Foreground: A Poetics Of Place In Transnational Memoir
Foreground:A Poetics of Place in Transnational MemoirbyBarton Michael SaundersA thesis submitted in conformity with the requirementsfor the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Toronto Copyright by Barton Michael Saunders 2018
Foreground:A Poetics of Place in Transnational MemoirBarton Michael SaundersDoctor of PhilosophyDepartment of EnglishUniversity of Toronto2018AbstractForeground: A Poetics of Place in Transnational Memoir explores place and identity incontemporary transnational memoirs, asking how writers conceive of each in relation tothe migratory experiences that they depict in their works. Although featuring bothphysical and psychic border crossings characteristic of transnationalism, the memoirs Istudy couple their shared focus on displacement with a drive toward alternative forms ofemplacement. These alternatives stand in contradistinction to assumptions about placeand social identities mapping neatly onto one another with an inherent or naturally boundgivenness. Rather than understanding the self as “belonging” in or to a certain place, thisdissertation brings to bear theories of articulation by Doreen Massey and Stuart Hall toargue that place and identity are dynamic relational expressions. In doing so, thedissertation also aims to convey dialogic interactions between identity and place thatexpand conventional structural and synecdochical modes of spatiality operative in literaryanalyses.ii
The thesis explores the theoretical contexts and objectives set forth in the introductorychapter by way of attention to four primary works: memoirs by Mourid Barghouti, EvaHoffman, Michael Ondaatje, and Edward Said. Chapter Two compares Said’s andBarghouti’s reconfigurations of self in relation to the Levantine landscape, concludingthat both writers refuse simple recuperative formations of either. With Chapter Three, Icontend that Hoffman’s focus on linguistic translation following emigration from Polandreflects a wider concern about fashioning the self in abstract spaces of writing andmaterial places of being. Rather than being degraded through translation, place, likelanguage, becomes enlivened. The next chapter focuses on intersections of genealogy andgeography for Ondaatje, arguing that his memoir figuratively excavates at thisconjunction in Sri Lanka while making explicit the active aesthetic processes thattransform his findings toward a sense of emplacement. In Chapter Five, I return to Said toargue that, beyond its youthful recollections, his memoir operates as a literary extensionof his theoretical work, offering a model of ethical emplacement. Taken together thesechapters promote articulations of place and identity that emerge relationally through,rather than despite, displacement.iii
AcknowledgementsI would like to express heartfelt thanks to my committee members for their patient,steadfast guidance throughout this project: Victor Li, unofficial advisor and earlycommittee member, opened many thoughtways that run through this thesis and inspiredme with his insightful, detailed reading of my drafts; Sara Salih, whose questioningalways cut straight to the heart of things; Cannon Schmitt, shepherd through thedissertation’s final stages; and my supervisor, Ato Quayson. Words cannot convey theextent of my gratitude to Professor Quayson for his mentorship and friendship. I wouldalso like to thank Wendy Laura Belcher for the constructive criticism in her externalappraiser’s report, which will be invaluable as this project evolves. Thank you, as well, toTanuja Persaud and Marguerite Perry, for keeping me somewhat straight on the path.The writing of this thesis was made possible in part through funding assistance providedby a Department of English Fellowship and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. TheDepartment of English provided additional support with travel grants for conferencepresentations of my research. Generously, the Thomas and Beverly Simpson Scholarshipalso funded the dissertation. In providing me the opportunity to work as a teachingassistant during the initial years of my program candidacy, the Centre for Diaspora andTransnational Studies was also instrumental financially and in expanding the disciplinaryscope of my scholarship.I owe innumerable thanks to my family for their support over the years of this projectand, more broadly, my life. To my parents—Ingrid, Fran, Carolyn, Barry, and Kjell—thank you. I also would have been lost on this journey without the help (and goodhumour) of my family’s Toronto contingent: Bill, Carol, and Marcia. Lastly, I extend mydeepest thanks to my son Hayden and Johanna, my wonderful partner in time, for giftingme space to write as well as a home in your hearts.iv
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments . ivTable of Contents. vChapter 1: Remembering: Place, Identity, and the Poetics of Dislocationin Transnational Memoir . 1Chapter 2: The Recollection of Homelessness: Configurations of Placein the Memoirs of Edward Said and Mourid Barghouti . 36Chapter 3: Rough Translation: Eva Hoffman’s Territorial Prerogativein Lost in Translation. 72Chapter 4: “From Seyllan to Paradise is Forty Miles”: Michael Ondaatje’sRunning in the Family and the Recovery of Place. 115Chapter 5: Not at Home at Home: Edward Said and the Ethics of BeingOut of Place . 159Chapter 6: Conclusion . 188Works Consulted. 196v
