Contemporary Migration Literature in German and English
Series Editor
Norbert Bachleitner (University of Vienna)
Editorial Assistance
Paul Ferstl Rudolf Pölzer
Founded by
Alberto Martino
Editorial Board
Francis Claudon (Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne University) Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) Achim Hölter (University of Vienna) Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz) John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) Alfred Noe (University of Vienna) Manfred Pfister (Free University of Berlin) Sven H. Rossel (University of Vienna)
VOLUME 187
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/favl
A Comparative Study
By
Sandra Vlasta
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vlasta, Sandra, author. Contemporary migration literature in German and English : a comparative study / by Sandra Vlasta. pages cm -- (Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 187) ISBN 978-90-04-30599-1 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-30600-4 (e-book) 1. Emigration and immigration in literature. 2. German literature--21st century--History and criticism. 3. English literature--21st century--History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 187.
PN56.E59V58 2015 809’.93355--dc23
2015032935
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To Antonino
∵
Contents
Acknowledgements IX
1 Introduction 1 1.1 Research on Literature and Migration in the German- and English-Speaking World 7 1.2 Studying Literary Themes and Motifs 41 1.3 The Present Volume: Questions of Terminology, the Gains of a Comparative Approach, and Themes and Motifs to be Analysed 45 1.4 Excursus: The Context – Immigration to Great Britain and Austria 53
2 The Motif of Language in Migration Literature 59 2.1 Neither Here nor There – The Second Generation as Linguistic and Cultural Translators 60 2.2 A Language of Images in Anna Kim’s Die Bilderspur 81 2.3 The Motif of the Tongue in Dimitré Dinev’s Novel Engelszungen 92
3 Identity and the Search for Identity in Migration Literature Expressed by Cooking, Eating, and Food 103 3.1 ‘Chutneyfication’ in Preethi Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White 109 3.2 Sweet and Sour Identities: Levels of Discourse on Identity in Connection with Cooking and Food in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet 123 3.3 Food, Cooking, Eating, and the Expression of Jewish Identity in Vladimir Vertlib’s Novel Letzter Wunsch 139
4 Depictions of the New Homeland 154 4.1 Depictions of England in Caryl Phillips’ Novel The Final Passage 159 4.2 Depictions of the New Homeland in Monica Ali’s Novel Brick Lane 180 4.3 Outside Looking In – The Depiction of Austrian History in Hamid Sadr’s Novel Der Gedächtnissekretär 205
5 Global Ethnoscapes in Migration Literature 223 5.1 Locations 231 5.2 Protagonists 242 5.3 The Shifting of Periphery and Centre and the Topos of the Border 254
6 Résumé 261
Appendix: Bio-Bibliographical Notes on the Authors 267
Bibliography 273 1 Primary Sources 273 2 Secondary Sources 276
Scholarly research is a collective effort and thus this volume is the result of a continuous exchange of dialogue with both other studies and books, as well as with colleagues, teachers, mentors, friends, family, and many others. I would like to thank all of them and use this opportunity to thank some of them in particular. I would like to thank Norbert Bachleitner for being a knowledgeable and kind teacher, mentor, and colleague, and for his continuous support of my work as well as the possibility to publish this study in the Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft (ifavl) series. Many thanks go to Rudolf Weiss for supporting this study at an early stage. I would like to thank colleagues from the research seminars at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, the Department of Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin, and the Institute for Contemporary and Comparative Literature at the University of St. Andrews for their valuable comments on my work. Thank you to the many, many colleagues who have commented on my work at various conferences and events on the topic of literature and migration. In particular, I would like to thank my colleagues from the project Trans-Culture. Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe: Cézar Domínguez, Myriam Geiser, Jeanne Glesener, Helga Mitterbauer, Fridrun Rinner, and Franca Sinopoli. Also, a warm thanks to my colleagues of the web portal Polyphonie: Beate Baumann, Michaela Bürger-Koftis, and Hannes Schweiger. And finally, I would like to thank Renata Cornejo for all the successful projects we have undertaken together. Furthermore, I thank all of my colleagues at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna for their support and the positive atmo- sphere, in particular Barbara Agnese and Christine Ivanovic. I also address my thanks to colleagues at the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, who kindly hosted me during the final stages of this book, in particular to Winfried Eckel and Dieter Lamping. My thanks go to Paul Ferstl for all his help with the editing of this study. Furthermore, a big thank-you to Kacy Walschots for correcting and proofread- ing this book despite our continuous transnational moves, and thank you so much to Helen O’Sullivan for her swift and careful corrections during the final stages of this book.
Zu guter Letzt danke an meine Eltern für die Unterstützung in der Endphase dieser Arbeit. Grazie mille anche a Pina per il suo grande aiuto, quando ne abbiamo avuto bisogno. Above all, I would like to thank Joseph and Antonino Falduto. Joseph, for teaching me the importance of concentration and reaching conclusions, and Antonino for reading, discussing, and commenting on my work, and for so much more.
The foreigner, they say, can never be trusted – / Because a wall, almost impenetrable/ Will always separate the enrooted from the homeless… Tom Lanoye, Mamma Medea
The artist as intercultural diplomat is able to cross many borders that solemn political activists are unable to. GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA, A Binational Performance Pilgrimage
Consumers of any Austrian media, whether they are interested in culture or prefer sports, will gain the impression of an ethnically and culturally mixed society. Here are some examples: Monika Ivkic, born in 1989 in Yugoslavia, came to Austria aged just 18 months during the Bosnian War. In 2008, she par- ticipated as the only Austrian candidate in the German talent show Deutschland sucht den Superstar [Germany Seeks a Superstar]. Vincent Bueno’s parents come from the Philippines; he was born in 1985 in Vienna. Bueno won the Austrian talent show Musical – Die Show [Musical – The Show] in 2008. Conchita Wurst, the transvestite stage persona performed by Thomas Neuwirth, was supposedly born in the Colombian mountains. In 2014, Conchita Wurst, a diva with a full beard, won the Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen as the Austrian representative. Similar examples can also be found in the world of sports: The swimmers Mirna Jukic and her brother Dinko Jukic, born in 1986 and 1989, respectively, in the former Yugoslavia, came to Austria in 1999 and both swam for Austria at the Olympic Games. Iva Vastic, born in 1969 in the former Yugoslavia where he also grew up, came to Austria in 1991 where he continued his football career in various clubs and also played for the Austrian national team. The current national football team of the country presents itself as a mixed one when it comes to origin: David Alaba’s parents come from the Philippines and Nigeria, respectively, Zlatko Junuzovic is of Bosnian descent, Veli Kavlak, born in Vienna, is of Turkish descent, Valentino Lazaro was born in Graz to a mother of Greek descent and an Angolan father – to name only a few examples of a young and ambitious team. The diversity of the Austrian population is also visible in less prominent areas, that is, for instance on the streets of Vienna: in April 2010 the Austrian
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004306004_002
1 Martina Stemmer, ‘44 Prozent der Wiener haben ausländische Wurzeln’, Der Standard, 10/11 April 2010, 1 and 10. For an electronic version of the article see:
Millennium, 2000–2010, ed. by Michael Boehringer and Susanne Hochreiter (Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2011), pp. 102–118. 4 See Sandra Vlasta, ‘Literature of Migration: A New Trend in ‘Austrian Literature’?’, in Readings in Twenty-First-Century European Literatures, ed. by Michael Gratzke and others (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 405–430. Dimitré Dinev, Engelszungen (Vienna: Deuticke, 2003). 5 On the reception of Dimitré Dinev in the German-speaking countries see Sandra Vlasta, ‘Angekommen und anerkannt? Die Rezeption des Autors Dimitré Dinev im deutschsprachi- gen Raum’, Aussiger Beiträge, 6 (2012), 237–256. 6 Although, of course, all of these writers do not live and work in Austria but in Germany. However, the winner of the Bachmann prize in 2014, Tex Rubinowitz, can also be regarded as an immigrant writer: he was born in Germany and came to Austria in his early twenties. 7 See, for instance Contemporary British Fiction, ed. by Richard Lane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Nick Bentley, Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London: Continuum, 2011). 8 Feroza Jussawalla, ‘Introduction’, in Interviews With Writers of the Post-Colonial World, ed. by Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), pp. 3–23 (p. 3).
So far, research on literature and migration has mainly taken into account what I have above called the first effect, that is, the majority of studies depart from the authors’ biographies and thus establish a corpus of texts by immi- grant writers. Many of these studies have resulted in very useful insights. However, such an approach is at the same time always in danger of being criti- cised for its biographical perspective and for grouping authors, who apart from an experience of migration (which is often a very individual one), do not have many things in common. In fact, many of the authors themselves have pro- tested against being labelled as migrant writers and instead ask critics and readers to concentrate on their texts rather than on their biographies.9 This is not to say that the studies in question have not concentrated on themes and motifs in the texts. On the contrary, there are a huge number of analyses that aim to establish similarities with regard to content (and form) in works by immigrant writers. However, most of them do not concentrate on texts that share the topic of (im)migration as the main common theme but use the authors’ biographies as selection criteria. Thus, what I have above described as the second effect of immigration on literature, namely immigration as a topic of literary texts, has up to now hardly ever been dealt with. This book intends to close this research gap and presents a corpus of texts of migration literature, or rather, texts that deal with the experience of migra- tion. The focus is thus on the texts and their main theme rather than on the authors’ biographies. In fact, the idea of migration literature enables the inclu- sion of texts by authors who themselves have not migrated. My main thesis is that texts of migration literature can be considered a genre as they share a number of features with regard to content and form. The experience of migra- tion described in the texts brings with it similar themes and motifs that occur in the texts, even though their form might vary. This is true also beyond lin- guistic and cultural borders, i.e. migration literature exists in various languages and various cultural contexts, a fact which supports the idea of a genre in its
9 See, for instance Seher Cakir’s protest in an interview: Meri Disoski, ‘Ich mache Literatur und Punkt!’, dastandard.at, 15 February 2010
10 See Umberto Eco, Im Wald der Fiktionen. Sechs Streifzüge durch die Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1994), p. 117. 11 See Gottfried Gabriel, Zwischen Logik und Literatur. Erkenntnisformen von Dichtung, Philosophie und Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), in particular pp. 10–11. 12 On literature as a sociological source cf. also Helmut Kuzmics and Gerald Mozetics who state: “Es scheint unter jenen, die sich grundsätzlich positiv zur soziologischen Qualität von Literatur als Quelle äußern, Übereinstimmung darüber zu geben, daß vor allem psy- chische Prozesse, die Weltsicht der Menschen, ihre Erfahrungen und Gefühle literarisch oft sehr genau erfaßt werden.” [It seems that those who are generally positive about the sociological quality of literature as a source agree that in particular psychological pro- cesses, people’s world outlook, their experiences and emotions are often registered very accurately in literature.] Helmut Kuzmics and Gerald Mozetic, Literatur als Soziologie. Zum Verhältnis von literarischer und gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit (Constance: uvk, 2003), p. 31; the quotation is taken from Zocco, The Delicate Place, p. 18.
1.1 Research on Literature and Migration in the German- and English-speaking World
The following overview of research on literature and migration will be pre- sented in four sections: (1) research on literature and migration in German in general, (2) research focussing on Austria, in particular, (3) research on litera- ture and migration in English, and (4) comparative studies on the topic. Here, I understand literature and migration in a broader sense and will thus look at the whole field of research. I will therefore present scholarship on migrant writing in the German-speaking context as well as very briefly refer to post- colonial literary studies in the English-speaking realm. Especially with regard to the German-speaking context, the plethora of studies on literature and migration and on single authors, respectively, makes it impossible to refer to all of them. Rather, the intention of this state of the art is to make visible currents and developments in the discourse on literature and migration. I will therefore concentrate on exemplary studies, show which authors and texts have been
1.1.1 Research on Literature and Migration in German In the 1980s, research on literature and migration in German started with sur- veys and documentations of the phenomenon. The activities of the Department of German as a Foreign Language at the University of Munich, and in particular Irmgard Ackermann’s and Harald Weinrich’s initiatives, were certainly an impor tant starting point for the first studies.13 By organising a literary competition, which was aimed exclusively at persons “denen die deutsche Sprache als Fremd sprache entgegengetreten ist”14 [who have been confronted by the German lan- guage as a foreign language], and by publishing anthologies with the texts that had been submitted at these competitions, literature by Gastarbeiter [guest workers] became known to a wider public for the first time.15 Ackermann’s and Weinrich’s activities have, however, also been criticised. Arlene Teraoka, for instance, has called their claim that only the competition would get some of the participants writing as well as their remark that the texts are “von oft erstaun- lich hoher Qualität”16 [often of surprisingly high quality] a colonialist approach in the sense that “only under the external coercion of the advanced, culturally and technologically superior Europeans”17 are the immigrants able to realise their potential. She argues that by being both the organizers as well as members of the jury at the competitions, Ackermann and Weinrich were defining and
13 One of these initiatives was, for instance, a colloquium with discussions and talks by vari- ous authors, which was also published: Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur. Zur Standort bestimmung der ‚Ausländerliteratur’, ed. by Irmgard Ackermann and Harald Weinrich (Munich: Piper, 1986). 14 Harald Weinrich, ‘Vorwort’, in In zwei Sprachen leben. Berichte, Erzählungen, Gedichte von Ausländern, ed. by Irmgard Ackermann (Munich: dtv, 1992 [1983]), pp. 9–11, (p. 11). 15 For the anthologies see, besides the one mentioned in footnote 14, for instance: Als Fremder in Deutschland, ed. by Irmgard Ackermann (Munich: dtv, 1982). 16 Harald Weinrich, ‘Um eine deutsche Literatur von außen bittend’, in Merkur 37 (1983), 911–920, p. 919. 17 See Arlene Akiko Teraoka, ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back’, Cultural Critique, 7 (1987), 77–101 (pp. 93–94).
18 See Heidrun Suhr, ‘Ausländerliteratur: Minority Literature in the Federal Republic of Germany’, in New German Critique, 46 (1989), 71–103. 19 See Sigrid Weigel, ‘Literatur der Fremde – Literatur in der Fremde’, in: Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Volume 12: Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968, ed. by Rolf Grimminger (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1992), pp. 182–229, in particular p. 215. In fact, Weigel’s observation is also reflected in the much later interest in literature and migration in Austria and Switzerland, see also Section 1.1.2. of this book. 20 Günter Gerstberger, ‘Viele Kulturen – eine Sprache’, in Viele Kulturen – eine Sprache. Die Preisträgerinnen und Preisträger des Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preises der Robert Bosch Stiftung 1985 – 2005 (Stuttgart: Robert Bosch Stiftung, 2005), p. 5. 21 Gerstberger, p. 5. 22 See for instance the anthology which was published during the first years of the prize and was up-dated every year, for instance: Viele Kulturen – eine Sprache: Die Preisträgerinnen und Preisträger des Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preises der Robert Bosch Stiftung 1985 – 2005 (Stuttgart: Robert Bosch Stiftung, 2005), as well as the Chamisso-Magazin that is published twice a year since 2009 and can also be downloaded from the Chamisso website
The first studies on migrant literature in Germany were published in the 1980s. They mainly give an overview of the field, present authors, groups and texts, as well as the beginnings of their writing, and often also comprise socio- logical and historical accounts of the development of ‘guest work’.23 Early col- lective volumes sometimes include both studies as well as primary texts, for example, Heimke Schierloh’s Das alles für ein Stück Brot or the volume Chamissos Enkel, in which texts by winners of the Chamisso-prize are con- trasted with articles on the prize.24 Other publications give overviews of the development or are intended as introductions to the topic. To give an example, Horst Hamm’s Einführung in die deutschsprachige Gastarbeiterliteratur – to cite the volume’s subtitle – analyses the content and the thematic foci of the texts and reads the works as socio-historical documents.25 In his early works, Gino/Charmine Chiellino (himself both a scholar and a writer) tries to give a comprehensive overview on Italian-born writers in Germany by including biographies, bibliographies of primary works as well as linguistic, stylistic and topical analyses of the texts and interviews with the authors.26 In 1995, Carmine Chiellino publishes another volume on the topic, this time taking a historical discussion of the relation between labour-related migration and literature as a starting point.27 In this way, he includes both the motif of guest work in literature in German as well as literature of immigrant authors in the Federal Republic of
The poetics lectureships in Dresden have also been published, see for instance the fol- lowing volume with Vladimir Vertlib’s lectures (he was given a Chamisso grant in 2001): Vladimir Vertlib, Spiegel im fremden Wort (Dresden: Thelem, 2007). The acceptance speeches of various winning authors up to 1993 have additionally been published: Der gefundene Schatten. Chamisso-Reden 1985 bis 1993, ed. by Dietrich Krusche (Munich: A1, 1993). 23 Already in 1983, Irmgard Ackermann in an article on the terminology in use as well as on the self-image of ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur’, gives a detailed bibliography of primary sources and literary journals on the topic. See Irmgard Ackermann, “Gastarbeiter’literatur als Herausforderung’, Frankfurter Hefte. Zeitschrift für Kultur und Politik, 38/1 (1983), 56–64. 24 See Heimke Schierloh, Das alles für ein Stück Brot. Migrantenliteratur als Objektivierung des ‚Gastarbeiterdaseins’. Mit einer Textsammlung (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1984). Chamissos Enkel. Literatur von Ausländern in Deutschland, ed. by Heinz Friedrich (Munich: dtv, 1986). 25 Horst Hamm, Fremdgegangen – freigeschrieben. Einführung in die deutschsprachige Gastarbeiterliteratur (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1988). 26 Gino Chiellino, Literatur und Identität in der Fremde: Zur Literatur italienischer Autoren in der Bundesrepublik (Kiel: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1989); Gino Chiellino, Die Reise hält an. Ausländische Künstler in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988). – The last volume cited includes the interviews with the authors mentioned above. 27 Carmine Chiellino, Am Ufer der Fremde. Literatur und Arbeitsmigration (1870–1991) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995).
Germany. Heidi Rösch undertakes another general survey. With her contribu- tion she furthers the discussion on the categorisation and terminology of migrant writing, presents various motifs in selected texts by migrant writers and potential ways of reading them.28 Sigrid Weigel starts her above-men- tioned contribution to the Hansers Sozialgeschichte der Literaturen [Hanser’s social history of literatures] by giving an overview of the emergence, develop- ment and the topics and stylistic features of migrant writing; later, however, she presents an alternative approach by contrasting the literature of migrants with the literature of German writers abroad.29 It has to be added though, that Weigel does not include literature of exile, but concentrates on travelogues by German writers. Already in the 1980s, a number of journals were dedicating (special) issues to literature and migration, such as the issue Gastarbeiterliteratur (Guest Worker Literature) of Lili. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik in 1984, which includes summarising overviews as well as contributions by authors (e.g. Franco Biondi and Yüksel Pazarkaya).30 In 1989 the New German Critique published a special issue which not only dealt with literature of migra- tion, but also addressed the sociological as well as political background of minorities in the Federal Republic of Germany.31 In the same year, the journal Muttersprache also came out with an issue on foreigners in Germany, including both secondary texts, poems and prose works by authors.32 Ten years later, in 1999, the German Quarterly ran a special issue with articles on Salim Alafenisch, Jakob Arjouni and TORKAN.33
28 The categories she presents in the paper in question are: Migrantenliteratur [migrant lit- erature], Migrationsliteratur [migration literature], and interkulturelle Literatur [inter- cultural literature] and are thus a modification of the categories used in her volume Migrationsliteratur im interkulturellen Kontext published in 1992 that will be discussed in Section 1.3. See Heidi Rösch, Migrationsliteratur im interkulturellen Diskurs, talk given at the conference ‘Wanderer – Auswanderer – Flüchtlinge’ in 1998 at the TU Dresden:
Publications of a general character can be found up until the 1990s and also later; however, from the 1990s onwards, more and more works on single authors and groups of authors are published, be it in monographs or in edited volumes. Research concentrates on writers such as Libuše Moníková, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Yoko Tawada;34 in addition, another focus is on texts by Turkish- German authors, again with emphasis on particular writers – besides Özdamar mainly Zafer Şenocak and Feridun Zaimoglu.35 Germanists such as Leslie A. Adelson, Tom Cheesman, Deniz Göktürk, Jim Jordan, Kader Konuk, Moray McGowan, and Karin Yeşilada, concentrate their research on Turkish-German literature. Additionally, many conferences, though initially intended to be dealing with the wider field of literature of migration, often concentrate on Turkish-German authors.36 This concentration reflects the situation in the German market, where Turkish-German writers constitute the largest group of immigrant writers. However, this should not lead to the conclusion that litera- ture of migration is exclusively Turkish-German literature. For instance, in 1994 a conference on MigrantInnenliteratur was organised in Sheffield. The proceedings include contributions on various authors (e.g. Franco Biondi, Nevfel Cumart, Aysel Özakin, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Yoko Tawada etc.) as well as texts by writers present at the conference.37 The editors Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan had already provided an overview of literature by German- Turkish authors in a volume on Turkish culture in German society published in 1996.38 Immacolata Amodeo also analyses a wider corpus of authors and is
34 But single studies are also dedicated to other authors: for instance, Amrei Probul after a general discussion of ‘Immigrantenliteratur’ in German concentrates on Dragica Rajcić’s work. See Amrei Probul, Immigrantenliteratur im deutschsprachigen Raum. Ein kurzer Überblick (Frankfurt/Main: R.G. Fischer, 1997). 35 For instance, Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada edited volumes on Zafer Şenocak and on Feridun Zaimoglu: Zafer Senocak, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003); Feridun Zaimoglu, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin Yeşilada (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012). 36 See for instance the proceedings of a conference which took place in Istanbul in 2003: Die andere Deutsche Literatur. Istanbuler Vorträge, ed. by Manfred Durzak and Nilüfer Kuruyazici (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2004). 37 See Denn Du tanzt auf einem Seil. Positionen deutschsprachiger MigrantInnenliteratur, ed. by Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1997). 38 Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan, ‘From Pappkoffer to Pluralism: on the Development of Migrant Writing in the German Federal Republic’ in Turkish culture in German society today, ed. by David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), pp. 1–22.
39 See Immacolata Amodeo, ‘Die Heimat heißt Babylon’. Zur Literatur ausländischer Autoren in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996). 40 Tom Cheesman and Deniz Göktürk, ‘Türkische Namen, deutsche Texte. Ein Literaturüber blick Ende 1999’, Parapluie, 6 (1999),
43 See for instance Döner in Walhalla. Texte aus der anderen deutschen Literatur, ed. by Ilija Trojanow (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2000); Morgen Land. Neueste deutsche Literatur, ed. by Jamal Tuschick (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2000); Feuer, Lebenslust! Erzählungen deutscher Einwanderer (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003). The latter volume also contains four discussions between authors. 44 Daniel Rothenbühler offers a first overview of literature by so-called Secondos/as in Switzerland: Daniel Rothenbühler, ‘Im Fremdsein vertraut. Zur Literatur der zweiten Generation von Einwanderern in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz: Francesco Micieli, Franco Supino, Aglaja Veteranyi’, in Migrationsliteratur. Schreibweisen einer interkulturel- len Moderne, ed. by Klaus Schenk and others (Tübingen: A. Francke, 2004), pp. 51–75. 45 See Dirk Göttsche, ‘Emine Sevgi Özdamars Erzählung Der Hof im Spiegel: Spielräume einer postkolonialen Lektüre deutsch-türkischer Literatur’, German Life and Letters. Special Number: Crossing Boundaries, 59:4 (2006), 515–525. 46 See Claire Horst, Der weibliche Raum in der Migrationsliteratur. Irena Brezna – Emine Sevgi Özdamar – Libuse Moníková (Berlin: Hans Schiler, 2007). 47 See Hiltrud Arens, ‘Kulturelle Hybridität’ in der deutschen Minoritätenliteratur der achtziger Jahre (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000).
48 See Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); as well as Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s’, New German Critique, Special Issue: The Holocaust, 80 (2000), 93–124. 49 German Life and Letters, Special Number: Crossing Boundaries, 59:4 (2006). 50 See Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur: Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). 51 See Kosmopolitische ‘Germanophonie’. Postnationale Perspektiven in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. by Christine Meyer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012). 52 See Moray McGowan, ‘Turkish-German Fiction Since the Mid-1990s’, in Contemporary German Fiction. Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 196–214.
53 See Text + Kritik Literatur und Migration, special issue ix (2006). 54 See Nilüfer Kuruyazıcı, Wahrnehmungen des Fremden (Istanbul: Multilingual, 2006). 55 See Brigid Haines, ‘German-language writing from eastern and central Europe’, in Contemporary German Fiction. Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 215–229. An issue of the journal German Life and Letters dedicated to the Eastern turn in German-language literature edited by Brigid Haines and Anca Luca Holden was published in April 2015: German Life and Letters 68:2 (2015). 56 See Eine Sprache – viele Horizonte …: Die Osterweiterung der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Porträts einer neuen europäischen Literatur, ed. by Michaela Bürger-Koftis (Vienna: Praesens, 2009). 57 See Aussiger Beiträge 6 (2012); Wie viele Sprachen spricht die Literatur? Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur aus Mittel- und Osteuropa, ed. by Renata Cornejo and others (Vienna: Praesens, 2014).
Europe the corpus is not restricted to authors living and working in Germany, but the focus is widened also to Austria and Switzerland as host countries. Furthermore, some scholars deal with particular aspects of this ‘eastern turn’. For instance, Renata Cornejo’s study presents a substantial overview of Czech authors writing in German after 1968.58 Agnieszka Palej, on the other hand, analyses writers of Polish origin who write in German (and she concentrates on authors working in Austria).59 Natalia Shchyhlevska focuses on German- speaking authors from the Bukovina and analyses the motif of cultural descent in their works.60 Like the one edited by Meyer, Shchyhlevska’s volume also deals with literature and migration from a historical perspective. Katrin Sorko eventually coins the term ‘system migration’ and analyses works by authors from central and Eastern Europe who write in German with regard to dis- courses in the texts that refer to the communist political system.61 However, during recent years, Turkish-German authors have continued to be another focus of research.62 Furthermore, studies on individual authors continue to be published, for instance there has been a lot of research on Yoko Tawada in recent times.63
58 See Renata Cornejo, Heimat im Wort. Zum Sprachwechsel der deutsch schreibenden tsche- chischen Autorinnen und Autoren nach 1968. Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Vienna: Praesens, 2010). 59 See Agnieszka Palej, Interkulturelle Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Polen und Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert anhand der Werke von Taddäus Ritter, Adam Zielinski und Radek Knapp (Wroclaw: Oficina Wydawnicza atut – Wroclawskie Wydawnictwo Oswiatowe, 2004). 60 See Natalia Shchyhlevska, Deutschsprachige Autoren aus der Bukowina: Die kulturelle Herkunft als bleibendes Motiv in der Identitätssuche deutschsprachiger Autoren aus der Bukowina (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004). 61 See Katrin Sorko, Die Literatur der Systemmigration: Diskurs und Form (Munich: Meidenbauer, 2007). 62 See, for instance: Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fiction (Rochester, Camden House, 2007); Karin Yeşilada, Poesie der Dritten Sprache. Türkisch-deutsche Lyrik der zweiten Generation (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2012). 63 See, for instance Yoko Tawada. Poetik der Transformation. Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk. Mit dem Stück SANCHO PANSA von Yoko Tawada, ed. by Christine Ivanovic (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010); Text + Kritik, Yoko Tawada 191/192 (2011); Die Lücke im Sinn. Vergleichende Studien zu Yoko Tawada, ed. by Christine Ivanovic and others (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2014). For an up-to-date overview of the emergence of migrant writers as well as the research on them in the German context see furthermore Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta, ‘Germany’ (working title), in Migration and Literature – a handbook of theories, approaches and readings, ed. by Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta, in preparation.
1.1.2 Research on Literature of Migration in Austria Despite the long tradition of research on literature of migration in Germany, authors who have immigrated to Austria have only been dealt with from the second half of the first decade of the new century onwards.64 This has to do with the fact that works by immigrant writers were published mainly from the end of the 1990s onwards.65 Then, with the launch of the literary prize sch- reiben zwischen den kulturen [writing between cultures] in 1997, the edition exil had created a platform that made the works of immigrant writers more visible; subsequently, scholars became more interested in the authors.66 The competition is held annually and aims to promote literature by authors
64 In fact, early studies on the topic of literature and migration undertaken at Austrian insti- tutions dealt with migrant writing in Germany. See, for instance, Bettina Trattner, Die türkische Migrationsbewegung und ihr Einfluß auf die deutschsprachige Literatur. Einblicke, Bestandsaufnahme, Analysen und Entwicklungstendenzen (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Graz, 1993). Similarly, in 2000 the 10th International Congress of German Studies, entitled ‘Zeitenwende – Die Germanistik auf dem Weg vom 20. ins 21. Jahrhundert’ [Changing times – German Studies on their way from the 20th to the 21st century], took place in Vienna. One section at this congress dealt with literature of migration, but the papers concentrated on writers working in the frg such as Aysel Özakin, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zehra Cirak, and Yoko Tawada, although at the time initiatives such as the literary prize schreiben zwischen den kulturen [writing between cultures] had already been launched and first works by writ- ers such as Vladimir Vertlib or Hamid Sadr been published. For the proceedings see: Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien 2000 ‘Zeitenwende – Die Germanistik auf dem Weg vom 20. ins 21. Jahrhundert’, ed. by Peter Wiesinger (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002). For an overview of the emergence of migrant writers as well as the research on them in the Austrian context see Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta, ‘New Austria, old roots: Writers of immigrant origin in Austria’ (working title), in Migration and Literature – a handbook of theories, approaches and readings, ed. by Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta, in preparation. 65 In a comparative study, Wiebke Sievers has analysed possible reasons for this rather late emergence of migrant writing in Austria. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field as well as the opportunity-structure approach, she argues that different structures within the two countries account for this difference. Whereas in Germany, immigrants (so- called guestworkers) began to organise politically in the 1970s, in Austria, established authors, critics and functionaries had been holding their respective positions since the interwar/war period and so the younger generation of (native) writers had to struggle for a public and for opportunities to publish. In such a contested field, there was hardly any space for immigrant writers. See Wiebke Sievers, ‘Writing politics: the emergence of immigrant writing in West Germany and Austria’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34/8 (2008), 1217–1235. 66 For an overview of the emergence of migrant writers in Austria see Vlasta, ‘Passage’, Vlasta, ‘Literature of Migration’, and Sandra Vlasta, “Faccio letteratura e basta!’
– Letteratura di migrazione in Austria tra disapprovazione e riconoscimento’, Scritture migranti, 5 (2011), 227–252. 67 See ‘Exil-Literaturpreis 2010 geht an Susanne Gregor’, derstandard.at
70 Fiddler, pp. 277–278. 71 See Fiddler, p. 282, as well as Sigurd Paul Scheichl, ‘Zu Kundeyt Surdums drittem Gedichtband’, in Kundeyt Surdum, Kein Tag geht spurlos vorbei (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2002), pp. 99–105. 72 Cf. Vertlib, Spiegel. 73 On Vertlib as a Jewish writer see for instance Sander L. Gilman, ‘Becoming a Jew by Becoming a German: The Newest Jewish Writing from the ‘East”, in Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 25.1 (2006), 16–32; Hans-Joachim Hahn, “Europa’ als neuer ‘jüdischer Raum’ – Diana Pintos Thesen und Vladimir Vertlibs Romane’, in Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur: Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 295–310; Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, ‘A Human Being or a Good Jew? Individualism in Vladimir Vertlib’s Novel Letzter Wunsch’, in Beyond Political Correctness. Remapping German Sensibilities in the 21st Century, ed. by Christine Anton and Frank Pilipp (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 109–133; Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, ‘Individuum und Individualität in den Werken zeitgenössischer jüdischer AutorInnen in Österreich’, in Zeitenwende. Österreichische Literatur seit dem Millennium: 2000–2010, ed. by Michael Boehringer and Susanne Hochreiter (Vienna: Praesens, 2011), pp. 389–409; Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, ‘Vladimir Vertlib, a Global Intellectual: Exile, Migration, and Individualism in the Narratives of a Russian Jewish Author in Austria’, in Beyond Vienna: Contemporary Literature from the Austrian Provinces, ed. by Todd C. Hanlin (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2008), pp. 230–261. Andrea Reiter, ‘Narrating ‘the Jew’: The Autobiographical in Recent Novels of Jewish Writers in Austria’, in Zeitenwende. Österreichische Literatur seit dem
Hannes Schweiger in several articles analyses texts by Dimitré Dinev, pri- marily his novel Engelszungen. Schweiger uses concepts from post-colonial studies as a theoretical frame for literature of migration, in particular Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as well as his concept of ‘third space’, in which “sich Räume überlagern, von dem aus eine doppelte Perspektive möglich wird und der weder das Eine noch das Andere ist”74 [spaces overlap and which enables a double perspective and is neither One nor the Other]. Besides Dinev, he discusses texts by Alma Hadzibeganovic, Anna Kim, and Vladimir Vertlib in the same context. In another paper, Schweiger analyses constructions of identity in migrants’ biographies in texts by, again, Dimitré Dinev as well as Dubravka Ugresic (who, however, writes in her first language, Croatian). He identifies hyphenated identities that result from the experience of migration and ongoing disintegration including the erasing of autobiographies and even names, both of which are subject to a process of continual remodelling, having to take into account ever changing criteria. At the same time, Schweiger argues, non-linear, fragile identities such as these question seemingly fixed concepts of national and cultural identity.75 The late emergence of both the authors as well as of studies on literature of migration in Austria has, however, had the effect of giving researchers the feeling of having some catching up to do. Consequently, a number of studies and projects have been undertaken and published since the turn of the millenium. For instance, the 2008 volume of the Modernes Kulturwissenschaftliches
Millennium: 2000–2010, ed. by Michael Boehringer and Susanne Hochreiter (Vienna: Praesens, 2011), pp. 410–429. Stuart Taberner, ‘Vladimir Vertlib’s Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur: Performing Jewishness in the New Germany’, in Emerging German- Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner (Rochester: Camden House, 2011), pp. 32–45. On Vertlib as a migrant writer see for instance Ernst Grabovszki, ‘Österreich als literarischer Erfahrungsraum zugewanderter Autorinnen und Autoren’, in Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur: Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 275–292. 74 Hannes Schweiger, ‘Zwischenwelten. Postkoloniale Perspektiven auf Literatur von Migrantinnen’, in Eigene und andere Fremde. ‘Postkoloniale’ Konflikte im europäischen Kontext, ed. by Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Birgit Wagner (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2005), pp. 216–227. See also Hannes Schweiger, ‘Entgrenzungen. Der bulgarisch-österreichische Autor Dimitré Dinev im Kontext der MigrantInnenliteratur’, Trans. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 15 (2004),
Jahrbuch was dedicated to the topic of migration.76 Helga Mitterbauer in her contribution in the volume also refers to writers who live and work in Austria, such as Dimitré Dinev.77 An international interdisciplinary project entitled Multilingualism and literary creativity has been launched by Michaela Bürger-Koftis at the conference Knowledge, Creativity, and Transformations of Societies (kctos) in Vienna 2007.78 In its first phase, the project has con centrated on literature written by multilingual authors who have chosen German as their (main) literary language. The focus of the project is both on authors living in Germany as well as in Austria. The research group published its initial findings in a volume entitled Polyphonie.79 The corresponding web portal Polyphonie: Mehrsprachigkeit_Kreativität_Schreiben [Polyphony: Multilingualism_Creativity_Writing] was launched in 2013.80 The concentra- tion on the linguistic aspect is a notable move away from the focus on the expe- rience of migration, and presents an alternative biographical approach. In line with the fact that the majority of immigrant authors living and work- ing in Austria come from Eastern European countries (such as Dimitré Dinev, Radek Knapp, Julya Rabinowich and Vladimir Vertlib) research also concen- trates on these writers.81 However, recently a number of new writers have entered the scene and they have been quickly recognised by academia. For instance, Anna Bakba presents a reading of Semier Insayif’s novel Faruq applying
76 See Moderne Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 4 (2008). 77 See Helga Mitterbauer, ‘Migratorische Kultur-, Identitäts- und Literaturkonzepte. Hybridität und Metissage – Diaspora, Nomadismus und Kosmopolitismus’, Moderne, 4 (2008), 19–37. 78 The panel at the conference kctos: Wissen, Kreativität und Transformationen von Gesell schaften [Knowledge, Creativity, and Transformations of Societies] (Vienna, 6.-9.12.2007) was called ‘Mehrsprachigkeit und literarische Kreativität’ [multilingualism and literary creativity]. 79 See Polyphonie – Mehrsprachigkeit und literarische Kreativität, ed. by Michaela Bürger- Koftis and others (Vienna: Praesens, 2010). 80 See the web portal
ُشوق Osten als َشق See Anna Bakba, ‘Zwischen Wien und Bagdad oder wenn der 82 Sonnenaufgang im Text auftaucht. Semier Insayifs Roman Faruq’, in Zeitenwende: Österreichische Literatur seit dem Millennium, 2000–2010, ed. by Michael Boehringer and Susanne Hochreiter (Vienna: Praesens, 2011), pp. 194–212. 83 See, for instance Helga Mitterbauer, Hannes Schweiger, and Sandra Vlasta on Anna Kim and Andrea Bartl on Michael Stavarič: Helga Mitterbauer, ‘De-Placement. Kreativität. Avantgarde’, in Polyphonie – Mehrsprachigkeit und literarische Kreativität, ed. by Michaela Bürger-Koftis and others (Vienna: Praesens, 2010), pp. 255–272; Hannes Schweiger, ‘Produktive Irritationen: Die Vervielfältigung von Identität in Texten Anna Kims’, in Dritte Räume: Homi K. Bhabhas Kulturtheorie. Kritik. Anwendung. Reflexion, ed. by Anna Babka and others (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2012), pp. 145–165; Sandra Vlasta, ‘Muttersprache, Vatersprache, Bildersprache. Mehrsprachigkeit und familiäre ‘Sprachbande’ im Kontext von Migration in Anna Kims Die Bilderspur’, Germanistik in Ireland. Jahrbuch der/Yearbook of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland, 2 (2007), 29–45; Andrea Bartl, ’Schädigung – Bereicherung? Androgyne Bastardfiguren in der deutschsprachigen Migrationsliteratur am Beispiel von Michael Stavaričs Terminifera und Libuse Moníkovás Eine Schädigung’, in Bastard: Figurationen des Hybriden zwischen Ausgrenzung und Entgrenzung, ed. by Andrea Bartl and others (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), pp. 191–205. 84 Eure Sprache ist nicht meine Sprache. Texte von Migrantinnen in Österreich (Vienna: Milena, 2002). 85 ‘heim.at’ Gedichte Burgaz Projekt/Burgaz Projesi. Anthologie türkischer Migration. Türk Göcu Üzerine Siirler (Landeck: EYE Literaturverlag, 2004).
86 Angekommen. Texte nach Wien zugereister Autorinnen und Autoren, ed. by Milo Dor (Vienna: Picus, 2005). 87 See, for instance, Matthias Beilein and Regina Kecht on Rabinovici; Wiebke Sievers in a comparative approach has analysed Elias Canetti as an immigrant writer: Matthias Beilein, ‘Auf diesem Markt ist Österreich: Doron Rabinovicis Ohnehin’, in National Identities and European Literatures/Nationale Identitäten und Europäische Literaturen, ed. by J. Manuel Barbeito and others (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 93–104 and Regina Kecht, ‘Literarische Topografie der Einwanderung: Rabinovicis Roman Ohnehin’, Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur, 52 (1/2008), 35–43; Wiebke Sievers, ‘Von Elias Canetti bis Dimitré Dinev oder: Was ist Migrationsliteratur?’, Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur, 53 (3/2009), 303–312. 88 Tandem®. Polizisten treffen Migranten. Literarische Protokolle, ed. by Susanna Gratzl and others (Vienna: mandelbaum, 2006). 89 Zum Glück gibt’s Österreich. Junge österreichische Literatur, ed. by Gustav Ernst and Karin Fleischanderl (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2003). Earlier, Denis Mikan had already published a book with stories with edition exil: Denis Mikan, Emil (Vienna: edition exil, 2002). 90 To name only a few examples, see: Julia Altrogge, Migrantenliteratur als Bestandteil deutscher Gegenwartsliteratur. Ihre Präsenz und Rezeption in Österreich (unpublished
master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2002); Ana Andric, ‘Migrationsliteratur’ in Österreich. Eine literatursoziologische Betrachtung der ‘Migrationsliteratur’ in Österreich (unpub- lished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2012); Greta Egle, Migrationsliteratur? Postkoloniale Lektüren von Melinda Nadj Abonjis Tauben fliegen auf, Julya Rabinowichs Spaltkopf und Olga Grjasnowas Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2013); Angelika Friedl, Der Literaturpreis ‚Schreiben zwischen den Kulturen’. Ein Literaturprojekt zur Förderung des Dialogs zwischen und über Kulturen (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2003); Gregor Alexander Grömmer, Heimatliteratur des Fremden. Perspektiven kultureller Differenzerfahrungen in den Texten Rafik Schamis und Dimitré Dinevs (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2008); Stefanie Grubich, Lange saß ich zwischen den Stühlen. Eine postkoloniale Liter aturanalyse mit intersektionalem Ansatz anhand der Werke von Seher Çakir (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2013); Anja Lydia Hagenauer, Deutschsprachige Literatur von Türkinnen und Türken: ein Beitrag zur interkulturellen Erziehung und Verständigung (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Salzburg, 1996); Anita Konrad, Sind sie zu fremd, bist du zu deutsch. Überlegungen zur ‘MigrantInnenliteratur’, Migration und Hybridität im deutschsprachigen Raum (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Innsbruck, 2003); Anna Weidenholzer, Aspekte und Möglichkeiten einer interkulturellen Literatur aus Bosnien-Herzegowina am Beispiel von Saša Stanišic, Alma Hadzibeganovic und Aleksandar Hemon (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2008); Angelika Welebil, Migrationsliteratur in Österreich unter Berücksichtigung des Autors Dimitré Dinev (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2008). 91 For a detailed survey of the activities of edition exil and especially for information on the literary prize schreiben zwischen den kulturen see Angelika Friedl’s thesis and Valerie Böckel’s book: Friedl, Der Literaturpreis; Valerie Böckel, Migration in der österreichischen Literatur: Die TrägerInnen des Preises ‘schreiben zwischen den kulturen’ 2003–2008 (Saarbrücken, vdm Verlag Dr. Müller, 2011). 92 For an overview of the winners of the prize during the first ten years see the anthology which was published for the tenth anniversary of the prize: best of 10. Anthologie. 10 jahre exil-literaturpreise schreiben zwischen den kulturen 1997 – 2006, ed. by Christa Stippinger (Vienna: edition exil, 2007).
Whereas already in the mid-1990s, only small publishing houses such as edi- tion exil would publish texts by immigrant writers, by the end of the 1990s the number of books written by non-native Austrians and published also by more renowned publishing houses started to increase. For instance, in 1999, Vladimir Vertlib’s novel Zwischenstationen [Interstations] was published by the Viennese publisher Deuticke, two years later his celebrated book Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur [Rosa Masur’s Peculiar Memory] made sure that he became an established writer.93 During the past few years Vertlib has published three more novels, Letzter Wunsch [Last Wish], Am Morgen des zwölften Tages [On the Morning of the Twelfth Day], and Schimons Schweigen [Schimon’s Silence] as well as a book of stories, Mein erster Mörder [My First Murderer].94 While at the beginning of the 2000s, only one volume with stories by Dimitré Dinev had been published, after the huge success of his novel Engelszungen (published by Deuticke) Dinev’s first book was reprinted by his new publisher.95 Thus, by now, Deuticke seems to hold a significant interposi- tion for non-native authors who write in German in the (Austrian) literary field; besides Vertlib and Dinev, also Hamid Sadr’s novels Gesprächszettel für Dora [Conversation Notes to Dora], already published in 1994, and his more recent book Der Gedächtnissekretär [The Secretary of Memory], were released by Deuticke.96 His latest novel, Der Vogelsammler von Auschwitz [The Bird Collector of Auschwitz], however, came out with a different publisher.97 Julya Rabinowich, whose first novel, Spaltkopf [Splithead], was published by the
93 Vladimir Vertlib, Zwischenstationen (Vienna: Deuticke: 1999); Vladimir Vertlib, Das beson- dere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur (Vienna: Deuticke, 2001). 94 Vladimir Vertlib, Letzter Wunsch (Vienna: Deuticke, 2003); Vladimir Vertlib, Mein erster Mörder. Lebensgeschichten (Vienna: Deuticke, 2006); Vladimir Vertlib, Am Morgen des zwölften Tages (Vienna: Deuticke, 2009); Vladimir Vertlib, Schimons Schweigen (Vienna: Deuticke, 2012). 95 Dimitré Dinev, Die Inschrift (Vienna: edition exil, 2001); id., Engelszungen (Vienna: Deuticke, 2003) In the republication of the stories, the majority of the texts was reprinted, one was omitted and six new ones completed the new book, which was published with a different title: Dimitré Dinev, Ein Licht über dem Kopf (Vienna: Deuticke, 2005). For a detailed account of the genesis of the two volumes see Michaela Bürger-Koftis, ‘Dimitré Dinev: Märchenerzähler und Mythenflüsterer der Migration’, in Eine Sprache – viele Horizonte…Die Osterweiterung der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Porträts einer neuen europäischen Generation, ed. by Michaela Bürger-Koftis (Vienna: Praesens, 2008), pp. 135–153 (p. 142, in particular footnote 17). 96 Hamid Sadr, Gesprächszettel an Dora (Vienna: Deuticke, 1994); Hamid Sadr, Der Gedächt nissekretär (Vienna: Deuticke, 2005). 97 Hamid Sadr, Der Vogelsammler von Auschwitz (Aachen: Shaker Media, 2009).
edition exil, also brought out her latest books (Herznovelle [Heart Novella] and Die Erdfresserin [The Woman who Eats Earth]) with the Viennese Deuticke.98 A number of activities – public readings, events, discussions etc. – have equally been evidence for the ever-growing public interest in the literary pro- ductions of immigrant authors. Dimitré Dinev’s popularity is probably the most obvious example of this interest: Over recent years, his plays have been staged not only on smaller stages such as the Rabenhof, but also at the presti- gious Akademietheater (which forms part of the Burgtheater) and the popular Volkstheater, all of them in Vienna.99 In 2008 he was announced Dichter zu Gast (writer in residence) at the Salzburger Festspiele, together with Nobel Prize winning Orhan Pamuk. His stage-version of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment however, was not accepted by Andrea Breth, the director respon- sible for its staging.100 During recent years, migrant authors living and working in Austria have also been awarded the German Chamisso Prize, e.g. Vladimir Vertlib and Radek Knapp (most promising writers’ award, both in 2001), Dimitré Dinev (most promising writers’ award in 2005), Magdalena Sadlon (2006), Michael Stavarič (most promising writers’ award in 2008 and main prize in 2012), Marjana Gaponenko (2013), and Ann Cotton (2014). Interestingly, neither Magdalena Sadlon nor Michael Stavarič had before ever been pre- sented or received as immigrant authors. In 2008, the Hohenemser Litera turpreis was founded in Vorarlberg. This new Austrian literary prize is aimed at “deutschsprachige AutorInnen nichtdeutscher Muttersprache”101
98 Julya Rabinowich, Spaltkopf (Vienna: edition exil, 2008; by now there is also an edition- published by Deuticke); Julya Rabinowich, Herznovelle (Vienna: Deuticke, 2011); Julya Rabinowich, Die Erdfresserin (Vienna: Deuticke, 2012). 99 In December 2006, Dinev’s play ‘Haut und Himmel’ had its premiere at the Rabenhof theatre, in April 2007 ‘Das Haus des Richters’, a play commissioned by the Burgtheater, was staged at the Akademietheater in Vienna. In May 2008 his latest play, ‘Eine heikle Sache, die Seele’, based on the story ‘Die Totenwache’, was performed for the first time at the Volkstheater in Vienna. See Dimitré Dinev, ‘Haut und Himmel’, in wortstaetten no 1. anthologie. das buch zum interkulturellen autorentheaterprojekt wiener wortstaetten 2006, ed. by Hans Escher and Bernhard Studler (Vienna: edition exil, 2006); Dimitré Dinev, Das Haus des Richters (Vienna: Thomas Sessler, 2005); Dimitré Dinev, Eine heikle Sache, die Seele (Vienna: Thomas Sessler, 2008); ‘Die Totenwache’ can be found in: Angekommen. Texte nach Wien zugereister Autorinnen und Autoren, ed. by Milo Dor (Vienna: Picus, 2005), pp. 113–123. 100 See ‘Salzburger Dostojewski ohne Dinev’, Der Standard, 19./20.1.2008 as well as an inter- view with Andrea Breth: ‘Hört doch auf mit dem Wahnsinn’, Der Standard, 31.1.2008. 101 See the online description of the prize: http://www.hohenems.at/de/kultur/literatur-und -geschichte/hohenemser-literaturpreis [accessed 12 May 2015].
[German-speaking authors of non-German mother tongue] and was co-initi- ated by the author Michael Köhlmeier. In 2009 the prize was awarded for the first time, it was given to Michael Stavarič and Agnieszka Piwowarska, Susanne Gregor received a most promising writers’ award. In 2011, Eleonora Hummel won the prize (the most promising writers’ award was given to Sandra Gugic) and in 2013 Saša Stanišić received it (most promising writers’ award to Léda Forgo). But immigrant writers are by and by also being recognised outside the niche of migration literature: Julya Rabinowich was awarded the prestigious Rauriser Literaturpreis 2009 for her novel Spaltkopf, a noteable sign that she has arrived on the Austrian literary scene. Furthermore, it has to be noted that this novel is up to now one of the few by a German-speaking ‘migrant writer’ that has been translated into English.102 Moreover, Rabinowich, just like Doron Rabinovici and Vladimir Vertlib, are also present in Austria as public intellec- tuals, writing regular columns in newspapers, for instance. Ilija Trojanow has also arrived, in a way: The Bulgarian-born writer, who writes his books in German and is therefore often discussed in the context of literature of migra- tion, currently lives in Vienna. The presence of another well-known migrant author might again have effects on the local literary field. Migrant writing has surely already had effects on literary studies in the Austrian context – in a recent volume on Austrian literature in the first decade of the new millen- nium, contributions on immigrant writers take up a big share of the volume. This is accompanied by the editors’ comment that to speak of Migrationsliteratur in the Austrian context what with the country’s long history of (im)migration seems nearly absurd.103 Still, despite all these recent activities, in the Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (klg) [Critical Lexicon of Contem porary Literature in German], the standard lexicon for German Literary Studies, as of the time of writing, no entries on Dimitré Dinev, Vladimir Vertlib, Hamid Sadr or Julya Rabinowich, can be found.104
102 See Julya Rabinowich, Splithead (London: Portobello, 2011). 103 See Michael Boehringer, Susanne Hochreiter, ‘Zeitenwende: Österreichische Literatur seit dem Millennium, 2000-2010’, in Zeitenwende: Österreichische Literatur seit dem Millennium, 2000–2010, ed. by Michael Boehringer and Susanne Hochreiter (Vienna: Praesens, 2011), pp. 9–27 (p. 22). 104 There is an entry for Doron Rabinovici, though, who, as mentioned above has also been received in the context of migration: Matthias Beilein, Doron Rabinovici, in Munzinger Online/klg – Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur,
1.1.3 Research on Literature and Migration in English To give an overview of research into literature and migration in English is a difficult task and is in danger of leading to unsatisfying results. It is difficult to delimit the area with respect to postcolonial literary studies and the study of ethnic minority writing, as well as in the light of the many different geographic and cultural zones within the Anglophone areas. In what follows, I shall thus concentrate on studies that have a rather clear focus on literature and migra- tion and that therefore form the context of my study. Furthermore, the major- ity of the studies presented focus on Great Britain as this is the national context where the texts analysed in this book are situated.105 As will be seen, many of these studies deal with authors who have migrated, that is, they propose a pri- marily biographical approach for the selection of the authors (even though they might later neglect this fact in the analysis of the texts). This biographical approach also continues with later generations of authors. Immigrant writers such as Sam Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, or Buchi Emecheta have experienced migration as first generation immigrants. The generation of authors such as Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie or Hanif Kureishi, however have at times been born abroad, but were raised and educated mainly in Great Britain. This also applies to a younger generation of writers such as Andrea Levy or Zadie Smith. Lately, some of the most successful British writers also have migratory backgrounds although they are perceived as undoubtedly British. Examples of these are Monica Ali or Hanri Kunzru. Many of the studies in question are influenced by postcolonial and cultural studies and this is certainly also true for my own approach in this book. Edward Said’s reading of the orient as a construction (mainly, but not exclusively) by the colonial powers whose images and ideas continue to have an effect up to the present day and Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the hybridity of culture and the Third Space as the place where this hybridity is constantly being negoti- ated have influenced both the way in which we perceive and analyse literary texts as well as our choice of texts to be discussed.106 To be more precise, post- colonial and cultural studies on the one hand have given us tools for an aes- thetically as well as a politically interested analysis of texts (and artefacts in general). On the other hand, these new theories have raised our awareness of
105 For a thorough overview on the emergence of migrant writing and research on it see Dave Gunning, ‘Migration and Literature in the United Kingdom’ (working title), in Migration and Literature – a handbook of theories, approaches and readings, ed. by Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta, in preparation. 106 See Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge, 1978) and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2006 [1994]).
