The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant [1 ed.] 9781453900574, 1453900578

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Arrival and the I-94: Predicaments for Entering and Leaving
2 Forging States of Belonging: Migrant Memory, Nation, and Subjectivity in Meena Alexander’s Memoir, Fault Lines
3 Double Displacement, Homelessness, and Nomadism: Questions of Belonging in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narratives
4 Threatening Bodies, Dangerous Knowledge, Legal Interventions
5 Remapping Home
6 The Question of Returns: Irresolution of Locations
Afterword
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT

The Postcolonial Citizen The Intellectual Migrant PO STCO LO NI A L

S T UDI ES

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The Postcolonial Citizen

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES Maria C. Zamora General Editor Vol. 3

PETER LANG New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

The Postcolonial Citizen The Intellectual Migrant

PETER LANG New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dutt-Ballerstadt, Reshmi. The postcolonial citizen: the intellectual migrant / Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt. p. cm. — (Postcolonial studies; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Commonwealth literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. Immigrants in literature. 4. Home in literature. 5. Displacement (Psychology) in literature. 6. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 7. Postcolonialism in literature. 8. Feminism in literature. I. Title. PR9080.5.D87 820.9—dc22 2009039370 ISBN 978-1-4539-0057-4 ISSN 1942-6100

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover image: Ralph Dutt-Ballerstadt

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2010 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

Dedication I dedicate this book to my parents, Malay and Purnima Dutt, and my son, Ronan. They are two very different kinds of postcolonial citizens, the two spectrums that I have yet to write about thoughtfully.

Contents Preface ............................................................................................... ix Acknowledgments ........................................................................... xiii 1

The Arrival and the I- 94: Predicaments for Entering and Leaving .................................................................................. 1

2

Forging States of Belonging: Migrant Memory, Nation, and Subjectivity in Meena Alexander’s Memoir, Fault Lines ......... 27

3

Double Displacement, Homelessness, and Nomadism: Questions of Belonging in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narratives .......... 53

4

Threatening Bodies, Dangerous Knowledge, Legal Interventions .................................................................... 83

5

Remapping Home ..................................................................... 109

6

The Question of Returns: Irresolution of Locations ............... 129

Afterword........................................................................................ 137 Bibliography ................................................................................... 141 Index ............................................................................................... 147

Preface This book is deliberately written in a multi-genre discourse and contains autobiographical, literary and theoretical narratives of displacement. Each of these modes of representations of displacement continues to haunt me in different ways. Since the act of displacement that migrancy forces upon us is first and foremost a personal and intuitive one, to completely ignore such personal experiences for the sake of objectivity, or disallow the usage of other memoirs depicting the complexity of living in these in-between spaces would leave a vital gap in assessing the state and stakes of intellectual migrancy. The theories of migrancy make sense only when the very subjects that these theories are built upon and around are allowed to speak, interrupt, deny, forget, forge and remember their multiple modes of belonging and dislocation. The language and images used to depict agitation, fragmentation, ambivalence, gains and losses created upon leaving home in other nations are both personal and literary, but the psychic state of being caught in the conflict of feeling “neither here nor there” is shared by many postcolonial migrants who have made deliberate decisions to leave home in order to pursue intellectual interests elsewhere. Although the literary chapters in this book theorize the complexity of intellectual migration by South Asian subjects, my intention is not to convey in any way, shape or form that postcolonial intellectual migration is only a South Asian phenomenon. I do so only to give latitude of depth to particular literary works that thus far have been underrepresented and allow me to continue my line of inquiry of depicting the migrant predicament. These chap-

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ters merely use as an example the migration of South Asians to the United States post 1960s after the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, allowing the “professional class” to migrate, but they imply the same phenomenon to hold for the postcolonial intellectual class in general migrating from Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Mexico, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South America. The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant addresses issues of subjectivity and cultural articulations of intellectual migrancy as a movement quite different from “other” forms of movements followed by subjects under the rubric of exile, nomad and refugee. At the outset, I want to acknowledge certain overlaps that the migrant subject shares with the exile, refugee, and the nomadic subjects (since they have all left “home” to be elsewhere in the world). However, this book is not about comparing and contrasting how the migrant subject position differs from the above- mentioned subject positions. The Postcolonial Citizen aims to critically examine how migrancy in general, and in particular the “intellectual” migrant, (instead of the “labor” migrant) is symbolically and philosophically understood as a cultural icon of displacement. The historical moment of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent rise of the National Security State has provoked a fresh inquiry into the question of (un)belonging for the migrant subject. Both immigration regulations and the erosion of conditions set forth by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, (Title VII)––particularly federal protections provided against “Discrimination on the basis of National Origin” has radically shifted, creating new forms of physical and intellectual displacements. Intellectual migrants, particularly postcolonial scholars, are no longer perceived as nonthreatening productive members of the United States but are seen as potential threats––as subjects questioning the “war on terror” by staging a broader critique of the American empire in relation to its operations elsewhere. Thus the very site of the university, where most of the intellectual migrants reside, has become a space of scrutiny and interrogations, and a new line of inquiry has begun questioning the limitations of “academic freedom.” These interrogations have forced the migrant subjects to become more agitated,

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destabilized and displaced, creating multiple tensions in the concept of home and nations and questions of subsequent returns. While writing The Postcolonial Citizen, I have often been asked, does one have to be a migrant in order to understand the predicament of migrancy? On one hand such a query assumes the function of “experience” as essential and necessary in articulating conditions of migrancy, yet on the other challenges articulation itself when based on the immediacy of such experiences. The process of writing this book finally made me realize that one can only begin to visualize and internalize the stages, stakes and state of migrancy when one is no longer a migrant, but has become an immigrant. This advancement in the immigration status (from a nonresident alien to a resident alien in possession of a green card), to becoming an American citizen (sacrificing your old passport for a new one), creates a simultaneous kind of looking back to the place of one’s origins with a critical distance. I say this with a certain degree of trepidation because invariably in order to intuitively and physically understand the trajectory of migrancy, the old route must be traveled in order to discover the very complexity of one’s roots. However, what one will find in that old route, the old self, the old house, the old language is unknown and cannot guarantee safe “returns” back to one’s home––new and old. Thus implicit in theorizing migrancy for the migrant subject is a risk––a risk of discovering past wounds, displaced memories, ruptures that accompany the old self, and dislocation that accompany past origins. I hereby undertake such a risk as I open myself up to evidence the profound shifts in my psyche. Half a decade ago, when I began writing this book, I was still a migrant but was simply unaware of the risk of causing this incision into my memory space. If one single dislocation can produce multiple dislocations for the migrant subjects, then one incision into one’s past further contaminates a series of memories, making the act of writing risky at best. Yet this incision must be made while one is still a migrant and the wound is still fresh. My own memoir is testimony to my own past migrant state. I am an immigrant now, a citizen of the United States, and thus my arrivals and departures to and from this country are not

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questioned anymore. Thus, instead of being at risk, I can now take the risk of theorizing what it really means to belong, to arrive and to leave. I hope this book speaks to my generation and before (the first and second wave of post-colonial scholars) in the United States and leaves a trace for the subsequent migrant subjects to arrive.

Acknowledgments This is indeed a small book, but what has made this small book become a reality is a very large number of friends, colleagues, students and even the love of strangers. I need to sincerely thank many people without whose thoughtful support, critique and numerous feedbacks this book would never have been completed. What every writer needs is time to write and rewrite, and I want to thank Linfield College and Dean Victoria McGillin for granting me both some time release from teaching and the much needed financial assistance in the form of a professional development grant to bring this book to completion. I owe much to my immediate colleagues in the English department for giving me the on and off push when I entered the procrastination phase. To all of them I can now say, “This is finally done. I’m moving on to other greener pastures.” Barbara Seidman, Lex Runciman and Katherine Kernberger are the kinds of mentors that every junior faculty member needs to produce meaningful scholarship, and I am indebted to them. My former mentors at the University of Minnesota deserve special thanks for allowing me to pursue my initial interest in migrancy in my dissertation. John Mowitt guided this initial project with the kind of scrutiny and care that only a few fortunate have received. Robin Brown, Maria Damon, Paula Robinowitz, Ruth Ellen Joeres and Richard Morrison helped me rethink the broader scope and implication of this project. Heartfelt thanks to Jonis Agee who taught me how to write poetry. Without her I would not know how to write in a multi-genre.

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Iain Chambers read the manuscript in its entirety, and his insightful comments allowed me to address the many loose ends in this project. Mia Zamora, the series editor for this book provided careful and strategic advice. I thank both Iain for our shard interest in migrancy and Mia for your patience and thoughtfulness in making sure that the project is completed with integrity. I also want to thank Caitlin Lavelle and Jackie Pavlovic at Peter Lang for your fantastic and professional communication throughout this project. My all-women writers group has given me invaluable feedback as I restructured the book. Patti Duncan, Marie Lo, Hillary Jenks, Priya Kandaswamy, Patti Sakurai, Jade Aguilar, and Sudarat Musikawong—you guys rock, and without you this book would have many embarrassing gaps. Many others have given me the kind of regular moral support that I needed during the last few years as I reworked parts of this book. I want to especially thank Kenneth Erickson, Barbara Drake, Margaret Krausse, Susan Whyte, Debbie Olsen, David Sumner, Anna Keesey, John Trombold, Sonia Ticas, Jennifer Nordstrom, Shaik Ismail, Stephen Pothoff, Mazenga Wanyama, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Marie Sulit, Marcy Newman, Mindy Larson, Mary Mannen, Sharon Glasco, Sarah Dvorak and Rebecca Rotert. I also want to particularly thank Jean Caspers and Bahram Refaei at Linfield’s Nicholson Library for assisting me in finding invaluable research materials and overriding my past-dues when I held on to a book for too long. A large number of my students have given me the opportunity to think out loud many initial ideas in this book. They have debated with me, challenged me, brought to my attention new research and have showed me really smart ways to consider old research that I had overlooked. They have contributed to this book in more ways than they know, and for that I am forever indebted to them. I especially want to thank my students in my senior seminar on the “South Asian Diaspora,” “Against Empire,” and “Third

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World Feminism” for allowing me to learn and unlearn what I thought I already knew. Special thanks to the many student workers in the English department for all kinds of invisible but much needed labor they provided me. This book has benefited tremendously as a result of chapters that have been presented at various national conferences. These gatherings of like-minded scholars gave me the time to both pause and be provoked by their inquiries. I specifically want to thank PAMLA (Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association) for allowing me to present a chapter in a special session on “Migration and Exile.” It is during this session that I came to know my copresenter Mohammad Salama and his story––a story that I have taken the liberty to recast in one of my chapters. I also want to thank MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature Society of the United States), ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), and ASSS (Association of Asian American Studies) for allowing me to present parts of this book and for engaging conversations. Two chapters in this book have been reprinted with permission from other journals. I want to thank the editor of The South Asian Review, Professor K.D. Verma, and the staff at Jouvert for granting permission to reprint chapters 2 and 5. Many special thanks to Beth Thompson. Without your constant help the last couple of months as you have meticulously proofread and formatted the book, this book would never have seen its completion. I cannot thank you enough. I need to thank my immediate family and best friends. My parents’, Malay and Purnima Dutt’s, constant love and support, Didi and Jam’s friendship and encouragement, Jurgen and Rosika Ballerstadt’s love, my friend Dana Lundell and Jayanti Sardar’s loyalty, and the “Comfords” constant care for my well being. You are the kind of people, family back home and family in one’s adopted land that every migrant needs in order to thrive. Each of you has made me realize that love and loyalty are what bind us together,

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and this binding is beyond the rhetoric of passports and barriers of cultures and languages. Lastly no amount of words can thank my partner and my best friend for life, Ralph Dutt-Ballerstadt. Our commonality in life as migrants is what brought us together and will keep us together. This book is a reminder of all that we hold together in common. 

Chapter 1 The Arrival and the I-94: Predicaments for Entering and Leaving Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world. —Martin Heidegger Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. —Edward Said

Before I first arrived in the United States, there were some requirements and formalities I had to complete back in Calcutta, now called Kolkata, my hometown and place of birth. Among many other formalities, the one I remember the most is my trip to the American Consulate located in Ho-Chin-Min Sarani. I took an early bus so that I could line up outside the American Consulate before the queue became too long and crowded. I had heard rumors

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that the Consulate General was a stern American man who often refused student visas on mere whims and fancies. I was lucky that day. Nothing of that sort happened to me, and I was given a multiple-entry student visa called the F-1 by the U.S. Consulate General in Calcutta. With the newly stamped F-1 visa in my brand new passport, I rode back home in a crowded bus. It was hot that day as usual and I was perspiring, but I kept thinking about my long journey ahead to a new country, that up until now I had only glimpsed through Hollywood movies, occasional Bollywood films, television programs and visits to the American library in Chowringee Square. What didn’t strike me at all was the act of leaving behind family, friends, books, LP records, many fancy Indian shoes and outfits that I couldn’t wear in America. Moreover, I was restricted by a weight limit of twenty-five kilos of luggage that I could carry in an international flight. All these things I couldn’t carry with me to America became my weight of memory. If as Rilke once said, “Life is heavier than the weight of all things,” then life that contains the luggage of too much memory can perhaps be even heavier, a heaviness that can become an eventual burden. When I arrived in America on January 24, 1990, my port of entry was Chicago. I was so excited to have arrived in America that I didn’t realize how cold it was that day. More formalities were completed. A new form called the I-94 (Arrival-Departure Record) was attached to my Indian passport. This form showed the date of my arrival in the United States and the “Admitted Until” date––the date when my authorized period of stay would expire. When I proceeded to the immigration counter at O’Hare International Airport and presented my passport and the long white form to the customs inspector, I was asked a few brief questions about the purpose of my trip, how long I would be in the United States, and my residence abroad. “Do not lose this form,” the inspector told me. “When you leave the country, you should give the Form I-94 to your airline or ship representative,” he said, smiling at me. I had officially arrived in the West after several missed flights, delays and over-sleeping, and the I-94 form had assured my status as a migrant, a non-resident alien in this country.

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While attending the “Foreign Student Orientation” a week later, we were all reminded again about the importance of the document I-94 and were told to keep this form in the safest possible place. “This form will prove that you arrived in the country legally and that you have not stayed beyond the period of stay authorized,” said the advisor from International Programs. In addition, we were told that when one left the country and returned the Form I-94 to the proper authorities, this would prove that he/she did not violate U.S. laws by staying in the country too long. “This proof that you are willing to obey U.S. immigration laws will be very important if you again want to travel to the U.S. as an immigrant or nonimmigrant” in the future. I had not realized up until that point the weight this single white form would carry. Misplacing it would be a fatal mistake! When I came back to my dormitory that night, I put my passport and particularly the stapled I-94 form in a very safe place––under my pillow, covered by the new starched white Bombay Dyeing pillow case my mother had given me. This experience of arrival for the intellectual migrant whether as a student or as a scholar is not new. Neither is the concept that a postcolonial intellectual migrant leaves his/her home country to travel to the West to establish new professional ties elsewhere. T.S. Eliot, in 1949, captured quite aptly the trajectory of a movement that resonates in modern-day postcolonial migrations. Eliot writes: The migrations of modern times…have transplanted themselves according to some social, religious, economic or political determination, or some peculiar mixture of these.…The people have taken with them only a part of the total culture…The culture which develops on the new soil must therefore be bafflingly alike and different from the parent culture: it will be complicated sometimes by whatever relations are established with some native race and further by immigration from other than the original source. In this way, peculiar types of culture-sympathy and cultureclash appear. (Eliot 62)

What Eliot calls “culture-sympathy and culture clash” becomes for Mary Louis Pratt “contact zones, ” “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of high-

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ly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 34). Thus, migrancy, as a cultural phenomenon that is predicated upon asymmetrical movements, (whether psychical, geographical, linguistic or psychological) evidences these “clashes” and experiences “asymmetrical relations of power” and is not a new arrival in either literary studies or cultural studies. Among many retheorizations that have problematized both conditions of migrancy and the formation of the migrant subject in postmodern times, my point of departure is to locate particularly the cultural conditions, rather than cultural movements of multiple arrivals and departures of the postcolonial intellectual migrants into the American nation-space. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 represents a watershed moment in the history of migration to America. Reversing decades of systematic exclusions and restrictive immigration policies, this single act opened up the migration of citizens from Mexico and Latin America, as well as Asia and other non-Western countries to enter the United States. It is under this act that professionals, scientists and artists of “exceptional ability” were allowed to enter the U.S. In this book, The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant, I draw the different trajectories of intellectual migrancy as it bears upon a cultural articulation of home and belonging, memory, citizenships and state-regulated rhetoric of immigration policies for the migrant. What makes the state and stakes associated with intellectual migrancy a dramatic condition in the contemporary world, particularly post-September 11, 2001, is the altered relationship that the migrant (the guest) shares with its host (America). In the wake of September 11, 2001, such a host-guest relationship has suffered some severe consequences so that the guest cannot be trusted by the host anymore. In fact, the guest is no longer a “welcome” party, but an enemy of the state that must be contained, detained, punished and watched. As a result of post-9/11 stateregulated consequences, this book is divided into segments that address the pre-psychic conditioning of the intellectual migrant through the reading of literary and personal narratives of displacement, and how such philosophic and cultural modes of displacement have been altered by the forced physical modes of

