Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recogni- Tion In

Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recogni- tion in Edward Said’s Out of Place and Gerald Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors

Katja Sarkowsky

Abstract

While the importance of ‘recognition’ for individual self-constitution is uncontested in theoretical debates, discussions—particularly in the 1990s—have increasingly sought to apply the concept also to social groups. This contribution looks at autobiographies by two cultural theorists, Ed- ward Said and Gerald Vizenor, that draw on a variety of cultural contexts and codes and address experiences of marginalization and dislocation. Asking how ‘recognition’ and ‘misrecognition’ are negotiated in the texts, I argue that both autobiographies connect—although in very different ways—the narration of individual self-constitution to claims of collective recognition.

Critics have declared the 1990s an ‘age of memoir.’ In a 1997 New York Times column, Maureen Dowd stated that “out of the top 11 books on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, 9 are autobiographical” (n. pag.; see also Eakin, How Our Lives 144). The 1990s saw a surge in autobiographies bitingly listed by Dowd, summing up the time as an “era of exhibitionism,” as revenge memoirs. Good mommy memoirs. Bad mommy memoirs. Bad daddy memoirs. Very bad surrogate daddy memoirs. Celebrity memoirs. Nonentity memoirs. Pu- bescent memoirs. Senescent memoirs. Anyone remotely associated with a celebrity memoirs (n. pag.). While this is certainly true, the interest that autobiographies continue to raise (and the money value they have) can also be seen as an (admittedly over the top) extension of a long-standing interest in other peoples’ lives that goes beyond the voyeuristic and ties in with a field of tension in which the genre is situated between ‘representative’ and ‘individual’ experience. Autobiographies have come to be regarded as narratives of self-formation. In contrast to the common expectations that may have contributed significantly to their financial success, they are not ‘accurate’ depictions of individual lives, but narrative self-inventions with all the omissions, selections, evasions, or self- justifications this entails; autobiographies, as critics have it, cannot be read as re-presentations of self, but rather as the attempt to create a self through the autobiographical narrative. As John Paul Eakin stresses, “narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self—the self of autobiographical discourse—does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative” (How Our Lives 100). Autobiography is thus a form of self-constitution, usually the attempt to create a seemingly coherent narrative 628 Katja Sarkowsky self against the backdrop of experiential fragmentation.1 This constitution closely links the individual to her or his societal and cultural context; as Leigh Gilmore argues, “one finds in autobiography a virtuoso display of the complexities and difference within gender, place, time, religious practice, the aesthetic, the family, work, as well the experiences of class, race, and ethnicity which self-reflexive narratives must manage” (82). In the context of autobiographical writing in the United States, “the pluralist nature of American culture has been decisive in the development of American autobiography” (Eakin, Introduction 15). What these complexities can entail in the context of transcultural autobiographies shall be illustrated below. For the reader, autobiographies tend to invite identification; for the writer, as Richard Freadman insists, autobiographies tend to be “recognition quests— journeys towards greater awareness, realization, understanding.” Therefore, for both writers and readers, ‘recognition’ is “central to the genre of autobiography” (136). Philosophical debates of recognition since the 1990s—in particular those building upon Charles Taylor’s influential conceptualization—have largely cen- tered around the issue of cultural recognition, the question of group rights, usually focused on the public sphere. Given the tension between collective life and individual experience in which the genre of autobiography is situated, I look in this contribution at how selected autobiographies stage ‘recognition’ on various levels—political, cultural, and familial—and at the ways in which misrecognition is depicted in its impact upon the individual’s self-relationship.

Relational Selves

Self-relationship and the narrative construction of self are necessarily relational. Underlying both theories of autobiography and theories of recognition is an emphasis on the intersubjectivity of self construction. Explicitly linking identity and recognition, Charles Taylor argues that “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others” (25). And with reference to the psychoanalytical framework proposed by Jessica Benjamin, Ea- kin quotes Benjamin to highlight the “intersubjective dimension” (49) of individuation and its central paradox: “at the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are dependent upon another to recog- nize it” (33). Thus, because the assertion of autonomy is dependent on this dynamic of recognition, identity is necessarily relational. (How Our Lives 52)2

1 As Paul John Eakin has it, “the selves we have been may seem to us as discrete and separate as the other persons with whom we live our relational lives. This experiential truth points to the fact that our sense of continuous identity is a fiction, the primary fiction of all self-narration. […] Most autobiographers, however, proclaim the continuous identity of selves early and late, and they do so through the use of the first person, autobiography’s most distinctive—if problem- atic—generic marker: the ‘I’ speaking in the present—the utterer—is somehow continuous with the ‘I’ acting in the past–the subject of the utterance” (How Our Lives 93). 2 Benjamin herself has emphasised throughout her work the close conceptual and experiential link between intersubjectivity, identification, and recognition. When looking at autobiogra- Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition 629

