Constructing Identities : The Interaction of National, Gender and Racial Borders [1 ed.] 9781443850926, 9781443849142

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Constructing Identities

Constructing Identities: The Interaction of National, Gender and Racial Borders

Edited by

Antonio Medina-Rivera and Lee Wilberschied

Constructing Identities: The Interaction of National, Gender and Racial Borders, Edited by Antonio Medina-Rivera and Lee Wilberschied This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Antonio Medina-Rivera, Lee Wilberschied and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4914-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4914-2

CONTENTS

Introduction .............................................................................................. vii Antonio Medina-Rivera and Lee Wilberschied Part I: Gender Representation and Identity Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Feminism, Modernity, and Premodernity in Japan and the West: Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House Takao Hagiwara Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 18 I Am My Mother: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Identity Formation in the Anglophone Caribbean Jaclyn Salkauski Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 33 Gender-crossing as Cultural and Identity Construct In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men Sorina Ailiesei Part II: Race, Stereotypes and Identity Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 48 Intention versus Reception: The Representation of the Chinese in Ah Sin Yusha Pan Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 61 The Metaphorical Consumption of the Racial Other in Spanish Advertising Diana Palardy Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 74 Mestizaje Revisited: Cherríe Moraga, Mixture and Postpositivist Realists Victoria Bolf

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Chapter Seven........................................................................................... 89 A Multi-faceted Experience of the Other in Michel Ocelot’s Fairytale, Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest Nina Tucci Part III: National/International Identities Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 116 Bollywood and the Diaspora: The Flip Side of Globalization and Cultural Hybridity in Kal Ho Na Ho and Salaam Namaste Anup Kumar Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 143 Re-Visioning Little Italy with Italian Eyes: The Italian Immigrant Experience in Early 20th century America as Portrayed in Melania Mazzucco’s Vita Carla A. Simonini Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 162 Crossing Cinematographic and Geopolitical Borders: Palestinian-Chilean Filmmaker Miguel Littín Heba El Attar Part IV: Political and Historical Borders Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 178 The Political Economy of the British Slave Trade: The Royal African Company and the Convergence and Confrontation Between Private and Public Interests Jennifer S. Schiff Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 194 Prophethood and the Making of Islamic Historical Identity Abed el-Rahman Tayyara Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 217 Looking Back, Looking Forward: National Identity, Healing Historiography and Greek Humorist Nikos Tsiforos Sylvia Mittler Contributors ............................................................................................ 248

INTRODUCTION ANTONIO MEDINA-RIVERA AND LEE WILBERSCHIED

The basic concern of border studies is to examine and analyze interactions that occur when two groups come into contact with one another. Acculturation and globalization are at the heart of border studies, and cultural studies scholars try to describe the possible interactions in terms of conflicts and resolutions that become the result of those possible encounters.1 The present book is a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented during the IV Crossing Over Symposium at Cleveland State University (October 7-9, 2011) and it is a follow-up to our discussion on border studies. The main focus of this volume is historical, [inter]national, gender and racial borders, and the implications that all of them have in the construction of an identity. The notion of identity can be complicated, controversial, and challenging. A more homogenous group or culture tends to perceive its identity as fixed and attached to a specific tradition that in many ways stays intact throughout many generations. However, migration, bordercrossing, globalization and even the media bring to our attention the dynamicity of an identity. Identity flows and changes based on the experiences of the individuals of a society. Today, it is difficult to think about a group that is totally isolated. Popescu2 explains that borders still help to establish (non)membership in a group, but a change has occurred in “the type of Othering, which has moved now beyond fixity to include flexibility and multiplicity, that is, network membership.” Consideration of issues of identity becomes even more compelling, as van Houtum notes, because borders of the past used to mark the beginning 1

Antonio Medina-Rivera and Lee Wilberschied, In, Out and Beyond: Studies on Border Confrontations, Resolutions, and Encounters (Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), ix. 2 Gabriel Popescu, Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-first Century: Understanding Borders (Lanhan, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2012), 93.

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and end of a territory, but now the form of borders may include detention centers and airports. Furthermore, our movement in public space is frequently tracked, and our fingerprints or irises may be scanned: “Our bodies have become the passports and maps that we carry.”3 With the use of biometric data, the body has thus become a precise instrument of identification, especially during border-crossing, but the notion of identity requires further exploration, including gender representation. The first part of the book focuses on gender representation and identity. The discussion regarding gender and identity borders connects us with the complexities of human nature, personality, sexual orientation, and the different facets experienced by individuals throughout their lives. Takao Hagiwara, in his chapter entitled “Feminism, Modernity, and Premodernity in Japan and the West: Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House” establishes the parallelism between a western and an eastern literary work and the idea of the discomfited wife. Hagiwara explains the values of premodernity and modernity and how other cultural and societal factors interact in the development and endings of both literary works, establishing similarities and differences between the worlds and the role of women in society. Jaclyn Salkauski in “I Am My Mother: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Identity Formation in the Anglophone Caribbean” examines the relationship between mother and daughter within a postcolonial context and the construction of a female identity. The daughter’s search for and development of a female identity conflicts with the strong presence of a patriarchal society and the mother’s need to transgress firmly-established societal norms. Sorina Ailiesei, in “Gender-crossing as Cultural and Identity Construct in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and China Men,” analyzes the role of gender in a Chinese-American context. The roles of male and female for people of Chinese heritage in the contemporary United States contrast with the past of Chinese immigrants who arrived with different traditions. First, the immigrants experienced discrimination, and second they had to adjust to the standards and cultural practices of a new society. Female representation in all three chapters deals with tradition and the expectations of family/society and opens the discussion of women’s role and empowerment in the world. Race, Stereotypes and Identity comprise the central topic of the second part of the book. As in the previous section, issues regarding identity are central in the examination of human conflicts, but this time the focus is on 3

Henk van Houtum, “The Mask of the Border.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds. (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 58.

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racial perceptions and generalizations. Yusha Pan, in the chapter entitled “Intention versus Reception: The Representation of the Chinese in Ah Sin,” explains the failures of a play written by Bret Harte and Mark Twain in 1877. The play creates an anti-Chinese sentiment and promotes mockery of Chinese people. In addition, the use of yellow paint on the face to represent a Chinese person in theater intensifies the ridicule and leads to stereotyping and racism. In the second chapter, Diana Palardy examines in “The Metaphorical Consumption of the Racial Other in Spanish Advertising” another case of racial stereotyping and mockery, but this time with a Black person as the element for entertainment. Palardy guides us in reflecting upon the idea of cultural appropriation and the consumption of the Other, in order that we may arrive at a better understanding of the stereotypes and derogatory racial profiles that are ingrained in our culture through advertisement. This theme is further developed in Victoria Bolf’s essay, “Mestizaje Revisited: Cherríe Moraga, Mixture, and Postpositivist Realists,” which introduces us to the complex narrative of race and identity in the United States. “Mestizaje” is represented as an issue that not only affects or influences the individual, but also as process or mixture that has repercussions for society as a whole. Finally, Nina Tucci in “A Multi-faceted Experience of the Other in Michel Ocelot’s Fairytale, Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest” takes us to the world of an animated fairy tale. The story shows people of different genders and ages, religious beliefs and socioeconomic backgrounds interacting together and connected in a symbolic dance. Mullen explains, “Groups of people sometimes form ‘communities of meaning’ constructed on selected aspects of various social categories. These communities can either construct social boundaries or act as an interface to cut across social networks and thus allow for change or innovation.”4 The first three chapters of this part are an invitation to contemplate racial conflicts and frictions, and to re-examine those stereotypes that have been perpetuated in our collective psyche. The last chapter brings out the differences among individuals, but at the same time engages us in an encounter of celebration, freedom and equality. Part Three of the volume considers issues related to national and international identity through the media of film and novel. Anup Kumar analyzes two films in “Bollywood and the Diaspora: The Flip Side of Globalization and Cultural Hybridity in Kal Ho Na Ho and Salaam Namaste.” Each film develops diasporic and cosmopolitan themes, both within a post-national context. Bollywood films must now depict social 4

David Mullin, ed., Places in Between: The Archaeology of Social, Cultural and Geographical Borders and Borderlands (Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books. 2011), 4-5.

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cross-mixing for audiences of the home culture in India as well as for those who have resettled all over the globe. The films point to a transposition of the ways in which Bollywood heretofore represented power; now, local power dominates and the global culture resists. Diener and Hagan note the increasing power of diaspora to influence the domestic debates in their homelands while those in the homeland can more easily mobilize members of the diaspora, because many dispersed groups are choosing a hybridized identity.5 This “de-bordering of human activity”6 coincides with more stringent and intrusive border and immigration controls, but interconnectivity through global media creates links among anyone who can cross the digital divide. The fictional narrative that Carla A. Simonini examines, in “ReVisioning Little Italy with Italian Eyes: The Italian Immigrant Experience in Early 20th Ccentury America as Portrayed in Melania Mazzucco’s Vita,” is a tale of departure and separation rather than the immigrant’s integration into American society. The uprooting of the Italian immigrant of an earlier generation as seen through the eyes of a contemporary Italian contributes to and enriches the discussion of ethnicity and identity. Manzanas and Benito point out that physical boundaries help to feed “the fantasy of a closed world,”7 but the novel has helped readers, especially Italian readers, to transcend notions of both time and space. Williams points out that the creation of a space, even a virtual space, associated with a territory but not striving for sovereignty, helps to foster plurality.8 The fourth and final section of the volume, “Political and Historical Borders,” examines issues of identity of larger institutions through historical lenses. The section opens with “The Political Economy of the British Slave Trade: The Royal African Company and the Convergence and Confrontation between Private and Public Interests,” in which Jennifer S. Schiff discusses the conflicting aspects of identity that occurred when the government of England charged the Royal African Company, a private corporation, with the defense of British interests in Africa. The dual burden of profit-making in slave trade and defense of British territory and trade created an irresoluble conflict of identity that resulted in the demise of the Company. Discussion of the identity of the corporation and its role 5

Alexander C. Diener, Alexander and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 86-87. 6 John Williams, The Ethics of Territorial Borders: Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand (New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 117. 7 Ana M. Manzanas and Jesús Benito, Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film (New York: Routledge, 2011), 49. 8 Williams, 129.

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in the politics of nations continues today. Abed el-Rahman Tayyara’s chapter entitled “Prophethood and the Making of Islamic Historical Identity” explains the Islamic concept of prophethood, the distinction it bears from that of other monotheistic religions and the contribution it makes in the formation of a unique religious identity. He traces the role of the Islamic view of prophethood and its role in shaping both the religious and the historical identity of Islam. In addition, it demonstrates the role of Islamic sources in shaping Muhammad’s distinctly unique mission as a prophet, in comparison with the missions of his predecessors. Islam, as the last of the Abrahamic religions, has played a tremendous role in the shaping of political borders as well as national and individual identity. These considerations are important, explains Peggy Levitt, because religious communities continue to operate across borders, channeling the flow of values and ideas, and convening diverse people and practices. Such encounters “provide members with strong, intricate, multilayered webs of connections that are perfect platforms from which to live globally.”9 Sylvia Mittler, in “Looking Back, Looking Forward: National Identity, Healing Historiography and Greek Humorist Nikos Tsiforos,” explains how Tsiforos helped to strengthen national self-awareness and identity in post-World War II Greece. His satirical histories conveyed his distinct perspective on Greek history, identity and society at a time during which his contemporaries subscribed to an idealized view of Greekness constructed on classical and utopian themes. His unique approach was a response at a deeper level to the modernization experienced in Greece during that era and reflects current examination of the notion of nationalism and identity. Diener and Hagan note that, in the past, border studies often inferred divisions between states or other geopolitical bodies were set by historical or natural circumstances. However, “borders are essentially evolving practices,” and institutions are subject to the influences of contingent events, ideas, and ideals. These may include issues regarding human rights (for example, equality in sexual orientation or reproductive rights), neoliberal economic practices (for example, outsourcing or privatizing) and new threats to security (for example, criminal cartels or terrorist networks). Thus, national identity should now be considered in light of the notion of bordering as a process.10 This fourth and final section relates back to the previous three, showing the expanse of 9 Peggy Leavitt. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing Religious Landscape (New York: The New Press, 2007), 134. 10 Diener and Hagan, 67.

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questions regarding identity and border crossing and their effect on the lives of citizens and nations alike. The chapters in this volume help to fulfill a need for discussion of “cinematic, literary, and media border texts, since these popular and narrative representations are particularly powerful in carving out general conceptions on borders, border crossers and territorial identities.” Some chapters contribute insights into questions regarding identity migration considered under the lens of postcolonial studies.11 Newman observes that common themes are relevant to the many types of border, even if such a compilation does not result in one particular model or theory. Interdisciplinary contributions such as those appearing in this volume help to create “a common language, or glossary of terms” that may facilitate “meaningful common discourse” among disciplines.”12 The chapters in this book affirm Diener and Hagan’s observation that current efforts to materialize borders physically must also operate within new realities such as cyberspace. These media help to implement new types of human connections by reducing the dimensions of distance, but at the same time they may provide an environment for confrontation, or even prejudice and hatred. “The human capacity to employ borders to filter flows into and out of territory is central to this new era of shifting spatiality.”13 This collection of chapters helps to illustrate Mullin’s observation that border studies go beyond the study of border regions and relate not merely to the geographical aspects of human existence, but the social.14

11

Jopi Nyman, “Review of The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 26, no. 3 (2011): 373-374. 12 David Newman, “Contemporary Research Agendas in Border Studies: An Overview.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, ed. Doris Wastl-Walter (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 44. 13 Diener and Hagan, 17. 14 Mullin. 9.

PART I GENDER REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY

CHAPTER ONE FEMINISM, MODERNITY, AND PREMODERNITY IN JAPAN AND THE WEST: FUMIKO ENCHI’S THE WAITING YEARS AND HENRIK IBSEN’S A DOLL’S HOUSE TAKAO HAGIWARA CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), first translated into Japanese in 1901, influenced not only writers in Japan but also Japanese society in general,1 which at that time was rapidly modernizing and Westernizing itself. Like A Doll’s House, Fumiko Enchi’s (1905-1986) novel The Waiting Years (1957) deals with the lives of a frustrated wife, Tomo, and her domineering husband, Yukitomo, a high-ranking government official. Tomo and Yukitomo, both from low-ranking local samurai families, married around the time of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan ended its feudalistic samurai regime to take on contemporary Western values. However, both Tomo and Yukitomo continue to follow the old samurai codes—albeit distorted by modern Western thought2—defining 1

See, for instance, Toshiko Nakamura, Nihon no ipusen genshǀ: 1906-1916 (Ibsen Phenomenon in Japan: 1906-1916) (Fukuoka: Kynjshnjdaigaku shuppankai, 1997). 2 Kanji Nishio wrote in 1968: “However, the target of attack by the people who, in order to fight against the Japanese feudalism, advocated the Western version of modernity could not have been the feudalistic thought itself. This is because feudalism in the pure sense of the word had ended by that time [i.e., the Meiji Restoration of 1868]. They did not try to eradicate the residues of the feudalism, either. They were only fighting against the feudalistic morals distorted by Western modernity, i.e., the degenerated forms of the feudalistic morals generated and changed by their modernization” (Kanji Nishio, Yǀroppa no kojinshugi [Individualism in Europe] [Tokyo: Kǀdansha, 1968], 11). See also note 22 below. Unless otherwise specified, all the English translations in this essay are mine. In this essay, I refer to the publication of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House translated

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the loyal relationship between master and servant. As he advances as a powerful official in the modernizing Meiji government and loses interest in Tomo, Yukitomo begins to find sexual relationships elsewhere. He brings young concubines into his own household, and has an adulterous relationship with his daughter-in-law; he even orders Tomo to go to Tokyo to find him a teenage concubine. Tomo obediently carries out her husband’s orders, but the changes in Japanese society cause her to seethe with frustration and anger at her domineering and callous husband. However, unlike Ibsen’s Nora, Tomo stays with her husband for the sake of her young children, thereby sacrificing her independence to her oppressive husband and her family. She patiently manages household matters, hoping to outlive her husband, but she dies in her sixties of a chronic kidney disease, a metaphor for the arduousness and oppression of her life. Her last request to Yukitomo is to dump her body into the sea instead of giving her a sumptuous funeral. While A Doll’s House likely had some literary influences on The Waiting Years,3 Nora’s and Tomo’s contrasting responses to their domineering husbands also offer insights via the topics of feminism, modernity, and premodernity on cultural encounters and confrontations between the modern West and traditional Japan. In particular, the three interrelated topics of nature, religion, and narrative point of view in the literary works help to clarify the nature of these intercultural contacts and possible solutions to the problems arising from them. According to Max Weber, modernity is a process of rationalization or disenchantment (Entzauberung),4 a process by which humans rationally attempt to control non-rational parts of nature and its cognate worlds of non-rationalities, including magic, myth, superstition, and, by extension, religion. This process engenders a division between culture/civilization as the master, and nature as the servant or slave. This hierarchical dichotomy is also a feminist issue, as implied by Sherry Ortner’s question: “Is female anonymously (New York: Dover Publications, 1992) and to Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years, translated by John Bester (Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco: Kǀdansha International, 1987). Subsequent references to these works will be indicated parenthetically in the body of this essay. 3 It is said that under the influence of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Enchi wrote a scenario under the same title for a TV drama that was broadcast in 1960. For more on this drama, see The Asahi Shinbun (The Asahi Newspaper), February 17, 1960, 5. 4 See “Science as a Vocation” in Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, edited and with an introduction by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong; translation by Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2004).

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to male as nature is to culture?”5 According to Ortner and other feminist critics, women have universally been relegated by men to the realm of nature or non-rationality, and men to that of culture/civilization or rationality—a perspective that gives men a pretext for dominating and exploiting women. These critics thus argue that linking women with nature is the basis of discrimination against them. A Doll’s House strongly criticizes this kind of sexism in its depiction of a modern bourgeois family: Nora’s husband Torvald Helmer, a lawyer and bank manager,6 often calls her a skylark or a squirrel, thus diminishing her while emphasizing his human dominance over her. On the other hand, while it superficially parallels A Doll’s House in its indictment of male domination and discrimination against women, The Waiting Years in fact supports the relegation of Tomo and other female characters to the world of nature, suggesting that nature is an important source of empowerment for them. This contrast between the two works is evident in their images of nature, specifically in their depiction of the sea, water and plants. While Torvald’s nicknames of “squirrel” and “skylark” for Nora clearly emphasize his view that she is subservient to him, a kind of doll that lacks an independent soul and the capacity for rational thought, the sea also plays important thematic roles in this work. When Torvald was seriously ill, Nora forged her father’s signature so that she could borrow money from Niles Krogstad in order to save Torvald’s life. When Krogstad later blackmails her with his knowledge of her forgery, Nora thinks of committing suicide by throwing herself into the sea so that she can protect Torvald’s honor. At the last moment, however, when she realizes that Torvald is an egoist who cares only for himself, she decides to leave him and her children: instead of dying, Nora determines not only to live, but also to become an independent human being. That A Doll’s House, a threeact play, takes place during three days7 around Christmas time seems to 5

The title of Ortner's article published in Feminist Studies, 1.2 (Autumn, 1972), 531. 6 Torvald’s occupation symbolizes nineteenth-century modern Western bourgeois society in that it was governed by law (rationality) and bureaucratic capitalism. For more on relationships between rationality, bureaucracy, and capitalism in Western modernity, see such works from Max Weber’s writings as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Constructively criticizing Weber’s theory on capitalism in his Puraton to shihonshugi (Plato and Capitalism) (Tokyo: Hokuto shuppan, 1982), Hirono Seki points out how bureaucratic spirit in Plato’s Acadeamia played a crucial role in the subsequent development of modern Western capitalism. 7 Besides these images related to the number three, Ibsen repeatedly uses that number throughout this play: “For a full three weeks . . . you shut yourself up every evening . . .” (5); “Yes; it is three years ago now” (6); “I have three lovely

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suggest underlying Christian themes such as felix culpa (happy fault of Adam and Eve), because Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ, the redeemer of original sin. Thus, Christmas also implies not only Christ’s birth but also his later spiritual suffering, death, and rebirth.8 There is a clear parallel between Ibsen’s central theme of Nora’s spiritual growth and the Christian theme of felix culpa,9 the latter in turn supported by the dialectical10 arrangement of the play’s three acts: Act I (thesis: original innocence), Act II (anti-thesis: fall, or experience), and Act III (synthesis: restored innocence, or salvation). In Act I, after Torvald has been promoted at his bank, Nora is innocently happy—until Krogstad appears halfway through the act to dampen her happiness. The stage directions at the outset of Act I depict Nora’s house as that of a very comfortable middle-class bourgeois family (the stove is cozily burning), children” (7); “The last three years have seemed like one long working day . . .” (9); “It is impossible—I have three little children” (29); “It will remain a secret between us three” (43); “These must have been three dreadful days for you, Nora” (64). 8 Thus, Easter is an extension or a variation of Christmas, and vice versa. 9 His strong interest in Kierkegaard and in the question of sin and egoism (see, for instance, his plays Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean) suggests that one of Ibsen’s central themes was hamartiology, especially that of felix culpa. In the final scene of A Doll’s House, to her husband’s question if she knows what religion is, Nora responds: “I know nothing but what the clergyman said when I went to be confirmed. He told us religion was this and that and other. . . . I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all event if it is true for me” (68). Nora here is Kierkegaardian in that she challenges conventional Christianity and that she wants to search for a religion that truly convinces her. 10 For dialectics centering on felix culpa in Hegel and Kierkegaard, see, for instance, Jason A. Mahn, “Felix Peccabilitas: Fallibility and Christian Heroism in the Hamartiology of Søren Kierkegaard,” Diss. Emory University, 2004. See also, A. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), where Abrams discusses the themes of felix culpa and self-education in Romanticism and Hegel. Nora’s suffering and aspiration for self-education in A Doll’s House parallels the spirit’s self-education through suffering (fall/alienation) in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807). E. M. Forster says: “Ibsen was a poet at 40 because he had that preference. He was a poet at 60 also. His continued interest in avalanches, water, trees, fire, mines, high places, traveling, was not accidental” (E. M. Forster, “Ibsen, the Romantic,” The New Republic, 131.21 [November, 1954], 65). Nora can be seen as a romantic character in her individualistic and idealistic pursuit of an ideal romantic love. See also Errol Durbach, ‘Ibsen the Romantic’: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1982), in which Durbach explores the Romantic search for a lost paradise in Ibsen’s later plays.

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thereby underscoring Nora’s simple joy. In Act II, however, the Christmas tree’s candles have been put out, setting the scene for Krogstad further blackmailing Nora and aggravating her spiritual agonies and her contemplation of committing suicide. Yet in Act III, the last act, the lamp burning on the table in the middle of the room symbolizes life and hope for Nora, who indeed confronts her husband sitting at this table at the end of the act and decides to abandon death in order to start living a new life. Right before Nora makes this decision, Dr. Rank, the couple’s dying friend, drops by and asks for a cigar, which Nora lights for him, thereby further emphasizing the connection between fire and Nora’s new life and hope. Act III therefore stands for, or at least adumbrates, Nora’s future maturation, spiritual growth, and salvation, a future that will incorporate her preceding spiritual sufferings. Thus, the blackmail by Krogstad that Nora suffers and eventually overcomes parallels Christ’s spiritual suffering, death and rebirth. And the sea that Nora contemplates for her death seems to stand for the water of her baptism into full humanity: her spiritual suffering results in triumph. This is the main thematic role of the sea, one of two key nature images in A Doll’s House. As suggested above, the Christmas tree in the same work plays a similar thematic role. Nora’s opening words to the maid in Act I, “Hide the Christmas tree, Helen,” have multiple overtones, including an allusion to Nora’s secret procurement of money through forgery and her suppressed frustration at Torvald’s domineering treatment of her. When Torvald criticizes Krogstad’s past forgery (an earlier event that parallels Nora’s forgery) and the immoral influences that mothers have on their children, Nora hides herself behind the Christmas tree, which she started to decorate after Krogstad began to blackmail her. Her decoration of the Christmas tree foreshadows her later mending of her outfit for the fancy dress party on Christmas day. But at the outset of Act II, the Christmas tree is described as dishevelled, stripped of its decorations and its candles put out. In this way, the tree is a harbinger of Nora’s eventual exposure as a forger and her consequent abandonment of her fancy dress, a facade representing the reality of her frustrating, false marriage. Thus, the Christmas tree stands for Nora herself, and like the sea it supports the play’s Christian theme of Nora’s spiritual death, rebirth, and growth. Nora eventually discards the decorated Christmas tree, her false self clad in the fancy dress, in order to become an independent human being. A Doll’s House thus uses nature images, from squirrels and skylarks to the sea and the Christmas tree, to symbolize the servitude and discrimination that Nora experiences as a woman; nature is therefore something that she must separate herself from in order to grow into a full-fledged human being.

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Nature images in The Waiting Years, however, play an almost opposite role. Starting with the first chapter, entitled “First Bloom,” and ending with the last chapter when Tomo dies in the middle of the winter, each chapter of this novel as well as the main female character in that chapter are closely associated with one of the four seasons. For instance, in the second chapter, “Green Grapes,” Suga (the young concubine Tomo found for Yukitomo) is compared to green yet sweet grapes: She [Tomo] could see Suga and Etsuko [Tomo’s young daughter] standing face to face beneath the serrated leaves of the grapevine in the orchard. . . . The sunlight falling through the vine flecked the fair skin of her face with green. “Can you eat them as green as this?” “They’re very good. They’re a kind of green grape they grown in Western countries.” Etsuko’s voice came cool and clear. Suga pulled off the bunch and placed one of the grapes like a great green gem in her mouth. “I told you so—it’s sweet, isn’t it?” (39)

About two decades later, in the chapter “Unripe Damsons,” Suga still resembles green fruit, suggesting Yukitomo’s ongoing exploitation of Suga, and by extension of other women, including Yumi, Yukitomo’s other concubine; Miya, his daughter-in-law; and Tomo. While the plot of A Doll’s House is logically structured into three dialectical acts to support the themes of felix culpa and Nora’s spiritual growth, in The Waiting Years the plot is patterned on the four seasons, and Suga, Tomo, and other female characters are described as emanations of nature,11 all of which fits with the story’s cyclical approach to the generations of characters. Moreover, despite the fact that the female characters in The Waiting Years at first seem to resemble nature in their passivity, subjugation, and exploitation by men like Yukitomo (Suga’s resemblance to green grapes or unripe damsons, for instance, suggests this association), Tomo’s eventual empowerment through her connection with nature shows that she, and by extension the other women too, actually find in nature a path to power. Tomo’s association with nature and her resultant empowerment is suggested early in the story, when her husband Yukitomo seeks Tomo’s maternal support. Tomo indirectly refuses to provide it:

11 For instance, Miya is associated with cherry blossom (82, 92) and butterfly (96, 105); Etsuko together with Suga, with green grape (39); Ruriko, Tomo’s granddaughter, with butterfly (160, 163).

8

Chapter One “Why don’t you change [your clothes]?” he said, directing an ill-tempered look at her. Quietly, she went out into the anteroom again. The sound of rustling fabric reached him with an odd clarity. She must be undoing her sash of stiff silk; he . . . listened to the indications of slow, heavy motion that were melancholy and monotonous yet powerful as the waves on a wintry sea in their silent suggestion of the body and the voice so familiar to his sight and hearing after nearly twenty years of marriage. They summoned up forgotten scenes that came and went as she moved, scenes of the mountain streams of his home in Kyushu and the deep snows that buried the northeastern districts of Honshu where his work had taken him. Like a shadow that he could never leave behind, Tomo would gradually age in this house, growing more and more like a family ghost till finally she died. (74-75)

Here, Tomo is depicted as an emanation of nature, especially in terms of a cold ocean: for Yukitomo, she is nature, which is heavy and slow in motion, but powerful like a wintry sea. Another example of how Tomo is associated with the sea involves a traditional Kabuki play about Oiwa, a wife who is estranged and eventually killed by her husband, Iemon. Early in the novel, Yukitomo takes his family, including Suga, to see this ghost story in which Iemon falsely accuses Oiwa of adultery and kills her, throwing her body into a river, so that he can marry a neighbor's daughter. But later, Oiwa’s vengeful ghost haunts and eventually kills Iemon. Although Tomo identifies with Oiwa when she sees her on the stage, for the welfare of her children she refuses to become like Oiwa: She [Tomo] must not become like Oiwa. Even though a madness many times the strength of Oiwa's sought to possess her, she would hug Etsuko [her daughter] to her all the more fiercely as though the act were a prayer. For if she were to became [sic] mad, what would happen to the children? (44-45)

Nevertheless, at the end of the novel, when Tomo is dying in the winter, nursed by Fujie, the third wife of Tomo’s son Michimasa, and Toyoko, who is Yukitomo’s niece, she becomes like Oiwa, requesting that her body similarly be dumped into the sea and indirectly conveying this request to Yukitomo as if in a trance, through the mouth of Toyoko: She [Toyoko] had meant to present her [Tomo’s] request as the delirious nonsense of a sick woman, but when she spoke her voice came out serious and shrill, as though Tomo’s spirit had taken possession of her.

The veil cleared instantly from Yukitomo’s eyes. The old man’s mouth opened as though to say something, then his expression went blank. In the

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newly bathed, watery eyes, fear stirred as though he had seen a ghost. . . . His body suffered the full force of the emotions that his wife had struggled to repress for forty years past. The shock was enough to split his arrogant ego in two. (203) What shakes Yukitomo to the core here is his intuitive realization that he has mistreated Tomo just as Iemon mistreated Oiwa, the revengeful wife who haunts and destroys her husband. Thus, while her request that she be tossed unceremoniously into the sea might seem to suggest Tomo’s acceptance of her husband’s careless disregard for her humanity, his horror and the destruction of his ego actually signal her victory over him by implying Tomo’s protest against the oppression of Yukitomo’s pompous house. In contrast to this scene of spirit possession where Tomo is delirious, the final scene in A Doll’s House shows Nora’s rationality emerging: in answer to Torvald’s dismissive “You are ill, Nora; you are delirious; I almost think you are out of your mind,” Nora replies, “I have never felt my mind so clear and certain as tonight” (69). While Nora’s eventual refusal to throw herself into the winter sea shows that she is becoming independent from both nature and her domineering husband, Tomo’s masochistic request that Yukitomo throw her body into the sea signals her retaliation against and defeat of her husband. Moreover, unlike Nora, who directly and logically protests her husband’s treatment of her, Tomo makes her request indirectly through the mouth of Toyoko, who behaves like a medium possessed by Tomo’s spirit/ghost, and whose voice, so to speak, comes from the sea with which Tomo intends to merge. Thus, whereas nature provides a false identity and is the source of enslavement for Nora, for Tomo it is her own identity and the source of her empowerment. Since Tomo, the novel’s central female character, seems to share a camaraderie with other women (Etsuko, Oiwa, Suga, Yumi, Toyoko, and Fujie), Tomo’s empowerment through nature can be seen to represent their potential empowerment too; in her apparent victimization by Yukitomo and her eventual victory over him, Tomo represents the others. Tomo’s connections with these women can be seen, for instance, in how Tomo takes care of Suga and Yumi, the two concubines who should have been her rivals and enemies, to the end. Similarly, Tomo’s subtle act of resetting Etsuko’s comb while intimating her business of finding a young concubine (Suga) for Yukitomo connects her daughter with Suga, who is not much older than Etsuko, and with Oiwa, who in the play is combing her hair. (Oiwa in turn longs to pass “the comb that her mother had left them” [43] to her younger sister.) Moreover, when they hear Tomo’s urgent request to tell Yukitomo that she wants her body be

10

Chapter One

dumped into the sea, “the unspoken feminine complicity of two women [Fujie and Toyoko] who had been married and suffered themselves” (202) also indicates that Tomo and other female characters, despite their being different individuals, share the same source of power, nature. Finally, the words of Kin’s daughter Toshi, who has uncanny, shamanistic knowledge, when she sees Etsuko’s fascination with the Sumida River, “Mind you don’t fall, Miss Etsuko” (18), suggest Oiwa’s and Tomo’s eventual falling into water. The women in The Waiting Years, all abused by men like Yukitomo, are unhappy. Tomo wants to protect her daughter from such misery; hence, her subconscious act of resetting Etsuko’s comb.12 While A Doll’s House criticizes the dominance of modern maledominated spheres such as law and capitalism, the play ultimately promotes modern ideals—rationality, humanism, individualism, and feminism—over nature. The Christian paradigm of fall and salvation also supports the play’s modern theme of growth and progress while downplaying the importance of nature. On the other hand, religion and nature go hand in hand in The Waiting Years. Tomo, living in a changing Japan, at first despises her mother’s belief in the Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism as merely irrational and superstitious: All talk of the Buddha and Amida had come to seem [for Tomo] like a pack of lies to deceive children. The injunction in her mother’s letter to leave everything to the Buddha only irritated her: what was she supposed to leave to him, and how? If there were some noble being, some god or Buddha, who could see all that went on in the human world, why did he not make life more decent for one who tried as hard as she to live truthfully? (54)

However, as she ages and experiences hardships in life, she finds herself embracing her mother’s beliefs:

12

In connection with Oiwa’s hair-loss due to poisoning, see the following from A Doll’s House: Krog. Under the ice, perhaps? Down in the cold, coal-black water? And then, in the spring, to float up to the surface, all horrible and unrecognizable, with your hair fallen out— Nora. You can’t frighten me. (45) Here Krogstad and Nora are talking about the possibility that she will commit suicide by throwing herself into the winter sea. Nora eventually rejects this kind of death, whereas Tomo wishes it.

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Yet why, she [Tomo] asked herself, should she be obliged to spend all her life entangled with such distasteful affairs? . . . It was a problem that admitted of no solution under any theories that her mind could conceive… . “Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu . . . [.]” Effortlessly the muttered invocation of the Buddha found its way to Tomo’s lips . . . . (188)

Japanese Buddhism is a synthesis of indigenous pantheistic, shamanistic nature worship and abstract, theoretical Indo-Chinese Buddhism. One central concept in Tomo’s sect of Buddhism is jinenhǀni, the idea that Buddhist enlightenment is naturalness or as-it-isness. In jinenhǀni, the cyclical temporality-spatiality of nature’s four seasons harmonizes with the Buddhist idea of karma and transmigration. The Buddhist jinenhǀni advocates that adherents abandon rational, logical thinking to become one with nature’s natural flow. Herein lies the theoretical, logical basis for Enchi’s association of nature with Tomo (and with other women) in The Waiting Years, in which nature, while appearing to be dominated by men like Yukitomo, eventually becomes the master; men, represented by Yukitomo, become its servants. On the other hand, Ibsen’s perspective on nature in A Doll’s House reflects both JudeoChristian and Greco-Roman views of nature: nature is material that human beings are entitled to exploit, including via technology and science. While modern rational thinking may seem to consider Judeo-Christianity as superstition or magic, the Christian dialectical pattern of felix culpa (primary innocence, fall, and restored innocence or salvation) still underlies the linear-horizontal schema of modernity: failure-strugglevictory, or growth from immaturity to maturity, or the idea of progress, all of which parallel human beings’ independence from, and control of, nature. Nora grows from the soulless, non-rational doll or skylark that Torvald sees her as to an independent, rational human being. Thus, in A Doll’s House, the plot moves Nora from the natural to the human world, whereas in The Waiting Years, the reverse is the case for Tomo. A Doll’s House is a realistic play that presents a scenic, objective view of the characters on the stage combined with occasional soliloquies by the central character, Nora. The play’s stage structure, with one of the walls of the room open to the audience, provides a voyeuristic look into Nora’s private family life. The spirit of realism and voyeurism seems to concur with that of the rationalism and objectivism of modern science: in modern science, one rationally, objectively, and voyeuristically examines and analyzes nature. The subject-object or mind-body dichotomy is a thematic underpinning of A Doll’s House, a play about Nora’s resistance against, and eventual defeat of, her husband’s attempt to objectify and subjugate her as a creature lacking human rationality and autonomy.

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Chapter One

Superficially, The Waiting Years is also a realistic work. However, the work’s apparent omniscient narrative point of view sometimes erratically and subtly changes from the third- to the first-person narrative voice, resulting in what might roughly correspond to the Western literary device of “free indirect speech.”13 One notable difference between Enchi’s version of free indirect speech and that of Western writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce is that because writers of Japanese sentences may omit the grammatical subjects of their clauses and relatively freely change between the past and the present tense, English translations often fail to reproduce the subtle shift in Japanese from the third- to the first-person voice, as does John Bester’s translation of The Waiting Years. In this work, erratic shifts to free indirect speech occur especially when characters become emotionally agitated. For example, when Suga’s mother finds out that Yukitomo has had the young concubine Yumi in his house, she becomes highly disturbed and emotional: Timid and naively trusting though she was, Suga’s mother could not help bridling at the malice that lurked in the latter part of the report [that Yukitomo’s interest in Yumi might jeopardize Suga’s role]. . . . Suga might be negative and lacking in vitality in some ways, but, even as a child, she could never have been called stupid . . . . If only her parents had managed their affairs properly, who could tell what an advantageous marriage she might have made? To have put her into service with the Shirakawas . . . before she was even a real woman, was the act of a mother so heartless as hardly to deserve the name. Nevertheless, Suga seemed to feel sorry for the wretched parent thus obliged to sell her daughter, and though she never came to the house herself, she was sufficiently mindful of her family to send them, via others, presents of money and things to eat. (63, italics added)

In this passage, the third-person narrative voice in the first paragraph erratically but subtly changes to first-person in the second paragraph. The change is indicated by the shift—absent in Bester’s translation—from the past tense in the first paragraph to the present tense in the first and the last sentences of the second paragraph. Also, the narrator’s words in the translation and italicized here (“her parents,” “the wretched parent,” and “them”) respectively imply “we,” “me,” and “us” in the original, thereby resulting in Enchi’s version of free indirect speech.

13 In this device, the first-person voice is embedded within third-person narration, as in “She stopped. How can I keep on going? But the next moment, she resumed her walk.”

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The same shift in narrative voice takes place when Tomo’s emotional tension heightens. As noted earlier (p. xx), after viewing Oiwa’s play and with her sleeping child Etsuko resting on her lap on the rickshaw, Tomo thinks “she must not become like Oiwa. . . . For if she were to become mad, what would happen to the children?” (44-45, italics added). “She” and “the children” in this quotation read respectively as “I” and “my children” in the original, thus realizing a shift from the third- to the firstperson narrative voice. Still another example takes place at the climax of the novel, where on her way home after visiting her grandson’s baby and a maid, old Tomo slowly trudges up a long, gentle slope14 in the evening snow: Tomo felt a sudden, futile despair at herself as she stood there in the road alone in the snow, loath to go on, with her gray shawl drawn up close about her neck and an open umbrella held in the hand that was frozen like ice… . Was it possible, then, that everything she had lived for was vain and profitless? No: she shook her head in firm rejection of the idea. Her world was a precarious place, a place where one groped one’s way through the gloom. . . . Yet at the end of it all a brighter world surely lay waiting, like the light when one finally emerges from a tunnel. If it were not there waiting, then nothing made sense. She must not despair, she must walk on; unless she climbed and went on climbing she would never reach the top of the hill (189-190, italics added).

In this quotation, the third-person narrative voice using the past tense in the first paragraph changes in the second paragraph to that of the firstperson using the present tense, and the italicized words (she, Her, and She) respectively read “I,” “My,” and “I” in the original. This kind of sudden shift of narrative voice is closely related to the shamanistic spirit possession that takes place when the dying Tomo, as if possessed by Oiwa’s spirit, in turn possesses Toyoko so as to use Toyoko to convey her death message to her husband.15 At this moment in the story, it is as if the novel’s female characters like Suga’s mother and Tomo are speaking through the mouth of the novel’s narrator, behind whom is Fumiko Enchi, the author. While this shift is perhaps the author’s literary device for such emotionally intense scenes, Enchi, a woman herself, must have identified herself emotionally with the plights of her female characters. 14

This slope is called “on’nazaka” (lit., “woman’s slope” or “female slope”), which is also used as the title of the novel in the original, symbolizing the suffering and frustration of Tomo’s long, arduous life. 15 Early in the novel, Toshi’s uncanny ability to foresee things is also compared to that of a medium (9).

14

Chapter One

That The Waiting Years abounds with elements of Noh drama seems to be related to this kind of spirit possession and shift of narrative voice: Noh is based on animistic, shamanistic spirit possession.16 Noh elements are closely associated with Tomo when she first tells Kin (Toshi’s mother, in whose house Tomo and her daughter Etsuko stay while in Tokyo) of her business in Tokyo: “‘Well, since I shall have to ask your help at any rate . . . [.]’ Again the smile, elusive as the smile on a Noh mask, played about the corner of Tomo’s mouth” (13). Also, after introducing Suga to her husband for the first time, Tomo retires to her room: “Whether the torment that seethed within her was love or hatred she could not tell, but a calm determination not to leave the crucible of doubt gave her features the tranquillity of a Nǀ [sic] mask in her unhurried progress along the corridor” (37). The highly stylized, unnaturally slow movements of Noh performers on both the stage and the corridor-like bridge on which they appear from and disappear into the mirror-room (the other world) is a salient feature of Noh. Thus, on one level, Tomo is the main performer (shite) of a Noh play, and the novel’s apparently irregular changes in narrative voice come from the story’s shamanistic elements of spirit possession, which in turn are related to that element of Noh.17 16

The Noh performers, usually male, are often either possessed by or are emanations of the spirits of the dead: male or female, gods, animals, or plants. Together with the use of masks (which muffle clear-cut logical arguments, as exemplified by Nora’s conflict with Torvald at the end of A Doll’s House), the music of drums and flutes, chorus chanting, stage structures (the bridge that connects the stage with the mirror room—the other world—by which performers appear on the stage), and the incantatory chanting of the lines delivered by the performers on the stage, Noh evokes a dream-like effect of yugen (lit., subtle, dark and mysterious). Buddhist chanting of scriptures influenced Noh chanting, and so old Tomo's chanting of the Buddha’s name (188) further evokes Noh traditions. 17 Besides Noh influences in The Waiting Years, another important influence on this novel is Lady Murasaki’s 11th century work, The Tale of Genji, a story about the life of a powerful and amorous nobleman called Hikaru Genji, the shining prince, who has love affairs with many women both young and old, and of both high and low social rank. Fumiko Enchi was an avid reader of this tale since childhood and later translated it into modern Japanese, and so it is no surprise that The Waiting Years resembles The Tale of Genji not only in its inclusion of spirit possession and irregular shifts of narrative voice but in many other points as well, such as the variety of women that Yukitomo, like Prince Genji, has affairs with; the female characters being emanations of nature; the importance of the four seasons in the story’s plot; young Suga being taken from her home when Yukitomo buys her, like the girl called Wakamurasaki (lit., young purple; later called Murasaki no ue [lady purple]) being abducted by Genji; Suga being associated with purple (30, 34, 35, 41, and 48), as Wakamurasaki is; the fact that Yukitomo has an affair with

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In conclusion, I would like to touch on the criticism of Nora by Raichǀ Hiratsuka (1886-1971), a pioneering Japanese feminist who founded the short lived feminist journal Seitǀ (Blue Stockings) (1911-1916).18 In this journal, Hiratsuka criticizes Nora’s decision to leave her husband and children in order to become an independent, autonomous individual: Nora, your real self-realization will occur from this point on. A second tragedy is awaiting you. It is the tragedy of discarding your false and illusionary self . . . . Nora, after you had left your family, surrounded by cold-hearted people you must have endured every kind of hardship in order to become a human being, to perform above all your duties to yourself, and to express wholehearted sincerity to yourself. . . . And when finally you won the victory of becoming an individual, how did you feel, Nora? . . . You will sadly say, “When I won the freedom of my self, there was no freedom there. When I won the independence of my self, there was no independence there.” You will realize that what you called the “self,” an illusion which you deemed to be more important than anything else, ironically loses its freedom and independence because it exists in confrontation with other selves. . . . Nora, what I meant by “your second tragedy” is the curse of this false and illusory self. It is a negation, a bitter struggle of self-extermination. Nora, is it not that you can gain true self-realization only when you have completely killed without trace what you call Nora?19

Hiratsuka studied Zen Buddhism, which seems to be reflected in her criticism of Nora’s modern sense of individual self, because Zen and Buddhism in general consider the independent, autonomous, and individual self to be an illusion (ku or emptiness). Tomo’s belief in the Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism and her natural invocation of the his daughter-in-law while Genji has an affair with his step-mother Fujitsubo (lit., lady wisteria), who is Wakamurasaki's aunt; and so on. For more on the narrative voice in The Tale of Genji, see, for instance, Takehiko Noguchi, Genjimonogatari o Edo kara yomu (Reading The Tale of Genji from the Edo Period) (Tokyo: Kǀdansha, 1995). For spirit possession as a source of empowerment for the women in Genji, see Doris Bargen, A Woman’s Weapon: Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997). For more on the theme of spirit possession in Enchi’s works, see, for instance, her On’namen (Masks) and Namamiko monogatari (The Tale of False Fortunes). 18 A title that alludes to “The Blue Stockings Society” of mid-18th century England, perhaps one of the earliest feminist organizations in the West. 19 Raichǀ Hiratsuka, “Nora-san ni” (To Nora) in Tomie Kobayashi, ed., Seitǀ serekushon: atarashƯ on'na no tanjǀ (Selected Writings from the Seitǀ: The Birth of New Women) (Tokyo: Jinmon shoin, 1987), 26-27.

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Buddha are based on the Buddhist notion of selflessness (the illusion of the individualistic self).20 In contrast to Nora’s idea of the self, which her final logical argument with her husband and her emancipation from her confining and imprisoning family show to be a self-assertive and centrifugal notion, Tomo’s self is centripetal because she sacrifices her self for others, remaining to the end in the restricting and oppressive family domineered by her husband. This sense of the self (or denial of Nora’s type of self) in Tomo derives from the Buddhist concept of empty self, which also infuses other salient elements of the novel such as the characters’ connections with nature, jinenhǀni (synchronizing with nature’s flow), spirit possession, shifts in narrative point of view, and female camaraderie. It is through these self-effacing, centripetal elements that the novel’s female characters, represented by Tomo, paradoxically gain empowerment. While A Doll’s House critiques Western modernity, the play nevertheless accepts modernity’s core elements: the humanism and rationalism embodied in Nora at the end of the play. On the other hand, while The Waiting Years appears to be employing modern Western values to criticize the premodern feudalistic male domination of Japanese women, the novel in fact asserts nature-oriented premodern sensibilities such as animism and shamanism, which are not only the sources of empowerment for Tomo and other women but also the basis of those feudalistic sensibilities themselves.21 More precisely, then, The Waiting Years criticizes not feudalism per se, but its distortion, as embodied by Yukitomo and his Meiji government in their mixture of premodern feudalistic sensibilities and modern Western perceptions.22 In this sense, 20

D. T. Suzuki maintains that Zen and the Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism are essentially the same. See, for example, D. T. Suzuki, Shin Buddhism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) and Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist: The Eastern and Western Way (New York: Macmillan, 1957). 21 Pantheistic sensibilities such as animism and shamanism permeate the art forms of the feudalistic periods (1185-1868): renga (linked poetry), haiku, Noh, kabuki, sumi-e, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, etc. 22 The Meiji writer ƿgai Mori (1862-1922), one of the first Japanese to introduce Henrik Ibsen to Japan, describes a feudalistic marriage before the Meiji Restoration in his short piece entitled “JƯsan bƗsan” (“An Old Couple”). This story, about a young samurai and his wife describes how, soon after their arranged marriage, the two are separated by feudalistic law due to the husband’s fatally wounding his colleague in a quarrel at a sake party. After thirty-seven years, when the husband is forgiven, the couple peacefully and happily resumes their married life as if nothing has happened. A Meiji man descended from a samurai family, ƿgai did medical research in Germany for four years; we can thus surmise that he

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The Waiting Years depicts, on the one hand, the problems engendered by the encounter of Japanese premodernity with Western modernity, while on the other, in the life and death of Tomo, it suggests one solution to these problems.

perhaps wrote this story to contrast marriage under Japanese feudalism with modern Western marriage, as presented in, for instance, A Doll’s House. For more on this story in relation to Western individualism, see Nishio, Yǀroppa no kojinshugi (Individualism in Europe), 12-15.

CHAPTER TWO I AM MY MOTHER: MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN THE ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN JACLYN SALKAUSKI INDIANA UNIVERSITY All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. —Oscar Wilde1

The mother-daughter relationship and the cultural and social influences that guide this relationship are a pertinent factor in postcolonial Caribbean female identity formation. Homi Bhabha explains the conflicted inbetween nature of postcolonial individuals, indicating that one’s cultural surroundings and social relations create the framework within which one must develop and access identity.2 Due to the gender norms already accepted within any given society, a female individual is subjected to not only social norms through her environment, but to the much more intimate representations of these gender norms by her own mother. Judith Butler confirms that while an individual can be born biologically female, gender is learned through the norms presented to her.3 Therefore, a woman is created by taking part in performatives that categorize her as such. Females are taught to be expressly dependent upon their mothers to 1

Oscar Wilde and Henry Popkin, The Importance of Being Earnest (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 10. 2 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 63. 3 Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 3-44.

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represent the ideal female, and therefore have difficulty separating from their mothers in order to create an individual identity, apart from their relationship with their mothers.4 Historically, the Caribbean woman has been the leader of her family within a patriarchal society. In many cases, the male influence is absent in the family context. Despite a male-dominated discourse, it is the role of the woman to guard her family’s history and identity through a nondominant discourse, oral tradition. In spite of a relevant surge of female Caribbean writers in the global market, the works of these authors have not been widely accepted as canon literature, leaving Caribbean females in the margins of both Caribbean society, as well as the global community. Although the mother-daughter relationship is a pertinent factor for identity studies in the Anglo, Dutch, French and Spanish postcolonial Caribbean, it is the specific societal and cultural limitations of the literary representation of Jamaica that will be discussed here. The novel discussed in this analysis, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home by Erna Brodber, offers exemplary representations of the role that the mother and family dynamics play in a female’s identification process.5 More important, the motherdaughter and other-mother relationships that a young female has oftentimes determine the complexity or ease of determining and defining her individual identity, as well as that of her place in the collective. In Jane and Louisa, the female gender is represented as the inferior gender, and race is seen only as a binary: African traditions are not valued, while white traditions are. The collective identity that represents this community is defined as both a protective force and a suffocating barrier, and individual identity is a painstaking individual journey; one must successfully maintain her roots while simultaneously growing wings. Jane and Louisa is a story about Nellie, a young Jamaican girl, and her search for identity. Nellie is finally confronted with the decision to allow the community’s protective kumbla to continue suffocating her, or to break out on her own.6 Brodber’s countless representations of women and their role in society offer an illustration of the psychological stage of a small 4

Ruth Wodak and Muriel Schulz, The Language of Love and Guilt (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986), 4. 5 Erna Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (London: New Beacon Books), 1981. 6 Here, kumbla is defined as the barrier created to protect an individual or community. The barrier can be a social construction, a language, or any other means used to protect those of the in-crowd from those of the out-crowd. For further essays and perspectives on the kumbla see: Carole Boyce Davies, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton: Africa World Press), 1994.

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Chapter Two

community in Jamaica where Nellie and her family live. Although there are myriad factors that determine identity, only a selection of representative elements will be discussed here: literary representations of racialized women, female story-telling as a means to overcoming trauma, and “other-mothering.” In this novel, three representations of women are prevalent: women are the lesser gender; educated, racialized women continue to be perceived as sexualized beings under the male gaze; and women are represented as a contributing factor in the perpetuation of patriarchal structures. While the women are portrayed as less biologically sound than the men in this society, it is the women who perpetuate and strengthen the belief that female is the lesser gender through their secretive behavior. Rhonda Cobham believes that women “are able to base their rejection of patriarchal models on a fictive affinity with an entire civilization rather than retreating into an exclusively female subculture,” however this is not the representation of women as seen in Jane and Louisa.7 Rather, it is the women’s compliance with age-old male-dominated structures that prevents them from creating an equally comfortable environment for women within the self-created protective kumbla. The desire to protect is so strong that the protective forces become prohibitive. How then, does an Afro-Caribbean woman escape the boundaries that have been imposed on her, as well as those she imposes on herself? A second representation of women that complicates the female identity process is the community’s treatment of educated women as valuable and valued, but not sexually desired. Racialized women in this text are also represented as exotic and sensual. As T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting explains, the Black woman has suffered under the gaze and fear of the French man.8 The stereotype of a savage being was projected on the bodies of racialized women and they were in turn represented as overtly sexual beings. This cultural phenomenon has been clearly documented in nineteenth century French literature and Francophone literature of the Caribbean, and additionally presents itself in Jane and Louisa. As demonstrated by Nellie’s experiences and the dialogue amongst women in Jane and Louisa, an Afro-Caribbean woman is sexually desirable for corporal reasons while an educated woman is no longer seen as the exotic,

7 Rhonda Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas: Transforming Feminist and Nationalist Agendas in Three Caribbean Women’s Texts,” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 55. 8 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press), 1999.

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sexual being that she was previously perceived to be and, therefore, is no longer attractive to the males of this society. According to Rhonda Cobham, the Afro-Caribbean woman has always been linked to and defined by attributes such as “physical strength, sexual independence and economic resourcefulness.”9 In addition, since slave times, the Afro-Caribbean woman has also been considered an exotic, sensualized object of men’s sexual fantasy, but very rarely represented as men’s choice of mate in literary fiction.10 One example of a literary representation of a racialized, gendered subject can be seen as recently as Luis Palés Matos’ “Majestad negra” from Tuntún de pasa y grifería.11 Here, the Afro-Caribbean woman has held an objectified role in men’s eyes. Also in Pales Matos’ “Majestad negra” is the inherent physical strength and sexual independence of Afro-Caribbean women that Cobham refers to. Judith Butler explains that “the cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of ‘identities’ cannot ‘exist’—that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not ‘follow’ from either sex or gender.”12 While women may not be represented as having an abundance of options, the same literary representations indicate that women are in control of their bodies, and with continued education they will gain control over their life decisions. This implies the inherent existence and attainability of a desired identity that is not necessarily existent or attainable. The attempt at taking control of one’s life decisions can be seen in Jane and Louisa when Nellie is strongly advised to choose a worthy educational path. All members of the family are supportive of Nellie receiving an education and Nellie’s Granny Tucker even tells her, after winning a scholarship, that her “blessings shall flow like a river…to your children’s children,” firmly indicating the importance of education in maintaining a fruitful family lineage.13 Granny Tucker’s promise of blessings for generations to come due to an educational advance directly negates the perception of the Afro-Caribbean as little more than the object of man’s sexual desire. However, as we will see, the rejection of female as 9

Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 52. For another perspective on the sexualization of racialized, gendered subjects, see: Vera M. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 1993.172. 11 Luis Palés Matos, “Majestad Negra” in Tuntún de pasa y grifería (Río Piedras: University of Puerto Rico), 2000. 21. 12 Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” 17. 13 Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 8. 10

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object of sexual desire leaves Nellie in the margins of societal norms, questioning whether or not this desired identity for which she strives does indeed exist within her grasp. Most Jamaican females of Nellie’s age on the island are getting married and starting families. Despite propositions from males, she continues to focus on her education. However, after attending college in the United States, Nellie finds that she is no longer part of the in-crowd upon her return to Jamaica. For her lack of experience with men, Nellie is marginalized in her community, where the majority of women identify themselves in relation to their male counterpart, or as an element of her male-driven society. Neither the role of the educated Afro-Caribbean woman nor that of the island woman birthing a family seems to be the right fit for her. Again taking cues from her family community, Nellie must understand that the island culture that she has grown up with is now a thing of the past, and her future lies in education.14 Nellie is made to believe that breaking with Jamaican culture and the social norm by receiving an education is what will ultimately help her to rise in status. A third representation of females in this novel illustrates the women as compliant with a patriarchal society, and therefore supporters of this mode of thought and social organization. While the obstacles that AfroCaribbean women in this text face when choosing their place in life and within their community are abundant, one factor continually outweighs the other: isolation. Again, the women are portrayed as weak and unassuming, yet it is the women who are afraid of being outcast from society who are the ones that most strongly perpetuate the hierarchical, patriarchal structure of this community. Whether through active decision making or through compliance with the social structure of this community, the women conform to male-driven organization and rarely break from the mold of what is accepted by the majority. However, it is the isolation associated with island culture as a whole that explains the inability for escape or for outside influence on the inhabitants of an island. While on a smaller geographical scale, the isolation that families and small communities experience within an already isolated region can be even more oppressive, offering its inhabitants few options for change, and even fewer options for the triple-marginalized (gender, race, discourse) AfroCaribbean woman. Representations of these repressive pocket communities in AfroCaribbean women’s literature illustrate the mental tug-of-war experienced by the women in this situation, and further complicate the process of identification. Similar representations are abundant in Caribbean women’s 14

Ibid., 43.

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literature and are exemplified in works by authors such as Simon SchwarzBart, Esmeralda Santiago, Christina García, Elizabeth Nunez, Michel Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Merle Hodge, Gisèle Pineau, and many others. As Cobham notes, “women are not merely the disfigured victims of the patriarchy, doomed to reproduce their own oppression. They are also active partners in the ongoing game, with a chance each time the wheel turns to change their partners and alter the steps of the dance.”15 If a woman cannot decide whether she is in favor of or against the patriarchal system, how does she have any ability to escape the very constraints she simultaneously desires to both reject and accept? Upon Nellie’s return to the island, she feels differently, having experienced another culture’s perspective on the matter of education. She has taken the opportunity to cultivate her knowledge, all the while keeping men on the back burner to avoid unwed pregnancy. Nellie is respected for her education and doctoral status in the United States, and therefore, she does not feel as though she owes the men back home anything, as most women in the community do.16 For the majority of these cloistered women, definition through marriage and motherhood is the only choice they have, but Nellie has taken a different path, refusing anything that might diminish or demean her perception of self.17 The second factor to be discussed as a contributing factor to female identity formation in this text is female story-telling regarding the roles of orality, intertextualization, and trauma recovery. Story-telling is one way in which the women of this society do not perpetuate patriarchal structures. Oftentimes, the rich intertextual references along with the female story-teller’s point of view is very different than the accepted norm of the patriarchal society, and creates a separate, lesser-accepted female version of history—HERstory. This woman-centered story-telling contributes to the formation of collective and individual female identities. The use of these intertextual references is threefold: to reference cultural clues that have meaning only for the small percentage of people who will understand them and read the novel; to create a heightened sense of reality as if the references were not ficticious; and to create binaries with strong lines of separation. Cobham suggests that “the juxtaposition of orature, children’s games and dance with female protagonists is hardly unique, as Black women traditionally have been associated with the handing on of oral rather than written cultural forms in the work of Black nationalist 15

Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 51. Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 33. 17 Ibid., 34. 16

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writers.”18 The use of such intertextual references, then, is an attempt to create space for the Afro-Caribbean woman writer, not in place of the male writer, but in addition to him. One attempt toward the rebuilding and restructuring of Jamaican society can be observed at the novel’s beginning, with the refrain from a popular Jamaican children’s song, “Jane and Louisa.”19 The glaring reference these lyrics make is easily brushed aside before arriving at the novel’s end, when their importance is revealed. Everyone must remain captive in the kumbla for a period of time to remain safe, and then must break free alone by figuring out their own identity and making a change, for when the circle comes to an end, the end of one circle is just the new beginning of another. Female story-telling allows the individual to psychologically and emotionally deal with the postcolonial effects of slavery that remained after emancipation. Trauma theorist Dominick LaCapra claims that the effects of slavery on a given society can and do still psychologically affect current-day inhabitants of the Caribbean.20 Story-telling opens a window to the past, where memories and past traumas can be played out and psychologically dealt with, allowing the subject the psychological and emotional space necessary for identity formation. The recovery attempts of the Jamaican women story-tellers represented in Jane and Louisa run parallel to the goals of Caribbean women writers of fiction. As Cobham notes, “living in a world ‘without history’ or with a history too brutal to contemplate, speaking in the language of the colonizer from within the psyche of the colonized, Caribbean writers more than most have had to find ways to accommodate paradox…in order to survive.”21 The postcolonial reality indicates that there are psychological and sociological wounds that have yet to heal. Historically, it has been the female figure that nurtures and restores order when a situation has gone awry. As a testament to this role, AfroCaribbean women writers “seem singularly committed to that oldest of female/colonial responsibilities of maintaining and renewing the sociosymbolic order” via the healing powers of writing and sharing the

18

Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 50. Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 9. 20 Dominick LaCapra, “An Interview with Professor Dominick LaCapra: ‘ActingOut' and 'Working-Through Trauma,’” by Amos Goldberg, Yadvashem.org, June 9, 1998, http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203648 .pdf. 21 Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 60. 19

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Afro-Caribbean woman’s piece of history.22 As Dominick LaCapra explains in his trauma theories, a victim of trauma (whether primary, secondary, etc.) can implement any combination of “acting-out” or “working-through” in order to better deal with the memory of trauma.23 However, Nellie must first understand her individual past in order to apply it to a greater understanding of her cultural history. Nellie begins this search for understanding with her own genealogy. First, she must know where she comes from and what her roots are in order to understand her current place in society. In the process of learning more about herself and her family, she also comes to a better understanding of Jamaican culture and history. Her family, like many, has mixed roots. The majority of the society attempts to only participate in their white history and culture, and Nellie’s family is no different. Albeit trying, she cannot completely squelch her roots and the blood-deep rituals of her ancestors. Nellie feels caught between these two worlds, just as many female authors of varied Caribbean descent represented in their texts; both find refuge in sharing their stories. Thus, Nellie understands more profoundly the importance of the cultural kumbla and, more importantly, the importance of sharing the experiences she has while under its cover. Before the protective powers of publishing and dispersing AfroCaribbean woman’s literature were known, it was the kumbla that created this pod of comfort, stability and safety. The very act of writing and sharing one’s story has given Afro-Caribbean women the opportunity to question themselves and their surroundings. While attempting to break with a repressive tradition, Afro-Caribbean female empowerment cannot be complete for the triple-marginalized subject until the majority has become an agent of change for its own destiny. Despite the urge to overcome the restrictive constraints of the kumbla, Judith Butler brings to light the issue that “the identity categories often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics…simultaneously work to limit and constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up,” further indicating the difficulty in overcoming the many protective and suppressive layers of limitations.24 22

Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, eds., “Introduction,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2000), xvii. 23 LaCapra,“‘Acting-Out,’” 5. Acting-out is the inability to separate the traumatic past from the present, while working-through is the ability to recognize the traumatic past as different from the present and future. 24 Judith Butler, “From Parody to Politics,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 147.

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The agenda of Caribbean women writers may be none other than to inscribe their place in history. By sharing a triple marginalized perspective of Caribbean history and experience, Caribbean women writers do not present their HERstory as more important or truer than the traditionally accepted dates and facts of HIStory, but as equally important. Quite different than the previously accepted misunderstanding of the goals of female Caribbean writing in which female discourse and experience was to overtake male experience and patriarchal discourse, the intent of this new genre of literature directed by the triple-marginalized female Jamaican population suggests a blurring of the hard lines that distinguish between male/female, black/white, rich/poor and HIStory/HERstory. In Jane and Louisa, Nellie is affronted by the issue of the integrity of history as told by males versus history as told by females. Nellie spends a significant amount of time with Mass Stanley, listening to his stories and personal life experiences. Nellie understands that storytelling (history telling) creates power and a rise in status. Because Mass Stanley is Baba’s grandfather, Nellie understands that it is not her right to share his stories, so instead she is relegated to sitting on the sidelines, “watch[ing] opportunities for conversation and status go by.”25 In the past, AfroCaribbean women were also subjected to this same rule-playing when it came to history and the representation of real-life personal experiences. It has not been until recently, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, that these experiences have been taken seriously and their publications have shown-up on the world-wide market. While there is a desire to complement or create another equal genre to male-driven literature, the community already functions as such. Men and women in Brodber’s novel do not have all-inclusive all-knowing roles as mothers and fathers. One gender cannot survive without the other and one generation cannot move forward without knowing the past experiences of the preceding generations. Just as the kumbla protects its inhabitants, it also creates a self-containing environment where all necessary elements to survive can be obtained through one’s neighbors, if not directly from their biological parents. In this other-mothering and other-fathering community, “the inevitable link between biological and social mothering [and fathering] is ruptured,” creating a greater need for community-driven survival.”26 Nellie finds a father figure in Mass Stanley. She frequently plays in Mass Stanley’s yard and visits his house to spend hours listening to his stories and conversing with him. Nellie recounts that “she would walk in 25 26

Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 111. Cobham, "Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 56.

