts of the globe… if Bengal was the home of cholera, colonial expansion and global trade were the causes of contagion”.34
22 The “verifiable” truth of the 1911 cholera outbreak may be enough for some to dismiss the colonial trope and its larger significance in Death in Venice. However, it is apparent that Mann’s text posits certain ways of representing colonized spaces, fostering the idea of a “tropical dangerous space” that as Mukherjee states, “[was] not always congruent with the actually existing geographical and topographical tropical location” but it “proved to be a key ideology of European imperialism.35” Hence, Gustav Aschenbach has to die in the end because his European self has come in contact with the diseased East—more significantly, it also records a crisis and anxiety of the empire, a crisis of contact.
23 If Mann is established as a “meticulous chronicler of facts” – nothing is denying him that against the historical backdrop of the text was a cholera epidemic, yet as I have tried to argue in this essay, the tropicality of the disease and the discourse it disseminates a case of “palliative imperialism.” At best, Mann’s text posits the age old imperial fear of colonized and colonizer coming in any contact, and at worst, the text presents a deep rooted anxiety of contamination – “a horror of diversity” that Ashenbach first notes when talking about the imagined space of India and disease. Needless to say, the history of medicine and its impact on literature takes on significant epistemological and ontological realms that affect us as people in a wider context. I end here with civil servant and famous colonial writer, Sir William Hunter’s panicked announcement regarding the cholera outbreak in Europe: “The squalid army of natives, with its rags, hair and skin freighted with infection may any year slay thousands of the most beautiful and talented of our age in Vienna, London or Washington”.36
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NOTES
1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988. Sontag in this book argues about the symbolic register of illness as culturally represented. 2. David Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 1. 3. Thomas Rütten, “Cholera in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice,” Gesnerus. Vol 66, n 2, 2009, p. 256-287. 4. Rütten, “Cholera in Thomas Mann’s”, p. 257. 5. Ibid., p. 258-262. 6. Ibid., p. 257. 7. Ibid., p. 265. 8. Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution,” Critical Inquiry, Vol 21, n 3, Spring 1995, p. 640-669. 9. Ibid., p. 640. 10. Thomas Mann. Death in Venice, Vintage Books. 1998, p. 46. 11. Arnold, Imperial Medine and Indigenous Societies, p. 7. 12. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p 58. 13. Ibid., p 58. 14. Mann, Death in Venice, p. 46. 15. Eugene Tognotti, “Lessons from the History of Quarantine, from Plague to Influenza A. Emerging Infectious Diseases. Vol 19, n 2, February 2013, p. 254. 16. Tognotti, “Lessons from the History,” p. 255. 17. Ibid., p. 254. 18. Ibid., p. 255. 19. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and The Outbreak Narrative, Durham, Duke University Press, 2008. Wald in this book discusses the emergence of contagion and epidemiology and argues that such narratives and stories have consequences to stigmatize some people to a certain derogative stature and impact survival and economies. 20. Pablo Mukherjee, “Cholera, Kipling and Tropical India.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard (Ed.), Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 85. 21. David Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism in British India,” Past and Present, No 113, 1986, p. 136. 22. Ibid., p. 136. 23. Ibid., p. 137. 24. Mann, Death in Venice, p. 200. 25. Mann, Death in Venice, p. 199-200. 26. Mukherjee, “Cholera, Kipling and Tropical India,” p. 82. 27. Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, p. 5. 28. Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal, New York, Routledge, 2010, p. 1. 29. Ibid., p. 98. 30. Ibid., p. 101. 31. Dasgupta, Rajib. Cholera in Delhi: A Study of Time Trends and Determinants, Ph.D Dissertation. School of Social Sciences, JNU, India. 2014, p. 116. 32. Ibid., p. 117. 33. Ibid., p. 124. 34. Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism, p. 103. 35. Mukherjee, “Cholera, Kipling and Tropical India”, p. 80. 36. Arnold, “Cholera and Colonialism in British India”, p. 142.
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ABSTRACTS
Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig) was published in 1912, and written during a time when cholera as a fatal disease had made its presence felt in Italy in 1911 and caused a series of fatalities. This article focuses on the notion of tropicality, and the diseased body and what it means in terms of imagining the colonized spaces as represented in the novella, through the discourse of nineteenth century imperial medicine. The historical context of the 1911 cholera epidemic in Italy is indeed significant in the contextualization and the production of the text. Yet, as the paper argues, the disease of cholera works in a larger metaphor to enable a colonial discourse that serves as a cautionary reminder of barring contact zones, “the horrors of diversity” as Mann’s text states when first describing the emergence of Asiatic cholera in the text.
AUTHOR
AMRITA GHOSH Amrita Ghosh is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Linnaeus University's center of Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial research. She has a Ph.D in Postcolonial literature and Partition Studies and her interests are border studies, Partition, literature from conflict zones and gender studies. Ghosh has been a full time lecturer at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, prior to her postdoc, and she also serves as a co-founder editor of an online journal Cerebration, and is the associate editor of Feminist Modernist Studies, by Routledge.
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Transcultural Psychiatry and the French Provision of Health for Migrants: Between Mediation and Misunderstanding
Dafne Accoroni
Methodology
1 I carried out multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at two different sites in Paris: in a foyer1 of the Île-de-France region and at the transcultural psychiatric Bellevue Centre for migrants’ mental health.2 I spent a year long period at the former, where I conducted participant observation, semi-structured and focus group interviews. The foyer, in the in the departmental area of Seine-Saint-Denis, is commonly referred to as the ‘neuf-trois’, the ‘nine-three’, in reference to its postal code, 93. According to the 2013 census, the neuf-trois has the highest number of migrants of the whole Île-de-France region (predominantly of Western and Northern African origin) and also has the highest mortality and unemployment rates compared to the national figures (respectively 5.7 per thousand and 13.5 %).3 The residents of the foyer4 provide the case study for the first-generation migrants’ health seeking behaviour and coping strategies.
2 I spent the first six months of my ethnographic data collection at the Bellevue Centre. The Centre delivers transcultural psychiatry to migrant patients with the support of a multi-disciplinary team made up of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and anthropologists from Anglophone countries (Canada and the United Kingdom). As a medical anthropologist, I contributed to the research and study groups run by the Centre and participated in the team’s weekly meetings. Here, I could observe the provision of mental health services for migrants, and the latter’s attendance and composition.
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Background: Transcultural Psychiatry in France
3 The aftermath of World War Two brought with it a huge movement of people from the ex-colonies (due to the need for a labour force in the reconstruction of France, to care for and assist orphans, refugees and so forth), so that interest in mental health studies began to shift towards comparative approaches with respect to people from different social and cultural backgrounds.5 At this time, the World Federation for Mental Health was created by ‘J.R. Rees, the chief of the psychiatric services of the British army’; there followed by H.B.M. Murphy’s comparative studies on ‘dispersed people’ (in particular refugees) that also revealed the impact of migration on the aetiology of psychopathologies.6 Hence, interest shifted toward the evaluation of cultural difference as a focal element in psychoanalysis and therapy. In 1957, the American Association of Anthropology dedicated its annual meeting to the theme of ‘Culture and Mental Health’, while the newly formed World Psychiatric Association organised a conference on the same theme.7
4 Comparative and transcultural psychiatry became the arena for the confrontation of analyses reading colonization and the colonised people in psychological (cf. Mannoni) and socio-political terms, while historical, political conjunctures and cultural representations became ways of addressing psychopathology.8 In France, scientific attention focussed on the colonies in West and North Africa as a way of solving the ‘African problem’.9 Anthropological work moved towards the knowledge and description of local understandings of illness and suffering, thus producing a shift towards ‘cognitive and semantic anthropology’.10 In Senegal, the Ortigues and Zempleni attempted to make sense of the culturally-framed meaning and expression of psychopathology, so challenging their supposed universality that often coincided with ethnocentric views, while psychiatrist Collomb at the Fann Hospital of Dakar carried out unprecedented community-based therapy.11 Collomb implemented classical psychiatric care within a network in which both the hospital and the community provided support to the patient; this would become one of the ground-breaking tools of this new transcultural epoch. This project was never replicated in Paris, although, among grassroots associations working on migration and health, healers are currently invited to discuss and reflect on the possibility of bridging the gap between the biomedical system and the ‘traditional’ one.
5 In France, ‘ethnopsychiatry reached its apogee with the foundation of the George Devereux Centre, annexed to the University of Paris VIII (1993)’.12 Devereux 13 inaugurated a new way of doing psychiatry, by combining clinical practice, research and teaching. Tobie Nathan, his student, championed his teacher’s approach by associating anthropology and psychiatry as ethnopsychiatry. 14 From his perspective, to have a migrant in therapy in France would imply reproducing the migrant’s milieu in the therapeutic setting by introducing, for example, amulets (or other objects) and the group (made up of a number of therapists and experts on the patient’s culture). Both the use of objects and of the group were consistent, in Nathan’s clinical practice, with the migrant’s traditional environment. Nonetheless, Nathan’s theory and clinical practice have been subjected to criticism in recent years by both anthropologists and clinicians in France, who accuse him of carrying out ‘folk therapy’ and reducing the migrant to a mere copy of his supposed culture of origin. First among the critics is anthropologist Didier Fassin addressing in particular healthcare among Western
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African migrants.15 Implicit in both his critique and in the clinical work currently carried out in Paris is the refusal to think of the migrant’s adaptation as a one way- process. The patient’s wellbeing is thus simply not achieved once the migrant has re- integrated himself into his own community (from which he has probably distanced himself, voluntarily or not). Fassin clearly attacks Nathan in his 1999 article, whose title paraphrases Nathan’s famous book L’influence qui guérit, expanding on the theory of one’s origin as the main formative experience of one’s psyche. Such a datum, according to Nathan, would be incontrovertible.16 Fassin, by referring to Foucault, shows how colonialism constituted a ‘war of races, construed as a tension between a nostalgic ideal of sovereignty and a one made up of bio-politics’, in which again and again, the supremacy of one people over another is condoned.17 In Fassin’s analysis, echoing British transcultural psychiatry, what is at stake in the migrants’ healthcare, is precisely the affirmation of power (of the dominant group) over those excluded from it (the migrants and the subdominant groups).18 This may occur in various guises, he says, from blatant racism to obtuse reductionism in therapy, making of one’s culture one’s exclusive fate, or rather, one’s ‘culture as a closed, undivided reality, impossible to share, the reason why cultures have to be differentiated (…) by watertight frontiers’ and thus dominated.19 Moreover, the author argues that migration and health have long occupied a marginal space within the study of tropical diseases, a subcategory relegating the migrants, with their culture and/or diseases, to a minor field of interest. 20 Culturalism, another concept at the heart of current criticism and research in France, marked the migrants as people exhibiting certain cultural and biological characteristics, which were ‘other’ or ‘different’ from those borne by the larger community. Fassin cites paludisme (malaria), saturnism (lead poisoning) and so forth, as examples of migrants’ illnesses, to which healthcare services responded with tailored programmes of prevention and information.
6 Littlewood and Lipsedge question whether specific migrant illnesses exist, or to put differently, whether there might be a ‘migrant’s psychopathology’, due to the difficulty engendered by his/her adaptation process.21 In this sense, grassroots, clinical and anthropological work shows that the answer is a mixed one, in that illness is a complex experience entailing both societal (of the sending and receiving countries) and individual meaning-making beyond the specificity of the physical disease. In Europe, and in France in particular, healthcare for minority groups has been associated over time with social rights and, more specifically, with the right to receive healthcare, regardless of one’s status (legal or illegal migrant). Fassin subtly remarks that in France there has been another shift: from the successful fight to obtain human rights such as healthcare for all, to the demand for social rights on the grounds of medical need. Thus, migrants may now claim residency rights, if they can prove that they can only receive treatment in France, so that social, political and anthropological debates have moved closer to the universalism of the droit commun, in the opposite direction to the initial struggles, advocating the recognition of migrants’ rights and cultural difference. One again, Fassin’s argument that migrants’ mental health issues may, in fact, be political and economic in origin foregrounds how Nathan's cultural enclave and ritual objects approach neglect this possibility entirely.
7 There are now two main theoretical standpoints in French clinical theory. The first is acculturation, conceived of as a process of change in which the migrant becomes involved in the host community. The second is that of métissage (cultural and ethnic mixing), as the way of approaching the migrant population with an open gaze, which
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does not reduce the individual to his own background, but uses it instead as a valid tool of interpretation enabling an understanding of the ways in which pain and suffering are articulated socially, culturally and religiously. Psychiatrist Marie Rose Moro, a well- known figure on the transcultural psychiatric scene, has introduced the working concept of métissage in her practice with children born to migrant parents or to parents of migrant descent. She was Nathan’s student and has incorporated part of her former mentor’s teaching into her practice, while also distancing herself from some of its aspects; for example, she does not use ritual objects during psychotherapy. According to her, ethnographies of illness are essentially a methodological tool in transcultural psychiatry.22 Métissage is the element affirming the universality of the psyche, while maintaining cultural difference in its dynamism within the context and power relationships those children inhabit.23 This approach does not imprison the psyche in the determinism of one’s background, but rather widens it towards the possibility of different choices, and thereby, towards an act of consciousness.
Context
Foyer 93
8 The foyers are a central issue for the Republic historically, politically and socially. The first ones emerged as a consequence of the France’s post-war reconstruction, and its need for a labour force in the aftermath of World War II. The first residents were Algerians, hosted in foyers/dormitories, which were generally converted ex-factories. At the time, these buildings resembled military areas under the control of a guardian who watched over them permanently. The foyers now have a completely different status: the migrants living there are residents with whom neither the mayor of Paris nor the police nor other third parties can interfere unless criminal activities take place. Given the number of illegal migrants in the foyers, one wonders in fact, how this can be. Thanks to the infamous rebellions of the 1970s and the ongoing work of social services and associations in the foyers, the latter have reached the status of a social residence, or parc social, granting their residents the right to privacy.24 Nevertheless, the foyers are still no-go areas for French people. Those in Paris are particularly unsightly, being the oldest and never having been restored: many are falling apart and security and health are never guaranteed. Open sewage, no anti-fire measures, no hygiene in the collective kitchen and so on, demonstrate the way in which West African migrants’ fate in France is entangled with the political and historical context which socially constructs their reality.
9 The foyers appear to be much like independent microcosms. They are spread out over the whole Île-de-France region and have been a part of the physical landscape for some time. Nonetheless, they remain foreign to most of the French people who are not directly involved with them. The “nine-three” foyer is located in Seine-Saint-Denis, to the North East of Paris, and is one of the banlieue closest to Paris, together with Haute de Seine and Val de Marne.25
10 Overall, Sub-Saharan migration represents only 12% of inward migration to France. Approximately thirty-seven thousand Malian migrants live legally in France, while another thousand are undocumented migrants, principally in the Paris region.26 My work addresses the portion of male migrants who live in the foyers, about 150.000 men
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housed in 700 foyers, of which 250 are in the Île-de-France region (about 55.000 official places).27 As Timera has pointed out, notwithstanding the small number of people living there in comparison to the wider migrant population, the foyers are the gateway to future housing and work for West African migrants, especially when they are illegal.28 Thus, the foyers are representative of these migrants’ strategies in settling in the big city, since over time they host different generations of migrants. This is also true for other groups from the Sahel, organised in the foyers by village of origin - not necessarily ethnically -, in Paris as much as in other cities of France such as Lyon and Marseille.
The Bellevue Centre
11 The Bellevue Centre was founded about forty years ago and has about two thousand patients currently in therapy (of whom 10% are children), corresponding to twelve thousand medical and non-medical sessions held each year. The Centre falls under the Agence Régionale de l’Hospitalisation d’Île-de-France, which means that the institute is under the control of the regional council as to preventive programmes and the promotion of mental health. This institute recruits its patients from the whole Île-de- France region and its status is that of private health care institute (Établissement de Santé Privé d’Intérêt Collectif). The Bellevue Centre applies transcultural psychiatry in its practice with migrant patients. Medical anthropology, that is, the understanding of the migrants’ cultural background in the aetiology, formation and expression of the illness is emphasised, analysed and managed by the team. Traditional healing is not part of the psychiatric care offered; as a method it is, in fact, criticized. However, traditional, religious, biographical and social elements, which may be conducive to the individual’s formulation of the illness, are taken into account in order to provide a service which might best answer the migrants’ needs and therapeutic demands.
12 The clinical unit premises its work on the notions of emic/etic, disease/illness as they were developed by Eisenberg and on the explanatory model as elaborated by American anthropologist and psychiatrist Kleinman on the relationship between illness and culture, wherein physical and psychic suffering are expressed according to cultural metaphors, a form of cultural dressing-up (habillage in French) specific to culture. 29After Kleinman, BC’s working concepts are those of sickness, disease and illness, imbricated with a particular emphasis on the acculturation process of the migrant patient. Psychiatrists and psychologists attempt not simply to decode, but also to make sense of the patients’ explanatory models of suffering, which may not correspond to the clinical and western nosography or even to the patient’s actual behaviour.30 The ambivalence of the patients, split between two worlds is similar to that of the psychiatrist, also caught at the edge of two worlds: the French one, from which his therapeutic tradition stems, and that of the patients’, which he is demanded to ameliorate.
13 The Bellevue Centre is the first medical institute to have inaugurated clinical medical anthropology in France. This entails meeting the migrants’ demands in the clinical practice on the one hand, and on the other, training personnel in transcultural psychiatry by involving them in ongoing research. Hurdles that the team has to confront daily are language barriers and the difference in cultural representations between care-giver and patient, who might not share the ‘implicit codes of the
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discourse about mental illness’.31 The Bellevue Centre has recently adopted the working concept of ‘cultural competence’, in accordance with other transcultural and international psychiatric milieus in the United States and the United Kingdom.
14 The Bellevue Centre’s psychopathologies chart presents cases of mood disorders (34%), neuroses (28%), and schizophrenia (8%), the remainder consisting of non-specified cases, drop-outs and so on. These diagnoses testify to the fact that an ‘ontological implication between migration and illness cannot be drawn, but rather, that mood disorders appear within difficult migratory trajectories or devastating experiences of exile’.32
Samba
15 Samba has been one of the Bellevue Centre’s users for a limited period. He is from Dakar, Senegal, and aged forty-two. His clinical record reported him in a state of confusion and anxiety, while experiencing social marginality and achieving little progress in therapy. Samba had had a car accident in Paris, after which he could no longer cope with the normal course of life. When I met him, he had no employment apart from running a little jewellery workshop that provided him with the little revenue on which he lived. However, his social life was not so limited. He paid visits to a friend at Foyer93, generally on Fridays for the ritual prayer, and also frequented the Mouride Centre at Aulnay, in the Île-de-France region. 33 He had friends living in his neighbourhood, who paid him visits, and vice-versa, and he taught the Koran to the children where he lived. When we met, he was on medication. Samba shared a very modest flat to the north of Paris with a Senegalese friend. He had been referred to the Bellevue Centre by the mental health centre of Seine-Saint Denis. He had his carte vitale, or French social security card, that allowed him to have access to a doctor and free medication.34 He did not attend the Bellevue Centre for long, and soon stopped going altogether. After a couple of months during which we had met almost regularly, he stopped answering my calls. I lost track of him eventually, just as the Bellevue Centre did; anything might have occurred, from his having returned to Senegal, to having been repatriated or having lost his accommodation. My account of Samba’s suffering is thus limited to the short time we spent together.
16 I met Samba at his place and at a café next to Foyer93, not far from his workshop. At the beginning, Samba would not talk of his illness, apart from admitting that the car accident had dramatically changed his life. It was when we started seeing each other more frequently that he elaborated on his suffering. It became clear that his affliction had to do with his dissatisfying way of life in Paris, the lack of family and the impossibility of feeling an attachment to the people in France as he had back home, from which ensued anxiety and disorientation. His regret at not having a wife was also related to the stigma that his status as a single man entails in his Muslim and conservative milieu, where sexual satisfaction is only sanctioned within marriage.
17 Dial’s analysis of marriage in Senegal shows how it marks the entry in society and independence from the family of birth, which lose their control over the couple.35 For many, marrying and then divorcing has become a strategy of social advance, as much as a way of affirming one’s perceived role and sexuality, especially in the urban context of Dakar. At the Dakar Fann Hospital, Professor Babakar Diop used a Lacanian reading of the family dynamics in his clinical work, where different metaphors and symbols
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represented the cultural traits of the traditional Wolof society. The husband, for example, representing law and authority, geno baye, is also the one who can pass on the baraka to his children, while the ‘mother’s good work’ may bring good fortune to them. 36 For Samba, not having a wife was tantamount to being emasculated, not having a leadership role (over the wife and in the family), and eventually, not being able to pass on his baraka. In a way, Samba compensated for the latter by teaching children the Koran and Cheick Amadou Bamba’s qasidas, or religious poems. He said that this was very important, so that the new generation of Muslims in France would not lose contact with their Muslim and Mouride tradition.
18 Samba received children in his house, where people he knew entrusted them to him with his teaching. He gave accounts of his lessons with passion and serenity, which he did not show when speaking of other moments of his day, which all came across as a source of anxiety. Not only did teaching the children take place at his place, thus in a familiar environment to him, but also, as a teacher, his skills were employed in one of the most heartfelt values within the Mouride community: the education of the new generation in line with Cheick Amadou Bamba’s lesson of tarbiyya, or esoteric science. Samba taught them the rudiments of Arabic writing and reading, a few of Cheick Amadou Bamba’s qasidas and the most important prayers of the Koran, such as the Al- Fatiha, the opening, ritual prayer of the Koran deemed capable of warding off evil influences.
19 He talked extensively of the importance of doing things for others and of doing good as a way of gaining baraka. In Islam, it is conceived of as the sacred gift Allah concedes to His ‘friends’, the holy men, wali, but also as a quid, which people can obtain by praying sincerely, or by being at the service of the community and, generally, by doing good deeds, such as carrying out the five pillars of Islam, visiting the saint’s tomb, zyad, by bringing back bottled holy sand from Touba (the sacred town of the Mourides), and by obeying one’s marabout, the Sufi spiritual leader. In sum, both spiritual and material practices may enable the faithful to receive such a blessing.
20 Samba hinted at the idea that his illness was ultimately part of God’s design. He thought of it as a condemnation: God had mysteriously decided that he should be ill, that this should be his fate. In his words: Everything comes from Allah, so if He’s s not happy with you, well, you won’t have a very good life. Or it might happen that if you suffer in this world, you’ll be happier in the beyond. Certainly, it’s not money that counts, it’s doing things in moderation, not thinking badly of other people and hoping that, little by little, by every good action you do you’ll be rewarded (…). Some people though, no matter what they do, won’t be happy in this life.
21 His ‘fate’ did not obviate his guilt for all the things that he was unable to achieve and that are endorsed, or their lack thereof stigmatised, in his milieu. Samba made sense of his situation with social arguments (not being married and not being able to go home), medical ones (his reduced mental faculties and anxiety) and symbolic ones (his condition was part of a divine project), from which he drew a kind of strength, perseverance and patience. Samba is indeed a paradigmatic case of Kleinman’s concepts of illness, sickness and disease used in clinical practice at the Bellevue Centre. Yet, he is also one of the very few migrant patients from West Africa attending the Centre, if not the only one loosely related to Foyer93.
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Working with the Jinns
An Islamic Cosmogony of Wellbeing
22 Pitt-Rivers notes the remarkable absence of anthropological literature on the subject of grace, an exception being made for the works of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss for whom, respectively, the concepts of gift and exchange entail that of gratuitous reciprocity, ‘the cement which holds any society together’.37 Divine grace is solicited by sacrifices, since ‘the offering invites a return-gift of grace, the friendship of God’.38 Unlike the relatively scarce literature on the subject of grace, that of baraka enjoys broad attention in Islamic studies.
23 Werbner talks of a ‘symbolic complex of blessing’, in which barkat is only one term among several that specifically refers to a particular form of saintly power, which is not only for healing and exorcism.39 In this sense, ‘it is a generic Islamic term for divine blessing. Barkat imbues objects, such as the salt given by the Sufi saint, with the power of procreation, life, fertility and so on.40 ‘Barkat is magic and contagious. This means that the Sufi saint is charged physically with it, which explains why he is constantly mobbed by devout followers, endangering his life in their attempts to touch him’.41 Barkat can thus be transmitted metonymically as well as metaphorically to things, ‘crystallising embodied connections between a sacred centre and its extended peripheries’.42 نيج , Within the Islamic tradition, the jinn humanlike spirits, live a parallel life to that 24 of humans. Some troublesome jinn are said to attack people and interfere with their lives, creating troubles of the mind and misfortune. They are mentioned in the Koran, Sura 72, and variously in the Hadith of the Prophet, as having been created from the ‘smokeless flames of fire’, from where also shaytan, Satan, is thought to originate.43 The jinn can see the humans, who in turn, can ‘see’ and ‘own’ them. Interestingly, from the نج ّة, yanna نونجم , ‘Arabic root of the noun jinn derives the word maynuun mad’, and ‘paradise’, which is also reflected in the Soninké distinction between waxanté, madness, and jinebena, that is, possession of the jinn.44
25 Among the Soninkés, while withdrawal indicates the presence of a problem, generally associated with depressive states, possibly linked to professional deception, confrontation, disputes, and bizarre look and behaviour testify to one’s madness, while courage and dynamism are characteristics of the Soninké ‘sane’ identity.45 Mental illness in this context thus manifests itself as a kind of extravagance in comparison to the Senegalese and Bambara groups, where descriptions revolve around ideas of a non- integrated self – fatò in Bambara. Jinebena, on the other hand, is described as affliction brought about by mystical agents. In my respondents’ view, both illness and affliction, their causality and effects are human destiny; non-Muslim and Muslims undergo the same suffering, physical and mental, but act upon it differently. Ultimately, illness and health unfold in mediation, or through a process of negotiation with the spiritual realm, which requires the intervention of a marabout-healer and implies the essentially non-psychotic nature of the possessed.46 Hence, the puzzlement of the clinician in discerning the interaction between cultural statements of alleged attacks of the jinn, as reported by Muslim patients, and episodes of illness that fall within conventional medicine. Indeed, some patients only recover after resorting to traditional healing.47
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26 According to my respondents, the ontological complexity of baraka adds to the confusion existing in Europe regarding who is a marabout, a healer or one who practises magic or witchcraft, all equally employed as synonyms for charlatans. The difference between marabout and marabout-healer is one which separates the domain of baraka, the mystical power channelled by God, from that of lasrar, magical knowledge, which could also be used to harm people. Ousmane, a young resident of Foyer93, aged twenty-four, said to me: Because we believe in Islam, we think that the world doesn’t stop here. All is connected to the same source, which is eventually spiritual. What you see and what you don’t see is there. We don’t know why, God’s plan for us all is a mystery. Affliction, supersedes illness and takes shape in many ways. It can be an attack of the jinn, as much as misfortune. The marabout only prays to God yet, exceptionally, he can take excerpts from the Koran, write them on paper and give it to you, so that you’ll wear it. Wearing the amulet is important because it will be with you at all times and thus protect you. Nevertheless, that is the marabout-healer’s job. Healers normally belong to your circle, people you trust that have gone through similar problems as you have here in Paris, so you feel confident enough to open yourself and tell them your deepest problems.
27 Notwithstanding the distinction between tradition and Islam, which makes ordinary believers frown upon those resorting to healers, all of my respondents frequent healers to solve their day-to-day concerns. When they worry about their legal status (many have temporary visas or no documents at all), their children’s upbringing and marriage, their family back home or their lives in France, they will easily turn to healers. My respondents think that in the face of illness both medicine and traditional healing are valid as the Koran states that Muslims are compelled to heal themselves by any possible means. They define themselves as the generation of change, between the country where they have chosen to live and that of origin, receptive to both worlds especially with regards to their wellbeing. They resort to western medicine as much as to their marabouts and healers, finding the former useful to treat physical ailments, while the latter better placed to deal with their concerns. For instance, both marabouts and healers deal, at different levels, with troubles of the mind, which are conceived to entail the realm of the spirits that has somehow been disrupted, and they are part and parcel of their world, first and foremost as Muslims and not least, as migrants.
Ritual Healing
28 During my fieldwork in Paris, I met Drame, a healer to whom I was introduced by community members at Foyer93. He held his divination sessions at his house in Barbès, an up-and-coming district in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris, where recently opened art shops, bookshops, little ethnic restaurants and night clubs attract both the locals, mainly of Western and Northern African origin, and the bohemian glitterati of Paris, who enjoy the atmosphere of the rich cultural mix in this part of town.
29 Drame underlined that his clientele belonged to his own circle of people, a proof of sorts of his talent and renown which in fact, should normally not need advertising. As he put it, those who stand at metro stations publicising themselves as miracle workers certainly are not and they spoil the image of the ‘real ones’ vis-à-vis the French. If someone is a good healer, people in the community know, as the information is spontaneously passed on and circulated. Drame is also said to confront liguééy, sorcery. People consult him when they think that somebody, or the jinn, either in Senegal or in
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France, is trying to harm them or when they wish to achieve or change something in their lives. Problems may vary from an attack of the jinn, alcoholism, infidelity, sexual impotence to ‘wrong’ marital matches. The last time I visited him, a woman was there to ask Drame to ‘break’ her son’s relationship with a girl. Caste affiliations are partially still present and add to the social stratification of the Soninké society; although with migration caste has become less meaningful due to social mobility and similarity of status within the migrant working class, marrying into a lower caste is disapproved of. The woman mentioned was from a maraboutic family and wished her son to marry within his own milieu, yet as her son’s girlfriend belonged to a family of griot descent, she found it dishonourable.48
30 Overall, the ritual implies the use of the hatim, a grid associating a numerological system to the letters written in Arabic corresponding to the name of the person (or other personal detail) involved. The resulting number provides a formula that is then used for protection. One of these, called the formula of Souleymane, is deemed useful to heal all kinds of illnesses. Translated from the Arabic, it reads: ‘a marabout is working to take you’, meaning that the marabout is casting away the jinn. Other grids apply different letters, which therefore result in different numerical combinations and formulas:
31 Drame summons rauhan and khudan, a kind of jinn, to guide him during divination. According to him, not all practitioners have the power to deal with these spirits, since they only associate with men of the highest spirituality, virtue and knowledge of the Koran. The intervention of the guiding spirit may in fact fail to happen if the practitioner has misbehaved or failed to accomplish his prayers. In this case, he should praise the spirits and gain their intervention by asking forgiveness. The Surat Al-Jinna – the seventy-second in the Koran and the twenty-eighth of the Revelation – is useful for this purpose.49 The pantheon of the jinn is therefore crucial, since they are the practitioner’s allies, without whom he could not operate. Reparation thus entails mediation in different realms, where what is at stake is not only the resolution of the problem, but also a wider equilibrium which needs rebalancing. The success of the practitioner’s intervention lies in his moral standing, so that good, as opposed to evil, is not only a Muslim principle of behaviour, but embodied spirituality attained through
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practice, a source of healing power which is put to use for the good of the community. During divination, all the agents involved undergo a testing.
32 Resorting to marabouts can also be propitiatory: because they are conceived to be dealing with the spiritual realm, they bring baraka, understood in the widest sense possible. Baraka can be the marabout’s advice, his fabrication of protective objects, his power to deal with, see or push the jinn away from the victim. My respondents think that the validity of the marabout’s intercession is limited in time and contextual to the problem and situation. Amulets and prayers have to be reproduced and performed on any new occasion, as life goes on, in order to keep troubles at bay or to escape them when these arise.
33 The residents of Foyer93 endorse marabout-healers for their skills, but most often because of what they represent: their common tradition, language, identity and needs. Marabout-healers belong to same milieu as their clients’ and experience in the same way the difficulties of settling into in the big city. For many, obtaining a residence permit or avoiding a police-check can be reason enough to visit one of them. Whether or not the marabout-healers be trustworthy or considered to be less powerful than those left in the home country my respondents’ belief system remains unquestioned and its practice unperturbed.50 Marabouts and marabout-healers guarantee the marginal, yet vital space of hope that things can be manipulated, turned in their favour, and that the spiritual realm, as opposed to the law, can still satisfy their demands as human beings.
34 Notwithstanding the endeavours of French transcultural psychiatry to alleviate migrant’s afflictions and to bridge the gap that exists between the wider French society and first-generation migrants, it still cannot extend its medical provision to people like the residents of Foyer93. Such a possibility is already impeded by their feeling increasingly and more consciously that what France offers is not designed for them, they who are socially marginal and attached to their own values. They sense that French healthcare, premised on a secular and disenchanted standpoint, is ultimately detached from their most immediate needs and spirituality. This points rather to the need for a form of mediation, which would see them and their interlocutors (healers, associations and religious leaders) at the centre of the process, not unlike the psychiatrist Collomb’s pioneering community-based project that proved to be successful. Marabouts and marabouts-healers still give them the guarantee to be listened to, understood and fortified in their spiritual and social quest. Hence, among West African migrants, the former’s role flourishes in the wider setting of health and the realm of divination and anti-sorcery, which reinforce the belief in the baraka as their unique spiritual way of understanding the world and of dealing with it.
NOTES
1. The French Foyers des Travailleurs Migrants are housing centres for exclusively male migrants.
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2. All the names of people and professional bodies are pseudonyms used to protect my respondents’ anonymity. 3. https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2020940?geo=DEP-93&sommaire=2106113#IMG1A_ENS 4. Henceforth, it will be referred to as Foyer93. 5. René Collignon, “Émergence de la psychiatrie transculturelle au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale (Références Africaines)” in M.R Moro., Q. De la Noë and Y. Mouchnick (eds.), Manuelle de Psychiatrie Transculturelle: Travaille Clinique, Travaille Sociale, Grenoble, La Pensée Sauvage, 2004, p. 79-107. 6. Collignon, p. 80. 7. Collignon, p. 82. 8. See Franz Fanon F., Black Skins White Masks, Harmondsworth, Penguin, [French ed.1952] 1967, and Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, London, Macgibbon & Kee, [French ed. 1961] 1963. 9. Collignon, p. 83. 10. Roland Littlewood, “Science, shamanism and hermeneutics. Recent writing on psychoanalysis”, Anthropology Today, v. 5, n. 1, 1989, p. 5. 11. Andras Zempleni, “La dimension thérapeutique du culte du rab: Ndöp, Tuuru et Samp. Rites de possession chez les Lebou et les Wolof”, Psychopathologie africaine, v. 2, n. 3, 1966, p. 295-439. Marie-Cécile Ortigues and Edmond Ortigues, Œdipe Africain, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1984. 12. Carolyn Sargent, Stéphanie Larchanché, “Sur les pas de l’anthropologie médicale clinique en France : la maturation d’un approche sur la place de la culture dans les soins de santé mentale”, Transfaire et Culture, 1, 2009, p. 101. 13. See George Devereux, Ethnopsychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology as Complementary Frames of Reference, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. See also George Devereux, Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980. 14. Sargent and Larchanché, “Sur les pas de l’anthropologie médicale clinique”, p. 102. 15. Didier Fassin, Pouvoir et Maladie en Afrique: Anthropologie Sociale dans la Banlieue de Dakar, Paris, PUF, 1992. 16. Didier Fassin, “L’ethnopsychiatrie et ses réseaux : L’influence qui grandit”, Genèses, v. 35, n. 35, 1999, p. 146-171. Tobie Nathan, L’Influence qui Guérit, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1994. 17. Fassin, “L’ethnopsychiatrie et ses réseaux”, p. 151 (my translation). 18. Roland Littlewood and Maurice Lipsedge, Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry, London, Routledge, [1982] third edition, 1997. 19. Fassin, “L’ethnopsychiatrie et ses réseaux”, p. 154 (my translation and emphasis). 20. Didier Fassin, “Le droit d’avoir des droits”, Hommes et Migrations. Santé et Droits des Étrangers : Réalités et Enjeux, n. 1282, 2009, pp. 20-23. 21. Littlewood and Lipsedge, Aliens. 22. Marie-Rose Moro, Quitterie de la Noë and Yoram Mouchenik, Manuel de Psychiatrie Transculturelle, Grenoble, La Pensée Sauvage, 2006. 23. Marie-Rose Moro, Enfants d’Ici Venus d'Ailleurs: Naître et Grandir en France, Paris, La Découverte, 2002. 24. Michel Fievet, Le Livre Blanc des Travailleurs Immigrés des Foyers : Du Non-Droit au Droit, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999. 25. The banlieue, which literally means lieu banni, banned place, is first of all a peripheral territory, where different socio-economic realities co-exist. 26. Carolyn Sargent, “Reproductive strategies in Islamic discourse”, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 20, 1, 2006, p. 31. 27. David Lessault and Cris Beauchemin, “Les migrations d’Afrique subsaharienne en Europe: un essor encore limité”, Population & Sociétés, n. 452, 2009, p. 224. 28. Mahamet Timera, Les Soninké en France: D’une Histoire à L’autre, Paris, Karthala, 1996.