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movement and dislocation since September 11, 2001, and the rise of the National Security State and new immigration regulations. Between Here and There In the previous conceptualization of migrancy, the migrant seeks a place to make a “new” beginning, to start again, to make a better life. The migrant has to learn the new language and culture. He/she has to cope not only with the torture of separation (from his/her former nation), but often also encounters resentment and hostility from the host population (in the new nation). The above definition no longer suffices. A new kind of an intellectual migrating population has emerged where the migrant’s several activities in life encompass both his/her past and present nations—where the past is never quite viewed as the past, and the present is always temporary, ambiguous, restless and suspended. Sociologists have begun to call these migrants “transmigrants” whose motions are circulatory rather than a linear backward and forward movement. Invariably, in order to maintain these haphazard circulatory movements between two or more nations, the migrants must travel, arrive and depart to and from their past nations into their present nations multiple times, under new visas granting them particular timeframes for legitimate stays within the foreign country. This notion of multiple arrivals and departures in a transnational context can also be read as a cultural conditioning in which subjects inhabit in multiple homes, becoming homeless multiple times. Seen theoretically the discourses of post-structuralism and postcolonialism have affected this conceptual shift from a singular home to multiple homes. Specifically, these discourses taken together have complicated in different ways the subject’s relation to origins. For the migrant then, the landscape of home as Paul Carter notes, becomes a temporary “campsite”—a site that is devoid of either any origin or any promises of a permanent stay. If we take this image of the “campsite” as a site of stay, then, Carter also quite aptly articulates how this stay is never quite viewed as a permanent staying:

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The Postcolonial Citizen The truth is that our prefabricated suburban cottages and jerry-built terrace houses, clinging to the sides of channels of traffic, have not served as living places so much as camp sites, stopping places along the way; and although the final destination may have remained unrealized, the dream of moving on has often presented migrant residents from ever accepting this as the place where they [actually] live. (Carter, “Lines of Communication” 11)

Carter’s above articulation implies that, rather than negating the concept of home, he pushes for a reconceptualization of “home”—like the moving border, the migrant lives in moving homes. Iain Chambers, in his book, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, captures the essence of Carter’s definition. Chambers says that the concept of home means to conceive [a] dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning presence reverberates in the movement of language that constitute our sense of identity, place and belonging (Chambers 4).

The migrant’s haphazard movement within/outside of his/her “home,” language, and its relationship to the psyche are often set in a contradictory and dialectical relationship. The impossibility of pinpointing the direction of the haphazard movement back and forth across space and time also stretches to the irregular and often agitated psychic movement that takes place within the framework of migrant subjectivity. Here, these random movements for the migrant create dialectical spaces and parallel gestures of enablement and disablement as the migrant articulates his/her subjectivity in two or more national spaces. Both Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines in chapter 2 and my own autobiographical narration in chapter 5 illustrate these parallel gestures of un(belonging) based on memory. What does it mean to belong to two or more places? Does one really belong to any of these spaces, or do they simply perform memories of belonging? Can one long for a place without having any sense of belonging to that particular place? The Postcolonial Citizen engages in these above inquiries and offers various modes

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of cultural, spatial, and geo-political belongings and displacements. For many subjects, particularly the first generation migrant subjects this very act/attempt to belong have concurrently produced a sense of both psychic and linguistic displacement. Such displacements taken together answer the intertwined and dialectic relationship between longing and belonging, the relationship between one’s fragmented psyche and the production of discursive conditions, and the state of retrospective nostalgia. First, both longing for home and belonging in either a particular or multiple spaces is not an abstract phenomenon. It manifests itself physically as well as emotionally. Also, the images through which “home” is articulated and reconstituted are sensuous, material, place, time, and geographically specific. Secondly, both the act of scripting and the language with which the migrant subject writes about home, past or present, involves excavating the Unheimliche, the unhomely, the uncanny. These intellectual migrants are not contained by Heim, but begin to participate within and outside the “marks of the shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 315). For those who have managed to relocate and establish new ties to the Western metropolitan centers, the very act of looking back and remembering past homes exposes the terror and fragility of newly formed identities, newly forged ways to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings. In particular, such moments of “arriving” and “leaving” and “looking back” also become concurrent moments of placement and displacement, traveling and dwelling, location and dislocation. Each of these movements comes to play a role in understanding the formation of the migrant subjectivity and his/her suspended state of being. I carefully use the rhetoric of suspension here given how the migrant subject finds himself/herself to be caught up between and betwixt the above movements, yet finds no resolution in situating himself/herself in either movements. Travel and Dislocation This fascination with movements under the rubric of travel and displacement and hence a production of estrangement of sorts is not strictly a postmodern one, or a field of interest that is particu-

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lar to literary studies, but has existed since the turn of modernity and is a phenomenon studied in social sciences. However, what both modernity and social sciences reveal is that each migrant subject has one home, one language, one family, one nation, and in effect one origin—and hence treats the migrant subject with pity devoid of any suffering from terrors of multiplicity. Terms such as travel, displacement, nomads, migrants, refugees, and exile link modernity to postmodernity. The Postcolonial Citizen locates how the discontinuities and disjunctures that particular modes of travel have impacted our understanding of the postcolonial migrant subjectivity as a distinct form of cultural and literary representation (since all displacements are neither the same, nor produce the same kinds of results). Here, I use the terms of “travel” and “displacement” in relationship to one another. How do certain kinds of travel and certain kinds of subjects produce certain kinds of displacements, both psychic and textual? In chapter 3 I devote an entire discussion on the works of South Asian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri’s works provide a lens through which I look at both the migration of the first-generation South-Asian intellectuals and the stakes of belonging for the second- generation American born East-Indian subjects. I call these second-generation subjects born in America “migrants by association.” They belong to domestic spaces that continue to practice and impose upon these second-generation “American” subjects values of their parental homelands. Such impositions create a form of double dislocation and consciousness for these second-generation subjects as they struggle to find a stable sense of self and home(land) in their country of birth where they are marked as “model minorities,” and perceived as Others in their ancestral homeland. Divisions within one’s home and language as a result of travel and movement necessarily produce abjection. Post-colonialism and postmodernism gives us different ways to think about this state of abjection. However, they do so by over-reacting, i.e., by reducing all subjects to the status of migrancy. Thus in this book I take the step as it were to re-theorize migrancy in the wake of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and post 9/11, giving up the metaphysics of origin, but hanging onto the notion of “suffering” and the

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new possibilities of cultural expression it contains through the usage of fragmented realities and memory in literary texts. As travel and displacement open up a plethora of complex questions of cultural representations, so does the subject position of the intellectual migrant, who also opens up possibilities of understanding the condition under which such subjects reside in simultaneous homes, i.e., physically in one nation and psychically in another. These intellectuals as Revathi Krishnaswamy puts it, are “Cross pollinated by postmodernism and postcolonialism” (125). In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said explains the double consciousness that expatriation brings forward. “This plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions…[B]oth the new and the old environments are vivid, actually occurring together contrapuntally” (172). Here, displacement engages the migrant in random movements, creating dialectical spaces and parallel gestures of enablement and disablement as the migrant articulates his/her subjectivity simultaneously in two or more nation spaces. For Salman Rushdie the image of the postcolonial writer as migrant is both crucial and fundamental for developing an enabling theory of artistic creativity and an intellectual migrant’s subjectivity, and he goes on to suggest: [T]hat the writer who is out of country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the psychical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place for his past, of his being “elsewhere.” This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal. (Imaginary Homeland 12)

This intensified loss of language and a dual existence in two nations becomes grounds for the production of decentered subjectivity and new forms of knowledge about one’s stake and stages of belonging. This decenteredness is also a result of a constant adjustment and readjustment to one’s mode of being as expressed through language in two nations. This decenteredness is what Said calls a “psychical fact of discontinuity.” This psychical discontinuity that postcolonial intellectual migration creates also produces a specific form of psychic fragmentation that expresses itself in texts

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that exhibit specific forms of fragmentation (not formal but mimetic). Such nature of mimetic fragmentation can also be found in the writings of Alexander and Lahiri––both contemporary women writers but are separated by a generation. Rather than analyzing a plethora of texts comparing and contrasting and exploring the nature of intellectual migrancy from different regions of the world, I deliberately concentrate on just two women and South Asian writers to provide some depth of analysis to particular texts and contexts. However, the conditions that I extrapolate from these texts are not just a South Asian phenomenon, but hold an universal appeal to texts dealing with the problematic situation of migrant memory, subjectivity and dislocation. It would be both a mistake and reductive to deduce that the intellectual migrancy is only a South Asian phenomenon. How a migrant writes about his/her state of in-betweenness in simultaneous nations occupies as much space as what one articulates in the same given space. It is in this spirit that I examine Alexander’s memoir, Fault Lines, to expose the unreliability of memory, and hence its impact on the past representation of postcolonial nations. I use the role of memory in this chapter as a dialectical tactic to expose the relationship between remembering and forgetting, and how such a relationship gets transmitted within a text making one’s perceived sense of both self and nation to be decisively forged. Different parts of the migrant self based on different kinds of memory align to different parts of the imagined communities simultaneously. Here, fragmentation is not caused by a lack of having a “home,” but on the contrary is caused as a result of longing to belong to both homes, past and present simultaneously (contrary to the former notion that a migrant is constantly trying to resolve his/her state of being in one original home). The Route Itself When scholars of migrancy stress disillusionment that is common among the foreigners caught between two or more nations, they invariably assume the following: 1) Questions of identity, loyalty and homeland become disrupted only upon entrance into the new migrated nation—previously all homogeneous and intact

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in the past nation; and 2) The present nation has caused the migrant psyche to feel fragmentation and alienation—as if such symptoms were devoid in the past nation. Lahiri’s short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (for which she won the American Pulitzer prize in 2000), her novel The Namesake, and her most recent collection of short stories, The Unaccustomed Earth, extend the nature of in-betweenness and the nature of cross-pollination between and within nations, particularly among and within two generations of postcolonial subjects (those who arrive for professional interests, and the subjects who are born here in America of migrant parents) who experience intensified forms of homelessness. These second-generation subjects are migrants by association. Often these second-generation subjects are referred to by first-generation migrant as ABCD’s (American Born Confused Desi’s). Secondgeneration Indian-born subjects call the first-generation migrants DCBA (Desi confused by America). Evident in these derogatory “name calling” is both a kind of gap and animosity between these two forms of citizenships, i.e., the first-generation migrant (the DCBA) who is a migrant/non-citizen/future naturalized citizen, versus the American born second-generation subject (ABCD) who is a natural citizen. I use Lahiri’s texts to extend this analysis of cross-generational stakes of dislocation as it bears upon the anxiety of belonging and citizenships (a conversation started by Amitava Kumar in Passport Photos) as being distinctly different for two generations of postcolonials living in the U.S. Using Lahiri and Alexander, I expose the tension that migrants face when arriving and leaving nations. Tied closely to this act of entering and leaving the margins of one’s nation for another is the question of the subject’s relationship to both his/her “native” nation and the person’s “migrated” nation(s). These margins or “borders” are vibrant and are constantly changing. The margins of the nations do not demarcate the “end.” Rather, it is a place where something begins; i.e., margins of other nations, margins of one’s self, language, and history. These margins, like the “port of entry,” are a site of many transits. These borders function as both an opening and a closing. They are places, as Geoffrey Bennington, citing Edgar Morin has pointed out, are sites of “associations and

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dissociations, separation and articulation” (Bennington 121). The beyondness of the margins not only marks a specific distance and a temporal location, but also simultaneously marks discursive progress. This very act of living on, or beyond, the margins marks displacement and disjuncture. “Being in the ‘beyond,’” Bhabha says, “then, is to inhabit an intervening space…But to dwell ‘in the beyond’ is also, to be a part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity” (Location of Culture 7). The intellectual migrant is caught in redescribing such “cultural contemporaneity” as he or she is in a state of both transit and transitory. This image of the traveling subject as both situated and in transit, located and multiply dislocated—(temporal, spatial and linguistic)—is crucial in defining not just the subject’s ambivalent consciousness, but also the anxiety, agitation and suffering caused by the impossibility of tracing not the route, but the routing through which the migrant travels. In that regard, the trope of migrancy, and particularly the intellectual migrant as the traveling subject, has indeed proved useful in opening up conceptions of borders as it re-maps the nation from its edges. Instead of disempowering the self, dislocation actually opens up an abundance of alternative locations for the intellectual, allowing the individual to own several different homes, memory and consciousness by first becoming homeless. Intellectual postcolonial migrancy then becomes a phenomenon that requires a simultaneous tracing of not just the “role” and “function” of cross-pollination of the intellectual, but the passage (both geographic and psychic, past and present) through which the contingent movement(s) occur. Such a mapping of contingent movements clarifies not just the nature of various temporal transits, but also the routing and conditions through which the migrant encounters such temporality. In this regard, to simply talk about shifting borders where the intellectual migrant is placed or arrives, and then articulate the nature of shifting borders to understand the temporality of migrant movement and subjectivity is not enough in understanding migrancy. The very location of the border must be understood. Abdul JanMohamed, while interrogat-

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ing the kinds of spaces that characterize both the border and the migrant intellectual, also points out the simplicity and ease with which the concept of borders have/has been defined, and offers a redefinition that encompasses the slippery moving borders: …borders are neither inside nor outside the territory they define but simply designate the difference between the two. They are not really spaces at all; as the sites of differences between interiority and exteriority, they are points of infinite regression. Thus, intellectuals located on this site are not, so to speak, “sitting” on the border; rather they are forced to constitute themselves as the border, to coalesce around it as a point of infinite regression. (“Worldliness-Without-World” 103)

Postcolonial migrancy, and in particular the postcolonial intellectual migrants from former colonized countries, upon entrance are confronted with these infinite regressions, which problematizes for them any kind of movement—backward into the past or forward into the future. What are the conditions upon which regressions, infinite or otherwise, take place? Is there any possibility for the migrant to move on to the next frontier where s/he can be free of any regression? Are certain intellectual migration patterns indicative of lesser regressions? Finally, how these regressive tendencies are transmitted by ruptured migrant subjects through the medium of textual representation are questions one must explore in producing a shifting theory of migrancy. JanMohamed for one has said that “the ruptured body of the subject becomes the text on which the structure of group identity is written in inverted form–– the in-formation of the group is inscribed on the body of the border subject” (“Worldliness-Without-World” 115). Then, can a similar topography be drawn on the ruptured body of the migrant text indicating the state of the multiply fragmented imagined communities inside which the migrant subject constantly resides––both psychically and psychologically? The intellectual migrant assumes that by displacing her/himself, he or she can travel out of the familiar into the unfamiliar, an imperialist desire for creating a world of privilege and opportunity. In Cool Memories, Baudrillard reminds us that

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The Postcolonial Citizen You have to travel, keep on the move. You have to cross oceans, cities, continents, latitudes. Not to acquire a more informed vision of the world—there is no universality anymore, no possible synthesis of experience, nor even, strictly speaking, is there any pleasure of an “aesthetic” or “picturesque” variety to be had from travel––but in order to get as near as possible to the world-wide sphere of exchange, to enjoy ubiquity, cosmopolitan extraversion, to escape the illusion of intimacy. Travel as a line of flight, the orbital voyaging of the age of Aquarius. (Cool Memories 168-69)

Here, ironically, traveling outside home makes the intellectual migrant feel more exulted. “Outside” as the West also operates for the intellectual migrant is a site of curiosity, exchange, ubiquity. For many postcolonial intellectuals arriving or making a transition to an industrial capitalistic society in many ways bring the imagination of “home” to the forefront. As Rushdie has articulated, “…I grew up with an intimate knowledge of, and even a sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England: a dream England…I wanted to come to England. I couldn’t wait” (Imaginary Homelands 18). Said too invokes parallel sentiments as he describes the migration pattern of the intellectual scholar from the non-Western “periphery” to the Western “center” as a “voyage in” (Third World Intellectual 31). Thus, dreams being fulfilled upon arrivals into these foreign lands––and the rhetoric of the voyage of entrance being one of looking “in” rather than looking “out”––certainly invokes a different kind of regression that “willing” migrants are subjected to perform upon entrance into these new nation spaces. However, these celebrations of arrivals should not be read as excuses to erase the tensions and regressions of the journey through the passage(s) that lead to multiple arrivals. In articulating cultural conditions of migrancy, a retrospective looking back into the passage or route through which the migrant has journeyed is as important as looking forward to the many arrivals and departures that cause several shifting regressive moments. In other words, in order to come to terms with the route, the route itself must be critically interrogated. In the process of this critical intervention Chambers, in his book Migrancy, Culture, Identity, points out the impossibility of tracing the point of departure or origin, since “such a journey ac-