107 The volume I am alluding to is Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. by Bill Ashcroft and others (London: Routledge, 1989). 108 See Prabhu Guptara, Black British Literature. An Annotated Bibliography (Sydney and Mundelstrup: Dangeroo, 1986). 109 See Dennis Walder, Post-Colonial Literatures in English. History Language Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 110 Walder, Post-Colonial, p. 195. 111 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 232.
The stepmother tongue: 1. New Literatures in Old Worlds (‘our’ land/‘their’ language): Asia, Africa and the South Pacific 2. New Literatures in New Worlds (‘their’ land/‘their’ language): Afro- America, the Caribbean 3. Old Literatures in New Worlds (‘their’ land/‘our’ language): Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada
The mother tongue: 4. Old Literatures in Old Worlds (‘our’ land/‘our’ language): The British Isles, North America117
112 Boehmer, Colonial, p. 233. 113 Boehmer, Colonial, p. 234. 114 Robert Fraser, Lifting the Sentence. A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 8–9. 115 See John Skinner, The Stepmother Tongue. An Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 116 Skinner, The Stepmother Tongue, p. vii. 117 See Skinner, The Stepmother Tongue, p. 12. For a detailed description of the single catego- ries see Skinner’s introduction, pp. 1–27.
All of these groups comprise authors that can also be discussed in the con- text of migration. Be it Buchi Emecheta, who Skinner discusses in the first group as an author who speaks other languages besides English and thus has made a conscious decision for English to be her literary language. Or writers such as Caryl Phillips and Sam Selvon who have both migrated to Great Britain and Canada and the usa, respectively, and who continue traditions of Black or Caribbean creole English (see also Chapter 2 of this book). Due to the long history of colonialism, slavery, and segregation linked to these forms of English it is problematic to simply speak of English as these writers’ mother tongue. Rosemary Marangoly George uses the term immigrant writing to refer to works by authors “whose personal history include birth, childhood and possi- bly an early education in one of the former colonies, but whose work is pub- lished and received by western publishing houses and academic (as well as other) readers.”118 Thus, for her, language (competence) is not a criterion. According to her definition, though, postcolonial literature in most cases can be regarded as immigrant writing; with the gain that the latter can also be used in other cultural or historical contexts. For George, besides the biographical aspect, immigrant writing is often characterised by a distanced and unsenti- mental attitude towards the experience of homelessness. In many of the texts the constructedness of home is revealed. George mentions Anita Desai’s Bye- bye Blackbird (1970), Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974), Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1989) and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) as examples for immigrant writing and illustrates her theory with a detailed analysis of M.G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989). A. Robert Lee reads the multicultural fiction, as he calls it, composed by immigrant authors in Great Britain as an expression of a new, heterogeneous Britishness.119 Accordingly, in the volume edited by him, a wide spectrum of authors is discussed, ranging from V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie via Sam Selvon to Hanif Kureshi, Timothy Mo, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Jewish and Irish prose is also part of the new multicultural fiction as well as texts by authors from Australia and New Zealand. In another study, Susheila Nasta concentrates on writers who have immi- grated to Britain from South Asia, also taking into consideration authors from
118 Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home. Postcolonial and Twentieth Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 [1996]), p. 172. 119 See Other Britain, Other British. Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. by A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto Press, 1995).
120 See Susheila Nasta, Home Truths. Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). 121 See Ruvani Ranasinha, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). 122 See Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002). 123 See Roy Sommer, Fictions of Migration. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2001).
124 See Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 125 See Extravagant Strangers. A Literature of Belonging, ed. by Caryl Phillips (London: Faber & Faber, 1997). 126 See for example Leave to Stay. Stories of Exile and Belonging, ed. by Joan Riley and Briar Wood (London: Virago, 1996); Voices of the Crossing. The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, ed. by Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000) and Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. by James Procter (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000). 127 See, for instance Bentley, Contemporary British Fiction; Dominic Head, The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).
Besides these works on literature and migration in Great Britain, studies on literature by immigrant writers in Australia, in Canada, and in the usa provided a helpful context for this book. In Australia, there is a huge corpus of texts by migrant authors that was only slowly freed from the at times folkloristic view of multiculturalism and which was able to establish itself as an independent part of Australian literature (previously, this was predominantly anglo-celtic, and thus undeclared immigrant literature). The literary critic Sneja Gunew led the way in collecting and analysing these texts and authors.128 In a similar way to the British and the German-speaking contexts, also in Australian literary stud- ies the recognition of immigrants’ literary production has led to a call for new definitions of Australian culture and what it means to be Australian. Sneja Gunew also forms a link to the scholarly work on immigrant writing in Canada: in a foreword to Joseph Pivato’s Echo. Essays on Other Literatures, Gunew identifies the parallels and differences in literary studies on immigrant writing in Canada and in Australia.129 In Canada, Pivato had worked on Italian- Canadian writing long before any such studies were launched in Australia. However, in the volume Echo, written after a fellowship in Sydney, Australia, he himself engaged with Australian ethnic minority writing. In Canadian literary studies, scholars have concentrated in particular on Quebec and on immigrant writing that has emerged there.130 Scholars working in the United States on literature by immigrants, have con- centrated mainly on Chicano/-a (i.e. Mexican American), (Black) Caribbean, and Chinese-American authors.131
128 See, for instance Sneja Gunew, Marginality. Multicultural Literary Studies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994); Sneja Gunew, ‘Arts for a multicultural Australia: rede- fining the culture’, in Culture, Difference and the Arts, ed. by Sneja Gunew and Fazal Rizvi, (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994), pp. 1–12; Striking Chords. Multicultural Literary Interpretations, ed. by Sneja Gunew and Kteryna O. Longley (Sidney: Allen & Unwin, 1992); Sneja Gunew, ‘Migrant Women Writers: Who’s on Whose Margins?’, in Gender, Politics and Fiction. Twentieth Century Australian Women”s Novels, ed. by Carole Ferries (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985), pp. 163–178. 129 See Sneja Gunew, ‘Foreword. Speaking to Joseph’, in Joseph Pivato, Echo. Essays on Other Literatures (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 1994), pp. 7–31. 130 See, for instance: Christine Wesselhöft, Erzählte Migration. Literarische und biographische Deutungsmuster im Einwanderungskontext (Quebec, 1983–2003) (Frankfurt: iko, 2006); Écriture Migrant/Migrant writing, ed. by Danielle Dumontet and Frank Zipfel (Hildesheim: Olms, 2008); Migrance comparée. Comparing Migration. Les Literatures du Canada et du Québec. The literatures of Canada and Québec, ed. by Marie Carriére and Catherine Khordoc (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008). For a general view of Canada see Literary Pluralities, ed. by Christl Verduyn (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998). 131 For an overview on literature and migration in the usa see, for instance, Post-Colonial Literatures. Expanding the Canon, ed. by Deborah Madsen (London: Pluto Press, 1999);
1.1.4 Comparative Studies Up to now, literature in the context of migration has been mainly been dealt with within individual language departments, i.e. for instance in English, German or Italian Studies rather than from a comparative point of view. Aglaia Bloumi addresses this gap and locates a possible reason for it when she states that Comparative Literature holds onto a “[…] nationalen Literaturbegriff […], der wiederum die Übereinkunft von Nation, Sprache und Kultur impliziert”132 [[…] national concept of literature […] that implies the unity of nation, lan- guage, and culture]. Since, however, literature in the context of migration refuses being ascribed to a single national literature it has to be asked whether “[…] im Rahmen der Komparatistik der grenzübergreifende Vergleich nach sprachlichen und/oder Maßstäben des Staatsgebietes stattfinden sollte”133 [[…] within Comparative Literary Studies the comparative approach across boundaries should take place along linguistic parameters and/or along those of the nation state]. In any case, in Blioumi’s view Comparative Literary Studies are predestined to deal with migration literature. She suggests text immanent analysis as an alternative approach: “Die rhizomatischen Prinzipien der Redevielfalt, Mehrsprachigkeit und kulturellen Interferenzen müssen vom Komparatisten herausgearbeitet und im ästhetischen Ganzen eines Textes bewertet werden”134 [The comparative scholar ought to elaborate the rhizom- atic principles of plurality in discourse, of multilingualism, and of cultural interferences and evaluate them within the aesthetic framework of a text]. A comparative approach, furthermore, would make visible the inherent bilin- gualism of the texts, which for Blioumi constitutes the “vergleichbare […] Kern”135 [comparable […] core] of migration literature. However, in her article she concentrates on literature in the context of migration written in German
Heike Paul, Mapping Migration. Women’s Writing and the American Immigrant Experience from the 1950s to the 1990s (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998); The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature. Carving Out a Niche, ed. by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999); Cathy Schlund-Vials, Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 132 Aglaia Blioumi, “Migrationsliteratur, der schwarze Peter für die Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft? Plädoyer für eine Komparatistik mit ,doppelter Staatsbürgerschaft‘”. Arcadia. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwis senschaft, 34/2 (1999), 355–365 (p. 360). 133 Blioumi, p. 361. 134 Ibid., p. 363. 135 Ibid..
136 See Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 137 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 151. 138 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 158. 139 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 158. 140 Sabine Scholl, Die Welt als Ausland. Zur Literatur zwischen den Kulturen (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1999).
141 Konuk, Kader, Identitäten im Prozess. Literatur von Autorinnen aus und in der Türkei in deutscher, englischer und türkischer Sprache (Essen: Verlag die blaue Eule, 2001). 142 Mediha Göbenli, “Migrantenliteratur’ im Vergleich. Die deutsch-türkische und die indo- englische Literatur’, Arcadia. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwis senschaft, 40/2 (2005), 300–317. 143 Writing Across Worlds. Literature and Migration, ed. by Russell King and others, (London: Routledge, 1995). 144 Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe, ed. by Mirjam Gebauer and Pia Schwarz Lausten (Munich: Meidenbauer, 2010).
145 Behschnitt, Wolfgang, and others, eds, Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013). 146 Two more collected volumes on literature and migration are currently under way: The aim of Trans-Culture. Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe (to be published in the A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (CHLEL) series) is to reflect on migration and literare in Europe since the second half of the 20th century. This study of the evolution of migration literature in Europe will treat aspects of the reception, the aesthetics, and the poetic imperatives and innovations of the phenomenon. See Trans-Culture. Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe, ed. by Myriam Geiser and others, in preparation. Migration and Literature – a handbook of theories, approaches and readings, on the other hand, will present current overviews of the emergence and the situation of migrant writing as well as the state of the art of research on literature and migration in 15 different national contexts. Migration and Literature – a handbook of theo- ries, approaches and readings, ed. by Wiebke Sievers and Sandra Vlasta, in preparation. 147 Liesbeth Minnaard, New Germans, New Dutch. Literary Interventions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). 148 See Literatur der Migration – Migration der Literatur, ed. by Karin Hoff (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008).
A broad spectrum of literature in the context of migration is given in another volume of interviews with writers of the post-colonial world by Feroza Jussawalla.149 The authors with various different ethnic backgrounds, native Caribbeans, Nigerians, Kenyans, Indians, Pakistanis, Maoris, as well as Chicanos/as share English as the language in which they write. Jussawalla’s intention is to highlight the importance of authors who write in English out- side Great Britain. At the same time she gives an example of what to her is the most useful methodology in dealing with migration literature – that of “informed eclecticism”.150 In her introduction she furthermore discusses sev- eral theoretical concepts, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s littérature mineure [minor literature],151 which have influenced the discussion of post-colonial literature as well as that of literature of migration.152 Elke Sturm-Trigonakis in her volume Global Playing in der Literatur [pub- lished in English as Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur] also proposes a corpus of texts that is both transnational and translingual.153 Sturm-Trigonakis refers to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of Weltliter atur [world literature]. Unlike the terms world literature or literature-monde used nowadays in the English- and French-speaking world, Weltliteratur refers to a worldwide body of literary texts. Like the French and English concept, it attempts to open up national literary canons, but unlike them, Weltliteratur also crosses linguistic boundaries and includes texts in different languages or even whole corpora of national literatures. Likewise, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis’ concept of Neue Weltliteratur [new world literature], denotes a global phenom- enon of texts. According to her, Neue Weltliteratur is characterised by two main criteria: an inherent multilingualism and an engagement with the discourse of globalization, either on a narrative level or as part of a poetic strategy. Sturm- Trigonakis illustrates her argument by analysing a huge number of texts that come from different language areas (written in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish) and thus presents a truly comparative approach.
149 Interviews With Writers of the Post-Colonial World, ed. by Feroza Jussawalla (Jackson/ Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1992). 150 Interviews With Writers, p. 21. 151 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Les Èditions de Minuit, 1975). 152 See Interviews With Writers, pp. 3–23. 153 See Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, Global Playing in der Literatur: Ein Versuch über die neue Weltliteratur (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), published in English in a revised and updated version as: Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013).
The comparative study on migration and literature by Soren Frank shares a number of features with the present book. Soren argues that a literature of migration can be established and described by several criteria, both on a social as well as on a stylistic level. In his book, he analyses texts by Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjaerstad and thus both by authors who have personally migrated and by authors who do not have this personal experience. Thus, on the move away from the biographical criterion, I agree with Soren. However, he keeps “biography of the author”154 as a criterion in his list and also has a wider understanding of migration than the one intended in this study. To Soren, migration includes notions such as “the exile, the expatri- ate, the refugee, the nomad, the homeless, the wanderer, and the explorer”.155 This opens up a very broad category that can hardly be argued to be a (sub-) genre in its own right. Therefore, unlike for Soren, criteria, such as “Europe and European literature,”156 as well as all the categories on a stylistic level (enuncia- tion, composition and narrative form, and (the formal aspect of) language) are not applicable to the genre of migration literature proposed in this study.
1.2 Studying Literary Themes and Motifs
The main thesis of this book is that there exists a corpus of texts that for the time being I have decided to call migration literature and that is characterised by its topic, that is, by the fact that it deals with the experience of migration. Furthermore, I argue that the texts not only resemble each other with regard to their overall topic, but that migration literature also demonstrates similarities in the themes and motifs that occur in the texts. At the same time, the present analysis will show how differently authors present these themes and motifs. Thus, this study uses a thematic approach. For a long time, thematics (also referred to as thematology) has been a neglected and criticised branch of liter- ary studies.157 As Werner Sollors summarises, thematics was seen as “a positiv- istic misunderstanding of what constitutes literary texts and their specificity
154 Soren Frank, Migration and Literature. Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjaerstad (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 21. 155 Frank, Migration, p. 17. 156 Frank, Migration, p. 21. 157 For an up-to-date overview on the developments and the state of the art of thematic approaches see Gianna Zocco’s study on the motif of the window: Gianna Zocco, The Delicate Place. Das Motiv des Fensters als Öffnung ins Innere in Erzähltexten seit 1945 (Berlin: Weidler, 2014), pp. 41–47.
158 Werner Sollors, ‘Thematics Today’, in Thematics. Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. by Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 217–235 (p. 217). 159 The substantial volumes by one of the most well-known German researchers in themat- ics, Elisabeth Frenzel, are examples for such studies: see Elisabeth Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur. Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1976) and Elisabeth Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur. Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1961). 160 See Zocco, The Delicate Place, pp. 44–47. 161 Theodor Wolpers, “Motif and Theme as Structural Content Units and ‘Concrete Universals’”, in The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. by Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 80–91, (p. 80), the quotation is taken from Zocco, The Delicate Place, p. 44. 162 Horst S. Daemmrich and Ingrid Daemmrich, Themen und Motive in der Literatur. Ein Handbuch (Tübingen: Francke, 1987), p. XI. 163 Bo Petterson, ‘Seven trends in recent thematic and a case study’, in Thematics. Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. by Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 237–252 (p. 241).
164 Sollors, ‘Thematics Today’, p. 219. 165 See also Sollors who states that ‘undeclared thematology’ is a widespread practice in fields such as post-colonial studies, cultural studies, ideological criticism, and New Historicism. See Sollors, ‘Thematics Today’, p. 219. Besides other studies mentioned in the sections on the state of the art above, see for instance the following as examples for an undeclared thematological approach in the field of literature and migration: Wesselhöft, Erzählte Migration; Frank, Migration; Monika Stranáková, Literarische Grenzüberschreitungen. Fremdheits- und Europa-Diskurs in den Werken von Barbara Frischmuth, Dzevad Karahasan und Zafer Senocak (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2009). 166 Daemmrich and Daemmrich, Themen, p. XI.
I propose a wide range of theoretical approaches for my analysis and will thus refer to traditional text analysis, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, but also to sociology, anthropology, history and memory studies. Furthermore, in my selection of texts I do not distinguish between categories such as highbrow literature and light fiction but apply an inclusive understanding of texts and am more interested in their overall topic, that is migration. However, one question still has to be answered: how to define a literary motif or a literary theme? Definitions of these two terms vary and blur and become even less well-defined when looked at in different languages (such as Motiv, Thema, and Stoff in German or thème in French). Mostly, theme refers to the central idea of a text, to “the highest level of a text’s organization,”167 to its “aboutness”168 as Willie van Peer calls it. Motif, on the other hand, is usually defined as a smaller unit, as “the smallest element of narrative”169 as Elisabeth Frenzel cites Max Lüthi. It thus is located in concrete passages in a text and is less abstract than theme. The relation between theme and motif is also described hierarchically, the theme being the “primary (overarching) subject” and the motif the “minor (local) subject”.170 However, scholars at the same time underline the gradual difference between theme and motif and thus question this hierarchisation.171 For the present study, I shall adopt the view that a theme is a larger unit and a motif a smaller one. The theme that is common to all the works discussed here, is migration. Nonetheless, in my analysis I suggest a number of sub- themes that are too large to be called motifs. I therefore suggest treating migra- tion as the overall and common ‘topic’ in the texts and will use the term ‘theme’ for the smaller units. The themes to be looked at, then, are language, transla- tion, identity and the search for identity, the new homeland, periphery, and centre. Within these themes, several motifs will be identified and analysed, for instance the motif of the tongue, cooking, eating, arrival, and the climate. The experience of migration as the main (but not exclusive) topic will serve as a reference level for the analysis of all the other themes and motifs in this book. We ought to keep in mind that, at the same time, literary topics (i.e. themes in
167 Willie van Peer, ‘Where do literary themes come from?’, in Thematics. Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. by Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), pp. 253–263 (p. 254). 168 van Peer, ‘Where do literary themes come from?’, p. 254. 169 Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur, p. VI. 170 Petterson, ‘Seven trends’, p. 238. 171 See Claude Bremond, ‘Concept and Theme’, in The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. by Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 46–59 and Petterson, ‘Seven Trends’, p. 238.
1.3 The Present Volume: Questions of Terminology, the Gains of a Comparative Approach, and Themes and Motifs to be Analysed
By now, I have already referred to several gaps in research on literature and migration that this book intends to close. By suggesting a corpus of texts that are defined by their common topic, namely migration, this study furthermore contributes to the discussions on terminology that in the context of literature and migration have been conducted both in the German-speaking as well as in the English-speaking countries. In German studies, literature written by immigrants has been called Gastarbeiterliteratur [guest workers’ literature], letteratura Gast [a wordplay on guest workers’ literature, in which the Gast, the guest is emphasized], Literatur der Betroffenheit [literature of concern and/or by the ones affected], Emigrantenliteratur [emigrants’ literature], interkulturelle Literatur [intercul- tural literature], Migrationsliteratur [migration literature] or Migrantenliteratur [migrants’ literature], for example.173 These terms all refer to the authors and
172 See Daemmrich and Daemmrich, Themen, p. XI. 173 Letteratura Gast is a term which was coined in the 1970s by Italian immigrants in Germany. Later the same literature is called Gastarbeiterliteratur by the writers Franco Biondi and Rafik Schami; this term is taken up for instance by Harald Weinrich. Literatur der Betroffenheit is also an expression first used by the authors themselves – again Franco Biondi and Rafik Schami used the ambiguous label in order to promote literature by immigrants in Germany. Carmine Chiellino eventually entitles his comprehensive com- pendium on the subject interkulturelle Literatur. For an overview and a detailed discus- sion of the terminology see Carmine Chiellino, ‘Interkulturalität und Literaturwissenschaft’, in Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland. Ein Handbuch, ed. by Carmine Chiellino (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), pp. 387–398 (particularly pp. 389–390). Another overview on the development of the terminology as well as on the literature itself can be found in Moray McGowan and Sabine Fischer, ‘Migrant Writing in the German Federal Republic’, in Writing Across Worlds. Literature and Migration, ed. by Russell King and others (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 39–56. For a critical discussion of various terms see also Arens, ‘Kulturelle Hybridität’ and Heidi Rösch, Migrationsliteratur im interkulturellen Kontext (Frankfurt: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1992), pp. 12–37. Furthermore, see the following publications for the discussion of terminology in German Studies: Heidrun Suhr, “Heimat ist, wo ich wachsen kann’ Ausländerinnen schreiben deutsche Literatur’, in
Emigranten- und Immigrantenliteratur Begegnung mit dem ‘Fremden’. Grenzen – Traditionen – Vergleiche, ed. by Shichiji Yoshinori, Akten des viii. Internationalen Germanisten Kongresses Tokyo 1990, Vol. 8/Sektion 14 (Munich: Iudicium, 1991), pp. 71–79; Teraoka, ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur’; Saskia Hintz, Schreiben in der Sprache der Fremde. Zeitgenössische deutsche ‘Migrantenliteratur’ und Kreatives Schreiben im Fach Deutsch als Fremdsprache (New York: Dissertation, 2002), in particular pp. 50–62. 174 Rösch, Migrationsliteratur, pp. 34–35. 175 See A. Robert Lee, ‘Introduction’, in Other Britain, Other British. Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. by A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 1–3. 176 Lee, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 177 For a detailed discussion of the term Black British literature see Susan Brähler, Susanne Reichl, and Mark Stein: Susan Brähler, Rückkehr im zeitgenössischen Migrationsroman der Karibik (Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2014), pp. 25–33; Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone, in particular pp. 21–45; Stein, Black British, pp. 3–18.
178 See Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. by David Morely and others (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 441–449. 179 See Gunning, ‘Migration and Literature in the United Kingdom’. 180 See for instance: Dave Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poetry, ed. by Jackie Kay and others (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2012). 181 Stein, Black British, p. 17. 182 Stein, Black British, p. 17. 183 Roy Sommer favours the expression ‘fictions of migration’ over the “gängigen, generalisie- renden Konzeptionen von ‘black British fiction’” [prevalent, generalising concepts of ‘black British fiction’]: Sommer, Fictions of Migration, preface (no page numbers). He argues that the term ‘fictions of migration’ is more apt to underline the thematic and formal diversity of texts by ethnic minority writers. The American Germanist Leslie A. Adelson uses ‘literature of migration’ in her studies on Turkish-German authors: See Adelson, The Turkish Turn. Although Ottmar Ette deals with travel writing, his remark, that travel writing would often represent Literatur ohne festen Wohnsitz [literature with- out a permanent home] approximates it to the concept of ‘literature of migration’: Ottmar Ette, Literatur in Bewegung. Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika (Weilerswirst: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2001), p. 10.
184 Adelson argues against an ‘intercultural’ approach and the term ‘intercultural literature’ for the German literature of Turkish migration she analyses, as it “[b]y and large […] stresses dialogic communication as a process in which readers and characters engage as representatives of discrete worlds”. Alternatively, her approach requires the “transfigura- tion of ethnic signifiers”. Adelson, The Turkish Turn, p. 26. 185 Seyhan uses both the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘disaporic’ literature as well as ‘exilic’ lit- erature in her study. However, she dismisses the term ‘MigrantInnenliteratur’ due to its transitory connotations. See Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 10. 186 See Harald Weinrich, ‘Vorwort’, in Als Fremder in Deutschland: Berichte, Erzählungen, Gedichte von Ausländern, ed by Irmgard Ackermann (Munich: dtv, 1982), pp. 9–11 (p. 9) and Weinrich, ‘Um eine deutsche Literatur von außen bittend’.
A conference in the Netherlands in April 2001 called ‘Writing Europe 2000: Migrant Cartographies’ gave an impression of the potential that a comparative approach of, say, Turkish literature in German, North African literature in French, Italian or Dutch, Saami literature in Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish, and many other literary products of diverse con- tact zones, would entail. A project like this would focus on the overall situation of migration, of being in the minority and of using the language of a majority.192
187 See Rösch, Migrationsliteratur, p. 166. 188 See Blioumi, ‘Migrationsliteratur’, p. 355. 189 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Für eine kleine Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976 [1975]), p. 28. 190 See Chiellino, ‘Interkulturalität und Literaturwissenschaft’, p. 394. Chiellino in particular refers to a conference organised in 1998 by Tom Cheesman in Swansea where a compara- tive, Turkish-German/British approach was fostered. 191 Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone, p. 5. 192 Ibid., p. 214.
According to Reichl, such a project would lead away from any canonical dis- cussions and would rather direct our attention to the global situation of migration. All these comments suggest that parallels in literature of migration written in various linguistic and national contexts are assumed and have already been detected. However, up to now they have hardly ever been analysed in detail. The present book intends to close precisely this research gap and thus wants to deal with migration literature from a broader perspective. Furthermore, both the growing awareness and popularity of literature by immigrants in Austria and the lack of studies of their works have been part of the motivation for this study. The restriction of my corpus to writers from two national contexts has prac- tical reasons; it does not imply a comparison along the lines of two nation states and their respective national literatures, a category which has been ques- tioned and undermined by migration literature, but instead a comparison along the lines of (1) two societies with different, but to some extent also similar histories of immigration (as discussed in Chapter 1.4.), and (2) of two (or more) languages chosen as literary languages, often by authors who are non-native speakers and (3) of various texts with individual stories of migration which, however, also reveal common features. Also, it seemed challenging to confront texts that were produced in a context with high awareness of postcolonial dis- course with texts from a context where such a discussion is relatively new. The chosen texts were all published rather recently, between the 1980s and 2006, except for one text: Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, which was published in 1956. All the works discussed here are novels, again it was necessary to restrict the corpus and not include the rich body of lyrical and dramatic works (that until now has mainly been neglected by literary scholars). As will be seen, many of the authors have personally experienced migration, others have parents who have immigrated to Austria and Great Britain, respec- tively. Furthermore, many of them have chosen a language different from their first language for their writing (although this does not exclude the possibility that they do not additionally write texts in their first language). Nonetheless, with regard to language, it is often difficult to draw a clear boundary, especially when it comes to authors from the wider English-speaking world. Some of the authors have parents with different first languages, others migrated at a very young age. However, as I have decided against the criterion of the authors’ biographies for the selection of the texts analysed in this study, biographical details will only be referred to occasionally and do not form the context for my analysis. Interested readers, however, will find brief information on the indi- vidual writers and their most important works at the end of this book.
For this study I have chosen several themes and motifs for a comparative analysis. There are various themes and motifs which reoccur in the texts whichever language they are written in, and which therefore suggest a com- parative approach. These are for instance: language; identity and the search for identity expressed by cooking, eating, and food; depictions of the new home- land and global ethnoscapes in migration literature; the second generation in migration; family histories as histories of migration; the discussion of new cul- tural traditions and of the old ones left behind; and, finally, private, alternative histories of the nation. Some of them have already been addressed in other studies, but usually they are restricted to a particular context, for instance, a particular writer or a certain background of migration (such as Turkish- German writers in Germany). The present analysis of the texts does not pre- clude the existence of these motifs in other literary genres. Nonetheless, the thesis of this study is that there are themes and motifs that reoccur in texts on migration in different languages, and by authors with diverse backgrounds. Of the many motifs which could be looked at in a comparative study, the following were chosen for detailed analysis: (1) language as a theme, (2) iden- tity and the search for identity in literature of migration expressed by cooking, eating, and food, (3) depictions of the new homeland, and (4) global eth- noscapes (a model taken from the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai)193 in migration literature, that is, the creation of an ethnographic network in the texts by means of the locations, the protagonists, the motif of the border and the shifting of centre and periphery. As mentioned above, this study proposes an intertextual and interdisciplinary thematic approach. In the analyses I will thus apply traditonal text analysis and at the same time refer to theoretical approaches coming from postcolonial studies, cultural studies, but also from sociology, anthropology, history and memory studies. In discourse on literature and migration, the issue of language is often addressed. Taking an (immigrant) author’s (linguistic) biography as a starting point in such an analysis bears the risk of reading the texts primarily as docu- ments by non-native speakers rather than literary works. Still, looking for traces of a writer’s mother tongue(s) in a text could show how new forms are created by this form of language encounter. For such a study, though, linguistic competence in both (or more) languages is necessary. On the other hand, read- ing a text for ‘mistakes’ (as for instance some critics have done with Dimitré Dinev’s texts) consolidates the border between immigrant writers and those who ‘actually belong’. The analysis in Chapter 2 of this book takes a different
193 See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
194 Marilya Veteto-Conrad, Finding a Voice. Identity and the Works of German-Language Turkish Writers in the Federal Republic of Germany to 1990 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 1996), p. 50. 195 Anna Kim, Die Bilderspur (Graz: Droschl, 2004). 196 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 96. Dimitré Dinev, for instance, in his novel Engelszungen gives a private and subjective account of Bulgarian history in the 20th cen- tury. In ever changing perspectives, the personal and family life of Svetljin and Iskren is told with references to the political and historical developments in the country.
The focus of the final chapter, Chapter 5, which analyses the creation of global ethnoscapes in the texts, evolved from the analysis of the other motifs as well as from recent studies on literature and migration, in particular Leslie Adelson’s reading of a text by Emine Sevgi Özdamar. It is strongly determined by an interdisciplinary perspective as it links the literary texts to sociological- anthropological studies of migration.197 I interpret Arjun Appadurai’s concept of global ethnoscapes as a network, which interconnects places, people, spaces, centres, peripheries, borders and so on, which up to now have hardly had anything in common. As an amalgam of migration and media, both of which play a key role in these networks, migration literature has a special role in their expression and promotion. Each of the following chapters begins with a general introduction to the topic that is followed by the analyses. The translations of primary and second- ary sources into English are all mine unless otherwise indicated. In the follow- ing chapters, for better legibility, I refer to primary works by giving the relevant page numbers in parentheses after the quote in the main text.
1.4 Excursus: The Context – Immigration to Great Britain and Austria
In this study, I am particularly interested in the themes and motifs presented in texts that describe experiences of migration. As stated above, I suggest reading these themes and motifs intertextually, that is, with regard to their literary but also extra-literary context. Thus, in this section I will give a brief overview of immigration to Great Britain and to Austria from the end of the Second World War until today. Immigration to Great Britain and to Austria has developed rather differently during the past 70 years. These developments also have to do with different historical preconditions: while Great Britain has a long colonial history and immigrants for a long time arrived mainly from (former) colonies, immigration to Austria after the Second World War was characterised by a lack of workforce and the subsequent recruitment of so-called guest workers. In the period after the Second World War, in Great Britain, as in other European countries, there was a great need for workforce. At first, mainly European immigrants were recruited: in the late 1940s about 345,000 people from (Southern) Italy, the Baltic States, and Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, the Ukraine, and Yugoslavia came to the British
197 See Adelson, The Turkish Turn, in particular pp. 41–49.
198 See Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners. The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2004), p. 254. 199 However, Black and Asian people had been living in Britain for much longer as has been shown in several studies, see for example Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 1555–1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Rosina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002); this is of course also evidenced by Caryl Phillips’ anthology mentioned above, see Extravangant Strangers. 200 See Winder, Bloody Foreigners, pp. 252–253. The positive approach of the British popula- tion (as well as the racism of the Americans) is portrayed in Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island. Andrea Levy, Small Island (London: Review, 2004). 201 The Windrush generation included several by now well-known writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, George Lamming, or Edgar Mittelholzer.
202 For a detailed account of the British legislation on immigration until the 1990s see Heather Booth, The Migration Process in Britain and West Germany. Two Demographic Studies of Migrant Populations (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), pp. 15–28. 203 See ‘Born Abroad. An Immigration Map of Britain’, bbc News
206 See ‘Jugoslawien-Kriege: 115.000 flohen nach Österreich’, Medien-Servicestelle Neue Österreicher/innen
Germany, the other most important countries of origin are Turkey, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.211 About 19% of the population is of migration back- ground, i.e. both their parents are foreign-born.212 Heather Booth compares the immigration to Great Britain and Germany based on the assumption of a basically similar development: both countries saw big waves of immigration after the Second World War that were later cur- tailed by respective political measures and reduced radically by the beginning of the 1990s (i.e. by the end of the period analysed by her). However, she notes differences between the two countries that due to similar structures can also be applied to a comparison with Austria: “In the case of Britain, migrants entered as immigrants and were always regarded as permanent. In contrast, migrants to West Germany were viewed as temporary guestworkers who would never gain permanent status.”213 In Britain, the (legal) status of immigrants for a long time was not discussed as initially most of them were British citizens and therefore had the right to live in the country, despite the racism and the prejudices they were confronted with. In Germany, on the other hand, as in Austria, the status of immigrants was defined differently: those who were not refugees, were guest workers who were in the country for a short time only and therefore did not have any right to participate in its public life. Booth points out, however, that the actual situation was different, in particular if the guest workers’ families had also relocated: “In particular, the study shows that con- trary to their temporary de jure status the majority of the migrant population in West Germany today behave demographically as if they were permanent.”214 The different view of immigrants is also reflected in literary criticism and literary studies when it comes to the reception of literary texts written by immigrants. This is expressed for instance by the terminology used: terms such as Commonwealth literature (a term that was criticised for instance by Salman Rushdie), postcolonial literature or Black British literature refer to the British context and its historical past. Concepts used in the German-speaking realm, such as Migrantenliteratur [migrant literature], on the contrary, stress its pro- visory character. The reception of literature by immigrants as well as the interest in literature on migration is closely linked to a society’s self-perception. A. Robert Lee states
211 See ‘Netto-Zuwanderung’. 212 See ‘Bevölkerung in Privathaushalten nach Migrationshintergrund’, Statistik Austria
215 See A. Robert Lee, ‘Changing the Script: Sex, Lies and Videotapes in Hanif Kureishi, David Dabydeen and Mike Phillips’, in Other Britain, other British. Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. by A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 69–89 (p. 70). 216 See 2011 Census, Table KS201UK
One should never pass over in silence The question of the tongue In which the question of the tongue is raised. john skinner, The Stepmother Tongue (after Jacques Derrida)
Language is one of the most often discussed issues in discourse on literature and migration, which also holds true for this book. In the texts chosen for this study, the reflection on language – a constituting element of any literary text – is often closely connected to the experience of migration; a change of place brings with it a change in language. In this way, translation (in a linguistic sense, but also cultural translation) becomes part of everyday life and strate- gies of dealing with language(s) have to be found and renewed constantly. Azade Seyhan calls autobiographies written in a language different to the authors’ first one ‘metatexts of language learning’: “For the writer whose medium is literally a second language, the writing of autobiography goes beyond the ‘second acquisition of language’. It also becomes a metanarrative account about the acquisition of the second language in which the autobiogra- phy is written.”1 Similarly, in texts on migration, language and language acqui- sition are common motifs. The following analysis concentrates on three thematic foci: In the first part of this chapter, the relation(s) of the second generation to language will be analysed, in the second part the concept of language in Anna Kim’s text Die Bilderspur will be dealt with, and in the last one the motif of the tongue, closely connected to language, in Dimitrè Dinev’s novel Engelszungen will be at the centre of attention. Thus, the intention of the present chapter is to give an impression of the variety of ways in which language is written about in migration literature. The texts and motifs analysed here are examples for literary realizations of issues such as foreign language(s), speaking, language
1 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 88. Helen O’Sullivan has recently published a book on intercultural texts that she reads as language learner narratives, see Helen O’Sullivan, Language Learner Narrative. An Exploration of Mündigkeit in Intercultural Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). Paul Eakin refers to any writing of autobiographies as a process of ‘second acquisition of language’. – See Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Act of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 9.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004306004_003
2.1 Neither Here nor There – The Second Generation as Linguistic and Cultural Translators
When migration and language change are experienced by a family or a group of people, the generation gap is often expressed on a linguistic level. While the first generation often struggles to learn the new language, the children are able to deal with an additional language more easily: They speak their parents’ lan- guage (often still perceived as the first language, even though speakers only have limited competence in it as the language is used primarily with family and friends) as well as the language of the new home.5 The latter is often learned at school, although this situation is a tricky one as starting school in a language different to one’s first language can lead to severe problems, such as
2 Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage (London: Vintage, 2004 [1985]). 3 Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (London: Paddleless Press, 2003 [1982]). For a detailed analysis of Mo’s literary strategies to render Cantonese in English see Susanne Reichl’s book in which she argues that Mo’s transfer from one language to the other creates ambivalent gaps for the readers. Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), pp. 187–197. 4 See Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak. 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 2000 [1995]); Feridun Zaimoglu, Koppstoff. Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 2000 [1998]). 5 Azade Seyhan notes this difference in language competence in migration, though she sees it rather from the parents’ point of view when she states: “The immigrant parents cling to a language on which their children have only a tenuous and disintegrating hold.” While the parents this way continue to have their traditions, it is up to the second generation to change both language as well as traditions according to the new place: “The burden of refashioning cultural practices to avoid embarrassment and misjudgement falls on the children.”, Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, both p. 74.
Elena My Spanish isn’t enough. I remember how I’d smile Listening to my little ones, understanding every word they’d say, their jokes, their songs, their plots. Vamos a pedirle dulces a mamá. Vamos. But that was in Mexico. Now my children go to American high schools. They speak English. At night they sit around
6 Horst Hamm mentions the second generation’s role of translators and the according parents’ loss of credibility. However, his conclusion seems radical: “Ausländische Eltern haben meist größere Sprachschwierigkeiten als ihre Kinder, so dass Kinder oftmals Dolmetscherfunktion übernehmen. So erfahren die Kinder ihre Eltern als schwach, spüren die eigene Macht über sie und erleben, dass die geringe Achtung, die ein Ausländer in der Bundesrepublik genießt, berechtigt scheint: Selbst sie sind ja mächtiger.” (Foreign parents often have bigger problems with language than their children, therefore the children often take on the role of translator. In this way, the children see their parents as being weak and they feel their own power over them. Also, they experience that the little respect versus foreigners in Germany seems to be justifiable as even they themselves are more powerful.) Hamm, Fremdgegangen – freigeschrieben , p. 95. 7 Cf. Scholl, Welt.
The kitchen table, laugh with one another. I stand by the stove and feel dumb, alone. I bought a book to learn English. My husband frowned, drank more beer. My oldest said, “Mamá, he doesn’t want you To be smarter than he is.” I’m forty, embarrassed at mispronouncing words, embarrassed by the laughter of my children, the grocer, the mailman. Sometimes I take my English book and lock myself in the bathroom, say the thick words softly, for if I stop trying, I will be deaf when my children need my help.8
While before she could understand every word her children said, now Elena has problems following their conversations. The language chosen for this reflection on linguistic difference and linguistic incompetence, however, is English and therefore the same language the narrator admits and laments not to know well enough. The narrator’s correct use of English, especially in the stylistically elevated form of a poem, counteracts the piece’s content and the problems Elena purportedly has. However, the use of English in the poem rec- reates the described distance between mother and children as a distance between narrator and readers since we do not have access to her most intimate experiences and thoughts which would be expressed in Spanish. The use of English emphasises the linguistic distance Elena feels both to her first language of Spanish, which in the text is present only in memories mentioned briefly, and to English, which although it surrounds her (and the reader), be it in more intimate situations (at home, in the bathroom) or in official ones (with the grocer, the mailman), still remains inaccessible to her. The situation of a dou- ble-exile, meaning that of the persona as well as that of the author, leads to a situation where English is used to express the distance to, and the nostalgia for, the mother tongue. Nalini, the protagonist in Preethi Nair’s novel One Hundred Shades of White, finds herself in a similar situation.9 She also experiences that her children learn the language of their host country, Great Britain, apparently without any
8 Pat Mora, ‘Elena’, in Barrios and Borderlands. Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, ed. by Denis Lynn Daly Heyck (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 386; quotation taken from Scholl, Welt, p. 68. 9 Preethi Nair, One Hundred Shades of White (London: Harper Collins, 2003).
Anna Kim’s Die Bilderspur Anna Kim’s Die Bilderspur deals with the relationship between a daughter and her father in a new homeland. It is composed both linguistically, as well as with regard to contents, in a rather associative way, and is full of plays on words. The daughter, who is the first-person narrator, as a child takes on the role of transla- tor for her father. He depends on “K. wie Kind” (10) [C. like child], the daughter defends him against “die Fluten des Fremdseins” (10) [the floods of foreign- ness] that he is confronted with, and she accompanies him “als Schattenspion, Heimlich-Übersetzer, Wanderstab” (10) [as shadow-spy, secret-translator, walk- ing stick]. More than just a daughter, to him she is an indispensable support in daily life, but he prefers that her help not be visible to others. Thus, her role as a translator is an invisible and secret one, even though the father rests with all the weight of his life in migration on her vital support.
Wir kreisen uns auf den Teppich, Edith möchte blinde Kuh spielen, Vater der Erste im Ring. Er hüpft auf angewinkelten Beinen mit verbundenen Augen im Kreis, dreht sich nach allen Seiten, den Kopf gegen die Erde
10 Monica Ali, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday, 2003).
geneigt, um die Balance zu halten. Man lacht und kichert, ruft Regeln, die er nicht versteht, dennoch bleibt sein Gesicht mit Grinsen verziert; ich schummle die Übersetzung zwischen das Kreischen, helfe bei Fallen und Fällen, nennt er mich sein Sprechrohr […]. Man lässt ihn weitere Minuten das Kreisrund sprengen, bewirft ihn mit Fetzen von Wörtern, die er ver- steht; das Grinsen erstirbt, bevor man die Lust am Spiel verliert, das der Fremde mit Fremdsein verdirbt. (10–11)
[We circle onto the carpet, Edith wants to play Blind man’s buff, father is the first one in the ring. On bent legs he jumps in a circle, blindfolded, turns in all directions, his head bent towards the ground in order to keep his balance. The others are laughing and giggling, they call rules which he does not understand, still his face remains decorated by a grin; I smuggle the translation in between the screeches, help with traps and cases, he calls me his mouthpiece […]. They let him blow up the circle for some more minutes, throw shreds of words which he understands at him; the grin dies away, as long as they are still in the mood to play, a game which is spoilt by the foreigner being foreign.]
The first-person narrator is a gentle translator; she is aware of the loss of authority that her father experiences due to their changed roles so she tries to put in “die Übersetzung [der Regeln] zwischen das Kreischen” (10) [the transla- tion [of the rules] between the screeches] to help her father “bei Fallen und Fällen” (10) [with traps and cases]. The situation seems to be uncomfortable and excluding, particularly before the translation – the father smiles although he does not understand anything, and the others are shouting at him without understanding his reaction. He, however, trusts in his child and the help he is going to get from her, as she in her role as a translator knows what the father understands and where he might have problems. Therefore, his face remains “mit Grinsen verziert” (10) [decorated by a grin], because he knows that he is going to be helped. However, the ‘floods of foreignness’ prove to be stronger: They are not part of the foreigner, but are in the heads (the “Kopfbänken” (11) [head benches/ banks]) of the others, from where they form waves. The waters flood the father, his smirk disappears and the game is abandoned before it is spoiled by “der Fremde mit Fremdsein” (11) [the foreigner being foreign]. The translator has failed, she was not quick enough, she was not understood fast enough. The ‘other’, i.e. the foreigner, renders both communication as well as entertainment impossible. After this negative experience of translation, father and daughter resort to their language of images, which is also characterised by a process of
Einmal überrascht er mich bei einem Schauspiel, kauert sich zu mir in die Koje hinter die Sofasessel, übernimmt restliche Rollen. Ich verbessere seinen Akzent, jedes Wort, jeden Satz. Eine Silbe Scham versinkt, nicht tief jedoch. (26)
[Once, he surprises me during a play, he crouches down in the bunk behind the armchair, takes over the remaining parts. I correct his accent, every word, each sentence. A syllable of shame is sinking, not deep enough though.]
The daughter is more and more aware of the fact that her father is not fluent in a language which has now become her first language, and she can hardly refrain from correcting him. – It is not only his accent that annoys her and which she corrects, but whole sentences, at times every word. The first-person narrator slowly gives up her vital position as a careful translator to her father, especially after he leaves her several times in order to return to his homeland. These partings, which happen more and more, leave behind the daughter in her role as a translator because her skills are no longer needed. At the same time, she loses the only partner who she can communicate with in both the language of images, and the father’s first language. Left to herself, she turns even more to the language of the new country as it becomes necessary to her to master this language in order to be able to construct her identity. At the same time, she becomes more critical towards her father, whose lack of Heimat [home] becomes obvious in his inaccurate language.
Vladimir Vertlib’s Abschiebung [Deportation] In Vladimir Vertlib’s narrative Abschiebung, the adolescent first-person narra- tor also takes on the role of translator for his parents.12 He has travelled to the usa with his Russian-Jewish family, where they apply for a stay permit after having decided that they do not want to live in either Israel or Germany.
11 For a detailed analysis of the language of images see Chapter 2.2 of this book. 12 Vladimir Vertlib, Abschiebung (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1995).
The process of applying and waiting for the permit is at the centre of the text, eventually though the stay permit is denied. In the family, the son is the one who speaks English the best and therefore becomes the interpreter when his parents speak to civil servants: “Ich war vier- zehn Jahre alt, meine Hauptaufgabe, bei allen Gesprächen im Regierungsgebäude zu übersetzen, wurde dadurch nicht gerade leichter.” (9) [I was fourteen years old, a fact, which did not make any easier my main task: to translate all the interviews in the government building.] Again and again, the parents urge their son to trans- late for them: “‘Geh ins Büro und frag, wie es weitergeht’, befahl mir Vater.” (10–11) [‘Enter the office and ask what’s going to happen next’, father commanded.] They also criticize him when he does not fulfill his role to their satisfaction:
‘Was hast du dort [am wc] so lange gemacht’, sagte er [der Vater] unge- halten, mit einer nicht verborgenen Nervosität in der Stimme. ‘[…] Stell dir vor, es wäre jetzt jemand gekommen und hätte uns geholt oder etwas gefragt und wir hätten es nicht verstanden! […]’ (15)
[‘What have you been doing there [in the bathroom] for such a long time’, he [the father] said indignantly, with a hardly concealed nervousness in his voice. ‘[…] Just imagine somebody had shown up right now and taken us with him or had asked something and we would not have been able to understand! […]’]
Similarly, due to his language competence, the son is also the primary contact person for the civil servants, who explain to him the various procedures of the family’s application and refer to him with their questions. This happens for instance when one of the civil servants wants to find out the real motive for the family’s immigration to the United States and starts to interrogate the boy.13 From this interrogation, the narrator remembers in particular the civil ser- vant’s form of address – he calls him ‘pal’ and ‘lad’ (given in English in the origi- nal). In the relatively short period of time he has spent in the usa, the narrator has already learned to distinguish linguistic nuances and therefore under- stands the different connotations of the respective ways of address. In the same scene it becomes clear that the linguistic competence of the second gen- eration also means that the children bear responsibilities which the parents are unaware of. Due to the protagonist’s knowledge of English, his conversa- tions with the civil servants become more significant than his parents’. The weight of this responsibility at times overwhelms the boy:
13 See Vertlib, Abschiebung, pp. 34–41.
Und erst jetzt, ganz unerwartet, wurde ich von einer Angst gepackt, die mir den Atem verschlug. Es war mir, als wären meine Füße mit dem Boden verwachsen und als drehe mir etwas langsam Kopf und Oberkörper nach vorne […]. […] Und je stärker ich versuchte, mich auf das Gesagte zu konzentrieren, je mehr ich mir vorsagte, das Gespräch sei entscheidend für mich, für mein weiteres Schicksal und das meiner Eltern, desto weniger konnte ich dem Sinn des Gesprochenen folgen, desto mehr entglitt mir das Gesagte. Es schien, als hätte ich nie Englisch gelernt. (35–36)
[And now, completely unexpected, I was taken by a feeling of fear that took my breath away. It was as if my feet were fixed to the ground and something was slowly turning forward my head and the upper part of my body […]. […] The more I tried to concentrate on what was being said, and the more I told myself that this conversation was crucial for myself, for my fate and that of my parents, the less I was able to follow the mean- ing of what was being said, the more it slipped away. It seemed as if I had never known any English.]
For the ambitious parents, the son is never good enough in his role as a transla- tor: “Mein Vater wurde nervös, unterbrach mich öfters, während meine Mutter, die ein wenig mehr Englisch verstand als er, mich zu korrigieren begann und hin und wieder selbst direkt ins Gespräch eingriff.” (9) [My father became ner- vous, he would often interrupt me, while my mother, who understood slightly more English than he did, started correcting me and would sometimes inter- fere in the conversation.] To the parents, he is too slow, barely eloquent, uses wrong collocations, etc.: “‘Nun? ... Übersetze doch schon’, drängte mich mein Vater,’ worauf wartest du? ... Muss ich noch lange warten? Bist du nicht fähig, diesen Satz ins Englische zu übersetzen?’” (50) [‘Well? … Go on, translate’, my father urged me, ‘what are you waiting for? … how long will you keep me wait- ing? Are you unable to translate this sentence into English?’] The first-person narrator is aware of the insufficiency his parents are talking about, and he is afraid of making the same mistakes:
Womöglich würde ich wieder: ‘That is not true!’ sagen, mich ängstlich umschauen, das Gesicht meines Vaters rot anlaufen sehen und die nervöse, etwas gehetzt klingende, aber bestimmte Stimme meiner Mutter: “Wie oft habe ich dir gesagt: Das heißt nicht: ‘That is not true!’ sondern ‘That is not correct!’ ‘True’ ist sehr unhöflich, willst du uns end- gültig ins Unglück stürzen, schließlich geht es doch um dich!” (9)
[Maybe I would again say: ‘That is not true!’, and would look about me anxiously, see my father’s colouring face and [hear] my mother’s nervous, slightly stressed, but decisive voice: “How many times have I told you: Do not say ‘That is not true!’, but ‘That is not correct!’ ‘True’ is very impolite, are you trying to invite trouble, in the end this is all about you!”]
Eventually, the parents decide that their son should always undertake impor- tant telephone calls (even though the father once states “man könne nicht immer nur ‘das Kind’ telefonieren lassen” (129) [it should not always be ‘the child’ who makes the telephone calls]) and they continue to depend on his interpretations in official conversations. The boy on the other hand, assumes his role nearly automatically: “Dann kam schließlich irgendein Beamter und fragte: ‘Wer spricht hier Englisch?’ ‘Ich’, antwortete ich.” (82) [Then another civil servant appeared and asked: ‘Who of you speaks English?’ ‘I do’, I answered.] Due to his language competence, the narrator becomes an important interme- diator at the same time as his parents’ competence is undermined. As if to diminish their perceived nonage, the parents, particularly the father, state several times that if their English was slightly better, they would prefer to undertake the necessary procedures at the various administrative offices them- selves: “Ja, wenn er die Sprache beherrschen würde, dann könnten wir schon sehen, wie man solche Telefonate erledige. So aber müsse er sich mit den not- wendigen Tips begnügen, die er uns gebe. Leider.” (129–130) [Yes, if he was profi- cient in the language, then we would be able to see how to undertake such telephone calls. This way, however, he is restricted to giving us essential advice. Unfortunately.] Although he speaks Russian and Latvian, the father remains speechless in this situation as a migrant in the usa and depends on his son. Languages and language competence is newly evaluated in migration, and while it is not language competence in general that is decisive, one still has to know the right languages. To the protagonists in Vertlib’s text, all the languages are of the same value: The first-person narrator speaks several languages, English, Russian, some German and Hebrew, as well as Italian and Dutch are mentioned in the text. Languages are selected according to the situation and the possible benefit, there are no hierarchies. Once the family is in the usa though, only English mat- ters to the authorities which renders all the other languages useless. In Vertlib’s novel, language change and translation take place on a more concrete level than in Kim’s text. In Kim’s narrative, two characters are looking for a common language and the estrangement between them, due to different progress in language acquisition, as well as the child’s role as a translator are depicted. In Vertlib’s book, the concrete process of translating from and into a foreign language is the main focus, and it is strongly connected to the possibil- ity of remaining in the new country of choice. In both texts, the positions of
14 A similar situation and experience of a whole family is described in Vertlib’s second book Zwischenstationen [Interstations]. 15 See Scholl, Welt, pp. 69–70.
