Cultural Dynamics

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Intimate History: Reweaving Diaspora Narratives Minal Hajratwala Cultural Dynamics 2007 19: 301 DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080296

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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

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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

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. Migrants themselves, though, rely on such highly individual factors as coincidence, impulse, and destiny (karma or divine will). It is as if, in explaining the phenomenon of cloth, one party were to assert the primacy of the loom, while the other could see only the submolecular composition of thread. The literary nonfi ction approach, or what I am calling ‘intimate history’, weaves together these insider and outsider explanations. In writing of my turn-of-the-century migrant ancestors, for example, I found myself grappling with often-confl icting metastories: Gujaratis were never ‘coolies’. Motiram-daadaa traveled on a ‘coolie’ ship. Gujaratis exploited poor Indians and natives. Uncle Gaandaa worked long hours to serve his customers with needed goods and foods from home. Gujaratis reaped the rewards of meeting the British need for middlemen. Gujaratis reaped the fruits of hard work, smart thinking, and the blessings of the almighty. Gujaratis were ‘better than’ other Indians. Gujaratis were treated and legislated as ‘coolies’. Were these early travelers solely self-willed, or solely the products of imperialism? How could I give equal weight to both the emotional and historical content of their moments of migration? By juxtaposing journalistic, historical, and ethnographic methods with literary techniques, I found a narrative structure that was open to both parts of the story, allowing a more complex model of diaspora to emerge. Such a structure, an act of intimate history, enables the portrayal of sweeping social forces without resorting to fi ctionalization, anonymity, or the fl attening out of individual lives. These latter were never options for me. I know my subjects; we share blood; I am both inside and outside their stories. No matter how many telling details I might alter, everyone in my family (that most intimate audience) would be able to decode the identities of the ‘characters’. So I am naming names. To approach each moment with the necessary openness, I have in my box only three tools.

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Tools

First, of course, there is research: I gather every bit of string that seems as if it might be woven into a person’s moment of migration. In 1909, Motiram Narsey, my great-grandfather, traveled from Gujarat to Fiji. What was happening in and around this single journey? What were the names of the ships, how bad was the drought in Gujarat, how poor was the weaving caste to which he belonged, what were the histories and demographics and cultural landscape of the Fiji in which he arrived? 1912, 1931, 1957, 1963, 1979, 1997. Gujarat, Fiji, South Africa, England, Canada, the United States. Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand. This is the diaspora of my family. The book is a string of these moments of migration, each carrying its own cluster of meanings that can be partially reconstructed through research into the precise conditions surrounding it, what came before and after, how the story was passed down in the family, how history was recorded by the victors and, sometimes, the losers of those times. Each such moment is a crystal in which a whole life is refracted, and also the life of the diaspora. The second tool, perhaps the most crucial one, is vulnerability. At some point I must let go of research, and admit what I do not know. I cannot question my great-grandfather about his emotional state at his moment of migration in 1909; he died ten years later, in the great worldwide infl uenza epidemic that arrived in Fiji via a New Zealand ship. No one is even alive who knew him then. Here I must bow to the truth of our lives as migrants and the children of migrants: that the most vital facts have, often, been lost in the passage. I confess, and thus I create a congruence of form and content, for diaspora itself is composed of this not-knowing: the gaps in the language, my uncle teaching himself English by reading the dictionary, page by page. Word by word, we learn new countries, new methods of living. Where to fi nd food. What to wear. Whom to love. Vulnerability. The third tool is speculation, which is, in a way, an act of language itself. Language, given free enough rein—which is to say, if the author is willing to expose herself suffi ciently—becomes the tool that allows us to enter even what we do not know. In the case of my great-grandfather Motiram, I have gathered my data, pored through Indian and Fijian libraries and archives, subjected others of our community who made the same trip early in the century to interviews, and so on. I have admitted that I cannot know for sure what he felt. Now, I must speculate. I seek a transparency of style that does not seek to conceal or evade or make up the unknown, but which still carries an emotional richness. I want my narrative to be a mirror of its subject, and in this case the mirror is cloudy; still, I gaze into it. As I look into my accumulated knowledge of my people, into my own experiences of displacement and loneliness and adventure, I catch a glimpse of the fl ickering states that a man of our community might feel upon crossing a

Downloaded from cdy.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on July 31, 2013 306 Cultural Dynamics 19(2/3) vast ocean alone, to a foreign land where he knows no one. Exhilaration. Fear. Desperation. Worry. Ambition. Wanderlust. Homesickness. Despair. I try to evoke these feelings for the reader by naming them as possibilities, with as much grace and lyricism as I can muster, much as an actor might summon her own emotional history in the service of a character. Perhaps he felt this, or perhaps this; I do not try to be defi nitive; I use perhaps and may and could and would. I use question marks. The structure of language itself, if we take the leap to enter it, passes into the realm of humanity: a shared humanity constituted of questions and ideas. Which particular language we speak might determine the content of what we can ask; but language itself, any language, carries our human capacity for learning, questioning, speculating, being curious, and entering into the experiences of others. One of a child’s fi rst words is, Why? As readers, as writers, of intimate history, we can allow the facts to give way, not to fi ction but to this kind of curiosity: a willingness to explore the rich terrain of the unknown, which is also the terrain of the self. This speculation is itself a risk. It is an exercise (again) in vulnerability; in intimacy, this time with the reader. By the very questions I ask, I take the risk that the reader will know me; will see into and through me, will see me. And of course, the fi rst one who must see me is myself.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

For the insight of the ﬁ nal sentence of this article, I am indebted to the writer Susan Grifﬁ n; in addition, our conversations have been critical to shaping my understanding of vulnerability and speculation as writers’ tools.

REFERENCES

Freedman, Samuel G. (2001) Lectures in nonﬁ ction book seminar at the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University, New York. Khan, Aisha (2006) ‘“Deterritorialized Roots” and “Coolie Odysseys”: Seeking a Diasporic Consciousness’, paper presented at the 23rd annual Spring Symposium ‘Margins and Migrations: South Asian Diasporas across the World’, organized by the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, 20 April.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Minal Hajratwala’s narrative nonﬁ ction book about the Indian diaspora as lived by her extended family is forthcoming from the Houghton Mifﬂ in Company. She

Downloaded from cdy.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ on July 31, 2013 Hajratwala: Intimate History 307 was a journalist at the San José Mercury News for eight years, spent 2000–1 as a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, and her performance-art piece, Avatars: Gods for a New Millennium, premiered at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 1999. [email: [email protected]]

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