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29. Leon Eisenberg, “Nature, niche and nurture: the role of social experience in transforming genotype into phenotype”, Academic Psychiatry, 22, 1998; p. 213-222. See Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980. See also Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition, New York, Basic Books, 1988. 30. Simon Dein, “Against belief: The usefulness of explanatory model research in medical anthropology”, Social Theory and Health, 1, 2, 2003, p. 149-162. 31. Rachid Bennegadi, Marie-Jo Bourdin and Christophe Paris, “Santé mentale des migrantes et des réfugiés : le cadre de l’anthropologie médicale clinique”, Transfaire & Culture, 1, 2009, p. 15. 32. Bennegadi, Bourdin and Paris, p. 11. 33. The Senegalese Cheick Amadou Bamba M’Backé (1855-1927), is the founder of the Mouridyya (from the Arabic mouridoullah, literally ‘aspirant to God’), a Sufi branch of Islam. The Mouride talibé are the faithful of the order. 34. It is a card which entitles only those who have worked in France for at least three months and who can provide an address to benefit from healthcare schemes. 35. Fatou Binetou Dial, Mariage et Divorce à Dakar: Itinéraires Féminins, Paris, Karthala, 2008. barkat, is the divine gift that saintly and virtuous men are ةكرب Baraka, from the Arabic .36 thought to possess through their proximity to God. See also next paragraph. F.B. Dial, review of René Collignon, Mariage et Divorce à Dakar: Itinéraires Féminins, Karthala, Paris, 2008, Psychopathologie Africaine, v. 24, n. 3, 2008, p. 415-421. 37. Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Postscript: the place of grace in anthropology’ in J.G Peristiany. & J. Pitt-Rivers J. (eds.), Honour and Grace in Anthropology, Cambridge, University Press, 1992, p. 218. 38. Pitt-Rivers, p. 223. 39. Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult, London, C. Hurst., 2003, p. 250. 40. Werbner, Pilgrims, p. 251. 41. Werbner, Pilgrims, p. 252. 42. Pnina Werbner and Helen Basu, “The embodiment of charisma” in P. Werbner, H. Basu (eds.), Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults, London, Routledge, 1998, p. 13. 43. Najat Khalifa and Tim Hardie, ‘Possession and jinn’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, v. 98, n. 8, 2005, p. 351. 44. The Soninkés are a subdominant ethnic group, stretching between Senegal and Mali along the Senegal River Valley. They are part of the Mande greater family group, comprising the Bambara and the Mandinka ones. 45. Ellen Corin, Gilles Bibeau, Elisabeth Uchôa, “Éléments d'une sémiologie anthropologique des troubles psychiques chez les Bambara, Soninké et Bwa du Mali”, Anthropologie et Sociétés, v. 17, n. 1-2, 1993, p. 125-156. 46. See the following authors: Roberto Beneduce, Trance e Possessione in Africa: Corpi, Mimesi, Storia, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. Michael Lambek, Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte, Cambridge, University Press, 1981. Clemens Zobel, “Les génies du Kòma: identités locales, logiques religieuses et enjeux socio-politiques dans les monts Manding du Mali”, Cahiers d'Études Africaines (Cahier 144, Mélanges maliens), v. 36, n. 144, 1996, p. 625-658. 47. Khalifa and Hardie, ‘Possession and jinn’, p. 351-353. 48. Maraboutic families stand for the traditional religious élite and hold great prestige. The griots, who used to be the bards chanting the epic of the Soundiata Empire, are still the repositories of the Soninké oral tradition. 49. The Suras are ordered in the Koran by length, and therefore, they do not follow the chronological order in which they appeared historically. This explains why, Muslims refer in the
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first case to the standard order, while in the latter to the ‘Suras of the Revelation’. Thus, they produce a different way of counting. 50. Murray Last, “The importance of knowing about not knowing”, In: R. Littlewood (ed.), On Knowing and not Knowing in the Anthropology of Medicine, California, Left Coast Press, 2007, p. 1-17.
ABSTRACTS
This paper addresses several issues of significance in the field of migration and health, transcultural psychiatry and the politics of healthcare, in order to reflect on the integration of the Muslim West African population in France. My analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork that I carried out in Paris, in a clinic that targets migrant patients with psycho-social dilemmas and in a foyer among Soninké migrants from the region of Kayes, Mali. The reader is introduced to two case studies that shed light on the detachment existing between migrants and the mainstream healthcare offered to them. Arguably the divide interlaces with the particular secular, positivistic emphasis that moulds, epistemologically and culturally, French civil society as a whole, as opposed to other traditional, religious worldviews that understand healing as a symbolic and spiritual experience achieved through ritual.
AUTHOR
DAFNE ACCORONI Dafne Accoroni is an anthropologist whose expertise in the field of Migration Studies is based on years of qualitative and analytic research carried out first as a PhD researcher at University College London University and secondly as a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at Jean Moulin University, Lyon. At UCL, Accoroni worked on integration and health (i.e. access to health and housing; community support, copying strategies, secularism and so on) among Western African minority groups in France. Her Lyon-based fieldwork revealed an important Moroccan component, which led her to carry out explorative research in Marrakech, Morocco, and to extend her spectrum of interest to North Africa. Accoroni is an Associate member of the IETT, Université Lyon3, to which she contributes by working on the themes of cultural and linguistic diversity and representations of health with regard to Francophone African migrants.
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Eat the Rich: Pandemic Horror Cinema
Johan Höglund
“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich” Adophe Thiers, citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau1
1 In South Korean film Train to Busan (2016), a hardworking, single and largely absent father and his young daughter board a high-speed train heading from the Seoul suburb Gwangmyeong to Busan. They are accompanied by a variety of other characters, a high- school baseball team and their one cheerleader, a couple of elderly ladies, a pregnant young woman and her combative and protective partner, and an egotistical senior manager. Except for a tramp who has climbed aboard and who hides in the bathroom, inexplicably frightened, all are solidly middle class.
2 As the train begins to pull out of the station, a young woman boards unseen. She has evidently been hurt. She has problems standing up. Her left leg is turning a strange white colour while the veins stand out, dark blue against the skin. Shortly after the departure, she falls over and has a seizure. Another young woman, a conductor on the train, rushes over to help but can offer little assistance. The conductor turns her back on the shaking body of the woman and attempts to use an uncooperative walkie-talkie to bring the sudden emergency to the attention of her fellow crew members. Her back turned, she does not see the seizures subside and the woman rising in a languid but threatening movement. It is not until the woman has fully regained her feet, standing at an oblique angel, that the conductor looks up to notice, first the unnatural posture, the discoloured skin, the milky white eyes, and, finally, the bared and snarling teeth that confronts her. In the next scene, the conductor is stumbling down the aisle with the young woman attached like a gigantic tick to her back, teeth clamped over the conductors exposed neck. The baseball team look on in abject confusion and horror.
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Caption: A young woman turned zombie rises from the floor to begin spreading the contagion she carries in Train to Busan.
3 This sequence is initially gothic and uncanny. The young woman, seemingly traumatized and hurt but potentially recognisable as self with her fashionably torn shorts and cotton hoodie, has transformed first into something clearly diseased and troubling, and then into a carnivorous, even cannibalistic agent of a doubly violent pandemic. What is disturbing to the viewer is certainly the violence she performs and spreads, but also the fact that the contagious agent is a young, diminutive, middle class, Asian woman. Her transformation into diseased Other challenges not only the dichotomy between health and illness, but also the stereotypical boundaries of gender, ethnicity and class. As the film plays out, this challenge collapses into a spectacle of violence and gore that causes the utter collapse of any recognizable social fabric, of modernity, even of the human as a meaningful species.
4 When trying to come to terms with the imagined diseases of the Other as represented within a wide transnational context, zombie cinema constitutes one of the most widely disseminated and multivocal expressions. In fact, most pandemic narratives with a wide distribution belong, like Train to Busan, to the genre of violent horror. This casts the pandemic in a very particular light. While actual pandemics can certainly impact society in drastic ways, and cause the demise of a vast number of people, the pandemic typically paralyses the victim. The pandemic, even when it moves quickly, still represents a form of slow violence, to borrow a term from Rob Nixon.2 While certainly not as slow as the environmental destruction that Nixon discusses in his seminal book, pandemics do not make a great deal of noise. They move silently over the globe, they slow their victims down rather than energize them, and, like gradual environmental catastrophe, they claim by far the most victims among the poor.
5 The point of pandemic horror cinema in general, and of the zombie film in particular, is that it makes a different understanding of the pandemic possible. With the aid of the horror genre, the pandemic is sped up and magnified so that its destructive capabilities become starkly visible. The slow violence of the viral pandemic here becomes hyper fast as undead carriers of zombie contagion run or stumble through chaotic streets in search of the still uninfected. This acceleration of pandemic violence enables the
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zombie film to invest the (imagined) disease it represents with specific political content and, in relation to this, to tie it to various types of Otherness.
6 As will be discussed below, this political content revolves around matters of religion, ethnicity, race and gender in general, but it also and importantly highlights the concept of class in transnational society. A point here is that while the microbes that spread illness (as well as assist human life in a number of positive ways as observed by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2017))3 does not recognize sexual, gendered, racial, ethnic or class- based borders, the impact of pandemics are typically strongly affected by class borders. Certain pandemics, like the Spanish Influenza of 1918, did kill more or less indiscriminately across these barriers. Yet, in most cases, the well-fed global middle class rarely suffers dramatically from pandemics today. Armed with all the medical benefits of modernity, including vaccinations, elaborate health care apparatuses, and wall-mounted dispensers of gelatinous disinfectant, the pandemic appears to the middle class as an anxiety and a reminder of their mortality, rather than as a palpable threat to their lives or dominant position. Several non-gothic or non-horror pandemic films, such as Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995), revolve around the possibility that an epidemic capable of disturbing the middle class might be let loose on the world, but never let this come to pass. In films such as this, brave white physicians penetrate into Ebola infested African communities to make sure the contagion never reach into European or US territories. The successful prevention of such transnational infection is the comforting closure of the film.
7 By contrast, global zombie cinema such as Train to Busan represents pandemics that invariably consume also the middle class. Thus, the present article discusses how most zombie films, again like Train to Busan, show middle-class protagonists succumbing to a pandemic disease, rising again in the shape of the utterly tattered poor, and joining the growing pack of similarly destitute zombies that roam a crumbling metropole. Whether cast as the fast and agile creature that has become more and more common in horror cinema in recent years, or as the traditional, lumbering being that still roams the streets in much popular culture, the zombie is essentially a person deprived of social status, of shelter, of food, of health care and of the infrastructure that makes middle class life possible. In short, the zombie is an iterant creature that no longer has access to the modernity that spawned it; that now stands outside modernity’s comforting embrace, transformed into its violent and hungry Other. The zombie’s abject poverty, I will argue, will remind the middle-class movie audience of other middle-class citizen deprived of his or her wealth by bad planning, drugs or simply the precariousness of the post 9/11 economy, or equally of the migrant subaltern forced from his or her home by war and ethnic cleansing and now inhabiting street corners, railway stations, camps and parks in a comparatively affluent West.
8 With this in mind, this article argues that pandemic horror cinema facilitates an often eloquent conversation on the relation between the imagined diseases of the Other and modernity as an engine of middle-class preservation. To bring the different discursive strands of this conversation to light, this article first traces the tradition of the gothic and horror pandemic narrative from its nineteenth-century origins to the present moment in time when it has proliferated into a number of different nations, languages and ideological positions. The article then explores these positions in some detail through a discussion of a number of pandemic horror narratives, with a focus on the films Dawn of the Dead (2004), I am Legend (2007), World War Z (2013), and Train to Busan.
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Through the focus on how these narratives consider religion, race, ethnicity, and, in particular, class, in relation to pandemic disease, the article will describe how the pandemic horror cinema helps project different understandings of self and Other through the image of pandemic disease.
The Anglo Pandemic Narrative
9 The pandemic narrative has a very long history and has often accompanied, or followed in the wake of, actual pandemics. These narratives have always been deeply influenced by existing ideologies and prejudices, and helped to produce certain identity formations through the production or intensification of already existing types of Otherness. Thus, the plague known as the Black Death that struck the world in the 14th century was, as discussed by David Nirenberg in Communities of Violence (1998), perceived a disease produced by, or because of, minority groups such as Jews or Muslims.4 In this way, the pandemic became a way to comprehend one’s belonging to, or exclusion from, a religious, regional or national community. At the same time, by analogy, religious Otherness could be cast as in itself a form of disease or even pandemic. Understood in this way, the Black Death could be imagined as a kind of religious illness that those of weak faith could not resist. By the same analogy, non- normative religions could be imagined as diseases or infections that, if not contained, could bring great destruction.
10 The precursor to the modern zombie film makes this connection clear. In nineteenth- century gothic fiction such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871-2) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the vampire is invested with specific religious, cultural, class-related, and racial content. To look first at religion, in these British stories, the vampire typically comes from, or represents, a non-normative form of religion and the figure has been linked to the biblical character of the Wandering Jew and to Jewry in general as discussed by Judith Halberstam,5 to Catholicism as explored by Patrick O’Malley,6 and even to Islam through Dracula’s location on the border between the former Ottoman empire and Christian Europe. The vampire is furthermore fought with the aid of Christian symbols and artefacts: the cross, communion wafers, holy water. The point here is, of course, that these early gothic tales are also narratives of how the religious and cultural Other that the Vampire represents spreads disease. In the case of Dracula, the eponymous vampire is poised to trigger a pandemic of apocalyptic proportion. By satiating his “lust for blood” among the “teeming millions” of London he will “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless”.7 Through his diseased and infectious blood, Dracula is able to spread his own form of abject religious, cultural and, indeed, biological liminality, producing an essentially diseased “semi- demon”. The social order he imagines does not come about, but it does look back in time, towards a feudal order where he remains lord of the castle, and his minions exist only to do his bidding.
11 The modern, pandemic horror narrative is arguably often involved in the same kind of discursive project. As discussed above, contemporary Gothic horror cinema accelerates the horror element always associated with narratives of pandemics by casting the carrier not as a passive host, but as an aggressive agent of the disease. Thus, the carrier of the viral pandemic is still often the vampire or this creature’s proletarian evolution: the zombie. The zombie is like the vampire in that it feeds off the same human race to
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which it used to belong. The zombie is different from the vampire though, as Kyle William Bishop has observed,8 in that it seems to have lost not only rationality but also all desire in middle class comforts or trappings.9 As I will argue, the modern zombie looks, and often behaves, like the nightmarish, middle-class vision of the homeless, impoverished migrant: poorly dressed, dirty, irrational, needy, potentially violent especially in large numbers, incomprehensible, diseased and infectious. Thus, the most frightening thing about this being is that the middle-class consumer may be forced to join it.
12 British and US popular culture still often makes use of the basic model provided by Dracula, where the pandemic is seen to arise from a liminal Eastern space, and carried by an agent of this space. In the typical Anglo narrative, this agent then invades the West and proceeds to infect its unsuspecting and innocent citizens. As Johan Höglund has argued in The American Imperial Gothic (2014), much of US horror and Gothic reproduce in Gothic narrative the tension between white Anglo Empire and the various categories that are seen to challenge the hegemony of this entity. In the post-9/11 era, the image of the “Islamic terrorist” has, not surprisingly, been central to both Gothic and non-Gothic representations of the global pandemic. As an example from non- Gothic writing, Michael T. Osterholm argues in his alarmist non-fiction book Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe, that “I do not believe it is a question of whether a lone terrorist or terrorist group will use infectious disease agents to kill unsuspecting citizens; I’m convinced it’s really just a question of when and where”.10
13 At the time of writing, Ostermholm’s prediction has not been realized, but similar fears have taken form in best-selling novels such as Terry Hayes’ I am Pilgrim (2013) or in Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero (2009). Both texts describe how militant jihadists engineer vastly destructive pandemics and attempt to release them into the West in an effort to destroy its hegemonic position and to thus further their own religious agendas. In the case of Patient Zero, the pandemic produces a zombie-like carrier who aggressively spreads the disease.
14 The plethora of such writing has garnered significant scholarly attention. Mark Dery is one of many to have observed that “visions of a zombie apocalypse look a lot like the troubled dreams of an age of terrorism, avian flu, and H1N1, when viruses leap the species barrier and spread, via jet travel, into global pandemics seemingly overnight”.11 In other words, in the “age of terrorism”, mortal pandemics such as avian flu, H1N1, and Ebola merge effectively with terrorism in the figure of the zombie. This happens frequently not just in the novel but, even more so, in horror cinema. There also do battles between the US military and representatives of a Middle East imagined as diseased play out. In Ozombie (2012), Usama bin Laden have risen from the undead and now walk Afghanistan where US Special forces soldiers must combat him and his minions. In the brief prologue of Zack Snyder’s significantly more financially successful remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), the connection between the violent zombie outbreak and the Middle East is more subtle. The very first image of this opening is of trees moved by the wind before a blue sky. In the next instance, the name of the production company, Universal Pictures, is shown in red against a black background. The name liquefies and spills to the right, like blood, before the third image of the film appears: a mosque where a large number of worshippers have gathered and bend over in prayer.
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Caption: People praying in a mosque as shown in the opening sequence of Dawn of the Dead (2004).
15 This brief scene is never commented on within the film and its connection to the violence that follows is indirect. It shows no conflict or unrest, only a second of recorded worship. Even so, it arguably organises the audience’s understanding of the horrifically violent pandemic depicted in the film that follows. As the title sequence rolls on, seemingly documentary photography shows civil unrest while other, clearly staged, images depict a White House press conference breaking down, close ups of snarling, grisly faces, images of blood cells trembling and splitting apart under the lens of a microscope, and, increasingly, of modern society collapsing. Set before these images, and before the violence of the main narrative, the first scene of the mosque merges with the short-cut origin story of the pandemic that the prologue tells. In other words, brief second of prayer that is shown before the barrage of violence, clearly works to disturb the audience, and to inform the images of violence that follows.
16 After the initial and disturbing prelude, Dawn of the Dead revolves around a group of Americans who struggle against a tide of undead zombies. The actual movie begins with a young middle-class couple in suburban Milwaukee who have eschewed television in favour of “date night” or an evening of scheduled love-making in the middle of a busy working week. Because of this they miss an emergency news bulletin and find out about the zombie pandemic when, early in the morning, the neighbour’s pre-adolescent girl enters appears in the door to the bedroom, her face in shadow. For a brief moment, the scene is thoroughly recognizable to any nuclear family, where a child hovers on the doorstep to the sanctuary that the parents’ bedroom constitutes. Then, the girl steps into the light, her face a bloodied mess, and proceeds to attack the young man. Soon, he too is infected and his wife barely escapes into the bathroom and out the window into a world that is utterly lost to chaos. The suburban community has been transformed into burning and confusing territory of random carnage.
17 The wife drives through the wreckage of her neighbourhood as it fall apart around her, and soon ends up at a shopping mall where she meets other survivors besieged by the undead. Stripped of their privileges, the protagonists rely on the mall’s security infra- structure provides temporary respite. As in Train to Busan, many of the survivors were once middle class, but there is no privilege to be had in the post-pandemic world that the film is set in. The only meaningful preoccupation is the maintenance of the borders that separate the still uninfected from the violent, diseased undead. Indeed, in global pandemic cinema, the construction of borders is always central. The most crucial such border is that of the body. In pandemic horror cinema, this specific border is not
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crossed quietly, through the air or through the contact with the diseased skin of the Other, but through a bite that breaks the skin and mingles the saliva of the zombie with the blood of the victim.
18 The border that the body constitutes is protected, especially in US pandemic cinema, partly by the borders that vast, physical walls constitute, but equally by constant gun violence. Such violence and such walls play an important part towards the end of Francis Lawrence’s remake of I am Legend (2007), where a vampire virus has transformed New York and the world into an uncanny wilderness. Within this wilderness, virologist and US Army Colonel Robert Neville struggles to produce the cure that is, in the film’s last scene, delivered to a gigantic, walled in compound within which American heartland society appears to have survived.
Caption: Part of the wall enclosing a US, post-epidemic colony in I am Legend (2007). Note the centrality of the Christian church in the community.
19 Similarly, in World War Z (2013), another big-budget Hollywood film that also belongs to the pandemic horror genre, Jerusalem has managed to survive a global zombie outbreak thanks to already existing walls and thanks to their ever-vigilant army. Outside the wall, tattered zombies roam the streets in large groups. Inside, members of the Jewish community survive side by side with members of the Islamic. In the face of the zombie pandemic, the film imagines political and religious differences to have disappeared.
Caption: The walled-in part of Jerusalem where uninfected humans can hide from the infected masses outside.
20 Large physical walls are central to US pandemic horror film, but they do not always serve to protect the people inside them. Horror films demand that borders are
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breached and in World War Z, even the massive walls and tremendous fire power of the Israeli army cannot keep the zombies out. Even so, the only hope these films present is a thoroughly militarized modernity; a society where everyone is armed and vigilant, their eyes always scanning the large physical borders that separate the uninfected confines of the community from the savage world outside it. By casting the subaltern as a supremely aggressive, possibly undead, cannibal, great violence against this figure becomes not only legitimate: it is a necessity for continued survival. Thus, the central figure in US pandemic horror film is often not the scientist who is trying to find a cure, but the armed soldier or survivalist who is killing the infected off. Thus, the solution to global health in this type of cinema, or at least to the immediate survival of humanity, is military. The solution is a war fought by posses of armed white men, by platoons of Marines, by special forces soldiers gunning down a migratory flood of supremely aggressive beings trying to scale the wall that keeps them from invading what is left of organised society.
Pandemic Horror Film against the Dominant Strain
21 The pandemic horror narrative produced, primarily, in the US has had a tremendous impact on global pandemic horror cinema. As discussed above, a great portion of these narratives are firmly conservative and tie the different anxieties that traverse the US to images of societal collapse cast as zombie apocalypse, and suggest that the only way to survive is to organise society according to strictly militarized mores. However, there is also a US tradition that complicates this dominant and normative narrative. Alternative, counter-hegemonic narratives appear in the 1950s and 60s, and become legion in the 1970s. These are often low-budget productions, but they have had considerable impact on the pandemic narrative inside and outside Anglo borders. An important text here is Richard Matheson’s original I am Legend, which tells a story very different from the 2007 film. As in the original, the protagonist believes himself to be the only human being to have survived a global pandemic that has transformed everyone else to vampires. By night, he holds out against the onslaught of the vampires outside. By day, he seeks them out to destroy their then dormant bodies. Not until the ending of the novel does he begin to understand that vampire society is now the new normal, and that he is, in their eyes, a lone and murderous monster. This reversal of normativity also guides the production of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), the original of Snyder’s 2004 remake discussed above. Here, the zombie pandemic is not understood to have travelled from a liminal East. Instead, in Night of the Living Dead, the protagonist is a black man who is trying to shield himself and a group of cowardly white people from a host of similarly white, middle-class zombies who, relentless and cannibalistic, have risen from their graves. Somehow surviving the terrible night, the protagonist walks into the daylight only to get shot by a white posse and then thrown haphazardly onto a gigantic pyre as the end credits begin to roll.
22 If global pandemic horror cinema looks to the US for inspiration, this cultural context allows for a number of different positions along an ideological strata that stretches between two extremes. On the one side of this strata, Otherness is seen to emanate from a still orientalised and Islamic East, and to result in the collapse of a white, middle-class modernity seen as absolutely central to Western selfhood. On the other
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side, it is Western society itself, the reliance on white masculinity, the uncritical belief in modernity, that is the real horror that produces the illness.
23 This latter position is clearly discernible in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and in much of the late director’s other oeuvre. It also surfaces in interesting ways in Train to Busan. To return to this film, the young woman transformed into voracious cannibal begins to spread the illness she carries to other passengers, changing them into similarly aggressive beings. Soon, the few uninfected protagonists are collected in one of the front sections of the train. They manage to communicate with the driver of the locomotive car and are told that the train, and all of South Korea, is caught up in a nation-wide crisis of unknown proportions. What remains of organized, modern society attempts to engineer their rescue from the train, and they are told that the army will be waiting to receive them further down the line. However, when they pull into the assigned station and get out of the train, the station is eerily quiet. They move down a set of escalators and finally make contact with the waiting military, only to find that they too have been transformed. In the scene that ensues, a hoard of bloodied, frenzied young men in uniform storm the people who have exited the train, biting, killing and transforming them.
24 The train of Train to Busan may be a temporary refuge for the few survivors who make it back on board, but modernity, even in the shape of this technologically advanced form of transportation, does not offer any real or lasting security. Similarly, the military provides no protection. When they finally appear in the movie, they pose the largest threat so far, ruthlessly decimating the few survivors. They, and the context to which they belong, offer no protection from a disaster that, the audience is informed, was in fact produced by capitalist modernity itself. The absent father, an investment manager, has helped fund and also put pressure on, the biotech companies that have developed and released the virus. In this way, Train to Busan upends the logic of the conservative pandemic narrative. Whether we understand modernity as the confluence of capitalism with technology that enabled, and was enabled by, colonialism, as suggested by Gurminder Bhambra in Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination,12 or simply as a society organised around industry and rational thinking, the pandemic has in fact been engineered within and by this entity. A warlike modernity is not what shelters the human in these narratives, it is what has produced the plague that turns people into ravenous carnivores.
25 The same ideologically disruptive model characterizes a number of other zombie films, including the six-movie Resident Evil franchise (2002-2016), where a multi-national pharmaceutical company known as the Umbrella Corporation has engineered a virus that has thrown the world into chaos. Similar stories play out in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), in novels such as those of Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy and in several other narratives. What complicates the critique of capitalist modernity that these texts arguably launch is the fact that the only imaginable resolution is still military. The Resident Evil franchise may describe capitalism as the culprit and the agent of illness, but the only solution to managing the multitude of disenfranchised diseased is still violence and the films revolve around scenes where super-skilled human soldiers combat hordes of infected and mutated beings. In the post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic societies these narratives imagine, the choice facing the protagonists is not between a sheltered middle-class existence and the abject poverty of zombiefied existence, but
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between this existence and the life of an ever vigilant soldier protecting the barriers of a militarized micro-state.
Eat the Rich
26 Although pandemic horror cinema sometime identifies capitalist modernity as the source of the violent plague that transforms society, it typically cannot imagine an alternative political organisation that does not rely on the dichotomies between modern and primitive, rich and poor, armed and disarmed, and healthy and diseased. The border is still the paradigm, and this border recalls a long series of images from the Western past and present: the walled-in forts of the US nineteenth-century frontier landscape built to keep settlers safe from the indigenous populations outside, or the Trump’s administration’s promise to “build the wall” between the US and its southern border in an effort to revive a strong, independent, white and middle class America. It similarly manifests in European political discourse on refugee migration from northern Africa and the Middle East into Europe. Here also are a number of different borders being erected and fortified.13 Thus, despite gestures towards a desacralisation of modernity and middle-class existence, horror pandemic cinema does not offer any systematic critique of capitalism, modernity, or militarism. The genre directs the viewer’s attention towards a protagonist that is almost invariably a white, middle class citizen faced with the imminent threat to be eaten and infected. Regardless of whether the infection was engineered by terrorists from the Middle East or by the modern state itself, this protagonist must grab a gun and help cull the diseased multitude that presses against the quickly erected barriers that now constitute the limits of civilisation. In the future of the zombie pandemic, the protagonist must always be, or become, a soldier standing vigilant on the wall that separates the remains of civilisation from the voracious and barbaric multitude below.
27 However, while this basic analysis does say something about how pandemic horror cinema participates in the conversation on the imagined diseases of the Other, it does not fully account for the contribution that the genre actually makes. To fully grasp this, it is necessary to avert one’s gaze from the protagonist that arguably constitutes the focus of attention of the audience, to the infected that demand even more constant attention from the protagonist. While the pandemic drastically transforms the living conditions of the middle class in horror film, those struck by the plague undergo even more dramatic change. As discussed above, the zombie is strongly connected to the image of the impoverished subaltern. In what is usually referred to as the first zombie film, White Zombie (1932), virtually all zombies are black, sedate slave labour and while the audience is encouraged to focus their attention to the white American female who is also transformed into a zombie, it is the disposable black zombie slaves, who topple to their death from a cliff at the end of the movie, that deserve it. As Aalya Ahmad has observed, the zombies that beset western society in the zombie pandemic film is ‘redolent of the subaltern’.14 Looking away from the white protagonist and instead focusing on the zombie as subaltern poor, enables a very different understanding of what these films do.
28 To understand the zombie as subaltern entails a combined focus on race and class. The term subaltern, of course, was coined by Antonio Gramsci and refers in his writing to the disenfranchised poor barred from the established institutions of (Italian) society by
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the fascist government.15 In postcolonial or subaltern studies, the concept has been used to describe those denied access to the power structure of the colonial metropole as it operates both in the centre and the margin. This subaltern is a person denied political representation, economic independence, social and medial security and even the right to speak as in Gayatri Spivak’s influential and often referenced essay “Can the Subaltern Speak”.16 The zombie quite easily fits all of these categories. Reduced to an object (no longer a he or a she), it has lost all claims to citizenship and can be killed off with impunity (although not always without emotional turmoil). In the television series The Walking Dead, the zombieified human and former citizen wanders aimlessly along defunct suburban street in images that strongly recall the urban poor of post- depression US society. In movies such as World War Z, their frantic scaling of borders much more strongly recall the refugee migrants desperate attempt to flee war and social turmoil by crossing national borders.
Caption: The undead zombies of The Walking Dead may still wear the tattered clothing that mark them as middle class, but their emaciated and dirty appearances strongly recall images of the urban homeless.
29 While post-communist global society rarely encourages an understanding of the world’s poor population as potentially powerful or even worthy of consideration, pandemic horror cinema arguably invests the subaltern with tremendous agency. The imagined disease that the poor as Other suffer from is central here. It is the disease that fuels the displaced revolution that takes place in pandemic horror cinema. It is, paradoxically, through illness and even death, that the subaltern can enact direct political transformation. The pandemic makes it possible for them to sever their ties to modernity. They are no longer in need of its comforts or protection. Similarly, they can now refuse to help reproduce it. The former rulers of modernity, the middle class for which they toiled, have become their sustenance. The subaltern now eat the rich.
30 Again, this is hardly a sustained or useful critique of the present social order or of the current geopolitical situation. However, it does provide an understanding of how western and global culture imagines Otherness, disease and their connection to social and global relations. Pandemic horror cinema strongly suggests that what truly frightens the global, middle class audience for which these movies are produced is, ultimately, the prospect that they may be stripped of their privileges and made to join, as if struck by a chronic and terribly dilapidating disease, the ranks of the global poor. As such, they will be forced, for the rest of their miserable existence, to roam
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unsheltered in search of the sustenance constituted by their own class. This anxiety is described differently in different examples of the genre, but it is remarkably resilient and, like the pandemics they describe, these films move easily across national and linguistic borders. Through web-based video and television companies such as Netflix and Amazon television, they reach a wide audience. Through piracy sites and fan subs, they reach even further. In this way, these films can be said to not only speak about pandemics; through their global spread, they also constitute a form of discursive pandemics in themselves.
NOTES
1. Adolphe Thiers, The History of the French Revolution. Trans Frederick Shoberl, 3rd ed. Philadelphia, A Hart, Late Carey & Hart, 1850, p. 359. 2. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge MA, Harvard UP, 2011. 3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable”, New Literary History, vol. 47, no. 2 & 3, Spring & Summer 2016, p. 377-397. 4. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton NJ, Princeton UP, 1998, p. 231-2. 5. Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's "Dracula"”. Victorian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Spring, 1993, p. 333-352. 6. Patrick R O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 146-50. 7. Bram Stoker, Dracula. New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1897, p. 48-9. 8. Kyle William Bishop, The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, Jefferson NC, McFarland & Company, 2010. 9. There are a few exceptions from this rule: most importantly iZombie (2015-) and the Santa Clarita Diet (2017-) where the female protagonists transform into zombies but remain rational and carry on their middle class lives. 10. Michael T. Osterholm, Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe, New York NY, Dell Publishing, 2000, p. xvii. 11. Mark Dery I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, p. 11. 12. Gurminder Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination, Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 13. See Kim Moody The Neoliberal Remaking of the Working Class in The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism, eds Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martin Konings, and David Primrose, Los Angeles CA, SAGE, 2018, p. 403. 14. Aalya Ahmad « Gray Is the New Black: Race, Class, and Zombies » in Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, Jefferson NC, McFarland & Company, 2011, p. 130. 15. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and transl. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. 16. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg, Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988, p. 271-313.
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ABSTRACTS
This essay posits that pandemic horror cinema speeds up the slow violence of the pandemic so that political stakes become apparent. Thus, pandemic horror cinema enables an eloquent conversation on the relation between the imagined diseases of the Other and modernity as an engine of middle-class preservation. The essay traces the tradition of the gothic and horror pandemic narrative from its nineteenth-century origins to the present moment in time when it has proliferated into a number of different nations, languages and ideological positions. The article then explores these positions through a discussion of the films Dawn of the Dead (2004), I am Legend (2007), World War Z (2013), and Train to Busan (2016). Focussing on religion, race, ethnicity, and class, the essay describes how the pandemic horror cinema helps project different understandings of self and Other through the image of violent pandemic disease.
AUTHOR
JOHAN HÖGLUND Johan Höglund is associate professor of English at Linnaeus University and Director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He has published extensively on the relationship between imperialism and popular culture as it manifests in a number of different contexts, including the late-Victorian era, the long history of US global expansion and decline, and the often unrecognized era of Nordic colonialism. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, of the monograph The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (2014), and the co-editor of B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (2018), Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (2015), and Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (2012).
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The Queer Post-Migratory Writings of Christos Tsiolkas: (Re)locating Mental and Sexual Disorders of “Translated” Subjects
Sophie Coavoux
Christos Tsiolkas’s prose fiction is full of suffering souls and bodies, “lost in translation”, a characteristic often identified as a topos of so-called migration literature or migratory writings.1 Indeed, through the prism of the complex entanglements of the themes of migration and disease, the whole corpus of Christos Tsiolkas provides a wide range of disorders that affect the minds and the bodies of his “translated” subjects (mainly depression, dementia, self-destruction, gender and sexual troubles). His controversial representations of hyphenated subjects provide a critique of identities and identity politics through his interpretation of the unhealthy imaginary of the migrant. Furthermore, those numerous disorders affecting his novels’ characters are interwoven with the ambiguous encounters between “inside” and “outside” perceptions, through a dialectical conflict between “identity” and “otherness”, following a process of internalization of dysphoric unhealthy representations, similar to what Franz Fanon termed the “epidermalization of inferiority”.2 In relation to this, Christos Tsiolkas’s writings also explore, as one of its major themes, hate and self- hatred, described as a universal component, to demonstrate, like Fanon, that hate and racism (extended to ethnicity, social class, gender, sexuality) is a collective neurosis that affects all human beings. This is expressed by the protagonist of Loaded who believes “Everyone hates everyone else”, and that “a web of hatred connects the planet”.3 Exploring those complex issues, Christos Tsiolkas seems to go beyond any binary approach or any kind of Manichaeism based on a simplistic and superficial opposition between the “same” and the “other”, categories which coincide with those of the “healthy” and the “unhealthy”. According to him, otherness does not exist per se, as an essence, but rather forms itself in relation with the others and the self: in this sense, the philosophical background of his work comes across in Paul Ricœur’s Oneself
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as Another.4 Lastly, through the renewal of the cartography of otherness and partly by the way in which he subverts and relocates the unhealthy imaginary of his translated subjects, Christos Tsiolkas’s writings can be considered an example of queer post- migratory literature.
