On the Move

The aftermath of the Paris attacks and the coarsening of the political dialogue in our own country have me thinking about refugees again (Syrian and otherwise), which brings Clifford's essay back into my field of vision. We're reminded yet again, as Caren Kaplan writes, that "the ever-expanding numbers of displaced persons remains uneasy and unresolved," and of how marginal and imperiled refugees are (rhetorically and literally) relative to such other categories as exiles, migrants, transnationals, etc. The added spectre of terrorism (i.e., of terrorists using to their advantage the flow of refugees to western Europe) raises the stakes of Clifford's sense that diasporic cultural forms "encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and norms" (307).

For our purposes, we must remain mindful of the material histories and, often, the psychic trauma of bodies on the move (which may end up being the focus of final papers for some of you, in one way or another). Clifford proposes that "a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin" (306), or of any possibility of a return to that origin, and we think again, perhaps, of the various bodies on the move in our course texts this semester, seeking a better life, seeking communal affiliation, etc.: the spectral existence of Martha in Crossing the River and Mary Duane in Star of the Sea, the existential loneliness of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, Travis's (CTR) and Bobby's (No Telephone to Heaven) wounded and symbolic odysseys, the difficult travails of Moses and his fellow immigrants in Selvon's London, even, at some level, Plunkett's displacement in Omeros ... among many others.

Gosh, did you notice that even the seagulls in The Lonely Londoners (the ones that end up on the window ledge of Cap's apartment) are exilic/diasporic? We learn that they "come up from the old Thames when things too hard for them by the sea," and that "sometimes they join the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and it have some of them does hang out by the Odeon in Marble Arch" (134). Creatures of the sea (just like the Caribbean immigrants) who have moved to urban areas for congress and survival -- how appropriate is that?! Lately, too, I tend to think of the poignant symbolism of Greer in Crossing the River (Joyce's and Travis's bi-racial son). Not only does he both challenge naive/purified notions of British national identity (as white, for example), but he also inflects that national identity with the history of slavery and racism (Bhabha's ideas of disjunctive temporalities would be useful here. And then, wow, we remember Joyce, on the novel's last page, thinking, with great irony and sadness, "I almost said make yourself at home." We're stunned, realizing that there can be no homecoming for Greer, realizing that his experience of dislocation and dispossession will be ongoing, and that he'll have to seek affirmation and solidarity in other (hybrid, intercultural) affiliations.