Chapter 1Remembering: Place, Identity, and the Poetics of Dislocation inTransnational MemoirThe centre of this work is occupied by questions about the relationship between place andidentity in a world increasingly characterized by transnational interrelations connectingdifferent people in different places and how such concerns inform practices of reading theintersections of place and identity in contemporary transnational memoirs. I argue that howwe conceive of and represent “place” have tremendous implications. Firstly, the practices ofrepresenting place weigh not only upon how one experiences a given place but also how itsconstitution as such comes about, in part, through those very representations. Secondly,because place has a tendency to function as an ideological linchpin for the figuration ofidentity, its representations significantly inflect our sense of self, whether as individuals or aspart of (or apart from) a broader collective. Examining memoirs by transnational writers, Iexplore an emergent form of representing place and identity that stands in contradistinctionto pervasive assumptions that inherently link a given people, their cultural habits, and aspecific territory to which they properly belong. I propose, instead, a sense of placeparadoxically grounded in the experiences of displacement akin to those depicted in thememoirs that serve as this study’s primary texts. This sense opens both place and identity toforms that do not shore themselves up with appeals to transcendent, essentialist, or absoluteantecedents, accepting that place and identity are undergoing profound redefinition as wecome to understand the experience of each as heterogeneous and ambulant.I submit, thus, that we ought to think about place and identity as articulations that arisethrough their expression of changing and changeable social relations. Adopting thisperspective, I offer close readings of contemporary transnational memoirs that move in kindtoward advancing a more deeply realized sense of the spatial in literary studies. From HenriLefebvre to Michel Foucault, for example, or Gaston Bachelard to Edward Soja, a widerange of theorizing space and place has innovatively infused the humanities for nearly a1
2century with a shared if differently expressed conviction that place is no static cartographiclocation of steadfast essence.1 Yet literary criticism has often found itself hampered byapproaches that limit its discussions of space to either a overarching structural and/orreception component of a work or a motif crystallizing some characteristic of a work taken tobe more significant than its representations of space or place themselves.2 Beginning with thepremise of place as an articulation allows its literary representations to be explored asinherently processual, rife with contradictions and contestations, and ultimately serves thecontemplation of place as an expression itself as well as of, by extension, its dialogicinterplay with the identities indelibly bound to the groundings it provides.I.Representations participate in the constitution of place, the central characteristics that definethem, as well as the identities of people rooted in and routed through their relationships toplace. Given the elasticity of representation as a concept, it is important to note thatoperationally I use the term herein to denote a system of signs that makes present to the mindsomething other than the signs themselves, whether that be a physical object such as acityscape or an abstraction such as an identity conferred upon that landscape. As thisdissertation examines literature, it is the linguistic medium of signs materialized therein withwhich I am primarily concerned. Although etymologically the term stems from a sense ofmaking present a likeness or resemblance of an absent thing, this work assumes theimpossibility of identity between sign and signified, preferring instead to explore theparticipation of representations in the making and remaking of place and identity intransnational memoirs.3 Additionally, I use representation in a secondary sense of conveyingsomeone or something as being of a certain nature, understanding that any such conveyanceoperates similarly pertaining to identity as the aforementioned sense and, further, occurs in acontested field. Place follows in this work as the configuration of a given social world—1Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place. U of California P, 1997, p. 286.For example, work by Joseph Frank and Mikhail Bakhtin, respectively, both of which I willtake up in detail later in this chapter.3Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 1976. Oxford UP,1983, pp. 266-69.2
3spaces in which time and events are not only seated but created and sustained in part throughtheir representation. As representations impart a sense of place’s character, so too do they theindividual identities capable of cohering with it.Life and its locations are mediated by their representations. This is not to say that oneparticular narrative, ideology, or other determines the identity of a place or people. Therelationship between representations and the world before and after them, the same world inwhich those representations are constructed, would better be described as dialogic thancausal. Representations do not determine; in their crafting, transmission, and reception theycontribute to the shaping of paradigms that seem both natural and possible. Yet even when itmay appear a representation aims to establish a totalizing vision, it also strains and falters andgives way from within itself to alternate modes of thought. For all representations “arealways enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society,” never simply an isolatedabstraction (Said, The World 35). Moreover, representations inevitably undergo numerousnegotiations with other constructs such as gender, class, ethnicity, age, and so forth, all ofwhich in their own right are subject to processes of negotiation rather than the mark of anabsolute character. Any given representation is positioned within a series