This intersubjective dimension stressed by Benjamin raises the question of failed or denied recognition; to cite Taylor again, the close link between identity and recognition hence entails that a person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. (25) Recognition and its denial, then, are central not only for the stated paradox of individuation, but also for autobiography as the formalized narrative of this process. The aspect of relationality and intersubjectivity in autobiographical research has first been addressed in the context of ethnic autobiographies, African Ameri- can and Native American in particular, and women’s autobiographies. Critics have juxtaposed female and male autobiographies by stressing the relational self-understanding of women in contrast to an autonomous self coded as masculine;3 and Arnold Krupat has emphasised the absence of the myth of the autonomous self in Native American cultures and the understanding of an individual who “could not in any positive way be imagined to stand outside or against his society” (11), hence, an understanding of the individual as necessarily relational. This, Krupat argues, has a significant impact on the (possibility of) writing autobiography in a Native American context. The understanding of self-construction as relational and intersubjective by now has become a standard concept for reading autobiographies as a genre, largely re- placing the highly individualistic understanding of the subject as autonomous, a concept that Eakin calls the ‘Gusdorf model’ (How Our Lives 47). Despite this re- vision, however, the tight link between autobiography and the issue of (individual and collective) recognition continues to ascribe to autobiography, as Tobias Döring has argued, a “crucial function […] for writers in a de-centred or displaced position” (71). As a narrative of self-formation it claims a space not only for an individual, but for an individual as a member of a particular, marginalized group, and this claim is formulated in terms of recognition—often towards this particular group, but also and more commonly towards ‘mainstream society.’ “Through telling his or her own life, the autobiographer therefore turns into the author of his or her own self” (Döring 71), a self that crucially depends on recognition on an individual level as well, and to which the denial or recognition presents a devastating experience of denied individuality and belonging (Honneth, Kampf 212). Therefore, the crucial, even constitutive connection between autobiography and recognition stated by Freadman is particularly relevant for a specific form of autobiography, namely transcultural autobiography.4 Staging individual self-formation in a field of tension between different cultural contexts, familial constellations, and expectations di- phy, this link might be particularly relevant for the discussion of readerly identification and the question of recognition. This discussion, unfortunately, goes beyond the scope of this essay. See, for instance, Benjamin, Shadow xiii. 3 For a discussion and criticism of these positions, see Eakin, How Our Lives 46-51. 4 I define as ‘transcultural autobiographies’ those autobiographical texts that overtly and self- reflexively refer to two or more cultural contexts and/or culturally coded narrative strategies. 630 Katja Sarkowsky rected at ‘the cultural other,’ these texts foreground the issue of recognition and its denial on the various interconnected levels outlined above, and by so doing negoti- ate American autobiography as transnational and transcultural. In the following I will discuss in more detail the ways in which autobiographies stage recognition and its denial as constitutive for self-formation. My focus is on two examples from the 1990s: Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999) and Gerald Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990). The texts have a number of aspects in common, and each provides the self- narration of an intellectual and activist. Both writers have a strong reputation as theorists, Said particularly in the field of discourse analysis and postcolonial studies, while Vizenor’s postmodern concepts of trickster hermeneutics and coinage of terms such as ‘postindian’ have had a significant impact on cultural theory and Native American studies. As literary scholars, both authors are well aware of the conventions of autobiography, narrative structure, and the theoretical frameworks to which they refer; both writers very consciously stage their position as marginalized subjects in their autobiographical narrative; both have produced their autobiographies within a decade of intense debates around recognition and cultural identities; and both deliberately, if in very different ways, as will be shown, connect their individual claim for recognition with a demand for group recognition. Hence, I am interested in the ways in which ‘recognition,’ both individual and collective, is negotiated in the texts, and in what ways misrecognition and the denial of recognition are written into the self-construction of these autobiographical narratives.