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quires the form of a restless interrogation, undoing its very terms of reference as the point of departure is lost along the way” (Chambers 2). Chambers continues to extend his argument in the later part of the book as he toils with the direction of the migrant route: Perhaps the sense of our journey does not lie only in one direction, perhaps there is not terminus at the end of the tracks to justify our insistent movement forward? Perhaps we are riding blinded by a future whose redemption ultimately lies at our backs, in the rubble, misery, and confusion that we think we have already overcome? (Chambers 30)

In this context Deleuze and Guattari also identify a number of metaphors to indicate sites of displacement causing rootlessness. The botanical metaphor of a root-like “rhizome” has been used as a metaphor for deterritorialization. Caren Kaplan, in Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, defines such a rhizome as “burrowing through substance, fragmenting into simultaneous sprouts, moving with certain sleath, powerful in its dispersion” and hence “the rhizome destabilizes the conventions of origins and endings” (Kaplan 87). Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, also suggest, “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (25). Deleuze has also stated that the possibility of deterritorialization doesn’t exist without a conscious effort for reterritorialization. Akin to Bhabha’s hybridity as “third space,” Deleuze and Guattari suggest that elements reterritorialize themselves into each other. While each element maintains some of its own territoriality, their combined reterritorialization produces a new territoriality. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization is useful in defining the intellectual migrant condition since it captures the “inbetweenness”––another form of reterritorialization by refusing to seek pure “origins.” This impossibility of locating either the points of departures as a result of deterritorialization, and the many transit locations that leads to a circular routing, rather than a linear method of arriving at a final destination, have rendered social scientists in a state of paralysis. This paralysis has made the task of adequately

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The Postcolonial Citizen

representing the state and stakes of migrancy challenging (where “suffering,” “inbetweenness,” “fracture” and “agitation” are overlooked for evidence of celebrations of arrivals into new nation spaces). Also, these cultural and emotional moments of loss that the intellectual migrant embodies find their expression through the genres of memoirs, fiction, poetry—genres that are not used as a center of analysis in the social sciences. “Where Am I? Who Am I? When Am I?” Embedded in the cultural articulation of migrancy is its backward and forward movement. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” where the angel’s face is turned toward the past and the wings caught by the storm propel him into the future–– symbolizing both the “chiasmatic paths of history and the contradictory burden of the visionary”––the intellectual migrant repeats an oddly different movement. For the migrant his/her back is turned toward the past, (just like the Angel) but instead of the wind propelling the subject into the future, the wind swings the migrant both into the past and the future—like a pendulum. This pendulum-like movement makes the direction of the migrant ambivalent and unlocatable. Here, like the Angel’s movement the migrant’s movement too rests on the philosophy as Nikos Papestergiadis puts it, “is not directed towards the celebration of the transmission, or a lament for the loss of putative wholes, but is a method for understanding the relative autonomy and irreconcilability of the parts which migrate across and within various histories” (The Journeys Within 159). The image of such a random and haphazard movement causing layered cultural and psychic displacements has been an ongoing dialogue within both discourses of postcolonialism and postmodernism. Although both the discourses have named these movements to cause various nexuses of fragmentation, and an heterogeneous understanding of the psychical and psychic fractures taking place on these moving bodies, none have mapped the actual trajectory of the movement that continuously determines for the moving migrant subject its multiple shared, yet disengaged, ambivalent and agitated relationship to particular locations: social, po-

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litical, national. If we take as a point of departure a common expression such as “Home is where one belongs”––in migrancy then both the concept of home and (un)belongingness that follows, performs a radical shift as we trace the movement that redefines the premise of home. Here, home becomes a space where one belongs and also does not belong. Psychical departure from one’s home, as John Berger notes, also “involves an ontological and psychological severance which is irredeemable. After migration, identities, habits, and personal memories and social histories can no longer be embraced within the four walls of a home” (Berger 67). Once we embark on the route to migration, identities, habits, personal memories are carried both forward and backward to the new and past homes. For instance, both America and the past nations become points of arrival and departures, and both these nations contain our conceptualization of home. The terminology of home is no longer one that is used strictly to define domestic spaces, but embodies an ethos of being in a different nation. In this regard the question of not “who am I? but rather “who am I becoming” becomes one that haunts the migrant subject from time to time. This back and forth and intermittent construction of both the present and past homes can no longer be confined to boundaries of just the past or the present, but are seen in relation to one another. Here, both the past and the present are meaningless without reading them side by side. In this simultaneous and continuous back and forth movement that causes dislocation upon dislocation, Alexander, in her memoir Shock of Arrival, quite aptly says that the questions we ask are “not necessarily new: Where am I? Who am I? and hardest of all, When am I?”(Alexander 142). She keeps revisiting the migrant many times in many places as the migrant constantly relocates himself/herself in several geo-political locations. In this world of in-betweenness of constantly traveling between the past and present, migrancy as a “discontinuous state of being,” and the intellectual migrant as the subject en route, embodies the essence of such postmodern and postcolonial sense of discontinuity, temporality, and rupture as indicated in migrant narratives. This discontinuity and temporality are intuitively encapsulated within

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The Postcolonial Citizen

the framework of migrancy that manifests into an understanding of a discursive construction of migrant selfhood. Migrancy, in this sense, becomes not just a cultural phenomenon, where every transit is briefly locatable only to be dislocated again, but also an intellectual endeavor––where it becomes worthwhile to undertake the representation of the migrant psyche and the passage through which this psyche travels, which has set itself in constant motion. As Bhabha citing Rushdie has noted: The effect of mass migration has been the creation of radically new types of human beings: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves—because they are so defined by others—by their otherness: people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions, between what they were and where they find themselves. (The Location of Culture 124)

Thus, the frontier, “the place” or the margin for the migrant is a movable border––the border constantly moving along with the migrant’s mobility. Along with this moving border, the migrant engages in several moments of being both at home and homeless in the same space multiple times––extending further “fusions” and fractions to take place within the psyche. In order to grasp systematically how these constant movements cause homelessness and home to exist side by side (producing a state of agitation, rupture, discontinuity, and restlessness)––the literary texts that demonstrate these layered narrative movements both in their construction and narrativization of migrant subjectivity must be central to an analysis of migrancy. Any analysis of the migrant impulse requires an investigation into the symptomatic nature of migrancy, resembling the medical condition of a “chronic migraine”––a continuous throbbing, sometimes locatable, and at other times unlocatable. Here, the symptoms of migraine as a source of throbbing pain (literally and figuratively within the psyche) become indicative of larger ambivalent relationships that the migrant articulates through the medium of textual representation; the migrant’s relationship to both his/her past and present nations, the location of the migrant’s national identity as the migrant gets caught in the random backward/forward movement between simultaneous im-

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agined communities, and how these ambivalent and often agitated movements are mapped in the psyche. Lahiri’s literary representations allow me to map the conflicted and conflicting relationship that an intellectual migrant and his/her second-generation offspring share with the multiplicity of belongings. The clash between the first and the second generation and their forms of negotiation are complex in Lahiri’s works, yet what is compelling is a mode of in-betweenness Lahiri’s subjects strike in order to survive in an increasingly fragmented world. Many of Lahiri’s migrant subjects (both first and second generation) deploy nomadic tendencies as a result of inhabiting the liminal space of homes and nations. Lahiri’s subjects are what Chambers would also call a “mobile habitat.” It is precisely this theoretical concept of mobility as it bears upon home, memory and belonging is what I give a fictive space through my autobiographical chapter titled, “Remapping Home.” In this creative chapter I produce a reflection about my own migrant subjectivity to explore the conflicted status of the migrant subject––one who is caught between not just home and homelessness (Unheimliche), but also between representation and misrepresentation, memory, nostalgia and forgetting, the reality of belonging to multiple homes, and the desire to perhaps remain homeless. For most intellectual migrants from formerly colonized spaces, the arrival in the West coincides with their undergraduate or graduate studies in a Western university. My own trajectory is no different. I came to the U.S. as an undergraduate, as a foreign student holding a multiple-entry F-1 student visa in 1990. As a foreign student I was a non-resident alien. Then, I became a green card holder, or what is called a permanent resident (resident alien). In 2004 I decided to become an American citizen. Each state of my own migrancy or en route to acquiring a new immigration status has brought to the surface a series of resolutions and irresolutions about my past, and my own growing ambivalence regarding the state of my own transgressive citizenship, here and now. I have only one passport, but maintain simultaneous alliances to India, Germany and America. My Indian passport was “cancelled

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The Postcolonial Citizen

without prejudice” by the Indian consulate when I received my American citizenship. In my mind I will always be an Indian citizen. I am married to a German citizen (a former East German), and if I desire I can acquire a European Union citizenship. Ironically, I cannot have my Indian citizenship back without surrendering my American one. Recently the Indian government has launched a program called “Overseas Citizens of India” or “OCI.” This program does not grant dual citizenships, but it allows a person born in India but living elsewhere to acquire an Indian visa to indefinitely visit, study or work in India. In light of these new regulations, and my own status as a migrant/immigrant subject, I made a deliberate decision to use my own transformation and subjectivity a part of this book. This creative chapter metaphorically articulates how the old and the new environments are woven contrapuntally and hence the production of anger, terror and despair upon identification and disidentification of familiarity and unfamiliarity of home. Also, since migrants speak in many languages, it is apt that I use multiple discourses to illustrate such subjectivity. The I-94 and the Irresolutions of Arrivals and Departures The past, according to Said, can only be defined in migrancy as a form of picking a quarrel with where one comes from. Unlike travel, which implies movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival, a return, and knowledge of an itinerary, migrancy provides no such resolution. On the contrary migrancy involves a movement in which neither the points of departure or those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming completing the story, domesticating the detour…becomes an impossibility (Chambers 5).

Migrancy, whether in cultural studies or in disciplines such as social sciences, is predicated on movement and questions any “rooted” existence. Thus, when the movement stops and roots are established, one is no longer a migrant. Unlike the natural state of “rooting” oneself to a place, nation, national identity etc., for the

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migrant subject “uprooting” becomes the very basis of his/her cultural existence. Contrary to the rhetoric of “uprooting,” which causes a sense of unwillingness, the migrant has trouble identifying with such a rhetoric. For the intellectual migrant, as JanMohamed has noted, this unwillingness is replaced with a rhetoric of willingness, and he describes the migrant as being in an “ascetic ode of willed homelessness” (JanMohamed 99). His/her intent to migrate is predicated upon a willingness to go abroad in order to seek higher education, research, high-tech professions, etc. These “willed” homeless subjects are mostly intellectuals, who are neither quite exiled, nor quite an immigrant subject [but] are able to develop, out of his more complicated border status, an enabling theory of “in-betweenness” of being willingly homeless. If we look into the post-1965 selective migration pattern from the formerly colonized countries, something important is revealed about the nature of the historic pattern of intellectual emigration since 1960s. The vast majority of these subjects immigrating to the U.S., and secondarily to Britain, typically have little to do with the working class, inside or outside of their own countries. Contrary to the emigration of the working class (prior to the 1960s) these postcolonial intellectuals are characterized by the arrivals of a huge number of highly educated, urban middle- and upper-middle-class people. Unlike forms of labor migrations, Asian Indians (pursuing intellectual and high-tech interests) have been able to maintain their bourgeois status after arrival in the U.S. These “willed homeless” postcolonial intellectuals enter and exit the borders of the Western and postcolonial nation spaces many times. This entry, or the arrival (since every point of entry is also essentially a point of arrival) for the postcolonial migrant subject— from the margins of his/her own nation into the margins of the new nation––has often been described as a point of rupture, or what Alexander calls in her book title The Shock of Arrival. Here, arrivals take on multiple dimensions. This “shock” is an intermittent reaction, since this shock for the migrant is not just predicated upon arrival, but also upon temporary departures multiple times—a departure that once again leads into another arrival, i.e., into the frontiers of the “old” or “past” nations. The migrant’s con-

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ception of uprooting, or being between two or more worlds, two nations, several selves, and multiple languages produces a “sense of being rootless, of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern condition” (Chambers 27). The arrival back into the old nation space is yet another shock, a shock that is built upon a return to the nostalgia-filled past––only to find the same roads, same trains, same houses, but different selves. This arrival into the past nation for the migrant is also different in technicality under the rubric and rhetoric of immigration documentations. In order to differentiate the two “arrivals, ” i.e., one into the new nation of America and the other upon arrival in the migrant's old postcolonial nation, it is imperative that I draw attention to the very symbol, and hence the rhetoric of “stapling” followed by the “ripping” of the I-94, i.e., the arrival record from the migrant’s passport. This arrival record is completed by the migrant at the port of entry to which the migrant subject has declared to be a nonresident alien, and, then “stapled” to the migrant’s passport. When the migrant leaves the migrated nation temporarily to return to his/her former nation, this I-94 is “ripped” from the passport, only to be reattached upon arrival or return again. This “stapling” and “ripping,” other than bestowing a metaphorical sense of migraine, also becomes symbolic in the theoretical framework of multiple arrivals and departures for the migrant subject. Like Clifford’s distribution of tension and trauma in both places, the migrant, as a result of several rippings and staplings, also undergoes multiple attachments and detachments. Fundamentally then, migration can be viewed as an en route movement into the process of becoming an immigrant. A migrant is not an immigrant. Migration is a temporal condition, a transition, before arriving at another more permanent status, like the transition from a non-resident alien, to a resident alien. Intellectual migrants are thus foreign born and non-resident aliens. On the other hand, immigrants are resident aliens, permanent residents, green card holders, and hence there is a permanency associated with their status. The green card holder is no longer a “visitor” but is not a “host” yet either. This permanent position for the

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immigrant also produces a more stable sense of place, or home, since his/her passport doesn’t require any more staplings and attachments of I-94 forms. Unlike the migrant, the resident alien can stay in America for ten years (since a green card is issued for ten years at a time), and then renew his or her green card after that period again. The status of the permanent resident stands in sharp opposition to the impermanent nature of home associated with the migrant. While both the migrant and the immigrant may long for the past home and nation, Avtar Brah in Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities offers a useful distinction between “homing desire” and “desire for the homeland” as a way of articulating how “belonging “ and “home” are not synonymous for migrants and immigrants. She argues instead that “not all diasporas sustain an ideology of return” (180), just as not all migrants are compelled to return to their roots. Carter extends Brah’s line of inquiry by remarking: An authentically migrant perspective…might begin by regarding movement, not as an awkward interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but as a mode of being in the world. The question would be, then, not how to arrive, but how to move, how to identify convergent and divergent movements; and the challenge would be how to notate such events, how to give them a historical and social value (Carter, Living in a New Country 101).

Post September 11, 2001, the intellectual migrant’s movement is greatly under scrutiny by the state. The migrants have been infected by a new type of migraine as a result of state regulated regulations that followed the September 11 attacks in New York, denying migrants many constitutional protections in America. The terrorist attacks on America also marks a simultaneous attack on migrants by America––indeed providing a space to reevaluate the “historical and social value” of migrants as common citizens and intellectuals residing in this land of freedom. The Migrant’s Migraine Post 9/11 Post September 11, many of the freedoms of movement associated with the migrant figure have been challenged by the rise of

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The Postcolonial Citizen

the Security State, the PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) and its new regulatory practices. Among many of the declines in terms of civil liberties, particularly on common citizens and scholars of South Asian and Middle Eastern descents, the erosion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 providing protection to the migrant on the basis of national origin have severely jeopardized the migrant condition within the U.S. Tied to such an erosion are also at stake issues pertaining to academic freedom––a freedom that constitutes the very basis of a postcolonial intellectual migrant’s professional status in understanding and articulating the human condition within and against empire. The rise of the National Security State in order to combat the Bush administration’s policies to control and confront the “war on terror” forces us to rearticulate another new shift in the status of migrant subjectivity. The migrant’s voice and actions, particularly any critique of the American empire, may jeopardize any guarantees that s/he will be allowed to stay willingly in America. What I was once told, that a safe-keeping of the I-94 would ensure one’s stay and return to and from America, no longer suffices. With such changes in the immigration regulations and the rising number of postcolonial intellectuals who are now subjected to surveillance, deportation, revocation of visas and passports, and detentions imposed (without following any due process)––a new landscape addressing the stakes of migrancy has emerged in the twenty-first century. I treat this new condition in chapter 4, “Threatening Bodies, Dangerous Knowledge, Legal Interventions,” where the migrant is no longer an enabling figure but a figure of disablement, an enemy of the state that must be contained under surveillance. Here the migrant becomes unclassifiable by nature, and in principle undecidable as a subject. Given the reality of living in a post-September 11 world, the question for the post-colonial intellectual migrant is not a tracing of his/her roots, but in fact a systematic process of how one comes to terms with his/her route, a route that neither guarantees a safe stay, nor a return. Stuart Hall extends the complexity of coming to

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terms for the migrant route by reminding us that such transformations in the migrant subjectivity are subject to a radical historization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation. We need to situate the debates about identity within all those historically specific developments and practices which have distributed the relatively ‘settled’ character of many populations, above all in relation to the process of globalization…(Hall, Questions of Cultural Identity 4).