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and sit at the doorway and Mass Stanley, smoking his pipe in his rocking chair by the door, would crinkle his eyes and start talking to [her].”27 In addition, Nellie is very close with her Aunt Alice, who reserves the sole right to make decisions for Nellie, in her best interest. While these rights and responsibilities are usually reserved for the biological mother, the responsibility of properly bringing up a child within the kumbla is shared by all. This type of relationship is not just the experience of the protagonist, but that of all the children in the protective kumbla of the society. Cobham notes that the “continuous exchange of partners is reminiscent of the children’s game for which the novel is named, but it also re-enacts the way in which the seemingly arbitrary patterns of kinship and nurturing in Nellie’s community weave an intricate web of social possibilities” that create a denser, stronger, more protective outer cover for this community’s kumbla.28 The “other-mothering” that this community participates in not only creates a strong community, but specifically, a strong female community and identity. Due to the fact that the majority of men in this Jamaican community are not present, the burden of creating role models for the young girls to emulate falls on the shoulders of all the adult women of the community, not just a girl’s mother. Thus, the othermothering and other-fathering that is common in Caribbean communities becomes not only a preventative practice for future protection of the child, but a necessary means of survival. The organization of Brodber’s novel is structured around a popular game played throughout the Caribbean, another metaphorical kumbla meant to protect the information hidden within. Each section of the novel is titled after one of the phrases of the refrain of the song sung during this game. The game, as well as the lyrics, reflects a repetition of the beginning and the end of the song as well as the game. Cobham observes that “they give the reader familiar with the game a key to the pattern of development in what, to the uninitiated, may seem a confusing, even structureless work.”29 Just as the novel begins with a section titled “Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home,” it ends with the same lyric. Just as the lyrics sung during the game imply movement away from home and then back again, so we see the same process with Nellie. However, one who leaves home and then returns never returns exactly the same as when she left. Such is the case with Nellie and this popular Caribbean children’s song. In actuality, “the spiral structure of the folk song that frames the narrative ensures that each generation, while going 27

Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 103. Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 57. 29 Ibid., 48. 28

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back to square one, does so with a new partner: a new set of values and inhibitions which are based on accretions from the past but which constantly describe a movement onward to new contexts and possibilities.”30 Nellie has left her family and has been educated. She has kept her promise to herself, her family and her community to dedicate herself to education instead of fraternizing with men. After she leaves the protective kumbla of her community and has many experiences that she otherwise would not have had back home, it is then time for her to return to her roots. Upon returning to her family, she also brings something new. Nellie is the representation of hope for the future of this Jamaican society. It is only through understanding and accepting the identity she shares with her community that Nellie was able to break free from the once protective, now oppressive, kumbla and take part in her individual identity process. While collective identity is promoted throughout the novel as the only way for the protagonist to really know herself, Nellie eventually realizes that this is not necessarily the best path to the auto-identification needed to save the future of her community. Nellie also realizes that while all the members of the community are in some way related, the elders of the community have purposely omitted or changed some of the facts necessary for Nellie to find the truth about herself. Greene notes that “the structure of the novel itself, which mirrors the jumbled crystal fragments of a kaleidoscope—the spy glass through which Nellie hoped to learn the truth of her world—tells us that Nellie never did learn the answers” and that despite “having gotten to know the inhabitants of her kumbla, she realizes that what her life is about is still a[n unfinished] puzzle” whose missing pieces will forever leave the puzzle of her identity unfinished unless she restructures and rearranges the pieces herself.31 Nellie realizes that “the search for an identity that acknowledges or transcends the fragmentation and alienation of modern life, a concern with origins, and a questioning of the psychological needs and cultural myths which drive such searches” cannot be obtained without either first knowing the truth about her community and their relations or without first leaving the protective and simultaneously restrictive kumbla, the kumbla that has shaded her from knowledge and experience.32 It is societal changes that initially bring on the need for the kumbla in the first place. Any change brought on by an individual member would not survive unless it was to be accepted by the community as a whole. Tia 30

Ibid., 50. S. Greene, “Six Caribbean Novels by Women,” New West Indian Guide 58 (1984), no: 1/2, 68. 32 Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 44. 31

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Maria began weaving a kumbla to protect her khaki family because “things could change so why not?”33 All of society was seemingly in flux, so there was great motivation for her to follow through with protecting her family’s roots and future wings. Inadvertently, the kumbla woven by Tia Maria and this community “becomes a symbol for the manifold strategies by which black women throughout the ages have ensured their own survival and that of the race.”34 For example, Tia Maria learned early on in her marriage to William, a white man, that “there were his people and there were her people and she knew who had power,” so “she nurtured [a protective kumbla] in each of her children,” creating a better possibility for their success throughout life.35 Tia Maria found it so important to weave a kumbla for her children that she did not even mind that the kumbla would prevent her children from resembling her or representing her roots in any way. In fact, “the more [her children] turned their backs on her,…the more sure she was that they had found their places in the established world to which William belonged, a world that was foreign to her, a world that was safe and successful,” leaving no opportunity for her children to experience the rich past of her familial lineage, but only that of her husband’s roots.36 Brodber makes the metaphor that the living members of the community are the mouth of the community and the voice belongs to both the living and deceased members of the community because, after all, the living members “must walk over [the buried bodies] to get where they are going.”37 In effect, the only way to the future is through the past. Time is not linear, but repetitive, even cyclical, with only slight changes in every completed loop that is made, just like the game after which the novel is titled. In addition to placing such faith in the ancestors that came before them, children are expected to respect their elders and to take their counsel into account in their daily life decisions. While each member of the kumbla is frightened for what the future brings, “they’re [all] doing the same thing…stepping warily and taking their elders’ hands. [They] are families walking bravely in fear, secure in family fear” and moving into the future the only way they know how: together.38 As an elder of this community, Granny Tucker understands the need for continued community functioning, for which she is continuously praying. If the community relationships break down, the community breaks down with 33

Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 137. Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 49. 35 Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 138. 36 Ibid., 139. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 Ibid., 14. 34

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them and they are left with the knowledge of nothing, not even their individual identity. While the kumbla that Brodber depicts in Nellie’s Jamaican community does maintain some protective qualities, it also functions as a restrictive boundary, preventing its inhabitants from being affected by the outside world and prohibiting members from leaving by creating a tightlywoven structure that cannot be maintained in the outside world. As Greene recognizes, “the identity that Nellie is able to construct from the extensive family that is her kumbla is not strong enough to carry her unscathed into the outside world” or even to eventually protect her within the kumbla.39 Nellie has been so protected that even the slightest change or new situation could potentially put her in a psychologically damaging situation. Nellie, as a middle-aged woman, is still questioning the role of the protective kumbla. One day while studying her body in the mirror, she reflects on how well (or poorly) she kept the familial lineage, but she cannot even distinguish what that is anymore.40 She is still upset by the contradictory elements that form her identity. It is clear, however, that the kumbla has been instigated both by Nellie’s father’s family and via the incessant prayers of Granny Tucker on her mother’s side.41 Generally speaking, the maintenance of the family’s, as well as the community’s, kumbla is made up of “half-veiled threats, contained in proverbs and partially understood anecdotes, which create in the child a fear of contamination and prevent her from interacting socially or sexually with her community once she reaches puberty.”42 Not yet completely understanding the kumbla in its entirety, Nellie realizes that she is “weighed in the balance and found wanting” because she has “tried to be good” and has been met with aversion.43 Nellie, like others in the community, blindly follows rules that are set forth without completely understanding them. Over time, these rules that the children of the kumbla follow prevent them from thinking on their own and prevent them from functioning properly as adults both inside and outside of the kumbla. Unless the code is broken, their only choice is to pass on the same confusing reality to their children and generations to come. Realizing the inability of keeping Nellie protected in the kumbla, Aunt Alice’s and Baba’s combined efforts pull her out, but only because Nellie wants to be set free. One cannot be pulled from a kumbla that they are not 39

Greene, “Six Caribbean Novels,” 66. Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 80-1. 41 Ibid., 145. 42 Cobham, “Revisioning Our Kumblas,” 49. 43 Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 19. 40

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ready to leave. Nellie describes her own experience of being pulled out of the kumbla as “weak, thin, tired like a breach baby.”44 Nellie eventually learns that it is “best [to] leave this place [kumbla] altogether” if there is any possibility of surviving and thriving.45 However, Brodber continues to indicate that “nurturing a kumbla is like nurturing any vaccine, any culture. Some skins react positively, some don’t,” explaining in one fell swoop the immensely positive outcomes as well as the psychedestroying pitfalls of the kumbla.46 The kumbla of Nellie’s community is similar to the metaphorical kumbla that originally served to protect, but that has become a repressive force for Afro-Caribbean women and that prevents them from sharing their personal stories. Balutansky points out that novels like Brodber’s have begun to demonstrate that “Caribbean women writers are coming out of their womb-like kumblas.”47 Just like the perceptions of the kumbla that Brodber presents here as both good and evil, “the strength invested in Caribbean women is recognized as a source of both good and evil” in the novels, and is used as a tool to escape their Caribbean kumbla. In such cases, the kumbla is so deeply entrenched in the culture of the society, that for Tia Maria (and other Caribbean women), “survival depends on the annihilation of either herself or her children,” and Tia Maria chooses the survival of her children.48 Nellie has been forewarned of the imminent truth that she faces: there is no way out but to continue right back to where she started, having— hopefully—gained a new skill or piece of knowledge that will allow the future generation to be better off than she was. Nellie knows that her community offers “no street map towards each other. No compass, no scale either. Leaves [her] no path, no through way, no gap in [the] circle.”49 Nellie is condemned to participate in the cyclical pattern of history, in an unending game to the song “Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home,” in which no maps are needed, since there is nowhere to go but back to the beginning. Nellie is left at the same juncture where she started, still unable to grasp and define her own identity. Nellie feels just 44

Ibid., 130. Ibid., 20. 46 Ibid., 139. 47 Kathleen Balutansky, “Anglophone and Francophone Fiction by Caribbean Women: Redefining ‘Female Identity,’” in A.J. Arnold, Julio Rodriguez-Luis and J.M. Dash, eds., A History of Literature in the Caribbean (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1994), 540. 48 Greene, “Six Caribbean Novels,” 68. 49 Brodber, Jane and Louisa, 17. 45

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as lost within the kumbla as she felt when outside of the kumbla, but it is not until she reaches full circle that she comes to terms with the gravity of the cyclic kumbla: “I had seen this thing before hadn’t I? Those circles I was walking, were they natural, or had I been forced to walk them? Was there a power trying to get me back to this room?”50 There is no escape, and even if there were, neither path would lead directly to self-discovery. Nellie is condemned to continually repeat this spiral-like process of identification in which each turn of the circle creates a more profound understanding and identification of herself and, in the long-term, a slow process of change for the inhabitants of the Jamaican kumbla. In Jane and Louisa, Erna Brodber offers a representation of the female identification process in the Anglophone Caribbean. While throughout the Caribbean, the mother-daughter relationship is a binding factor in a female’s search for identity, specific elements of Jamaican identity are portrayed as specifically binding in Brodber’s novel. The mother-daughter relations and female expectations represented in this novel are exemplary of the gender and relationship elements that factor into identity formation. While the mother-daughter relationship serves as a similarly important factor in female identity formation throughout the Caribbean, greater differences in the approach and success of identity formation can be seen at the national and personal levels. For example, while Nellie is trapped in the cultural and social kumbla of Jamaica —a construct that is intended to protect her—it rather serves as an ambivalent force in identity formation. For Nellie, the presence and role of women in a patriarchal society creates a complex reality in which the women themselves contribute to their further repressed state within Jamaican society. In Nellie’s case, she can only progress in her search for identity by breaking with cultural norms and expectations and, in turn, with her own mother.

50

Ibid., 67.

CHAPTER THREE GENDER-CROSSING AS CULTURAL AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCT IN MAXINE HONG KINGSTON’S THE WOMAN WARRIOR AND CHINA MEN SORINA AILIESEI ALEXANDRU IOAN CUZA UNIVERSITY, IASI, ROMANIA

Gender roles and their representations, gender differences or gender constructions, feminist criticism or masculinity studies are basic issues examined by gender studies. Debates on the relations between culture, power and gender have centered more recently on structuralist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic theories that illuminate the specifically cultural dimensions of gendered identity. There are clear differences between these three theoretical traditions. Briefly stated, structuralist accounts of gender and narrative might focus on the conventional positioning of the male hero as active subject and the heroine as passive object of narrative action. In poststructuralism, the roles are reversed: for instance, in Judith Butler’s Foucaultian account1, the emphasis shifts from gender as a given symbolic entity, to “gendering as a practice that is historically productive of gender identities.”2 The emphasis here is on the fluidity of gender. Gender binarism, masculine authority and feminine subservience seem useful in the studies of the role of cultural practices and forms that consolidateʊor disruptʊgender hierarchies and norms. Leslie Rabine asserts that “the hierarchized dichotomy between superior masculine 1

Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 2 Michael Payne and Jessica Rae Barbera, eds. A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2010), 298.

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essence embodied by men and an inferior feminine essence embodied by women would give way to an infinity of different and alternating gender positions.”3 Since this oppositional order represses the feminine “and substitutes for it a femininity that stands in as the secondary term derived from masculinity,” the repressed feminine becomes, especially in the works of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, “the site where the play of sexual difference can emerge through discursive practices” that Cixous calls écriture féminine4. However, masculine and feminine are not necessarily embodied by biological men and women since men also engage in feminine writing; these biological bodies are at some point transformed into social men and women who occupy either privileged or oppressed social positions. Therefore, in establishing a difference between symbolic and social gender, Leslie Rabine concludes that strategies of feminine writing can subvert symbolic gender while leaving social gender intact since they do not adopt social feminist strategies of institutional transformation5. Gender issues are inevitably ingrained in the Chinese-American cultural terrain and involve various confrontations and debates on traditionalist notions of masculinity and femininity, on dialectics of racial stereotypes, or on the painful “emasculation” of Chinese-American men. Various dichotomies have been established, either in terms of “matrilineage” and “patrilineage,” “manhood” and “womanhood,” or “mainstream” versus “minority heritage.” The paramount importance of patrilineage in traditional Chinese culture predisposes many Chinese Americans of older generations to favor male over female offspring. On the other hand, Chinese American men have suffered deeply from racial oppression, from enforced “feminization” that raised feelings of betrayal. In this respect, masculinity studies seek to discover how and why men succeed or fail, analyzing their behaviors and activities, including their sexuality, the male body, versions and performance of masculinity, associated with power or violence, the relationship between fathers and sons, fathers and daughters. Gender-crossing as a trope is preponderant specifically in Kingston’s prose as a condition that highlights the instability of gender definitions, especially in the context of slippery cultural and ethnic geographies. In 3

Leslie Rabine. “No Lost Paradise: Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston,” in Revising the Word and the World: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Vèvè Clark, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, and Madelon Sprengnether (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 145. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 146.

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35

conjunction with this instability of male/female dichotomy, her texts also set to spinning fixed oppositions of theme and form—between autobiography and fiction, myth and history, parents and children, and finally oral and written. These forms of gender, “distinct and interrelated, illuminate, contradict, and reinforce each other.”6 Throughout Kingston’s work there is the desire to transform fear and oppression into bold and beautiful actions, promoting the idea that one can “survive brutality without being brutalized, that one can endure abuse, but keep one’s gentleness and tenderness, one’s humanity intact.”7 While in The Woman Warrior and China Men, gender determines one’s place in the power relations, there are no gender essences because both women and men can also have opposite qualities. Thus, The Woman Warrior and China Men employ cross-dressing figures as important icons—Fa Mu Lan8 in the former book, Tang Ao in the latter. Kingston’s first such transformation, in The Woman Warrior, is of Chinese women and is spurred by the story of No Name Woman, her aunt, a female in the male-dominated Chinese patriarchal system who appears to exist only to serve that system, experiencing the brutality of gender oppression. Defined entirely by the needs of the male order, once she fails in her central duty to meet those needs, that is “to guard her reproductive powers for the service of her husband’s male line,” she becomes, literally, nothing.9 She is completely wiped out, invisible, as she is not only driven to suicide and to kill her illegitimate child (probably a female), but she is also erased from memory because she threatened what Kingston terms the “roundness”—the harmony and wholeness—of her family and the larger community. In fact, a central issue in The Woman Warrior is Kingston’s portrayal of the culturally embedded patriarchal assumptions that define Maxine and the women in her family. In feudalist China, women were subjected to silence and acquiescence, and the custom of foot-binding ensured women’s immobility. This feminine dependence upon the maledominated family unit is reinforced by the cultural conceptions that Maxine finds crystallized in degrading maxims like “Girls are maggots in

6

Ibid. Diane Simmons. Maxine Hong Kingston (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999), 50. 8 The story of the medieval Chinese mythical figure would also be popularized by Jeanne M. Lee’s bilingual picture book, The Song of Mu Lan (1995) and by Disney’s animated feature film Mulan (1998). 9 Simmons. Maxine Hong Kingston, 50. 7

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the rice” and “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.”10 The subtitle (Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts) emphasizes the importance of gender by using the word “girlhood” rather than “childhood” in naming the early years of a female life. Kingston explores in both Chinese and American cultures the consequences of a woman’s inability or refusal to fit in. Kingston succeeds in endowing her aunt with subjectivity through her voice and empowers herself by an alliance with the aunt’s transgression of the laws of the Chinese patriarchy that denies her aunt’s identity as a woman. In her desire to give power to the powerless, she imagines a totally upside-down situation, transforming the oppressed, powerless women into women warriors who rebel against their condition. And she achieves this fundamental transformation of crossing genders, moving from a family tale to a myth known to most Chinese for centuries, the story of the woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan. The legend turns into a prototype of feminine power, the eponymous woman warrior, rebelling against the patriarchal mores in spite of the pacifist subtext and of Kingston’s resistance to complete identification with the war heroine. Kingston introduces Fa Mu Lan in the “White Tigers” chapter, recounting the story of the young girl who is lured away from home by a bird, and trained by a mysterious old couple in the martial arts. Returning home to find her village crushed by an oppressive baron, she takes her father’s place in the army, concealing her gender beneath the warrior’s armor: I put on my men’s clothes and armor and tied my hair in a man’s fashion. …I inspired my army, and I fed them. …I built up my army enough to attack fiefdoms and to pursue the enemies I had seen in the water gourd. …When I became pregnant,...I wore my armor altered so that I looked like a powerful, big man.11

Dressed as a man, she leads an army composed of hundreds of peasants to victory over the tyrannical landowning aristocracy, but she returns home to take up the more traditional female roles of wife and mother.12 When the baron asked her who she was, she replied: “I am a female avenger…I want your life in payment for your crimes against the 10 Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage International Edition, 1989), 41. 11 Kingston. The Woman Warrior, 36, 37, 37, 39. 12 E.D. Huntley. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion (Greenwood Press, 2001), 97-98.

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37

villagers.”13 Thus, she temporarily ceases to be a “worthless female,” transforming herself into a valiant and valuable fighter, contesting the cultural scripts that have dictated the behaviors and identities of men and women in feudal China. As Diane Simmons claims: “Through her heroic defense of patriarchyʊfamily and emperorʊshe is transformed from the eternal outsider in a male system to the glorious savior of that system, a feat for which she is recognized and accorded honors usually reserved for men.”14 Diane Simmons also suggests that “the woman warrior’s emergence implies not only that something is deeply wrong” in the patrilinear Confucian order dominant in Imperial China, but also “that men have not fulfilled their duty.”15 The mythical Fa Mu Lan, described by Louise Edwards as a moral mirror for the degenerating menfolk, proves through her military prowess that women have the ability to excel, and she proves as well that women can have both domestic and public lives.16 Kingston explains her choice for this mythical background: “When the girls and women draw on mythology for their strength, the myth becomes part of the women’s lives and the structure of the stories.”17 Kingston’s revision of this myth, which is an account of female empowerment, is meant to subvert the patriarchal orders and transform the despised and useless female into a swordswoman, transcending traditional gender roles, embracing her mythical qualities as a moral, noble, and heroic woman who rebels against the system that does not recognize her as a member. The woman warrior motif is also revealed in the title of the narrative, which points to the importance of the theme of resistance and rebellion. With her version of the swordswoman, Kingston rebels against the Chinese cultural influences to which she is subjected, against imposed racial and gender identities, and eventually against conventional literary forms that are inadequate to express her cross-cultural position. At least imaginatively, Kingston fulfills her dream to be treated as the equal of a boy through the swordswoman. Achieving equality with men is one way to defy the gender injustice. Kingston turns the inspiring heroine into a super-woman she herself wishes to be, transforming herself into a valiant and valuable fighter, contesting the cultural scripts that have 13

Kingston. The Woman Warrior, 43. Simmons. Maxine Hong Kingston, 52. 15 Ibid, 58. 16 Louise Edwards. “Women Warriors and Amazons of the Mid Qing Texts, Jingbua yuan and Honglou meng,” in Modern Asian Studies (29, 1995), 244. 17 Paula Rabinowitz. “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston” in Michigan Quarterly Review (24.1, 1987), 179. 14

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dictated the behaviors and identities of men and women in feudal China. In the chapter’s last paragraph, Kingston finds consolation that she and Fa Mu Lan serve a common purposeʊthe concern about the welfare of their peopleʊboth testifying to the strength and determination of women who create their own destinies: What we have in common are the words at our backs.18 The idioms for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—“chink” words and “gook” words too—that they do not fit on my skin.19

These words finally unite the swordswoman and Kingston, reclaiming this goal as a word warrior, a Fa Mu Lan of pen instead of sword. With her portrayal of the woman warrior, Kingston recreates wellknown female figures of Chinese culture who have taken the responsibility of saving the world, and studies the nature of women’s transformative identity power from slave to hero. Moreover, Kingston’s focus on the connection between gender and racial oppression underlines the similarity between the oppression of women in the male-dominated Chinese kinship system and the oppression of Chinese men in the United States. With this comparison of the two types of oppression, Kingston moves to her second book, China Men, in which, through the lens of gender studies, she analyzes the opposite pole, male oppression, investigating the dominant patterns of emasculation. While in her first book, Kingston takes “vengeance against her family,”20 expressing her rage against an institutionalized hatred for women, in her second book, Kingston is the woman warrior who takes “vengeance for the family” by describing and raising awareness of the vicious racism her male relatives fought against in America and the uncredited contributions they made to build that country. In a similar act of transformation, it is not women but Chinese men who, as workers in America, are viewed as despised, potentially destructive outsiders. And again, Kingston needs “the ancestral help” of Chinese myths to seek and rewrite images of Chinese heroism. But this time, heroism looks different: 18 Fa Mu Lan’s father’s physically carved words into his daughter's back: ideographs, or symbols as a “list of grievances,” including the oaths and names of her family that will serve to remind everyone of the sacrifices she and her family made. The exotic and enigmatic message challenges interpretations in the desire of decoding the text. 19 Kingston. The Woman Warrior, 53. 20 Rabine. “No Lost Paradise”, 148-49 (italics are in the original).

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the heroes do not fight as in the first book; instead, they have the ability to keep their sensitive inner selves intact in the face of the demeaning exile. Most of the legends incorporated into China Men tell stories about exiles who wander in search of returning home, and, in at least two legends, exile is symbolized by men being transformed into women: “To be a woman whose birth is not recognized by the family, is to be a permanent exile, without any home, without a place. To be a man who loses one’s home is to cross over into the feminine gender.”21 Therefore, China Men, paradoxically written by a woman who crosses into the masculine gender like a woman warrior, is about men who have been forced to cross over into the feminine gender. Kingston reveals her intention to explore the connection between the sexist oppression of women and the racist oppression of men in the first images of China Men as she rewrites the Chinese novel Flowers in the Mirror, the story of the legendary male protagonist Tang Ao who journeys to find the Gold Mountainʊthe Chinese metaphor of North Americaʊand is captured instead in the Land of Women, where he is subjected to humiliating and painful feminizing rituals: forced to have his feet bound, his ears pierced, his facial hair plucked, and his cheeks and lips painted redʊan ignominious act that symbolizes the “emasculation” of Chinese men by the dominant culture. On the other hand, the image of the women who transform Tang Ao is suggestive, as it can be associated with an America emblematized as female. This image can be traced back to the moment right after Europeans discovered the New Land, a utopian symbol of hope and freedom in contrast with the European authoritarian power. It is from this jumping-off place that Kingston launches her challenge to the myth of America as passive, nurturing female, subjected to the European scrutiny and invasion in order to present another picture from a victim’s point of view. This time, the roles are reversed: unlike the European explorers pictured as masculine conquerors, the male Chinese Americans are viewed only as victims, and the New Land is no longer passive and welcoming, but a powerful, oppressive authority. Thus, a Chinese metaphorʊthe Tang Ao storyʊis rendered against an American metaphorʊthe land as woman. Kingston’s dexterity in playing with the two opposing traditions, her double consciousness and bifocality, serve as means to establish her own voice.22 Similarly, King-Kok Cheung sees this legend as “double-edged,” pointing not only “to the mortification of Chinese men” in America, but 21

Ibid., 152. Yan Gao. The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1996,) 64-65. 22

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also “to the subjugation of women both in old China and in America.”23 According to Cheung, Kingston uses this myth to disrupt “the familiar and commonplace acceptance of Chinese women as sexual objects.”24 This parable makes it perfectly clear that Kingston is still writing from a feminist perspective: she denounces the Chinese stereotype of femininity, sketches a utopian female society without taxes and wars and, perhaps in an act of wishful thinking, writes a reversal story, taking revenge on men as well as picturing women as members of the stronger sex. Just as the nameless aunt is forced into a position of powerlessness and silence once she transgresses the laws and traditions of Chinese patriarchy, Tang Ao is forced into the same position by the laws of the New Land. On the other hand, while the woman warrior in the former book represents women’s attempts to transgress gendered positions, to cross over into “male” territory, Tang Ao is also involved in gender crossover, but one forced on him rather than willingly adopted. Tang Ao’s predicament indicates that “Chinese men have been metaphorically castrated in the United States.”25 Although brief, the Tang Ao episode parallels symbolically the experience of Chinese men who crossed the Pacific Ocean on their way to the Gold Mountain. Since she associates the mythical Land of Women with North America, Kingston seems to refer to a connection between the man who is forcibly feminized and the men who came to the United States. She also suggests that the oppression of women by the Chinese patriarchal system and the oppression of Chinese men in the United States are very similar. She shows, as David Leiwei Li has written, that “female identity is as much an arbitrary cultural and historical construction as the identity of ‘Chinamen.’”26 Expressing his willingness to travel in search of the Gold Mountain, Tang Ao exposes his spirit of adventure, his bravery and the attributes of masculinity. The men who emigrated were prepared for hard labor, physical exhaustion, and pain as the price they had to pay in order to find wealth and success. Arriving in the Gold Mountain, the treatment Chinese men received at the hands of the dominant culture for the first time in their lives was remarkably similar to that suffered by women of all races for 23

Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) 163. 24 Ibid,, 164. 25 Amy Ling. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (Pergamon Press, 1990), 144-45 26 David Leiwei Li. “China Men: Maxine Hong Kingston and the American Canon.” American Literary History 2 (Fall 1990): 488.

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centuries: “enforced silence, confinement to domestic spaces, invisibility, and lack of agency and control.”27 Deprived of job opportunities and women’s presence in the “bachelor” Chinatowns, some of these men forcibly ended up in traditionally “women’s” jobs, as waiters, launderers, servants, and cooks. Moreover, they were disenfranchised and denied the right to become US citizens. Yet, they display a redefined heroism: quiet, stoic, simple endurance in a foreign country far away from all that is familiar. Only the nature of heroism is different. They do not fight like warriors; they suffer their demeaning exile in silence. Kingston suggests that it may be hard for a woman to understand the pain of a man feminized by racism just as it is for a man to understand the pain of a woman feminized by sexism.28 That is why she reveals her intention to make both men and women imaginatively identify with the plight of the other. On the other hand, Kingston seeks to redress this stereotyping and historical erasure, not by a simple reversal of the figure of laundryman/cook and that of railroad laborer/plantation worker, “feminine” and “masculine,” but by a disruption of this gendered binary opposition.29 The narrator sympathizes with the experience of powerlessness and humiliation that these “emasculated” Chinese men must endure. With every ‘talk-story’ʊbesides “The Laws” section’s “purely factual” account which chronicles the dark history and harsh reality of anti-Chinese legislation as embodied in Exclusion and Segregation lawsʊshe attacks the dominant culture’s laws against Chinese immigrants, presenting us a variety of China men from her family: Bak Goong, her ‘Great Grandfather of The Sandalwood Mountains’ who endured physical hardships and racism as a sugar plantation worker in Hawaii; Ah Goong, the ‘railway grandfather’ who risked his life carving through the Sierra Nevada Mountains for the Central Pacific Transcontinental Railroad; and BaBa, her father, the Chinese scholar who becomes an American laundryman. While fathers in China are treated with great respect and approached with awe, in China Men, they undergo unfair treatment, and laborers who die while working on the railway are buried beside the tracks with no records kept. Kingston embellishes these stories with more meaning, fusing Chinese myths and family history with Chinese

27

Huntley. Maxine Hong Kingston, 148. Simmons. Maxine Hong Kingston, 109. 29 Donald C. Goellnicht. “Tang Ao in America: Male Subject Position in China Men,” in Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Laura E. SkanderaTrombley (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998), 235. 28

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migration history, framing in a historical fiction the hardships, the labor, and the racism these men endured: In the men’s stories, I tell a myth and then I tell a present-day story, a myth and then another present-day story; they are separate narratives. The reason I think that happened was that those men went to a place where they didn’t know whether their mythology was giving them any strength or not. They were getting very broken off from their background. They might not have even been drawing any strength, or they may have gone against the teachings of the myth. They were so caught up in the adventure of the new land that they thought, ‘What good are the memories and the past?’ Memory just hurts them, because they can’t go home.30

Just like the Fa Mu Lan legend, the Tang Ao legend occupies a privileged position and acts as a kind of controlling myth, a metaphor both for the father and for Kingston as writer. By fusing the figures of Tang Ao and the merchant Lin from the original story, Kingston depicts the father, Tom Hong, both as the disappointed, wandering, depressed scholar and as the man who has been forcibly feminized in exile. This inversion is quite unusual, since a scholar’s status is much higher than a merchant’s. But Kingston’s mission is to locate her father in history and present the contributions the Chinese-Americans have made and the injustices they suffered during the process. This time, Kingston embodies the role of Little Hill, “a daughter whose life is still ruled by filial devotion, even though she is a bold fighter and scholar.”31 Maxine’s imaginary trajectories suggestively start with ‘The Father from China’ Kingston never knew, moving towards ‘The American Father’ Kingston experienced in California, in which the narrator struggles to discover her father’s history and the means by which he emigrated to the United States. In “The Father from China” section, Kingston begins by showing her paternal grandfather, having already three sons, who wanted a daughter so much that he traded his fourth son, the valuable scholar Tom Hong, for a neighbor’s daughter: “Since you want a boy, I want a girl,” he said, “let’s strike a bargain. Let’s trade” “This boy will be very intelligent,” he said. “He’s got scholar’s hands. And look what a smart forehead he has. He’ll win a name for you at the Imperial Examinations. He’s very skinny and eats hardly any food.”32

30

Rabinowitz. Interview with M. H. Kingston, 69. Simmons. Maxine Hong Kingston, 112. 32 Kingston. China Men (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 14. 31

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He even blames his penis for failing to produce girls, thus attacking the symbol of the phallus that constitutes the very center of the patriarchal norms. Within these norms of Confucian society, this act is considered insane. The maternal grandfather from China also “was an unusual man in that he valued girls; he taught all his daughters how to read and write.”33 Thus Kingston subverts our expectation that life in China would have been more rigidly patriarchal than life in America, suggesting perhaps that this image about the rigorous Chinese tradition was either induced by the mainstream American society or by the immigrant community in America out of a sense of nostalgia for the lost homeland. Just as a girl had to give up her family and become part of her husband’s when she married, so her father and other Gold Mountain Sojourners34 had to replace their own identity and “memorize another man’s life, a consistent life, an American life.”35 In an insightful analysis, E. D. Huntley mentions as one dominant pattern of China men’s emasculation, the “reduction of the Chinese immigrants to nonentities,” in a context where they are expendables or unimportant creatures like the despised girl babies in China.36 On their way to America, Tom Hong and other men of his family sense a general loss of identity when they have to purchase papers from legal US citizens to get through immigration. Thus, before he even gets to America, Kingston’s father’s identity begins to break apart. This loss of identity and the resulting feminization of Chinese men in America underscore Kingston’s feminist critique of Chinese sexism. She traces her father’s abuse of Chinese women back to his feelings of emasculation in America: “We knew that it was to feed us you had to endure demons and physical labor.”37 Her father’s rage is reflected not only in the verbal and physical abuse of women, but also in his silence of resignation that signals humiliation. The daughter must work hard to understand a father as angry and abusive as her own. She writes to her father: You were angry. You scared us. Every day we listened to you swear. …You screamed wordless male screams that jolted the house upright and staring in the middle of the night. …Worse than the swearing and the nightly screams were your silences when you punished us by not talking. You rendered us invisible, gone. …You kept up a silence for weeks and months. 33

Ibid., 30. Kingston uses this term with capitals 35 Ibid., 43. 36 Huntley, Maxine Hong Kingston, 149 37 Kingston. China Men, 8. 34

44

Chapter Three …You say with the few words and silences: No stories. No past. No China.38

But Kingston empathizes with her father and attributes his bad temper to another pattern of “emasculation” embodied in the “legally sanctioned sexual deprivation” that marked the lives of thousands of men during the decades of exclusionary laws.39 The society of China Men is almost exclusively male, just as The Woman Warrior’s is female. Masculinity, as a cultural construct, exists in opposition to femininity, and since in the absence of women masculinity becomes difficult to define, so the masculine role becomes superfluous. Fathering sons is required by traditional masculinity as an imperative duty for the Confucian patriarchy, in order to keep a family prosperous. But the vast geographical distance separating the Sojourners from their homes turns the men into mere income producers, deprived of the social and cultural power they would wield in their China villages and denied the customary practice of their sexual potency in the procreation of sons. Ah Goong, the grandfather, is the only exception to this patriarchal rule as he displays a softer, more feminine side, yearning for a baby girl. In the absence of wives or women suitable for marriage, the men of the bachelor communities sought sexual release with prostitutes, thus many Chinatowns became notorious for their brothels frequented mostly by Chinese Sojourners. Ironically, these China men lose the centric position of masculine authority they used to have over women in China and confront the “eccentric” position of marginality in America. They also lose their male power of sustaining a family, undergoing this new form of “emasculation”: the exclusion of the Chinese fathers from having the opportunity of providing adequately for their wives and children. When the police shut down the gambling house in Stockton, destroying BaBa’s source of income, he falls into a deep depression and “deteriorates from the man in ‘power suits’ to the ninety-pound weakling.”40 During this trying period, his wife (Kingston’s mother)ʊthe graduate of a Western medical school and a practicing physician while she was in Chinaʊsupports the family by working at menial tasks. This episode results in his venting his rage on the women of the family, and Maxine relates a memory of her or her sister being beaten by her father. Later, Maxine narrates a story of BaBa being tricked by gypsies: “Kill your Romany mother’s cunt,’ you said between your clenched teeth. 38

Ibid., 7,9. Huntley. Maxine Hong Kingston , 149. 40 Goellnicht. “Tang Ao in America,” 238. 39

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…You called the gypsies those names too. ‘Old bags,’ you muttered. ‘Gypsy bag. Smelly pig bag. Sow. Stink pig. Bag cunt.”41 BaBa wants to recover his centric position along with the role of breadwinner and opens a new laundry, but that does not justify his violent acts against women, nor diminish the fact that women have suffered for centuries the ordeals he now suffers. It is this angry father that Kingston finally acknowledges as a man who has been nearly destroyed by his losses and sufferings. Through this knowledge, Kingston is able to transform him from the abusive father of her memory to an exiled and misunderstood poet. She does this through the act of writing China Men, saying to the father: “I’ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and a few words, and you can tell me that I’m mistaken. You’ll just have to speak up with the real stories if I’ve got you wrong.”42 But his voice never intrudes to correct her; this text, his-story, remains her creation. In a deliberate attempt to ameliorate the reader’s opinion of her father, she does not always present him as morose and abusive in America. She presents more attractive memories in the second half of the text, “The American Father,” thus making the transition from the father’s life in China and his fifteen years of bachelor life in New York City until the arrival of his wife, to the father’s later life in his new country with his wife and family. Here, he appears not as a slave, but as a hero of endurance, as a kind, gentle man who takes time to explain to his daughter and who accepts with resignation, but wisely, the injustices he endured to become an American citizen. Thus Kingston imagines his-story, granting him a positive identity. In fact, Kingston’s task is to bestow a new identity not only for her father, but for the ‘fathers’ in her family who managed their sense of homelessness and alienation in America. With this special poetic license, the narrator reestablishes her father’s intellectual integrity as she becomes the mediator that counterpoints the father’s repressive silences. Thus, China Men is also an act of attempted reconciliation between daughter and father, just as The Woman Warrior was an act of reconciliation between daughter and mother. The dialogue, though, is not at the same level as in The Woman Warrior, which makes more difficult Kingston’s task of restoring his identity. The dialogic structure of the book is presented as a dynamic process in which Kingston challenges new voices from the first vignette, ‘On Discovery,’ to the last, ‘On Listening.’ Through this epilogue, Kingston passes the story to the next generation of Chinese Americans “as the spirit 41 42

Kingston. China Men, 8. Ibid., 15

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of inquiry and the ability to listen are passed on.”43 Through listening she discovers, and she discovers through listening. This reciprocity seems to work as a sine qua non condition for her to be able to speak her voice, representing interests, opening up possibilities “for perpetually redefining both the constitution of the body politic and the identities of the individuals it embodies.”44 By recounting the stories of some of America’s forgotten pioneers, and by insisting on creating a space for them in conventional American history, Kingston imagines a new kind of American man, one who transcends the stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture.45 These Chinese men yearn so arduously they belong to this nation, since they practically created the new frontier, and they name themselves Ed, Woodrow, Roosevelt and Worldster, go to tea parties and dress like Americans. In this context, Kingston tries to rediscover America through the eyes of men and begins her exploration of the possibility of a new definition of the American man, which incorporates new behaviors and values, acknowledges the possibility of multiple origins and cultures: a template for a man who is less prone either to subjugate or silence women. The new man that Kingston envisions is also playful like BaBa, he loves daughters like Ah Goong, he is a storyteller like Uncle Bun, and he is educated, patriotic, peace-loving, and open-minded like Kingston’s brother. In a poetically resonant voice, Kingston succeeds in giving us a classic of diasporic writing that raises issues of cultural passing and its discontents, portrayed in eloquent passages.

43

Pin-chia Feng. The Female Bildungsroman by Tony Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston, A Postmodern Reading (New York: Peter Land Publishing, Inc., 1998), 155. 44 Brook Thomas. “China Men, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Question of Citizenship,” American Quarterly, 50.4 (1998): 713. 45 Huntley, Maxine Hong Kingston, 151.

PART II RACE, STEREOTYPES AND IDENTITY

CHAPTER FOUR INTENTION VERSUS RECEPTION: THE REPRESENTATION OF THE CHINESE IN AH SIN1 YUSHA PAN NANJING UNIVERSITY OF AERONAUTICS AND ASTRONAUTICS

Ah Sin, a frontier melodrama coauthored by Bret Harte and Mark Twain about a namesake Chinese protagonist opened at Ford’s National Theater in Washington in May 1877. Despite the two writers’ enthusiasm for drama writing, the play turned out to be a failure five months later and it also marked the end of the friendship between Harte and Twain. Reviewers complained that the play suffered from many flaws due to the two playwrights’ uneasy collaboration and their lack of training in drama writing. For instance, San Francisco’s Daily Evening Bulletin criticized the play’s loss of balance between speaking and doing: “[I]t is not only clothed but piled with ‘talkee,’ ‘talkee.’”2 Compared with the Daily Evening Bulletin, the New York Sun was much more critical when it regarded the play as a “pot-boiling business” and expressed its dissatisfaction that the play’s characters did “innumerable things without

1

This study is supported by NUAA Research Funding, No. NR2011026. Mary Clemmer, “Ah Sin,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), May 21, 1877, in Mark Twain in His Times, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/playscripts/ahsinrev02.html. All the contemporary reviews of Ah Sin that I quoted in this paper were obtained from Mark Twain in His Times, a website made by Stephen Railton, who is a professor of American literature at the University of Virginia.

2

Intention versus Reception: The Representation of the Chinese in Ah Sin

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any conceivable motive.”3 After its subsequent tour in New York and other cities, the play closed in October. Although the reviewers criticized the artistic weaknesses of the play, they were generally satisfied with the actors’ and actresses’ performance, especially that of the leading actor Charles Thomas Parsloe,4 who played the title role, the “heathen Chinee” Ah Sin. “[He] evoked great laughter and applause from a densely crowded audience,”5 the Daily Evening Bulletin commented. The stock image of the heathen Chinee won warm reception from the critics and audience alike. This popular role in the unsuccessful play and the playwrights’ attitudes toward the Chinese that the role reflects have drawn scholars’ attention both in China and the US. In 1999, in his monograph Mark Twain’s Chinese Complex, Shuzhen Deng stated that “both Harte and Twain believed that they were friendly to the Chinese and both of them had given support to the Chinese who suffered social injustice in their previous works.”6 As to the play Ah Sin, Deng emphasized that the two writers “tried to satirize the prejudice that the Chinese suffered at that time, but the effect achieved might be quite the opposite.”7 Apparently Deng noticed the playwrights’ failure in making their audience aware of their sympathy for the Chinese. Another Chinese critic, Gang Zhu, expressed a similar view. He remarked that Mark Twain and Bret Harte “regarded the Chinese as a helpless and pitiable ethnic group” and that in the play they mainly aimed at “satirizing the ignorance and violence of their own countrymen,” but this aim was too radical and hence unacceptable to their audience.8 Compared to Deng and Zhu, an American scholar James S. Moy made more insightful comments on this issue because he explained why the 3

“Amusements: Ah Sin,” Sun (New York), Aug. 5, 1877, in Mark Twain in His Times, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/ playscripts/ahsinrev06.html. 4 Charles Thomas Parsloe (1836-1898) was an English-born actor known for his acting of the part of “the heathen Chinee.” 5 “Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s Play—‘Ah Sin’ at Washington—a Vote on Its Success,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), May 16, 1877, in Mark Twain in His Times, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/ playscripts/ahsinart01.html 6 Shuzhen Deng, Mark Twain’s Chinese Complex, vol. 2 (Taipei: Tianxing Publishing House, 1999), 81-83. 7 Ibid. 8 Gang Zhu, “Literature on and by Chinese Americans,” in Literary History of the United States, vol. 2, eds. Haiping Liu and Shouren Wang (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2002), 538.

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playwrights failed to achieve their aim. When interpreting another drama, Moy referred to Ah Sin to explain the problematic relationship between “the popular unconscious” and “the self-conscious” arts.9 He said that although both Harte and Twain sought “to provide sympathetic views of the Chinese,” they ended up producing “little more than a stereotypical character.”10 Regretfully, as Ah Sin was not the focus of his study, Moy did not elaborate on this issue. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to expound upon the disparity between the playwrights’ intention to portray the Chinese sympathetically and their audience’s reception of this portrayal in the opposite way. This paper argues that this disparity results from the mainstream society’s antiChinese sentiment and the playwrights’ outward conformity to that sentiment. To do so, this paper will first prove the two playwrights’ intention to show their sympathy for the Chinese by analyzing their earlier works related to this ethnic group and by interpreting their satire on racial discrimination in Ah Sin. Next, by examining some important contemporary reviews, this paper will show what the audience thought of the Chinese image created by the playwrights. Last, this paper will explain the two causes of the disparity between the writers’ intention and their audiences’ reception. It contends that the audience misinterpreted the play because of the intense anti-Chinese sentiment at that time and the playwrights’ outward conformity to such sentiment. Due to their outward conformity, the play becomes an ambiguous and problematic product. The version of the play studied in this paper is an amanuensis rehearsal copy reviewed and edited by Frederick Anderson in 1961. It is kept in the Clifton Walter Barrett Library of American Literature at the University of Virginia. The original manuscript is very likely to have been lost except for “several pages of revised and discarded dialogues in the handwriting of Harte and Twain in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California Library in Berkeley.”11 When Bret Harte and Mark Twain created this play, they intended to satirize the racial superiority of the whites instead of deriding the Chinese. This stance can be found in their other works apart from this play.

9

James S. Moy, “David Henry Hwang’s ‘M. Butterfly’ and Philip Kan Gotanda’s ‘Yankee Dawg You Die’: Repositioning Chinese American Marginality on the American Stage,” Theatre Journal 42, no. 1 (1990): 48. 10 Ibid. 11 Frederick Anderson, “Text Note,” in Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee, ed. Frederick Anderson (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1961), xvii.

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A typical example of these works is “Plain Language from Truthful James or the Heathen Chinee,”12 a poem that Bret Harte composed in 1870. Harte created this poem as a satire on anti-Chinese sentiment in the mining regions of the American west. In the poem, the narrator Truthful James told his listeners a story about a Chinese laborer named Ah Sin13 who, in a card game, outcheated him and another Euroamerican miner Nye. The narrator’s words implied that angry Euroamerican miners beat Ah Sin and knocked him out in the end. In the poem, Harte expressed his sympathy for Ah Sin in an indirect way, especially when he, through the mouth of Truthful James, alluded to that violent scene described by the ending part of the poem: cards were strewn like fallen leaves on the ground and Ah Sin lost consciousness, lying there while the participants in this race riot (i.e. Nye and perhaps other Euroamerican miners) found twenty-four packs of cards hidden in his long sleeves and tricky wax on his nails.14 These victorious and seemingly morally superior participants represented by Nye are in stark contrast to the “heathen Chinee” Other, who gets punched, becomes unconscious, and loses the ability to speak for himself. One of Harte’s contemporary reviewers was quite an acute observer of Harte’s intention to design this contrast. This reviewer said, “Mr. Bret Harte wished to delineate the Chinese simply as beating the Yankee at his own evil game, and to delineate the Yankee as not at all disposed to take offence at the ‘cheap labour’ of his Oriental rival, until he discovered that he could not cheat the cheap labourer half so completely as the cheap labourer could cheat him.”15 However, Harte’s satirical narrative in the poem sounds so subdued and restrained that it “has the air almost of ‘quietism.’”16 As a result, most of Harte’s readers misinterpreted this poem, changing it into a sort of antiChinese propaganda. Harte was sorry for the unintended consequence. Enthusiatic Euroamerican readers with anti-Chinese sentiment frequently 12 Bret Harte, “Plain Language from Truthful James or the Heathen Chinee,” in Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte, Project Gutenberg, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2507/2507-h/2507-h.htm#2H_4_0044. The poem was first published in The Overland Monthly Magazine in San Francisco in September 1870. 13 This poem created a precedent of the Ah Sin image. Thus Ah Sin the heathen Chinee had already become familiar to the audience nationwide before the performance of Harte and Twain’s play. 14 Harte, “Truthful James,” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2507/2507-h/2507h.htm#2H_4_0044. 15 “The Author of ‘That Heathen Chinee,’” Spectator, Apr. 1, 1871: 378-379. 16 Ibid., 379.

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cited this poem to justify racial discrimination. The reviewer mentioned in the previous paragraph reported such a case: “[A] politician most vehemently opposed to the admission of Chinese labour is said to have written to Mr. Bret Harte, when his ballad was first published, to thank him for it, writing, of course, under the impression that the ballad was a new and powerful blow struck on his own side of the question [of Chinese immigration].”17 Because of this poem, Harte became the most wellknown literary figure in 1870. In fact, enthusiastic readers almost forgot the poem’s title “Plain Language from Truthful James” and only remembered its subtitle “The Heathen Chinee.” Harte was not pleased with his fame gained in this way. When the poem became a source of inspiration for the creation of songs, poker cards, pottery and other works of art that expressed anti-Chinese feeling, Harte “regretted it even more as it swelled to a kind of cultural shorthand for Everybigot’s view of the grasping ‘John Chinaman.’”18 Harte often expressed his strong disappointment about this work. He was “quick to disparage the poem privately whenever he heard it mentioned in later years.”19 It is also likely that Harte would like to do something to amend this situation in his later writings. Harte’s collaborator Mark Twain also held a sympathetic attitude toward the Chinese. He wrote a lot about the Chinese, portraying them as gentle and inoffensive people and expressing a sympathetic feeling similar to Harte’s. Twain’s representative works of this type include “Those Blasted Children”20 (1864), an essay that criticized a group of children’s mistreatment of a Chinese immigrant; “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy”21 (1870), an essay that satirized anti-Chinese sentiment in San Francisco; “I Am a Boxer,”22 a speech that Twain made in 1900 to sympathize with Chinese natives when they rebelled against American and European intrusion; and “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”23 (1901), an 17

Ibid., 378. Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2005), 391. 19 Gary Scharnhorst, “‘Ways That Are Dark’: Appropriations of Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language from Truthful James,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 3 (1996): 377. 20 Mark Twain, Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 18521890 (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 72-77. 21 Mark Twain, Sketches New and Old, Project Gutenberg, accessed Nov. 20, 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3189/3189-h/3189-h.htm#persecution. 22 Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Speeches, Project Gutenberg, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3188/3188-h/3188-h.htm#link2H_4_0037. 23 Mark Twain, Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 18911910 (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 457-473. 18

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essay that satirized the United States’ imperialist expansion in China and the Philippines. Besides these non-fictions, “Goldsmith’s Friends Abroad Again”24 (1870), a short story that Twain had written before the play, also serves as a convincing example of Twain’s sympathy for the Chinese. In the story, Twain censured the injustice that the Chinese immigrants suffered in the US. The narration of the story is in the form of a series of letters that a Chinese immigrant named Ah Song Hi wrote to one of his close friends back in China. In these letters, Ah Song Hi told this friend ruefully that he went across the Pacific to the US and dreamed of a new life in a promised land only to end up in jail. In the end of the story, Ah Song Hi found that the promised land was merely a place haunted by racial persecution. The story sets the compassionate tone in which Twain would create his subsequent writings about the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America. Therefore, both Bret Harte and Mark Twain had clearly expressed their sympathy for the Chinese before they wrote Ah Sin. Considering this stance, it is unlikely for them to have a different attitude when they wrote the play. The play does show the same sympathetic view. The only difference between this play and the two writers’ other writings lies in how their sympathy is expressed. In the play, the two writers show their sympathy in a rather indirect form, namely, a satire on the racial superiority of the whites. This artistic form can expose “the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn.”25 As satire found in plays and novels usually allows audiences and readers to draw their own conclusions from the actions of the characters,26 it may appear obscure and ambiguous. In Ah Sin, the satire finds its expression in two ways. First, the satire lies in Ah Sin’s speech. The play is filled with Ah Sin’s seemingly gibbering but actually witty words. In the mining regions in the nineteenth century the Chinese immigrants were an extremely marginalized ethnic group. Their unique physical appearance and especially their language that was so different from those of European immigrants isolated them from other members of local communities. From the perspective of those white miners who harbored a strong sense of racial superiority, the Chinese were an inferior and even eccentric group. 24 Twain, Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852-1890, 455-470. 25 Chris Baldick, “Satire,” in Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2000), 198. 26 Ibid.

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To reflect and satirize this anti-Chinese feeling, the play intentionally portrays Ah Sin as a gibbering speaker of broken pidgin English just as the mainstream society expects. His speaking manner surely becomes a laughingstock of other Euroamerican characters in the play and the predominantly Euroamerican audience. Nevertheless, if readers examine Ah Sin’s speech closely, his speaking manner and the meaning expressed so actually show that Ah Sin is a very witty person and that his level of intelligence is above those arrogant, white characters who are contemptuous of him. In the first act, for instance, Ah Sin made a clever reply to a harsh remark made by a Euroamerican miner, Broderick, the villain in the play. Broderick always looked down upon the Chinese immigrants believing that they had an inclination to steal, so one day when he met Ah Sin in Plunkett’s (another miner’s) cabin, he felt sure that Ah Sin would steal Plunkett’s whiskey. Before Broderick left the cabin, he said sarcastically to Ah Sin, “When you see him [Plunkett], tell him I drank his whiskey to keep you from stealing it, you sinful old sluice robber.”27 When he returned a short while later and found Ah Sin still there, he asked him, “You here yet—you moral cancer, you unsolvable political problem—what’s up now?”28 To his surprise, Ah Sin answered wittily in his broken English, “Waitee tellee Punkee you dlink whiskey so me no stealee him.”29 This ironic imitation of Broderick’s mocking words changes Broderick from the one that makes fun of others into the one that is made fun of. Even Broderick himself admitted, “[T]there’s a smell of sarcasm about that remark.”30 Therefore, Ah Sin’s wit can overthrow the racial hierarchy imposed by the mainstream society to a certain degree. This characteristic of his speech shows that the playwrights intend to satirize racial discrimination and be sympathetic towards the Chinese. The satire in the play also lies in the unexpected power that the playwrights give Ah Sin to challenge the mainstream society’s racial ideas. Before the creation of Ah Sin, American theaters had already established a distinct stock image of the Chinese, who usually did menial jobs such as cooking and washing and almost without exception, played a minor role.31 However, in this play, although Ah Sin was still a laundryman, he stepped 27 Mark Twain and Bret Harte, Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee, ed. Frederick Anderson (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1961), 10. 28 Ibid, 11. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 For instance, Hop Sing, a laundryman in Bret Harte’s Two Men of Sandy Bar. This character only has a few lines in that play.

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into the center of the stage and could control the fate of Euroamerican characters. This is especially true of the conflicts between Ah Sin and Broderick. In Act I, after Broderick hit Plunkett heavily and “killed” him by throwing him over a cliff (in fact the latter did not die), he tried to conceal his blood-stained jacket by throwing it into a river. However, Ah Sin noticed his furtive behaviors. Thus the jacket that he discarded was not the real one but a substitute that Ah Sin gave him. Therefore, in the court scene in the fourth act, when Broderick attempted to impose his own crime upon another man, Ah Sin took out Broderick’s incriminating jacket with Broderick’s own name on its collar. Broderick’s vicious scheme failed so unexpectedly that he could not believe that the man he had always looked down upon should be able to make a fool of him. Before the court tried to hang him, he cursed Ah Sin and said, “Devil take the Chinaman, he has put the rope around my neck.”32 The new power that Harte and Twain give Ah Sin shows their intention to satirize and denounce the mainstream society’s mistaken views about race. With such power, Ah Sin, a supposedly minor and weak character, can mock the mainstream society’s conventional ideas about racial hierarchy. In this way, the play expresses the two writers’ self-conscious endeavor of making daring changes to the stock image of the “heathen Chinee,” which is mainly established by readers’ misinterpretation of Harte’s own poem “Truthful James.” Due to the satire that the playwrights employ, the play Ah Sin appears more radical—from the perspective of its Euroamerican audience—than their former literary creations, such as Harte’s “Truthful James,” in terms of its censure of racial discrimination. Ah Sin became the hero of the play. He defeated the villain of the story, who was a Euroamerican and was supposed to be superior to him in every way in the opinion of the contemporary audience. In the final court scene of the play, before the curtain fell, stage directions showed that there were even general shouts from the miners to praise Ah Sin: “Hurrah for AH SIN!”33 Nevertheless, the self-conscious sympathy of both writers for the Chinese immigrants could not prevent the play from being misinterpreted by its predominantly Euroamerican audience. From their perspective, although Ah Sin beat the villain in the play, he could be no more than a heathen Chinee. As Charles Thomas Parsloe performed, the protagonist Ah Sin appeared childlike and inoffensive but was cunning and prone to steal in nature. Parsloe must have amused and satisfied his contemporary audience 32 33

Twain and Harte, Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee, 89. Ibid., 90.

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when he, as Ah Sin, stole habitually from other characters on stage. For instance, in Act I, Ah Sin stole Plunkett’s whiskey and after drinking it, he put a cup that Plunkett left lying around loose up into one of his long sleeves.34 His “propensity” to steal was immediately applauded by the Times as a sign of “Chinese humor, cleverness, and amusing rascality.”35 Spectators showed great enthusiasm for Parsloe’s performance because the image that Parsloe represented—partly owing to the playwrights’ satire on racial discrimination—matched and reinforced their expectations of a Chinese. The Daily Rocky Mountain News praised Parsloe’s performance, saying: “‘Ah Sin,’ the hero of Bret Harte, comes on, the most complete Mongolian ever born outside the Celestial Kingdom.”36 The Times also observed that “Mr. Parsloe’s Chinaman could scarcely be excelled in truthfulness to nature and freedom from caricature.”37 Although the New York Herald did not like the coarse and vulgar dialogues in the play, it did appreciate Parsloe’s part: “[Parsloe] is the life of the play. He has the merit of being always funny and never vulgar, and his imitation of the Chinaman is natural and free from extravagance or buffoonery.”38 The acclaim that Parsloe received reflects the audience’s recognition of his superb rendering of the heathen Chinee on the one hand, and their inability or unwillingness to recognize the playwrights’ biting satire on racial discrimination on the other. Apparently, there is a disparity between the “heathen Chinee” image that the audience see in the play and the sympathetic representation of Ah Sin intended by the playwrights. This disparity results from two causes: the mainstream society’s intense anti-Chinese sentiment and the playwrights’ outward conformity to that sentiment. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, strong anti-Chinese sentiment arose from racial discrimination justified by a fear of “Chinese 34

Ibid., 10-11. “Amusements: Fifth Avenue Theatre,” Times (New York), Aug. 1, 1877, in Mark Twain in His Times, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/ onstage/playscripts/ahsinrev03.html. 36 “Ah Sin on the Stage: An Interesting Sketch of an Interesting New Play,” Daily Rocky Mountain News (Denver), May 19, 1877, in Mark Twain in His Times, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/playscripts/ ahsinrev01.html. 37 “Amusements: Fifth Avenue Theatre,” http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/ onstage/playscripts/ahsinrev03.html. 38 “‘Ah Sin’ at the Fifth Avenue Theatre,” Herald (New York), Aug. 1, 1877, in Mark Twain in His Times, accessed Mar. 9, 2012, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ railton/onstage/playscripts/ahsinrev05.html. 35

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cheap labor.”39 This unfavorable social climate is the first factor leading to the audience’s misinterpretation of the two writers’ intentions. At that time, white workers and especially the Euroamerican workers in the west considered the Chinese immigrants that arrived in large numbers in America during the Gold Rush to be a great threat to them in labor markets. Thus from the very beginning Chinese immigrants became victims of strong racial discrimination. Besides the prejudice from other members of the labor force, Chinese immigrants suffered extremely poor living and working conditions, as most of them were employed as credit contract laborers, whose positions were next to those of slaves. For their voyage to the US that cost about 70 dollars, they had to pay nearly three times as much after they landed and started to work for a meager income if they managed to survive that hard trip.40 They earned much less than Euroamerican workers. Even when they tried to ask for a raise, other workers would not give them any support. The strong anti-Chinese feeling of the mainstream society culminated in The Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress in 1882.41 Consequently, no matter how much the playwrights wished to express their sympathy for the Chinese, the audience could easily misinterpret their satirical devices and find their ideal stereotype of the heathen Chinee in the performance anyway. Harte and Twain’s outward conformity to the mainstream society’s anti-Chinese sentiment is the second factor leading to the audience’s misinterpretation of their satire. To please their predominantly Euroamerican audience, the two playwrights capitalized consciously or unconsciously on the popularity of the “heathen Chinee” image. This image had previously won enthusiastic reception and became widely known due to Bret Harte’s poem “Truthful James” and his drama The Two Men of Sandy Bar42 (1876). Although Harte regretted the impact that “Truthful James” had on Chinese immigrants, he needed desperately to “haul out the Chinee for one more payday”43 for he was broke and badly in debt in 1876. Unlike Harte, Mark Twain was well established in his profession at that time but he was also eager to achieve success in drama. Besides, both writers were quite aware of the mediocre quality of dramas 39

Harte, “Truthful James,” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2507/2507-h/2507h.htm#2H_4_0044. As a result of the popularity of the poem, this phrase became widely used to express anti-Chinese feeling. 40 Zhu, “Literature on and by Chinese Americans,” 515. 41 This Act was not abolished until 1943. 42 Bret Harte, The Two Men of Sandy Bar, Project Gutenberg, accessed Nov. 20, 2012, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2570/2570-h/2570-h.htm. 43 Powers, Mark Twain: A Life, 391.

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at that time. Therefore, when Harte proposed a collaboration based on the image of the heathen Chinee, Twain quickly accepted. Both of them expected the play to be a big hit. To cash in on the popular heathen Chinee image, Harte and Twain created Ah Sin as a special vehicle for Charles Thomas Parsloe, who had already secured his professional and financial success by playing a similar Chinese comic role as Hop Sing in Harte’s The Two Men of Sandy Bar. They decided that in this collaborated play, they would “insert the Ah Sin brand name into the boilerplate ‘Chinee’ role" and “give Parsloe license to go chop-chopping around the stage to his heart’s content.”44 Parsloe’s performance may help guarantee the play’s financial success, but his distorted, stereotypical representation of the Chinese obscures the playwrights’ satire on racial superiority. When Harte and Twain cast Parsloe as Ah Sin, they did serious harm to their intention of presenting the role sympathetically. As the audience was under the control of racial follies, it was hard for them to resist the stereotype of the heathen Chinee that Parsloe produced. It was also difficult for them to appreciate the underlying satire intended by the playwrights. A very good example comes from a scene in Act II. When a group of white miners attempted to lynch Ah Sin for murder without any evidence, Ah Sin tried to defend himself in his unique way. Stage directions showed that when the miners “all make a dive for AH SIN,” he “scrambles between their legs and, upsetting one or two of them—jumps on table, seizes flat iron, shrieking and gibbering Chinese.”45 In this scene, Ah Sin jumped on his ironing board and brandished hot flatirons to prevent anyone from approaching and catching him. Doesn’t this scene look familiar? It is a satirical rendering of the race riot scene in Harte’s “Truthful James.” The only difference is that Ah Sin is lucky this time: he is not harmed. The playwrights’ intention to criticize this violence caused by racial prejudice is half-tragically, half-comically expressed in Ah Sin’s seemingly absurd behavior of fighting against the violence by using his strange weapons—the hot flatirons and his gibbering Chinese. However, the eccentric behavior and the eccentric language simply reinforce the stereotype of the heathen Chinee in the audience’s eyes. As a result, Parlsoe’s performance seriously interferes with the two writers’ original plan to express their sympathy for the Chinese by means of satire.

44 45

Ibid. Twain and Harte, Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee, 46.