“Translated” Subjects within “imaginary homelands”
Christos Tsiolkas is a Greek Australian writer whose work is informed by the themes of migration and exile, but also gender, sexuality, “race” and family. Often regarded as the “enfant terrible” of contemporary Australian literature, he is mostly famous for his provocative forays into the sexual and ethnic politics of multicultural Australia. Author, playwright, essayist and screenwriter, since 2005, he has so far published six novels: Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe (which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award).5 He has been mostly acclaimed for his multi- award winning novel The Slap.6 Barracuda is his fifth novel. His 2014 book, Merciless Gods was not a novel but a collection of short stories.7 It should be mentioned that Christos Tsiolkas is an Anglophone writer even if he writes on occasion in Greek and translates his prose himself. Being a “second-generation Australian of Greek origin”, he portrays in his novels a myriad of characters who illustrate the failure of multicultural Australia where a mix of people from various and hybrid origins live together with the so-called “Aussies”. More broadly, Christos Tsiolkas is engaged with the migration theme in general, and the now globalized flows of people, migration becoming a globalized experience. He shows the blurring of identities through his characters, whether migrants or the “original” inhabitants of the host country. His writings could be analysed as an attempt to rethink diversity, at a collective and at an individual level, in order to show the ambivalences between the construction/deconstruction of the self and the complex relationships between the self and the other. Almost all his characters, protagonists or not, are marked by the migratory experience, the issue of belonging being interwoven in many cases with a process of acculturation and, as a consequence, they are characterized by different forms of uneasiness. Whether or not they have been experiencing migration themselves, all of them seem to be marked, and affected, if not traumatized, by migration, in their mind and in their flesh, and all of them can be characterized as “translated” subjects, as Salman Rushdie has it in his Imaginary Homeland.8 In this way they also fit the conceptualization of “translation” coined by Stuart Hall which: describes those identity formations which cut across and intersect natural frontiers, and which are composed of people who have been dispersed forever from their homelands. Such people retain strong links with their places of origin and their traditions, but they are without the illusion of a return to the past. They are obliged to come to terms with the new cultures they inhabit, without simply assimilating to them and losing their identities completely. They bear upon them the traces of the particular cultures, traditions, languages and histories by which there were shaped. The difference is that they are not and will never be unified in the old sense, because they are irrevocably the product of several interlocking histories and cultures, belong at one and the same time to several ‘homes’ (and to no one particular ‘home’). People belonging to such cultures of hybridity have had to renounce the dream or ambition of rediscovering any kind of ‘lost’ cultural purity, or ethnic absolutism. They are irrevocably translated. The word ‘translation’, Salman
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Rushdie notes, ‘comes etymologically from the Latin for "bearing across'". Migrant writers like him, who belong to two worlds at once, ‘having been borne across the world… are translated men’ (Rushdie, 1991). They are the products of the new diasporas created by the post-colonial migrations. They must learn to inhabit at least two identities, to speak two cultural languages, to translate and negotiate between them. Cultures of hybridity are one of the distinctly novel types of identity produced in the era of late-modernity, and there are more and more examples of them to be discovered.9 By drawing up a typology of Christos Tsiolkas’s characters, it appears that an overwhelming majority of them have an immigrant background, shaping a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious cast, along with a few Aboriginal and Anglo characters: Greeks, Indians, Serbians, Italians among others, Catholics, Christian Orthodox, Muslim, Jews. For sure, if all his protagonists fit this category and that characterization is obviously always presented as central in the narrative, “that does not mean that ethnicity becomes a totalizing form of characterization”.10 Furthermore, Christos Tsiolkas’s characters often possess hybrid origins: for example, a Canadian of Chinese and Czech origin, mixed nationality couples (Indonesian and Greeks from Georgia) and so on. But it has to be noticed that for most of them, they have not themselves experienced migration, but rather are of migrant descent, and significantly the protagonists of his novels are second-generation subjects. On this point, the epigraph of Loaded is quite significant. It is a quotation from the writer Richard Rodriguez’s book An American Writer: The immigrant child has the advantage or the burden of knowing what other children may more easily forget: a child, any child, necessarily lives in his own time, his own room. The child cannot have a life identical with that of his mother or father. For the immigrant child this knowledge is inescapable.
“I xenitia” and the Inheritance of “migration disease”
Thus, it seems as in Christos Tsiolkas’s perception, migration is not only something empirical, a lived experience. It is also an inheritance, a memory, if not a curse or a type of atavism. Therefore, as second-generation subjects, his characters suffer from a kind of migration disease with various symptoms (mostly psychological), as a consequence of the (xenitia) inherited from their parents. This untranslatable Greek term (xenitia) is an ambiguous concept with multiple meanings: foreign (host) land, exile, homeland, homesickness, to live as a stranger in a foreign land.11 Even if, according to Hariclea Zengos, the xenitia theme dealt with by second-generation writers appears to express a sense of exile “of a different nature” from that of first generation writers, it remains central in the narrative, even if they focus on the exploration of hyphenated hybrid identities.12 The inheritance of the “migration” disease is a leitmotiv in The Jesus Man, a novel that tells the story of one family, torn between conflicting identities: while the parents are Greek and Italian, their three sons, Dom, Tommy and Luigi Stephano, have grown up as Australians. All the members of the family are literally haunted by their history and their origins. In particular, Maria, the mother, who is not only unable to escape the harsh taste of exile, but has transmitted her uneasiness provoked by homesickness (xenitia) to her son Tommy, who, because of “the overwhelming presence of the past”, finds himself inexorably caught up in a vicious circle of violence, pornography and madness that will tragically end with a crime and a suicide.13 Migrant parents transmit
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to their children a feeling of homelessness and the ghosts of their “imaginary homeland” which become a burden.14 But the second-generation children are not looking for their supposed original homeland, aware that it is impossible for them to live in it. In The Jesus Man, Luigi Stefano expresses that very clearly: “In Greece I could not be Greek. In Perth I cannot feel Australian”.15 Even their migrant parents see them neither as Greek nor as Australian. In The Jesus Man, Maria the mother says to her son: “you’re nothing”.16 Furthermore, outside their families, the migrant children, generally considered by the others to be “wogs” (a racist term generally used for “migrants of colour”), are not even recognized as such by the other “wogs”, as described by Luigi: When we cut ourselves from the Greek tongue, we also cut ourselves off from the Greeks. This was probably inevitable, nothing any of us did could have stopped it. My mother, the only one of us a migrant and therefore unapologetic for her right to be a Greek, thinks we’re a failure as a migrant family, not a success story to write back home about. But I guess that’s the rub: we weren’t really a migrant family. I’m not even a wog. Or at least that’s what the wogs tell me. I’m very self-conscious about who I am.17 Not even having experienced migration, but being rejected from both sides, the putative homeland and the so-called host country, Christos Tsiolkas’s protagonists are caught up in a paradoxical situation: haunted by a past/a country which is not theirs, neither can they fit into a present/a place to which they do not belong.18 Consequently, they reject both. Thus, the protagonists of Loaded, The Jesus Man, Barracuda and Dead Europe, all remaining “translated subjects”, feel rootless, as if they belong nowhere or to a “no-man’s land”, and they suffer harshly from their state of constant and suffocating in-betweeness. For them, the “imaginary homeland” provokes a phantom pain comparable to that of an amputated limb. So they all struggle to find their own personal identity, rejecting all conventional identity labels, and seem to be lost amidst conflicting representations of ethnicity, gender and sexuality. For example, Ari, the protagonist of Loaded says: I’m not Australian, I’m not Greek, I’m not anything. I’m not a worker, I’m not a student, I’m not an artist, I’m not a junkie, I’m not a conversationalist, I’m not an Australian, not a wog, not anything. I’m not left wing, right wing, center, left of center, right of Genghis Khan. I don’t vote, I don’t demonstrate, I don’t do charity. What I am is a runner. Running away from the thousand and one things that people say you have to be or should want to be.19
Identities in (Mental and Sexual) Trouble
Showing a predilection for extreme experiences, Christos Tsiolkas expresses the uneasiness that characterize most of the translated subjects through extreme situations engaging their health. To say the least, Christos Tsiolkas’s protagonists are not healthy. On the contrary, they suffer from multiple mental and sexual troubles, their alienation being linked to their inherited migration disease. Their minds and bodies are prey to illness and disability, as they suffer from depression, dementia, eating disorders/obesity, violence, self-destruction, gender and sexual troubles, and, as a consequence, they are exposed to marginalization, social exclusion and psychic alienation. In Loaded the protagonist Ari gets “wasted”, or “loaded”, on drugs and sex, just as Tommy, the highly depressed character of The Jesus Man who after losing his job gets lost in pornography and food. Or significantly the protagonist of Barracuda, whose
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name is Daniel Kelly, a translated subject of Greek and Scottish immigrant parents, is nicknamed “Psycho”, this nickname being inherited from an outbreak of violence that lead him to beat a friend almost to death. Whether they suffer from visible or invisible disabilities, they are marked by a stigma with negative effects on their sense of belonging. Christos Tsiolkas describes those translated characters as identities in trouble whose uneasiness is not only related to ethnicity but also to gender and sexuality. The most important is that, regarding their sexuality, a number of the characters perceive themselves (or are perceived) as ill and they think they suffer from perversity or hypersexuality. It has to be underlined that most of the protagonists are gay men, and that there is no “gender balance” in Tsiolkas’s writings. Having internalized the stereotype of the over-sexed Mediterranean man, some of them identify with it.20 In particular Greeks are described as sex maniacs, as in The Jesus Man (“randy little buggers. They’d fuck anything”).21 Others think they are perverse, like Tommy who thinks he is a sexual pervert by birth (The Jesus Man), a central component in his feeling of being a freak: obscene and obese flesh.22 In addition to this, this sickly self- representation is linked to sexual orientation. In Loaded, Ari offers an example of a homophobic gay subject: arguing he has no problem with his homoerotic desires and life, he paradoxically reinforces the dominant heterosexual male culture and the current homophobia he has internalized, rejecting a lover, George, because, according to him, he has been feminized. His conflicting emotions and perceptions are quite similar to those of Luigi Stephano in The Jesus Man. Sharing the same libidinal and ethical difficulties, he thinks: Homosexuality is a sickness. So, probably, being hetero. Being black is a sickness, so too is being white.23 The depiction of the health of translated subjects is undoubtedly dysphoric as Tsiolkas shows a predilection for characters suffering from various mental and physical health problems, being mentally tormented by troubled sexual, ethnic, class and gendered identities: alienation seems to be the actual outcome of migration. But if there is indeed a reality of psycho-traumatic experiences linked to migration, the crisis of belonging described by Tsiolkas is largely due to the internalization of racist stereotypes (in the larger sense of the word, racism being extended to ethnicity, social class, gender, sexuality), a form of what Frantz Fanon called “epidermalization of inferiority” the dominated being “the slave of their archetypes”.24 In this way, the representation of suffering/ill translated subjects seems to function like a metaphor of the corporeality of a symbolic order ruled by multi-layered hierarchies related to class, sexuality, gender, or ethnicity. This is exemplified by Daniel, Barracuda’s protagonist, whose athletic body is healthy – at least when, as a young boy, he had the ambition to become a champion swimmer, before collapsing and getting fat – is exposed to a double jeopardy due to his ethnic and class background, along with his gay sexual orientation, which make him feel sick – a phenomenon marked by quite frequent occurrences of the semantic field of sickness. Coming from a working-class family in the suburbs of Melbourne, when he wins a sport scholarship to a private school, he remains an outsider in the middle of a majority of hostile “golden boys”, and faces grave problems of belonging, which make him sick. From the first time he reaches his new school, he feels like a stranger, and his feeling of otherness morphs into self-disgust, hate and self-hatred:
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He hated them, he absolutely hated them, the golden boys. He hated their blondness, their insincere smiles, their designer sunglasses, their designer swimmers and their designers sports gear. They made him feel dark and short and dirty.25 In particular, he has to shave his own hairy body for competing makes him sick, operating as a corporeal metaphor embodying his difference with the other boys: He forced his eyes back to his reflection in the mirror. What repelled him instantly was all that hair. It disgusted him. […] There were ugly clumps of it across his chest, down his belly, dense back thatches of it under his arms. He hated how it was crawling up to his shoulder blades, he saw it as a virus invading his body, the explosion of it from his crotch, how it crept up his legs and grew thicker and blacker on his thighs. One day he would get it all waxed, have an operation to get rid of it, the whole filthy mess of it. It sickened him.26 Ultimately, the hate that grows inside him becomes the main source of his feeling of being sick: “it sickened him how much hate he had inside him. All I am, thought Dan, is hate”.27
Hate/Self-hatred as a Collective Psychosis
Indeed, in Christos Tsiolkas’s writings, the most important form of illness is hatred, self-hatred and racism, which appears to be a collective psychosis. Under a variety of forms linked to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, religion or class, the hate issue is very central to Christos Tsiolkas’s work, as it is always interconnected with the theme of migration. His novels function like a compendium, or archive, of racist insults and verbal racist attacks uttered by members of the same or different communities, thus transcending a binary conception of the “same” and the “other”. Self-hatred, as a consequence of the internalization of racist representations and shame, is above all a major theme developed by Christos Tsiolkas. In his last book Merciless Gods published in 2014, which is a compilation of short stories told from diverse cultural perspectives (Greek, Italian, Turkish, English and Iranian), hate is everywhere, which is made clear by the pervasiveness of racist insults: “wog”, “dago”, “reffo”, sexist ones “bitch”, “faggot” etc. Merciless Gods can be identified as a snapshot of migrant cultures clashing where this universal hate appears between communities and even inside them – it is worth noting that there are around one hundred occurrences of the terms “hate”, “hatred” and “self-hatred” in the book. And it is important to stress that there is no solidarity between the suffering migrant or in- between characters, mainly because of the collision of sexual, ethnic and class boundaries. An example of multilayered hate and racism occurs in Barracuda where Danny, the half Scottish, half Greek protagonist, finds himself insulted by the other immigrant children at school who consider “the faggot isn’t even a true wog”.28 What is particularly interesting in Christos Tsiolkas’s novels is the depiction of the hatred of the other inside us and Tsiolkas shows that what we call hatred of the other is in fact, on the down side, self-loathing. The most significant, and also controversial, example is given by the novel Dead Europe, a kind of realistic gothic tale recounting the protagonist Isaac’s macabre tour around Europe, through Italy to the United Kingdom, which becomes a descent into hell. Beyond the protagonist’s psychic and bodily alienation, Tsiolkas’s Europe is described by Janine Hauthal as a “traumascape”.
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Graham Huggan calls it “a place seemingly condemned to repeat its own violently self- destructive history”: Haunted by spectres of its own making, it is a deadened – but also deadly – site of corrupt pimps and destitute sex workers, caught in a vicious web of race and class- based exploitation […] Tsiolkas’s Europe […] is a far cry from the fount of idealistic humanism dreamed up by generations of both pre- and post-Enlightenment politicians and philosophers, a Europe defined by its durable capacity for civility in an otherwise barbarous world.29 As he returns to Greece, where he visits his mother’s village, the protagonist Isaac, an Australian photographer of Greek descent, morphs into a vampire. Inheriting his family’s curse, he is haunted by the ghost of a Jewish boy, who turns out to be his own grand-father, murdered by his ancestors, who has colonized his body and his photographs. Consequently, Isaac finds himself colonized “by the curse lurking atavistically within him”.30 Christos Tsiolkas’s choice to explore the gothic figure of a vampire is not a coincidence.31 According to Johan Höglund and Tabish Khair “The vampire has always been a traveller and the vampire story frequently explores national, sexual, racial and cultural boundaries”: Through its itinerant ways and transformative body, the old and modern vampire take the reader on trips from the Imperial metropolis into the colonial periphery, to the places where East and West intersect, where stable cultural categories clash, collapse and transform, allowing both the human and the political body to take new and often disturbing forms. Thus, the vampire narrative effectively and continuously maps transnational, colonial and postcolonial concerns.32 As a metaphor, the vampire has the potential here to embody a state of in-betweenness. Even if it has been argued by some critics that Tsiolkas’s use of this vampiric figure is ambivalent as it encounters anti-Semitic themes, the author on the contrary subverts or reverses the cliché of the anti-Semitic vampire. Indeed, Dead Europe’s “central ploy” is to “take the great phobic structures underlying Western vampire discourse – anti- Semitism, fascistic nationalism, ethnic absolutism, homophobia – and, by dismantling their myth of origin, to use them to reflect on the ravaged history of the West itself”.33 Because of this family curse, not only does Isaac morph into a vampire (which makes him sick and annihilates him: “This journey seems to be taking me further away from myself, from all my certainties, from even a sense of my own origins”), he is also exposed to the transmission/contamination of viral anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism.34 Exploring the theme of anti-Semitism and its modern forms in Europe, along with other forms of racism and hate, Christos Tsiolkas focuses on individual ossimoric and schizophrenic conflicts that Isaac encounters: his own blood might be Jewish but at the same time he is exposed to anti-Semitic sentiments.35 Thus, Christos Tsiolkas’s controversial and quite risky exploration of anti-Semitism cannot allow any anti-Semitic reading of the novel. The understanding of the complex appropriation of anti-Semitic discourse in Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe is possible through the contextualization of the broader topic of hate/self-hatred, which is not restricted to Jewishness nor Jewish self-hatred. Here, Christos Tsiolkas illustrates and scrutinizes paradoxes and apparent contradictions between hate and self-hatred, between the other and the self, through the interiorization and contamination of dysphoric and hate-filled representations of the other, applied, as mentioned above, to ethnicity, sexuality, gender and any form of otherness.36 The author transcends the ontological binary scheme opposing the same and the other, going beyond the
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paradigm of the victim, exploring humankind’s shadowy areas, including the Baudelairian figure of “The Self-Tormenter” (in French, L’Héautontimorouménos, a poem found in the collection Les Fleurs du Mal). In this way, hate and self-hatred are described as both part of the same self-sustaining mechanism, a manifestation of social marginalization and an expression of anger for those who are, or who feel, being rejected due to their “difference”, and who, as a consequence, find themselves a stranger and exiled from the self. In this way, Christos Tsiolkas refuses the mechanisms ruled by binarism as he resolves the irreducible fracture between the same and the other, every stereotype collapsing under the complex configurations he elaborates in his novels. His reshaping of “migrancy” comes close to Iain Chambers’s conception in the way, invoking Julia Kristeva, he defines the “stranger”: As such the stranger is an emblem – she or he is a figure that draws our attention to the urgencies of our time: a presence that questions our present. For the stranger threatens the ‘binary classification deployed in the construction of order’, and introduces us to the uncanny displacement of ambiguity. That stranger, as the ghost that shadows every discourse, is the disturbing interrogation, the estrangement, that potentially exists within us all. It is a presence that persists, that cannot be effaced, that draws me out of myself towards another. It is the insistence of the other face that charges my obligation to that ‘strangeness that cannot be suppressed, which means that it is my obligation that cannot be effaced’. As ‘the symptom that renders our “selves” problematic, perhaps impossible, the stranger commences with the emergence of the awareness of my difference and concludes when we all recognise ourselves as strangers.37
Post-Migratory and Queer Writings
The main source of uneasiness and disease in Tsiolkas’s narrative originates from the problem of belonging and the search for identity in a migratory global context, his critique being intrinsically intersectional and showing how biopower acts notably on translated subjects’s embodied experience (including on their subjectivity), describing their body encapsulating alterity related to the nation, sexuality and so on. In this way, he subverts the figure of the stranger, and thus avoids any ontology of strangeness.38 In order to conclude, we shall argue that Christos Tsiolkas’s writings provide an example of queer post-migratory literature. The term “post-migratory” coined by Caryl Philipps, is quite relevant to Christos Tsiolkas’s ethos, in the way he breaks down the constraints of ethnicity and national characteristics, implementing a new sense of identity and belonging.39 Thus, in Dead Europe, according to Parlati, Tsiolkas shows that “roots are mischievous, mystifying, annihilating”.40 Even more, beyond its thematic approach, the situation of Tsiolkas’s writing within literature can be described as post- migratory, rather than simply migrant. If for instance Dead Europe is “ ultimately neither European nor Australian”, neither is it an example of Greek Australian literature.41 It is rather a “global novel”, or a transcultural one, where the literary imaginary allows reshaping so-called migrant identity.42 In addition, trying to escape every attempt of ethnic definition or any “floating signifier”, to use Sneja Gunew’s words, Christos Tsiolkas thus could also be defined as a “post-multicultural writer”, disrupting the reading that would confine him to being just an “ethnic” (gay) writer.43 Within a larger discussion around the relationship between migration and literature, the paradigms of “migrant literature” and “migration literature” are at the core of a
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debate within scholars, and central to the discussion is Elleke Boehmer’s attempt to redefine texts of the early 2000s as “post-migratory”: Such ‘post-migratory’, ‘post-postcolonial’ writing, as ‘postmigratory’ black British writer Caryl Phillips terms it, explores not only leave-taking and departure, watchwords of the migrant condition, but also the regeneration of communities and selves out of heterogeneous experiences in the new country. To find ways ‘to begin again and go on’ is today’s imperative. The creative landscape that emerges from this impulse can be schematized not only as a multitude of divergent margins (which in terms of the recognition of differences it of course is), but also as a collection of at times connected and overlapping yet distinct centres and regions, which would include constituencies of once-migrant writers. My use of spatial metaphors here is intentional. Decentring the centre in many cases involves embodying, materializing, or giving spatial form to what were previously regarded as one-dimensionally temporal and even ahistorical terms: weightlessness, migrancy, in-betweenness, cultural pluralism, postcolonialism.44 More importantly, this paradigmatic shift beyond the blanket category of migrant literature and toward a post-migratory writing conception is particularly interesting as it fits better with another characteristic of Christos Tsiolkas’s work. His novels are indeed an outstanding example of queer literature as his work provides “a queer kind of belonging”, clearly situating himself within the parameters of a post-identitarian and post-belonging queer politics.45 Thus, “queer” does not only challenge gender and sexual norms but also a variety norms, if not all kind of norms: Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer”, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative […] [Queer] describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.46 Within a wider intersectional post-identitarian landscape, the queer paradigm has the potential to extend beyond the gender agenda, including other categories in the construction of otherness, as they converge under the label of hybridity.47 Since his first novel, published in 1995, Christos Tsiolkas goes beyond a gay politics and the paradigm of identity, as he criticizes any identity label. Being subject of multi-minority groups, the protagonist of Loaded, Ari, defines himself through a process of counteridentification.48 He rebels against the model of normativity and conformity, in a very provocative way, as he says: Faggot I don’t mind. I like the word. I like queer. I like the Greek word pousti. I hate the word gay. Hate the word homosexual. I like the word wog, can’t stand dago, ethnic or Greek-Australian. You’re either Greek or Australian, you have to make a choice. Me, I’m neither; it’s not that I can’t decide; I don’t like definitions. If I was black, I’d call myself nigger.49 Remaining in the same register as Barracuda, published in 2013, the end of alienation coincides for Danny the protagonist with the moment he understands that “belonging […] was the wrong question”: Belonging, he knew now, was the wrong question. The context between country and nation, the tussle between home and roaming, here and elsewhere, all the relentless claiming and the ever-shifting mapping, none of it could settle the question that had mattered most to him since he’d found himself moored on dry land: was he – Danny Kelly, Psycho Kelly, Danny the Greek, Dino, Dan, Barracuda –
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was he a good man? He needed to answer that first, and then all would fall into place.50 Christos Tsiolkas gives voice in his work to a variety of multilayered translated subjectivities and his acknowledgement of personal identities does not coincide with any form of politics, as expressed by Ari in Loaded (“I sing fuck politics, let’s dance”).51 While criticizing the traditional framing of (both ethnic and gender) belonging, he contributes to dismantling any binary essentialist scheme and any assigned and fixed identity against which he supports an identity and culture model in terms of lability, movement and migrancy. While the sense of belonging is constantly being eroded by modern society, Tsiolkas’s queer and post-migratory writings can thus be defined also as post-belonging. This conception offers the possibility of going beyond and subverting the dysphoric unhealthy representations of translated subjects, whilst the queer and post-belonging paradigms perhaps provide a type of therapy for both identity troubles and identity politics.
NOTES
1. Concerning Greek-Australian literature, see: Andrea Garivaldis, The Evolution of Greek Identity through the Study of Selected Short Stories of Greek Australian Writers: 1901–2001, in M. Rossetto, M. Tsianikas, G. Couvalis and M. Palaktsoglou (Eds.), Greek Research in Australia: Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University, 2009, p. 280-290. George Kanarakis, Greek Voices in Australia: a Tradition of Prose, Poetry and Drama, Sydney, New York, Australian National University Press, 1987. Con Castan, “Greek-Australian Literature: An Essay” in Spilias, T. and Mesinis, S. (eds), Reflections: Selected Works from Greek Australian Literature, Melbourne, Elikia Books, 1988, p. 3-28. Con Castan, “Greek-australian literary publication”, Modern Greek studies, Australia, New Zeland, 2, 1994. 2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White masks, Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Forewords by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha, London, Pluto Press, 2008, p. 4. 3. Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded, London, Vintage Books, 1997, p. 51, 64. 4. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blamey, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992 (originally published under the title: Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990). 5. Loaded, London, Vintage Books, 1997; The Jesus man, North Sydney, NSW, Random House Australia Ply Ltd, 1999 (Kindle electronic book); Dead Europe, London, Atlantic Books, 2011 (first published in Australia by Random House Australia Ply Ltd, 2005). 6. The Slap, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 2008. 7. Barracuda, London, Atlantic Books, 2014 (first published in Australia by Allen & Unwin, 2013); Merciless Gods, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 2014. 8. See Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London, Granta (in association with Penguin Books), 1992, p. 17: “The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.” See also Homi Bhabha, The location of culture,
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London, New York, Routledge, 1994 (see the last chapter “How newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation”, p. 212). 9. Stuart Hall, The Question of Cultural Identity, In: S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and Its Futures, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Open University Press, 1992, p. 310. 10. Andrew McCann, Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique: Politics, Obscenity, Celebrity, London, Anthem Press, 2015, p. 106. 11. See Pavlos Kavouras, University of Athens, “Xenitia or the State of Being a Foreigner: Juxtaposing Realities, Interpreting Encounters”. Retrieved from https://lsa.umich.edu/ modgreek/news-events/all-events.detail.html/25098-1654342.html 12. See Hariclea Zengos, “Re-defining Parameters: Greek Australian Literature”, In: Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader, Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal (Eds), New Delhi, SSS Publications, 2009, p. 271-282. See also Garivaldis, The Evolution of Greek Identity, p. 285, 288. 13. See Tsiolkas, The Jesus man, 3527. 14. See Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p. 10: “It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge ‑ which gives rise to profound uncertainties ‑ that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” 15. Tsiolkas, The Jesus man, 3527. 16. Tsiolkas, The Jesus man, 985. 17. Tsiolkas, The Jesus man, 3787. 18. See also Marilena Parlati, “Europe and its ‘Ends’. Haunting (by) the Past in Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe”, The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia, vol. 2, n°2, 2011, p. 42-52. 19. Tsiolkas, Loaded, p. 149. 20. See also similar examples of sexual orientalism provided by Todd Shepard, Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017 (also in French: Todd Shepard, Mâle décolonisation. “L’homme arabe” et la France, de l’indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne, Paris, Payot, 2017). 21. Tsiolkas, The Jesus Man, 2949. 22. Tsiolkas, The Jesus Man, 3527. 23. Tsiolkas, The Jesus Man, 4363. 24. Fanon, Black Skins, White masks, p. 22: « Yes, the black man is supposed to be a good nigger; once this has been laid down, the rest follows of itself. To make him talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible. And naturally, just as a Jew who spends money without thinking about it is suspect, a black man who quotes Montesquieu had better be watched. Please understand me: watched in the sense that he is starting something. Certainly I do not contend that the black student is suspect to his fellows or to his teachers. But outside university circles there is an army of fools: What is important is not to educate them, but to teach the Negro not to be the slave of their archetypes.” 25. Tsiolkas, Barracuda, p. 166. 26. Ibid., p. 218. 27. Ibid., p. 279. 28. Tsiolkas, Barracuda, p. 44. 29. Janine Hauthal, “Writing back or writing off ? Europe as ‛tribe’ and ‛traumascape’ in works by Caryl Phillips and Christos Tsiolkas”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 2, p. 208-219. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2015.1012816 Accessed 31 May 2017?
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Graham Huggan & Ian Law, Racim Postcolonialism Europe, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2009, p. 1. 30. McCann, Andrew, Jeff Sparrow and Christen Cornell, “The Spectres Haunting Dead Europe”, Overland 181, summer 2005, p. 27. 31. See also Nikos Papastergiadis, “Wog Zombie: The De- and Re-Humanisation of Migrants, from Mad Dogs to Cyborgs”, Cultural Studies Review, 2009, 15 (2), p. 147-178. 32. Johan Höglund and Tabish Khair, “Introduction”, In Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires. Dark Blood, Johan Höglund, Tabish Khair (Eds), Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 1-2. 33. On the reception of the novel and the anti-Semitic theme, see Eleni Pavlides, Un-Australian fictions: nation, multiculture(alism) and globalisation, 1988-2008, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, p. 117 sqq. Graham Huggan, “Vampires, again”, Southerly, 66, n°3, 2006, p. 192-204 (quoted by McCann, Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique, p. 145). 34. Tsiolkas, Dead Europe, p. 260. Catherine Padmore (p. 61) also suggested “Dead Europe presents a powerful image of how ideologies can move between people through physical contact. When Isaac’s skin touches his boyfriend’s swastika tattoo, a relic of a neo-Nazi past, Isaac fears: “The ink [is] on [his] skin too” (255). Colin’s shameful history clings to him through the tattoo and becomes absorbed into Isaac when their skins touch. I suggest this ink does not remain contained within the narrative: some of the ink from Colin’s tattoo is transmitted through Tsiolkas’ pages to the reader (a form of textually transmitted disease), so that the stain of anti-Semitism is on our skin too. See Catherine Padmore, ‘“Blood and land and ghosts”: Haunting Words in Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe.’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Special Issue 2007: Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors, 2007, p. 52-64. 35. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Eds.), Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 41-42. Also cited in Padmore, ‘“Blood and land and ghosts”, p. 61-62. 36. See Esther Benbassa, Jean-Christophe Attias (Eds.), La haine de soi. Difficiles identités, Bruxelles, Éditions Complexe, 2000 (on the genealogy of the concept of “Jewish self-hatred” coined in the 1930s by Theodor Lessing to the exploration of multifaceted self-loathing related to sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity and so on). 37. Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London and New York, Routeldge, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001 p. 6. See also Kristeva : « Étrangement, l’étranger nous habite : il est la face cachée de notre identité […]. De le reconnaître en nous, nous nous épargnons de le détester en lui- même. » http://www.kristeva.fr/reflexions-sur-l-etranger.html 38. See Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine, éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1989 : « «Personne n’est intrinsèquement autre, il ne l’est que parce qu’il n’est pas moi », p. 356. 39. About the origin of the term “post-migratory”, see Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Post-colonial literature. Migrant Metaphors, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 250. 40. Parlati, “Europe and its ‘Ends’, p. 49. 41. Graham Huggan, Australian literature. Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism, Oxford New York, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. vii: “Perhaps, as Andrew McCann suggests, Dead Europe is ultimately neither European nor Australian; rather, it is a ‘global novel’ which demonstrates, plausibly if pathologically, the ‘sprawling networks of exchange, violence and desire that have been moulding the modern world for at least the past two hundred years’ (McCann 2005: 28). Needless to say, however, this global novel throws off sparks for contemporary Australia, alluding both to hostilities against (illegal) migrants in the Howard-Ruddock era and to the repeatedly frustrated search for a national identity that remains haunted by the past from which
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it wishes to free itself, forcing the nation’s younger citizens back into reliving the nightmares of another, older world.” See also Eleni Pavlides, Un-Australian Fictions: Nation, Multiculture(alism) and Globalisation, 1988-2008, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 42. Hauthal, “Writing back or writing off ?”, p. 216-217. 43. Sneja Gunew, Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-cosmopolitan Mediators, London, New York, Anthem Press, 2017. 44. See Elien DECLERCQ , ‘“Écriture migrante”, “littérature (im)migrante”, “migration literature” : réflexions sur un concept aux contours imprécis’, Revue de littérature comparée, vol. 339, no. 3, 2011, p. 301-310. On “post-migratory” literature, see Ahmed Gamal, “The global and the postcolonial in post- migratory literature”, In Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial, Florian Stadtler, Ole Birk Laursen (Eds), Routeledge, 2016, p. 94-106. Boehmer, Colonial and Post-colonial literature, p. 250-251. 45. See Mandy Treagus, “A queer kind of belonging: identity and nation in Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded”, CRNLE Journal (Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English), Flinders University of South Australia, 2000, p. 219-227. Mandy Treagus, “Queering the Mainstream: The Slap and ‘Middle’ Australia”, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 12 (3), 2012, p. 1-9. Ben Authers, ‛“I’m Not Australian, I’m Not Greek, I’m Not Anything”: Identity and the Multicultural Nation in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 4, 2005, p. 133-145. See also Chantal Zabus, The Future of Postcolonial Studies, New York and London, Routledge (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures), 2015, p. 189. 46. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 62. 47. Aristea Fotopoulou, “Intersectionality Queer Studies and Hybridity: Methodological Frameworks for Social Research”, Journal of International Women's Studies, 13 (2), 2012, p. 19-32. 48. See Sophie Coavoux, « Greek Diaspora and Hybrid Identities: Transnational and Transgender Perspectives in Two novels: Loaded, by Christos Tsiolkas (Australia) and Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (USA) », Transtext(e)s Transcultures, 7 | 2012. Retrieved from http:// transtexts.revues.org/451 49. Tsiolkas, Loaded, p. 114-115. 50. Tsiolkas, Barracuda, p. 508. 51. Tsiolkas, Loaded, p. 62.
ABSTRACTS
Through the prism of the complex entanglements of the migration and disease themes, the whole work of Christos Tsiolkas provides a wide range of disorders that affect the minds and the bodies of his “translated” subjects. His controversial representations of hyphenated subjects provide a critique of identities and identity politics through his interpretation of unhealthy imaginary of the migrant. In this way, Christos Tsiolkas goes beyond any binary approach based on a simplistic and superficial opposition between the “same” and the “other”, categories which coincide with those of the “healthy” and the “unhealthy”, and according to him, otherness does not exist per
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se, as an essence. Through the renewal of the cartography of otherness and by the way in which he subverts and relocates the unhealthy imaginary of his translated subjects, Christos Tsiolkas’s writings can be considered to be an example of queer post-migratory literature.
AUTHOR
SOPHIE COAVOUX Sophie Coavoux est Maître de conférences HDR de grec moderne à l’Université Jean Moulin (Lyon) et membre de l’IETT (Institut d’Études Transtextuelles et Transculturelles). Elle travaille essentiellement sur la littérature grecque moderne et sur le genre et a notamment publié Le développement de l’érotisme dans la poésie de Constantin Cavafy aux Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée (2013) et Masculin / Féminin dans la langue, la littérature et l’art grecs modernes (dir.), Publication de l’IETT (2011). Sophie Coavoux is Assistant Professor in Modern Greek Studies at the Jean Moulin University (Lyon), and a member of the IETT (Institute for Transtextual and Transcultural Studies). Her work mainly focuses on Modern Greek literature and gender and among her major publications are Le développement de l’érotisme dans la poésie de Constantin Cavafy (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013) and Masculin / Féminin dans la langue, la littérature et l’art grecs modernes (Ed.), publication de l’IETT (2011).
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Varia
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“It Is (Not) What It Looks Like”: Chen Hangfeng’s Liminality
Bérangère Amblard
1 Chen Hangfeng 陈航峰 introduces his viewers to a world were nothing seems to be what it looks like. A world of paradox and ambiguity, of movement and transformation. A blurred universe, which disorientates, confuses and bewilders. He was born and studied in Shanghai where he is still based today. Growing up and living in this more and more Westernized, and permanently changing environment had a huge impact on his work. After graduating from a high school program dedicated to the study of art, he enrolled in the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University. There, he majored in oil painting, but the course content also included design, graphic design, photography, sculpture, print, wood cut, traditional Chinese ink painting and art history. When he graduated and made his debut as an artist, he had already “started mixing different types of logos and icons into patterns” but he quickly stopped and became a graphic designer specializing in logo design. In 1999, he started working in a design studio and an advertising company.1 A few years later, he switched back to being an artist and started working on his papercut series of artworks, which he is most famous for.