Eines, das ich vor den amerikanischen Behörden versteckte und dessen Platz, ein Mauerspalt im kleinen Verlies unter der Kellerstiege, meinem Vater bekannt war (er liest das Tagebuch nämlich zwecks Kontrolle), ein zweites, das ich vor ihm verbarg, lag auf dem Dachboden. Ein drittes schließlich, das ich in einem holprigen Englisch zu schreiben versuchte und das meine intimsten Gedanken enthielt, war als Schulheft getarnt. Ich hatte es immer bei mir. (18–19)
[One, that I was hiding from the American authorities and whose hiding- place, a crack between the bricks in the small dungeon underneath the steps to the cellar, my father knew about (he reads the diary for inspec- tion), a second one, which I kept from him, was lying in the attic. A third one, finally, that I tried to write in poor English and which con- tained my most intimate thoughts, was camouflaged as an exercise book. I always carried it with me.]
He writes his diaries in two different languages – Russian and English. The father reads one of the two Russian diaries, but both are in danger of being read by the American authorities. Only in the third diary, written in English, can the narrator actually write down his most private thoughts, however this diary is the one his classmates could read without any difficulties, not to men- tion the authorities, if they were really interested. In the usa, the boy falls in love with one of his classmates and feels that English is the most adequate language to write about these new, unknown emotions he is experiencing. Thus, an important step towards maturity and adulthood takes place exclu- sively in a foreign language. Only in English can he express his “intimste Gedanken” (18–19) [most intimate thoughts], and it is only in this language that he can write them down because his first language is too open and acces- sible at home. The fact that Vertlib’s narrator is not completely proficient in the new language does not prevent him from expressing himself in it and thereby constructing a new identity for himself in the new language. On the contrary, writing in a foreign language offers new possibilities and opens up a whole new world for the protagonists. This is also the case in Kim’s Die Bilderspur, as will be shown in the following section. The adolescents’ search for language and autonomy differs in Vertlib’s and Kim’s texts. In Abschiebung, the protagonist experiments with language on his own and thereby distances himself from his parents while moving towards
Ich übersetzte. (184) […] übersetzte ich ins Englische. (50) […] sagte mein Vater auf russisch. (49) […] sagte auf einmal meine Mutter im schönsten Englisch. (50)
[I translated. […] I translated into English. […] my father said in Russian. […] my mother suddenly said in the most beautiful English.]
Thus, the language changes are camouflaged in such a way that on the (German) level of narration no other comments are needed because the changes seem to flow in a natural way. The first-person narrator in this manner is not only the translator for his family, but also the translator for the readers, for whom he transfers/translates everything into German. The narrator’s translations thereby become a double translation, and the reader is being distanced twice.
The text with regard to its content is a multilingual one, its multilingualism, however, is rendered in translation.
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet In Timothy Mo’s novel Sour Sweet, translation takes place on several levels. The protagonists are Chinese immigrants who open up their own takeaway eatery in a suburb of London. In this text, translation takes place not only on linguis- tic and cultural levels, but in particular on a culinary one, as will be analysed in the third chapter of this book. For now, I will concentrate on the analysis of language and translation with regard to the depiction of the second generation in the text, who in this case is the small boy Man Kee.16 Man Kee is born in Great Britain, where he starts kindergarten and school and therefore has a much more direct approach to British culture and the English language than his parents, who remain enclosed in the world of Chinese takeaways. This closer connection is illustrated both by Man Kee’s competence in English, as well as his knowledge about the family’s new home country. At first, the family does not take notice of his progress, which will eventually lead to an identity rather different to that of his relatives (besides his parents, also Man Kee’s aunt and his grandfather live in England). In a con- versation with her sister (Man Kee’s aunt), Man Kee’s mother Lily expresses her surprise about her son’s knowledge of English:
Son spoke to me this morning, Mui. Yes, he’s getting quite talkative really. I was a bit worried for a while. He was such a silent little boy. Yes, but Mui, he spoke to me in English! Eiyah! In English! But where would he learn that? It’s as mysterious to me as it is to you. What did he say, Lily? He said: ‘Hello, Dah Ling.’ But that’s just nonsense; it’s only the name of our village. Mui, why are you laughing? I’m not, I’m not. (118–119)
16 For a detailed analysis of Timothy Mo’s language use see Susanne Reichl’s book Cultures in the Contact Zone. Reichl focusses on Mo’s strategy of rendering the Cantonese language. Cantonese is translated into a particular form of English, thereby creating gaps of under- standing for the (English-speaking) readers. In this way, an air of ambivalence, or pluriva- lence, is created, which serves as a counterpoint to the clichés on Chinese immigrants in London, which are also part of the text. Reichl, Cultures, pp. 187–197.
Besides being the name of their home village, “Dah Ling” is the name the sis- ters have chosen for their takeaway. By watching television and being more in contact with the customers, Mui knows more English than her sister Lily, and after some time understands why the customers like to repeat the name of the restaurant:
[…] dah ling restaurant, after the girls’ home village. Natural attri- tion saw it become the Darling Restaurant, of course, and the girls the two Darlings. About three months after they had moved in, the reason for the customers’ strange jollity and their obsession with languidly repeat- ing the name of the restaurant out loud dawned on Mui. She didn’t tell Lily. (101)
Mui therefore understands Man Kee’s first attempts to speak in English and probably explains them to herself by the fact that he listens to the customers. Lily, however, is completely mystified by her son’s words. She understands them as being English, yet to her, the second part is just a repetition of the name of their home village, an incomprehensible uttering (“that’s just non- sense”). In this manner, her son resembles their customers, who in a similar way keep repeating the takeaway’s name, and Man Kee does in fact approxi- mate them as he masters the linguistic obstacles which to his family remain insuperable. In the first scene cited above, the three protagonists are depicted in different positions of closeness and distance to English: To Lily it remains more or less unfathomable, her sister starts understanding it, and finally to Man Kee, both English and Cantonese are possible options. At first, Lily does not encourage her son to speak English, which to her is a language inferior to Cantonese. On the contrary, she is glad he does not make any more attempts at it: “Son, providentially, had not displayed any further dis- turbing tendency to speak English as well as Cantonese.” (174) When Man Kee starts going to school, however, she can no longer do anything about his prog- ress in English. Besides the language, at school he also gets to know a culture and traditions different to those of his own family, an experience which is also described in Preethi Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane discussed further down. This way, throughout the course of the book Man Kee becomes not only a translator of languages, but also a cultural translator. Thus, the character of Man Kee in the novel serves to illustrate the possible effects of migration on later generations. Like in Nair’s and Ali’s novels, the contact between cultures in Mo’s text first takes place in the culinary realm. To the Chen family this is a very important space and deserves protection, not so much because they are proprietors of a
17 See also the analysis of the role of cooking and eating in the construction of identity in Mo’s novel in Chapter 4 of this book. 18 See also Mui’s explanation of her decision to become a British citizen at the end of the novel: “This is my home now” (284), she says to Lily.
There was little or no discipline, minimal organisation in the classroom. They interrupted Teacher, walked around the room, chatted in little groups, went to do big business and little business whenever they felt like it. They even, if you could really believe Man Kee, decided what they were going to learn. It was perfectly disgraceful. (236)
For Lily, discipline is the most important thing at school. In order to compen- sate for its lack, she decides to send Man Kee to a Chinese school once a week, “as a measured dose of radiotherapy might burn out cancerous growth.” (254) Again, in these situations cultural translation takes place. The readers, how- ever, hardly ever find out what these situations mean to Man Kee because the text’s focus is on how the family deals with the information and on the transla- tion processes that occur between the generations.19
19 One time, Man Kee’s friends at school are mentioned and thereby his position at school is illustrated, as well as Lily’s racist stereotypes (and again the focus is on the other family members rather than on the boy): “He was friendly with Indian boys now, he told Lily. They ate the same special lunch and went round in a group. ‘Nice for you, Son,’ she said, pleased it wasn’t those monkey-looking black boys. They looked so primitive.” (255).
As in the texts by Kim and Vertlib, the process of translation creates a dis- tance between the generations here also. This is opposed to conventional translation/interpretation which aims at approximation. When Man Kee talks about his experiences at school for the first time and mentions English dishes unknown to his relatives, Lily already starts to feel the incipient alienation:
There was something new happening; something which Lily realised was beyond her experience and from which she was forever excluded; some- thing she could give no name to; something which separated her from Son. She didn’t like it at all. (178)20
Similarly, in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and in Preethi Nair’s novel One Hundred Shades of White, the mothers realise via language and food that their children feel more like a part of the new homeland than of the old.
Preethi Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane The constellations of the protagonists in the two novels by Preethi Nair and Monica Ali are somewhat similar and therefore the two works will be discussed together in this section. Although the protagonists have different backgrounds – the family in One Hundred Shades of White comes from Southern India, in Ali’s book the protagonists are from Bangladesh –, in both texts there is a woman at the centre and her two children represent the second generation (not taking into account Nazneen’s first child who dies as a baby). In both texts, the latter feel more part of the new than the old homeland. Subsequently, the families lose their common cultural background; the children get to know traditions and values different to those of their parents and thus reflect on their parents’ way of life, which is no longer the only option for their own lives. The following analysis will concentrate on the depiction of the linguistic and cultural genera- tion gap in the two texts and will point out the similarities and differences.21
20 The process of alienation is, amongst others, expressed symbolically by the mango plant, which stands for the slow growing together of Man Kee with the family’s new home coun- try. Lily eventually even uses physical force when she rips the plant from the ground, symbolically trying to stop a process which was started with the family’s decision to emi- grate. For a detailed analysis of the relevant passages in the novel see David Chung, ‘Man Kee and Mangoes’,
At the beginning of the novel One Hundred Shades of White, the main pro- tagonist Nalini, the mother, stays mainly inside the family’s apartment in London because in her new home country everything seems very different to her. Besides, her husband goes to work and earns a living for the family, and even the groceries are being delivered so there simply is no reason for Nalini to leave the house. While at school, her children become more and more familiar with English and the British culture, but Nalini refuses to learn the language. In retrospect, her daughter Maya remembers: “She secretly willed that we would be going home soon and her taking English classes would somehow indicate […] that this would not be the case.” (23) Nalini consciously does not want to learn English as to her this would be a sign of staying in England more perma- nently, a place she does not consider her new home country, but rather a place of transition. She prefers to depend on translators and tries to have as little contact as possible with her actual environs in order to continue living in their new home the way they did in the old one, before migration. It seems she does not want to take the risk of letting the new language (and all that comes with it) intrude into her life and possibly change it. In Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, the situation presents itself differently. At the beginning, the protagonist Nazneen also stays mainly in her apartment in Tower Hamlets, a London district populated in large part by immigrants from Bangladesh. Staying at home, however, is not Nazneen’s decision but her hus- band Chanu’s. Although presenting himself as a liberal person, he does not want his wife to leave the house but blames the others for it: “‘Why should you go out?’ said Chanu. ‘If you go out, ten people will say, “I saw her walking on the street.” And I will look like a fool. Personally, I don’t mind if you go out but these people are so ignorant. What can you do?’” (35) Chanu offers a similar argument when it comes to language – there is simply no need for his wife to learn English. Nazneen, motivated by her friend Razia who attends an English course, still asks her husband about it:
‘I would like to learn some English,’ said Nazneen. Chanu puffed his cheeks and spat the air out in a fuff. ‘It will come. Don’t worry about it. Where’s the need anyway?’ He looked at his book and Nazneen watched the screen. (28)
Nazneen’s friend Razia starts to learn English because of her children who are growing up in Great Britain: “‘Do you know why I’m going to learn English?’
Colonial and Postcolonial Writing, ed. by Gerhard Stilz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), pp. 227–238.
Every time he came, he taught me a new English word or sentence: ‘This, Mrs K, is called a pumpkin and this is a marrow …’ […] and a year later, I could understand him and give him whole sentences back as well. He would always encourage me and as he left he would say, ‘You’re a fast learner, Mrs K, it’s coming along really well.’ (83)
Later, Nalini also depends on her children to help her with the process of lan- guage acquisition:
Amma [i.e. the mother, Nalini] started learning English, annoying us by interrupting the television programmes we were watching with ques- tions every five minutes as to who was saying what, but she did make a big effort to learn. (27)
Just like Razia, both women choose to follow their children into their life in the new home country. Here, as in Vertlib’s and Kim’s texts, the first generation participates and benefits from the second generation’s language competence, although Nair’s and Ali’s protagonists, by actively and conscientiously learning the language, take more initiative than the ones in the other texts. In her depiction of Chanu, Monica Ali also describes a different reaction to the generation gap in migration and again uses the motif of language for doing so. When the two daughters, Shahana and Bibi, learn English at school and
‘What is the wrong with you?’ shouted Chanu, speaking in English. ‘Do you mean,’ said Shahana, ‘“What is wrong with you?”’ She blew her fringe. ‘Not “the wrong”’. (165)
This allows Shahana to show the absurdity of the ban: Although she speaks English just as well if not better, than her supposed mother tongue, she is not allowed to speak it at home, whereas her father every now and then tries to demonstrate his apparent status in the new home country by using English himself, though at times incorrectly. Chanu tries to express his social role as an integrated immigrant, who is at the same time aware of his roots and tradi- tions, but he restrains his daughters from identifying themselves with their new homeland at home. His language ban seems even more rigorous, and at the same time arbitrary, in light of the fact that he has earned certificates from various institutions by taking evening classes (such as a correspondence course, an it Communications course and a course on nineteenth-century economic thought, though it remains unclear whether he actually attended the course, cf. 32) and therefore feels superior to his colleagues at work and, particularly, to the bigger part of the (uneducated) immigrants from Bangladesh. It seems as if Chanu perceives his own multilingualism as enrich- ing, but at the same time is aware of the potential dangers it brings with it, such as becoming distanced from one’s culture and traditions. He wants to protect his family from this process. Therefore, he does not openly ban his wife from attending an English course, but by expressing a negative opinion of the idea, he still prevents her from doing it. This is the same reason why he bans English at home.
It is not only Shahana who ignores the ban though. When Chanu is not at home, the younger daughter, usually always loyal to her father, also switches to English without Nazneen interfering: “When Chanu went out the girls fre- quently switched languages. Nazneen let it pass. Perhaps even encouraged it.” (158) By letting the girls ignore the ban, she herself gets closer to the new home country, and her daughters become her bridge to its new language. Shahana identifies with London (where she was born) not only on a linguistic level. She openly expresses her London identity for instance when she, at the centre of London, responds to a passerby: “I’m from London.” (245) However, in this scene with her father, who always stresses his Bengali origin, Shahana cannot convince others of her London origin and identity. The passerby in fact asks her: “Is that in India?” (245) and thereby does not enable her to live in her London identity. Only at the end of the novel is the female part of the family (Nazneen and the two daughters) able to identify in an inhibited manner. Then, the family structure which has evolved in the course of the book is con- firmed: Chanu returns to Bangladesh (where he had wanted to bring the whole family), while Nazneen stays in London with her children. Although he has tried to prevent the other family members from planting roots in London, he eventually has to admit that he is the only one in the family who does not feel at home there. By leaving, Chanu enables the other family members to finally lead a life that allows them to construct a respective identity and also fully accept their new homeland. Maya, the daughter in One Hundred Shades of White, also sees herself as a Briton and expresses her positive feelings towards England: “I loved my school, my teacher, the food, television, and I didn’t want to go back. If I was asked to make a choice, I would choose England every time.” (26) In both novels, the generation gap is also discussed via other motifs in close connection to the topic of migration. The various feelings of cultural belonging for instance, are depicted in what the various characters eat. While the first generation tries to stick to the dishes of their former homeland, the second generation tends to prefer those of the new one. This becomes clear in a comparison of Indian and British ingredients by Maya, Nalini’s daughter, in Nair’s text:
The prickly bitter gourd looked almost offensive sitting next to a sedate cucumber, the black-eyed beans looked evil next to the green garden peas, and the hairy yam looked as if it was going to eat up the potato. (24)
In Brick Lane, the daughter Shahana also expresses her rejection of her father’s idea to return to Bangladesh on a culinary level. For instance, when the family
2.2 A Language of Images in Anna Kim’s Die Bilderspur
Unlike in the texts discussed so far in this chapter, multilingualism in Anna Kim’s text Die Bilderspur does not help to bridge distances by way of transla- tion, but rather leads to an ever growing distance which can only be overcome by using a new language, created by the protagonists. Kim’s text can be regarded as an example for the intrinsic multilingualism of migration literature, although in her text, the only language visible to the reader is German. However, besides German, the language of the lost homeland (never precisely specified) is also present, as well as the language of images in which the protagonists – a daughter and her father, who is a painter – communicate and negotiate their identity in migration. As relations to the mother tongue and the fatherland change with the experience of migration, they have to be redefined, and the search for a new language becomes necessary. The language of images in Kim’s text represents this new language; it is closely connected to the relationship between father and daughter, who by using it try to overcome the distance between them. The space which is created by this distance therefore enables and encour- ages the creation of a new way of communication. Thus, with reference to Homi Bhabha it can be regarded as a ‘third space’. Bhabha’s concept describes a space in flux, a space where identities are constantly negotiated, re-/de- constructed, where ambiguities, complexities and hybridity are being discussed, and positions of authority are questioned and challenged.22 However, the lan- guage of images in Kim’s text remains a private language, accessible only to the daughter and her father. Still, they do not seem to be trapped in it or restricted to a secluded space between cultures as other concepts of the in-between have
22 See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 55.
23 For criticism on the picture of an in-between space mainly attributed to migrants see for instance Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’, in Unpacking Europe. Towards a Critical Reading, ed. by Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001), pp. 244–255. 24 The critic Eleonore Frey similarly perceives the text as being divided into language and images when she writes that one can read the text alternatively as a textbook or as a pic- turebook: “je nach Perspektive [kann man den Text] einmal als ein Sprach- und einmal als ein Bilderbuch verstehen” [depending on the point of view [one can read the text] alter- natively as a textbook or as a picturebook]. The text continuously generates images and these are also the main theme of the narrative, Frey writes. The book’s title also alludes to this, given that “[…] nur die Spur der Bilder […] [lässt] ins Wort hinüberretten” [[…] only the trace of images allows for salvaging into the word(s)/language]. Eleonore Frey, ‘Fremde Sprache’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 88 (16.4.2005).
25 See Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner Jugend. 1883–1912 (Berlin: Francke Verlag, 1958), in particular pp. 83–92. From this particular linguistic situation, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed the concept of a “small literature” which they use for an analysis of Kafka’s texts but also suggest to use for literature written by migrants, see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka.
Stumm träumen teppichweit Tuben, Pinsel, Skizzen, begonnene, vergan- gene, dicht verwoben auf dem Rain zwischen Betthort und Staffelei; ich tanze Seil auf Zehenrücken und Fersen im farbenfreien Raum, wackle meinen Füßen Platz, bis Vater Tuben, Pinsel, Skizzen, begonnene, ver- gangene, dicht verwoben, vom Rain zwischen Betthort und Staffelei weghäuft; mir ein Teppichnest freifegt. (11)
[Mutely, tubes, paint brushes and sketches, commenced ones, past ones, are dreaming, carpetfar, densely woven on the baulk between the shelter of the bed and the easel; I walk on the tightrope on the dorsum of my toes and my heels in a space free from colours, I wiggle space for my feet, until father stacks away paint brushes and sketches, commenced ones, past ones, densely woven, from the baulk between the shelter of the bed and the easel tubes; until he sweeps free a nest on the carpet for me.]
This is how the first-person narrator describes how she crosses her father’s stu- dio, on her way to the new language, the father tongue, which she wants him to teach her. Before learning first words, she has to pass obstacles, has to be brave enough to traverse the peculiar mixture of utensils belonging to her father, all forming part of his language: tubes of colours, paint brushes, sketches – these all are necessary for the father in order to teach her the language of images. This path is also a game to the girl, a walk on a tightrope, but without any dan- ger, a changing from toes to heels and back again in a space free from colours,
26 In this quote there are parallels to Kafka, who once in a letter to Max Brod compared the situation of Yiddish literature in Prague to the one of a child walking a tightrope: “[…] also war es eine von allen Seiten unmögliche Literatur, eine Zigeunerliteratur, die das deutsche Kind aus der Wiege gestohlen und in großer Eile irgendwie zugerichtet hatte, weil doch irgendjemand auf dem Seil tanzen muss. (Aber es war ja nicht einmal das deutsche Kind, es war nichts, man sagte bloß, es tanze jemand)” [[…] so it was a literature impossible from all sides, a gypsy’s literature, which had stolen the German child from its cradle and had prepared it somehow very quickly, because after all somebody had to walk the tight- rope (but it was not even the German child, it wasn’t anything, they just said somebody was dancing)]. Franz Kafka, Brief an Max Brod vom Juni 1921, quotation taken from Wagenbach, Franz Kafka, pp. 91–92.
27 Linda Stift compares the protagonist’s reading of images to Anna Kim’s way of reading society: “Bildlich ist auch die Sprache von Anna Kim: So wie die Protagonistin Bilder liest, liest die Autorin in der Gesellschaft, in der Landschaft, in den Gegenständen, in allen Spuren einer vermeintlichen Realität. Sie malt gewissermaßen neue Sprachbilder, erfin- det Wörter, macht unbekümmert aus Substantiven nie gehörte Verben […].” [Anna Kim’s language is figurative: just as the protagonist reads images, the author reads in society, in landscapes, in objects, in all traces of a supposed reality. She so to say draws new images of language, invents words, unconcernedly produces unknown verbs from nouns […].] Linda Stift, ‘Urlaub vom Abschied’, Wiener Zeitung (Extra), 212 (29.10.2004), 10. Sabine E. Dengscherz, on the other hand, argues that for the daughter the way of expressing herself is the text, maybe even literature, rather than images: “Sie [die Protagonistin] greift sie [die Bilderspur] auf, indem sie nun ihrerseits in Bildern spricht. Nur eben in Metaphern, ihr Ausdrucksmittel ist der Text und nicht die Malerei.” [She [the daughter] takes it [the trace of images] up by talking in images herself. In metaphors, though, her means of expression is the text, not painting.] Sabine E. Dengscherz, ‘Verfremdet’, Die Furche, 24 (16.6.2005), 19. 28 ‘Schreiben bedeutet für mich, die Begrenztheit, in der ich mich im Grunde befinde, zu sprengen. Anna Kim im Gespräch mit Christa Stippinger’, in fremdLand, ed. by Christa Stippinger (Vienna: edition exil, 2000), pp. 15–20 (p. 18).
What seems to me to be happening is that those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it – assisted by the English language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.32
In this way, English in India becomes an Indian language. The remaking of language reflects processes and conflicts, which take place not only in litera- ture, but on various levels (e.g. in politics, in society).
29 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 23. 30 Chambers, p. 23. 31 Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, in Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981–91, ed. by Salman Rushdie (London: Granta Books, 1992 [1991]), pp. 9–21 (p. 17). 32 Rushdie. ‘“Commonwealth Literature”’, p. 64.
Anna Kim’s way of dealing with language in her text is an example of how language acquisition and language adoption in migration could work. By using German in order to describe and write down the images, the language receives the “unexpected accent” Chambers mentions: nouns as verbs, objects, which start to carry out actions, unusual images – this way of writing adds an accent to German, which is not classifiable, but is obvious and always unexpected. The protagonists continue Kim’s manipulation of language, thereby making transparent the process of language acquisition. Reading the images together with the protagonists enables the readers to understand the changes within the language. When the daughter starts adopting elements of the language of images into her everyday speech, she reaches the limits of comprehension. For instance, she tries to transform images, partly drawn by herself, into language: “Vor dem Fenster wringt es Wolken, in die Lachen fallen Flammen, Edith bessert mich aus, Tropfen, ich widerspreche: Als würden Flammen im Loch ertrinken; ich zeichne sie auf, Edith versteht nicht.” (10) [Outside the window it is wringing clouds, flames are falling into puddles, Edith corrects me, raindrops, I object: as if flames were drowning in a hole; I draw them, Edith does not understand.] When the daughter describes raindrops as flames falling into puddles to her father’s partner Edith, she corrects the child – ‘raindrops’ is the correct word. The child though insists on her description and draws the flames, but Edith does not understand the picture either. However, when the daughter later tells her father about the flames and sketches them, he immediately knows what she means: “[…] ich erzähle Vater von fallenden Flammen in Lachen, ich zeichne auf, Vater versteht.” (11) [[…] I tell father about the flames falling into puddles, I draw them, father understands.] Later in the text, the lack of other people who can communicate in the alter- native language of images is mentioned again, though this time the protago- nist is already well aware of it: “Edith versteht keine Bildergeschichten” (20) [Edith doesn’t understand stories of images]. Again, the protagonist’s attempts at teaching Edith the language of images fail. Though Edith is interested, no communication takes place: “[ich] empfinde […] kaum Unterhaltung trotz wippender Nasenspitze in meine Richtung.” (20) [[I] hardly feel […] any com- munication despite a tip of the nose nodding in my direction.]. The language of images has become an exclusive means of communication between father and daughter, its images are only intelligible to the two of them, and other protagonists are portrayed as not being open enough for the language of images. For Edith, the child’s word creations are simply wrong and have to be corrected.
In her book on literature between cultures, Sabine Scholl describes how Chicano/a authors work towards a positive image of their contribution both to the English language as well as to culture in the United States. Thus, instead of negatively calling the mixing of Spanish and English ‘interference’, this approach departs from a positive merging in a ‘syncretic’ literature. Scholl cites Frances R. Aparicio who states that “the most important contributions of these writers to u.s. literature lie not only in the multiple cultural and hybrid subjec- tivities that they textualize, but also in the new possibilities for metaphors, imagery, syntax, and rhythms that the Spanish subtext provides u.s. literary English.”33 Azade Seyhan cites Juan Bruce-Novoa, who refers to Chicano/a lit- erature as being “interlingual”,34 because in the texts the languages are not parallel to each other, but are being merged. Code-mixing would be an example for this fusion, i.e. the switching of languages in speech (or, in our context, in writing). Words are chosen from different languages according to what the speaker finds more appropriate. In this way, they might also be used within the grammatical system of a different language. Sandra Cisneros’ texts are an example of this mixing of languages, which in her case are English and Spanish. The title of her novel Caramelo Or Puro Cuento reflects its linguistic structure: the text is written mainly in English, but it is peppered with numerous Spanish words and references.35 Sam Selvon, a British then Canadian author who emi- grated from Trinidad, takes this a step further in his Moses-trilogy. He was the first one to use Trinidadian Creole English not only in dialogues, but also in narrative passages. Caryl Phillips also uses Creole English in the dialogues in some of his works. However, these new forms and the transformations triggered by them also ask for open-mindedness on the part of the recipients. In Kim’s text, Edith does not expose herself to possible situations of misunderstanding or communica- tion failure, although these belong “zum Prozess der Kommunikation mit dem Fremden und des Überschreitens der eigenen Kultur”36 [to the process of com- municating with the other and of transcending one’s own culture] and are necessary for cultural, linguistic, and even human exchange. Yet this is a well
33 Francis R. Aparicio, ‘On Sub-Versive Signifiers: Tropicalizing Language in the United States’, in Tropicalizations. Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, ed. by Francis R. Aparicio, Susana Cháves-Silverman (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1997), pp. 194–212, (p. 202), the quotation is taken from Scholl, Welt, p. 105. 34 Seyhan, Writing Outside The Nation, p. 107. 35 Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo Or Puro Cuento (New York: Knopf, 2002). 36 Scholl, Welt, p. 105.
Er fragt, ob ich mich an seinen Unterricht erinnere, die Stunden, in denen er meine Hand samt Pinsel geführt, die Farben gerührt, die Leinwand bemalt habe? […] Er sagt, er habe die Bilder an die Wand gestellt, die
37 Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, p. 30.
Wand reserviert für das Lesen der Bilder; ich hätte gelernt, Linien zu buchstabieren, er habe verbessert. (58)
[He asks whether I can remember his instructions, the hours in which he guided my hand with the paint brush, stirred the colours, painted the canvas? […] He says he leaned the pictures against the wall, the wall was reserved for the reading of the pictures; I learned to spell lines, he was correcting.]
The daughter listens, but she confuses him with her questions, pretending not to remember: “Ich bitte ihn, mir mehr zu erzählen. […] Ich frage, ob mir die Zeichnungen gefallen hätten. Diese Frage irritiert ihn.” (58) [I ask him to tell me more. […] I ask him whether I liked the paintings. He is confused by this question.] Although she recognises her father, she does not remember the common language or perhaps chooses not to remember it. She has lost the language of images, too many farewells and arrivals have taken place in the meantime, as well as her own taking leave from leaving. The reunion between father and daughter fails: the language of images becomes the sole means of expression for the father, but it does not enable him to communicate. This time he is left on his own, just like at the beginning of the text. With the loss of lan- guage, he has also lost his daughter. The daughter relates to the readers what her father says at the end of her visit in the hospital,: “Ich sei nicht seine Tochter. […] das Fremde blende ihn.” (61) [I was not his daughter. […] the unknown/ other was blinding him.] As before, misunderstanding means estrangement. In this manner, the created language does not endure in Die Bilderspur. At the end of the text the situation is similar to the one at the beginning: the lan- guage of images is the father’s language, and the daughter loses the ability to communicate with her father in it. To her, the language of the new and that of the old homeland remain. This impossibility to sustain the common language in migration can be read as another expression of the generation gap. In this text, however, the father seems to anticipate his daughter’s feelings of home and therefore tries to make a decision for her instead of letting her decide for herself. He does so for instance when he keeps returning to his homeland, but does not take his daughter with him. His explanation reads as follows: “Ich müsse bleiben, ich hätte mich angepasst, er wolle keine Wurzeln ausreißen, er aber müsse gehen, […] Heimat haben” (18) [I had to stay, I had adapted, he did not want to pull out roots, but he had to go […] had to have a homeland], and the grown-up daughter thinks: “noch heute die Frage, ob er eine kleine Träne im Augenwinkel nicht verkneifen konnte” (19) [and still today the question whether there wasn’t a small teardrop in the corner of his eye]. Only much
2.3 The Motif of the Tongue in Dimitré Dinev’s Novel Engelszungen
Bilingualism and multilingualism can assume extreme forms: In Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior, for instance, a mother slits her daugh- ter’s frenulum of tongue to enable the child to be bilingual (two-tongued): “[I cut it so that] Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything”,40 the mother explains to her daughter when she, later in life, finds out about this crippledness. Here, the tongue becomes the central organ of speech. It also plays a central role in language change. In fact, the tongue is a very common motif in texts on migration. Thus, this final chap-
38 Scholl, Welt, p. 96. 39 Scholl, Welt, p. 96. 40 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 164.
41 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 75. 42 Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Mutterzunge (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1991), p. 7. Note that Mutterzunge is a word created by Özdamar. It is a literal translation of the Turkish word for mother tongue, anadili, which, like in English, is composed of ‘mother’ (ana) and ‘tongue’ (dil). 43 Özdamar, Mutterzunge, p. 7.
Kingston’s book, in Elias Canetti’s autobiography Die gerettete Zunge, the pro- tagonist’s tongue is threatened to be cut.44 This text is an autobiography of an author who lived and wrote in several languages and in which multilingualism and language change take centre stage, and where again, the tongue is attrib- uted a particular, central role.45 A similarly radical approach is communicated in the title of Zafer Senocak’s collection of essays, Zungenentfernung. Bericht aus der Quarantänestation [Removal of the Tongue. Reports from the Quarantine Office].46 Moray McGowan reads the title of Senocak’s volume as an opposition to the common attributions to Turkish-German literature: “[…] the volume’s title gives notice of an act of removal of and from the tongue as a refusal to perpetuate familiar tropes, whether of migrant inarticulacy or garrulity.”47 In the same article, McGowan furthermore refers to two other ref- erences to the tongue in Senocak’s work: on the one hand the image of the border, which in his poem ‘Doppelmann’ runs right through the tongue of the lyrical I.48 However, for McGowan this stands less for the linguistic estrange- ment of immigrants than for another recurrent motif in Senocak’s texts, namely the motif of unease which holds creative potential.49 On the other hand, the tongue can be found again in his novel Der Erottomane, where the word occurs as “siebenzüngige Peitsche” [whip with ‘seven tongues’], a prosti- tute’s sadomasochistic device.50 This image again expresses both the physical- ity of the tongue and approximates it to pain. The tongue, and with it language (or languages, respectively, as the image suggests seven tongues), oscillates between pain and lust – poles which Dinev also refers to in Engelszungen.51
44 Elias Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994 [1977]). 45 For a detailed analysis of language and language acquisition in Canetti’s Die gerettete Zunge see Helen O’Sullivan, ‘Father Tongue and Mother Tongue – Elias Canetti’, Journal of Postgraduate Research Trinity College Dublin, 5 (2005–2006), 130–143 as well as O’Sullivan, Language Learner Narrative. 46 Zafer Senocak, Zungenentfernung. Bericht aus der Quarantänestation (Munich: Babel Verlag, 2001). 47 McGowan, ‘Turkish-German Fiction’, p. 212. 48 Zafer Senocak, ‘Doppelmann’, in Übergang. Ausgewählte Gedichte 1980–2005, Zafer Senocak (Munich: Babel Verlag, 2005), p. 147. 49 See McGowan, p. 212. 50 Zafer Senocak, Der Erottomane. Ein Findelbuch (Munich: Babel Verlag, 1999). 51 A similar image, which refers to the skin rather than the tongue, can be found in the novel Our House in the Last World by the Chicano-author Oscar Hijuelo. Here, the skin of one of the protagonists is being ripped open by the English language: “[…] Spanish words drifted inside him, he dreamed in Spanish, but English began whooshing inside. English forced its way through him, splitting his skin”. Oscar Hijuelo, Our House in the Last World
In all of these texts, the tongue acts as the link between body and language, thereby relations between speaking and other sensual impressions, such as tasting, become obvious. As a pre-verbal organ, the tongue can also be used for various other types of communication, which for instance can be expressed via taste or pleasure. This way, the tongue plays a role in the texts by Timothy Mo and Preethi Nair, in which cooking and eating are major themes (discussed in chapter three of this book). The connection between pleasure, taste, tongue, and language/speaking can also be found in Dinev’s novel. Another aspect of the symbol of the tongue is its function as a pre-verbal organ of cognition; children put things into their mouths in order to liter- ally grasp them. This epistemic value of the tongue is expressed in a negative way in Dinev’s text, where for example, tongues are cut because their owners know too much. The tongue can also “grasp” the new language, as is described by the German-Japanese author Yoko Tawada in her collection of essays enti- tled Überseezungen [Overseas Tongues].52 For instance, in the essay titled ‘Zungentanz’ [Dance of the Tongue] the first-person narrator becomes a tongue, which has problems understanding and pronouncing words and phrases in the new language.53 The tongue has particular problems pronounc- ing some combinations of letters and it refuses to surrender to them. These letters become concrete obstacles, which later in the text become manifested on the narrator’s boyfriend’s body which the narrator explores with her tongue.54 At the centre of Dimitré Dinev’s novel Engelszungen, there are two Bulgarians, Iskren Mladenov and Svetljo Apostolov, whose lives are being nar- rated in a parallel way from their birth to their final encounter in Vienna.
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1990 [1983]), 95; the quotation is taken from Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 81. Seyhan also refers to another text, where the experience of migration and borders becomes obvious and visible as physical wounds: in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, the Mexican border becomes an open wound in the body of the first person narrator. See Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 120. 52 Yoko Tawada, Überseezungen (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag, 2002). 53 Yoko Tawada, ‘Zungentanz’, in Überseezungen, Yoko Tawada (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag, 2002), pp. 9–14. 54 In her analysis of Yoko Tawada’s short novel Das Bad (The bath), Sabine Fischer states that Tawada in her writing is geared to “Formen der körperlichen Kommunikation” [forms of physical communication]. Also in Das Bad, the motif of the tongue comes up, albeit in its deprivation: A dead woman steals the protagonist’s tongue. Sabine Fischer, ‘“Verschwinden ist schön”: Zu Yoko Tawadas Kurzroman Das Bad’, in Denn du tanzt auf einem Seil. Positionen deutschsprachiger MigrantInnenliteratur, ed. by Sabin*e Fischer and Moray McGowan (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1997), pp. 101–113, p. 100.
By narrating the family histories of the two characters, Dinev sketches a pan- orama of Bulgaria’s history in the 20th century, including emigration after the collapse of the communist regime. The focus is on the protagonists’ personal histories, which are constantly contrasted with events in politics and society. At the same time, life in migration is always present as a theme, as the novel does not start chronologically, but with a flash-forward to a scene in Vienna, a place of action which is mentioned again only at the end of the book. In Engelszungen, speaking and the motif of the tongue takes centre stage.55 It is present in its title and is later taken up in various forms. More often than not, the tongue becomes a mute organ. The muteness though leads to alternative ways of communication: for instance to the language of bodies, another pre-verbal form of communication, which uses the tongue primarily as a sensual organ, as the organ for taste and pleasure – both in a culinary and a sexual way. The title of the novel draws the readers’ attention to language and speaking. Engelszungen, ‘Angels’ Tongues’, recalls the German saying mit Engelszungen reden, which means to speak to someone in an insistent manner or with great power of persuasion. In Dinev’s novel, the attribute ‘angel’s tongue’ most obvi- ously refers to Iskren’s father, Mladen Mladenov.56 As the chairman of the
55 In some of the reviews language, speaking, and tongues are mentioned as main motifs of the novel. For instance, Klaus Zeyringer writes: “Eine wesentliche Rolle spielen dabei die Wörter und Bilder, das Sprechen und das Träumen, das Lachen und das Weinen […].” [Words, images, speaking and dreaming, laughing and crying play essential roles […]] and, a bit further down: “Die Breiten seiner Prosa hält Dinev zudem durch ein Netz zusammen, in dem das Traum- und Titelmotiv (die Zunge, das Reden) die wichtigsten Knoten sind.” [Besides, Dinev holds together the broadness of his prose by a net in which the the dream motif and the main motif (the tongue, speaking) are the most important knots.] Klaus Zeyringer, ‘Engel mit Handy’, Der Standard (Album), 4516 (6.11.2003), p. A6. Paul Jandl also underlines the motifs of language and the tongue: “Die Sprache spielt eine große Rolle. […] Als leitmotivisches Bild kommt die Zunge im dicht gewebten Roman immer wieder vor.” [Language is very important. […] The tongue reappears in the tightly woven novel as a leitmotif.] Paul Jandl, ‘Mit Wärme, Witz und Wissen’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 285 (8.12.2003), p. 20. Finally, Gudrun Braunsperger also mentions the tongue as one of the important motifs: “Einige Motive spielen dabei eine wichtige Rolle, Friedhöfe etwa oder Zungen.” [Several motifs are important, cemeteries, for instance, or tongues.] Gudrun Braunsperger, ‘Engel aus Stein mit Handy’, Die Presse (Spectrum), 16726 (15.11.2003), p. vii. 56 The expression mit Engelszungen reden goes back to a quote from apostle Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians in the Bible: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” (Bible (new interna- tional version), First Epistle to the Corinthians, 13.1. In our context it is also noteworthy
Ich habe schon Rinds- und Kalbs- und Lammzunge gekostet. Aber was eine Engelszunge ist und wofür man sie verwenden kann, weiß ich nicht, Genosse Shivkov. Ich rede einfach mit der Sprache des Volkes, das ist alles. (334)
[I have already tasted beef, veal, and lamb tongue. But I have no idea what an angel’s tongue is and what it can be used for, Comrade Zhivkov. I just speak with the language of the people, that’s all.]
This supposedly humble self-assessment is exactly what Zhivkov wants to hear. The ‘language of the people’, i.e. the tongue of the people, rather than that of angels is what the party wants to speak in order to successfully address the people (who, however, have stopped listening long ago). Using Zhivkov’s com- parison himself could become dangerous for Mladen. In a society where lan- guage and speaking might have fatal consequences, content and arguments count and have weight with regard to the political power (or impotence) of speakers and listeners. Mladen might be a good orator, but it could very well be that his speeches are only good enough for the Party and are not brilliant at all.
that in translations of this passage it is sometimes noted that the word ‘tongues’ could be replaced by ‘languages’.) Paul furthermore distinguishes between prophetic speaking and speaking in tongues, the first is addressed to men, the latter is private, personal talking to God, which, amongst others, is read as a symbol for the Holy Spirit. Mladen’s supposedly speaking with an angel’s tongue corresponds to Paul’s interpretation but with God being replaced by the communist system.
Seen from this point of view, it does not really matter whether he speaks with beef, veal, lamb, or angel’s tongues. In Dinev’s text, the tongue is both an organ of speech as well as one of non- speaking. While Iskren’s father masters the art of socialist talk, Svetljo, due to an experience with his tongue and ‘Comrade Zhivkov’, does not speak for a very long time. When he is about one year old, Svetljo’s father takes him to Sofia where he is supposed to hear a speech by Zhivkov for the first time. During the speech, for which Dinev uses original quotes from speeches by Zhivkov, the child falls asleep in a kind of rucksack on his father’s back.57 He wakes up very suddenly when the people around him start to cheer. Svetljo is scared because of the noise and accidentally swallows his tongue, which his father manages to pull out of his throat just in time. This experience has con- sequences for Svetljo growing up: he becomes a very silent boy and refuses to start speaking. The head of state’s speech makes him fall silent completely, and not only when it comes to speech: “er weinte nicht, er lachte nicht, er brüllte nicht, er knurrte nicht” (153) [he did not cry, he did not laugh, he did not bawl, he did not growl] – he does not make any sounds, but just looks at his worried mother Marina with big eyes. Although the audience cheers after Zhivkov’s speech, Svetljo instinctively seems to know that this person’s speech makes all the others fall silent, i.e. not only Svetljo, but the Bulgarian people, who under communism have lost their voice. In this instant, the relative value of speaking becomes obvious: a single person’s speech and tongue – Zhivkov’s – is worth more than the common voice of all the others. Svetljo’s reaction to this insight is complete silence, for a moment he even loses (i.e. swallows) his tongue. Elsewhere in the book, the tongue is again associated with falling silent. Marina, Svetljo’s mother, has fallen in love with a bus driver and has an affair with him. She wants to be divorced from her husband Jordan, but he refuses to do so. As a corporal of the militia he has his own methods to put an end to his wife’s extramarital affair. Once he has identified her lover, he interrogates him just as he has done to others many times before as a sergeant. He asks the bus driver what his wife likes best, what makes her “richtig scharf” (396) [really hot], and the young man answers: “Die Zunge.” (396) [The tongue.] Satisfied after having found out these details, Jordan kills his rival. He cuts out the dead man’s tongue and keeps it preserved in alcohol at home. Once a week he takes out the glass container from its hiding place to watch it, but his hopes are in vain – his wife has already left him and will not come back. The tongue remains his trophy which he keeps “wie ein wertvolles seltenes Tier” (397) [like a
57 See Dinev, Engelszungen, pp. 149–152 and the note on p. 599 where Dinev quotes the origi- nal sources of Zhivkov’s speech.
precious rare animal]. Again, in Bulgaria’s hierarchical, politically dominated society, as described in the novel, speaking leads to silence. By giving the information (i.e. by using his tongue), the bus driver also gives the reason for his death. The inflicted silence is underlined by the fact that Jordan cuts out his tongue, but it redounds upon him as there is no further communication with his wife either. As with Svetljo before, who refused to speak to him, Jordan fails again with his professional methods in his private life. The bus driver’s tongue, which Jordan later puts around his neck on a string, furthermore becomes a symbol for the many tongues he has forced to speak during his time in the militia.58 The tongue is a pre-verbal organ, which primarily is a body part and only together with other processes and experience becomes constitutive for com- munication. In Engelszungen this physical aspect of language/tongue is taken up several times in the context of taste in the widest sense. The tongue is understood as an organ which links body and language. For instance, the accent of Emma, a Hungarian girl living in Vienna, sounds sweet “als ob die Zunge in ihrem Mund mit einer Weintraube spielte” (495) [as if the tongue in her mouth was playing with a grape]. When Svetljo asks his grandfather to speak to his class about his past as a partisan, the grandfather wants to make excuses, but his tongue impedes him: “‘Weißt du, mein Enkel, ich bin kein Held gewesen’, sagte der alte Svetlin und spürte, wie ihm der Saft reifer Trauben die Zunge zuklebte und er nicht weitererzählen konnte.” (311) [‘You know, my grandchild, I wasn’t any hero’, the old Svetlin said and he could feel how the juice of ripe grapes was pasting up his tongue and he could not continue to talk anymore.] In both examples, the text approximates language, speaking, and taste, with the tongue becoming the linking element between them. In the context of Mladen Mladenov’s speeches, the tongue also gains sexual, i.e. again physical, connotations when he practices and corrects his speeches with the prostitute Isabella, with whom he has a close relationship. After hav- ing given the speeches, he also reports back to her on how it went:
58 Men making trophies out of the body parts of their wives’ or girlfriends’ lovers is a theme which occurs in other texts by Dinev, too. In his narrative ‘Die Handtasche’ [The Handbag], for instance, a man commissions the strangulation of his girlfriend’s lover. The body is then skinned and a handbag made from the skin. Eventually, the man gives the handbag to his girlfriend (whom he betrays his wife with) as a gift. In this text however, the hand- bag, after a long journey through Europe helps its final proprietor, Sofia, to regain lan- guage. See Dimitré Dinev, ‘Die Handtasche’, in Die Inschrift, by Dimitré Dinev (Vienna: edition exil, 2001), pp. 7–33, see also Dimitré Dinev, ‘Die Handtasche’, in Ein Licht über dem Kopf, by Dimitré Dinev (Vienna: Deuticke, 2005), pp. 16–51.
‘Er [Todor Shivkov] hat mir gesagt, ich hätte die Zunge eines Engels’, hatte Mladen später, von Isabellas Schenkeln umrahmt, erzählt. ‘Worauf wartest du dann noch. Laß mich auch diese Zunge spüren’, hatte sie mit ihm gescherzt. (334)
[‘He [Todor Zhivkov] told me that I had the tongue of an angel’, Mladen said later, framed by Isabella’s thighs. ‘So what are you waiting for. Let me also feel this tongue’, she was kid- ding him.]
The tongue, both as a speech organ as well as a sensual one, unites Mladen and Isabella. The prostitute Isabella is portrayed as being a great communicator, especially when it comes to communicating without words. She has to show just as much empathy for her audience as Mladen does and because of her skills, she becomes his teacher. Eventually Mladen relies on her for his speeches entirely because he trusts her criticism and her reactions to his words. Soon enough, Isabella’s skills are being praised by Zhivkov via Mladen’s speeches, while Mladen himself feels most at ease when he can use his tongue in a sexual way when he is with Isabella. In the previously mentioned relationship between Marina and her lover, the tongue also symbolizes the eroticism between them. During their first meet- ing, only their “Lippen und Zungen” (309) [lips and tongues] meet, and later she tells him: “Mit der Zunge, mach es nur mit der Zunge” (388) [Your tongue, use your tongue only]. Eventually, it is exactly this organ which Marina’s hus- band keeps as a trophy after having killed her lover. In the relationship between Svetljo and Radost, his first love, the tongue becomes the symbol for the eroticism between them as well:
Sein Herz flog, sein Trieb schwamm, und beides haltlos Radost entgegen und, ohne zu wissen, wie es geschehen war, stießen seine Lippen an ihre. Eine Zunge drang in seinen Mund, spielte mit seiner. Zwei Zungen hatte er jetzt, und plötzlich hatte er das Gefühl, dass sich alles Gute in seinem Leben verdoppelt hatte. Die Freude, die Liebe, das Glück. (412)
[His heart was flying and his instinct swimming, both anchorlessly towards Radost, and without knowing how it had happened, his lips were pushing against hers. A tongue entered his mouth and was playing with his own. Now he had two tongues and suddenly he felt that all the good in his life had doubled. Joy, love, happiness.]
Later, when Svetljo has to leave for his two-year military service, this situation is repeated in a slightly different way and from Radost’s point of view:
Sie hätte noch etwas gesagt, aber da drang seine Zunge in ihren Mund. Zwei Zungen hatte sie jetzt und auch die nassen Spuren auf ihren Wangen wurden zwei, und alles, was sie empfand, wurde doppelt so stark, die Liebe, der Kummer, die Lust. (418)
[She would have said something else, but his tongue entered her mouth. Now she had two tongues and also the wet traces on her cheeks became two, and everything she felt became twice as intense. Love, sorrow, desire.]
In many of the intimate relationships in Dinev’s novel, the tongue, primarily its sensual aspects, is the main focus. This becomes prominent in another of Svetljo’s relationships, this time with the deaf-mute girl Kamelia. In this rela- tion, the potential dangers of speaking, and therefore of the tongue, are com- pletely absent. With her Svetljo can return to the world of signs, to the time of his childhood in which he refused to speak for a long time. For him, learning to speak was a step into a world that often brought pain and disappointment. With Kamelia though, he feels restored to a time and space which resembles his earliest childhood:
[…] und Kamelias Körper strahlte so eine kontinuierliche Wärme aus, dass er am liebsten wie ein Säugling den ganzen Tag neben ihr schlum- mern hätte wollen. An nichts denken, weder an früher noch an später, liegen wollte er, schlafen, träumen, Kamelias Körper spüren und keine Fragen hören. (517)
[[…] and Kamelia’s body emanated such continuous warmth, that he would have preferred to slumber next to her all day like an infant. Not to think of anything, neither of before nor of later, he wanted to lie, sleep, dream, feel Kamelia’s body and not hear any questions.]
His relationship with Kamelia is Svetljo’s second refusal of language. He nei- ther wants to hear any language, nor: “Nicht noch einmal mit dem falschen Wort zu reden beginnen.” (517) [Start again to speak with the wrong word.] In the relation with Kamelia, Svetljo retreats almost completely to non-verbal language. Only in this physical communication does he experience intimacy
It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Everyone Eats is the title of E.N. Anderson’s study on eating and culture and he sums it up in a nutshell: everyone has to eat in order to survive, therefore every- one in one way or another is occupied with food.1 Besides these physiological requirements, eating is a cultural practice strongly charged with symbols, mes- sages, and meanings. It can convey information on status, gender roles, ethnic- ity, religion, identity, and other cultural constructions. It can also be a symbol of solidarity within a group, be it the family or bigger communities such as villages, ethnic groups, or nations. Thus, in the representation of eating, cook- ing, and food in literature, often the focus is not on their physiological necessi- ties, but rather on their symbolic and cultural meanings. Literary depictions of eating and descriptions of dishes and meals have highly symbolic value, and can reveal a lot about the characters’ identity or their search for it. In migration literature, this becomes particularly apparent as the necessity for a re-negotiation of identity is often a main topic that is discussed via food and eating. Accordingly, this chapter will look at four texts and analyse how identity and the search for identity is linked to food and cooking. The findings will be related to earlier studies on food in literature, which shall be introduced in this section. In Britain and France, research on culinary topics in literature started earlier than in the German-speaking countries, where first substantial studies have appeared only from the 1980s onwards. Impulses for these have mainly come
1 E.N. Anderson, Everyone Eats. Understanding Food and Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005). However, a recent documentary exploring the phenome- non of inedia, i.e. the alleged ability to live without food or drink, states the contrary. Still, eating and food is a main topic here, even though in its negation. Cf. the film Am Anfang war das Licht [In the Beginning there was Light] by Peter-Arthur Straubinger, Austria 2010.