Mis/Recognition, Intersubjectivity, and Autobiography

The centrality of a relational understanding of subject constitution for auto biography is obvious. The manifestations of identity as relational in autobiography can range from the programmatically collaborative (such as Sally Morgan’s My Place, Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life, or classical, if problem- atic, anthropological collaborations) via implicitly dialogical (such as The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston) to texts that focus on a particular relationship (Philip Roth’s Patrimony) and those—probably the bulk of texts—that implicitly or explicitly highlight the centrality of other persons to the development of the autobiographical narrator. Both autobiographies under consideration here fall into this last category. They therefore provide the opportunity to “acknowledge the relational dimension of narratives that ostensibly reflect the Gusdorf paradigm” (Eakin, How Our Lives 56). In both Out of Place and Interior Landscapes, this aspect becomes particularly obvious by the different ways in which the autobiographical narrators present their lives as struggles with and a growing autonomy from primary relations. And both narratives link these individual struggles to their self-identification as members of marginalized groups. In order to analyze these narrative strategies, I would like to resort to the concept of recognition as formulated by Axel Honneth. Recognition is a constitutive element in Honneth’s theory of social justice, and hence a normative model. What Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition 631 is nevertheless helpful in the context of reading of autobiographies as negotiations of recognition and misrecognition is the way in which Honneth, based on a conceptualization of the self as relational, seeks to categorize forms and spheres of recognition and misrecognition. He resorts to Hegel and Mead in order to suggest a tripartite division of spheres, a division which “arises from the consideration that subjects in modern societies depend for their identity-formation on three forms of social recognition, based in the sphere-specific principles of love, equal legal treatment, and social esteem” (Fraser and Honneth 180). To each of these principles, Honneth matches the individual dimension and the form of recognition this entails, but also the equivalent forms of misrecognition and the way in which they threaten aspects of personality and individual self-relations (Honneth, Kampf 211). This is a helpful model for the analysis of autobiography, since in contrast to, for instance, Taylor’s concept of recognition, it is not concerned only with the public sphere and inter-group recognition (cf. Taylor 37); instead, it sets out to conceptualize different forms of recognition as analytically distinct but related, in that each principle of recognition acknowledges the constitutive function of intersubjectivity for the self, from the most intimate to societal and legal relations. It thus takes into account the paradox already cited, that individual independence crucially depends on the recognition of others—individuals as well as groups.5

Inventing Families

“The most common form of the relational life,” argues Eakin, is “the self’s story viewed through the lens of its relation with some key other person” (How Our Lives 86). The majority of individual life stories begin with the family. While many texts may leave out the history of parents, the embeddedness of the autobiographical narrator in a family context (or the stating of a lack thereof) is constitutive for the narrative of self. Autobiographers like Said or Vizenor are not only keenly aware of these conventions, but reflect them as part of their self- narration. The first chapter of Said’s Out of Place, for instance, begins with a reference to the invented character of ‘family,’ not only in autobiography, but more fundamentally in familial relations per se: “All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language” (3). Said thus narrativizes primary relations; family relationships are not constellations that are merely reproduced in narrative, but instead narratively produced. The autobiographical self, as cited above, “does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative” (Eakin, How Our Lives 100); neither, in extension, does ‘the family’ precede its narrative constitution. While this beginning indicates the possibility of further reflection of the autobiographical genre, however, Said sticks to the narrativization of relations and shifts the emphasis to his own ‘invention’ by others; he continues: “There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters” (3). Not only does the autobiographical narrator present himself as an ‘invention’ of oth-

5 Benjamin’s Shadow as quoted by Eakin, How Our Lives 52. 632 Katja Sarkowsky ers, he immediately points to the falseness of the invention, a violation of what Taylor would call authenticity. Hence, the text begins with an indication of both, the centrality of relation and recognition, and at the same time the devastation that its denial entails: “I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place” (Said 3). ‘Out-of-placeness’ is thus the logical thrust of the overall narrative—geo-politically, as will be elaborated below—but in the first instance in a family context. Out-of-placeness, as the autobiographical narrator makes clear, is produced by a number of controlling strategies within the family that illustrate to young Ed- ward (as seen in retrospect) that he does not ‘belong’ the way he is, that he needs constant monitoring and ‘improvement’; this includes centrally a tight control of the body, as Said reflects: “As I look back on my sense of my body from age eight on, I can see it locked in a demanding set of repeated corrections, all of them or- dered by my parents, most of them having the effect of turning me against myself” (62). These ‘corrections’ are not only physical, involving corsets and humiliating exercises, but also suggest a form of psychological violence; in any case they are outright painful and clearly evaluated by the autobiographical narrator as having a destructive impact on his self-relationship. Thus, he describes them as forms of denied recognition, a denial that can potentially be so severe as to result in the break-down of individual identity (Honneth, Kampf 212). At the same time, the emphasis of having been ‘invented’ goes hand in hand with a narrative of discovery—of the ‘buried’ (and presumably ‘real’) Edward beneath familial projections; the oppressive and controlling narrative invention of the family is countered by an alternative narrative of self-discovery. As Döring points out, “the emergence of ‘a second self’ is the central trope by which the whole text is constructed” (72). This ‘other’ Edward can be read as an attempt to escape the need for recognition by others, for he remains ‘hidden’ until the autobiographical narrator has left the familial context for the United States. Here, despite what he calls “hypocritical authority” at the college that he attends, “a new found will” developed “that had nothing to do with the ‘Edward’ of the past but relied on the slowly forming identity of another self beneath the surface” (Said 230). Ironically, it is in the context not only of “intellectual discovery (and self- discovery),” but also of an overwhelming feeling of ‘out-of-placeness’ in which this second self emerges; it is this ‘out-of-placeness’ that gives Said “the incentive to find my territory, not socially but intellectually” (231). Feelings of displacement and exile provide the ground for a new, ‘second’ Edward; it is this link between out-of-placeness, intellectual life, and identity formation that Alon Confino has stressed this link in his reading of Out of Place when he writes:

Said represents his childhood in the same metaphors with which he represents the intellectual. […] Said provides a one-directional, purposeful grand narrative of his entire life—his personal and professional life, his childhood and adulthood—as understood in a similar set of metaphors: vulnerability, heroism, and out of placeness. (23)

Thus, on the level of interpersonal, primary relationships, Said’s autobiography provides a narrative of self-formation that highlights the emergence of an intel- Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition 633 lectual self against the denial of recognition in the context of highly ambivalent familial love, a “‘buried’ self [that] is being excavated and established against the adverse circumstances of a life imposed on him by parents, social convention and history” (Döring 73). This buried self thus emerges against the background of the experience of misrecognition. In contrast to this staged sense of misrecognition in Said’s autobiography that creates a juxtaposition between the family on the one hand and young Edward on the other, Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes narrates processes of subject formation and mis/recognition along different lines. Here, the concept of ‘family’ is not self-evident; who and what family is has to constantly be negotiated and redefined by a narrator whose early life was shaped by his father’s death, maternal abandonment, and foster homes. Hence, the family as narrative construction takes on a very different significance. The autobiography begins with a chapter entitled “Families of the Crane”—and a story: When the earth was new six tricksters posed as humans on a wild landscape; one re- vealed the power of the trickster stare, a mortal wound to humans, and then returned to the sea. The others abided on the earth as totems and endured as the crane, loon, bear, marten, and catfish clans. There are other totems in tribal narratives, but these five were the first woodland families. The crane is one of the original five totems of the Anishinaabe. (3)6 The narrator then turns to his paternal grandmother, a member of the crane clan, and to his father, who was murdered when Vizenor was a small child; this trau- matic event of his father’s death is taken up frequently throughout the text, and I will return to it below. In the first chapter, this early loss is coded in terms of family and clan remembrance: “My father died in a place no crane would choose to dance, at a time no tribal totem would endure. One generation later the soul of the crane recurs in imagination; our reversion, our interior landscape” (3). Vize- nor thus places one of the generic questions of autobiography—‘where do I come from?’—not only in the context of immediate family, but he takes up a specific Na- tive American convention of autobiography: He locates the individual life story in both a family context and in the larger context of the cultural group and its social and spiritual organisation (cf. Krupat, For Those 11). This gesture towards genealogy and tribal (hi)story probably should be read less as a claim to Native authenticity than a very conscious alignment with the paternal side of his family—which places him in the Anishinaabe tribal context not in terms of an assumed ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic essence,’ but in terms of narrative choice. As Eakin remarks in his foreword to Krupat’s For Those Who Come After, “people are provided by the culture they inhabit with models of the person. Against these models, or in terms of them, they position their own experience of subjectivity” (xiv). In the case of transcultural autobiographies such as Vizenor’s, this might entail a conscious choice in which cultural context to situate the narrative of self; in Interior Landscapes, Vizenor makes such a choice by resorting to a

6 The Anishinaabe are the woodland tribes of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ontario that are more commonly known as Chippewa (in the United States) and Ojibway (in Canada). Since Anishinaabe is the tribal self-denomination, I will use this term throughout the essay. 634 Katja Sarkowsky specific autobiographical tradition, a choice that entails a particular claim for cultural recognition. Thus, much more so than Said’s text, Vizenor’s autobiography demands of the non-native reader a shift of perspective: from the conventional expectations towards an auto-biography as the story of an individual to the ac- ceptance of an alternative framework of autobiographical narration that places the individual not only in a community context, but that also operates with specific narrative conventions such as the reference to mythological stories as part of knowledge production. Nevertheless, cultural recognition is tightly linked to individual recognition, placing the autobiographical narrator in a paternal line—a relation that he yearns for and that is of paramount importance for the narrative. And while tribal relations indeed become a major point of reference throughout the text, it is the attempt to capture a sense of the dead father that helps the narrator create a sense of self; a search for ‘re-cognition’ not by, but in the murdered parent. Since there is no memory that can be voiced, Vizenor’s ‘interior landscapes’ are produced by photographs that can be shown; the book, like many autobiographies, carries two extended sections of images, but one in particular stands out: a photograph of Clement Vizenor holding young Gerald in his arms, “taken a few weeks before his death” (28).7 This photograph appears three times in Interior Landscapes: It is the cover image of the original edition, it provides the frontispiece, and it is part of the photo section. In addition, included in the autobiography is a poem entitled “The Last Photograph” (a clear reference to this particular picture) that ends with the lines, my father holds me in the last photograph the new spruce with a wide smile half white half immigrant he took up the cities and lost at cards. (31) The last line here does not necessarily refer to Vizenor’s father as a gambler, at least not in the literal sense; “lost at cards” is a reference to the Anishinaabe story of the ‘evil gambler,’ who gambles for the life of victims and usually wins. In the story, it is the tribal trickster, his cunning and his wit, that finally gain the upper hand over this archetype of a monster (26-27, 185-86). This ending once again links Clement Vizenor (and by extension the autobiographical narrator) to the cosmological framework of the Anishinaabe. Thus, the ‘presence’ of Vizenor‘s father—in photographs, in poetry, in narratives of an imagined life—manifests on the one hand the desperate desire of an abandoned son, for whom the photograph provides a fleeting sense of being held: “My father and that photograph hold me in a severed moment, hold me to a season, a tenement, more than we would re- member over a dark river” (32). On the other hand, in terms of the autobiographical narrative, it suggests a narrative of self-formation that is carefully situated

