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Cultural Dynamics Cultural Dynamics http://cdy.sagepub.com/ Intimate History: Reweaving Diaspora Narratives Minal Hajratwala Cultural Dynamics 2007 19: 301 DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080296 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cdy.sagepub.com/content/19/2-3/301 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Cultural Dynamics can be found at: Email Alerts: http://cdy.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://cdy.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://cdy.sagepub.com/content/19/2-3/301.refs.html >> Version of Record - Sep 26, 2007 What is This? Downloaded from cdy.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on July 31, 2013 Hajratwala: Intimate History 301 INTIMATE HISTORY Reweaving Diaspora Narratives MINAL HAJRATWALA ABSTRACT While conventional academic diaspora narratives privilege sociopolitical/ economic causes, migrants themselves rely on such factors as coincidence, impulse, and destiny (karma) to explain migratory choices and outcomes. The literary nonfi ction approach (what I call ‘intimate history’) juxtaposes these insider and outsider explanations, weaving together journalistic, historical, and ethnographic methods with literary techniques, without resorting to fi ctionalization. I lay out three writerly ‘tools’—research, vulnerability, and speculation—that, I argue, allow for a more complex model of diaspora to emerge. I describe how these tools, developed and used in the process of writing my forthcoming nonfi ction book, provide insight into the emotional and historical complexities around each diasporan’s ‘moment of migration’. Key Words Fiji Gujarati literary device/technique/craft migration nonfi ction South Asian writing Auto- In speaking of ‘intimate history’, it is only fair to begin by being intimate. And so I must begin fi rst of all with the fears. As a writer I have, always, the fear of being misunderstood, which takes on different avatars for each audience and for each phase of the work. In an academic context, it is the classic imposter syndrome: a fear of being found out as a fraud, as a mere journalist perhaps, as a child only playing with the tools of research, analysis, and theory, here among you grownups who seem, somehow, more solid, more real. Of course so: this is your reality. And so there is, then, the opposite fear: of being transformed. Of somehow becoming, for one half-hour or the space of a few pages, fully academic, with all of the dishonor and disloyalty that implies for me: impenetrable, for example, inaccessible to the very people who are not only my subjects but 19(2/3): 301–307. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080296] http://cdy.sagepub.com Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) Downloaded from cdy.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on July 31, 2013 302 Cultural Dynamics 19(2/3) the audiences of my heart—my blood kin, many of whom are not literate in any language. There is the breathing past and into fear, familiar by now, listening for what it can teach me. What arises: a tendency, the natural desire, to protect—by attempting to camoufl age, for instance. To douse my own ideas in the terminology of the academy, to the extent that I can assimilate it rapidly; to sprinkle in syncretism, occlusion, auto-ethnography. The words are so seductive. Auto-ethnography, with its faint titillating echo of auto-eroticism. How lovely. And, after some time, surely, how lonely. And the opposite desire also: to reject, to defend, to give caveats—I am not an ethnographer, anthropologist, historian, etcetera, at least not in any trained sense. Shall I insist on being unlabeled, being only what I am—a writer? To assimilate; to reject. Aren’t these always the choices, when crossing a border? Is it true that we are always, as migrants, and the children of migrants, attempting to choose what my parents would call ‘the best of both worlds’? Or, is it possible to transcend—no, not transcend, but enter into— the dualism, the gap, the uncertain interstices between the worlds? Is it possible to integrate, even heal, the trauma of crossing; of many crossings? Vulnerability is the opening gambit. N=? The project I am completing tells the story of the diaspora of my family, whose expansion from rural Gujarat to nine countries over the past century parallels the growth of the Indian diaspora itself. It is a work of narrative nonfi ction. In casual conversation I fi nd myself saying these two words more and more slowly, yet in the next sentence often my listener refers to the ‘novel’ I am writing. Nar-ra-tive NON-fi c-tion: Not fi ction, all right, and not academic history; what is it then? One way to describe it is perhaps as history and anthropology and journalism balled together, held together with the twine of literary techniques most clearly associated with fi ction: drama, character development, dialogue, scenes, and desire with its satisfaction, dissipation, or betrayal. Another is through a basic defi nition of narrative itself, in the formula passed on to me by journalism professor Samuel G. Freedman, N = C + E + T: Narrative equals Character plus Event plus Theme. The mathematically inclined might break it down further: an Event is composed of Time plus Place plus Verb. Thus, N = Character + Event (= Time, Place, Verb) + Theme. One or more themes. The key Event here, of course, is the moment of migration—although the techniques to be described can be applied to any signifi cant moment in any Downloaded from cdy.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on July 31, 2013 Hajratwala: Intimate History 303 person’s story. In our families the story of migration goes something like this: your great-grandfather wanted to (had a chance to, was tricked into, was forced to) go to Fiji, so he went. In the books, the recovered histories, we are told other origin myths: not desire, but economics, politics, the needs of colonial powers. I have set out to fi nd the meeting place, where character intersects with history. It is possible to patch these moments into a hybrid or fragmented project, but I am more interested in an integrative one. This requires a structure and voice expansive enough to take in multiple, very different diaspora stories: my own queer story, female stories, male stories; story of the brain drain, story of the working class 1990s migrant, stories of dual or triple displacement. In weaving together the threads that link my fi rst ancestor’s migration (from rural Gujarat to Suva, Fiji, in 1909) to my own multiple journeys (from San Francisco to New Zealand to Michigan and back to San Francisco), I need a frame that spans, in Aisha Khan’s terms, both the ‘coolie odyssey’ of the early diaspora and the ‘deterritorialized narrative’ of the late. The frame I’ve built is a string of individual moments of migration, each of which is composed of course of many other moments. Interviews quickly reveal that, as with other signifi cant events in any life, the moment of migration is not only remembered, but forgotten in equal parts; told, as well as concealed or silenced or left unheard. Whatever the qualities of this moment, though, any diaspora narrative must include some reconstruction of it. For it is this crucial decision, the concurrence of both personal and political forces, that reverberates across whole communities and into future generations. Each leap makes the next possible, so that successive generations of diaspora experience both greater displacement and expanded possibilities of self-creation. To enter this initial moment of migration, however—to attempt to understand the desires and desperations operating when a person decides to leave a known home for the unknown—is to enter the fi eld of uncertainty itself. If the person is long dead, there is no way of knowing how she or he felt. If the person is alive, and can be interviewed, we have slightly more information, but still no way of really knowing how the moment itself, unshaped by future revisionism, really felt. Faced with this problem, a fi rst instinct may be to turn to fi ction. This is why, I think, we have such a rich fi eld now of South Asian diasporic fi ction. In fi ction it is possible to enter another person’s emotional state, to approach a character’s desire. It is said often by fi ction writers that they wish to capture something more than a literal truth: the emotional truth. Other writers and thinkers respond to this arena of uncertainty by backing off: making a move toward the general, toward perhaps a historical cause or a theoretical point. The emotion at the center of the moment, considered unknowable, is skipped; it recedes further into silence. Individual desire is Downloaded from cdy.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on July 31, 2013 304 Cultural Dynamics 19(2/3) marginalized. A person becomes a case study, rendered (dismembered) as an anonymous informant. The problem is fundamental to diaspora studies. It is the difference between a summary of a story, and the story itself—in creative writing terms, between telling and showing. If we think of cloth, as I must—all of my great-grandparents were weavers, and my grandparents were tailors and haberdashers—we can see history as the weft, and individual lives as the warp. One cannot weave whole cloth by moving the threads only in only one direction. Conventional academic diaspora narratives privilege the great communal forces—social change, geopolitical turmoil, economic status—as explanations of migratory choices and outcomes.
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