2 Chinese paper cutting has a history of over one thousand years, and at first glance, Chen seems to follow the footsteps of his ancient masters. Taking the form of the Chinese zodiac’s twelve animals or of that of the double xi 喜, the character for happiness, his papercuts seem to imitate traditional forms of patterns and designs. It is only by taking a few steps forward and a closer look, that the spectators will appreciate the artwork’s complexity. What looks like traditional patterns is actually an arrangement of the logos of the world’s largest companies. The pig, which is a traditional symbol of prosperity in China, has eyes formed of the logo of the French supermarket Carrefour, its snout is decorated with that of the jewellery brand Omega, and its back is engraved with those of MacDonald’s, Adidas, Puma, Apple, Nike and Shell (Figure 1). The whole series was playfully entitled Logomania. This series of works sets up an apparent dichotomy between artistic media and practices which are considered traditional one the one side, and contemporary means of artistic expression or interpretation on the other; namely between western “influences” and local
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“Chineseness”. The confrontation goes even further in the sense that the juxtaposition questions the challenging of ‘timeless traditions’ by modernity. This opposition is such that it stands out the most, but Chen Hangfeng’s art plays around with a great diversity of other dichotomies. They are anchored in his peculiar academic and professional background – which they might be a consequence of. Between movement and stillness, control and lack of control, the natural and the unnatural, action and inaction, real and virtual or East and West, the artworks seem to be the place where confrontation occurs. However, this paper aims at showing that Chen Hangfeng’s creations actually challenge the idea of a strict confrontation with two well-defined sides. The line where the contact is made is not a demarcation, it is neither definite, nor impermeable. The contact itself is neither fixed nor rigid. It is a moving, dynamic kind of encounter. This dynamism is embodied in different types of movement which can be found in the artworks. From them originates a sense of ambivalence that will be linked to the concept of liminality as a significant characteristic of the fourth generation of contemporary artists in China. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: an overview of the fourth generation of artists in China will precede a more detailed description of the movements. The final part will approach the notion of liminality and link it to contemporary creation.
Figure 1: Logomania Pig 疯狂标志之猪, 2007, Courtesy of the artist
Brands: The New Decoration of China
3 Chen Hangfeng was born in 1974. He belongs to the fourth generation of Chinese artists after the Cultural Revolution.2 Artists from this generation were born after – or a few years before – the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, which marked both the end of the Cultural Revolution as well as the cessation of the Maoist era, and the launching of President Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and Open-Door policy.3 The Four Modernisations si
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ge xiandaihua 四个现代化opened the way to the fulgurous transformations of the following four decades.4 The pace briefly slowed down after 1989 with the trauma caused by the Tian’anmen massacre, only to accelerate again in the 1990s. This decade started with Deng Xiaoping’s trip to Guangdong province. His famous speech given in Shenzhen definitely set the tone for the following decades: “Reform and Opening”. Indeed, the late 1990s and 2000s were dotted with major political, economic and social changes. The country’s economy grew on average at an annual rate of ten percent between 1990 and 2004. China became increasingly involved in globalization and its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 confirmed its entry in the capitalist world. This opening of the Chinese market facilitated foreign investments, of which China quickly became the second destination country and was soon to be the first. Artists of the fourth generation thus grew up during the country’s transition into a market economy, a period of reform and opening up to the West which significantly modified its reality. What makes them a significant generation of artists, utterly different from previous post Cultural Revolution generations, is a matter of context as well as a matter of artistic forms and contents.
4 Even if they have not reached the renown of previous generations of artists, several exhibitions centred on fourth generation artists were organized in China and abroad: After 1970s: The Generation Changed by Market; Next Station, Cartoon?: Paintings from the post-70’s generation; or My Generation: Young Chinese Artists.5 Each of them put forward a possible designation that would best characterize them. They were labelled as “the post-70’s generation”, “a generation of young artists”, “the Young Chinese Artists” (YCA) – referring to the Young British Artists (YBA) –, “the “me” generation”, or “the generation changed by market”.6 Indeed, they are considered the heirs to Deng Xiaoping’s political and economic reforms. Introducing the book Young Chinese Artists: The Next Generation, Xia Juan lists a series of milestones from the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century in China.7 He juxtaposes the main political and economic events or reforms with changes which occurred in pop culture and people’s lifestyle in the course of those three decades. Coca-Cola entering the Chinese market in 1979, aerobics becoming popular in the course of the 1980’s, girls wearing bikinis and swinging hula hoops, young people singing karaoke, the arrival of the first mobile phones, the screening of Titanic along with other Hollywood movies, the appearance of international luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel or Armani, the sprouting of blogs or that of beauty contests; he takes his audience through the tremendous changes which lead to the fact that– as Chen Hangfeng rightly pointed out – brands actually became the new decoration of China.
5 Since those artists came at age in the unique epoch I just gave an overview of, the above-mentioned exhibitions were based on the hypothesis that Young people’s lifestyles - the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the home they live in, the level of education they have, and the way they spend their leisure time - have undergone radical transformation. This combination of factors affects one’s perception, one’s thinking: it created new values and an estrangement from older ones.8
6 As well as Like their peers, many of the artists […] are One Child prodigies and, as such, travel extensively, text constantly, play in rock bands and live by the latest fashion trends. They are empowered, […] because they live in the fastest growing superpower in the world and are beneficiaries of its greatly expanding free market.9
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7 Stating that new consumption patterns, massive population displacements to newly developed urban centres, and a recent fascination with personal economic gain, were all mutations that came to be driving forces for the artistic creation, those exhibitions rightly put forward the political, social and economic conditions in which the young artists were raised and create art.
8 Let us now consider the contents and forms of their artistic creations. Being “one child prodigies”, one of the salient characteristics of this generation is a previously non- existing form of individualism. Under the Maoist era service to the state exceeded personal desires or ambition. Once they came of age, adults, rarely able to choose their own direction, were assigned work units. As for artistic creation, starting from the launching of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the policy that had been formulated by Mao Zedong in Yan’an in 1942 was reaffirmed: no form of art would be independent from politics. It stressed on an utilitarian type of art, which had to serve propaganda, revolution and the people. Socialist-realism was the official style. Art had to be hong, guang, liang 红光亮 [red, bright, and shiny], and had to express and represent the masses, by shedding light on the main three heroic groups: workers, peasants and soldiers.10 The post-1970s generation of artists is the first one which did not experience the Cultural Revolution. This period left a mark not only on the first, but also on the second and third generations of artists after the end of the Maoist era, composed of artists who were born in the 1950s and 1960s and whose careers started in the 1990s. Among them are many of the Chinese art market’s big names: Yue Minjun 岳敏君, Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚, Liu Bolin 刘勃麟or Wang Guangyi 王广义whose works still engage with Cultural Revolutionary iconography. The fourth generation of artists enjoyed a new individualism where success was based on individual choices. Yet, it comes at a price: the pressure of succeeding academically and economically, both to live up to their parents’ expectations, and in order to support them financially. Since they were not holding the Cultural Revolution period and its symbols as a point of reference, and as a source to oppose, they had to come up, as Barabara Pollock puts it, “with their own sense of contemporary aesthetics and find their own ways of bringing frisson to their work”.11 In doing so They often explore the psychological conditions of living in China, rather than confront social issues or political history, as was the case of an earlier generation of Chinese artists who came of age during the Cultural Revolution and lived through Tiananmen Square.12
9 The range of themes they focus on, as well as the artistic forms in which they express them diverge from earlier generations of artists. Those artists are indeed known to approach questions such as the rapid urbanisation of the country and the transformations of scenery it involved, the restructuration of social and family ties caused by the One Child Policy, the emergence of a materialistic consumer culture, or the advent of digital technologies and the development of internet. Whichever topics they focus on, the artists draw from their daily lives. Their artworks depict the social, economic and political landscape they experience living in China. They express a common feeling about their unique cultural moment, an understanding and acute perception about their world, and in so doing imbues the contemporary art scene with their generation’s most pressing concerns.13
10 Thus, like many other artists from his generation, Chen Hangfeng can be said to be an observer and a commentator of the continuous upheaval of a Chinese landscape which is far from serene or impassive. Just like his peers, he works with every medium:
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painting, performance, installation, new media, video and photography. During our meeting in May 2017, he explained that, when he was attending university, the educational system was still based on realistic and figurative styles. A student would start by learning how to draw and sculpt. He would then move on to life drawing and oil painting, practicing on still lives. The last step would be life portrait of the human figure. Chen recalls the course of the third year of university during which he “got bored with all of that”, “went the opposite way and started exploring possibilities by [him]self”.14 About the fourth-generation artists, Barbara Pollack said: In between the extreme of the most traditional and the most innovative, lies a broad range of media, from digital processed photography to video, performance, sculpture, and artworks that exist solely in virtual form on the internet.15
11 As I am about to further elaborate in the section that follows, it could be said that Chen Hangfeng has developed an eclectic and protean work, which lies precisely in this in- betweenness.
Confronting or Interwining?
12 As previously stated in the introduction of this paper, Chen Hangfeng’s creations seem to set up different types of dichotomy. According to me, what is of interest is the way the contact, the encounter is established. While they convey the impression of a strict opposition, they actually explore several forms of movement.
13 The first type of movement is such that it can be qualified as “physical”. In some artworks, this physical movement takes on a particularly material or mechanical form. For the series Wind from the West, (Figure 2) Chen chose simple drawings of plum blossoms, orchids, or bamboos. While traditional Chinese literati used ink to draw them, he shapes them with plastic shopping bags. He cuts out the forms and mounts them on a wooden board using stick pins. The wind from the West takes the form of small fans set up on the side of the board. A movement sensor switches them on, they blow on the plastic leaves and petals which softly rustle. Introducing those artworks, the artist said I think that from 2010 inward, I got interested in slowness and in mechanical movement. I got interested in the subtleness which can be brought by an installation. That’s why I make those moving paintings.16
14 In the moving paintings, the movement indeed is quite subtle. It is light, delicate, ethereal in such manner that it is practically a “non-movement”. First of all, because it only exists when the spectator comes closer to the painting, enough to activate the sensors, and is surprised to see the drawing enliven. Moreover, in the short descriptions he wrote about each artwork, Chen said about Wind from the west that “随 着定时器的中止，它们便恢复到原来的形状” [when the timer stops, they [the leaves] always return to their original position].17 Blowing blowing, a different work based on a similar system, is composed of a sentence written out of plastic bags which “不停得顺 着风的方向摇晃，同时又保持着它们的姿态” [ceaselessly sway in the wind, but through it all, maintain their posture].18 As soon as the wind stops blowing, everything goes back to its original position, it is almost as if nothing happened. This specificity of the artworks is embodied in the title of one from the same series which was paradoxically entitled Don't move. The last example is that of Constructed shadows (Figure 3). Using the same process the artist created shadows on an old decrepit wall, shaping a
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traditional-styled landscape with black acrylic paint and pieces of dark plastic bags. Even more subtle this time, the movement comes from the gentle breeze that agitates the plastic leaves and makes them glisten and sparkle in the sunlight. Moreover, the form, intensity and orientation of the shadows casted on the wall, vary depending on the sun’s position in the sky, and disappear on a cloudy day. A particularly patient spectator would notice those slow changes along the day. Never is the movement completely “sincere”. All those artworks bear the intrinsic contradiction of a movement which is ephemeral, not total: in a sense, a half or a non-movement.
Figure 2: Wind from the West, Plum Blossom 风渐左西之梅, 2010, Curtesy of the artist
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Figure 3: Constructed shadows 造影, 2010, Curtesy of the artist.
15 The second type of movement is one of proliferation, accumulation or transformation. Logos and brands invade Chen Hangfeng’s papercuts, which they shape the patterns of. On the occasion of the exhibition Daily Prosperity, they were stamped on other media as well (Figure 4).19 Proliferating on the walls and floor of the room, they became a decorative pattern on the wallpaper and carpets. During a special event, they even made their way to the skin of the exhibition’s visitors who were offered logo-themed temporary tattoos.20 The form of proliferation embodied in those works are reminiscent of another kind of proliferation that one witnesses on a daily basis in China. The recent fulgurous development of rental bikes is one of many examples. Proliferation also concerns two other series of works. The first one, Fengshui (Figure 5), is composed of different drawings made in a modern “acrylic on magazine paper” adaptation of the traditional ink on rice paper style. The magazine photographs picture fashion models on whom the artist added a layer of paint. He used the same method with the series Growing (Figure 6), only replacing the magazine photographs with engravings that he collected in flea markets in Switzerland. This time, the title is more evocative of the proliferating effect conveyed by the artwork. However, in both series, the painted landscape seems to be in an in-between state at once masking and completing the original image. It seems out of place and, at the same time playfully blends with, and adds meaning to the partly hidden picture. In Feng Shui, the black line, one of the tree’s branches, settles as a stroke of eyeliner on the woman’s face. This in- betweenness comes in the way of what would otherwise be a pure confrontation between different media and artistic practices.
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Figure 4: Daily Prosperity 欣欣向荣, Installation view, 2008, Curtesy of the artist.
Figure 5: Fengshui 风水, 2015, Curtesy of the artist.
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Figure 6: 生长 Growing, 2016, Curtesy of the artist.
16 Accumulation is also a big part of Chen Hangfeng’s work. For some artworks, he used found or recovered objects that he accumulated and then put together in installations. The most prominent type of accumulation however, is an accumulation of layers in the artworks. Looking back at the previously described series Fengshui and Growing, it can be stated that painting on the pictures, the artist adds both a layer of paint and one of meaning. It comes and goes (Figure 7) is also based on an accumulation of layers. It is a video recording of the process of making a collage. Chen cuts different blue-packaging consumer products out of advertisements. He places them on a white piece of paper and arranges two mirrors forming a 60-degree angle around them. Both the accumulation of the pictures of objects and the multiplication of their reflections in the mirrors, create the illusion of a snowflake. The spectator’s gaze gets lost in this illusion, which is a process that Toss and Turn (Figure 8) takes to another level. This installation is made of two cameras, one outside the museum, the other inside. Both are filming the museum’s visitors through kaleidoscopes which spin and turn in front of the lenses. An added device records the sound of the kaleidoscopes moving. The fragmented and moving image is projected on the wall of a hexagonal-shaped room, while the sound recorded from the kaleidoscopes plays. Not only is the image multiple, but the devices mobilized by the artist, and the spectator’s senses they stimulate are too. It results in a disorientating immersive environment. The above-mentioned artworks, whether based on proliferation or accumulation also engage with transformation. The images get transformed by the added media whether it is paint, mirrors or a more complicated set of devices. The matter of interest is in the movement of transformation which comes as a proof of the existing “interaction” between the different layers of media or content. Once again, the confrontation is merely an outward appearance.
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Figure 7: It comes and goes 来来去去, 2007, Curtesy of the artist.
Figure 8: Toss and Turn 翻来覆去, 2009, Curtesy of the artist
17 The last type of movement this paper mentions is the one of the spectator. Many of the described artworks require participation of the spectators, and the mobility of their position in front of the picture. To appreciate the complexity of the artworks, one has to physically come closer to them; either to activate the hidden sensors or to realize that what looked like a traditional pattern is made of logos or pieces of plastic. There are several layers to each artwork and the spectators’ gaze has to be mobile in order to notice them all. Like the famous drawing of an animal that can either be a duck or a rabbit, depending on the way one looks at it, Chen’s creations require a mobility of the spectator’s gaze – a characteristic that embodies their ambivalence in a perfect manner. The artworks are multifaceted. Before further elaborating on the question of the ambivalence in Chen Hangfeng’s artworks, let us consider the concept of liminality.
The Ambivalence of Liminality
18 The word “liminality” is based on limen, the latin word for “threshold”. The concept of “liminality” originated from anthropology. The French researcher Arnold van Gennep
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was the first to use it. Talking about “un stade liminaire des rites de passages” [a liminal stage in rituals of passage], he linked the study of the ritual of passage and the idea of in-betweenness. In Rites de passage, published in 1909, “le stade liminaire” characterizes the intermediate stage of rituals, during which participants have already departed from their pre-ritual status but have not yet transitioned into their post- ritual one.21 However, the concept, as well as the rest of his work, long remained unknown. Victor Turner rediscovered the theory of which he adapted the terms. “Le stade liminaire des rituels” thus became “the liminal stage of rituals” which translates a state of “liminality”. Whereas Arnold van Gennep stressed on the rituals’ tripartition, Victor Turner got interested in the intermediate stage. He isolated and scrutinized it in order to identify and name its main features. His essay “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage”, opens with a reminder of van Gennep’s analysis of rites of passage.22 Turner reminds his readers that they accompany a change in place, social position or age – situations that he qualifies as “state”. Interested in the difference between “state” and “transition”, he argues that “a transition has different cultural properties from those of a state”.23 Following van Gennep’s tripartite model, he noticed that the first stage, the stage of separation marks “the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or a set of cultural condition (a “state”)”. After the final stage, the aggregation, the subject goes back to a “stable state”. In-between though, in the course of the liminal stage “the state of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) is ambiguous; he passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state”.24 The rite thus engineers the shifting from one stable, structured state to another. The liminal stage differs by its ambivalence. This is how Victor Turner characterizes it: “paradox”, “confusion”, “indefinable”, “essentially unstructured”.
19 “Betwixt and between”, liminality is neither this nor that, as well as both this and that. During rituals, the liminal stage is thus associated with symbols which reflect its peculiar condition. Huts and tunnels, that are at once tombs and wombs; lunar symbolism, for the same moon waxes and wanes; or snake symbolism, for the snake appears to die, but only shades its old skin and appears in a new one. This coincidence of opposite processes and notions in a single representation characterizes the peculiar unity of the liminal: that which is neither this nor that, and yet both.25
20 The concept’s ambivalence comes from what Turner calls “the peculiar unity of the liminal”. From this ambivalence results the ritual neophytes’ ‘undefinition’. Divested of their name, they are often considered to be sexless or bisexual, as well as neither dead nor living. The neophytes are neither living nor dead from one aspect, and both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, confusion of all the customary categories.26
21 In that sense liminality can also be understood as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configuration of ideas and relations may arise”.27
22 I opened this essay stating that in Cheng Hangfeng’s artworks nothing is what it seems. Looking back at them through the lens of liminality enables to understand that “it is not what it looks like” because they are neither one nor the other, and both at the same time – they are in-between. More than a confrontation, they embody a movement of oscillation between several states, movement from which originates the sense of
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‘undefinition’ and ambivalence. Labelling Chen Hangfeng’s work seems impossible. The series Wind from the West resembles ink painting, but the leaves are made of plastic and the noise of the fans which blow on them does not let the viewer forget about their presence. In the paper cut series, it is hard to tell if the medium is paper or logos. In fact, about his usage of logos and brands the artist said: “In my opinion, these logos are very concise images on their own. Used in different situations, they say something far beyond their own meaning”.28 Moreover, Chen Hangfeng also used the same patterns on different objects – including carpets, tattoos or screens – thus blurring the line between artworks and by-products, or that between artworks and decorations, when they are infinitely stamped on wallpapers, or engraved on a plastic Christmas tree.
23 The artworks also oscillate between the real and the virtual. Introducing Toss and Turn Chen explains that 万花筒的转动及持续变化的图像输入使得六角型房间内的影像变幻莫测，每天不 断的将美术馆内外的景象变成超现实般移动的墙纸。29 [The motion of the kaleidoscopes and the constantly-changing images make the hexagonal room’s landscape unpredictable, continuously transforming everyday scenes from inside and outside of the museum into surrealistically moving wallpaper.]
24 Not only do the artworks transform images extracted from reality into something surrealistic which is used as a wallpaper, but the set of devices ensures an unpredictable flow of continuously transforming images. The immersive experience creates an effect of disorientation, blurring the limits between what is inside and outside the museum and what is real or not. The video Three Minutes, is composed of a succession of pictures taken and collected by the artist over a range of ten years from 2000 to 2008. Close ups of everyday life scenes, urban landscapes and portraits succeed one another in a random order, while the sound of a siren plays in the background. The video lasts for three minutes, which are the three minutes of silence that were observed after the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province. The moment of tribute itself is liminal, at the threshold of reality. During those three minutes, life stopped running, people remained still and silent, only listening to the sound of the siren. This impression is conveyed in the video by the fact that each photograph has been animated. The almost imperceptible movement of a unstable photograph which is supposed to be unanimated challenges the line between reality and fiction.
25 The artist also plays with the notion of simulacrum. He classified the series Growing, Wind from the West and Don’t move under the name Fake tradition series. It comes and goes, Toss and Turn and Three minutes, are part of the group of artworks entitled Simulacrum reality. “Fake tradition” and “simulacrum reality”, are two oxymorons which echo Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum.30 The simulacrum concerns postmodern societies that have lost all contact with reality. In the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, the simulation or the representation even determines reality. The consequence is the disappearance of any distinction between reality and its representation. He argues that simulation threatens the difference between “true” and “false”, and between “real” and “imaginary”, features that can be found in the studied artworks. The video artwork It comes and goes even goes as far as recording the process of creating fakeness, displaying the mirrored image of the illusion of a snowflake, made out of superficial consumer goods.
26 Chen Hangfeng’s artworks engage with liminality in many different ways. They go beyond a simple confrontation or dichotomy and set up dynamic, intermingled,
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intertwined encounters of media, practices, histories, memories and even temporalities. The topics he approaches and the way he addresses them are typical for the fourth generation of artists. Artists from previous generations sought to establish a modern aesthetic. Their artworks – grinding and confronting different artistic practices and media – attest to a conscious intention to create “modernity”. Those considerations and oppositions are now out of date. There is, in contemporary creation, an evident and assumed hybridity of practices where the “modern” goes alongside the “traditional”, without any willing confrontation, or questioning of the use of one or the other. That is one of the reasons why I consider that artists from the previous generations fall into the category of modern art, and argue that the fourth generation of artists actually is the real first generation of contemporary artists in China. A generation where hybridity became more of a “state of affairs” than a confrontation. The ambivalence and ‘undefinability’, the sense of in-betweenness which comes from this hybridity are embodied in the artworks’ liminality. They are symptomatic of many fourth-generation artists, Cao Fei 曹斐, Yang Yongliang 杨泳梁, Maleonn 马良, Tamen 他们, amongst others. The indefinite state of their creations translates the lack of definition of the landscape they grew up in. That of a country which has been for the last three decades, and still is, in a state of transition. A state in which it is fashioning its identity, that involves both revising its past and inventing its future. A state, which can be illustrated by what the Queen of Hearts says to Alice when trying to make her way through the chessboard in the looking-glass world: “Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”.31
NOTES
1. This quotation was extracted from an interview the artist gave the author in Shanghai in May 2017, in the following footnotes it will be referred to as “Cheng Hangfeng’s interview, May 2017”. 2. Confronted to the Great Leap forward's failed attempt to catch up with the economic development of the main European powers, Mao Zedong was hoping to strengthen his power by relying on the country’s young people. Millions of them rose to his call and joined factions of Red Guards hong weibing 紅衛兵. They were encouraged to track and destroy the ‘four olds’ sijiu 四旧 namely old ideas jiu sixiang 旧思想, old culture jiu wenhua 旧文化, old customs jiu fengsu 旧风俗 and old habits jiu xiguan 旧习惯. The Cultural Revolution wenhua da geming 文化大革命 drew all its strength from the Chinese youth’s aspirations. In charge of the revolution’s destiny, the red guards damaged or destroyed monuments and places of worship, which were seen as symbols of outdated traditions. They tracked down, harassed, humiliated, brutalized or killed anyone considered to be counter-revolutionary. University professors, writers, artists, politicians and every opponent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were among the victims, the exact number of which still remains unknown. 3. The structure of modern and contemporary Chinese art history often leans on the succession of artistic genres and movements that developed and intersected after the end of the cultural revolution. Following Li Xianting’s approach I take a different point view and base it not on a series of styles, but on the different generations of artists from which they originate. This division slightly diverges from that of Li. The first generation (1976-1983) consists of artists born
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in the 1940s and 1950s who were trained in propaganda painting. They experienced the cultural revolution from which their artworks began distancing themselves. Artists of the second generation (1984-1989), followed their example taking it even further. Stimulated by the effects of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, they tried to determine what would be the style of modern Chinese art. The third generation came out of the ashes of the 1989 Tian’anmen massacre. Artists born in the 1960s, are characterized by a feeling of disillusion. Unlike their predecessors, they do not aim at the construction of a new Chinese culture, but cynically confront their lived reality. See Xianting Li, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art”, in New Art from China, post-1989, Marlborough fine art (London, 1993), for further information on Li Xianting’s approach. 4. In December 1978 at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, Deng Xiaoping launched a campaign of reforms and modernisation of agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology. 5. “China and abroad: After 70’s: The Generation Changed by Market” is the name of a 2005 exhibition at the Today Art Gallery in Beijing. “Next Station, Cartoon?: Paintings from the post-70’s generation” is the name of a 2005 exhibition at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen and the Star Gallery in Beijing. “My Generation: Young Chinese Artists” is the name of a 2014-2015 exhibition in Tampa Museum of Art in St. Petersburg, Florida and in Oklahoma City Museum of Art. 6. Barabara Pollock refers to them as the ‘me’ generation and the YCA in My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, Exhibition Catalogue, London, London, 2014. 7. Xia Juan in Cristoph Noe (ed.), Young Chinese Artists: The Next Generation, London, Prestel, 2008, p.14-15. 8. Cornelia Steiner, Cristoph Noe, ibid., p.6. 9. Barabara Pollock in My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, Exhibition Catalogue, Giles, London, 2014, p.13. 10. It is important to keep in mind that a relative diversity of practices persisted in spite of the imposed stylistic homogeneity. See Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History, London, Reaktion Books, 2014, p.67. 11. Pollock, op. cit., p.15-16. 12. Ibid., p.14. 13. Steiner, Noe, op. cit., p.9. 14. Cheng Hangfeng’s interview, May 2017 15. Pollock, op. cit., p.9. 16. Cheng Hangfeng’s interview, May 2017. 17. Chen Hangfeng 陈航峰, 非自然选择 : 陈航峰作品选集fei ziran xuanze : Chen Hangfeng zuopin xuanji [Unnatural selection : Chen Hangfeng’s selected portfolio], Curtesy of the artist. 18. Chen, ibid. 19. Daily Prosperity, Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, 29 November, 2008 - 16 January, 2009. 20. Neospring alternative culture festival on April 14, 2007. 21. Arnold van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, Paris, A. et J. Picard, 2000 (1909). 22. Victor Turner, “Betwixt-and-Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” In The forest of symbols: aspects of Ndembu ritual, London, Cornel University Press, 1967, p.93-111. 23. Turner, ibid., p.94. 24. Turner, ibid. 25. Turner, ibid., p.99. 26. Turner, ibid., p.96. 27. Turner, ibid.,p.95. 28. Chen Hangfeng’s interview, May 2017. 29. Chen, op. cit.
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30. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation, Paris, Galilée, 1981. 31. Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking-Glass” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009 (1865), p.145.
ABSTRACTS
Born in 1974, Chen Hangfeng belongs to the fourth generation of Chinese artists after the Cultural Revolution. A generation of artists who were born after the Maoist era and grew up during the years of modernisation and opening up of the country. He is based in Shanghai where he was born and studied. Growing up and living in an increasingly westernized and permanently changing environment had a great impact on his work. His series of artworks seem to establish a confrontation between, on one side contemporary means of artistic expression or interpretation, and, on the other, forms of art which are considered to be traditional; namely between western “influences” and local “Chineseness”. Of interest is how the contact between those different forms is established. While the encounter seems to take the form of a dichotomy, it actually challenges the idea of a strict confrontation with two well-defined sides. The line where the contact is made is not a demarcation, it is neither definite, nor is it impermeable. The contact is not fixed or rigid. It is a moving, dynamic kind of encounter. The artworks consist of an intermingling set of practices, histories, memories, and even different temporalities. The now, the present of the image seems to contain the trace of the future along with that of the past. Né en 1974 Chen Hangfeng appartient à la quatrième génération d’artistes chinois après la Révolution culturelle. Une génération d’artistes nés après la période Maoïste et ayant grandi durant les années de modernisation et d’ouverture du pays. Il est aujourd’hui basé à Shanghai, ville dans laquelle il est né et a étudié. Vivre et avoir grandi dans cet environnement toujours plus occidentalisé et en constante évolution a eu un impact notable sur son travail. Ses séries artistiques semblent établir une confrontation entre des media artistiques contemporains d’un côté et des pratiques considérées comme traditionnelles de l’autre ; entre des « influences » occidentales et une « sinité » locale. Il est toutefois intéressant de se pencher sur la manière dont le contact, la rencontre est mise en place. Si elle paraît prendre la forme d’une dichotomie, elle défie en réalité l’idée d’une stricte confrontation. La ligne de contact n’est pas une ligne de démarcation, elle n’est ni définie, ni imperméable. Le contact n’est pas fixe ou rigide. Il s’agit au contraire d’une rencontre dynamique et en mouvement. Les œuvres se composent d’un entremêlement de pratiques, d’histoires et de souvenirs, où les temporalités même se mélangent. Le maintenant, le présent de l’image semble contenir des traces du passé aussi bien que du futur.
AUTHOR
BÉRANGÈRE AMBLARD Bérangère Amblard is a PhD candidate from the Institute of Transtextual and Transcultural Studies (IETT) in Lyon, France. She holds a Master’s Degree in Chinese Studies and a BA in Art History. Her research focuses on the different manifestations of in-betweenness or liminality, in contemporary Chinese art from 1992 to 2016. Bérangère Amblard est doctorante à l'Institut d'Études Transtextuelles et Transculturelles (IETT)
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de Lyon, France. Elle est diplômée d'un master en études chinoise ainsi que d'une licence en histoire de l'art. Ses recherches portent sur les différentes manifestations de l'entre-deux, ou liminalité, dans les oeuvres chinoises contemporaines de 1992 à 2016.
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Échanges transdisciplinaires et légitimation générique : le poème en prose et les arts plastiques
Bertrand Bourgeois
1 Suzanne Bernard l’a souligné dans son étude fondatrice, le poème en prose est un genre anarchique né de la révolte1 et la plupart de ses premiers praticiens ne rencontrent à l’origine qu’un succès d’estime alors que leur œuvre est sinon déconsidérée, tout au moins méconnue du grand public. Aloysius Bertrand, que Charles Baudelaire proclame l’inventeur du poème en prose, meurt dans l’anonymat, et la parution posthume de son œuvre Gaspard de la nuit en 1842 a lieu dans l’indifférence presque complète du champ littéraire. Baudelaire meurt lui aussi avant de finir Le Spleen de Paris, recueil dont on doit la parution posthume en 1869 à Théodore de Banville et Charles Asselineau. La réception contemporaine de ce recueil est pour ainsi dire inexistante, et il restera considéré par la critique, jusqu’aux années 1960, comme une œuvre mineure du poète jugée digne de peu d’intérêt.2 Les Illuminations de Rimbaud n’ont à l’origine pas plus un statut de recueil poétique volontairement constitué par son auteur, puisqu’elles paraissent sous forme de fragments successifs, grâce à Paul Verlaine, en 1886, dans quelques numéros de La Vogue, revue dont « le tirage confidentiel »3 rappelle le lectorat restreint autant que l’impact limité qu’elle eut sur le champ littéraire de l’époque. Les aléas de la première guerre mondiale font également des Calligrammes d’Apollinaire un recueil posthume regroupant des poèmes longtemps déconsidérés par la critique : ils ont été par exemple présentés comme un « manifeste amusant [...] que l’on aurait pu croire d’un collégien »,4 ou même été réduits à de pures « tautologies ».5
2 Dans ses multiples manifestations historiques, depuis Aloysius Bertrand jusqu’aux pratiques les plus récentes, le poème en prose apparaît ainsi comme un genre hybride dont le nom antithétique résume le paradoxe qui l’anime et semble lui dénier toute possibilité d’une légitimité générique au sein de la tradition littéraire. Contrairement à la poésie versifiée qu’il délaisse délibérément, et que des critères formels bien précis permettent d’identifier, le genre marginal et marginalisé du poème en prose ne semble pouvoir se définir que comme ce qu’il n’est pas, à la frontière d’autres formes littéraires
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telles que la nouvelle, la fable ou l’anecdote, avec lesquelles il partage nombre de ses traits.
3 Délibérément mineur, refusant les codes hérités de la tradition littéraire et occupant une place résolument marginale dans le champ littéraire, le poème en prose n’a toutefois de cesse de surprendre et, dès ses balbutiements, ce sera notre hypothèse, il part en quête d’une légitimité générique du côté des arts visuels en se revendiquant comme héritier de pratiques plastiques mineures. En outre, en renonçant à la versification, il se coupe des ressorts rythmiques et musicaux propres à la poésie pour faire advenir « le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme »,6 selon les célèbres mots de Baudelaire à Arsène Houssaye. Ce faisant, le poème en prose dénoue le lien orphique sacré qui rattachait d’abord la poésie à la musique, le vers à l’oreille, et ouvre la voie à une poésie de l’œil où les mouvements d’une plume « assez souple et assez heurtée » ne trouveraient d’équivalents que dans les coups de pinceaux de l’artiste-peintre.
4 Afin d’explorer les échanges transdisciplinaires impliqués par la revendication de légitimité plastique du poème en prose, c’est à une micro-histoire du poème en prose en mode mineur que cet article entend procéder. Il interrogera d’abord le choix effectué par quatre poètes de recourir à des dénominations qui relèvent de pratiques artistiques mineures pour désigner aussi bien leurs poèmes en prose que les recueils dans lesquels ils s’insèrent : la bambochade (Aloysius Bertrand), la caricature (Charles Baudelaire), le croquis (Baudelaire et Joris-Karl Huysmans) ou encore l’enluminure (Arthur Rimbaud). Cette micro-histoire retracera ensuite l’historique complexe de publication qui conduit Guillaume Apollinaire de l’album d’« idéogrammes lyriques » aux Calligrammes et indique que le poème en prose peut désormais se passer d’une référence générique explicite aux arts plastiques. Il s’agira ainsi de démontrer le passage d’une entreprise de légitimation générique du poème en prose à l’affirmation d’une nature proprement plastique du poème.
« Un nouveau genre de prose »7 : entre fantaisie et bambochade
5 Les appellations dont Aloysius Bertrand entoure son Gaspard de la nuit, sont à cet égard aussi révélatrices qu’inaugurales, dans la mesure où les poètes de la fin du dix- neuvième siècle, Baudelaire le premier, l’établiront a posteriori comme le fondateur du « genre » du poème en prose. On sait en effet qu’Aloysius Bertrand n’a jamais utilisé le terme de « poème en prose » pour qualifier le « nouveau genre de prose » qu’il invente, et les termes qu’il utilise n’appartiennent pas à la tradition générique littéraire, mais plutôt aux domaines extérieurs de la musique et de la peinture. Il sous-titre le recueil « fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot », et affirme dans sa préface signée Gaspard de la nuit avoir réalisé, outre de telles fantaisies, « des études sur Van-Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Dürer, Peeter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van- Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator-Rosa, Murillo, Fusely et plusieurs autres maîtres de différentes écoles ».8
6 À propos de la notion générique de « fantaisie », Luc Bonenfant a affirmé avec justesse que le recours de Bertrand à ce terme qui relève d’abord de la tradition musicale
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allemande lui permettait de rompre avec la tradition littéraire française, en même temps qu’il lui fournissait un espace de liberté créatrice à l’écart de carcans génériques et d’horizons d’attente réducteurs.9
7 À la suite de Bonenfant, Fanny Bérat-Esquier souligne « la promotion du mineur opérée par le choix de ce terme et d’une esthétique qui lui est rattachée ».10 Elle dégage toutefois ce terme de la tradition musicale à laquelle Bonenfant le rattache exclusivement et insiste sur le fait qu’« une autre dimension doit être prise en compte : celle du recours à d’autres arts que l’art littéraire. Dans la fantaisie est en effet primordial le rapport à l’image ».11 Ainsi, le recours à cette désignation générique, placée sous la double égide « de Rembrandt et Callot », aurait un autre enjeu : celui de rechercher une légitimité du côté de la peinture, voire, à travers la liste de noms propres convoqués, de se constituer une véritable paternité picturale, afin d’inscrire l’esthétique de son recueil dans la lignée des « maîtres de différentes écoles » de la peinture hollandaise, italienne, espagnole et française.