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As Hsuan L. Hsu observed, with Parsloe’s acting, Ah Sin becomes “a yellowface representation of a Chinese laundryman.”46 Hsu coined the term “yellowface” according to an existing term “blackface” (a conventional make-up representation of black people by white actors in a traditional comic variety show) because it is in a similar way that a white actor represents a Chinese character. In the nineteenth century, Asian actors including Chinese ones did not have an opportunity to perform on the American stage. It was a common practice then for white actors to represent these ethnicities absent from stage by means of yellow makeup. This is especially true of Ah Sin, in which Parsloe trans-ethnically cross-dressed and played the heathen Chinee. When Parsloe played Ah Sin, his cross-dressing was next to perfect, with almost all the necessary elements including a pig-tail, a blouse, short trousers, an umbrella and his “talkee-talkee” and “washeewashee” pidgin English. Only one element was missing. That was a pair of slanted eyes, just as the Daily Evening Bulletin commented: “[T]he one perfect picture of the play, comes in, a genuine Chinee-man, sans obliquity of eyes.”47 Yet some special make-up quickly supplied the lack and made the play a wonderful yellowface minstrel show. To sum up, the play Ah Sin as a yellowface minstrel show is not the one that Bret Harte and Mark Twain intend to create as self-conscious artists, who are eager to challenge racist attitudes. Although both of them have good intentions, the play only highlights and fixes the image of the heathen Chinee in the audience’s mind. Today readers of Mark Twain’s later anti-imperialist essays like “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”48 (1901) may wonder why the writer who showed great sympathy for the Chinese should create Ah Sin to ridicule the Chinese. Readers may also wonder why Bret Harte could not undo all the wrongs that his “Truthful James” had done to the Ah Sin image since he had already felt sorry for the impact. The answers to these questions lie in the strong anti-Chinese sentiment of the mainstream society at the time when the play was created. Both Harte and Twain have to comply with that sentiment. At least they have to do so outwardly. Although they may try to challenge their audience, they have to do it discreetly. Therefore, satire becomes the most 46

Hsuan L. Hsu, “Vagrancy and Comparative Racialization in Huckleberry Finn and ‘Three Vagabonds of Trinidad,’” American Literature 81, no. 4 (2009): 704. 47 Clemmer, “Ah Sin,” http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/playscripts/ ahsinrev02.html. 48 Twain, Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1891-1910, 457-473.

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suitable way to preserve their moral righteousness without offending the audience seriously. Yet it is also an indirect and even ambiguous way of expression. When Harte and Twain chose Parsloe to act the part of Ah Sin, Parsloe’s comic, exaggerated performance entertained the audience but obscured the satire that Harte and Twain put into the play. When their satire failed to work, their sympathy for the Chinese was overlooked by the audience. In the end, Ah Sin “must be an eccentricity on the stage, because it is impossible to make him pathetic.”49

49

“‘Ah Sin’ at the Fifth Avenue Theatre,” http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/onstage/ playscripts/ahsinrev05.html.

CHAPTER FIVE THE METAPHORICAL CONSUMPTION OF THE RACIAL OTHER IN SPANISH ADVERTISING DIANA PALARDY YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY

The iconic figure of a primitive man feeding on a hapless explorer was a mainstay of colonial folklore during the Age of Exploration. However, in contemporary Western society, the reverse, that is to say the image of a colonial power consuming the racial Other, is prevalent in a variety of manifestations. As the image of the Other is absorbed into mainstream society, it crosses the border between the domain of the minority and that of the majority. The purpose of this investigation is to explore the function of race in a few select Spanish advertisements chosen specifically for how they directly or indirectly represent the consumption of non-Spanish individuals, specifically those of African descent. Linking together these various advertisements, which span from the 1970s until the present, are undercurrents of colonial and sexual exploitation, as well as latent racism. Although attempts at humor in some of the ads may appear to soften the racist undertones, they cannot mask them. Humor often serves as a buffer that protects a person who expresses racially offensive sentiments, thus enabling one to redraw the border between socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior so that society may become more comfortable with racial insensitivity. The concept of consumption implies taking possession of something, breaking it down, and absorbing part of it—the part that can be digested and provide sustenance—into a larger system. In the context of race relations, the symbolic act of consuming the racial Other may be associated with the exploitation of the aspects of the Other that benefit members of the dominant society. Maggie Kilgour, in From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation, concludes that

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metaphors of consumption tend to underscore hegemonic relationships: “As Bakhtin himself notes, one of the most important characteristics of eating is its ambivalence: it is the most material need yet it is invested with a great deal of significance, an act that involves both desire and aggression, as it creates a total identity between eater and eaten while insisting on the total control—the literal consumption—of the latter by the former.”1 Therefore, an analysis of metaphors of incorporation in a racial context may unveil a society’s drive for total control of the Other, which may erode the borders between the two groups. In the advertisements that will be analyzed, which are for Conguitos, Bitter Cinzano Soda, and Magnum Ice Cream, the advertisers equate the Other with their specific products in a way that results in the commodification and subsequent dehumanization of the members of these racial groups.

Conguitos Conguitos, which are chocolate-covered peanuts similar to M&M’s, are well known, in part, because of their logo.2 The original logo consists of a cartoon caricature of African natives, who are represented as naked, pot-bellied, spear-wielding pygmies with enormous red lips. The name of the product itself, “Conguitos,” is the diminutive expression Spaniards often use in a humorous context to refer to individuals from the Congo, or sometimes in contemporary vernacular to any person of African descent. One of the most well-known Conguitos ads from the late seventies, which was ranked as the seventh best “anuncio antigüo” (“old commercial”) in Spanish history and has the highest number of views of the Conguitos commercials on YouTube, presents the image of a young Tarzan swinging from a vine and landing in the middle of a group of Conguitos happily singing their famous jingle and preparing fresh batches of Conguitos candies in round vats.3 The way the young boy towers over all of the members of the village highlights his status amongst them. This reduces the Congolese people to the diminutive in the popular Spanish imagination, both in terms of their nationality, Conguito instead of Congoleño or Congolés, and their physical stature, as they are represented only as pygmies. The conversion of the Other into a diminutive form 1 Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 7. 2 See Figure 1. 3 “Anuncios antigüos—Conguitos,” ConguitosTV, YouTube, http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=KzMSmW8zh3U.

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establishes an implicit hierarchy between whites and blacks and facilitates patronizing attitudes toward the Other. While one of the Conguitos in the commercial is touting that Conguitos are “de rechupete” (“finger-licking good”), his proud declaration is interrupted mid-sentence, when he is transformed into the logo on a packet of Conguitos. Now voiceless and inanimate, these infantile caricatures exist only as logos on the packaging and as products for consumption. The sound of the crinkling packet that overtakes the voices of the singing and talking Conguitos also underscores the commercialization of the product. On the one hand, the transformation of these people into products underscores their dehumanization, especially when viewed in the context of colonial exploitation of African nations.4 In White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture, Jan Nederveen Pieterse notes: “A black represented as candy, as chocolate or liquorice, is a cliché as old as that of the little black page serving chocolate.”5 Pieterse further observes: “Over the years the role of blacks in the advertising and packaging of rum, cocoa, chocolate and coffee has hardly changed. As tropical products these things seem to be permanently associated with the colour black and with black labour.”6 Similar to the myth of how Conguitos are produced in this commercial (i.e. the Conguitos caricatures are making Conguitos candies), the actual process of producing chocolate often relies heavily on the exploitation of African labor. Jill Lane’s “Becoming Chocolate, a Tale of Racial Translation” points out: “The production of cocoa to this day lies primarily in former colonies, particularly the countries of western Africa; the industry is fraught with the social problems, including child and slave labor, common to poor growers dependent on the volatile buying patterns of the First World.”7 Whether it be chocolate or some other natural resource, many African lives have been sacrificed in the process of producing goods for exportation under colonial rule. On the other hand, the light-hearted, humorous nature of the myth masks the actual means of chocolate production for the average consumer. David Harvey affirms in The Condition of Postmodernity that in 4

It is worth noting that other products like Cola Cao and Filipinos also bring to mind an association with colonization. 5 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 193. 6 Ibid., 194. 7 Jill Lane, “Becoming Chocolate, a Tale of Racial Translation,” Theatre Journal 59.3 (Oct. 2007): 385.

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contemporary times, “different worlds are brought together in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin of the labour processes that produced them, or the social relations implicated in their production.”8 The fact that the Conguitos in the ad are happily producing and packaging themselves for consumption suggests that they are complicit in their own exploitation—both of their resources and their people. Aside from the figure of the young Tarzan, there are no other colonial figures present here to oversee the process of chocolate production. This reflects the tendency toward divesting colonizers of their role in forcing Africans into slave labor or inhumane work conditions. During Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, it was common to attempt to conceal the atrocities committed there while they were exploiting natural resources (particularly on the rubber plantations), much in the same way that other colonial powers covered up the negative externalities of chocolate production in other African nations. Juan Tudela Férez, the designer of the Conguitos logo, derived his inspiration for the logo from the 1961 liberation of the Republic of Congo from Belgian colonial rule.9 Living in an autarchy during the Franco regime in the sixties, many Spaniards had very little contact with or knowledge of Africa or people of African descent, aside from images from films and information from the international news. In addition to the other Conguitos cartoon commercials from that era, this ad mythologized Africa and molded the perceptions of many Spaniards (especially Spanish children) of Sub-Saharan Africa. Even if the advertisers of Conguitos did not intend to make any references to the strife that resulted from colonialism in the Congo and the commercials were merely intended to be amusing, the pre-existing association between the production of chocolate and the exploitation of African labor is already embedded in the discourse. Moreover, the commercial reveals that the West has devoured the exotic image it has created of Africa, including the music, attire, and landscape there. In a campaign against some of the Conguitos ads, María Frías, a university professor from La Coruña, argued that they “insultan a los miles de africanos que se encuentran en España, hieren la sensibilidad de cualquiera, tengan el color de piel que tengan, y sólo sirven para fomentar y perpetuar estereotipos negativos del pueblo africano” (“insult the thousands of Africans that are found in Spain, harm anyone’s sensibilities, 8

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 300. 9 “Juan Tudela Férez: ‘Hoy no lo habría dibujado así’,” El periódico de Aragón.com. March 4, 2003. http://www.elperiodicodearagon.com/noticias/ aragon/juan-tudela-ferez-hoy-no-lo-habria-dibujado-asi-_44262.html.

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regardless of their skin color, and only serve to foment and perpetuate negative stereotypes about African people”).10 As a professor of African American literature, Frías presents a point of view that is in line with that of the majority of US scholars dealing with race relations. Efforts toward promoting civil rights, integration, and multiculturalism in the States have contributed to an increased understanding about racial concerns, not just among academics, but also the rest of the society. Many (though by no means all) of the blogs and websites about Conguitos, as manifested in articles like “Conguitos: Spanish Sweets with an Out-of-Date Image” in On Africa and “Race Relations” in Barcelona Writing, offer a critical perspective of the ads.11 Although the Conguitos advertisements have, for the most part, relied less on racially-charged imagery in recent years, the name of the brand has not changed and the original logo and jingle are still firmly ingrained in many Spaniards.

Cinzano Bitter Soda A 1985 commercial for Cinzano Bitter Soda featuring Grace Jones also employs the metaphor of consumption, however it does so in order to exploit black, female sexuality.12 Famous for her iconic role as a disco queen/new wave diva from the 70s and 80s, Grace Jones is a Jamaicanborn American who periodically appeared in movies, advertisements, music videos and other visual media adorned in theatrical costumes and positioned in dramatic poses. She conveys a type of sexuality characterized by its primitive, powerful, raw and borderline androgynous nature. In the commercial, Jones is wearing a billowy top and is constantly in motion, flowing in a manner that resembles the soda being poured. Interspersed throughout the commercial are shots that create the illusion of Jones dancing in an ice cube and consuming fire, as well as brief clips of soda being poured and ice cubes clinking. Accompanying these images is 10

Oscar Hernández, “La rebelión del Conguito,” El periódico de Aragón.com. March 4, 2003. http://www.elperiodicomediterraneo.com/noticias/sociedad/larebelion-del-conguito-_40236.html. 11 “Conguitos: Spanish Sweets with an Out-of-Date Image,” On Africa, http://onafrica.org/2010/03/03/bgm1267614467; “Race Relations,” Barcelona Writing, http://www.barcelonawriting.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id =104&Itemid=45. 12 The ad for Cinzano Bitter Soda can be found at the following web address at 3:25: “Cinzano Bitter Soda.” Anuncios de 1985. YouTube. http://www.youtube .com/ watch?v=jlhpLZssI9k

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Jones’ song in the background in which she, with a seductive yet husky voice, sings: “Sabes que yo sé encender tu hielo, apagar tu sed. Bitter Cinzano Soda.” (“You know that I know how to light your ice, to quench your thirst. Bitter Cinzano Soda.”) The contrast between the red and blue tones, the juxtaposition of fire and water imagery, and the opposing actions of “encender” and “apagar” (which literally mean “to turn on” and “to turn off,” but carry sexual undertones in this context), serve to underscore the difference between the implied viewer, presumably a white male, and the subject, a black female. Embodying the actual Bitter Cinzano Soda drink, Jones personifies a product that, while satisfying the thirst of the consumer, has a bit of an edge, a pleasing bitterness. A direct correlation is established between the desire for a unique, transformative sexual experience with a black woman and for a soda whose bitterness, though strong and off-putting for some, is intensely satisfying for others, particularly those that consider themselves more adventurous than your conventional Spaniard. In her essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks observes that ethnicity is often perceived as alleviating the tedium of living in a homogenous society.13 She affirms: “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”14 Though this may imply an acceptance of racial diversity, the Other is objectified in a way that makes her appear wild, primitive, “bitter” and in every way distinct from individuals in mainstream Spanish society. Anne McClintock adds: “Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination” and “[their] women figured as the epitome of sexual aberration and excess.”15 In most of the media representations of Grace Jones, she captures a spirit of boldness that is often interpreted as primitivism, and conveys a type of raw, aggressive sexuality that is easily correlated with (in McClintock’s words) “sexual aberration and excess,” an association which is only strengthened by her androgynous appearance.

13

bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” Media and Cultural Studies. (Malden, MA: Blackwell University Press, 2006), 366-380. (bell hooks purposefully uses only lowercase letters when spelling her pen name). 14 Ibid., 366. 15 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22.

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Chocolate Possession In another popular, though much more recent advertising campaign (from 2006), Spanish actress/model Paz Vega starred in a series of suggestive ads promoting Magnum Ice Cream bars. In each of the ads, Vega adopted multiple roles simultaneously, as if interacting with clones of herself. Many of the ads contained homosexual overtones, thus implicitly equating the decadent pleasure of consuming Magnum ice cream with the enjoyment of titillating, yet transgressive homoerotic fantasies. There are numerous articles and blogs dedicated to the controversy surrounding the implied lesbianism in the ads, but there is no buzz about the issue of race, even though Vega is transformed into a black woman after consuming a Magnum bar in the ads titled “Chocolate Possession.”16 Lane’s essay points out that many Spaniards simply view Vega as being possessed by chocolate, as indicated in the slogan, and do not view the image in a racial context. The “chocolate”-colored skin in this ad is viewed as highlighting a distinct personality trait in the individual (similar to how Vega, in her “Descubre mi yo” (“Discover myself”) ad, takes on a different persona for each of her personal characteristics, such as her innocent self, her mysterious self, etc.).17 Regardless of the interpretation of the Chocolate Possession ads, the fact remains that Vega looks like a black person (so much so that when I first glanced at the image, I actually thought it was a black woman) and since images of blacks have frequently been associated with chocolate in advertising, it is difficult to disassociate the skin color from its racial connotation. To better understand the purpose of the metaphor of consumption in this ad, it is important to question what, aside from chocolate, blackness signifies. In both “Chocolate Possession” ads, the black woman poses with her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open, and a look of ecstasy on her face, as if she had just been sexually gratified, while the white woman’s expression appears more contemplative or matter-of-fact. The white male viewer is encouraged to fantasize about sexually possessing the black woman in order to be fulfilled by her, satiated by her Otherness. Kilgour indicates that sexual intercourse is often represented as a form of consumption, as both acts often utilize similar vernacular (she cites as an 16

Images of the “Chocolate Possession” ads can be found on the following web page: “Chocolate Possession.” Marketing News. http://www.marketingnews.es/ gran-consumo/noticia/1038173028005/frigo-estrena-primera-campanapublicitaria.1.html. 17 “Descubre mi yo.” Magnum Chocolates. Videos.Publispain. http://videos. publispain.com/video/ 4027/Descubre-mi-yo-con-Paz-Vega.html.

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example that the same word is used in French to signify consume and consummate).18 Alternately, a white female viewer may fantasize about transforming into the black woman, who possesses the qualities of being both exotic and sexually appealing. Kilgour argues that another way to perceive consumption in the expression “you are what you eat [...] is [as] a means of asserting and controlling individual and also cultural identity.”19 Whether directed toward a male or female audience, the viewer is encouraged to devour Magnum chocolate in order have the transformative experience of being overtaken by it. hooks comments on the trend of white males wanting to appear more daring and experienced by having sex with black women: “They were confident that non-white people had more life experience, were more worldly, sensual and sexual because they were different.... Engaging in sexual encounters with non-white females, was considered a ritual of transcendence, a movement out into a world of difference that would transform.”20 Even though this advertisement may be intended to focus only on the transcendent nature of chocolate, visually it strengthens the stereotypical associations between black females, sexuality, chocolate and the notion of possession (both of and by the Other). If the associations are not obvious enough in this ad, the Magnum Light Nouveau ad in which two chocolate ice cream bars are positioned so that they look like a black woman’s buttocks and thighs leaves no doubt regarding the intention of the advertisers.21 Therefore, the metaphor of consumption, both in the Magnum Ice Cream and Cinzano Bitter Soda ads, serves the purpose of commodifying black female sexuality, as if it were a product that one could purchase in order to make oneself appear more bold, decadent and worldly. Although there have been plenty of examples in the history of advertising of the use of racial imagery to market specific products, there are few cases in which advertisers have gone as far as to equate the experience of consuming their product with that of consuming a member of a different race. This symbolic act of consumption implies taking possession of the Other, and in the context of the ads analyzed in this study, translates to colonial or sexual conquests. The image of the Other is appropriated, or, utilizing the consumption metaphor, absorbed into the “body” of Spanish society, because of its association with abundant natural resources, exploited labor, primitiveness, exoticism, and “sexual aberration 18

Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 7. Ibid., 6. 20 hooks, “Eating the Other,” 368. 21 Magnum Light Nouveau. ¡Ojú! con la publicidad, May 8, 2010. http:// margafernandez.blogspot.com /2010_05_01_archive.html 19

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and excess.” In an attempt to add “spice” to a presumably homogeneous society, these advertisers have created an image of the Other that has resulted in their dehumanization in the process. Ultimately, these characterizations reveal more about Spanish society than they do about the cultural identity of the Other. This leads us to the thorny question of why these types of advertisements would generally not be considered racist in Spain.

I’m not a racist, but... Many Spaniards would be reluctant to label the advertisements for Conguitos, Cinzano Bitter Soda and Magnum Ice Cream as racist because racism is associated primarily with acts of violence, aggression, or blatantly negative stereotyping.22 Teun Van Dijk asserts that in many Western nations, racism is usually “elsewhere: in the past (during slavery or segregation), abroad (apartheid in South Africa), politically at the far right (racist parties), and socially at the bottom (poor inner cities, skinheads).”23 However, racism is most often prevalent in a variety of much more subtle manifestations, such as representations of race in the news media, political legislation, everyday comments, jokes, etc.24 Often, Spaniards who outright deny that they are racist exhibit behaviors that individuals who are sensitive to racial concerns would typically identify as subtle or latent racism. A common belief in Spain is that positive stereotypes, or ones that they believe could not possibly cause any harm, should not be considered a form of racism.25 For example, when Spaniards 22 Due in part to the wave of immigration from Africa and Latin America in the 1980s and 90s, most people of different racial backgrounds are presumed to be immigrants, regardless of how long they have been in Spain. Thus, the concepts of racism and xenophobia are often conflated for many Spaniards. 23 Teun A. van Dijk, “Denying Racism: Elite Discourse and Racism.” Race Critical Theories. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 311. 24 A study conducted every trimester by La Oficina Permanente de la Inmigración (“The Permanent Office of Immigration”) found that in a sample of ten newspapers analyzed in 2000, around 18% of the news about immigrants was positive, 63% was negative and 19% was neutral. (Juan Manuel Cardoso Carballo, “Violencia, inmigración y xenofobia: el periodismo, frente a los grandes retos informativos.” Revista Latina de Comunicación Social 41 (mayo 2001): 2. http://www.ull.es/ publicaciones/latina/2001/latina41may/52cardoso.htm). 25 Positive stereotypes are more likely to be viewed as a form of racism in the States than in Spain. The famous figure of Balthazar, the black Wise Man, is revered by children across Spain during the celebration of the Reyes Magos (which is sometimes viewed as their version of Christmas). In recent years, a move has

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painted their faces black in order to look like Conguitos during the carnival celebrations or when the Spanish basketball team posed for a photo for the 2008 Beijing Olympics in which all the team members posed with “Chinese eyes,” they believed that their attempts at humor and the frivolous nature of their actions should not be misinterpreted as racism. Lane observes that these types of actions would be viewed much differently in the States, where they would immediately be labeled as racist because of a much different past regarding race relations (slavery, civil rights, integration, etc.). 26 In the US, “black face” clearly carries negative connotations associated with minstrel shows.27 Even in cases in which a person associates an individual from another race with positive stereotypes, s/he is adopting an essentialist stance and viewing the Other in light of a particular attribute, rather than a complete person with a wide range of characteristics. For example, the black women in the Cinzano Bitter Soda and Magnum Ice Cream ads are limited to being only objects of sexual desire. In the comments on YouTube about Conguitos commercials, respondents frequently argue that something is not racist unless it explicitly shows the oppression of another race, yet humor is often used to perpetuate racism. A psychological study conducted by a bi-racial couple about the nature of different forms of subtle racism in post-apartheid South Africa indicates: “racist opinions are often communicated in an equivocal and ambivalent manner” and commonly preceded by phrases like “I'm not a racist, but...”. 28 After analyzing the data collected from their spontaneous conversations in everyday life that were secretly taperecorded over the course of two months, the couple concluded that the dominant rhetorical device used to bring up the sensitive topic of race was humor.29 Barnes, Palmary and Durrheim demonstrate how “humor establishes a lighthearted context” and “discourages others from inferring racism due to the inappropriateness of anger as a response to it.”30 On the website for SOS África, Telefónica Móviles-España is criticized for been made to stop painting people’s faces black to impersonate Balthazar. This could either reflect a move toward greater sensitivity, or perhaps just a matter of practicality, as there are now more individuals of African descent living in Spain who can easily fill the role. 26 Lane, “Becoming Chocolate,” 383. 27 Ibid., 383. 28 Brendon Barnes, Ingrid Palmary and Kevin Durrheim, “The Denial of Racism: The Role of Humor, Personal Experience, and Self-Censorship,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 20.2 (Sept. 2001): 321, 324. 29 Barnes, Palmary and Durrheim, “The Denial of Racism,” 335, 333. 30 Ibid., 331.

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repeatedly referring to their humorous intentions to defend their ad characterizing Africans as cannibals.31 Time and time again, people who view something as racist are accused of not having a sense of humor, of being too sensitive, of having something wrong with her/him, or of being a Nazi or fascist (as commonly seen in responses to articles that are critical of Conguitos advertising).32 Tudela Férez (designer of the Conguitos logo) argues that people should not be so judgemental about Conguitos ads because everything must be judged in the context in which it was produced.33 On the one hand, he reminds the reader that Conguitos were created in the context of an autarchic society with virtually no African or other immigrant population (as if ignorance were proof of innocence). On the other hand, he admits that his idea for the advertisements came from the bloody revolution in the Congo after the decimation of nearly half of its population under colonial rule. Both of these circumstances provided the context for the creation of the product. Therein lies the problem with cultural (mis)appropriations. Begoña Sánchez, a spokesperson of the anti-racism organization SOS Racismo, affirms that Spaniards “do not give [the issue of race] the importance that it deserves” because of “unawareness.”34 Isabel Santaolalla confirms: “Whereas in countries like Britain, France and Germany or, outside Europe, in the United States, Brazil, Canada and Australia, among others, discussions centering on questions of ‘otherness,’ ‘assimilation,’ ‘integration’ and ‘multiculturalism’ have been commonplace for decades now, modern Spanish society has remained largely indifferent to these.”35 As Spaniards in most regions of Spain generally have very little social contact with Africans on a regular basis, and those Africans that do live there now are often not fully integrated into society and may not feel comfortable publicly criticizing their host country, the dominant cultural order is rarely challenged. 36 31

“La reflexión de SOS África para Telefónica Móviles-España,” SOS África, http://www.sos-africa.org/estereotipos.htm. 32 “Conguitos with an Out-of-date Image,” On Africa, http://onafrica.org/2010/ 03/03/ bgm1267614467 33 “Juan Tudela Férez,” El periódico de Aragón.com, Mar. 4, 2003. 34 “Race Relations,” Barcelona Writing, http://www.barcelonawriting.com/ index.php?option=com_content&task =view&id=104&Itemid=45. 35 Isabel Santaolalla, “Close Encounters: Racial Otherness in Imanol Uribe’s Bwana,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXXVI (1999): 112. 36 It is interesting to note that starting in 2009, economic problems have deterred immigration. (“Spain and Immigration: Bad New Days,” The Economist (Feb. 4 2010), http://www.economist.com/node/15464909.) There has still been some evidence of scapegoating of foreigners, but this phenomenon is much less

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In recent years, non-governmental organizations in Spain like SOS Racismo, SOS África, and Contamíname: Fundación para el Mestizaje Cultural have worked hard to raise the level of awareness about racial issues and demonstrate how sometimes even subtle stereotypes and latent racism can have detrimental effects. The recent proliferation of NGOs dedicated to supporting immigrants is a testament to the increased sensitivity to racial concerns in Spain, at least amongst a certain sector of the population. However, as Tomás Calvo Buezas indicates, “un minuto de los medios de comunicación, echa a perder años de trabajo de muchas organizaciones por la integración” (“a minute in the media wastes years of work of many organizations for integration”).37 To counter negative stereotypes about other ethnicities in the media, NGOs have come up with their own ads encouraging tolerance and have sponsored art contests, festivals, concerts and other activities that promote diversity. In many of their ads, images are created to dismantle and replace myths about the Other, not unlike what Hal Foster describes as “myth-robbery,” which is the act of “break[ing] apart the abstracted mythical sign... to reinscribe it in a countermythical system.”38 This trend has even crossed over into the field of education, as web pages such as “¿Racismo en las imágenes?” on the site EduAlter: Red de recursos en educación para la paz, el desarrollo y la interculturalidad, and articles like “Educación antirracista e interculturalidad” by Ángela María da Silva Gomes on the website Bakeaz, address how educators can sensitize their students to perceptions of race in the media.39 A strong “countermythical system” would be needed to undermine racially-charged icons like Conguitos, which are so deeply-ingrained in Spanish culture that one of the marketing directors, José Antonio Iniesta, pronounced than in some other European nations. In fact, in the 2011 survey from the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, only around 11% of Spaniards identified immigration as one of the most important problems affecting Spaniards today. (“Barómetro de Septiembre, Avance de Resultados, Estudio No. 2911.” Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. 3. http://www.elpais.com/elpaismedia/ ultimahora/media/201110/04/espana/20111004elpepunac_1_Pes_PDF.pdf.) 37 Patricia Izquierdo Iranzo, “Representación de la raza en la publicidad: análisis de ‘El país semanal’, 1997-2003,” Diss. (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2004), 6. 38 Hal Foster, “Readings in Cultural Resistance,” Recodings: Art, Spectacle, and Cultural Politics, (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985) 169. 39 “¿Racismo en las imágenes?”, EduAlter: Red de recursos en educación para la paz, el desarrollo y la interculturalidad, http://www.edualter.org/material/ racisme.htm; Ángela María Da Silva Gomes, “Educación antirracista e interculturalidad,” Cuadernos Bakeaz 10 (Aug. 1995): 1-12.

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claimed it is “algo que está intrínsicamente dentro de los españoles” (“something that is intrinsically in Spaniards”).40 Iniesta infers that consuming the icon, which has fully crossed over into the mainstream and is now an integral part of Spanish identity, is almost as important as consuming the product itself. The metaphors of consumption analyzed in the ads for Conguitos, Bitter Cinzano Soda, and Magnum Ice Cream implicitly express this same desire for possession of the Other, though this drive is represented in terms of colonial or sexual conquests in the commercials. When a culturally-appropriated icon becomes fully consumed by Spanish culture, as is the case with the Conguitos icon which has lived for over 50 years in the popular Spanish imagination, at what point does the original meaning behind the name and icon cease to be relevant? Do culturally (mis)appropriated icons have a statute of limitation? How would one avoid crossing the line between cultural appropriation and misappropriation? Should the context in which a cultural icon is produced require us to judge it differently than if we take it purely at face value and examine its ideological substrates? These are just some of the questions that arise as we consider the implications of metaphorically consuming the identity of the Other and absorbing it into the corpus of Spanish society.

40 “Puro chocolate con cuerpo de cacahuete,” El diario de Teruel, 12 Dec. 2010, http://www.diariodeteruel.es/aragon/7572-puro-chocolate-con-cuerpo-decacahuete.html.

CHAPTER SIX MESTIZAJE REVISITED: CHERRÍE MORAGA, MIXTURE AND POSTPOSITIVIST REALISTS VICTORIA BOLF LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO Preface I begin this essay on a personal note, not because I believe that it alone necessarily illustrates anything about a wider experience of identity, but because it will be useful to the reader to know where I come from and what my investments are. My three sisters married Louisiana Creole/Mexican, Mexican, and Mexican American men, respectively. My nieces and nephews—even within the same immediate family—range in complexion from dark brown skin and black hair and eyes to fair skin with blonde hair and blue eyes. My father remarried a light-skinned, workingclass immigrant woman from Sinaloa, Mexico, and my younger half sisters from that remarriage also embody a range of skin tones. I do not recite these tidbits about my family to invite comparison with someone like Cherríe Moraga, which I realize is a danger of beginning this way. Instead, I bring these things up to illuminate the ways that even a relatively privileged white family like mine, and even a relatively privileged white experience like mine, can include mixture and identity formations not accounted for in the dominant narrative of race and nationality in our country. Some of my family members are “literally” mestizo: my stepmother, for example, and my nephew’s father. Yet whether we are mestizo or not, mestizaje1 is the reality with which all of us 1

The word mestiza/o dates from the Spanish colonial casta system in Latin America, in which context it denoted a person who has one indigenous parent and one European parent; later it would refer to indigenous and European mixture more generally. In 1920s Mexico, the idea of a mestizo populace represented the

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live. It is, for us and for many other “Anglo” families, a fact of life. But how does one answer the “What are you?” question if none of the conventional answers is entirely accurate? Where is the theory or movement that incorporates this experience? These questions about my family are no doubt a large part of the impetus to do what I do in this paper. First, I read Moraga in light of some of her statements about mestizaje and mixture, focusing on her references to her nieces and nephews and son. As these references are few, they can fly under the radar in interpretation of Moraga’s work, but I argue that they are key to understanding the consequences of Moraga’s vision for the future. I then respond to Paula Moya’s postpositivist realist reading of Moraga. I agree with and build upon Moya’s insight that individual experience cannot be discounted or generalized in readings of Chicana/o2 literature, but I expand her linguistic analysis of certain terms in order to open up application of postpositivist realism more generally. Finally, I propose an expansion of identity categories that relies on the notion of mestizaje in order to cover the lived realities of people who cannot or do not “choose” one identity category over another.

Cherríe Moraga, Indigenismo, and the Next Generation There is no denying the biting power of many of Moraga’s critiques of US racial and sexual politics. With Gloria Anzaldúa and other Chicana feminists, Moraga has changed the way scholars think about Chicana/o studies. Her self-reflexive identity formation, evidenced throughout her books, has endeared her work to postmodernists and postpositivist realists alike. Indeed, Moraga, with others, has “changed the rules for evidence gathering, challenged ideas of chronology, and discarded that which has passed as ‘history,’” as Suzanne Bost says in Encarnación.3 Yet even as opportunity for national unity through synthesis of European and indigenous cultures; the Chicano movement of the 1960s also deployed the notion of the “bronze race,” emphasizing Mexican Americans’ indigenous roots. Chicana writer Gloría Anzaldúa in her 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera uses the term to theorize a mestiza consciousness—“una conciencia de mujer,” a woman consciousness. Although mestiza/o still denotes a specific racial mixture (European & indigenous) and can be contrasted with other types of mixture (for example, mulata/o), the word mestizaje (that is, the state of being mestiza/o) can sometimes be more generally applied, especially in Latin America, as a sort of umbrella term covering many kinds of racial mixture. 2 “Chicano/a” is used here and elsewhere to mean a politically aware person of Mexican descent living in the United States. 3 Suzanne Bost, Encarnación (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 48-9.

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Moraga’s work provides an alternative to “patriarchal and imperialist capitalism,”4 a close reading reveals that when discussing racial, cultural, and sometimes sexual identity categories, the work reinforces values that it elsewhere mistrusts. These identity categories are then reified as a “choice” one must make; the forced choice becomes problematic not because there is not value in reaffirming and highlighting what has historically been rejected and denied, but because there is a risk, in that very affirmation, of rejecting and denying something valuable for the sake of inhabiting a coherent racial or sexual identity. This risk is made most clear in Moraga’s work when she speaks about her nieces and nephews. What’s more, Moraga’s anxiety about the next generation is traceable throughout her oeuvre, from Loving in the War Years to some of her most recent essays. In the first edition of the genre-mixing autobiographical Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983), as well as in This Bridge Called My Back (1981), Cherríe Moraga articulates her position as a lesbian woman of mixed heritage who has chosen to identify with her Chicananess and with her queerness. The Last Generation (1993) explores the author’s Anglo heritage in some of its essays, but also contains strong statements of identification with at least some aspects of Chicano cultural nationalism. Finally, in the additions to the second edition of Loving in the War Years (2000; hereafter “A Flor de Labios”) and in “Indígena as Scribe: The (W)rite to Remember” (2004), Moraga is fully identified with what she figures as her indigenous roots, which means disavowal of her whiteness. Though there are clearly commonalities between all of Moraga’s works, “A Flor de Labios” clearly belongs in spirit with “Indígena as Scribe” rather than, say, “La Güera” or “Long Line of Vendidas,” both from the first edition of Loving. Some scholars, including Suzanne Bost, argue that the indigenismo so much more strongly articulated in Moraga’s later work represents a “resistant stance and…selfreflexive defiance of history[,] expos[ing] deliberate mediation rather than passive genetic inheritance.”5 I argue, however, that while indigenismo may be an intentional form of resistance, it can have both positive and negative consequences for the way we think about identity. In “Queer Aztlán,” an essay in The Last Generation, Moraga critiques Chicano nationalism for lacking a place for its jotería, or queerness/queer folk. “Chicano nation is a mestizo nation conceived in a double-rape: first, by the Spanish and then by the Gringo,” she declares.6 The notion of 4

Ibid., 45 Ibid., 41. 6 Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 152-53. 5

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“mestizo nation” is important: it was foundational for the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, who deployed it in order to affirm Chicanos’ connection to indigenous Americans. (“Mestizo” has also often been used to elide or downplay the indigenous heritage of Mexicans, as the Chicano movement recognized.) Moraga explores the concept of mestizaje further, relating the experience of being considered (on “birth certificates”) as white, yet treated as “colored.”7 She also discusses the “forced…denial” of indigenous roots that centuries of discrimination, first Spanish and then Anglo, have enforced.8 For Moraga, this “denial” continues in the repression of queerness within the Movement: the title of the essay, “Queer Aztlán,” alludes to one of the foundational documents of the Chicano movement, “El Plan Espirituál de Aztlán” (“The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán,” the imagined Chicano homeland). Although Moraga is certainly aware of “the dangers of nationalism as a strategy for political change,” the discussions of “Chicano nation” in “Queer Aztlán” reveal her anxiety that the next generations of Chicanas/os won’t be Chicana/o enough (a thread that also runs through “A Flor de Labios”).9 In most ways in “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga seems to be advocating nationalism as something around which to organize: “I cling to the word ‘nation’ because without the specific naming of the nation, the nation will be lost (as when feminism is reduced to humanism, the woman is surrendered). Let us retain our radical naming but expand it to meet a broader and wiser revolution.”10 It is fair to be wary of the potential erasure of particularity that a relinquishing of “Chicano nation” could introduce, and Moraga’s call to broaden the inclusion of “Chicano nation” to include the “full range of racial diversities, human sexualities, and expressions of gender,” is admirable. Yet it is unclear whether the “full range of racial diversities” refers merely to the range of skin tones typical of Mexican mestizaje or whether this is a gesture towards inclusion of all the Southwest’s current diversity, including African-American, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, and Japanese communities, all of which also have long histories in the region.11 In fact, Moraga’s reiteration that “it was [Chicanos’] Indian blood…that made [them] rightful inheritors of Aztlán” leaves very little room for inhabiting any space but one side of an Anglo/Chicano binary.12 7

Ibid., 153. Ibid. 9 Ibid., 149. 10 Ibid., 150. 11 Ibid., 164. 12 Ibid., 154. 8

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As the essay continues, it becomes clear that, for Moraga, a vibrant “Chicano nation” is intimately and complexly connected to the perpetuation not just of Chicana/o political consciousness, but of Raza itself. Early in “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga discusses the supposed “deadness” of the Chicano Movement. “Were immigration from Mexico to stop, they say, Chicanos could be virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the population within a few generations. My nieces and nephews are living testimony of these faceless facts.”13 Presumably, the lack of “Spanish fluency” as well as intermarriage with “non-Chicanos” is what makes the third generation “indistinguishable” from the “rest of the population”— that is, the rest of the white population, if Moraga’s nieces and nephews demonstrate these statements’ truth.14 Moraga goes on to “mourn the dissolution of an active Chicano movement,” concluding that El Movimiento is not dead but underground, “awaiting resurrection in a ‘queerer,’ more feminist generation.” 15 Where do these Chicanos and Chicanas who intermarry, lose their Spanish, move out of the barrio, and have blond, blue-eyed children go? What do they do, and why does Moraga discount them as no longer Chicano? Part of the reason is probably related to a lack of radical politicization in these groups, but it also has to do with what Moraga sees as a dilution of indigenous roots—particularly when this heritage is readable on the body in the form of dark skin and “indio” features. Later in Queer Aztlán,” Moraga claims that “[a] new generation of future Chicanos arrives everyday with every Mexican immigrant.”16 For Moraga, it seems, be(com)ing Chicana/o is more easily achieved when one has dark skin, speaks Spanish, and has first-hand experience of “barrio” life. While these things do of course contribute to a political consciousness and to identification with the Chicano Movement, it seems curious to ignore the generation who does not have this experience, but whose parents come from it. It fetishizes some aspects of Mexican American experience and ignores others. The fetishization of indigenous-looking, Spanish-speaking aspects of Chicano identities continues in “A Flor de Labios.” Moraga, now the mother of a boy whose father she chose for his “dark beauty”17 relates her struggles to find an appropriate school for her son. “Three times in the same conversation, my [five-year-old] son explains his difference from 13

Ibid.,148. Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.,155. 17 Cherríe Moraga, Waiting in the Wings (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1997), 39. 14

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other kids [in his private after school program] by referring to himself as “Black” because in his kindergarten, “not-white means Black” Moraga says.18 One sentence later, she is “on the phone politicking to get [her] son transferred out of [their] neighborhood school, not to separate him from Blackness, but to situate him in Latinidad…”19 However, when she finally does “manage” to get Rafael transferred to “a Latino elementary school,” she finds that it is severely underfunded (after a month, her son is “still without books, in a classroom with no windows, speaking English”).20 Moraga takes him out of that school as well. “I was humbled by the process,” she says, “realizing the Chicano school I sought for my son no longer existed,” concluding that “the only way you can ‘stay Latino’ in the state of California…is to ‘stay poor,’” since transferring Rafael to a wellfunded, middle-class school would take him out of the majority-Latino milieu Moraga is trying to create for him.21 While Moraga’s concerns about her son’s education are certainly justified, the whole ordeal reveals that, for Moraga, there is something inherently beneficial in the presence of “real” Latinos—not the other middle class kids, some of whom may also be second- or third-generation Latinos, like her son. Undoubtedly, there is indeed something beneficial in knowing that one is not alone and being able to become friends with others like oneself, but I question whether her son’s identity formation will be as adversely affected as she assumes by a peer group without a Chicano majority. Her attitude here begs several questions: Can identity be formed not just in identification with but sometimes also in opposition to the group around one—whether it be family, school peers, or sports teammates? What is the difference between complete separatism in theory (about which Moraga expresses doubts22) and what amounts to a desire in practice for as much separation as possible? If Moraga’s assertion, born of her negative experiences with the schools, that to “‘stay Latino’ in the state of California…is to ‘stay poor’” is true, then what exactly is it to “stay Latino”? Part of the answer to this last question may be found in Moraga’s indigenismo. Throughout “A Flor de Labios,” “Indígena as Scribe,” and to a lesser extent in The Last Generation, she clearly and purposefully identifies with the indigenous part of her Mexican background, consistent 18

Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), 182. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 183. 22 Moraga, Last, 149.

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with her claim in “Queer Aztlán” that Chicanos are “rightful inheritors to Aztlán” because of “our Indian blood and history of resistance against both Spanish and Anglo invaders.” Earlier in The Last Generation, Moraga declares: We [people of color] must learn to see ourselves less as US citizens and more as members of a larger world community composed of many nations of people and no longer give credence to the geopolitical borders that have divided us, Chicano from Mexicano, Filipino-American from Pacific Islander, African-American from Haitian. Call it racial memory. Call it shared economic discrimination. Chicanos call it ‘Raza,’—be it Quichua, Cubano, or Colombiano—an identity that dissolves borders.23

“Raza” here is specific to Latina/o experience, but represents the “racial memory” that all nonwhites can tap into as a source of solidarity with each other. Even as this paragraph gestures towards inclusivity, however, it reinforces the racial categories of the dominant society that Moraga urges people of color to resist. Though Moraga claims “Raza” is an identity that dissolves borders,” her own list of racial pairs maintains the racial “borders” of contemporary US society; the Raza dissolves borders among those already identified as the same “race” (Chicano/Mexican, Filipino-American/Pacific Islander, AfricanAmerican/Haitian) but not between those racial groups (which are as arbitrary, in their own way, as the national identifications “Raza” is supposed to dissolve). One of the main problems with this figuration is that it leaves very little room for racial diversity within the Chicano Movement. It may seem that I am making an unfair assertion about Moraga here; she does, after all, mention at least twice in The Last Generation the African and European parts of mestizaje.24 Yet both of these references hearken back to colonial conceptions of race and colonial-era mixtures. In Moraga’s figuration, contemporary Chicanas/os have separate “racial memories” from contemporary African-Americans and Asian-Americans, as we saw above (and Europeans may not have any racial memories, for all that they are mentioned). Yet if Moraga can critique the original Chicano nationalism’s selective use of Aztec and indigenous culture to support a patriarchal structure, why must she remain faithful to Chicano nationalism’s figuration of racial mestizaje? Which is the “racial memory” of Latinas/os of African descent: indigenous American or African? Is there 23 24

Ibid., 62. Ibid., 57, 153.

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no European racial memory? And why doesn’t it play a part in the mestiza’s racial memory? Part of the answer is obvious: as Bost says in the quotation above, indigenismo is not about “passive genetic inheritance.”25 It is not “passive,” certainly, but it is about blood—ties of blood, the blood running in one’s veins. Moraga jokes in “Queer Aztlán” that “Chicanos are usually the most Indian-looking people in a room full of ‘skins,’” and can “claim, through physical traits alone…Native blood,” which in turn authorizes their claims to Aztlán and their indigenismo.26 Further, in one of the footnotes to “A Flor de Labios,” Moraga discusses her feelings on queer/lesbian co-parenting, expressing deep reservations about the “political” implications of white women adopting “the children that poor women have been forced to discard” because it often deprives the child of his or her “primary biological connection to his or her mother.”27 Clearly, one strand of her genetic inheritance matters to Moraga, very deeply. As we see in Moraga’s own family, however (not to mention my own family), this conception of “race” makes categories like “Latina/o” and perhaps even “Chicana/o” overly rigid. This rigidity is especially apparent in the references Moraga makes to her sister’s children. Though they are few, they are telling of the kind of conundrum Moraga’s expression of indigenismo can create. In the introduction to The Last Generation, Moraga paints a family Christmas scene: her blue-eyed niece performs “a two-and-a-half-year-old version of Jingle Bells for her tamales-fed [sic], sleepy-from-too-much-beer-and-kids audience,” then demands applause.28 The niece, according to Moraga, is her white grandfather’s grandchild: “There is no sign of la Mexicana, her grandmother, having entered the picture.”29 The introduction ends with Moraga’s reflection that she is the only one in the family who does not “ignore” its “disintegration.”30 We are not told exactly how the family is disintegrating even as it “increases in number” and gathers for holidays, but the implication is that it is connected to the death of “our Mexican grandmother of ninety-six years” and the presence of this Anglo-looking niece.31 “I am the last generation put on this planet to remember and record,” Moraga declares.32 25

Bost, 41. Moraga, Last, 165-166, my italics. 27 Moraga, Loving, 225-26. n.6 28 Moraga, Last, 9. 29 Ibid., 8. 30 Ibid., 9. 31 Ibid., 32 Ibid. 26

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In “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga speaks of the “ghost” of el Movimiento, “haunt[ing her] daily in the blonde hair of [her] sister’s children.33 In “A Flor de Labios,” Moraga figures her mother is upset about her “grandchildren foreign-blonde and too-often remote.”34 Apparently, for Moraga, the white-looking grandchildren of Anglo/Chicano mixture represent the death of Chicano culture (“foreign-blonde”) and the dissolving of close intergenerational familial bonds (“too-often remote”). The reason this is problematic is because it draws a line in the sand, as it were, demarcating the precise boundaries of who is too mixed to be considered (potentially) Chicana/o and who is not. As far as Moraga is concerned, her sister’s children are white, not mestizo, and as such, cannot carry forward Mexican identity in the family. But who is to say that, even if they are raised to identify as white, as Moraga was, these nieces and nephews will not come to identify with their Mexicanness at some point? In Moraga’s figuration, whiteness is a dominating genetic trait, obliterating “la Mexicana” and paradoxically preventing a priori the kind of rediscovery of one’s roots that she herself went through. What Moraga’s search for an appropriate elementary school for her son and her mourning over the death of the Chicano Movement (symbolized by her nieces’ and nephews’ complexions) have in common is that they deal with the next generation of people who have the potential to think of themselves as Mexican, Mexican American, Chicana/o, or mestiza/o. Moraga’s disappointment in her siblings’ children manifests itself as intense anxiety about her son’s cultural milieu. To the end of securing the desired environment for him, she is even willing to leave her white partner of eight years, who has helped her raise her son. What this disappointment and anxiety point to is a desire not only to pin down definitions of Latina/o and Chicana/o identity for herself, but to pin down definitions of those terms for the next generation as well. The problem is that Moraga’s definitions force a choice in terms that may or may not reflect the lived experience of her son and his peers. Like her own generation’s break from its parents’ mode of thought, the next generation may not agree with her on every—or many, or any—of her views on what it means to be Latina/o or Chicana/o.

33 34

Ibid., 148. Moraga, Loving, 200.

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Moraga as Example Paula M.L. Moya’s Learning From Experience outlines a theory of postpositivist realism, using Cherríe Moraga as one of its main examples of the utility of the theory. “The realist proposal,” she says, “is that the truth of different theories about the world can be evaluated comparatively by seeing how accurately they refer to real features of the world.”35 A postpositivist realism, therefore, does not propose that we can arrive at an absolute truth or final knowledge about the world (which would be a naïve positivism), but neither does it accede to the postmodernist claim that all identity is fractured and that “the relationship between identities and the ‘real’ or ‘material realm’ is arbitrary.”36 Moya suggests that a “reconstructed universalist justification for the kind of work being done by myself and other ethnic studies scholars” is not only desirable, but necessary.37 She continues, “while the experiences of Chicanas/os are admittedly subjective and particular, the knowledge that is gained from a focused study of their lives can have general implications for all Americans.”38 In response to criticisms from “neoconservative minorities,” Moya asks a series of questions: “Does a focus on particular lives preclude the production of a more general knowledge? Does paying attention to racial identities always obscure our universal humanity? Or is it possible to understand the concept of identity in a complex enough way so that an understanding of our particularity contributes to an understanding of the way in which we are all universally human?”39 She goes on to clarify that, for a postpositivist realist, unlike for a postmodernist critic of identity, “objectivity…[is] an ideal of inquiry”; that is, she acknowledges with postmodernists that “pure” or complete objectivity may be impossible to achieve, but that “a theory-mediated objective knowledge is both possible and desirable.”40 Postmodernists, she argues, are “hard-pressed to justify their theoretical and normative commitments” whereas the postpositivist realist stance can appeal to “a normative conception of the human good” since it accepts that objective inquiry, subject to revision and scrutiny, can and should be practiced.41 35

Paula Moya, Learning from Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press,2002), 28. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Ibid., 2. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 5-6. 40 Ibid., 15, 14. 41 Ibid., 15.

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Moya is right when she says that “[w]e do not need to see these categories [of identity] as uncontestable or absolutely fixed to acknowledge their ontological status,” but that we must realize that these categories “have real material effects and that these effects are systemic, not random.”42 Moraga’s work demonstrates both an internal tension (that is, within a single work, such as The Last Generation) and an evolving mode of thought from her earliest writings (Bridge and Loving) to her latest ones (“A Flor de Labios” and “Indígena as Scribe”). In other words, Moraga’s inconsistencies are partially a result of her attention to different aspects of her identity, such as race and sex, as Moya argues. But crucially, they are a result of her intensifying articulation of indigenismo, which is in some ways a closing off of certain aspects of her identity, such as her whiteness. For Moya, as for Moraga, racial or ethnic mixture is figured as loss of particularity rather than an expansion, as we see in her discussion of the terms “Chicana,” “Mexican American” and “Hispanic.” Moya defines “Chicana” as “a politically aware woman of Mexican heritage who is at least partially descended from the indigenous people of Mesoamerica and who was born and/or raised in the United States.”43 So far, so good. She then goes on to claim that identifying as a “Mexican American,” while technically accurate, “implies a structural equivalence with other ethnic Americans (Italian Americans, German Americans, African Americans, etc.) that erases the differential social, political and economic relations that obtain for different groups.”44 But why should it be so that saying “Mexican American” erases anything? While television anchors and (white) pop cultural understanding of “hyphenated Americans” may erase the differences between such Americans, that is not the fault of the terms themselves, which can do as much to particularize as they can to homogenize. While Moya accounts for the different ways “woman” and “Chicana/o” affect a given individual’s identity formation, she does not address something like “woman,” “Anglo in-laws,” “Chicano uncle,” and “lesbian.” If it seems like postpositivist realism could do what I say Moya does not do, that is because it can: “When I speak of postpositivist realism in this book, I am referring to an epistemological position and political vision,” Moya says, “…[that is] developing an alternative to the reductionism and inadequacy of essentialist and postmodernist approaches 42

Ibid., 44-45. Ibid., 42. 44 Ibid., 43. 43

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to identity.”45 The fact that a theorist’s articulation of a theory may be an important and necessary improvement on what came before does not mean that it cannot be expanded. Indeed, the ability to build on a theory probably indicates its strength rather than weakness. One of the ways Moya’s excellent articulation of postpositivist realism could be expanded would be to allow not only the intersection of “established” identity categories, but to allow for unusual, unconventional, or new expressions of identity that mix, for example, not just “race” and “gender” but “race” and “race,” or “gender” and “gender,” or “step-family’s class-status” and “biological mother’s class-status.” Learning From Experience is an important book, and of course, I benefit greatly from being able to build on Moya’s and others’ work. Maybe, however, it is time for a new configuration of how we draw the boundaries of identity in the academy.

Mestizaje As Identity: A Possible Way Forward I have always hated the terms ‘biracial’ and ‘bisexual.’ They are passive terms, without political bite. They don’t choose. They don’t make a decision. They are a declaration not of identity, but of biology, of sexual practice. They say nothing about where one really stands. And as long as injustice prevails, we do not have the luxury of calling ourselves either.46 But as metaphors, are [“hybridity” and “mestisaje”] brave enough to counter the insidiousness of the United States project of global empire, whose cultural agenda is to erase our awareness of the bitter realities of social difference? Do the terms not assume and succumb to the loss of our aboriginality, with no hope for recuperation?47

One of the clearest things to me about the quotations above is that, in both, Moraga figures mixture as dilution rather than reinforcement. At the end of “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga advocates “invent[ing] new ways of making culture, making tribe.”48 By the time of writing “Indígena as Scribe” and “A Flor de Labios,” however, the “new ways” (plural) have been reduced to a new way (singular), which is also, for Moraga, the oldest way—the way of pre-Columbian indigenous Americans. Even within The Last Generation, however, Moraga’s uneasiness with ambiguous loyalties is apparent. In the first passage above, the solution to the dilemma of biracial and bisexual identity is not in imagining a new 45

Ibid., 27. Moraga, Last, 126. 47 Cherríe Moraga, “Indígena As Scribe: The (W)rite to Remember” in A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (Durham: Duke University press, 2011) 87. 48 Moraga, Last, 174. 46

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kind of identity, but in choosing one of the pre-existing identities on offer in the world. In the second passage, drawing from or even acknowledging Spanish/European ancestry is already to deny the indigenous “without hope of recuperation.” But this seems to me like a failure of imagination. Mestizaje is a lived reality. It is not always experienced as negative, and in a more just society, it would not need to lead to the privileging of one category over another. Indeed, it does not always do so now. Moraga’s conception of race, seen as it is through her particular brand of indigenismo, is not the only way to imagine it—indeed, it seems to me to be one of the more stultifying ways to conceive of it. One sees the incoherencies, the thread unraveling, in Moraga’s discussion of the next generation of her family, as I discuss above, and in the persistent way that brown skin becomes synonymous with depth and richness, while pale skin—like hers and her white family members’—is something worse than neutral or absent; it is “beige,” vampiric, “weak-kneed.”49 Privilege, of course, exists, and that privilege is often tied to “social identities,” as Linda Martín Alcoff puts it in Visible Identities, including (but not limited to) skin color. But it seems less than productive to force a “choice,” as Moraga says, between two identities. For Moraga, the choice is directly linked to privilege and affirmation of the status quo; there is no redemption in identifying as Anglo. The problem this creates manifests itself in deep-seated anxiety over her son and her apparent disappointment in her siblings’ children, as well as her own pity for and eventual silencing of her white family. I would like to propose another way of discussing identity, akin (and indebted) to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of the “new mestiza” articulated in Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa also advocates mestizaje as a source of strength rather than weakness, and her idea of mestizaje extends not just to racial identity but to “consciousness” itself: the “new mestiza” possesses advantages in social and spiritual perception that others do not. Like Moraga, Anzaldúa has often been taken as a sort of “token” postmodern Chicana, and I want to avoid setting her up as “the” example that proves that what I am saying is valid. Like Anzaldúa, however, I believe mestizaje, and mixture more generally, can be a source of strength. Unlike Anzaldúa, I want to expand our theorization of mestizaje considerably, from the single mixed-race individual to the whole nexus of relationships that such an individual forges or is born into during a lifetime. All of those people—“monoracial” (for lack of a better term) or not—are implicated in 49 Ibid., 70, 102-03. For a further discussion and queer reading of Moraga’s figuration os skin color and shame, see Sandra K. Soto’s “Cherríe Moraga’s Going Brown: ‘Reading Like a Queer.’”

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the mestizaje of that individual. We should make space for different kinds of hybridity and mestizaje while recognizing that not all mixtures have the same result; not all elements mix in the same way. It seems productive to me to begin to account not just for blood ties, but for ties of marriage, remarriage, adoption, fostering, and other less conventional family ties that can help shape a person’s conception of self and place in the world, listening carefully to people’s own articulations of their identity, especially, as Eve Sedgwick urges, when those identifications go against the grain.50 Though often Moraga is eloquent and insightful in her critique of (hetero)sexism and racism, there is a rigidity in her stance, especially regarding her son and nieces, that I see as a detriment. What a theory of identity might do, instead of mandating allegiance to a certain way of thinking about oneself and the collective one belongs to, is provide for the inevitable change in outlook and further knowledge that will come with a new generation of thinkers and experiences of the world. Instead of defining absolutely, we might instead define provisionally, with an eye toward open construction of identities. Instead of defining mixed people as sell-outs by default, or isolating them from those we perceive as “different” from them, we might allow them the freedom to stake out alliances and oppositions that make sense to them, that dove-tail with their own experience. Postpositivist realism can help provide the framework for such freedom of choice. Moya argues that people have different experiences in the world based on which aspect of their identity is emphasized. I contend that it is just as crucial to recognize the ways identity can be multiple even within the same “category,” like race. Much work remains to be done on the concept of mixture: racial, ethnic, sexual. For in spite of Moraga’s disdain for the terms “bisexual” and “biracial,” many people do in fact identify as mixed-race, bisexual, multiracial, multicultural, etc., even as the dominant culture identifies them as one thing or the other (“African American,” “Asian,” “straight,” “gay,” “male”), and even as mixed individuals themselves may find it easier to identify more strongly with one thing rather than another in different contexts. Rather than assuming that people who do not wish to choose one aspect of their identity over another are attempting to appropriate the privilege of the dominant group or somehow selling out on the more marginal group, we might honor their embodiment of their own identity, and work to make it easier to inhabit a provisional, shifting, multiple identity. 50

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 26-27.

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I realize that my articulation of a “new” or expanded notion of identity formation leaves it open to critique as politically useless or even politically counterproductive. After all, social inequality does still often follow racial, ethnic, sexual, and class demographic lines, does it not? If identities are not to be defined according to certain criteria with clear boundaries around them, then how can anyone organize for anything? My answer is that though the political implications of this argument are indeed a concern, the danger has less to do with the terms themselves than with the people deploying them. As I discussed above in my critique of Moya’s analysis of hyphenated identities, identification with multiple cultures, races, or even genders does not have to mean that one has no loyalty to either (or any) of them. Instead it can be the source of a productive sense of dissonance: as Moraga herself demonstrates in her persistent racing of her sexuality, multiple identifications can lead to a constructive critique of the status quo, even of a minority, oppressed group. Therefore, if our energies are directed towards imagining and embodying categories that reflect a multiplicity of experience, we may go a long way toward halting some of the more pernicious effects of the categories we already use. “Strongly felt identities do not necessarily lead to separatism,”51 and multiple stronglyfelt identities will not necessarily lead to a battle to the death between them in the psyche of the “mixed” person if we are willing to imagine identities that embody such mixture. It should be possible both to want to work for justice and equality in the world and to entertain the notion of mestizaje within the same person and to talk about the ways that mixture influences society, and not just the mixed individual. If what Moraga says in The Last Generation is true— that more and more Americans will be born of parents of distinct races52— then it would behoove us not just to tell those children where they come from, but to attend closely to where they say they are going.

51

Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 41. 52 Moraga, Last, 128.

CHAPTER SEVEN A MULTI-FACETED EXPERIENCE OF THE OTHER IN MICHEL OCELOT’S FAIRYTALE, AZUR & ASMAR: THE PRINCES’ QUEST NINA TUCCI UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON

The overwhelming endorsement given to Michel Ocelot’s fourth animated film, Azur & Asmar: the Princes’ Quest, at the Directors’ Fortnight of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival forged a glowing trajectory of success in his homeland and abroad. The tale of the film is cast in the mold of a fairytale, and as befits the genre, the viewer is relocated to another time and space: in this case, the medieval worlds of Europe and the Maghreb countries of Africa. In a lengthy interview concerning his work, Ocelot explains his predilection for fairytale form: “I like fantasy and my language is the fairytale. I can do anything with fairytales. I want two things. One is to tell . . . important things, things I believe in. The other is to enchant . . . to give . . . pleasure, to offer . . . beauty. With fairytales I can have the message AND the pleasure. And I am totally free.1” Elsewhere, Ocelot elaborates on the form that he has chosen to assume the burden of the “important things” he believes in: “I play with balls that innumerable jugglers have already used for centuries. These balls, passed down from hand to hand, are not new. But today I’m doing the juggling.”2 Ocelot’s important statement suggests: that fairytale motifs are ancient and belong to the reservoir of stories that humankind tells about itself; that 1

Michel Ocelot, interviewed by Peter van der Lugt, http://ghibliworld.com/michelocelot-interview.html. 8. 2 Sébastien Bazou, “Princes et princesses: Les contes de fées revisités (author’s translation) (http://www.artefake.com/spip.php?article125), 2.

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they reappear over and over again worldwide; that they are modified by the storyteller to reflect the spirit of the times. The filmmaker’s belief in the suppleness of the human psyche to constantly renew its stories is echoed by C. G. Jung, the renowned Swiss psychologist, who thought of fairytales as “stories, representative of the collective unconscious, emerging from historic and pre-historic times . . . [which] display similar motifs discovered in widely separated places . . . at different periods . . . and that these stories developed around archetypal themes of the human psyche.”3 Marie Louise von Franz, the Jungian scholar who fleshed out Jung’s theory, adds that “fairytales endeavor to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a psychic fact so complex and far-reaching, and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects, that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician’s variations are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness. . . . This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic totality of an individual. . . .”4 In the trove of archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious, each archetype represents “a specific psychic impulse, producing its effect like a single ray of radiation, and at the same time a whole magnetic field expanding in all directions. Thus the stream of psychic energy of a ‘system,’ an archetype, actually runs through all other archetypes as well.”5 Each tale, then, strives to shine a partial light of consciousness on the immense and inexhaustible story of the human psyche. Indeed, for Jung instructs us that archetypes can be “constellated” by a specific “situation,” which heralds “new forms of assimilation.” Furthermore, the soil in which an archetypal confrontation takes place can produce “highly emotional conditions” and poses an “ethical problem.” Finally, the archetype “is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and takes its color from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.”6 In this study, we will attempt to show how aspects of Jungian psychology can take us beyond the outer form of story to the depths of the perennial problems that plague humankind, which reappear worldwide in different guises at different 3

Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter, Fred Plaut, A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1996), 57 (author’s italics). 4 Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairytales (Spring Publications, University of Dallas, 1978), 1-2. 5 Ibid., 2 (author’s italics). 6 We have culled the various aspects of the archetype from the following source: C. G. Jung, The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) vols. 18, 677: 6, 442: 3, 255: 8, 208.

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times, and which must be readdressed in an original fashion according to time and place. In Ocelot’s tale, the formal elements of the fairytale are immediately recognizable, as will be seen in a summary telling of the story:

Once upon a time, there lived a dark-skinned woman named Jénane, who hailed from a foreign land and culture across the sea, and who with her son, Asmar, lived in the castle of a nobleman in France. Jénane is a nanny to his son, the blond and blue-eyed Azur, and she often delights in telling the milk brothers7 the story of an imprisoned Djinn fairy in her land who awaits her rescue by a hero to whom she will give her hand. As usual, the suitor will have to overcome several obstacles: in this case he will have to find three magic keys that will eventually open the doors that lead to the abode of the imprisoned Djinn fairy in the black mountain. Additionally, he will have to subdue the Simurg bird and the Scarlet Lion who has devoured many a suitor, and if successful, will be led to the black mountain. Once inside the mountain, the hero will be required to overcome another series of hurdles to prove his worth. He who performs all the feats successfully will have access to the inner sanctum where no human foot has ever tread, and will finally have earned the right to stand before the fairy in the hall of 7

“Milk brothers . . . are children breastfed by a woman other than their biological mother, a practice known as Nursing, and once widespread in the developed world, as it is still is in parts of the developing world.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibling, 3.