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2 Important impulses came from (in chronological order) Norbert Elias, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Pierre Bourdieu. See Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques I-IV (Paris: Plon, 1964–1971), Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979). 3 Alois Wierlacher, Vom Essen in der deutschen Literatur. Mahlzeiten in Erzähltexten von Goethe bis Grass (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1987). The Akademie für Kulinarik deals with eating as a cultural phenomenon, that is it is interested in the subject beyond the context of literary works. Also Alois Wierlacher’s and Gerhard Neumann’s works on food and eating, from an intercultural and/or cultural studies point of view, are a valuable basis: Essen und Lebensqualität. Natur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, ed. by Gerhard Neumann, Alois Wierlacher and Rainer Wild (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2001); Alois Wierlacher, Architektur interkultureller Germanistik (Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 2001); Alois Wierlacher, ‘Kultur und Geschmack’, in: Handbuch interkulturelle Germanistik, ed. by Alois Wierlacher and Barbara Bogner (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2003), pp. 165–175; Kulturthema Essen. Ansichten und Problemfelder, ed. by Alois Wierlacher, Gerhard Neumann and Hans Jürgen Teuteberg (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993). 4 Recent publications include: Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, ed. by Tobias Döring and others (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2003); Erlesenes Essen. Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Hunger, Sattheit und Genuss, ed. by Christa Grewe- Volpp and others (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003); Tanja Rudtke, Kulinarische Lektüren. Vom Essen und Trinken in der Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript 2013); as well as a special edition of the journal Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1 (2012), edited by Dorothee Kimmich and Schamma Schahadat. 5 Cf. Norman Kiell, Food and Drink in Literature. A Selectively Annotated Bibliography (Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 1995). 6 Goody further develops Pierre Bourdieu’s work who in his study La distinction presented an analysis of the various social classes in France at the time (i.e. in the 1970s). Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
7 Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1975). 8 David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies. We Are What We Eat (London: Routledge, 1997). In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson demonstrates how nations and nationalism are based on ideational, social constructions. According to his the- sis, communities such as the nation state, which are presented and perceived as being ‘natu- ral’, are more or less consciously constructed ‘imagined communities’. Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 9 Cf. Wierlacher, Vom Essen in der deutschen Literatur, but also Maggie Lane’s analysis of eating in texts by Jane Austen as well as Diane McGees article on dinners in texts by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: Maggie Lane, Jane Austen and Food (London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1995); Diane McGee, Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
10 Cf. Wierlacher, Vom Essen in der deutschen Literatur. 11 Cf. Wierlacher, Vom Essen in der deutschen Literatur, in particular p. 60. 12 For studies on food in science fiction literature cf., for instance: Foods of the Gods. Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. by Gary Westfahl and others (Athens and London: The University of Georgie Press, 1996). 13 Rothenbühler, ‘Im Fremdsein vertraut’. 14 Aglaja Veteranyi, Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 1999). 15 On cannibalism cf. also the following two studies: Das Andere Essen. Kannibalismus als Motiv und Metapher in der Literatur, ed. by Daniel Fulda and others (Freiburg: Rombach, 2001); Christian Moser, Kannibalische Katharsis. Literarische und filmische Inszenierungen der Anthropophagie von James Cook bis Bret Easton Ellis. (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2005).
16 Heike Henderson, ‘Beyond Currywurst and Döner: The Role of Food in German Multicultural Literature and Society’, Glossen, 20 (2004), http://www2.dickinson.edu/ glossen/heft20/henderson.html [accessed 15 February 2012]. In this article, Henderson refers to her book on preparation entitled Mouthwatering Feasts and Gastronomical Disasters: The Role of Food in Contemporary German Literature. However, on completion of this manuscript the book was yet to be published. Cf. also Rafik Schami, ‘Kebab ist Kultur’, in Der Fliegenmelker: Geschichten aus Damaskus, Rafik Schami (Kiel: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1993), pp. 11–24. 17 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge/ Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 79. 18 Wierlacher, Architektur interkultureller Germanistik, p. 379. 19 Cf. Susanne Reichl’s comment: “Food […] can provide a link to ‘home’, even for those characters who have never been in the country of their parents’ origin.“ Susanne Reichl, “Like a Beacon Against the Cold’: Food and the Construction of Ethnic Identities in Black
British Novels’, in Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, ed. by Tobias Döring and others (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2003), pp. 177–193 (p. 192). 20 Bettina Friedl, ‘Indisches Essen in Iowa: Die Bedeutung des Kochens in der zeitgenös- sischen indisch-amerikanischen Literatur’, in Erlesenes Essen. Literatur- und kulturwissen- schaftliche Beiträge zu Hunger, Sattheit und Genuss, ed. by Christa Grewe-Volpp and others (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003), pp. 109–126 (p. 111). 21 Friedl, ‘Indisches Essen’, p. 111. 22 Friedl, ‘Indisches Essen’, p. 111. 23 Krishnendu Ray, The Migrant’s Table. Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), p. 12.
In the following, the meaning of cooking, eating, and food in the context of identity formation in migration will be investigated in three texts: Preethi Nair’s novel One Hundred Shades of White, which I shall analyse by referring to Mita Banerjee’s theoretical concept of chutneyfication, in Timothy Mo’s book Sour Sweet, where the protagonists’ characters and characteristics are depicted and, at times, accented through food, and finally in Vladimir Vertlib’s novel Letzter Wunsch, where a scene at a Rabbi’s dinner table is symbolically charged and again food and cooking serve to underline (Jewish) identity. In literary texts, references to food and eating can be explicit or apparently incidental. Through references to food a text can acquire foreign or even exotic qualities, while at the same time, distances can be bridged via food. In the fol- lowing I argue that in literary texts on migration there is a connection between the depiction of eating, food, and its preparation and the protagonists’ life sto- ries, experience of migration, and their search for identity. No matter whether the texts talk about traditional dishes or dishes that belong to the new home- land, they are often used in a symbolic way or as metaphors and ultimately reveal more about the characters, particularly about their search for identity in the new homeland.
3.1 ‘Chutneyfication’ in Preethi Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White
In Preethi Nair’s novel One Hundred Shades of White, chutney (an Indian relish made of pickled fruit and vegetables) has central meaning. For the main pro- tagonist Nalini, who emigrated from India to Great Britain, chutney is not only a metaphor for her life in the new homeland, but it also becomes her reality in the new situation. By actually preparing chutneys, she creates a (new) identity for herself and her family, thereby actively undertaking a process of ‘chutney- fication’, a theoretical concept developed by Mita Banerjee with reference to Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children.24 At the same time, to Nalini cooking is a process that has purifying effects; it can give answers and solve problems. Like Saleem or Mary Pereira in Rushdie’s book, Nalini also has the gift of preserving emotions and memories. By using the right ingredients she is capable of triggering processes that help solve problems or bring back memo- ries. Her dishes and chutneys affect her surroundings and she uses cooking as a ritual in certain situations in her life. Furthermore, in the novel cooking is
24 Mita Banerjee, The Chutneyfication of History. Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee, and the Postcolonial Debate (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2002).
All the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred
25 Banerjee, The Chutneyfication of History, p. 9. 26 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Virago, 1995 [1982]), p. 459.
million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities […]. (459)
By way of this comparison, Rushdie’s narrator Saleem illustrates the singularity of any chutney. The tiniest parts of any ingredient, which he compares to the population of India, determine the texture, the taste, and the appearance of chutney. Even though the recipe might always be the same, no jar of chutney is identical. The chutney’s taste and its look, for instance, depend on the ripeness of the mango used and the exact amount of spices. In any case it is an individual product, no chutney resembles another one, just like every story of migration is individual, personal, and distinct from any other. A postmodern reading would see this individuality as the distinguishing mark for the whole category: chutneys are equal in their diversity. However, the characteristics of difference would not be carved out, an aspect which, accord- ing to Banerjee, is important though: “Such a comparison [of the ways in which each chutney is unique] […] would be more balanced in that each chutney’s uniqueness would not be privileged over those aspects in which it concurred with other chutneys.”27 In order not to let the differences become an unques- tioned characteristic, the individual qualities of a personal (hi)story should be made visible rather than just stressing their diversity. At the same time, this carving out of the individual differences also guarantees that no single (hi) story is privileged over another, that in the end the ‘chutneys of migration’ are similar in their diversity, but at the same time can be perceived as individual identities. The chutneys differ in their respective ingredients and their propor- tions, however because of these features (the ingredients and the recipes) they can still be understood as a group. 2. ‘disruptive spatiality’: in a chutney there are no layers; every ingredient, every spice is floating around because there are no allocated spaces. There is no hierarchy; therefore there are no different values either. This characteristic enables the coexistence of different concepts, ideas, and properties without having to put them into a hierarchy. The lack of layers represents the equal coexistence of cultural differences. Banerjee also uses the lack of hierarchy to carve out the inseparability of spatial and temporal aspects. To her, the post- modern concept of ‘palimpsest’ is further developed in the chutney where any hierarchy of layers is missing. In a palimpsest, one layer has to be destroyed in order to be able to visualize another one. This destruction of layers, (‘disruptive spatiality’) or rather the destroyed layers which cannot be perceived as such
27 Banerjee, The Chutneyfication of History, p. 10.
28 Banerjee, The Chutneyfication of History, p. 11. 29 Scholl, Welt, p. 72. 30 Scholl, Welt, p. 72.
Maybe there are one hundred shades for explaining truth, a spectrum from light to dark, depending on the vulnerability of those who have to hear it. Things are not always clear cut, they are not either black or white, life just isn’t like that (53),
Nalini says, referring to the title of the novel, but also, in an indirect manner to the layers of chutney, which – disintegrated and mixed – can take on various forms. The layers and shadings of Nalini’s life are expressed in her life in migra- tion, which in India forced her to take on different identities, namely as a daughter, as a servant of the Kathi family, as a lover, and eventually as the wife of the wealthy Raul Kathi. By marrying him, albeit without his family’s consent or approval, she advances her position in society. When she is suddenly left by her husband, Nalini has to adapt to a new situation again: she is out of money and has to fight for a living just like the other immigrants from lower social classes. In the end, however, she becomes a successful producer of chutneys – an actual and metaphorical victory for Nalini. By accepting and living out her various identities, Nalini starts to experi- ence life in migration as one consisting of numerous layers. As becomes clear in the citation quoted above, because of her various experiences in migration she learns to understand that categories, such as truth, have dif- ferent shades rather than being “clear cut, […] either black or white” (53). Realising the multifacetedness of her own identity enables Nalini to per- ceive other people with their own diverse layers of identity. Her cooking skills, which taught her about the interaction of different ingredients, help her in this process.
Chutneys and Chutneyfication Nalini receives her first order for chutneys from a friend, Tom, shortly after her husband has left her. At the time, she lives with her children in a small apart- ment, works in a nearby factory, and does not even have a proper kitchen at her disposal, no ‘room of her own own’ so to speak, for her process of chutneyfica- tion. She feels guilty because she only has time for her children on Sundays and she often despairs of her difficult situation. Preparing chutney, however, changes her situation: after the first delivery of chutney, orders increase and soon the whole family is involved in its production:
It got so busy that I stopped working Saturday overtime at the factory and concentrated on making and bottling hand-made pickles. Satchin and Maya [Nalini’s children] helped. The mixture needed to be stirred continuously so Satchin stood on a chair and did that. Maya wanted to spoon the contents into the jars […]. In just two days, we made a week’s wages. (95)
After some time, the Kathis move into a bigger flat and Nalini gives up her job at the factory in order to keep up with the production of chutney. With the chutney, the life of the small family starts to change. Up until now the proper metaphor for their life in migration had been missing, now living and surviving becomes easier, and the contradictions between the old and the new homeland seem to dissolve in the steam of the kitchen. The impulse to this process is provided by Nalini’s friends Maggie (her landlady) and Tom, who as immigrants from Ireland have themselves experienced migration and are familiar with its effects on identity. Their past has taught them the impor- tance of creating a new identity in migration and thus allow them help Nalini in the most direct way: by making her cook her own chutneys. The process of chutneyfication means two things to the family and, in par- ticular, to Nalini: On the one hand she now actively deals with the story of her life and its conservation, its chutneyfication. On the other hand, she is only able to do so because of the financial independence the chutneyfication brings her. However, the process of chutneyfication is also resisted; especially by Maya, who complains about how the family is now constantly surrounded by the odours of the chutney. The chutney’s smell sticks with her when she goes to school, and her friends see her encircled by pickles. The ingredients are also constantly present: “Soon, the bedsit was full of brightly-coloured mangoes and lemons, spices and bottles.” (95) In this way, the chutney is present all the time in Maya’s life in migration, but she experiences it in an unpleasant and obtrusive way. Her story of migration, however, starts in a different way: from the beginning, she turns to English food and this way is ready to accept the new culture from the start. Only much later, when Maya tries to build bridges to her former homeland India, does she become aware of how much she has missed that part of her biography. Even Nalini, though, at times worries about the process of chutneyfication:
I worried about practical things like the intensity of heat in that room, whether they [i.e. the children] would fall sick from the draft that came from an open window, the constant smell that must have made them nauseous. (100)
The heat in the flat, the draft because of the open windows – it is not an easy task to ‘compose’ this alternative history in migration, and Nalini is worried about her children’s health. She tries to do most of the work when Maya and her brother Satchin are at school – another indication that the process of chut- neyfication is mainly Nalini’s and that her children will have to create their own life stories in migration. Accepting the new, individual identity is a process which takes time: the chutney is freshly prepared again and again, new variations are created all the time, and the family is permanently surrounded by slightly changing odours which they can only slowly get used to. The chutney’s smell has to change from an obtrusive one to one which expresses a proper, new identity. This is eventu- ally expressed in a new chutney:
The mango and lime pickles were doing very well and I decided it was time to introduce a new range: apple, cinnamon and chilli. Ripe, sober English cooking apples blended with a mixture of temperamental chil- lies, a hint of toasted fenugreek and asafoetida for vision, all grounded with lightly fried onions and mustard seeds. In those bottles were a per- fect combination of stable West and fiery East. (108)
In a rather obvious and explanatory way, Nair lets her protagonist describe the ‘fusion of cultures’ in the newly created chutney: “It was an acceptance on my part, an assimilation of cultures, fused together with the coarse sweetness of cinnamon.” (108) The effect of the odours and the experience of the process of chutneyfication enable Nalini to accept her life in migration as her own iden- tity. Up until now, she has been using recipes from her former homeland. Now she can go a step further and is able to preserve her own creation as a mixture of her former and her new homeland. She accepts this fusion in an active way as she herself creates the recipe, as she herself decides on the ingredients, the taste, and the texture of the new chutney.31
31 In a similar vein, Bettina Friedl describes how the separation from one’s country of origin and the acceptance of a new home is expressed via cooking and eating in Indian- American literature: “Solange der Traum von der Rückkehr das eigene Verhalten in der Diaspora bestimmt, findet so etwas statt wie die Ausgrenzung der fremden Umgebung oder umgekehrt ihre imaginäre Anpassung an die eigene Erwartung. Andere hingegen haben die Trennung von Indien bereits vollzogen und evozieren kochend eine Begegnung der Kulturen […] ohne dass sie Herkunft und kulturelle Identität verleugneten” [As long as the dream of return determines one’s behaviour in migration, something like the exclusion of the foreign surroundings takes place or, on the contrary, the foreign sur- roundings are imaginarily adapted to one’s own expectations. Others, however, have
The Effect of Cooking and Food Nalini learned to cook from her mother, who in her village was known as a cook with magical skills. The mother used to cook with love and gratitude, qualities which would enter the dishes and affect those who ate them. This skill calls to mind the characters in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (and thereby inscribes the novel into a tradition of postcolonial writing). On the one hand, it is reminiscent of Saleem’s chutney creations. Through his chutneys he reminds people of historical situations and makes them aware of their own personal story within the official history. On the other hand, it evokes Mary Pereira’s and Reverend Mother’s cooking skills; their dishes also affect other peo- ple’s feelings and emotions. For instance Saleem’s mother, Amina, is affected by “[…] the curries and meatballs of intransigence”, “the fish salans of stub- bornness and the birianis of determination” (139). In contrast, Mary Pereira’s pickles contain “the guilt of her heart” and “the fear of discovery”, “so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers” (139). Besides the cook’s emotions in Nair’s novel, the ingredients, which all belong to the culinary tradition of the former homeland, are also crucial. Nalini’s mother attributed certain qualities to them:
Just the right amount of cumin to stimulate appetite for life, a cinnamon quill to bring spice or action into stagnant phases of life, lemon juice to diffuse an argument, chilli to relieve pain and turmeric to heal the heart. Freshly picked coriander leaves tempered bad humour and gave a sense of clarity, fiery peppered rasam warmed the soul, and grated coconut added to many dishes soothed and comforted. Pounded lentils […] for a sense of pride and stability. Golden beans […] were for longevity and prosperity. (55)
Equipped with this knowledge, Nalini’s mother ‘prescribed’ certain dishes and ingredients to all the inhabitants of the village. People came to her and described their problems or she observed situations before trying to help with her dishes:
If in the village there was a rift that seemed impossible to heal, she would muster forgiveness with bright turmeric, mustard seeds, ginger, garlic, the
already undertaken the parting with India and through cooking evoke an encounter of cultures […] without denying their origin and their cultural identity], Friedl, ‘Indisches Essen in Iowa’, p. 112–113.
bitterness of lemon and anger of hot chilli. The latter two ingredients were supposed to counter the bad feelings and diffuse them. She then sealed it all with warm water and made a paste, which she added to what- ever dish she felt appropriate, and then offered it to both sides. The results were not instantaneous and many could claim that it was time that solved the problems but somewhere, she was sure, her simple process of forgive- ness was working away. (102)
Nalini, who was taught these skills by her mother, takes them with her and uses them for her chutney production in London. She also ‘prescribes’ certain chut- neys or other dishes to her clients and thereby makes sure the ingredients have the proper effect on them. This motif of helping and healing with the assistance of food is also present in other popular postcolonial texts, such as the novel The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. There, the main protagonist Thilo, the female owner of a spice shop, has “a special vision allowing her to see inside the minds of her customers and learn of the various ways in which they suffer from the circumstances of their diasporic lives”, as Rüdiger Kunow notes in his analysis of the text.32 Thilo also listens to her customers before ‘prescribing’ them cer- tain spices that should heal or at least help them. For her friends Tom and Maggie, Nalini cooks with a strong feeling of grati- tude, which at first only Tom can accept: “Tom, as always, devoured the food.” (94) Nalini knows that it is more difficult for Maggie to accept her dishes and their effects:
Maggie found it a little too hot, which was understandable as the spices conflicted with her temperament, leaving her feeling vanquished. I hoped that one day the spices would do their job by diffusing the anger that was raging inside and that she could give up her profession. (94)
Nalini does not give in and lets the spices do their job on Maggie, who earns her money as a prostitute. She makes sure that Maggie helps her in the kitchen in order for her to be confronted with the chutney’s smell. Although Maggie does not believe in the secret effect of the ingredients and dishes, eventually they do work on her: “Slowly, she began to open up and diffuse her memories with the aroma that emanated from those pickle bottles.” (103) The smell of the
32 Rüdiger Kunow, ‘Eating Indian(s): Food, Representation, and the Indian Diaspora in the United States’, in Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, ed. by Tobias Döring and others (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2003), pp. 151–175 (p. 170).
In cooking there are always answers. As I squeezed the fresh tomatoes into a pulp, I thought of saying yes to Ravi and then as I chopped and fried the onions, I would agree to move the family to Mill Hill but on the condition that I kept my business and perhaps with the deposit I saved, I could lease a shop or an outlet where we would work from. […] Finally, fresh corian- der and a few cinnamon sticks made it smell just right. Things would work out. I called up Ravi and said, yes, yes, I would be his wife. (119–120)
Here, the preparation of the dish becomes a parallel to Nalini’s vision of her future: by preparing and cooking the familiar ingredients, she not only strengthens her identity in migration, but she is also able to think of new per- spectives for her family’s future. When Maya stays in Spain for a long period of time, Nalini keeps asking her to come back until she decides that it is “time to let her go” (268). In order to really let her go though, Nalini has to use the right spices:
Volcanic dried red chillies and mustard seeds bubble in boiling hot oil and burst, releasing their insides. The pungent smell fills the room with a black choking smoke, clinging to all that surrounds it, years of stagnation, guilt and sorrow that I had not been a good daughter, wife or mother, failing miserably in every role. (268)
Cooking becomes a ritual that drives out negative emotions, like feelings of guilt and sorrow, in order to make space for new, positive energies:
I open the kitchen door and the windows, and the suffocating fog is enticed away. Courage revisits and blows a gentle, hopeful breeze telling
me there is now space so I am able to start again, building brick by brick on new foundations. (268)
And when Maya eventually returns from Spain, Nalini manages the wounds of the previous years – Satchin’s death, Maya’s absence and the distance between her and the family – again with a dish, to which she adds sufficient ingredients:
Soothing coconut milk poured into the potato and onion stew as it boiled doubts away. […] Served on a bed of pancakes made with pulses, throb- bing black gram and angry red split lentils. Hardened seed surrounded by layers to survive external conditions, taking hours, like the years of absence, to soak and soften into a gentle centre, all that I knew she [Maya] was. Grinding resentment in a blender, […]. Finally coated with ghee, soft and golden, which melts into kindness. My daughter was coming home. Sprinkling just a little turmeric, so she would hardly notice it was there […]. Wounds are sealed with turmeric and from the thousands of fronds from the crocus flower, which make saffron. (264)
Cooking as a Female Tradition – the Kitchen as Space of/for Revolution As already mentioned, Nair portrays cooking as a female tradition passed down from Nalini’s mother to her and, at the end of the novel, to her own daughter Maya. In her study, Sabine Scholl shows how in literary works on migration activities and spaces that are traditionally perceived as being female (such as the kitchen) become the place of origin for female liberation. Scholl stresses in particular the importance of the kitchen as a space for the liberation of the Chicanas. In this way, the kitchen becomes a metaphor for the social and polit- ical struggle which women from less privileged social classes often have to conduct from the position of a servant in the kitchens of the white, privileged classes. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novels the kitchen is attributed with a similar political meaning. In Old Town Folks, the kitchen becomes the emotional cen- tre “wo es behaglich warm ist und wo entsprechend ‘warme Diskussionen’ im Geiste politischer Liberalität geführt werden können”33 [where it is cosy and
33 Joseph C. Schöpp, “Everything in its Place’: Amerikanische Küchenkultur zur Beecher- Zeit’“, in Erlesenes Essen. Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Hunger, Sattheit und Genuss, ed. by Christa Grewe-Volpp and Werner Reinhart (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003), pp. 83–95 (p. 89).
34 Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Boston: Beacon Press1993), p. 300. 35 Scholl, Die Welt als Ausland, p. 73. 36 Azade Seyhan also attributes a special task to the female family members in migration; according to her, in migration literature remembering the left homeland is part of a female tradition. The homeland’s past becomes a text of grandmothers and mothers, through which anecdotes and myths about ancestors are passed on to younger genera- tions. Cf. Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 130.
The Second Generation and Their Relation to Food Once settled in London, Nalini tries to compensate for her loneliness and bore- dom by cooking. She prepares huge meals, which she usually has to give away or throw out as both her husband Raul and her children have gotten used to English food, as Maya describes in retrospective: “Satchin and I discovered that we liked burgers and fishfingers with ketchup a whole lot better.” (24) They prefer hamburgers and fishfingers to traditional Indian dishes and try to con- vince their mother to cook English food. Similar situations are also described in other texts on migration experi- ences. For instance, in Meera Syal’s novel Anita and Me, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the region of Punjab prefers fishfingers to her mother’s dishes when living in Great Britain.37 Fishfingers seem to be a favourite dish with many children of immigrant parents in Great Britain; a comparable scene is also described in Shappi Khorsandi’s autobiographical book A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English.38 At a friend’s house, the first person narrator Shaparak is asked for the first time how many fishfingers she wants to eat and she does not know what to answer: “I had no idea how many I was having. Fishes’ fin- gers must be pretty small and I was very hungry so I said, ‘Ten, please!’ ” (220) Although her friend's mother only serves her two pieces, she immediately knows: “The fish fingers were the most delicious thing I had ever eaten” (220) and decides “I’d have to find out how they were made and tell Maman [mum].” (220) Earlier in Khorsandi’s book, the children ask their mother to prepare what they refer to as a normal lunch, i.e. sandwiches, rather than Iranian pitta bread, rice, and whatever is left over from dinner the night before. Eventually, after the first term at school the parents decide to pay for school meals rather than be blamed every morning for making packed lunches with food from the old homeland.39 In Nair’s novel, Satchin and Maya also want to eat ‘normal lunch’, that is the same food as the other children at school, and they secretly throw away the food their mother gives them:
The food […] would go into our tiffin carriers […], but it got embarrass- ing doing that whole tiffin carrier routine day after day, especially when Catherine Hunter held her nose, so we would get the chauffeur to stop on the way to school, run out and throw the contents over somebody’s fence. (24)
37 Cf. Syal, Anita and Me, p. 54; cf. also Reichl, ‘Like a Beacon’, p. 189. 38 Shappi Khorsandi, A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English (London: Ebury Press, 2009). 39 Cf. Khorsandi, A Beginner’s Guide, p. 113
Later, Maya remembers the constant arguments with her mother, where food always stood at the forefront: “Food was the battleground between her and us, used to establish the balance of power, and Satchin and I stood firm.” (238) Because the children have more direct contact with their new surroundings, they quickly realize that they are different and in what ways they are different. They also have the opportunity to easily refuse the traditional Indian food by just throwing it away. Nalini tries to fight this loss by adding English ingredi- ents, such as ketchup, to her children’s food. In these dishes the old and the new homeland start to mingle, just like in the new chutneys she later creates. The approach to food also changes in the situation of migration. To Nalini, the actually physical contact with food is important, both when preparing and eating it. She tells her children that “[…] it is important to touch the food” (239) and eats with her fingers: “Fingers connect […] you to food in a way no other instrument could.” (239) To Nalini, the direct contact with food means an actual link to her homeland and her identity, whereas using cutlery would mean keeping an artificial distance to something that is far away anyway. Maya and Satchin, however, have heard their classmates say that ‘Pakis’ are dirty because they eat with their fingers and they start to talk to their mother about hygiene. Not only the dishes but the ingredients themselves are viewed differently by the generations. By contrasting English ingredients and the products Nalini uses to prepare Indian dishes, Maya’s rejection of her own roots and her exag- gerated view of the new homeland are made clear:
The prickly bitter gourd looked almost offensive sitting next to a sedate cucumber, the black-eyed beans looked evil next to the green garden peas, and the hairy yam looked as if it was going to eat up the potato. (24)
The dishes which Nalini intends to prepare with these ingredients and which she proudly lists, only evoke negative reactions in Maya:
’For aviyal, olan, thoran.’ She reeled off a list of dishes just like she used to do […] in the kitchen in India and I nodded and made my way quickly out of there […]. (24)
Maya is convinced that since her family is not in India anymore her mother’s behaviour is inappropriate; she herself does not want to have anything to do with this nostalgia. England and therefore English food are Maya’s reality. She and her brother want to lead a normal life in their new homeland and there- fore want to adapt to English eating habits by having the same lunch as the
3.2 Sweet and Sour Identities: Levels of Discourse on Identity in Connection with Cooking and Food in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet
In Timothy Mo’s novel Sour Sweet, three different generations try to cope with their new lives in migration. Mo uses food, eating, and cooking in various ways as key metaphors for the experience of migration. In the following section I will analyse how Mo uses food and its preparation in order to characterise the pro- tagonists and to show them in their respective life in migration. Furthermore, I will deal with the depiction of the Chen's Chinese takeaway eatery and will illus- trate how it is portrayed as a tradition nobody identifies with. The Chen’s experi- ence with English food is another key aspect I will look at before finally analysing the social and connecting function of common meals depicted in the text. The Chen family comes from China and their traditional dishes as well as the hybrid world of Chinese restaurants and Chinese takeaways in London are the background (or rather the basis) for their story of migration told in the novel. Besides the traditional meals that the Chens eat and some traditional English dishes (which they hardly ever try), food served in London’s Chinese takeaways, which are neither English nor Chinese, is primarily represented in the text. By putting this particular culinary realm in the spotlight, Mo creates a culinary world that nobody really feels a part of. Its dishes are not part of any- body’s tradition, thus, a borderland of new hybrid dishes is created. The Chens, however, cannot claim this new realm as a new identity in migration as it remains distant to them. This is because they were not involved in its creation but rather adopted the main features of Chinese takeaways and continued tra- ditions foreign to them. As will be shown, processes of chutneyfication can also be identified in the text, though they are different for each of the family members, especially for the main protagonists Chen and Lily.
The Characterisation of the Protagonists in Sour Sweet Through Food At the beginning of the novel, Chen, the father of the Chen family, works as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant in China Town in London. He works hard and for many hours – six days a week. Although he receives a fair salary, is insured, and can afford a comfortable flat for his family, his position is not satisfactory. On the contrary, he struggles in a position which he has mainly achieved because of his status as a Chinese immigrant. Chen finds himself restricted to a space inside ‘his’ community of Chinese immigrants: in the restaurant, where authentic Chinese food is served, his colleagues are from China, and in his spare time during the day he sometimes goes to a Chinese film club. Being a Chinese immigrant in London seems to imply that Chen can only work at the restaurant and that there is no other space for him except within the ethnic business of Chinese gastronomy. This way, he finds himself in a kind of in- between world, caused by migration but not created or self-determined by Chen himself (and therefore not to be mixed up with Homi Bhabha’s ‘third space’). His life in migration is determined by somebody else, it is predeter- mined by his origin. In this situation Chen is unable to create his personal chutneyfication. Mo again uses food to further emphasise this condition, namely a regular common meal of the restaurant’s employees which illustrates Chen’s heteronomy:
[…] Chen enjoyed at the unusually late hour of 11.45 p.m. what the boss boasted was the best employees’ dinner in any restaurant. They sat, wait- ers, boss, boss’s mother too, at a round table and ate soup, a huge fish, vegetables, shredded pork, and a tureen of steaming rice. (6)
For Chen the meal is not only too late, but also too opulent, however due to the hierarchy he is unable to refuse it, particularly as the owner of the restaurant is very proud of his offer to his employees. His boss is not the only one who forces Chen to eat: when he arrives at home after work, usually around 1.15a.m., his wife Lily awaits him with soup, which he has to finish completely while she watches. “Did you enjoy that, Husband? Was it nice?” (6) Lily asks every time, and Chen always tries to answer in a way which will neither hurt her feelings, nor encourage her to serve him more soup. After the soup, Chen would like to eat a biscuit, which Lily denies him:
Sweet after salty was dangerous for the system, so she had been taught; it could upset the whole balance of the dualistic or female and male prin- ciples, yin and yang. […] For four years therefore, Chen had been going to
bed tortured with the last extremities of thirst but with his dualistic male and female principles in harmony. (6)
In this first part of the novel, to Chen the traditional food does not represent a connection to his former homeland as it does for Nalini in Nair’s novel. Rather, the food exerts pressure on him – at work where it makes his feet hurt so badly that he has to spend his day off lying on the couch all day, and at home where every night he is forced to go to bed uncomfortably full, unsatisfied due to the denied biscuit, heated up by the soup and the warm kitchen, and thirsty. In this situation it is impossible for Chen to undertake his own chutneyfication, to tell his personal life story through the dishes, instead he is constrained to be part of the others’ recipes and life stories. Chen’s wife Lily has a completely different relation to food than her hus- band, as is shown in the description of her lunches:
She and Mui [Lily’s sister] ate a frugal lunch of cabbage, rice, and a two- egg omelette, occasionally enlivened with four or five shrimps which Lily tossed in just after she had smashed the entire egg in a lightly oiled wok. […] Man Kee ate with his mother and aunt and fed well. His portions of chopped liver and fish were small but amounted to more than the total food bill of the two women. (8)
On Chen’s work days the women feed in this simple, light, and regular manner, but Lily prepares something special on his days off. She cooks duck or pork, which is mainly eaten by Chen: “Despite Chen’s muffled exhortations, the girls only picked at the delicacies which he wolfed down from his upheld bowl, employing the chopsticks as levers rather than pincers.” (8) To Lily and Mui, cooking and eating are a daily routine, however not an exhausting one. Their meals become “enlivened” by the ingredients, Lily can toss the shrimps into the pan with ease. Chen on the other hand, wolfs down his food because to him, eating has become an annoying duty that he wants to finish as quickly as pos- sible, hence using the “chopsticks as levers rather than pincers”. While the women are able to identify themselves with what they eat (and what they have prepared themselves) and in consequence can enjoy it, Chen can neither appre- ciate the food nor take his time with it. Just like during other meals, he is stressed and the food remains alien to him. Lily, on the contrary, is much more self-deter- mined: she decides what ingredients are bought and therefore what her family eats. This allows her to realize her own, personal version of life in migration. Aside from these differences between Lily and her husband, the diverse characterisation of the two protagonists also illustrates the different approach
Chen remained motionless until they had driven off, then lowered the heavy bags. He noticed his best shoes had become quite sodden with tea. He exclaimed and moved away, seeing that the fruit in the bags had indeed been squashed and, as he had feared, there were greasy-looking patches on the brown paper. The bags were already starting to disinte- grate. Perhaps this was why they had rejected his offering. (73)
He takes the fruit home and gives it to Lily, whom he tells it was left over from a dinner at the restaurant. Her reaction to the squashed fruit is the complete opposite of Chen’s. The mangoes are crushed and full of black spots, they look
She and Mui made purée out of the mango flesh, cutting the yellow meat away from the huge, hairy stones after they had sliced out the damaged black areas from the waxy, mottled skin in crescent-shaped gouges. Soon the flat was full of the heavenly perfume of crushed mangoes and the sound of ice-cubes being grated […]. Ah, those sounds and those smells! And she and Mui laughed and sang old children’s songs as they prepared the dessert, remembering hot summers in Kwangsi long ago. (73)
As opposed to Chen’s reaction, to Lily and Mui the smell of the mangoes together with the sounds of the ice-cubes trigger positive memories of their childhood. Again, through food the female part of the family manages to estab- lish a positive relation to the old homeland and, at the same time, a positive process of self-determination in the new homeland. For Chen though, the same fruit and smells represent the memory of a humiliating and threatening situation that forces him into another situation of dependence. The social aspect of eating is also important to Lily and Mui, whereas for Chen this aspect is either missing or threatening. The women share common memories when preparing food. Furthermore, via eating they form and main- tain social bonds, for instance they keep up the relation to Lo and they get to know Mrs Law and continue to have a rather culinary friendship with her. This social aspect of eating in Mo’s novel will be analysed in depth in a section below. Lo is another protagonist in the text who is characterised by his (rather artistic) relation to food. He is a Chinese immigrant too and works at the same restaurant as Chen. Lo is the barbecue chef, which means that he cuts up already prepared meat in a very skilled way. He undertakes his work in a spe- cial glass-fronted booth next to the window of the restaurant. Above him are hanging ducks, pieces of pork and glazed chicken. He often attracts onlookers with his skill of quickly carving meat from bones with a cleaver.
He [Lo] often drew spectators. There was an element of the trapeze about the performance. It seemed quite possible he would chop off one of his own fingers, no doubt obliviously pushing it off the board and on to the plate with the back of his cleaver to join the other cubes of meat and slices of sausage where some shocked customer would find it under his garnishing. (33)
His existence inside the booth, though firmly based on the ground, resembles a trapeze act. The food, as well as Lo himself, appear exotic to his audience. His skills are marvelled at, but at the same time they are classified as being danger- ous and are therefore watched from a distance, just like Lo himself is kept at a distance. The glass-front makes sure that the onlookers are protected from pos- sible incidents with the cleaver, but at the same time they are protected from direct contact with the exotic Lo. Furthermore, the booth corresponds to the expectations of the common staging of exotic objects. The barrier protects from the exotic and alien, but at the same time enables its detailed observa- tion. Lo himself would not notice if he cut his finger – is he able to feel any pain at all? – only a guest would later be confronted with the result of the accident and, unlike Lo himself, would suffer from it. Just like Chen, Lo also finds him- self in a space which he has not determined or chosen himself, but which he was allotted to because of his origin. Chen, who sees Lo as a distant friend, does not think very highly of the barbecue chef’s work. He would have preferred to see another colleague of his, Roman Fok (whom he refers to as his enemy), in the booth. Later in the text, it becomes clear that Lo’s job at the Ho Ho restaurant is perceived in this spectacular way because of its staging in the glass booth. After having been ill for some time, Lo starts to work in a different restaurant. There, he does a similar job, although not inside a booth, but just behind the window. The only spectator he draws now is Lily, his friend, who thinks about knocking at the window to call Lo’s attention.
Lo was already at work in the empty restaurant and Lily was about to rap playfully on the window when she thought better of it. What if there was an accident and he chopped off a finger? (56)
The constellation is similar, but the tone has changed completely. Again there is glass and a window, but this time it is not a dividing line but rather a means to contact the other person. The idea of an accident is reiterated, but this time not as a lurid thrill which makes watching even more exciting, but as the expression of real worry and care about Lo. In the new restaurant, Lo’s reputa- tion is also different. When the manager sometimes calls him back to work, for instance when Lo is talking to his friend Mrs Law, a regular customer at the restaurant, he does so “discreetly because the manager knew how to deal with a virtuoso” (58). In this way, Lo’s relation to food is portrayed in two ways which are similar in their form, but very different in their effects. In the first presentation he is determined by his work and does not have any possibility to decide his position
The Chen Family’s Chinese Takeaway as a Possible Identity in Migration Being hassled by his colleague Roman Fok – he presses Chen for money in order to pay back what the Hung family had given for his father – makes it easier for Chen to give in to Lily’s idea of having a restaurant of their own, a plan which she has been saving money for.40 They decide to rent a house in a rather shabby suburb of London (Chen prefers it to be as far away from the centre as possible) where they can live and also set up their business.
40 Ching Lin Pang starts her sociological study on Chinese restaurants in Belgium with a quotation from Mo’s novel Sour Sweet. As Pang states, the development of Chinese restau- rants in Belgium is similar to that in Great Britain. Her detailed account of it shows many parallels to Mo’s novel. In both countries sailors were the first Chinese immigrants who then started to attract other fellow countrymen (cf. Mo, Sour Sweet, p. 111). Until the 1970s Chinese immigrants could enter Belgium without nearly any control. Most (male) immi- grants started to work as hands in kitchens, after some time their women and children could also immigrate to the new country. The further development of typical Chinese immigrants’ lives resembles Mo’s depiction in his novel. As Pang describes, with the money the immigrants managed to save, they would open their own restaurant, in which they would often continue to use the menu of the former chef. The system of numbers for the various dishes was also invented in migration because of linguistic barriers. Chinese restaurateurs, as opposed to other so called ‘ethnic businesses’, in particular other ‘ethnic restaurants’, have aimed at clients from the new homeland rather than other Chinese as a target group right from the start. Furthermore, Ching Lin Pang stresses that Chinese res- taurant owners do not live in close contact with other Chinese immigrants, a situa- tion which is described in Sour Sweet too. Pang also mentions that Chinese restaurants are often family run, which at times affects the children’s achievements at school. In the novel, Man Kee, Chen’s and Lily’s son, helps in the family’s takeaway business. Like the Chen family in the novel, Pang describes that in the restaurants “[a] highly adapted or ‘bastardized’ form of Chinese immigrant food” is served. According to the author, this strategy was developed by Chinese immigrants “to suit the palate of the native cus- tomer in order to make a living.” Ching Lin Pang, ‘Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Reinterpreting Chinese Immigrant Food in Belgium’, in Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, ed. by Tobias Döring and others (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2003), pp. 53–70, (p. 63).
The design of the restaurant reflects Lily’s ideas of what an English Chinese takeaway should look like:
Ideally, the front should have been all glass, an expanse of unimpeded visibility […]. But this would mean knocking down part of the wall between their two windows and then reglazing at prohibitive expense. […] They would have to have a counter, though. No take-away business worth the name could function without one of those. […] There was already a serving hatch in the wall between kitchen and front room and Chen took the little door off its hinges altogether. They put the flat’s gas stove in the kitchen, together with a ring which ran on a huge, dented bottle they had acquired secondhand. On this they would heat their wok. ‘Chairs,’ Lily said suddenly. ‘Where will they sit?’ And of course, that was what take-aways had too, chairs. As important as the counter, really. (99)
The Chens do not arrange the takeaway according to their own taste or the way restaurants in China are furnished, but aim at copying the idea of an English Chinese takeaway. Therefore a counter is important and chairs have to be pro- vided. Similarly, when it comes to the menu the Chens do not decide for them- selves what dishes they would like to serve, but instead copy what is being offered in similar places.41 Chen finds out what is being served in other take- aways and, consequently, the Chens offer “a stereotyped menu, similar to those outside countless other establishments in the UK” (111). Some of the dishes are described in the text:
‘Sweet and sour pork’ was their staple, naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce […]. ‘Spare-ribs’ (whatever they were) also seemed popular. So were spring-rolls, basically a Northerner’s snack, which Lily parsimoniously filled mostly with bean- sprouts. All to be packed in the rectangular silver boxes, food coffins, to be removed and consumed statutorily off-premises. (111)
41 With reference to Frank Chin, Ching Lin Pang calls this praxis “food pornography” and defines it as “making a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’ aspects of one’s ethnic foodways”. Chinese immigrants have to economically exploit the prejudices and stereotypical ideas which people have about them in order to be able to survive in migration. At the same time, ‘food pornography’ also means to acknowledge and to confirm the supremacy of the (in this case) white population, who accept immigrants as long as they offer “‘spicy’ and ‘exotic’ food”. Pang, “Beyond ‘Authenticity’”, p. 55.
The meals sold by the Chens remain alien to them: the food is soaked in funny red sauces, some of the dishes remain a complete mystery to them, such as “‘spare-ribs’ (whatever they were)” (111). They would never eat this food them- selves and cannot comprehend their English customers’ taste: “English taste- buds must be degraded” (111), is their judgement.42 Rather than ‘food’, the dishes are merely a substance the Chens earn their money with. They certainly do not have anything to do with their own traditional food: “it bore no resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine” (111). Chen already had this impression when he was working at the restaurant in China Town. There, while he served authentic food to Chinese guests, the dishes from the tourist menu remained a mystery to him: “the food he served from the ‘tourist’ menu was rubbish, total lupsup, fit only for foreign devils” (21). Similarly, the Chens now serve ‘lupsup’ (Cantonese for ‘rubbish’) in their own takeaway. In addition, the food is packed in small containers that remind Lily of coffins. Thus the Chens’ relation to the food becomes even more distanced, as does their relation to the clients, who eat from these sterile coffins.43 At the same time, the Chens would never offer the food they eat themselves to their customers as it is too different from what they seem to like. The only thing that seems authentic to the Chens themselves is the most simple and pure dish: boiled rice. This is quite ironic, as Susanne Reichl mentions in her analysis of the novel, since rice was imported to Great Britain as one of the first ‘oriental’ dishes and therefore was integrated into English cuisine quite early.44 Therefore, to the English customers it is probably the least Chinese dish, whereas to the Chens it is the most authentic one. Yet, the so-called ‘fried rice’ does not resemble any Chinese dish: “The fried rice they sold with peas and
42 Many Chinese immigrants seem to feel a similar way. According to Ching Lin Pang, especially the first generation of Chinese restaurant owners in Belgium “maintain an ambivalent attitude towards their customers, who could not appreciate certain Chinese ingredients. Some of them have harbored disdain for the food their customers were will- ing to consume.” Pang, “Beyond ‘Authenticity’”, p. 67. 43 To David Chung, the almost stoic acceptance of the differences between the various eat- ing habits in the novel also has positive aspects: “The food metaphor and imagery in Sour Sweet […] seems to support a plural mosaic model of the post-colonial world where adaptability and flexibility is achieved through an acceptance of differences rather than through a forced synthesis or melting-pot.” David Chung, ‘A Taste of Both Worlds’,
Chen would willingly have discarded the last elements of authenticity about the dishes, fried thick tombstone slabs of meat or entire splin- ters of bamboo, used clear sauces of pure Knorr stock thickened with Bisto. (144)
To him, the kitchen at times becomes an “alchemist’s magic laboratory” (145) in which he seems to be at the mercy of his own creations rather than the other way round:
So sweat-soaked, chronically thirsty, perpetually harassed, sometimes reduced to utter despair by the consequences of momentary neglect of a saucepan’s contents, Chen orchestrated his instruments to the best of his abilities. (144)
Cooking is very stressful for Chen – among all these alien dishes, which he does not prepare to his own taste but according to set economical and culinary stan- dards, he struggles to preserve his own identity. This seems to be even more difficult than when he worked as a waiter. Then, he was at the mercy of dishes prepared by others, now it is he himself who is forced to cook them. Unlike in Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White, where to Nalini cooking, the dishes, and the ingredients always form a harmonious unity, and where problems are solved in the kitchen and the meals’ aromas and taste evoke memories, Chen is hounded by the smoke, the noises, and the smells in the kitchen. They are alien to him, they do not have anything to do with his personal life story, and he struggles to control the ingredients in the pots.
45 In her analysis, Reichl sees the reference to the “West Indian customers” as “yet another ingredient [!] to the multi-cultural panorama of London in the 1960s, together with Greek garage owners and black bus conductors, all of whom are seen to develop a sort of migrant solidarity.” Reichl, ‘Like a Beacon’, p. 180.
In this scene the difference between Chen’s and Lily’s relation to food is once again made clear. Chen’s way of preparing the food (and also of present- ing it in coffin-like containers) does not have anything to do with Lily’s spirited way of preparing the dishes for the family described and discussed earlier. Furthermore, she, in contrast to her husband, can enjoy the success of the small family business. She remains indifferent to the dishes they sell and con- tinues to cook traditional, authentic food for her family and friends (such as Mrs Law and Lo). The food prepared by her keeps its social aspect and brings people together. Chen, on the other hand, is trapped in the limbo of his kitchen and suffers. For the Chens, the opening of their own restaurant is a potential opportu- nity for the creation of something new by using elements both from their old and their new homeland in their situation of migration. The family, though, chooses not to create something new and instead continue a tradition which does not include their personal experience of migration. They continue the tradition of Chinese-English cuisine that was introduced by Chinese sailors who had retired in the city long before the Chens came to London.46 Of course, back then these dishes were also newly created and are therefore a hybrid invention. They are the result of an adaptation of the Chinese cuisine mixed with the tastes of the new homeland, Great Britain. The menu of the Chinese takeaway is therefore a new cuisine that cannot be called either English or Chinese, but has elements of both. However, this ‘hybrid tradition’ does not have very much to do with the Chens’ personal chutneyfication, or with their search for identity in the new homeland. The dishes the Chens offer in their takeaway remain an abstract idea in the sense that the family cooks what, according to them, should be served in a Chinese takeaway in London and what they think their customers expect. In this way, the dishes are very differ- ent from the chutneys which Nalini creates in Nair’s novel. Furthermore, in her reading of the text Susanne Reichl sees a parallel between what the Chen fam- ily cooks and sells in their takeaway and in Mo’s way of reproducing the Chens’ Cantonese in English, which according to her, is also supposed to cater to ‘English tastebuds’.47
46 This is not only mentioned in the article by Pang (Pang, “Beyond ‘Authenticity’”), but also in the novel itself: “The dishes were simple to cook; well within Chen’s capabilities, which was hardly surprising since they had been invented by the Chinese seamen who had jumped ship or retired in East London a generation ago” (111). 47 Cf. Reichl, ‘Like a Beacon’, p. 182–184. In his analysis of Mo’s novel, David Chung associates this catering for English tastebuds with the notion of the Empire writing back and states: “The whole affair reflects, in some
Eating as a Bonding Ritual When people in Sour Sweet meet, it is almost always accompanied by food.48 For example, Lily serves Chen soup every evening when he comes home from work, and Lily and Mui are invited over by Mrs Law for the ritual of drinking tea in a more formal context. People come together by sharing food; eating together helps create a feeling of trust and enables characters to get closer emotionally. Eventually, this renders it possible for the Chens to build up a social life in their situation of migration. For instance, Lily and Mui get to know Mrs Law in the supermarket. They start a conversation, addresses are exchanged, and two weeks later Lily, Mui, and Man Kee receive an invitation to “drink tea” (48).
‘Tea drinking’ turned out to be a sumptuous affair of delicacies she [Lily] hadn’t seen for years: sweet black gelatine rolls, formed of layers of trans- parent film thinner than tissue paper, which gleamed and shivered tanta- lisingly; cakes of crushed lotus seed paste with fiery, salty egg yolks inside; cold cuts of abalone, chicken, ham, smoked fish, fungus strips, mush- rooms so thick and succulent they tasted like meat; English strawberry tarts and fragrant jasmine tea of the kind Lily adored. (48–49)
At the first invitation, the two women are so overwhelmed by the food offered, which is so different from the light dishes they usually eat, that they hardly eat anything. Then, Mrs Law’s invitation becomes a regular weekly ritual (which the women do not tell Chen about) and an important part of Lily and Mui’s social life. In this ritual, the food builds a bridge, both between the three women and to their homeland.
ways, the symbiotic relationship in colonialism where the issue of cultural hegemony is blurred by the effects of the Empire writing back (and now, cooking back). The invasion of Britain by sweet and sour pork, Asian heroin, and Chinese secret societies [three motifs which also come up in Mo’s novel] is almost a perverted form of reverse colonialism.” David Chung, ‘A Man-Eats-Man World; and the Empire Writes (and Cooks) Back’,
When Mui becomes pregnant, she moves in with Mrs Law for some time. In a letter to Lily, she expresses her gratitude towards Mrs Law and describes her generosity referring to food:
Mrs Law is very kind to me. I eat rice four times a day with dishes of meat, chicken, fish and egg at every meal. Not to mention tea and savoury and sweetmeat snacks at odd times of the day as well as late at night, and plenty of fruit. (206)
When Lo, after having been sick for some time, starts to work in a new restaurant, Mrs Law invites Lily and Mui to have dinner there. In this way, Mrs Law also gets to know Lo, whom she has already heard a lot about from Lily and Mui. Again, food becomes a bridge and brings people together. The invitation to the restaurant is being prepared meticulously and well in advance:
Lily accompanied Mrs Law to Shaftesbury Avenue to talk money with the manager. Lo was already at work […]. They settled terms over the inevi- table tea. The proprietor suggested some dishes: crabs were fresh and plentiful in the market at the moment, white vegetable was good, as were Holland beans. What about a baked crab with ginger and spring onion, roast pork and duck, a whole steamed sea bass, baked chicken or pigeon with potato puffs, and noodles and fried rice? Shark’s fin soup to start, of course, and half-way through a sweet soup of almond or peanut. Fresh fruit and tiny sweet buns to end. (56)
The dishes are mentioned in detail, then chosen and paid for by Mrs Law. Choosing the right dishes is crucial in order to give enough importance to the dinner, but also in order to show respect towards the restaurant and its owner. In the end the dinner is favourable: “[…] the meal itself turned out to be a culinary as well as social success.” (56) Again, both the culinary as well as the social aspect of food are emphasised. The dinner reflects the relationship between Mrs Law and Lily and Mui, but also between them and Lo and the restaurant, where Mrs Law eats regularly from then on. The food enables the friendship between the elderly lady and the younger women, but it also makes it possible for Lo and Mrs Law to speak to each other when she comes to the restaurant; eventually they become friends. Food as a socially bonding ritual is also significant in the parallel plot of the mafia-like organisation called the Hung family. As previously analysed, when Chen meets members of the Hung family, food plays an important role. All of
The meeting was held at the Wong Ho restaurant, in the fifth floor rear special banquet room behind a compound of screens. They had feasted on a superior shark’s fin soup and, amongst other things, a homely dish ordered by Red Cudgel of chopped cow’s lungs, sweetbreads and intes- tines, with coriander and parsley. Dessert was quail’s eggs in lightly sug- ared water. (37)
On other occasions, like at meetings, tea and nibbles at the very least are always served. Finally, when the Hung family attacks a rivalling clan, they choose a moment when they know important members of the other clan are together – having dinner in a restaurant.49
A Taste of Two Worlds – the Chens’ Experiences with English Food The Chens are not only depicted in relation to the food they cook, sell, or eat themselves, but also to the traditional English food they encounter. For instance, on a trip to the seaside they eventually start looking for a place to eat:
[…] they passed a fish and chips shop with an enviably wide all-glass front window. It was the window which attracted Lily’s attention first. How clear it was and thick; presumably both vandal- and wave-resistant. It was clever, too, of the owner to paint prices onto his glass. (165)
In this scene, Lily does not think so much about the food but rather how it is presented. She has become a real business woman who compares other restau- rants to her own, weighing the pros and cons of certain details. The wide, clear, all-glass front is still something she dreams of for her own takeaway. A little envious, but with a professional attitude, Lily examines the fish and chips shop. Her sister Mui, on the contrary, is more attracted by the smells of vinegar, chicken, fish, and potatoes which come from the shop. In the end, the Chens enjoy the food they are served there:
And the food was quite good, really not bad at all. Even Lily, depressed at spending two shillings and sixpence a head, had to concede it was good stuff as she bit a long finger of potato in half. (165–166)
49 Cf. Mo, Sour Sweet, p. 136–140.
This episode is one of the few occasions where the Chens are depicted outside their own takeaway and its immediate surroundings. At the same time, it is one of the very few times the Chens eat English food. They themselves seem to be surprised that they enjoy the fish and chips. In the end, they like them so much and having realised that the profit margin of chips is relatively good, they decide to serve them in their own restaurant. Of course, they would offer them with the staple sweet and sour sauce; sometimes, they would even eat the chips themselves, but without the sauce of course.50 Later in the text, the family again has an experience with English food, or rather with an English ‘ingredient’. Just before Christmas, one of the lorry driv- ers, who stops regularly at a nearby garage and is being served food from the takeaway by Mui, presents her with a turkey, that, however, is still alive. The driver simply tells Mui: “Put its neck across a broom-stick and then do the busi- ness” (182). The Chens do not really know what to do with the live bird:
What were they to do with it? Serve it as one might chicken, with peas and cashew nuts? Eat it themselves? Sell it? Mince it? (Son might have some.) Then turn it into dumpling stuffing? (182)
Whatever they decided to do, it was clear that they would have to kill it as keep- ing the animal alive would not have been economical. The attempts to kill the turkey make for humorous scenes in the book. The bird tries to escape, Mui wants to benumb it with brandy so that it does not feel any pain, but eventually Lily catches it and uses the martial arts skills she learned as a child to kill it. Still, there remains the question of how to prepare the huge animal until Chen suggests preparing ‘Beggar’s chicken’, a recipe from the North of China. Thus, the turkey is wrapped into leaves and mud and then cooked in ashes. The women like the idea, however, in the end it does not seem to be the right way to prepare a turkey: even after having cooked it for a long time, it remains partly raw and its skin has become green from the leaves. Hence, the experi- ence with the turkey remains a negative one: the Chens cannot find a proper way to prepare it and the son, Man Kee, even refuses to eat any of it. While Lily and Mui remain unsuccessful in the scene with the turkey, with Man Kee’s help they find access to another English specialty: mince, jam tart, and custard. Man Kee knows these dishes from school and because he talks
50 As Susanne Reichl mentions in her analysis, this taste for chips, just like the later prepara- tion of a true English tea with mince, jam tarts, and custard, can be read as positive sym- bols already referring to Mui’s fish and chips shop which, together with Lo, she opens at the end of the novel. See Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone, p. 191.