In the light of the above quote, it becomes urgent more than ever before to develop a theoretical framework of conditions of migrancy, where the migrant is central and not at the periphery of this historical process of globalization. As Carter has articulated, “we need to disarm the genealogical rhetoric of blood, property and frontiers and substitute it for a lateral account of social relations, one that stresses the contingency of all definitions of self and other, and the necessity always to tread lightly” (Carter in Living in a New Country 7-8). Post-9/11 has produced a state of contingency for the migrant, and this contingent state cannot be ignored anymore. It must be confronted head-on. When I started writing this book, my own migrant status was a part of the historical process that challenged the trajectory of a rather racist race-based European immigration to the United States and opened its frontiers to “third world” subjects to arrive. The flooding of postcolonial academics and the birth of Silicon Valley coincided with the passing of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. September 11, 2001, marks the end of such an era of “willed” migration by postcolonial intellectuals. The Postcolonial Citizen: The intellectual Migrant does not bring to any conclusion the state of migrancy, since any conclusion regarding both the migrant and migrancy defeats the continuous state of becoming. What this book does, I hope, is open up another vantage point to link and interrogate the meaning of being a postcolonial citizen in a pre- and post-September 11 world.

Chapter 2 Forging States of Belonging: Migrant Memory, Nation, and Subjectivity in Meena Alexander’s Memoir, Fault Lines A woman who did not know herself, how could I have written a book of my life and thought it true? I was tormented by the feeling that I had written a memoir that was not true. —Meena Alexander, Fault Lines

Meena Alexander belongs to a long list of twentieth century diasporic writers who seek to create a sense of deep attachment to cherished places based on memory. However, any critical inquiry into the complexity of such memories is not only necessarily limited, but must also be approached with a certain degree of caution. In Alexander’s case, memory is something she constantly invents as a means to keep her narrative moving forward. Alexander’s memory is filled with either repressed or half-remembered tales from past events/nations and her conflictual presence in the U.S. This very collision between her experience based on past memory and that based on present memory forms a jumbled col-

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lage in her own discursive formation of identity and writing. I contend in this chapter that through the genre of the memoir, particularly the problematic discursivity staged in the two editions of Fault Lines (FL 1993 & 2003) the issue of gross misrepresentation of the postcolonial states of memory and belonging comes to the forefront. In other words, Alexander’s writing itself becomes a space that begins to expose the arbitrary and contradictory nature of memory. In his article “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Edward Said reminds us that “memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalisms, of power and authority” (175). Accordingly, along with a critique of the often fragmented, postcolonial nation-space represented in memoirs, we also need to explore what this fractured and displaced memory actually represents. In his essay “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” Bessel A. Vander Der Kolk points to the current revival of interest in the role of exaggerated and overwhelming experiences in the development of psychopathology. This interest, according to Kolk, “has provoked a fresh look at how memories are stored in the mind and continues to affect everyday perceptions and interpretations of reality” (qtd. in Caruth 158). In the light of the current interest in cultural memory and memory construction, I offer a close textual reading of Alexander’s original and revised memoir Fault Lines, followed by an extended discussion of the uses and abuses of memory in migrant memoirs. In particular, the revised and expanded 2003 edition of Fault Lines deeply rewrites the original memoir by revealing Alexander’s trauma of sexual abuse experienced in her childhood by her maternal grandfather Ilya in India. In her memoir Alexander effectively deploys a method of “making up” stories from her past, to establish layered and superimposed representations of herself as a South Asian-American female subject. Ten years after the publication of Fault Lines Alexander recalls dark and repressed memories of her grandfather Ilya sexually molesting her and rewrites the memoir by adding a new section called the “Book of Childhood.” 1 This new addition raises significant questions regarding the exclusion of such acts of trauma and forgetting from her original me-

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moir and the impact of such forgetting on Alexander’s identity. Within both the narratives she becomes obsessed with depicting layers of loss, in particular loss of memory as a significant feature of migrant subjectivity. This loss of memory resulting from multiple displacement(s) and repressed sexual trauma ultimately leads to a fault in Alexander’s subject formation––a fault that she carefully identifies and defines for her readers at the very beginning of her memoir with the aid of the Oxford English Dictionary: “Fault: Deficiency, lack, want of something […] Default, failing, neglect. A defect, imperfection, blamable quality or feature: a. in moral character, b. in physical or intellectual constitution, appearance, structure or workmanship” (1993 FL 2). By declaring what the word “fault” means, Alexander grants herself permission to create faulty representations by deploying the act of forgetting as a “deficiency” and not a disease in her memory. Hence, she enters her own narrative of displacement as a self-declared deficient subject who has been traumatized by her multiple migrations, sexual abuse and forgetfulness. And the most poignant signs of this trauma lie in her memory loss and forgetting and hence her need to “make up memory” in order to reconstruct her fragmented subjectivity caused by acts of displacement. Like those of other migrant writers, Alexander’s stories are of her breaking free from the restraints of her conservative and suffocating past—her escape from an arranged marriage, bearing children, and staying within the confines of a house. However, in Fault Lines the narrative process of unburdening neither releases her from her past nor provides any resolution to her present condition. Instead she remains baffled by recalling the stories she wants to remember; stories that she claims she has forgotten. Her memoir begins by Alexander questioning her genealogy: “Where did I come from? How did I become what I am? (1993 FL 2). This line of inquiry not only reflects upon the ambiguity of origins—but a lack of such clarity torments her throughout the first half of her memoir. It is not until she rewrites (her)story that she is able to put her past into some perspective and understand the grounds of her restlessness that provokes feelings of betrayal and guilt. It is also this rewriting that prompts Alexander to remember her past and re-

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claim her forgotten experiences. In her revised and expanded Fault Lines Alexander again returns to another type of a fundamental question—one less concerned with origins but more concerned with issues of subjectivity: “How could I not have known what happened to me?” (2003 FL 242) Then she writes: The short answer is, of course I knew, I simply could not bear to remember […] As I remembered Ilya, as I wrote him into being, I saw the child that I was, the child who set herself the harsh task of forgetting. To learn to forget is as hard as to learn to remember. (2003 FL 242)

This omission of her grandfather’s abuse comes as a shock to the readers. This shock is not as much a result of the realization that indeed her grandfather abused her, but due to Alexander’s previous representation of her grandfather in her memoir. In the 1993 edition Alexander writes: Almost seventy by the time I was born, he [Ilya] was well established as an intellectual and community leader […] I learnt to accept his place in the world around him, his public power. I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone in my life––in that intensity that childhood brings […] (1993 FL 52)

Such fond memories crumble as Alexander in her revision begins to remember the details of her grandfather’s abuse, details emerging in flashes. “The teak desk where I had to lie down as he touched my body. The white wall where I pressed myself back trying to escape” (2003 FL 240). Using Cathy Caruth’s title of her book, Alexander calls such recalling of past memory, claiming Unclaimed Experience. Within the context of the memoir what becomes problematic is exactly what prompts her to claim her unclaimed experiences, a question that I will return to later in the essay. This task of both forgetting and remembering doubly confines Alexander and in the process fragments both her identity and her writing. This double confinement manifests itself through the metaphor of the “barbed wire”—a sharp fence that confines her on either side, past and present throughout the memoir. The barbed wire, apart from suggesting that she is metaphorically chained, is

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also used instrumentally to indicate the mutilation caused within her memory. Unable to cope with the nature of self-mutilation, Alexander simply takes refuge in claiming that her displaced sense of self originates from simultaneous losses––loss of home, loss of memory of particular events from her past, loss of language resulting from such mutilations and forgetting. In Alexander’s case, the act of remembering (as the past flashes up in front of her eyes) is what further mutilates both herself and fragments her past. The argument in this chapter is thus three-fold. First, contrary to the popular belief that a migrant’s psychic fracture is the result of a loss of memory of significant events from the past and a perduring inability to adapt to the new nation, I argue that it is precisely the reverse. Fragmentation is actually due to the simultaneous desire and obligation to remember and belong to both nations. Second, I explore how this fracture is represented in Fault Lines both figuratively and metaphorically through acts of forgetting and remembering. Alexander hides behind her metaphors and the layered discursivity in her text. Here the text itself begins to expose the arbitrary and often contradictory nature of memory. Moreover, I expose the forgery (by forgetting) perpetrated by Alexander as she constructs her past self based on its disremembered and “assumed” nature. In the epigraph Alexander cites from Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks as a justification for her assumptions: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (1993 FL vii). When assumptions become a pretext for representation, it results in dangerous representations. Although memories and particular experiences of movement by migrants may differ, when real memories begin to collide with “made up” assumed and exaggerated memories, then memory, as Said notes, begins to be “used, misused, exploited, rather than something that sits inertly there for each person to possess and contain” (177). Memory is no longer used to represent one’s past, but is “manipulated and intervened in for sometimes urgent purposes in the present” (Said 177). Within the context of this paper I stage a detailed discussion of the discursivity and the referential quality of

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memory by exposing the complexity of memory into “sense memory,” “thinking memory,” “deep memory,” “legitimate memory,” and “proto-memory.” These divisions allow us to understand the complexity of memory on a narrative, and in particular the nature of trauma as a result of forgetting and then remembering crucial details from one’s past. Mapping the Cognitive and Geographic Space: The Language of Memory Sometimes I am torn apart by two sorts of memories, two opposing ways of being towards the past. The first makes whorls of skin and flesh, coruscating shells, glittering in moonlight. A life embedded in a life, and that in another life, another and another. Rooms within rooms, each filled with its own scent: rosehip, neem leaves, dried hibiscus leaves that hold a cure, cow dung, human excrement, dried gobs of blood […] The rooms, enfolded each within the other, the distinct houses all have held me (1993 FL 29).

Memory (cognitive location) of the body (geo-physical location) from where one speaks and the identity (subjectivity) that one speaks of share a conflicted and often a contradictory relationship. If we take the above passage as suggesting that a migrant is “torn apart by two sorts of memories, two opposing ways of being towards the past,” then can such a referentiality of “opposition” be taken as a stable source of representation in the construction of one’s self and subjectivity? Here, the two spaces of geographic (nation) and cognitive (language and memory) are set in a dialectic relationship to each other. This set-up causes a collision between Alexander remembering the physical details of a particular geographic space and then transferring these details to narrate other places in her memory. For instance, “rooms within rooms, each filled with its own scents” is remembered, and yet what is forgotten is how she survived cognitively in that past geographic space. In this context, what she remembers––that is which is distinct–– gets written. What is forgotten––that is, what is “enfolded”—is skipped, thus making the link between remembering and forgetting discursively and dialectically constructed.

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The representation of memory, and particularly its impact on the genre of non-fiction, has agitated scholars, literary, cultural and historical, for quite some time. However, what has less frequently been addressed is the nature of the discursive space from which such memories are first filtered and then articulated. Fault Lines becomes one such text in which the graphing of the memory in simultaneous nation spaces is explored, a strategy that leads to unpacking the relevant theoretical questions pertinent to the relationship between the geography of the postcolonial memory (the imaginary lines that divide the “real” from the “fantasy”) and its representation on postcolonial identity. What becomes problematic here is not so much the metaphoric language and the discursive text through which memories are transmitted, but how the memories themselves are transmuted over time, showing external marks on the body as “whorls of skin and flesh” (1993 FL 29). Alexander comments on the nature of such transmutation on herself and how such divisions affect her feelings of alienation in her migrated land. She says: Composed of bits and pieces of the present, it renders the past suspect, cowardly, baseless. Place names litter it: Allahabad, Tiruvella, Kozencheri, Pune, Khartoum, Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem, Dubai, London, New York, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, New Delhi, Trivandrum […] But when she approaches me, this Other who I am […] I see quite clearly what I had only guessed at earlier: she has no home, no fixed address, no shelter […] But it is clear that she is a nowhere creature (1993 FL 30).

Here, the act of migration causes her past to become “suspect” and dislocated, a dislocation that can be can be read by the discursive naming of cities. These names indicate geographic spaces and a trail of crossing borders in no particular chronological order. At first, Alexander articulates her affiliation with particular geographic locations through a kind of haphazard naming of cities. When this does not receive the desired understanding of her stake in these past locations, she begins to extend her feelings of not being located––to her not being seen (made invisible). Also, as Sangeeta Ray has noted in her article “Ethical Encounters: Spivak, Alexander and Kincaid,” Alexander’s homelessness 2 is a result “not

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because of the absence of rooms but precisely because there are too many rooms to count, to describe” (51). She reduces herself to becoming a “nowhere creature” and enters her own body as the Other. It is her own otherness that makes her realize the profound impact of her own dislocation: “She has no home. No fixed address, no shelter” (1993 FL 30). Her subject position as a “nowhere creature” indicates not just her loss of expressive language, but also a loss of, to use Mary Warnock’s term, “memory knowledge” based on a dissonance between her past and her present subjectivity. Roberta Culbertson, in her essay “Embodied Memory, Transcendence and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self,” extends the idea of “memory knowledge” as “perhaps not something that is even remembered, but only felt as a presence, or perhaps [shaping] current events according to its template, itself unrecognized” (Culbertson 170). We clearly see in Alexander’s articulation of her gradual remembrance of her past how her memory of her grandfather Ilya is felt not in her memory but rather in her body. She writes, “I learnt […] that the body remembers when consciousness is numbed” (2003 FL 242). Scholars working in the field of trauma and testimony have long believed the relationship between body and memory, i.e., ‘there is no memory without body memory’ [italics in original] (Casey, 172). Yet what happens when the very body one tries to remember has become indivisible from one’s own flesh? Since Alexander acknowledges that Ilya in her mind is almost fused as “one flesh, indivisible” (2003 FL 241) how does such act of fusion create superimposed memory and larger questions of fractured subjectivity based on the nature of such superimposition? In Alexander’s case, memory knowledge connotes both a loss and a pull between two types of memory, old and new. Her new memory of sexual abuse by Ilya comes to the forefront in New York City in the wake of September 11, 2001. “They are feelings that you had that are coming back” (2003 FL 240), says Alexander’s therapist in New York. These new resurfacing memories are placed beside her past memories of Ilya as Alexander realizes that “there is knowledge that is too much for the nervous system to

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bear, that disappears underground, that sparks up through fault lines (2003 FL 242). Such memories of betrayal produce simultaneous feelings of guilt and anger in Alexander’s consciousness. “Why did he expose me to the violence in his head? Sometimes when he touched me a strange light came into his eyes. Why did he use my flesh, my soul instead of canvas or paper? Why did he paint on me so violently? (2003 FL 272) Such questions coincide with Alexander’s new discovery of trauma theory 3 and Western obsession with psychotherapy that allows her to create a self-indulgent narrative of new trauma based on past sexual abuse. She is no longer haunted by her displaced status as a “nowhere creature” or is displaced by thoughts of a homeland she will never find. Now aided by trauma theory she is doubly traumatized by memories of sexual abuse by her beloved grandfather Ilya. It is precisely this reclaiming of her experience of abuse that further fragments her memory and consciousness. However, in J. Edward Mallot’s article “Body Politics and the Body Politic: Memory as Human Inscription in What the Body Remembers,” he reminds us that for Shoshana Felman 4 “successful trauma narratives manage to place the suffering of the victim ‘within the body’ of the reader, moving the impact of trauma, as it were, from one body to another” (Mallot 166). In Alexander’s case, however, no such transference of trauma from the narrator (Alexander) to the reader takes place given her juxtaposed memory of Ilya. Such juxtaposition is evident in the discursive textual space that exposes the arbitrary nature of Alexander’s memory past/present and complicate the relation between the act of signification and the signified past. Memory by definition is always in past tense and indicates absence, or what is forgotten. However, memoirs make a deliberate attempt to make this absence become present. Fault Lines puts into context the ramifications of using memory as Salman Rushdie suggests, in Imaginary Homelands, “a process of filtration itself” to make this absent present. According to Rushdie, “we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as a tool” (23-24). When memory is used as a tool, it gives a certain kind of discursive logic based on the inconsistent nature of remembering and forgetting. Within her memoir (prior to her recollection of being sexually