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In the traditional setting of the fairytale, the hard won prize is usually awarded to one contender. How will Ocelot solve this dilemma? The answer will reveal itself in the “juggling” of his personal, creative agenda. In another commentary on his film, Ocelot shares with us the birthing of his project, which reveals a movement from the general to the particular. “My point of departure was a moral and contemporary one. . . . I thought of the quotidian animosity between citizens of French origin and those of foreign extraction, and . . . at the same time, between the Occident and the Middle East. . . . The images [of the] Maghreb and the Muslim civilization followed. . . . Once I envisaged the France-Maghreb relations, I thought of two foster brothers, each entrenched in a specific mindset — one rich, one poor — then I imagined changing the roles during the denouement of the story.”9 Ocelot goes on to add that once his subject had taken form, his burning desire was to cast it into the mold of the fairytale.10 In Azur & Asmar, this modern “juggler” of an ancient form retools the perennial archetype of the hero by splitting it in two, in itself an archetypal process which John Lash defines as “the archetype of universal duality,”11 so that he might deal with a modern and ethical problem constellated in our times: the pressing need for an acceptance of the Other.12 8

In the Middle Ages, a “Saracen” indicated any person Arab, Turk etc. who professed the religion of Islam. “In the following centuries, the use of the term by Christians was extended to cover Arab tribes in general. . . . The name spread into Western Europe, where . . . it . . . has survived until modern times.” http://www. britannica.com/EBcheched/topic/523863/Saracen, 1. 9 Michelot Ocelot, interviewed by Pascal Pinteau, 12/24/2008, http://www.effetsspeciaux.info/article?id=151, 2, (author’s translation; author’s italics). 10 Ibid. 11 John Lash, Twins and the Double (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 5. 12 von Franz notes that fairytales were found in “Egyptian papyri and stelai, one of the most famous being the two brother-type, Anubis and Bata. It runs absolutely

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From the beginning of the tale, the young brothers, Azur and Asmar, cross over to the culture of the Other, Asmar in the reality of time and space in the West, and Azur through the imagination and only later in the reality of time and space in the actual encounter with Asmar’s culture in the Middle East. In Jungian psychology, the duality of light and dark in the economy of the human psyche, both on the personal and cultural levels, is called the shadow. By shadow, Jung meant “the negative side of the personality, the sum of all the unpleasant qualities [one likes] to hide .”13 This undesired dark aspect of the psyche is usually unconscious and is projected onto the Other. Initially, and according to Ocelot’s plan, the relationship of both siblings is hindered because each stubbornly wears the inherited persona of the superiority of his culture. Each child, still unaware of its consequences, speaks the language of an already molded fragment of the psyche fashioned by collective thought forms, and this unilateral view results in the repression of the Other.14 In their immaturity, they do not yet realize that a one-sided posture requires much energy to uphold and can suppress the development of one’s true personality. As Jung has pointed out: “The greater the tension between the pairs of opposites, the greater will be the energy that comes from them, and the greater the energy, the stronger will be its constellating, attracting power.”15 And yet, winding in and out of the incessant, unbearable bickering between the brothers, in moments of need, one notices a mutual and sincere brotherly attachment, a willingness to come to the aid of the other, which lays the foundation for a future relationship of equality and mutual respect. For the moment, however, Azur has the upper hand because Asmar and his mother live in a culture in which light skin is considered superior and it is the dark-skinned brother who must bear the burden of Azur’s projections. The personal, psychic dissociation from his cultural persona does not come into full consciousness until Azur comes of age and answers the call of destiny, the seeds of which were planted since infancy by the nanny, Jénane. In the land of Jénane, Azur, in a confrontation with a foreign culture, undergoes a total psychological collapse of all previously ingrained concepts of cultural superiority, and eventually will come face to face with his brother, Asmar, who still harbors deep resentment for his treatment in the West. It will be the

parallel to the two brother-type, which one can still collect in all European countries.” von Franz, Interpretation of Fairytales, 3. 13 Jung, vol. 7. 66. 14 Ibid., 157, 297. 15 Ibid., vol. 8, 26.

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searing desire of both brothers to claim the Djinn fairy that brings them together to cleanse the palate of their mutual recriminations. It is not our intention in this study to address the technology of animation that Ocelot used to embody his ideas.16 To continue threading the tapestry of a Jungian apperception of the tale, we will focus on the aspect of animation (a derivative of the Latin verb animare which means “to endow with breath or soul”17) that fashions “pictorial,”18 archetypal figures from the clay of the unconscious, called forth to address a particular task. Early on in the film, Ocelot introduces the viewer to Jénane suckling two infants at her breasts in the castle of a medieval lord. The backdrop, however, of this personal, routine, feminine feeding, endlessly repeated across time and space, is embedded in the eternal, archetypal feminine, who as the Great Mother, has the power to shapeshift into the form appropriate to circumstances at hand. Such an incarnation is Jénane, who, in our opinion, takes the personalistic form of a belittled nanny/mother of color in the West. According to Eric Neumann, Jénane’s “milk giving” would be defined as more than just a feeding: “The Great Goddess as a whole is a symbol of creative life and the parts of her body are not physical organs but numinous symbolic centers of whole spheres of life. . . . For this reason the ‘self representation’ of the Great Goddess, her display of her breasts . . . is [also] a form of divine epiphany.”19 Jénane’s numinous and non-local identity is also revealed, then, by the two breasts that feed and nourish two individuals that straddle two cultures, Azur, the light-skinned, blue-eyed child and the brown-eyed, dark-skinned Asmar. And, from the eternal memory of the stories of mankind, Jénane, as the “Great Container,”20 breathes life into an ever familiar story, the one of the plight of the imprisoned Djinn fairy who awaits her rescue in a faraway land by the hero, but one that will bend to the agenda of the juggler. 16

Ocelot has discussed his methods in several interviews and most amply, e.g., in his interview with Peter van der Lugt. http://www.ghibliworld.com/michel_ocelot_interview.html. cf. also: Thierry Méranger, “Travail d’orfèvre,” Cahiers du cinéma 669 (2011): 81-97. 17 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1986), 85. 18 Eric Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 6. 19 Eric Neumann, 128, (author’s italics). 20 Ibid., 25.

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Jénane’s story fired the imagination of her young charge, Azur, which laid the groundwork for the vocation of the future hero, for long after her departure from the West with her son, Asmar, and during the long years of education befitting a young Western aristocrat, the embers of the fire that she had ignited continued to smolder and nourish his dream. Her internalized voice had never ceased to give energy to his project, a project to which Jung gives psychological meaning and validity. There must be “a certain willingness,” he says, “to give ear to these . . . voices. . . . We can discern in this listening attitude an inward-flowing current of libido, leading towards a still invisible and mysterious goal.”21 The nascent consciousness of a new goal serves to challenge the patriarchal authority of father and culture. For Azur now, the psychic blueprint of the archetypal hero quest, whose ancestry stretches back into time immemorial, has been fully constellated, and the energy (libido) accumulated through the period of his maturation will be transformed into action. After a brief but final, acrimonious encounter with his father, the lord of the castle, Azur finally sets off on a one-pointed personal agenda, to rescue the Djinn fairy across the sea, only to run into the personal exigencies of his creator, who, speaking to the content of his tale, and his work in general, says: “I have a hundred messages all the time. . . Even with a lot of fantasy . . . you have to have something to say behind it.”22 Even so, his “hundred messages” are integrated into the well-trodden, ageless path of the hero-initiate who separates himself from the West and travels East, which in psychological parlance symbolizes the conscious and unconscious, respectively.23 In the story of the hero, the recurrent mode of travel is the familiar night sea journey during which the initiate is usually shipwrecked and cast ashore in an unknown land. Scattered throughout the Collected Works, Jung stresses time and again that the sea is a symbol of the mother image 21

Jung, vol. 5, 172. http://www.ghibliworld.com/michel_ocelot_interview.html 23 Jung, vol. 12, 382. 22

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par excellence. To give an example: “The projection of the mother-imago upon water endows the latter with a number of numinous or magical qualities peculiar to the mother. . . .The maternal aspect of water coincides with the nature of the unconscious, because the latter (particularly in men) can be regarded as the mother or matrix of consciousness.”24 Elsewhere he sums it up: “Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.”25 In the context of Ocelot’s tale, Azur’s unflagging intention to rescue the fairy has activated this unconscious feminine water spirit that, much to his astonishment, dispossesses him of all but his life during his fateful voyage. The positive, archetypal aspect of the Feminine as a vessel of nourishment and protection, to which he had been accustomed as a child, fragments and is compensated by an elemental form of lifethreatening water. Neuman explains that “The ocean is experienced archetypically not only as a mother but also as the devouring primeval water who takes her children back into herself.”26 The good mother, in her capacity of protective vessel, shapeshifts into one of her myriad symbolic forms, a ship to carry her charge to the other shore. She is torn asunder by another aspect of herself, the elementary chthonic power of deep waters.27 The departure and the ensuing passage through the waters of the sea, then, are not immediately cathartic as Fotini Apostolou suggests in his article Cultural Translations: Transcending Boundaries in Michel Ocelot’s Animated Film Azur & Asmar. 28 In this first step of the journey, the destruction of the loving container-mother and immersion in the ferocious waters of the feminine water spirit represents a near-death experience, the breaking apart of Azur’s deeply ingrained, patriarchal values that excluded the feminine and the Other. Jung would say it was a “process of regression, the backward movement of libido (energy)” that has the potential, if successful, “[to raise] the value of contents previously excluded from consciousness.”29 In other words, Azur’s way of being in the world had resulted in a serious case of “soul loss,” that is, a part of his psychic wholeness. Azur, of course, is not yet aware that the winning of the lady’s hand entails fulfilling the complex agenda of the master

24

Ibid., vol. 5, 219. Ibid., vol. 9i, 18-19. 26 Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 257. 27 Ibid., p. 257. 28 Fotini Apostolou, “Cultural Translations: Transcending Boundaries in Michel Ocelot’s Animated Film Azur & Asmar,” Communication, Politics and Culture 42, no. 1 (2009): 96-117. 29 Jung, vol. 8, pp. 33-4. 25

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“juggler,” which Jung and Neumann have identified in the broad strokes of psychological language. After the perilous night sea journey, Azur is cast onto the shores of a foreign land, not the idyllic, welcoming haven of which Jénane had so often spoken as a child, but initially a land of poverty and potential danger to himself. To his amazement, the citizens of this land speak the language of his former nanny, and now those long-forgotten sounds of his childhood re-surface with difficulty, only to inform him that he is a most unwelcome visitor. Even more amazing is the fact that his physical appearance is cause for terror, for these dark-skinned people consider those with blue eyes to be cursed and they assail him physically. With the arrival of Azur on foreign shores, the pendulum swings from West to East. The formal structure of the fairytale dovetails with Ocelot’s agenda. He turns the tables in order to create symmetry between two cultures and to show that poverty, superstition and prejudice are not the province of any one people. Physical danger, coupled with the immediate confrontation of a culture to which he cannot relate, causes a profound psychic disorientation in Azur: he decides to feign blindness. Azur’s decision to close his eyes for personal protection has other more significant ramifications. The transformation of the human psyche is an arduous process, and the enormity of his own dark Western shadow, seen in projection before his very eyes, is more than he can assimilate at the moment. At the same time, however, Azur’s decision bodes well as he enters the early stages of the transformative process. It means that he is willing to sacrifice the staid, cultural imprints of the ego to those possibilities that as yet reside out of consciousness.30 Dropping the lids over the blue eyes slowly begins to inhibit the learned vision of his culture to make space for new ways of seeing. In the annals of the hero’s initiatory journey, the mythologist, Joseph Campbell, would say that Azur has reached the “second stage of the Way, that of the ‘purification of the self,’ when the senses are ‘cleansed and humbled,’ . . . the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of [his] personal past.”31 Azur’s decision to no longer see in the customary way is admirable, but to plunge into the darkness of the unknown without any knowledge of the terrain requires help, as he soon discovers. Fortunately for him, his terrifying experiences with the citizens of the new land are being monitored. 30

Neumann, The Great Mother, 53-4. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 101.

31

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If, indeed, the archetype is anchored in similar, repetitive actions throughout the course of the human adventure, and if this mode of action has become a part of the history of the human psyche, then it would be plausible to say that no novice faces the task alone. He belongs to an ancient family and sits on the shoulders of those who have preceded him. Yet, the journey of each initiate is tailored to the specific tasks at hand, each entering the fray with varying gifts, and each requiring aid accordingly. Campbell informs us that, at the beginning, the aspirant may receive otherworldly aid: “For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure. . . . [and], not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form.”32 Ocelot collapses the fairytale into the hero legend, and vice versa, and from the mixture, fashions a character necessary to the development of his story. In the elite, hero caste, there is a branch of lesser members, whose gifts are not ample enough to bring the chosen task to fruition, but who have not been vanquished by the ordeal. Such an individual is the Westerner, Crapoux, in our opinion a “failed hero” who claims no supramundane powers, but whose twenty years of searching has blazed a partial trail to the faraway abode of the Djinn fairy, and he now stands ready to serve—to the extent of his possibilities. Crapoux is an interesting character, for he sits astride the cultures of the West and the East in varying degrees. He was never able to effect the moral and ethical transformation necessary to carry both cultures equitably in consciousness. The collective Western persona in him continued to stifle the shadow culture and this, in turn, prevented the development of an individuality that could sustain the tension of these opposite cultures, and maintain a respect for the plural voices of both. Jung would say that because the culture of the Other never lost its status as a “psychic minority, that has equal rights,”33 Crapoux’s relationship to the Other remained blurred. On the one hand, his psychic imbalance manifested outwardly in his constant criticism of the dress, food, religion and music of the people; on the other hand, he had developed an affinity for his adopted land during his extended sojourn in search of the fairy, and had never returned home. And obviously, after a similar experience with the curse of the “evil eye,” he had covered his blue eyes with glasses and took to the streets to beg for his living. For Crapoux, the heroic quest had dwindled to a task of mere survival. This, then, is the Crapoux who offers his services to the seemingly blind Azur. It is now Azur’s turn to prove himself worthy of 32 33

Ibid., 69, 72. Jung, vol. 18, 621.

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sitting on the shoulders of an ancient brotherhood of heroes. He accepts shouldering Crapoux, who offers to be his “eyes.”

During the short trek into town that ends with a joyous and unexpected reunion at the home of the now wealthy merchant, Jénane and her son, Asmar, Ocelot manages to seamlessly weave in some of his “hundred messages,” to show that the onus of the biased mind is never the pale of any one culture, for example, the reciprocity of ingrained inter-cultural prejudices. The harsh treatment of Jénane and Asmar at the hands of the French nobleman is replicated in the land of Jénane by its refusal to offer hospitality to Azur on the basis of his appearance. The presence of the Other is ubiquitous, and thorny problems of relationship may also surface in intra-cultural situations. Azur’s clumsiness damages the stands of two merchants from Kabylie, and this, in turn, sparks an angry repartee between them that reveals that all “recent citizens” (to use Ocelot’s language) are not equally adapted to the host country. One merchant complains about the presence of the foreigners to which the other retorts that he too is a foreigner, and furthermore, should speak the language of the land, Arabic.34 Ocelot’s plea for mutual human acceptance runs parallel to the unfolding story of the hero. Having survived the encounter with the 34

For a detailed account of this scene, see: Fotini Apostolou, Cultural Translations, 107-08.

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feminine as an elemental force, Azur has now entered the transformative phase. His rejection of the one-sided, directed vision of his culture had created the psychological space for heretofore dormant senses to awaken. Through the sense of touch and smell, Azur, guided by Crapoux, locates the fiery key and the scented key of which his nanny had so often spoken, two of the three keys that he will need to open the doors in the black mountain that will lead to the Djinn fairy. When chided by Crapoux for the damage he had caused and for not having waited to be properly guided, Azur responds: “It is not when I am guided that I find things.”35 And his joyous reunion with Jénane comes about because he hears and recognizes her voice behind the closed doors of her home. For Jénane, the traumatic separation from Azur had also been a profound experience of “soul loss,” and as for Azur, we interpret the word “soul” to mean a “sense of identity.” 36 Earlier we noted how Jénane had shapeshifted in and out of her human/Great Mother roles, and how from her archetypally derived, pictorial form of Nourisher, she provided insight into both realms. Here we will add that, as Ocelot’s specific incarnation of a Great Mother figure who sits astride the East and the West, Jénane’s very “raison d’être” has been undermined. Jénane is the mother of two sons, and by extension, of two cultures, and the forced separation from Azur had dissociated her from the fullness of her role as Mother/mother, in the archetypal/human sense. Azur’s return, then, is an experience of “soul retrieval,” that is, the splitting of her psychic totality is healed through the reconnection with Azur, and with the culture he represents. In her capacity of Great Mother, she makes it very clear that she stands above all superstition and prejudice, regardless of culture. In response to Azur’s query about the taboo on blue eyes, she cries out angrily: “I know two countries, two tongues, two religions, and so what others know, I know twice over. While others may shrink before eyes that are blue, . . . I press on and I win. So never mention that miserable nonsense about blue eyes again!”37 There is more. This reunion would have been impossible had Azur been vanquished in his test with the primal, ocean Mother. The cache of psychic energy, earmarked for the voyage to free the Djinn fairy, accumulated since childhood, was ample and pure enough to endure the initial trials of the hero journey. Having sustained the initial, customary 35

“The City” Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest, directed by Michel Ocelot (2006: Paris, France: The Weinstein Company: Genius Products), DVD. 36 The New Oxford American Dictionary, New York: The Oxford University Press, 2001, 1628. 37 “The Lost Son,” Azur & Asmar.

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period of deprivation, Azur has now re-earned the spiritual and material support of the benevolent Great Mother, alias, the wealthy Jénane, his nanny of long ago. Ocelot, in the meantime, continues to mold the accoutrements of the fairytale to his personal vision. Through Azur’s intercession, Crapoux, followed by a tenebrous reputation of long standing, is reluctantly accepted into Jénane’s household. She questions the underlying motives that prompt him to escort Azur on his journey, and he, in turn, quells her misgivings with an insightful response tinged with heart-rending nostalgia: “I’m no longer on the road that leads to the Djinn fairy. Azur is. He is the very flame itself. But I can help him, passing on to him what I have learned during my long quest. My life won’t be a failure if Azur succeeds.”38 This first “helping figure” of which Campbell speaks in The Hero with a Thousand Faces will, with Jénane’s permission, join two others who had already long tutored Asmar on the perils of the journey that led to the Djinn fairy: the sage, Yadoa (whose name in Hebrew means ‘sage’) and the princess Shamsous Sabah (whose name in Arabic means ‘morning sun’). Crapoux accompanies Azur to the home of Yadoa. Azur’s utter surprise at hearing Yadoa’s command of the English language in this foreign land allows the old sage to blend personal story with instruction. Putting aside his professional persona, he explains that, as a citizen of the West, he had been persecuted because of his foreign ancestry, and had relocated to Asmar’s land where he was allowed to continue his teaching and research in freedom. Yet again, and in another context, Ocelot slips in the everrecurring theme that disrespect for the Other is not provincial. In preparing Azur for the impending voyage, Yadoa consults a book of fairies, which profiles the physical dangers of the way. Azur must cross “the mountain of ancient cities,” to the black cliff where resides the Djinn fairy; however, Yadoa, not having made the journey, cannot indicate a precise itinerary. Crapoux, on the other hand, draws on his own personal experience of the quest and appoints himself Azur’s personal squire. The book further indicates encounters with bandits, slave traders and other suitors, also possible encounters with the Scarlet Lion or the Simurg bird, known to have devoured many a suitor.39 Upon reaching the black cliff, Azur must find a crack invisible to the naked eye, which opens into an underground world of pitfalls. If successful in overcoming them, he will reach the duplicate doors, one of which will lead to the hall of lights in which resides the imprisoned Djinn fairy. 38

Ibid., (author’s italics). Ocelot explains that he had invented the Scarlet Lion and borrowed the Simurg bird from Persian tales. http://www.effets-speciaux.info/article/id=151, 2. 39

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Azur’s meeting with the princess Shamsous Sabah also yields personal and instructional information. As a spokeswoman for Ocelot’s many concerns, she informs Azur that all the men in her family are dead, either poisoned or killed in war, and that in this patriarchal world, the presence of the feminine presents no threat. She expresses to Azur the need for the intercession of the Djinn fairy in human affairs. In keeping with the magic of the fairytale, she gives Azur amulets that will possibly see him through dangerous moments: a potion of invisibility, a magic feather to appease the Simurg bird and a sweet that allows one to interact with lions. Yet, displaying wisdom beyond her years, the girl-princess reminds Azur that, in the end, these trinkets cannot replace the moral qualities of courage, heart and intelligence needed to accomplish the task. Both suitors, now as humanly informed as is possible of the road to the Djinn fairy, leave at the break of dawn, each determined to follow his own path to his future bride. At the beginning of our story, we defined the antagonism between the two brothers as a shadow problem, the origin of which had not reached consciousness, and therefore, had expressed itself in infantile forms of comparisons and name-calling. As young adults, the persona, or the onesided cultural mask of established values, had hardened on the face of each, forcing the genuine, nuclear personality deeper into darkness. Jénane’s unbridled joy at the reunion with Azur was not shared by Asmar. The reunion rekindles Asmar’s resentment and the unresolved shadow issues that he still carries for his brother, Azur, the representative of a culture that had treated him as the inferior Other and had banished him. The renewed clash of these two antagonistic figures creates the spark of energy needed to propel the story forward. It is Jénane’s material support that takes the quest out of the dream state and launches it into reality. The material underwriting of the journey to the Djinn fairy will, as we shall see, serve to canalize the energy formerly expended on the immature values of boyhood competition. Jung defines the process as a “transfer of psychic intensities or values from one content to another, . . . . [that is] the energy of certain psychological phenomena is converted by suitable means into other dynamisms.”40 It is the nucleus of this moral and ethical behavior long hidden under the weight of cultural precepts that now demands its due, and gives credence to Jung’s notion that the shadow also “contains . . . qualities which [could] . . . vitalize and embellish human existence.”41 Though each brother is single-mindedly intent on winning the hand of the Djinn fairy, it is not within the inherent, moral capacity of either one to win her at the cost of harming the other and this becomes 40 41

Jung, vol. 8, 41. Ibid., vol. 11, 78 (author’s italics).

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evident as the events unfold. Each brother, traveling on different levels of the difficult terrain, stands ready to rescue the other in life-threatening situations. Asmar interrupts his journey to bandage the wound inflicted on Azur by bandits. With the trinkets given to them by the princess, Azur and Asmar seemingly subdue the Scarlet Lion and the Simurg bird, respectively, on their way to the black cliff.

Once inside the mountain, Asmar is mortally wounded by members of his own culture for revealing to Azur the secret of the golden door that leads to the inner sanctum of the Djinn fairy. Azur, at great risk to his life, rescues his brother and moves through the formidable tasks with Asmar on his back. We will recall that Azur had found two of the three keys needed to reach the abode of the Djinn fairy. Without his brother, Azur would have failed in the endeavor, for it is Asmar who had the third key that finally leads the two suitors into the hall of lights where the Djinn fairy is imprisoned. Behind the façade of the heroic, fairytale tasks, does not Ocelot demonstrate through the trials of Azur and Asmar that all individuals, indeed all cultures, are interdependent, and that survival also depends on mutual giving? The moral and ethical metal that was inherent in the young boys of long ago has been subjected to the fires of transformation and they have proved themselves worthy. This doubleedged journey and all the obstacles encountered and endured by both have brought about a maturity and refinement of values. Throughout the entire ordeal, it was a growing mutual dependency and respect for the Other that carried them to victory, and to win the hand of the fairy at the expense of the Other would not have been worthy of either one. Nor, as we shall see, would she have accepted either one. Now standing before the Djinn fairy, Azur pleads for the life of his brother who lies dying at his feet, and who he swears is responsible for his victory. The enchanting intercession of the

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magical comes forth at the command of the Djinn fairy: an elf doctor restores Asmar to life and an elf tailor attires them both in sumptuous dress. To their utter surprise, they are informed that the choice of door was unimportant. It was she who dictated which suitor/s would enter her abode, indicating her disinterest in the others. Obviously, the stereotype of the feminine that automatically acquiesces to the will of the masculine is over.42 This Djinn fairy chose to remain imprisoned until a suitor of her choice appeared. However, the dilemma of the choice between two princes remains. Whom will she choose and who will help her to make the choice? All of the major players of the tale are now brought to the hall of lights by the fabulous Simurg bird to help solve the problem of choice in the following order: Jénane, the princess Shamsous Sabah, Yadoa, and finally, Crapoux. All are equally unsuccessful. Jénane prostrates herself in front of the princess and humbly reveals that they are not princes, to which the Djinn fairy quickly responds: “We know their conduct. They are princes as we understand the word.”43 Her definition of royalty certainly weakens Fontini Apostolou’s critique of the poster of the film in English, which changes the wording of the French poster from Azur & Asmar to Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest. He imputes the change to “an attempt to promote the film on the basis of its adventurous plot and its link to royalty [which] makes it another conventional tale about princes and princesses.”44 As we shall see, Ocelot is merely exchanging royalty of “birth” for the royalty of “soul.” The princess Shamsous Sabah’s immature and perhaps too hasty solution of marrying both Azur and Asmar is immediately rejected. Or is Ocelot, through this youthful mouthpiece, safely criticizing the Muslim practice of plural marriages? Yadoa admits that his wisdom is not capacious enough to yield an answer to the dilemma, and asks that Crapoux be summoned. Crapoux’s suggestion that the impasse be solved in his favor is also immediately discarded on the grounds that only those who have overcome the ordeals are eligible. Finally, the solution comes from within the parentage of the fairy herself. She summons her cousin, the beautiful fair-skinned elf fairy from across the sea who, like the others, does not have the answer but feels that the problem could be solved by taking the time to become acquainted. At the suggestion of the princess Shamsous Sabah, they engage in dance during 42

In an interview with Ocelot, Elodie Leroy comments on the assertiveness of his feminine characters, to which the filmmaker responds: “Yes, I didn’t want my heroines to be decorative figureheads.” http://lci.tfl.fr/cinema/news/Interviewmichel-ocelot-azur-et-asmar-page-4-5011230.html (author’s translation). 43 “The Decision,” Azur & Asmar. 44 Fontini Apostolou, Cultural Translations, 97.

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which she partners with Yadoa, Jénane with Crapoux, the fair-skinned elf fairy with Azur and the Djinn fairy with Asmar. During the course of the dance, the elf-fairy from across the sea, though enjoying the company of Azur, finds herself attracted to Asmar and the Djinn fairy to Azur. There is a re-organization and finally the four couples engage in a joyous dance, which brings the film to an apparent end. It is this apparent typical ending that elicits Fontini Apostolou’s remark that “they probably live happily ever after.”45 He goes on to say that “it is in this Utopia that these misfits can survive. The tale has transported them to this never-never land that knows no borders, no boundaries where they can thrive and enjoy their difference and complimentarity.”46 Is it possible that Ocelot, after creating a film in which fairytale form and pressing, contemporary concerns are so seamlessly interwoven, would succumb to a trite “happily-ever-after” ending? At the beginning of our study, we placed ourselves under the aegis of the Jungian apperception of fairytales as stories that depict “the general human basis.”47 Von Franz instructs, however, that “we must discipline ourselves to chisel sharp outlines, which throw the different aspects [of the tale] into bold relief,” for no one tale can put the light on the entirety of the human experience, which comprises the Self. In the undifferentiated soup of the unconscious, Self and Other are one. It is in the culture-making process, the Jungian, Robert Johnson notes that we cull “out those characteristics that are dangerous to the . . . functioning of our ideals.” But whether we know it or not” he continues, “our psychic twin follows us like a mirror image.”48 The hero myth from the Jungian point of view is “an unconscious drama seen only in projection. . . .”49 Azur and Asmar, then, are recent incarnations of the ancient hero archetype, which in our story overlaps with the twin archetype, and which, for Ocelot, has been constellated by a current situation that exists outside in the world between the French and their Arabic brothers. The coming together of the players of this specific drama at the end of the tale is not an idyllic solution of “happily ever after.” It is rather a gathering of individuals who in the time and space of the twenty-first century have been given the task of coming to terms with a pressing and 45

Ibid., 110 (author’s italics). Ibid., 112-13. 47 Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairytales, 18. 48 Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 5, 16 (author’s italics). 49 Jung, vol. 5, 391. 46

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complex problem, each according to his or her level of consciousness and purpose. Each has become personalized through the imagination and creativity of the creator, who has refashioned them from a bit of the clay of the vast, archetypal human experience. The main players, Azur and Asmar, have gone through the fires of transformation and each can now experience himself both in the capacity of oneness with his ally and in the separateness of his individuality. This means that the dissociation or the doubling of the shadow that had split them into antagonistic figures50 has been bridged because that which was formerly a shadow projection has now been integrated into consciousness. Each experiences his own individuality and the Other simultaneously. Azur no longer carries the unconscious projections of Asmar, and vice versa. The hardened, cultural differentiations in which they were formerly imprisoned have now dissolved, and they can experience and appreciate each other in the truth of who they are, at once equal but different. For both, the success in overcoming the hardships of the Way of the Hero has been a gradual process of “soul retrieval,” and they are now aligned in syzygy, which Jung defines as “the paired opposites, where the One is never separated from the Other, its antithesis. It is a field of personal experience which leads directly to the experience of individuation, the attainment of the self.”51 Azur and Asmar now face each other as equals; they are brothers of a transpersonal human family, not because they have rejected their own “previous values,” but because each has consciously given “equal rights” to the values of the Other.52 A profound inter-personal and intra-personal healing has taken place.

50

Ibid., vol. 9ii, 120. Ibid., vol. 9i, 106. 52 Ibid., vol. 13, 18: vol. 18, 621. 51

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The strata of the human psyche, however, are multiple and interrelated. Earlier we noted that the Djinn fairy’s personal choice of partner indicated a shift in the relationship between the masculine and the feminine. The seeds of this freedom of choice were intrinsic to the fairytale repeated again and again to the two young boys by Jénane, for her task as double mother was not only to lead her charges to a personal and cultural acceptance of the masculine Other. Her over-arching, archetypal vision also included the necessity to release the feminine from cultural expressions of inferiority53 to a place of integrity and equality alongside the masculine. She infuses new life into the age-old story of the damsel in distress, who passively waits to be rescued by the handsome prince. Indeed, Jénane represents the primal breath of the feminine, which gave impetus to the journey, and which Jung defines as the anima, the inner feminine side of the male psyche.54 He also makes the important statement that in the early stages of the psychological development of the male psyche, the archetype of the anima always mingles with the image of the mother.55 After Azur and Asmar’s success in reaching the hall of lights, Jénane, the earthly mother, is incapable of choosing between two sons 53

James Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985), 43. 54 Daryl Sharp, Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1991), 18. 55 Jung, vol., 9i, 82.

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whom she loves equally. As the Mother Goddess, she cannot discriminate between the two, for to do so would be to establish not only the superiority of one son over the other, but also of one culture over the other. Ego solutions cannot be imposed on an archetypal dilemma and éclaircissment can only come from within its own intrinsic potential. It is time for the Mother/anima to pass the scepter to her feminine progeny, and she does so with grace and ease. Jung clarifies the process: “The archetype of the feminine, the anima, first appears in the mother and then is transferred to the beloved.” 56 It is only when the Djinn fairy summons her cousin, the blond elf fairy from across the sea that the possibility of resolution is envisaged. Initially, the blond elf fairy and the Djinn fairy judiciously choose partners from like culture (Azur/blond elf fairy; Asmar/Djinn fairy) on a trial basis. Jénane, supervising from the sidelines remarks: “The answer is becoming obvious!”57 Testing the waters further, they move to partners of the opposite culture (Azur/Djinn fairy; Asmar/blond elf fairy). Jénane approves, but without interfering says:

“It is even better this way.”58

To which Crapoux retorts: “Yes, it’s the answer for a harmonious future.” 59 Crapoux’s insightful remark opens the door to further reflection

56

Ibid., vol. 5,332. “Obvious Answer,” Azur & Asmar. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 57

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on the events that are taking place in this mountain beyond time and space.60 In the Jungian story, the feminine or anima in the masculine psyche coexists with the masculine or animus in the feminine psyche. The eminent Jungian, James Hillman, in his book entitled Anima: the Anatomy of a Personified Notion says: “To be engaged with anima is to be engaged simultaneously with animus . . . .”61 In this transformative, dialogical encounter between masculine and feminine, however, the feminine seed of Jénane, as we saw, reclaimed the right of choice. Just as Azur and Asmar were reshaped by their ordeal, so prolonged solitary imprisonment in the mountain could possibly be construed as a time of fruitful reflection and transformation, which released the Djinn fairy (and the elf fairy of the West) from the stereotypical mold of contrasexuality that acquiesces to masculine superiority. Hillman would say that as a function of psyche, she “is no more exonerated from the tasks of . . . cultivation [of the self] than man.”62 He would further add that “only what has been properly separated can be adequately joined.”63 The independence, then, displayed by the Djinn fairy and her cousin means that, as psychological phenomena, they can now emerge as a newly reframed function of relationship, one in which they can reclaim their place as equals with the masculine. Thus, another interpersonal and intrapersonal healing has taken place. Another psychological syzygy has been formed. The spell is potentially broken. 60

Ocelot’s use of mountain symbology and animals as vehicles of psychological development beg comment. Mountains in the East and the West have always represented the omphalos of the world, and are often feminine in nature. In the Muslim tradition, for example, with which Ocelot is conversant, Mount Kaf is viewed as the “mother mountain.” She stands at the crossroads between the visible and invisible worlds, which, in the psychological idiom, can refer to the conscious and unconscious, a notion upon which our study is based. It is, further, home to the wise Simurg bird, who lives in the mountain and acts as counselor to heroes. It is also interesting to note that the Simurg bird facilitates Asmars’ journey to the mountain and is called upon by the Djinn fairy to do her bidding. Just as the Simurg bird facilitates the initiation and rebirth process for Asmar, so the Red Lion with the blue feet becomes the vehicle for Azur’s journey to the mountain. Though not exclusively, the lion is a Western symbol of strength and Ocelot’s choice of red can refer to new life and rebirth; the color blue of his feet symbolizes “infinity” and this combination speaks to his ability to move between the two spheres, heaven and earth. Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. by John Buchanan-Brown (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1994), 683-84, 102-03, 792. 61 Hillman, Anima, 171, (Hillman’s italics). 62 Ibid., 61. 63 Ibid.

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This means that beyond the psychological union, this newly reframed relationship will also bear, hopefully, on the status of woman and her presence in human affairs, effaced by societal, patriarchal standards. A comment made by Ocelot in an interview with Elodie Leroy bears out our premise: “When half of humanity says to the other half that it is nonexistent, I am outraged.”64 Jénane, we will remember, was an example of patriarchal discrimination and the denigration of the feminine in both cultures. In the West, she was a nanny and a despised immigrant of color. In her own land, she is despised because her status as a successful merchant has exceeded that of the male competition. As for the princess Shamsous Sabah, the present laws of her culture dictate that she may never set foot outside her palace. We will remember that in their journey to the black mountain, Azur and Asmar encountered archeological remnants of religious icons, which ranged from images of a Byzantine Christ to Jupiter to Baal to cave paintings. Though Ocelot maintains that he is telling the story of North Africa in reverse, we also interpret this long trek backwards through and beyond time to the mountain that imprisons the Djinn fairy as an indication of the long-standing, multicultural subjugation of the feminine.65 Therefore, the freedom of these feminine/archetypal figures posits the hope that they will create a bridge that spans the cultures, and that their presence will heal the wound inflicted on the feminine. Hillman describes the toil of translating the psychological into the human: “If anima is a cultural factor that shapes personal expression, then work on anima does re-work the feeling function at its roots. This helps to understand why changes in feeling are so slow: simply ‘to relate’ in a different style requires changes in our ancestors’ modes and values, our culture’s habits and tastes. We are working at the roots, racines, race.”66 And in this new world, as the princess Shamsous Sabah had predicted to Azur in their meeting: “Droughts [will] come to an end, young men [will] no longer kill each other, and princesses [will] no longer be locked up in palaces.”67

64

http://lci.tfl.fr/cinema/news/interview-michel-ocelot-azur-et-asmar-page-4-5011 230.html, 3 (author’s translation). 65 Michel Ocelot, interviewed by Michael Guillen, http://twitchfilm.com/interviews /2009/03/animationazur-asmara- few-questions-for-michelocelot, 5. 66 Hillman, Anima, 43. 67 “The Princess,” Azur & Asmar.

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Yadoa and the princess Shamsous Sabah, Jénane and Crapoux join Azur and Asmar and their partners in a final, joyous dance. And if they have been allowed into the numinous realm of the archetypal world of the anima, it is because each one is a newly minted “material component” of ancient, psychic dynamisms needed to contribute to the success of the heroes’ journey.68 “Archetypes,” says Neumann, “can erupt on a number of planes, often at the same time.”69 Jénane, the nanny, fronts the Great Mother; Yadoa, the sage, embodies the archetype of the Wise Man; the princess Shamsous Sabah, represents the incipient, feminine archetype of leadership; Crapoux, the “streetwise” semi-hero, the archetype of survival. This microcosm represents the potential of a new beginning, Ocelot’s mandate to form a possible new ethic in the realm of human relations. The four couples, a number of which Jung has written so extensively, is a number of completion. It is an archetypal number, says Jung, whose parts revert back to the One, which to our mind means that the work of human relations in all of its intricacies is ever to be renewed, because when stratified, it produces shadow, and shadow promotes division and dissension individually and culturally.70 For the moment, the possibilities of Eros and Logos reign over the finale of this beautiful tale. Eros, in its highest form meaning the ability to relate to oneself and to others on the level of the spirit, and Logos, the ability to sustain a balance between one’s own point of view, while 68

Neumann, The Great Mother, 8. Ibid., 9. 70 Jung, vol. 11, 57. 69

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accepting without judgment the various attitudes of fellow human beings. In his insightful article entitled The Quest for the Primal Word, Ashok Gangadean says: The Logos is filled with what we might call alterity, an infinite capacity for generating alternatives, differences, pluralities. . . . Alterity, the differential power of the infinite Unity, reveals that Otherness is a feature of Logos; the ultimate nature of language is dialogical, a discourse between self and other. . . . The dialogue of Logos can accommodate multiple grammatical expressions. Realization of this truth is of the utmost importance for the survival of humanity. In spite of cultural, ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity, we are participants in a common dialogical origin: we are different expressions of the same Word.71

And, does this definition not coincide with the accumulative and complex, open-ended messages embodied in this cast of characters who represent the vision of Michel Ocelot? We adhered to Ocelot’s command to treat Azur & Asmar as a fairytale; the magnificence of the images, the music, the sorcery of superhuman magical feats were a sensorial feast. However, we also adhered to his command to treat all “the sentiments as true.”72 “In Azur & Asmar” the filmmaker insists, “I showed all kinds of people. It is not Azur and Asmar only who are friends; that was not enough. I show males and females, an old person, a little child, Muslims, Jews and Christians, rich and poor, a princess and a merchant . . . and they all dance together at the end.”73 And if we embellished the conscious intentions of the filmmaker, we did so with his permission. In his interview with Thierry Méranger, Ocelot says: “That which the storyteller says, the moviegoer completes.74 The genius of Ocelot is that in his fairytale, Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest, enchantment and instruction are seamlessly intertwined.

Acknowledgements I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the renowned, French filmmaker, Michel Ocelot for allowing me full access to his magnificent film Azur & Asmar. I also wish to thank M. Philippe Silvy of Studio O,

71 Ashok K. Gangadean,“The Quest for the Primal Word,” Parabola, vol., 20, no. 3 (1995): 44-48. 72 http://ghibliworld.com/michel_interview.html. 73 Ibid. 74 Thierry Méranger, “Travail d’orfèvre,” 88 (author’s translation).

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who painstakingly inventoried the entire repertoire of the film’s images to make available to me those I selected for this study.

PART III NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL IDENTITIES

CHAPTER EIGHT BOLLYWOOD AND THE DIASPORA: THE FLIP SIDE OF GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN KAL HO NA HO AND SALAAM NAMASTE ANUP KUMAR CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

This article is about how Bollywood/Hindi1 movies that tell stories of émigré Indians in the diaspora2 flip the vector of power in the dialectic of global/local in cultural flows and construct cultural hybridity in the cinematic text.3 The global flows of capital, services, commodities, information, images, and people in search of new markets are signifying features of globalization.4 Scholars have argued that mass media constitute a significant part of the cultural “flow” of images across the globe.5 Since 1 India has the world’s largest film industry. On average more than 800 movies are made each year in all the major Indian languages. The Bombay film industry that makes movies in Hindi is the largest and has been euphemistically referred to as “Bollywood” by the film press in India. 2 Safran defines the diaspora in terms of the desire to return some day to the homeland and therefore the need to stay connected with the communal consciousness. See William Safran, “Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myth of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1(1991): 83-99. 3 See the discussion of the global/local dialectic from diverse perspectives in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 4 Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994), 1-28. 5 Myria Georgiou and Roger Silverstone, “Diasporas and Nation Flows Beyond Nation-Centrism” in Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-flow, ed. Daya Thussu (New York: Routledge, 2007), 30-43. Also see Ulf Hannerz, “Flows, Boundaries, and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology,” Mana (Rio

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the 1990s, filmmakers from Bollywood, to tap the growing global market in the Indian (South Asian) diaspora, have been making films dealing with diasporic themes and are constructing their identity in the global arena.6 Until recently, the predominant flow of movies has been from the West (North) to the East (South), especially when we take into consideration the global hegemony of Hollywood. Nonetheless, in the last couple of decades, the global media consumption by diasporic communities in the West has produced a contra flow of information and images from the East. The media flow in a direction contra to the predominant flow from the West to the East is a phenomenon that I am describing as the flip side of globalization. This flip is happening largely at a symbolic level, mostly because global consumption and market capitalization of culture industries such as Bollywood is quite small compared to Hollywood. Hence, it is not surprising that some communication scholars have argued there is an element of “hype” in “contra-flow” of Bollywood cinema, which is largely targeted at the South Asian diaspora rather than at a wider global audience.7 In the context of cultural representation of diasporic communities, Kavoori has also questioned the idea of contra-flow from the perspective of spatial dislocation and national origin.8 I argue that on the flip side of media globalization the media products originating in the East and consumed by the diaspora in the West are representing the local (eastern particularism/ethnic) as a dominant ideology and the global (western universalism/cosmopolitan) as a resisting ideology. Wallerstein saw this as a constant battle in the dialectics of the East and the West: “We are required to universalize our particulars and particularize our universals simultaneously and in a kind of constant dialectical exchange,

de Janerio), 3 (1997): 7-39 and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 6 Rajinder K. Dudrah, “Vilayati Bollywood: Popular Hindi Cinema Going and Diasporic South Asian Identity in Birmingham” Javnost, 9 (2002): 19-36. Also see Rajinder K. Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (London: Sage. 2006); and Anandam P. Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar eds., Global Bollywood (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 7 Daya Thussu, “The Globalization of “Bollywood”—The Hype and Hope” in Global Bollywood, 97-116. Also see Daya Thussu, ed., Media on the Move: Global flow and Contra-flow, 10-29. 8 Anandam P. Kavoori, “Thinking Through Contra-Flows: Perspectives from Postcolonial and Transnational Cultural Studies” in Media on the Move: Global flow and Contra-flow, 44-58.

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To explore how the dialectic between western universalism in the global (the West) and particularism in the local (the East), I will analyze how the global and the local is negotiated in the cultural hybridity represented in Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and Salaam Namaste (2005). The heightened impact of Bollywood must be seen as an outcome of the widely accepted fact that Hindi cinema is one of the most significant and visible hegemonic features of culture both at home and in the diaspora.10 With the growth in the South Asian diaspora, Bollywood movies have emerged as an important material constituent in the construction of a global public culture.11 For example, in a cover story on Bollywood, in National Geographic, Suketu Mehta quotes a CEO of a film production house— “For the diaspora the only connection with India is Hindi films. Hindi film is India for them.”12 Again, Safran had argued that one of the characteristic features of diasporic culture is the pull to the homeland and a mythical desire to return

9

Immanuel I. Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: The New Press), 49. 10 For the impact of movies on Indian culture, see Madhav Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1998). For contemporary perspective see Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Popular Culture in India (SOAS Studies on South Asia) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); Nasreen M. Kabir, Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story (London: Channel 4 Books, 2001); and Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2002). For the ‘Bollywood’ phenomenon in the diaspora see Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (London: Routledge, 2004); Jigna Desai, “Bombay Boys and Girls: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Transnationality in the New Indian Cinema in English,” South Asian Popular Culture, 1 (2003): 45-61; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4(2003): 25-39; Marie Gillespie and Tom Cheesman, “Media Cultures in India and the South Asia Diaspora,” Contemporary South Asia 11 (2002): 127-133(7); and Ravinder Kaur, “Viewing the West through Bollywood: A Celluloid Occident in the Making,” Contemporary South Asia 11 (2002): 199-209(11); 11 Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, “Why Public Culture?” Public Culture 2 (1989): 5-9. Also see Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 12 Suketu Mehta, “Bollywood,” National Geographic, February 2005, 64.

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at some time in the future.13 This theme—the representation of the desire among the first generation of Indian diaspora to return someday to the homeland, and therefore the need to stay connected with the ethnic/national consciousness of India—had attracted the attention of scholars analyzing the early breakout Bollywood films on the global stage. For example, Jigna Desai in her study of Dil Wale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), one of the first major blockbusters on the global stage, argued, “In DDLJ, it is the patriarch [Baldev] who longs for homeland and finds the west threatening in terns of contamination and corruption; in contrast, for Baldev’s daughters, diaspora is home.”14 We see a similar tension across the two generations of the diaspora in other early movies, such as Pardes (1997) and Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gam (2001). In later movies—such as Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Salaam Namaste (2005), New York (2009), and My Name is Khan (2010)—we see a lesser emphasis on the desire to return some day to the homeland. Instead, these films tell the stories of émigré Indians building a future in the West. For a more confident second generation, in the later movies, the West is not only home, but this new home must be blended with the East, the homeland, as part of the process of creating a new hybrid social world of the diasporic Indians (and to some extent South Asians). I argue that this shift fosters a significantly different treatment of the negotiation between the local and the global in movies such as Kal Ho Naa Ho and Salaam Namaste when compared with representation in earlier movies such as DDLJ and Pardes. In the media representation of the hybrid social world of émigré Indians/South Asians, we see evidence of a negotiation in parallel discourses of globalism, localism, ethnicity, nationalism, race and religion.15 We also know from past research that cinematic representation is often a negotiation in identity, ideology, culture, political economy and social change.16 Arguably, unlike in the western universalism of 13

Safran, “Diaspora in Modern Societies: Myth of Homeland and Return.” Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, 127. 15 Arjun Appadurai, “Patriotism and its future,” Public Culture 5(1993): 411-429. Also see Meenakshi G. Durham, “Constructing the ‘New Ethnicities’: Media, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity in the Lives of South Asian Immigrant Girls,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21(2004): 140-161. 16 See Colin MacCabe, “The Discursive and the Ideological in Film: Notes on Conditions of Political Intervention,” Screen, 19(1978): 35-48; Christian Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 65-71; and also see Metz, “Problems of Denotation in Film,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 72-86; and Umberto Eco, “On the Contribution of Film to Semiotics,” in 14

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cosmopolitanism in the discourse of Hollywood movies, in Bollywood movies we see a claim to eastern universalism that seems more like a throwback to hegemonic ethno-nationalism of “global desi,” i.e. an ingroup nomenclature for émigré Indians in the West.17 These movies imagine the life in the West by filtering it through a set of core traditional Indian values.18 Some see in this a failure of Bollywood cinema to imagine the “other.”19 I will first further clarify what I mean by “flip side” of globalization, followed by a discussion of the theory of cultural hybridization. Then I will discuss how cultural hybridization has been an important aspect of cinematic representation in Bollywood movies even before its arrival on the global stage. Then I will undertake a structural-semiotic analysis of the Kal Ho Naa Ho and Salaam Namaste. Finally, I will conclude this paper with a critical assessment of what this tells us about construction of diasporic culture and identity of Indians/South Asians in the West.

The Flip Side of Media Globalization To understand how this phenomenon of the flip side of globalization changes the power vector of global/local, let us first see this contra direction in the flow of media products with reference to theories of media globalization. This global flow, from the West to the East (the North to the South), has been extensively studied for its impact on local communities, their cultural identities, modernity, and political-economic power. The Film Theory and Criticism (pp. 194-208). For Indian context see Madhav Prasad, “Sign of Ideological Reform in Two Recent Films: Towards Real Subsumption,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed., Ravi S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145-167; and K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 2004). 17 The Sanskrit root word “desi” means ‘belonging to a place,’ as opposed to a migrant; and in the contemporary usage it means ‘coming from the country.’ Also see Jocelyn Cullity, “The Global Desi and Cultural Nationalism on MTV India,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26 (2002): 408-425. 18 Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film; Somnath Zutshi, “Women, Nation, and the Outsider in Contemporary Indian Cinema,” in Interrogating Modernity, eds. Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993), 85-88; and Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena” 19 Vinay Lal (1998). “The Impossibility of the Outsider in the Modern Hindi Film,” in The Secret Politics of Our Desires : Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. by Ashish Nandy (New York: Zed Books, 1998), 228-259.

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studies gave rise to theories of globalization that had highlighted modernization, dependency, and Americanization/westernization that explain globalization in terms of flow from center, i.e. the West, and periphery, i.e. the East.20 Past studies draw our attention to a dichotomy that privileges the West and views the East as a passive receptacle for western values and ideologies. Dorfman and Mattelart in a pioneering work on cultural imperialism showed how the flow of comics such as Disney from the West/North to the East/South served as a vehicle to spread the prevailing capitalistic ideology of the West.21 Schiller saw mass communication industries such as television products and Hollywood movies as central to the spread of American culture and “empire.”22 Mohammadi argued there was a dependency link between cultural identity and spread of American cultural imperialism.23 Wallerstein gave it a conceptual framework of the flow of knowledge and culture from the center to the periphery in his world systems theory. The center, i.e. the West/North, because of its dominance in production and trade, delineates the flow of knowledge and culture to the periphery, i.e. the East/South.24 However, the earlier perspectives were later overtaken in media globalization studies by new evidence that suggested active resistance at the local level to westernization and dependency. To explain this phenomenon, some scholars proposed the alternative theoretical perspective of “glocalization.”25 For example, Katz and Liebes in a pioneering reception analysis study found diverse interpretations of the universal constructed in the TV series Dallas because of how it interacted 20

John Tomlinson, “Cultural Globalization and Cultural Imperialism,” in International Communication and Globalization, ed. by Ali Mohammadi (London: Sage, 1997), 170-190. Also see John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991). 21 Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (Oakland: AK Press, 2003). 22 Herbert I. Schiller, Mass Communication and American Empire (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 23 Ali Mohammadi, “Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Identity,” in Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, eds. John Downing, Ali Mohammadi and Annabelle Sreberny (London: Sage, 1995), 362-378. 24 Immanuel I. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham :Duke University Press, 2004). 25 Mike Featherstone, “Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Identity,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, 46-77. Also see Daya Thussu, “Localising the Global: Zee TV in India,” in Electronic Empires: Global Media and Local Resistance, ed. by Daya K. Thussu (London: Arnold, 1998), 273-294.

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with local cultures of viewers in the Middle East, North Africa and the United States.26 Even Mattelart, while revisiting communication as culture, saw evidence of resistance and hybridization in mediation.27

Alternative Perspectives on Flow The interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens and billboards floating across the globe producing global public cultures of diverse ethnic communities inspired alternative ‘flow’ perspectives to understand cultural globalization. Discussing global cultural flows, Hannerz had called upon scholars to understand and interpret these flows from the perspective of Appadurai’s “global cultural economy.”28 Appadurai, describing modernity in the context of globalization, explained it as the phenomenon of “deterritorialization.”29 By deterritorialization he meant cultural flows in the new global economy are free from circulating within geographic boundaries of nation-states. He conceptualized the consequences of “deterritorialization” in terms of “scapes,” and proposed five types of scapes: “ethnoscapes,” “mediascapes,” “technoscapes,” “finanscapes,” and “ideoscapes.”30 From this perspective, Bollywood movies are “mediascapes” consumed in Indian/South Asian “ethnoscapes” (audiences in the diaspora and the homeland). And if Bollywood movies constitute a mediascape in an ethnoscape they should construct a sense of “deterritorialization” that transcends the geographical boundaries of nation-state. This deterritorialization at first appears to be an indication of a postnational stage that encompasses cultural, social, and economic forces, but I argue that we should not conflate nation-state with ethno-national imaginaries. If the discourses of globalization are embedded with new commodified and symbolic identities associated with mediascapes in their respective ethnoscapes, then they could be producing new imaginaries of 26

Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, “Interacting with ‘Dallas’: Cross-cultural Reading of American TV,” (Departmental Papers, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 1990). Retrieved from http://repository.upenn. edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1162&context=asc_papers on September 26, 2011. 27 Armand Mattelart, Mapping World Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 28 Hannerz, “Flows, Boundaries, and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology.” 29 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 49. 30 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 35

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identity. Lowe, drawing on Anderson, sees in this phenomenon that “identity formation based on consumption and lifestyle discourses similar to cultural production/consumption” results in “the proliferation of new ‘cultures’ and new ‘imagined communities’ as well as the re-packaging and commoditization of some old cultures and identities.”31 I suggest a fusion between the two concepts of “deterritorialization” and “imagined communities” from a post nation-state perspective, although not necessarily from a post-ethnic perspective. In this sense, we should see in the contra flows of mass media that are reaching out to the diaspora with a construction of new forms of deterritorialized imagined communities that privileges particularism of the local while at the same time mutating it as an alternative cosmopolitanism on the global stage—a hybrid identity floating in mediascapes consumed by ethnoscapes, but very much rooted in particular values, hegemonic traditional ideologies and structures of power that are embedded in local culture.32 I argue that this phenomenon has resulted in flipping the dialectics of global/local.

Flipping the Dialectics of Global/Local Again, when media organizations from the East reach out to the diaspora in the West, they dislocate and flip the power vector in the dialectic of global/local. Kraidy, while proposing an alternate framework of “critical transculturalism” with the concept of “hybridity” at its center, has argued against dichotomies of the West and the East, the global and the local, America and the rest.33 Mostly agreeing with Kraidy on cultural hybridization, I argue that the dichotomies are still relevant to understanding globalization, especially in the context of flipping of the power relationships in the dichotomies. I suggest that we must see the flip in the dialectic from the global/local to local/global from a postcolonial perspective on binary oppositions, i.e. the second is conceptualized by privileging of the first (e.g. white/black, speech/writing, man/woman, developed world/developing world, etc.). In the traditional understanding of the binary dichotomy of globalization such as West/East, North/South, 31

Eric P. Lowe, The Media and Cultural Production (London: Sage, 2001), 151; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). 32 Anup Kumar, “The Bollywood Movies: Globalization and Hybridity in the Construction of Identities”, conference paper, Critical and Cultural Studies Division, AEJMC, San Antonio, TX, 2005. 33 Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity: Or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 151.

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and Global/Local, the latter is defined in terms of the cultural categories, dominant ideologies and power structures of the former. Again, in this sense, on the flip side of cultural globalization, especially in the media representation, the local or the particularism of the East mimics the universalism of the West, especially in its hegemonic articulation of values universalism. The challenge for cultural products on the flip side of this flow is to reassert the particularity in identities, within the larger paradigm of cosmopolitanism, and at the same time challenge the claims of universalism, rooted exclusively in western values, and occasionally displace it with the particularism of the East. Negotiating cultural hybridity is central to this flipped dialectic.

Diasporic Identity as a Negotiation in Hybridity The historical roots of the concept of cultural hybridity or allied terms such as creolization and mestizaje lie in the explanations of the social process of acculturation of immigrants in the colonial world. Nevertheless, in the last few decades the concept of cultural hybridity has undergone a transformation in postcolonial theory through the works of scholars such as Bhabha, Gilroy, and Hall.34 They see cultural hybridity as a discursive identity of the immigrants in the diaspora, although the idea of immigrants negotiating their identities in the process of acculturation mediated by media is not new. Robert Park, in his study of the process of immigrant assimilation and the role of the immigrant press, came up with the idea of “the marginal man” that describes an immigrant living in doubleconsciousness.35 In W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon, this double consciousness takes a radical turn that becomes a problem of coexistence.36 In contemporary western societies, according to Gilroy, a duality of consciousness in Blacks seems to arise from the experience of slavery, which is different from immigration, and is negotiated as an

34

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222-237. 35 Robert E. Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 356. 36 Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29; and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1982).

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alternative modernity that transcends the constraints of ethnicity and nationality, constructing a trans-Atlantic Black identity.37 In a way, identity construction in popular culture is also about critically negotiating transformation and difference in social production of cultural hybridity. In Nation and Narration, Bhabha argues that the identity of a nation is a narrative construction that is a product of “hybrid” interactions between different cultural constituencies.38 Bhabha’s concept of hybridity that originates in his study of the interaction of the native with the colonial has come a long way in its application to a post-colonial world, but the core elements of his theory of hybridization has remained the same. He argues that in the colonial interaction between the native and the colonial authority we see a site of cultural hybridization. In “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,”39 the native Indians are depicted saying that they would be happy to convert to Christianity, the religion of the colonial master, if they are assured that the word (Bible) of the Christian God did not come from a cow-eater.40 Through this example of the non-beef-eating hybrid Christian in colonial India, Bhabha shows domination through disavowal by privileging of certain core values that the native was not ready to give up while still being attracted to the progressive Christian values of the colonizer. From this perspective, it would be simplistic to see the colonial only in terms of repression of local traditions and values. During the colonial period, like Christianity in India, movies were seen as symbols of colonizers’ progress and modernity. From the very beginning, movies emerged as cultural sites for domination of tradition through repetition and 37

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 91. Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: New York: Routledge, 1990). 39 Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” Critical Inquiry 12(1985): 14465. 40 In “Signs Taken for Wonders” Bhabha (1985) explicates his theory of hybridization through the example of a scene describing interaction between an Indian catechist, Anand Masih, and some Hindu peasants who are reading the gospel translated into the vernacular that took place in 1817 in colonial India. The peasants appreciate the message of the gospel and are moved by it, but when Masih explains to them the nature and process of Baptism and Sacrament, and prods them to come to the church, the peasants reply “We are willing to be baptized, but we will never take the Sacrament. To all the other customs of Christians we are willing to confirm, but not to the Sacrament, because Europeans eat cow’s flesh, and this will never do for us.” (p. 146). Here we have a construction of the hybrid identity of ‘non-beef eating Christian.’ 38

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mutation of certain disavowed western values, such as individualism, thereby seamlessly fusing tradition with the project of modernity. For example, we see in movies such as Raja Harischandra (1913), Kisan Kanya (1937) and Achhut Kanya (1936) that the project of modernity, which included social reforms in the caste system and gender relations, was represented without entirely repressing the core traditional values of Hindu society. This is why modernity is not merely the product of repression of tradition but can be seen as a mutation, a hybrid, in which “the disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different.”41 I suggest that we see a similar hybridization in the construction of global desi in the West. Bhabha suggests that in the process of hybridization the dominant discourse splits along the axis of power. Similarly, in Bollywood movies on the global stage the dominant discourse of universal western values splits along the axis of power, simultaneously subsuming the core values of the Indian society that are rooted in myth, history and tradition with the western cosmopolitan values of the diaspora. In this respect Bhabha’s idea of hybridity rooted in the colonial experience makes immigrant identity a problem of co-existence, not in a multicultural sense, but in the emergence of “the third space.”42 Bhabha views this cultural hybridity as negotiation between the adopted land of the immigrant and the homeland, creating a “third space” or “liminal” or “interstitial” space that becomes the site of hybridization. According to Bhabha this “liminal” space is the site of production of meaning. I suggest that Bollywood movies represent such a “third space,” or a mediascape in an ethnoscape. Thus, I suggest that in the post-colonial émigré experience in the counter flows, Bollywood films emerge as the new sites of hybridization in which the power vector in the dialectic of the global and local is flipped. Now to understand cultural hybridity in contemporary Bollywood, we have to step back and briefly see how the negotiation between contending cultural traditions and diverse ethnicities of a subcontinental size country, with a largely pre-modern rural India coexisting with a modern metropolitan India, was blended in Hindi movies before its reinvention as Global Bollywood.

41 Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” 153. 42 Interview with Homi Bhabha: The third space in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 207222.

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Cultural hybridization in Hindi Movies Since their early days, movies in India have been a site of contestation between tradition and modernity.43 Cultural hybridity is a necessary outcome of internal migration from one part of the multiethnic country to another or from rural to urban settings. The desire to return and connect with the roots or the “lost origin” is not a uniquely diasporic experience; indeed has been happening in the case of all large multiethnic countries, such as India, with space-time migration within the geographic boundaries of the nation-state. The Indian urban location is modern, and even postmodern. It identifies with global network capitalism and cosmopolitanism; still, most Indians live in rural areas and at a material level live between pre-modern and modern. Not surprisingly, when people move from diverse cultural and ethnic settings in their villages to cosmopolitan urban settings such as Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Delhi they practice cultural hybridization in their lives. Past studies have shown that Hindi movies have played a crucial role in constructing national identity by constructing a mélange of cultural makers from diverse ethno-linguistic identities that are part of India.44 Hindi/Bollywood filmmakers who also come from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds to cohabit in the Bombay film industry are perhaps are aware of it, which inspires them to practice hybridization in their cinematic representation to attract audiences in a multicultural and multilinguistic Indian sub-continent.45 Moreover, as they are also competing with other developed cinema industries of sub-national groups such as Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, and Punjabi, hybridization in cinematic representation is also important for market share.

43

Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Ravi S. Vasudevan, “Introduction” in Making Meaning in Indian cinema, ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1-38. Also see Manjunath Pendakur, Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology, and Consciousness (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003); Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); and Ashish Nandy, The Secret Politics of Our Desires; Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 45 For an ethnographic account of the social world of Hindi filmmakers and actors see Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 44

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Elements of Hybridization To reach audiences spread across different ethno-linguistic and religious cultural settings, filmmakers construct a mélange in language, clothes, studio sets, and even outdoor locations.46 This is why when we refer to popular films from Bollywood as masala movies—a blend of diverse cultural markers and tropes—there is always something for everyone in India, and perhaps now for everyone in the diaspora. One of the most prominent elements in the cultural hybridity of Bollywood movies is language.47 In Bollywood movies language emerges as a fertile ground for negotiation and contestation.48 Blackledge has argued that in multilingual and heterogeneous societies, dominant language ideology is constructed and reconstructed in the discourse at all levels in the media.49 In the case of India, Hindi is the pre-eminent language of movies made in Mumbai, but as filmmakers are sensitive to the cultural angularities of multilingual India they have over the years constructed and reconstructed the language of Bollywood movies as ‘Hindustani.’50 (It is similar to recent hybridization seen in the Indian news media in the use of

46

Lothar Lutze, “From Bharata to Bombay: Change in Continuity in Hindi Film Aesthetics,” in The Hindi Film: Agent and Re-Agent of Cultural Change, eds. Beatrix Pfleiderer and Lothar Lutze (Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1985), 3-15. Also see Shoma A. Chatterjee, “Documentary Cinema: A Visual Metaphor in Cultural Pluralism,” in Frames of Mind: Reflections on Indian Cinema, ed. A. Vasudev (Delhi: UBSPD, 1995), 157-170. Nikhat Kazmi, The Dream Merchants of Bollywood (New Delhi: UBSPD, 1998). 47 “Bollywood is also commonly referred to as ‘Hindi cinema,’ even though frequent use of poetic Urdu words is fairly common. English is more and more used in dialogues and songs. It is not uncommon to see movies which feature dialogues studded with English words and phrases, even whole sentences. A few movies are also made in two or even three languages (either using subtitles, or several soundtracks).” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood. Also see, Bollywood Language on http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001694.php 48 Prasad, Ideology of Hindi Film. 49 Adrian Blackledge, “The discursive construction of national identity in multilingual Britain,” Journal of Language, Identity & Education 1(2002): 67-87. 50 The linguistic term Hindustani means belonging to Hindustan, (i.e. the land of the Hindus). The people in Persia (Iran) and other Muslim countries used this term to refer to the South Asian subcontinent. Later Mughals, who ruled India until the British displaced them, referred to their country as Hindustan, and the culture and vernacular language of northern parts of the Indian sub-continent came to be collectively referred to as Hindustani.