7 On the importance of photographs for autobiographical narratives see, for instance, Ea- kin, How Our Lives 92. Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition 635 in the context of a tribal past and present, devoid of cultural nostalgia, but self- confidently demanding recognition of cultural narratives that divert from or even oppose ‘white’ America’s myth of absolute individual ‘autonomy’; as such, like the initial reference to clan stories, it can be read as an address to the reader as well, a demand not so much for individual recognition but recognition of alternative conceptions of self. So while the murdered father connects the autobiographical narrator emo- tionally, genealogically, and narratively to the Anishinaabe, the relationship to LaVerne Lydia Petersen, Vizenor‘s (white) mother, is presented as shaped by repeated abandonment, disavowal, and abuse. Early on the narrative creates a sense of juxtaposition between the tribal family and the loneliness of the mother-son relationship: “The tenement with my tribal grandmother, aunts, and uncles, was narrow, crowded, and warm. The apartment with my mother, the source of my earliest memories of loneliness, was dark, cold, and desolate” (35). Recognition is sought elsewhere, for instance in a difficult, but in the end close, relationship to the ‘last stepfather,’ Elmer Petesch, with whom Vizenor continues to live after his mother leaves them both. Elmer’s death brings back the mother, who once again provides the countermodel of any successful process of mutual recognition: My mother was obsessed with fear, death, and loathing. She was wicked that winter; she sputtered her hatred, seethed, and scorned my independence and responsibilities to the man [Elmer Petesch] who trusted me more in five months than she had ever dared to care in seventeen years. (97) “Independence,” according to Benjamin, had been recognized by Elmer (qtd. in Eakin How Our Lives 52); we might recall the initally cited paradox that independence needs to be recognized as such by others and thus is not to be understood as being ‘without relation.’ Here, clearly, that recognition is denied: As Honneth argues, in the moment of denial of one’s needs, a person realizes the constitutive dependency on another; the emotional tension this creates can only be resolved by finding a way to act Kampf( 224). Recognition and agency are thus inextricably linked (Freadman 139). ‘Re- sponsibility,’ in its direct link with ‘trust,’ can be read literally in this context—as a form of response to another human being, a response of mutual recognition, a response to each other’s needs, an ethical attitude: “For to adopt such an ‘attitude’ towards the Other is to take responsibility for him” (151). The autobiographical narrator reflects the impact of his stepfather’s recognition: “My trust in him, and his courage to trust me, a mixedblood adolescent son left over from a bum marriage, made me a better person” (Vizenor, Interior 90). The experiences of misrecognition, as exemplified by the mother, remarkably are not—very much in contrast to Said’s narrative—narrated as having an impact on the narrator’s self- formation; misrecognition is stated and narrated as a series of painful experiences, but their impact does not, in this self-narrative, match that of the experiences of mutual recognition, trust, and interpersonal ‘answerability.’ 636 Katja Sarkowsky