of(re)configurations through which people orientate themselves and make meaning ofthemselves and their circumstances.Bearing in mind the dialogic relationship between representations and how we read and livein the world, representations of place have a significant role in the constitution of places. Thepoint is more than the observation that our knowledge of places is possible only inside orthrough representation. It is, rather, to emphasize the formative effects of the ways a place isrepresented. Representations of place do not, in other words, simply provide a reflexivedepiction of an objective reality but rather participate in both its cognitive and materialconstructs. Thus, how place is represented matters in regard to what it is perceived to be orpossible of becoming. “It is not,” James Donald avers, “that the images [of a givencity/place] are over here, on the noumenal side of representation and text, as opposed to thephenomenal space of the city over there. The reality of the city emerges from the interplaybetween them” (qtd. in McLeod 8). In that interplay, places also become endowed withvalues cultivated by those representations. Edward Said describes the process as one of
4“imaginative geography” in Orientalism. Particular places acquire meaning through theirrepresentations, developing a semblance of objective veracity only retrospectively in light ofthose representations.4 In addition to naturalizing a sense of givenness or inevitability of aplace, the values imparted in its representation inflect how one is figured or figures him- orherself within it. I will stress again, however, that no representation is determinative. In hismelancholic mappings of Paris in The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin shows us thismuch, a variety of concealed memories, wilfully forgotten histories, and alternativenarratives meandering through the cityscape.Within these dynamics, transnational literature offers a generative means for thinking aboutthe construction of place and its relationship to identity. In bringing connective networksbetween places to the fore, transnational literature suggests that places are generally entwinedin and even produced through a series of linkages or articulations, with the import Stuart Hallhas brought to the term. Drawing on the work of Marxist theorists such as Gramsci, Hallframes articulation as the process of analyzing the dialectical relationships between socialforces and ideologies through which diverse subjects envision themselves as belonging to acollective identity above and beyond their differences. Articulation resists ideologicaldeterminisms such as socio-economic structures of power and the consequent attribution ofany intrinsic character to a given social formation. It directs us instead to the particularideological conjunctures through which social formations come into being and knowthemselves, none of which are innate but rather positions within broader configurations ofpolitical, cultural, and historical forces.While articulation theory provides a dynamic means for thinking about how hegemonicforces operate, its equal if not greater significance for Hall lies in the transformativepossibilities it provides for social identities, particularly since the articulations through whichthey take shape are neither inevitable nor intractable. (Hall’s essay “New Ethnicities” makesthis argument forcefully in its complications of black experience as an essentialized categorywith the recognition of the immense range of black subjects’ historical and culturalexperiences.) What is more, articulations are not exclusive to social formations; they also4Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1979. 25th Anniversary Edition, Vintage, 1994, p. 54.
5operate in the social forces at play in those formations. Both the social formations of identityand ideological forces acting upon each other are subject to articulation. As such, neitherideological forces nor their concomitant social formations exist outside the historico-culturalcontexts in which they help shape each other.Among the ideological forces at play in this dynamic is the notion of place and the identitiesit appears capable of conferring through a demarcation of who belongs properly to a givenplace from those who fall outside its boundaries. In “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, andthe Politics of Difference,” Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson identify the notion of distinctsocieties and cultures occupying discontinuous geographic spaces as an isomorphism ofparticular force in the social sciences. Doreen Massey offers a more emphaticcharacterization of this understanding as hegemonic in the geographical imagination: “spaceand society,” it was assumed, “mapped onto each other and that together they were, in somesense ‘from the beginning’, divided up” (For Space 64). As such, places were configured asinternally coherent entities naturally bound to the space of their particular ground. InDisplacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburgcontend that this assumed tandem of a “particular culture and stable terrain” has undergirdedmodern conceptions not only of culture but also nationalism, constructing a pervasivelyconvincing homology between people and places spatially distinguished from one another(1). From this immediate spatial homology and its tandem spatial differentiation from othercultures and places, a whole series of hierarchical binaries are also set in motion, e.g., centreand periphery, home and abroad, the West and the Rest, and so on. In practice, these binariesallowed anthropologists to separate subjects and objects in such a manner so as to deny theircoevalness. The “native” object inhabited a field distinct in both time and space from that ofthe observer, the creator of knowledge, the Western machinations of knowledge, and soforth. While anthropologists created knowledge about Others, in other words, theydifferentiated those Others—producing a “them” spatially separate from an “us.”Articulation, however, directs us toward understanding place as a process without anecessary, inherent givenness. This is to say, place is not derived from a static essentialcharacter that arises unbidden from the ground on which it is situated but rather through theways in which spatial relations are—dialectically—conceived, represented, executed, and