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“Hinglish”51—a mix of Hindi, Urdu, Marathi and Punjabi while using English). In a way, the so-called Hindi movies produced in Bollywood are made in Hindustani, which is a hybrid of the many North Indian languages, especially Urdu (the language of the Muslim minority), Punjabi, and Marathi (the language spoken in the state of Maharashtra where the Bollywood film industry is located).52 Even the construction of hybrid Indian-ness through the linguistic hybrid of Hindustani only goes to show that all cultural interactions in a multicultural society are not always structured hierarchically. Moreover, it should not be surprising that in their construction of Indian identity, filmmakers of these movies often signify Indian identity as ‘Hindustani.’ There are many Indian movies with titles such as, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (Yet the Heart is Still Hindustani), Raja Hindustani, Hindustan Ki Kasam (I Swear by Hindustan), Saat Hindustani (Seven Hindustanis), etc. It can be argued that “Hindustani” is a hybrid construction of national Indian identity and national culture in Bollywood movies. However, the practice of hybridization goes beyond language and can be seen in characterization, cultural markers and narrative structure. In most cases it is difficult to identify a protagonist in Bollywood movies with one ethnic identity. The protagonists are often a mélange of ethnicities. One of most visible elements of hybridity is in the narrative structures of the Bollywood films, especially in the use of songs as important tropes to provide the subliminal context and to advance the story. Even the outdoor location of many parts of a movie or a song sequence is a deliberate attempt by the filmmaker to identify with ethnic differences across audiences.53 The songs hybridize the otherwise linear narrative structure of movies, like in the West, with non-linearity of the folk and the aesthetics of the Natyashastra.54 The songs in Bollywood 51

See “Use of ‘Hinglish’ to go Global” in Daily Mirror. Retrieved from World Wide Web on 01-11-05. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/tm_objectid=14 768443&method=full&siteid=50143&headline=that-jungli-dacoit-with-opticalstook-a-stepney-from-my-josh-car-s-dicky----that-uncouth-thief-with-spectname_page.html . Also see “‘Hinglish’ may soon conquer the world” on Rediff News. Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 02-11-05. http://us.rediff.com/news/2004/oct/17hing.htm 52 D. Boyk, “Bollywood for the Skeptical.” Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 01-15-05. http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~dboyk/bollywood/#language 53 Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. London; New York: Routledge, 2004). Also see Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. 54 Natyashastra is a 200 B.C. Sanskrit text on aesthetic theory of performance written by Bharata. The text has served as a manual on theatrical performance

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movies are diegetic and integral to the semantic (meaning-making) structure of the films. A good example of this form of hybridity is the movie Sholay (1975), which is a hybrid version that integrates the narrative structure and form of Hollywood westerns with the Indian structure of epic story telling with diegetic integration of songs.55 Experience tells us that it is reasonable to expect that Bollywood filmmakers would be sensitive to the cultural identities of their diasporic audiences as they have been to their multiethnic audiences in India, and would practice cultural hybridization in cinematic representation. Now let us see how cultural hybridization gets represented in Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and Salaam Namaste (2005).

Kal Ho Naa Ho and Salaam Namaste The two films are about150 minutes long and in the Bollywood fantasy genre—family drama, with a mix of songs, dance, romance, comedy and pathos. The two films tell stories about diasporic South Asian communities in the West. Kal Ho Naa Ho opened to full houses in New York, Fremont, Los Angeles, and Houston, in 52 theatres across the United States.56 Worldwide the film made about $18 million at the box office.57 It was directed by Nikhil Advani, the screenplay was by Karan Johar and the film was produced by Yash Raj Productions. It was one of the biggest Bollywood successes at the box office in India, the United States and the United Kingdom.58 The film was shot in New York City. It depicts the life of an immigrant Indian-American family living in the city.59 Salaam including dance, music and acting, and to this day is used in theater schools in India. It discusses bahvas (emotions) enacted by actors and the rasa (emotional responses) it elicits in audiences. See Kapila Vatsyayan, Bharata: The Natyasastra (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996). 55 See Anna Morcom, “An Understanding Between Bollywood and Hollywood? The Meaning of Hollywood Style Music in Hindi Films,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 10(2001): 63-84. Also see Wilson Dissanayake and Malti Sahai, Sholay: A Cultural Reading (New Delhi: Wiley Eastern, 1992). 56 A. J. Pais, “Kal Ho Naa Ho Grosses in Millions in U.S.” Retrieved from http://in.rediff.com/entertai/2003/dec/01khnh.htm on February 28, 2005 from 57 Information retrieved from http://ibosnetwork.com/asp/filmbodetails.asp? id=Kal+Ho+Na+Ho on July 22, 2011. 58 Trade Guide, January 10, 2004 (Mumbai: Trade Guide). 59 Dave Kehr, “Romance, Comedy, Bathos: All Blended by Bollywood,” in The New York Times, November 23, 2003. Retrieved from http://query.nytimes.com/ gst/fullpage.html?res=9E07E0D7163AF934A15752C1A9659C8B63 on January 26, 2005.

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Namaste was relatively less successful at the box office. Worldwide it made about $13 million.60 The direction and the screenplay are by Siddhartha Anand. The movie was shot in Australia, and tells the story of a live-in relationship, which is a taboo topic in Bollywood’s family-oriented cinema. A film critic wrote, “Some Indian audiences are expected to find this film shocking because the characters have a sexual relationship outside marriage and occasionally use four-letter words (in English)” and concludes that Salaam Namaste “attempts to be more like American films.”61 Kal Ho Naa Ho is a story of an émigré Indian family living in New York City. Naina Catherine Kapur (played by Preity Zinta), one of the protagonists in the movie, narrates the story. Naina is a young single woman who is working on her MBA and living with her family, which includes her mother, paternal grandmother, and two siblings. The grandmother and her mother do not have a good relationship and are constantly squabbling over domestic issues. To Naina’s chagrin, the grandmother is searching for a suitable Punjabi Sikh groom for her. The family is going through difficult times. The family restaurant business is not doing well, and they are on the verge of defaulting on the lease. The mother, Jennifer Catherine Kapur, is confident that God will make everything all right and perhaps send someone like an angel to help. Meanwhile, outside the family pathos, Naina has a flirtatious friendship with her classmate Rohit Patel, played by Saif Ali Khan. One day a visitor, Aman Mathur, played by Shah Rukh Khan, an infectiously energetic and optimistic character, comes to the neighborhood from India. His presence brings sunshine to the otherwise gloomy neighborhood. Naina falls in love with Aman, who has come to America for treatment of a fatal heart problem of which Naina is unaware until the end. Aman does not want to reciprocate her love, and instead, like a Good Samaritan he sets out on a mission to get Naina and Rohit together. Aman turns out to be the “angel” the family was hoping for. He helps them recover from their financial troubles and resolves the differences between the in-laws. Salaam Namaste is a story of two young émigré Indians, Amby and Nick, who have come to Australia to escape the control of their families over their lives. Ambar Malhotra, alias Amby, played by Priety Zinta, and 60

Information retrieved from http://ibosnetwork.com/asp/filmbodetails.asp? id=Salaam+Namaste on July 22, 2011. 61 Anita Gates, “True to the Bollywood Look, While Defying Traditions,” in The New York Times, 10 September, 2005. Retrieved from http://movies.nytimes.com/ 2005/09/10/movies/10nama.html on August 26, 2011.

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Nikhil Arora, alias Nick, played by Saif Ali Khan, have come to Melbourne in pursuit of their individual career ambitions. Nick’s dad had forced him into architecture and wants him to run the family business. He has earned a degree in architecture to please his dad, but takes up a job as a chef in an Indian restaurant and dreams of opening his own restaurant some day. Back in India, Amby’s parents wanted her to get married at an early age. After rejecting twelve marriage proposals, Amby escaped to Australia, where she is studying medicine. To support herself she works as radio jockey on an ethnic radio station, “Salaam Namaste,” that is popular in the South Asian community in Australia. Nick and Amby start on a confrontational note, over the phone, because Nick fails to keep his appointment as a guest on her radio show. Angry with him, Amby uses her show to make fun of his skills as a chef. Nonetheless, soon afterwards they are attracted to one another at a beach wedding party. When they each realize who the other person is, and that they had fought on the radio show, they decide to give their relationship a chance. To know each other better, they decide to live together as roommates. They rent a house by the beach from an Indian immigrant cab driver who has cashed in after winning a lottery. Nick and Amby do not have immediate plans to get married, as they are not ready for the commitment and want to focus first on establishing themselves in their respective careers. In the course of their live-in relationship, Amby gets pregnant and Nick wants her to abort the pregnancy as he is not ready to be a father. Amby develops motherly instincts after seeing the image of growing twins in her womb. Her decision to give birth creates a rift between Amby and Nick, but because of the lease, neither can afford to move out of the house. They continue living in the same house in their respective rooms. As in any good romance, Nick is attracted to the babies as they grow in the womb, and eventually overcomes his fear of commitment. Finally, while Amby is giving birth to the twins, Nick proposes to her and the film ends on a happy note.

Analytical method Movies constitute a semiotic system, a multilayered and complex text that has all the elements: visual image, written language, and audio (voice, music, and sound effects).62 Metz argues that a textual analysis of cinematic texts must make an attempt at ideological analysis of the narrative to identify the denotative and connotative thematic structures in 62

Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema.”

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the narrative and textual qualities. The goal of my analysis was to look for emergent themes that can help to discover the ideological sub-text and the construction of hybrid identities in the film. Filmmakers make deliberate semantic choices while editing a film. The frames in the montage are sequenced using syntagmatic and paradigmatic codes to produce desired effects and preferred meanings.63 In the case of Bollywood movies, the semantic structure includes songs and dances. For example, in Bollywood movies diegetic and non-diegetic songs are used as paradigmatic features to advance the narrative and suggest complex emotions. As mentioned above, Bollywood producers are targeting audiences in India and in the diaspora, and we may see cultural hybridization in the representation of material practices (food, clothes, material symbols rooted in traditions and religion, etc.) and everyday life (the family and household routines and the outdoor routine). Identifying hybridity in the material and symbolic elements in the narrative will give us an understanding of how the dialectic of global/local is constructed in the two movies, and how a hybrid form of global desi emerges. There are similarities in the construction of a hybrid social world of the diaspora in the two films, but there are also crucial differences in how the two films negotiate important cultural markers of Indian identities. For example, there is an effort in Salaam Namaste to privilege values of individualism, whereas, in Kal Ho Naa Ho the traditional notions of family, marriage and womanhood dominate. Kal Ho Naa Ho reinforces the traditional notion of marriage, whereas Salaam Namaste explores the difficult topic of live-in relationships and pregnancy outside marriage. First I will first discuss some of the thematic similarities that emerged from the analysis and then address the differences.

Themes in Cultural Hybridization Thematic Similarities Indians in global cities: The opening monologues in Kal Ho Naa Ho and Salaam Namaste present émigré Indians who are confident and successful in the global cities, New York City and Melbourne respectively. Kal Ho Naa Ho begins with the narrator, Naina, jogging through the 63

Prasad, “Sign of Ideological Reform in Two Recent Films: Towards Real Subsumption.” Also see Ellen Seiter, “Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. R.C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 31-66.

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streets of New York, introducing the city and the émigré community to the audience. As Naina is jogging through the parks, the neighborhoods, and the streets of the city she says: “New York, one of the world’s biggest cities…the business capital of the world…Every breath of the city, every heartbeat is defined by pace…people are always in a hurry…in a hurry to leave home…in a hurry to reach the office…to be a step or two ahead of life. There is no place for anyone who cannot cope with its pace…Miles away from India…the city is crowded with Indians.” Likewise, Salaam Namaste starts with an aerial shot panning across the skyline of Melbourne with a radio announcer speaking in Hindustani introducing the city on a morning show that includes interviews with successful South Asians in Australia. The scene cuts into a montage showing people listening to the ethnic radio station as they go about their daily chores. Hybrid lingua franca of Global Desi: The language of the two films is Hindustani, with occasional use of English, Punjabi, Gujarati and Hindi, with caricatured markers of regional accents from India. The construction of mélange in the language is deliberate. It suggests a hybrid social world with which the diasporic audience from all parts of India, and occasionally South Asia, can identify. To include linguistic elements of host countries, the films employ stereotypical ways of hailing and addressing such as, “cool,” “sexy,” “babe,” “jerk,” “dog,” “crap,” and “dude” to establish symbolic connection with the linguistic milieus of the host cities. The women are occasionally hailed in the movies as “sexy”—the connotation being beautiful and pretty, and not necessarily sexualized. In Kal Ho Naa Ho, when Aman addresses his friend Rohit as “dog,” there is an obvious reference to the hailing style of hip-hop culture and a way to connect with second generation Indians in America. In Salaam Namaste the lead character Nick keeps saying “Oh crap!” to express his annoyance. In their particular usage, the above-cited instances of slang perhaps do not mean anything significant, but they suggest a crude attempt at hybrid construction of the language. Life is not easy in the West: New York City and Melbourne represent the success of global modernity that attracts Indians to these faraway alien lands, but life in the global West is hard like in any other place—one has to work hard to make a living, but there are opportunities for fulfillment of individual ambition. The two films lay special emphasis on this in their own ways. For example, the middle class professionals in Salaam Namaste had rebelled against their families back home and escaped to Australia, where they are striving hard to make it big. Nick and Amby, despite breaking-up, are forced to continue living together as neither can afford to move out of the house. For Nick it is an uphill task to finance his

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dream restaurant. In Kal Ho Naa Ho the working class family lives in a working class neighborhood and is struggling to pay the mortgage. For example, Naina’s mother, Jennifer, runs a restaurant that is not doing well. She is shown pleading on the phone with a banker for an extension on her loan, and Naina enters sorting the mail saying, “Bills! Bills!! Bills!!!”— seemingly an attempt to show a tenuous relationship between income and expense in the West. The two films keep dwelling on the theme that success enjoyed by global desis in the West is a result of hard work and a daily struggle to make it in a foreign land. Hybrid social world of Global Desis: All significant characters in the hybrid social world of the two movies are émigré Indians. The failure to imagine the other, i.e. the native populations, is conspicuous. For example, the plots are set in New York City and Melbourne respectively; but Whites or Blacks or Hispanics or other Asians, or native Australian characters do not feature in the films. The local Americans or Australians are like shadows. They float around but are rarely seen as significant to the social world of the émigré Indians. For example, Rohit Patel, in Kal Ho Naa Ho, works in an advertising agency where almost all his co-workers are white Americans, but they just float in the background. Both Naina and Rohit are studying at a business school, but non-Indian students or professors are not featured in the film. Even Aman, who has come to America for medical treatment, has an émigré Indian doctor. Yes, there are many émigré Indian doctors in America, yet it only ends up showing the failure to imagine the other. Similarly, in Salaam Namaste local Australians float in the background. In some scenes where they have smaller roles there is no character development and we do not come to know much about them. For example, in a scene in Salaam Namaste, Nick and Ambar meet at the beach wedding party of someone called “Simone.” Nick’s buddy, Ron, meets his wife Cathy there as well. But we never come to know much about Simone. Even Cathy lacks character development and is onedimensional. In a way, locals are more like a prop in the scene. The irony is that in Salaam Namaste the local Australian identity is presented through an émigré Indian who is ashamed of his Indian identity and is presented as a stereotypical caricature of an Australian bushman from the Outback. He is a cab driver who hits a jackpot by winning a lottery, and decides to jettison his Indian-ness and become a “real” Australian with a contrived Australian accent and a white wife — who is incidentally presented as a bimbo. It adds comic moments, but also serves as a means of disavowal of certain aspects of Australian identity. Signs of wonderment taken for the Global/West: Instead of people, signs are used to represent the American and Australian identities. For

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example, the American and Australian flags, respectively, loom large in the two films. Other signs of wonderment representing Australia and America are strategically blended into the film such as the skylines of New York City and Melbourne. The Merrill Lynch bull, glazed doughnuts, blueberry muffins, large cappuccinos-to-go, breakfast cereals, jogging in the street and Central Park, beaches, and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream are signs of the West. The elements are incorporated subliminally while the characters are on the move, which is an attempt to show the fast-paced lifestyle in the two cities. The signs loom large in the background and may work quite effectively in constructing American and Australian presence in the respective movies, for audiences in India; once again, for audiences in the West it suggests the absence of the other. More in Kal Ho Naa Ho than in Salaam Namaste, the national flag looms large over the screen. The very first song in Kal Ho Naa Ho has people waving the star spangled banner and with Whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians dancing with a huge American flag in the background. The music is a mix of Indian Bhangra and American Rap. There seems to be a deliberate attempt to suggest loyalty to the adopted homeland. Similarly, in Salaam Namaste the first song which takes place at the beach party has white Australians and émigré Indians singing and dancing to a music that is a blend of Indian pop and Australian grind. This is perhaps the longest shot in which the local Australians appear. Global Desi as an archetype of unity in diversity: The characters in the two films are émigré Indians from different religions and ethno-linguistic groups in India. The construction of Global Desi collective identity is represented as an archetype of “unity in diversity”—a political cliché often used by the Indian state to describe inclusive Indian identity with its many linguistic, religious and racial sub-national identities. In Salaam Namaste, the characters are from all parts of India, including one from Bangladesh. Their ethno-linguistic identity is constructed in stereotypical fashion through their ethnic names and caricatured accented Hindustani. Last names in India signify ethnicity and caste. In the treatment of global desi identity in the two films, there is an attempt to represent inclusive India. For example, in Kal Ho Naa Ho, Naina’s marriage to Rohit Patel is represented as one between peoples of Punjab and Gujarat, two ethnolinguistic states in India. Naina’s mother is Christian, her grandmother is Punjabi Sikh, Rohit is Guajarati Hindu, and Aman is Hindu from Uttar Pradesh. In the beginning of the movie, the narrator says, “I am Naina Catherine Kapur and this is my story.” At the end of the movie, she speaks her name once again as “Naina Catherine Kapur Patel”—she is now

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Hindu, Christian, Punjabi and Gujarati. The minor ethnic differences that are sources of interpersonal and family conflicts are resolved at the end of the movie. For example, in the end pictures of Jennifer’s Jesus and Grandmother’s Guru Nanak get a place on the same wall. Naina’s middle name Catherine could also be representing America, the Christian West. The ethnicity of Naina’s mother, from whose name the protagonist gets her middle name, is left ambiguous in the movie. She is shown as a Christian and is chided in the movie by her mother-in-law because she does not know how to cook Indian food. When Aman, who is a Hindu, goes to a church service with Jennifer and Naina, they ask him if he liked their service. He says, “Yes, it was good and I would like to come every Sunday.” Here again there is a connotation that suggests that the diaspora should not only respect but also subsume all that is good of the Christian West. However, the construction of cultural hybridity in the films privileges the value of coexistence over acculturation.

Thematic differences Indian tradition fills in values that are missing in the West: The two films negotiate differently the values associated with the individualism of the West and the communitarian values of the East. For example, in Salaam Namaste the émigré Indian characters have chosen to come to Australia to realize their individual dreams. Nick has come to Australia to become a chef, whereas his father back in India wanted him to be an architect. Ambar, or Amby, is working to become a medical doctor, and has chosen a path different from her sister back in India, who was married off by her parents at a young age. Kal Ho Naa Ho uses ideological tropes of family values, from the East, to substitute for the missing family values in the West. There is an effort to balance the individualism of the West with family values of the East. For example, the nagging grandmother hates Naina’s mother and is a constant irritant and a burden, but Naina knows that her mother considers her grandmother her responsibility. Older parents and in-laws are the responsibility of the next generation in India. Naina says, “The city has taught me to be independent and fulfill my responsibilities, but it could not teach me to love.” Aman, who is visiting from India, teaches her the value of love and resolves the differences between the mother and the grandmother. An angel comes from India: In the two films, the suggestive power of the cinematic medium is deployed to produce maximum effect, but explicit reference to the East as the source of the missing, the miraculous and the good in the West is missing in Salam Namaste. For example, in

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Kal Ho Naa Ho, facing difficult days ahead, Jennifer, Naina’s mother, tells her two younger chhildren, “Jesus will send an angel to wipe our tears…An angel will come and bring lots of happiness and will take our sorrows away.” And when one little one asks, “When will the angel come?” the shot cuts to a man with his back towards the audience, standing on a boat that is moving toward Ellis Island with the Manhattan skyline in view. And then the shot again cuts back and shows that the family is praying and a man is standing on a neighboring balcony watching. He is the same man who was on the boat. In a case of serendipity as miracle, the shot once again cuts and shows that earlier in the day the same man had collided with Naina, spilling her coffee in the subway station. The scenes in the shot are linked at a paradigmatic level and the montage constructs metaphorically that an angel comes from the East to help the family in distress in the West. Building little Hindustan in the West: Again, in Kal Ho Naa Ho and Salaam Namaste we are made to believe that émigré Indians in the West live in a social world that mostly comprises of South Asians. Again, the social world of émigré Indians in Salaam Namaste is constructed by effacing the other, the local Australians. But it is in Kal Ho Naa Ho that the idea of émigré Indians constructing their ethno-nationalism is explicitly explored and represented. For example, one of the desires of Naina’s grandmother is that her native Punjab becomes a part of New York. The connotation seems to be that the first generation diaspora misses the homeland but values the good life and prosperity of the adopted land. As the restaurant business is not doing well, Aman recommends that Jennifer remodel her restaurant, changing it from a typical American food joint to an ethnic Indian restaurant. In an impromptu speech he says the Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood is doing well because, “they have brought their culture and country to this place... We have a great advantage, which we must make use of…and that advantage is Hindustan…We must get Hindustan to New York…We have to get Hindustan here, bring it to the streets, spread it in all directions.” When Naina replies, “I do not believe in this nonsense,” Aman tells her to shut up and says we can do this, “Because Hindustan can do anything, anywhere…anytime.” While making the speech, Aman does not say “India;” instead, he says Hindustan. The connotation here seems to be that India is a nation-state and Hindustan is a culture with a set of core values that is shared by all the people of India. The remodeled restaurant is named the “New Delhi Restaurant,” suggesting an all-India identity. Calling everyone to put their effort into the task of remodeling, Aman says, “Come on all-India,” making a reference to Indian immigrants from .

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all the states that constitute India. The Hindustani trope is also used strategically to appeal to the audience back in the homeland. Arranged Marriage: The most striking difference between the two films is in how they negotiate love and marriage. Salaam Namaste challenges the traditional view on marriage and seems to suggest that the West offers the young the opportunity to break the shackles of the family’s hold on their conjugal future, whereas, Kal Ho Naa Ho reinforces the tradition of arranged love/marriage in Bollywood cinema.64 For Ambar and Nick, career comes first. We are told that before coming to Australia, Ambar had rejected potential grooms chosen by her parents. She sees an arranged marriage as a life of drudgery, and one that would kill her career ambitions. Ambar asks Nick sarcastically, “For Dad’s wish you studied architecture, to fulfill your own wish you became a chef. What will you do for Mom’s wish…marry a good Indian girl.” For Nick too, career comes first, although he is also fearful of commitment and the responsibility of raising family. The accidental pregnancy, despite protection, is used in a stereotypical manner to show the differences between the genders when it comes to having a child. Nick wants the pregnancy to be aborted, wherea, Ambar wants to keep the child even if it means raising the child alone. In Kal Ho Naa Ho there is ambiguity in Naina’s attitude toward the traditional idea of arranged marriage. When she comes to know that her grandmother is looking for a groom, she tells her mother, “I do not want to get married; why Grandmother doesn’t leave me alone?” When her grandmother shows her pictures of three potential grooms, she says, “I am not interested in marrying anyone….one, two or three.” She is not depicted explicitly saying that she will find somebody, but the idea is that she has to know the person before she marries him. Later, when she responds to Rohit’s love, the whole affair is shown to have the blessings of the two families. There is once again a clever use of editing at a paradigmatic level to privilege the notion of arranged-love marriage, a dominant theme in most Bollywood movies. Rohit is shown proposing to Naina; the scene takes place in a church, and when Naina accepts the proposal the church bells sound in the background, an obvious indication of blessings from God, and then the scene cuts and takes the audience to her home, where everyone is shown rejoicing at the news. Desi womanhood: The treatment of marriage in the two movies represents the dilemma and conflict in the construction of Indian feminine identity. At one level for émigré Indian women, like men, in the diaspora 64 See discussion of this social phenomenon in the context of Hindi cinema in Patricia Uberoi, “The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in DDLJ” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 (1988): 305-336.

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career comes first, but the maternal instinct is always lurking in the background. In Kal Ho Naa Ho, a young unmarried woman’s destiny is to get married and become a mother and take care of her children. Any other woman is construed as deviant. Naina and Jennifer as Indian émigré women are construed as hybrids of emancipated women in the west and women under the traditional patriarchal relations. Naina is doing an MBA and wants to be successful. She is proud of her mother, who has provided for the family after the death of her father, but she still misses the presence of a strong man in the family. She and her mother are contrasted with two other Indian émigré women. They are two sisters. The younger one is on the lookout for a man through “blind dating” and thinks dating is “cool.” Her elder sister, who is Jennifer’s friend and business partner, is unmarried and is depicted as a nymphomaniac. She says, “Love is body’s hunger.” The sisters are contrasted as deviant when compared with Naina and her mother. The construction of woman as “mother” serves as a powerful metaphor in both films. In Kal Ho Naa Ho woman as mother is shown from the perspective of a son and a daughter. The missing son is Aman. His relationship with his mother is depicted with the use of paradigmatic sequencing of scenes showing his relationship with Jennifer. At one place Aman says to Naina, “Whatever I have done, I did for those eyes. You know I have a problem…I cannot see any mother’s sorrow or pain…” Naina, the grown-up daughter who is confident enough to jog alone on the streets of New York City and to study in a business school, fails to bring confidence to her mother, Jennifer. Aman is the man and the grown up son that Jennifer did not have. After Naina has accepted Rohit’s proposal and the whole family is shown rejoicing, the scene cuts to a frame showing Aman being hugged by the three woman—his mother, Jennifer and the grandmother—suggesting how grateful the mothers are for having such a son. If we contrast this with the mother-daughter relationship between Naina and her mother, the patriarchic framing becomes more obvious. Naina and Jennifer are shown many times in the movie talking about love and life in general like two women sharing their experiences, but Naina’s mother is never shown discussing her financial problems with her. This is quite different from Salaam Namaste, where construction of womanhood takes a radical turn—the woman is equal to the man. She can have it all, even have a live-in relationship, but both films privilege motherhood. Ambar chooses to give birth to a child even if Nick does not support her decision and marry her. The treatment of womanhood is more nuanced, but traditional values ultimately triumph.

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Conclusion This structural-semiotic analysis shows that even though the films affirm the ideology of globalization, on which they depend for their own commercial success, the dialectic of global/local is flipped to local/global. The themes show that the two films are strong examples of hegemony of the local ideology, more so in Kal Ho Naa Ho than in Salaam Namaste. At the level of signification there is a negotiation between the global (as the universalism of the West) and the local (as the particularism of the East), but the local emerges as dominant and hegemonic. The global is identified with prosperity, modernity, multiculturalism and the success of the capitalist economy. The films express their affirmation of the values represented by global capitalism and loyalty to the adopted land, but they do not affirm entirely the universalism of western values. The local is hegemonic, whereas the global is resistant in the “third space” of the cinematic representation. The films construct a hybrid identity of diasporic Indians, the global desis, as Hindustani-Americanglobal or Hindustani-Australian-global. The protagonists in the end still hold onto traditional Indian values. If we look at this from the perspective of Bhabha’s concept of “hybridity,” the films represent disavowal of universalism of some western values by holding on to certain core values associated with Hindustani identity. The reference to the other large disaporic community from the East in the Kal Ho Naa Ho, the Chinese, is interesting. By portraying competition between an Indian-owned restaurant and one that is Chinese-owned, the film suggests to the audience that the local cultures of India and China are competing in the new global economy. Bollywood remains a vanguard of national culture even in the global arena in its representation and promotion of core Hindustani values of patriarchy, family, unity of religions, and the Indian concept of womanhood as privileged wife and mother. For the films, the global desis and their social world is a little Hindustan in the West. In this construction of Indian identity in the public culture of the diaspora, the films reinforce that the “ethnoscape” is free of the nation-state, which is restricted by geography, but not free of ethno-nationalism. If we take out the location and the material and discursive markers in the cinematic text, then what is left in the two films is India. This once again reminds us of the failure of Bollywood movies to imagine the ‘other.’ The only way the ‘other’ is represented is either through signs of wonderment or through inclusion of some cultural markers of the West in the hybrid émigré Indian characters.

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It can be argued that the diasporic audiences sharing the public culture are being called upon by Bollywood “mediascapes” to construct “ethnoscapes” of a deterritorialized imagined community of global desis. From the perspective of media globalization, the flip side has implications for theories of ethno-nationalism and cosmopolitanism and their coexistence. It also suggests that at a cultural level the idea of the ethnonationalism is not fading away, but re-inventing itself in a deterritorialized environment. In the “third space,” between homeland and adopted land, Bollywood movies not only show flipping of the power vector in the contra-flow of media globalization, but also show that the “trope of the tribe”65 and diasporic identities are being reinvented on the screen.

65

Appadurai, “Patriotism and its future.”

CHAPTER NINE RE-VISIONING LITTLE ITALY WITH ITALIAN EYES: THE ITALIAN IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY AMERICA AS PORTRAYED IN MELANIA MAZZUCCO’S VITA CARLA A. SIMONINI YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY

Melania Mazzucco’s Vita was published in 2003, a full century after her characters, twelve-year-old Diamante and nine-year-old Vita, leave the small Italian town of Tufo di Minturno to set sail for America, joining the “dodicimila stranieri al giorno”1 that were disembarking at Ellis Island at that time, amongst whom “gli italiani sono aborriti come alieni superstiziosi e criminali.”2 So explains the book jacket of the novel’s first edition, a gloss on the novel’s historical setting directed at an Italian readership presumed ignorant of the environment into which turn-of-thecentury Italian immigrants arrived. Ignorance notwithstanding, the work quickly achieved popular and critical success, topping Italian best seller lists and earning the prestigious Strega Prize in its debut year. Critics praised Mazzucco for her handling of the theme of emigration, noting how her book’s publication “interrompeva ... un silenzio troppo lungo, una rimozione troppo pesante.”3 Before Mazzucco, the only significant work focusing on the emigration experience per se was Edmondo DeAmicis’s Sull' Oceano (1889). DeAmicis’s narrative, though, holds his reader at sea, 1

“twelve thousand foreigners a day” “the Italians are abhorred as superstitious aliens and criminals” 3 “too long a silence, a removal too heavy” Corriere della Sera, 6 agosto 2006: 35. 2

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on a voyage to Argentina and Uruguay, and the story ends the moment the emigrants disembark and disappear into exotic and unfamiliar surroundings. Vita thus distinguishes itself as the first Italian literary depiction (i.e. written by an Italian author for an Italian readership) of the Italian emigrants’ experience after the point of arrival and followed into their life in the United States. In Vita, Mazzucco displaces the Italian emigrant from his/her previous position “sull’oceano” (on the ocean) into a space that is distinctly “oltre-oceano” (beyond the ocean), and beckons her Italian readership to follow along. On the flip side, however, Mazzucco’s novel, like her characters, has emigrated out of Italy; it has crossed the ocean and taken residence in a different land. Vita was translated into English and published in the United States in 2005, where the title was notably modified to Vita: A Novel, presumably a marketing choice on the part of the publisher to promote it as the more familiar “immigrant saga” rather than a post-modern hybrid of narrative, autobiography, chronicle and essay. Apparently favoring function over form, critics characteristically extolled it not for its literary innovation, but for “putting an Italian accent on the larger story of immigrant assimilation”.4 Not a single reviewer, however, recognized Mazzucco’s Italian “oltre-oceano” perspective as having enriched the genre of the American immigrant narrative in any unique way. This paper represents an attempt to address this absence by examining how the gaze of a contemporary Italian—i.e. of one looking back and re-visioning the American immigrant experience as the displacement of the Italian emigrant, as a tale of departure rather than arrival, of separation rather than integration—can serve to enrich American literary discourse on ethnicity and identity. For example, how does the novel’s trans-national perspective allow for a different “reading” of the Italian-American immigrant experience? What does it reveal about the relationship between contemporary Italy and the Italian diaspora community and its descendants abroad? Does a common, de-territorialized “Little Italy” exist? To address these questions, I will contextualize Mazzucco’s vision of “Little Italy” within and against its pre-existing constructs by examining some of Mazzucco’s sources, including DeAmicis’s aforementioned work, the writings of Amy Bernardy, Mazzucco’s archival research in the US and Italy, her investigations of family artifacts, and, finally, her explorations of memory. In doing so, I will compare Mazzucco’s work to that of an iconic Italian American novel that in many ways parallels Vita—Helen Barolini’s 4

Sven Birkerts, “‘Vita’: Exile on Prince Street,” The New York Times, September 25, 2005.

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Umbertina, published in 1979 and translated into Italian in 2001, just two years before Vita was published. American literature is replete with immigrant tales, including numerous representations of neighborhoods populated by Italian immigrants and their descendants, from William Dean Howells in the Gilded Age to Adriana Trigiani in the 2000s5. Italian literature, in contrast, has shown little interest in depicting the lives of those who left their native home to live or work abroad, 6 this despite startling statistics indicating that 16 million people emigrated out of Italy between 1870 and 1915, effectively depopulating entire towns in some regions of the South. A social phenomenon of such a scale would seem ripe material for literary consideration, particularly in Italy where literary production has a long tradition of being employed in support of political causes.7 Stefania Lucamante considers this notable lack of attention to be rooted in a “strategy of silence” (a term she borrows from Martino Marazzi) resulting from the inadequately realized objectives of the Italian Risorgimento in the late 1800s and extending into fascist regime, whereby discourse promoting mass consciousness and national identity effectively censored contradictory themes and ideologies, in politics as in literature.8 Thus, on the heels of the Risorgimento and during the first great wave of emigration, the most celebrated works of Italian literature supported and promulgated the image of a united Italy at the expense of giving voice to conditions of suffering or laying bare the drama of displacement of those who were forced to leave in order to survive.9 Similarly, “the creators of 5

Howells’s Suburban Sketches (1872) contains one of the earliest depictions of an American neighborhood becoming populated, and therefore transformed, by the settlement of Italian immigrants (Ferry Street in Boston, which was to become in later years a main artery in Boston’s Little Italy—the North end). Trigiani’s Lucia, Lucia (2004) is set in New York City’s Greenwich Village Little Italy, past and present. 6 As is clearly evidenced by the 114-year gap between the publication of DeAmicis’s Sull' Oceano and Mazzucco’s Vita 7 Early Italian writers such as Dante Alighieri and Machiavelli, to cite some of the most renowned examples, produced literature that unabashedly espoused their political agenda. 8 Stefania Lucamante, “The Privilege of Memory Goes to the Women: Melania Mazzucco and the Narrative of the Italian Migration,” MLN, 124 (2009): 295-296. 9 Most scholars consider the Italian Risorgimento to be as much a literary movement as an ideological one in so far as the literary works of writers such as Massimo D’ Azeglio, Ugo Foscolo and Alessandro Manzoni ultimately served to arouse the national consciousness of the Italian people. Even the choice of the Tuscan dialect as the “official” Italian language was effected through literature,

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Fascist propaganda found migration to be utterly unsuited to the building of the nation’s historicity.”10 Given such a climate, it is not surprising that the writers who did consider the theme of emigration during these years usually approached the subject in negative terms , emphasizing the damaging effects that the decision to leave has on those left behind and even expressing disdain for the emigrant’s perceived traitorous act.11 Lucamante thus sees Mazzucco’s work as doubly serving to address Italy’s “historical lack of memory” of the emigration experience and to fill “a conspicuous blank space in Italian literature.”12 This view is echoed by Franco Baldasso, who goes so far as to define Vita as the “autobiografia di una nazione” (autobiography of a nation)13 , that nation being Italy and her story being the unwritten one that has survived only in family artifacts, memories and oral story telling. Baldasso writes that Mazzucco’s work aims to “ripristinare, attraverso la ricerca storia d’archivio e la scrittura letteraria, la trasmissione delle memorie interotta dai trauma del secolo

when Manzoni affirmed that Tuscan, the language of Dante and Petrarch, offered the Italian people a unifying linguistic platform. He famously rewrote his historic novel I promessi sposi,with its message in support of Italian unity, in the Tuscan dialect, translating it from its original composition in Manzoni’s native Lombard dialect. In 1827 Manzoni went to Florence to “risciacquare i panni in Arno” (literally, “to rinse his clothes in the Arno River,” which is to say to learn the Tuscan dialect in its purest form, and free himself from regionalisms and other linguistic impurities). 10 Lucamante, 296. 11 Carlo Levi’s seminal work Christ Stopped at Eboli, (1945) recounting his years of imposed internal exile by the Italian fascists to a remote village in Basilicata in the deep south, is replete with commentary on the extent and consequences of mass emigration from the region. By Levi’s estimates and census records, the town seems to have been depopulated by nearly 40% (from a high of 1981 in 1881 to Levi’s estimate of 1200 in 1936). Levi reports that the primary emigration destination was the United States, and that many families were effectively split, between what he terms to be the “village in exile” across the Atlantic and the residents that remained behind—this latter group being primarily comprised of women, children and the elderly. Other works, such as Luigi Pirandello’s short story “L’Altro figlio” and Maria Messina’s stories “America 1911” and “America 1918” likewise portray the social and emotional devastation left in the wake of mass emigration. 12 Lucamante, .297. 13 Franco Baldasso, “New York come archivio della rimozione: Vita di Melania Mazzucco e l’epopea dell’emigrazione italiana,” Scrittura Migrante n. 3 (2009): 99.

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attraverso i racconti familiari ma anche le trace materiali lasciate dai protagonist del passaggio.”14 For the American reader familiar with Italian American literature, the notion of Vita functioning to fill a vacuum in social and literary history and to give voice to silences that lay tucked away in family artifacts and fragments of stories begs comparison with Helen Barolini’s novel Umbertina. Both are sagas of young women compelled by the harsh living conditions in their native Italian towns at the turn of the century to seek a better life in the United States. Both protagonists, Vita and Umbertina, are based upon the respective writers’ real-life ancestors. And both works, ostensibly, seek to give voice to the writer’s personal history while simultaneously presenting a more universal tale developed around the themes of displacement, loss, re-appropriation and belonging. In Gramsci’s words, “The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”15 Mazzucco and Barolini, through Vita and Umbertina, set out to compile their respective historical inventories, and engage in the process of piecing together the “infinity of traces” of their ancestral record in order to construct an identity for themselves in the present. For both writers, the starting point of their critical elaboration is a recovered image of a female immigrant/emigrant ancestor, the figure through whom and from whom each writer/protagonist seeks to discover a missing piece of herself. In Umbertina, the character Marguerite beholds a picture of her Italian immigrant grandmother, longing for a sense of “kinship” with the “handsome, proud, direct-gazing, unflinching peasant face”16 that stares at her from the oval gilt frame. Similarly Mazzucco, in a meta-narrative passage in which she reflects on the inspiration for her story, contemplates a photograph of the “real” Vita.17 She sees: 14

Ibid., “to restore, by means of archival historical research and literary writing, the transmission of memories interrupted by the traumas of the century through family stories but also material evidence left by the protagonists with regards to their passage” 15 Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell, (Smith. New York: International, 1971), 324. 16 Helen Barolini, Umbertina, (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1998), 150. 17 The frequent authorial intrusions Mazzucco employs in the work are typical of post-modern Italian literary form, in which different literary styles, such as fictional narration, autobiography and reportage are combined in one work. In perusing reader reviews on amazon.com and other online sites one notes how

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Barolini, in her memoir Chiaroscuro, reveals that the flesh and blood Umbertina upon whom her character is based is her own grandmother, an enigmatic figure dressed in black with whom Barolini could not even communicate and seems scarcely to have known in any real or intimate way.19 Similarly, the “real” Vita is Mazzucco’s great-aunt, a woman she vaguely remembers as sending care packages and making a single visit. For both writers, the ancestor’s photograph represents an image of a person onto which the protagonist/writer not only projects a feeling of longing, but more importantly to which she seeks to affix a story. And it is through this story—through the process of writing and telling the ancestors’ history, that both writers seek to repair the disjuncture of memory that has resulted in some sense of loss of self. Both Mazzucco and Barolini may explore their traces of history and research archives and records to piece together a saga based, in part, on their own family, but the resulting figures that emerge in their works are more personal than historic. As Sollors points out in his monograph Beyond Ethnicity, just as Alex Haley was accused of fashioning Kunte Kinte in his own image as a 1960s civil rights activist, so can Barolini and Mazzucco be seen as creating their ancestors both from and for themselves. Symbolically, the name Vita in Italian means “life,” and the words for “story” and “history” in Italian are metonymically linked. Vita’s story, therefore, is a life story— Muzzucco’s own. The story she tells for herself through Vita shall become her appropriated history and her truth. In her meta-narrative, Mazzucco dedicates her work to her father, Roberto, an aspiring writer himself, who “loved to tell stories and knew that only the stories told were true.” But if words and the process of American readers were generally critical of this form, noting how it interrupted what they viewed to be the central storyline—i.e. the immigrant protagonist’s saga. This perhaps explains the addition of the subtitle in the work’s English translation—Vita: A Novel—as if the publishing house recognized the work as appealing to the American readership primarily in this form. 18 Melania Mazzucco, Vita: A Novel, trans. Virginis Jewiss (New York: Picador; 1st edition: 2006), 144. 19 Barolini was only 12 when her grandmother died. Her grandmother spoke only her Calabrian dialect, and at this age Barolini spoke only English.

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crafting stories are central to Mazzucco’s work, from a trans-national perspective the limits of language come into play as well. Beyond its original publication in Italian and subsequent translation into English, the work contains references to other operative linguistic planes that relate to region, class, race and definitions of high and low culture. Amy Bernardy, one of the few early twentieth century Italian commentators on the condition of Italian emigrants in the United States, writes extensively about la lingua del iesse, a term she coins to describe the language composed of amalgamated southern Italian dialects mixed with English that was commonly spoken in Little Italies in the early twentieth century.20 Much is lost in the novel’s English translation, but the American reader is aware that there is a Minturno di Tufo dialect in which the characters converse with one another at home, and another dialect of the street (la lingua del iesse) which Diamante initially doesn’t understand. “Agnello and the boss,” he notes, “speak a language that sounds familiar but really is foreign.”21 Diamante, who is Vita’s love interest in the text and Mazzucco’s grandfather in the autobiographical meta-narrative, realizes early on that English is the key to unlocking the New World and is jealous of Vita’s opportunity to learn the language at school. Vita senses her newfound power to capture Diamante’s attention, and capitalizes on it by charging him a kiss for every word she teaches him. Diamante eagerly pays, and thus comes to love and desire Vita quite literally through the sweetness of her words. Much later, when Diamante returns to Italy, defeated, penniless and with no material goods to carry home, Mazzucco as omniscient narrator tells us, “in his suitcase…(he) packs words—they will be his only baggage, and the only wealth he takes with him from America.”22 While Mazzucco’s character Vita originally resists learning the language of her new land, in Mazzucco’s meta-narrative the “real” Vita is described as speaking only English when she returns to visit Italy as an adult. The “fictional” Vita’s son, Dy, meanwhile, purposefully forgets the Italian he has learned at home, the reader is told, in an effort to cancel out one of the most identifying markers of his shameful immigrant origins. In Mazzucco’s (hi)story, the emigrants thus have no Italian voice (other than the one she gives them) and are unable to communicate with their Italian origins. In both Barolini’s and Mazzucco’s works, issues of language and race are entwined in assessing the Italian immigrant’s position in American Amy Bernardy, “La ‘Piccola Italia’ e la sua lingua,” Il Giornale d'Italia, 1 dicembre 1903, 3. 21 Mazzucco, Vita, 22. 22 Ibid., 410. ʹͲ

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society, and his or her displacement from their culture of origin. In various sections of her meta-narrative, Mazzucco is stunned to learn that Italian immigrants in the US faced double discrimination as non-white and nonEnglish speakers. “The Italians were like blacks who couldn’t even speak English,”23 an American doctor at Bellevue informs her. Barolini’s character Umbertina has a similar revelation when she encounters her first black man, a train porter, noting, “when she nodded to him her thanks he smiled and said something back, it took her aback—he spoke English and she didn’t.”24 Most telling, though, is Mazzucco’s own reaction to the Italian Americans she describes as meeting during her explorations of New York. She clearly feels no affinity for the “elderly people with farmers’ faces” that call her paisà. “What they thought was Italian was really another language. Dialects spoken in the South long ago.”25 Mazzucco here echoes the reaction of Tina, the Italianized great-granddaughter of Umbertina in Barolini’s novel, who cringes at the way Italian American tourists claim to speak Italian, only to utter a “garbled southern pastiche from some ignorant mountain recess.”26 Tina, however, recants her harsh judgment as she comes to embrace her Calabrian great-grandmother as an extension of herself, whereas Mazzucco remains detached. For Mazzucco, the Italian Americans she meets inhabit a space across a linguistic, and therefore cultural, void. Clearly, in the emigrant/immigrant experience, the silence between the ancestor and the descendant can result as much from what is lost in translation as from that which is purposely forgotten. Paralleling the structure of Barolini’s work, Mazzucco’s narrative follows her characters from their disembarkation at Ellis Island (or Castle Garden, as it was in Barolini’s case) into their life in Little Italy. The respective first views of the New World of Barolini’s and Mazzucco’s characters portend their future experiences in America. Umbertina arrives on a day that is “fair and clear” and exclaims “È bella!” as she beholds the “thick green” and “fine wooded hills” on the New Jersey side, the “wonder of the completed Brooklyn Bridge” and the bustle of “industry and commerce”27 on the streets of Manhattan. Diamante, in stark contrast, “is too short to see anything of the Promised Land except a bunch of ragged rear ends and emaciated spines.”28 Diamante’s obstructed view is evocative of a scene from Emanuele Crialese’s film Nuovomondo (The 23

Mazzucco, Vita, 41. Barolini, Umbertina, 79. 25 Mazzucco, Vita, 41. 26 Barolini, Umbertina, 315. 27 Barolini, Umbertina, 50. 28 Mazzucco, Vita, 17. 24

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Golden Door, 2006) in which the Sicilian emigrants gather on deck upon their arrival in New York Harbor but see nothing because the city is covered in thick fog. Crialese’s film is often praised for being, along with Vita, one of the first serious artistic works dedicated to the theme of emigration in recent times. It is interesting to note that the arrival at Ellis Island is in fact the conclusion of the film, and that despite a distance of over a century, Crialese chooses to end his epic emigrant tale much the same way that DeAmici did in the 1880s—with the emigrants disembarking and effectively disappearing into their new environment. In Crialese’s surrealistic final scene, his emigrant characters float down a river of milk—a Biblical reference to the land of milk and honey and the promise of a better life that awaits them. But as the camera pans out the scene transforms into a vision evocative of sperm heading out to spawn new life in a foreign womb. Floating along in the ejaculatory stream are not just the Italians, but the many other emigrants/immigrants that arrived at Ellis Island along with them from the far corners of the world. Clearly, the view is of the masses moving towards a common destination, and being amalgamated together along the way (perhaps Crialese’s twist on the image of the American “melting pot”). Crialese’s artistic decision to conclude his emigration tale in this manner is consonant with Lucamante’s thesis that Italian intellectuals have “given up on those Italians who moved to the United States, considering their presumed assimilation into the new country’s system of values and ethics reason enough to avoid a comparison” with Italy.29 Mazzucco in many ways does not represent an exception to this thesis, for despite the numerous pages she dedicates to Vita’s and Diamante’s life in America, she never fully succeeds in entering into the thick of life in Little Italy in the early 20th century. Her vision of life in “Little Italy,” in particular, remains as obscured by ragged butts as is Crialese’s by enveloping fog. Marazzi writes of the “unease of the Italian intellect toward another Italy”30 (“little” or otherwise), the effects of which persist to the current day. The Italian diaspora community, most represented in the United States as “Little Italies,” has been historically discounted in terms of any real or sustaining ties to Italy or Italian culture. Lucamante maintains that, “for some, those Italians who migrated were not even co-national,”31 a 29

Lucamante, 296-297. Martino Marazzi, Voices of Italian America: A History of Early Italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology, trans. Ann Goldstein (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2002): 293. 31 Lucamante, 295. 30

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sentiment echoed in today’s popular press, where it is not uncommon to hear the view expressed that emigrants integrated into their new societies shed their Italianness, and went on to inhabit a space separate and apart from the people and culture they had left behind.32 Mazzucco’s task, both artistic and historic, is therefore to create a space around that which she has been culturally conditioned to perceive as a “non-place.” Once again like Barolini before her, Mazzucco physically locates her “Little Italy” on the New York street map, laying out the street names that form its borders and the representative Italian groups that inhabited each one in the period in which the story takes place. Barolini writes that Prince Street and Elizabeth Street were “shady” streets “infested with brawling Sicilians;” Mulberry was “the street of the napoletani—a bad street—full of fights and bandits.” And, finally, there was Mott Street, “where the Calabrians lived,”33 which intersected with Bleeker Street, a central artery and main commercial zone. Mazzucco, for her part, calls the neighborhood: “Woptown or Dagoland…that city within a city between Houston and Worth Streets, between Broadway and the Bowery, crammed full of 250,000 pieces of shit, that is to say, southern Italians.”34 Beyond its physical boundaries, however, Little Italy exists also as a cultural space, a zone inhabited by what Clifford Geertz characterizes as the ‘multiplicity of complex structures’ that separate the lives of Vita, Diamante and the other Italian immigrants from those of mainstream Americans. For Geertz, a “thick” ethnic culturescape draws from contrastive elements such as: food, dress, religion, traditions, customs and beliefs.35 “Little Italy” thus dually exists: as a city within a city and as an 32

Even when emigration is recognized, Italians tend to use “distancing” techniques whereby they differentiate themselves from characteristics associated with Italian immigrants and their descendants abroad. The following post appeared recently on the site Yahoo Answers in response to a post asking what opinion people in other countries held of Italians: /it.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=200906240 34303AasMohO “Negli altri paesi il contatto con gli italiani è dovuto soprattutto alla nostra emigrazione e mi risulta che gli emigranti non fossero il fiore all' occhiello dell' Italia (senza offesa). Avevano per la maggior parte un livello culturale e sociale bassissimo, venivano inoltre da regioni all'epoca molto arretrate.” (“In other countries contact with Italians above all results from interaction with our emigrants, and it follows that the emigrants weren’t the cream of the crop no offense. They were for the most part from the lowest cultural and social level, and moreover came from regions that were extremely backward at the time.”) 33 Barolini, Umbertina, 61. 34 Mazzucco, Vita, 63. 35 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation Of Cultures (Basic Books, 1977).

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ethnic sub-culture set against mainstream American society. For Barolini, life in Little Italy is conjured through a series of contrasts and binary oppositions between recognizably Italian ethnic signifiers and elements of “mainstream” American society. Accordingly, she constructs her image of Little Italy from various sights, sounds and smells: from women’s native dress and men sporting earrings, simmering sauces and small garden patches sprouting tomatoes, basil and rosemary, to fetid and cramped tenement quarters echoing with the cries of children and the animated conversations of women gathered on stoops. In contrast, Mazzucco’s geo-cultural construct of “Little Italy” is far less sensual and multi-dimensional and seems to rely almost exclusively on the writings of Amy Bernardy. In her articles published in Italy between 1907 and 1931, Bernardy wrote of the plight of the Italian immigrants in the United States and the abhorrent conditions in which many of them lived. She was particularly concerned for the moral and physical well being of women and children, and chronicled the harsh and often dangerous street occupations of young boys, such as newspaper boy and rag picker. Most notably, though, she passionately condemned the Italians’ practice of establishing boarding houses to earn money, believing the practice of bringing unrelated single men into one’s home resulted in the moral corruption of the family, particularly girls and young women. It is into just such an environment—a boarding house on Sicilianinfested Prince Street—that Vita and Diamante go to live. It is run by Vita’s father, Agnello, and his Circassian mistress, Lena. Described as “so blackened, run-down, and decrepit it looks as if it might collapse at any moment,” for Vita and Diamante, “This is America.”36 As if she were a character right out of one of Bernardy’s case studies, Vita is forced to share a bed with her older brother, who fondles her at night, and the boarders sexually molest her whenever she is alone with them. She cooks, washes and cleans for the boarders, and then at night sews petals on artificial flowers to earn the family extra money. She attends school only after a social worker discovers her at home during the day, and even then only briefly. She finally completes high school only because her father, Agnello, is jailed and she is sent to a school designed to “Americanize” delinquent minors. All the boys and men of the boarding house, meanwhile, work long hours for little pay, often ruining their health in the process. Diamante alternately finds work as a rag-picker and a paperboy. The Italian paperboy, Mazzucco writes, “combines the quickness of the Irish with the tenacity of the Jew,”37 a description lifted nearly verbatim 36 37

Mazzucco, Vita, 13. Ibid., 61.

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from one of Bernardy’s articles.38 Selling papers on the street, Diamante meets Nino, “a homely, filthy little creature with a sickly air, sores on his feet, and the imploring eyes of a bastard.”39 Where Mazzucco does not appear to rely on Bernardy, she resorts to her meta-narrative text to explain and chronicle events otherwise embedded with the fictional narrative. As the plot unfolds, one of the boarders, Rocco, (in a scene worthy of Coppola’s Godfather trilogy) ascends to the head of a mafia-like criminal enterprise which fronts as a funeral parlor by killing the man who is his boss, mentor and father-in-law. Diamante, meanwhile, rejects the gangster life and is forced to leave New York City in search of honest work. The reader follows him as he travels across the country, working under exploitative conditions on the railroad, a misbegotten adventure that leads him to his physical and financial ruin. In these crucial plot elements, Mazzucco relies less on Bernardy and more on chronicle, documents and statistics. The scene in which Rocco kills his boss is counterpointed with period newspaper articles listing the number of bombings and other crimes committed in the city’s Italian colonies during the period in question. Diamante’s experience on the railroad, meanwhile, is universalized through Mazzucco’s lengthy iterations of case files on the maimings and deaths of immigrant workers (along with the company’s legal justifications for not paying any damages). The reader is left feeling shocked and wondering if anyone came away from such work unscathed, but at the same time curiously detached from the original characters that were the subject of the drama. The use of chronicle breaks the narrative flow and the reader’s connection to the characters and their story. Mazzucco elsewhere relies on “embedded” newspaper chronicle to provide the American perspective on how traditions or customs familiar to 38 “Dapprima era il ragazzo irlandese che aveva il monopolio della vendita di giornali per le strade. Questo irlandese era intelligente, abile e pugnace, ma mancava di persistenza; l’ebreo, quando gli si volle sostituire, non tentò di combatterlo colle stesse armi, ma si presentava sempre al suo posto, a dispetto del tempo, dell’ora, della salute,delle difficoltà. Il cliente poteva contarci. A detta di tutti il ragazzo italiano riunisce in sé la sveltezza dell’irlandese e la tenacia dell’ebreo, quando si tratta di guadagnare quattrini” “Il lavoro dei ragazzi,” [At first it was the Irish boy who had a monopoly on selling newspapers in the streets. This Irish boy was intelligent, able and pugnacious, but lacked persistence; the Jewish boy, when he wanted to take his place, did not openly oppose him on the same terms, but instead he had always maintained his post, in spite of the time, weather, or health difficulties. A customer could count on him. By all accounts the Italian boy combines the quickness of the Irish with the tenacity of the Jew, when it comes to earning money.] "The work of the boys,” (Il giornale d’Italia, 1909). 39 Mazzucco, Vita, 61.

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the Italian reader registered as strange and exotic signifiers of “otherness” in the American context. As Vita is “swallowed up by the procession” at the Saint Rocco Feast on Mott Street, she notes the “reddened faces” that stand out in the crowd. Newspaper articles, the reader is told, have drawn these curious onlookers here, extolling the feast as “the enactment of authentic Mediterranean folklore.”40 As the statue of Saint Rocco passes, those who have prayed for his mercy swarm around it to offer up their thanks in the form of graphic ex-voto offerings, including an artistically carved cedar leg and a wax breast with a rosy nipple, which, Mazzucco writes, “initially inspires ecstasy and then disgust in the two reporters from the World.”41 Most tellingly, one of the most common markers of italianità in American culture is conspicuously absent from Mazzucco’s text—Italian food. This cultural lack is particularly apparent in that Vita’s future success in America is as the proprietress of an “Italian” restaurant. It is difficult to imagine how this happens, since Mazzucco’s text reveals that Vita arrives not knowing how to cook. The boarders refuse to eat the first meal she prepares, decrying it as inedible, and in the years that follow, one assumes, she is taught to cook not by her Italian mother, but by Agnello’s Circassian mistress. There are, in fact, few references to food or eating in Mazzucco’s text, outside of a passing nod to Vita’s talent for cooking cod. In striking contrast, Barolini’s text is replete with detailed descriptions of meals and foods. Barolini’s protagonist, Umbertina, considers eating well to be “an article of faith,” and works to ensure that her kitchen is always stocked with “the most virgin of olive oils, the most aged and mellow of cheeses, the best salami and freshly baked bread.”42 Umbertina, too, begins her ascent to material success by preparing and selling food—hearty sandwiches of peppers and sausage, eggplant and meatballs, wrapped in thick, crusty Italian bread, to her neighbors. The lack of emphasis on eating in the New World seems particularly odd considering that much is made of how Diamante had left Italy to flee from the ravages of starvation that claimed his other siblings. The only hunger that Diamante manifests in America is for making money, which would seem to indicate that Mazzucco does not see the New World as having nourished him in any real or sustaining way. Mazzucco views what is considered Italian food in America not as a sustaining cultural memory but as an inauthentic artifice. While in New York, she scoffs at the restaurants in Little Italy with “bogus Italian 40

Mazzucco, Vita, 278. Ibid., 280. 42 Barolini, Umbertina, 94. 41

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menus,” like the Neapolitan restaurant that was serving Milanese-style cutlets and saffron rice. The review of Vita’s restaurant that she uncovers likewise offers a rather odd assortment of dishes. Billed as offering “yesterday’s cuisine for today’s tastes,” menu items include: “turtle with peas, cod alla marinara, sour cherry tart, zeppole, mostaccioli, and …stuffed goose.”43 The “fictional” menu for Vita’s first restaurant, in turn, includes, “pizzelle with anchovies, spaghetti with meatballs, clam risotto, fried mozzarella, ricotta pudding…Neapolitan garlic soup, (and) capponata di melanzana”. The American reader is left wondering if this, too, is but a “bogus” representation of Vita’s native cuisine. Once again, Mazzucco relies on the newspaper and her meta-narrative structure to provide the American point-of-view on the Italian “other” regarding food. Vita’s food, the narrative reveals, “had even made its way to the pages of the Telegraph.” The journalist writing in praise of Vita’s food indicates how he enjoys “haunting the sweaty taverns of the Italian lowlife where you can taste exotic southern Italian cooking.”44 All told, in Mazzucco’s gaze, “Little Italy” is a dirty, ugly, oppressive, disdained and a generally undesirable place, and in portraying it in this way, relying so heavily as she does on Bernardy’s social critique and period articles tinged with the anti-Italian sentiment of the era, Mazzucco is in fact deconstructing and displacing another image that tells a different story. In her meta-narrative, while visiting New York, she finds herself in the modern environs of Little Italy, which she describes as merely “depressing.” “On display was the postcard of a world that had never really existed,” she writes, “and that was now tidied up, purified, cleansed of all suffering, blood and shame.” To the pretty postcard image of “Italian flags, (and) windows decorated in white, red and green,”45 Mazzucco has affixed quite a different story. One hears the echo of the opening line of her work, “This place is no longer a place.” It is as if Mazzucco, ever conscious of the power of words, is investing the New World as utopia with its alternative meaning—the Promised Land as utopia: as much an ideal place as it is also a non-place; it never really existed, except in the stories told about it. Not once, but twice, Mazzucco entitles chapters “My Desert Places”— two chapters that almost frame the work (almost because there is a final chapter as coda) and that respectively relate the stories of descendants of Vita and Diamante returning to the town of Tufo di Minturno in Italy in search of traces of their past. In the first “desert place,” Vita’s son Dy 43

Mazzucco, Vita, 146. Mazzucco, Vita, 333-335. 45 Ibid., 41-42. 44

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(short for Diamante) arrives in Tufo as a Captain in the U.S. army during World War II. He finds—nothing. The village from which his mother emigrated has been completely destroyed, leveled; the roots of his family tree quite literally deracinated, for not only is no one left alive, but not even a tree is left standing. In the second “desert place,” Mazzucco herself travels to Tufo to research the church archives in search of her family records. Like Capt. Dy before her, she leaves disappointed, not having found any tangible remains of the Piedmontese dowser hailed to be the Mazzucco family patriarch. He in fact never existed—the Mazzucco family’s lineage can be traced to the town of Tufo and its environs as far back as the written records go. There was no Piedmontese ancestor—the Mazzuccos have no blood ties to the region that gave birth to the Italian Risorgimento and maintains social and economic hegemony. Mazzucco thus discovers that even before Diamante and Vita left for America, the Mazzucco family identity derived as much from “una storia” (a story) as from “la storia” (history). Striking for the American reader is the novel’s ending—the coda chapter affixed outside of the “My Desert Places” chapter frames. In the chapter “Rescue” the reader is brought back to the beginning, to the transAtlantic crossing that brought Vita and Diamante to the United States. Not wanting to spend another night below deck, being even at nine years old smart enough to know that “whoever rushes to be closed into the fetid corridors of the ship’s hold doesn’t expect anything from the future,”46 Vita convinces Diamante to sneak off and meet her on the deck. There, together, clinging to each other against the cold, they spend the night suspended in a lifeboat, looking, but not finding, the promised white star of the White Star Line upon which they are traveling. Mazzucco’s Italian emigrants thus remain as much “sull’oceano” as DeAmicis’s a century earlier, suspended between the land they were leaving and that which they hoped to find. Mazzucco’s Vita: A Novel, ultimately reads as a tale of rootlessness, displacement and loss. Whatever it is that Vita, Diamante, Mazzucco or the reader had hoped to find, they are left, like Diamante’s suitcase, filled only with words from which they must fashion a story for themselves. In conclusion, how can one “read” the Italian immigrant/emigrant experience in Mazzucco’s Vita from a trans-national perspective? Mazzucco’s vision of the Italian emigrant’s experience in America, based on critical and popular reaction, both shocks and surprises the Italian reader, and certainly the frequency with which these readers express sympathy for the plight of their nation’s extra-communitari when 46

Mazzucco, Vita, 426.

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commenting on Mazzucco’s work speaks to one of the most significant levels at which the novel resonates with its intended contemporary Italian audience.47 On this side of the Atlantic, the work is stunning for its relentlessly negative portrait of Italian immigrant life, and the conspicuous lack of emphasis on the Italian immigrant’s American success story. In Barolini’s novel, Umbertina escapes from Little Italy to settle amidst the green hills of upstate New York, quite literally establishing roots, through the garden she tends, and through the healthy and prosperous branches of her extended family tree. In her old age, Umbertina reviews the choices of her life and declares, “She had won.” But what of Vita? “I am very rich…Richer than I ever dreamed of becoming,” she tells Diamante when they are reunited in their old age. Diamante, in contrast, she judges to be “as poor as Italy.”48 But despite Vita’s material success, Mazzucco depicts her as still seeking happiness. Vita in the final phase of her life seeks happiness back in Italy. Where Umbertina is content in her garden, growing the American varietal of rosemary she has planted, Vita still longs to establish roots in Italy, tending lemon trees with Diamante in Tufo. The reader learns, much too soon in the novel, that such happiness is not to be.