8 Le rapport au pictural, et en particulier à Rembrandt et Callot, est d’ailleurs posé, moins sur le mode de la transposition ekphrastique, puisqu’il ne s’agit pas dans le recueil de reproduire tel ou tel tableau des deux artistes, que dans la logique d’une filiation avant tout esthétique : « à la manière de » est en effet à l’origine une expression réservée à la peinture qui évoque, depuis le maniérisme de la fin du XVIe siècle, la manière, c’est-à-dire le maniement du pinceau, la facture et le style, propres à un peintre ou à une école. Bertrand justifie le choix de Rembrandt et Callot du fait qu’ils incarnent pour lui « les deux faces antithétiques »12 de l’art : Rembrandt est le philosophe à barbe blanche qui s’encolimaçonne en son réduit, qui absorbe sa pensée dans la méditation et dans la prière, qui ferme les yeux pour se recueillir, qui s’entretient avec des esprits de beauté, de science, de sagesse et d’amour, et qui se consume à pénétrer les mystérieux symboles de la nature. — Callot, au contraire, est le lansquenet fanfaron et grivois qui se pavane sur la place, qui fait du bruit dans la taverne, qui caresse les filles de bohémiens, qui ne jure que par sa rapière et par son escopette, et qui n’a d’autre inquiétude que de cirer sa moustache.13
9 Une telle association relève avant tout d’une problématisation morale et thématique du pictural qui oppose deux conceptions de l’art et de la vie : Rembrandt, ou la philosophie et le sacré, l’art transcendantal et le domaine immatériel et symbolique des idées ; Callot, ou le plaisir physique des sens et du corps, le matérialisme d’une réalité quotidienne et triviale. Derrière ces deux postulations idéologiques, ce sont deux manières de peindre qui sont corollairement évoquées : Rembrandt et l’art subtil du clair-obscur avec sa maîtrise de la lumière et des ombres ; Callot et le maniement de la ligne et du dessin, l’art prosaïque de la caricature vivante et mouvante du réel.14 Rêve picturalement impossible, l’esthétique bertrandienne chercherait donc à assimiler ces deux postulations qui correspondraient finalement à ce « nouveau genre de prose » : le poème en prose où la dualité qui oppose les termes « poème » et « prose » peut être comprise et désignée métonymiquement par les noms et les manières de Rembrandt et Callot. Rembrandt, ou le « poème », c’est-à-dire l’idéal incarné dans une forme parfaite ; Callot, ou la prose, entendue comme représentation triviale du réel.
10 Ce seraient donc des peintres et leurs manières qui permettraient à Aloysius Bertrand d’asseoir la légitimité générique et esthétique du poème en prose, ce que confirmerait bien l’appellation de « bambochade »,15 également convoquée pour désigner les textes de son recueil. Comme le rappellent notamment Steve Murphy et Luc Bonenfant,
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Aloysius Bertrand avait même d’abord songé à intituler Gaspard de la nuit, « bambochades romantiques »16 : « Ces trois pièces font partie d’un recueil de compositions du même genre que l’auteur se propose de publier très prochainement sous le titre de Bambochades romantiques. »17 On notera d’ailleurs que l’emploi du terme « bambochade romantique » est associé aux notions de « recueil » de « compositions » et surtout de « genre ». Il serait sans doute exagéré d’affirmer que ce dernier mot ait sous la plume de Bertrand le sens précis de « genre littéraire », mais le contexte dans lequel le titre « bambochades romantiques » est évoqué par Bertrand indique bien une réflexion métapoétique.
11 Si ce titre est finalement abandonné par Bertrand, le terme de « bambochades » se retrouve dès la première ligne d’« Harlem », texte liminaire du recueil et qui peut se lire à bien des égards comme un manifeste poétique : « Harlem, cette admirable bambochade qui résume l’école flamande, Harlem peint par Jean-Breughel, Peeter-Neef, David Téniers et Paul Rembrandt. »18. Le mot « bambochade » est appliqué à Harlem, titre du poème, ville elle-même présentée comme la métonymie de « l’école flamande », objet du poème, et plus généralement du premier livre du Gaspard de la nuit intitulé « L’école flamande ». Les textes de ce premier livre sont ainsi à envisager comme autant de tableaux imaginaires de cette école picturale dont Aloysius Bertrand mentionne les noms les plus célèbres. « Bambochade » fait ainsi figure de terme générique qui s’applique aux différents textes du recueil. Or, il s’agit d’un terme de peinture qui évoque « Il Bamboccio », surnom du peintre néerlandais de l’âge d’or Pieter Van Laer qui fut actif à Rome, où il reçut ce surnom signifiant « le bamboche » ou « le pantin » faisant très certainement allusion à son physique difforme, dont il affuble d’ailleurs nombre des figures grotesques qu’il représente. Le terme de « bambochade » désigne ainsi plus spécifiquement à la fois sa manière picturale et les sujets de prédilection de ce peintre : des tableaux généralement de petit format, « représentant des scènes grotesques et champêtres »19 typiquement flamandes, telles que des scènes de beuveries dans des tavernes, des scènes de jeux de cartes, de fêtes de villages, de brigandages, et où la vie quotidienne est représentée de façon burlesque et presque caricaturale. Par extension, la « bambochade » désigne des tableaux, eaux-fortes, dessins, gravures qui, même s’ils ne sont pas d’ « Il Bamboccio », exploitent cette même veine, tels ceux de Jacques Callot, David Téniers, Adriaen Van Ostade ou Adriaen Brouwer, autant de noms récurrents sous la plume d’Aloysius Bertrand.
12 En plaçant son recueil sous l’auspice de « la bambochade », ce sont donc trois caractéristiques picturales propres à ce genre qu’Aloysius Bertrand impose au poème en prose : le petit format, c’est-à-dire, en termes littéraires, un texte bref et nettement circonscrit ; la représentation du quotidien le plus prosaïque sous forme de courtes scénettes visuelles ; et enfin, le grotesque et le caricatural élevés au rang du poétique, trois caractéristiques effectivement présentes dans la majorité des textes du recueil, et assurément décelables dans les poèmes en prose d’autres auteurs.
Les « Petits poëmes en prose », entre croquis de mœurs et caricature
13 Que Baudelaire, qui se pose avec provocation dans la postérité de l’obscur Aloysius Bertrand, ait lui aussi lorgné du côté des arts visuels pour asseoir la légitimité d’un genre mineur qu’il est le premier à nommer « petits poëmes en prose » fait peu de
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doute : une section des Fleurs du mal s’intitule déjà « Tableaux parisiens », et le recueil qu’il hésite à appeler Le Spleen de Paris ou même Le Rôdeur parisien peut ainsi se lire comme le pendant de cette section qui se proposait de décrire des scènes de la vie quotidienne à Paris.20 Ce n’est sans doute d’ailleurs pas un hasard si dans le poème en prose « Les projets », la découverte d’une estampe dans une boutique de gravure par un narrateur qui déambule dans la ville constitue le point de départ de l’imagination poétique : En passant plus tard dans une rue, il s’arrêta devant une boutique de gravures, et, trouvant dans un carton une estampe représentant un paysage tropical, il se dit [...]. 21
14 Mais plus spécifiquement encore que la gravure, c’est la technique de l’eau-forte remise à la mode dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle22 qui fascine Baudelaire et lui fournit un modèle esthétique pour ses poèmes en prose, ainsi que l’a noté Michelle Hannoosh : liberté formelle et privilège donné à l’expression individuelle, variété de tons et d’effets, pertinence pour représenter la réalité urbaine moderne seraient les trois principales caractéristiques qui feraient de « cette forme relativement mineure un modèle permettant de définir les possibilités, en fin de compte, à la fois d’une forme nouvelle et d’un art visuel et littéraire distinctement moderne ».23
15 On sait en outre que l’essai Le Peintre de la vie moderne consacré à Constantin Guys, qui paraît pour la première fois en 1863 en feuilleton dans trois numéros successifs du Figaro, s’avère une façon indirecte pour Baudelaire de parler de son art, et plus précisément, de ce qu’il accomplit dans Le Spleen de Paris. Or, dans Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire intitule la courte deuxième section « Le croquis de mœurs », genre qu’il considère comme le plus apte à représenter la beauté mobile et « triviale » de son époque. Dans cette section, il assimile avec insistance le peintre, sinon à un poète, du moins à un écrivain : Plus l’artiste y mettra de beauté, plus l’œuvre sera précieuse ; mais il y a dans la vie triviale, dans la métamorphose journalière des choses extérieures, un mouvement rapide qui commande à l’artiste une égale vélocité d’exécution. Les gravures à plusieurs teintes du dix-huitième siècle ont obtenu de nouveau les faveurs de la mode, comme je le disais tout à l’heure ; le pastel, l’eau-forte, l’aqua-tinte ont fourni tour à tour leurs contingents à cet immense dictionnaire de la vie moderne disséminé dans les bibliothèques, dans les cartons des amateurs et derrière les vitres des plus vulgaires boutiques. [...]. On a justement appelé les œuvres de Gavarni et de Daumier des compléments de la Comédie humaine. Balzac lui-même, j’en suis très convaincu, n’eût pas été éloigné d’adopter cette idée, laquelle est d’autant plus juste que le génie de l’artiste peintre de mœurs est un génie d’une nature mixte, c’est-à-dire où il entre une bonne partie d’esprit littéraire. [...]. Quelquefois il est poëte ; plus souvent il se rapproche du romancier ou du moraliste ; il est le peintre de la circonstance et de tout ce qu’elle suggère d’éternel.24
16 Favorisé par l’émergence de nouvelles techniques picturales et lithographiques (le pastel, l’eau-forte, l’aqua-tinte), le croquis de mœurs permet, selon Baudelaire, de saisir « la métamorphose journalière des choses extérieures », c’est-à-dire « la vie moderne ». L’artiste qui se livre au genre du croquis de mœurs, le « peintre de la circonstance et de tout ce qu’elle suggère d’éternel », possède donc la capacité d’extraire la beauté du transitoire et d’en faire une œuvre d’art qui résiste au passage du temps.
17 Or, comme le poète en prose, il puise son inspiration « dans la vie triviale » et « derrière les vitres des plus vulgaires boutiques », c’est-à-dire dans le prosaïsme du quotidien. Pour ce faire, il consulte l’« immense dictionnaire de la vie moderne » qui lui permet de
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réaliser « la description de la vie moderne, ou plutôt d’une vie moderne et plus abstraite »,25 idéal revendiqué des Petits poëmes en prose. On notera en outre que les deux artistes auxquels Baudelaire fait explicitement référence dans cet extrait sont Gavarni et Daumier, c’est-à-dire deux des plus grands caricaturistes du dix-neuvième siècle : ce serait donc le genre de la caricature, intimement lié au croquis de mœurs, qui serait en fin de compte le genre de référence pour l’esthétique baudelairienne, et plus particulièrement pour le poème en prose.
18 On sait en effet l’importance que Baudelaire accorde au genre de la caricature auquel il a consacré plusieurs essais. Dans Quelques caricaturistes français, Baudelaire affirme par exemple à propos de l’œuvre de Carle Vernet : « Son œuvre est un monde, une petite Comédie humaine ; car les images triviales, les croquis de la foule et de la rue, les caricatures, sont souvent le miroir le plus fidèle de la vie ».26 Comme dans Le peintre de la vie moderne, le caricaturiste est une fois de plus comparé avec l’écrivain, et « les images triviales, les croquis de la foule et de la rue » qu’il livre dans ses caricatures ne sont pas sans rappeler les choses vues et les personnages croqués dans les poèmes du Spleen de Paris. On pense par exemple aux situations et aux personnages de poèmes en prose tels que « Le Mauvais vitrier », « Les Fenêtres », « La fausse monnaie », « Le Joujou du pauvre », ou encore « La soupe et les nuages » pour ne citer que les titres de poèmes où l’excès du trait caricatural pour rendre compte d’une prosaïque réalité témoigne à l’évidence, pour reprendre les mots de James Hiddelston, « que l'esthétique du Spleen de Paris doive quelque chose à ce genre mineur, mais éminemment moderne, de la caricature ».27
Le poème en prose selon Huysmans : de la bambochade au croquis parisien
19 Huysmans, qui se présente lui-même comme « un inexplicable amalgame d’un parisien raffiné et d’un peintre de la Hollande »28 et qui « a édité un volume de Croquis parisiens où, après Aloysius Bertrand et Baudelaire, il a tenté de façonner le poème en prose »29, procéderait de fait à une étrange synthèse des modèles picturaux génériques convoqués par les deux poètes qui l’ont précédé.
20 Comme Bertrand, Huysmans se réfère à la bambochade, même s’il ne le revendique pas aussi directement. Le poète dijonnais est néanmoins présenté comme un prédécesseur, et la thématique des bambochades flamandes est explicitement convoquée dans la poésie de Huysmans : les « croquis de concerts et de bals de barrière »,30 les « cabarets brodés de pampre et de lierre »31, les « paysans de Breuwer »32 sont en effet autant de thèmes récurrents de bambochades qu’il présente comme « les principaux sujets »33 de son Drageoir aux épices dans le sonnet liminaire qui a valeur de manifeste poétique, et dont une ligne biffée du manuscrit autographe assimilait même les poèmes en prose du recueil à des « tableaux fuligineux de vieux maîtres Flamands ».34 En outre, Adrien Brauwer, qui fut, on l’a dit, un peintre de bambochades, n’est pas seulement mentionné dans le sonnet liminaire, mais est l’objet même d’un des poèmes du Drageoir auquel il donne son titre. Puisqu’il s’agit « de façonner le poème en prose », c’est-à-dire de conférer une forme à ce genre nouveau, Huysmans, à l’instar d’Aloysius Bertrand, part en quête d’une légitimité générique, non du côté des formes galvaudées de la littérature, mais du côté des genres plastiques mineurs : « vieux médaillons sculptés, / émaux, pastels pâlis, eau-forte, estampe rousse ».35
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21 Si la bambochade n’est qu’une référence suggérée parmi ces pratiques mineures, c’est celle du croquis que Huysmans revendique explicitement à plusieurs reprises. Le terme ouvre en effet le premier vers du sonnet liminaire de son premier recueil, en même temps qu’il donne son titre à son second et dernier recueil de poèmes en prose, Croquis parisiens. Au même titre que la bambochade pour Bertrand, le croquis comme technique picturale qui sert de référence générique n’est donc pas un choix fortuit de Huysmans, et il a plusieurs implications formelles pour le poème en prose. Le Littré propose la définition suivante du croquis : Terme d'art, surtout de peinture. Ouvrage fait à la hâte, qui n'a que les premiers traits, au-dessous encore de l'esquisse. Faire le croquis d'une figure. Esquisse d'un ensemble dont les détails ne sont pas terminés. Par extension. Il a jeté sur le papier un croquis de son poëme.36
22 Le caractère mineur d’une pratique « au-dessous encore de l’esquisse » ressort à l’évidence de cette définition peu élogieuse du Littré. La rapidité d’exécution et l’inachèvement sont deux traits propres à ce genre mineur selon le dictionnaire du XIXe siècle. La mise en relation avec la notion d’« esquisse » – convoquée à deux reprises – mérite toutefois d’être notée, surtout quand l’on se rappelle ce que Diderot en dit à propos de Fragonard dans son Salon de 1767 : « Pourquoi une belle esquisse nous plaît- elle plus qu’un beau tableau ? C’est qu’il y a plus de vie et moins de formes ».37 L’écrivain-critique d’art a bien saisi ce qui fait la force de ce genre mineur, quand il est l’œuvre d’un peintre de talent : son inachèvement formel est le garant même d’un plus grand réalisme dans l’expression de la vie en mouvement.
23 La définition huysmansienne du croquis se situe à l’évidence dans cet héritage diderotien, via Baudelaire. Pour Huysmans, les trois traits soulignés par le Littré – inachèvement, hâte, caractère mineur – s’avèrent en effet les véritables qualités d’un genre dont elles garantissent même la modernité, et partant, celle du poème en prose. L’héritage de la modernité baudelairienne renforce explicitement celui de la définition de l’esquisse par Diderot : le titre Croquis parisiens renvoie directement à l’expression « tableaux parisiens », titre de la deuxième section des Fleurs du mal, en même temps qu’il évoque aussi indirectement les petits poèmes en prose de Baudelaire, et leur autre titre, Le Spleen de Paris.
24 Enfin, la notion de croquis fait signe vers Constantin Guys, « le peintre de la vie moderne », dont Baudelaire a fait le symbole de sa conception esthétique du beau et qu’il a présenté comme le maître du croquis de mœurs. Et Huysmans de situer explicitement dans la lignée de Guys, un de ses amis peintres qu’il admire : Jean-Louis Forain. Il le présente en effet comme « l’un des peintres de la vie moderne les plus incisifs que je connaisse »38 et affirme que Forain « a voulu ce que le Guys, révélé par Baudelaire, avait fait pour son époque ».39 Huysmans inscrit ainsi sa modernité dans une double lignée symétrique et légitimatrice : si Forain (qui illustre d’ailleurs les Croquis parisiens de Huysmans) est le nouveau Guys, Huysmans se présente dès lors presque explicitement, et en toute modestie, comme le nouveau Baudelaire.
25 De la bambochade bertrandienne, en passant par le croquis de mœurs et la caricature vantés par Baudelaire, au poème en prose « croquis parisien », il s’agit pour Huysmans d’envisager le poète en prose comme un artiste capable de saisir un réel prosaïque en mouvement dans un texte bref et dense qui ne s’encombre pas de détails inutiles. Une telle définition du poème en prose comme croquis incisif de la réalité quotidienne
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rejoindrait en outre la célèbre définition générique idéale du poème en prose fantasmée par le personnage de des Esseintes dans À rebours en 1884 : De toutes les formes de la littérature, celle du poème en prose était la forme préférée de des Esseintes. Maniée par un alchimiste de génie, elle devait, suivant lui, renfermer, dans son petit volume, à l’état d’of meat, la puissance du roman dont elle supprimait les longueurs analytiques et les superfétations descriptives. [...] Le roman, ainsi conçu, ainsi condensé en une page ou deux, [...]. En un mot, le poème en prose représentait, pour des Esseintes, le suc concret, l’osmazome de la littérature, l’huile essentielle de l’art.40
26 En littérature, comme dans les autres arts, des Esseintes refuse les hiérarchies établies et fait du poème en prose un concentré d’art dont la brièveté dense est garante de l’efficacité narrative et esthétique : idéal littéraire par excellence qu’il substitue avec provocation au roman. Les genres picturaux mineurs du croquis, et plus généralement de l’estampe et de la gravure, fourniraient paradoxalement à Huysmans des modèles génériques novateurs qui permettraient au poème en prose de se définir comme un anti-roman subvertissant ainsi les codes d’un genre devenu à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, le genre littéraire de référence.
Illuminations : Le poème en prose, entre gravure coloriée et enluminure
27 C’est encore un genre mineur des arts visuels qui semble constituer l’horizon d’attente générique des Illuminations de Rimbaud, même s’il est difficile d’établir qui de Rimbaud ou de Verlaine est le principal responsable de ce choix. On sait en effet que Rimbaud n’est pour rien dans la publication de ces textes, qui paraissent pour la première fois, sous l’impulsion de Paul Verlaine, dans quelques numéros de la revue La Vogue sous le titre Les Illuminations en 1886. Dans la Notice qui les accompagne, Paul Verlaine donne la précision suivante : « Le mot Illuminations est anglais et veut dire gravures coloriées, – coloured plates : c’est même le sous-titre que M. Rimbaud avait donné à son manuscrit ». 41
28 S’il est impossible de vérifier l’authenticité de ces propos, une phrase célèbre d’Une saison en enfer de Rimbaud semble aller dans le même sens : « J’aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires42. » Ces mots écrits à la première personne appartiennent d’ailleurs à la section « Alchimie du verbe » souvent lue comme une profession de foi du poète. En outre, ce goût revendiqué pour des genres picturaux mineurs fait pendant à l’expression d’un rejet des formes picturales et poétiques reconnues : « Depuis longtemps, je me vantais de posséder tous les paysages possibles et trouvais dérisoires les célébrités de la peinture et de la poésie moderne ».43 Formes auxquelles Rimbaud substitue notamment des pratiques graphiques mineures qu’il invite ainsi à lire comme horizon générique pour ses textes.
29 Quoi qu’il en soit, la notice de Verlaine dans La Vogue conditionne la réception inaugurale des Illuminations en les estampillant, par le détour de la langue étrangère, du cachet d’une technique picturale mineure à l’écart de tout modèle générique littéraire connu, celui des « gravures coloriées », et plus généralement de l’art de l’enluminure. Le Littré définit ainsi le terme « enluminures » :
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Action d'enluminer ; l'art de l'enlumineur ; objet enluminé. L'enluminure de cette estampe n'est pas soignée. Cela n'est pas peint, ce n'est qu'une enluminure. Nom des peintures qui ornaient autrefois les manuscrits.44
30 Le verbe « enluminer » est quant à lui défini comme l’action consistant à « ajouter avec le pinceau des couleurs vives sur une estampe qui lui donnent de l'éclat par rapport au trait noir ; ce qui fait comparer ces couleurs à une lumière45. » De telles définitions autorisent sans aucun doute à reconsidérer ce que Renée Hubert-Riese affirme à propos du titre et du sous-titre : « Painted Plates attire plutôt l’attention sur un ensemble coloré, mais stable, alors qu’‘illuminations’ fait songer à un éclairage momentané et variable ».46 Le mot « illuminations » serait en effet à comprendre avant tout dans son sens anglais, synonyme de « painted plates » ou de « coloured plates ».47
31 Rimbaud, par le truchement de Verlaine, ferait de ses textes un ensemble coloré à l’aune de l’enluminure : un genre mineur de la peinture, – le ton dépréciatif du Littré est clair (« n’est pas soignée », « ce n’est que de l’enluminure ») – où ce qui importe est moins le sujet que Rimbaud semble également préférer mineur – « idiot », « naïf », « niais », « petit », « vieux », « populaire »48 sont les adjectifs qu’il utilise dans « Alchimie du verbe » – que sa lumineuse mise en couleur. Au même titre que la bambochade pour Aloysius Bertrand, ou le croquis pour Huysmans, le modèle générique de la gravure coloriée permet à « l’homme aux semelles de vent » de faire du poème en prose un genre plastique mineur où l’accent est mis sur la production d’images poétiques éclatantes et contrastées, ainsi qu’en témoigne un poème tel que « Fleurs » : D’un gradin d’or, - parmi les cordons de soie, les gazes grises, les velours verts et les disques de cristal qui noircissent comme du bronze au soleil, - je vois la digitale s’ouvrir sur un tapis de filigranes d’argent, d’yeux et de chevelures. Des pièces d’or jaune semées sur l’agate, des piliers d’acajou supportant un dôme d’émeraudes, des bouquets de satin blanc et de fines verges de rubis entourent la rose d’eau. Tels qu’un dieu aux énormes yeux bleus et aux formes de neige, la mer et le ciel attirent aux terrasses de marbre la foule des jeunes et fortes roses.49
32 Le poème fait en effet figure de véritable enluminure où scintillent couleurs et matières chatoyantes sur un fond d’or, si bien que les fleurs du titre sont moins décrites que suggérées sous la forme d’impressions colorées et lumineuses par l’art d’un poète- joailler qui les transforme en autant de pierres précieuses textuelles.
33 Michel Murat emporte ainsi notre adhésion quand il souligne l’adéquation générique qui unit le titre des Illuminations aux poèmes qui composent le recueil : « C’est une trouvaille de poète, si congruente à son objet qu’elle est capable de fonder un genre nouveau, un titre puissamment synthétique, et en même temps ambigu ou glissant ».50 Il semblerait cependant que ce soit avant tout dans « son rapport à l’image et au discours sur l’image »51 que ce titre ébauche les fondations d’un genre nouveau.
De l’album d’idéogrammes lyriques aux Calligrammes : au-delà de la légitimité picturale
34 Alors que se multiplient les avant-gardes artistiques à l’aube de la première guerre mondiale, Apollinaire ne semble dorénavant plus chercher un modèle du côté des techniques et genres plastiques mineurs pour légitimer une pratique poétique en prose qu’il veut plus avant-gardiste encore que le futurisme ou le cubisme. Le 10 août 1914,
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Apollinaire rédige l’achevé d’imprimer d’une plaquette intitulée « Et moi aussi je suis peintre » composée d’une série d’« idéogrammes lyriques ». L’Allemagne vient de déclarer la guerre à la France le 3 août, et Apollinaire se retrouve mobilisé à Nîmes en décembre, si bien que la plaquette « Et moi aussi je suis peintre » n’est pas publiée du vivant du poète.52 Comme le résume Daniel Grojnowski : « Sa plaquette passe à la trappe des désastres de l’Histoire ».53 Les poèmes qui composent cette plaquette sont ensuite intégrés aux Calligrammes dont ils ne constituent plus qu’une mince partie. Ils perdent ainsi autant leur spécificité picturale originelle que leur caractère proprement expérimental : Pour restituer le caractère propre des idéogrammes, il faut donc revenir au moment d’exaltation où Apollinaire les conçoit et les agence en album. Désignant de ce mot une plaquette fabriquée à petit nombre, il pose un cadre. [...] les « idéogrammes lyriques et coloriés » sont antérieurs aux Calligrammes qui les absorberont par la suite. Ils s’en distinguent d’autant plus nettement que leur agencement en une suite de sept pages emprunte un beau format : 29cm de hauteur pour une double page de 39cm de large, un espace où le lyrisme verbal se transforme en construction visuelle. L’auteur de l’album rompt les frontières qui séparent les Belles-Lettres des Beaux-Arts.54
35 Si Apollinaire ne prend pas à proprement parler pour modèle une technique ou un genre plastique mineur pour nommer sa pratique poétique, comme l’avaient fait avant lui Aloysius Bertrand, Huysmans ou Rimbaud, le choix de regrouper une série de poèmes baptisés « idéogrammes lyriques » en un album intitulé « Et moi aussi je suis peintre » relève véritablement d’une entreprise poétique inventant de nouveaux genres et de nouvelles pratiques qui se veulent explicitement d’ordre visuel et graphique : Je dis idéogramme parce que, après cette production [Lettre-Océan], il ne fait plus de doute que certaines écritures modernes tendent à entrer dans l’idéographie. [...]. On m’objectera qu’un pur idéogramme est un pur dessin et ne saurait comprendre de langage écrit. Je répondrai que, dans la Lettre-Océan, ce qui s’impose et l’emporte c’est l’aspect typographique, précisément l’image, soit le dessin. Que cette image soit composée de fragments de langage parlé, il n’importe psychologiquement, car le lien entre ces fragments n’est plus celui de la logique grammaticale, mais celui d’une logique idéographique aboutissant à un ordre de disposition spatiale tout contraire à celui de la juxtaposition discursive.55
36 Le Littré définit en effet l’idéogramme comme le « nom donné aux signes qui n'expriment ni une lettre ni un son quelconque, mais une idée, abstraction faite du son par lequel cette idée est rendue dans telle ou telle langue. [...]. Dans les écritures hiéroglyphiques, signes présentant des images d'idées et de choses ».56 Ainsi, le recours à une telle pratique rattache immédiatement l’entreprise poétique à la représentation imagée, abstraite et spatiale plutôt qu’à une représentation discursive reposant sur une succession de signifiés linguistiques. Pour reprendre les mots de Grojnowski, l’idéogramme vise à « accomplir une œuvre plastique dont le lyrisme « poétique » emprunterait les voies de la typographie et de la mise en page »,57 c’est-à-dire qu’il s’agit de créer une poésie qui repose d’abord sur une conception proprement picturale d’un support matériel qu’ont en commun la littérature et les arts plastiques, celui de la page.
37 Le néologisme calligrammes qu’Apollinaire forge ensuite pour baptiser le nouveau genre de poème qu’il a inventé confirme une telle idée. Le Trésor informatisé de la langue française définit en effet le calligramme comme un « texte écrit dont les lignes sont disposées en forme de dessins »58 avant de rappeler l’étymologie à partir de laquelle
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Apollinaire a forgé le mot : « néologisme créé par G. Apollinaire par croisement de idéogramme avec calligraphie ».59. En convoquant la notion de calligraphie, Apollinaire met l’accent sur la beauté plastique du texte/poème envisagé comme « belle écriture », et il insiste ainsi plus nettement encore sur la révolution poétique à laquelle il procède : un lyrisme qui relève de la disposition de symboles graphiques regroupés sur une page dans un but avant tout formel : J’ai cherché avec mes idéogrammes à retrouver une forme qui, sans être le vers libre, ne retombait pas dans le vers classique. Mes images ont la valeur d’un vers. Ils ont une forme typographique ou lapidaire déterminée...60
38 Et l’on notera qu’en insistant ainsi sur la plasticité formelle du poème en prose, l’entreprise poétique d’Apollinaire, dont il n’a de cesse de souligner le caractère novateur, retrouve paradoxalement la composante essentielle de la poésie classique : le vers, mais un vers désormais converti en idéogramme.
39 Si le poème en prose est bien dès l’origine un genre mineur et anarchique, en marge du champ littéraire, qui nait du refus (voire de la contestation) des traditions littéraires et qui se définit par des pratiques et des formes individuelles plutôt que par des lois structurelles internes, il semble que les poètes en prose, d’Aloysius Bertrand à Rimbaud, dans leur entreprise même de dénomination et de définition de leur pratique scripturale, cherchent tous de façon plus ou moins consciente, et plus ou moins explicite selon les cas, à conférer une légitimité à ce genre dont le nom même est une contradiction.
40 À une époque où le lyrisme et la poésie sont en crise et à réinventer,61 c’est à l’extérieur de leur domaine qu’ils vont chercher cette légitimité, en regardant obliquement du côté des techniques et des genres mineurs des arts visuels : bambochade, croquis, gravure coloriée, ou enluminure sont autant de dénominations plastiques qui permettent aux poètes de redéfinir le lyrisme autant que d’assigner une légitimité générique et théorique à la nouveauté de leur pratique poétique, où le poème en prose est pensé comme une forme d’expression éminemment visuelle : Le poète qui se déclare peintre peint avec des mots : cette expression est ici littéralement observée, et ce sont bien les mots qui tracent un dessin, esquissent une forme, etc. Selon un certain degré d’accommodation, il est permis de discerner des figures et, dans les relations qui s’établissent entre les motifs ainsi déterminés, se dégage quelque chose comme un tableau. Telle est bien la justification de l’ut pictura poesis : donner à voir avec des mots.62
41 Ces lignes d’Henri Scepi à propos des idéogrammes lyriques d’Apollinaire nous semblent pouvoir être étendues à la révolution poétique à l’œuvre depuis Aloysius Bertrand, dans la mesure où elles révèlent à la fois ce qui unit et sépare Apollinaire des poètes en prose qui l’ont précédé : comme pour eux, il s’agit pour lui de peindre avec des mots. La singularité de sa démarche consiste toutefois à proclamer la possibilité de le faire littéralement : de la bambochade ou du croquis à l’idéogramme lyrique ou au calligramme se joue le passage d’une logique de la transposition, où le titre choisi relève d’un emprunt lexical direct aux arts plastiques, à une logique de la substitution, où le titre pose le poème en nouveau genre pictural, dans des titres dont les enjeux génériques sont incontestables. La transformation de la logique titulaire transpositionnelle mise à l’œuvre par plusieurs poètes en prose du XIXe siècle en logique substitutive par Apollinaire traduit une rupture épistémologique fondamentale pour la poésie moderne : le passage d’une quête de légitimité du poème en prose à l’écart des modèles génériques littéraires à l’affirmation d’une autonomie visuelle du
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poème-tableau qui ouvre la voie à la « poésie plastique »63 des avant-gardes de la première moitié du XXe siècle.
NOTES
1. Suzanne Bernard, Le poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, Nizet, 1959. 2. Jusqu’à l’étude fondatrice de Charles Mauron, Le dernier Baudelaire, Paris, Corti, 1966. Pour une étude informée de la question, voir Robert Kopp, « Le Spleen de Paris : une reconnaissance tardive », in Steve Murphy (dir.), Lectures du Spleen de Paris, Rennes, PUR, 2014, p. 23-39. 3. Jean-Marie Seillan, « La Revue de poésie, une forme éditoriale hybride », Loxias, no6, 2004, URL : http://revel.unice.fr/loxias/index.html?id=77, consulté le 16 octobre 2017. 4. Pascal Pia, Apollinaire par lui-même, Paris, Seuil, 1965, p. 173. 5. Michel Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1973, p. 21. 6. Charles Baudelaire, « À Arsène Houssaye », Le Spleen de Paris, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, p. 104. La dédicace à Houssaye est parue pour la première fois dans La Presse, le 26 août 1862. 7. C’est l’expression employée par Aloysius Bertrand dans une lettre adressée à son ami David d’Angers et datée du 18 septembre 1837. 8. Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit, Paris, LGF, 2002, p. 59. 9. Luc Bonenfant, « Aloysius Bertrand et les noms du genre », University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 71, no3, 2002, p. 715. 10. Fanny Bérat-Esquier, « Gaspard de la nuit : des fantaisies en mode mineur », in Steve Murphy (dir.), Lectures de Gaspard de la nuit, de Louis (« Aloysius ») Bertrand, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, p. 153. 11. Ibid. 12. Bertrand, ibid., p. 59. 13. Ibid. 14. La description de Rembrandt peut d’ailleurs être lue comme une évocation du célèbre tableau du maître qui se trouve au Louvre, Le Philosophe en méditation, et où s’exprime tout son art du clair-obscur. 15. Bertrand, ibid., p. 69. 16. Steve Murphy, « Avant-propos : pour le roi ou pour les rats ? Notes en marges de Gaspard de la nuit », in Steve Murphy (dir.), Lectures de Gaspard de la nuit, de Louis (« Aloysius ») Bertrand, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, p. 15. 17. Aloysius Bertrand, Le Provincial, 12 septembre 1828, p. 212, cité par Luc Bonenfant, « Le vers détourné : Aloysius Bertrand et la réinvention de la prose », Romantisme, n°123, 2004, p. 45. 18. Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit, p. 69. 19. Définition du Littré : http://www.littre.org/definition/bambochade. Consulté le 30 octobre 2017. 20. Voir Patrick Labarthe, Petits poèmes en prose. Le Spleen de Paris de Charles Baudelaire, Paris, Gallimard, 2000, p. 13-15. 21. Baudelaire, « Les projets », Le Spleen de Paris, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, p. 160. 22. Ce dont témoigne la création de la Société des aquafortistes à Paris en mai 1862. Baudelaire participe de cette mode en rédigeant deux articles consacrés à l’eau-forte : « L’eau forte est à la mode » (avril 1862) et « Peintres et aquafortistes » (septembre 1862).
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23. Michele Hannoosh, « Etching and Modern Art: Baudelaire’s Peintres et aquafortistes », French Studies, Vol. XLIII (1), 1989, p. 60. Ma traduction. Pour plus de détails sur les liens qui unissent l’esthétique de l’eau-forte et celle du poème en prose chez Baudelaire, voir l’article complet d’Hannoosh. 24. Baudelaire, « Le peintre de la vie moderne » [1863], L’Art romantique, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1885, p. 56-57. 25. Baudelaire, « À Arsène Houssaye » [1862], Le Spleen de Paris, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, p. 103-104. 26. Baudelaire, « Quelques caricaturistes français » [1854], Curiosités esthétiques VII, Paris, Michel Lévy frères, 1868, p. 389. 27. James A. Hiddleston, « Les poèmes en prose de Baudelaire et la caricature », Romantisme, n°74, 1991, p. 57. 28. Portrait autobiographique de Huysmans, publié en 1885 dans Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, Paris, Vanier, fascicule n°23, sous le pseudonyme d’A. Meunier, cité par Patrice Locmant dans son édition critique du Drageoir aux épices, Paris, Champion, 2003, p. 249. 29. Ibid., p. 251. 30. Huysmans, Le Drageoir aux épices, Paris, Champion, 2003, p. 69. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 68. Il s’agit de la reproduction d’une page du manuscrit qui se trouve à la bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (Fonds Lambert, n°20, folio 8). 35. Ibid., p. 69. 36. http://www.littre.org/definition/croquis. Consulté le 30 octobre 2017. 37. Denis Diderot, « Salon de 1767 », Œuvres complètes, vol. 11, Nendeln, Kraus Reprint, 1875-1877, p. 245. 38. Huysmans, « J.-L. Forain », Écrits sur l’art, Paris, GF, 2008, p. 122. Ce texte paraît pour la première fois dans L’art moderne, Paris, Charpentier, 1883. 39. Ibid., p. 268. Ce texte paraît d’abord dans Certains, Paris, Stock, 1889. 40. Huysmans, À rebours, Paris, GF, 2004, p. 227. [1884]. 41. Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations, notice de Paul Verlaine, Paris, Publications de la Vogue, 1886. 42. Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 192. [1873]. On se souvient qu’Une saison en enfer est le seul texte publié par Rimbaud lui-même. 43. Ibid. 44. http://www.littre.org/definition/enluminure consultée le 30 octobre 2017. 45. http://www.littre.org/definition/enluminer consultée le 30 octobre 2017. 46. Renée Hubert-Riese, « La Technique de la peinture dans le poème en prose », Cahiers de l'association internationale des études françaises, no 18, 1966, p. 175. 47. L’hésitation entre les deux expressions est également de Verlaine qui parle de « painted plates » dans une lettre à Charles de Sivry. 48. Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer, Paris, Gallimard, p. 192. 49. Rimbaud, Illuminations, Paris, GF, 2010, p. 276-277. 50. Michel Murat, L’art de Rimbaud, Paris, José Corti, 2013, p. 206. 51. Ibid. 52. Michel Décaudin, puis Daniel Grojnowski en ont toutefois récemment proposé une belle réédition : Daniel Grojnowski, « Et moi aussi je suis peintre ». Les idéogrammes d’Apollinaire, Paris, Le temps qu’il fait, 2006. 53. Ibid., notice de Grojnowski à cette édition, non paginée. 54. Ibid.