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abused) as Alexander begins to unpack her past self, her present self in New York dislocates her. She becomes an Other to her own self as disorienting strands of her past provoke her consciousness. The plural nature of the postcolonial consciousness begins to trace itself discursively through the texts these migrant subjects produce. Alexander is not unusual in this case to wrestle with the juxtaposition between writing and memory evident in the text. Yet it is not the juxtaposition itself, but its consequences as it bears upon questions of representation that fracture the migrant subject’s memory and consciousness. Alexander admits to recognizing the vexed relationship between writing and memory in The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. She writes that “Suddenly, I felt that even the memory would be impossible if I did not turn my attention to the violence very close at hand, attendant, in fact, upon the procedures of my own writing (4). This important shift from the violence inflicted upon memory and forgetting to the violence imposed upon the act of writing itself links the problematic space of memory to the discursive language of the memory. Perhaps this is the only explanation for Alexander’s references to “making up memories” as a result of psychic wounds caused by unmediated acts of displacement. These images of displacement within the self, memory, and language are represented through fleeting metaphoric images of the barbed wire. These images are discursive, disconnected and dispersed obstructing the narrative order and meaning throughout the text. Sometimes she uses the barbed wire to indicate literally a fence that divides the back of the Tiruvella compound where her grandfather lived (1993 FL 115). While at other times the rhetoric of the barbed wire is used to extend the nature of a psychological weight, like learning the “forked power” of the English language. Here the barbed wire is referred to as an “invisible barbed wire of burden” (1993 FL 116). As time shifts, the image of the barbed wire migrates with Alexander. This becomes evident as her eyes fall on an image of barbed wire at the corner of Fifth Avenue in New York. This image in the heart of New York City takes her back to the Tiruvella house left empty after her grandfather’s death. The house had been half-destroyed: “all the wiring had been ripped out of the

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walls…and my parents and those who came to their assistance had to remove yards and yards of barbed wire from the finely carved window of my grandfather’s house” (1993 FL 124). Yet, as the bus “jolted on Fifth Avenue, then in front of the Museum…I looked out at the museum where a banner hung and realized that, for me, poems made real places” (1993 FL 125). Literally, symbolically, and metaphorically, the barbed wire transmutes her continuous memory of one thing or another and replaces it with an event or logic that is discursive and sometimes “made up” altogether. She attributes such making up of memories to her first ocean crossing at the age of five. She recalls, “I think of it as a figurative death. Losing sense, being blotted out, thrown irretrievably across a border” (1993 FL 65). This is also where she confesses that the ocean becomes a large barrier (a fence) between herself and her language of expression. Her being thrown across the border “[provoked] the imaginary” and she is “forced to fabricate, trust to the maquillage of words” (1993 FL 65). Thus for the narrative to go on Alexander justifies that she must make up memories. As Culbertson comments, this making up of memories is not because certain events and feelings are not registered, but precisely due to the fact that something that is not registered is not necessarily forgotten. Culbertson adds: Such memories––of abject, fear, pain, anguish––are left apart from the story of the self because if included it would destroy it, being so counter to the self’s conception of itself as whole as to be inimical and threatening to it. Thus, the body and mind conspire to protect the self from overwhelming awareness of its permeability, to deny in important ways the terror of experience. (Culbertson 174)

Contrary to Culbertson’s suggestion that subjects conceal memories of “abject, fear, pain, anguish” to protect one’s self; Alexander’s conflicted relationship to herself precisely arises when she confronts rather than conceals. This moment of confrontation for Alexander does not take place during such tragic events as her father’s and grandfather’s deaths. It is September 11, 2001, and its aftermath, a time of national and collective trauma, that marks the splitting open of Alexander’s individual narrative of trauma, 5 which she calls the “dark mirror” 6

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“tear[ing] open the skin of memory (2003 FL 229). Alexander insists that her forgetting, or not claiming of her past experiences and memory post-9/11, rather than being read as a gap in representation, should be read as a process of discovery by digging the past. She invokes Walter Benjamin’s words from A Berlin Chronicle as a justification for reclaiming forgotten experiences in her memoir: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging […] he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter” (2003 FL 230). Indeed for Benjamin this act of digging may uncover new truths regarding one’s past. Yet, the question remains, when new memory is used to cover up or invalidate old memories––what repercussions can such a “digging” impose upon issues of representation? Can this new memory simply be read as a new representation––replacing, invalidating, discrediting the old memory? Furthermore, when subjects choose to continuously trade old memory for the new ones during significant moments in national history/trauma, then should subsequent occurrences of national tragedies trigger moments for a continuous rewriting and reclaiming of one’s history based on such digging of new memories? Theorizing Memory: What is Then the Fault in Fault Lines? In different ways Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud have pointed out that language through which memories is expressed contains sedimented layers of emotionally resonant metaphors, knowledge, and associations. These metaphors and associations can only be expressed in particular languages, and images in any language other than the “original” will invariably suffer mutilation. In “Ethnicity and the Art of Memory,” Michael M. J. Fischer also points out that “much of the contemporary philosophical mood is to inquire into what is hidden in language, what is deferred by signs, what is pointed to, what is repressed, implicit, or mediated” (198). Alexander’s anxiety in representing her past experiences through memories is portrayed through her multiple migratory patterns from one nation to another (India, Sudan, England). Each nation offers her a different language of existence, namely Malayalam, Arabic, and English. As the narrative unfolds we learn that

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Alexander’s father immigrated to Sudan in 1956 to help Sudan establish its independent government. Alexander was only five years old when she left India and stayed in Sudan until the age of eighteen, making periodic visits between Khartoum and Kerala to visit her immediate family. At the age of eighteen, she went to England to pursue a doctoral degree. In 1973, still in her early twenties, she returned to Delhi and Hyderabad, staying in India until 1979 when she moved newly married, to New York City. Alexander’s place of residence during the period of both her childhood and young adulthood is Sudan. Yet the place that begins to constitute the site of her “deep memory” is Tiruvella in India. Deep memory is a time period when the subject remembers consciously his or her surroundings. Culbertson cites Charlotte Deblo as defining “deep memory” 7 —“the persistence of the past in its own perpetual present” (170). It is this memory of Ilya in Tiruvella that runs through the veins of both Alexander’s memoir and her body’s recollection of Ilya. Also, the representation of Sudan fades in her memoir, and what is high-lighted instead is her “external memory” of India. Culbertson, citing Deblo, calls this external memory “socially constructed, skating along the surface of words and engaging the intellect–––not the body’s re-experience” (170). In this context, Alexander constructs past places from two types of memories, “deep” and “external.” Such mobility within memory and acts of displacement complicate questions of representation. Interestingly enough, Alexander herself repeatedly highlights the limits of her memory and the effect of such limits on the narrative construction of both her past and present identity and her history as a migrant subject. Within the narrative, she shifts between consciously narrating what she remembers and fantasizing what she cannot remember. She insists, “I’m forced to fabricate, trust to the maquillage of words, weave tales” (1993 FL 65). Her fabrication of memory becomes a necessity for constructing her past. She writes again, “I needed to make up that memory, which didn’t exist, a conversation that hadn’t occurred, for that was the only way Khartoum could come back to me” (1993 FL 190). In order to make sense of her present state Alexander forges a sense of historical affinity toward her past based on her relation-

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ship to central figures in her memoir. For instance, she creates her grandmother Kunju, whom she never knew but yet longed for such an ancestral figure that “would allow [her] mouth to open, permit [her] to speak” (1993 FL 15). Such longings prompt Alexander to skip “a whole ring of life and [make up] a grandmother figure, part ghost, part flesh” (1993 FL 15). Alexander is quite selfconsciousness here for such forging of central characters in her narrative and confesses to readers “to free my voice, tell my story, I need to say something else. I never knew her. And that is the most brutal fact I have about her as she enters me, enters my life” (1993 FL 10). By acknowledging her fabrication of central figures like her own grandmother she is momentarily traumatized when she entertains the possibility of meeting her grandmother. She asks, “How would we possibly recognize each other, we who have never met in flesh? […] Would she be ashamed of me, a woman with no fixed place, a creature struggling to make herself up in a new world?” (1993 FL 15) Hence, her terror of misrepresentation does not stem from her uncomfortable relationship with imperial history but rather her own acknowledgement of self-consciously forging central figures within her narrative in order to make sense of her present. Other times this forging is a result of her memory loss. She replaces such memory loss with assumptions about her past, and her creation of counter-memory to fabricate the loss. She confesses by saying that “the house of memory is fragile; made up in the mind’s space” (1993 FL 3). Given the fragility of her memory, she justifies the need to “make up” counter-memory. Thus within the two versions of the memoir itself her grandfather Ilya becomes a figure who is associated with “awakening of her cultural sophistication” (Sultana 95) on one hand, while her counter-memory suggests Ilya as a sexual abuser. She justifies the usage of such counter-memory: “Where we go when words cannot yet happen, what a terrible counter memory wells up” (2003 FL 260). Theoretically then it is unclear which of the two memories is “made up” for the purpose of both the narrative and the history of herself to be (re)represented. Whatever may be Alexander’s justification to use countermemory, but according to Michel Foucault, this evocation of coun-

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ter-memory involves a radical disruption of the usual reading of history. In Alexander’s case, we read her history as a discontinuous process, moving backward in time. This discontinuous process of recalling and retelling, according to Foucault, is a result of counter-memory placing its attention on the “heterogeneous systems which masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 162). Foucault concludes his essay with a discussion of the discursive aspect of Nietzsche’s history and its impact on identity: The purpose of history guided by genealogy is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us. (162)

Contrary to Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s notion of history where subjects are not obliged to find the “roots” of their identity, but engage in the process of dissipation, we find in Alexander a deep contradictory desire to narrate the self within a particular version of history—a history based on her forgetful and often “made-up” memory. To extend this would also mean that Alexander’s construction of her past subjectivity relies upon her attention to her memory––a memory of herself rooted in familial and gendered expectations. She says, “The fault lay in the tension I felt between the claims of my intelligence––what my father had taught me to honor, what allowed me to live my life––and the requirements of a femininity my mother had been born and bred to” (1993 FL 102). Essential to the latter was an arranged marriage. Alexander knows that her mother’s traditional expectations will lead to an arranged marriage, and staying at home with her children. She plays upon this fascination and mystification with the custom of an “arranged marriage” to tactically draw her Western audience into her assumed oppressed space. However, she undermines her own reality, in which she was not, in fact, oppressed, but free to exercise her own desires. She exercises her choice by marrying a North American Caucasian man. First by migrating to England to receive an elite education, and then by marrying a Jewish-American man,

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her desires mimic the English language: seeking social control in conquering the gaze of the West. As a way to cover up her desires of coming to the West to free herself of traditional roles like arranged marriages, she manipulates her memory, creating a system of belief that is deeply rooted in the philosophical promises and mysticism of the East. Her subjectivity is constructed within her over-dramatized desires to belong to India––particularly by emphasizing her relationship with her grandfather. Her attachment to India becomes synonymous with her memory of her grandfather. She recalls: The moment of parting from Ilya […] became my trope of loss. Even now I see this tall figure standing in the sunlight at the edge of the runway in Cochin airport, or in the station at Madras. Just before the sun blinded me, I saw the tears on his face […]Coleridge wrote, quoting Plotinus in explanation of our bond to divinity. For me that bond comes from radical loss, the light pouring into the space where Ilya stood as the train that was carrying me moved its metal body into the future (1993 FL 63).

Here, Ilya’s relationship with Alexander is elevated as a “bond to divinity” and it is this “bond” that keeps resurfacing throughout her memoir. Such need to recover one’s past based on memory and bonding serves a deeper socio-psychological function. Said claims this function as arising “at a time of bewildering change, of unimaginable large and diffuse mass societies, competing nationalisms, and most important perhaps, the decreasing efficacy of religious, familial and dynastic bonds” (Said 177). Accordingly, on the one hand Alexander constructs a genealogy of herself based on her desire to align herself with a particular sense of nationalist history connected to her father and grandfather. On the other, she realizes the limitations placed upon her memory of such history by the “mists” in her memory, between herself and her forgotten subjects. What Alexander calls “mist” can also be seen as memory traces that are both extended and superimposed—many traces layered over one another in the same cognitive space. In Philosophy and Memory Trace, John Sutton citing van Gelder calls such layering “many representations in one representing.” Alexander also needs to create memories because she is prone to forgetting memories of a country (Sudan) where she spent her

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young adulthood. Alexander’s mother accuses her of not recalling Khartoum, a place in which she spent more than a decade of her childhood. “Nothing, you remember nothing” (1993 FL 191), says her mother. Alexander replies by saying, “Amma, I do remember but it doesn’t feel like real memories. Do you know what I mean? Real, raw stuff. None of that. Perhaps it’s just that I’m scared, having covered it over for so long” (1993 FL 191). When Alexander cannot remember what she calls “real, raw stuff,” she represses such memory out of fear of misrepresentation. The possibility of representing the self is weighed against the balance of memory and history’s mechanism of deletion and distortion. This balancing act problematizes the construction of a personal history and opens up the caveat to interrogate the site of memory itself in the construction of such history and self-representation. In Alexander’s case her subjectivity, as a dislocated subject, is not just based on personal experience and memory, but also on the act of forgetting. She says, “What I’ve forgotten is what I have written” (1993 FL 3). However, the notion of remembering and forgetting of personal experiences is never this direct and unmediated as Alexander makes it out to be, but is usually assumed and is fundamentally discursive. Joan Scott also challenges the category of personal experience being used as a central reference in the construction of personal narratives. She writes, in her essay “Experience” in Feminists Theorize the Political: Subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to a fixed order of meaning. Since discourse is by definition shared, experience is collective as well as individual. Experience is the subject’s history. Language is the site of history’s enactment. Historical exploration cannot––therefore, separate the two (Scott 22).

Thus, writing—the medium through which such history and memory is transmitted—begins to play a pivotal role. Alexander deliberately forges anew what she cannot remember. Under the guise of fantasy, she interrogates her own state of amnesia caused by these colliding memories. She nervously questions her limitations and asks herself in the very beginning of her memoir: “What

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could I ever be but a mass of faults, a faultmass?” (1993 FL 2) Here we need to take the rhetoric of self-disclosure of being a “faultmass” seriously, since what follows such a disclosure is a fundamental question: mass of faults––in what respect? For someone to become convinced he or she has forgotten crucial experiences of the past is for that person to open his/her subjectivity to profound historical disruption. If experience, according to Scott, is indeed the subject’s history, then forgetting of such experiences can only lead to creating faulty and erroneous representations of both one’s self and history. In light of such an assertion, Alexander’s revised and expanded version of Fault Lines provides an avenue to interrogate the repercussions of not forgetting but remembering the past, and how such memory shifts the reader’s understanding of layered (re)presentation. (Re)presenting the Forgotten: Toward Understanding “Faultmass” The term “(re)presentation” seems to lead in more than one direction. While writing about this dialectic between remembering and forgetting of both the cognitive and geographic space, Charles E. Scott contends in The Time of Memory that an individual thinks and speaks in the “withdrawal of appearance as well as in the disclosiveness of appearance” (39), and argues that the acts of both self-remembrance and forgetting occur in the withdrawal and disclosiveness of appearance. In this context, to remember is to forget and absurdly, to forget is to remember. Thus, “concealment and forgetfulness of the appearing of the self accompany the appearing self. Forgetting itself slips into a concealing, and indeed in such a way that we ourselves along with our relation to what is forgotten, fall into concealment” (39). But is concealment necessarily forgetting? Such a dual approach to examining contemporary migrant memory in terms of remembering and forgetting, mapped as a juncture between the time and space from which the subject remembers and forgets, makes the charting of discursive migrant identity/writing possible. In Fault Lines, Alexander explores the loss and violence of relocation and displacement and also her deep concern for survival in

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splintered spaces. Her memory is split between and within multiple migrations, causing her to be subjected to what she calls “the exhilarating dangers of memory” (1993 FL 5). This is what Homi Bhabha in “DisseniNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation”calls the splitting of a subject caught in the tension of demand and desire. It is precisely such modes of tension that for Alexander provides the ambivalence in the double narrative movement between location and dislocation, longing and belonging, and most importantly remembering and forgetting, as she rewrites and reclaims herself into the text of her new nation. For her, rewriting demands retracing. In the act of retracing and forgetting she recovers the past. Hence, she locates “the dark soil of self” on the very site of her ancestral home. Having left India at the age of five, she remarks how her life is “shattered into bits and pieces. In my dreams I am haunted by thoughts of a homeland I will never find. So I turned my lines to a different aesthetic, one that I build upon out of the stuff around me, improvising as I go along” (1993 FL 27). “Being obliged to forget,” as Bhabha reminds us, “becomes the basis for remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending and liberating forms of cultural identification” (“DissemiNation” 161). For Alexander such a shattering causes memories not only to be distributed over Alexander’s cognitive space but also superimposed as “traces” in her memory as she rewrites her past. Hence, what emerges in her narrative is retrieval of superimposed memory, a memory that is noisy, ambiguous, or systematically distorted. In Alexander’s case, this systematic distortion is perhaps caused by the intrusions of undesired memories into her desired memories. Desirable memories of Ilya’s “tall figure standing in the sunlight” (1993 FL 63) with tears on his face are placed side by side (a decade later in her revised version) as she imagines telling her father, “Appa, Ilya hurt me sexually when I was a child. I could not bear to remember” (2003 FL 241). Such “precariously constructed” past is a form of controlled memory––which, according to Jacques Derrida, is always problematic within the psychic archive––suggesting a synthetic construction as opposed to a “real” construction. In Positions Derrida calls this synthetic construction

