Unhomed

Homi Bhabha proposes that the state of being "unhomed" is the paradigmatic post-colonial experience, an idea that we can certainly start to see being played out in our texts so far this semester. I guess it all started with that Grace Nichols poem on the first night (I don't really know where I belaang / Yes, divided to de ocean / Divided to de bone / Wherever I hang me knickers -- that's my home), which cautioned us to be ready to spot a poetics of home that features irreconcilable fragments of memory and desire. Antoinette is denied a home in Jamaica by unyielding racial categories, and then, after crossing the Atlantic, she ruefully notes that "this cardboard house where I walk at night is not England" -- the cardboard might be the walls that can't protect her (and that will soon burn), but this is also a touching moment in that she's still trying to believe in some "real" England that she was always taught to believe existed. And then, wow, I can't get that devastating story of Martha out of my mind from the second section of Crossing the River. In a way, because she is finally so utterly dispossessed and seems only able to find some measure of solace in a dream, Martha reminds me of Antoinette and her obeah-induced sleep in Wide Sargasso Sea.

When contemplating the state of being unhomed, I think of all those Syrian refugees on the move for western Europe, and of that striking image (above) of untold numbers amassing in a battered Damascus and seeking food from the United Nations; once a mass of people are uprooted and moved, they all too often become spectral figures, and are removed from the field of vision of literature, culture, and public consciousness (in some distant way, Antoinette's situation in that attic becomes a kind of metaphor for this spectrality). Whether we get to talk about it this week or next, this condition brings the importance of James Clifford's essay into our purview. The questions Clifford raises are vitally important (especially for our pursuits in this class), and they're immediate and direct: "What is at stake, politically and intellectually, in contemporary invocations of diaspora" (302)? This is especially pertinent given that diasporic consciousness and positions so often get articulated (in largely salutary ways, as a kind of homogenized cosmopolitanism, for example) by academics, theorists, writers, artists, etc. What happens when we nearly start to celebrate the condition of exile? What responsibility do we have as participants in literary studies, in a class like this one, etc., to keep this discourse rooted in historical and cultural specificity? "What is the range of experiences," asks Clifford, "covered by the term [diaspora]? Where does it begin to lose definition?" (306).

Our readings this semester are already making it clear that not all experiences of displacement and estrangement are experienced evenly. Caren Kaplan, in her book Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, cautions us against seeing exile as "a condition of the soul," something that ends up being unrelated to the facts of material life: the exile subsequently gets constructed as a "romantic figure" while the refugee (of which there may be some 25 million in the world today) becomes a "faceless political construct outside the sphere of literature and aesthetics." Anyway, our novels (and poems) are already helping us think about "the distinctions between exile, expatriation, diaspora, and immigration," and how they can be teased out and "made meaningful in historically and culturally specific ways" (Kaplan).