6experienced. Within this process, transnational literature disrupts the seeming connectiveease afforded representations more immediately hemmed by the identity politics of thenation-state, ethnicity, and so forth by making explicit the array of negotiations condensedwithin their construction. In this respect it shares a salient feature of minority andpostcolonial literatures as an interruptive force against dominant modes of representation thathave pretended to an authoritative, ahistorical universality.5 Without diminishing theparticular specificity of the localities in which the processes of articulation occur,transnational literature directs us toward conceptualizing the linkages on which they draw asnot bound by a homogenous or coterminous geography. What this means is that astransnational literature rehearses place, it expresses or articulates a discursive formation thatforegrounds the articulations—those contingent linkages through which it is comprised—incompetition for its territorial narrative.The decision to focus with this project on place and its inflections on identity in transnationalmemoirs is both a pragmatic and theoretical one. Concerns about place and identity intransnational literature are prominent characteristics not confined to a specific genre. Theintersecting effects of colonialism, decolonization, diaspora, globalization, and the like arefocalizing features of transnational literature, animating cross-cultural contact within andbetween spaces. Consider, for example, the reconfigurations of Ibo life under the yoke ofBritish colonialism and Christian missionaries in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or thepsychic bond between the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, SaleemSinai, and the independence and partition of India. In her poetry collection Land to Light On,Dionne Brand cycles through dislocations that problematize any static grounding in place orherself, any comfortable identification with her adopted Canadian home, her Trinidadianpast, or how they inform one another. The genre-bending historical travelogue In an AntiqueLand finds Amitav Ghosh explicating, across centuries and continents, the intractablyintertwined nature of human experience. Given the propensity of such concerns intransnational literature, focusing on memoirs serves to constrain the project’s scope, allowing5See Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Cornell, 2010,pp. 17-23; and Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1975. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.Translated by Dana Polan, U Minnesota P, 1986, pp. 16-27.
7for a comparative basis to be established through content similarities and shared genericcharacteristics, particularly the construction of identity, both for the narrated subject and itsauthor.This last point leads to theoretic assumptions informing the dissertation’s focus on memoir.Although my project does not offer a generic study of memoir, one finds implicitly in thegenre that dislocation is a deeply-seated, generative force. Whether one understands memoiras determined by generic traits or more a means of reading wherein one is tasked withaligning the subjects of author and textual figuration as mutually reflexive, memoir activatessubjectivity as always a multiple beyond the singular. From the start, it dislocates the “I,” afiguration never precisely the protagonist, its narrator, or author but rather one that emergesin the shifting space between. The degree of overlap between the protagonist and author (orthe represented figure and historical referent) is less significant here than the textualized selfthe memoir fashions in its divergence from the “I” as a singular, stable entity. Theconfiguration of self that memoir assumes is one produced through rhetorical fragmentation.In addition, as memoir necessarily imposes a retrospective interpretation, ordering asupposed past from shifting present positions, its contents also thematize dislocation. Aslived experiences are appropriated into the medium of text, they are subject not only to theconstraints of literary form in which they are shaped but also the interceding experiencesthrough which they are filtered. Both function as interpretive lenses through which the past isrecovered, ordered, and restated.6 As such, the memoir is necessarily marked by degrees ofdifference between the pasts and selves it aims to represent and their representation. Thus thegenre proves an appropriate form to convey matters of dislocation that sit at the heart oftransnational memoir. What is more, as a genre, the memoir not only asserts a claim to anindividuated voice but also the capacity of that voice to participate in narrating place.7 Theclaim is especially fraught in the transnational memoir, which often finds its gravitationalcentre in a tenuous identity between self and place.6Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of SelfRepresentation. Indiana UP, 1987, pp. 45-47.7Koundoura, Maria. Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethicsof Global Culture Exchange. I.B. Touris, 2012, p. 9.