‘“Sweet and sour pork” is too hard for old people’s teeth, if these English people have any teeth left. […] Perhaps congee and minced salty pork would be suitable.’ ‘Mmm.’ Mui was doubtful. ‘Old people may not like Chinese food, Lily. Even real Chinese food. […]’ More silence, broken this time by Mui: ‘I know!’ ‘Chips and Omelette?’ ‘No (but that’s a good sugges- tion, younger sister). I rather thought mince, jam tart and custard.’ ‘Eiyah! Of course!’ Lily shouted. Easy to cook, not difficult to chew, light on the digestion, and good for them. (256)
Subsequently, the sisters buy custard and jam tart at the supermarket and pre- pare the mince themselves. The friends of Lily’s father-in-law obviously enjoy the food and the tea:
[…] now the old folk were actually starting to eat and giving every appear- ance of enjoying the food […]. Sounds of sucking, an occasional click of dentures, the unfamiliar, brittle sound of metal on porcelain, filled the room. (259)
In his essay on Mo’s novel, David Chung remarks “To understand the food is to understand the society”.51 The Chens have two very different experiences with English food. While the living turkey becomes an almost hostile animal to them, difficult to kill and even harder to prepare, the two women do not have any problems organising tea for the grandfather’s English friends. However, for the elderly people, just like for their clients, Chinese food is out of the question. Practical aspects such as the problems older people might have chewing the food are taken into account just as much as the fact that they, being used to other dishes, simply would not like neither real Chinese food nor the kind of food they serve at the takeaway. “[…] Do you notice how most of our customers are young?” (256), Mui asks Lily, intending that the grandfather’s friends will be too old to be able to like different food. And in fact, from their reaction it seems that the elderly people expected to be served traditional English tea with
51 Chung, ‘A Taste of Both Worlds’.
Lily’s system perpetuates binary oppositions of this and that, us and them, which characterizes her relationship with anyone not Chinese. Although the goal is to strike a balance between yin and yang, there is no promise that the two can be synthesized.52
In their handling of food and their cooking and eating, there is hardly any pro- cess of chutneyfication, indeed the Chens do not even seem to be aware of the option to write their own history in migration. In contrast to Nalini in Nair’s novel, processing the various ingredients is hard and stressful work for Chen, but it brings economic success to his family and enables them to advance their position in society. However, since they do not see the possibility of writing their own story of migration, they remain in the role of immigrants and the second generation, i.e. Man Kee, might also find himself in this role. The Chens seem to be stuck between their former homeland, which they cannot return to, and their new surroundings, which are alien to them and where they are regarded as strangers. The various depictions of the family’s relation to food and cooking in the novel reflect this situation.
3.3 Food, Cooking, Eating, and the Expression of Jewish Identity in Vladimir Vertlib’s Novel Letzter Wunsch
Although food and eating are not very prominent in Vertlib’s novel Letzter Wunsch, they do play an important role in key scenes of the plot. Vertlib uses
52 Chung, ‘Sweet Sour, Sour Sweet’.
53 This denial of knowledge for Salzinger happens repeatedly: at the rabbi’s invitation to dinner, when he tells him in an educational manner: “Ich nehme nicht an, dass Sie die Schiwa, die Trauerwoche, einhalten wollen, während der man nicht aus dem Haus gehen soll.” (251) [I do not assume that you intend to respect the Schiva, the week of mourning, during which you are not supposed to leave the house.], and also at the first funeral of Gabriel’s father when the cantor uses his loud voice to drown out Salzinger’s inaccurate pronunciation and accentuation of the Kaddish (see p. 128). Furthermore, it happens at the meeting of the Jewish community where the problem of Gabriel’s father’s funeral is being discussed (Gabriel is ignored by the others, see pp. 204–206) and finally again at the
1. Schauspielmahlzeiten [meals of acting] or Repräsentationsmahlzeiten [representational meals], as for instance in Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, where the meals serve to represent groups of people, for instance families. The served dishes are often opulent and rich. 2. Solidarmahlzeiten [solidary meals] usually take place in smaller groups or in pairs. Often the people involved only get to know each other at this meal which therefore above all has a socially bonding function. At soli- dary meals, usually light, frugal food is eaten.
dinner at Rosenzweig’s, when the rabbi explains the meaning of various Jewish prayers to Salzinger (see p. 297). 54 The construction of Jewish identity in Vertlib’s works has been analysed by a number of scholars. However, they mostly deal with other topoi than food, eating, and cooking. Cf. for instance Lorenz, ‘A Human Being’ and Taberner, ‘Vladimir Vertlib’s’. Cf. also Dagmar C.G. Lorenz who states that at the basis of the creation of evolving models of Jewish indi- vidualism in the works of authors like Vladimir Vertlib (and Doron Rabinovici), “lies a self-concept informed by Jewish historical narratives and an intimate knowledge of Jewish culture that does not require but includes as potentialities life in Central Europe, Aliyah, relocation to international Jewish centers, religious and political affiliation, and a secular existence”. Lorenz, ‘Individuum’, p. 389. 55 Cf. Wierlacher, Vom Essen.
3. Konfliktmahlzeiten [meals of conflict] are typically shared by adults, except for Familienmahlzeiten [family meals] that often are used to depict conflicts between the generations. With these meals, the conflict between the eaters is usually in the foreground. Tribunalmahlzeiten [tri- bunal meals] also belong to the group of Konfliktmahlzeiten. In this case, the meal takes over the function of a tribunal. The dishes served often contain a lot of proteins, but are also rich. 4. Äquivalenzmahlzeiten [meals of equivalence] are balanced meals, which according to Wierlacher respect “das diätetische Prinzip der gemis- chten Speisen”56 [the dietary principle of mixed dishes].
The scene at the rabbi’s dinner table combines aspects of solidary and family meals, but in the end can be identified mainly as a meal of conflict. According to Wierlacher, solidary meals serve to create a feeling of community between the eaters, who often meet for the first time at the occasion. The atmosphere and the conversation rendered possible by the meal are at the centre. Cultural and social barriers are neutralized; therefore, solidary meals can take place between protagonists from different social classes and origins. Typically, sim- ple (but not inferior) food is served/eaten, although with solidary meals the actual dishes are not of particular importance, as will be shown in Vertlib’s text. Family meals, in contrast, are particularly important for the socialization and the enculturation of children. Through eating together, as through other rituals, children grow up with a certain culture, they get to know the daily rou- tine, and they get used to a culture’s repetitious habits and ceremonies.57 In literary texts, family meals are often possible situations of conflict. Repeatedly the familial kitchen table becomes the place where the generation gap is at its most obvious. During family meals, frequently the suppression of the chil- dren’s ideas and ambitions becomes most obvious.58 In meals of conflict, on the contrary, a problem is at the centre of the meal. The eaters are usually adult persons who are in conflict with each other; their disagreement is depicted and narrated via the meal, which often consists of meat and rich dishes.59
56 Wierlacher, Vom Essen, p. 60. 57 Cf. Wierlacher, Vom Essen, p. 42. 58 Of course there are also texts or scenes which can be quoted as counterexamples. For instance, Wierlacher refers to Adalbert Stifter’s Nachsommer [Indian Summer], where the frequent common meals, which are kept “heiter und einfach” [serene and simple] become “Ordnungs- und Konzentrationsmomente” [moments of order and concentration] for the family. Wierlacher, Vom Essen, p. 45. 59 Wierlacher Vom Essen, p. 60.
Furthermore, factors such as whether meals are served hot or cold are taken into consideration by Wierlacher, as certain values are thereby transported. This qualitative ranking of ways of preparing meals is reminiscent of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ‘triangle culinaire’ [culinary triangle]. Based on his model, Lévi- Strauss found out that in all societies it is defined by convention what is con- sidered food and what is not, and what is being eaten at what occasion.60 However, the status of the various ways of preparing food, according to Lévi- Strauss, is universal. For instance, the high prestige of roasting as opposed to boiling is a universal cultural phenomenon.61 While boiling is an economi- cal, plebeian way of preparation, roasting is an aristocratic one, as it involves destruction and loss.62 In the following reading of Chapter 2, Part iv of Vladimir Vertlib’s novel Letzter Wunsch, I will address and illustrate how Wierlacher’s various meal cat- egories are linked to particular dishes and his ways of preparing them.
A First Categorization of the Meal at the Invitation The rabbi extends a dinner invitation to Salzinger at the end of a meeting at the Jewish community, where Gabriel’s father’s case was being discussed. On the surface the invitation is polite and friendly, the rabbi says: “[…] es würde mich freuen, wenn Sie am Dienstag mein Gast sein könnten. […] essen Sie mit meiner Familie zu Abend” (214-215) [I would be delighted if you were my guest on Tuesday. […] to have dinner with my family]. However, it is followed by a rather patronizing enquiry about the shiva: “Ich nehme nicht an, dass Sie die Schiwa, die Trauerwoche, einhalten wollen, während der man nicht aus dem Haus gehen soll.” (251) [I do not assume that you intend to respect the shiva, the week of mourning, during which you are not supposed to leave the house.] By explaining the shiva to Salzinger, the rabbi implies that he does not know the term. In this way, Salzinger is once again denied of having prior knowledge about Jewish traditions. Furthermore, Rosenzweig then adds another justifica- tion of why Salzinger’s father cannot be buried in the Jewish cemetery. Thus, the style of the invitation already gives an impression of what the dinner will be like: on the surface, it is expressed in such a way that the meal could be
60 Cf. Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (Munich: dtv, 1971), p. 35. 61 Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Le triangle culinaire’, L’Arc, 26 (1965), 19–29 (p. 23), the quotation is taken from Leach, Lévi-Strauss, p. 36. 62 On these differences see also Pierre Bourdieu, who regards boiling as a less prestigious way of preparing, though more so because is takes a lot of time. Thus, it is a way of prepar- ing which is usually attributed to women (in particular housewifes) rather than to men and is therefore considered less prestigious. See Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 186.
Home, Sweet Home – Jewish Identity in the Description of the Rabbi’s Flat The scene is set at the rabbi’s house and is characterized by an atmosphere of domesticity that is missing in the other parts of the book. It is the only scene that takes place at a family home; although other homes are mentioned and described in the text, they are always domiciles of people living on their own. This scene is also the one with the highest number of people eating together; all other meals are eaten by one or two people at the most. Even when a group of people meet, such as after the interrupted first funeral of Salzinger’s father, they do not necessarily eat together. In fact, in that instance, only two people order something to eat at a café.63 In the scene at the rabbi’s, however, domes- ticity is in the foreground from the beginning, when Gabriel Salzinger, the first- person narrator, gives a detailed description of the flat. The fact that both the rabbi’s wife and one of his daughters is present further emphasizes this impres- sion. In his description, Salzinger mainly mentions Jewish objects he notices in the flat: for instance, he describes the kosher kitchen, the mezuzah, and the menorah.64 In this way, the Rosenzweigs’ flat is characterised explicitly as a
63 Cf. Vertlib, Letzter Wunsch, p. 156. 64 At the end of the book there is a glossary where Jewish terms and concepts such as ‘mezu- zah’ are explained: “Mesusa: Einzelne Thora-Texte werden auf kleine Pergamentstreifen geschrieben und in kleinen Behältern (meist aus Metall) am rechten Türpfosten (Mesusa) eines Hauses bzw. eines Wohnraumes befestigt. Traditionsbewußte Juden berühren beim
A Meal of Conflict with Unusual Dishes – the Dinner’s Menu as a Solidary Meal According to the rabbi’s supposed intention at the invitation, the choice of menu at the dinner suggests a solidary meal rather than a meal of conflict. Like in Wierlacher’s description of a solidary meal, the dishes are of a frugal nature. Solidary meals are not characterised by a “den Repräsentationsinteressen ver- gleichbare Speisenpalette”65 [range of dishes comparable to meals with repre- sentational intentions], but often only small amounts are eaten, and meat is rarely offered. Although the dinner at the rabbi’s consists of three courses, the dishes themselves are relatively light, healthy, and low in fat. The kosher menu starts with a fish soup most likely prepared by the rabbi’s wife, as can be deduced from the conversation. The main dish is “Spaghetti à la Rabbi” (287), freshly prepared by the rabbi himself, and a Crème Caramel de luxe closes the meal. The dinner is a warm meal, which according to Wierlacher corresponds to the “Gesetz deutscher Endoküche” [rule of the German endo-cuisine]: “in den deutschsprachigen Ländern signalisiert und summiert ein warmes Essen, zu dem nach Hause eingeladen wird, grundsätzlich eine wesentlich intimere Verständigungsgemeinschaft der Essenden als eine kalte Mahlzeit”66 [in the
Eintritt die Kapsel und rezitieren ein spezielles Gebet.” (385) [Mezuzah: Single texts from the Torah written on small strips of parchment are put into small containers (mostly made from metal) attached to the right doorpost (mezuzah) of a house or a room. Traditional Jews touch the casing on entering and recite a particular prayer.] The meno- rah is explained in the text itself as “der siebenarmige Leuchter” (287) [the seven-branched lampstand]. 65 Wierlacher, Vom Essen, p. 83. 66 Wierlacher, Vom Essen, p. 74.
German-speaking countries, an invitation to a warm meal at somebody’s house generally signals and summarizes a much more intimate rapport between the eaters than a cold meal]. Wierlacher adds that there is even the view that a cold meal can be read as a symbol of “dürftiger Mitmenschlichkeit”67 [lacking humanity]. The fact that a warm meal is served at the rabbi’s house can there- fore be understood as a reference to an aspired solidary meal. Furthermore, at a solidary meal ordinary, even inexpensive dishes are usu- ally offered. Rather than highly valued food, the experience of eating together and the feeling of forming a community are central. In Vertlib’s novel, although the main dish is ‘only’ spaghetti, the food becomes special because the rabbi himself prepares it. This increase in value of the meal may be the reason for the lasting distance between the hosts and their guest that creates an atmosphere of a meal of conflict rather than a solidary meal. Because of the fact that the rabbi himself prepares the dinner, the meals are not as simple as they should be for a solidary meal, on the contrary, distance between the eaters is created and enforced, respectively. The constellation at the meal also suggests a meal of conflict rather than a solidary one. It is not a family that sits down to eat together, but rather three adults at the table, brought together by a conflict and without any intention to solve it, as has already been made clear by both parties when the invitation was extended. However, the dishes served do not correspond to Wierlacher’s con- cept of a meal of conflict. Apart from the fish soup there are no dishes high in protein, and no rich dishes or any meat is served. This deviation between con- tent and form of the meal continues in the conversation between Gabriel Salzinger and the Rosenzweigs. They talk about both simple, straightforward topics (as they would at a solidary meal) and more difficult, controversial ones (analogous to a meal of conflict).
The Expression of Jewish Identity in Cooking Wierlacher states that in the examples he analysed for his study on food in literature, kitchen and domestic work are not described.68 In contrast, in Vertlib’s novel the preparation of the meal is illustrated in detail.69 The rabbi
67 Wierlacher, Vom Essen, p. 72. 68 Cf. Wierlacher, Vom Essen, pp. 23–24. 69 This is also true for the other novels analysed in this chapter, of course. It is worth men- tioning that recently a number of books have been published where descriptions of cook- ing take centre stage. See for instance Peter Arenz, Der Duft von Schokolade (Munich: dtv, 2009), Erica Bauermeister, The Monday Night Cooking School (London: Penguin, 2010), Anthony McCarten, The English Harem (London: Alma Books, 2009), Christoph Peters,
Mitsukos Restaurant (Munich: Luchterhand, 2009), Lily Prior, La Cucina. A Novel of Rapture (London: Harper Collins, 2001), and Martin Suter, Der Koch (Zurich: Diogenes, 2010). On this topic see also Jasmin Parapatits, Liebe geht durch den Magen – Erotik und Leidenschaft beim Essen in der Literatur – gezeigt an Beispielen der englischen und deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2013). 70 Wierlacher, Vom Essen, p. 72.
Mrs Rosenzweig’s Jewish Identity in Migration In the scene at the rabbi’s home, Salzinger, and with him the readers, find out about everyday Jewish life in Germany mainly through Mrs Rosenzweig. For the first time in the text, he is confronted not with official Judaism, such as in the synagogue or on the premises of the community, but with everyday life of a very religious, young Jewish mother.71 Rebecca Rosenzweig speaks
71 Another very personal view of Judaism is revealed to Salzinger by another woman in one of the secondary rooms at the synagogue (cf. pp. 253–259): this elderly lady is identified as
“mit starkem amerikanischen Akzent” (288) [with a strong American accent]; she is from Chicago and moved to Germany because of her husband. “[N]och bevor Frau Rosenzweig die Suppe serviert” (288) [even before Mrs Rosenzweig serves the soup], she tells Salzinger her life story as well as those of the rabbi’s parents. For Mrs Rosenzweig (and in a slightly lower degree, for her husband), inviting Salzinger is an occasion to speak about the problems they are con- fronted with in Germany. For instance, according to her there are hardly any other religious families, it is difficult for Mrs Rosenzweig to find a job as there is no Jewish hospital in Gigricht where she could work as a nurse, and finally, they have to order kosher food at high prices from Frankfurt.72 Again, on more than one level, it is food which represents one of the most important markers of identity and along which the current situation in migration is narrated: besides the expensive groceries, Mrs Rosenzweig cannot imagine working in a gentile hospital as she does not want to “auf keinen Fall mit unreinen Speisen in Berührung kommen” (291) [by any means, get in touch with food that is not kosher] as she tells Salzinger. Mrs Rosenzweig feels like a stranger in Gigricht; this difference is underlined by her appearance. As an orthodox Jew she wears a black wig and her clothes are dark blue throughout. Salzinger seems to be more convinced by what Mrs Rosenzweig tells him than by her husband’s well-worded and obviously knowledgeable expla- nations. While waiting for the meal, Salzinger and Mrs Rosenzweig have a conversation about everyday Jewish life and its traditions. In contrast to Mr Rosenzweig’s very calculating way of conversing, the conversation between the two of them is very natural and therefore honest. Also, the two partners differ in the way they deal with elements sustaining Jewish identity. While his wife obviously suffers from the fact that kosher food is difficult to obtain, Mr Rosenzweig has come to terms with the situation, he even manages to remain inventive and to create something new with the ingredients at his disposal. Mrs Rosenzweig, on the other hand, retreats to her role as a mother and wife, despite, or rather, because of her homesickness and her feeling unwell in her situation in Gigricht. Yet, as she supports her husband unconditionally, with her discourse she underlines Mr Rosenzweig’s intentions. Both demonstrate contemporary orthodox Jewish life and thereby make it clear to Salzinger that neither he nor his father belong to this tradition. Therefore, his insisting on his father’s last wish is not justifiable and cannot be approved by the rabbi.
Rosa Masur, a character who is known to readers of Vertlib’s works as the main protago- nist of his novel Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur [Rosa Masur’s Peculiar Memory]. 72 Cf. Vertlib, Letzter Wunsch, pp. 289–291.
A Culinary Conflict – Eating and Cooking as a Secondary Rhetoric Level at the Dinner In the scene at the Rosenzweigs’ house, cooking, eating, and talking about food is used as a parallel and to illustrate, respectively, the discourse on modern Judaism in general and on Jewish life in Germany in particular. This is the argu- ment Salomon Rosenzweig intends to talk about at the occasion, contrary to Gabriel Salzinger, who would rather speak about his specific problem. Eating and talking are often interpreted as nearly identical acts, in fact eating has been called “Reden mit anderen Mitteln”73 [talking with different means], not least because the same organs for talking, such as the tongue and the teeth, are used.74 In her analysis of the meaning of cooking in novels by Indo-American female writers, Bettina Friedl compares eating to a language and the rules of eating with grammatical rules. Foreign food therefore has a similar effect as foreign languages do on us. To Friedl, the intention of the depiction of foreign dishes in literary texts is “nicht das Lernen einer Fremdsprache durch das kom- plette Repertoire des fremden Essens, sondern eher das Bewusstsein für den anderen Geschmack und für den Geruch, der wie der andere Klang der Sprache zu einer fremden Kultur gehört: interessant und schmackhaft, aber nicht ohne Schwierigkeiten erlernbar.”75 [not to learn a foreign language via the complete repertoire of foreign food, but rather to become aware of the different taste and the smell, which just as the different sound of a language belongs to a for- eign culture: interesting and tasty, but not to be learned without difficulties.] As already mentioned, cooking as a preliminary stage to eating can be seen as the process where the content of a conversation is determined. The cook – in the scene in question Salomon Rosenzweig – therefore is the one who decides on the topics to be discussed. He also maintains this role at the dinner itself. As will be shown, whenever the main topic of the evening, i.e. talking
73 Werner Reinhart, ‘Erlesenes Essen: Eine Einführung’, in Erlesenes Essen. Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Hunger, Sattheit und Genuss, ed. by Christa Grewe- Volpp and Werner Reinhart (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003), pp. 1–8 (p. 7). 74 Cf. Gerhard Neumann, ‘Tania Blixen: Babettes Gastmahl’, in Kulturthema Essen. Ansichten und Problemfelder, ed. by Alois Wierlacher and others (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), pp. 291–318 (p. 317). With reference to Neumann, Stefan Horlacher takes up the idea of the identity of the organs in eating and speaking, cf. Stefan Horlacher, ‘Überkreuzungsphänomene oder die Differenz in der Differenz: Nahrung, Grenzauflösung, Inkorporation und die Macht des Abjekts in The Virgin and the Gipsy’, in Erlesenes Essen. Literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Hunger, Sattheit und Genuss, ed. by Christa Grewe-Volpp and Werner Reinhart (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003), pp. 208–239, pp. 209–210. 75 Friedl, ‘Indisches Essen in Iowa’, p. 126.
Judaism, but about food; since he always speaks about kosher food, the link to Judaism is constantly present. Between the starter and the main course, the contrast between the two levels is most obvious. After having listened to Rosenzweig’s recipe for “Indonesisches Curryhuhn mit Reis” (291–292) [Indonesian curried chicken with rice] as well as his explanations while preparing the spaghetti, Salzinger, already irritated, tries to stop the rhetorical game: “Ich bin nicht wegen des Essens zu Ihnen gekom- men, Herr Rabbiner!” (292) [I have not come to your house for the food, rabbi!] Rosenzweig, though, keeps to his strategy and responds: “Auf der Kommode im Schlafzimmer steht ein Aschenbecher. […] Wenn die Mädchen nicht im Zimmer sind haben wir nichts gegen Zigarettenrauch.” (292) [On the chest of drawers in the bedroom there is an ashtray. […] When the girls are not in the room, we don’t mind cigarette smoke.] Again, his wife is ready to support him when she stresses that they do not mind at all. This time though, Salzinger does not give up:
‘Es geht mir nicht ums Rauchen!’ Diesmal schreie ich. ‚Wollen Sie ein Glas Wein?’, fragt der Rabbiner. Was für ein albernes Spiel!, denke ich. (292)
[‘This is not about smoking!’ This time I am shouting. ‘Would you like to have a glass of wine?’, the rabbi asks. What a silly game, I think.]
This time, the ‘game’ nearly becomes violent, but Rosenzweig keeps calm and again it is the process of preparing the food that keeps him busy. He turns away from Salzinger and towards the frying pan with the now ready food. Again, the rabbi manages to bring together the two levels of conversation when he advises Salzinger to learn how to cook as a form of meditation while he stirs the meal one more time: “[…] Eine kontemplative Beschäftigung. Kochen Sie, wenn Sie nicht gelernt haben zu beten.” (293) [[…] A contemplative activity. Cook if you haven’t learned how to pray.] If eating is a way of speaking, then here cooking is compared to the absolute way of speaking, i.e. speaking to God. In this way, the rabbi gives high significance to the preparation of food, a significance that puts into perspective the changing between the rhetoric levels. Interpreted this way, the two levels become even closer. The rabbi’s standpoint is underlined one more time at the very end of the chapter, when he gives a present to Salzinger:
Er steht auf und holt aus dem Schrank ein Buch, auf dessen Cover ein Wok, Essstäbchen und ein siebenarmiger Leuchter abgebildet sind.
Es trägt den Titel: Fernöstliche Speisen, garantiert koscher. Von Rabbiner Dr Salomon Rosenzweig. (302)
[He gets up and takes a book from the cupboard. On its cover there is a wok, chopsticks, and a seven-branched lampstand. Its title is: Dishes from the Far East, absolutely kosher. By Rabbi Dr Salomon Rosenzweig.]
With this present, Rosenzweig terminates the dinner and the conversation, countering one more time with kosher dishes as a symbolic gift and thereby stressing his Jewish identity and his point of view, which has not changed throughout the evening. The ruptures in the conversation as experienced by Salzinger, and the readers alike, dissolve when seen from a distance. The con- tent keeps changing from food to religion and back again, but the overall topic always stays the same: though he artfully switches between simple topics, such as kosher cooking and food, and more difficult ones, Rosenzweig never stops talking about Jewish identity and Jewish life.
Chi lascia la via vecchia per la nuova, sa quel che perde e non sa quel che trova. Proverbio siciliano
[He who leaves the old road for a new one knows what he looses but does not know what he will find. Sicilian proverb]
In her study of literature in the context of migration, Azade Seyhan interprets the texts in question as “unauthorized biographies of the nation”.1 She reads works by Ana Castillo, Aysel Özakin, and Emine Sevgi Özdmar as “act[s] of writing the nation outside the nation”2 and focuses on the depiction of the nations left behind and the (in the analysed works exclusively female) protago- nists’ strategies to preserve a memory of the homeland they left behind:
When exile becomes a condition of critical reflection, its writers find the narrative and cultural coordinates to offer another version of their land’s history, a version free of official doctrine and rhetoric, a history of the actual human cost of transformation and migration.3
In this way, ‘looking back’ becomes a critical reflection of the homeland’s his- tory, culture, and society which enables the narration of an alternative history. In some of the texts analysed in this chapter, the protagonists also look back: for instance, Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane narrates Nazneen’s memories of Bangladesh, and long parts of Caryl Phillip’s book The Final Passage are situ- ated on the Caribbean island which the protagonists leave eventually. The pro- tagonist in Hamid Sadr’s text Der Gedächtnissekretär thinks of Persia and his family there several times. Often though, these motifs serve as a contrast to the depictions of the ‘new homeland’ and therefore can be read in comparison to them. In fact, Seyhan underlines this aspect when she says: “Writers who have
1 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 96. 2 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 20. 3 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 20.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004306004_005
4 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 158. 5 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), p. 43. 6 Halbwachs states: “[…] verbal conventions constitute what is at the same time the most ele- mentary and the most stable framework of collective memory”. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 45. 7 On the importance of the reference to the past for (collective) cultural memory, see Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1992), pp. 31–34.
8 See Adelson, The Turkish Turn, in particular pp. 79–122. 9 Isabel Santaolalla, ‘This Island’s – Also – Mine: New Expressions of a New Britishness’, in Nationalism vs. Internationalism. (Inter)national Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. by Wolfgang Zach (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996), pp. 159–167 (p. 160).
10 Lee, ‘Changing the Script’, p. 71. 11 Lee, ‘Changing the Script’, p. 71. 12 Lee argues: “In turn, a down-the-middle post-war literary circuit of, typically, William Golding, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Antonia Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, Faye Weldon, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, John Mortimer, or the Amises, père et fils, gives off an Englishness of generally comforting familiarity […], rooted in English ways and irony. The choice of necessity always theirs to make, rarely has any of them tackled multicultural Britain with any degree of appetite. One has to wonder why.” Lee, ‘Changing the Script’, p. 74.
13 Doron Rabinovici, Ohnehin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004). 14 Vladimir Vertlib, ‘Mein erster Mörder’, in Mein erster Mörder. Lebensgeschichten, Vladimir Vertlib (Vienna: Deuticke, 2006), pp. 9–82.
Ali’s Brick Lane, where the main protagonist Nazneen continues her journey to the centre once she has arrived in London. In Phillips’ The Final Passage, how- ever, the centre eventually becomes an impenetrable labyrinth that the pro- tagonist Leila decides to escape from in the end. In the texts, cities and buildings also become particular bearers of cultural memory. In Sadr’s novel, buildings and bricks carry memory within them; this enables the protagonist Ardi to become completely immersed in wartime Vienna. Thus, literally via the city, Ardi can find out more about the actual events at the end of the war. Also in Phillips’ novel, traces of the war, in particu- lar of the bombings, can be found in the depictions of 1950s’ London. Here, the miserable housing situation in the city is explained by the war too. Moreover, the city might be used as a counterpart to the rural homeland left behind. In Ali’s novel Brick Lane, the differences between the artificial, nearly hostile urban surroundings of London and the unspoiled, peaceful nature of the native village in Bangladesh are made obvious. However, this does not hold true for the inhabitants of the native village, who are at times portrayed as hav- ing rather cruel attitudes. What is more, life in the city of Dhaka is also depicted as difficult. In The Final Passage, Phillips puts into perspective the differences between the rural Caribbean island left behind and the city of London. For instance, on the island the weather and the climate at times seem to turn against its inhabitants and some descriptions of its nature are used to under- line the bleak situation of those who live there. All in all, the island seems to offer just as little hope as London does. In the following the three texts will be read along similar lines, however, the analysis is aimed at showing the different ways of depicting the new homeland in the texts. The single sections of this chapter will therefore concentrate on the individual strategies applied in the texts. This means that in the English texts the depiction of the present situation of immigrants will be concentrated on, whereas in the German text the historical aspect, i.e. the ‘touching tale’, will be the central focus.
4.1 Depictions of England in Caryl Phillips’ Novel The Final Passage
In Caryl Phillips’ novel The Final Passage, the descriptions of the new home- land, i.e. England, are given along with the depictions of the protagonists’ everyday life.15 In this way, England is described by aspects such as the weather,
15 In 1996 Phillips wrote an adapted version of The Final Passage as a screenplay for a tv movie directed by Peter Hall. In his earlier drama ‘Strange Fruit’ (1982), Phillips dealt with
a topic similar to that of The Final Passage, i.e. with a woman from the Caribbean who is confronted with life in Great Britain. Ideas first presented in this chapter have been fur- ther developed in the following article: Sandra Vlasta, ‘Islands to get away from: Postcolonial islands and emancipation in novels by Monica Ali, Andrea Levy, and Caryl Phillips’, in Shipwrecks and Islands, ed. by Brigitte Lejeuz and Olga Springer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming). 16 This reading is supported by the fact that in recorded reports, West Indian immigrants very often refer to the same aspects when talking about their experiences in and impres- sions of England. For reports by West Indian immigrants on the factors mentioned see Winder, pp. 264–284 and the following volume of collected reports by immigrants: Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush. The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain (London: Harper Collins, 1998). 17 See Harry Goldbourne, Race Relations in Britain Since 1945 (London: MacMillan Press Ltd., 1998), p. 25. 18 See Bénédict Ledent, Caryl Phillips (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 19 See for instance Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London: Continuum, 2004).
Britain with the intention to start a new life there, her husband Michael sees his time in England only as a phase in his life. These attitudes change through- out the course of the text: eventually, Leila decides to return to the Caribbean and Michael, on the contrary, feels more and more comfortable in England. However his coming to terms with the country distances him from his family at the same time. Thus, to Leila ‘home’ does not carry the common meaning of the word since the new homeland never really becomes a ‘home’ to her.
The Arrival Phillips’ novel is not structured in a chronological way; it is divided into five parts and starts with “The End”, the departure to England, followed by “Home”, a description of the protagonists’ life on the island, “England”, a part set in Great Britain, “The Passage”, the account of the arrival in England, and finishes with the chapter “Winter”, which is also the chronological end of the narrative. The first part begins with the protagonists waiting on a small Caribbean island for the departure of a ship to England, where Leila, her husband Michael, and their baby boy Calvin hope for a different future and a better life. The ship they are going to board is called the ss Winston Churchill, a choice of name, as Ledent states, which stresses the economic moment (and importance) of the immigration which at the time was still furthered by Britain.20 Only in the fourth part of the novel, in the chapter called “The Passage”, however, is Leila’s arrival in Great Britain depicted:
On the fifteenth day the wind died and Leila saw land; the high and irreg- ular cliffs of England through the cold grey mist of the English channel. She clasped together the collar of her light cotton dress and shivered. Overhead a thin fleet of clouds cast a bleak shadow across the deck, and the sluggish water swelled gently, then slackened. Leila stood at the front of the ship with six or seven more. Nobody spoke. It was still early and they waited, as if trapped in a glass case, while the other voyagers were still getting up, or feeling sick, or sleeping. (137)
In this scene, after two weeks the passengers see the country they have chosen as their new homeland for the first time. The first sentence of the quotation, which is also the beginning of the new chapter, reminds one of the topos of the flood as described in the Bible:21 after the flood the water starts to dry up and Noah’s Ark strands on Mount Ararat. Eventually, he and his family see land.
20 Ledent, p. 28. 21 See The Bible, from Genesis 6, verse 9 to Genesis 8, verse 22.
Although Leila’s journey is much shorter than Noah’s, there are similarities between the two. In the Biblical story, the waters of the flood become a strong symbol of the divide between the old and the new life of mankind with God. In Phillips’ text, the water that the ship crosses during the journey marks the divide between Leila’s life on her native island and her new life in Great Britain. On her arrival, she looks ahead, into a new future. It seems as if she has a new life before her, just like Noah and his family. Although Leila arrives in a place where she hopes to be able to lead a better life, with more opportunities both for her and her family, and where she will finally be able to see her mother, who immigrated to England some time ear- lier, her first glance of England is characterised by negative impressions. The adjectives used in the passage cited above are negative throughout. England’s contours are “high” and “irregular” and the kind of landscape – cliffs – are repellent rather than inviting. The water is described as being “sluggish” and the descriptions of meteorological phenomena are negative too: there is a “thin fleet of clouds” which casts a “bleak shadow”. There is nothing positive in this first perception of England. Accordingly, the small group of passengers in the scene are unable to speak or move, but feel trapped and doomed to wait.22 They are at the mercy of these negative images of the new homeland. Leila’s first impressions after leaving the ship are rendered as indirect com- parisons to the memories of the homeland left behind. The ideas she had when waiting in the harbour of the small Caribbean island for the ship to cast off form a contrast to those at the arrival in England. Before the departure, Leila’s surroundings are described in the following way:
At 6.30 the harbour had been a blaze of colour and confusion. Bright yel- lows and brilliant reds, sweet smells and juices, a lazy deep sea nudging up against the land, and looking down upon it all the mountains ached under the weight of their dense vegetation. Leila watched as the women sold their food, cursing, pushing, laughing. (9)
It is a colourful world full of noises and smells which Leila, just before her departure, seems to experience intensely one last time. The scene is character- ised in a positive way, by means of the adjectives (“bright”, “brilliant”, “sweet”, “lazy”, “deep”, “dense”), nouns (“colour”, “yellows”, “reds”, “smells”, “juices”, “veg- etation”), and verbs (“nudging up”, “pushing”, “laughing”) used. The structure of
22 The speechlessness they feel also befalls Leila and Michael later in the novel, for instance in conversations between Michael and his senior or between Leila and Miss Gordon from welfare. Their answers are reduced to silent nods and gestures or they just do not react at all.
Leila looked at England, but everything seemed bleak. She quickly real- ized she would have to learn a new word; overcast. There were no green mountains, there were no colourful women with baskets on their heads selling peanuts or bananas or mangoes, there were no trees, no white houses on the hills, no hills, no wooden houses by the shoreline, and the sea was not blue and there was no beach, and there were no clouds, just one big cloud, and they had arrived. (142)
Here, many elements of the description of the harbour on the native island are evoked: the mountains and hills, the women with their goods, the beach and the sea, respectively, and, most of all, the colours (and, with them the smells, implicitly by way of the missing peanuts and bananas). Stylistic features are also repeated. The long enumeration again serves to enforce the impression, however, this time its effect is different. Although the same semantic elements are used, their absence, their non-existence change the statement into a nega- tive one. In this way, England is described as a place where everything that existed on the island is lacking, therefore, it is perceived as a place of absence. This impression is reinforced by the fact that apart from the bleak and overcast sky, the reader does not find out what Leila actually sees. Her arrival in England, therefore, is not so much a first impression of the new homeland, but rather a memory of the island left behind, which in comparison seems to be a place of wealth and plenty.
Climate and Weather In the scenes quoted above, the English climate and weather are depicted as being particularly repellent. This characteristic can be observed all throughout the novel; all the chapters set in England are marked by the negative descrip- tions of the weather. Upon her arrival, Leila sees the “cold grey mist” (137) of the English Canal – a cliché that has become reality and makes her shiver with the cold. On the last stage of Leila’s journey to the ‘centre’, i.e. on the train from the harbour to London, she is accompanied by the rain: “Outside it began to rain. It was a sort of half-rain which left whole drops of water compressed against the window.” (144) The end of that day too is characterised by the sound of rain “[…] the early afternoon sounds were replaced by the fiercer ones of
‘Well, what did you think it would be like?’ asked Mary, as she put more wood on the fire. ‘I don’t really know. I thought it would be much warmer than this.’ ‘Ah, well, there you are. This is the summer and you just wait till you get to January or February. […] I used to come home and say to him [her husband] how I’d seen some of you, coloureds that is, shivering by the bus stops and I just wanted to go across and hug you and say, “don’t worry, love, you’ll get used to it.”’ She laughed. ‘I never did, though.’ (170)
Here, two clichés meet: the presumed fondness of British people for talking about the weather and the West Indian immigrants’ suffering from the cold. At the same time, in this scene a dichotomy of ‘we’ and ‘them’, i.e. ‘coloureds’ and ‘white’ people, is created by Mary’s anecdote. In this way, the depiction of the climate also becomes a way of negotiating group belonging and of showing relations between groups and individuals in society. However, Bénédict Ledent stresses that although in Phillips’ text the immigrants at times are seen as a group, at the same time they are also shown as individuals. Thus, the author conveys that the idea of a common experience of migration is a fictitious one. Rather, each migrant has his/her own individual story that one ought to listen to.23 Phillips’ decision to concentrate on Leila and Michael’s story signifies that he decides to show one of the innumerous fates of migration rather than see- ing immigrants as a homogeneous group.
23 See Ledent, pp. 34–35.
Leila also attempts to integrate herself via the weather. She starts to talk about the weather to others, for instance when she starts the conversation with a nurse at the hospital with the comment “Getting colder” (130). Besides, her thoughts circle around the weather, like when she observes a scene on the street: “A child, a coloured boy, who needed a good bath and a meal, stared at the bus and wiped his nose across the back of his sleeve. This is not yet winter, thought Leila, and the boy has a cold.” (122) To Leila, the whole city of London seems to live in direct reaction to the weather – constant rain and cold – a cli- mate that makes England an inhospitable place. Only at the very end of the book is there a single positive description of the weather in Great Britain. Leila has just decided that she will return to the Caribbean with her son, Calvin, when she returns to their house on a December evening: “Then the snowflakes began to spin, first one, then tens of them. Leila watched spellbound. Then she fled into the house and locked the door behind her.” (204) For the first time, Leila seems to be spellbound by the weather in England, even though only for a moment. In this scene, the climate seems to offer something new, something unexpected. However, she has already made the decision to leave the country and therefore cannot take any further plea- sure in the snow. Therefore, the weather again becomes a negative experience that Leila has to flee and hide from. Accordingly, Ledent reads the snow as a final symbol for the dominance of a white world. He compares the passage to a scene from “Strange Fruit” (1981), an earlier play by Phillips: “Although the characters bear different names and the situations are not exactly the same nor match chronologically, both works chart the confrontation of Caribbean migrant women with the ruthlessness of the white English world, symbolised in both cases by the snow that starts to fall as the two heroines reach the lowest point of their migratory experience.”24 Still, as Leila is described as being “spellbound”, there is an instance of being positively surprised by this hitherto unknown phenomenon which she finds beautiful, if only for a moment. Nonetheless, this short spell of beauty cannot make her change her mind about leaving Great Britain and returning to the Caribbean. As just shown, the chapters set in England are dominated by negative descriptions of the weather. However, the chapters set on the Caribbean island are also characterised by comments on the climate that are not always posi- tive. Whereas in London the cold and the rain are omnipresent, heat and humidity make life difficult for the inhabitants on the island. While Leila suf- fers from the lack of sun in England, the isle is currently under threat of being dried up and dust is everywhere. Also, there is always the potential danger of
24 Ledent, p. 11.
General Descriptions of England Apart from the weather, there are also other general descriptions of England in The Final Passage that add up to the atmosphere in Great Britain in the 1950s as experienced by a West Indian immigrant. When the ship lands in England, Leila’s journey has not finished; the newcomers are taken to the centre of the ‘motherland’, i.e. London, by train. During this train ride, Leila generates her first impressions of the country:
Leila gazed through the cold window of the train. She watched as her warm breath misted up the glass. The fields had little in them save a few sheep here and there. Some cows stood silent and still, like statues. Where was the food they grew to feed themselves? As they plunged further inland, she wondered how it was that people managed to live so far away from the sea. (143)
This description is characterised by the use of negative adjectives (at least in this context) such as “cold”, “little”, “few”, “silent”, and “still”, as well as by com- parisons (“like statues”) and associative questions that seem to be part of an inner monologue. At the same time, it refers to images that Leila, having attended school in one of Britain’s colonies, has supposedly learnt about.25
25 In his book on immigration to Great Britain, Robert Winder stresses that the ‘motherland’ was also appealing to immigrants because they felt very familiar with it due to the colonial
When the train approaches London, it passes more and more towns in order to eventually arrive at the capital:
[…] Then a thick road cut along the fringes of the fields. The cars, tens [sic!] of them, rushed madly along, all different colours, different sizes. Then the chimneys began to multiply, and the greenness disappeared, and they were in a town, and Leila could no longer keep her eyes open. […] The houses and the streets and the cars seemed to be going on forever. The huge jug-shaped towers, and the great posters advertising coffee and cereal and cigarettes, and the broken, crumbling lips of the chimneys, all of this caught Leila’s eyes. Already she was used to the red double decker buses, but she worried slightly for she could see no end to this town which fought off the freedom of the fields and the low hills. (144)
Furthermore, the description of the city is characterised by the use of negative adjectives and adverbs (“thick”, “madly”, “huge”, “broken”, “crumbling”), at times the ever growing and ever-bigger dimensions are referred to (“multiply”, “going on forever”). While before the English landscape as seen from the train appeared barren, empty, and bleak, now, in contrast to the nearly aggressive city, the memory of it is positive: the road cuts along the fringes of the fields, the city eliminates the freedom of the fields and hills, and their greenness (which was not mentioned earlier) has disappeared completely.26 Upon her arrival, Leila's experience of England was quite negative, but now in compari- son the capital seems to be downright hostile.
school system: “The colonial administration had given West Indians a grounding in Queen and Country, in Shakespeare and Tennyson, in W.G. Grace, Kennedy’s Latin Primer, and the Lord’s Prayer. They had grown up singing “‘There’ll Always Be an England’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at assembly. Many of their Christian names – Nelson, Milton, Winston – derived from British heroes.” (Winder, p. 256) Harry Gouldbourne also states that Afro-Caribbean and Asians have more in common with the British than other Europeans because of their experience of colonial times. See Gouldborne, p. 41. 26 In his interpretation, Ledent does not take into account the – marginal, but existing – descriptions of nature in Great Britain, but reads the contrast between nature and city in the novel as one between the native island and England: “In the Caribbean, nature is omnipresent, almost like a character that bears the traces of the history of the island. In London, on the contrary, it is hardly visible and associated with death. If Caribbean peo- ple are cut off from history, English people are cut off from nature. The only vegetation in Leila’s London are the bunches of meaningfully cut flowers she takes to her mother in the hospital” (Ledent, p. 30).
In contrast to the change in the perception of the countryside, the impres- sion of the city does not change throughout the course of the novel. Again and again, details on London form the background to the plot, and they are always depressing. Often, the same stylistic elements as described above (use of nega- tively connoted adjectives, adverbs, and verbs) are employed in order to con- struct an overall negative picture of the city. The representation of London is given through Leila’s glances and through the implied knowledge she has accu- mulated during her time there, for instance when crossing the city on the bus to go visit her mother in the hospital:
She sat in the front seat on the top deck of the bus, looking down at the people and the life in the street below. She noticed that in some areas there were many coloured people and in other areas there were very few. She noticed that coloured people did not drive big cars or wear suits or carry briefcases, that they seemed to look sad and cold. […] The rivers that the bus lurched over were like dirty brown lines, full of empty bottles and cigarette ends, cardboard boxes and greying suds of pollution. (121)
In an immediate and therefore almost naïve way, Leila’s observations and her thoughts on them are reproduced in the text. They give an impression of London at the time and of a West Indian female immigrant’s perception of it. Furthermore, they are characterised by social criticism as Leila notices the dif- ferences in the social standing of coloureds and whites as expressed by cars, clothes, and jobs. Likewise, she realizes that there are particular parts of the city, where immigrants live. Thus, her observations reflect the sociological findings about immigration to London at the time.27 Buildings too are described in such a way as to give a negative visual of them. This starts with the description of the station that is compared to a black room: “Leila stepped down on to the platform, but it was like stepping into a spacious black room for there was a ceiling and birds circled overhead.” (145)
27 Robert Winder mentions in which parts of London immigrants from the West Indies mainly used to live in the 1950s and 1960s: “South London, thanks to the Windrush voyag- ers, was the first port of call for subsequent migrants from Jamaica. The South London Daily Press was on sale in Kingston: would-be expats could scan the classifieds, marvelling at the wages on offer in this scintillating wonderland called Lambeth. Trinidadians and Barbadians drifted to Notting Hill and Paddington; Guyanese congregated in Tottenham and Wood Green; Montserratians plumped for Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park. The markets in these neighbourhoods acquired new accents and flavours: pineapples, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes, mangoes, and chillies sat alongside apples and pears from the English countryside” (Winder, p. 268).
The description of an ordinary house has an intimidating aspect to it: “From the outside the house looked thin and flat, as did all the other houses on the street. It had two small steps up to the door and it stood three storeys high.” (146) Whereas in these first descriptions Michael at least is impressed by the houses (he says: “‘All this house can’t belong to your mother’”, 146), the descrip- tions of the houses in the part of the city where Leila and Michael eventually rent a house are without any positive aspects at all:
On stepping back into the daylight [after a trip on the metro], the houses offered precious little comfort to Leila’s eyes. Like Earl’s [Leila’s mother’s landlord] neighbourhood they disappointed in their filth. Unlike Earl’s neighbourhood they were small, clearly cramped and uncomfortable, even on the outside. Again they were all joined up, and although Number One, Florence Road was not hard to find it was hard to believe. (160)
Again, the accumulation of negative adjectives is obvious (“small”, “cramped”, “uncomfortable”, “joined up”), and more than once the disappointing impres- sion is underlined (“offered precious little comfort”, “disappointed in their filth”, “hard to believe”). With that last sentence the readers are prepared for the view of the actual house that Leila and Michael have rented, without see- ing it first:
It stood at the corner of a main street which ran downhill and away under a railway bridge, and a side-terraced street that ran dead into a brick wall. Leila stood at this junction and looked up at their home. Two of the upstairs window panes were broken in, and the door looked like it had been put together from the remains of a dozen forgotten doors. (161)
Here, the disillusioning, negative description of the street continues. The tone does not change once they enter the house; the earlier luck of having found a house here turns into bad fortune. Other observations by Leila also serve to strengthen the negative overall pic- ture of the city. Often, they are rendered as short, spontaneous impressions, for instance when she walks towards the hospital: “Even before she got to the hos- pital the endless views of decay and poverty only made her feel more depressed.” (129) Elsewhere, a graffiti reflects the atmosphere of racism: “[…] Leila noticed that the lettering got smaller and more hurried, as if the artist was running out of paint and time. ‘IF YOU WANT A NIGGER NEIGHBOUR VOTE LABOUR.’” (122) Just a little later, Leila watches children playing on the street:
Leila looked down a side street. Two little girls, their faces blackened with grime and filth, bounced merrily upon an old mattress. For a moment they […] lost themselves in simple pleasure. (122)
Although the girls are happy, their pleasure is put into perspective and is char- acterised as being “simple” by Leila/the narrator; the girls’ dirty faces and their simple ‘toy’ dominate the scene. Thus Leila’s spontaneous impressions also form part of a general negative picture of a city full of racism, social hardship, and cold. Apart from the buildings and the greyness of the city, it seems to be its speed and rhythm in particular which is difficult for Leila to come to terms with. At times it seems that her dislike of the place is due to a general aversion towards the city rather than a particular antipathy towards London. Leila comes from the countryside and she feels that her inability to adapt to her new life might have something to do with her rural upbringing. The velocity of life in an urban surrounding is mainly expressed via depictions of the traffic. All through the novel, the traffic remains fast and impersonal, both as experienced aboard public transport as well as when on the streets. During one of their first rides on the metro, Leila’s fear is also felt by her son Calvin:
The underground frightened Leila, and Calvin cried. But, beside the ever-present fear that they [Leila, Michael, and Calvin] might have got on the wrong tube, there was also the fear that the train was going so fast that it would not be able to stop. Each time it braked they seemed to be already halfway out of the station, and they held on to the straps and swung back and forth into each other until they reached the end of the line. (160)
As before, when Leila was watching the traffic from the train, speed becomes a typical feature of urban life, which in Leila triggers fear. The immigrants are at the mercy of the city’s elements, they can only hold on to the straps in a provi- sional way and are forced to swing in a heteronomous rhythm which they do not trust but still have to engage in. Also on the street, they are faced with this rhythm:
The square black taxis came about every two minutes, and soon there was only a tall Englishman ahead of them. A taxi came and the man climbed in without glancing back. Then, as the taxi swished away, another one arrived. (146)
The taxis almost resemble coffins (“square black taxis”), they arrive one after the other in an almost automated way and Michael and Leila have to accept this rhythm of the city and of the traffic in order get a chance to participate in their new homeland’s life.
Racism and Stereotypes Besides descriptions of the weather, the landscape, and the city, contact with the natives is another aspect of the descriptions of the new homeland in Phillips’ novel. When natives and immigrants from the Caribbean meet in the book, cli- chés and prejudices are at the forefront. Rather than discussing stereotypes, Phillips presents them in an overt way. In the chapter set on the Caribbean island, the characters’ skin colour is referred to several times. Leila’s lighter skin colour is emphasised; both her mother and her best friend Millie have darker skin:
Leila, the taller and lighter of the two girls, obediently followed her friend [Millie]. (28) She [Leila’s mother] was, unlike her only child, a dark, almost black woman […]. (32)
Again and again, both the narrator as well as other protagonists stress that Leila is of good character, and it is implied that this has to do with the fact that she is of a lighter skin tone. Before they are married, Michael’s grandmother even refers to Leila as being white: “Don’t worry, I think you better off with the white girl for she going look after you right if you look after she, you hear me?” (47) Despite this link between lighter skin colour and positive character traits, there are no implications of darker skin indicating a negative character. The sociologist Harry Gouldbourne points out that “colour gradations” used to be important in the Caribbean, but that during the time of mass migration to Great Britain it was not possible anymore to refer to a person’s social status by judging the colour of their skin.28 In Phillips’ novel, the former importance is reflected in the comments of Michael’s grandmother who belongs to a genera- tion to whom skin colour was of greater importance. However, only once they have arrived in Great Britain do Leila and Michael meet outright racism due to the colour of their skin. This is most obvious in the scenes in which they look for a flat. Streets are described as being full of dis- criminating signs: “They walked along this empty road looking up to their left for signs, but the first three they saw gave Leila an idea as to what to expect.