47 In reading reader reviews there is a notable contrast between how the work has been received in Italy versus in the United States. American reviewers almost all comment favorably on Mazzucco’s vibrant and detailed descriptions of life in “Little Italy,” viewing them as central to the novel’s narrative force. In striking contrast, Italian reviewers repeatedly note how the distinctly “Italian” elements of the story could easily be subtracted and the story remain intact, relating it more to Italy’s present than to the past it ostensibly depicts. Writes one reviewer of Mazzucco’s work, “Fili narrativi fatti di dettagli minuti dipanano storie di emigrati che potrebbero valere anche oggi, anche qui, senza che mai vengano nominate le parole mafia…” or “dago” or “guini guini goon” [Narrative threads composed of minute details unravel stories of immigrants that could just as easily refer to today, even here ( in Italy), without ever having to use the words “mafia” ... " or "dago" or "Guinea Guinea gone”] (Daniela Padoan). Indeed, paging through reader reviews on online Italian bookstore sites one notes the frequency with which Italian readers identify Mazzucco’s characters not with themselves, but with the nation’s growing population of extra-communitari. One comments: “È sufficiente cambiare il nome della nazione d’arrivo e di quella di partenza, e poi il dramma di povertà e disperazione, la voluntà di resistere per realizzare il sogno di un futuro migliore, sono gli stessi di altra gente che sbarca su altre spiagge, anche oggi in Italia” [Simply change the name of the country of arrival and the departure dates, and then the drama of poverty and desperation, the will to resist to realize the dream of a better future, are the same as other people who land on other beaches, even today in Italy] (it.answers.yahoo.com). 48 Mazzucco, Vita, 245.

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Diamante dies before this dream can be realized, and Vita disappears back into America. Vita: A Novel is not as much the story of Mazzucco’s Italian American protagonist as it is her own. The entire saga of Vita’s adult life in the States, of her genesis into an Italian American, is absent from the narrative, due, at least in part, to the fact that Mazzucco held no imagine upon which to affix that story. For the American reader, conditioned to expect more from the genre of the immigrant tale, Vita’s American life seems rather uni-dimensionally rendered in terms of making money. Early on, the Italian emigrant characters realize “that the abacus and not the alphabet is the key to (New York)—and maybe the entire country” (73). Everything is counted, and the higher the number a person or thing is ascribed the greater its value. Mazzucco implies that Italians, like Vita, made money, increased their bank accounts, moved to higher numbered streets, and simply “blended into” the Americans around them. Here, once again, Mazzucco echoes Bernardy, who criticized the Italian immigrants for their preoccupation with accumulating money in the present, at the expense of their long-term social and moral development. Vita’s father, Agnello, in his return visits to Minturno, is remembered as being “newly rich and odious, and odious because he was newly rich.”49 In Lucamante’s view, Vita represents a “mending job” in which Mazzucco “uses literature to successfully suture the chasm between Italian writers and Italian migrants.”50 While this may be true in the Italian context, I would respectively disagree that it functions as such in its English translation on the grounds that Mazzucco’s narrative does not leave room to imagine that for every Italian seeking their Vita there is an American seeking her Umbertina. Despite all her meticulous research, Mazzucco does not mention having interviewed or even met a single descendent of the Minturno di Tufo emigrants that stayed in the United States. Clearly, she does not see their story as being important to her story, a disconnect most clearly illustrated in her meta-narrative, when she is unable to communicate with the group of Italian Americans whose dialect fails to confer meaning in the standard Italian Mazzucco speaks, demonstrating if not outright disavowal, certainly a clear disconnection between modern Italy and the descendants of its diaspora community abroad. On the other hand, Vita: A Novel in its innovative post-modern form, with interjected references to newspaper articles, police logs, statistics and other archival material, succeeds in highlighting in cold hard fact the many 49 50

Mazzucco, Vita, 91. Lucamante, 302.

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hardships and the sting of prejudice that early Italian immigrants faced, and that narratives like Umbertina tend to marginalize in favor of the greater story of the immigrants’ material success and integration into American society. Little Italy may remain for Mazzucco “tutta un’ epopea da lei vagamente conosciuta,”51 as Baldasso states. But she at least provides a vehicle by which the American reader can avoid the trap of romanticizing the Italian immigrant past as a glossy picture postcard of Little Italy. As a non-place, Mazzucco’s “Little Italy” is effectively deterritorialized, less a geographic locale than a metaphoric space, and this too represents a strength and a contribution of Mazzucco’s work to the genre of the immigration tale. Through her meta-narrative technique, in particular, the reported characteristics and conditions of the Little Italy in which Vita lived are ascribed to the Italian immigrants themselves. In a blending of place and space, as much as the characters are physically located in Little Italy, so too Little Italy is in them. What Bernardy characterizes as a “hybrid” space is really more of a contrastive culturescape, as much interior as related to geographic location. Barolini likewise illustrates this process as her character Umbertina moves from one Bleeker Street to another. The two Bleeker Streets could not be any further apart, in distance or elsewise, but they symbolically share the same name, implying that as the Italian immigrant characters enter these new territories they bring their own Little Italy along with them, whether they form a neighborhood, street, home, or even just a meal. In the end, though, Vita: A Novel leaves the reader suspended, like Vita and Diamante, hanging in a little lifeboat not knowing what comes next. In an ironic twist, Mazzucco seems to have chosen the historical theme of Italian emigration—of physical uprooting—to portray the post-modern condition of rootlessness at home. As much as she cannot imagine Vita’s journey to success in America, and feels no affinity to the Italian Americans she meets in New York, even at the end of her exceedingly long text ostensibly dedicated to recovering a family history in search of self, Mazzucco seems to remain curiously detached. For instance, when she remarks on the longevity of the ninety-three-year-old Tufo native, she quips “it was a shame I wasn’t from Tufo.”52 But isn’t she? Isn’t that the point of her entire novel—finding oneself by exploring one’s origins? Apparently not. Like Vita in her grandfather’s stories, Mazzucco seems to see herself as having “popped out of nowhere” to lead her life in Rome, and again, like Vita, is destined to disappear. After tracing the Mazzucco family tree all the way back to the Middle Ages, she notes: “I was the last 51 52

Baldasso, 97. Mazzucco, Vita, 245.

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one. No one was born after me—and with me the chain breaks, the name will be lost. With me, all of us who came from nothing dissolve into nothing.”53 Vita: A Novel thus propels us all into an eternal migratory pattern, suspended in little lifeboats over vast internal seas.

53

Ibid., 413.

CHAPTER TEN CROSSING CINEMATOGRAPHIC AND GEOPOLITICAL BORDERS: PALESTINIAN-CHILEAN FILMMAKER MIGUEL LITTÍN HEBA EL ATTAR CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY Introduction Miguel Littín, a film director, TV producer, newsreel maker, novelist, scriptwriter, Third Cinema advocate, and leftist, is primarily known for his works that focus on Chilean and/or Latin American sociopolitical issues. Despite this predominant tendency in his work, it is impossible to completely factor out his non-Latin American heritage, passed down by his Greek mother and Palestinian father. His Palestinian lineage cannot be ruled out because of Chile’s nature as not merely a host society for immigrants of Palestinian origin, but also as a home for the largest Palestinian Diaspora outside of the Middle East. With this in mind, this essay approaches Littín’s work by looking mainly to his late films on Palestine. It aims to underscore how Littín crosses the cultural borders between Chile and Palestine, thus bridging/dialoguing between his Chilean and Palestinian selves. This is a dialogue which inevitably originates from the very existential experience of the filmmaker, who acknowledges, “I lived between two worlds: one was the republican and democratic Chile of Allende and Neruda, and the other was the Arab-Byzantine culture of my family, where food, attitudes, and the music of the words all talked about Palestine.”1

1

Giulia Spagnesi and Fabio Veneri, “Preguntas y respuestas con Miguel Littín,” accessed 10/25/2012, http://es.arcoiris.tv/miguel_Littin/entrevista.htm.

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Previous studies on the cultural performance of Palestinian-Chileans2 found that, though fully integrated culturally and linguistically, secondand third-generation Palestinian-Chileans are increasingly beginning to acknowledge and celebrate their Arab/Palestinian heritage. This celebration, however, is often made in a dialogic way with a hegemonic Chilean culture/identity. For instance, in his late poems, Mahfud Massís (1916-1990), whose work was entirely written in Spanish and is considered integral to the Chilean surrealist movement, tackled Arab nationalist themes and integrated thematic and aesthetic techniques3 related to the Mahjar4 schools in the Americas. In mixing characteristics of Arab poetry and culture with those of Chile and Latin America, Massís was bridging dialogically between his national and ethnic identities. Like Mahfud Massís, Miguel Littín’s ethnic heritage began to be voiced late in his career, in the 2000s, when he filmed Palestinian Chronicles (2001), a documentary, and The Last Moon (2005), a feature film, both about Palestine. A decade earlier, in 1991, he had already written a novel about his Greek grandfather, El Viajero de las Cuatro Estaciones. If Littín’s work in the 90s—be it narrative or cinematographic—began unraveling both his Palestinian and Greek ethnicities, several questions ensue from this proposition. For instance, why does this shift occur specifically in that period? Does the shift in scope imply a similar shift in activism? If so, how does it relate (or not) to the previous phase of his career? Does Littín’s work merely claim a dual identity, or is there a dialogue across the hyphen? This essay contends that Littín’s earlier activism is not clearly dissociated from the thematic shift that began to appear in his work in the 90s. At this point, his cinematic scope seems to have momentarily moved away from Latin America to cross the borders to Palestine, although “moved away” might not be an accurate description, as Littín was actually taking Chile (and Latin America) to Palestine, and vice versa. Hence, to explore this border crossing and ensuing dialogue, this study looks at his feature films The Jackal of Nahueltoro (1969) and The Last Moon (2005) as well as his documentaries General Statement on Chile (1986) and Palestinian Chronicles (2001).

2 Heba El Attar. “Una intifada literaria. Mahfud Massís: El poeta palestinochileno,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 21, no. 2 (2010). 3 Ibid. 4 Mahjar schools are the literary movements of Arab immigrants in the Americas.

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The New Palestine: Chile Could it be that, while depicting Chile in his earlier films, Littín was instead reconstructing the Palestine of his dreams? To answer this question, it is necessary to deconstruct some of the filmmaker’s earlier films and even his own comments regarding Palestinian immigrants in Chile. Littín points out: For the Palestinians, Chile is a second Palestine or another Palestine.5 Given the landscape, the people, the way of life, the hospitality, both are very similar. Chileans and Palestinians are two people of agrarian roots and cultures, which is a fact that creates across time and space a very profound existential relation between them. Many Palestinians left behind towns like Beit Sahur and Beit Jala and, upon crossing the ocean and arriving in Valparaíso, they established themselves very quickly here, making of Chile their own country. Chile in turn gave them a chance to exist, identity cards, a right to live, and an opportunity to participate in Chilean life.6 Here, the relevance of his words does not spring from their historiographical nature or comparative connotation, but rather from rhyming with the enunciations of one of the characters in The Last Moon. One of the Palestinian characters in the film, Gorbasha, greedily collaborates with the Ottoman colonizers to amass enough money to send children of his family to the New World, namely to Chile. There, Gorbasha says, new generations of Palestinians would leave behind the turmoil and endless violence in the Middle East and would “have all the time to create a new Palestine.”7 This is especially insightful if we take into consideration that the film is inspired by the biography of Littín’s grandfather who, in the movie, is one of the children sent by Gorbasha to Chile. It is his grandson, Littín himself, who would later carry out Gorbasha’s dream as expressed in the movie. Subsequently, similar utterances by the filmmaker and/or enunciations by his movie characters may lead us to think that, since his earlier films depicting Chile (or Latin America), Littín was trying to image the Palestine that his father and ancestors dreamed of, one that is free of oppression and based on social justice. These were the real values that Miguel Littín was seeking in his new Palestine, Chile, as could be inferred from one of his earliest and most successful films, The Jackal of Nahueltoro. The latter was also the film which defined the major characteristics of Littín’s subsequent works: political activism, influence of the documentary genre, and collective narrative.

5

All quotes were translated from the original Spanish into English by the author of this essay. 6 Alejandra C. Rojas, “Entrevista con el director Miguel Littín,” accessed 10/15/2012, http://www.lahiguera.net/cinemania/pelicula/3066/comentario.php. 7 Miguel Littín, The Last Moon (Mexico: Latido Films, 2005).

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The Jackal was a box-office hit when first released in 1969. It put Littín at the forefront of the New Latin American cinema.8 Based on the story of a real crime perpetrated in 1960 during the conservative rule of Jorge Alessandri (1958-1964), the film portrays Jorge de Torres, a poor peasant who, while drunk, indiscriminately kills a woman and her five children, a crime for which the press depicts him as a “jackal.” Years later, during the Christian Democrat rule of Eduardo Frei 1964-1970, Littín revisits the story and diverges from the national press in its depiction of the accident as an individual crime. For Littín, the peasant was merely a victim whereas the state was the real criminal. Hence, in the film, he insists on representing de Torres as a subject of the systematic physical, spiritual, and intellectual alienation enforced by State institutions.9 It was one of the first times that Chilean social and political realities would be so meticulously scrutinized.10 Such revisionism led some scholars to view Littín’s movie not simply as an attack on Alessandri’s regime as it is depicted in the movie, but rather as ferocious criticism of the then-actual rule of Eduardo Frei.11 The film uses titles before each episode, hence enabling the audience to think critically and thereby capture the political and ideological discourse behind the crime.12 In this sense, The Jackal is thought to have raised public awareness and to have drawn the public’s attention to political alternatives such as La Unidad Popular, whose candidate, Allende, was running for president in 1970. Not surprisingly, impressed by Littín’s work and activism, president Allende later appointed him as Director of Chile Films. Apart from becoming a landmark of Chilean cinema, The Jackal of Nahueltoro was a turning point in Littín’s career. The film highlights his relentless political activism, a characteristic that, as mentioned elsewhere in this essay, would mark the rest of his work. This is also very much the case in his latest film, Dawson 10 (2009), which depicts the survival of late-president Allende’s cabinet members in a Pinochet concentration camp. On the other hand, The Jackal, in which fiction is mixed with documentary, emphasized Littín’s vocation of creating documentaries. Years later, this vocation would culminate in two major works: General Statement on Chile (1986) and Palestinian Chronicles (2001). More importantly, the making of the film showed that Littín not only was able to dissociate himself from the dominant discourse regarding the jackal, Jorge de Torres, but rather was able to use the story of an individual citizen to construct a collective narrative. This is a

8 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 279. 9 Tim Barnard and Peter Rist, South American Cinema: A Critical Filmography, 1915-1994. (New York: Garland, 1996), 223. 10 Jacqueline Mouesca, Plano secuencia de la memoria de Chile: veinticinco años de cine chileno, 1960-1985 (Madrid: Eds. del Litoral, 1988), 90-94. 11 John King, Magical Reel: A History of Cinema in Latin America (New York: Verso, 1990), 173. 12 Teshome H. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World. The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982), 53.

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feature that reappears in The Last Moon, in which he utilizes the story of his grandfather to reconstruct a collective narrative about Palestine. The success that The Jackal of Nahueltoro garnered for Littín would, after Allende’s assassination, expose him to Pinochet’s vengeance, subsequently forcing him into exile for almost two decades. Before leaving Chile, he finished The Promised Land (1971), a film that symbolized the history of that country. It narrated the story of a group of peasants from north and central Chile who head to the south in search of the lands that the government was distributing to the settlers in the 30s. Instead, they found a new area of land where they established a town based on socialist values. In fact, invoking The Promised Land is relevant to this discussion because it sheds light on two features that were lingering in most of the films Littín made about Chile and which reappeared later in his films on Palestine. The first of these features is his reliance on folklore, which is a characteristic that will resurface later in The Last Moon, the title of which is itself inspired by a Palestinian folk song of the same name.13 The second feature is the biblical reference in the title of The Promised Land. This feature is shared by The Last Moon, his later movie on Palestine. In the latter, the biblical realm is invoked specifically in the final scene, which shows a close-up of Soliman’s face behind the fence, bringing to mind images of Christ crucified. The success that Littín had achieved before being forced to leave Chile represents a new beginning in his career. In spite of his exile, his accomplishments continued. After leaving Chile, he moved to Mexico, where he lived for almost eleven years. Not only did he find the Mexican government sympathetic to Chilean exiles, and was therefore able to obtain financial support for his films,14 but he also discovered his Latin American self. In this respect, he notes: I always think of Mexico as my other country. Not my second country, but rather my other country. I feel Latin American whenever and as much I sense I am Mexican. I believe that Mexico was the door through which I delved to understand the real meaning of being Latin American.15

This enabled him to broaden his scope to include sociopolitical struggles in other Latin American countries.16 A good example of this expansion of Littín’s creative vision is his film The Recourse to the Method (1978) based on Alejo Carpentier’s novel. The film takes place in 13

Zvei Tal, “La reconctrucción de la identidad de judíos y palestinos en películas recientes de Chile y Argentina,” in Árabes y judíos en Iberoamérica. Similitudes, diferencias y tensiones, ed. Ranaan Rein, (Spain: Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterraneo, 2008), 434. 14 King, 181. 15 Armando G. Tejeda, “Miguel Littín: Latinoamérica es un continente de alquimistas.” Entrevista con el cineasta chileno Miguel Littín,” Babab, 2000, accessed 11/03/2012, http://www.babab.com/no00/miguel_littin.htm. 16 Mouesca, 84-102.

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an unidentified Latin American country where the population is being constantly crushed by its dictatorship, thereby narrating the collective history of all Latin Americans with their respective oppressive regimes. Littín’s activism for continental causes never distracted him from his initial and ongoing concern about the situation in Chile. Like many other Chilean exiles, he was keeping abreast of the Chilean dictatorship’s horrendous practices. He then decided to denounce the dictatorship’s atrocities to the international audience in 1986 when he managed to cross the borders to Chile and clandestinely film General Statement on Chile: Secrecy was built into all aspects of the project, which operated in a cellular fashion that resembled the structure of the guerrilla groups then fighting oppressive military regimes in the Third World. Only the chief of each crew knew Littín and was in on the project, and apparently no film crew was aware of the other crews. In addition, no rushes could be viewed during filming because the footage was smuggled out for processing in Spain. As a result, there was no way to correct mistakes. All in all, 105,616 feet of film was exposed, which Littín spent six months editing upon leaving Chile. The result was General Statement on Chile, a four-hour television program, which was broadcast in many European countries. It won accolades at film festivals in Venice, Toronto, and Havana. Subsequently, he edited a two-hour version for theatrical distribution.17

The documentary earned Littín international acclaim and immortalization in a novel by Gabriel García Márquez titled Clandestine in Chile.18 In fact, the risky task undertaken by Littín in filming this documentary is chronicled by the Colombian novelist in a style that, to a certain extent, tried to imitate the filmmaker’s own version of the story as recounted to the novelist. In doing so, García Márquez was in fact placing more emphasis on the character of the filmmaker than on his high-risk venture to denounce Pinochet to an international audience. It is this particular attention paid by García Márquez in Clandestine in Chile to the man behind the camera that paves the way here to the contention that films can be viewed as performances of the identity of their makers even if they are not directly about them.19 This contention, in Littín’s case, implies that his films can be viewed as a performance of his Chilean and Latin American identities. Taking into account that he is also a descendent of two immigrant groups in Chile (Palestinian and Greek), his voice could be 17

Naficy, 281. Gabriel García Márquez, Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín (New York: H. Holt, 1987). 19 Naficy, 282. 18

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viewed as representative, in one way or another, of either or both of these two minorities. Subsequently, his voice may be also viewed as embodying a contribution of that minority (be it the Palestinian or the Greek) to the construction of the host country’s national identity. Such contribution may in turn be considered as a means to eliminate or attenuate the borders of the minority group and to integrate it into the hegemonic group. By the same token, it could be suggested that Littín’s films between the 60s and 90s denote the assimilation of Palestinian and/or Greek immigrants in Chile. While being silent all those years about his ethnic identities and pouring his self into Chile, Littín was not becoming de-ethnicized; rather, he was fulfilling the dream expressed by Gorbasha in The Last Moon: creating in Chile a new Palestine.

Bringing Chile to Palestine If, between the 60s and 90s, Littín’s camera was imaging Palestine while shooting films about Chile, could it be possible that when he later shot films about Palestine he did so through a Chilean gaze? If The Last Moon is narrated by an immigrant who arrives in Chile and who, from Chile, looks back and remembers the Middle East, then The Last Moon and even Palestinian Chronicles could be viewed not simply as mere representations of Palestine, but rather as particularly constructed from a Chilean (and Latin American) border-crossing gaze. If so, then the camera’s gaze in these films was actually bringing Chile (and Latin America) to Palestine. This interpretation is further supported by basic facts about the two aforementioned works, especially The Last Moon. For instance, in an interview about this movie, Tamara Acosta says “The film shooting took about a month and we did the dialogues first in English and French, but later it was us (the Chilean actors) who did the dubbing into Arabic or Hebrew.”20 Known as the “muse” of Chilean cinema, Acosta played one of the leading roles in The Last Moon. She is Matty, the wife of Soliman who represents Littín’s great grandfather in the movie. She was not the only Chilean to appear in the film, however; Alejandro Goic played the role of Jacobeo and Francisca Merino the Zionist Alinne, whereas the rest of the casting consisted mostly of Arab actors. Moreover, shot almost entirely in Palestinian territories and running primarily in Arabic with Spanish subtitles, the film production was mainly funded by MexicanChilean money. It could then be argued that, by bringing Chilean actors to 20

Patricio A. Hoffman,“La inolvidable experiencia de filmar en Palestina,” Al Damir 43 (2005): 12-15.

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speak Arabic in a film done about Palestine and by producing it with a Latin American budget, Miguel Littín was not only bringing Chile (and Latin America) to Palestine, but additionally and concretely engaging the two geographical regions in a cross-cultural dialogue. There is one caveat, however, before proceeding to an examination of how Littín brought Chile to Palestine in Palestinian Chronicles and The Last Moon. It was not really unusual that he prioritized, at least between the 60s and 90s, the reflection upon/projection of the Chilean and/or Latin American identities and histories at the expense of his ethnic ones. Not far from where he was, other immigrants of Arab descent, such as Juan José Saer or Juana Dib in Argentina, did not usually mention any “Arab issues and none of them depict[ed] Arab immigrant life; instead they enact[ed] strategies of discursive assimilation.”21 Upon his return to Chile, Littín decided to take his work in a new direction. Although he was still burdened by the trauma and memories of his exilic experience, which led to his film The Shipwrecked (1991),22 his return to Chile meant a border crossing back to his birth country, and it reinstated his Chilean self, which allowed him subsequently to cross borders to his ethnic self. It was then that he published his novel El Viajero de las Cuatro Estaciones (1991), on the adventures of Kristus Kukumides, his Greek grandfather from his mother’s side, while traveling from Greece to Chile. Not surprisingly, he would later follow suit with his family from his father’s side, who came from Palestine to Chile, with the aim of depicting the struggle of Palestinian immigrants in crossing the Atlantic and facing a new culture. Nonetheless, if Littín, as originally planned, had simply tackled the story of Palestinian migration to Chile, his narration of their epic would have merely been an ethnic one, and, as such, the objective of the narration would have been limited to marking the difference between the subaltern and the hegemonic groups. Had that been the case, Littín would have been retracting what he had earlier achieved throughout his career, as he would have been indulging in a sort of ethnicization, hence reinstating the minority group’s borders in the face of the hegemonic group. What Littín actually did, however, was a narration through film that could be viewed as interpreting or transforming the hegemonic group into an integral part of the minority group’s history and memory. Littín was still considering the project—that is, to narrate the Palestinian migration to the Americas—when the Second IntifDah took 21

Christina Civantos, Between Argentines and Arabs. Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 19. 22 Naficy, 282.

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place. He then decided to physically cross the borders for the first time to Palestine with the aim of shooting the IntifDah live in a documentary titled Palestinian Chronicles (2001). The documentary starts with a long shot depicting a Palestinian boy throwing stones at an Israeli tank. It is the nonphysical space between that boy and the tank that is examined by the camera’s gaze. It could be proposed that the documentary constitutes simply the depiction of a ten-day tour by the filmmaker through Palestinian and Israeli territories in an attempt to capture the complexity of the situation and provide Latin Americans with a firsthand take on the conflict away from mainstream media. However, this is admittedly a contestable proposition, as a deeper scrutiny might lead us to consider that the documentary was probably reflecting Littín’s positionality about the entitlement of Latin Americans to film and/or narrate others’ history from a Latin American perspective. This may explain why the documentary starts with a voiceover: We were always trained to believe that Palestine was nothing more than a permanent bad news. We watch images about disturbance, kids throwing stones at tanks, and blood. But, what does really lie there between the tanks and the demonstrators? What is hidden there in that dark space forgotten and silenced by all? What about that Palestine which grows then dies in that abyss? Is it all about a sacred war scenario, a rock, a wall, or a temple? Or is it an expression of a divine rage?23

Certainly, starting off the documentary with the subject pronoun “we” unravels Littín’s positionality as a Latin American attempting to reconstruct reality in the Middle East. Hence, it leaves little doubt that it is the filmmaker’s Latin Americanness in general, and his Chileanness in particular, that are delimiting the camera’s gaze. This is especially true in the case of Palestinian Chronicles, as the struggle for freedom that his camera was capturing was anything but new to his cinematographic lens. Earlier, in his General Statement on Chile, he had already engaged personally and cinematographically in Chilean and Latin American struggles for freedom, justice, and democracy. In General Statement on Chile, the filmmaker had initially aimed at documenting how Chileans remembered Allende’s ideals. After starting to film it though, he found himself delving into a more in-depth representation of Chile’s sense of history and the people’s struggles which eventually led to the establishment of democracy. It is possible then to suggest that it was that background which made it easier for him to recreate similar experiences in 23

Miguel Littín, Palestinian Chronicles (Chile: Pepe Torres, 2001).

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Palestinian Chronicles. As had been the case with General Statement on Chile, Littín had initially intended in Palestinian Chronicles to shoot the IntifaDah live. However, he ended up delving into documenting the current history of the conflict on both the Palestinian and the Israeli fronts. Furthermore, it could be suggested that his Chilean/Latin American background had further guided his project on Palestine in the sense that the danger entailed in shooting Palestinian Chronicles was definitely not new for him either. He had already taken high risks in Latin America specifically when clandestinely filming General Statement on Chile during the Pinochet regime. This may explain why he did not shy away from the ongoing unrest when filming Palestinian Chronicles, nor was he dissuaded by aggressive measures frequently taken by the Israeli authorities, who at one point arrested him and his crew and freed them only after Chilean authorities intervened. More importantly, it was his earlier experience with exile after being forced out from Chile and his later reunification with his country that is actually mimicked in Palestinian Chronicles. While the former marked his reunion with Chile after long years of exile, the latter symbolized his reunion with his ancestors’ homeland. This indicates that, had he not crossed first the borders back to his Chilean self after exile, Littín would not have been able to reunite with his Palestinian self. Interestingly, this reunion was not dissociated from his Chileanness/Latin Americanness, which was heavily marking the making of Palestinian Chronicles despite its being shot entirely in Palestinian and Israeli territories. Such can be inferred from the accounts given by the filmmaker about the scenes behind the camera: […] we had already shot the documentary Palestinian Chronicles in the same war zone. Certainly it would have been safer to film the scenes in Jordan or Morocco, but we believed that our contribution as Chileans consists in participating with an act of peace in a zone of war.24

Seemingly, however, while Littín was narrating excerpts of the Palestinian present history in this documentary to his fellow Latin Americans, he realized more than ever the need to reconstruct his Palestinian ethnic past. Such need might have been especially motivated both by the tour and the documentary, which enabled him to talk directly with insiders on both sides, which in turn likely compelled him to 24 “Miguel Littín en la línea del fuego,” El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 05/24/2002, accessed 11/3/2012, http://www.mercuriovalpo.cl/site/edic/20020523210828/pags/ 20020523233453.html.

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reconsider his earlier project that was left undone: to narrate the history of his Palestinian immigrant ancestors. At that point, he understood that in order to reconstruct that past it would not be enough to solely rely on the collective memory of those Palestinians who migrated to Chile. It was crucial to include the view of those who stayed back to survive in Palestine, as depicted in The Last Moon, in which Chilean identity and influence is definitely more pronounced than in Palestinian Chronicles. The Last Moon, the film title, is inspired by a Palestinian folkloric song meant to drive away a threatening dragon,25 which in this movie might be invoked as a metaphor for colonialism/oppression in general. The film recovers images of Palestine from the memory of a child, who, in fact, is the grandfather of Miguel Littín himself. The child’s memories go back to the beginning of the twentieth century before his family sent him to the New World. Newsreels of WWI inaugurate the film with several shots taken from different angles as if to show the target audience, primarily Hispanic, how the region was being attacked from everywhere by foreign armed forces. The camera then moves to a close-up of the child’s face while one crucial scene—that of his father, Soliman—dominates his memories. As was the case with The Jackal, in which the filmmaker used the individual story of Jorge de Torres to narrate the over-arching story of the Chileans under institutionalized oppression by successive Chilean governments, in The Last Moon, Littín uses the individual story of Soliman to narrate the collective story of Palestinians dealing with the oppression institutionalized by successive colonialist rules. Through the child’s memories, the camera’s gaze illustrates the land, which was owned by his father Soliman and which the child so nostalgically remembers. The camera specifically concentrates on how Soliman was obliged to sell that land cheaply to an immigrant only to pay off an absurd fine unjustly levied by the oppressive Ottoman ruler. The child’s memory goes back to the friendship that later grew between his father, Soliman, and that immigrant, a Jewish Latin American named Jacob. Through a period of mutual support and defense against Ottoman and later, British rule, the friendship between Soliman and Jacob is constructed simultaneously along with the construction of a house which Soliman helps Jacob to build at the top of a hill in Beit Sahur. It is a friendship that is later challenged as both men are betrayed by the Zionist Alinne, an Ashkenazi immigrant, who seduces Jacob and brings Jewish settlers from the Kibbutz to bulldoze the house he had built in the Palestinian town. In the final scene, after the settlers had invaded his land, Soliman looks across a fence at Jacob with disbelief, disappointment, and frustration. 25

Tal, 434.

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As previously noted, Littín himself underscored the fact that this storytelling on Palestine was being reconstructed from the perspective of a Chilean immigrant—that is, the child who narrates from Chile his memories about the Middle East. This explains why his memories go back specifically to Beit Sahur and Beit Jala, as these are the ChristianPalestinian towns from where migration toward Chile primarily originated. Hence, the Palestine-Chile connection is established from the first moment in the film. It is a connection that is further supported by a central scene depicting Soliman and Jacob measuring an arid and mountainous land that Jacob wants to buy from Soliman. This scene marks the incipient interaction and ensuing friendship between Soliman and Jacob. The identity conferred to the latter should never be deemed accidental. He was not just any Jewish immigrant—he was a Latin American Jewish immigrant who had migrated from nowhere else than the Southern Cone itself. If we take into consideration that, at the turn of the century, Zionism was very strong in the Southern Latin American Cone—where Jacob is from—it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the filmmaker was keen to distinguish between Jews who migrated to Palestine from Latin America and those who came from Europe. This is especially true given that the film insists on differentiating between Jacob and Alinne, the Ashkenazi Jew. Unlike the friendly Jacob, Alinne perpetrates various betrayals throughout the course of the film. She betrayed Soliman and his people after they had healed her from her injury at the hands of the Turks. She betrayed Jacob himself when she seduced him to later bring in Jewish settlers from the Kibbutz to bulldoze the house he had built on the land he had bought from Soliman in the Arab town. In this sense, it could be argued that, by conveying a Latin American identity to Jacob, Littín was actually being influenced by his own Chileaness/Latin Americanness. However, it could be further argued that, by emphasizing the difference between Jewish immigrants from Latin America and their counterparts from Europe, the filmmaker was hinting at the substantial advantage that the former group had over the latter—that is, their recent successful coexistence with Arab immigrants in Latin America, and therefore their ability to in turn achieve a more peaceful coexistence with Arabs in Palestine. This could also be rightly inferred from the filmmaker’s own assertion that “Here Arabs and Jews coexist in peace and harmony. And this is what we want to convey in this film.”26 In truth, the notion of Chile is intertwined with the very theme of the film, the child’s nostalgic memories of his ancestors’ land. Certainly, this nostalgia is a claim of the Palestinian identity that is passed down by 26

“Miguel Littín en la línea del fuego.”

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Soliman to his child and then to the grandson of the latter, Littín himself. Additionally, this claim is made around the land which is symbolized specifically in that piece of terrain sold by Soliman to Jacob. However, it could be suggested that even such claims of Palestinian identity in The Last Moon cannot be dissociated from the filmmaker’s own Chileanness. In the film, Chile is not merely mentioned as a destination where the child was to be sent, but rather it is invoked as being the place where, according to Gorbasha, he was going to create a new Palestine. This justifies the idealization of Chile in the letters sent to Gorbasha by family members who had already migrated to Chile. This idealization is especially emphasized through the poster of a Chilean national hero that was sent by those Palestinian immigrants for Gorbasha to frame and send back with the child. It is a scene which was interpreted as an indication of Palestinian-Chilean identity negotiation.27 However, it could also be viewed as an indicator of those early immigrants’ readiness to integrate into the host society, Chile, and their readiness to contribute to the identity construction and history-making of that country. Apart from the historical/conceptual level, it could be suggested that the idealization of Chile (and Latin America) in The Last Moon is also achieved at a linguistic/textual level. The idealization of Chile in The Last Moon suggests that, despite claiming the right of his ancestors and his own in Palestine, Littín’s Palestinian identity survived and flourished in another land—that is, Chile. The latter, in their eyes, is then a continuum of Palestine. In The Last Moon, this is supported by the description of Chile as a long and narrow country overlooking the sea, which, in fact, closely describes Palestine itself. It could also be contended that Chile was literally brought to Palestine, given Littín’s accounts of the shooting of a scene depicting Jewish and Palestinian bodies floating in the Dead Sea. The filmmaker and his crew managed to reach the shooting scene without problems, as their vehicles bore the Chilean flag. Among the crew, however, there were Palestinian actors and personnel. Littín notes how the Chilean members of the crew observed the delight on the Palestinian’s faces as they reached the Dead Sea for the first time in their lives. On their way back, however, the vehicles were stopped by Israeli officers, who discovered the Palestinians inside. They were all detained and had to spend the night in prison, where they stayed until later being freed, thanks to the Chilean diplomats. In fact, it was not only Chile that was brought to Palestine in The Last Moon, but also Mexico, Littín’s other

27

Tal, 434.

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country. The scene which was shot at the Wailing Wall was completed only thanks to the assistance of a Mexican soldier.28 Hence, in terms of identity construction, The Last Moon, and, before it, Palestinian Chronicles, were not a disconnect from Littín’s earlier work but rather a continuation of it. They were not a shift in the filmmaker’s activism, either. In the same way that Littín had turned Jorge de Torres of The Jackal into a symbol of the Chilean masses who were victims of oppressive governments, he turns Soliman of The Last Moon into a symbol of the Palestinian masses who were victims of the successive colonizers. In the same way, he was determined in The Jackal to unravel the whole system which supports the lack of social justice and oppression to which de Torres was subjected. He does not limit himself in The Last Moon to denouncing the colonizers, but rather insists on representing the whole stratification system that the rulers generated, particularly within the ethnic and religious minorities.

Conclusion When asked whether Chile and Palestine were intersecting in The Last Moon, Miguel Littín replied: At the beginning we were Turks, but Chile, with its Andalusian roots, opened up as a new home for the Palestinians and welcomed them, especially in the provinces. There, the young immigrants found a new Palestine, and became Chileans, without ever giving up their pride for being Palestinians.29

In the only scholarly study done thus far in respect to The Last Moon, it is argued that the film insists on victimizing Palestinians and vilifying Jews, and by doing so the movie is adopting the rhetoric of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).30 However, the discussion in this essay suggests that similar interpretations of the film risk being an oversimplification due specifically to the fact that they fail to place The Last Moon within the whole context of Littín’s work. The film should not be viewed as a simple construction of his Palestinian-Chilean identity but 28

“Miguel Littín: “La última luna es mi modo de contribuir a la paz y el entendimiento en el Oriente Medio,” Casa América, accessed 11/4/2012, http://www.casamerica.es/contenidoweb/ miguel-littin-la-ultima-luna-es-mi-modode-contribuir-la-paz-y-al-entendimiento-en-orie. 29 Faride Zerán, Las cartas sobre la mesa: Entrevistas de Rocinante (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2009), 176. 30 Tal, 421.

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rather as a dialogue that the filmmaker spent his career establishing across the hyphen. As suggested in this essay, this dialogue is always ongoing. It was established in his earlier films in which he tried to create an ideal Palestine from Chile before bringing Chile to Palestine in two of his later works. It is a dialogue that Littín was eagerly trying to establish between the two loci, Chile and Palestine, to which he was eternally bound and from which he was helplessly exiled. It is also a dialogue embedded in his positionality regarding filmmaking and life; he acknowledges that he believes “in dialogue as the means for coexistence.”31 This justifies what his camera’s gaze captures in Palestinian Chronicles, which dialogically alternates between Palestinians and Israelis. It also suggests that The Last Moon was attempting to achieve a dialogue, be it with the Chilean Other or the Jewish Other. This is especially true at the linguistic level as, throughout the film, the voiceover and most of the characters speak in Arabic, with the exception of one scene in which Jacob is pictured standing on top of the hill and dreaming of the house he is about to build overseeing Jerusalem. It is in this particular moment that Jacob utters his dreams in Spanish, as if this language is a signifier for the dream which was held for too long by Palestinian-Chileans and which is now projected back from Chile and Latin America, through the camera’s gaze, onto the Palestinian ancestors’ homeland. Ultimately, such dialogue embodies a contribution by the Palestinian Diaspora to peace-building and conflict resolution in the ancestors’ homeland, Palestine. It also embodies a contribution by Chile/Latin America into world peace for, according to Littín, “Chilean and Latin American cinemas are mature enough to tackle big themes that are tangible for the rising of a new era in the human history. This is the real bet.”32

31 “Encuentros Digitales: Miguel Littín,” El Mundo, 11/26/2006, accessed 11/3/2012, http://www.elmundo.es/encuentros/invitados/2006/11/2270/. 32 Zerán, 178.

PART IV POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL BORDERS

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE: THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY AND THE CONVERGENCE AND CONFRONTATION BETWEEN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC INTERESTS JENNIFER S. SCHIFF WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY Introduction Over the span of its approximate 200-year involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, the British government defined the trade as an essential component of its economic policy. As such, the state believed that it was vitally important for Britain to safeguard its African trading interests in order to sustain its plantation economies across the globe. Indeed, in 1672, the British state created the Royal African Company, a multinational corporation, as a visible manifestation of British interest in the slave trade, and charged this corporation with the task of defending and facilitating British trading interests in Africa. At its peak, the Royal African Company exported goods valued at £1.5 million, dispatched 500 ships to Africa, delivered 100,000 slaves to Britain’s colonial plantations, imported 30,000 tons of sugar, coined more than half a million guineas, and built or rebuilt eight forts on the African coast.1 Despite its reported successes, the Royal African Company (RAC) faced a difficult road during its organizational life, a route filled with lengthy court battles and declining profits as the company attempted 1

Kenneth Gordon Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), 345.

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futilely to meet the dictates of its governmental mandate. Ultimately, the RAC failed to earn sufficient profits for its own sustainability, and its insolvency finally heralded the dissolution of the company in 1752. Traditionally, scholars have examined the evolution of the RAC and the experience of its life as an incorporated entity within the framework of monopolistic versus free trade sentiment.2 Certainly, the case of the RAC can be quite instructive in this sense, but it may be equally enlightening for one to reconceptualize the experience of this company and its relationship to the British state through the context of the RAC’s defensive role, a fundamental Company responsibility to which the literature has paid very little attention. A new perspective is called for, then, that conceives of the Royal African Company’s monopoly charter as a secondary consideration, while giving the RAC’s defensive character due attention. Indeed, the relevant historical documentation suggests that the British government created the RAC for the primary purpose of defense, with the monopoly control of the slave trade serving as compensation for defensive expenditures. Ultimately, however, the dual mandate of the Royal African Company represented a peculiar fusion of public and private interests which was, upon analysis, wholly unsuccessful.3 As a private capitalist enterprise, the company’s main objective was the accumulation of profits, yet as part of its charter, the state charged the company with the responsibility of defending English interests in Africa, an objective that was decidedly public in its orientation. Over time, the Royal African Company could not sustain this often contradictory combination of state and private interests, and the power of the capitalistic pursuit of profits eventually doomed the Company’s role as a defensive arm of the state.4 However, the experience of the RAC provided a valuable lesson for the English government, a lesson which suggested that private interests could not adequately provide for the public good of the national defense, and also that while the public and private spheres may overlap at times, the pursuit of profits and the provision of public goods may, at times, be mutually exclusive goals.5

2

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Books IV-V, 1776 Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4 James D. Tracy, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Emmpires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 5 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 3

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Theoretical Conceptions of the State, Corporations, and Public Goods A Weberian definition of statehood serves as a theoretical departure point for an analysis of the Royal African Company’s defensive role in the Atlantic slave trade. Theorist Max Weber defined the state as an organized political community, occupying a territory, and possessing internal and external sovereignty. According to Weber, then, the state is “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”6 Furthermore, Weber considered the state the sole source of this ‘right’ to use violence. One can argue, then, that the 17th century British government, as the organized political community representing territorial holdings identified as “British,” held the monopoly on violence and was responsible for defending its territorial interests in Africa. While a monopoly on violence may help to define the political purpose of a state, the study of political economy, as the name implies, suggests that states also play an important economic role. Much of the relevant political economy literature expects that states are the only actors that are able to provide economically for the public good of the national defense. Indeed, the concept of a “public good” is centrally important within the explanatory framework of the relationship between the Royal African Company and the British state, and it deserves a more thorough analysis and explanation. Public goods are defined by two factors that distinguish them from private goods: They are non-rivalrous, meaning that consumption by one person does not diminish the amount that remains available to others, and they are non-exclusive, meaning that if the good is available to one person then it is automatically available to all others.7 8 The national defense, then, serves as a classic example of a public good. The provision of defense to one citizen of a state does not diminish the amount of defense provided to any other citizen, and no one citizen is excluded from national defense provision. The literature holds that necessary public goods are most often provided by the state because private actors have no economic incentive to handle the problem of “free riders,” persons who choose to receive the 6

H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Translated and edited), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78. 7 Duncan Snidal, “Public Goods, Property Rights, and Political Organizations,” International Studies Quarterly 23:4 (December 1979), 533. 8 Paul Samuelson, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” Review of Economics and Statistics 36:4 (November 1954), 387.

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benefits of a public good without contributing to paying the costs of producing those benefits.9 It is logical, then, that a private actor would not be willing to provide a good for which it may not be compensated. Within the context of defense spending, the free rider problem translates into the idea that even if a citizen refuses to pay his/her taxes to the state, (e.g., in essence refusing to pay for being defended), that individual still enjoys the same level of protection as citizens that do contribute money toward the state’s defense spending. Theoretically, then, the state is a public political actor defined by its monopoly on violence and a public economic actor defined by its ability to provide public goods when private interests lack the incentive to do so. In the case of the Royal African Company, the British state turned this theoretical definition on its head, thus the RAC’s experience deserves further analysis from a political economy perspective. Historical evidence suggests that the British state itself defined the protection of its African trading interests as a vitally important component of the state’s national defense. As such, one expects that the British state would provide for the defense of its trading interests in Africa; however, that was not the case, as the state proved unwilling to “expend [its] entire economic or defense capabilities…in pursuit of any single foreign policy goal.”10 The state’s solution to this dilemma was to create a traditional corporation, which by definition existed to further the accumulation of capital in the form of profits, and charge this corporation with the provision of the state’s national defense. By engaging in this experimentation, for want of a better term, the British state subverted its traditional role as a provider of a public good, defense. Ultimately, however, the British experiment failed, as the dual goals of providing for its own private economic interests and the public defense of the nation proved impossible for the Royal African Company to achieve. Although all British citizens enjoyed the benefits from the defense of the African trading interests abroad, few citizens nor the state were actually paying the Royal African Company for the defense service it provided, and the free rider problem eventually doomed this inventive British experiment. The cost of providing defense for the state was ultimately detrimental to the Royal African Company’s profits, a finding that 9

Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 10 Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51:4 (Autumn 1997), 513-53, from Charles Lipson and Benjamin J. Cohen, eds., Theory and Structure in International Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 44.

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supports the idea that the state truly did, in this case, maintain a monopoly on violence and is the most appropriate economic actor to provide for the public good of national defense. Those defensive capabilities, though, relied largely on the profits the company reaped from the slave trade; thus, a discussion of the dynamics of that trade is in order.

The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Vital Component of the National Interest The 17th century witnessed a scramble for Africa’s trade, marked by fierce international rivalries, as many European nations sought to carve out their own specific niches in the African trade market. Indeed, British interest in African trade had begun over a century before the Royal African Company ever came into being. In the 1560s, for example, Englishman Sir John Hawkins led several slave raids on the African coast, and in 1620, the first known English exploration group of the African interior traveled up the Gambia River.11 Throughout the first half of the 17th century, British trade with Africa slowly expanded, although the majority of the trade at that time was not human-based. In fact, between 1657 and 1668, the English East India Company dispatched a small number of ships to Africa for the sole purpose of trading gold and other non-human commodities.12 Sugar, however, was the deciding factor in the English decision to expand and safeguard its trade in African slaves. Sugar and its byproducts, rum and molasses, were the “most valuable British imports from anywhere in the world in the 18th century,” and incomes accruing from expanding sugar sales in Britain provided “the impetus to expand the slave trade to maintain the output of the plantations.”13 As sugar cultivation grew to encompass a central role within the British colonies, the British government perceived the critical importance of the West Indian plantations in its imperial economy, and it realized that it needed to ensure the supply of labor to those colonies as an essential feature of imperial strategy. Indeed, evidence strongly suggests that the British state conceptualized the African slave trade as a necessary component of its foreign policy interests, as “foreign trade and commerce is the great concern and interest of every nation,” and “trade and commerce cannot be maintained or increased without government, order and regular 11 Kenneth Morgan, ed. The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, Volume Two (London, Pickering & Chatto, 2003), ix. 12 Morgan, The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, xi. 13 Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, 1660-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 67.

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discipline.”14 By its own admission, then, the British government recognized that the slave trade was vitally important to its national interest and that the success of the trade required some form of governmental intervention. Although the British state acknowledged the necessity of its intervention into the African trade, it realized that the operationalization of that intervention would require significant expense in terms of manpower and resources. In other words, to continue its profitable trade in sugar, the British state needed to assure its access to African slave labor, but to do so was to engage in violent conflict, as European states battled endlessly over territorial access on the African continent. Violent altercations marked the “zero-sum” equation of trade competition, as one state’s gains equaled another’s losses. The Dutch West India Company, for example, “only by the means of a few forts and three or four ships,” could “render the coasts of Africa inaccessible to all others,” and “the Dutch, Danes, French, and other nations, that likewise trade in [Africa] are evermore vigilant for their own profit,” frequently attempting “to extirpate and destroy…English Commerce.”15 Trade wars, then, were not uncommon, and the AngloDutch War of the 1660s and the Franco-Dutch Wars of 1672-78 and 16891713 serve as further examples of the slave trade’s potential for conflict.16 Military vigilance, then, seemed a necessary response for protecting national trading interests, and indeed, the British government openly acknowledged that the African “trade cannot be carried on but by a constant maintaining of forts…and ships of war to protect the ships of trade,” since the natives and foreign governments “cannot be obliged by treaties without being awed by a continuing and permanent force.”17 Intuitively, then, Weberian notions of the state lead one to assume that the appropriate form of British governmental intervention in the trade was the provision of “a continuing and permanent force” since the state both maintained a monopoly on violence, and, as the political economy 14

Government of Britain, Certain Considerations Relating to the Royal African Company of England. In Which, The Original Growth, and National Advantages of the Guiney Trade, are Demonstrated: As Also That the Same Trade Cannot be Carried on, but by a Company and Joint Stock (London, 1680). 15 Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England, (London, Sam. Aris, 1730), and Certain Considerations Relating to the Royal African Company of England. In Which, The Original Growth, and National Advantages of the Guiney Trade, are Demonstrated: As Also That the same Trade cannot be carried on, but by a Company and Joint Stock (London, 1680). 16 Davies, The Royal African Company, 16. 17 Government of Britain. Certain Considerations Relating to the Royal African Company of England.

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literature suggests, the state also served as the only appropriate economic actor to provide for the public good of defense. Historical documentation indeed suggests that the British state certainly considered providing the capital to build and maintain forts and provide naval forces to fight trade wars in Africa, but ultimately decided that although “traffic with infidels and barbarous nations not in unity with [Britain]…cannot be carried on without the establishment of forts and factories in places convenient,” this defensive protection “requires too great and constant expense” for the state.18

The Royal African Company: An Amalgamation of Public and Private Interests It seems, then, that the British state, due to the exorbitant costs of trade conflicts, was unwilling to fulfill its role as a provider of public goods, although as previously noted, the state explicitly recognized that the public good of defense was indeed necessary to ensure the safety of British national interests at the time in the African trade. For its part, the state maintained that it was not just unwilling, but also unable, to efficiently provide this public good, and that the costs of defense “cannot otherwise be defrayed then by managing the whole trade by a Joint Stock [company].”19 The state certainly considered other defensive options, such as allowing private traders to provide for the slave trade’s defense, but when ultimately rejecting the call for individual traders, the state foreshadowed the free rider problem that plagued the Royal African Company throughout its life. In the state’s view individual traders were insufficient protectors because, when the danger and charge of supporting the trade is greater than the present profit,…private traders will desist and consequently for want of supplies to defend the forts, the whole trade in Guiney must be inevitably lost, and all the English interests there fall into the hands of the enemy.20

Thus, the state explicitly acknowledged that individual traders had no incentive to provide for the slave trade’s defense because the exorbitant 18

England and Wales. Sovereign (Charles II). By the King. A Proclamation. Whereas it is found by Experience, That Traffique with Infidels and Barbarous Nations not in Amity with Us ... cannot be carried on without the Establishment of Forts and Factories in places convenient--. 1674. 19 Ibid. 20 Certain Considerations Relating to the Royal African Company of England.

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costs of that defense would eat up any potential profits from the trade, and as capitalists, individual traders and their companies were in the slave trade precisely because they wanted to turn a profit. Interestingly, though, the British government decided that a corporation would not suffer from the same incentive issues as private traders, and that with a corporation “such great a misfortune can never probably happen” because a supply of capital would always remain employed in the necessary protection of slave forts and castles.21 In practical terms, then, this meant that the British government decided to create a private corporation whose primary mandate was the safeguarding of state interests in the trade of African slave labor. The Royal African Company was born of this compromise in 1672 and was imbued with the powers and responsibilities of a defensive arm of the British state. The defensive capacity of the Royal African Company is one crucial area in which the framework of this analysis seeks to distinguish itself from previous scholarship on this topic, as much of the relevant extant research focuses on the RAC’s role as an economic trade monopoly. In actuality, however, historical documentation seems to suggest that the British government did not create the Royal African Company for the primary economic purpose of trading, but instead, to serve as a provider of the national defense. Indeed, the British state only granted the RAC’s monopoly status in order to allow the RAC to maintain the level of profits necessary for the military defense of British trading interests. The official proclamation creating the RAC supports this contention, stating that the Royal African Company should be granted, all and singular, the Lands, Countries, Havens, Roads, and Rivers, and other Places in Africa, from the Port of Sally, in South Barbary, to the Cape of Good Hope, for and during the Term of 1,000 years, with the sole, entire, and only Trade and Traffic into and from the said countries and places…as [is] judged proper and necessary for enabling and encouraging them to undertake and accomplish so hazardous and chargeable a work.22

In other words, by granting the RAC monopoly trading status, the British government recognized that maintaining the “forts and ships of war” was so expensive that without a monopoly on profits from the slave trade, the RAC would have no incentive to continue to provide for Britain’s national defense.23 Thus, the British state apparently granted the 21

Government of Britain, Certain Considerations Relating to the Royal African Company of England. 22 Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England. 23 Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England.

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RAC a monopoly, either intentionally or unintentionally, in order to compensate the Company for the hazardous nature of its defensive mandate. Ultimately, the state saw this monopoly charter as a means to an end in the case of the Royal African Company, and not an end in itself.

The RAC’s Fortifications: A Drain on Resources The Royal African Company was created as a joint-stock corporation with its headquarters in London, and with forts and territorial assets in Africa fleshing out its multinational character. As a joint-stock operation, it was entitled to the privileges of incorporation, meaning that although King Charles created the RAC and invited “all his subjects residing in foreign plantations as well as here at home to subscribe what sums they pleased towards carrying on the trade,” this openness was somewhat of a façade, as the company was actually a private entity that allowed it to restrict its membership to those approved by its governing body.24 Additionally, the RAC’s joint stock status allowed for the pooling of capital, with all trading done on a common account between Company members. Governing officers and a Court of Assistants handled all company business, and the RAC held two General Courts each year, one for the election of officers and the other for hearing statements about the company’s stock. For its part, the Court of Assistants was chosen annually by shareholders and dealt with most of the company’s business in weekly meetings.25 The defensive reach of the RAC was long, and the Company had a formidable overseas presence. In West Africa, it maintained between fifteen and twenty fortified establishments housing 200 or 300 civilian and military personnel. Cape Coast Castle served as the Company’s African headquarters, and most of the company’s slaves were purchased there.26 In keeping with the defensive mandate of the RAC, Cape Coast was more like a military base than the offices of a traditional corporation, in that Cape Coast had fortifications consisting of outworks, platforms and bastions; apartments for the Director-General; chief merchants; chaplains; writers; surgeons; laborers and soldiers; numerous workhouses and stores;

24

Charles Davenent, Reflections upon the constitution and management of the trade to Africa through the whole course and progress thereof, from the beginning of the last century to this time : wherein the nature and uncommon circumstances of that trade are particularly--. 1709. 25 Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, xi-xii. 26 Ibid.

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and enough space to lodge a thousand Africans.27 The Company itself acknowledged the drive to increase its defenses on Africa’s west coast, and for this purpose they “enlarged Cape Coast Castle and made it six times larger, stronger and more commodious than before” during their tenure.28 The Company also maintained permanent agents in the West Indies to receive slaves for sale from the Company’s owned or hired ships.29 The RAC even maintained its own justice system, and a Court of Judicature sat on the African coast to listen to mercantile disputes associated with the company. The Royal African Company’s fortified trading bases were concentrated in certain zones along 1,800 miles of the West African coast, and the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin as far as Whydah had the protection of the company’s forts, castles, and factories. By the late 1680s, there were eight of these establishments on the Gold Coast at: Cape Coast, Sekondi, Komenda, Fredericksburg, Anashan, Anomabu, Egya and Accra. The company also had a presence at James Island in the Gambia River, which was the most westerly of the English forts, at Bance Island on the Sierra Leone River; at York Island on the Sherbo River, and at Whydah, which served as the most easterly of the English forts and factories.30 One should not underestimate the maintenance costs of the RAC’s forts and factories. Even its smaller trading bases required an incredible amount of upkeep, as some of many of its buildings were large structures with extensive equipment and personnel. Building supplies required quite an investment of capital, as it cost the RAC a large percentage of their capital to transport “the necessary supplies of soldiers, provisions and all other necessary and materials from England for such buildings”31 In fact, the RAC built several of these fortifications from scratch, including Dixcove Fort and the factory at Whydah, and not only paid the construction and maintenance costs for these forts, but also had to ensure the natives’ cooperation because these forts and factories were run as joint AfricanEuropean ventures in practice and employed many Africans to carry out trade and to act as brokers, interpreters and porters. To that end, “the Company [was] put to an incredible charge and expense in purchasing the consent and assistance of the natives, for making such settlements.”32

27

Ibid. Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England. 29 Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, xi-xii. 30 Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, xi. 31 Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England. 32 Ibid. 28

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The Royal African Company soon learned that the provision of the public good of defense required extremely large and constant infusions of capital, and over time, the defensive mandate of the RAC took a toll on the Company’s resources, as the forts, factories and lodges in West Africa drained its finances. Conflict also took its toll, and the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) led to the destruction of most of the Company’s fortifications by the French. Initially, the Royal African Company’s capital equaled £111,100, but this soon proved insufficient for its needs. Between 1691 and 1708 the RAC’s deteriorating financial position was met by substantial borrowing and calls for more capital. Taking out loans, however, led to new debt charges and at the end of 1708, the Company had debts at interest of £301,195 per year and book debts of £11,429. At that point in its history, the RAC had paid nearly one third of its initial capital to obtain the forts on the Gold Coast and had spent around £20,000 per year defending them.33

The RAC and the “Free-Rider” Problem At the same time the Company faced declining profits due to its defensive responsibilities, it also faced strong opposition from private or “separate” traders who felt that the RAC’s monopoly on trade undermined English competitiveness in the global slave market. Manufacturers criticized the RAC for artificially limiting their markets, colonists criticized the RAC for delivering an insufficient amount of slaves to their plantations, and merchants wishing to engage in the trade themselves fought the RAC’s monopoly charter. In 1698, Parliament bowed to the pressure from the separate traders and opened the African trade to private individuals by stating that “a free enlargement of trade is the best encouragement to industry.” 34 The state, however, still realized that “maintaining such forts and castles as are necessary for the purpose of the trade,” so it imposed a 10% levy on the separate traders, the profits of which would help the RAC “better…uphold, maintain and defend…its African forts.”35 Thus, the documentation suggests that Parliament’s action was an acknowledgement that the corporation created to provide for the public good of defense was not necessarily successful in pursuing its dual economic profit potential. Parliament was still unwilling, however, to 33

Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England. Great Britain. Parliament. An Act for the Better Improvement of the Trade to Africa by Establishing a Regulated Company, 1709. 35 Ibid. 34

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provide for the national defense itself; thus, the levy seemed to serve as a type of stop-gap measure that might allow the RAC the financial wherewithal to continue to defend British interests in the African trade. In advancing this measure, however, Parliament greatly underestimated the free-rider problem, a problem that became glaringly apparent in the following years as the separate traders often went to great lengths to subvert the levy, meaning that the Company saw little ultimate economic benefit. Available evidence even suggests that at certain ports, roughly 40% of the private traders failed to pay their company taxes on their slave exports.36 In this case, the free rider problem reared its ugly head. Many separate traders refused to pay for the public good of defense that the Company provided, although, ironically, that defense enabled the individual traders to profit from the trade. As a corporation, the RAC needed profits to survive, but with so many free riders, those profits were non-existent, and the RAC lost both the incentive and financial means to continue defending Britain’s trading interests. By 1712, the year the 10% Act expired, the Company faced such monumental financial burdens that it was technically insolvent.37 The British state reinstituted the RAC’s monopoly at that point, but although the state had originally provided the monopoly charter so that the RAC could better afford to provide for the nation’s defense, separate traders continued to subvert the charter and continued their own trade unimpeded. By 1726, the British state finally legitimated this informal trading practice, and opened the trade to any interested parties free from levies and taxes.38 Once the monopoly was lifted, the state essentially forced the RAC to assume sole responsibility for maintaining British forts in Africa without the financial benefit that came along with dominating the trade. Thus, with these actions, the state worsened the free rider problem already suffered by the Company, and the RAC soon acknowledged explicitly that it lacked any incentive to keep offering the public good of defense. Interestingly, the Company freely accepted the prominence of the separate traders and never fought to regain its trade monopoly, but it did recognize the free rider problem by calling on the state to require public taxes in support of the slave trade’s defense. In doing so, the RAC framed the issue of trade defense as a public good and confirmed that corporations can be inadequate for providing certain public goods without sufficient incentive. Thus, the Company explicitly acknowledged that the service it provided was a public good, and as such, the taxes from the public should support 36

Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 224. Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, xiv. 38 Ibid. 37

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that service. As the RAC was providing the public good of defense in place of the state, this proves that, in this case, a private company was not the most efficient provider of this public good, due to its need to earn a profit.39 In making its argument for state control of the trade’s defense, the RAC argued that, by the state’s own admission, British forts in Africa were instrumental in protecting state trading interests from the encroachment of rivals and without proper defense of the African castles and forts, British trading interests would suffer at the hands of the Dutch and French companies. Simply stated, the British government and citizens seemed to fear that other nations would, engross [Britain’s] share in the trade to Africa, and more vigorously pursue the prosperity of their American colonies, while [Britain’s colonies] will become wretched and contemptible…they will hereby increase in seamen and naval power, while [Britain] shall be daily declining in both. They will obtain another asiento with Spain, and introduce their manufactures all over the Spanish West-Indies, while British subjects will be forever excluded from that branch of…foreign trade.40

Furthermore, as the slave trade was “the chief and fundamental support of the British colonies and plantations in America,” and because the wealth and naval power of Britain “owe[d] much to the amount and value of colonial produce imported, the consumption of British manufactures in the colonies, and the employment of shipping and seamen in transatlantic trade,” the African forts deserved to be supported by an actor that could justify bearing the sole financial responsibility for the state’s defense.41 Additionally, the Company felt the weight of providing such an important public good inadequately and feared that its financial inability to continue maintaining British trade fortifications forced it to become an accessory “to the entire loss of the trade to Africa, and consequently to the utter ruin of all…colonies and plantations in America.”42 Thus, the Company recognized that its identity as a corporation in search of profits prohibited it from fully providing for Britain’s defense, as its insolvency would cause it to “relinquish and abandon [Britain’s] forts and castles, to be seized and possessed by such foreign nations, as have been long

39

Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England. A British Merchant, The African Trade, The Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America, 1744. 41 Royal African Company, The Case of the Royal African Company of England. 42 Ibid. 40

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watching for an opportunity to get them into their hands.” 43 What actor, then, would have an incentive to continue to provide for the nation’s best interests despite the financial burden of free riders? From its own experience, the Royal African Company concluded that the charge for maintaining the forts “must be born and defrayed” by the state.44 The issue stagnated for years, and the forts and castles, which the House of Commons had on seven occasions resolved were necessary for the preservation of the trade, were left to decay until 1730, when the British government decided to provide a small subsidy for the maintenance of the trade’s protection.45 In 1730, the British Parliament voted an annual subsidy of 10,000 pounds to the Royal African Company for upkeep and maintenance of the forts. Given that the Company’s total expenses in 1731 were 13,500 pounds, the British government had in effect assumed the financial responsibility for the Company’s forts and castles. Although the subsidy helped to maintain the forts, it was not enough money to allow the Royal African Company to pay off its debts, and in practice the Company ceased to exist as a corporation until it was officially dissolved in 1752.46

Conclusion Ultimately, the Royal African Company failed as an organization because it was made to carry a burden which in later years was born by the state—the burden of defense. Indeed, the British government gambled with the RAC experiment, as the Company represented a type of political bargain that attempted to fuse public and private responsibility. This melding of public and private interests was doomed to fail from the start, however, as the interests of the contracting parties were ultimately irreconcilable; the pursuit of profits and the pursuit of the public good, in this case, were mutually exclusive. It has been argued in the literature and in this paper that the British state created the Royal African Company in order to assume responsibility for an essential link in the imperial economy, and also as a payment for assuming the responsibility of the public good of defense, the state granted the RAC a trade monopoly. The provision of the public good of defense sapped the Company’s resources, however, and its profits from the trade monopoly were never enough to overcome its defensive debts. Additionally, the free rider problem reared its ugly head, as separate 43

Ibid. Ibid. 45 Davies, The Royal African Company, 152. 46 Davies, The Royal African Company, 152. 44

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traders undermined the RAC’s profits by illegally trading in slaves and avoiding the Company’s levies and taxes. Separate traders were not the Company’s only free riders, however, and once the British Parliament lifted the RAC’s monopoly charter and rescinded the 10% levy, some British citizens that saw a benefit from the slave trade became additional free riders as they began to take advantage of the defensive services that the RAC provided without paying for those services. In the end, this preponderance of free riders diminished the RAC’s incentive to provide for the overall protection and defense of the trade. Although most of the academic scholarship regarding the Royal African Company concentrates on the Company’s monopoly charter, a consideration of this historical case complements the political economy literature by addressing the relationship between private actors and public goods. As a private business, the Royal African Company should have been able to solve its free-rider problems by developing means of excluding non-payers from enjoying the benefits of trade defense, but as defense is a public good which is non-rivalrous and non-excludable by definition, the RAC could not resolve its financial dilemma. The experience of the Royal African Company, then, supports the Weberian idea that the state is defined by its monopoly on violence, and this monopoly is further supported because there is no other actor that has the incentive to provide defense as a public good of the state. The case of the RAC also suggests that the state is also the only actor with the power and ability to solve the free rider dilemma, by imposing taxation to fund the production of public goods. During the life of the RAC, however, the British Government refused to accept responsibility for the preservation of English interests in Africa, preferring to impose the responsibility onto a private company, an action which proved unsuccessful. The point of this analysis, ultimately, was to describe and defend a different aspect of the Royal African Company, separate from the general examinations of the Company’s place in the economic marketplace. In the end, the evidence suggests that there is a separate role in the historical political economy for both the state and private actors; as the RAC illustrated, a state does not a successful corporation make, and vice versa. The RAC occupied dual roles that were ultimately mutually exclusive, as the Company was created to earn a profit and to defend British trading interests, but it seems that the costs were too great to bear. The subsidy was too little, too late, however, for the Royal African Company to pay off its debts and adequately provide for the trade’s defense. The company’s finances continued their precipitous decline, until 1752, when the Royal African Company formally dissolved. After persisting exactly eighty

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years, the Royal African Company finally succumbed to the pressure from its mountain of debt and forced the British state to recognize that by encouraging a private actor to provide the public good of defense to the nation’s citizens, the state had failed to provide sufficient incentives for the actor to overcome the free rider problem and to reconcile its dual role as both a public and private actor, serving both the state’s public and private good. In so doing, as this paper argues, perhaps the British state had doomed the Royal African Company to failure from the onset of its existence in 1672.