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a “prosthesis from the inside” (11-19). This prosthesis in Alexander’s memory makes her question the unsettled spaces in her past, rather than move toward any conclusions. At the very beginning of her memoir Alexander questions her origins, and hence the writing itself begins not by narrating the past, but rather by interrogating it. The narrative begins with a depiction of the past geographic space and her past memories of such a space as “unsettled”: Where did I come from? How did I become what I am? How shall I start to write myself, configure my “I” as Other, image this life I lead, here, now, in America?…But the house of memory is fragile; made up in the mind's space. Even what I remember best, I am forced to admit is what has flashed up for me in the face of present danger, at the tail end of the century, where everything is to be elaborated, spelt out, precariously constructed. And there is little sanctity, even in remembrance. What I have forgotten is what I have written. (1993 FL 2-3)

For Alexander the act of remembering something not present becomes present. Charles E. Scott writes, “we might speak of remembering as an advancing decision, as a determinant presenting of the remembered in a division from its own happening––as a past events coming to presence and determination in a occurrence of separation. [Thus] is remembrance a product of separation and suspension?” (34-55). Here, as Charles E Scott points out, “Remembering hovers in temporal uncertainty, presenting absence of origin […] positing a loss of the depositor, giving loss to an origination. Remembering seems to compose a place in time” (55). For Alexander, remembering is always a discursive writing act that requires a narration in past present, a dialectic play between being home and homeless simultaneously. For Alexander then, being at “home” and “homeless” are not matters of movement just in physical spaces, but are also a mapping of the coordinates of time, place, and forgetting in the memory space. One is at home when one inhabits a cognitive environment where one’s identity is best mediated, and homeless when such a cognitive environment is eschewed. John Berger articulates this point. He writes: “Once uprooted from the ‘original’ social space— no succeeding one becomes truly home” (138). Stuart Hall in his essay “Minimal Selves” echoes similar sentiments when he com-

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pares migration to a “one way trip,” and writes, “there is no ‘home’ to go back to” (44). Although movement from one nation to another causes a certain degree of homelessness, the new space also provides for the migrant a kind of diasporic intimacy. Alexander seems to be obsessed with depicting her fractures and losses and undermines a simultaneous intimacy between strangers that any dislocation can produce. This intimacy is only a result of uprootedness and defamiliarization. Defining diasporic intimacy, Svetlana Boym observes: Their intimate experiences occur against a foreign background, where they are aware of the unfamiliar stage set whether they like it or not […] Diasporic intimacy can be approached only through indirection and intimation, through stories and secrets […] Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion but only a precarious affection– –no less deep, while aware of its transience. (499)

Abdul JanMohamed calls these diasporic subjects “specular border intellectuals” (97). These subjects live and write the evershifting boundaries of the national space from the very margins of their own nations and elsewhere. In his essay “Worldiness-without World, Homelessness-as Home: Toward a Definition of a Specular Border Intellectual,” JanMohamed makes a brilliant distinction between the “syncretic 8 and specular border intellectuals” based on the “intentionality of their intellectual orientation” [author’s emphasis] (97). From the very beginning of her memoir Alexander performs the psychic formation of a specular intellectual by declaring the impossibility of spelling out the part of such a broken geography as hers, and expressing her anxiety in representing the faultlines that exist between her disparate existences. However, in reality, she is closer to a “syncretic” intellectual, one who is at home in both cultures. In the very first page of her memoir, readers are introduced to her in a café in New York as she eats a tuna sandwich with her friend Florence. During their meal Florence asks: “Will you write us a memoir?” (1993 FL 1). Florence Howe, an editor of the Feminist Press that published Fault Lines as Alexander’s acknowledgement suggests, “not only started me off on this project, but read the manuscript with care and understanding” (1993 FL xii). I point this

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out only to alert readers to a kind of psychological and geographical comfort that Alexander shares with Howe that allows her first to agree to write a memoir, and later, to share intimate portions of her life as depicted in the memoir with someone from “here and now in America”—an intimacy that is rare among specular intellectuals. Also, her confrontation with her past abuse/abuser also takes place in NYC post 9/11. It is the horrors of 9/11 in her space of intimacy (home in New York City) that force her to confront other spaces of turmoil in her memory space. In an interview Alexander says: “after what has just happened in NYC I did not want to be swallowed up in the past, with so much molten and flowing all around, the world I love in turmoil” (Basu, 32). Yet it is precisely what happens. Her memory of Ilya’s abuse “[swallows] her up in the past.” JanMohamed’s concept of the “specular border intellectual” acknowledges the itinerary of the fragmented subject, but also uses the distinction of the formation of subjects in a different manner. Displaced and fragmented intellectuals, he says, cannot be distinguished merely as self/other, center/periphery, provincial/metropol, and so on, but can be examined through their trail of border crossings. It is precisely this trail of crossing borders, gathering and scattering many times in different borders, that causes the fragmentation in the self, memory, and text. Alexander expresses this very “split” of her own by shuttling back and forth between her old and new nation––between Hyderabad and New York City: Sometimes a voice rises in my dreams, as floodwaters rise, subsiding suddenly. And the parched landscape of Hyderabad, in the season before the rain falls, starts to crackle with flames and the flames become the blue gas flames in the stove in my New York City kitchen and in my dream I have to hold myself back with both hands, tie the end of my sari to the refrigerator handle to prevent me from tumbling over the slopes into the fault lines that split my imagined earth [. . .] Shelter, unhousedness, the multiple speeches that surround us, broken walls, prison cells. The thoughts turn jagged in me. Everything is overcrowded. Everything is emptied out. I dream of barbed wire (1993 FL 128).

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This passage in particular illustrates a key feature of Alexander’s memory construction, and more broadly the dislocated migrant subject’s discontinuous memory. For Alexander the longing for the past nation is only a longing and not a state of belonging. Alexander unconsciously draws a line of continuity between her dreams that originate in Hyderabad using a metaphorical “flame” that extends as the blue gas flames in the stove in her New York City kitchen. Here, both time and memory are devoid of spatial lapse and are constructed through an imaginary continuity. Like Alexander, the migrant writer also employs intertextual devices to rewrite the past and scrutinize the present. Such a re-writing rehistoricizes both the current national space where one cannot belong and the past national space where the subject longs to belong. Such a pull between two longings split the migrant’s memory between several spaces. For Alexander, her encounter with this process of splitting happens with the moment of the train leaving for another new destination: As the train started up, metal wheels biting into tracks, I felt for an instant as if I had metamorphosed […] Looking back, I feel as if in that instant my life split, then doubled itself, in a terrible concupiscence. That moment of parting from IIya, repeated time and again, only to leave again, became my trope of loss (1993 FL 63).

These acts of entering and re-entering and repeated leaving of spaces and nations cause the migrant subject to metamorphose and split like a vessel. What Alexander describes as her “trope of loss” is layered for the migrant subject: loss of self, loss of memory, loss of nation, loss of national identity, and loss of nationalism and others. But since the gains are not as pronounced as the losses, the migrant is stuck with the image of loss. Both these internal and external visualizations of “fragments” in the migrant selves cause the migrant to imagine the space of the nation, both past and present, as fragmented too. Different parts of the self and memory align with different parts of the nation. The narratives of the imagined community, when constituted by migrants, confront “two incommensurable temporalities of meaning that threaten its cohe-

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rence” (“DissemiNation” 158). These “incommensurable temporalities of meaning” also threaten, for the migrant any unified consciousness of time and memory. For these decolonized subjects then, the dimension of past events from which that they are cut off, yet within which they conceal their memory includes a “loss of touch and sight.” Scott in Time of Memory calls this loss “forgetfulness—as it includes a ghostly quality of withdrawn presence” (5). Hence, the identity of these migrant subjects in their past home(s) or nation(s) can only be constructed based on the actual remembered time and the space movement within that past time frame that not only indicates presence, but is always in relation to the present. Alexander’s memoir, on the other hand, although drawing from the past, is profoundly future oriented. She enacts what bell hooks call “a politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as it once was, a kind of useless act, from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present” (147). Alexander politicizes and recreates her memory/experience to recompose her own sense of disintegrated self. Also, rather than constructing nostalgia as a “useless act,” Alexander makes it a rather useful act, where her repeated forging of memory—what she refers to as reclaiming previously unclaimed experiences not only carries her narrative forward, but concurrently creates a tormented and traumatized past, a curious Western readership, and a mutilated self that allows her to continue in a future from where she can safely look back. Based on politicizing her memory and making nostalgia and trauma a useful part of the narrative, what it ultimately achieves is a questionable representation of her own subjectivity. Poststructuralist theories of subject formation, particularly the formation of displaced subjects, have already provided us a space for understanding the nature of overlapping and superimposed subjectivity. Rather than being selfconscious about such overlapping representation, when subjects (re)write past pleasant experiences of either central figures/histories in exchange for traumatic ones to assert one’s doubly marginalized status 9 we encounter a serious problem. It is my hope that

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such representations, rather than be celebrated, be read with caution. Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

2003 FL. In the “Book of Childhood” Alexander uses as an epigraph Walter Benjamin’s invocation of returning to the “buried” past over and over again and “conduct himself like a man digging,” as Benjamin would say. Alexander in the epigraph cites Benjamin from the Berlin Chronicle: “He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one over soil.” This invocation serves as a justification for Alexander to both “dig” and re-represent her past with new memories in her 2003 expanded edition of Fault Lines. Ray distinguishes quite aptly the difference between homelessness caused by material deprivation versus Alexander’s position as being a homeless woman to “register the narrator’s exile and nomadic status.” Ray writes, “this sense of being a “nowhere” creature often very enabling for a cosmopolitical position, is for Alexander yet another instance of free falling.” (“Ethical Encounters” 51) “I picked through any books I could find on trauma and trauma theory” (2003 FL 242). Such statements are a clear indication how external knowledge in Alexander’s case precedes self-knowledge, or the subject’s experience and confrontation of particular events from the past. It is only after reading and intellectually being exposed to psychoanalytical theories on the impact of sexual trauma on the self that Alexander begins to process her own trauma of being sexually abused in the past. Felman says: “The specific task of the literary testimony, is in other words, to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes […] what is happening to others—in one’s own body”(Felman, 108). “I began this writing in New York City in the months immediately after September 11, 2001, and completed it, a lifetime away, in my mother’s house in Tiruvella […] This is a book of slow, sometimes uncertain accretion […] The destruction visited on the island where I make my home, a second home, tore open the skin of memory, made me start to write again. But to close this book I had to go back to India. I had to return to the house of childhood” (2003 FL 229). Alexander uses this as the title of her chapter in the revised version of Fault Lines (2003). Deblo provides an example of what she means by “deep memory.” She writes: I feel it again, through my whole body, which becomes a block of pain, and I feel death seizing me, I feel myself die […] the cry awakens me, and I emerge from the nightmare, exhausted…” (Culbertson 170). The “syncretic intellectual,” JanMohamed suggests, is: More “at home” in both cultures than his or her specular counterpart, is able to combine ele-

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The Postcolonial Citizen ments of the two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences.…By contrast, the specular border intellectual, while perhaps equally familiar with two cultures, finds himself or herself unable or unwilling to be “at home” in these societies. Caught between several cultures or groups, none of which are deemed sufficiently enabling or productive, the specular intellectual subjects the cultures to analytic scrutiny rather than combining them; he or she utilizes his or her interstitial cultural space as a vantage point from which to define, explicitly, other utopian possibilities of group formation (97). In this case Alexander is doubly marginalized—first, as a postcolonial female subject, and, second, a sexually traumatized postcolonial voice (based on her new memory of sexual abuse).

Chapter 3 Double Displacement, Homelessness, and Nomadism: Questions of Belonging in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narratives It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. —Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake The space of the foreigner is a moving train, a plane in flight, the very transition that precludes stopping. As to landmarks, there are none. —Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva’s provocation that “should one recognize, that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?”(14) 1 is not just a provocation, but a radical shift in the way one determines migrant subjectivity. Kristeva, in a similar note, would also equate the foreigner with the stranger, as well as the idea of strangeness within each displaced foreigner. Being a foreigner, and more so what constitutes

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foreignness, i.e., a sense of detachment, alienation, unfamiliarity with language, place, culture, people, indifference, animosity from the new culture, etc., is no longer something that is imposed upon by the “host” 2 but is already present within the “guest” who has just arrived. Foreignness is, then, beyond the terminology of immigration rhetoric and regulations, visas, and passports, but predicated upon a dramatization of loss and aloofness, “not belonging to any place, anytime, any love. A lost origin, the impossibility to take root, a rummaging memory, the present in abeyance (Kristeva 7)—altogether taken to form the sense of foreignness within. However, the story of global displacement, I want to suggest, is a kind of double confinement, a double strangeness, a double foreignness for women and second-generation subjects. Based on the traditional definition of postcolonial migrancy, a second-generation subject who is born and brought up in the West doesn’t quite fit the category of being a postcolonial migrant. Yet, as a result of his or her associations with foreigners, in this case, his or her own parents and their associations, these second-generation subjects are what I call migrants by affiliation. I want to suggest, then, that although the second generation born in the United Kingdom or America are not “foreigners” in the traditional sense of the term, they share similar feelings of displacement and alienation both in their own countries of birth and upon returning to their parents’ homeland. Here, the second generation comes face to face with their blood relations (grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins). This interaction itself, both literally and symbolically, manifests into shared spaces of differences experienced by the second generation in their ancestral home. Secondly, for the second generation a series of maladjustments that takes place within the dominant culture (as a result of their “minority” status ) and their home front (as a result of their imposed parents’ culture) provide for them feelings of alienation, estrangements and dislocation in two or more spaces simultaneously. While the first generation longs to go back to their country of birth and perform temporary moments of belonging, the second-generation struggles to “fit in” within their country of birth itself. The concept of home, or a lack thereof for the second generation, is conflicted from its inception.

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In Jhumpa Lahiri’s novels and short stories these predicaments for women and the second generation as they explore their “foreignness from within” is examined in a rather continuous and deliberate fashion. In examining “foreignness” or such alien conditions Lahiri specifically focuses on the various nuances of migration, mostly intellectual (post-1960s) to America, and the effect of such migrations on the first-generation subjects and their American-born offspring. N.V.M. Gonzales uses the term “fusion of migrancy and exile” (82) to describe Filipino/a American literature and this is also applicable to Lahiri’s works. What is unique in Lahiri’s work is that she not only creates the first-generation migrant subject as “exilic,” but also continues to show how the secondgeneration American-born subjects are equally exilic, nomadic and displaced in their land of birth and elsewhere. Such exilic status for Lahiri’s second generation subjects are not always as a result of leaving their home/nation permanently to go elsewhere, but are more a feature of being caught in-between two cultures and two selves (their Bengali parents in America and their own IndianAmerican identity in a culture that marks them as “hybrids”). Many of Lahiri’s subjects in her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, are postcolonial (Bengali-Indians) in origin (coming from Kolkata) and hence “foreigners”/migrants in America. In her second novel, The Namesake, she combines the struggles to belong in America for the first-generation Bengali immigrant along with a different kind of struggle to belong for the secondgeneration American-born Indian––the “hyphenated” subject. In her most recent collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, she extends both the nature of cultural hybridity for these hyphens side by side with the tensions and maladjustments they share with their first-generation migrated parents from India. These hyphenated subjects have ties to their postcolonial worlds as a result of their parental upbringing and Bengali “home” culture, but often do not consider themselves “postcolonial” subjects. Rather, they identify themselves as South Asian Americans, or simply as “Americans” who are well aware of their “minority” status within America. Given their self-acknowledgment of being a minority, and often their struggle to blend in with the dominant culture, these second-

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generation subjects are often subjected to a “double minority” status and are often not accepted as “real” Americans. 3 They are marked racially as “brown” and “Asian” in America, and often find themselves “out of place” culturally, geographically and linguistically in India. As a result of this double displacement, I want to argue, Lahiri’s second-generation subjects become psychically and physically nomadic. This new kind of nomad, or what Ketu Katrak calls “ethnoglobal”––“one that certainly transcends narrow nationalisms but celebrates an ethnic heritage along with evoking an exemplary universalist humanism” (Kartak 2), become the subjects of Lahiri’s work. For Shirley Lim, such nomadic subjects who live in North America exhibit what she defines as the “exilic” as opposed to the “immigrant” sensibility: The exilic experience, like that of immigration, is the condition of voluntary or involuntary separation from one’s place of birth, but unlike immigration, this physical separation is offset by continued bonds to the lost homeland, together with non-integration into the affiliative order in which the exhilic subject is contingently placed (Shirley Lim 296).