8With such assumptions, this dissertation examines the processes of configuring place andtheir implications in memoirs by writers whose backgrounds are indelibly marked by theoverdetermined coincidence of displacement. Owing to the autobiographical mode in whichthese texts operate, the most obvious of these processes is, perhaps, a temporal disjuncture.Each memoir necessarily requires a passage of time before that passing can be re-memberedand narrated. Of more particular interest to this dissertation, though, are the ways in whichthese processes are also spatial in nature, specifically how place is thought through thedislocations from the countries of the memoirists’ youths in which they first came to knowthemselves and the differences those experiences engender in subsequent attempts toorientate themselves in relation to the places of both their past and present. The authors havemoved, under different degrees of volition, to new countries, into new languages, cultures,and narratives of identity. Albeit alluring, place as autochthonous becomes suspect and,eventually, untenable for these writers.As much as exilic longing informs these memoirs, as much as they function to recuperateaspects of loss, they are neither wholly about the powerful pull of return nor its ultimatefutility. They are, instead, concerned with revisions of both place and emplacement. In theirworks, there is a consciousness persistently doubled by different places and attendanthistorico-cultural affiliations. Rushdie describes the perspective as stereoscopic vision.8 Thisperspective is not simply a function of memory but a cultivated awareness of the way placesare produced in the endless traffic of social relations within and between cultures. As such,location becomes a figuration of dislocation and vice versa in these works, and this dynamicproductively troubles the notion of place, as it is re-placed within the geographic andhistorical contexts of migratory experience. If one accepts, as I do, that how place isrepresented weighs not only on how it is experienced but in its very constitution, then theforegrounding of displacement in these works offers more than a strategy for theautobiographical assertion of self. It offers an alternative articulation of the unity betweenpeople and place in which difference is explicitly fundamental to its expression andexperience.8Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Penguin, 1996,p. 19.
9Four key memoirs are taken up in this dissertation to explore the articulations of place andidentity: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (2003), Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation:Life in a New Language (1989), Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982), andEdward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). Although these writers are not bound by asingular affiliation of culture or country of origin, their memoirs do share points ofintersection that informed their selection for this project. Firstly, each memoir works througha primary concern regarding the dislocations the writers have experienced. In the first sensethese are rather literal in the experiences of exile and immigration through which the writershave been carried across the familiar boundaries of their youths into ostensibly new worldsmarked as such not simply by time and maturation but by the borders of nation-states. Inthese physical transnational moves, they have been thrust into new cultures and customswhich they negotiate with those of their past and vice versa. This first sense is significant inthat it tempers the temptation to lapse into dislocation solely in the abstract as symptomaticof a contemporary (postmodern) condition, reminding us that as people move across bordersthey do so under particular circumstances, with a variety of histories, and with divergentexpectations for and constraints on what is made possible by these journeys.In its more figurative formations, dislocation also marks a discord between these writers andthe places they have lived, including those of origin as well as the adoptive lands in whichthey have come to reside. This is to say, the discontinuities on which they reflect are notexclusive to their reorientations in new lands or even the subsequent transformations theyhave undergone that make return to their first “homes” a problematic proposition. Thememoirs are indicative of a kind of double consciousness in which identity is always morethan one, emerging in the cross-cut and translation of different identifications.9 Similar toHall’s description of cultural hybridity produced by post-colonial migrations, these writersbear upon them the traces of the particular cultures, traditions, languages, andhistories by which they were shaped. The difference is that they are not and9I qualify the term double consciousness here (“a kind of”) as a description of thetransnational experiences the memoirs reflect so as to signal its origin in yet distance fromW. E. B. Du Bois’s concept, which spoke specifically to the psycho-social divisions of blackexperience in the United States.
10will never be unified in the old sense, because they are irrevocably the productof several interlocking histories and cultures, belong at one at the same time toseveral ‘homes’ (and to no one particular ‘home’). (“The Question” 629)Importantly, those interlocking histories and cultures cannot simply be disambiguated forthese writers by parsing them into coherence with one place or another. The play of historicocultural identifications between places illumines the play that is also within them. Thus, thepast is not a counter to the instabilities of the present or some anodyne for the problems ofunity with place. Rather, these works reflect on experiences of dislocation both in theenvironments in which they “belong” and those in which they do not. It is not that theirexperiences are the same in each instance, of course, but that dislocation is not consigned to aterritory mutually exclusive of emplacement. In this regard, each memoir is concerned withdifferences between national territories and those within them.Secondly, each was written within Western traditions of aut
A Poetics of Place in Transnational Memoir Barton Michael Saunders Doctor of Philosophy . or Gaston Bachelard to Edward Soja, a wide range of theorizing space and place
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