CHAPTER TWELVE PROPHETHOOD1 AND THE MAKING OF ISLAMIC HISTORICAL IDENTITY ABED EL-RAHMAN TAYYARA CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

As monotheistic and scriptural religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share many of the same beliefs and doctrines. Yet certain differences between these religions reflect to a great extent their religious distinctiveness and justify their moral existence.2 Islam, the last among the monotheistic religions, formed a unique religious identity as the final and, therefore, true manifestation of the divine message that began with Adam. But this distinctiveness is nowhere more evident than in the Islamic concept of prophethood (nubuwwa). The notion of prophethood in Islam has been the subject of a fair number of studies, which can be divided in terms of interest into three major themes. The first group of studies focuses on religious and revelatory aspects of prophethood, with an emphasis on the unique status of Muতammad as the “seal of prophets (khƗtam al-nabiyyƯn),” that is, the last prophet in a successive line of prophets.3 In their treatment of 1

I am using the term prophethood rather than prophecy to show the uniqueness of the term in Islam. 2 N. A. Stillman, “Judaism and Islam: Fourteen Hundred Years of Intertwined Destiny? An Overview,” in The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific and Cultural Dimensions, eds. M. M. Laskier and Y. Lev (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 10-20; F. E. Peters, Jesus & Muhammad: Parallel Tracks, Parallel Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 84-123; M. M. Ayoub, Islam: Faith and History (Oxford: Oneworld, 2004), 30-50. 3 D.S. Powers, Muhammad is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: the Making of the Last Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), (especially) 52-54, 68-69; B. M. Wheeler, Prophets in the Qur’an: An Introduction to the Qur’an and Muslim Exegesis (London and New York: Continuum, 2002); R.

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prophethood in Islam, other scholars give attention to the theological and philosophical nature of this concept.4 Finally, a third group of studies examines the political aspect of prophethood as a source of legitimate rulership.5 This article explores how the Islamic view of prophethood helped shape the religious and historical identity of Islam. It also shows how Islamic sources construct the unique status of Muhammad’s prophetic mission, in comparison with those of previous prophets. Central to this study, therefore, is the examination of the divine missions of four prophetmessengers: Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus (along with Muতammad), on whom Islamic traditions bestow the title “the unyielding and the determined ones (ulnj al-‘azm).” This prophetic history reveals important conjunctions in human history, in addition to the moral lessons conveyed in these stories. First, however, a few words ought to be said about the unique concept of prophethood in Islam in comparison to Judaism and Christianity.

Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qur’Ɨn and Muslim Literature, trans. M. Robertson (Richmond: Curzon, 2002); I. B. Hussain, Prophets in the Qur’Ɨn: the Early Prophets (London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1994), I; vii-xxiv; F. Donner, Origins of Islamic Narratives, The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton: the Darwin Press, 1998), 151 no. 16; W. M. Watt, “The Nature of Muhammad’s Prophethood,” Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, 8 (1987), 77-84; J. al-Haqq, “Epistemology of Prophethood in Islam,” al-Taw‫ۊ‬Ưd, 4,ii (1987), 53-71; S. Stroumsa, ”The Signs of Prophecy: the Emergence and Early Development of a Theme in Arabic Theological Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 75 (1985), 101-114; U. Rubin, “Prophets and Progenitors in Early Shi‘a Traditions,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 1 (1979), 41-65. 4 F. Griffel, “Al-Ghazali’s Concept of Prophecy: the Introduction of Avicenna Psychology into AŠ‘arite Theology,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 14, I (2004), 101-144; B. Abrahamov, “Religion Versus Philosophy, the Case of Fakhr al-DƯn alRƗzƯ’s Proofs for Prophecy,” Oriente Moderno, 19 (2001), 415-425; F. Rahman, Prophecy in Islam; Philosophy and Orthodoxy Prophecy in Islam; Philosophy and Orthodoxy ( Chicago: Midway Reprint, 1979), 30-91. 5 U. Rubin, “Prophets and Caliphs,” in Methods and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins, ed. H. Berg (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 73-99; idem, Between Bible and Qur’Ɨn: The Children of Israel and the Islamic Self-image (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1999), 11-35; L. Marlow, “Kings, Prophets, and the ‘Ulama in Medieval Islamic Advice Literature,” Studia Islamica 18 (1995), 101-120; P. Crone and M. Hind, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the first Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 46-54.

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Prophethood: Genealogy and Origins Islam’s conception of prophethood has elements in common with the earlier monotheistic religions, especially with regard to the eschatological and the messianic aspects of this term,6 yet there are some significant differences.7 As the first monotheistic religion, Judaism is the first setting where the term prophecy (nevo’a) appeared. The Old Testament refers often to the concept of prophecy, using the following words to designate a prophet: hozeh (seer)8, ro’eh (seer),9 navi (prophet)10 and ish ha-Elohim (man of God).11 The differences between these terms primarily reflect different stages in Jewish history.12 However, it was the term navi that became the distinctive word associated with prophecy. Jewish religious texts are replete with stories of prophets who served as communicators between God and humans. Judaism gives prophecy two primary meanings. First, a prophet is a chosen person, such as Moses, who can transmit God’s divine message to the Jewish people. In Jewish religious texts, the term also refers to an inspired person who can locate lost things or foresee future events.13 The line of prophets, according to Jewish literature, ended with the construction of the Second Temple.14 Christianity, which acknowledges the Jewish scriptures, follows, on the whole, these two meanings of prophecy in Judaism. Yet the Christian view of prophecy 6 F. H. Shahid, Prophecy and the Fundamentalist Quest: An Interactive Study of Christian and Muslim Apocalyptic Religion (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008), 812. 7 For the biblical origins of the Islamic concept of prophethood see S. D. Goitein, “Attitudes Towards Government in Islam and Judaism,” Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 197-216; L. Marlow, “Kings, Prophets and the ‘Ulama’ in Medieval Islamic Advice Literature,” 101-110. 8 II Samuel 24:11; II Kings 17:13. 9 I Samuel 9:9; II Sam. 15:27. 10 Exodus 6:28-7:2; Numbers 12:1-8; Deuteronomy 18:20-22. 11 I Samuel 9:6-10; I Kings 12:22-24; I Kings 17:18-24; II Kings 1:10-13; I Chron. 23:14; II Chron. 30:16. 12 Shalom M. Paul, “Prophets and Prophecy,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, XIII, 11501175, 1154. 13 D. E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983), 81-107. 14 Deuteronomy 13, 18:20; bat kol. The Talmud refers to seven female prophets and forty eight male prophets. See Megillah 14. The last prophet mentioned in the Bible was a woman named Noahdia. Nehemiah 6:14. See also “Prophet,” in Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism, Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, 43, eds. S. B. Noegel and B. M. Wheeler, (Lanham, MD.: Scarecrow, 2002).

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emphasizes the prediction of the future, because it ties in closely with the eschatological anticipation of the messianic coming of Christ and the end of this world.15 Islam’s view of prophethood resembles that of previous religions, especially Judaism,16 but it introduces five new significant elements. Prior to the discussion of these Islamic perceptions of prophethood, one should bear in mind that a belief in previous prophets is a fundamental of the Islamic creed. First, Muতammad’s prophetic mission is the same divine message with which God entrusted all human prophets, of whom Adam was the first and Muতammad was the last. The second meaning of prophethood refers to the prophet’s qualifications. A prophet must be sinless, infallible, trustworthy, steadfast, and sharp-witted. Third, Muতammad received God’s messages through Qur’Ɨnic revelations. Muslims believe that the Qur’Ɨn is the literal and eternal word of God as revealed to Muতammad. These revelations, received as events unfolded, were designed to show Muতammad and his community the true path of God and to remind them of stories of previous prophets to whom God entrusted the same mission. These divine messages came to the Prophet through different ways known as “the manners of revelations (KayfiyyƗt al-wa‫ۊ‬y).”17 The fourth feature of prophethood in Islam is the distinction between a prophet-messenger (rasnjl) and a prophet (nabƯ). The rasnjl is a prophet whom God entrusts with a divine message (risƗla) to convey to his people and warn them against their wrongdoings. Their divine message to certain people is in the form of a revealed book. Prophets (nabƯs) are, on the other hand, divinely inspired persons, who would remind people of God’s true path; they cannot deliver God’s message. Prophet-messengers played, therefore, a major role in conveying the message of God, implementing His commandments, and fighting for the achievement of this sublime

15 Matthew 16, 3; John 4: 18-19, 7: 40. See also D. E. Aune, Apocalypticism Prophecy, and Magic in Early Christianity (Michigan, Baker Academic, 2008), 299-302; W. Montgomery Watt, “The Nature of Muhammad’s Prophethood,” 7778. 16 U. Rubin, “Islamic Retelling of Biblical History,” in Adaptations and Innovations: Studies on the Interaction between Jewish and Islamic Thought and Literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Late Twentieth Century, Dedicated to Professor Joel L. Kraemer, ed. Y. Tzvi Langermann and Josef Stern, Collection del la Revue des Études Juives (Paris-Louvain-Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2007), 299-313. 17 W. Montgomery Watt, “The Nature of Muhammad’s Prophethood,” 79.

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task.18 The number of prophet-messengers (rasnjl) and prophets (nabƯ) in Islamic traditions is controversial. The number of rasnjls in the Qur’Ɨn is 25, but early Muslim scholars disagree about the identity of some of these names. Some later Islamic traditions list the number of rasnjls as 315, whereas the number 1000 is given for nabƯs. Still other Muslim scholars mention the total number of prophets as 224,000.19 The fifth and final meaning of prophethood in Islam revolves around the miraculous abilities that God grants each prophet-messenger as a way to demonstrate His divine signs to humans. Before discussing these meanings of prophethood, we should touch on the sources of Islamic prophetic narratives. The Qur’Ɨn, which is full of stories about earlier prophets, is the first source of prophetic history. The prophetic tradition (‫ۊ‬adƯth), the sayings and deeds of the prophet Muতammad, is the second source. The tafsƯr tradition (Qur’Ɨnic exegesis), which came to supplement the Qur’Ɨn and the prophetic tradition, is another important source. When these sources proved insufficient to construct the stories of previous prophets, Muslim scholars began to search for new sources. These inquiries formed the basis for the genre known as the “stories of the prophets (qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’).”20 Biblical and extra-biblical narratives, later known as the isrƗ’ilyyƗt,21 were the earliest materials upon which Muslim scholars relied to construct the prophetic stories. Muslims’ curiosity about the stories of prophets led them to search for new materials when the abovementioned sources proved insufficient to reconstruct certain prophetic biographies.

The Genesis of Prophethood Islamic traditions trace the genesis of prophethood back to the Creation story, when God made a primordial covenant (mithƗq) with mankind. In this pact, God provided humans with clear instructions that would show 18 M. Z. Ibrahim , “A Prophet or a Messenger: How Bona Fide a Qur'anic Concept?” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26:1 (2009): 20- 46; M. M. Ayoub, Islam Faith and History, 30-40. 19 B. Wheeler, Prophets in the Qur’an: 8. 20 On the early authors of this genre see ‘ArƗ’is al-majƗlis fƯ qisas al-anbiyƗ’ or “Lives of the Prophets, as Recounted by Abnj IshƗq A‫ۊ‬mad ibn Mu‫ۊ‬ammad ibn IbrƗhƯm al-Tha‘labƯ, trans. by William M. Brinner (Leiden: Brill, 2002), xviii-xxiv. 21 A good discussion on the IsrƗ’iliyyƗt can be found in the studies of Jane D. McAuliffe, "Assessing the IsrƗ’iliyyƗt: an Exegetical Conundrum," in Story-telling in the Framework of non-Fictional Arabic Literature, ed. S. Leder (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 345-369; "The Qur'anic Context of Muslim Biblical Scholarship," Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 7, ii (1996), 141-158.

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how to stay on His straight path. On their part, humans pledged to obey Him and not go astray.22 At certain stages of prophetic history, humans were misled and became mindless of His path. This calamitous development necessitated divine intervention, when God sent prophetmessengers to remind them of the covenant. Those who follow God’s path would be rewarded, whereas those who disobey Him would be punished.23 Islamic traditions consider Adam the first prophet-messenger, whom God entrusted to propagate this divine message that was concluded with Muতammad. Hence, the term “seal of the prophets” figures prominently in Islamic traditions to emphasize the finality of Muতammad’s message as well as his unique status among other prophets. The confrontations between sinful, misled people and the messengers sent by God to remind them of His path constitute the main driving force in prophetic history in the time between Adam and Muতammad. God’s intervention in prophetic history always causes clashes between Good and Evil, destined to end with the victory of the former.24 Under the presentations of prophetic history, Islamic traditions single out the stories of five prophet-messengers (rasnjls), whose missions became exemplary models of prophethood, bringing about significant conjunctions in human history. These five prophets are Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muতammad. In Islamic traditions, four main attributes distinguish these prophets from the others. First is the universality of their prophetic mission, that is, God sent them to propagate His message not only to a certain group of people, but to all mankind. Second, these prophets were sent as reminders at crucial stages when humans were shunning God’s path by committing injustices and immoral actions. Third, in implementing God’s divine message, these prophets faced great challenges and difficulties, and, consequently, God granted them the ability to perform miracles, enabling them to demonstrate God’s power and overcome their adversaries. These miracles were in line with the common supernatural forces or beliefs that dominated their societies. Finally, throughout their prophetic mission, these prophets demonstrated extraordinary endurance for dealing with great challenges and risks that no 22

Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 133-136 (de Goeje, I, 133-137); “MƯthƗq,” in Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism. 23 Snjrat al-A‘rƗf (7): 172; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh al-rusul wa al-mulnjk, ed. Muতammad Abnj al-Faঌl IbrƗhƯm (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘Ɨrif bi-Miৢr, 1960), I, 133-136 (de Goeje, I, 133-137); al-MaqdisƯ, KitƯb al-Bad’ wa al-Ta’rƯkh (Beirut: Maktabat KhayyƗ৬, n.d.), III, 10. 24 Elsewhere I have examined this topic. See A. Tayyara, “Narratives of Inevitable Prophecies of Confrontation between Good and Evil,” IdƗ’Ɨt, 3 (2010), 323-348.

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mere human could handle. The Qur’Ɨn, therefore, bestows upon these five prophets the epitaph “the unyielding and determined ones (ulnj al-‘azm).”25 Besides recording major events in prophetic narratives, Muslim scholars were interested in calculating the number of years between Muhammad and previous prophets, as I have discussed elsewhere.26 Our undertaking here is limited to certain events in prophetic history and their role in shaping Islamic religious and historical identity. We launch our discussion of these conjectures in prophetic history with the story of Noah.

The Flood and the Second Beginning of Humanity Islamic presentations of the story of Noah, whose name in Arabic is Nnjত, follow, on the whole, the story in the book of Genesis,27 where it is considered a turning point in prophetic history. Since Adam’s story represents the genesis of the human race, Islamic sources give him the epitaph “father of mankind” (Abnj al-bashar),28 whereas the Noah narrative signifies the second beginning of human history.29 No wonder, some Muslim historians give Noah the epitaph “the later Adam (Adam alakhƯr).”30 At the heart of the Noah narrative is his struggle against the deluded people who instigated God’s wrath in the form of the flood. The flood episode brought about a new beginning in human history, when God intervened, destroyed the immoral people who rejected Noah’s pleas, and saved the righteous.31

25

Snjrat al-A‫ۊ‬zƗb (33): 7; Snjrat al-A‫ۊ‬qƗf (46): 35; al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn ‘an al-BƗbƯ al-ণalabƯ, 1968), xxvi, 37; ta’wƯl Ɨy al-qur’Ɨn (Cairo: Ma৬ba‘at Mus৬afƗ ҕ al-Qur৬ubƯ, al-JƗmi‘ li-a‫ۊ‬kƗm al-qur’Ɨn, ed. A. al-MahdƯ (Beirut: DƗr al-KitƗb al‘ArabƯ, 2007), xiii-xiv,115-116. 26 A. Tayyara, “Prophethood and Kingship in Early Islamic Historical Thought,” Der Islam, 84 (2007), 73-102. 27 Genesis 4:25-26; 5:1-9. See also “Noah,” in Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism. 28 Snjrat Ta-Ha (20): 123-124; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 85-105 (de Goeje, I, 82-103); B. Wheeler, Prophets in the Qur’Ɨn, 23-29. 29 Ibn Qutayba, KitƗb al-Ma‘Ɨrif, ed. T. ‘UkƗsha (Cairo: DƗr al-Ma‘Ɨrif. 1969), 20; al-Ya‘qnjbƯ, Ta’rƯkh (Beirut: DƗr ৡƗdir, 1960), I, 13-17; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 165 (de Goeje, I, 167-68); al-Mas‘njdƯ, Murnjj al-dhahab wa ma‘Ɨdin al-Jawhar, ed. Pellat Charles. Beirut: ManshnjrƗt al-JƗmi‘a al-LubnƗniyya, 1965), I, 43 (sec. 63); al-MaqdisƯ, al-Bad’, III, 11. 30 Al-MaqdisƯ, al-Bad’, III, 15. 31 Genesis 6: 9-22; 7: 6-22; l Midrash Rabba, XXX, 1-7; L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, German trans. H. Szold, I, Bible Times and Characters from the

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The Noah narrative first appears in the Qur’Ɨn, where five major themes figure prominently: the immorality and corruption among humans that necessitated Noah’s mission, 32 Noah’s attempts to guide the people to God’s path and warn of God’s punishment,33 the people’s rejection of Noah’s message,34 God’s command to Noah to build the Ark, and the flood as the final punishment. 35 A similar representation of the Noah story can be found in the prophetic tradition.36 Noah’s prophethood and the events associated with it exemplify God’s will in history, by which He punishes misguided people and rewards the righteous. Both the flood, which led to a second beginning in human history, and extended life spans were the miraculous signs of Noah. His prophetic mission became the symbol of forbearance and resoluteness due to the difficulties and suffering he faced throughout his time. 37 Like other prophetic stories, Noah’s narrative serves, therefore, as a moral lesson for Muতammad and his followers, showing how God’s intervention punishes the immoral and rewards the righteous. The following Qur’Ɨnic verses capture these themes: We sent Noah to his people. He said: “My people, worship God. There is no god for you other than He. Do you not fear God?” The leaders of his people who disbelieved said: “This one is only a human like you, and he wants for you to consider him better than you. If God had wanted he could have sent angels. We have not heard this from our forefathers. “He is only a man in whom is a Jinn, so be patient with him for a while.” Noah said: “My Lord, give me victory because they are rejecting me.” We revealed to him: “Build the Ark under our eyes and inspiration. When our command comes and the pits gush forth, take on board pairs, two of everything, and your family, but not him against whom the word has already been issued. Do not address me concerning those who do wrong, for they are to be drowned. “When you and those with you are on board the Ark, say: ‘Praise God who saved us from the people who do wrong.’ “Say” ‘My Lord, allow

Creation to Jacob (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 163. 32 Snjrat al-A‘rƗf (7): 59-63; Snjrat Ynjnus (10): 71-72; Snjrat al-Shu‘arƗ’ (26): 105116. 33 Snjrat Hnjd (11): 25-37. 34 Snjrat al-AnbiyƗ’ ( 21): 76-77; 23: 23-25 35 Snjrat Hnjd (11): 37-48; 23: 27-28. 36 Al-BukhƗrƯ, ‫܇‬a‫ۊ‬Ư‫ ۊ‬al-BukhƗrƯ, kitƗb a‫ۊ‬ƗdƯth al-abiyƗ’ ed. Muতammad ‘Abd alBaqƯ (Cairo: DƗr al-Haytham, 2004), (তadƯths 3337-3340). 37 Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’ al-musammƗ ‘arƗ’is al-majƗlis (Cairo: Ma৬ba‘at Muৢ৬afƗ al-BƗbƯ al-ণalabƯ), 60-61.

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Chapter Twelve me to disembark in a blessed landing place. You are the best to allow us to disembark.’”38

The presentation of the Noah story in the Qur’Ɨn and the prophetic tradition become the basis upon which later Islamic accounts of the story build. Uniquely, later Muslim scholars, particularly historians, emphasize aspects of the Noah story that serve the construction of Islamic religious identity. Since the flood represents God’s first large- scale, devastating punishment in human history, Muslim scholars view Noah’s mission as bringing about a new birth for mankind. In this way, Noah’s prophethood is considered a prototype of divine justice and punishment.39 To tie Noah’s prophetic experience with Muতammad’s, Muslim scholars underscore two main facets of the story: drawing a parallel between the Noah story and the prophetic mission of Islam and highlighting the significant role of Noah’s mission in the origin of nations after the flood. In both his tafsƯr and ta’rƯkh, al-৫abarƯ (d. 923) offers the most detailed account, which serves as a repository of early Islamic traditions,40 of the Noah story and its moral lessons. A detailed examination of al-৫abari's account, therefore, is relevant to our discussion.41 Following the above-mentioned main themes of the Noah story in the Qur’Ɨn, al-৫abarƯ portrays the flood story as a new beginning in mankind’s history, devoid of wicked and disobedient people. He also draws parallels between this story and the prophetic mission of Muতammad. Al-৫abarƯ emphasizes the commonalities between the flood narrative and the rise of Islam, showing that both events represent significant conjunctions in the history of mankind. This conjunction is evident in the following ‫ۊ‬adƯth, where we are told: “The example of the people of my house (ahl baytƯ) is similar to the Ark of Noah; whoever boarded it was rescued and whoever failed to do so (takhallafa ‘anhƗ) died.”42 This hadith underscores the same divine message that Noah brought to mankind and represents Muতammad as the last messenger sent by God. Like Noah’s prophethood and the new beginning initiated by the flood, Islam’s message delivers a new dawn. 38

Snjrat al-Mu’minnjn (23): 23-29. I rely here on the translation of B. Wheeler. See Prophets in the Qur’an, 51. 39 Al-Kisa’Ư, Bad’ al-khalq wa qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’ ed. al-৫Ɨhir bin SalmƗ (Tunis:DƗr Nuqnjsh ‘Arabiyya, 1998), 156-164; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 54-61. 40 Al-DƯnawarƯ, al-AkhbƗr al-‫ܒ‬iwƗl, ed. A. ‘Ɩmir and J. al-ShayyƗl (Cairo: DƗr IতyƗ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya, 1960), 1-2; Ibn Qutayba, al-Ma‘Ɨrif, 26; al-Ya‘qnjbƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 13-15; al-Mas‘njdƯ, Murnjj I, 44-46 (secs. 66-72). 41 Al-TҕabarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, xii, 26-56. ҕ 42 Al-MaqdisƯ, al-Bad’, III, 22.

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As in the biblical narrative,43 Islamic traditions emphasize the important role of the Noah narrative in the origin of nations through Noah’s three sons: Shem, Japheth, and Ham. Dealing with nations descended from Noah’s sons, Islamic sources recognize two main genealogical frameworks: prophethood and ethnicity. The prophethood rubric concerns itself with the line of prophets from Adam to Muতammad. As for the ethnicity model, Islamic reports deal with Noah’s three sons, from whom all people descended.44 Of relevance to our discussion here is that in Islamic sources, as in the biblical story, Shem enjoys a superior place among his brothers for being the forefather of prophets and the best among nations.45 Among the prophets descended from Shem, Muslim scholars emphasize the role of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muতammad. We turn now to discuss Islamic presentations of the next link in the prophetic history and its significance to Islamic narratives of origins.

The Abrahamic Tradition Abraham, whose Islamic name is IbrƗhƯm, plays a central role in the construction of the religious origins of Judaism,46 Christianity,47 and Islam.48 More than any other prophet, Abraham occupies a central place in the making of Islamic religious and historical identity. Islamic traditions emphasize, therefore, that Abraham, whose epitaph is khalƯl al-ra‫ۊ‬mƗn (the friend of God), is the founder of the true religion (Islam) that was

43

Genesis 10. Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 155 (de Goeje, I, 156); al-Mas‘njdƯ, Murnjj, I, 36 (secs.4546), 40 (sec. 56), 41 (sec. 58), 42 (sec. 60), 43 (sec. 6; Ibn Sa‘d, al-ܑabaqƗt alkubrƗ, I, (Beirut: DƗr ৡƗdir and DƗr Beirut, 1960), 54-55; al-MaqdisƯ, al-Bad’, II, 150-154. 45 Ibn Qutayba, al-Ma‘Ɨrif, 27-28; al-Ya‘qnjbƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 17; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 191 (de Goeje, I, 199), 201-204 (de Goeje, I, 210- 216); JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, xxiii, 6768. 46 Genesis 17:5. 47 The significance of Abraham in Christianity appears in the book of Matthew 1: 1-18 where he portrays Jesus as a descendant of Abraham. But it was St. Paul who established the connection between Abraham and Christianity. Galatians 3:29. 48 B. Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (New York: Harper Collins Publishers), 31-35; S. Lowin, The Making of A Forefather: Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegetical Narratives (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 39-70. 44

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restored by Muতammad.49 References to this fundamental belief can be found in many places in the Qur’Ɨn and the prophetic tradition. These sources also record other aspects of the Abraham narrative. The Qur’Ɨnic narrative consists of the following main themes: the preprophetic life of Abraham, his search for God’s path,50 the confrontation between him and Nimrod, the test of Abraham and the fire,51 the migration of Abraham,52 the establishment of Abraham’s progeny through IsmƗ‘Ưl in Mecca,53and Abraham’s sacrificial son.54 All these themes recur in the prophetic tradition.55 In their construction of the Abraham narrative, later Muslim scholars incorporated new materials borrowed from biblical and extra-biblical sources.56 These Islamic accounts portray Abraham as the prototype Muslim to whom Islamic origin is traced. To achieve this objective, Muslim scholars highlight two primary aspects of the Abraham story: the establishment of his progeny in Mecca and the unequivocal closeness and similarities between him and Muতammad. Hence, the relation between Islam and Abraham can be characterized as both ethnicreligious and prophetic. Islamic presentations of the Abraham story begin, as in the biblical story,57 in Babylon, then under the reign of Nimrod, described as an arrogant tyrant and evildoer who challenged God’s will. Nimrod learned from his astrologers that on a certain date a child named Abraham would be born and challenge Nimrod’s rule and ridicule his pagan religion. Nimrod made tremendous efforts to prevent the fulfillment of this prophecy, but to no avail. When Abraham was born, his mother hid him in a cave until it was safe to return home.58 Islamic traditions also refer to the 49 R. Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: the Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legend in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 11-15. B. Feiler, Abraham, 113-185. 50 Snjrat al-An‘Ɨm (6): 74-84; Snjrat Maryam (19): 41-50. 51 Snjrat al-AnbiyƗ’ (21): 60-70; Snjrat al-‘Ankabnjt (29): 16-24. 52 Snjrat al-AnbiyƗ’ (21): 71-7. 53 Snjrat al-Baqara (2): 125-129; Snjrat al-‫ۉ‬ajj (22): 26-27. 54 Snjrat al-SƗffƗt (37): 99-113. 55 Al-BukhƗrƯ, ‫܇‬a‫ۊ‬Ư‫ ۊ‬al-bukhƗrƯ, kitƗb a‫ۊ‬ƗdƯth al-anbiyƗ, 3349-3370; al-NƯsƗbnjrƯ , ‫܇‬a‫ۊ‬Ư‫ ۊ‬muslim (Cairo: Mu’assasat al-MukhtƗr lil-Nashr wa al-TawzƯ ’, 2004), kitƗb al-fa‫ڲ‬Ɨ’il, 2369-2371. 56 “Abraham,” in Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism. 57 Genesis 10:8-9. 58 MuqƗtil b. SulaymƗn, TafsƯr muqƗtil, ed. A. M. ShiতƗta (Cairo: al-Hay’a alMiৢriyya al-‘Ɩmma lil-KitƗb, 1979-1989), I, 569-70; al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, VII, 249-250; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 73; al-Kisa’Ư, Bad’ al-khalq, 200-205; al-MaqdisƯ, al-Bad’, III, 46-47.

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corruption and sinfulness permeating the life of Abraham’s people, who believed in magic and astrology.59 This moral and ethical deterioration, therefore, justified a new prophetic mission. Growing up in this environment, Abraham was troubled with his pagan society and began to search for God’s path. When Abraham found the true path, God entrusted him with the prophetic mission.60 Propagating God’s message, Abraham confronted his people, showing them the worthlessness of their pagan belief, and finally clashed with Nimrod.61 Enraged by Abraham’s challenges, Nimrod ordered that Abraham be thrown into a furnace, but God miraculously saved him, demonstrating the divine triumphing over evil. Abraham left his country to establish a righteous society elsewhere, where a new stage of his prophetic mission began.62 Islamic traditions underscore, as previously mentioned, that Islam is the true religion, founded by Abraham. Hence, Islamic sources highlight similarities and parallels between the prophethood of Muতammad and that of Abraham, and underline the establishment of Abraham’s progeny in Mecca. To demonstrate that Abraham was the father of Islam, the Qur’Ɨn emphasizes that he was neither a Jew nor Christian, but Muslim. This attitude is evident in several Qur’Ɨnic verses, among which the most important are the following: “Oh, People of the Book! Why do you dispute about Abraham, when the Torah and the Gospel were not revealed until after him? Have you no sense? There, you have disputed in matters about which you have some knowledge! Why are you, then, debating about things in which you have no knowledge? And God knows, whereas you do not know. Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian; but he was an upright (‫ۊ‬anƯf) Muslim and he was not a polytheist (min al-mushrikƯn). Verily, the worthiest people of Abraham are those who followed him, this prophet [Muতammad], and those who believed [him]; and God is the protecting friend of the believers.” 63

These Qur’Ɨnic verses maintain that Abraham is the founder of Islam and that the Prophet Muতammad and his followers are worthier than others 59

Al-Ya‘qnjbƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 23-24; al-Mas‘njdƯ, Murnjj, I, 48-49 (sec. 75-76). Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, I, 308; Ta’rƯkh, I, 236-237 (de Goeje, I, 254-255); alTha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 74-75. 61 Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 237 (de Goeje, I, 256). 62 Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 75-78. It is worth noting that there is no mention of the furnace scene in the Bible, but this story appears in the midrashic literature. See S. Lowin, The Making of A Forefather, 183ff. 63 Snjrat Al-‘ImrƗn (3): 65-68. 60

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to adhere to Abraham’s religion and to succeed him. This view constitutes the axis around which the Abraham story revolves in the prophetic tradition. For example, in his tafsƯr, al-৫abarƯ cites a ‫ۊ‬adƯth in which the Prophet says: “Verily, each Prophet has close associates [from other prophets] and my patron is [Abraham], my father and the Friend of my Lord.”64 Another ‫ۊ‬adƯth expresses a similar view, in which the Prophet said: “I am the prayer of my father Abraham and the good tiding of Jesus.”65 Elsewhere, al-৫abarƯ emphasizes this idea, saying not only that Muslims are the true inheritors of the Abrahamic religion, but also that Islam is a universal religion surpassing both Judaism and Christianity.66 A number of stories voicing this view revolve around encounters of Muslims with other nations’ leaders, who acknowledge the affinities between Muতammad and Abraham. Such is the story of the Islamic delegation sent to Constantinople to meet the Roman emperor. Exchanging information with his Muslim guests, the emperor showed them a small coffer that consisted of several compartments with small doors. Each compartment contained portraits of the prophets from Adam to Muতammad depicted on pieces of cloth. Muhammad’s image was, according to this story, housed in the last compartment. From this story, we learn that Muতammad’s image retains the shapes of all prophets, but his depiction most resembles Abraham.67 Another story, in which the king of China showed a group of Muslims a similar casket,68 similarly highlights the unique status of Muhammad, as well as his closeness to Abraham. Islamic sources emphasize the role of Abraham in establishing his Islamic progeny in Mecca through his son IsmƗ‘Ưl. According to the biblical story, Abraham took Hagar, his concubine, and IsmƗ‘Ưl away and left them in the desert near Beer Sheba (at the behest of his wife, Sarah).69 Islamic sources identify this place with Mecca. This part of the Abraham story is very significant in the development of Islamic religious identity and particularly its affinity to Abraham, who is credited with the building of the Ka‘ba and the establishment of the pilgrimage rituals.70

64

Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, I, 308. Ibid. See also Ibn Sa‘d, al-ܑabaqƗt al-kubrƗ, ed. M. A. ‘Ata (Beirut: DƗr alKutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1997), I, 149. 66 Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, I, 558-563. 67 Al-DƯnawarƯ, al-AkhbƗr, 18-19; al-HamadhƗnƯ, KitƗb al-buldƗn, Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, ed. de Goeje (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), V, 140-143. 68 Al-Mas‘njdƯ, Murnjj, I, 168-169 (secs. 342-344). 69 Genesis 16:7; 21:14; L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, I, 265-66 70 Ibn Sa‘d, al-ܑabaqƗt al-kubrƗ, I, 46-46; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 80-81. 65

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Thus, a substantial part of the Abraham story in Islamic traditions is dedicated to the arrival in Mecca, where God had ordered him to take Hagar and IsmƗ‘Ưl to build the Sacred House (al-bayt al-‫ۊ‬arƗm).71 Once Abraham finished building the Ka’ba with his son, IsmƗ‘Ưl, he called upon the people to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.72 No wonder that the pilgrimage rituals in Islam revolve entirely around the arrival of Abraham, Hagar, and IsmƗ‘Ưl in Mecca. This Islamic presentation of this part of the Abraham story aims to demonstrate that Abraham is the founder of Islam and that Muতammad is its restorer. The centrality of the Abraham story to the establishment of Islamic origin makes his prophethood unique to Islam, and, in a religious sense, disassociates Judaism and Christianity from Abrahamic traditions. To further enhance this direction, Islamic traditions include under the ulnj al-‘azm frame discussions of the founding fathers of the other two monotheistic religions: Moses and Jesus.

The “Chosen People,” Lost and Regained In comparison with Islamic portrayals of other prophets’ stories, the Moses narrative contains the most detailed description. There are a number of reasons for this Islamic interest. First, Islamic traditions consider Moses the founding father of the first monotheistic religion— Judaism—whose scripture influenced later religions. Second, Islamic sources attribute to Moses unique prophetic qualities. For example, he is considered the first prophet to speak directly to God and, hence, has been given the epithet “the mouthpiece of God (kalƯm allah).”73 Moses also is credited with performing supernatural acts and miracles. Third, Islamic traditions associate Moses with Judaism, the main religious contender with Islam. In so doing, Muslim scholars disassociate Abraham from Judaism and at the same time affirm his indispensable role in founding Islam. Finally, the Qur’Ɨn acknowledges that Jews are the “Chosen people,” but asserts that they fell from His favor after they went astray. Muslims became, therefore, the new “Chosen people” after they embraced the divine message that was restored by Muতammad.

71

Ibn Qutayba, al-Ma‘Ɨrif, 34; al-Ya‘qnjbƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 25-26; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 251-262 (de Goeje, I, 274-288); al-Mas‘njdƯ, Murnjj, I, 49-51 (secs. 77-80)., II, 161 (sec. 938); al-MaqdisƯ, al-Bad’, III, 60-62; .al-Kisa’Ư, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 216 -217; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 82-83. 72 Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 251-262 (de Goeje, I, 274-288). 73 This attribute of Moses can be found in Exodus 33:11.

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Islamic presentations of the Moses story, which generally follow the biblical story,74 have many features in common with the prophetic stories of Noah and Abraham. Such are the themes of corruption and godlessness, warning signs through prophetic mission, confrontation with evil forces, and divine intervention. From the Qur’Ɨnic story, we learn that Moses was the messenger-prophet sent by God to Egypt to guide people to God’s path and to free the Israelites from slavery. The following main themes figure prominently in the Qur’Ɨnic narrative: the Israelites’ misery and suffering in Egypt,75 Moses’ birth and growing up in Pharaoh’s house,76 Moses leaving Egypt after killing an Egyptian,77 Moses in Midian,78 his prophetic mission and miracles,79 the return to Egypt and confrontation with Pharaoh,80 God’s punishment of the Egyptians and the deliverance of the Israelites from their slavery,81 Moses parting the sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army,82 Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness,83 the revelation and the reception of the commandments,84 and the Israelites’ arrival in the Holy land.85 Similarly, the Moses story is treated in the prophetic tradition.86 The abovementioned themes of the Moses narrative became the basis for the portrayals of the story in later Islamic writings and later Muslim scholars incorporated new sources to provide a more coherent construction of the story. Central to these Islamic accounts is the theme that Jews were 74

Most of the representations of the story of Moses in the bible can be found in the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. 75 Snjrat al-AnbiyƗ’ ( 21): 1-6. The same theme appears in the bible. See Exodus 1: 7-22. 76 Snjrat ܑƗ-Ha (20): 38-41; Snjrat al-Qa‫܈‬a‫( ܈‬28): 7-12; Exodus 2:1-10. 77 Snjrat al-Qa‫܈‬a‫( ܈‬28): 22-28; Exodus 2:11-15. 78 Snjrat al-Qa‫܈‬a‫( ܈‬28): 14-21; Exodus 2: 16-22. 79 Snjrat ܑƗ-Ha (20): 9-24; Snjrat al-Naml (27): 7-12; Snjrat al-Qa‫܈‬a‫( ܈‬28): 29-35; Snjrat al-Nazi‘Ɨt (79): 15-19; Exodus 2-23-25; 3:1-31. 80 Snjrat al-A‘rƗf (7): 103-126; Snjrat Ynjnus (10): 75-83; Snjrat BanƯ IsrƗ’Ưl (17):101-103: Snjrat ܑƗ-Ha (20): 49-69; Snjrat al-Shu‘arƗ’ (26):10-5: Snjrat alNazi‘Ɨt (79): 20-26; Snjrat al-Qa‫܈‬a‫( ܈‬28): 36-42; Snjrat al-Mu’min (40): 36-37; Exodus 4:1-24; 5: 10-13; 6: 1-16. 81 Snjrat al-Naml (7): 127-136; Exodus 6: 17-25; 7: 1-27. 82 Snjrat al-Shu‘arƗ’ (26): 52-68; Snjrat al-DukhkhƗn (44): 17- 33; Snjrat Ynjnus (10): 90-92. 83 Snjrat al-Baqara (2): 47-61; 67-73; Snjrat al-A‘rƗf (7): 148-158; Snjrat ܑƗ-Ha (20): 80-98. 84 Snjrat al-A‘rƗf (7): 142-147. 85 Snjrat al-MƗ’ida (5): 20-26. 86 Al-BukhƗrƯ, ‫܇‬a‫ۊ‬Ư‫ ۊ‬al-bukhƗrƯ, kitƗb a‫ۊ‬ƗdƯth al-anbiyƗ, 3393-3407.

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ungrateful to God’s grace bestowed upon them through Moses.87 Muslim scholars begin their description of the Moses story, as in the case of the Abraham story, with a prophecy foretelling his coming. The Pharaoh learned from soothsayers that a boy born among the Israelites would defy his religious authority and put an end to his rule. Attempting to prevent this prophecy, the Pharaoh ordered the killing of all Israelite male babies. Nevertheless, Moses was born, and his mother was divinely inspired to place her infant in a small ark and cast him in the Nile. The baby was found by the Pharaoh’s wife, who received her husband’s permission to raise the child.88 She was even inspired to assign Moses’ mother to suckle him after he did not accept nursing from other women. Moses grew up in the Pharaoh’s palace as part of the royal family.89 The next stage in Moses’ life started when Moses unintentionally killed an Egyptian who was fighting with an Israelite and fled to Midian.90 In Midian, he met a prophet known in Islamic sources as Shu‘ayb91 and married one of his daughters upon the completion of eight years of service as a shepherd. At this stage, God appeared to Moses and entrusted him with the prophetic mission. Islamic sources, as in the bible, offer detailed descriptions of the miracles which God granted Moses. Examples include the striking of his hand with light and turning his rod into a frightening snake. Now his main mission was to return to Egypt and to challenge Pharaoh, showing him God’s path, and to free the Israelites from bondage. Moses’ brother, Aaron, who was more eloquent, also went with him to Pharaoh.92 The confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh represents the climax of the story. Supported and guided by God, Moses and Aaron met with Pharaoh and tried to convince him to follow the path of God. Not only did Pharaoh refuse to believe in God, but he also challenged Moses’ divine 87

“Moses,” in Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism. In the Bible it was Pharaoh’s daughter who pulled Moses from the water. Exodus 2: 5. 89 Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, I, 271-275; xxvi, 26-43; Ta’rƯkh, I, 386-395 (de Goeje, I, 444-456); al-MaqdisƯ, Bad’, III, 83-84; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 166-172; Ibn KathƯr, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-AnbiyƗ’, ed. M. M. Muতammad (Cairo: DƗr alHaytham, 2002), 230-235. 90 Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, xxvi, 43-61; Ta’rƯkh, I, 395-398 (de Goeje, I, 457460); al-MaqdisƯ, Bad’, III, 84-85; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 172-174. 91 The name appears in the Bible as Jethro. Exodus 18. It is worth noting that this name appears in some Islamic sources. See al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 400 (de Goeje, I, 452). 92 Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, xxvi, 61-76; Ta’rƯkh, I, 400-403 (de Goeje, I, 463467; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 174-181. 88

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message by conducting a competition between Moses and his magicpracticing priests. Moses had the upper hand in that contest when his snake swallowed theirs, leading Pharaoh’s magicians to defy their king and follow Moses. In Islamic tradition, Pharaoh’s wife symbolizes the upright woman who defied her husband and accepted Moses’ message.93 Thus, Pharaoh ordered her to be tortured and killed.94 Despite the horror that affected Pharaoh as a result of Moses’ wondrous acts, he remained defiant and continued in his attempts to punish Moses and his followers.95 Pharaoh refused to let Moses and the Israelites leave Egypt and imposed even harsher penalties on them. God then smote the Egyptians with successive plagues.96 These eventually forced Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave with Moses, but he chased them to the Red Sea. Again, God saved the Israelites by inspiring Moses to strike the sea with his rod, creating twelve corridors in the sea through which Moses led the Israelites safely to Sinai. When Pharaoh and his army chased the Israelites into the sea, they were trapped and drowned in the returning water.97 The next stage of the Moses story revolves around the Israelites’ experience in the wilderness, God’s epiphany, and Moses’ reception of the Ten Commandments.98 Indeed, Islamic sources acknowledge that God selected the Israelites as His chosen people by protecting them, performing miracles on their behalf, and providing them with food. Nevertheless, the Israelites were ungrateful, rebellious, and disobedient. 99 For example, when Moses returned to the Israelites with the tablets, he found most of them worshipping a golden calf. Moses was enraged, and God commanded him to have everyone that worshipped the calf killed. God also punished the Israelites by abandoning them in the wilderness for forty years before they entered the Holy Land (al-Ar‫ ڲ‬al-muqaddasa).100

93

Another part of the Moses story that is unique to Islamic sources is the description of a tower built by Pharaoh in order to challenge God. Snjrat al-Qasas (28): 38; al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 189-190; 94 Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 188-189. 95 Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 403-413 (de Goeje, I, 466-478); al-Tha‘libƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬alanbiyƗ’,182-187. 96 While in the Bible the number of these plagues is 10, Islamic sources mention only nine. 97 Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 413-421 (de Goeje, I, 478-488); al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬alanbiyƗ’, 190-200; Ibn KathƯr, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬s al-anbiyƗ’, 268-275. 98 Exodus, 15: 22-34, 35: 1-40. 99 Snjrat al-Baqara (2): 41, 47; Snjrat al-MƗ’ida (5): 12. 100 Snjrat al-MƗ’ida (5): 20-26; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 421-431 (de Goeje, I, 489501); al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ, 204-213; Ibn KathƯr, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ, 278-302.

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The story of Moses and the Israelites plays an important role in the making of Islamic religious identity and historical legitimacy. Although God took the Israelites as His “Chosen people,” they remained ungrateful, despite His grace and miracles. This aspect of the Moses narrative aims to demonstrate that Muslims, worthier of God’s grace and blessing, are the true “Chosen people.” This view is clearly exemplified in a ‫ۊ‬adƯth on the authority of the Companion Ibn ‘AbbƗs (d. 680), in which the Prophet says: When Moses was given the tablets he examined them and said: ‘O Lord, you had bestowed upon me a great blessing that you never honored anyone with before me.’ He [God] said: ‘I chose you above the best among humans through My messages and revelations, so follow what I gave you thankfully, i.e. with force, diligence, and determination; and be mindful of the great esteem to Muতammad, may peace be upon him, before you die.’ Moses said: ‘My Lord, who is Muতammad?’ He [God] replied: ‘He is Aতmad whose name was fixed on My Throne two thousand years before I created Heaven and Earth, he is a prophet and the best of My creatures and the most beloved one among humans and angels.’ Then Moses said: ‘O Lord, if Muতammad is the most beloved one among Your creatures, have You created a more dignified nation than my nation?’ God Almighty then replied: ‘The superiority of the community of Muতammad, may peace be upon him, over other nations is comparable to My superiority over all creatures.’101

To sum up, the Moses story constitutes a significant link in Islamic accounts of prophetic history in general and the ulnj al-‘azm framework in particular. To construct their religious self-identity, Muslim scholars use the Moses story to contrast the grace that God bestowed upon the Jews as His “Chosen people,” with their ingratitude for His miraculous deeds. Following Muতammad’s message, Muslims became, therefore, worthier of the title “Chosen people.” Moving chronologically, we come to the Jesus story and its place in the Islamic tradition of prophethood.

Jesus and Islamic Apocalypticism Jesus, whose name in Arabic is ‘ƮsƗ or al-MasƯত, plays a prominent role in the Islamic presentations of the ulnj al-‘azm narratives. The Jesus story recurs frequently in the Qur’Ɨn; one chapter is even entitled “Mary” (Maryam). The Jesus narrative in the Qur’Ɨn consists of the following

101

Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ, 204-205

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major themes: Mary and the birth of Jesus,102 Jesus’ prophethood and miracles,103 Jesus’ disciples,104 and the nature of Jesus.105 The same topics, yet with more details, can be found in the prophetic tradition.106 The influence of the New Testament is, as we shall see, noticeable in Islamic accounts. However, one has to bear in mind two fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity, regarding the questions of the Trinity and the Crucifixion.107 These issues generated the theological polemic between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages. However, the examination of these differences is beyond the scope of this article. The presentation of Jesus’ prophethood in the Qur’Ɨn and the prophetic tradition served as a model for later Muslim scholars. However, as time passed, they sought non-Islamic materials, such as the New Testament, to provide more coherence. The plot of the Jesus narrative in Islamic sources follows, on the whole, the Gospels, and particularly those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.108 As in Christian sources,109 Muslim scholars allocate a central role for Mary in the Jesus story, and portray her as one of the most upright and pious among women.110 Mary was betrothed to Joseph when she received the announcement that she would be Jesus’ mother. God sent the archangel Gabriel to Mary in the form of a human who breathed into an opening in her clothing, and from this breath Jesus was conceived. Giving birth to Jesus, Mary had to confront her people and convince them

102

Snjrat Ɩl-ImrƗn (3): 42-47; Snjrat Maryam (19): 16-26 Snjrat Ɩl-ImrƗn (3): 48-63; Snjrat Maryam (19): 30-37; Snjrat al-MƗ’ida (5): 110-111. 104 Snjrat al-MƗ’ida (5): 112-115; Snjrat al-‫܇‬aff (61): 14. 105 Snjrat al-NisƗ (4): 171-173; Snjrat al-MƗ’ida (5): 73-75, 116-118. 106 Al-BukhƗrƯ, ‫܇‬a‫ۊ‬Ư‫ ۊ‬al-bukhƗrƯ, v, kitƗb bad’ al-khalq, 390-401 (‫ۊ‬adƯths 30713086) 107 Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, xvi, 82-86; F. Peters, Jesus and Muhammad, xix-xx; The Muslim Jesus, Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature, ed. and trans. T. Khalidi (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9-17. See the Arabic version of this book Al-InjƯl bi-riwayƗt al-MuslimƯn (Beirut: DƗr al-NahƗr lil-nashr, 2003), 23-30. H. Raisanen, “The Portrait of Jesus in the Qur’an: Reflections of a Biblical Scholar, “The Muslim World, 70, II (1980), 122-133; 925; For early Islamic-Christian debates about Jesus see R. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997), 160-167. 108 Matthew 2: 1-23; Mark 1: 1-13; Luke, 1:5-2:52 109 Matthew 1: 18-25; Mark 1: 1-13; 2-3. 110 Surat Ɩl-‘ImrƗn (3): 42. When the Angel said: “Mary, God has chosen you and purified you, and chosen you above all women of the world.” 103

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about this miraculous sign of God.111 It was Jesus who, as an infant, spoke to them, presenting himself as the messenger of God and defending his mother for giving birth to a fatherless child.112 The birth of Jesus is portrayed in Islamic traditions as a significant event in prophetic history. The day Jesus was born, all idols, therefore, toppled on their heads, and demons were terrified and confused.113 As part of the miraculous abilities that God granted Jesus, Islamic traditions portray Jesus’ ability to heal the blind and the leper and bring forth the dead.114 Islamic traditions treat the major events and themes of Jesus’ life and refer to the geographical locations associated with his story, such as Nazareth, Bethlehem, Egypt, and Jerusalem. A central theme in Islamic accounts of the Jesus story is the Jewish opposition to his new prophetic mission. Such is the case with Herod, the governor of Judea, who attempted to kill the newborn baby, but God prevented him from achieving that goal.115 Placing the Jesus story chronologically, most Muslim historians treat it as part of Roman history. According to these accounts, we learn, as in the New Testament, that Jesus was from Nazareth and born in Bethlehem during the reign of the emperor Augustus. The fact that some Muslim historians mention the 25th of December as his exact birth date shows the reliance on new sources.116 Jesus’ disciples and the missionary tasks entrusted to them form another important theme in the Islamic tradition. Interestingly, in Islamic texts, the term disciples appears as the ‫ۊ‬awƗriyynjn, deriving from the root ‫ۊ‬-w-r, associated with whiteness. They were given this title because they were pure-hearted and their faces were radiant with light due to their deep devotion to God.117 Muslim scholars refer to the twelve apostles and their role in conveying the message of God to other peoples.118 No doubt, Islamic interest in Jesus’ apostles relates closely to the Companions of the 111

Ibn Qutayba, KitƗb al-ma‘Ɨrif, 53; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 593-596 (de Goeje, I, 723-728); al-MaqdisƯ, al-Bad’, III, 120-121; al-Tha‘laibƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ, 381383; al-KisƗ’Ư, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ, 371-373. 112 Al-৫abarƯ, JƗmi‘ al-bayƗn, xvi, 76-8; Ibn KathƯr, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 479. 113 Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 595-596 (de Goeje, I, 727-728); al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬alanbiyƗ, 384-385. 114 Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ, 392-394; Ibn KathƯr, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 459-461. 115 Al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 605 (de Goeje, I, 740-741); Tha‘labƯ, Qisas al-anbiyƗ’, 385. 116 Al-Ya‘qnjbƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 146; al-৫abarƯ, Ta’rƯkh, I, 604-605 (de Goeje, I, 740); alMas‘njdƯ, Murnjj, II, 34 sec. 719). 117 Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 391. 118 Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 390-39; Ibn KathƯr, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 465-470.

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Prophet Muhammad, who played an indispensable role in the transmission of the prophetic tradition to the following generations. The Jesus story plays a significant role in Islamic religious legitimacy and historical identity. To achieve this objective, Islamic traditions place an emphasis on three themes of the Jesus narrative. First, Jesus is the last prophet-messenger (rasnjl) sent to the Israelites who had gone astray, reminding them of God’s straight path. Second, his prophetic mission was also to bring good tidings of the coming of Muতammad as the “seal of the prophets.” Finally, Jesus plays an indispensable role in Islamic apocalyptic literature, specifically, in his struggle against the Antichrist. A reference to the first two themes can be found in the Qur’Ɨn, where we are told: When Jesus, son of Mary, said: “Israelites, I am the messenger of God to you, fulfilling that which is in my hands of the Torah, good news of the messenger to come after me, his name being Ahmad.119” When he came to them with signs they said: “This is clear magic.”120

The theme of the coming of Muতammad, foretold by Jesus, also recurs in a number of ‫ۊ‬adƯths. According to one such ‫ۊ‬adƯth, the Prophet says: “I am the prayer of my father Abraham and the good tiding of Jesus; when my mother was pregnant with me she saw as if light radiated from her and lit the palaces of Busra in Syria.”121 This ‫ۊ‬adƯth stresses three significant aspects of Islamic religious identity and historical legitimacy: Abraham is the founder of Islam, Jesus announced the coming of Muhammad, and Islam is the last revealed religion. Jesus also figures prominently in Islamic apocalyptic literature, where he plays, as we shall see, a pivotal role in the struggle against the Antichrist.122 Thus, according to Islamic sources, Jesus will come back to lead the Islamic community, along with the Mahdi, and defeat the Antichrist. References to the eschatological role of Jesus can be found in the prophetic tradition. Such is the case with the two following ‫ۊ‬adƯths. In the first, the Prophet says, “How would God destroy a community that begins with me and ends with Jesus, and the Mahdi, who is from my family, in the middle!”123 In the second, the Prophet says: 119

Islamic traditions use different names to refer to the Prophet Muতammad, such as Aতmad and TƗha. 120 Snjrat al-‫܇‬aff (61): 6. English translation by B. Wheeler, Prophets in the Qur’Ɨn, 314. 121 Ibn KathƯr, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’, 462. See also U. Rubin, “Islamic Retelling of Biblical History,” 307-310. 122 The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories In Islamic literature, 22-29 123 Al-Tha‘labƯ, Qi‫܈‬a‫ ܈‬al-anbiyƗ’ 404.

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All the prophets are brothers. Their mothers are different but their religion is one. I am the worthiest among all people of Jesus, son of Mary, May peace be upon them, for there was no prophet between him and me. The son of Mary is about to appear as a just judge among you living among the community as my vicegerent. When you see him, you will recognize him to be a man of medium size, with skin of red and white…. He will break the cross, kill the pigs, and abolish the tax on non-Muslims until all other religious sects, but Islam, perish. In this time, God will destroy the hypocrite Antichrist, and will establish security on earth…. He [Jesus] will remain for 40 years… then he will die, be prayed over by Muslims, and buried in Medina next to ‘Umar.124

This hadith provides a clearer emphasis on Jesus’ role as the eschatological leader of the Islamic community, second only to Muতummad. It demonstrates that Jesus propagates the same divine message that began with Adam and was concluded with Muতammad’s message. He will appear again after Muতammad to lead and protect the Islamic community against the Antichrist. Thus, Islamic traditions apply the Jesus narrative to both the past and future in Islamic religious and historical identity.

Conclusion Prophethood in Islam acquires a unique meaning that paved the way for the religious distinctiveness of Islam. This perception is based primarily on the belief in the revealed divine message that God bestows upon chosen persons referred to in Islamic traditions as prophetmessengers (rasnjls). These chosen prophets serve as communicators between God and humans by conveying His message, observing His commandments, and demonstrating His miraculous signs. This understanding of prophethood is best exemplified in the stories of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, who received (along with Muতammad) the epithet “ulnj al-‘azm. At the center of the formation of Islamic religious identity and historical legitimacy stands the belief that Muতammad is the last prophet in the long line of prophets originating with Adam. Hence, the concept of khƗtam al-anbiyƗ’ (seal of the prophets) underlines the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood. Muhammad’s unique status among other prophets, beginning with Adam, makes him, according to Islamic belief, the most authentic representative of God’s message. Hence, Islam is deemed superior to other religions, and Muslims are the new and only chosen people. Islamic 124

Ibid. 403-404.

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portraits of the prophetic stories of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus recount parallel tracks of the same divine message that confirms the authenticity and the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood, with an emphasis placed on the stories of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. In Islam, Moses and Jesus are considered the founding fathers of the other two competing monotheistic religions--Judaism and Christianity, respectively. However, Abraham is believed to be neither Jewish nor Christian, but rather the founding father of Islam, and Muhammad is the true and final restorer of the Abrahamic tradition. This construction of prophetic history, therefore, demonstrates the historical legitimacy of Islam and its distinctive religious identity.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD: NATIONAL IDENTITY, HEALING HISTORIOGRAPHY AND GREEK HUMORIST NIKOS TSIFOROS SYLVIA MITTLER UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO SCARBOROUGH

Over fifty years ago Herbert Muller wrote “Every age has to rewrite its history, recreate the past… Our task is to create a ‘usable past’ for our own living purposes.”1 This universal attempt assumes particular relevance in the context of modern Greece, for roughly two millennia the site of encounters, confrontations and oft-constrained solutions between peoples, cultures, ideologies, religions and indeed, empires. Such an unsettled past, alas, encourages the formation of neither settled institutional values nor a settled sense of identity. In the modern era, battles over interpretation of the past and the nature of “Greekness” have occurred in Greece ever since 1832, when with the help of Britain, France and Russia a far smaller territory than that we know today was released from the Ottoman “yoke” and formally instituted as a nation-state. These profound ideological disagreements, inseparable from the socio-cultural, linguistic and political fabric of the country until recently—some cynics might say until now— are rooted in the “foundational complicities” of the Enlightenment and Philhellenism and represent perhaps one of the less well-known consequences of Western European colonialism. Greece is, it seems, “history’s sole witness of the colonization of the ideal”2—not so much the 1

Herbert Muller, The Uses of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 35. 2 Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 6.

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product of identity formation processes within the Greek-speaking or Christian Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire as a response to European appropriation of the cultural inheritance of a deterritorialized and utopian classical topos. The results of this “annexation of the mind” were profound and longlasting. Embracing economic and political dependency like those of other peripheral states, nineteenth-century Greek élites contributed to the creation of a political, academic and cultural establishment steeped in European paradigms of national destiny3 and wedded to the peculiar thesis that Greeks were the “same” nation from antiquity to the present regardless of the possibility of socio-historical change or modification in self-perception. The hegemonic conservative Neohellenic ideology favored by Greek governments until the 1960s deemed the largely Oriental character of domestic everyday culture with its legacy of Byzantine and Ottoman traditions embarrassingly backward in contrast to modernity and sought to suppress and expunge the various loci it inhabited. This official management of such a “Romeic” past (“Romeic”—from romios, Roman Greek, i.e. Byzantine, being the term of national self-designation used by Greeks during the period of the Ottoman occupation from 1453 to 1827) resulted in the successful displacement of a substantial part of the history, memory and experience of modern Greeks.4 It was only in the postwar period, particularly from the late 1950s, when the effects of affluence began to be felt, that nationally enforced cultural models lost their dominance and the more palpable, remembered and directly experienced Romeic tradition gained social currency. The expansion of the middle class, particularly the lower middle class, occurred in conjunction with rapid urbanization and cultural transformation. At this time the Hellenic/Romeic duality surfaced with renewed urgency, among other ways in the form of an entire body of contemporary artistic texts dealing with self-perception, with questions of cultural memory and contemporary Greek society5. Propelled by a significant increase in consumerism and the 3

See Elly Skopetea, Fallmerayer: Tehnasmata tou Antipalou Deous/Fallmerayer: The Ruses of Rival Fear (Athens: Themelio, 1999). 4 Umut Özkirimli and Spyros A. Sofos, Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (London: Hurst and Company, 2008), 24. 5 See Vrasidas Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema (New YorK: Continuum Books, 2012), xx. Maria Stassinopoulou, in “Definitely Maybe: Possible Narratives of the History of Greek Cinema”, Lydia Papadimitriou and Yannis Tzioumakis eds., Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012), 140, notes that although partially addressed in reference to poetry, comics and the fine arts, a systematic approach to an “upbeat and quite wide-ranging cultural scene” across different media still remains to be implemented.

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adoption of Western lifestyles as exemplified by conspicuous changes in housing, in modes of transportation and in leisure activities, these texts responded at a deeper level to the confrontation of values brought on by social and cultural modernization. As unprecedented possibilities for enrichment created the conditions for the formation of a nouveau riche class, contradictions presented themselves between the traditional ethics of communal bonds and the capitalist rules of modern urban life. The gap between tradition and modernity, or more precisely between two different national traditions, highlighted a class distinction: the middle and upper classes espoused primarily the Hellenic adoption of Western values, while the Romeic continuation of a lived tradition mostly characterized the working class. Crucially, the two forms of cultural identity co-existed in ways that spawned hybrid cultural positions and identities; indeed, the social mobility of the times contributed significantly to such hybridization.6 In a country still economically reliant on foreign investment and private enterprise while exhibiting enduring structural cleavages only partially veiled by the official doctrine of national unity on social, geographical and historical levels,7 solutions were slow to come. Amid the anxieties of a society confused over its present and future character, ordinary people during the 1960s concentrated on their job, their home and their neighborhood, forced to confront the immediate, the contemporary and the actual, together with all the compromises they entailed.8 Not surprisingly production in arts such as the theatre and particularly the cinema, at the height of its popularity during this decade, bore eloquent witness to the difficult constitution of modern Greek identity. I wish to maintain here that the historiographical works of prolific Greek humorist Nikos Tsiforos (1913-1970) discussed here, penned during 6

Lydia Papadimitriou emphasizes this point in The Greek Film Musical: A Critical and Cultural History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006), 4. 7 Cf. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “’Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans”, in Modern Greece: Nationalism and Nationality, eds. Martin Blinkhorn and Thanos Veremis (Athens: ELIAMEP, 1990), 41-42; also David H. Close, Greece Since 1945: Politics, Economy and Society (London: Longman, 2002), 67. 8 Lydia Papadimitriou, The Greek Film Musical, 5; Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema, 63. Papadimitriou describes the mid-1960s as “a time of hope and turmoil for Greek politics and society”. Authoritarian right-wing regime control was briefly broken when massive popular support led to the installation of a centrist government under George Papandreou (1963-65) but after it succumbed to paralyzing strikes and disagreements with the Royal Palace national instability ensued, followed by military dictatorship in 1967.