Constructing Individuals and Communities

The understanding of selves as relational and hence the centrality—in fact, the constitutiveness of recognition in both texts—extends into the social sphere and to the ways in which both writers take up their position as members of ‘minority groups,’ Said as Palestinian American, Vizenor as Native American. Since the demand for recognition in autobiography differs from the way in which this demand would have to be voiced in the political and social realm, in the spheres regulated by the law and by social esteem (to use Honneth’s terms), the question is how Said and Vizenor link the ways in which they narrate themselves as individuals shaped by their membership in a particular group, and the claims for group recognition in the public sphere; that is, the way in which they narratively connect claims for recognition in the spheres of love/care, social esteem, and political rights—claims that are not only directed at a wider public, but also at the individual reader.8 In this regard, Said’s autobiography has been particularly controversial; the renewed debate revolved around Said’s place of birth in Jerusalem, and whether this was a family home or merely a vacation spot to the family. Connected to this debate around the ‘accuracy’ of his memoir and Said’s defense of it was his standing as a spokesman for Palestinians and his ‘right’ to present himself as a refugee (Döring 72), particularly since it ties in with other, overtly political works such as The Question of Palestine (1992). For the context of this essay, I will dis- regard the questions of ‘accuracy’ or ‘inaccuracy’ of Said’s family story that has so intensely shaped this debate, for I am more interested in the narrative strategies by which Said seeks to connect his family story, the constitution of self, and the demand for political recognition of Palestinians claims. Hosam Aboul-Ela has read Out of Place as connecting “personal experience with geopolitics and a critical attitude toward American foreign policy” (24), thus formulating a “dissi- dent relationship to United States foreign policy in the Middle East” that he sees as “foundational to the experience of many Arab Americans and to a potential sense of Arab American community” (15). While I would want to set aside the question of whether Said’s self-narration in any representative way ties in with a construction of Arab American community, the close link between individual experience and geopolitics in the Middle East is certainly a shaping aspect of the narrative. Recalling the earlier cited Confino, Said links the experience of exile with a growing sense of self—and this exile is easily read not as an exclusively individual experience, but as one that ties in with Said’s witnessing of the plight of Palestinian refugees in Cairo: It was through Aunt Nabiha that I first experienced Palestine as history and cause in the anger and consternation I felt over the suffering of the refugees, those Others, whom she brought into my life. It was also she who communicated to me the desolation of being without a country or a place to return to, of being unprotected by any national authority or institutions, of no longer being able to make sense of the past except as bitter, help-

8 A proper reader-response analysis would go far beyond the scope of this contribution; my analysis will thus seek to draw out the indirect address to readers, both readers identifying as either Palestinian or Anishinaabe and those who do not, without systematically investigating the processes of reader-text-interaction as a form of interpersonal (claim for) recognition. Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition 637

less regret, nor or the present with its daily queuing, anxiety-filled searches for jobs, and poverty, hunger, and humiliations. (119) In addition to the daily struggle for survival, it is the experience of displacement that Said highlights. While this experience is narrated from the position of an empathetic witness, it nevertheless provides, as Confino has pointed out, the central metaphor for this autobiography: out-of-placeness. He not only relates to others’ experiences of humiliation politically, but also by interweaving the narrative of his own life with the images of displacement and humiliation of others that he witnessed as a child—that of refugee Palestinians. These experiences can be cap- tured easily in the terminology of ‘misrecognition’ as defined by Honneth Kampf( 211). Misrecognition through humiliation, and denial of access to resources etc., is both an individual and a collective experience; collective because it concerns a group of people as ‘Palestinian refugees,’ and individual because—beyond the truism that experience is subjective—Said’s narrative individualizes it; towards the end of the book, the dislocations that had been experienced first- and second- hand come together when he writes: 1967 brought more dislocations, whereas for me it seemed to embody the dislocation that subsumed all the other losses, the disappeared worlds of my youth and upbringing, the unpolitical years of my education, the assumption of disengaged teaching and scholar- ship at Columbia, and so on. I was no longer the same person after 1967; the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine. (293) As Paul Armstrong points out, passages like the above-cited illustrate that although Said is Palestinian by filiation, inasmuch he was born in Jerusalem, his long sojourn in Egypt meant, paradoxically, that he became Palestinian only by affiliation— by learning from his parents and other relatives the import of the diaspora of 1948 and by taking on the appropriate attitudes of and identifications for this mode of cultural belonging. (105) One might add that this identity is not only one learned by affiliation and identification, but also a narrative one, performed in his earlier books beginning with Orientalism (cf. Armstrong 106) as well as in this autobiographical project. Döring has read the use of photographic images in and on the book accordingly, pointing out the images reproduced on the spine of the book—photographs of Said at different ages, in different places across the Middle East; he writes: Seen together, the pictures document a process of changing places—thus implying a political story of expulsion or migration. From this perspective, the photographic chronicle on the spine, which looks almost like a film reel, bears on the larger chronicles of the Middle East, to which Said’s memoir surely wants to testify. Autobiography […] is real- ized here as auto-geography. (74) Through the central tropes of ‘places’ and ‘out-of-placeness,’ Said narrates his life as a Palestinian, an exile, and an intellectual against the background of a series of failed acts or even denial of individual and collective recognition. While Said’s autobiography foregrounds experiences of dispossession and misrecognition, thus making individual and collective experiences of negation constitutive for the narrative of self, the autobiographical narrator in Interior Land- scapes presents his affiliation with the Anishinaabe on two separate levels: on the 638 Katja Sarkowsky level of content, particularly when Vizenor writes about his time as a community activist and a journalist; and in terms of narrative strategies, which have to be understood in the context of trickster discourse and hence as a direct and self- reflexive link to tribal narratives. On the content level, Vizenor carefully deploys modes of documentation, for instance by relating emotional situations in direct dialogue and with little or no comment, leaving judgment to the reader. He relates his encounter with the police officer who had, twenty-five years earlier, investigated his father’s murder:

He explained that he was a new officer then and defended his trivial report. ‘We never spent much time on winos and derelicts in those days… Who knows, one Indian vagrant killing another.’ ‘Clement Vizenor is my father.’ ‘Maybe your father was a wino, then,’ he said, and looked at his watch. (32)

The denial of respect and recognition to both Clement Vizenor and his son are obvious, and throughout the text it becomes clear that the autobiographical narrator sees this kind of racism, even if individually enacted, as systemic: “Kill- ing Indians in South Dakota today is not sanctioned, but it is seldom viewed as murder” (237). Honneth has called racism Anerkennungsvergessenheit, a form of “forgetfulness of recognition” (Reification 78). But Vizenor’s depictions of scenes of misrecognition not only refer to racist discrimination of Native peoples, they also include, for example, the treatment of the mentally ill (178). Hence the con- cern for recognition of those who find themselves at the margins of society runs through the text; it both demands an emotional response by the reader and becomes part of self-narration. On the level of narrative construction, as I will illustrate below, the form of recognition demanded is of a different kind. It is the figure of the tribal trickster, a figure of transformation and subversion, which best exemplifies the endurance of Native individuals and cultures. Therefore, the above cited trickster story with which Vizenor begins his autobiography has to be read not only as a grounding of his individual narrative in tribal affiliation, but also as a claim to a culturally specific narrative form that in many respects intersects with postmodern strategies of fragmentation and a distrust towards coherence and closure (see Jahner). The very structure of the text—its ‘snapshot’ chapters that both suggest and frus- trate biographical continuity, the final chapter that replaces the ‘I-narration’ with a third person singular narrator who reflects upon autobiographical conventions, the refusal to ‘close’ the narrative (Hutson 111)—suggests a narrator who presents himself as a ‘mixed-blood trickster.’ On this level, the claim for recognition is directed less at society or specific social groups, but rather at the reader; the text demands a tolerance for openness and fragmentation that not only frustrates common reading expectations towards the genre of autobiography, but that also is coded in culturally specific terms. On both levels, content and form, Vizenor therefore clearly illustrates a desire to create a narrative not of ‘victimry,’ as he would call it, but of ‘survivance.’ ‘Survivance’ is one of the typical ‘Vizenoresque’ coinages (or, in this case, rather a ‘revival’) in which he combines ‘survival’ and ‘endurance’: “Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; surviv- Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition 639 ance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent” (“Aes- thetics” 1). Survivance does not deny the power of misrecognition, negation, and humiliation; Native American literature, autobiographical or not, extensively ad- dresses individual and collective experiences of denied recognition. But survivance shifts the emphasis from the experience of victimization to possibilities of transformation (cf. Honneth, Kampf 224). Thus, on the whole, Interior Landscapes avoids the metaphorical conflation of individual and collective experiences of misrecognition that Said uses as a central strategy. But like Said, Vizenor also sets out to connect directly the individual to a collective framework: Alice Beaulieu, my grandmother, told me that my father was a tribal trickster with words and memories; a compassionate trickster who did not heed the sinister stories about stolen souls and the evil gambler. Clement Vizenor must have misremembered that tribal web of protection when he moved to the cities from the White Earth Reservation. (26) Both father and son, if in very different ways, are embedded in the Anishinaabe narrative context; this context offers a cultural matrix for self-narration and nar- rations of individual and collective recognition. Along these lines, the need for recognition is not restricted to the living; the dead are part of a web of mutuality and reciprocity in Interior Landscapes. This concerns, as illustrated, the lost fathers in the text (Clement Vizenor, Elmer Pe- tesch) as well as Dane White, a Native American youngster who ran away from his white foster family and hanged himself in jail in 1968; or Thomas White Hawk, who was executed for rape and murder in 1967, 9 and whom Vizenor sees as af- fected by ‘cultural schizophrenia’; to the tribal dead whose remains do not rest in graves but in museums. The recognition demanded in these passages is not necessarily one for specific individuals or a cultural group, but rather for an epis- temology that seeks to constantly unsettle boundaries. The kind of recognition demanded here is bound to community and culture, but also challenges any kind of group definition that seeks to unambivalently draw boundaries.