28 See Gouldbourne, p. 46.
‘No coloureds’, ‘No vacancies’, ‘No children’.” (155) Still, rather than being looked at and turned away with dubious arguments, Leila prefers to be told straight away that they are not welcome. Her attitude is shared by Earl, an acquain- tance of theirs:
[…] the rest of the signs were explicit. ‘No vacancies for coloureds’. ‘No blacks’. ‘No coloureds’. Leila felt grateful for their honesty. Earl was philo- sophical about the whole thing. ‘Well, some people just don’t like us and I guess we have to deal with it.’ (156)
In these scenes, the signs reflect the atmosphere at the time that made it diffi- cult for coloured immigrants to settle in Great Britain.29 According to Imke Sturm-Martin and Karen Schönwälder, the new presence of coloured immi- grants meant that for the first time in Britain, immigration became visible and it was perceived as a problem.30 Despite the economic need for immigration after the Second World War, racist prejudices that had their roots in colonial times, and arguments against (black) immigrants were at the forefront. Such a climate rendered possible signs such as the ones depicted in Phillips’ novel. On Florence Road, where Michael and Leila eventually find a place to stay, the negative impression of the street, analysed above, is reinforced by the pres- ence of sceptical neighbours. “Like the street down by the park where Earl had taken them yesterday morning, the women stood, arms crossed, out on their doorsteps, and they watched the newcomers’ every move.” (161) The narrator’s reference to the scene the day before makes it clear to the readers that they are watched mainly because of their skin colour. When Michael starts looking for a job, his skin colour does not seem to mat- ter at first to his future boss. The man’s question about Michael having one or two wives seems to have more to do with him being a foreigner than with the colour of his skin. Eventually, it turns out that Michael only gets the job because of his skin colour: “As they crossed the courtyard Mr Jeffries shouted to an
29 See Robert Winder, who in his account on immigrants in Great Britain refers to the hous- ing problem for coloured immigrants. Winder, p. 263, p. 269. Randall Hansen in his account on immigration to Britain also mentions the signs that were common practice in London in the 1950s. Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain. The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. vi. 30 See Die britische Gesellschaft zwischen Offenheit und Abgrenzung: Einwanderung und Integration vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Karen Schönwälder and Imke Sturm- Martin (Berlin: Philo, 2001), pp. 9–15.
Englishman in overalls, ‘You can put up the ‘COLOURED QUOTA FULL’ sign now.’” (167) Although in this case Michael’s skin colour has positive effects for him and he is given a job, the scene is still another example of the general attitude towards blacks in 1950s Britain. While the Trades Union Congress (tuc), the national trade union centre and umbrella organisation of all trade unions, was committed to anti-discrimination policies, the single trade unions were free to choose their own ways and companies, too, decided mostly on their own. Randall Hansen talks about two strikes against the employment of black workers and describes the introduction of a quota for coloured work- ers.31 The way in which Michael’s future boss deals with the quota also makes it clear that it was not introduced as a means of ‘positive discrimination’. Despite these negative experiences right after their arrival in England, only towards the end of the novel, when she suspects Michael is having an affair with a white woman, does Leila actually feel an effect of her skin colour:
In England Leila had suddenly found herself, her light skin starved of the sun, growing paler by the day. But she was more coloured than she had ever been before, and not shame exactly, but feelings of inadequacy pre- vented her from looking back into the mirror. (195)
In the new homeland, the discrepancy between Leila’s outward appearance and how she feels inside grows. On a physical level, her body seems to adapt to the new surroundings and her skin becomes even lighter in England. This is put into perspective though, as Leila actually feels much darker than before. This is caused by the racist environment, and also by a feeling of “inadequacy”, as mentioned in the quotation above, which she feels towards white English women. She feels inferior to them because of her origin and her looks, and in particular because of her suspicion about Michael having an affair with a white woman. This is neither denied nor confirmed in the book, but in any case it is linked to another prejudice about coloured men which was already mentioned in the chapters set on the island: white women’s preference for coloured men. Michael's infidelity, however, is not a new motif in the novel. Before their departure to England, his relationship with another woman is revealed. While still on the island, Leila reflects on Michael’s other relationship but does not feel any responsibility for his actions. In England though, she deals with the (assumed) situation of betrayal quite differently. She feels that Michael’s infi- delity does not have so much to do with his character, but rather is caused by her being less valuable because she is a coloured woman. Thus, she practically
31 See Hansen, p. 131.
[…] when she [Miss Gordon] touched Calvin (which she loved to do) Leila was sure that it was done to see if his skin colour was invented or real, to see if his blood was cold, for as she touched him she always let her hand slide a little as if scraping up a laboratory sample underneath her fingernails. (199)
Leila herself feels observed by Miss Gordon, and is convinced that she has dif- ficulties with the word ‘coloured’:
[…] Leila felt sure that when she [Miss Gordon] spoke to her parents about her work she steeled her face when she reached the word coloured, and when she wrote it down she put it in inverted commas. After a glass of wine with her friends, if she had any friends, she probably giggled at the word, but with Leila it always got caught just beneath the centre of her tongue and created more saliva than the rest of the words in the sen- tence put together. (199)
Leila assumes that Miss Gordon essentially is not at ease with coloured immi- grants and therefore has difficulties when talking about her. Similarly, she imagines that when Miss Gordon and Leila’s neighbour Mary meet, they con- verse about unknown, exotic beings:
As she had talked more than once with Mary, Leila wondered if Miss Gordon had used the word [coloured] with her. If she had asked her how she felt about living next to coloured people, and if Mary had offered to make her a cup of tea. (199)
Leila feels more and more reduced to the colour of her skin. She imagines that people do not speak about her, but exclusively about her skin colour, just like Mary, who when they first met talked about “you, coloureds that is.” (170) At the same time, Leila’s view of the natives in London is characterized by clichés or at least by simplifications, even though it never reaches any level of racism. Mostly, the (brief) descriptions of English people complement the pic- ture of a cold, hostile city. This is the case for instance, when Leila and Michael
She was friendly and helpful, but she puzzled Leila, for she could not work out why she would want to be so towards a total stranger. But then Leila thought of home, and what would happen if Mary had moved into St Patrick’s with her family, or into Sandy Bay, or any place on the island, and suddenly it did not seem so strange. (173)
Here the two worlds – England and the native island – seem to approximate for the first time. Leila manages to reflect the situation and her neighbour’s as well as her own behaviour. When she imagines the situation inversed, i.e. Mary on Leila’s island rather than vice versa, Leila recognizes that there are parallels and similarities between them, and in the end she accepts Mary as a friend. The memory of home allows her to overcome clichés in the new homeland. However, this scene remains an exception. Most of Leila’s other interactions with natives of Great Britain are negative experiences, and her perception of them becomes more and more influenced by stereotypes. Again it seems as if the discriminatory environment she is often confronted with is, in the end, incorporated by Leila and renders any normal contact between her and other people in London impossible.
Clichés and Colonialism Besides the already discussed aspects that characterise Leila and Michael’s experience of the present in Great Britain, historical issues are also examined in the novel. These frequently affect personal relationships via clichéd ideas closely connected to the common historical past of the Caribbean island and Great Britain. Furthermore, these stereotypical notions often reflect traditional colonial images and situations of power. Stylistically, these ideas are intro- duced unexpectedly, as sudden thoughts. For instance, during their first con- versation, Mary and Leila touch upon the topic of history, introduced by Mary with a rather awkward question:
‘[…] And then there was the war when he was overseas, France most of the time. You do know about the war, don’t you?’ Leila smiled. For a moment Mary did not know whether to be embar- rassed or annoyed. In the end she was neither as she just stared at the laughing girl. ‘I was only small when the war was happening, so I don’t remember much, but they told us about it at school.’ ‘What I meant, though, was that you didn’t have any actual fighting where you were, did you, or did you?’ ‘No, but I think we used to see the planes going overhead sometimes, German ones as well […].’ (171)
When Mary rephrases her question, it does not seem credible that she really wanted to ask about actual acts of war in the Caribbean. Only Leila’s reaction to her first question forces her to act in response – she smiles about her neigh- bour’s question and its implication that Leila has no education and therefore no knowledge of the world. Though in fact, the situation is the other way around: whereas Leila is depicted as being well informed, Mary does not know anything about what the war was like in the West Indies, let alone about life in the West Indies in general. The dialog reflects the colonial ideological system which still affects people’s perception of the world. In the colonies, great importance was given to the distribution of knowledge about the ‘centre’, there was no interest in any information about the colonies, and in particular not about the time before their colonisation since from the colonisers’ point of view their history actually starts with colonisation. This eventually could have led to a loss of history and historical awareness of the natives. For Bénédict Ledent, the descriptions of the city in the novel express the typical situation inhabitants of formerly colonised regions find themselves in, namely a situa- tion in which they become aware of an “absence of historical awareness”:
This absence of historical awareness is apparently not so much of a prob- lem when living the circular island existence, but it is exposed when the emigrants are on their way to England or in England itself, in a society which, unlike the Caribbean, strikes us with its linearity and cold institu- tionalised organisation.32
Also in this comment on the text though, colonial ideas seem to dominate: inhabitants of formerly colonised islands are depicted as happy, unaware crea- tures in their native land, but as victims once they arrive at the centre. On the contrary, I would argue that by statements such as the one in the dialogue above, Leila is depicted as having historical awareness and knowledge. Towards the end of the novel, clichés in connection with ideas influenced by a colonial past are presented one more time when Leila is visited by the social worker Miss Gordon, whose appearance seems to consist of several stereotypes:
She [Miss Gordon] dressed from shoulder to calf in wool and tweed. On top she gathered her hair into an unhealthily tidy bun, and she hid most of her freckled face behind a pair of black horn-rimmed spectacles. […] She sighed, then once again her sharp Scottish accent droned forth and Leila felt as though she was listening to a musical instrument being played out of tune. (190)
The negative effect Miss Gordon has on Leila is underlined by her physical appearance or rather, the impression Leila has of it. Through the description of her hair, her freckles, and her glasses she is presented as a disagreeable charac- ter. With the negative connotation of her accent and the fact that Leila associ- ates her voice with an out of tune musical instrument (bagpipes most likely), it seems that Miss Gordon is mainly disagreeable because of her origin. Later, the social worker turns out to be rather persistent: she keeps visiting Leila and also continues to ask her the same questions that Leila usually refuses to answer. Leila feels dominated by Miss Gordon and associates the situation she finds herself in with those she has read about at home: “Miss Gordon could never pretend to be anything other than what she was; a missionary whom Leila had read about in books when she did history back home.” (190) Although mission- aries are not part of the life on the island anymore, she is aware of them as typi- cal elements of the colonial situation. As a coloured immigrant in London, however, she finds herself in a situation that reminds her of scenes she thought
32 Ledent, p. 27.
The girl was painting her nails. She sat, one leg tucked underneath the other, behind a desk with a bulky typewriter on it. Her face looked like a mask, her features simple and hard. ‘You saw the job in the paper?’ Michael nodded. She tossed her head in frustration. ‘Well, go on. Go on in or are you waiting for something?’ Michael sat on the near side of the man’s cluttered desk and felt the silent mockery. Occasionally Mr Jeffries (his name was on a plaque) took a drink from a cracked mug of tea that stood by his right hand, but it was a few moments before he addressed Michael directly. ‘Have you ever been to prison or to a courtroom in front of a judge?’
33 Paul Robeson was a black American singer and writer.
Michael shook his head. ‘How many wives, one or two?’ ‘One.’ Mr Jeffries smashed his cigarette dead and smiled gently. Michael fol- lowed the slight curl of the man’s lips. (166)
In this scene, clichéd ideas mix with racism and colonial elements. Mr Jeffries’ dominant position is expressed by the atmosphere, the silence, as well as by the fact that he is drinking tea and smoking a cigarette and is the one who controls the conversation. Furthermore, Michael, in contrast to Mr Jeffries whose name is written down on a plaque in front of him, remains nameless and therefore anonymous. He is just another coloured worker, one that is needed in order to fulfil the “coloured quota”, as cited earlier. The difference between Mr Jeffries and Michael is also expressed by their physical appearance:
[…] Michael nodded and Mr Jeffries stood up. For a large man he moved easily, as if his shoes were made of velvet, the carpet of some cloud-like material. Without turning around Michael had no idea of how close to him the man was. ‘Follow me.’ Michael stood. (166)
Mr Jeffries moves fast and easily, his surroundings seem to support this elegance and ease. Michael though perceives this agility as a threat; through swiftness the English man becomes almost an enemy, or at the very least unpredictable. Again, Michael can only take on the role of an observer as he remains at the mercy of his future boss. The clichés here are conveyed and enforced by the stereotypical depiction of the characters, both the secretary and Mr Jeffries. These scenes are a mirror of the situation between Leila and the social worker, and like Leila, Michael also finds himself in a dominated position in which he can only react either silently or by giving very short answers. In these scenes coloured people become dominated subjects whose move- ments and even emotions are completely determined by others. In more ways than one, in the ‘centre’ the immigrants find themselves in situations they thought to have left behind in history books. As immigrants though they are pushed into the role of colonised subjects like their ancestors. In Phillips’ inter- pretation, this discrimination eventually leads to hostile reactions on the immigrants’ part and further advances an unsurmountable dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
4.2 Depictions of the New Homeland in Monica Ali’s Novel Brick Lane
Brick Lane, published in 2003, tells the story of a family from Bangladesh living in London. The plot is set from the 1980s to 2002 in the borough of Tower Hamlets, which is an area where a large number of immigrants from Bangladesh settled, close to Brick Lane. A third of the current population of Tower Hamlets comes from Bangladesh, most of them from rural Sylhet, the most northeast- ern region of the country. Today, Brick Lane is famous for numerous curry res- taurants (which are mentioned in the novel) as well as the Brick Lane market held on Sundays. A couple of years ago, the area and its restaurants were dis- covered by an in-crowd; it has since experienced gentrification and has become a centre for young fashion designers – a development which is insinuated in the novel by more stylish restaurants opening in the area. Monica Ali’s novel starts in the 1980s when 18-year-old female Nazneen, the main protagonist, comes to London from a village in Bangladesh in order to join her considerably older husband Chanu, whom she has just been married to, as arranged by her father. In the course of the book Nazneen changes from a traditional, fatalistic housewife to a woman who eventually decides for her- self and her two daughters to stay in London while her husband returns to Dhaka. Read this way, the novel can be regarded as a Bildungsroman, a coming of age novel, although in that sense Nazneen’s development may sound more determined than it actually is.34 For instance, her final decision to stay in London is taken rather silently and is respected by her husband, who does not in any way try to make her change her mind. The book and especially its film adaptation have provoked protests from the inhabitants of Brick Lane, who saw themselves portrayed in a negative way. In December 2003, about half a year after the novel had been published, the view of a group that called itself the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council was expressed in an article in the Guardian. The group had sent an 18-page letter to Monica Ali, as well as to the Guardian, in which it called the novel a “despicable insult” to Bangladeshis living in the Brick Lane area. According to them, the book depicts the community in a “shameful way”.35 Eventually, in the
34 For an interpretation of Brick Lane as a Bildungsroman see Michael Perfect, ‘The Multicultural Bildungsroman: Stereotypes in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, xliii/3 (September 2008), pp. 109–120. 35 Matthew Taylor, “Brickbats Fly as Community Brands Novel ‘Despicable’,” The Guardian, 3.12.2003,
As Monica Ali expresses in the latter article, she believes the person behind the group to be the same one who tried to intervene with her publishers before the novel was even published. 36 In fact, shortly after the publication of the book in an essay published in the Guardian, Monica Ali reacted to this accusation: “In an audience recently at the Bengali World Literature Centre in the East End, a woman invited me to take a test. ‘How can you know what it is like to be a Bengali mother,’ she protested, ‘when you don’t even speak our lan- guage? Come on, speak to us in Bangla.’ […] I declined the questioner’s test […]. […] How can I write about a community to which I do not truly belong? Perhaps, the answer is I can write about it because I do not truly belong. Growing up with an English mother and a Bengali father means never being an insider. Standing neither behind a closed door, nor in the thick of things, but rather in the shadow of the doorway, is a good place from which to observe. Good training, I feel, for life as a writer.” Monica Ali, ‘Where I’m Coming From’, The Guardian, 17.6.2003
The public debates around the book and the film, which are reminiscent of the controversies at the end of the 1980s around Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, launched another verbal exchange in the British feuilleton, this time between Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer. Whereas Rushdie, together with colleagues from the English Poets, Essayists, and Novelists Centre (pen) expressed his support of the film company (and in this way indirectly also of the author), Germaine Greer argued that Ali should have been more sensitive in a novel that was the first depiction of the Bengali community in Great Britain. Furthermore, she criticised that Ali had a British point of view rather than one between the different cultures.38 In Ali’s novel, the reader experiences the new homeland through Nazneen’s eyes. The main protagonist slowly becomes familiar with and appropriates her new surroundings in London, first by looking through windows, like those of her apartment or buses, and later by exploring her environs on foot. Eventually, the family organises an outing to the centre of London and at the end of the novel Nazneen even manages to get there by herself. Accordingly, the first part of this section is an analysis of Nazneen’s looks, followed by a reading of the slow process of appropriation of the new homeland, which is a metaphorical and an actual journey to the centre simultaneously.39
2014]; Maev Kennedy, ‘In a Sense, If You Come under Fire from Those Conservative People, You Must be Doing Something Right’, The Guardian, 28.7.2007
The final part of this section is dedicated to the depiction of the city. As previously suggested in my reading of The Final Passage above, in Brick Lane, the new homeland is not so much Great Britain or London, but the city as an urban space. In Ali’s novel urbanity becomes the opposite of living in the coun- tryside, of living with nature, characterised by Nazneen’s memories of her native village in Bangladesh. Urban and rural life are constantly contrasted with each other through parallels and comparisons, however, they become less frequent as the novel progresses. The city is seen as the new home more and more and in the end takes centre stage. In this way, as in Phillips’ novel, the city becomes the new homeland for immigrants; in both texts there are hardly any references to Britain’s rural areas. In Ali’s book, the immigrants’ increasing positioning in the city (in London) is also reflected in the structure of the novel: while the first chapter starts in Bangladesh and the homeland is present through Nazneen’s memories and her sister’s letters, later in the book these insertions occur less often and the plot finally is only set in London. Another similarity to The Final Passage is the fact that the city is characterised in a rather negative way. In Brick Lane this denotes the weather, the climate, and the traffic, as well as the people who seem strange in their appearance or actions, and those who meet the immigrants with prejudices.
Views of the New Homeland – Glances through Windows In Brick Lane, the main protagonist Nazneen’s views of the new homeland are depicted as a movement from the margin to the centre. She moves from an elevated, but rather restrictive point of view from her apartment windows at the beginning of the novel, first further down and then into the city until,
Ingo Berensmeyer and Christoph Ehland (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 107–124, p. 112 and p. 113). Sara Upstone also refers to the movements in the novel in her reading of the book “through the concept of protest, in which movement into public space is the central metaphor of Ali’s novel” (Sara Upstone, British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 173). Pirjo Ahokas analyses how trans- national, female identities are created in Ali’s novel. He states that Nazneen, throughout the book, is “yearning for a fluid and mobile identity”, a yearning which is associated with “the weightless movements of ice-skaters” whom she watches on tv (Pirjo Ahokas, ‘Constructing a Transnational, Postmodern Female Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane’, in Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Globalized World, ed. by Yiorgos Kalogeras, Eleftheria Arapoglu, and Linda Manney (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), pp. 165–182, p. 178). Although the motif of the ice- skaters does indeed support the idea of Nazneen’s gaining of agency, it is hard to see her as a character longing for a fluid and mobile identity, but rather for stability in a place which she eventually declares to be her new homeland.
Nazneen waved at the tattoo lady. The tattoo lady was always there when Nazneen looked out across the dead grass and broken paving stones to the block opposite. Most of the flats that closed three sides of a square had net curtains and the life behind was all shapes and shadows. But the tattoo lady had no curtains at all. Morning and afternoon she sat with her big thighs spilling over the sides of her chair, tipping forward to drop ash in a bowl, tipping back to slug from her can. She drank now, and tossed the can out of the window. (12)
This glance through the window turns up again and again throughout the book.40 The quality of the looks change though. Whereas Nazneen first looks
40 As Beck states, “[t]his well-established spatial image [is] traditionally used to reflect upon the position of women in the domestic sphere ([…] cf., e.g., Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847); Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813))”; Beck, ‘Subjective Spaces’, p. 112. In her article on Ali’s novel, she also mentions the repeated description of Nazneen’s looks through the window (cf. Beck, ‘Subjective Spaces’, p. 112). The glances in Monica Ali’s novel remind one of a similar motif in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s narration ‘Der Hof im Spiegel’ [The courtyard in the mirror]. In Özdamar’s text, the relations between the Turkish first-person narrator and her neighbours in Düsseldorf, Germany (at times also via the courtyard) are contrasted with those of her family and friends in Turkey. Leslie A. Adelson reads the relationships and identifications in the narration with Arjun Appadurai’s concept of long- and short-distance identifica- tions. The protagonist identifies more strongly with the relations to her friends and family in Turkey, which in the text are expressed in telephone calls. Adelson, however, suggests a reading of these relations which is opposed to Appadurai’s interpretation of long-distance relationships, that to him are typical of processes of identification over great distances caused by migration in a globalised world. On the contrary, Adelson argues that the pro- tagonists’ relations to Turkey are short-distance identifications, as they were formed when the narrator was still in Turkey. Rather, the narrator’s relations to her immediate surroundings in Germany can be characterised as long-distance identifications as she can hear and see them, but does not know them. See Adelson, The Turkish Turn, pp. 41–49.
Nazneen thought sometimes of going downstairs, crossing the yard and climbing the Rosemead stairwell to the fourth floor. She might have to knock on a few doors before the tattoo lady answered. She would take something, an offering of samosas or bhajis, and the tattoo lady would smile and Nazneen would smile and perhaps they would sit together by the window and let the time pass more easily. She thought of it but she would not go. (13)
Here, Nazneen starts to mentally expand her view. Rather than staying in the frame of the window, she imagines actively moving towards a goal – physical contact with the “tattoo lady”. At first this seems to be a simple objective as most of the movements would take place in a space Nazneen is familiar with. Still, there are quite a few uncertainties about this move too: “Strangers would answer if she knocked the wrong door. The tattoo lady might be angry at an unwanted interruption. It was clear she did not like to leave her chair.
And even if she wasn’t angry, what would be the point?” (14) Thus Nazneen’s idea is never put into action, but remains a first expression of her wish to explore unknown spaces and to get into contact with other people. In the course of the book, this movement away from inner spaces and towards other people becomes increasingly present; the appropriations are more and more courageous as will be discussed in the next part of this section. In Brick Lane, the window becomes a connecting element rather than a separating one. For instance, when Nazneen opens the window in order to get in touch with the outside world: “She opened the window and leaned into the breeze.” (31) Later, through the open window Nazneen makes contact with the familiar surroundings of the other flats:
Through the open window drifted wafts of music and snatches of curry. It was the shift work. Main meals were cooked at all times of day or night. There was nothing to anchor them. Voices were raised in the courtyard and she looked out at a group of Bengali lads. (189)
However, Nazneen’s glances through the window do not remain solitary ones; further on in the novel, she shares them with her daughter Shahana, her hus- band Chanu, and her firstborn son Raqib, who dies as a baby.
Nazneen went to the window and looked out at the orange glow of the lamp-posts. […] Shahana looked out of the window with her. (273) She [Nazneen] had not noticed Chanu come in. […] He came to the window. (387) She put him [Raqib] on her shoulder and patted his back to expel some imaginary wind. He made a noise, an experimental sort of sound, which she seized upon as distress and walked with him over to the window. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Never mind. Look, look, look.’ But she kept him against her shoulder so that it was she who looked out. (69)
Nazneen’s lover Karim also looks through the window of her flat, although with him she makes sure they are never seen together. While the glance con- nects her with her children and her husband, it separates her from Karim: “He [Karim] stood at the window but Nazneen would not go and stand with him. She did not want to stand in view with him.” (257) However, the window also has a central role in the relationship between Nazneen and Karim in a different way. Similar to the scene with the “tattoo lady” that Nazneen waves at, the window becomes a means of communication for the two lovers:
They [Nazneen and Karim] had developed a routine of sorts. In the early afternoon she watched from the window. When he appeared, she raised her hand as if she were about to scratch her face. Then he would come up. If Chanu was still at home, she leaned her head against the glass, and he did not wave or smile or do anything other than continue his walk across the yard. (247)
Nazneen is aware that through this means of communication she has the power in the relationship:
Then she imagined that she would do the same every day, until he stopped appearing. She would simply watch and eventually he would understand and not come back again for her. But the next day she trembled just the same as she raised her hand. (247)
Nazneen’s supposed political activities are also expressed via the window. She participates in meetings of the Bengal Tigers, however, she does so more by chance than because of political reasons and is actually not very involved in the group’s activities. Her distance to the group is furthermore conveyed by the fact that she watches them from high above, from her window:
The leafleting campaigns geared up a notch. Small crowds began to gather around the leafleteers. Insults were exchanged. From her window, Nazneen watched the Questioner jab the air, as if all opposing thoughts were mere bubbles he could burst with the tips of his fingers. (214)
Similarly, she watches the Bengal Tigers’ preparations for a bigger rally from her window too: “She […] moved to the window. A rudimentary stage had been erected out of wooden pallets in the courtyard […].” (385) Here again, the win- dow pane becomes a separating element which this time Nazneen uses con- sciously as a divide between herself and the things going on around her. Other protagonists use the window in this way as well: when Nazneen opens the window during the manifestation in order to be able to understand the dem- onstrators’ slogans (“A chant was setting up among the demonstrators. Nazneen could not make out the words. She opened the window. […]”, 387), her husband Chanu, who is opposed to the Bengal Tigers’ political activities, closes it again, just when Karim is about to start speaking: “Karim mounted the stage. He held a megaphone to his lips. Chanu closed the window.” (388) In this scene, Nazneen’s distance to the political events is enforced by Chanu, and the rela- tionship between the three is also portrayed in a symbolic way. The motif of
The woman who fell, what terror came to her mind when she went down? What thoughts came? If she jumped, what thoughts came? Would they be the same ones? In the end, did it matter whether she jumped or fell? Suddenly Nazneen was sure that she jumped. A big jump, feet first and arms wide, eyes wide, silent all the way down and her hair wild and loose, and a big smile on her face because with this single everlasting act she defied everything and everyone. Nazneen closed the window and rubbed her arms. (31)
In the scene at Razia’s house, Nazneen is in a desperate situation, having to follow her husband to Bangladesh with her children, and therefore also having to leave her lover Karim. Thus, she finds herself at the window again. Just as at the beginning of the novel, Nazneen seems to be caught in a situation that dominates her and in which she has no possibility for a self-determined deci- sion. Once again, the window becomes a dividing symbol, and although the alternative solution it implies is not expressed explicitly in the scene, it remains in the air nevertheless because of the parallel to the scene of the falling woman. Later, when daydreaming about her near future, the symbol of the window is used yet again:
A vision rose before her. Chanu sitting on an aeroplane, trying to peer out of the window. No matter how he struggled he could not reach the window.
He was too small. Just a baby-sized Chanu, and his legs did not reach the end of the seat. Nazneen lifted him up and put him on her knee. She looked out of the window […]. (389)
This ‘window vision’ helps Nazneen understand that it is she who has to help Chanu with his decision to return. She realizes that he does not control or determine her, but that he rather asks her to come with him and that, in the end, he will also accept it if she decides to stay. Again, the window is used as a symbol in this passage; it becomes the goal for the protagonists as it enables communication, but here it can only be reached by Nazneen. Nazneen’s final look out of the window after her decision to stay in London with her daughters remains unaddressed: “Nazneen rested the picture against the tiles. She looked at the clock. She looked out of the window.” (401) Eventually, looking out of the window has once again assumed its place in Nazneen’s everyday life. No further comments are needed; the fact that she resumes her ritual again means that she has regained her daily routine. At the end of the novel, the motif of the window is utilised once more, though from an alternative perspective: “From the edge of the courtyard she glanced up to see how the window boxes looked from down here. Over the edge of the long white tubs a few dark green leaves were visible. She had bought winter pansies and they would soon be in flower.” (404) Only after her conscious decision to stay in London does Nazneen start to change the flat according to her and her daughters’ needs. Whereas at first she did not like Chanu’s furni- ture, but accepted it, she now begins to change the apartment in a visible way. In doing so, she realizes something which earlier had seemed impossible to her:
She looked over at the old flat in Seasalter House and saw that the win- dow was filled with potted plants. She should have bought plants and tended and loved them. All those years ago she should have bought seeds. She should have sewn new covers for the sofa and the armchairs. She should have thrown away the wardrobe, or at least painted it. She should have plastered the wall and painted that too. She should have put Chanu’s certificates on the wall. But she had left everything undone. For so many years, all the permanent fixtures of her life had felt so temporary. (283)
The scene from page 404 cited above is the opposite of Nazneen’s earlier thoughts. With her decision to stay and plant flowers on her windowsill, she has taken the first step away from her provisional life. This also brings with it a change of perspective: instead of watching from the window, Nazneen now finds herself in an active role, in the outside world.
Processes of Appropriation – Nazneen’s Movements towards the Centre 1. The Estate and Its Immediate Surroundings Besides the changing views and meanings of the window in the novel, Nazneen’s movements in the outside world also signify an increased appro- priation of her surroundings. This is emphasized by their direction versus the centre. Nazneen’s journey to the former colonial ‘mother country’ does not start with her actual flight to Britain (that she cannot even remember), but with the slow appropriation of her immediate environs once she is there.41 Eventually, this process takes her right to the centre of London, first with her family, and then on her own. Prepared by her looks from the window, Nazneen starts her movement towards the centre on the estate where she lives. Her husband Chanu asked her not to leave the house, so she defines (and thus appropriates) the estate as being part of her home: “Staying on the estate did not count as going out.” (36) In this way, Nazneen begins to socialize and gets to know other people on her walks:
Nazneen, on the short journey from Seasalter House [to Razia], began to strike up acquaintances. She nodded to the apopletic man in vest and shorts who flung open his door every time she passed it in the harshly lit corridor. She smiled at the Bengali girls who chattered about boys at top volume on the stairs but fell silent as she passed. Razia introduced her to other Bengali wives on the estate. Sometimes they would call and drink tea with her. (36–37)
Moving across the boundaries of the estate starts slowly. In accordance with her husband’s wishes, she is accompanied by him at first, for instance when they are looking for a new sari for Nazneen: “Once or twice she went out. She asked Chanu for a new sari. They looked in the shop windows on Bethnal Green Road. ‘The pink with yellow is very nice,’ she said. ‘Do you think so?’” (33) While Chanu is thinking about an answer to Nazneen’s question, she attentively watches the surroundings: “Nazneen looked up at the grey towers, the blown-by forgotten strands of sky between them. She watched the traffic. […] The people who passed walked quickly, looked ahead at nothing or looked down at the pavement to negotiate puddles, litter and excrement […].” (33)
41 Years after her arrival in London, Nazneen tries to remember the journey from Bangladesh: “She had come to London on an aeroplane, but she could not remember the journey. All she remembered now was being given breakfast, a bowl of cornflakes which had broken some sort of threshold and released a serving of tears. […]” (282–283).
A little later, Nazneen leaves the estate entirely on her own for the first time; a crucial stage in her movement towards the centre. She walks along known and unknown streets, again watches the architecture and the people, and is confronted with cold, wet weather (see 42–48). Besides consciously leaving behind her flat and continuing the process of appropriation, Nazneen’s first outing on her own is a parallel movement to the one made by her sister Hasina, who in Bagladesh decides to leave her violent husband for the capital Dhaka. This scandalous act for a traditional Muslim woman renders her a “lost” woman (46). Nazneen also gets lost when running around the streets, however, although she does so on purpose in the end she realises that she cannot help her sister by getting lost herself. In this scene, Nazneen’s appropriation of the city is illustrated in several ways. For the first time, she is on Brick Lane on her own: “She ran again and turned into a side street, then off again to the right onto Brick Lane. She had been here a few times with Chanu, later in the day […].” (43) Continuing on her way, she starts to discover the city according to her own map: “[…] From there she took every second right and every second left until she realized she was leaving herself a trail.” (44) Her excursion thus becomes an expedition on which she leaves invisible traces for herself in an unknown area. This distinguishes the female Muslim immigrant in the former colonial centre from colonial male powers in the colonised margins, who aimed at leaving as many and as obvious traces as possible. The immigrant’s appropriation of the centre, on the contrary, is much quieter and invisible to others, but still successful: at the end of this first trip on her own, she is identi- fied as being part of the city when asked for information by a passerby:
Someone tapped her on the shoulder […]. He came round to the front. A brown-faced man in a dark coat and tie. […] He said something. Nazneen recognized Hindi when she heard it, but she did not understand it. He tried again, in Urdu. Nazneen could speak some Urdu, but the man’s accent was so strong that she could not understand this either. She shook her head. He spoke in English this time. […] She shook her head again and said, ‘Sorry.’ And he nodded solemnly and took his leave. (48)
Here, Nazneen is inquired as an inhabitant of the city and even though she is not able to answer the passerby’s question, she still manages to communicate with him in English. Her linguistic competency leaves Nazneen with a positive feeling, with the impression that this might be the beginning of something, probably of her journey:
It rained then. And in spite of the rain, and the wind which whipped it into her face, and in spite of the pain in her ankle and arm, and her bladder,
and in spite of the fact that she was lost and cold and stupid, she began to feel a little pleased. She had spoken, in English, to a stranger, and she had been understood and acknowledged. It was very little. But it was some- thing. (48)
Nazneen has become one of many passersby and was addressed as a resident of the city for the first time; a first visible sign of her progress in appropriation. The final and maybe most important step in this first movement towards the centre beyond the borders of the estate is her return home, which at first is not referred to. After running around unknown streets, in the next paragraph she is depicted again at home, busy with the usual preparations for her husband’s return: “She got home twenty minutes before her husband, washed the rice and set it to boil, searched through a cupful of lentils […], put them in a pan with water but no salt and put the pan on the stove […].” (48) Only later the mystery about how she found her way back home is revealed and the symbolic meaning of her excursion thereby reinforced:
Anything is possible. She wanted to shout it. Do you know what I did today? I went inside a pub. To use the toilet. Did you think I could do that? I walked mile upon mile, probably around the whole of London, although I did not see the edge of it. And to get home again I went to a restaurant. I found a Bangladeshi restaurant and asked directions. See what I can do! (50)
Nazneen describes her trip as a circular movement around London (“around the whole of London”), whose dimensions seem big to her (“I did not see the edge of it”) but not impossible to grasp (after all she has the impression to have walked all of London). Thus, in this scene she encircles her final target, that is the centre of London, for the first time. The experience that she is able to find her way on her own is motivation for Nazneen’s future process of appropria- tion of the new homeland. Whereas before it was the estate, now its the immediate surroundings in the borough of Tower Hamlets that has become the new homeland she is familiar with. Several times Nazneen is depicted moving through the streets, first with Chanu, later with her (female) friends, and then on her own.42 She goes for
42 Chanu and Nazneen’s Sunday walks after the birth of their first child, Raqib, take place around Brick Lane: “It was Sunday morning. They would go out for a walk soon, around Brick Lane, and Chanu would push the pram and she would walk a step behind.” (73)
Nazneen walked a step behind her husband down Brick Lane. The bright green and red pendants that fluttered from the lamp-posts advertised the Bangla colours and basmati rice. In the restaurant windows were clip- pings from newspapers and magazines with the name of the restaurant highlighted in yellow or pink. There were smart places with starched white tablecloths and multitudes of shining silver cutlery. In these places the newspaper clippings were framed. The tables were far apart and there was an absence of decoration that Nazneen knew to be a style […]. (208)
When Nazneen goes shopping with her friend Razia, again the casually men- tioned names of streets and shops indicate her familiarity with the borough:
Razia wanted to buy cloth and Nazneen accompanied her to Wentworth Street. […] Past Regency Textiles and Excelsior Textiles Ltd. […], beyond the ‘exclusive’ luggage of Regal Stores […]. They crossed the street and looked inside Narwoz Fashions. Yellow Rose Universal Fashions caught their attention briefly, and Nazneen was pulled into Padma’s Children’s Paradise (East End) by a keen assistant […]. (255–256)
Later, when Chanu starts to work as a taxi driver mostly at night, Nazneen becomes responsible for doing the shopping on her own which allows her to meet other women: “Razia and Nazneen stood with a little group of mothers outside Alam’s High Class Grocery shop on Bethnal Green Road.” (323). She also picks up her daughters from school every day. Both routines show how moving through the city on her own has become normal to Nazneen. Finally, at the end of the novel Nazneen is depicted as being completely familiar with the area around Brick Lane, even though the scene in question shows the area in a rather different light due to an out-of-control manifesta- tion of young Bengalis. At this supposed climax of the novel, Nazneen is depicted in a determined and self-confident way when she tries to rescue her daughter Shahana from one of the cafés on Brick Lane. In order to do so she jumps over police barriers, runs past overturned cars, and protects herself from various objects flying around. This scene is a final example for Nazneen’s appropriation of her immediate surroundings which here reaches a climax too. The street names mentioned as she runs past them, heading for Brick Lane, shows how familiar they are to her and how she moves through them without any problems: “Nazneen ran. Down Bethnal Green Road. Turned at
Vallance Road. Jogged down New Road. Stitch in her side on Cannon Street.” (390) And, later: “The George Estate was covered in scaffolding. […] Nazneen crossed over Cable Street and passed under the railway bridge. […] She turned into Berner Estate.” (390–391) During her run towards Brick Lane, she meets Karim as well as the Bengal Tigers’ so-called Multicultural Liaison Officer, and she also recognises the Bengal Tigers’ so-called Questioner. In this sense, Nazneen is not only portrayed as being familiar with the geography of the area she lives in, but she also seems to have gained a position in the social structure of the place. Thus, the scene is one of the culminations of the book.
2. Extended Views Nazneen’s further appropriation of the city happens through various excur- sions that take her to other places in London. For instance, she rides on the bus with her son Raqib and her husband, through unknown streets in order to visit Dr. Azad, an acquaintance of Chanu’s. These first extended views of her sur- roundings again happen through a window, which both protects and separates Nazneen and her family from the outside world:
She [Nazneen] stood the baby up on her knee so he could look out of the window with her. It was dark, and cosy with lamp-posts. The people were tucked into big coats, and steamed as they walked. […] Leather shops, dress shops, sari shops, shops that sold fish and chips and samosas and pizzas and a little bit of everything from around the world […]. (81)
Shortly afterwards, Nazneen is forced to radically accelerate the project of appropriation of the new homeland when her son Raqib, still a baby, falls sick and has to be rushed to the hospital. The drive is an expression of this accelera- tion: “The city shattered. Everything was in pieces. She knew it straight away, glimpsed it from the painful-white insides of the ambulance. Frantic neon signs. Headlights chasing the dark. An office block, cracked with light. These shards of the broken city.” (95) The city, hitherto known to her only in frag- ments, again presents itself in this way. Thus to her, the fragments become the true city: it seems shattered just like Nazneen herself feels shattered by Raqib’s illness, which eventually leads to his death. Before this though, the shattered city seems to have rearranged its bits and pieces around a new centre – Raqib:
Nazneen pressed her fingers against the incubator. He was the centre. The world had rearranged itself around this new core. It had to. Without him, life would not be possible. He was on the inside and all else looked in. The nurses and doctors who rustled and sighed, and bunched around.
The hospital building with its smothering smells, its deathly hush and alarming clangs. The crystal towers and red-brick tombs. The bare-legged girls shivering at the bus stop. The hunched men and gesticulating women. The well-fed dogs and bloated pigeons. The cars that had screamed alongside the ambulance, urging it on, parting in waves. (95)
Here, Nazneen is not glancing at the city any longer, but rather the city is look- ing at a part of her, at Raqib. In this vein, her stay at the hospital with her son becomes another important stage in the process of appropriating the city. Although she is being catapulted right into the centre of her new homeland, she proves strong enough to direct not only her own concentration, but also that of the whole city towards her son. After this experience, it seems only the final movement, the final arrival in the centre, still awaits her.
3. Arrival at the Centre The final j ourney to the centre happens twice, each time quite differently and with diverse connotations. The first time the trip to the centre is Chanu’s idea; the whole family travels as tourists to the centre of London. The second time, though, Nazneen undertakes the trip on her own account; she manages it by herself, with just the help of directions. The two journeys are characterised by completely different atmospheres: whereas on the first trip, the family is consciously on holiday in the city they live in, Nazneen undertakes the second one in order to meet her lover Karim at Covent Garden. When viewed from the outside, the second journey seems like a normal everyday ride on the underground. During the second bus ride depicted in the novel, Chanu and their daughter Shahana look through the window at the outside world. Nazneen however, watches her family this time, in particular Chanu, to whom this first holiday after thirty years is a special event: “Nazneen looked down at his [Chanu’s] sandals, which were also new […]. She brushed an imaginary hair from her husband’s shoulder.” (240) In this way, the holiday in London is less a journey to the centre than a family trip, i.e. one of the few times the family undertakes something together and acts like a family. This is expressed in several ways. For instance, on the bus Nazneen decides to make this day special: “Nazneen decided she would make this day unlike any other. She would not allow this day to disappoint him [Chanu].” (240) Eventually, they stand in front of Buckingham Palace as a family (even though their older daughter Shahana turns her back on the sight in order to show her protest against the supposedly happy family life) and they pose for photos. With the first picture, taken by Nazneen, she records the image of her family in the ‘centre’: “She [Nazneen]
She walked down Brick Lane to get to the tube station at Whitechapel. […] (374) Nazneen reached the entrance. […] (374) As she bought her ticket […] (374)
43 Later, Nazneen is confronted with another picture anticipating further appropriation of the new homeland when she is packing for the supposed return to Dhaka. She stares at a mug on Shahana’s desk: “She stood by Shahana’s desk. A cracked mug bearing a picture of a thatch-roofed cottage and a mouse in trousers leaning on the gatepost. It was a picture of England. Roses around the door. Nazneen had never seen this England but now, idly, the idea formed that she would visit it.” (365–366) While Nazneen looks at the mug she also glances at an extended version of her new homeland. After having been to the centre, she recognises the image as an illustration of rural England and forms the idea that after the centre she is also capable of appropriating its periphery, that is the rural areas of England. These thoughts further enable her to perceive Britain as her actual home and London as the city she is not prepared to leave for Bangladesh anymore.
Nazneen stood close to the edge, watching the mice twitch in and out of the tracks and looking out for the eye of the train in the black tunnel. […] (374) The woman reached the bench. Nazneen almost collided with her. ‘Sorry,’ said the woman. ‘Sorry,’ said Nazneen. They both sat down. (374)
Here, Nazneen is depicted as being self-confident; she seems to be familiar with the necessary movements and this journey that she has never undertaken on her own before does not intimidate her. Only later when she has to change trains does the subterranean geography become unknown to her:
She had to change to the Piccadilly Line. Karim had explained it all. She got lost and walked for miles through tunnels and up steps and down escalators, across ticket halls, past shops and barriers and through more tunnels. A couple of times she was close to tears. (374)
Once she meets Karim and they walk to the market in Covent Garden together, Nazneen thinks: “she could have done this before” (376). This thought not only reflects her personal process of emancipation, but it also expresses an oppor- tunity which is open to all immigrants from Brick Lane and other areas: the appropriation of their new home, of all parts of it, even those which are usually reserved for tourists. Nazneen’s journey symbolically opens up the geography of the city to all immigrants; henceforth the new homeland is not only Brick Lane and its surroundings, but also the very heart of the city of London.
4. ‘Moving Towards the Centre’ as a Structural Element in Ali’s Novel The structure of the text underlines Nazneen’s movement towards the centre. At the beginning of the novel, Nazneen’s native homeland receives a lot of attention, for instance the entire first chapter is set in Bangladesh. However, in the course of the novel London becomes increasingly present, also from a structural point of view: Nazneen’s sister’s letters from home arrive less and less often, and for the most part the chapters towards the end of the book are completely set in Great Britain. The novel consists of 21 chapters. It starts in Bangladesh with the narration of the birth of Nazneen, whose fateful character (she was believed to be a still- born child, but started to cry some minutes after having been born) is present all throughout the plot. In this way, the beginning of the novel is strongly con- nected to the first homeland and Nazneen’s origins are very present. This pres- ence is continued through Nazneen’s sister Hasina, whose letters, which provide dates and at times place names, are reprinted in italics. The first three
The City (of London) as a New Homeland 1. London at the Centre of the Novel Like in the texts by Caryl Phillips and Hamid Sadr already discussed in this chapter, the city also takes centre stage in Ali's novel. Rather than Great Britain, London as an urban centre is depicted as the immigrants’ new homeland. The focus of the book is on the Brick Lane area in London as a centre for immi- grants from Bangladesh. Ali chooses a realist style of depiction:44 often, names
44 Several critics have dealt with the formal aspects of Brick Lane and have, in particular, discussed it as a realist novel: cf., for instance, Alistair Cormack, ‘Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form: Realism and the Postcolonial Subject in Brick Lane’, Con temporary Literature, 42.4 (2006), 695–721; James Graham, “This in’t Good Will Hunting”: Londonstani and the Market for London’s Multicultural Fictions’, Literary London:
A red and gold sari hung out of a top-floor flat in Rosemead block. A baby’s bib and miniature dungarees lower down. The sign screwed to the brickwork was in stiff English capitals and the curlicues beneath were Bengali. No dumping. No parking. No ball games. Two old men in white panjabi-pyjama and skullcaps walked along the path, slowly, as if they did not want to go where they were going. A thin brown dog sniffed along to the middle of the grass and defecated. The breeze on Nazneen’s face was thick with the smell from the overflowing communal bins. (13)
Even the readers who are not familiar with the area and who cannot locate neither “Brick Lane” nor “Tower Hamlets” with these first descriptions of the quarter, still get a clear idea of it. The sari, the bilingual sign, and the men in “panjabi-pyjamas” with “skullcaps” characterise the area as being one where a lot of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent live. The dog, the smells, as
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, 6.2 (2008)
Market stalls lined the road selling leather goods, coats of every kind of syn- thetic, bright handbags on cheap chains, shoes that looked disposable, Jamaican patties, tinned food at 40 per cent off. They ignored the stalls and stuck to the pavement. Past Regency Textiles and Excelsior Textiles Ltd, cloth draped on wire hangers in windows, Balinese prints, wax-block African prints (with certificate of authenticity), beyond the ‘exclusive’ luggage of Regal Stores, past the untitled window where cellophane-wrapped blocks of fabric were suspended on end in a pattern of diamonds […]. (255–256)
This scene does not only give an account of the two women’s shopping tour, but it reflects the geography of a distinct part of the city which is clearly influ- enced by its inhabitants and shows their diversity. This ‘multicultural’ atmo- sphere also generates blendings which according to Ali’s ironic description cater primarily to economic needs:
Days of the Raj restaurant had a new statue in the window: Ganesh seated against a rising sun, his trunk curling playfully on his breast. The Lancer already displayed Radha-Krishna; Poppadum went with Saraswati; and Sweet Lassi covered all the options with a black-tongued, evil-eyed Kali and a torpid soapstone Buddha. ‘Hindus?’ said Nazneen when the trend first started. ‘Here?’ Chanu patted his stomach. ‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authentic- ity,’ said Chanu. (373)
The Bengali restaurants use Hindu gods as marketing tools because this sells better than a Muslim restaurant. Again, this is an actual phenomenon from Brick Lane that is utilised in the novel.46
46 In an interview with the German magazine Die Zeit, Monica Ali comments on the blend- ing of cuisines on Brick Lane: “Die meisten Bangladesher servieren in ihren Restaurants
In the chapter where the family organizes an outing to the city centre, again exact geographical indications are given. They see Buckingham Palace and walk around the area: “They walked on the other side of the road, following St. James’s Park, back towards Buckingham Palace.” (243) Again, the protago- nists can nearly be followed on a map. The most detailed and numerous descriptions of locations in the city can be found at the end of the novel – a formal climax which coincides with a culmi- nation on the level of discourse (i.e. Nazneen’s decision not to return to Bangladesh as well as her journey to the city centre on her own to meet Karim). For instance, Nazneen’s trip to the city centre is depicted in detail, with regard to both locations as well as actions which characterise life in the city (373–374). Nazneen gets lost when she has to change trains, and her search for the right way also serves as a description of London’s tube architecture (374). The scene of Nazneen’s search and eventual rescue of her daughter Shahana on Brick Lane is accompanied by detailed descriptions of the location; as quoted above, the names of the streets she runs past are listed (cf. 390). Later, the street names are complemented by names of shops and a pub: “The George Estate was covered in scaffolding. […] Nazneen crossed over Cable Street and passed under the railway bridge. The Falstaff pub was boarded up […] Nazneen pressed on, past the Sylhet Cash and Carry, the International Cheap Calls Centre, the open jaws of a butcher’s shop […]” (391) In this manner, throughout the novel it is the city that always manages to take centre stage, whether it be its margins or its centre. The many detailed descriptions of London make it seem less like a theatre, but still strongly present it as the new homeland.
2. London and Nazneen’s Memories of Bangladesh Like in Phillips’ The Final Passage, in Ali’s text London as an urban centre is depicted as being artificial. The city is very distant from nature; a few excep- tions in the text even enforce this impression. For instance, when Nazneen gets lost during her first excursion on her own, a little park might save her:
There was a patch of green surrounded by black railings, and in the mid- dle two wooden benches. In this city, a bit of grass was something to be guarded, fenced about, as if there were a sprinkling of emeralds sown in among the blades. […] The sun came out from behind a black cloud and shone briefly in her eyes before plunging back under cover, disappointed with what she had seen […]. (46)
sowieso indisches Essen, nur merkt das keiner.” [Anyways, most Bengalis serve Indian food in their restaurants, but nobody notices it.] Marko Martin, ‘Ali im Wunderland’, Die Zeit, 14, 25.3.2004,
Here, the rare occasion of seeing green grass in the city is stressed; the patch of grass is fenced about with black railings, but also one more time on the seman- tic level. The fact that Nazneen finds this rare bit of green in a place which otherwise seems very artificial is such a special event that even the weather changes, though only for a moment. Other references to nature in descriptions of the city are usually connoted negatively, like for instance the descriptions of the immediate surroundings of the estate: “She walked around the back of the estate, […] past the stunned clumps of rosemary and lavender that the council had put in a raised bed and left, defenceless against the onslaught of dogs and takeaway wrappers and small children.” (230) The plants seem to have been forgotten as they have lost any natural appeal, and now reinforce the derelict impression of the estate. During the course of the novel, their situation gets even worse: “Where were the little lads who sat on the edge of the raised beds that once held lavender and rosemary and now cradled old cans and dog dirt […]?” (381) In this manner, in the courtyards of the estate even natural objects become artificial, as also illustrated by the following quote: “Outside, the estate was dead. A pile of turf squares stood on the scrubby grass at the centre of the courtyard. They had been delivered in summer. Then, they were bright and even. Soon enough, they blended into the environment.” (380) Just like every- thing else, the turf squares ‘die’, they seem to be forgotten by the borough coun- cil, just like the inhabitants of the area are. This absence of nature is not only characteristic of public places; for instance the private garden of the Azads, a family from Bangladesh, is described as being rather artificial:
They had come to a small front garden paved with multicoloured flag- stones in random shapes and sizes, as if a huge vase had been dropped from a great height and the shattered fragments had landed directly in front of the house. Beneath the window a plaster goose in a red spotted bonnet peered into the darkness. Just to the side of the door a three-foot- high policeman bowed his jolly legs, and faked a smile. Other figures crouched in the gloom, outsized animals and stunted humans. (86)
The front garden is populated with figures whose artificiality is enforced by the attributes that describe them: the goose is wearing a bonnet, the policeman obviously is a caricature, as are the other figures that are either abnormally large or crippled. Even the path towards the house is depicted as being unnatural; to Nazneen it seems like the result of a destructive act. Here, English life itself, as expressed by the assimilated Azad family, becomes unnatural. Even in their closest surroundings they are incapable of creating or preserving nature.