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the 1960s, possess a distinct cultural function and can fruitfully be seen in this same vibrant context of period and place. A protean cultural figure, active as a journalist, playwright, screen writer and film director mainly from the 1940s through the 1960s,9 Tsiforos contributed extensively to artistic genres that clearly propose fictional negotiation between traditional and modern versions of Greek identity. In particular, recent scholarship has shown how popular Greek films of the time, even though borrowing from foreign models of film-making and storytelling, transformed them through the use of domestic cultural references to places, habits, recent events, stars and of course the Greek language. Tsiforos would have been intimately aware that, as Vrasidas Karalis tells us today, the movie-going urban masses who had just left their villages were in the majority illiterate, implicitly conditioned regarding public morality, gender roles and political ideology such that between 1955 and 1965 the act of going to the cinema was an experience of nation-building with social and educational value.10 This, to my mind, gives us a clue about his motives and his choice of themes, forms and functions in books that include The Franks and Us, Crusades and Greek Mythology, as well as detailed histories of England, France and the United States.11 I propose to read these historiographical works as an attempt to offer an equally formative experience via a 9

For many years Tsiforos contributed regular and occasional columns to newspapers, writing on current events for Phileutheros (1951-54), for To Vima (1954-56), and again on current events for Eleutheros Kosmos from 1966 until his death from cancer. He was also a regular contributor to several household-name Greek magazines, including Trast (1948-49), Romantzo (1950-70), Tachydromos (1956-70) and Pantheon (1969-70). His theatrical plays number more than 40, his screenplays more than 60 according to some, more than 80 according to others, some written alone, others with Polyvios Vasileiadis. Many of them became films, some directed by him, some not. A selective filmography can be found online through Wikipedia. 10 Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema, 80. 11 The Franks and Us (Emeis kai oi Frangkoi), Greek Mythology (Elliniki Mythologhia) and Crusades (Stavrofories) were originally published in serial chapter form in the wide-circulation magazine Tachydromos, Greek Mythology and Crusades appearing in 1964, followed by The Franks and Us in 1965. Greek Mythology was brought out in book form by the Athens publishing house Ermis in 1970, followed by Crusades in 1971 and The Franks and Us in 1973, all of them going through further editions in the ensuing years. In contrast, Tsiforos’ three histories saw publication only after his death of cancer in 1970 during the somber years of military dictatorship. Ermis brought out his History of England (Historia tis Anglias) in 1977, his History of France (Historia tis Gallias) in 1978, and his History of the United States (Historia ton Enomenon Politeion) in 1979. To my knowledge none of these works have as yet been translated into English.

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different artistic medium. It is possible to argue that throughout the 1960s, precisely because film production was “exhausting its expressive idiom through the proliferation of inane slapstick comedies, urban melodramas and folkloric tragic idylls”12—some perpetrated in full consciousness by himself in response to the pressures of the Greek studio system—Tsiforos turned to the printed page as a mass educational tool better suited to the political ramifications of his message.13 Many commonalities link the two media, allowing a number of discourses and rhetorical strategies to intersect. My comments will be made in three parts. I will first discuss Tsiforos’ many-pronged construction of the relation between popular culture and national identity and its implications not only for improved self-perception but for increased popular participation in civil society. I will then examine more closely the issue of Greek cultural nationalism in the context of inevitable hybridity and Tsiforos’ tacit suggestions for a selective, cosmopolitan constructivism. I will conclude with a discussion of his contribution to the historically vexed question of postmodernism in Greece. The foregrounding in the 1960s of popular culture and Romeic experience as a realistic candidate for the expression of Greek national identity, generally speaking, made necessary a number of specific choices, both in theme and in form. Tsiforos’ work can be seen to share many of the orientations and solutions selected by others with similar cultural intentions during this period. As do many films of the 1950s and 1960s, including his own, he elevates the common man/underdog as his central cultural hero, restoring an image and a voice long officially suppressed in order to render him a potent vehicle of information and a sympathetic adversary of despotism:

12

Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema, 89. Karalis in A History of Greek Cinema, xviii, does not mince words: “The main concern of most Greek movies has been the political question in contemporary Greek society. And the political question, of course, is associated with the history of the country and the ways in which Greek society dealt in times of war and peace with its own self-perception and cultural memory.” The wide-circulation popular magazines of the day—in whose pages many of these works were first published in installments—offered a perfect vehicle for the propagation of politico-cultural ruminations couched in deceptively simple language.

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Clearly sharing the contemporary interest in revisiting history and its legacy as an implied critique of the local political establishment, he wades into the charged politics of cultural memory, “rerouting the historical”15 in order to subversively re-position the past and suggest the present. His chatty and ribald rereadings of the Crusades, Frankish Greece and, not surprisingly, Greek mythology itself display a rich range of comedic devices, serving up “infotainment” that reformulates non-Eurocentrically the pillars of national and supra-national history and identity for a lower middle class readership in search of escapism and fun, yet deserving of knowledge more accurate than that delivered by official historical perspectives. Tsiforos’ narrative features dialogic narrator-reader relations that allow pragmatic history lessons cloaked in satire and parody to subvert a salvational myth of racial continuity, purity and unity that had dominated historiography, literature, folklore and the national educational system since the nineteenth century:16 14

Greek Mythology, 555. Translation of this passage and all subsequent ones is mine. 15 G.C. Spivak, “Reading the Satanic Verses”, Third Text 11, Summer (1990): 41. 16 From the time of the “revenant nation” created out of a former part of the Ottoman empire, the divide between conflicting traditions, perspectives and needs infused Greek cultural and political life. The clash of centuries-old communal values with the prescriptions of a reactionary Westernizing Hellenism was long mirrored in language and culture. By the end of the 1800s, the nation-building mission was spearheaded by the disciplines of history and folklore, their research findings permeating public discourse, the modern Greek historical novel and popular memory alike. After the Austrian scholar J.P. Fallmerayer underlined the gap in the continuity and provenance thesis by arguing that modern Greeks were largely descended from the Slavic and Albanian tribes who populated the region during the centuries of Byzantine decline, both disciplines rushed to echo the official account of descendance formulated by Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, considered the founder of Greek national historiography. Paparrigopoulos’ History of the Hellenic Nation (published 1860 through 1877) having effected a seamless Hellenic-Christian synthesis linking ancient to modern times, it fell to folklore to mould the varied practices and memories of many localities into the “immutable” proof of this “national” heritage. Folklore’s vision reduced the human repositories of folk culture into a mere expression of mystical Hellenism capable of nothing more than the passive inheritance of ancient virtues (Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece, New York: Pella, 1986, 93). The idea of Hellenic-Christian synthesis, nonetheless, is not dead within

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Hesiod scratched his beard. In those days you couldn’t be wise unless you had a beard. Today if you have a beard you’re either a tourist, a fashion-plate or a bum.17 Arguing, like Walter Benjamin, that history is written by the victors, Tsiforos exhaustively shows that far from idealism, self-interest alone universally propels political events: . . . history has no great men. Only men without moral bounds, who dare to kill and to violate with the excuse of trumped-up moral grounds. Those grounds are variously baptized ‘religion,’ ‘ideals,’ ‘fatherland’ and so forth. . . . Those who are brave but foolish believe them and become heroes. Those who are brave but smart turn a profit and win the goods. . .18

The ingenuous reader sufficiently exposed to the chasm between official celebrations and harsh quotidian realities will be compelled to realize that “the past, history itself, is…the primer of self-formation and self-understanding;”19 once better informed of the resilience of his countrymen as well as the long unfolding of relations between East and West he will, it is hoped, be able to heal his insecurities20 and “move on” to differentiate Greek national identity in the context of an increasingly interrelated and consumerist global community.21 Such a task, however, involves overcoming the pernicious effect of ‘purist’ Western-Hellenic social engineering that has always gone beyond the fetishization of ‘authentic’ ‘national’ history through schooling to focus viscerally on the

the national educational system today. A recent addition to the copious literature on the subject, and one that makes a case for little educational change, is Yannis Hamilakis, “’Learn History!’ Antiquity, National Narrative, and History in Greek Educational Textbooks,” in The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories, eds. K.S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003), 39-67. 17 Greek Mythology, 7. 18 The Franks and Us, 413-15. 19 James D. Faubion, Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 173. 20 According to Karalis, one can see the profusion of contemporary texts dealing with self-perception as “an antidote for confusion and anxiety;” he describes their “attempt to bring balance and closure to the symptoms of a post-traumatic helplessness that dominated a society in constant crisis over its present and future position in history” (A History of Greek Cinema, xx). 21 As Vassiliki Tsitsopoulou remarks in “Coloniality and Early Greek Film Culture,” in Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities,91, “the question of the national cannot be raised without at the same time investigating its entanglement in the geocultural imaginary of global capitalism.”

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Greek language by intertwining linguistic history with national identity.22 Tsiforos borrows a page from contemporary popular films, which furnished an alternative sphere where villagers and urban proletarians could hear their own language on screen in place of the austere and archaic idiom employed by officialdom.23 This language, dimotiki, was clearly the appropriate vehicle through which to successfully furnish remedial instruction to his readers.24 Tsiforos’ historiographical oeuvre attests to contemporary fantasies of middle-class enrichment and empowerment in the context of what we may call the “Greek dream”, not to mention increasing commercialization of “Greek” identity by the tourist industry: in Greek Mythology Ariadne is unoperatically stranded on the island of Naxos, a tourist without boatfare, and in Crusades Alice of Antioch puts her hair in rollers, only to discover that wily archbishop Raoul de Domfron has married her daughter Constance to her intended groom. However, Tsiforos shares, particularly with contemporaries active in the realm of popular film and the older tradition of popular theatre, much more than the illustration of modernity’s 22

For a thorough, recent analysis of the Greek “language question,” see Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 23 Karalis, A History of Cinema, 86. Karalis goes on to tie language to the possession of power: “The demoticism [his italics] of these films has to be studied carefully as an opposition to and parody of the official language of power, which seemed incomprehensible, hostile and opaque to the audiences of the day.” We should remember that in 1964 nearly one quarter of the compulsory lower secondary syllabus was devoted to ancient Greek, with special focus on the intricacies of archaic grammar. For barely twenty years katharevousa, the artificially-reconstituted language designed to purge everyday demotic of its Turkish corruptions, had been replaced by demotic (dimotiki) as the language of instruction—but only in the first four years of primary school. Katharevousa had long served as an instrument of socio-economic exclusion; it was only in 1964 under the new centrist government that demotic became acceptable as a written language and was introduced at all educational levels. 24 At the time the state of education in Greece reflected what Gregory Jusdanis (in Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) has characterized as a belated and uneven modernity. Public education suffered from grossly inadequate funding in spite of mounting social demand, from harsh pedagogy that promoted uncritical respect for authority, and from centralized curricular control on the part of governments who viewed attempts to modernize curricula or methodology as leftist subversion. As for secondary education, ignoring job-related needs, it continued to exhibit what Mackridge terms “an almost total disregard for modern Greek culture” (Language and National Identity, 209).

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accomplishments within a traditional culture or even the desire to emphasize elements of a repressed Romeic identity at a time of flux. The form and style of these works themselves exhibit a hybridity that has much in common with the mix of elements recently identified in the context of Old Greek cinema in general and the Greek musical in particular.25 Viewed as artifacts, Tsiforos’ historiographic works can be seen to contain stylistic features borrowed from the theatrical genre of the epitheorisi, the Greek version of music hall or revue. First appearing in Greece in the late nineteenth century and at the peak of its popularity during the 1910s and 1920s, it became a distinctively Greek hybrid that mixed elements of European spectacle with Greek comedy and topical satire, its fragmented and episodic structure of short sketches betraying its proximity to the French revue and vaudeville. Together with the comic idyll (komidyllio), another late nineteenth-century precursor of the Greek musical, it had a strong impact on Greek film comedies of the 1950s and 1960s, bequeathing to them its vernacular banter and urban setting, its musical ingredient, its engagement with the everyday and a foundation of improvisation and direct address reminiscent of the theatrical genre.26 In the case of Tsiforos, who together with several other post-war Greek comic playwrights successfully transitioned to the cinematic medium, it therefore comes as no surprise that unlike traditional published political satire,27 his satirico-historical narrative habitually takes the form of 25

Cf. Lydia Papadimitriou, The Greek Film Musical, 2006, and “Music, Dance and Cultural Identity in the Greek Film Musical” in Greek Cinema, Papadimitriou and Tzioumakis eds., 2012. The term “Old Greek Cinema”, as opposed to “New”, is applied to Greek films spanning the period 1946-1970. 26 Papadimitriou, The Greek Film Musical, 24. 27 Political satire represents an older and respected tradition dating from around 1860 in Greece, where it was produced in the demotic language by recognized writers, journalists and poets, both independently and in magazines such as the celebrated Asti and Skrip. Alexander Soutsos (1803-63), Emmanuel Roidis (18361904), Georgios Souris (1852-1919) the demoticist and Marxist poet Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974) as well as the corrosively expressive poet Kostas Kariotakis (1896-1928) unleashed strong convictions on contemporary society and politics. By the 1950s and even before, efthimografia, “humorous writing” (from efthimos, merry; also hilarious, facetious), more responsive to a widening consumer base immersed in popular culture, had made its appearance. It was considered by many high-culture-bound literary critics to be “bite-less” and in addition, to possess suspicious links with the epitheorisi—which of course it did. Papadimitriou, in The Greek Film Musical, 23, mentions film comedy writers such as “Alekos Sakellarios with Alekos Giannakopoulos; Asimakis Gialamas with Kostas Pretenderis; and Nikos Tsiforos with Polyvios Vassiliadis”.

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somewhat shapeless, semi-autonomous meanderings on individual personages or events that pass for chapters, that his accounts are here and there dotted with musical references or that in them concise and incisive dialogue is an integral source of plot development. Of more than passing interest, however, is his use of a chatty and opinionated narrator figure strongly reminiscent of a personage indispensable to the epitheorisi, the compère. Acting as guide for the audience, mediating between audience and character, the compère is almost continually on stage in order to facilitate linkage between the various sketches of the show.28 I shall return later to the compère-like narrator in the works I discuss. One of the distinct characteristics of Old Greek Cinema style is its reliance on the theatre, particularly European comedies, melodramas, farces and boulevard comedies popularized in the nineteenth century. It is noteworthy that Greek comedies and melodramas, often filmed intact, were thus like the epitheorisi or even the dramatiko idyllio (dramatic idyll), another vernacular nineteenth-century precursor, heavily dependent on dialogue; furthermore, their characters were largely stereotypical, based less on psychological finesse and more on effective set pieces appropriately performed and readily understood in the context of specific and recognizable audience expectations and hypotheses.29 These aspects also inform the works I discuss here and should be considered when examining the implications of Tsiforos’ thematic and formal choices. It is important to bear in mind that in his attempt to connect with his reader, he appears to leave almost no culturally recognizable signifier untouched. Thus, throughout these texts he exhibits exemplary deference to Romeic customary practices. We may turn first to his treatment of his primary task, the cultural excision of what is for him the largest malignant growth in Greece, skewed European visions of history. Shallow albeit sharp characterization coupled with the depiction of a palpable, hardscrabble world all but guarantees the reader’s familiarity—and crucially, participation. In The Franks and Us, the monumental and “eternal” crumble as elitist agendas yield to a demotic imaginary wherein motley European monarchs and disingenuous knights-errant—errant until they can snag a fiefdom in Palestine—steadily debunk the “noble plans” and “sublime ideals” trumpeted by the powerful. Greek Mythology shows a similar approach: the separation of art and life carried out by cultured travelers of the Romantic era musing in exaltation over dead ancients among hoary ruins, as well as the alternate view of modern Greeks as infantile, Mediterranean “Irish” unsuited to partake in the European 28 29

Papadimitriou, The Greek Musical, 24. Papadimitriou, The Greek Musical, 20.

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civilizing mission,30 are both swept away by a triumphantly cheeky, streetsmart Greekness. Nymphs, Parnassians, seers, kings, thoroughly divested of any western idealistic and idealized perceptions, now appear preening, maudlin, beset by markedly unhumanistic bodily needs; King Midas must eat, while Lycurgos is obliged to withdraw to his water-closet. Plucky désabusés and all too often koroida (“suckers” in Greek) of the sort familiar to his readers from the figures of the traditional Karaghiozi shadow theater,31 they function in a proto-commodity world where alertness alone determines survival.32 They also go beyond everyday demotic speech, expressing themselves in a lingo for which Tsiforos has been remembered as a writer—the pithy, Turkish-laden vernacular of communal relations which hark back to the imperial régimes of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.33 Synonymous with a dense world of social and commercial transactions as well as with intercommunality as a mode of everyday living based on the accommodation of cultural differences within a common moral environment in an intensely multi-ethnic empire, this mode of expression, together with many of its practitioners, was a victim of modern state

30

Cf. Rodanthi Tzanelli, Nation-Building and identity in Europe: The Dialogics of Reciprocity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); also Thomas W. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 31 From the early twentieth century on (purified of its original obscene elements) the shadow theatre, an artefact rooted in Ottoman times, had become a folknational performance genre that challenged the cultural preconceptions of conservative Europeanizing society even as it celebrated the cynical shrewdness and anarchistic resilience (poneria) exhibited by its comic underdog anti-hero. 32 A similar opposition to western interpretation of the classical world can be seen in director Nikos Koundouros’ landmark 1963 film Young Aphrodites (Mikres Afrodites), which foregrounds the life of ordinary people outside the grand histories of Oedipus and Troy. Karalis remarks (A History of Greek Cinema, 101): “Koundouros’ heroes were not on a pedestal or the Parthenon frieze, having won immortality through aesthetic perfection and stylistic elegance; they were eternal in their triviality and triteness, because of their earthy existence and attachment to the world of immediate objects and in their banal struggle for survival.” 33 Among his works, it is Ta Paidia tis Piatsas (translatable as The Guys who Hang Out in the Market-place, a sort of “Kids in the ‘Hood”)(Athens: Tachydromos Editions, 1967; later Ermis, 1973) that best illustrates this form of speech. According to one oral testimony, Tsiforos accessed jail in order to learn it. On the rich historical significance of the “piatsa”, see Emmanouil Zahos, Piatsa (Athens: Kaktos, 1980).

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formation and the urge to create ethnically homogenous spaces,34 not to mention of Orientalist mythology. It is the tart idiom of the manghes, tough, moody proles who in Greece arose around 1900 in the ports of Athens and Salonica, their self-proclaimed disreputableness matched only by their resistance to non-indigenous social and esthetic codes.35 With its use Tsiforos undoes the exclusions wrought by katharevousa: stripped of the artificial language of an unevenly-reproduced European nation-state, Euro-superiority re-emerges, humbled, in Ottoman-Oriental garb. Socially peripheral, symbolically central, the manghes are Tsiforos’ proof, first, that identity is constructed within specific historical sites using the resources of history, language and culture, and second, that “ the constitution of a social identity is an act of power.”36 Their flippant minority gaze punctures the

34

Cf. Nicholas Doumanis, Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Co-existence and its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 35 The phenomenon of the manghes, and particularly of the rebetes, or musicplaying manghes, and their music, rebetiko, has attracted much musicological and sociological analysis since the 1970s. After the Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed the rout of Greek troops by Kemalist forces in Turkey in 1922, many talented Greek refugee musicians joined the ranks of what was arguably the lowest social stratum in Greece, with links to the criminal underworld, drugs and prostitution. Maria Konstantinidou in A Social History of Rebetiko (Koinoniki Historia tou Rebetikou)(Athens: Barbounakis, 1983), 26, throws light on Tsiforos’ reasons for highlighting the rebetes’ songs and style of speech: “the rebetiko, rooted in a marginal culture, helped to bring about the continuance, the propagation and the dominance of a way of life and a mentality that shaped the personality of the modern Greek.” Elsewhere, Gail Holst-Warhaft explains that perceived as a form of eastern cultural expression, the “deracinated urban rebetika, with their foreign-derived slang, their shady milieu and antiauthoritarian lyrics, were a thorn in the side of nationalists, but . . . attractive to modernist writers and intellectuals who opposed narrow nationalism, and to working-class, urban Greeks, many of whom were sympathetic to the Greek Communist Party’s campaign for a more equal distribution of resources” (“World Music and the Orientalising of the Rebetika”, 2001 Hydra Rebetiko Conference, www.geocities.com/hydragathering/holst3.html, 2). As Lydia Papadimitriou makes clear in The Greek Musical, 86, the rising popularity of rebetika songs, many of which highlighted the role of the bouzouki, disturbed proponents of Hellenic ideals who argued that they were aesthetically and morally inferior, formulaic, foreign, degenerate and escapist. The supporters of bouzouki music, conversely, praised its beauty and authenticity and valued its hybridity, noting influences from Byzantine, eastern and folk music. 36 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 33.

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canonic status of the Oedipal myth as Tsiforos rewrites the fateful encounter of Oedipus and his real father: He had a chariot, seeing as he was a king’s son. On the way to Phocis, he came face to face with another chariot. The road was narrow, and in the other chariot was his father, Laius. Laius was on a pre-election tour. Laius said, in a manner not at all befitting a king: —Back up so’s I can pass. Said Oedipus: —Nothing doing! —Back up kid, I said. —I can’t, my reverse broke.37

Laughter here becomes a mode of understanding, a politically potent cultural analytic which restores their capacity for common sense to those who have historically been easily swayed, as Tsiforos writes, by martial fanfares, tearful women and zealous priests. He does not mince words. “All history,” the reader is told, “is about who’ll get the tax-money.”38 Funny, yes, but knowledge adroitly wielded can effect change. With this change in mind, Tsiforos expertly expands his use of cultural signifiers. Knowing his readers expect meaning constitution on his page to reflect traditional methods of assigning significance, he offers them the understandability formal education has denied most of them by simply relating history to daily life. He becomes a storyteller, using familiar-style dialogue and description and advancing actions through the bald attribution of character and motive. Although he often reasons with his reader as he attempts to refine his critical judgment, he has no pretensions of writing “objective” history. Instead, narrator-listener proximity strategies culture-specific to Greek narrative performance are given rhetorical pride of place. These include the use of constructed dialogue that stresses culturally relevant interaction as well as the introduction of strategies of implicitness that involve visualization, immediacy, the provision of evidence by means of social drama, and especially, sensory ways of constructing and imparting knowledge which prioritize the communication of affect and downplay adherence to accuracy or factuality.39 Drawing the reader near is crucial, for only thus can Tsiforos

37

Greek Mythology, 502. The Franks and Us, 361. 39 Cf. Deborah Tannen, Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue and imagery in conversational discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 125; also Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Narrative Performances: A study of Modern 38

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then attempt to mould his critical thinking skills by inviting him to analyze, evaluate and apply his intelligence to a broad variety of both historical and authorially imagined situations. With this aim in mind, he is careful to place the concept of referentiality at the very center of his pedagogical approach. That the reader see connections is fundamental to his project. Analogies between issues are introduced through traditional tools common to popular cultures that include metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and heavy doses of irony. Tsiforos leaves nothing to chance: in the event these methods might occasionally prove insufficient to assure the reader’s transfer of meaning from past to immediate Greek present, he constructs broad transhistorical themes that help illuminate present experience and tie it to previous events. His page effortlessly recycles philosophical commonplaces and proverbs, many of which, upon examination, can be seen to reinforce the view of history as pattern. This particular perspective, which has been described as widespread in Greece,40 allows him considerable flexibility. He is able to expose the long centuries of international meddling to which Greece was forced to submit, but also to decry the fact that, as he writes plaintively, “we will never learn”: Unlike Rome, Greece wasn’t destroyed by wealth. Her way of thinking brought her down. . . .The four stations of her ruin: war between Athens and Sparta, the premature death of Alexander the Great, the supremacy of the clergy under Byzantium, the Asia Minor disaster. . . .All four came just when we were raising our heads. “And a good day to you, most great and esteemed allies and protectors,” but it’s our fault too. We have a highlydeveloped love of independence and initiative, and a thirst for ruling. And we’ll never mend our ways. That’s our tragedy.41

Greek storytelling (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997), 144-45. 40 David E. Sutton, in Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), ch. 7, documents the same tendency to see patterns in history among the contemporary inhabitants of the island of Kalymnos. More generally, Michael Herzfeld in “Segmentation and Politics in the European Nation-State: Making Sense of Political Events”, in Kirsten Hasrup, ed. Other Histories (London: Routledge, 1992), 62-81, has argued that certain shared themes and tropes are used in modern Greek politico-historical discussions. 41 Greek Mythology, 198. This quote exemplifies what Herzfeld has identified in Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 2005 [1997]) as the Romeic tendency for self-critique and self-blame, often ultimately

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Tsiforos’ “history from below” recognizes customary practices as the backdrop against which average Greeks analyze political and cultural issues. By scrupulously reproducing these practices, all the while careful to judiciously space his more intellectual ruminations and avoid the pompously academic, he successfully restores the validity of communal experience and hence communal identity in the face of an imported and foreign mentality. To the countrymen he wishes to reach, its selfrighteousness dissuades, while its belief in absolutes, procedure and rationalism remains unconvincing because it reinforces the impersonal and the permanent. In a “habitus tempered in the crucible of continual invasions,”42 communal experience is instead one of contingency. Reliant on ties of loyalty to family and friends, it has always meant confronting the situational, and has inevitably expressed the collective feelings of the dispossessed. Tsiforos’ page faithfully transmits this reality. The crusader Josselin of Edessa’s troops abandon him when they learn their wages have been used to pay for a generous store of Burgundian wine, while the Titans, old-fashioned heavies who feel slighted by that upstart Zeus, grumble, “So what do we do?—We wipe him out”43—and so begins the battle of the Titans. Other aspects of traditional communal identity are foregrounded with equal affection. The reader soon sees that boundaries are fluid, morality never absolute; the Templars and Hospitallers learn two things from the Assassins: to smoke hashish to forget their problems, and to kill without mercy in the dark.44 Idealism is fatal: St. Bernard, leader of the Second Crusade, makes “the big mistake. To believe in mankind.”45 Saints, Tsiforos says, should only believe in God; when they trust the powerful of this earth they become careless—a polite way of calling them suckers. Watchfulness calls for deception: the scholar Nikiforos Vlemmidis is sent to the Despotate of Epirus by the Byzantine Emperor Vatatsis, ostensibly to buy old manuscripts, but in fact to scout out how best to attack the Franks. Cynicism prevails: Gérard de Provence, founder of the Hospitallers, “a holy man with a beard and lice like pine-seeds,”46 is succeeded by the much less holy Raymond de Puy, who unphilanthropically arranges to have the Knights paid from the public purse. Some of the individuals Tsiforos plucks from history’s pages are deployed to explain the ills of society. As I have attempted to show, however, this attitude is not synonymous with an inability to contribute to national progress. 42 Faubion, Modern Greek Lessons, 156. 43 Greek Mythology, 12. 44 Crusades, 106. 45 Crusades, 150. 46 Crusades, 87.

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especially rank—the scheming Melissanthi, who poisoned her son Baldwin III of Jerusalem, or Renaud de Châtillon, lord of Antioch, who on a foray to Cyprus so pillaged and killed that even the Chronicle of the Crusades calls him “a criminal towards Christendom.”47 Yet he is visibly moved at the story of the young leper king Baldwin IV, whose four hundred knights fought Saladin’s twenty-six thousand men to proceed in triumph to Jerusalem: “a leper, seventeen years old, and worthy of the first great Crusaders, Godefroi and Bohemund.”48 Tsiforos’ method of research clearly involves working back and forth between texts and contexts in what Robert Darnton has qualified as the “anthropological mode of history.”49 Particularly in Crusades, he makes equal use of Western and Arab sources in order to clear the best possible way through a foreign mental world. Beha en Din, Saladin’s official chronicler, is quoted for his description of the siege of Acre, where the Crusaders used a huge stone-throwing machine nicknamed “Evil Neighbour-Woman.” and the Turks a similar behemoth nicknamed “Evil Female Cousin”: They are not men, but a wall even an earthquake cannot shake. One fellow, a giant of a man, fired such large stones at us that he would have killed four hundred men. Twenty wounds from stones and arrows on him, and it was as if he had nothing. We finally burned him alive, we threw a bottle of naphtha at him, but couldn’t make the enemy fall back one bit. Even their women fought. One of them with a green cloak really nailed us with her bow. We killed her and took her bow but alas, she had cast a spell on us.50

In a remarkable passage in The Franks and Us, Tsiforos becomes momentarily personal as his narrator plaintively expresses what Jenkins and Munslo, building on Hayden White, have suggested: that the goal of learning lessons from the past can really only be that of learning lessons from stories written by historians and others.51 Even so, he says in 47

Crusades, 166. Crusades, 203. 49 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 6. 50 Crusades, 242-3. 51 Cf. Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); also Alun Munro, Deconstructing History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Unlike most Greek academic historians of his time, Tsiforos admits he is telling stories about events whose outcome, ultimately, remains unknown. Philosophizing at the close of Greek Mythology on the whereabouts of Achilles’ murder, he writes: “Now that he’s gone it’s of no 48

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frustration, the events to which they give life possess a unique seduction: “Here important things happened, how can I leave them unknown?”52 As a strategy that enables the reader to re-evaluate his or her identity positively, Tsiforos’ celebration of customary practice and communal identity is anchored, indeed validated, by the performance of his garrulous and omnipresent narrator. It is the narrator’s task to provide the universally human details that bring alive the events and times portrayed. He asks rhetorical questions: early in Greek Mythology he stops to ponder “Why are we mentioning all this well-known stuff? To refresh the beginnings and then keep going.”53 And he has opinions: “Let’s take a break from all these love stories and tell the one about Philemon and Baucis.”54 Ever careful, like any village gossip, to protect himself from accusations of fabrication, he wraps himself in authenticity: “And I’m not just making it up. Eratosthenis says it, and anyone who wants can go read it.”55 Tasked as is the compère of the epitheorisi with linking divers events in order to underscore their significance as a whole, he creates relations where others might fear to tread: God created microbes, debts, pig-headed judges and family relatives in order to punish thankless, luckless man. The first you fight with antibiotic injections, the second you fight with denial and they clap you in jail, the third you fight with straight imprisonment. Family relatives you just can’t fight with anything.56

Perhaps Tsiforos’ most distinctive strategy for fostering reader engagement, however, remains his unique use of humor. As his personages flatter, fight, bed and poison their way to power, he unleashes upon them a range of comic devices borrowed from the dramatic resources of Romeic vernacular culture. Satire, parody, caricature, travesty and pastiche all share the ability to distance the reader from a comic object, prying him importance. At the gates of Troy, at the temple of Thymbraian Apollo, anywhere else – we don’t know.” (Greek Mythology, 538) 52 The Franks and Us, 183. 53 Greek Mythology, 549. 54 Greek Mythology, 45. 55 Greek Mythology, 17. Dimitris Tziovas in “Residual Orality and Belated Textuality in Greek Literature and Culture”, in Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7 (2), (1989), 321-36, points out that post-World War II Greek literature in general engages in the deliberate reproduction of oral narrative styles. Tsiforos’ expert use of orally-based language and style, however, is certainly influenced by his theatrical background as well. 56 Greek Mythology, 525.

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free of blind, uncritical belief. It is precisely this uncritical stance that is satirized when we encounter Peter the Hermit rambling through the dirty villages of the Burgundian plain, his mouth reeking of wine and onions as he preaches the First Crusade. The villagers rush to seize swords and pikes: “In those days there weren’t any circuses or virtuoso pianists, not even ancient drama festivals, people needed to take time out and when they heard the word ‘saint,’ they enjoyed themselves by becoming religious fanatics.”57 As for parody, in Tsiforos’ hands it becomes a provocative trope whose deliberate use of paradox breeds exploratory enquiry, signaling “how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference.”58 “My son, a hero,” says Peleas, preening father of the vicious warrior Achilles. We are eventually met with full-scale travesty as we encounter sultan Bayiadzid Kildirim the Lightning Bolt sitting in his magnificent green tent, removing lice and swearing: “May I spit upon the beard of the holy Selim, protector of insects… How is it possible, a fullranking sultan like me, tormented by lice? . . . Lice are for lowly Lumpens. I’ll issue a firman doing away with the dratted creatures.”59 At this point we may pause to revisit the question of Tsiforos’ authorial aims. Is his proposal of Romeic identity as a candidate for national identity merely intended to strengthen the reader’s self-respect while correcting both the latter’s ignorance and Eurocentrism? I believe his subject matter and his detailed choice of symbols and associations resonant in collective popular memory together indicate an ambitious educational campaign designed to go further and hone the reader’s self-management skills for cultural battle in a developing, transnational consumer society. In my opinion, Tsiforos considers it important “individuals come to grips with what a society has made of them, how it has incorporated them ideologically and materially into its rules and logic, and what it is they need to affirm and reject in their own histories in order to…lead a selfmanaged life.”60 It follows that such action for him involves overturning Hellenism’s long de facto exclusion of those not belonging to the educated élite from participation in a state (kratos) which for ideological reasons hypocritically maintained that ethnos (nation) and laos (populace; common folk; the masses; the people, particularly for those of leftist

57

Crusades, 17. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 93. 59 The Franks and Us, 287. 60 Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: a Pedagogy for the Opposition (Boston: Bergin, 1983), 38. 58

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leaning) were one and the same thing.61 He is at pains to stress the necessity for national unity, for example illustrating in great detail its advantages in his History of England and complaining in Greek Mythology about the historically destructive power of conflicts between Greeks.62 His message seems therefore that unity, together with the self-respect and agency born of better knowledge of past and present, has the ability to shape the future, lifting Greece from its divisive past and enabling it to become a modern, civil society.63 Carrying undoubted political implication, such a vision can be seen to ultimately connect popular culture, through its valid representation of national identity, to responsible participation in a pluralistic civil society. This equation leads us logically to a consideration of Tsiforos’ historiography in the framework of a rewriting of nationalism. Tsiforos’ suggestions for what we may term a “new nationalism” are based on distinctness of the cultural variety. His vision, however, leads him away from the condemnation of nationalism as a “procrustean force restraining difference;”64 rather, he proposes with considerable passion a more contemporary, pragmatic nationalism that in nurturing cultural specificity, prioritizes a democratic present in place of the unsustainable marriage of a glorious past to an uncertain future. Recognizing that “culture became political when it became national,” he deliberately portrays national culture as a “real structure that people can see, hear and feel” rather than a European-born relational construct, persuaded it is the primary enabler of social change.65 Nonetheless, in a Greece still confronted by socioeconomic and educational disparities, greater popular participation in civil 61 Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 13. Herzfeld observes that the ethnos represented an absolute moral entity “against which the laos could be matched and measured”. 62 Greek Mythology, 198. 63 Karalis, in A History of Greek Cinema, 35, is of the opinion that the divisions of the past constitute “the dominant subtext of almost all Greek movies produced after 1945 through to the 1990s.” He writes that the German occupation that began in April 1941, “with its horrible atrocities, humiliations, terrible famine of 1942 and 1943, collaboration, and finally the Resistance, remained one of the most politically sensitive issues” for cinematic elaboration. It is notable too that Tsiforos’ 1948 film Last Mission (Teleutaia apostoli), like many movies of the 1940s, used the technique of flashback as a device for presenting the invisible survival of the past in the present. 64 Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4. 65 Ibid, 6, 12.

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society is clearly dependent upon greater awareness. His reader must be persuaded that national culture is by definition inclusive, situated beyond narrow essentialist beliefs concerning traits and ideals. Thus we read in The Franks and Us that in the Greece of the 1960s, all who live Greece and live in Greece are patriots.66 This statement, together with what has been discussed until now, clearly proposes a nationalism that understands Hellenism culturally rather than territorially. In turning to the demotic tradition to nourish national distinctiveness and choosing the Romeic strand of modern Greek identity as that best suited for necessary nationhood, Tsiforos is not proposing something new; he is doing what others have done before him. In interpreting the nation-state as the protector of cultural difference, he may be seen to continue in a tradition which includes historical figures such as Righas Ferraios and much later, Ion Dragoumis.67 His own refusal of modernity’s radical break with the past, however, is not categorical. Undoubtedly, his positive view of a nation whose citizens tie culture to power in order to protect their national identity globally challenges the widespread opinion among theorists of postcolonialism and cultural studies today that the nation is in many ways a political form to be overcome. It must be said, however, that the Greek national model is unique, carrying with it through much of its formation a discourse of populism whose impetus towards vernacular culture was critically synthesized with nationalism—albeit in very different interpretations— from the time of the civil war through to the 1960s and beyond.68 For this 66

The Franks and Us, 16. The refusal of modernity as a truncation or denial of one’s past can be traced back to Rhigas Ferraios (1757-1798), a central pre-revolutionary figure who envisioned in his New Political Dispensation (1797) a polyphonic state, a multiethnic polity which essentially privileged the vernacular cultures shared by the Ottoman Rum millet together with the religious and political practices they sustained, and in which Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Albanians and Serbs, Christians, Jews and Muslims, would live with equal rights, local autonomy and collaborative rule. Ferraios’ secular vision of a national space at once historical and multicultural was marginalized within a national narrative that espoused Paparrigopoulos’ homogenous view of history, essentially an expression of the nation’s holy mission. The later writer and diplomat Ion Dragoumis (1878-1920) also envisaged a nationalism that understood Hellenism culturally rather than territorially, believing that the demotic tradition alone could nourish a distinctively Greek culture and that the Greek nation could find strength in multiethnic coexistence with others. 68 Artemis Leontis maintains in Topographies of Hellenism, 184 that the discourse of populism “permeates Neohellenic vernacular culture from its early demoticist to 67

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reason Tsiforos’ interpretation of the Greek experience in reality does not seek to discard all of modernity, but merely those aspects of modernity he feels are destructively foreign. As Jusdanis points out, “the great challenge to nationalists has always been to take part in modernization while preserving traditional identities.”69 It is worth quoting him further: Nationalism appeared in Europe at least as early as the destruction of the ancient regime and the industrialization of the economy; however, it cannot be reduced to these developments. The undertaking to build nations is an autonomous process that seeks to unify a particular people in a hostile world, to give them a realm of emotional attachments in the face of continuing change, and, above all, to propel them on a path of progress. Rather than sliding back into darkness, nationalism actually is an attempt to interpret and participate in modernity.70

At this point it is necessary to look beyond Tsiforos’ general re-siting of the nationalist meta-narrative in order to ask an important question: how does the notion of responsible nationalism and a healthy national identity square with Tsiforos’ endorsement of a Romeic cultural complex in which patriarchal traditionalism is a notoriously integral feature? A short comparison here with Yorgos Skalenakis’ 1966 film musical Diplopennies (Dancing the Sirtaki in English) can prove instructive. We are told that wanting to make a ‘Romeic’ national musical71 which effectively evoked the cultural milieu of the working classes, Skalenakis included in it songs whose texts and visuals conveyed the impression of group participation its late modernist phase, approximately from 1880 to 1960, before taking hold of the state apparatus in the postmodern 1980s.” In Greece, populism promoted the inherent integrity of the (simple) people, seen in their collective traditions as transmitting the eternal spirit of the Greek nation. Its polyvalent meaning ensured that it was claimed or practiced by a wide variety of groups vying for the right to dominate Greek social, cultural and political life, from Left to Right and from “low” to “high” culture. With the rise of vernacularism it incorporated concepts such as the “Romeic” (to romeiko), here signifying popular folk-culture Greekness of the sort practiced in everyday life, and Romiosyne, a more formal noun whose added connotation of somewhat mystic nobility, in sharp contrast to the Hellenism advanced by western Hellenist ideology, achieved legitimacy only after decades of struggle. 69 Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, 5. 70 Ibid. 71 Papadimitriou, “Music, Dance and Cultural Identity in the Greek Film Musical”, in Greek Cinema, 153-4. Papadimitriou quotes from an interview in which the director said “I always had the ambition to make a national musical – I mean Romeic [her italics].”

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and conveyed a “positive and sympathetic view of male bonding” that spoke “of the hardships, the pride and the integrity of the poor (ftohologia), referring particularly to men and to masculine values.”72 Tsiforos’ satirico-historical texts can, by now, be placed in the same perspective. Furthermore, Skalenakis and Tsiforos both employ irony to show that adoption of westernized (consumer) values inevitably results in a distancing from tradition. Notably, however—for both of them—gender issues are depicted as exempt from this cultural transition. The conclusion of Dancing the Sirtaki shows women’s traditional social role (ironically) intact in the form of the proud hero, his contentedly pregnant wife who has given up a promising career as a popular singer, and their seven children. Tsiforos’ narrator likewise flirts with liberal gender politics—miniskirts, beach beauties, the twist—but is in the end consistently conservative regarding the position of women, sexual morality and public “decency.” In Greek Mythology he lambasts moralizing spinsters who virtuously complain about the behavior of more youthful ladies, but nonetheless demonstrates in the case of Ariadne and numerous others what happens to nubile females devoid of male control. Indeed, his version of the fabled encounter between Oedipus and the riddle-posing Sphinx is baldly malesupremacist: Oedipus spurns her invitation to make breakfast for him and mangas-style, laconically tells her “Baby, go scrape tripe.”73 It seems that Hellenic ideals are welcome where social mobility is concerned, but threatening in terms of what they imply for gender relations. Papadimitriou rightly describes—and we can too—“a highly problematic ideological position that is the result of the most conservative and traditionalist aspects of both available cultural identities.”74 We are thus compelled to ask a second question: Was Greek society actually ready to construct alternative views of national identity at this time? In my opinion, we can best discern Tsiforos’ stance in response to the constraints of the socio-historical moment in the overall tacit invitation to his countrymen represented by his three hefty Histories of England, France and the United States. In them, the meaning and reality of human action, indeed, of history, is reviewed in the specific context of the metanarrative of nationalism. The implicit raison d’être of assessments which again examine the public realm through the private—the dialogues of his 72

Papadimitriou, in Greek Cinema, 159. Greek Mythology, 503. 74 Greek Cinema, 163. Karalis, for his part (A History of Greek Cinema, 47), notes that even though Left and Right intellectuals diverged strongly in interpreting Greek identity, they were in a strangely cordial agreement regarding ethical and gender issues. 73

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personages reveal their mangas-tinged origins, albeit of necessity with less intensity than in “domestic” treatments such as The Franks and Us and Greek Mythology—can be seen to originate in a nexus of specifically postwar discourses that have been discerned by both Dimitris Tziovas and G.M. Katsan. These include the attempt to foster a more individual/internal focus, the Romeic, the literal and literary conception of “how a place becomes a homeland”75 and the question of justice, all of which lead to a further narrative, that of the questioning or reconfiguration of the public realm.76 Tsiforos’ Histories tactfully invite the reader to consider “remodelling” Greece on the basis of informed evaluation of national formation elsewhere over the centuries. Whereas the first part of his Romeic project reviewed in loving detail what the past, complete with ample contact with conquerors, has made Greeks, this, its second part, offers implicit suggestions and guidance on what the future in a transnational world can make them if they choose to be proactive. In the Histories, Tsiforos abandons tit-for-tat cultural re-appropriation, however humorous, in favor of an inquiry that lingers on details of dynasties, laws, religious and political feuds, parliamentary majorities and territorial colonizations, to name but a few, that he considers appropriate for an education in the politics of power. These details constitute a basis upon which to proceed with the adaptation and application of approaches found viable by other nations. In each tome, Tsiforos investigates individually the concept of the nation, the conditions for its development and its social deployment down through the centuries. In England, seat of the original national idea, he shows how events, beginning from before Roman times, slowly fashioned the right to free thought and the belief in discipline, obligation and the common good, permitting the English to prosper and eventually divide and rule in the age of colonialism. In his History of France, he reprimands his individualist compatriots for their disunity and failure to grasp that a nation advances through the steady nurturing of a creative and critical spirit, not the achievements of homicidal generals or transient rich men. His treatment of the American example, finally, focuses on basic questions such as why do people emigrate, why do they decide on revolution, how does materialism grow and prosper, and what sort of criteria inform the responsibilities of the powerful, in particular at present (“America is a great country, the most 75

Katsan cites Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 3. Tziovas, The Palimpsest of the Greek Narrative (Athens: Odysseas, 1993), 253; G.M. Katsan, Unmaking History: Postmodernist Technique and National Identity in the Contemporary Greek Novel (Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2003), 6-8. 76

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powerful in the world today…”77). Considered together, his Histories thus plead the case for an open-minded Greek adaptation and application of approaches that have worked for others. Let me point out that Tsiforos is here not presenting a revolutionary concept. His proposal for a measured historical constructivism jibes with past habit. Greeks, he observes in The Franks and Us, have always adapted the foreign and made it Greek: This land has a peculiar ability. To assimilate foreigners and make them its own. Bit by bit, every conqueror is conquered, without realizing it. All sorts of races passed through here. . . In the end though, the Greek element prevails. That’s the secret you observe in no other nation on earth, maybe only in the Arab world.78

A closer look at the Histories confirms that Tsiforos’ talent for vernacular drollness remains intact. Early in History of England, for instance, he creatively paraphrases the contents of William the Conqueror’s last will and testament, having William declare concerning his first son Robert, “so much for him, he’s not worth a shilling;” concerning his third son Henry, “no way I can see him as king, give him three thousand marks so he can open a newsstand ‘cause he won’t get any farther;” and concerning his second son, William the Red, “let him become king of England ... he’s not superlative material, but ... he’s capable of distinguishing himself in the ruling profession.”79 The proliferation of bons mots, however, never obscures his understanding of the reality of – and the need for – cultural hybridity in the context of a national entity. In my opinion, Tsiforos’ satirical observations of human history teach, finally, that national cultural identity is formed through a long accretion of human interactions and confrontations—of “crossing overs”—which render ethnic purity impossible: Let’s not brag about our “pure Greek blood”…Today all of us are one hundred percent Greek. . . Because men are moulded by their country. . .As in the case of all peoples—no-one has remained pure—we too have a lot of foreign blood in our race …Here, even more, because of continuous 77

History of the United States, 363. The Franks and Us, 135. In her discussion of the Greek film musical and the epitheorisi (Greek Cinema, 151), Papadimitriou has this to say: “The Greek musical was not an isolated case of imitation and appropriation of foreign models. Like the epitheorisi - and numerous other examples that have no place in this discussion – it illustrates a broader tendency in the nation: the desire to borrow western values and ideals, but make them feel and look as if they were ‘Greek’.” 79 History of England, 64. 78

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incursions. Just think: Romans, barbarians, Anatolians, Goths, Slavs, Franks, Italians, Turks, Arabs…80

For him, cultural identity, existing in time, is unfinished business, a work-in-progress. As such the national Greek space is inescapably hybrid. In his approach to Greek cultural identity, Tsiforos shows remarkable sensitivity to the entire concept of the historical archive. He is visibly at pains to render manifest the historical process of cultural accretion. Here as before, he looks for rhetorical strategies that make sense to his reader. His choice falls on pastiche, on the use of anachronisms, on the juxtaposition—particularly meaningful in Greek—of different styles and registers of language. To begin with, pastiche, more complex than paradox, is undoubtedly a useful sharpener of wits. More philosophically, it metaphorically describes the reality of the cultural cross-pollination of human relations throughout history. As cultural identity is the reflection of the deep historicity of culture, so pastiche reflects upon the historicity of aesthetic judgment and taste. As a rhetorical device too, it offers rich possibilities in the context of contemporary literary canons, disrupting the wholeness and self-sufficiency of high art as understood by the modernist aesthetic. Ingrid Hoesterey defines pastiche as a stylistic medley whose semantic environment involves bricolage (making the new out of heterogenous sources), palimpsest (a metaphor for intertextuality) and parody (which recites a canonical text of the past with critical, indeed polemical intent).81 She observes that “pastiche as art does not insist that it is culture, as modernist art implicitly did, but its ‘allegorical impulse’ makes it art about culture”—an art intended to liberate from the “obsession with one truth…unfit for enlightened world-making.”82 Pastiche for Tsiforos clearly represents, as does national identity, a composite process of meaning constitution. The reader is confronted by it—to take but one example—when Queen Sybilla of Jerusalem pays a state visit to a peculiarly melodramatic Saladin: Madame! Saladin stood up. What? You? And you didn’t tell me ahead of time so we could prepare some rice wrapped in vine leaves? Please sit down. How are you?83

80

The Franks and Us, 329. Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 315. 82 Ibid, 99, 27. 83 The Franks and Us, 227. 81

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Tsiforos’ handling of anachronisms and different linguistic registers as well, manages to make a statement as culturo-political as any made by the proponents of purist language before him. While his anachronisms, ostentatiously borrowed from the archive of Western culture, skewer “great” history and literature—he goes as far as to compare the Frankish taking of Jerusalem to the municipal abattoirs of Chicago—it is his masterly juxtaposition of different registers of Greek that best reveals his resistance to the linguistic standardization by which, in the name of the autonomy of art, modernist bards of Hellenism such as George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis engineered the reconciliation of civil society with the state. Especially in Greek Mythology, he juxtaposes for ironic effect not only everyday but purist, classical and medieval Greek. The starving subjects of king Lykourgos, told “Let us see…” regarding emergency victuals, retort “But let us also eat” complete with pompous purist verb endings.84 Freely importing into his text words of French, Italian, English and Turkish origin, he presents the Venetian doge Enrico Dandolo as a subscriber to the motto “Siamo veneziani e poi cristiani” (in English translatable as “We’re first and foremost Venetians, then Christians”), which he translates as “steal first, and then cross yourself just in case.” 85 And in The Franks and Us, a breathless messenger arrives when the hubris-prone Duke of Athens, Gautier de Brienne, hires the infamous Catalan Company in 1310 to help him secure Thessaly: –Mon sire! –What is it? –Le Catalan. –What have they done? –They are descendant, cuttant et slashant, prédominant… –Really? –By la Sainte Vierge!86

I want to suggest that in the works discussed here, Tsiforos’ choice to represent trite ideals often tritely expressed can be read as a cryptic statement of separation from widespread modernist literary trends that included the Nobel-winning modernist poets’ construction of a national literary canon predicated on an eternal, transcendent Greek topos.87 84

Greek Mythology, 429. The Franks and Us, 7. 86 The Franks and Us, 191 87 One is unable to link him to the “poetics of absence” (Gourgouris, Dream Nation, 226) of a Yiorgos Seferis, wandering nostalgically in search of personal rebirth and a lost homeland forever displaced to ancient past and uncharted future 85

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Tsiforos implies throughout these books that modern Greeks must take up their identity in the real world; the irretrievable ancestry dictated by the “punishment of Philhellenism” as Gourgouris calls it,88 does not look to a transnational future. This means that he refuses the tropological flights of a neo-Byzantinism based on the discovery of medieval Hellenism, just as he does the healing irredentist abstraction of national horizons extended over a transcendental plane umbilically tied to Greece’s traumatic 1922 withdrawal from Asia Minor.89 Of the peripheral modernism identified by Leontis in Greece, he retains only the “drive to appeal to a national audience’s sense of outrage at the appropriation of its past by others,”90 adding to it the universally acceptable discourse of populism. Can one, however, situate him as a postmodernist? Dimitris Papanikolaou has observed that “there has not been a sustained effort to localize, to Hellenize postmodernism as an intellectual stance, or to argue that its condition could be re-viewed as an indigenous phenomenon;”91 indeed Jusdanis in 1987 claimed its enabling conditions (high modernism) were absent from Greece,92 Lambropoulos in 1988 that its tradition was

in poems that exhibit what Leontis has termed the twin functions of obfuscation and sublimation (Topographies of Hellenism, 169). Tsiforos is equally unsuited to interpret modern Greek identity as does Odysseus Elytis, who attempts to “translate Hellenism from the remoteness of history to the immanence of form, to incorporate Hellenism in the autonomous cosmos of a well-structured modernist poem” (Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 202). 88 Gourgouris, 122. 89 The irredentism of the so-called “Grand Idea” (Megali Idea) broached sovereign Greek rule over territories where Hellenic culture still flourished, including parts of Turkey and Istanbul itself, ancient seat of Byzantium. The Greek defeat in Asia Minor positioned it against the nationalist ideology of a newly republican Turkey which considered formerly multiethnic Anatolia the ancestral Turkish homeland. Under the Lausanne Treaty the resulting population exchange saw roughly 1,200,000 refugees resettled in Greece, where they attempted to retain their identity in often inhospitable conditions. The Katastrophe, as it is called, created a memory of loss that became a central component of national discourse, leaving Greeks to confront the debilitating burden of a glorious past and an insignificant present. 90 Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 130. 91 Cf. Dimitris Papanikolaou, “Greece as a postmodern example: Boundary 2 and its special issue on Greece”, in Kampos: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek, No. 11 (2005), 130-31. 92 Cf. Gregory Jusdanis, “Is postmodernism possible outside the ‘West’? The case of Greece”, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11 (1987), 69-92.

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“quite foreign”93. Conversely Tziovas, attempting to trace the emergence of postmodernist elements in the cultural fabric of twentieth-century Greek society,94 mentions a number of specifically postwar Greek metanarratives that include the separation of the public and the private as seen in the Romeic rather than the Hellenic tradition, and the questioning or reconfiguration of the public realm as part of a larger questioning of the constructedness of the meaning of history95—both notions which I have attempted to show are present in Tsiforos’ historiography. Among the additional elements Papanikolaou classifies as postmodern in many Greek texts are techniques of allusion and parody, the use of language and the presentation of self and otherness.96 He also singles out the relationship with the classical past as “fertile ground” for a bona fide Greek postmodern expression which has nothing to do with the residual postmodernity claimed by the Greek-American scholar who first coined the term, William Spanos.97 According to Papanikolaou, a “review not only of literature but also of art, architecture, historiography [my italics], music and popular culture [my italics again] trends” reveals the existence of postmodernism in Greece; this is inevitable given the socio-economic context of late capitalism and after 1967, the absurdity of the dictatorship’s discourse.98 His conclusion: rather than be concerned about labeling certain features, scholars should try to determine whether these features “evolve into a modality that is meaningful within the sociohistorical space in which they are uttered.”99 On the grounds of these comments, I see no problem in identifying Tsiforos’ perspective as a postmodern one. His concerns are, like those of many others producing work in a variety of artistic media during a turbulent decade, meaningful precisely because they are tied to socio-economic change and the increasingly visible incapacity of traditional structures, whether repressive or supportive, to remain useful and viable. It is this new reality that informs Katsan’s statement that the turn to competing forms of the national allegory was 93

Cf. Vassilis Lambropoulos, Literature as national institution: Studies in the politics of Modern Greek criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 156. 94 Cf. Dimitris Tziovas, The Palimpsest of the Greek Narrative; also The Other Self: selfhood and society in Modern Greek fiction (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2003). 95 The Palimpsest, 253 and 259. 96 “Greece as a postmodern example”, in Kampos: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek, 140. 97 Ibid., 142. 98 Ibid., 140, 141, 142. 99 Ibid., 141.

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visible quite early in the modernist period, and slowly developed into postmodernist practice—a practice rooted in the everyday.100 We may conclude that Tsiforos’ satirico-historical works position the Greece of the times as Janus-faced, looking backward and yet forward in more ways than one. In them, his references to topical events and an irreversibly urban present as well as his satire of social rules and conventions reveal his ties to the epitheorisi and the slapstick film comedies of the decade, two historically influenced and intertwined genres.101 Capturing the fervent desires of the nation to become modern, affluent and westernized, but also to retain some traditional characteristics that could distinguish Greece from other nations in a new geopolitical reality, these books represent, like so many contemporary films, what Karalis calls “a kind of populist therapy for social displacement and communal loss and, at the same time, a symptom of a community in search of an ‘archetypal’ identity in conditions of instability and uncertainty.”102 Undoubtedly, Tsiforos’ carnivalized treatment of eternal, authentic Greekness is problematic: when he confronts Hellenic identity discourses, one may legitimately ask if he is merely replacing them with Romeic ones. I would have to say that I think he is. However, in so doing he is reflecting reality. The social and cultural modernization of Greek society, already discernible in the early and mid-1960s, was not stoppable. On the other hand, it was, at that time, an incomplete achievement. As Papadimitriou shows in the case of Dancing the Sirtaki, the attempt to use working-class culture to construct and project an image of Greekness captured the desire for change expressed in the political climate of the mid-1960s; it failed, however, to project a coherent and progressive Romeic identity capable of singlehandedly captaining the nation.103 Civil War ghosts and the fear of Communism still lurked within Greek society: the colonels’ seizure of power in April 1967 proved it was not yet ready to construct alternative views of national identity. The cultural function of Tsiforos’ satirical historiography thus cannot be other than to mirror and negotiate the tensions and contradictions in Greek society that surfaced during a period of rapid modernization and social change. Unlike most contemporary melodramas and slapstick 100

G.M. Katsan, Unmaking History, 20,23. Eleftheria Thanouli, “Film Style in Old Greek Cinema:: The Case of Dimos Dimopoulos”, in Papadimitriou and Tzioumakis eds., Greek Cinema, 224. From 1948 to 1970 Greek theatre and cinema routinely exchanged writers, actors and directors while vying for the same audience 102 Karalis, A History of Greek Cinema, 30. 103 Papadimitriou, Greek Cinema, 163. 101

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comedies, however, which ultimately functioned as confirmations of conservative practices and values and domesticated modernity by deradicalizing it, soothingly showing a style of living that accommodated the new and the old but declined the challenge of a reality with political implications, Tsiforos aims for loftier results. His critique of official archival logics focuses on discourses of power in the framework of a demotic tradition not merely because he believes it better equipped to preserve traditional Greek identity than its western Hellenic counterpart, but first and foremost because it possesses capacities of subversion that make it the best tool to develop in the long term what Papanikolaou has recently called the “logic of archival disturbance.”104 In cultural terms it is also the only viable bridge to an incoming world no longer based on elite norms but answering to popular consumption and production, and increasingly transnational in character. Tsiforos’ drunken Franks may well persist in singing the lines of well-known rebetika songs—but the reader learns that as the author writes, foreign film-makers have commandeered the Acropolis for a Jayne Mansfield vehicle called It Happened in Athens105. Tsiforos’ works ultimately mirror Eagleton’s observation that transnational capitalism “weakens national cultures by cosmopolitanizing them,” severing people from traditional attachments so that it “encourages cultures of defensive solidarity at the same time it is spreading this new cosmopolitanism.”106 Their silent sub-text pits the resources of the community, including lived group identity, tradition, lieux de mémoire and an inimitable and resourceful language, against a social imaginary predicated on capital. Tsiforos understands that the expansion of the bounds of capital dilutes the stocks of inherited culture, speeding the impoverishment of cultural memory and community alike and progressively standardizing both language and identity. Electing pragmatically to strengthen national self-awareness even as he sardonically documents capital’s evolution in his imagery of Frankish wives scurrying anxiously to the dressmaker, he invites his readers to select helpful elements from the very nations that saw the birth of modernism in order to insure their country’s survival. Seen in the Greek context, his twin exhortations to a self-assertive national community and a syncretic cultural identity illustrate his unique transition—among literary contemporaries mired in an ideal and compensatory modernist 104

See Cultural Anthropology, Hot Spots: Beyond the Greek Crisis, “Archive Trouble”, 4 (2011-10-31) at http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/446. 105 Dating from 1959, the film features music by a young Manos Hadjidakis. 106 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 62-63.

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Greekness—to a post-modern era. Modernity may well have absorbed Greece, peripheralizing it in the process, but Tsiforos’ promotion of a demotic-fueled, pro-actively syncretic alternative to bland acceptance of the occidental model marks him as a great deal more than a famously trenchant humorist. A reassessment of his distinct gaze on history, identity and society is overdue.107

107

Papanikolaou, in Cultural Anthropology, Hot Spots: Beyond the Greek Crisis, “Archive Trouble”, 4, is optimistic about the current and future potential for archival disturbance: “an array of cultural texts are bound to take on a cultural importance that perhaps would have been unthinkable some years earlier.”

CONTRIBUTORS

Sorina Ailiesei has a B.A. in English and French from Babes-Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania) and an M.A. in American Studies from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University (Iasi, Romania). In 2011, she defended her Ph.D. in American literature at A. I. Cuza University. She has published articles and read papers on Asian American literature at several academic conferences. Victoria Bolf is a native of Southern California, and she is a Ph.D. student in the English department at Loyola University Chicago, studying feminism, Latino/a literature, and transnational 20th century literature. She previously published a review of Cherríe Moraga’s A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness on LambdaLiterary.org. Heba El-Attar is Associate Professor of Spanish. Her teaching interests include both Spanish and Arabic languages and literatures. Originally from Cairo, Egypt, she received her Ph.D. in 20th Century Peninsular Literature from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2003). In 2004, she received an M.A. in Latin American literature from UW-Milwaukee. Her research interests include Peninsular, Arabic, and Latin American literatures. Takao Hagiwara is Associate Professor of Japanese, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. His research interests include classical and modern Japanese literature, comparative literature, modernity, and postmodernity. He recently published Modern Japanese Literature as Interpreted in North America (in Japanese) (Tokyo: Keibunsha, 2008). He is currently working on a book manuscript in English tentatively titled Facets of Modern Japanese Literature: A Comparative Approach. Anup Kumar is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication, Cleveland State University. His research focuses on the interactions of media with culture and politics. He is author of The Making of Small State: Populist Social Mobilisation and the Hindi Press in the Uttarakhand Movement (2011).

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Antonio Medina-Rivera is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Cleveland State University. His areas of study include Spanish in the US, US Hispanic literature, Puerto Rican literature, and cultural studies. He has organized the Crossing Over International Symposium in Cleveland, Ohio every other year since 2005. Sylvia Mittler is Associate Professor of French at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her areas of research and publication cover popular culture, nationalism, post-modernism, discourses on alterity and ethnicity, and humor. She has been interested in Tsiforos’s reformulation of modern Greek history and memory for several years. Diana Palardy is an Assistant Professor at Youngstown State University who has published articles in journals such as Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, España Contemporánea, and Revista Chilena de Literatura. Currently, she is working on her manuscript titled “Sinister Spaces: The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Peninsular Literature and Film.” Yusha Pan is a lecturer in the English Department of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She teaches intensive English reading to junior English majors. Her research field is American literature. Jaclyn Salkauski received her doctorate in Spanish (Latin American Literature) from Florida State University. In 2009, she received The AdaBelle Winthrop King Research Grant to conduct studies in Puerto Rico. Her research explores Hispanophone, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean literature, focusing on the role of race and gender in postcolonial identities. She currently teaches at Indiana University. Jennifer S. Schiff is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at Western Carolina University. She teaches various classes in international politics and serves as WCU’s Model United Nations faculty advisor. Her research interests include historical international political economy and international environmental policy. Carla Anne Simonini received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Brown University. Her research interests include 20th century and contemporary Italian literature and cinema and constructs of italianità in American and Italian American literature, which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation. She is currently Assistant Professor of Italian at Youngstown State University.

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Contributors

Abed el-Rahman Tayyara is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic at CSU. He earned his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from New York University. His teaching and research interests include a wide range of areas, such as early Islamic cultural history, Islamic historiography, classical Arabic literature, and Byzantine history. He has published in a number of journals, such as Der Islam and Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Nina S. Tucci is Associate Professor of French at the University of Houston. She has published articles on Paul Claudel, Charles Baudelaire, André Malraux, Marie de France and Kama Sywor Kamanda. Her research interests lie in Jungian theory, the meeting of East and West and its spiritual implications, the recent renaissance of Shamanism and how these various systems are reflected in literature. Lee Wilberschied is Associate Professor of Spanish and Foreign Language Instruction at Cleveland State University. She teaches courses in Spanish, bilingual education, and second language acquisition. Her research has included recruitment and retention of preservice and inservice foreign and second language teachers, service learning in language instruction and teacher training, and peer mentoring.

Reviewers Georgios Anagnostou, Ohio State University Andrea Baldi, Rutgers University Bruce Beaty, Emeritus, Cleveland State University Gerardo T. Cummings, Wells College Lanny Hollis, Central Catholic High School Charles Hancock, Ohio State University (deceased) Kristin Hull, Neero Consulting Kim Neuendorf, Cleveland State University Richard Neupert, University of Georgia Michelle Ramos Pellicia, California State University-San Marcos Mary Thomas, Consultant, MLD Phillipa Yin, Emerita, Cleveland State University Proofreading/format/style: Mary Thomas