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55. Gabriel Arbouin, « Devant l’idéogramme d’Apollinaire », Les Soirées de Paris, juillet-août 1914, p. 383-385. Article reproduit dans l’édition déjà citée de Grojnowski. Selon Grojnowski, Arbouin serait un pseudonyme d’Apollinaire qui théoriserait ainsi sa propre œuvre dans un périodique d’avant-garde. Il existe toutefois une notice de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France dédiée à Gabriel Arbouin (1878-1917), homme de lettres contemporain d’Apollinaire et lui aussi mort pendant la première guerre mondiale qui permet de douter d’une telle affirmation. Cette notice est consultable en ligne : http://data.bnf.fr/11043797/gabriel_arbouin/ consultée le 30 octobre 2017. 56. http://www.littre.org/definition/idéogramme consulté le 30 octobre 2017. 57. Grojnowski, édition de « Et moi aussi je suis peintre ». Les idéogrammes d’Apollinaire, Paris, Le temps qu’il fait, 2006, non paginée. 58. http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/calligramme consulté le 30 octobre 2017. 59. Ibid. 60. Guillaume Apollinaire, « Lettre privée à Fagus », citée par Henri Scepi, « Apollinaire entre le texte et l’image », Critique, vol. 727, n012, 2007, p. 979. 61. Les travaux sont nombreux sur cette question, voir notamment Jean-Michel Maupoix, Du lyrisme, Paris, Corti, 2000. 62. Henri Scepi, « Apollinaire entre le texte et l’image », Critique, vol. 727, n°12, 2007, p. 984. 63. Selon l’expression forgée par Isabelle Chol pour rendre compte de la poésie de Reverdy : Isabelle Chol, Pierre Reverdy. Poésie plastique, Genève, Droz, 2006.
ABSTRACTS
Genre oxymoron qui rejette la versification et la musicalité traditionnellement associées à la poésie, le poème en prose semble immédiatement se tourner vers les arts visuels. Afin d’explorer les échanges transdisciplinaires impliqués par la revendication de légitimité plastique du poème en prose, cet article procède à une micro-histoire du poème en prose en mode mineur. Il s’agit ainsi de démontrer le passage d’une entreprise de légitimation générique du poème en prose à l’affirmation d’une nature proprement plastique du poème. L’article interroge d’abord le choix effectué par quatre poètes en prose de recourir à des dénominations qui relèvent de pratiques artistiques mineures pour désigner leurs poèmes en prose : la bambochade (Aloysius Bertrand), le croquis (Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans) ou encore l’enluminure (Arthur Rimbaud). L’article s’intéresse ensuite à l’historique complexe de publication des Calligrammes d’Apollinaire qui révèle l’autonomisation d’une poésie en prose plastique à la légitimité générique désormais acquise. Prose poetry starkly challenges the versification and musicality traditionally associated with poetry. As a result, its visual aspect has often heralded the prose poem’s entry into the realm of the visual arts. This article draws a micro-history of the prose poem as a minor genre, in order to explore the transdisciplinary exchanges implied by this claim of visual generic legitimacy. After first considering the choice of four poets to name their prose poetry with clear reference to visual arts genres and practices: bambochades (Aloysius Bertrand), sketches (Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans), and illuminations (Arthur Rimbaud), this article analyses the convoluted publishing history of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes. These case studies demonstrate how the prose poem distances itself from generic references to the visual arts, and ultimately asserts its own visual and plastic autonomy.
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AUTHOR
BERTRAND BOURGEOIS Bertrand Bourgeois is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Poétique de la maison-musée (1848-1898). Du réalisme balzacien à l’œuvre d’art décadente (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2009). He is currently working on a second monograph entitled Au-delà de la peinture: le poème en prose, du texte-tableau à l’objet visuel (1842-1948). He has also written various articles on nineteenth and twentieth century French authors such as Flaubert, Gautier, Goncourt, Huysmans, Perec and Houellebecq. Bertrand Bourgeois est maître de conférences en langue et littérature françaises à l’université de Melbourne. Il est l’auteur de Poétique de la maison-musée (1848-1898). Du réalisme balzacien à l’œuvre d’art décadente (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2009) et termine actuellement un second ouvrage intitulé Au- delà de la peinture : le poème en prose, du texte-tableau à l’objet visuel (1842-1948). Spécialiste de Huysmans, il a également consacré plusieurs articles à des romanciers du XIXe et XXe siècles tels que Flaubert, Gautier, Goncourt, Perec et Houellebecq.
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Lost in Consumerism: Existential and Linguistic Wanderings in Confusion d’instants (2003) by Gerty Dambury
Vanessa Lee
Introduction
1 This article explores the interplay between globalization, historical commemoration, and social marginalisation as articulated in Guadeloupean playwright Gerty Dambury’s Confusion d’instants (2003). French Caribbean theatre has often been the vector for socio- political and historical debates engendered by the complex cultural and political history of the region. Guadeloupe is a former plantation colony, and was one of the loci of the Transatlantic Slave Trade from the sixteenth century until 1848, when slavery was abolished for the second time in the French colonies.1 After three centuries as a colony, Guadeloupe is one of four former French colonies to have gained, in 1946, the status of départements, overseas French administrative regions.2 The inhabitants are French citizens, with concomitant rights and status. Despite being an integral part of France politically, administratively, and linguistically, French overseas territories have often had a strained relationship with the French metropole, due to the history of slavery and colonialism and a liminal status that has prolonged the colonial relationship between overseas territories and their metropole. What is more, in the case of the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, cultural, geographical, and historical proximity to other Caribbean autonomous and independent nations, has contributed to their frequently defiant attitude towards the French metropole. The French Caribbean is also renowned for having participated in anticolonial struggles and for the contributions to postcolonial thought by its most prestigious writers and theorists, who constitute what Forsdick and Murphy term postcolonial theory’s ‘French-language roots’.3
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2 French Caribbean culture draws from a multiplicity of histories and cultural heritages. The population is made up of descendants of European colonizers, African slaves, indentured labourers from South and East Asia, and immigrants from the Middle-East. Some may also claim antecedents from the first indigenous populations, in large part wiped out when the Europeans started settling on the islands. The study of Caribbean drama is fundamental to the understanding of the region’s complex socio-cultural fabric. The genre developed from an imbrication of European, African, and Asian performance styles with local oral traditions. In Martinican and Guadeloupean theatre there is an interweaving and overlapping between the field of metropolitan French drama and more distinctly local Caribbean theatre; plays by Martinican and Guadeloupean authors have marked contemporary French drama, as well as having contributed to the formation of postcolonial theatrical forms.
3 The métissage of Caribbean society has been the inspiration for many a reflection on cultural identity and social formation. Indeed, the Caribbean case can be used as a template for a global society based on the embracing and celebration of difference and cultural exchange. Martinican Édouard Glissant’s critique of Western universalism and globalization merits attention in this context. Glissant describes mondialisation or globalization as a form of ‘downwards standardization’, which enforces a sameness where difference is diluted in a monotonous and unoriginal simulated equality. To this he opposes the term mondialité, which calls for an equality that embraces difference. Glissant’s works are key to understanding the complexities of French Caribbean culture, history, and identity formations, but the engagement in his later oeuvre with more ‘global’ debates has led to certain critics describing the Martinican author as watering down his politics by turning away from his Caribbean-focussed theory and activism, in a move away from the political to a more apolitical poetics.4 Yet criticising Glissant, for developing a new poetics based on mondialité more so than on Antillanité [Caribbeanness] is disingenuous. Why should he not write about other areas via a reflexion on the global drawn on the local? As Charles Forsdick has it, Glissant’s works cover ‘an important range of other politically urgent issues, including slavery, ecology, and the ideology of departmentalization, via which specific local or regional circumstances of the Caribbean are drawn, powerfully and ineluctably, into wider global debates’.5 This articulation of the local and global is found in the works of many late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century French Caribbean writers, including Gerty Dambury. Dambury herself writes, on the subject of being identified as a Caribbean writer: … il est absolument capital que nous soyons, nous Antillais, des êtres humains tout court. […] on est tellement regardé comme étant particuliers, et on se regarde nous- mêmes comme étant particuliers, qu’on ne se rend pas compte que pas mal de problèmes auxquels on est confronté ici sont les même qu’ailleurs.6 [it is capital that we Antilleans should be simply human beings. […] we are so often regarded as being particular, and we consider ourselves as being particular, that we do not realize that many of the problems we face here are the same as elsewhere.]
4 This is representative of an issue many French Caribbean writers face: being confined to restrictive categorisations that in effect exclude them from mainstream literature, arts, and theory. Writers such as Dambury continuously attempt to reject and question restrictive categorisations of their work, lest they fall and remain confined to such fields as ‘Francophone’, ‘black’, ‘regional’, rather than simply ‘French’ literature, or even ‘Literature’. For the global dimension of the works by Dambury and her fellow
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artists are apparent in their treatment of subjects that affect societies worldwide such as ‘race’, colonialism and its legacies, French hegemony, globalization, or gender.
5 The status of the French Caribbean artist symbolizes the peripheral status that Martinique and Guadeloupe have often occupied within the French nation, as former colonies remaining in a semi-colonial relationship with France. This has led to socio- political tensions between overseas territories and metropole. One of the main contentions is the issue of recognition and commemoration of French and the French Caribbean slave and colonial pasts. Glissant writes of a ‘tormented chronology’ of the French Caribbean when describing a history that has not been acknowledged by official state historical narratives.7 This ‘chronology’ refers to the collective memory of the French Caribbean people, shaped by experiences of slavery, deportation, migration, and colonialism. There have been efforts on behalf of the French state to commemorate the slave and colonial pasts of overseas territories. In 2001 the Taubira Law recognised the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity. In 2006, the tenth of May became the official ‘journée des mémoires et de réflexion sur la traite, l’esclavage et leurs abolitions [day of commemoration of and reflection on the slave trade, slavery, and their abolitions]’, the only one of its kind in the world. However, these efforts have often emphasized ‘abolition [of slavery] as a philanthropic act’, with the celebration and foregrounding of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies by the French state serving as an instrument dispensing the state from recognising the full extent of the damage inflicted during the colonial period and historical and current ‘narratives of Caribbean resistance’ to French rule.8 Indeed, in 2003, a law encouraged ‘les programmes de recherche universitaires accordant à l’histoire de la présence française outre-mer […] la place qu’elle mérite [university research programmes should allow the history of the French overseas presence the place it deserves].’9 At the time it also stated that school curricula should recognize the benefits of colonialism. This was later was amended, yet without dispensing universities from the obligation to teach the ‘benefits’ of colonialism. What is more, there is a lack of recognition by the French state of local historical events that shaped the fabric of overseas societies. For the most part, these events were overlooked because they took the form of strikes and protests against colonial and subsequent metropolitan governments.10 In the face of such a dismissive attitude from the French state, French Caribbean artists and theorists have taken on the responsibility of commemorating marginalised histories and local collective memories. One of the motivations of female playwrights in the French Caribbean is ‘le désir et le devoir de mémoire au sein d’un conscience collective qui, se reconnaissant, se dépasse et guérit ses maux [the desire for and the duty to memory in the heart of a collective conscience that in recognising itself, transcends itself and heals itself of its ills].’11
6 Gerty Dambury belongs to a highly prolific generation of French Caribbean playwrights, many of which are women whose works foreground the socio-political realities of their homelands and have contributed to the development of a truly unique theatrical culture. Born in Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe in 1957, Dambury is a poet, dramatist, novelist, theatre critic, actress, director, and former teacher of English, who has worked both in Guadeloupe and metropolitan France. Dambury started writing, directing, and acting in her own plays in the 1990s. Her texts have reflected on, and represented socio-political issues affecting her native Guadeloupe as well as the wider former colonized black world.
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7 Gerty Dambury succinctly explores the aforementioned concepts of globalization and historical commemoration in Confusion d’instants. First performed in 2003 in a production directed by the author herself, and published by the Éditions du Manguier in 2014, Confusion d’instants follows the interactions, or lack thereof, of three characters belonging to different generations and genders.12 Each character speaks in a single tense that echoes their obsession with a singular object of consumption. Mimilie is an elderly woman who only speaks in the present tense and is addicted to the purchasing and hoarding of household appliances. Cosmonaute, Mimilie’s husband, speaks in the past tense and is a former war veteran who has participated in several of France’s armed conflicts. Malonga is a young man who lives for the future and speaks in the future tense, and expresses himself using terms relating to cars. The play is set in Mimilie’s kitchen which is filled with numerous household goods. Throughout Confusion d’instants the characters fight against their own obsessions, and struggle to interact with one another. Towards the end of the play, however, Mimilie manages to unite her companions and they begin to find a semblance of unison when the play closes. While set in Guadeloupe and comprising only Guadeloupean characters, Confusion d’instants clearly articulates issues of consumerism, memory, and marginalisation as at once local and global phenomena. Each character appears to embody an allegorical role relating to each of these questions, and each will be analysed in turn below. The final section will assess how Dambury articulates the characters’ move from a confused - to borrow a term from the play’s title - polyphony to a semblance of harmony orchestrated, for the most part, by the female character Mimilie.
Consumerism
8 Confusion d’instants can be considered overall as a critique of the deleterious effects of consumerism in a capitalist economy. The crowded set is the most blatant demonstration of the characters’ absorption into and dependence on consumer culture. Indeed, in Confusion d’instants, the lives of the characters are contained within this cluttered set; the rhythms and sounds of the machines that constitute it are used on several occasions to reflect the characters’ moods and interactions. Dambury even includes the space as a character in the dramatis personae at the start of the published edition of the play, giving it equal weight with the characters Mimilie, Cosmonaute, and Malonga: Un espace : celui de Mimilie, dans lequel est accumulé un nombre impressionnant d’appareils électroménagers. La pièce en est saturée, les étagères croulent sous les robots, les fours à micro-ondes, les fers à repasser, les centrifugeuses, les cafetières électriques, les ouvre-boîtes électriques, les balances électroniques, etc. Il y a là des modèles différents, des marques différentes, des objets neufs ou cassés, à moitié réparés, des fils qui pendent de partout. La poussière, la graisse se sont accumulées sur certains de ces objets ; des vieux moteurs récupérés sur des machines en sommeil attendent d’être réutilisés. Partout des tas de notices, de factures graisseuses ou jaunies, des piles usagées, beaucoup de piles, des Wonder, des Akaï, des Sony, de toutes les tailles et de toutes les puissances. [A space: Mimilie’s space, in which are amassed a remarkable number of household appliances. The room is filled with them, the shelves weighed down by robots, microwave ovens, irons, juicers, electric coffee-makers, electric tin openers, electronic scales, etc. There are different models, different brands, new, broken, or half-repaired objects, wires hanging everywhere. The dust, the grease have
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accumulated on some of these objects; old motors salvaged from machines snoozing and waiting to be reused. Everywhere there are instruction manuals, greasy or yellowed bills, used batteries, a lot of batteries, Wonder, Akai, Sony batteries, of all sizes and strengths.] 13
9 From the outset, the play offers the spectator a vision of the materiality of conspicuous consumption. The excess portrayed on stage produces an effect of claustrophobia and entrapment. The characters are confined to this space throughout the play, as well as being drawn to the many objects within it. Indeed, Mimilie is obsessed with kitchen appliances, which occupy the greater part of the kitchen space, batteries are important to Cosmonaute who needs them for his pacemaker and radio sets, and the engines and machines on set may be seen as a visual reminder of Malonga’s fixation on cars.
10 The sensation of imprisonment was exploited in the first performance of the play, which took place in a square on an urban council estate in Pointe-à-Pitre. The actors performed in cages made of wire mesh, which ‘faisaient écho à celles des spectateurs juchés aux fenêtres de leurs immeubles, [echoed those of the spectators perched at the windows of their homes]’ explained Guadeloupean actor Mylène Wagram, ‘comme si l’urgence à dire n’avait pour vecteur que la parole directe, incarnée et frontale [as though the urgency of the message could only be conveyed through direct, embodied, and forward-facing speech].’14 The set in Confusion d’instants serves as a very visual, ‘direct’ depiction of the excesses of consumer culture. It efficiently questions the value of material goods and the entrapment of the consumer within the accumulation of such goods.
11 While the set serves as a powerful reminder of the excesses of consumerism, Dambury’s characters are also potently emblematic of the impact of these excesses on the individual consumer. Each character is obsessed with a particular kind of consumer good, but it is Mimilie who appears as the typical example of a shopping addict. In her first monologue at the start of the play, Mimilie is sitting at her kitchen table noting her purchases and savings in a ledger. In her monologue, which takes the form of a stream of consciousness, she reveals her obsession with saving money, with cutting out waste to economize, so as to have more money which she can then spend on a new time-saving machine, which allows her to be more productive. This depicts on an individual scale the cycle within which consumers are trapped under a capitalist economy. Saving money to buy goods, to save time with which to earn more money, to then buy more goods: …compter combien pour le pain, combien pour la farine, la farine, c’est pour faire les gâteaux, les gâteaux, c’est pour vendre, l’argent des gâteaux, c’est l’argent de la nourriture […] Avec tes économies, tu achètes une balance électronique pour peser la farine. On perd moins quand on pèse au milligramme près […] et c’est toujours ça de perdu sur le prix du gâteau. Avec ce que tu économises sur le poids de la farine, tu achètes une batteuse. Avec la batteuse tu vas plus vite pour préparer les gâteaux, tu en fais plus donc et comme tu en as plus, tu vends beaucoup, tu vends beaucoup, tu achètes un couteau électrique, avec le couteau électrique, tu coupes mieux le beurre glacé. [count how much for the bread, how much for the flour, the flour to bake cakes, the cakes, to sell, the money earned with the cakes is money you can spend on food […] With your savings, you buy electronic scales to weigh the flour. You waste less when you weigh by the milligram, every milligram counts when you bake a lot of cakes, and that’s always money saved on the price of the cake. With what you save on the price of flour, you buy a mixer. With the mixer, you make the cakes more quickly, and so you make more and since you have more, you sell more, you sell
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more, and then you buy an electric knife, and with the electric knife, you cut the frozen butter.] 15
12 And the monologue continues in this vein for another two pages, demonstrating the extent to which Mimilie has herself been consumed by the cycle of consumerism which dictates her lifestyle. Further on in the monologue she describes her use of daytime shopping channels, and three scenes later she reveals she owns several kinds and brands of the same object: Les couleurs ça change avec les années. Les batteurs, avant, c’est marron. J’en ai des marrons et des jaunes, des oranges, des crème et orange. […] Je manque de place. Sans ça, toutes les couleurs de cuisinière, j’achète. Des blanches, des marrons, des bordeaux, des bleu-profond, des noires. Je manque de place, bien sûr… [The colours have changed over the years. The mixers were brown before. I have brown and yellow ones, orange ones, cream and orange ones. I’m running out of space. Otherwise, I buy cookers of all shades. White ones, brown ones, burgundy ones, deep blue ones, black ones. I’m running out of space, of course…]16
13 Despite admitting to not having sufficient space, Mimilie sees the lack of space rather than the number of appliances she wishes to store within it as the problem. This demonstrates further her entrapment within a cyclical consumption of new household goods. The older ones remain, for, as she points out ‘je n’achète pas le ménage pour faire une seule chose avec, comme ils disent, moi, les choses ça peut toujours évoluer, c’est ce que je dis [I don’t buy household appliances to do only one thing with them, as they say, and as I say, things can always evolve, that’s what I say.]’17.
14 Cosmonaute and Malonga are also affected by the cycle of conspicuous consumption. Indeed, in each character’s case Dambury explores levels of alienation and reification that result from the contemporary capitalist economy. The reification of the characters is apparent in the direct symbiosis established between Mimilie, Cosmonaute, and Malonga with the machines in the play. The same scene where Mimilie describes the many types of appliances she owns starts with her switching all of these appliances on, whereupon she falls into rapture as she witnesses the ‘bruit des machines, de toute cette électricité accumulée. [the sounds of the machines, of all this accumulated electricity]’. She describes the appliances as though they were living creatures, the sensation they bring echoing her own feeling of ecstasy. In another scene, Cosmonaute turns on several radios at the same time. This paralyses him, and he behaves like a tripped-out machine: On entend d’un seul coup toute une série de radios qui se mettent en marche en même temps […] Cosmonaute ne bouge pas. Il est comme paralysé. Il répète un mot que l’on ne comprend pas. […] Mimilie sort en maugréant, elle passe derrière le rideau, et tout se tait, sauf les Ave Maria et Cosmonaute qui répète : Cosmonaute : Alerte n°1…Alerte n°1…Alerte n°1… […] Mimilie : Chaque fois, c’est la même chose, il reste bloqué.’ [All of a sudden, the sound of a series of radios all starting at the same time is heard […] Cosmonaute does not move. He is paralysed. He repeats an unintelligible word. […] Mimilie exits mumbling, goes behind the curtain, and everything is silent, save the Ave Marias and Cosmonaute who repeats: Cosmonaute: Red Alert… Red Alert… Red Alert […] Mimilie: It’s the same every time, he gets stuck.]18
15 This symbiosis symbolically reflects the characters’ experiences on a broader socio- political level. The characters in Confusion d’instants have all been exploited by colonial
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or capitalist institutions. Mimilie is a slave to the market and consumer economy, as is Malonga who yearns to possess a fortune and commodities of his own. And when Cosmonaute was a soldier he was exploited to build up and fortify the French state as one of the world’s largest and most powerful economies. Each character, like the machines on set, has a singular purpose that they have served (Cosmonaute), do serve (Mimilie), or will at some point serve (Malonga), to keep the cogs of various exploitative systems running. Thus, they resemble the machines that encumber Mimilie’s kitchen. And this in turn may explain why they cannot work together or communicate with each other, for they must each serve their single purpose, and take the other’s place in the cycle, much like the future tense succeeds the present tense which follows the past tense.
Remembering the Past
16 The enslavement of the characters to the consumer economy and global technico- capitalist system can be deemed a veiled reference to slavery and the dependency of overseas departments on the French metropole. Slavery and colonialism remain contentious subjects in the relation between France and its overseas territories. Yet in Confusion d’instants Dambury broaches another key issue in the debate on national memory and commemoration: the history of colonial troupes who participated in several conflicts in which France was engaged over the twentieth century, exemplified here by Cosmonaute’s character. The history of colonial troupes is imbricated with the histories of slavery and colonialism for without France’s colonies -- former slave colonies in many cases, there would have been no colonial troupes to fight in France’s conflicts. Several recent studies and artistic initiatives have contributed to shedding light on this often-ignored chapter of French colonial history.19 Within French Caribbean women’s theatre in particular, the figure of the veteran colonial soldier features as a memento of a forgotten past. Two notable examples are Ina Césaire’s Lafrik in Man Filibo: Pièce en neuf tableaux (pour un théâtre de rue) (2007) and Michèle Césaire’s character Cassino in La Nef (1991), named after the Mount Cassino campaign in which he took part during the Second World War.20 The character of Lafrik in Ina Césaire’s Man Filibo is a traditional French Caribbean conteur [storyteller] figure who relates the life story of a deceased character in the play, and is also the carrier of memories of both the distant and more recent pasts. He is the living memory of his community, and his pivotal role in the play reflects Césaire’s desire to honour such members of Martinican society. One interpretation of Michèle Césaire’s La Nef is that the characters are on board a replica of the ship of fools, a mythical ship manned by the mentally ill.21 The characters in La Nef are modern Caribbean manifestations of these ‘fools’, and the mental ailment afflicting Cassino the war veteran can be seen as a form of post-traumatic stress. Cosmonaute in Dambury’s Confusion d’instants shares both of these characters’ characteristics, in his embodiment of post-traumatic stress and in his role as living reminder of the colonial past.
17 Cosmonaute is a character whose past is at odds with the present he inhabits in Confusion d’instants. As Mimilie claims, ‘Cosmonaute utilise donc un temps passé pour parler d’un événement qui continue dans le présent et dont on ne connaît pas l’avenir [Cosmonaute thus uses a past tense to talk about an event that continues in the present and of which we do not know the future]’.22 Malonga speculates that the moment
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Cosmonaute will stop speaking in the past tense will be the moment he has recovered from his post-traumatic stress: ‘Cosmonaute, le jour où il parlera au présent, eh bien on pourra dire qu’il aura quitté ses obsessions. [The day Cosmonaute speaks in the present tense, we’ll be able to say he has abandoned his obsessions.].23 Various elements of Cosmonaute’s personality and behaviour denote this incapacity to let go of the past, and can be interpreted as symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Haunted by memories of the many conflicts in which he has taken part, Cosmonaute often conflates his present reality with a past experience. He is obsessed with radio sets, which he uses to receive radio transmissions reminiscent of those he depended on during the war: Cosmonaute : Vous n’aviez pas à blâmer les radios, vous autres, hein ! Si on avait eu des radios comme il faut, est-ce qu’on serait tombé dans leurs pièges ? Est-ce que j’aurais passé presqu’un an enfermé dans les ratières de Japs ? Est-ce qu’ils nous auraient encerclés dans les marécages ? Est-ce qu’ils nous auraient torturés ? [Cosmonaute: No need to blame the radios, you lot, eh! If we had had proper radios, would we have survived their traps? Would we have spent almost a year trapped in Jap traps? Would they have surrounded us in the swamp? Would they have tortured us?]24
18 His persistent distrust of former enemies is articulated in this rejection of all things Japanese, in reminiscence of the Second World War. This aversion is reiterated at other moments in the play, for instance when Mimilie insists on Malonga buying batteries that are not Japanese for Cosmonaute’s pacemaker: Malonga : Des piles pour son cœur ? Mimilie : Oui. […] Prenez plusieurs sortes mais pas des Japonaises. […] Les Japonaises, ça fait pas battre son cœur. La vieille histoire, 39-45, d’Indochine, Cacochine et le reste, vous vous rappelez ? [Malonga: Batteries for his heart? Mimilie: Yes. […] Buy different kinds, but not Japanese ones. […] The Japanese ones do not make his heart beat. The same old story, WWII, Indochina, Cacochina and all the rest, remember?]25
19 In addition to the Japanese, Cosmonaute is also suspicious of other former enemies of France. When Malonga announces he is to start a new job in Italy, Cosmonaute is dismayed: ‘Un emploi […] En Italie. Chez l’ennemi…Mussolini passe en revue les troupes [A job […] In Italy. At the enemy’s place. Mussolini reviews the troupes.]’26 This distrust is emblematic of his difficulty relinquishing past trauma, with memories of old conflicts haunting his present.
20 The extent of Cosmonaute’s trauma is depicted in a dialogue between himself and Mimilie halfway through the play. In this scene, Mimilie tries to ask Cosmonaute for help reading an instruction manual for a new microwave, which sends Cosmonaute into a rant about his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War: Cosmonaute : […] vous n’étiez pas contente de savoir que j’étais bien enfermé dans ma pièce avec mes radios, vous êtes venue me chercher, me tisonner pour lire des notices écrites en japonais. Du japonais, ça. Quelle marque ? Répondez ? Sansui. Sansui. Senseï… Comme ça qu’ils nous appelaient. […] Et pendant ce temps là, pendant qu’ils faisaient semblant de capituler, pendant qu’ils endormaient ta confiance, voilà, tu étais entouré, encerclé et en moins de temps qu’il fallait pour battre un œil tu te retrouvais sous la terre. Il faisait nuit bordel du bon Dieu il faisait nuit et tu ne savais même pas à quoi tu ressemblais après la raclée qu’ils t’avaient passée […] Mimilie : […] Ah mais Seigneur dieu de miséricorde, c’est pas possible d’avoir une conversation normale avec vous. Sansui, c’est coréen il me dit le vendeur. Coréen.
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C’est des ennemis aux Japonais. Voilà. C’est des ennemis des Japonais donc c’est des amis à nous. C’est bien pour ça qu’on vend leurs trucs ! [Cosmonaute: […] you weren’t satisfied knowing I was locked away in my room listening to my radios, you had to come and find me, harass me into reading manuals written in Japanese. This is Japanese. What brand is it? Answer? Sansui. Sansui. Senseï… That’s what they called us. […] And meanwhile, while they pretended to surrender, while they lulled you into a false sense of security, there, you were surrounded and in the blink of an eye you found yourself underground. It was dark good God it was dark and you did not know what you looked like after the beating they had just given you […] Mimilie: […] Oh Merciful God, it’s impossible to have a normal conversation with you. Sansui’s Korean, the sales assistant tells me. Korean. They are the enemies of the Japanese. There. If they’re enemies of the Japanese they are our friends. That’s why we sell their stuff!]27
21 This conversation reveals multiple aspects of Cosmonaute’s trauma. He is often seen lurking in the kitchen at night, and this corresponds to the darkness he was plunged in while imprisoned and left to starve by the Japanese. The physical impact of post- traumatic stress is depicted in Cosmonaute’s obesity and incessant hunger. He is in constant need of nourishment, sneaking into Mimilie’s kitchen to look for food on several occasions in the play. This hunger is never satisfied, and is a result of his lacking food during the many campaigns he participated in as a soldier: ‘les Japs ils avaient réussi à percer mes boyaux, c’était comme si rien ne restait, j’avais toujours faim… [the Japs managed to pierce my guts, it was as though there was nothing left, I was always hungry…]’.28
22 Cosmonaute’s fate is also relatable to that of other veterans from other countries. Indeed, references to the Vietnamese jungle and to soldiers speaking English, his distrust of Japanese brands, could also reflect sentiments of American war veterans. This analogy is articulated in the play’s final scene, which portrays Cosmonaute dreaming to a soundscape drawn from popular American war films: Des bruits de mitraille nous parviennent de loin, ainsi que le ronflement d’un moteur d’hélicoptère. On est dans une scène d’Apocalypse Now. […] Tout d’un coup il se trouve en plein centre d’un extrait de Kagemusha de Kurosawa, […] On entend des voix en japonais, donnant des ordres bref. Toute une série d’extraits de films défilent de cette manière, qui ont trait à la guerre. Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï (peut-être ce pourrait être juste la musique, que chacun reconnaîtrait), et autres films majeurs de l’histoire du cinéma. [Sounds of gunshots are heard from afar, as well as the sound of a helicopter. It’s a scene from Apocalypse Now. […] Suddenly he is in the middle of an excerpt from Kagemusha by Kurosawa […] Japanese voices are heard, giving brief orders. A series of war films excerpts flashes past in this way. The Bridge on the River Kwai (perhaps just the music, that everyone will recognise), and other major films from cinema history]
23 At the end of Confusion d’instants, Cosmonaute’s story and experience are thus portrayed as being of global significance. Interestingly, as part of a series of exhibitions run between 2014 and 2018 organised by the French research group Achac outlining the history of French colonial troupes involved in major world conflicts of the twentieth century, one exhibition draws parallels between soldiers from French colonies and protectorates and African American soldiers. The exhibition programme reads: ‘Il est désormais temps de bâtir une histoire partagée, avec distance et critique, et de croiser les mémoires pour inscrire désormais ces récits dans nos histoires nationales et dans
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une histoire postcoloniale. [It is now time to build a shared history, critically and with distance, and to share memories so as to now inscribe these narratives in our national histories and in a postcolonial history.]’29 Similarly, in Confusion d’instants, Dambury not only explores the fate of soldiers belonging the colonial troops, but also proceeds to turn this exploration into a critique of the impact of war on soldiers in general, and to reclaim the forgotten history of marginalised communities who participated in major world conflicts.
24 Cosmonaute is the main flagbearer of this reflection on historical commemoration and memory. Yet all three characters ultimately benefit from recognizing this forgotten or dismissed history. For in remembering one’s own local history, one has a better grasp of the past and its influence on contemporary social structures. As Mimilie realizes at the end of the play after she swaps tenses with him, ‘son passé était plus fort que mon présent’.30 A loaded sentence referring to the weight of the past on contemporary society.
The Disenfranchised
25 The characters’ psychoses in Confusion d’instants hint at issues of marginalization within Guadeloupean society. With Malonga, Dambury explores a theme found in several of her other plays: the social and financial precarity of Guadeloupean youth. Her plays Trames (2008) and Des doutes et des errances (2014) also feature young men at odds with their elders, their communities, and their own sense of self.31 The characters are often unemployed or disillusioned and have difficulties interacting with their elders out of mutual misunderstanding and resentment. Malonga in Confusion d’instants is in particular reminiscent of the character of Christian in Dambury’s Trames in which Christian and his mother Gilette are portrayed as sharing a series of meals together. At first it seems Christian visits his mother only to be fed and to borrow money. However, he also wishes to establish a connection with his mother, asking her about his past and his father, in an attempt to develop a sense of identity he lacks due to a fatherless childhood and his mother’s aloofness. But there appear to be irreconcilable differences between the two, and the play ends in tragedy with Christian accidentally killing Gilette. In Confusion d’instants, Malonga visits Mimilie’s kitchen for food, as well as the possibility of being conferred a paid errand. A monologue half-way through the play has him plot against the two other characters, in order to steal their money and belongings. However, the scenes that follow show that Mimilie and Cosmonaute consider him a son. He is an integral part of their family unit, and has as important a part to play in their dysfunctional search for harmony.
26 Malonga is obsessed with cars and speed, a symptom of his attachment to the future, which is also apparent in his constant use of the future tense. He speaks in mechanical terms relating to cars. In moments of elation and distress he uses a plethora of expressions, verbs, and nouns drawn from the lexical field of cars and machinery, when he plots against Mimilie and Cosmonaute for instance: Ah ! Chassieux ils seront leurs yeux quand ils comprendront mon échappement de leur prison. Ah, mais ils verront que je frein à disques à toute sur mes roues motrices. En plus je transmissionerai en manuel tout ça, et projets, et rêves, et tout l’ensemble.
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[Ah! Their eyes will be rheumy when they realize I’ve filtered myself out of this prison. Ah, they’ll see me disk brake hard on my wheels. And I’ll switch the lot to manual, projects, and dreams, the whole lot of it]’
27 Malonga lives in the future, anticipating his needs before they take shape: ‘Je penserai toujours à la faim avant son arrivée. Je mangerai avant d’avoir faim. [I’ll always be hungry before I get hungry. I’ll always eat before I’m hungry.]’32 He knows he will need money, he knows he will go hungry, he knows he will get a sports car. His actions are therefore motivated by these objectives. He lurks in Mimilie’s kitchen hoping to find her money, he eats before he gets hungry, and he plans to work in a car factory. In a dialogue with Mimilie she asks whether he can speak using ‘normal language’, such as the present tense, to which he replies: ‘Le présent ne me comblera pas, je serai perdu dans ce temps. [the present won’t fulfil me, I’d be lost in that tense/time.]’33 The present does not fulfil him, perhaps because its ‘immediacy’ might draw attention to his present insecure state of destitution. It is possible to deduce that Malonga is unemployed, and therefore that there is nothing in the present worth his while, save the achievement of a future that has yet to materialize.
28 The violence of some of Malonga’s words in his plotting against Mimilie and Cosmonaute echoes that of other characters found in plays by Dambury and by another Guadeloupean writer, Maryse Condé. In Condé’s Comme deux frères (2007), two delinquents are imprisoned after having tried to change society using violent means.34 In Dambury’s Les Atlantiques amers (2009) and Des doutes et des errances (2014), the setting of a popular strike in Guadeloupe leads to violence breaking out in the streets of the capital Pointe-à-Pitre, and to some of the characters wishing to take a stand to dissuade Guadeloupean youth from employing violence as a means of political protest. In Confusion d’instants Dambury pursues her examination and portrayal of the struggles of Guadeloupean youth, and the intergenerational conflicts within Guadeloupean society that could be resolved if individuals within the same community or family unit were made aware of the other’s problems, needs, and experiences.