Only once, when after a short trip to her flat Nazneen returns to Raqib in hospital, are there positive details in the description of the estate’s courtyard: “The sun was out and the now familiar but still nameless tree on the corner showed pale green buds. The grass, brave despite the odds, was attempting new growth.” (117) In this scene, Nazneen is in an optimistic mood and so perceives her environs in a positive way – for the first time she sees growth in the middle of the usually grey and brown courtyard and thus does not believe the area to be purely artificial. Further examples for the few positive depictions of nature in the city are the scenes at the family outing in St. James’ Park (246–47), and when Nazneen watches the winter pansies on her windowsill (404). The actual contrast to London’s artificial urbanity are the scenes referring to Bangladesh, i.e. either Nazneen’s memories of her native village Gouripur or Hasina’s letters. Like Leila’s native island in Phillips’ The Final Passage, in Brick Lane the native village also represents nature and thus forms a contrast to the artificial reality of Nazneen’s life in the new homeland. Furthermore, in Brick Lane the native region is mainly depicted through childhood memories and therefore, as opposed to Phillips’ novel, there is no compensation, thus the dif- ference between the artificiality of urban London and the naturalness of the homeland left behind is even more distinct. Chanu once calls Nazneen an “unspoilt girl […] [f]rom the village” (16) and in fact she remembers most of her childhood: “And she drifted off to where she wanted to be, in Gouripur tracing letters in the dirt with a stick while Hasina danced around her on six- year-old-feet. In Gouripur, in her dreams, she was always a girl and Hasina was always six.” (35) Her memories of the village express her close relation to it. Often, animals, plants, or landscapes take on an important role in her memo- ries, for instance when she remembers observing the fishermen on the lake: “Then they walked to the lake to watch the fishermen pulling in great nets of silver fish, and saw the muscles knot on their arms and legs and chests.” (35) In another scene, Nazneen and Hasina are shown playing with a dead insect which forms a contrast between them and her friend Razia’s children who have countless toys: “Later, they [Nazneen and Hasina] found a cricket, on its back, turning to husk. And they […] dug a shallow grave.” (63) While in London Nazneen sees only grey clouds between the high buildings, but the sky of her childhood was wide and spacious: “In Gouripur, when she looked up she saw that the sky reached to the very ends of the earth.” (353) In a different passage, the sky above Gouripur is full of ducks: “Nazneen looked up […]. The sky was thick with beating brown wings. The ducks were coming, it was the season. They came in hordes, casting great shadows across the rivers and threatening the sun.” (64) Whereas walks in London are characterised by the naming of streets and shops, life in the Bengali village is marked by abundant nature:
That afternoon […] Nazneen was not tired. She walked round the pond and stepped over the back of a snake, which slid into the water and became itself a glittering ripple. She climbed a little way up an amra tree and wedged herself into a forked branch to look out across the flat fields. The closer ones were lavish green, dense and deep, but the far fields filled with golden jute flowers were slick as mirrors. (84)
Nazneen’s earlier life spent in close relation to nature is further underlined by superstition, magic, and tradition, which characterise life in the village. For instance she remembers Jinni, her aunt’s good spirit as well as the bad one her mother was obsessed with and which had to be cast out by a fakir.47 Another time she thinks of the bird which had become very tame and almost ‘befriended’ her aunt Mumtaz.48 These memories form a counterpart to Nazneen’s life in London and thus complement the polarisation of nature on the one hand, and artificial life on the other. In one passage, this opposition is expressed in a nearly proverbial form: “You can spread your soul over a paddy field, you can whisper to a mango tree, you can feel the earth beneath your toes and know that this is the place, the place where it begins and ends. But what can you tell to a pile of bricks? The bricks will not be moved.” (70) Nazneen’s slow process of accepting London as her new homeland, the increased relations with her surroundings, as well as time passing eventually all lead to increasingly weaker memories of her native home. In the end the memory of her native landscape and its nature is lost: “She began to spend time at the window, as she had in those first few months in London, when it was still possible to look out across the dead grass and concrete and see noth- ing but jade-green fields, unable to imagine that the years would rub them away.” (302) What earlier was unthinkable has already become reality: the memories of her native land have almost left her completely during her time in Great Britain. Only in her dreams can her past and the nature of her village sometimes come back to her:
The village was leaving her. Sometimes a picture would come. Vivid; so strong she could smell it. More often, she tried to see and could not. […] As the years passed […] she began to rely on a different kind of memory. The memory of things she knew but no longer saw. It was only in her sleep that the village came whole again. (179)
47 See Ali, Brick Lane, pp. 329–331. 48 See Ali, Brick Lane, pp. 179–181.
Besides Nazneen’s memories, Hasina’s letters are also characterised by a rural atmosphere, even though she lives in the city of Dhaka most of the time. There, the building complex she lives in equals a community in a small village where everyone knows each other and takes part in the others’ lives. Hasina’s situa- tion becomes even more rural when one of the inhabitants buys two goats and she herself thinks about getting some chickens: “Hussain have got two goats and they eating washing. […] I think about getting some chickens myself.” (131) In contrast to Nazneen, who only towards the end of the novel grows flowers in her flat, Hasina does so immediately: “I growing mustard in a pot chilli plants in another.” (141) Again, life in Bangladesh is depicted as being closer to nature, and London, by comparison seems artificial. To Nazneen, this contrast between urban and rural life becomes one of the greatest differences she feels in the new homeland. However, she is realistic about her situation and knows that the difference is not only about the location she finds herself in, but rather about a difference in time: “[…] she knew that where she wanted to go was not a different place but a different time.” (35)
4.3 Outside Looking In – The Depiction of Austrian History in Hamid Sadr’s Novel Der Gedächtnissekretär49
In his novel Der Gedächtnissekretär, published in 2005, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Second Republic of Austria, Hamid Sadr deals with the end of the Second World War in Vienna. The Persian protagonist Ardi, who lives in Vienna in the 1990s, is mentally and physically overwhelmed by the time of the air raid warnings and bombings. Eventually these historical events become just as real to him as the contemporary city. In the context of the festivities and publications celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Second Republic, as well as the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 2005, Sadr’s novel at first glance seems to be another depiction of the final days of the war. This impression is enhanced by the fact that the first descriptions of the destroyed city are reminiscent of the various commemoration services that were organised in 2005; it seems as if ‘pitiful Vienna’ was depicted here. Soon though, readers realise that in the case of this book they are being confronted with a shifted perspective, with a different and much more varied outlook.
49 Parts of this chapter were first presented as a paper entitled “Total Recall? Remembering Somebody Else’s Past. Hamid Sadr’s Novel Der Gedächtnissekretär as a ‘Touching Tale’,” at the conference IN/DIFFERENCE: Current and Historical Perspectives on Cultures in Contact, organised by the Royal Irish Academy in Limerick/Ireland in November 2007.
This alternative dimension is characterised by the choice of an autobiographi- cally inspired protagonist and first-person narrator, i.e. a Persian student of chemistry, Herr Ardi [Mister Ardi; nearly an anagram of the author’s name]. Though he has lived in Austria for some time and studies and works there, he is still not very familiar with the historical period of the Second World War in Austria. His different cultural and historical background becomes the starting point for a process of coming to terms with the final days of war in Vienna, as well as with the war in general. Herr Ardi works as a “Gedächtnissekretär” [both a secretary of memory, as well as memory’s secretary] – a newly coined expression created by Ardi’s employer, Mr Sohalt. This job includes comparing photographs of the destroyed city Mr Sohalt took at the end of war with the actual city. In this process, Ardi is confronted with Sohalt’s memory, with that of the city, and eventually, with his own memory which begins to take him not to his home in Persia, but to the Austrian (post-)war period. This method of remembering events he has not experienced himself also starts to influence his present life. With every photo- graph he deals with, Ardi slides deeper into an increasingly dominant past. Eventually, when walking through the city, he is surrounded by a Vienna at the end of the war and loses the present altogether. Furthermore, Ardi is forced to actively remember in order to overcome the silence of Sohalt’s selective mem- ories, as well as those of the people to gain a more complete and probably truer picture of the final days of war in Vienna. The novel is structured along the notes Ardi takes while being treated in the Viennese psychiatric sanatorium Baumgartner Höhe to rid himself of the perva- sive assaults of the past. By means of this structure as well as on the level of discourse, Austrian and in particular Viennese history is told from an alternative perspective, i.e. from an immigrant’s point of view (what is more, in the case of this novel, this is also true for the authorial level). Ardi knows the city very well, but as a city of the present. Its memory and its way of remembering the past is hitherto unknown to him and he therefore has to work through this slowly, albeit rather intensely, by using Sohalt’s photos and notes and with the help of the memory of the city, the houses, the flats, the trees, and the cobblestones. In the end, Ardi is unable to see and experience the city in the present, in particular when he works with Sohalt’s pictures, the streets, houses, squares, as well as people change and sometimes everything becomes black and white just like in the photos. In these situations, Ardi suddenly starts to see soldiers of the German Wehrmacht (the unified armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945), and later, Russian soldiers or people fleeing to air-raid shelters for protection. He senses the fear and horror, hears the alarms, and feels the blasts and deto- nations. Ardi’s process of appropriating history does not end well: the pictures
The City’s Memory ‘Memory’ is a term that in its traditional meaning refers to a phenomenon that takes place inside a person, or inside a person’s brain. However, memory’s structure, the decision of what is saved and what is not depends on external factors such as society and culture. Jan Assmann, with reference to Maurice Halbwachs, divides these external dimensions of memory into several catego- ries, one of which is called the “Gedächtnis der Dinge”50 [memory of things]. The term ‘things’ is meant in a broad sense and therefore comprises everyday objects as well as cities and buildings. People have always been surrounded by objects and humankind invested its “Vorstellungen von Zweckmäßigkeit, Bequemlichkeit und Schönheit, und damit in gewisser Weise sich selbst”51 [idea of practicality, comfort, and beauty and thus, in a certain way, itself] in them. In this sense, objects are an image of humankind as they contain memo- ries and can build a bridge to the past. Halbwachs anchors memory in ani- mated spaces; for instance the city becomes a spatial frame for the memory of bourgeoisie societies, where memory, and with it the notion of ‘home’, is kept even in times of absence.52 In Sadr’s novel, the protagonist recognizes the ‘memory of things’ mainly as the memory of the city of Vienna, but also as that of everyday objects such as furniture. He eventually uses this memory for his (involuntary) project of coming to terms with the past. Both protagonists, that is Ardi and Sohalt, are aware of the ‘memory of things’, though in different ways. While Sohalt, via the photographs of buildings, puts symbols at the cen- tre of memory, Ardi concentrates on the fate of the city’s inhabitants. The novel is based on photographs of bombed houses in Vienna which Sohalt took during the final months of the Second World War; they are all labelled with descriptions in special notebooks. At the time, it was Sohalt’s idea to turn these pictures and notes into a book about the destruction of
50 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 20. 51 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, p. 20. 52 Also Assmann refers to this statement by Halbwachs, see Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, pp. 38–39 and Maurice Halbwachs, Das kollektive Gedächtnis (Stuttgart: Enke, 1967), pp. 127–130.
Vienna. In the present day of the plot, the 1990s, Sohalt wants to finally make this project a reality, but due to his physical state he needs an assistant. Ardi, who takes on this task, is supposed to look for the buildings in the pictures in present-day Vienna and compare Sohalt’s notes and pictures with the contem- porary condition. Sohalt chooses the pictures Ardi is supposed to work with and he only chooses photographs of buildings where no people can be seen. In his book, he plans to show these photos exclusively: „Ein Baudenkmal oder ein Palais habe Symbolcharakter, und der Band müsse zeigen, wie schrecklich dieser blind- wütige Krieg für die Österreicher gewesen sei. Denn die armen Häuser und Steine, was könnten die dafür?“ (23) [A historic monument or a palace were representative and the volume was supposed to show how terrible this raging war had been for the Austrians. The poor houses and stones were not able to help it.] With his preselection, Sohalt puts the city’s memory at the centre of recollection. He looks for symbols representing Austria and the Austrians, but does not dare to actually touch the people who suffered during the war. To Sohalt, the bombed houses are symbols for the end of the Second World War and this is also to be read as a political statement: to him, as for many other Austrians, the end of the war was not a liberation but an occupation by the allied forces following the bombing campaigns. In fact, in the course of the novel Ardi finds out about Sohalt’s Nazi-membership. According to Ardi, the volume Sohalt has in mind consists mainly of “Fotos, die ihm angenehm waren; also Bilder von einer zu Unrecht angegriffenen Stadt” (130) [photos that suited him; that is, pictures of a wrongly attacked city]. For Sohalt, the city is at the centre, but unlike Halbwach’s description of the ‘memory of things’ that reflects an image of humankind, Sohalt divides the city from its inhabitants. It is up to Ardi to bridge this separation again. The mem- ory of the city that he discovers is much more complex: buildings and objects are not only symbols, but turn out to be full of personal memories which they pass on to Ardi. Sohalt’s pictures become the starting point for this task:
Die Fotos, auf denen die Pflastersteine immer unten lagen: unter den Panzerketten der Fahrzeuge, den Stiefeln der marschierenden Standarte, den Hufen der russischen Lastgäule und so fort, als Kopfsteinpflaster, Granitwürfel, Gehsteigkanten und Treppenstufen zwar namenlos und wenig beachtet, aber als Zeitzeugen und Erinnerungsauslöser unbestechlich. (90)
[The photographs with the cobblestones always underneath: under the vehicles’ tank tracks, under the boots of the marching regiment, under
the hooves of the Russian sumpters and so on; flagging such as cobble- stone pavement, cobbles, the edges of the footpath and steps, without a name and hardly noticed, but incorruptible as contemporary witnesses and triggers of memory.]
Contrary to Sohalt, Ardi is not interested in the symbolical meaning of a destroyed building, but rather in the numerous stories that seemingly insignifi- cant objects such as cobbles, facades, or tram tracks have experienced, which they carry inside and will eventually pass on to him.53 Thus, he feels his task is not only the comparison of historical photos with the present, but also seeing beyond what is depicted. He knows that: “Was das Auge auf einem Foto sieht, ist immer nur ein Bruchteil dessen, was man erlebt.” (219) [What the eye sees in a photograph is always only a fraction of what one experiences.] Con sequently, Ardi himself ends up experiencing much more when he ‘falls’ into the past. His encounter with the past is strongly linked to the present; in con- temporary Vienna, people’s fate at the time of the war is still sensible to him. Therefore, he increasingly believes that the city is not only a symbol but a wit- ness of the war and thus carries inside it a memory:
[…] Die Lichtröhre über der Straße, die schwach in der Mitte schaukelte, verbreitete ein pessimistisches Licht auf der Fahrbahn, die halb verro- steten Blechtafeln vor den drei kleinen Geschäftslokalen an der Kreuzung, der geflickte Asphalt in der Arbeitergasse und die zwei vergitterten Kellerfenster in der Brandmayergasse erhärteten meinen Verdacht, sie hätten damals alles mit eigenen Augen gesehen. (71, my italics)
[[…] The lamp swung weakly in the middle of the street and effused pes- simistic light on the road; the semi-corroded metal plates in front of the three small shops at the crossroads, the patchy tarmac in Arbeiterstreet and the two barred basement windows in Brandmayerstreet substanti- ated my suspicion that they had seen everything with their own eyes. (my italics)]
Dealing with the past and the pictures causes Ardi to become increasingly more sensitive to history and the stories of history that surround him.
53 In a similar vein, Maurice Halbwachs stresses the importance of a city’s districts for its inhabitants. To him, these are as deep-seated as trees, rocks, or hills; due to their continu- ity a city’s inhabitants have a feeling of stability (Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 130–131).
Eventually, history is continuously present to him in the street as well as in the building where he lives: „Die alte Geschichte, es war nicht zu übersehen, wohnte noch hier und verbreitete eine Kälte, die von der Kriegskälte nicht zu unterscheiden war.“ (71) [Old history, one could not ignore it, was still living here and it let out a cold which could not be told apart from the cold of the war.] Ardi starts to perceive the past in all things and in the end some of the objects even start speaking to him:54
Auch der Armutsgeruch des Hauses, eine Mischung aus Chinakohl und Sauerkraut, erinnerte an die Vergangenheit. Die abgenützten Steinstufen, das gelockerte Holzgeländer, die zwei schwarzen Klotüren am Gang und die ausgetrockneten Bassenas grüßten mit einem heiseren Heil! (71)
[Also the bulding’s smell of poverty, a mixture of Napa cabbage and sau- erkraut, was evocative of the past. The outworn stone steps, the loosened wooden handrail, the two black doors of the bathrooms and the dried up washbasins on the corridor saluted with a coarse Heil [Hitler]!]
Later, the smell of poverty is mentioned again: to Ardi, it has become a typi- cally Viennese smell that connects the present with the past (cf. 224). After his experience of the city’s memory, he begins to see objects in a different light even in his small, unheated studio apartment:
Seit drei Jahren lebte ich hier, und das Inventar unter der Glühbirne sah aus, als wäre ich zum ersten Mal da: Das kleine Bücherregal stand schief, die Mendelevium-Tafel (Chemie) an der Wand war vergilbt, der alt- deutsche Schreibtisch war vollgeräumt und das schmale Eisenbett im letzten Drittel des Zimmers einsam. Das gesamte Mobiliar stammte, wenn nicht aus der Vorkriegs-, dann sicher aus der Kriegszeit. […] Viele der Gegenstände hier […] hatten mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit das Zittern des Bombenangriffes aus der Nähe erlebt. (72)
[I had been living here for three years, but the inventory beneath the bulb looked like I was here for the first time: the small bookshelf was crooked, the Mendelevium board (chemistry) on the wall was yellowed, the old desk was brimming and the small iron bed in the final part of the room
54 Already in Hamid Sadr’s first German novel, Gesprächszettel an Dora [Conversation Notes to Dora], a book about the last months of Franz Kfka’s life, objects carry memory inside them. In the text, trees as well as objects of daily use speak to Kafka.
was lonely. All the furniture was if not from prewar surely from wartime . […] Almost certainly, many of the objects had experienced the trembling during an air raid point-blank.]
Eventually in Sohalt’s apartment, the past is also very present to Ardi. During one of his first visits, the furniture seems quirky and old-fashioned to him, but he also feels an affinity to wartime in it:
[…] die Standuhr neben der Kredenz war stehen geblieben; das Landschaftsbild, auf dem ein Hirsch im hohen Gras stand und Richtung Wald röhrte, während der weiße Pulverrauch vor dem Gewehrlauf stand, war staubig. Das Sofa war abgewetzt, der Esstisch und das Klavier abge- nutzt, und alles war irgendwie mit dem Bunker draußen verwandt. (35)
[…] [the long case clock next to the credenza had come to a halt; the natural scenery with a belling stag in high grass and a smoking gunbarrel was dusty. The couch was scuffed, the table and the piano were worn off and in a way everything was related to the bunker outside.]
The memory retained in the furniture transcends both the temporal as well as spatial distance, and further approximates Ardi to the war; he feels the pres- ence of the bunker. Later, he also smells the war in Sohalt’s flat: “Die Luft im Zimmer war mit einem seit dem Krieg dort abgestandenen Geruch beladen […].” (37) [The air in the room was full of a stale smell which had been there since the time of the war.] These ‘talking’ and unsavoury objects form a con- trast to Sohalt’s photographs that in comparison are two-dimensional, momen- tary, lifeless images of objects of the past. Although he asks Ardi to find the links between the past and the present, Sohalt himself has difficulties with this task; despite the odd wallow, to him the past remains concluded. To Ardi, on the other hand, the photographs open up a memory hitherto unknown to him. This memory is not finished at all, but rather alive and thriving. Ardi is con- fronted with it via buildings and objects, in smells and sounds, and in more and more details. In this way, the city’s memory also becomes the antipode to the people’s silence, in particular to Sohalt’s silence, as indicated by his name that means ‘just like this’.55 In the course of the novel, Ardi encounters the ‘inscribed’ memory mainly in stones; cobblestones in particular help him to orient himself in the city of
55 The implied meaning of Sohalt’s name is also referred to in the epigraph of the novel: “Ja ja, so ist es halt” (7, Epigraph) [Well, well, that’s just what it’s like].
Geht man eine leere, verlassene Gasse oder Straße entlang und hört man außer den eigenen Schritten einen unbestimmbaren Lärm, wo weit und breit keine Passanten in der Nähe sind, sollte man in Betracht ziehen, dass die Steine uns vielleicht etwas sagen wollen. Nicht nur die Kopfsteinpflaster der Gassen und Gehsteige; auch andere, scheinbar sprachlose Gegenstände wie die Hauseingänge, Bäume und leeren Ladenfenster können uns etwas zuflüstern. (91–92)
[When walking along an empty, deserted lane or street, apart from the sound of your steps, you can hear some indefineable noise although there are no other pedestrians around, you should take into consideration that maybe the stones want to tell us something. Not only the cobblestones on the lanes and footpaths; but also other, seemingly mute objects such as entrances, trees and empty shop windows can whisper to us.]
Once again the extremely lively memory of the city as experienced by Ardi is emphasised. Initially, he has problems with the ‘language of the stones’; it is too inarticulate for him: “Die Sprache der Steine war nicht deutlich genug. Es gab auf jeden Fall viele Verständigungsprobleme zwischen uns.” (92) [The lan- guage of the stones was not articulate enough. There definitely were a number of communication difficulties between us.] Eventually, Ardi remembers the advice of one of his Persian teachers and decides to turn the stones in order to read them. This allows their significance as memorial stones to be underlined; like on the memorial stones in the church these stones also carry names, but they are invisible. The stories that the stones comprise accompany Ardi on his search for the original sites of the photographs. For instance, he uses them to orient himself when working with a series of pictures entitled “Volkssturm bei der Gruppe Siebenstern in der Neubaugasse 25, Donnerstag, dem 12. November”
(92) [people’s militia at the seven stars group in Neubau street 25, Thursday, November 12]. Again and again the stones are mentioned in the text:
[…] und betrachtete stets auch die Pflastersteine. (94) Das Pflaster war überall das alte, aber wo war die gesuchte Litfasssäule? (95) Etwa fünfzig Schritte weiter, ungefähr auf der Höhe der Spittelberggasse (wo das Pflaster nicht ganz mit Asphalt zugedeckt ist) […] (97–98) Nur die Pflastersteine blieben stumm. (99)
[[…] and was watching the cobblestones all the time. The paving was the old one everywhere, but where was the sought after advertising column? About fifty steps further on, about where Spittelberg street was (where the paving was not completely covered with tarmac) […] Only the cobblestones remained silent.]
Due to their memories, the cobblestones become Ardi’s accomplices. They are present both in the photographs as well as in his reality and thus build a bridge between the two realms. Unlike Sohalt’s photographs and his written com- ments that have (been) changed over time and were partly incomplete, the cobblestones are presented as bearers of the truth with an indefinite capacity to save memory. Once Ardi realises that he ought to pay more attention to the stones, he also gains a better understanding of their language:
Die Pflastersteine meinten, ich solle mich bücken und auf dem Boden bleiben. (100) […] von diesem Boden her, von dort, wo ich auf den Knien lag, witterte man aus den sauber gewaschenen Pflastersteinen Gewaltgeruch. (100)
[The cobblestones told me to stoop and to remain on the ground. […] From there on the ground, where I was lying on my knees, from the cleanly washed cobblestones one could get wind of the smell of violence.]
Like the scene in the building where he lives, the cobblestones’ memory works on multiple levels: Ardi can see them (both in the photographs as well as on the street), he hears them and eventually smells from them what has happened. The stones speak in an even more distinct way when Vienna is liberated on April 10, 1945:
Von der Sitzbank der Haltestelle aus, wo wir (ich und die Pflaster steine) so oft Zeugen anderen Benehmens waren, sieht alles anders aus.
Die Pflastersteine – bestens geübt in Nachsicht und mit allen Wassern gewaschen – zeigen auf die Leute und sagen: ‘Schau sie nur an! Man ist befreit!’ (212)
[From the bench of the stop where we (the cobblestones and I) have often witnessed different behaviour, everything looks different. The cob- blestones –very well trained in forbearance and knowing every trick in the book – indicate the people and say: ‘Just look at them! They have been liberated!’]
In Sadr’s novel, the cobblestones are memorial stones that cannot be attrib- uted to a particular time, but that carry inside them memory and hand it down.56 This memory is present all the time, however it needs a careful listener in order to be understood. The photographs reproduce only a detail of the past and while Sohalt’s comments are at times unclear and very subjective, to Ardi the city’s objects and buildings become the real bearers of memory, whose knowledge is worth deciphering. Eventually, the city’s memory takes over and becomes unbearable for Ardi. For instance, when forced to look for a new place to stay, he first thinks about moving into Sohalt’s flat (Sohalt is in the hospital at this time), but the past there, i.e. the objects’ memory, frustrate his plan:
Meine Idee, solange er im Krankenhaus war, dorthin zu übersiedeln, fan- den die Gegenstände des Zimmers gar nicht gut. Ich ging zum Sofa, machte mich dort breit, und wollte wissen, wie weich es war. Sowohl auf der Rückenlehne als auch auf dem Sitz waren die Abdrücke seines [Sohalts] Körpers noch warm. (158)
[The objects in the room disliked my idea to move in for the time he was in hospital. I went to the couch and lolled on it; I wanted to know how soft it was. Both on its back as well as on the seating the impressions of his [Sohalt’s] body were still warm.]
56 Accordingly, Evelyne Polt-Heinzl in her review of the novel refers to a book on memorial places for victims of fascism that is entitled Die Steine reden [The Stones speak]. To her, the novel develops a similar idea about the role of stones. See Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, ‘Wenn Steine flüstern. “Der Gedächtnissekretär” von Hamid Sadr’, Wiener Zeitung (extra), No. 106 (June 3, 2005), 11. Polt-Heinzl refers to the following volume: Erich Fein, Die Steine reden. Gedenkstätten des österreichischen Freiheitskampfes; Mahnmale für die Opfer des Faschismus; eine Dokumentation (Munich: Europa Verlag, 1975).
It is impossible that the impressions on the couch are still warm; at this point Sohalt has been in the hospital for a number of days (for instance, the food in the fridge has all gone bad). Thus, once again in this scene Ardi is con- fronted with the past. Furthermore, it becomes clear here that memory does not work on a timeline; it does not distinguish between events dating back further and more recent ones. Rather than time (span) the impressiveness of events seems to be decisive. In the case of the couch, regularity, daily routine, and habits seem to have left their traces in the flat’s memory. Ardi does not seem to be surprised by these events. Because of his experiences in the city, by now he is capable of talking about the couch and the imprint left by Sohalt on it as a matter of course. Sohalt’s flat has become a trigger for memory just like the earlier cobblestones, the edges of footpaths, and the steps. However, there is something disturbing and scary about his experience at the flat, namely Ardi’s uncontrollable reaction to the objects’ memory: “Die Flut unerwün- schter Bilder kam daher wie gerufen.” (158) [The flood of unwanted images arrived right on cue.] Then later: “[…] die Angst vor der Vergangenheit kam beim Ausräumen der fauligen Sachen aus dem Kühlschrank wieder hoch […].” (159) [[…] the fear of the past returned when clearing the rotten things from the fridge […].] Although later on Ardi stays in Sohalt’s flat for a short period of time, he first decides that he will not live in any of Vienna’s older buildings again:
Das Wohnen in einer Altbauwohnung käme für mich nie mehr in Frage. Nur ein Zimmer in einem neu gebauten Haus, in einem nach dem Krieg gebauten Haus, wo die Zimmerwände ein Wohnen ohne Geflüster über die früheren Einwohner erlauben würde. (159)
[Living in a flat in an old building was out of the question. Only a room in a newly built house, in a building constructed after the war, where the walls would allow him to live without the susurrus of earlier residents.]
However, it turns out to be quite difficult to find a room in a newer building and thus Ardi is forced to continue entering older buildings. Again, in these buildings he encounters a number of triggers of memory:
Die Doppelfenster mit den alten welligen Scheiben […] lösten die Erinnerungsflut aus […]. […] Der nächste Auslöser für Gespenster anderer Art war das Fenster des Hausmeisters, wo verbeult, abgenützt und rostig noch die Tafel Hauswart hing. Wie eine flüsternde Mahnung, man würde schon lange genug neben dieser Tafel stehen, drang aus dem
Keller merkwürdiges Geflüster. Dieses Wispern war bis zum Dachboden zu hören, dann schaltete sich das Licht ein, und man sah am Boden aus unerklärlichen Gründen nasse Flecken. […] Die Nummernschilder und die Fußmatten der Wohnungen erzählten von denen, die hier einmal gelebt hatten. Ich wollte gleich wieder weg. (224–225)
[The double windows with the old rippled panes […] triggered the flood of memories […]. […] The next trigger for different kinds of ghosts was the caretaker’s window, where there was still hanging the dented, worn out, and rusty sign Hauswart [meaning ‘caretaker’, but reminding of ‘Blockwart’, block warden, the unofficial title of a lower Nazi Party politi- cal rank]. Like a whispered warning that one has already spent enough time next to the sign, one could hear strange murmuring sounds from the cellar. This susurrus could be heard as far as the attic, then the lights went on and for reasons unknown on the pavement one could see some wet stains. […] The doorplates with the numbers of the flats and the doormats told about those who used to live here. I wanted to leave immediately.]
In passages such as this one, memory becomes ever stronger but is only expe- rienced by Ardi. Towards the end of the novel objects and buildings nearly exclusively reveal their image of the past and their memory, respectively. Their historicity is ever stronger and the present seldomly surfaces until it disap- pears altogether. Eventually, the city’s memory becomes the only visible layer, tangible and olfactorily perceivable to Ardi alone, who as a result also changes himself.
Total Recall or Ardi’s Memory of an Unknown Past At the beginning of the novel, Ardi is depicted as being strongly grounded in reality: he has to organise and finance his life as a student of chemistry in Vienna, he thinks of his native country Persia often, as well as of his father. However, in the course of the book, he is drawn more and more into the past, i.e. into the final months of the Second World War in Vienna. This past also starts to possess his memory and gradually replaces his recollections with its own. At the same time, giving up his memory (and therefore a part of his identity) enables Ardi to become completely immersed in the Viennese past and to find out the truth about it. This change of Ardi’s iden- tity as well as the mixing of different temporal levels is expressed in his per- ception. This happens for the first time on Teinfalt Street where at first everything seems to be normal:
Am frühen Morgen, als ich über die Freyung eilte und gleich neben dem Brunnen die Fotos auspackte, wehte von der Kirche eine frische Brise her, und die Sonne schien. Das Pflaster war nass, die Dächer der Umgebung tauten langsam auf, und die Ruhe, die durch das Plätschern des Wassers gestört wurde, war versöhnlich wie in einem Dorf. (25)
[Early in the morning, when I hurried over Freyung Square and then unpacked the photographs next to the fountain, there was a fresh breeze coming from the church and the sun was shining. The paving was wet, the roofs close by were slowly thawing and the calm, disturbed by the ripple of the water, was conciliatory just like in a village.]
According to his task, Ardi looks at Sohalt’s old photographs and tries to find the exact position of the photographer:
In die Fotos vertieft, merkte ich nicht, dass das Plätschern des Wassers verstummte und die Taube, die vorher ihre Federn ins Becken getaucht hatte, wegflog; auch das Traben des Fiakerpferdes war nicht mehr zu hören. […] Mit dem Durchblättern der Notizen beschäftigt, verdrängte ich die Stille, doch als ich aufblickte, war der Platz in seine Kriegstage versetzt; zertrümmert wie im Bild. Weil der Weg zum Schottenstift durch Ziegelbrocken bedeckt und nicht mehr begehbar war, machte ich einen Umweg und ging vorsichtig, als ob nichts geschehen wäre, zur Teinfaltstraße zurück. (26–27)
[Immersed in the photographs I did not notice that the ripple of the water had stopped and the pigeon that earlier had dipped its feathers into the basin flew away. Also the carriage horse’s trot could not be heard any longer. […] I was busy leafing through the notes and thus blocking out the silence, but when I looked up the square was transferred back to the days of war, it was destroyed just like in the picture. As the path to the Scottish Abbey was covered by bricks and therefore impassable, I made a detour and carefully, as if nothing had happened, walked back to Teinfalt Street.]
Looking at the pictures becomes the starting point for Ardi’s journey through time. When walking through the city on his own, he hardly ever finds himself in the past, but when doing his job, i.e. when wandering through Vienna with Sohalt’s pictures and notes, any detail can become a trigger for the disappear- ance of the present. During this time, something is blocked inside of him,
Wie weit ich schon in seine Vergangenheit hineingelaufen war, wurde mir erst vor dem Glaskasten klar, als ich nicht mehr wusste, ob ich nun in einem Weinkeller oder, wie ich schon aus seinen Notizen entnommen hatte, in einem Luftschutzkeller war. […] Im gelbschwachen Schein der alten Glühbirne […] hätte man beides […] annehmen können. (55)
[I only realised how far I had been running into his past when I was stand- ing in front of a glass case and did not know if I was in a wine cellar or, as I had read in his notes, in an air raid shelter. […] In the faint yellow shin- ing of an old bulb […] one could assume both.]
Eventually, the smell of cured meat, the music as well as the voices make him believe that the place probably used to be an air raid shelter but by now was a restaurant. He decides to look for a place to sit down and have a drink. However, once seated in the restaurant, the past again catches up with him: “Ich glaube, eine Ahnung von Gestapo-Regenmänteln hing noch am Kleiderständer neben der Tür.” (55) [I think there was still an idea of Gestapo raincoats hanging on the hat stand next to the door.] When Ardi reads about Sohalt’s wife, who was an aid in air raid shelters, he believes for a moment to be in one again. He smells its odour and the diners become people sheltering from the bombs. Ardi hears how the atmosphere and the sounds in the place change from a vinous babble of voices to a kind of choir, praying along with the air raid radio channel.
Lieber Hitler, bitt’ für uns! Lieber Himmler, bitt’ für uns! Lieber Goebbels, bitt’ für uns! Lieber Eichmann, lieber Göring, lieber Heydrich, bitt’ für uns! Lieber … (60)
[Dear Hitler, pray for us! Dear Himmler, pray for us! Dear Goebbels, pray for us! Dear Eichmann, dear Göring, dear Heydrich, pray for us! Dear …]
Later Ardi continues to see the present through the eyes of the past (so to speak): a group of elderly women singing “Brüderlein fein”57 becomes a group of so-called Trümmerfrauen [rubble women, women removing the rubble in Germany and Austria after the Second World War] cleaning bricks under the supervision of Russian soldiers, a family at the next table seem to be good and respectable and are therefore suspicious. Similarly, another group of men who raise their glasses, saying ‘cheers’ in French and Russian also raises his suspi- cion. Ardi himself admits these feelings:
Angesichts meiner Verfassung mündete alles, was ich auch an diesem Abend sah oder dachte, im Krieg; jede harmlose Frage, jede Bemerkung, jeder Gesichtsausdruck, wurde sofort nationalsozialistisch gedeutet. Es waren manchmal winzige, ganz kleine Zeichen, die mich dazu provozi- erten, sie alle als durch und durch nationalsozialistisch zu sehen. (61)
[Due to my condition, anything I said or thought that evening ended in war; any harmless question, any comment, any facial expression was immediately interpreted as National Socialist. At times it was tiny, very small signs which provoked me and which made me perceive them all as being nazi through and through.]
57 “Dear Little Brother”, a well-known folksong composed for Ferdinand Raimund’s play Das Mädchen aus der Feenwelt oder der Bauer als Millionär [The Girl from the World of Fairies, or The Millionaire Farmer] (Vienna: Bergland-Verlag, 1955[1826]).
Here, Sadr’s novels demonstrates how Ardi’s present is continuously influ- enced by the past. His escape, from both the past as well as the present, is his mother tongue. In the scene described above, he writes down a couple of words in Persian and is then able to perceive the restaurant’s atmosphere in a neutral manner. As described in the previous section, Ardi’s memory of a past hitherto unknown to him does not consist only of Sohalt’s memories but includes a much richer, historical panorama and is therefore more complete and objec- tive. It also includes Ardi’s own knowledge about the Second World War and, in particular, about the Nazi regime. In the text, this knowledge is represented in the form of images too. For example, a detail in the city reminds him of a pic- ture from the stone quarry in the concentration camp in Mauthausen (79). Later, the idle long case clock in Sohalt’s apartment showing 3 o’clock reminds him (though some time later in the novel) of the station clock in the concen- tration camp of Treblinka. The latter was a mock clock, intended to make the deported people believe that there was nothing to worry about (cf. 103). These impressions are pictures that Ardi has already seen before, for instance in books on the Holocaust. At the same time, some of them could be events Sohalt has experienced but does not want to talk about. Thus, they could be a simile to Sohalt’s Nazi party membership which Ardi finds out about by chance when he discovers all the objects from the time of the war in Sohalt’s attic (for instance flags with the swastika, awards, and steel helmets). These facts are never commented on in Sohalt’s notes. The memory of the secretary Ardi, how- ever, becomes Sohalt’s conscience and he remembers everything that has been forgotten. In this way, Sohalt’s selective ‘photographic’ memory is opposed one more time, though this time by a different kind of memory of images. Sohalt does not mention the Holocaust in his notes at all. To Ardi, on the other hand, the war in Vienna is inseparable from the concentration camps that in his memory are an intrinsic part of the Second World War. Whereas Sohalt focuses on the suffering of the city itself, Ardi’s memory presents an alternative version that includes the suffering of others. Here, Ardi’s memory brings together two very diverse ones: on the one hand that of a former Nazi, and on the other hand, that of the victims of the Holocaust. Sohalt’s version of history and in particular his silence corresponds with the official version of Austria’s role in the Second World War; up until the 1980s, Austria presented itself as the first victim of Nazi-Germany. Only recently has this stance been reviewed and Austria’s actual role discussed. Thus, Sohalt rep- resents a whole generation that decided to keep silent about what had hap- pened during the Second World War. The commonly accepted opinion (which was also expressed by the former Austrian president Kurt Waldheim in 1986,
Arjun Appadurai uses the term “global ethnoscapes” to describe places that are characterised by migration and mass media and that, especially since the 20th century, have become locations for the social, spatial, and cultural formation of group identities.2 The adjective ‘global’ indicates that these groups are no lon- ger tied to certain territories or particular areas but are to be seen in a bigger (i.e. in a global) context. In particular, they do not define themselves only with regard to their current place of residence but also with regard to distant places and groups (e.g. the homeland left behind or where their parents come from). The connections to these places are secured via mass media.3 Furthermore, Appadurai states that while these groups are heterogeneous they are also con- scious of having their own, common history as a group.4 In his seminal work on the effects of migration and mass media in the age of modernity, he defines ethnoscape as “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals”;5 however, he states that the term does not only include these groups of people, but also those that are not moving them- selves. The latter too are increasingly confronted with ethnoscapes:
1 Earlier versions of this chapter have been published as: Sandra Vlasta, “Globale ethnoscapes’ in deutsch – und englischsprachiger Literatur im Kontext von Migration’, in Gedächtnis und Erinnerung in Zentraleuropa, ed. by András F. Balogh and Helga Mitterbauer (Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2011), pp. 245–258 and Sandra Vlasta, ‘Das Ende des ‘Dazwischen’ – Ausbildung von Identitäten in Texten von Imran Ayata, Yadé Kara und Feridun Zaimoglu’, in Von der nation- alen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 101–116. 2 See Appadurai, Modernity and Arjun Appadurai, ‘Global Ethnoscapes. Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology’, in Recapturing Anthropology. Working in the Present, ed. by Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), pp. 191–210. 3 Leslie Adelson too refers to the concept of long-distance affiliations secured via media (that Benedict Anderson also discusses with regard to the imagining of the nation) in her reading of Emine Sevgi Özdamars story ‘Der Hof im Spiegel’ [The Courtyard in the Mirror], though in order to show that it is the production of locality (also discussed by Appadurai), i.e. the pro- tagonist’s present in her apartment in Düsseldorf, that is in the foreground rather than the long-distance relations (to her relatives in Turkey). See Adelson, The Turkish Turn, pp. 41–49. 4 See Appadurai, Modernity, p. 48. 5 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 33.
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This is not to say that there are no relatively stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work, and leisure, as well as of birth, residence, and other filial forms. But it is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move.6
Eventually, Appadurai suggests we replace terms used for entities such as vil- lages, communities, and localities with the term “ethnoscape”;7 thus, a global network characterised by migration and mass media replaces traditional units. Appadurai furthermore coins the terms mediascape, technoscape, finances- cape, and ideoscape that refer to the global networks of media, technology, finance, and the world of ideas and information, respectively.8 He uses the suffix-scape as it “allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes”.9 All of them are closely connected to the notion of ‘deterritorial- ization’, a process in which the traditional links between nation, culture, identity, and territory are dissolved and borders hitherto believed to be insur- mountable are shifted and overcome. Although Appadurai sees the process(es) of deterritorialization “at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms”,10 he also believes that it has new, positive, and creative potential, for instance when it comes to satisfying the longing for what Salman Rushdie has called “imagi- nary homelands”11 by way of films, media, journeys, etc. The growing impor- tance of imaginary homelands brings with it a growing importance of the imagination per se in society, and with it, “new markets for film companies, art impresarios, and travel agencies, which thrive on the need of the deterritorial- ized population for contact with its homeland”.12 Although the imagination has always played an important role in societies’ cultural life – as myth, history, dreams, etc. – nowadays, in a “postelectronic world”,13 it has been allocated a particular role: “More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before.”14 This is due to mass media present- ing a variety of possible ways of life that can either be adopted or at least be
6 Appadurai, Modernity, pp. 33–34. 7 See Appadurai, Modernity, p. 64. 8 See Appadurai, Modernity, p. 33–37. 9 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 33. 10 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 38. 11 Cf. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands. 12 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 38. 13 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 5. 14 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 53.
15 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 64. 16 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 65. 17 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988). 18 The short story was published in English in the following edition: Julio Cortázar, ‘Swimming In a Pool of Gray Grits’, in A Certain Lucas, Julio Cortázar (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 80–83. 19 Cortázar, ‘Swimming’, p. 82; the quotation is taken from Appadurai, Modernity, p. 59. 20 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 59.
Alexandra Lübcke takes up Appadurai’s concept of deterritorialization and combines it with Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of DissemiNation.21 Similar to Appadurai’s concept, DissemiNation – a term reminiscent of Jacques Derrida – is a typical notion of migration. Bhabha describes it as the dissolution of fixed communities in order to shape new forms of societies: “I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering.”22 According to Lübcke, both deterritorialization as well as DissemiNation challenge hegemonic national discourses of allegedly homogeneous societies that through migra- tion become heterogeneous. In a similar vein, Iain Chambers sees the decon- struction of traditional categories as a consequence of migration:
We are no longer dealing with closure – the unique and authorised ver- sion of events – but with the perpetual opening up and interrogation of such categories [such as ‘History’, ‘English’, the ‘culture industry’, ‘capital’ or the ‘West’], and their constant relocation beyond presumed borders and limits. Seemingly shared grammars [of cultural languages] and syn- tax are differentiated, undone, dispersed, simultaneously weakened and spread. There is no longer an ‘original’ presence to ground them in a pre- sumed ‘authenticity’, stable source or fixed ‘originary, holistic, organic identity’. In the space of this third culture […] the canon, the voice of authority, of the patriarch, of the Occident, is deferred and decentred.23
This deferring and decentring of the canon signifies a transformation and enlargement (or also, a threatening) of the ideological basis of a society’s cultural memory. According to Jan Assmann, cultural memory is an outer dimension of human memory where mimetic routines assume the status of rites, i.e. besides their function they also assume meaning.24 A community’s cultural memory rep- resents a “Bestand an Wiedergebrauchs-Texten, -Bildern, und -Riten”25 [stock of
21 Alexandra Lübcke, ‘Enträumlichungen und Erinnerungstopographien: Transnationale deutschsprachige Literaturen als historiographisches Erzählen’, in Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitlater globaler Migration, ed. by Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 77–97. 22 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Dissemination: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, in The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139–170 (p. 139). 23 Chambers, p. 85. 24 See Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis., p. 19 and p. 21. 25 Jan Assmann, ‘Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität’, in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. by Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 9–19 (p. 15).
Dass er diesen Platz [im kollektiven Gedächtnis] […] bekommen hat, ist Ausdruck der Subversivität von MigrantInnenbiographien, die nationale Identitätskonstruktionen fragwürdig erscheinen lassen und sie als kolle- ktive Imaginationen bloßstellen, die nicht auf eine Essenz, ein Zentrum oder einen Ursprung rückführbar sind.30
[That he [Miro] has received this position [in collective memory] […] expresses how subversive biographies of migrants are. They question national constructions of identity and expose them as collective imagi- nations that cannot be traced back to an essence, a centre or an origin.]
Leslie A. Adelson’s concept of touching tales underlines the subversive charac- ter of migrant stories. In her analysis of texts by Turkish-German authors,
26 Assmann, ‘Kollektives Gedächtnis’, p. 15. 27 Assmann, ‘Kollektives Gedächtnis’, p. 15. 28 See Lübcke, p. 78. 29 Schweiger, ‘Identitäten’, p. 184. 30 Schweiger, ‘Identitäten’, p. 184.
Adelson departs from a common history of Turks and Germans: “Germans and Turks in Germany share more culture (as an ongoing imaginative project) than is often presumed”.31 This shared culture is present in some literary texts more than in others. Furthermore, touching tales describe the blending of historical references and cultural developments that until now have not been seen as being linked. Additionally, Adelson uses the term to denote motifs in the texts that reflect “German guilt, shame, or resentment about the Nazi past, German fears of migration, Turkish fears of victimization, national taboos in both countries, and Turkish perceptions of German fantasies”.32 In this way, touch- ing tales write and narrate collective cultural memories in a new way and they also contribute to the search for post-national conceptions of communities. By approximating stories and histories until they ‘touch’, they are read and inter- preted in a new and creative way. Again, new contexts and links are made vis- ible that can be used to design projects for a common future in a politically and socially changing environment. Alexandra Lübcke chooses the term Erinnerungstopografien [topographies of memory] for her reading of transnational literature as a rewriting of cultural memory:
Erinnerungstopographien – dies umfasst sowohl ein zeitlich-diachrones, ein räumliches, als auch ein representatives Moment […]. Als Gedächtnis metapher umfasst dieser Begriff des Topos nicht nur den Ort, sondern darüber hinaus ein narratives Element – ein erzähltes, immer wiederkeh- rendes, aber wandelbares Thema. Das Erinnern greift die Topoi auf, re-zitiert sie, greift dabei sowohl in individuelle als auch gesellschaftliche, kulturelle Archive und versetzt sie mittels narrativer Praxis in gegenwärtige zeitliche und räumliche Bezüge. Dies führt zu einer diskontinuierlichen und nicht widerspruchsfreien netzartigen Anordnung. Im Unterschied zum eher statischen Begriff von kollektivem bzw. kulturellem Gedächtnis ermöglicht dieses netzartige Konzept den Blick auf Widersprüchliches, Diskontinuierliches, ‘Disseminiertes’ bzw. Zerstreutes.33
[Topographies of memory – this denotation includes a temporal- diachronic, a spatial as well as a representative aspect […]. As a metaphor of memory the term topos comprises not only the ‘place’, but in addition a narrative element – a narrated, recurring, but changeable theme.
31 Adelson, The Turkish Turn, p. 20. 32 Adelson, The Turkish Turn, p. 20. 33 Lübcke, p. 86.
Remembering takes up topoi, re-cites them, takes from individual as well as societal cultural archives and places them in contemporary temporal and spatial contexts with the help of narrative practice. This leads to a discontinuous and ambiguous net-like arrangement. In contrast to the rather static concept of the collective and the cultural memory, respec- tively, this netlike model enables to see contradictions, discontinuities, ‘dissemiNations’ and dispersed elements, respectively.]
In this chapter, my aim is to combine the approaches presented above; I under- stand Lübcke’s network of topographies of memory as an expression of Appadurai’s ethnoscape and will use these models in order to visualise both the transnational and transcultural network that is inscribed in migration lit- erature. The texts are read as artistic representations of these networks; in them, links between the local and the national/global are established and transnational/transcultural spaces of memory and experience are opened up. In this process, not only memory is central, but the disclosure of connections (i.e. ‘touching tales’, but also contemporary links) and the depiction of dynamic changes that reveal traditional concepts as frail (such as for instance the unity and homogeneity of nation, culture and identity) are as well. The network as a model reveals a number of possibilities: it enables a continuous negotiation of positions and connections as well as the establishing of new relations. The positions of the intersections in the network are versatile and can be changed and transformed actively. This description of the network as a space where negotiation takes place is of course also reminiscent of Homi K. Bhabha’s model of the ‘Third Space’. There, identity is negotiated as well as re/de- constructed; ambiguities, complexities, and blending (‘hybridity’) are dis- cussed and positions of authority can be interchanged.34 Furthermore, in social sciences the model of the network is used to study biographies of migrants and their effects on national and cultural constructions. In migration literature, ethnoscapes are unfolded in various ways. In my reading of the texts, I will concentrate on the following categories in order to demonstrate the constituted ethnoscapes: locations, protagonists, and the shifting of centre and periphery. The locations, or places, where stories are set or that are mentioned in the texts localise intersections of the net-like
34 See Bhabha’s description of the Third Space: “It is that Third Space, though unrepresent- able in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.” Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 55.
ethnoscape. The relations between the various places create and visualize the network. Thus, dichotomies such as home versus outland are dissolved in favour of a more global view in which places that have previously not been in contact are approximated. The protagonists in the texts are an expression of the heterogeneity that distinguishes ethnoscapes, and their individual biogra- phies, as characterised by migration, link them with various intersections of the network. Finally, the shifting of centre and periphery means that a supposed balance is unmasked as an imbalance and that as a result forces are rear- ranged. Although many of the texts are set in traditional centres (such as Berlin), a closer look reveals that the supposed centres are also margins and that it is their periphery that is at the centre of attention. Finally, diachronic elements shape the ethnoscapes created in the texts too. In this vein, Azade Seyhan calls transnational texts, such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus [Life is a Carawanserai Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other],35 “unauthorized biograph[ies] of the nation”36 as the narrator in the novel tells an alternative, personal view of Turkish history. In doing so, she resists an ide- alising version of history and even parodies “official versions of an invented glorious Pan-Turkey history”.37 In a similar way, the texts analysed in this book create alternative versions of history, both of the country left behind as well as of the new homeland. Thus, in Dimitré Dinev’s novel Engelszungen, the fate of two families in Bulgaria is linked to the historical events in the country. Vladimir Vertlib, on the other hand, tells unauthorised versions of the history of the Russian Jews in his novels, a story that is inevitably linked with the Holocaust. In the short stories in his book Mein erster Mörder, however, he presents alternative versions of Austrian history, or rather aspects of it. As shown in Chapter 4, in Gedächtnissekretär author Hamid Sadr rewrites Austrian contemporary historiography from the point of view of a Persian student in Vienna. In Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, the diachronic element is created by contrasting the narrative set in London with Bangladesh, depicted through both the letters written by Nazneen’s sister and by her own memories of her childhood in the country. In a similar vein, Caryl Phillip’s The Final Passage contrasts life on a Caribbean island and London in the 1950s. The depiction of
35 Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei hat zwei Türen aus einer kam ich rein aus der anderen ging ich raus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992). English transla- tion: Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Life is a Carawanserai Has Two Doors I Went in One I Came out the Other (London: University of Middlesex Press, 2000). 36 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 96. 37 Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, p. 149.
5.1 Locations
Most literary texts are set in particular places, be they fictive or correspond- ing to a real location. The choice of these places brings with it hermeneutic consequences as they carry cultural meaning(s); in migration literature, these localisations have particular relevance with regard to a transnational eth- noscape. In this section, two aspects will be at the centre of attention: places (cities in particular) as intersections in the global ethnoscape, and the home- land left behind. Places, both the more prominent ones as well as the ones only mentioned briefly, can be read as intersections in the network of the ethnoscape. Thus, rather than a dichotomy of homeland versus outland, the settings in a work of migration literature open up an extensive space. Furthermore, by reading the places as junctions in the network, new topo- graphic axes are created due to which the places are not to be seen as isolated but as connected, often via the experience of migration. In this manner, the homeland left behind is often revealed not as a single place but as multifac- eted: more often than not, ‘home’ is a memory connected to various loca- tions. Finally, in accordance with Appadurai’s theory, even for those that do not move migration changes their perception of the world and the place where they live.