If we take into account Katrak’s suggestion of “universalist humanism” that Lahiri’s works invoke and Lim’s formulation of the immigrant as an “exilic” subject, then Lahiri’s subjects that are both universal and exilic call for a fresh look at how the field of postcolonial and Asian American studies redefines previous claims of belonging. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri deliberately shifts her focus to the second-generation South Asian-born Indian subjects, and plants them in America. The clash between the first and second generations is more pronounced in the Unaccustomed Earth than the Interpreter of Maladies, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. It is a type of emotional and cultural clash that causes these subjects to dislocate in more than one direction–– spatial, psychic, linguistic and geographic. The dislocation may be read, as what Bhabha would say as a result of the tension and desire to belong to multiple locations, yet not finding a sense of home in any. Contrary to Bhabha’s suggestion, I read the dislocation of

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these subjects as twofold: 1) As a result of belonging to multiple homes concurrently these subjects have many homes, and it is in this act of multiple belongings that the subjects are split. 2) The death of a parental figure disrupts for these subjects a sense of roots and routes resulting in a loss of a home(land). Why does the trope of death reoccur in so many of her narratives? How these subjects come to terms with the deaths of these parental figures also becomes central in their acts of un(belonging) to their motherland/fatherland. This concurrent overlap between the death of a mother/father figure and a loss of homeland (that such a demise marks) is an exploration I analyze in this chapter. Like most first-generation immigrants, Lahiri’s Bengali immigrants are also fragmented and share an in-between space between two nations, two selves, two languages, and two or more homes. But it is the doubly fragmented second-generation American-born Indian subjects who are not only caught in a liminal space, but I would assert, also inhabit a mutilated space. Such mutilation is caused by not so much geographic dislocation, but by psychic dislocation and disorientation caused by death and grieving. Kaushik’s escalating isolation and dislocation coupled with a growing distance from his own father in the two short stories “Year’s End” and the final story in Unaccustomed Earth titled “Going Ashore” are exaggerated by a sense of untamed freedom that comes as a result of being rootless. Such rootlessness is caused by the literal “cutting” of the parental root, i.e., the untimely death of his mother. She is only forty-two when she dies of breast cancer. Similarly, the news of his father’s sudden death while visiting Ohio during his semester long sabbatical leave causes Gogol to lose track of his route, if not his roots. On Exile, Death and Dying The trope of death is overwhelmingly evident in all of Lahiri’s works. From the death of the unborn child in “The Temporary Matter,” to the death of Ashima’s father, news that arrives via a telephone from Calcutta––to Ashoke’s sudden death in Ohio, followed by Kaushik’s mother’s death to cancer, and finally Kaushik’s own death––is plenty to investigate the relevance of death in the

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life of a migrant/exile. In this segment I want to concentrate on the “karma” of the second-generation “brown folks” (to borrow Vijay Prasad’s terminology)––namely the male subjects in Lahiri’s work. In what ways does the death of a parental figure provoke these subjects to be rooted, uprooted, become exilic and nomadic? For the first generation the news of death of a parent that arrives in America becomes either another step closer to losing the urgency to return back to one’s homeland, or the reverse i.e., the loss of a parent makes one’s memory of the past nostalgic that one must return over and over again to connect to one’s roots. For the second-generation, however, the loss of a parental figure becomes a loss of both root and route. It is a loss of root given that these parental figures are the only reminder on an on-going basis for the second-generation regarding their ties to their ancestral homeland. It is a loss of route since the very parental figures that migrated to America or elsewhere, carrying with them the stories and cultures of the past and the trajectory of their travels are now dead. The news of death of a loved one for a migrant often doesn’t provide immediate closure (particularly when the death takes place in their homeland), and imposes a painful reminder of one’s split from his/her home/land. Kristeva calls this loss “a secret wound, often unknown to himself, drives the foreigner to wandering” (Kristeva 5). I want to invoke here the figure of Gogol from Lahiri’s first novel, Namesake, and continue my line of inquiry through Kaushik—Lahiri’s most recent protagonist in the last three intertwined narratives in the Unaccustomed Earth. The last three intertwined narratives in the collection Unaccustomed Earth will speak directly to the kind of fragmentation, displacement and mutilation the second-generation, American-born, Indo-American subjects face. Contrary to the suggestion that for the second generation the sense of dislocation and rupture is caused by a clash between the culture of their parents and their own American identity, I would like to offer an alternative reading; i.e., their rupture is caused by the death and dying of a parental figure. Ironically an untimely death of a parental figure becomes the site of mourning and melancholia 4 and profound loss for Gogol and Kau-

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shik’s relationships to both India and America––a loss that disables their relationship to their origins. While Gogol is American born and only visits India occasionally with his parents during vacations, and never quite seems to feel a sense of belonging in India, Lahiri creates Kaushik as a figure who closely resembles that of a global nomad––one that seems to belong in many places, and yet never can quite be rooted in any. Kaushik also is American born, but his parents take him back to Bombay when he is nine. Then, when Kaushik is sixteen, the family returns to America, and it is in America that Kaushik’s mother dies of cancer—a death that permanently disconnects Kaushik’s affiliation to both his mother and his motherland. Upon the death of his mother, his father marries a woman named Chitra who shares nothing in common with his own mother. Suddenly Kaushik becomes an older (step)brother to two young girls and is forced to give up his own room in his house (and move into the guest bedroom). The changes in his father’s new life destabilize and disrupt Kaushik’s process of mourning for his mother. It is precisely this disruption that leads Kaushik to enter his stage of melancholia, and causes distortion of his ego. Such “dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds” (Gay, 585) also causes a series of reactions to his father’s new environment. Not only is he not able to accept Chitra as a “replacement” mother, but also he is sickened to see Chitra using his mother’s kitchen: I had no memories of my mother cooking there, but the space still retained her presence more than any other part of the house. The jade and spider plants she had watered were still thriving on the windowsill, the orange-and-white sunburst clock she’d so loved the design of, with its quivering second hand, still marking the time on the wall. (“Year’s End” 263)

In the midst of realizing his own anger and aloofness provoked by the presence of his new step-mother and father, he makes a profound discovery about the commonality that bonds him with his two younger step sisters, Rupa and Piu. Kaushik realizes that, “like them I had lost a parent and was now being asked to accept a replacement (“Year’s End” 272). Yet this commonality outweighs Kaushik’s melancholic state he experiences after his mother’s

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death. His final outburst upon discovering Piu and Rupa sprawled on the carpet looking at the pictures of his mother (which his father had sealed and hidden in a closet after his mother’s death) becomes testimony to his melancholia. He is unable to contain his rage when he finds them looking at the photographs, and has his final outburst when he discovers Rupa and Piu exploring some old photographs of his mother: “My mother wearing a swimsuit by the edge of the pool in our old club in Bombay. My mother sitting with me on her lap on the brown wooden steps of our house in Cambridge. My mother and father standing before I was born in front of a snow-caked hedge” (“Year’s End” 286). Kaushik is possessive, and is unable to share with his stepsisters these intimate moments of his past as represented in this photographs. This inability to share his past results in the ultimate rupture and distancing that takes place between Kaushik and his father’s new life. His anger is displaced on Rupa and Piu, and his outburst is extreme and indicative of Kaushik’s inability to accept Chitra as a replacement “mother-figure.” He tells his stepsisters, “Well, you’ve seen it for yourselves, how beautiful my mother was. How much prettier and more sophisticated than yours. Your mother is nothing in comparison. Just a servant to wash my father’s clothes and cook his meals” (“Year’s End” 286). This outburst becomes the single most evidence of Kaushik’s continued state of mourning resulting in melancholia and an inability to move on/forward. His father’s remarriage not only becomes a visible reminder of his late mother’s absence from his own life, but also begins to act as a gesture of a second mourning for his own mother. The outburst becomes Kaushik’s final distancing from his own father, his home in America, and hence the beginning of his rootlessness and nomadism. In Lahiri’s representations of the second generation (particularly the male subjects), we find that these subjects rupture completely after the literal death of a parent. Gogol’s rupture is quite different from Kaushik’s. While Kaushik’s mother’s death stalls Kaushik from moving on in any meaningful manner, for Gogol, his father’s death becomes the moment of reconciliation with his own struggling hyphenated identity.

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It is only after Gogol’s father suddenly dies in Ohio, and later that year during Christmas that Gogol retreats to his own room and reestablishes his connection to Nikolai Gogol, and begins to take any interest in understanding the geneology of his own name. As he sits on his bed Gogol notices, The jacket is missing, the title on the page practically faded.…The spine cracks faintly when he opens it to the title page. The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. “For Gogol Ganguli,”…”the man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name” is written within quotation marks.…His father had stood in the doorway, just there, an arm’s reach from where he sits now. He had left him to discover the inscription on his own, never again asking Gogol what he’d thought of the book, never mentioning the book at all. The name he had so detested, here hidden and preserved––that was the first thing his father had given him. (Namesake, 289)

He starts to read “The Overcoat” from the book that his father had given him for his fourteenth birthday. His father is now dead, yet the book stands in-between them reminding Gogol of his father’s life. The act of reading serves as a symbolic gesture of both mourning and remembering his father. While Gogol can engage in the act of mourning by simply reading and reflecting, Kaushik, on the other hand, never quite has the time, or what he calls the “privilege” to mourn. “Being with her through her illness day after day,” Kaushik says, “denied us the privilege” (“Year’s End” 253) to mourn her passing. Long before his mother dies, Kaushik begins to prepare for her death. When he returns to Boston and his family is living with Hema’s (until they find the house his mother really wants), Kaushik spends isolated time walking through the woods. It is in these woods that Kaushik reveals his wish to Hema: “It makes me wish we weren’t Hindu so that my mother could be buried somewhere. But she’s made us promise we’ll scatter her ashes into the Atlantic” (“Once in a Lifetime” 249). Somehow, the idea that his mother’s ashes will be scattered in the Atlantic doesn’t sit well with Kaushik. It is the scattering of the ashes in a foreign land, in a foreign ocean, that permanently disconnects Kaushik’s ties to his mother and motherland. Latently, Kaushik wishes that the last

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rituals of his mother be performed in India and is troubled when such a desire is never quite expressed by him. Unlike Gogol, who never quite liked visiting India, Kaushik admits to Hema that he actually liked living in India and feels a bond with the country. The metaphor and symbolism of death and sickness in the parental figures of second-generation South Asian immigrants distances them from their motherland and fatherland. This distancing, other than causing a symbolic death of the origin, often mutilates, fragments and disables the second-generation psyche in more than one way—causing a sense of bewilderment and wandering, a wandering that is directionless, a wandering that ultimately leads to a demise, and that, too, in isolation. Upon the deaths of these parental figures, this mutilation is deferred and transferred to the second-generation American-born subjects, who “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth” 5 (from the epigraph by Nathaniel Hawthorne). Yet, we find that both Gogol and Kaushik are newly planted in a country where they have no ancestors, no previous roots, and as a result struggle to survive within their hyphenated bodies and selves. In this “unaccustomed earth” both Kaushik and Gogol are uncertain as to what their future holds. When Gogol finally opens the first few pages of The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol, he notices the chronology of the author’s life. “Born March 20, 1809. The death of his father, 1825. Publishes his first story, 1830. Travels to Rome, 1837. Dies 1852, one month before his forty-third birthday” (Namesake, 289). Gogol realizes that in another ten years he will be the author Gogol’s age and questions about his own state of mortality come to his mind. Will he ever marry again and have “a child to name”? (289) he wonders. It is important to understand that Gogol’s maladjustment and struggle to understand his place in America start long before his father actually dies. Apart from the parallel with Nikolai Gogol’s life that Gogol fears (the author’s short life, life-long depression and melancholia and one who dies as a virgin), the name alone is a source of much trauma for Gogol Ganguly, who struggles to find a home in both America and India. For Gogol such a name alone is the ultimate act of cultural violence by dislocating him into a

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“third space”––a violence that disables Gogol from assimilating in either culture. It is perhaps Gogol’s inability to completely belong in either his Bengali-oriented home or the larger American culture that he feels most in exile. When Gogol turns eighteen, he goes to court and changes his name to Nikhil, a gesture of turning Indian, only to discover that in his adult life he is often called “Nick.” Such discomfort with his own identity provoked by his naming takes a positive turn toward reconciliation only after his father’s death. However, his father’s death also prompts his own mother to finally return to India and spend at least half her time in her homeland and away from her children. Yet, Gogol finds it difficult to confront his dislocated self without the aid of his parental figures. His father is dead and his mother decides to weaken her ties to America. As a consequence Gogol feels, The givers and keepers of Gogol’s name are far from him. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different sort of departure…Once a week he will hear “Gogol” over the wires, see it typed on a screen…Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself loves, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so cease to exist. (289)

Yet, unlike Kaushik, as long as Gogol’s mother lives Gogol will always exist. For Gogol his struggle to penetrate through the inner psyche of his ancestral homeland is not so much as a result of his connection to his mother, but a lack of understanding of his father. It is precisely this lack of understanding that problematizes for Gogol any negotiation with his root and the route of his past. Tragically, upon his father’s death, the possibility of ever being able to penetrate the psyche of his father, and hence an understanding of his own relationship to India is lost significantly. Given that Gogol’s mother Ashima survives and decides to spend her time both in India and America, Gogol is at least saved from a permanent disconnection or loss from his root and routes to his mother/land. In Unaccustomed Earth, however, Kaushik’s fragmentation begins with the news of his mother having cancer. He describes the

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news as “a nauseating sensation that has taken hold the day in Bombay that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped anchor in me and never fully left” (“Year’s End” 254). Kaushik’s mother dies, and as a result his father remarries and brings his new wife, along with her two young children, to America. His father’s new life with his new wife and new children becomes for Kaushik a gesture to “move on” and find a new life for himself. Yet, it is precisely in this act of “moving on” that Kaushik becomes rootless. If Kaushik indeed moves on it is by “running away”. At one level Kaushik is conscious of his actions, as he leaves his two young step-sisters alone that night and runs away, while his father and Chitra are at a party: “My actions felt spontaneous, almost involuntary, propelled by the adrenaline of the state of emergency, but I realize now that on some level I had been thinking of running away for days “(“Year’s End” 287). This “running away” from home for Kaushik becomes the first gesture in embracing a state of nomadism and wandering that is provoked by his mother’s untimely death. Kaushik is never able to come to terms with either his mother’s death, or the choices that his father makes as a result of his mother’s death. His mother literally dies and his father metaphorically fades from his life–– resulting in a complete disappearence of Kaushik’s roots and routes. Kaushik then becomes the figure through which Lahiri performs an extreme mutilation of her second-generation Americanborn Indian subject resulting in the unnatural and untimely death of Kaushik himself drowning in the Indian Ocean. Right before the forces of the tsunami suck Kaushik, he confronts his rootlessness. His colleague Henrik asks, “Where is your family?” “My mother’s dead. My father lives in the United States.” “But you’re Indian, no?” “Yes.” “You live in India?” “I don’t live anywhere at the moment” (328). Right before the waves of tsunami overtake Kaushik, he sees his mother also swimming, “sees her body still vital, a brief

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blur…He dipped his hands into the water, cooling off his neck and face…Then he unbuttoned his shirt, felt the sun strike his skin. He wanted to swim to the cove as Henrik had to show his mother he was not afraid” (331). The demise of Kaushik can be symbolically seen as a simultaneous reunification with his mother and motherland, but comes at the cost of extreme alienation, a sense of homelessness and psychic wound caused by his mother’s untimely passing. In Lahiri’s work the tropes of death and dying manifest themselves in levels of fracture and displacement in the formation of second-generation subjectivity. Lahiri’s displaced subjects like Gogol and Kaushik are not just displaced as an effect of such symbolic and literal deaths, but they themselves begin to inhabit the modes and modalities of death and dying themselves. I would like to suggest that the death of a parental figure raises the stakes of belonging for the second-generation Indian-American subjects. Here the death of the mother or the father also becomes the simultaneous death of belonging to the motherland and the fatherland. It is the death of memory and a disruption of the hyphenated existence when the hyphen itself is disrupted. Derrida would call such a disruption an incision in the memory space—an incision sharp enough and deep enough to inflict psychic trauma in the secondgeneration immigrant figure. “The Foreigner” as Exiles and Nomads in Lahiri’s Works Lahiri’s subjects, particularly her first-generation South Asian Indian immigrants, are “foreigners” in America, and hence out of place for obvious reason of having left home––i.e., their old nation of India. Upon leaving, these subjects, particularly women, find their efforts to find a new sense of home and belonging in America ongoing. This effort to belong is often described as a kind of weight and heaviness. For Ashima Ganguly in The Namesake, her migrant subjectivity and her location in America get manifested as a constant weight of pregnancy without delivery. “For being a foreigner,” Ashima says she is “beginning to realize, is a sort of life–– a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts” (The Namesake 49).