From Polyphony to Harmony
29 There is a sense of a harmony that is sought yet not fully achieved in Confusion d’instants. Dambury confines each character to a single grammatical tense and material obsession to draw attention to discrete ailments within Guadeloupean society. However, it is made apparent that these characters cannot function independently of one another. The deleterious effects of consumption, the forgotten chapters of French history, and the precarious living conditions of the youth, are all of equal importance to contemporary Guadeloupean society. Hence each character, and the issue they represent, is vital to achieving harmony between the characters, and within society as a whole. They form a polyphony of voices and concerns that desperately need to become aware of one another. A sense of unity that fails to fully establish itself is conveyed throughout the play, but more emphatically so in the scenes where all three characters are present. The trio’s polyphony is introduced in an opening scene. It is a dream sequence with each character is trapped in a different dream. However, all repeat the same line, albeit in a different tense and with the occasional reference to their individual fixations: J’avance à tâtons, les mains tendues devant moi J’avançais à tâtons, les mains tendues devant moi
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J’avancerai à tâtons, les mains tendues devant moi […] Et puis tout doux Et puis tout doux Et puis tout doux C’est du plastique sous mes mains C’était de la terre sous mes mains Ce sera du cuir sous mes doigts [I feel my way along, hands stretched before me I felt my way along, hands stretched before me I shall feel my way along, hands stretched out before me And softly And softly And softly There’s plastic in my hands There was earth in my hands There will be leather in my hands]35
30 Throughout this sequence the characters make up a polyphony that hesitantly reaches for harmony. However, a turning point in the scene has them lose this harmony to fall into the confusion and misunderstanding that permeate the rest of Confusion d’instants. The rest of the play is dedicated to retrieving the sense of unity and harmony experienced in their subconscious state during the opening scene.
31 Mimilie, Cosmonaute, and Malonga have difficulty coming together, so focussed are they on themselves and their own obsessions. Interactions between characters typically show them at odds or failing to comprehend the other. Because they speak in different tenses and have different interests, communication fails. This lack of communication draws attention to contemporary social issues, such as the isolation of marginal and fragile individuals in society, intergenerational conflicts, as well as how overarching historical, cultural, and political problems feed into the social fabric and societal relations. It is however made apparent on several instances that each character has a memory and life experience from which the others, and society at large, may benefit. Malonga is the son Cosmonaute and Mimilie never had, Cosmonaute carries a history that needs to be recognised by society at large. In a touching scene, tellingly entitled ‘Dialogues Muets [Mute Dialogues]’, Cosmonaute and Mimilie describe their affection for each other, but rather than addressing themselves to the other they speak in parallel monologues: Mimilie : La première fois que je le vois je me dis « je le remplume celui-là, c’est moi qui m’en occupe. » Cosmonaute : Je marchais à peine, traînais les pieds. Mimilie : Pourquoi il marche comme ça, je me dis […] Cosmonaute : Je me suis évanoui. Un mètre quatre-vingt-sept de vaillant nègre à ses pieds. Sauf que j’étais pas bien vaillant. Ils sourient tous les deux. Mimilie : … il tombe comme un i. « Mais il meurt de faim, ce nègre-là », je crie. Cosmonaute : Elle s’est penchée, et elle m’a ramassé [...] Ma Mimilie et sa mère m’ont sauvé. Mimilie : Je te le mets debout et je l’emmène chez ma mère. [Mimilie: The first time I see him I say to myself ‘This one needs fattening up, I’m taking care of him’. Cosmonaute: I could barely walk, I dragged my feet. Mimilie: Why is he walking like that, I ask myself […]
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Cosmonaute: I fainted. One metre eighty-seven of sturdy black man at her feet. Except I wasn’t so sturdy. They both smile Mimilie: … he falls flat on his face. ‘But this man is dying of hunger’, I cry. Cosmonaute: She bent over me, and she picked me up […] My Mimilie and her mother saved me. Mimilie: I pick him up and take him to my mother’s.]36
32 This parallel narrative creates a rift between them, that is widened in the next scene, which despite starting off on a tender note, ends with the Cosmonaute returning to his war memories, and Mimilie to her household appliances. The breakdown in communication between them prevents them from acknowledging that they both need and benefit from their relationship.
33 After spending most of the play failing to enter into a dialogue with each other, the three characters reach a state of momentary unison following a singular event nearing the end of the play. Mimilie, wishing to cure Cosmonaute of his focus on the past, draws three circles on the ground, one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. She makes Cosmonaute jump into the circle of the present with her, which paralyses and renders him speechless. Mimilie, overwhelmed by the clash of tenses in the circle, starts speaking in the past tense. She realizes how insignificant her present was in comparison to the past Cosmonaute held within him, and this speaks to the need of contemporary society to acknowledge the colonial past. Indeed, Cosmonaute’s silence in the circle of the present is symbolic of the silencing of this history in which he took part. Malonga then arrives and pulls Mimilie and Cosmonaute out of the circle of the present, but ends up in the circle of past. Malonga panics, and utters a series of terms from the lexical field of cars and mechanics, such as ‘disque de freins [disk brakes]’, ‘freiner par temps de pluie [braking in rainy weather], and ‘freiner sec [come to a halt]’. The young man who has spent all his life speeding towards the future is forced to brake, to slow down and consider the past. Mimilie then pushes both Cosmonaute and Malonga out of the circles, after which both men discover that they now speak in different tenses. Mimilie tries the circle of the future tense, followed by Cosmonaute, for whom it is too much: his pacemaker, which has been in need of a battery change throughout the play, breaks down. Malonga once more goes to save him, but by the end of the scene both men are completely disorientated. Cosmonaute is mute and Malonga has lost the use of verbs and only speaks in monosyllables. Mimilie, however, has acquired all three tenses after this episode, which she uses for the rest of the play to cure her companions.
34 With her newly-acquired lucidity, Mimilie sets about healing Cosmonaute and Malonga. At the end of the circle episodes, Mimilie trips out all her machines. This is itself symbolic of the ‘tripping out’ of the characters themselves, who have broken down but are now ready to start anew. And by the end of the play, all the characters have spoken in a different tense to their own, and have achieved a heightened awareness of each other. Cosmonaute and Malonga are still obsessed with war and cars, but cautiously so, and Mimilie has relinquished her yearning for new household appliances. They are all objects, machines, that have broken down and been repaired, but repaired in a manner that allows them to work together more efficiently. The final scene replicates the opening scene of Confusion d’instants, with Mimilie, Malonga and Cosmonaute repeating the same phrase in a different tense. But this is done more harmoniously and jubilantly,
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for the mood is lighter than in the opening scene, with the characters singing in unison, and dancing while rotating hula-hoops around their waists: Mimilie, Cosmonaute, Malonga: Woollahop, Woollahop, Woollahop Mimilie : C’est un beau rêve Cosmonaute : C’était un beau rêve Malonga : Ce s’ra un beau rêve Woollahop Woollahop Woollahop. [Hula-hoop, hula-hoop, hula-hoop Mimilie: It’s a good dream Cosmonaute: It was a good dream Malonga: It’ll be a good dream Hula-hoop, hula-hoop, hula-hoop]37
35 The rest of their song refers to the ‘dream’ from which they have awoken, the ‘fixing’ of their faulty machinery, the feeling of togetherness they have achieved, and the qualities each member of the trio brings to the collective. The problems evoked in the play may not have been fully solved, as Mimilie’s final line suggests: ‘Ça y’est! On est encore dans les emmerdations ! [That’s it! We’re in trouble again!]’38 Nevertheless, the work towards recognizing and finding solutions to these issues has started.
36 The polyphony in the play, although giving voice to all three characters, is predominantly led and dominated by Mimilie. Her kitchen is the set of the play, and she is the catalyst for unity between the three characters. This points to the importance of the figure of the elderly woman within Guadeloupean society and culture: The motherly, homely figure who is responsible for the survival of society is often termed potomitan, the central pillar of the family. 39 Mimilie’s self-centred and consumerist personality does not deflect her from helping and nurturing Cosmonaute and Malonga. She has taken both men under her wing, feeding them and providing them with a place to call home. The importance of her role is particularly apparent in the final scenes of Confusion d’instants. The circles episode sees Mimilie emerge from the experience unscathed, and having gained the capacity to speak in the future and past tenses in addition to her favoured present tense. This is key to her subsequent endeavours to help her companions out of their reveries and trauma; the acquisition of these additional tenses granting her a heightened awareness of the problems at hand.
37 In Cosmonaute’s dream sequence, which depicts him in multiple scenes from war films, Mimilie appears as a voodoo priestess.40 Therefore, Mimilie as embodiment of this aspect of Caribbean culture anchors Cosmonaute, who is lost in battles set in other countries in this scene, to his homeland. Many rituals in voodoo are used for healing purposes, and Mimilie as a voodoo priestess is also endowed with the status of a healer. Indeed, in the dream sequence she is depicted as drawing circles, as she has done in the previous scene, perhaps in an attempt to mend what was previously damaged in the circles of the past, present and future tenses episode. This healer-status is extended to her relationship with Malonga. At the end of the dreamscape, it is discovered that while Cosmonaute was sleeping, Mimilie saved Malonga from being run over by a speeding car. The threat of losing his life to the object of his desire, a sports car, rouses Malonga from his monosyllabic state and he regains full speech capacity. Mimilie instigated the outing, having offered to accompany Malonga home, and she is responsible for the young man’s near-death experience. In both cases, Mimilie amends for making Malonga and Cosmonaute ill with the circles. She provides a mooring for them while they both confront their obsessions and traumas as part of the healing process.
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38 Homages to elderly women are found throughout Caribbean literature, Ina Césaire’s play Mémoires d’île (1983) for instance is one of the most renowned plays that focusses exclusively on the lives of Antillean grandmothers and their role within their community.41 Although this image of the elderly woman as pillar of a matrifocal society may be problematic since it may be, and has indeed been, deemed too reductive and deterministic an image of Caribbean femininity, the importance of reclaiming the role of such figures in the shaping of contemporary French Caribbean society, history, and identity is a laudable undertaking.
Conclusion
39 In Confusion d’instants, Gerty Dambury tackles issues relating to consumerism, forgotten histories, and youth disenfranchisement. Through the characters of Mimilie, Cosmonaute, and Malonga, the play explores the effects of the consumer economy and the marginalized status of the French Caribbean on Guadeloupean society’s most vulnerable members. Dambury unites the three voices in a polyphony that portrays the imbrication of all issues, generations, and concerns broached in the play. Each character is awoken from their self-centred and obsessive personality to a greater awareness of the other two, and this may be understood as a call for a greater awareness within Guadeloupean, and indeed French society as a whole, of the different qualities and experiences its individual members can offer. In the first production of the play, the creative team sought alternative locations to theatres or auditoriums for its theatrical representations, and Confusion d’instants was performed on a housing estate with locals watching the performance from their windows. The play inserted itself into public space thus demonstrating how theatrical production can reach a broader audience and thus initiate a debate about pressing contemporary problems. Dambury’s works appeal to local audiences in depicting Guadeloupean characters faced with issues shared by their contemporaries. However, the works also have a global remit, as the many references within Confusion d’instants itself to other cultures attest. The issues broached in the play are relatable to audiences worldwide: the negative aspects of globalization, the articulation and acknowledgement of forgotten histories, and the recognition of society’s responsibility towards its disenfranchised. French Caribbean theatre may be seeped in the local, but its meaning is global.
NOTES
1. Slavery was first abolished in the French slave colonies in 1794 following the French and Haitian Revolutions, but was reinstated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. 2. The other three regions are Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guyana on the South American continent, and La Réunion in the Indian Ocean. 3. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2009, p. 5.
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4. See Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2008. 5. Charles Forsdick, “Local, National, Regional, Global: Glissant and the Postcolonial Manifesto”, in Eva Sansavior and Richard Scholar (eds.), Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2015, p. 229. 6. Stéphanie Bérard, ‘“Mon cheval de bataille est l’intime” : Entretien avec Gerty Dambury réalisé par Stéphanie Bérard’, Île en île (July 2004), url : http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ ile.en.ile/ paroles/dambury_entretien.html [accessed 13th January 2015]. 7. Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1981, p. 133. 8. Charles Forsdick, “Local, National, Regional, Global”, p. 239-240. 9. Article 4, Loi n° 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés, Légifrance, url : https:// www.legifrance.gouv.fr/ affichTexteArticle.do;jsessionid=A1EB6E3B53350348DAD29B3872E9EA78.tplgfr34s_3? idArticle=LEGIARTI000006238939&cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006051312&dateTexte=20060216 [accessed 28th December 2017]. 10. See my article on the subject: Vanessa Lee, “Art and politics in contemporary French Caribbean theatre: The (re)presentation of Guadeloupe’s 2009 general strike in Gerty Dambury’s Les Atlantiques amers and Des doutes et des errances”, Journal of Romance Studies 17.2, June 2017, p. 211-231. See also: Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015. Louise Hardwick, “Depicting social dispossession in Guadeloupe: Nèg Maron, Lettre ouverte à la jeunesse and the general strike of 2009”, Forum of Modern Language Studies 48, 2012, p. 288–305. 11. Carole Edwards, “Théâtralisation et quête de liberté par procuration chez trois dramaturges antillaises”, Women in French Studies, Special Issue 5, 2014, p. 183. 12. Gerty Dambury, Confusion d’instants, Paris, Éditions du Manguier, 2009. First performance directed by Gerty Dambury at Festival des Abymes, Guadeloupe, 13th May 2003. 13. Gerty Dambury, Confusion d’instants, Paris, Éditions du Manguier, 2014, p. 7-8. 14. Mylène Wagram, ‘Mylène Wagram : “Gerty nourrit mon imaginaire de comédienne”’, Gens de la Caraïbe (10th March 2013), url: http://www.gensdelacaraibe.org/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=4944:mylene-wagram-gerty-nourrit-mon-imaginaire-de- comedienne [Accessed 27th December 2017] 15. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 19-20. 16. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 29-30. 17. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 22. 18. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 43. 19. The French-based research group Achac’s works on seven research strands relating to colonial and postcolonial issues, one of which is “Mémoires combattantes [Memories of conflict/ Conflict memories]”. Their website holds a wealth of interdisciplinary and multimodal resources relating to the history of colonial troupes, see: https://achac.com/memoires-combattantes/ 20. Ina Césaire, Man Filibo : Pièce en neuf tableaux (pour un théâtre de rue), in Christiane P. Makward (ed.), Rosanie Soleil et autres textes dramatiques, Paris, Éditions Karthala, 2011, p. 243-272. Michèle Césaire, La Nef, Paris, Éditions théâtrales, 1992. The Battles of Mount Cassino took place during the Italian campaign of World War One in 1944. 21. The ship of fools was a legendary ship evoked by Plato in Book VI of The Republic. It has no pilot, and is crewed by helpless, mad, incompetent individuals. The allegory became popular again in medieval times and inspired Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494) and Hieronymus Bosch ’s eponymous painting (1490-1500). Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilisation suggests the
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mythical ship is also linked to an actual societal practice in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, whereby the mentally ill were put on ships and left to drift down waterways. 22. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 49. 23. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 48. 24. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 40. 25. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 50. ‘Cacochine’ could be a mis-spelling of ‘Cochinchine’ or Cochinchina, a region of southern Vietnam that was a French colony between 1862 and 1949. 26. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 53. 27. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 40-41. 28. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 25. 29. Groupe de recherche Achac, Soldats noirs : troupes françaises et américaines dans les deux guerres mondiales, Paris, 2017. 30. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 56. 31. Gerty Dambury, Trames, Paris, Éditions du Manguier, 2008 ; Gerty Dambury, Des doutes et des errances, in Des doutes et des errances, suivi de Les Atlantiques amers, Paris, Éditions du Manguier, 2014. 32. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 48. 33. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 47. 34. Maryse Condé, Comme deux frères, Carnières-Morlanwelz, Lansman, 2007. 35. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 12-13. 36. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 23-24. 37. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 72. 38. Dambury, Confusion d’instants, p. 73. 39. The term used to designate a strong woman in French Caribbean culture, potomitan, is also borrowed from a term that describes the central pillar of the Haitian voodoo ritual. 40. Voodoo is a religion that developed in the Caribbean from African and European rites, specifically in Haiti and is a properly Caribbean phenomenon, although not practiced in Guadeloupe specifically. 41. Ina Césaire, Mémoires d’île (Maman N. et Maman F.), in Christiane P. Makward (ed.), Rosanie Soleil et autres textes dramatiques, Paris, Éditions Karthala, 2011, p. 199-228.
ABSTRACTS
Guadeloupean author Gerty Dambury’s play Confusion d’instants (2003) is a treatment of the impact of globalization on the French and French Caribbean societies’ most disenfranchised members. It also explores the interaction of personal and collective memory with local, national, and global histories. Confusion d’instants depicts the lives of three characters belonging to different generations and genders, who each speak in a single tense (past, present, or future). Each character also has a personal fixation with specific objects of consumption, such as radios, cars, or household appliances. Through the experiences of these socially and culturally marginalized characters Dambury articulates a searing critique of contemporary Guadeloupean society and of global capitalist consumerism in general. Through a close reading of the play, the
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article will analyse Dambury’s dramatic reflection on globalization, forgotten histories, and social marginalization.
AUTHOR
VANESSA LEE Vanessa is a lecturer in French Studies at Oriel College and Exeter College in Oxford. Her research interests include postcolonial, theatre, and gender studies, as well as intercultural, European, Asian and Caribbean Theatre. She has published in the Journal of Romance Studies, and on the University of Edinburgh Dangerous Women Project website. www.vanessalee.org Vanessa Lee enseigne les études françaises à Oriel College et Exeter College à Oxford. Elle s’intéresse aux études postcoloniales, théâtrales, et de genre, ainsi qu’aux théâtres interculturel, européen, asiatiques et caribéens. Elle a écrit pour la revue Journal of Romance Studies, et le site Dangerous Women Project. www.vanessalee.org
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Translating and Mapping the Many Voices in the Work of Niki Marangou
Marine Meunier
Introduction: Languages in Context1
1 Known to the world as a divided island caught between two “nations,” Cyprus has since 1974 been bisected by the Green Line, a no man’s land under the control of the United Nations that was erected in the aftermath of the Turkish military invasion of the northern part of the island. As a response to the coup ordered against President Makarios III by the Greek-Cypriot ultranationalist paramilitary EOKA B, Turkey invaded 37% of the island’s territory, under occupation until today. Forty percent of the total population was displaced by force, with the Greek-Cypriot population living north of the newly established partition line being moved to the south, and the Turkish-Cypriot population living in the south being moved to the north.2 Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus where the Green Line was first erected, has three accepted names—Lefkosia in Greek, Lefkosha in Turkish, and Nicosia in English. The city often stands as the symbol of the divided island:3 ΟΔΙΚΟΣ ΧΑΡΤΗΣ Βλέποντας τον οδικό χάρτη Λευκωσίας και προαστίων η οδός Fuat Paşa τελειώνει στην Δίωνος και Ιασίου η Defne Yüksel στην Λάμπρου Πορφύρα η Yenice Şafak στην Λεοντίου Μαχαιρά κοντά στον Προμαχώνα Ρόκα STREET MAP OF NICOSIA Looking at the street map of Nicosia and its suburbs Fuad Paşa Street ends on Dionysou and Herakleitou Defne Yüksel on Hermes Street
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Yenice Şafak on Leontiou Mahaira close to Rocca Bastion4
2 As illustrated by the first lines of the poem “Street Map of Nicosia” by Niki Marangou, Nicosia’s territory shows that geographical division also marks the coexistence of different languages in Cyprus. The streets change names on each side of the Green Line, and the poem renders the linguistic barrier all the more tangible by including the different names in their original languages and alphabets as they appear on the street signs. Crossing over, however, which has been possible since 2003 with the opening of several checkpoints on the Green Line, does not only result in changing languages. The streets continue with different names, so mythological references on the Greek side, for instance, are not literally “translated” by the Turkish signs, which refer instead to the Ottoman past. The poem makes visible that crossing the border means entering a different narrative about the island’s history.
3 In Cyprus, “language has been considered by the two major communities to be the primary proof of identification with the corresponding motherland,”5 whether Greece or Turkey. According to the Greek version of the island’s national narrative, Cyprus has been a Greek island since the settling of a Mycenaean population during the Bronze Age. According to the Turkish version, the island has been considered an Anatolian extension since its conquest by Ottoman troops in 1571.6 Yet the “cultures of nationalism”7 that remain strongly present in the island—accused of feeding the political and diplomatic dead-end of what has been coined as the “Cyprus problem”— have been challenged since the 1990s by scholars and writers working together from both sides of the Green Line.8 In the literary field, the challenge has often been specifically addressed through the matter of language and translation, as evidenced by a shift toward collective and multilingual publications.9 A great number of texts written by the new generation of poets and novelists circulate in Cyprus in more than one language, often in translations undertaken by fellow poets or, occasionally, by the authors themselves.10 These texts are equally available in their original and/or translated versions at the local level, and are quoted in journals and at cultural gatherings such as conferences, poetry readings, and exhibitions in both the original language and in translation, depending on the language proficiency of the audience or readership.
4 Niki Marangou (1948-2013) is considered one of the most important figures in the modern literature of Cyprus. She was an awarded poet, novelist, and artist. Even though she only wrote in Greek, her work reflects the issue of multilingualism and divergent narratives.11 Almost all her work exists in translation—mostly in English, to a lesser extent in Turkish, and in other languages.12 Towards the end of her literary activity she published several pieces that included translation(s) along with the original texts. These include “Nicossienses,” a short essay about her recollections of the Cypriot capital that appeared as a book in the island’s three languages,13 and a bilingual collection of poetry written between 2000 and 2013 that displays her poems in English translation on the left page and in the Greek original on the right.14
5 In addition to this consideration for inter-lingual translation, Niki Marangou also engaged in intra-lingual translation, as she comprehended the Greek language in its historical depth and geographical diversity. In an autobiographical profile she wrote: “Το κεντρικό όμως σημείο στη ζωή μου υπήρξε πάντα η σχέση μου με τη γλώσσα, την αρχαία, τη βυζαντινή, τη νέα.” [“The central point in my life has always been the
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passion with language, with the Greek language in all its forms, contemporary, ancient, Byzantine”].15 She further explored language translatability by experimenting with its spoken and written forms. An example of this can be seen in the short story collection Eighteen Narratives,16 in which she gathers testimonies from eighteen elderly women who originated from all over Cyprus. Each testimony is written in the island’s major vernacular, the Cypriot Greek dialect, which Marangou renders in different nuances according to the women’s age, background, and region of origin. Besides creating the illusion that the stories are written as they would have been (orally) told, the book obviously plays on the many dimensions of the language, oral, written, vernacular, and standard.17
6 As illustrated by the poem “Street Map of Nicosia” quoted above, translation in Cyprus may be understood not merely as the transfer of a message into another linguistic system, but rather in terms of the philosophical paradigm coined by Paul Ricoeur: the dialogical process of transferring meaning into an explanatory narrative, one which negotiates Self and Other between and within languages.18 The mapping of the border that underlines the language barrier in the poem points to the different directions of translation. The narratives of Cyprus move apart on either side of the Green Line, and the street names, as Geek Cypriot poet Stephanos Stephanides writes, “test the boundaries of the mythic past which constructs our cultural memory.”19 But contemporary diversity only reflects heterogeneity within narrative itself, as shown by the last verses of the poem: στους παλιούς χάρτες το ποτάμι διέσχιζε την πόλη αλλά ο Σαβορνιάνο άλλαξε την κοίτη για να γεμίσει με νερό την τάφρο. Εκεί τις Κυριακές οι οικιακές βοηθοί από τη Σρι Λάνκα απλώνουν τα μαντίλια τους και τρώνε μαζί. Οι φοίνικες τους θυμίζουν τον τόπο τους. on old maps the river cuts through the town but Savorgnano, the Venetian, changed its flow to fill the moat with water. There on Sundays domestic servants from Sri Lanka spread out their shawls and eat together. The palm trees remind them of home.20
7 Contemplating the course of the Green Line, the poet is reminded of the old course of the river, which also used to cross Nicosia until the fortification of the medieval defensive walls in the Venetian era (1489-1571). This second course opens up another layer of signifying, which the poem accesses differently in Greek and in English: whereas the English translation specifies the provenance of Venetian engineer Savorgnano, the original in Greek does not mention it. The translation considers that an anglophone audience, whether Cypriot or foreign, might not be as aware of Cyprus’s long history as a hellenophone public would, thus manifesting one of the many ways the poem—like a text in general—can reach its multiple readers. In the last verses, the poem overturns the excursion into the past and ends with the modern use of the ancient moats, transformed into public gardens when Cyprus was a British colony (1878-1960). There on weekends, new populations of immigrants21 gather today, and the palm trees—Cyprus’s landscape mark—become significant for yet another understanding of home and self.22 The border, at the crossroads of language and
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cartography, visibly allows Niki Marangou to go far beyond the “Cyprus problem” and its restrictive views, as its mapping creates movement in historical depth and between narrative multiplicities. In this article, I argue that translation is key in Niki Marangou’s work, as it constitutes a writing principle and conveys alternative perspectives that challenge political statements.
The Voice of Many Voices
8 One of the clues suggesting that Niki Marangou’s work can be approached through translation is the apparent contradiction between the structural role of the first-person narrator, and the fact that she does not engage in self-writing. A general overview of Niki Marangou’s work shows the great diversity of the genres she wrote in – she published several novels, essays, short stories, tales for children, testimonies, poetry collections, and even a cookbook. A prolific poet and prose writer, Niki Marangou would often combine different genres in her poetic prose and narrative poetry, oscillating between fiction and reality, personal memories and collected anecdotes. The continual appearance of the subject “I” suggests an adequacy of relation between author, narrator, and character when appropriate, and contributes consistency to her work in general, the only exception being perhaps in her tales for children. However, her work cannot be considered simply autobiographical. In Eighteen Narratives, for example, she describes her task as that of an editor: Οι αφηγήσεις είναι απόλυτα δικές τους [των γυναικών], η δική μου επέμβαση είναι να αφαιρώ αυτά που δέν έχουν ενδιαφέρον, τις επαναλήψεις, να επεξηγώ κάτι που θα ήταν ακατανόητο, έτσι ώστε να βγαίνει ένα σφιχτό κείμενο που να έχει κάτι να πει.23 The testimonies are entirely theirs [the women’s], my own interventions consisting in cutting off the irrelevant bits and repetitions, and clarifying what would remain unclear, in order to bring out a dense text that has something to say. (my translation)
9 As the book consists of a testimony collection, the statement is indeed relevant. However, it expresses the general attitude of a narrator who often seems to disappear behind what she recounts,24 as her voice usually bears the voices of others.
10 For the most part, Niki Marangou’s texts are concerned with places she visited herself, sometimes for a single stay and sometimes over many trips. While Cyprus was definitely the main subject of her inspiration, other places, including Egypt, Western Asia, and various Eastern European countries, were also frequently explored, both in writing and in real life.25 In order to map her different journeys, Niki Marangou (and/or her narrator) would collect stories about the visited cities, towns, or villages according to a double process: she would gather testimonies heard in random conversations in the street or told by her friends, and she would inquire into the locations’ specific histories as evidenced through antiques or items of any kind, spotted in shops, bazaars, flea markets, or historical monuments; the first-person narrators of her texts are often depicted wondering about the times and periods when these objects were still in use. The narrator herself draws on the comparison between people and objects as a resourceful impetus for storytelling: “Μου αρέσουν τα πράγματα που φέρνουν μια ιστορία μαζί του” [I like the things that carry a story with them].26 As such, the different texts about her traveling destinations—but also about Cyprus that was her home—
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consist of many embedded stories combining personal and non-personal recollections and experiences, reconstituting these locations in different layers of space and time:27 Ο δρόμος των χρυσοχών είχε μικρά καταστήματα με κάτι υποτυπώδεις βιτρίνες. Η πραμάτεια του χρυσοχού ήταν συνήθως στοιβαγμένη σε εγγλέζικα τσίγγενα κουτιά μπισκότων, που τα ανακάτευα με τις ώρες. Έβρισκα μια καρφίτσα που ήταν χέρι και κρατούσε ένα άνθος, ένα σκουλαρικάκι από το χρυσό εκείνο της Τουρκοκρατίας με πολύ χαλκό μέσα, και κάτι κόκκινες πέτρες που τις ονόμαζαν «σελάνια», από την Κευλάνη ίσως. Όλα αυτά ήταν τότε πάμφθηνα κι αγόραζα κάτι όταν μου το επέτρεπε το εβδομαδιαίο χαρτζιλίκι μου. Με εντυπωσίαζαν κάτι αλυσίδες με κουτάκια ασημένια, που είχαν μέσα κάτι χαρτιά σε γραφή αραβική, που όπως μου εξήγησε ένας χρυσοχός, ήταν για τον κεφαλικό φόρο που επέβαλαν παλιά οι Τούρκοι στους Έλληνες του νησιού κι όποιος δεν πλήρωνε τον φόρο αυτό του έκοβαν το κεφάλι. Τα κουτιά αυτά είχαν παραστάσεις αποκεφαλισμών, τα κοίταγα με τις ώρες μα δεν αγόρασα ποτέ κανένα. Χρόνια αργότερα είδα σε ένα μουσείο ένα τέτοιο κουτί. Παρουσίαζε τον Ιωάννη τον Βαπτιστή. Ίσως λοιπόν η ιστορία αυτή να ήταν ένας μύθος. Ένας από τους πολλούς μύθους που γεννιούνται μέσα στις αρχαίες πόλεις. (my emphasis)28 The road of the goldsmiths had tiny shops with rudimentary window displays. The merchandise was piled up inside English biscuit boxes, in which I rummaged for hours. I found a brooch in the shape of a hand holding a flower, a small earring of the red Ottoman gold made with a lot of copper, and a few red stones called ‘Ceylania,’ perhaps from Ceylon. Everything was very cheap then and, from time to time, I could afford to buy something with my weekly pocket money. I had been very impressed by small boxes on silver chains, which contained papers with Arabic inscriptions, and used to serve for the poll tax the Greeks of the island had to pay to the Turks—as a goldsmith explained to me. Whoever refused to pay the tax had his head cut off. I would stare at these boxes, engraved with representations of executions but I never bought one. Years later, I saw in a museum a similar box, representing John the Baptist. The story might have been just a myth then, one of all the numerous myths that are borne into ancient cities. 29
11 In this excerpt quoted in length from the essay “Nicossienses,” Niki Marangou recalls her bargain-hunts as a teenager in the old town of Nicosia, in the early 1960s. The text opens up the city’s temporality in various layers, using items as gates to the past—for example, the biscuit tins and the jewellery evoking the British presence in Cyprus or the Ottoman era. These objects may be said to translate the past, as they are bearers of diverse “myths” or stories, real or invented, such as the goldsmith’s interpretation of the silver boxes or the Christian episode of the beheading of John the Baptist. The layers of time are of different natures: personal memory, recalling the time the narrator used to wander in the capital’s old shops; collective memory, with the goldsmith’s anecdote; and (official) history, evoked by the mention of the museum. Through her walks and recollections, the narrator activates insights into Nicosia’s past, and her voice contains the many stories of the city, which merge together in various ways: “Η Λευκωσία είναι γεμάτη τέτοιες ιστορίες όπως είναι όλες οι παλιές πόλεις που φέρνουν μαζί τους σα στρωματογραφία τις μνήμες.” [“Nicosia is full of such stories, as are all old cities that carry with them layered memories.”]30 With an effect of mise en abyme, Nicosia is described in a way that echoes the structure of the text “Nicossienses”: the geological metaphor in the original Greek version of the essay, “ στρωματογραφία” [stratigraphy], depicts precisely a “writing” (γραφή/graphy) made of stories or memories in “layers” (στρώματα/strata).31
12 The additions inserted when the text was updated in 2012—which I have shown in italics above—point out that new layers open up with the narrator’s consideration for the meaning of “things,” that is translation. Her wondering about the red stones’ name
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in the colloquial language (“‘Ceylania,’ perhaps from Ceylon”) works as a reminder of Cyprus’s location on the route to India, particularly during the colonial era. In the same fashion, the second addition, which provides more explanation about the silver boxes used for the poll tax, seems to be motivated by the remembrance of the “Arabic inscriptions” inside the boxes. Precisely because these letters are not immediately decipherable, and the boxes’ purpose remains uncertain, the narrator needs interpretation, or translation. The text offers two possible versions: the goldsmith’s explanation, sociological yet unsubstantiated, invoking the former Ottoman administration, and an alternative yet non-contradictory version at the museum, which includes the silver boxes in the aesthetic discourse of the history of art but does not provide information regarding their use. This excerpt can thus be read as an allegory of translation. The two explanations offer what Paul Ricœur has coined as an “equivalence without identity,”32 or an equivalence that is not adhesion. As they each work on a different level, the two interpretations remain non-identical and can be compared with one another. For example, the narrator wonders whether the poll tax story is a fact or a legend, and proceeds, therefore, as a translator who negotiates meaning between two incomplete, questionable, yet plausible versions.33 By concluding that they both belong to Nicosia’s greater memory, the narrator does not try to make further sense of them; she “advance[s] with some salvaging and some acceptance of loss”34 that is inherent to the process of translation. Yet by giving up finding the “truth” about the boxes, she brings out another interpretation from the space in between the alternatives.
13 Regardless of their differences, what the two interpretations do render is the violence contained in the symbol of execution, which the goldsmith specifies as the rupture between “Greeks” and “Turks.” If we bear in mind that the essay describes post- Independence Nicosia, it is noteworthy that the first barricades in the capital—the roots of the future Green Line—are mentioned without any reference to the many outbreaks of violence from which they originated, to which the narrator was oblivious at the time: “Συνέχισα να πηγαίνω στον Τουρκικό τομέα ακόμα κι όταν στήθηκαν φυλάκια στις δύο πλευρές. Ένα νεαρό κορίτσι με το ποδήλατο, δε σκεφτόταν κανένας να με σταματήσει.” [“I carried on going to the Turkish Quarter even when roadblocks were erected on both sides. As a young girl on a bike, no one thought of stopping me.”]35 Moreover, the goldsmith’s vocabulary is anachronistic since it refers to the modern idea of bi-national Cyprus,36 whereas during the Ottoman administration the (more than two) island’s communities were identified by the religion they practiced, and all had to pay taxes. What the episode translates, thus, is the social, political, ideological, and epistemological shift that led to the many years of inter-communal violence preceding the Turkish invasion.
The (Un)translatable and the Necessity to Translate
14 The element of violence in the episode of the silver boxes is essential to understanding translation as a writing principle in Niki Marangou’s work. It could be argued that the idea emanates from a generous and positive reading of her work through Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical paradigm. In the essay “Nicossienses,” the words “myths”, “stories,” and “memories” alternatively name the same thing, which suggests an ontological equivalence corresponding to the concept of narrative identity at the root of Paul Ricoeur’s definition of translation: identity, or the sense of self and unity, is constituted
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through the narrative of the past and of experiences, and this narrative comes out in a different manner every time it is told.37 Niki Marangou’s work illustrates narrative as the negotiation between Self and Other (both outside and within the Self), as “Nicossienses,” for example, partially reconstitutes Nicosia’s collective memory by integrating a variety of voices which are “other” to one another. Drawing an analogy with translation, we could further argue that the narrator reconstitutes Nicosia’s living language, which she collects as many particular idioms of as she can. The text thus works as a translation in the sense of a paradigm of “linguistic hospitality:”38 the narrator “hosts” (hospes) “foreign” (hostis) voices within her own, without absorbing or neutralizing their otherness.39 In her article about divided Nicosia, Sherry Simon notes, however, that translation in Cyprus represents less a gesture of kindness than a social necessity.40 The capital, like all dual cities, makes visible the fact that the Other to address and to hear is not foreign or even distant; it is the citizen with whom we share the same place, town, sense of home, and daily life. Translation is therefore perceived as a movement across, and a displacement towards, different points of view; but decentring oneself is limited by the inherent knowledge that one’s own narrative can always be challenged and/or weakened by another, at times incompatible, narrative. The element of violence in translation reminds us that the paradigm is not always the amiable idea of a hospitality everyone should adopt in order to avoid or resolve conflict, since it also shows the very limits of common ground. In other words, when understanding and reciprocity are endangered, translation makes visible the untranslatable.