Urban Centres and Other Locations as Intersections in the Global Ethnoscape In most of the texts discussed in this book, cities are central points in the pro- cess of migration (see Chapter 4). These urban centres are prominent inter sections in the ethnoscape represented in the texts and they become the place where cultural, social, and societal identities are negotiated. In this
manner, the cities are portrayed as being formed by migration and by the immigrants.38 For instance, in Yadé Kara’s novel Selam Berlin, Berlin and Istanbul are central, and Imran Ayata’s short stories are set in various German cities (Baden-Baden, Berlin, Frankfurt, Ruhpoldingen). In Dimitré Dinev’s book Engelszungen, Plovdiv and Vienna are the most important intersections, whereas in Catalin Dorian Florescu’s Wunderzeit [Time of Wonders] it is Timisoara, Rome, and New York that take centre stage.39 In later books by Florescu, Zurich, Budapest, and again Timisoara become meeting points for migrants. The family’s migration in Vladimir Vertlib’s novel Zwischenstationen, takes them to several cities: Saint Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Vienna, Rome, Amsterdam, and eventually New York and Boston (Salzburg, mentioned at the end of the book, according to the narrator’s comments is more likely to be regarded as ‘country- side’ rather than a city). On the other hand, Hamid Sadr’s Gedächtnissekretär is set in Vienna exclusively. Both Monica Ali’s Brick Lane as well as Preethi Nair’s One Hundred Shades of White are primarily set in London, but also link Dhaka (in Brick Lane) and Mumbay (in Nair’s book) to the experience of migration. London is central again in two more works discussed in this book: in Timothy Mo’s Soursweet, London becomes the Chens’ new home which they (and there- fore the readers) experience mainly from an immigrants’ perspective. In com- parison, London is only an intersection for Leila in Caryl Phillips’ novel The Final Passage, as she eventually decides to return to her native island. The liter- ary description of cities reflects sociocultural realities: in large part, immigrants settle in cities as they offer more opportunities with regard to jobs and schools, thus providing greater possibilities for advancement. Furthermore, in cities it is more common to meet other immigrants, probably with the same origin or at least a similar cultural background, and who can help in the process of settling in. In his collection of short stories entitled Hürriyet Love Express, Imran Ayata chooses a rather international scope of locations.40 The young Turkish-German protagonists (mostly second/third-generation immigrants in Germany with varying levels of education) are portrayed as living in Germany, and all the other locations mentioned are either places they go to for holidays or are des- tinations of other journeys. The stories are set in various places in Germany (such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Ruhpolding) and in Turkey (Istanbul, Altinoluk,
38 Iain Chambers has stressed (though critically) that nowadays cities are places of move- ment, exchange, and transition and that the old centres of imperial power are now the places where those from the margins meet. See Chambers, Migrancy. 39 Catalin Dorian Florescu, Wunderzeit (Munich: Diana Verlag, 2003 [2001]). 40 Imran Ayata, Hürriyet Love Express (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005).
41 Yadé Kara, Selam Berlin (Zurich: Diogenes, 2003). 42 On the image of the border, see the final part of this chapter.
‘Düfte, Gerüche, Kebap und Knoblauch, schnurrbärtige Männer, Marktsch reier, das ist Kreuzberg! Es hat was von Asien, von Märkten, von Gewürzen, von Cafés. Das ist ein Stück Istanbul pur!’ schwärmte er, schloss dabei die Augen und schnüffelte mit der Nase, als wollte er koksen. (239)
[‘Fagrances, smells, Kebab and garlic, moustached men, market criers, that’s Kreuzberg! It has something of Asia, of markets, of spices, of cafés. That’s just a piece of real Istanbul!’ he was raving; he closed his eyes and sniffed with his nose, as if he was sniffing snow.]
To Hasan, Berlin resembles Istanbul when he comments on the presence of Roma from Romania in the streets of Berlin:
Rumänien hatte die Tore geöffnet, und in Berlin bekam man das zu spüren. Plötzlich war die ganze Stadt von singenden und bettelnden Zigeunern belagert. Kinder mit großen schwarzen Augen baten um eine Spende. Es war wie vor den Moscheen in Istanbul. (325)
[Romania had opened its doors and this could be felt in Berlin. Suddenly, the whole city was besieged by singing and begging gypsies. Children with big black eyes asked for offerings. It was just like outside the mosques in Istanbul.]
Dimitré Dinev also creates a rich ethnoscape in his novel Engelszungen. The two central places are Vienna in Austria and Plovdiv in Bulgaria, but there are a number of other references too. Like in Kara’s book, here the cities them- selves are also characterised by certain places and thus additional networks within the intersections are created. For instance, at the beginning of the novel the protagonists are at the Prater (an amusement park in Vienna) and at the city’s Central Cemetery, and thus are at two locations that can be inter- preted as worlds on their own. The Prater is a comical, bizarre, and at times old-fashioned place where characters without any hope, such as the two pro- tagonists Svetljo and Iskren, end up. The Central Cemetery, on the other hand, is the anti-city of the dead; it is the counterpart to the actual, vital metropolis. In the case of Plovdiv, the diachronic layers implied offer ever-changing views of the city. Bulgarian contemporary history is depicted mainly against the background of the city of Plovdiv, which is shown as a changing place – shifts and changes in the intersection of Plovdiv are inherent. In this way, the first and the second Balkan War as well as the First World War come through the city, just like the funeral of State poet Ivan Vazov (1850–1921), the govern- ment of Alexsandar Stamboliyski (1919–1923), the communist revolt against Stamboliyski’s government at the end of September 1923, the great earthquake in 1928, and many other events. However, the communist government of Todor Zhivkov, as well as the post-communist period, are given the most attention. Plovdiv and its inhabitants are depicted through all of these periods, thus a heterogeneous impression of the city is given. This also applies to its popula- tion, that consists of Jews (who were forced to emigrate by law in 1941) and a Turkish minority (who suffered severe repressions and finally were forced to assimilate or emigrate in 1984), among others. Eventually, this heterogeneity applies to Bulgaria as a whole, even though during the Communist regime only Vietnamese immigrants were accepted as ‘brothers’ (all others, such as Turks, Jews, and Romani were unwanted and forced to assimilate completely or leave the country).
In Dinev’s novel, just like in the other works discussed here, the network constituting the ethnoscape consists of many more places. Often, the network of places is related to travelling and migration: in their younger days Iskren’s father Mladen and his friend Ysop dream of travelling to India, and later Mladen’s sister Rosa moves with her Jewish husband Ysop first to Israel and then to the usa. On another level, a network of communist sister nations is created: Bulgaria produces chocolate for their Vietnamese sister nation and receives bananas from their sister nation Cuba. Finally, Iskren’s kindergarten teacher is Austrian. With the help of Iskren’s father she is allowed to visit her home country for the first time after twenty years of living in Bulgaria. Towards the end of the novel, Svetljo’s grandfather summarises these ethnoscapes as a world characterised by migration and movement when just before his depar- ture for Bulgaria he tells his grandson: “Dein Vater lebt in Plovdiv, deine Mutter in Burgas, deine Schwester in Australien, und du willst nach Österreich.” (531) [Your father lives in Plovdiv, your mother in Burgas, your sister in Australia, and you want to go to Austria.] The various locations in novels on experiences of migration by Catalin Dorian Florescu, Vladimir Vertlib, and Ilijy Trojanow also form intersections in the network constituting the ethnoscape. In Florescu’s novel Wunderzeit, the adolescent first-person narrator Alin Teodorescu talks about his family’s repeated attempts to leave Romania. Subsequently, the network of migration spans from Timisoara via Belgrade, Venice, Rome, and goes as far as New York. Two of the various intersections in the ethnoscape where Alin and his father spend more time, Rome and New York, are also identified with interpersonal relations and thus become the Teodorescus’ personal ethnoscape. The fact that the Sanowskys from New York originally come from Romania, and that the friends Alin’s family made in Rome later visit them at home in Romania creates a strong relation between the various intersections. At the same time, a trian- gle is created between the three cities that Alin’s father often compares to each other. In these comparisons, the single places represent different ways of life: Timisoara is a communist city, New York becomes a negative example for hostile capitalism (here again, a place within the place is disclosed as the Sanowskys live in Brooklyn), and eventually Rome is described as the city of joie de vivre and heartiness. In his later novels on the topic of migration, Florescu again spans such eth- noscapes of migration. His book Der kurze Weg nach Hause [The Short Way Home] features a Romanian who is raised in Switzerland and travels back to Romania via Vienna and Budapest.43 The various places along the axis between
43 Catalin Dorian Florescu, Der kurze Weg nach Hause (Zurich: Pendo Verlag, 2002).
Zurich and Mangalia at the Romanian Black Sea coast, combined with the het- erogeneous protagonists – the Swiss Luca of Italian origin, the two Swiss char- acters Toma and Lara, and the Hungarian girls Zsófia and Ildikó, as well as the first-person narrator Ovidiu – form an image of a young Europe characterised by movement but also by problems (such as drugs in Zurich and Vienna, per- sonal problems in Budapest, and poverty and decay in Romania). The individ- ual aspects are not treated in national contexts, but rather the single places take centre stage and become visible intersections in the net-like ethnoscape. This ‘young’ image of Europe is of course also linked to its past as implied by the name of the first-person narrator, reminiscent of the Roman poet Ovid. This reference is further supported by the protagonists’ destination: Ovid was banished to Tomi (today Constanța) on the coast of the Black Sea, not far from Mangalia. In this manner, a diachronic element is inscribed into the eth- noscape created in the novel. In Florescu’s novel Der blinde Masseur [The Blind Masseur], eventually, Switzerland and Romania seem to form two poles, however, again both are not homogeneous locations.44 For example, Switzerland on the one hand is pres- ent in the memory of the first-person narrator as the place where he grew up and where his mother still lives. On the other hand, ‘Switzerland’ is the country on which the Romanian protagonists project all their desires and imaginations of the Golden West. Romania, on the contrary, comprises both the ‘city’ (prob- ably Arad or Timisoara), characterised by crime and poverty, as well as the for- mer spa town of Moneasa, a nearly dreamlike place of retreat in the mountains where the narrator spends most of his time. The wide spatial network in Vladimir Vertlib’s novel Zwischenstationen, is mainly created by the numerous ‘interstations’ where the Jewish family of the first-person narrator (then a child and an adolescent, respectively) stops on their search for a real home: Saint Petersburg, Israel, Vienna, Rome, Amsterdam, again Israel and Rome, the usa, and eventually Vienna again. The network, as well as the links between the various intersections, is even stronger due to the repeated stays in some of the places, for example the adult first-person narra- tor returns to Saint Petersburg (the initial point of the family’s migration) in the opening chapter of the novel. He undertakes this first return to his native town on the train, thus choosing a slower form of travel which reinforces the ties to the starting point of his family’s migration. Furthermore, in the same passage he compares his own situation to a long train journey and eventu- ally states: “Obwohl ich, wie mir scheint, schon zwanzig Jahre unterwegs bin, werden die Zielbahnhöfe angeblich erreicht.” (8) [Although I have the
44 Catalin Dorian Florescu, Der blinde Masseur (Munich: Pendo Verlag, 2006).
impression of having been en route for twenty years, allegedly, the destination stations are being reached.] Travelling to the initial point helps the narrator to find a metaphor for his family’s migration, namely that of an endless train journey (a metaphor that also evokes the image of the Wandering Jew). The people he watches at the different stops seem aimless, just like himself, the places appear interchangeable or similar, and the only clarity is provided by the destination stations shown on the terminal boards. However, the destination stations never seem to manifest for the narrator, thus they remain a “momen- tan notwendiger Schwindel” (8) [momentary, but necessary, distraction]. In this novel, the intersections of the network are characterised as hetero- geneous due to migration; the wandering protagonists meet at various places (for instance, the narrator’s family meets the same Russian-Jewish family both in Israel as well as in Vienna), and in all the locations alternative com- munities (formed mainly by migrants) rather than homogeneous ones are depicted. These communities live in particular places, such as the so-called ‘Russian castle’ in Vienna’s twentieth district Brigittenau, an old, derelict house, where Russian Jews generally stay. Many of them have returned from disappointing stays in Israel and are now waiting for official permission to return to Russia.45 Vienna, in particular this derelict house, becomes the central place in the narrative that the family keeps returning to. Furthermore, it represents the most heterogeneous point in the topographical network of migration, and is described as follows by the first-person narrator:
Ich dachte manchmal, ich sei in Israel, dann wieder, ich sei in Russland, bis ich verstand, dass beides stimmte. Das Haus war ein Teil Israels und Russlands, der sich in einer fremden Welt namens Wien befand. Keine Frage: die Welt war wie eine Anzahl von Schachteln aufgebaut, die inein- anderpassten. (31)
[I sometimes thought I was in Israel, then again that I was in Russia until I understood that both was true. The house was a part of Israel and of
45 A similar (possibly the same) place in Vienna is also mentioned in Dinev’s short story ‘Spas is sleeping’, although the inhabitants are described as awaiting their departure to the USA instead of Russia: “[…] Es war ein Haus, wo nur russische Juden wohnten, Flüchtlinge, die darauf warteten, nach Amerika zu fahren.” [It was a house where only Russian Jews were living, refugees who were waiting to go to America.] Dimitré Dinev, ‘Spas schläft’, in Die Inschrift (Vienna: edition exil, 2001 [2000]), pp. 93–114 (p. 107) and Dimitré Dinev, ‘Spas schläft’, in Ein Licht über dem Kopf, Dimitré Dinev (Vienna: Deuticke, 2005), pp. 93–121 (p. 112).
Russia and it was located in a foreign world named Vienna. No doubt about it: the world was composed of a number of boxes that fitted into each other.]
In the course of the novel, these boxes are disassembled again and again, they are put in different places and, as in the case of the ‘Russian castle’, are also reassembled. At the end of the novel, the first-person narrator seems to want to escape from the network created by migration when he moves from Vienna to Salzburg. The constant moves to and from Vienna that characterise both his family’s relation to it, as well as the depiction of the city in the novel, eventu- ally are ruptured by the narrator undertaking yet another journey, which ulti- mately just reveals another relation/intersection in the network. Additionally, this final journey in the novel is taken by train, and thus refers back to the beginning of the novel and links the journey to Saint Petersburg (as well as to the family’s emigration from the city) with the one to Salzburg. In Ilija Trojanow’s novel Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall [The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Everywhere], two journeys connect some very different places.46 In this text, one part of the plot is dedicated to the emigra- tion of the main protagonist Alexandar’s family, who leave Bulgaria and reach Germany via Yugoslavia after a longer stay in a refugee camp in Solferino near Trieste in Italy. Although the family’s fate is at the centre of the novel, it is made clear that their story, i.e. their experience of migration, is only one of many. This is particularly obvious in the scenes set in the Italian refugee camp where numerous stories of migration are told. The locations in the book are thus inseparable from the experience of migration, and it is the continuing movement that connects the individual places. After many years, Alexandar, together with his godfather Bai Dan (who comes to Germany in order to look for the supposedly missing Alexandar), depart on a journey in the opposite direction of his family’s migration. This ‘return voyage’ has fantastic notions as the two travel on a tandem and make a detour via Monaco, Paris, London, Scotland, and New York. All these places are characterised by migration (often: Bulgarian migration), not only because of Alexandar and Bai Dan’s journey but also because of the people they meet. For instance in Monaco, Bai Dan plays a game of dice with another Bulgarian, and in Paris they witness how a Griot, an old African, is attacked by adolescents. They meet an old Bulgarian friend of Bai Dan’s in London, and in New York they get to know a Bulgarian cab driver
46 Ilija Trojanow, Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall (Frankfurt/Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1997 [1996]).
Looking Back to the Homeland Left Behind As already demonstrated, the single intersections in the network constituting the ethnoscape are neither homogenous, nor are they distinct and clearly defined. They often consist of different places that merge and form a supposed unity. In many of the analysed texts, this is also true for the homelands left behind that, in retrospect and in the emigrants’ memory, may adopt various forms. In this sense, the homeland of Bangladesh in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, is depicted from different perspectives: on the one hand, there is the historical- political dimension; at the time of the main protagonist Nazneen’s birth in 1967, the country is still part of Pakistan and is therefore referred to as ‘East Pakistan’ in the novel.47 Later in the text, the insecure political situation is implied in the letters sent by Nazneen’s sister Hasina, in particular the riots before the parliamentary elections in 2001 in the capital Dhaka. On the other hand, the homeland is depicted on a personal level through Nazneen’s memo- ries of her simple life as a child in a little village in the countryside, her thoughts for her sister, and her slow recognition of her parents’ unhappy relationship that led to her father’s infidelity and her mother’s suicide. In these memories, Bangladesh is essentially characterised by abundant vegetation, life in harmony with nature, and a simplicity that (apart from the scene of Nazneen’s supposed still birth at the beginning) only in the course of the novel is revealed as being hard and perfidious. In Nazneen’s memories her homeland becomes the coun- terpoint to her current life in London: the ‘natural’ village is in conflict with the ‘artificial’ city. This supposed opposition between her former homeland and her new surroundings is put into perspective later in the novel when Hasina moves to Dhaka and writes letters to Nazneen about her experiences there. Although the Bangladeshi city is also characterised by some rural aspects (for instance the keeping of animals such as goats and chickens in people’s flats), the fact that it is a metropolis with (by now) more than 15 million inhabitants shows
47 See Ali, Brick Lane, p. 7.
5.2 Protagonists
The heterogeneity of ethnoscapes described in migration literature is also reflected by the selection and the constellation of the protagonists in the texts. The discussion of the various locations in the works has already shown that a supposed dichotomy between ‘home/known’ and ‘abroad/foreign’ is discarded. This is also supported by an analysis of the protagonists. In fact, the texts often incorporate a high number of protagonists with various different cultural (and social) backgrounds, who come together at certain intersections of the eth- noscape in order to negotiate their common present (once again the concep- tual vicinity to Bhabha’s Third Space becomes obvious). Furthermore, the narratives recount individual life stories and thus form an opposition to ten- dencies of homogenisation. Rather than talking about ‘Turkish immigrants’ or ‘the Germans’, migration literature underscores the heterogeneity of life scripts (influenced by migration, but also beyond) and therefore the futility of group- ing people according to their (national) origin. I will start my analysis with texts by Yadé Kara (Selam Berlin), Imran Ayata (Hürriyet Love Express), and Feridun Zaimoglu (Liebesmale, scharlachrot [Love Marks, scarlet red]) that are all characterised by a number of protagonists with various cultural backgrounds.48 In all three books, young characters trying to
48 Feridun Zaimoglu, Liebesmale, scharlachrot (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002 [2000]).
Besides the main protagonists, Kara’s Selam Berlin comprises a number of characters that underline the transcultural scope of the book, for instance Polish workers, the Wessels (a German couple), and Emine Hanim. The latter is a Turkish lady who is cherished by the Turkish community as a fortune teller and for her ability to read tea leaves. However, despite her long stay in Germany she does not speak any German. The Wessels and Emine Hanim live in the same building as the Kazans, Hasan’s family. The house, built next to the Berlin Wall, is a centre for gossip, often accompanied by mocha coffee and Turkish sweets, Mr Wessel’s memories of the war, and the lives of the Kazan family. Thus, the tenants of the house foil the image of the border evoked by its loca- tion; the various residents are a sharing, communicative, productive, and cre- ative community. In a similar way, the transgression of borders is also visible in other rela- tions in Selam Berlin: there is a noticeable number of international couples besides the ones already mentioned. For instance, towards the end of the novel the Turk Kazim moves to London with his Indian girlfriend Sukjeet, and Leyla falls in love with the black American soldier Robert Redfield/Redford (the latter is his pseudonym). Then there is Cora, whose mother is German and whose father is an Iraqi who emigrated to the usa. Hasan falls in love with Cora who later leaves him for the Jewish Latvian Vladimir. Finally, the German Agnes Schulze has a long distance relationship with the Turk Ali and eventually also has a physical relationship with Hasan (who translates Ali’s letters for her). In Imran Ayata’s Hürriyet Love Express, the main protagonists are preva- lently of German or Turkish background. However, there is also a Polish au pair girl, a Columbian woman who is forced into prostitution in Germany, a Yugoslavian flower seller, a Bavarian constable, and a Greek who befriends a Turk (also in Germany). Finally, in the story ‘Liebe ist mächtiger als Tito’ [Love is stronger than Tito] the list of Deniz’ ex-girlfriends reads rather internation- ally as well: “Nora, Fatma, Helin, Angela, Songül, Giti, Margit, Pamela, Aylin, Katharina, Henriette, Julia, Nadine, Zeynep, Beate, Christel, Ludmilla, Müjgan, Ivanka, Diana oder Berfin. Jetzt war es also Nurten […]” (23) [Nora, Fatma, Helin, Angela, Songül, Giti, Margit, Pamela, Aylin, Katharina, Henriette, Julia, Nadine, Zeynep, Beate, Christel, Ludmilla, Müjgan, Ivanka, Diana or Berfin. Now it was Nurten]. In Feridun Zaimoglu’s Liebesmale, scharlachrot, the protagonists’ love life is also international. The main character, Serdar, leaves Germany for his parents’ place in Turkey in order to escape relationships he has with two German women (the parallel to Goethe’s Werther has been stated by some critics; in
‘Am Telefon klingt es gut. Verstehst du?’ ‘Neee.’ ‘Na, hör mal, wenn ich mich mit Robert Redford melde, dann denken diese weißen Macker gleich an einen blonden, blauäugigen Cowboy.’ Er grinste breit. ‘Und wenn ich dann vor ihnen stehe, fliegen ihnen die Augäpfel raus.’ (173–174)
49 See for instance Karin Yeşilada, ‘Feridun Zaimoglu’, in Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (klg), 86th supplementary 6/07, ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Edition Text & Kritik, 2007) and Tom Cheesman, ‘Akcam – Zaimoglu – ‘Kanak Attak’: Turkish Lives and Letters in German’, German Life and Letters, 55:2 (2002), 180–195. 50 Pierre Bourdieu, Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 79, quotation taken from Hannes Schweiger, ‘Identitäten’, p. 183. 51 Schweiger, ‘Identitäten’, p. 183. 52 Sanja Abramovic, ‘Mosaiksteinchen’, in Angekommen: Texte nach Wien zugereister Autorinnen und Autoren, ed. by Milo Dor (Vienna: Picus, 2005), pp. 47–55.
[‘It sounds good on the phone. Do you get it?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Just think about it: when I respond as Robert Redford those white blokes think of a blond cowboy with blue eyes.’ He was grinning. ‘And when they eventually meet me, their eyeballs fall out.’]
Subsequently, when looking for a flat in Berlin over the phone, Hasan calls him- self Katz rather than Kazan. This is also a reaction to other people’s need to cate- gorise him, to call him either a Turk or a German. In fact, Hasan is confronted with the question ‘Where do you come from?’ both in Germany and in Turkey where people try to distinguish his accent and eventually think of him as a Cypriote (“von denen gab es so wenige, und keiner kannte den Akzent so genau” (18) [there were only a few of them and nobody was really familiar with the accent]). In Germany, on the other hand, people want to find out Hasan’s actual origin due to his appearance. For instance, a landlady in Spandau is rather persistent:
‘Woher kommen Se?!’ Sie verschränkte die Arme. ‘Aus Berlin!’ ‘Ick meen, woher stammen Se …?!’ ‘Aus Kreuzberg!’ Die Antwort reichte ihr nicht aus. Sie bohrte weiter. ‘Was sind Se für een Landsmann?’ ‘Berliner!’ sagte ick [sic!] stolz. Doch das kam bei ihr nicht an. ‘Sie sind Araber, waa…?! Türke, stimmt’s…?!’ Bingo! Ich habe ihn erwischt, verriet ihr befriedigter Blick. Türke sind Sie, auch wenn Sie hier geboren sind oder deutschen Paß haben, strömte es aus ihr heraus. (189)
[’Where are you from?!’ She folded her arms. ‘From Berlin!’ ‘I mean where do you come from…?!’ ‘From Kreuzberg!’ The response did not suffice. She went on and on. ‘What are your compatriots?’ ‘Berlins!’ I said, proudly. But she would not listen. ‘You are an Arab, aren’t you? A Turk, right?’ Bingo! Got him, her satisfied look seemed to say. You are a Turk even though you may be born here or have a German passport, it spilled out of her.]
In Imran Ayata’s short story entitled ‘Hürriyet Love Express’ (like the whole collection), the transformation of the characters’ names may be read as an
53 Feridun Zaimoglu, Abschaum. Die wahre Geschichte von Ertan Ongun (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt/Rotbuch Verlag, 2003 [1997]). 54 Yeşilada, Feridun Zaimoglu, p. 6. 55 The word Kanake probably comes from the Hawaiian term kanaka which means man, as in human being (see for instance the Hawaiian Electronic Library ulukau ). European discoverers, merchants, and missionaries used the term for any non-European inhabit- ants of islands, as well as (in a positive way) for sailors from Polynesia and Oceania that were known for their seafaring skills and camaraderie. 56 Yeşilada, Feridun Zaimoglu, p. 3.
57 See Werner Lewerenz, ‘Feldforschung in Kanakistan’, Kieler Nachrichten, 7.9.1995. 58 This has also been noted by Karin Yeşilada, see Yeşilada, Feridun Zaimoglu, p. 10. 59 Kümmeltürke [Caraway Turk] is a derogative term for Turks. 60 Kanak Heino is used for somebody who wears sunglasses all the time; this is a reference to the German singer Heino who, as a trademark, wears dark sunglasses.
Kanak Sprak has not only been used in literature but also in Turkish-German films and music to express the new self-confidence of a younger (often second and third) generation of immigrants.61 The Turkish-German rapper Boe B. associated the term kan ak, which in Turkish means blood is flowing, with an interpretation that underlines that a militant use of the expression is also pos- sible.62 The diverse adaptation of Kanak Sprak (or at least the inspiration it has been for various contexts), its etymology, and its multilingual interpretation stress the global contexts in which it ought to be read. Thus, the Kanak Sprak can be interpreted as both an expression as well as a constituting element of the ethnoscape. In the British context, earlier works of migration literature often display a more distinct dichotomy between immigrants and native citizens than later works that also depict immigration from the point of view of second- and third-generation immigrants. In works that talk about first-generation immi- gration from Africa and the Caribbean in particular, skin colour is portrayed as a dividing line that is difficult to cross. For instance, in Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage, there is always a distance between the main character Leila and the locals. The atmosphere of discrimination described in the book reveals that this distance is based on racism rather than on the fact that Leila is an immi- grant. Furthermore, the realist depiction of everyday problems based on rac- ism in Great Britain’s 1950s and 1960s in works such as this one do not allow for alternative models of society. This is also due to the narrative situation; although not a first-person narrator, the readers experience London from
61 Feridun Zaimolgu is again a first point of reference as his novel Abschaum (1997) [Scum] was the model for the film Kanak Attack (2000) by Lars Becker. Furthermore, together with Thomas Röschner he made the film Deutschland im Winter – Kanakistan. Eine Rap- Reportage (1997). Due to its supposed commercialisation, Tom Cheesman calls Kanak Sprak (as well as Kanak culture) a new marketing label that is used for political activism by the anti-racist group Kanak Attak (founded in 1998), but mainly for marketing music, films, books, and cabaret of at times disputable quality. See Cheesman, ‘Akcam’ and Tom Cheesman, ‘Talking ‘Kanak’: Zaimoglu contra Leitkultur’, New German Critique, 92 (2004), 82–99. Recent successes of films such as those by Fatih Akin (Gegen die Wand [Head-On] (2004), Kebab Connection (2005), Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), Auf der anderen Seite [The Edge of Heaven] (2007)) and of the music by the Turkish-German singer Tarkan indicate a growing interest in Turkish-German culture. This does not mean that Zaimoglu’s Kanak Sprak was the model for all of these, but rather that he was the first one to use (elements of) the sociolect of Turkish-German subculture in order to trans- form it and make it known to a wider public. 62 See Levent Soysal, ‘Rap, Hiphop, Kreuzberg: Scripts of/for Migrant Youth Culture in the WorldCity Berlin’, in New German Critique, 92 (2004), 62–81, (p. 77).
Leila’s point of view. Though her negative experiences give an impression of a heterogeneous society, they are deprived of any positive aspects this may bring with it. For instance, Leila remains reserved towards her helpful English neigh- bour Mary, and eventually breaks ties with her. In a similar manner, in Emecheta Buchi’s novel Second-Class Citizen, the dividing line between the locals and the Nigerian immigrants in London runs along the lines of skin colour.63 The autobiographically inspired novel was published in 1974 and tells the story of the Nigerian Adah who, together with her husband Francis, immigrates to England. Like Phillips’ protagonist Leila, Adah is confronted with rejection when looking for a job and a place to live. Here though, the relations between Nigerians are characterised by prejudices, namely the antipathy between Igbo and Yoruba people (opposing Nigerian tribes). Buchi describes the racism Adah is confronted with as being based on skin colour, but at the same time she reveals her own clichéd view that is just another form of racism:
Why should she go and work with her neighbours who were just learning to join their letters together instead of printing them? Some of them could not even speak any English even though it was becoming a collo- quial language for most Igbos. To cap it all, these people were Yorubas, the type of illiterate Yoruba who would take joy in belittling anything Igbo. (38)
Later, Adah is forced to hide her Igbo identity when applying for an apartment with a Nigerian Yoruba landlord:
She [Adah] had lied to the landlord that her husband had gone home to Nigeria and that he would send for them soon when he was fully settled at home. She had to speak all this in Yoruba otherwise she would not have got [sic!] the flat. When she signed the cheque she gave the landlord he had noticed the name and had said: ‘How come a nice girl like you got married to a yaimirin?’ Yaimirin and ajeyon, are the two words the Igbos are known by – it means a race of cannibals. Adah had told him that it was a case of childish infatuation. (182)
Thus, although Second-Class Citizen describes a heterogeneous society, it is mainly perceived as negative; the relations between the various groups are
63 Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1994 [1974]).
64 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2002 [1956]). 65 For the High Tea scene see Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, p. 111–122.
66 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 2000).
67 Yadé Kara’s novel Selam Berlin displays even more similarities to Kureishi’s novel. This is true even for details such as Karim’s (Kureishi) and Hasan’s (Kara) experiences as actors (in a drama and a film, respectively): in both novels, the protagonists are chosen by the directors due to their ‘Indian’ or ‘Turkish’ looks. 68 A. Robert Lee argues in a similar vein in his reading of Kureishi, see Lee, ‘Changing the Script’.
5.3 The Shifting of Periphery and Centre and the Topos of the Border
According to Alexandra Lübcke, texts of transnational literature are character- ised by a shifting of periphery and centre.69 She illustrates her argument with the example of Zafer Senocak’s novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft [Dangerous Kinship], where Berlin appears as periphery, as does the usa since the narrator has only spent some time at a remote university (rather than a major one) before returning to Germany.70 In contrast, at the centre are Istanbul and the region of Anatolia that, from a Eurocentric perspective, are commonly regarded as the margin. In the context of this shift, the topos of the border keeps reap- pearing as borders that divide centre and periphery, or as borders that have to be overcome in order to arrive at particular places. Both aspects are closely
69 See Lübcke, p. 91. 70 Zafer Senocak, Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (Munich: Babel, 1998).
71 Cf. also Anna Beck who states that “[…] spatial relations (eg. centre/periphery, vertical/ horizontal) often serve the representation of non-spatial relations (e.g. class, gender, or ethnic differences and their various intersections).” Beck, ‘Subjective Spaces’, p. 107.
72 For Dinev’s short stories see Dinev, Die Inschrift and Dinev, Ein Licht über dem Kopf. The latter includes some (but not all) of the stories already published in Die Inschrift as well as newer ones. For an overview of the publication history of the short stories see Bürger- Koftis, ‘Dimitré Dinev’, p. 142, footnote 17. 73 Dimitré Dinev, ‘Ein Licht über dem Kopf’, in Die Inschrift, Dimitré Dinev (Vienna: edition exil, 2001 [2000]), pp. 81–90 and Dimitré Dinev, ‘Ein Licht über dem Kopf’, in Ein Licht über dem Kopf, Dimitré Dinev (Vienna: Deuticke, 2005), pp. 157–170. 74 See Schweiger, ‘Zwischenwelten’ and Schweiger, ‘Mächtige Grenzen. Von (literarischen) Verwandlungsmöglichkeiten in dritten Räumen’, in ‘Meine Sprache grenzt mich ab…’: Transkulturalität und kulturelle Übersetzung im Kontext von Migration, ed. by Gisella Vorderobermeier and Michaela Wolf (Münster: lit, 2008), pp. 111–126.
75 Cf. also Anna Beck who states that “the East End is represented as a dynamic site of dis- putes between different ethnic, religious, and social groups” in Ali’s novel. Beck, ‘Subjective Spaces’, p. 113. Others, however, have argued that the book in this manner is part of a process of commodification that makes London’s East End’s diversity part of a multicultural heritage industry; cf. Sarah Brouillette, ‘Literature and Gentrification on Brick Lane’, Critique, 51.3 (2009), 425–449. 76 See my analysis of Nazneen’s gazes in Chapter 4 of this book.
In Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet, a continuous movement towards the margins can be observed as well. The novel is set in London, i.e. in the centre, but right from the beginning China Town as a location and protagonists such as Chinese immigrants and a Chinese mafia-like organisation, make it obvious that the margins are at the centre of attention. In the course of the novel the protago- nists’ movements increasingly point to the edges of the centre. For instance, Chen agrees to accept money (in order to be able to pay for a health treatment for his father in China) from the mafia-like Hung Family and in this way moves to or even trespasses the legal edge of society. Subsequently, and in order to escape from the Hung family, he consents to his wife Lily’s suggestion and they open a takeaway restaurant in London’s periphery. The house they rent for this purpose also serves as a new home for the family, who leave a more central flat for it. Henceforth, Chen’s route to work does not take him to the city centre and he remains in the periphery. Unfortunately, he does not succeed in escaping the mafia-like organisation; they find him and thus move towards the city’s margins too. Eventually, one of the few excursions that the Chen family embarks upon takes them to Brighton and thus to the edge of the British island, so to speak. Like in the other works discussed above, in Sour Sweet the shifting on the level of plot also signifies a shift for the readers, whose attention is being turned to the periphery and who get to know London in an alternative, frag- mented form. In a similar manner, Hamid Sadr’s protagonist Ardi in Der Gedächtnissekretär finds himself at the margin, even though he is in the centre. Set in the sup- posed centre Vienna, the Persian first-person narrator Ardi, an immigrant who is constantly out of money, is a figure from the margin of society. The only friend he meets in the course of the novel is in a precarious situation too: the former teacher from Punjab works as a newsagent, selling newspapers on the street. Sohalt, the elderly man Ardi agrees to work for, with his intense but very selective memory, always finds himself on the border between present and past and thus on a margin, too. In the course of the novel, this condition is passed on to Ardi who eventually flees the centre in order to find help at a margin of the city of Vienna: he admits himself to the psychiatric hospital Baumgartner Höhe. There, he is able to watch the centre and thus history/the past from a distance. These thoughts on Sadr’s Der Gedächtnissekretär show the connection of the theme of centre and periphery and the topos of the border. In migration literature the topos of the border comes up again and again: borders that sepa- rate, borders as obstacles, borders that are crossed, borders as opportunities. For instance, the central settings in Kara’s Selam Berlin are both characterised by borders: Berlin by the Berlin Wall (that has just fallen, but is still there, of
The change of language and atmosphere that accompanies border crossings is emphasised by the protagonist in Sandra Cisnero’s novel Caramelo or Puro Cuento. This is an example coming from Chicano literature (texts written by Mexican Americans in the United States of America) that has produced a number of examples for migration literature. Here, the border in question is the one between the usa and Mexico, that the first-person narrator Lala (a Chicana) crosses with her family every year in order to go on holidays in Mexico. Again, the border area is presented as penurious, there are fewer bill- boards next to the road, and the family is increasingly aware of the stresses and strains of the journey. However, crossing the border is still a magical moment for Lala:
As soon as we cross the bridge everything switches to another language. Toc, says the light switch in this country, at home it says click. Honk, say the cars at home, here they say tán-tán-tán. […] Sweets are sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter. […] Every year I cross the border, it’s the same – my mind forgets. But my body always remembers. (17–18)
It is the study itself which is marginal with respect to the phenomena studied. Iain Chambers, Migrancy Culture Identity
In the introduction to this book I stated that the effect of migration on litera- ture could be studied with regard to at least two aspects: first, writers that have come to other cultural/linguistic/national etc. contexts due to migration can be analysed. Second, migration can be studied as a topic of literary works. Migrant authors and their texts, often written in a language that is not their first one, have been the focus of many studies.1 However, although critics have been ana- lysing works that deal with migration, up to now these texts have hardly ever been grouped with reference to their main subject. Thus, a term such as migra- tion literature only rarely has been defined as ‘literature on the topic of migra- tion’, i.e. the definition proposed in this volume. Rather, it has been described as ‘texts written by migrant authors’, a definition that has been discussed, criti- cised, and even rejected by critics and authors alike.2 This book intended to close this research gap and suggested to turn over a new leaf in research on literature in the context of migration. Accordingly, it presented an analysis of texts on experiences of migration independent of the authors’ personal background. This does not mean that the author is to be excluded completely – s/he is not “dead”,3 to refer to Roland Barthes’ famous dictum; rather, I focussed on the themes and motifs in the texts in order to suggest that migration literature can be regarded as a sub-genre that exists in
1 For the state of the art in the English as well as the German speaking countries see Section 1.1. of this book. 2 On the discussion of the terminology see Section 1.3. of this book. In the introduction I have furthermore referred to several authors who argued against the label ‘migrant literature’. Dimitré Dinev also refuses the term and prefers to be called an Austrian writer: “Es [die Bezeichnung österreichischer Schriftsteller] ist sogar viel angenehmer, als wenn jemand neue Begriffe wie Migrantenliteratur einführt. Weil da fühlst du dich immer ein wenig diskriminiert.” [[To be called an Austrian writer] is even much nicer than when someone introduces new terms, such as migrant literature. In that case one always feels slightly discriminated.] Dimitré Dinev im Gespräch,
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4 For other examples see the sections on Feridun Zaimoglu’s books Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff in Chapter 5 of this book.
5 The field of literature in the context of migration seems to suggest this kind of interdisciplin- ary and collaborative approach anyway, as two major publication projects currently under
As stated, the themes and motifs analysed in this study represent only a selection of possible aspects to be looked at and compared in migration litera- ture. This fact again opens up possible directions for future research that of course go hand in hand with the one already mentioned. Some examples for further themes and motifs have been mentioned in this study, for instance the alternative, unauthorised historiographies told in the texts, the role of genealo- gies, of family histories,6 and the role of the second (and third) generation that in this study was only looked at with regard to their role as linguistic and cul- tural translators. A comparative method such as the one proposed here furthermore suggests an intermedia approach; the study of the topic of migration could be extended to films and music on the issue. Moreover, apart from a few exceptions, the study of migration and literature has hitherto focussed on prose works. Thus, a com- parative study of poetry and drama on the topic is still a desideratum.7 Migration, i.e. a long-term transfer to another place, is not just a contempo- rary phenomenon. Authors have always been moving, be it voluntarily or invol- untarily, and so have texts. Movement and migration has been a topic of literature since its emergence. Even still, today the aftermath of the end of colo- nialism, the long-term effects of guest worker programmes, the collapse of communism, crises and wars, as well as societal and political discourse have all made migration a major topic in literary works. Thus, nowadays migration lit- erature forms a (sub-)genre in many literatures. The topic of migration has brought new themes and motifs into these literatures as could be shown in this book in an exemplary manner for migration literature in English and German. Finally, migration literature is always a political project also. It is part of a process of newly defining culture and literature, and works towards their transculturalisation and nationalisation. The texts are not only about the pres- ence of immigrants in a new country and their problems and difficulties, but also about the immigrants’ (cultural, societal, political etc.) participation and their impact. If literature is understood as a means of gaining insight and a
way show (though using different definitions of migration literature/migrant writing and thus with foci different to the one proposed here). Both have already been mentioned in the introduction of this book; cf. Trans-Culture. Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe and Migration and Literature – a handbook of theories, approaches and readings (working title). 6 On intercultural family constellations cf. the following volume: Die interkulturelle Familie. Literatur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, ed. by Michaela Holdenried and Weertje Willms (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012). 7 For an exception see Karin Yesilada’s study on Turkish-German poetry: Yesilada, Poesie der Dritten Sprache.
Monica Ali was born in 1967 in Dhaka, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) to a Bengali father and an English mother. At the age of three she moved to Great Britain with her family. Her first novel, Brick Lane, was published in 2003. Before its publication, Ali was already included in the prestigious Granta list of best young British novelists. In 2003 Ali was awarded the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year and the WH Smith People’s Choice Award. Furthermore, Brick Lane was nominated for the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2007, the novel was made into a film which, like the book, caused controversy within the Bangladeshi community in Britain. Ali has since published three other novels: Alentejo Blues (2006), In the Kitchen (2009), and Untold Story, published in 2011.
Imran Ayata was born in 1969 in Ulm, Germany where his parents had immigrated to from Turkey. Ayata studied political science in Frankfurt/Main and was editor of the journal Die Beute. Politik und Verbrechen [The Booty. Politics and Crime]. Furthermore, he co-founded Kanak Attak (an anti-racist group) and wrote several articles for magazines and collected volumes pub- lished in both Germany and Turkey. In 2005, he wrote a collection of short stories entitled Hürriyet Love Express, and his novel Mein Name ist Revolution [My Name is Revolution] was published in 2011. In 2013, together with Bülent Kullukcu, he released a cd called Songs of Gastarbeiter Vol. 1. He currently owns a campaigning agency where he works as a director.
Dimitré Dinev was born in 1968 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where he attended a German grammar school and began to publish texts in Bulgarian, Russian, and German. In 1990, Dinev escaped the country and fled to Austria. Since 1991 he has been living in Vienna where he writes stories, screenplays, and plays primarily in German. His play ‘Russenhuhn’ [Russian Chicken], an adaptation of Euripides’ trilogy ‘The Trojan Women’, premiered at the Viennese Theatre wuk. In 2000, Dinev published a collection of stories entitled Die Inschrift [The Inscription], and in 2003 his novel Engelszungen [Angels’ Tongues] was published and very well received by critics and readers alike. Furthermore, several of his plays have been staged in theatres in Vienna during the past decade. Dinev has received several prizes for his work: in 2000 he won the literary compe- tition schreiben zwischen den kulturen [writing between cultures], in 2002 he was awarded the literary prize of the city of Mannheim, and in 2005 he received the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Award for the most promising writer.
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Buchi Emecheta was born in 1944 in Lagos, Nigeria to a family belonging to the ethnic group of the Igbo people. She attended a mission school for girls in Nigeria and received a scholarship for a Methodist Girls School. At 16 she got married and two years later followed her hus- band to Great Britain. She gave birth to five children but eventually left her husband as he was abusive. It was at that time that Emecheta started writing. She accepted a job as a librarian at the British Museum and started studying sociology at the University of London. In 1972 she published her first book, a collection of short stories entitled In the Ditch. Today she has published more than 20 novels and is well known for books such as Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Prize (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). In her works she deals with topics such as child slavery, mother- hood, female independence, and freedom through education. Emecheta has received several prizes for her writing.
Catalin Dorian Florescu was born in 1967 in Timisoara, Romania. In 1976 he travelled to Italy and the United States of America with his father for the first time; they returned to Romania eight months later. Florescu wrote about this experience in his first novel, Wunderzeit (2001) [Time of Wonders]. In 1982, at the age of 15, he escaped from the country with his family. Since then, Florescu has been living in Zurich, Switzerland where he worked as a psychotherapist until 2001, when he became a freelance author. Florescu has published a number of other novels including: Der kurze Weg nach Hause (2002) [The Short Way Home], Der blinde Masseur (2006) [The Blind Masseur], Zaira (2008) [Zaira], and Jacob beschließt zu lieben (2011) [Jacob decides to love]. Florescu has received several awards for his work, such as the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Award for the most promising writer in 2002, and the Schweizer Buchpreis [Swiss Book Prize] in 2011.
Yadé Kara was born 1965 in Cayirli in the eastern part of Turkey, but grew up in West Berlin from the beginning of the 1970s. She studied English and German and worked as an actress, a teacher, a manager, and a journalist in Berlin, London, Istanbul, and Hong Kong. Selam Berlin, published in 2003, is her first novel. It received the Deutscher Bücherpreis [German Books Award] for the best debut in 2004, and in 2008 her second novel, Café Cyprus, was published.
Anna Kim was born in 1977 in South Korea. In 1978 she came to Germany and in 1983 she moved to Austria where she later studied dramatics and philosophy at the University of Vienna. Since 1999 she has been publishing texts (in German) in literary journals and
Hanif Kureishi was born in London in 1956 to a Pakistani father and an English mother. He studied philosophy in Lancaster and at King’s College in London. Kureishi is well known for both his literary works and his films. In 1985 the film My Beautiful Laundrette was released for which Kureishi was awarded the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and was nominated for the bafta Best Screenplay Award as well as for the Oscar for Best Screenplay. In 1988 the film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid was released together with the screenplay. Two years later, it was followed by Kureishi’s highly successful first novel The Buddha of Suburbia, for which he received the Whitbread First Novel Award. Furthermore, the book was later made into a British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc) television series. Subsequently, Kureishi published a number of plays, screenplays and novels; he worked as a film director and has received several awards for his movies. His latest novel, The Last Word, was published in 2014.
Timothy Mo was born in 1950 in Hong Kong. He attended school in both Hong Kong and England, where he moved to at the age of ten. He worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. He has written several novels that were all self-published with Paddeless Press. His first novel, The Monkey King, came out in 1978 and it received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1979. Sour Sweet, his second novel, was published in 1982. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was awarded the Howthornden Prize in the same year. In 1988, Sour Sweet was made into a film; the screenplay had been written by Ian McEwan. Mo’s latest novel, Pure, came out in 2012.
Preethi Nair was born in Kerala in Southern India in 1971. She moved to London with her family as a child. Her first novel, Gypsy Masala, has an extraordinary history: several publishers had refused to publish the book, so without further ado Nair decided to self-publish it. In order to promote the book, she invented an alter ego named Pru Menon, and eventually managed to sign a contract with Harper Collins. Finally, Pru Menon was even shortlisted for a prize as Publicist of the Year. Nair’s second novel, One Hundred Shades of White, was published with Harper Collins in 2003. Her latest novel, The Colour of Love (also pub- lished as Beyond Indigo), is based on Nair’s experience of self-publishing her first novel.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts but grew up in Leeds in Great Britain. He studied English at Oxford and taught at various universities in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. He was an English literature professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College at Columbia University in New York. The Final Passage, Phillips’ first novel after a number of theatre plays, was published in 1985. He started working on it during his first return journey from the Caribbean, while on board a ferry from St. Kitts to Nevis.1 Phillips received the Malcolm x Prize for Literature for The Final Passage. In his works, the author often deals with the topic of African slave trade and its effects on the African diaspora. Critics have received his writing very positively, in par- ticular his later texts, such as A State of Independence (1986), Crossing the River (1993), and The Nature of Blood (1997). So far, Phillips has published nine novels, a number of essay-collections, a non-fiction book, and scripts for television, radio, and theatre. His latest novel, In the Falling Snow, was published in 2009.
Hamid Sadr was born in 1946 in Teheran, Iran. He published his first books, Stories of the Alley (1966) and The Story of the Tired Pigeon (1967), in Persian before he came to Austria to study Chemistry and Political Science. He was an active member of the Iranian Students’ Movement and of the oppositional Mossadegh movement. With the Iranian (also: Islamic) Revolution in Iran in 1979 it became difficult for Sadr to publish his works in his home country and eventually, his publishing house was seized by the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. In the same year, Sadr moved from Vienna to Paris, then the centre of the Iranian opposition. He was politically active and became a member of the board of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance. At the same time, Sadr worked with the filmmak- ers Jacque Bral and Samuel Fuller in Paris. When the former Iranian prime minister was murdered in Paris in 1991, Sadr returned to Vienna. He started writing in German and published his first German novel, Gesprächszettel an Dora [Conversation Notes to Dora], with the renowned Viennese publisher Deuticke, in 1994. His second novel, Der Gedächtnissekretär [The Secretary of Memory], came out in 2005. Sadr has received several awards for his work, including the Austrian Staatsstipendium für Literatur [National Grant for Literature] in 1996, 1999, 2000, and in 2007/8, and the Elias Canetti grant in 2006. In 2009, the final
1 See Julie C. Taylor, Exile and Identity in the Fictional Work of Caryl Phillips (Vienna: m.a. thesis, 1995), p. 1. This thesis furthermore includes an extensive interview with the author.
Sam Selvon was born in 1923 in Trinidad, however his family has Indian and Scottish roots. He came to Great Britain in the 1950s and worked at the bbc. In the Caribbean he had written and published short stories and articles in journals; in Great Britain he estab- lished himself with his first novel, A Brighter Sun, published in 1952. For some time, the novel, based on the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt highway in Trinidad, was a popular compulsory reading at school. Selvon’s most well-known work is the novel The Lonely Londoners, the first part of a trilogy that focuses on the lives of West Indian immigrants in London. It is ground-breaking for its use of creolised English in both the dialogues and the narrative voice in a literary text for the first time. Selvon has pub- lished several other novels, some of which were also adapted as radio plays for the bbc. In 1978 he left Great Britain and moved to Canada. In 1994 Selvon died on a journey home to Trinidad.
Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in London, England. Her mother was Jamaican, her father English. She studied English at King’s College in Cambridge and started writing short stories at that time. Her first novel, White Teeth, was auctioned to publishers before it had even been finished. After publication in 2000 it quickly became a bestseller and Smith was awarded several prizes for it, such as the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, the Betty Trask Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She has since published three more novels: The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), and nw (2012), as well as the novella The Embassy of Cambodia (2013). She was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction for On Beauty, and was included on the 2003 Granta list of best young British novelists.
Vladimir Vertlib was born in 1966 in Saint Petersburg, then called Leningrad. His Jewish family emi- grated in 1971 to Israel, from where they began a long quest for a new homeland. They moved to Austria, again to Israel, to the Netherlands, the United States of America, Italy, and eventually to Austria again, where Vertlib has been living since 1981. His family’s migration was the basis for his first two novels, Abschiebung [Deportation], published in 1995, and Zwischenstationen [Interstations], published in 1999. Vertlib studied political economy in Vienna. He then moved to Salzburg where he has been living as a freelance author and translator. So far, Vertlib has published seven novels, a collection of short stories, a libretto, and several essayistic works.
Feridun Zaimoglu was born in 1964 in Bolu, Turkey. He emigrated to Germany with his family as a child. Since 1985 he has been living in Kiel. Zaimoglu became widely known for his volume Kanak Sprak [Kanak Language] (1995), a collection of supposedly real interviews with male Turkish immigrants that he reproduces in a poetically transformed way and thus in a peculiar language called Kanak Sprak. Sometime later, he published another simi- lar volume, Koppstoff [slang for: head cloth] (1998), this time giving a voice to female immigrants. In Zaimoglu’s later works, linguistic and political experiments take a back seat and he instead focuses on the act of narrating. He explores the genre of crime novels with Leinwand [Screen], published in 2003, and refers to classical models such as the epistolary novel in the style of the 18th century in his book Liebesmale, scharla- chrot [Love Marks, scarlet red], published in 2000. However, in his play ‘Schwarze Jungfauen’ [Black Virgins] (2006), written with Günter Senkel, Zaimoglu reverts back to his former writing process and again uses interviews with young German women who have converted to Islam as the basis for the play. On publication of his novel Leila (2006), Zaimoglu was accused of plagiarism. The accusation – withdrawn after three weeks – caused quite a media frenzy. Zaimoglu was awarded several prizes for his works, including the prize of the jury at the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Competition in 2003, the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Award for the most promising writer in 2004, the Hugo-Ball-Award in 2005, the Carl-Amery-Award in 2007, and the Jakob-Wassermann-Literary-Award in 2010. In 2015, Feridun Zaimoglu is writer-in-residence in Mainz, Germany. To date, he has published nearly twenty books (novels and short stories) and numerous plays (usually composed together with Günter Senkel). His latest novel Isabel, published in 2014, was nominated for the Deutsche Buchpreis [German Book Award]. Zaimoglu also works as an artist: he paints and previously organised an installation of flags entitled KanakAttak – The 3rd Turkish siege of Vienna at the Kunsthalle Wien [Arthall Vienna] in 2005.
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