Autobiographical Readers

To close my discussion, I would like to turn briefly to a final aspect that the two texts under consideration share, but which they also address in very different ways. Both autobiographical narrators depict themselves not only in dialogue and relationships of mutual recognition (or denial thereof) with other people. As to be ex- pected in intellectual autobiographies, both also depict themselves as readers whose readings have had a life-changing impact. Said presents reading as an escape from familial restrictions and control that seems to take on the quality of self-recognition: Slowly I found ways to borrow books from various acquaintances, and by my middle teens, I was aware of myself making connections between disparate books and ideas with considerable ease […]. What I wove and rewove in my mind took place between the

9 Vizenor covered both cases as a (highly empathetic) journalist; for his own account, see Interior 199-217. 640 Katja Sarkowsky

trivial surface reality and a deeper level of awareness of another life of beautiful, inter- related parts—parts of ideas, passages of literature and music, history, personal memory, daily observation—nourished not by the “Edward” whose making my family, teachers, and mentors contributed to, but by my inner, far less compliant and “private” self who could read, think, and even write independent of “Edward.” (164-65) The passage suggests an attempt to reject any constellation that might entail the need for recognition or the threat of its denial; the self that is being written here is presumably an ‘autonomous’ one that “ostensibly reflect[s] the Gusdorf paradigm” (Eakin, How Our Lives 56). Nevertheless, there is also an undeniably relational aspect implicit in this passage, for the ‘private’ self does not precede but is constituted by the relations he draws between parts—other peoples’ ideas, music, or literature. While reading is a solitary act, and solitude is what the autobiographical narrator seeks in face of restrictive environment, the passage suggests yet another aspect of recognition: self-constitution by identification. The role that Vizenor ascribes to reading is less that of an escape, but it certainly (and somewhat predictably) shares with Said’s depiction the aspect of discovery. Vizenor was stationed as a soldier in Japan in the 1950s and discovered Japanese literature, specifically haiku poetry, as his access to literature generally and to Anishinaabe dream songs (a genre that shares a number of characteristics with haiku) in particular: “Japan was my liberation, and the literature, the haiku poems, are closer to me now in imagination, closer to a tribal consciousness, then were the promises of missionaries and academic careers. My stories are interior landscapes” (130). While Said presents his younger self in the early attempts of literary analysis, Vizenor sketches his development as a writer; ironically, haiku poetry proved to be the beginning not only of his literary, but also of his academic career, for he was first hired as a college teacher for his poetry, not his academic merits: “Haiku poems, not a doctorate, earned the highest honors” (218). But in this context he presents himself first of all as an ardent student, and in the process of learning, the role of teachers receives detailed attention: “I was fortunate to have found a memorable course with an inspired teacher, and blest now to remem- ber several distinguished teachers in four years at two universities” (171). The autobiographical narrator is careful to highlight the importance of his professors—a form of recognition that, as in the case of his stepfather, constitutes him not only through someone else’s recognition, but the act of recognizing someone else is, for him, equally formative. In reading he finds access to an unknown literary world as well as a model for his own work; recognition takes the form of imitation; the writ- erly self is in dialogue with role models. In his relationship as a student, Vizenor constructs his younger self as giver and recipient of recognition, and delineates the contours of affective reciprocity and respect, of mutual recognition. Identification, imitation, mutuality—these terms are crucially linked. Imita- tion, according to Theodor Adorno, is the “archetype of love” (qtd. in Honneth, Reification 45). For Adorno, in Honneth’s paraphrase, imitation is the very basis of all cognitive capabilities, and “a person doesn’t become a person until he or she imitates other persons” (Reification 44). Honneth adds: “Just as is true for small children, however, so also for adults this act of taking over other perspec- tives, which will always reveal to us a new aspect of an object, is attached to the Transcultural Autobiography and the Staging of (Mis)Recognition 641 hardly accessible prerequisite of emotional receptivity or identification.” And he concludes: “Recognition must precede cognition” (Reification46). This necessity of or need for imitation and identification might easily be a driving force not only for writers, but also for readers of autobiography—a genre that provides especially well for both. In this context, the reader who encounters a transcultural autobiography such as the two texts discussed here might, in part, be faced with the challenge not only of experiences s/he may not necessarily share, but also of political claims (Said) or alternative epistemological frameworks (Vizenor) that s/he may not immediately relate to. Herein lies the challenge of this particular subsection of the genre: It demands a recognition on the part of the reader that is a response on more than an interpersonal level; as such, as Alfred Hornung puts it, “the autobiographer becomes a mediator in intercultural, interethnic, and interracial affairs” (xii).

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