15 An anecdote recounted twice by Niki Marangou appeared for the first time in a poem dated from 2005, “Για τους φίλους στο Βορρά” [“For the Friends in the North”], and constitutes a digression in the 2010 novel Γεζούλ [Yezoul]. The episode narrates a visit to a village tavern in the Karpass peninsula—in the northern part of the island under Turkish occupation—where Niki Marangou recognizes a painting on the wall, which her own mother had made decades ago. The painting used to hang in her family house by the beach in Famagusta, which was lost as a result of the 1974 invasion.41 She tells the tavern owner about the painting, but he replies that he will not give it back as he considers it a war trophy. I quote the last verses of the 2005 poem: Είδα έναν πίνακα που ζωγράφισε τις προάλλες στον τοίχο μιας ταβέρνας στο Καρπάσι. Μιας ταβέρνας που την αποτελούσαν κλεμμένες καρέκλες, κλεμμένα τραπεζομάντιλα, κλεμμένες πόρτες, κλεμμένα χερούλια. «Είναι της μάνας μου», είπα στον ταβερνιάρη, «εδώ είναι γραμμένο το όνομά της». «Τώρα όμως είναι δικό μου», είπε ο άντρα που ήρθε από το μέρος που ανατέλλει ο ήλιος (έτσι μου τον περιέγραψε η γυναίκα του). «Είναι δικό μου τώρα», είπε, « ganimet, έτσι το λένε στα τουρκικά». The other day, I saw one of her paintings hanging on the wall of a tavern in the Karpass. A tavern made up of stolen chairs, stolen tablecloths, stolen doors, stolen handles. “It’s my mother’s,” I told the innkeeper, “her name is written here.” “But now it’s mine,” said the man who came from where the sun rises (that’s how his wife described him to me). “It’s mine now,” he said, “ganimet, is how they call it in Turkish.”42
16 The subject “I” reports the event focusing, in order, on the painting, the list of stolen items from Famagusta, the origin of the innkeeper, and the untranslated Turkish word
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“ganimet.” The painting works as a catalyst for the poet, who suddenly realizes that the cheap tavern furniture around her must also come from looted Famagusta—the repetitive use of the adjective “κλεμμένος” [stolen] marks this revelation. She understands that the innkeeper has a totally antagonistic narrative about the situation: he is a settler who was given a chance to make a new home in an area taken by his country’s forces.43 The poet does not show any active sign of rejection or aggressiveness, but the text significantly ends with the untranslated word “ganimet,” as if to signify incompatibility, since what it names (“war loot” or “trophy”) can only exist in Turkish in the Cypriot context. The word is pointed out as foreign and untranslatable, with the Latin characters in the Greek original, and with the italics in the translation.
17 The 2010 version of the same episode further develops the matter of untranslatability: Μετά το άνοιγμα των οδοφραγμάτων είδα εκεί έναν πίνακα που είχε ζωγραφίσει κάποτε η μάνα μου. Ήταν ένα μέρος γεμάτο πράγματα -κλεμμένα πράγματα-, κλεμμένοι πίνακες, κλεμμένες σοβάντζες, κλεμμένα βάζα, κλεμμένα τραπέζια, κλεμμένες καρέκλες, όλα από την Αμμόχωστο… «Ο άντρας μου ήρθε από κει που ανατέλλει ο ήλιος» μου είχε πει η γυναίκα του. Πρέπει να ήταν Κούρδος. Δεν έδινε πίσω τίποτα. Ήταν λάφυρα πολεμού γι’αυτόν. Ganimet το λένε στα τουρκικά.44 After the opening of the green line, I saw there a painting that my mother had once made. It was a place full of stuff—stolen stuff—stolen paintings, stolen stands, stolen vases, stolen tables, stolen chairs, everything from Famagusta. “My husband came from where the sun rises,” his wife told me. He must have been Kurdish. He did not give anything back, because it was war loot. Ganimet, they say in Turkish. (my translation)
18 Published five years later, the episode is narrated in the exact same order. The most obvious variation however, is that the word “ganimet” is first translated (“war loot”), and then de-translated into its original form to insist on the narrative incompatibility. More subtly, the text in prose emphasizes with a quote another knot of untranslatability through the metaphor given by the innkeeper’s wife about her husband’s origin (Anatolia). In both texts, the poet/narrator apparently hosts or translates the woman’s metaphor, as she quotes it without referring to the language she used to speak with the couple. However, the metaphor itself is a periphrasis that deconstructs the etymon at the root of the region’s name in all languages (ανατολή, which literally means “sunrise” or “East” in Greek). The woman’s naming of the region (“από κει που ανατέλλει ο ήλιος” [from where the sun rises]) is therefore a translation, and yet it avoids naming what it actually means (Ανατολή/Anatolia, which evidences the Greek origin of the name). Precisely because it is translated, the periphrasis works as an untranslatable, or as a marker of incompatibility between conflicting narratives that the narrator herself quotes (un)translated. Jacques Derrida’s word, about the translatable and the untranslatable being equivalent,45 is often understood as the positive process of meaning, as a translated signifier always loses something from its first extraction in order to be brought to a new sense or be renewed in the process of translation.46 Yet, the episode of the painting offers a compelling illustration of this concept of the (un)translatable, not in the positive sense in that it coins the natural process of signifying, but as a paradigm revealing knots of violence where mutual exchange and comprehension remain endangered. The text should not be read as an indirect rejection of an alternative narrative by the narrator, as she explicitly de- identifies with the Famagusta refugees’ major claim,47 for whom reparation can only
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happen by getting back everything that was lost or taken: “Δεν ήθελα στ’αλήθεια τίποτε πίσω” [Truly, I didn’t want anything back].48 What she expresses instead is an anxiety (“ ταραχή”49) that urges her – in the novel – to learn more about loss itself.
All Vanishes
19 In Marangou’s 2010 novel Yezoul, the narrator’s inquiry into collective memory – in this case, into Athens’s past – is driven by the untranslatable. The novel offers indeed a space of reflection on translation, as it displays two narratives in one. The main narrative is a biographic novel that recounts, from a third-person perspective, the life of a 19th century Athenian woman who attended the Greek revolution (1821) and the following decades of Greece’s transformation into a modern nation-state. It is the fictionalized biography of Tereza Makri – nicknamed Loula in the novel – who was a minor historical character known as the “Maid of Athens” from Lord Byron’s eponymous poem (1810).50 In the novel’s first chapters, a secondary narrative in italics is inserted within the main story, consisting of a series of episodes depicting a first- person narrator discovering and settling in modern-day Athens. The first-person narrator is a Cypriot woman who recounts anecdotes – such as the episode of the painting quoted above – suggesting that she is the same narrator as in Niki Marangou’s other pieces. In the same fashion described above, the first-person narrator unravels Athens’s history by collecting stories/memories of its past, as she visits different areas at random, browses antique shops, meets new friends and neighbors, and goes to excursions or attends cultural events.
20 At first sight, the two narratives have nothing in common but the fact that they both take place in Athens. Yet the reader soon works out that the secondary narrative exposes the narrator’s different discoveries that motivated the writing of the historical novel – Loula’s story, or Tereza Makri’s fictionalized life: Ξεκίναγα από Ασωμάτων και έφτανα στον Κεραμεικό κοιτάζοντας τα σπίτια, τους δρόμους, τους Αέρηδες από την Αιόλου. Να δω με τα δικά της μάτια, να αποκλείσω τα μαγαζιά, τους νέγρους με τις τσάντες, τα Benneton, τα Bodyshop, να δω τη θέα της Ακρόπολης όπως θα την έβλεπε εκείνη από τα διάφορα σημεία του δρόμου. Και καμιά φορά στεκόμουν έκθαμβη μπροστά σε κάποιο κτήριο, κάποια εσοχή του δρόμου, κάποιο ετοιμόρροπο μπαλκόνι με μια αίσθηση λες και ήθελαν κάτι να μου πουν, σε μια γλώσσα που όμως δε γνώριζα, που δεν ήμουν σε θέση να αποκρυπτογραφήσω. Περπάταγα λες και ήμουν τυφλή για όλα τα σημερινά, και τα μάτια έψαχναν να βρουν αυτά που δεν διακρίνονται εύκολα, τα κρυμμένα και παλιά.51 I would start from Agion Asomaton Street to reach the Kerameikos area, watching the buildings, the streets, the Tower of the Winds. So I could see through her eyes, ignoring the stores, the black men selling bags, the Benneton and the Bodyshop, admiring the view of the Acropolis as she would see it from the different parts of the street. And sometimes, I would stand dumbfounded in front of a building, a nook in a street, or a balcony ready to collapse, with the feeling that in a way, they had something to tell me, but in a language I didn’t understand, that I wasn’t able to decipher. I would walk as if blinded to modern things, my eyes looking for what you can’t easily see—the hidden and the old. (my translation)
21 As she is depicted walking Athens’s historical center, the narrator’s method is explicitly compared to that of a translator: a process or an act of overcoming untranslatability. To quote her own words, the narrator tries to “decipher” a past “language” that, at first, “she does not understand.” The inability to immediately read that language – or
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in this case, to hear it – urges her to go deeper in her investigation, looking for “the hidden and the old” around her; this strange drive or “desire to translate”, to quote Antoine Berman’s coinage,52 is expressed by the idiomatic expression “λες και” [as if] repeated twice. As a translator who has first to understand the text to be interpreted, the narrator confronted with untranslatability – the undecipherable language she wants to understand – starts acting or interpreting the historical character that she wants to bring back from the past. Earlier in the first-person narrative, the narrator relates a strange encounter that took place in Cyprus before she even started to visit Athens: an old man then known as a mystic had told her that Tereza Makri was her own name in a previous life. The narrator disregarded this awkward revelation; however when she started to visit the Greek capital years later, she realized that she had bought a flat in the street where the Makri family used to live. She started then to investigate the character, but she could not find much about Tereza, as her existence has almost disappeared from archives or historical data.53
22 What the episode – the novel’s secondary narrative in general – suggests is that to compensate for historical loss, the narrator must recreate the character she wants to give life to by incarnating her. In the excerpt quoted above, she pictures herself as Tereza, and Tereza as herself, while she walks Athens’s old streets and “see[s] through her eyes” what she imagines Tereza did and saw. She becomes sensitive to insights and intuitions, unconsciously selecting what she sees or does. This interplay between narrator and character illustrates precisely what Walter Benjamin has described, in his 1923 essay, “The Task of the Translator,” as a “mode” or “stage of… continuing life.”54 Translation in this sense is a historical process that restores a text – an expression, or an experience – which may be out-dated or no longer understood into the present of a new language, which in turn transforms or renews the original expression.55 For the translation to be successful, the translator has “to find the intention toward the language into which the work is to be translated, on the basis of which an echo of the original can be awakened in it.”56 In this regard, it is compelling that the narrator translates Tereza’s biography as she enacts the character “with completely unmetaphorical objectivity,”57 and looks for her “intention” in her own body, as shown by the lexical field of sight. She then composes Loula’s story, which is Tereza’s renewed life (its translation) interpreted by the narrator’s “language” – i.e. with her personality, experience, knowledge, and imagination. The transitions between the two plots underline indeed the emotional and physical connections between the narrator and her character. For example, when teenage Loula wonders: “Πως συγχρονίζεται ο έρωτας;” [How does love synchronize?],58 the narrator interrupts the story and gives her own description of love and desire: “Γύριζα στο κρεβάτι προς τη μεριά του αλλά αυτός κοιμόταν· χάιδευα την πλάτη του, ανάπνεα τη μυρωδιά του. Ευτυχία.” [I turned over to his side of the bed but he was asleep; I touched his back and breathed his scent. Bliss].59
23 The narrator, the historical figure, and the fictionalized character make visible the paradigm of translation in the novel. Loula’s story stands as a reconstitution or continuation of Tereza’s life in the 19th century, based on what the narrator has been able to discover and has chosen to imagine about Athens at the time. The novel gives Tereza a plausible and renewed life experience, focused on inner feelings and emotions —among others, desire, depression, and maternal love.60 Moreover, it shows that untranslatability (historical loss) is actually key to creation, as loss is to gain.
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24 The novel’s title is in fact a(n) (un)translated word. After the narrator has bought her flat in Athens and is getting familiar with the city, she becomes friends with Vasilis, who owns an antique shop near her flat. One day he invites her over for coffee: «Κοίτα τι μου έφεραν χτες» μου λέει και μου δείχνει ένα πλακάκι με μια αραβική επιγραφή. «Γεζούλ» διαβάζει «που θα πει “όλα χάνονται”». «All vanishes» επαναλαμβάνω μηχανικά. « . . . είναι από το σπίτι που κάηκε το ‘74». [της Τερέζας] Μένω άφωνη. «Που τα μάθατε τα αραβικά;» τον ρωτώ. «Έζησα αρκετά χρόνια στο Κάιρο» μου λέει «πήγα γυμνάσιο εκεί». “Γεζούλ”… γυρίζω σπίτι με το πλακάκι τυλιγμένο. Γιατί σε εμένα, γιατί να μου το δείξει εμένα αυτό; Η γραφή στα αραβικά, ένα ανάποδο μπλε έψιλον με δυο τελείες και δυο λοξές γραμμές: “γεζούλ”. Το βάζω στο ράφι απέναντί μου και το κοιτάω. Την πέμπτη φορά που πήγα στο μαγαζί μού διηγήθηκε τη ζωή του.61 “Look what they brought me yesterday,” he says and he shows me a tile with an inscription in Arabic. “Yezoul,” he reads, “which means ‘everything disappears.’” “All vanishes,” I say automatically. “… It is from the house that burnt in 1974.” [Tereza’s house] I am speechless. “Where did you learn Arabic?” I ask him. “I lived many years in Cairo,” he answers. “I went to school there.” “Yezoul”… I go home with the tile wrapped in paper. Why me, why would he show it to me? The Arabic word: a reversed blue epsilon, with two dots, and two slanted letters. “Yezoul.” I put the tile on a shelf in front of me and I observe it. The fifth time I went to Vasilis’ shop, he told me the story of his life. (my translation)
25 The only actual remnant from Tereza Makri’s house is explicitly associated with translation. The Greek original emphasizes even more the movement of translation with the adjacency of three languages. The narrator first writes (in Greek) the Arabic word on the tile (“γεζούλ”), then its translation by Vasilis (“όλα χάνονται”), and as a character, she then translates it herself into English (“all vanishes”) – even if the plot does not justify it since the conversation is happening in Greek. Further down, the narrator goes on describing the word she cannot read by partially applying an alphabet appear as an (ز and ي) she knows: in her eyes, the first two letters of the Arabic word ل .) and و) inverted Greek epsilon (ε), but the other two letters remain undecipherable It is also noteworthy that she decrypts the word from right to left as she would do if she could actually read it. The word is literally untranslatable for the narrator who does not know the language; moreover, it seems out of any context since the tile on which it is written makes no sense for her. Vasilis, who can read Arabic, is yet not able to provide further information about the tile’s use or provenance – other than that it was found in Tereza’s old house. The narrator keeps repeating “yezoul” as she observes the tile she will know nothing about, and that will be of no consequence for Loula’s story even though it gives the novel its title.
26 The excerpt offers a vivid illustration of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “pure language” as an achievement of translation: “pure language” (or “pure intention”) is the essence proper to a literary work of art, which translation is supposed to reveal by means of the new version or language given to the work.62 The metaphor given by Walter Benjamin to conceive the idea is that of a broken vessel, the original text and its translations consisting each in a different fragment which allow the reader to seize – even partially
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– the work’s pure intention.63 In this manner, when pure language reveals itself, the sum of all texts (original and translations) disappear: In this pure language – which no longer signifies or expresses anything but rather, as the expressionless and creative word that is the intended object of every language – all communication, all meaning, and all intention arrive at a level where they are destined to be extinguished.64
27 Both because of its meaning and of its materiality, the tile “yezoul” represents such a fragment, in Marangou’s novel and in her work in general. With the dynamic of translation in the text (“γεζούλ” – “όλα χάνονται” – “all vanishes”), the episode stands like an epiphany wherein the narrator glimpses and names the natural movement of life, as the passage between and within language(s) seizes the passing of time and the fact that nothing remains the same in the continuum of creation. She seems to unconsciously fathom the nature of her own work, which captures people’s lives and experiences on their way to extinction and tells them anew by means of her own stories. What is more, she acknowledges loss and extinction as a means for writing or creating, which explicitly appoints writing as translating.
Concluding Remarks
28 I would like to conclude my discussion with a few remarks that the episode of the tile brings out. Perhaps paradoxically, the novel takes its title from an object the narrator is not able to figure out, and which does not even appear in Loula’s story. What it does in the novel’s global economy, however, is mark a transition in the first-person narrative: a new digression opens up that takes the narrator away from Athens, as she follows Vasilis’s account about his childhood in Egypt, and then his half-sister’s testimony about Cyprus during the interwar years. After this long digression, the first- person narrative ends and the main story is not interrupted anymore – only a few paragraphs in italics appear in further chapters. The passage in translation creates a definite shift in the novel, as the narrator moves away from Athens whereas the main plot stays centered on the Greek capital – with a few excursions into other cities and islands, such as Missolonghi, Aegina, Corfu, Istanbul, and Saint Petersburg.
29 What this shift first marks is the novel’s rupture between history and literature as a way to convey an alternative point of view regarding a supposedly known historical period. Indeed, Marangou chose a historical figure that allows her to trigger history without eluding the literary (fictitious) nature of her work. The book, subtitled “novel” on its very first page, is a fiction based on true events – it is Loula’s story, which differs slightly from Tereza Makri’s historical life.65 The idea of literature as a means to explore history is evoked by an episode in which the first-person narrator recounts a part of her research on 19th century Athens: as she is reading a biography of Lord Elgin, 66 she is suddenly interrupted by the thought of his wife and what she could possibly have seen or lived in the epoch the narrator is fascinated about. Lord Elgin’s wife lived through the period, yet she did not play any active part in it – at least not that history has remembered – and in this regard, Loula’s story stands as a plausible account of the experiences an ordinary person may have had during a particular historical time at different stages of her life. The novel does not use the general tone of official history but stays focused on an intimate narrative. The shift between the two plots renders the
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movement of fiction that frees itself from historical reality in order to offer a different perspective on it.
30 This first understanding is made more subversive if we bear in mind that the shift is created by an episode in translation. The novel’s background depicts the transformation of Greece from an Ottoman province into a newly constituted nation- state, and that of Athens into a state capital. In this context, the very choice of Tereza Makri as main character seems equivocal, since even if she existed in real life, Tereza Makri is above all Lord Byron’s “Maid of Athens,” mainly known today through his biography (Byron rented a room in her mother’s house when he first visited Athens in 1809, and composed poems about her and her teenage sisters).67 As is known, the English poet played an important part in the Greek independence – at least in its representation—being one of the most famous Philhellenes who contributed to the intellectual, literary, and artistic movement of Greece’s national regeneration. 68 It is true that the novel does not address the matter of Greek nationalism, as politics remains in the background, but it explicitly overturns the hierarchical relationship between Byron and Tereza Makri, as an “English man” merely appears a couple of times during Loula’s teenage years, with no name and without much importance for the rest of the story. Loula’s story is thus completely freed from the usual narrative centered on Lord Byron, who is a minor character in the novel rather than the national figure he usually represents in the English literary canon and in the modern movement of Hellenism or Philhellenism.
31 The secondary narrative that illustrates the writing’s process as a paradigm of hospitality also does not acknowledge this intellectual movement at the root of the Greek nation, since in the variety of her explorations, the narrator-translator never refers in any way to the myth of Athens or raises the stereotypes relating Greece to antiquity. In spite of the plurality of voices she carries within her own, the narrator stays within the scope of orally transmitted narratives and family chronicles, and she passes on living memories that at no time evoke the Greek nation idea or ideology. What is more, the language element in the (un)translatable – the mention of Arabic, which opens up the digression on Vasilis’s life and its narrative sequels – actually leads the narrator to other areas, some as important as Athens to Greek culture and modern Hellenism: Istanbul, Egypt, and even Cyprus, to name a few.69 Vasilis’s story itself starts in Athens, since he was born on the very street on which the narrator met him, yet it is entirely located elsewhere; in the same fashion, Loula’s story starts in and constantly returns to Athens, even though she follows her husband’s activities throughout the country all his life, as the wife of a British officer and representative at the newly constituted Greek government. The principle of translation therefore makes visible the novel’s paradoxical dynamic that keeps Athens as the narrative’s main axis and as the narrator’s main field of investigation, all the while challenging the central role of the capital, or even continental Greece, in the hegemonic narrative that gives it a dominant position. The novel epitomizes the definition Emily Apter gave of translation’s function: as an act of disruption, translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking then out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements… Translation is a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change.70
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32 In my discussion of Niki Marangou’s work, I have attempted to show how translation as mediation across languages, places and spaces informs the poetics of her writing, continuously probing questions of cultural and historical memory.
NOTES
1. This article is a revised version of the conference paper “The Lives of Others in the Writing of Niki Marangou: A Paradigm of Translation,” presented at the Tenth IABA World Conference “Excavating Lives,” International Auto/Biography Association, University of Cyprus, 26-29 May 2016. 2. Among the many sources regarding the 1974 events, see for example Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, London/New York, I. B. Tauris, 2004, particularly her introduction. 3. Irini Savvides, “Cypriot Women Poets Cross the Line,” Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture, vol. XXXIII, n° 1-2, 2011, p. 106-107. 4. Niki Marangou, “Οδικός χάρτης/Street Map of Nicosia,” Προς Αμυδράν Ιδέαν/For a Faint Idea, bilingual edition, translated from the Greek by Xenia Andreou, Athens, Rodakio, 2013, p. 12-13. 5. Marios Vasiliou, “Cypriot English Literature: A Stranger at the Feast Locally and Globally,” Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture, vol. XXXIII, n° 1-2, 2011, p. 84. 6. See, for example, the introductions to these volumes: Yiannis Papadakis and Rebecca Bryant (eds.), Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community and Conflict, London/New York, I.B. Tauris, 2012; and Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Welz (eds.), Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict, Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2006. 7. Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, op. cit. 8. Before the opening of the Green Line in 2003, Cypriot academics and writers would meet abroad. For example, one of the first collective volumes challenging the “Cyprus problem” from all fields of the humanities – Vangelis Calotychos (ed.), Cyprus and its People, Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1855-1997, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1998—gathers the communications read at the interdisciplinary conference “Cyprus and Its People: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Harvard University, 1994). Another collective volume addressing more specifically the question of language and literature – Mehmet Yaşin (ed.), Step- Mothertongue, From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, Middlesex University Press, London, 2000—gathers articles and poems read at the conference “From Nationalism to Multi-culturalism: New Interpretations in the Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey,” Middlesex University, 1997. 9. The academic journal Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus, which started in 2003, is the most representative of this new type of publication, as it issues yearly creative writings in the many languages of the island. The 2011 issue of Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture, vol. XXXIII, n° 1-2, was also dedicated to Cypriot literature of all communities and gathered both academic and creative writings. Earlier, a short anthology of Cypriot literature in Greek, Turkish, English, and Armenian appeared in the collective volume Step-Mothertongue edited by Mehmet Yaşin (op. cit., 2000). We can also refer to two poetry anthologies published in translation in 2010: one in Greek, edited by the poet Giorgos Moleskis, Σύγχρονοι Τουρκοκύπριοι
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ποιητές: Απόπειρα επικοινωνίας [Contemporary Turkish-Cypriot Poetry: An Effort of Communication], Athens, Topos Publications, 2010; and one in Turkish, edited by the poet Gürgenç Korkmazel, Kıbrıslırum S◌̧iir Antolojisi [Cypriot Poetry Anthology], Istanbul, Paloma, 2010. 10. Stephanos Stephanides, “An Island in Translation,” Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture, vol. XXXIII, n° 1-2, 2011, p. 51. 11. It can be noted that Niki Marangou had some experience as a translator, as she translated into Greek a poetry collection by the German poet Joachim Sartorius (Alexandria [Αλεξάνδρεια], Athens, Rodakio, 1999). 12. The main translators of her work into English are Xenia Andreou, and the poet and scholar Stephanos Stephanides. 13. Niki Marangou, “Nicossienses,” Photographies by Arunas Baltenas, translations by Xenia Andreou, Stephanos Stephanides, Murat Bülbülcü, Tuncer Bağişkan, Vilnius, Paknio Ieidykla, 2006. The essay is available in English on the author’s blog, http://www.marangou.com/ nicossienses/, which also includes a revised version in Greek (updated in 2012), http:// www.marangou.com/nicossiensis/ 14. Niki Marangou, Προς Αμυδράν Ιδέαν/For a Faint Idea, op. cit. 15. Niki Marangou, Cyprus PEN Literary Profile, n°50, Nicosia, 2009, p. 9; the text can also be found on the author’s blog in English, http://www.marangou.com/biography/, and in Greek, http:// www.marangou.com/βιογραφικό/. 16. Niki Marangou, Eighteen Narratives [Δεκαοχτώ Αφηγήσεις], Athens, Rodakio, 2012. 17. Stavros Karayanni, “Review of Δεκαοχτώ Αφηγήσεις, edited by Niki Marangou (Rodakio, 2012),” Cadences, vol. 8, fall 2012, p. 113. 18. Paul Ricœur, “The Paradigm of Translation,” On Translation, translated by Eileen Brennan with an introduction by Richard Kearney, London/New York, Routledge, 2006, p. 11-29. The point will be further developed in my analysis. 19. Stephanos Stephanides, “An Island in Translation,” op. cit., p. 50; in his analysis of the poem, Stephanides points out that the very names in the Turkish alphabet also carry another narrative by themselves: at the time of the Ottoman characters the streets refer to, the names would have been written with Arabic letters, as the writing of Turkish in the Latin alphabet only goes back to the language revolution implemented by Mustafa Kemal in the 1920s—who founded modern Turkey by distinguishing it from its Ottoman and Islamic past. The names in Turkish mark, therefore, the ideological and epistemological shift on which Turkish nationalism was founded (Stephanos Stephanides, idem). 20. Niki Marangou, “Οδικός χάρτης/Street Map of Nicosia,” Προς Αμυδράν Ιδέαν/For a Faint Idea, op. cit., p. 12-13. 21. Since the Republic of Cyprus became a member-state of the EU in 2003, migrant workers, female for the most part, have settled in the southern side of Cyprus, fleeing poverty from southern and eastern Asian countries (Irini Savvides, “Cypriot Women Poets Cross the Line,” op. cit., p. 121). 22. Stavros Karayanni identifies the gardens as an “epistemological space” of “recreation.” See “Migrant Goddess: Displacement, Gender and Transformation in Literature from Cyprus,” in Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Helga Ramse-Kurz (eds.), On the Move: The Journey of Refugees in New Literatures in English, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, p. 71. 23. Niki Marangou, Eighteen Narratives [Δεκαοχτώ Αφηγήσεις], op. cit., p. 16. 24. The poet’s discretion is also evoked by Stavros Karayanni who notes, about her poem “Street Map of Nicosia,” quoted in the introduction of this paper, that “the verse resists metaphorical embellishment as much as possible” so that the streets themselves bring out the city’s multidimensional temporality (“Migrant Goddess: Displacement, Gender and Transformation in Literature from Cyprus”, op. cit., p. 70).
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25. On the importance of traveling for her poetic inspiration, see Frangiski Ambatzopoulou’s review, in which she describes N. Marangou as “an avid traveler,” “Niki Marangou. Προς Αμυδράν Ιδέαν, Rodakio, Athens 2013 [review],” In Focus Magazine, vol. 11, no. 2, June 2014, https:// cyprusinfocus.org/essay/niki-marangou/ 26. Niki Marangou, Γεζούλ [Yezoul], Athens, Hestia Publications, 2010, p. 54 (my translation). 27. Among other sources, the plurality of temporalities in Niki Marangou’s work has been raised by Sia Anagnostopoulou in her paper “The different temporalities of Cyprus in the work of Niki Marangou,” read at the conference “Cyprus, Female Voice and Memory: Literature, Arts and History in the Work of Niki Marangou” (British School at Athens, Greece, 23/09/2017), https:// www.bsa.ac.uk/index.php/33-featured-news/337-cyprus-female-voice-and-memory 28. I quote here the revised version of “Nicossienses” from 2012, available on the author’s blog, http://www.marangou.com/nicossiensis/ 29. As I am referring to the revised version of the text in Greek, I quote the English translation by Xenia Andreou (“Nicossienses,” 2006, op.cit., http://www.marangou.com/nicossienses/), to which I added in italics the modifications brought in 2012. They are therefore my translation. 30. Niki Marangou, “Nicossienses, ” 2006, op. cit., p. 45, http://www.marangou.com/nicossiensis/ [Greek]; p. 29, http://www.marangou.com/nicossienses/ [English]. 31. To illustrate this writing technique, a parallel could be drawn with Niki Marangou’s artwork, as a common theme in her paintings represents the traditional Mediterranean louvered shutters, which combine at least two views—indoors and outdoors—in a single picture. See her website, http://www.marangou.com/gallery/paintings/ 32. Paul Ricœur, “The Paradigm of Translation,” op. cit., p. 22. 33. The equivalence translation offers is further analyzed by Paul Ricœur as a space enabling comparison (“construction of the comparable”), in “A ‘passage’: translating the untranslatable,” On Translation, op. cit., p. 37. 34. Paul Ricœur, “Translation as challenge and source of happiness,” On Translation, op. cit., p. 3. 35. Niki Marangou, “Nicossienses,” 2006, op. cit., p. 40, http://www.marangou.com/nicossiensis/ [Greek]; p. 24, http://www.marangou.com/nicossienses/ [English]. 36. In the introduction of her study Imagining the Modern, Rebecca Bryant describes how modernity encountered during British colonialism transformed “Muslims and Christians in Cyprus . . . into Turks and Greeks” (op. cit., p. 2). 37. The concept of narrative identity has notably been developed by Paul Ricœur in Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blamey, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992, chap. 5 and 6; for further analyses of his concept, see, for example, Joseph Dunne, “Beyond Sovereignty and Deconstruction: The Storied Self,” in Richard Kearney (ed.), Paul Ricœur. The Hermeneutics of Action, London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi, Sage Publications, 1996, p. 137-157; and David Rasmussen, “Rethinking Subjectivity: Narrative Identity and the Self,” in Richard Kearney (ed.), Paul Ricœur: The Hermeneutics of Action, op. cit., p. 159-172. 38. Paul Ricœur, “The Paradigm of Translation,” op. cit., p. 23. 39. An extended analysis of the concept of “hospitality” is provided by Richard Kearney in “Paul Ricœur and the Hermeneutics of Translation,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 37, 2007, p. 151. 40. Sherry Simon, “À l’enseigne d’Hermès. La ville multiple à l’intersection des langues et des mémoires” (in French), in Maroussia Ahmed, Corinne Alexandre-Garner, Nicholas Serruys, et al. (eds.), Migrations/Translations, Paris, Paris Ouest University Press, p. 63. 41. The touristic area of Varosha, on the coastal side of Famagusta, was seized and looted by the Turkish army in 1974. Since then it has remained a forbidden zone, known as the “Ghost Town” of Famagusta. 42. Niki Marangou, “Για τους φίλους στο Βορρά/For the Friends in the North,” Προς Αμυδράν Ιδέαν/ For a Faint Idea, op. cit., p. 14 [English] and 17 [Greek].
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43. To compensate the depopulation caused by the Greek Cypriots’ flight to the south of the Green Line after the invasion, thousands of impoverished Turkish settlers have been imported to the northern part of the island. It is estimated that they outnumber the Turkish Cypriot population today (Stephanos Stephanides, “An Island in Translation,” op. cit., p. 47). 44. Niki Marangou, Yezoul, op. cit., p. 26. 45. “[Nothing] can ever be untranslatable – or, moreover, translatable:” among other sources, see Jacques Derrida, “What is a ‘relevant’ translation?,” in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader [Third edition], London/New York, Routledge, 2012, p. 369. 46. I would like to add that I owe the idea of translation as a negative paradigm—which can host and sometimes hide a situation of conflict and violence – to Tiphaine Samoyault in her conference paper “Traduction et violence” (in French), read at the seminar “Le comparatisme comme approche critique,” Paris-Sorbonne Home for Research, 15/01/2016, https://www.canal- u.tv/video/universite_paris_sorbonne/traduction_et_violence.20454. 47. The Famagusta refugees being the major part of the Greek Cypriot population evicted from the north in 1974, the return of Varosha constitutes a crucial element in the negotiations to solve the “Cyprus problem.” See for example the newspaper articles by Elias Hazou, “Former residents eying return to Varosha homes,” Cyprus Mail, 02/04/2017, http://cyprus-mail.com/2017/04/02/ former-residents-eyeing-return-varosha-homes/ and Evie Androu, “Turks will allow 16,000 refugees back into Varosha,” Cyprus Mail, 24/07/2017, http://cyprus-mail.com/2017/07/24/ turks-will-allow-16000-refugees-back-varosha-reports/ 48. Niki Marangou, Yezoul, op. cit., p. 27 (my translation). 49. Niki Marangou, idem. 50. The poem can be found in many anthologies or poetry collections; see for example Lord Byron (George Gordon), “Maid of Athens,” The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, London, Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 60. 51. Niki Marangou, Yezoul, op. cit., p. 23-24. 52. Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader [Third edition], op. cit., p. 242. 53. My own research confirmed the limited sources about the character; some information is however provided by Liza Micheli, Η Αθηνά των Ανωνύμων [The Athens of the Unknowns], Athens, Patakis Publications, 1990, entry “Tereza Makri” p. 153-155 (in Greek). 54. Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” translated by Steven Rendall, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, p. 153. 55. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 153-155. 56. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 159. 57. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 153. 58. Niki Marangou, Yezoul, op. cit., p. 24 (my translation). 59. Niki Marangou, idem. 60. The story’s plausibility is in a way confirmed by a page on Tereza Makri recently published on Wikipedia, quoting Niki Marangou’s novel as a biographical reference, https://el.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Τερέζα_Μακρή (in Greek). 61. Niki Marangou, Yezoul, op. cit., p. 28. 62. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 162. 63. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 161. 64. Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 162-163. 65. Liza Micheli, op. cit.; see also Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Ιστορία του Ευρωπαϊκού Πνεύματος [History of the European Spirit], part 4, vol. 9, Athens, Giallelis Edition, 1976, p. 363-371 (in Greek). 66. Lord Elgin was an English diplomat who is mainly known for his loot of the Acropolis’ major masterpieces from the Parthenon, among other monuments. 67. Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, op. cit., p. 362-363.
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68. Among many references, one can refer to David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001; and Olga Augustinos, French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Writing from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1994. 69. Stéphane Sawas considers Athens’s struggle to impose itself as main cultural center after the independence in “Les expressions littéraires des diasporas grecques : une marge de la littérature néo-hellénique ?” (in French), in Corinne Alexandre-Garner (ed.), Frontières, Marges et Confins, Nanterre, Presses Universitaires de Paris 10, 2008, p. 51-63; Anna Olvia Jacovides-Andrieu points toward Cyprus’ intermediary role at the turn of the 20th century between Hellenism main cultural centers (Athens, Constantinople, Smyrna, and mostly Alexandria), in “Esquisse diachronique : La littérature chypriote de l’Antiquité à nos jours” (in French), in Josette Doron and Anna Olvia Jacovides-Andrieu (eds.), Prose et poésie chypriotes, VIIe siècle av. J.C.-XX e siècle, bilingual anthology (French-Greek), Paris, Hellinika Chronika, Association des Amis de la Grèce, 1993, p. 43-44. 70. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 6.
ABSTRACTS
This article examines the work of Niki Marangou, a Greek-language author from Cyprus. Her many stories and anecdotes, whether in poetry or prose, bring in a perspective of cultural geography as they open up places to a spatial imaginary on the crossroad of cartography and testimony. Conceptual tools developed in the field of contemporary Translation Studies may be used to articulate fresh and interesting views on the historical, cultural, political, and ideological contexts of her work, and show the cross-cultural literary dynamic in which her writing emerges.
AUTHOR
MARINE MEUNIER Marine Meunier is currently a joint Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus (Department of French and European Studies) and at Saint-Joseph University of Beirut (Department of Letters). She is writing a thesis on contemporary literatures from the Near East (Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine) in the broader theoretical field of World Literature.
Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化, 12 | 2017