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For the second generation, however, the tension is not as much that of the anticipation of delivery, but the trauma of their birth itself in this new land, a nation that marks them as “hyphenated.” It is a gap between their own senses of being an American, and how Others will perceive them as such. This gap is also operative when they return to their parents’ homeland, where they are perceived as “foreigners” and even their bodies react to such foreign environments. “Upon returning to Calcutta Gogol and Sonia both get terribly ill” (86). Migration, particularly from the West to a developing country, has produced sickness. “It is the air, the rice, the wind, their relatives causally remark; they are not made to survive in a poor country” (86). Lahiri in her works complicates the rhetoric of being foreign as she explores foreignness as a human condition, a condition that is perhaps unavoidable in one lifetime. Some like Mr. and Mrs. Sen, the “narrator” and his wife Mala in “The Third and Final Continent,” Ashoke and Ashima Ganguly (and many of their Bengali friends in The Namesake), and many other parental figures in The Unaccustomed Earth are migrants from India, namely Kolkata. While the women join their husbands as housewives and depend on their spouses to introduce them to America, the men come to America as intellectual migrants and work as professors, librarians, and company executives. Lahiri, perhaps deliberately, portrays migration and foreignness as a gendered phenomenon. While these first-generation figures experience foreignness in America, the second generation, like Mr. and Mrs. Das, Gogol, Moushumi and Hema, become foreigners when they return to their cultural heritage, i.e., India. Also, it is interesting to note that the first generation women perform their foreignness and the alienation that comes with it, within the confines of their own domestic spaces in America. The second-generation women, on the other hand, choose to perform their foreignness in other exotic Western spaces based on their intellectual leaning. While being an “alien” for the first-generation women may seem as a confinement, the secondgeneration women approach their intentional alienness as liberation. For all these subjects their intentionality to migrate to other

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spaces predetermines their respective relationships to dislocation and homelessness. Through subjects such as Gogol and Kaushik, Hema and Moushumi, Lahiri not only explores this new breed of secondgeneration nomads, but also establishes a place for nomadism as a trope that runs through the veins of Lahiri’s works. While nomadism becomes a form of exile––exile as a form of liberation by wandering, for these second generation subjects the questions that predicate such a state still remains unresolved. What are some effects of such attachment and detachment to people and nations that is produced by such nomadic restlessness? Lahiri is perhaps one of the first authors to complicate the intersection that troubles South Asian American literature and the dominant (American) canon by provoking such questions as: how much of such nomadic tendencies are a result of psychic detachment from home/land versus a political struggle to belong within the dominant structure of America––where these subjects are clearly marked as marginal and “brown folks”? How do men and women conceptualize their marginal status and the efficacy of the effects on marginalization? Finally, what does such nomadism tell us about the state of exile and movement within postcolonial/South Asian American literature regarding the psychic and socio-political conflicts within these subjects that constitute the part of South-Asian America? With the exception of Kaushik, who is American born and spends a part of his childhood in America and part of his adolescence in India, his relationship with both nations is fraught with double restlessness and belonging. He feels at home in both yet feels a sense of not belonging in either. Kaushik more than anyone else inhabits a kind of foreignness within himself prompted by his mother’s death and a simultaneous loss of motherland, his father’s remarriage, and his inability to accept new circumstances that begin to shape their lives after his mother’s passing. It is these layers of loss that result in Kaushik’s sense of movement and vagabond tendencies, marking him as a global nomad. Gogol, on the other hand, is not a nomad like Kaushik, but he too struggles to find his place in the world. Mousumi’s and Hema’s nomadism is a result of

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rebellion and liberation that any association with the “other” produce. In The Namesake the separation and “foreignness” that the second-generation subjects inhabit upon arriving in India could not be more evident: “…neighbors look from their windows and roofs as Gogol and his family emerge from the taxi. They stand out in their bright, expensive sneakers, American haircuts, backpacks slung over one shoulder” (82). They are treated special and are given “cups of Horlicks, plates of syrupy, spongy rossogollas for which they have no appetite but which they dutifully eat” (82). What is seen as hospitality and love from the point of view of the first generation, is often read by the second generation as torture, a submission against their desire, a duty that they must perform to please their parents and their “third world relatives.” This clash, other than producing obvious cross-generational conflicts, often sets the stage for feelings of life-long unbelongingness, aloofness and indifference. It is also this material contact with one’s own ethnic origin where one is and is treated as a foreigner––is precisely what provokes for the second-generation feelings of “foreignness” within. If global migration by definition is a continuous movement back and forth between two or more nations, then the second generation is caught in this motion, if not by choice then by obligation. This movement or “travel” back and forth between two nations causes for both these first- and second-generation migrants physical, geographic, linguistic, familial and psychic displacement. Taken together, these multiple displacements create a rupture in the rhetoric of belongingness, foreignness, and homelessness. Thus, central to any critique of a migrant subject, is a concurrent exploration of the site from which such a subject begins to undergo a series of displacements. In other words it becomes imperative to strike a dialogue between the migrant’s “original” home and the migrated home(s), since the latter is read in relationship to the former. Also, this “looking back” as a way to move forward provokes the migrant and the reader to focus on the dialectic between gendered location and dislocation (men and women experience dislocation differently), gaining and losing home and an understanding of

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the conditions of transmigrants. These subjects then can no longer be read as just migrant since they are always in transit, always becoming, always suspended in a state of irresolution. Perhaps being in irresolution, as many of Lahiri’s endings indicate, is the most poignant and fitting state of both migrancy and foreignness. For Ashima Ganguly in The Namesake, her migrant subjectivity and her location in America gets manifested as a constant weight of pregnancy without delivery. “For being a foreigner,” Ashima says she is “beginning to realize, is a sort of life long pregnancy––a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts” (Lahiri 49). In The Namesake, the overarching themes of homelessness, strangeness and alienation, generational clash between the first- and second-generation subjects, and the different nuances of belonging to both nations (India and American) are frequently experienced by South Asian migrants and run through the veins of the novel. What is deeply questioned is not so much alienation itself, but conditions that produce such alienation and heightened feelings of “otherness” and foreignness within these subjects. Edward Said would call this condition of being out of home as also being “Out of Place”––“a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world” (Out of Place, 1X). What are some manifestations of such record keeping of the past? These “out of place” condition often on the surface look quite normal, yet the overt and covert rebellions that stem from (mal)adjusting to certain cultural conditions produce a series of cultural and social disabilities (in a psychological sense of the term). In Lahiri’s works we find a leaning to make her subjects dwell in the liminal spaces that produce their mal(adjustments) in the first place. For Gogol, his name alone, which connotes his affiliation neither to America nor India, and later his divorce to Moushumi (who leaves his brown body and self to be with his former lover Dimitri) becomes a site of struggle to define his IndoAmerican identity and the status of the South Asian male within the canon. For Kaushik in The Unaccustomed Earth, the death of his mother at a young age causes his nomadic tendencies, and a disruption in his relationship with his father and America. For Mrs. Sen and Mala in the Interpreter of Maladies, and Ashima in

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The Namesake––their combined struggles to find a sense of home in America––(a nation that they have migrated to as a result of marriage, rather than their own will), becomes the site of layered negotiations with their new and old sense of self. Lahiri, rather than concluding the fate of these “housewives” or “professor’s wives” as incapable of adjusting to America, gives each of them particular functions to perform that portray the complex reality of migrancy for these well educated migrant women. Mrs. Sen’s struggle to learn driving is prompted by both a fear of being in a new culture (where she doesn’t know the rules), coupled with her simultaneous resistance to let go of her past class structure, where she was driven by a chauffeur. Mala’s quick adaptation of American ways in “The Third and the Final Continent” with the aid of her librarian husband, and Ashima’s constant feeling “out of sorts” in a country that will never be hers, yet a country in which her children are born and belong––portray “the prevalence of a global identity that relies upon neither their nationality nor ethnicity, but personal prerogative” (Field 177). Given Lahiri’s own subject position as a “double-border” subject (one who shares an affiliation to both India and America, but somehow doesn’t completely belong in either) she shares the complicated expectations placed upon the second generation. In an interview she says, “One of the things I was always aware growing up was conflicting expectations. I was expected to be Indian by Indians, and American by Americans. I didn’t feel equipped even as a child to fully participate in things” (Bahadur). What Lahiri alludes to as a gesture of a “lack” of participation in “things” becomes a prompt for investigating how such a lack of participation manifests into feelings of un(belonging) in America for migrants. In this ongoing conversation regarding the state of migrancy, it is crucial to map the stake of migrancy from not only the point of view of the first-generation subjects, but also the combined fates of the secondgeneration subjects, like Lahiri herself, who are equally affected by the movement of their parents from one nation to another. Lahiri’s contribution as a South-Asian American/post-colonial literary figure that demonstrates a range of experiences, by privileging “neither connection to nor distance from cultural roots, stressing,

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instead, the distinctiveness of individual experiences” (Field, 168) allows me to expand a theory of migrancy that does not only rely on roots, but routes 6 that these migrant subjects undertake. Displacing the Displaced: The State of Foreignness One way to locate and understand this new type of foreignness as exhibited through exilic existences and nomadic forms can best be captured by the story of displacement. Displacement in this case is a series of doubles: double confinement, double strangeness, double nomadism particularly for women and second-generation subjects. Based on the traditional definition of postcolonial migrancy, a second-generation subject who is born and brought up in the West doesn’t quite fit the category of the “migrant” in a traditional sense, but shares overlapping emotions of homelessness and displacement like the first-generation subjects. To borrow Vijay Prasad’s terminology of The Karma of the Brown Folks, I want to argue that although these second-generation American born “brown folks” are not foreigners in America (like their parents), but they are also not Americans in the dominant sense of the term. They are American Desi’s and “brown folks” in America. It is precisely their non-dominant brown status that gives them these feelings of being out of place that foreignness invariably provokes. In this struggle to belong in America, the “Gogols of the world” share similar feelings of displacement (as the first-generation subjects) both in America and upon returning to their parents’ homeland. Upon returning to India, the second-generation subject must make gestures of assimilation with his/her blood relations (grandparents, aunts and uncles, close cousins). This confrontation itself, both literally and symbolically, manifests into shared spaces of differences experienced by the second generation in their ancestral home. Second, for the second generation a series of maladjustments that takes place within both their dominant culture and their imposed parents’ culture provides for them feelings of alienation and estrangements within the country of their birth. While the first generation longs to go back to their country of birth and perform temporary moments of belonging, the second generation

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struggles to “fit in” both within their country of their birth and their parents’ homeland. Such double-displacements result in feelings of unbelonging in both spaces, and hence we often find in Lahiri a tendency to allow her second-generation subjects to explore a “third space” and culture quite different from what they’ve known as “home.” Moushumi, Gogol’s wife temporarily relocates to Paris after she graduates from Brown. Her intellectual interests are neither in Indian/postcolonial cultures, nor American, but French literature. Similarly Hema, in “Going Ashore” is more fond of Rome than any city in either India or America. Sudha, in “Only Goodness,” is more at home when she visits London and wonders why her parents didn’t get her a British citizenship (given that she is born in the United Kingdom). Thus “before leaving, she [sic] applie[s] for her British passport, a document her parents had not obtained for her when she was born, and when she presented it at Heathrow, the immigration officer welcomed her home” (144). In Italy, France and London each of these subjects are foreigners and strangers, if not in a legal sense, but in both a geographic and a psychic sense. Yet, neither Moushumi, nor Hema or Sudha share the kind of alienation, aloofness and nostalgia for America (their home) in these foreign cultures, as the first-generation women like Ashima or Mrs. Sen feel in America (about their past nation India). In fact, these foreign spaces provide a certain degree of curiosity, exoticism and adventure that neither India nor America provide for these second generation women. It is in Italy, France and London that these second generation women discover themselves, find love, feel desired. It is the newness, unpredictability and simply the excitement to be elsewhere in the world that marks their foreignness, a foreignness that is at best liberating. Such a state of liberation allows these subjects to not be obligated to fit in either the Indian or the American cultures (where they are socially and politically marginalized) but simply maintain their “stranger” status as a legitimate mode of being. Unlike Hema, Moushumi and Sudha, who find with spaces outside of India and America alluring, coupled with their interest in non-Indian lovers, Kaushik seems not to have found any attach-

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ment toward any third spaces as such. He lives and travels through many places in search of his home after his mother’s death. He travels without a map, leaving his father’s house after his emotional outburst with his stepsisters, and drives for days until he hits Canada. If there is one element that draws Kaushik to these spaces, it is water. Now and again I saw the water…It was too brutally cold to get out of the car, but occasionally I did, to look at the ocean…The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart…(“Year’s End” 289).

It is perhaps a fear coupled with a fascination for the water, or a premonition that Kaushik has toward bodies of water that simultaneously draws and paralyzes him. So, he runs away from water, only to come back to it. Kaushik’s profession as a photojournalist has taken him to many countries––from wandering through Latin America, to the Israeli coast to Madrid, Rome, Hong Kong, and finally Thailand. In fact, the demands of his job “allowed him to permanently avoid the United States” (“Going Ashore” 305). In the midst of all his travels he is still unable to find a sense of home in any. He is a constant stranger, living with a sense of foreignness within his own body, as Kristeva remarks. In fact this kind of foreignness within both his own body and exterior spaces becomes a site of familiarity for him and begins to manifest as a kind of nomadism for Kaushik. He is a nomad who wanders, explores, and escapes. But escape from what? Is it escape from his mother’s memory and melancholia that he cannot reconcile? Or is it an escape from the realities of life itself that constantly remind him of his motherless, nationless, loveless status? His memory of his mother continues to travel with him in Rome, a place that he visited “on the way back from Bombay to Bombay to Massachusetts with his parents” (“Going Ashore” 307) when he was still a teenager. “His mother was dying.…She had just turned forty…He remembered the look of the hotel where they stayed…He returned like a pilgrim to those places…”(307). It is also during one of these pilgrimages to Rome that he accidentally

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meets Hema, falls in love, and is rejected. Such a rejection only provokes for Kaushik further estrangements from his own self, body and environment and drives him into despair. Unlike Kaushik, the other second-generation subjects in Lahiri’s work such as Mousumi, Hema,Sudha, Gogol and his sister Sonia don’t “leap out” as much in a global sense to experience the thrill of “foreignness,” but they experience it upon arriving in particular foreign sites. These sites become spaces they long to return to, reject, or settle in for the long haul. If migration by definition is a continuous movement back and forth between two or more nations, then the second generation is caught in this motion as well. This movement or “travel” back and forth between two nations causes for both these second-generation migrants a similar sense of displacement––physical, geographic, linguistic, familial and psychic. Taken together, these displacements multiple times create a rupture in the rhetoric of un(belongingness), homesickness and homelessness, and give birth to a form of movement and nomadism that can be viewed as liberation, escape, wondering and wandering. Cross-Generational Gendered Modes of Agency For the first-generation subjects such as Ashima, Mrs. Sen and Mala (all first-generation migrant women) a sense of immediate displacement is forced upon them by a lack of familiarity––both with America and their own (new) husbands as a result of their arranged marriages. Hence, these women have to strike a familiarity with two new arrangements—a new country and a new husband. For the second generation, it is both the unfamiliarity of being in their parents’ homeland (as in Gogol and Sonia’s case) and the immediacy of their own longing to be in foreign spaces is what causes the initial shock of arrival. “Upon returning to Calcutta Gogol and Sonia both get terribly ill” (86). Travel to a foreign country, followed by sickness, makes Gogol and Sonia feel displaced. Yet, the relatives conclude that “it is the air, the rice, the wind” that make them sick. “They are not made to survive in a poor country” (86).

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While other subjects in Lahiri’s work travel and migrate to find home, escape the reality of their present lives, and experience forms of displacement(s), Gogol’s displacement is one that is inescapable. His own name is one that displaces him from both his country of birth (America), and the country of his ethnic origin (India). In addition to his ongoing conflict and identification with his own name, Gogol is told “Ganguly is a legacy of the British, an anglicized way of pronouncing his real surname, Gangopadhay” (Lahiri 67). Moreover, when Ashok tells his son that the author Gogol like himself (Ashok) had “spent most of his adult life outside his homeland” (77) Gogol doesn’t identify with such a reality. For Gogol, America is his place of birth and hence his home. Gogol’s self alienation and loss of agency with self identification begins when it strikes Gogol one day that “no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America, or anywhere, shares his name” (78). Although being in such a position with an unique name could have given Gogol precisely the advantage and agency to stand out within the confines of the dominant culture, but Gogol is deeply uncomfortable with claiming any difference. He longs to belong to America and fit in within the dominant ways of being. His brown body and his Bengali-Indian home environment are a baggage that is longs to shed. And then when he learns from his English teacher Mr. Lawton about Nikolai Gogol’s lifelong unhappiness, his mental instability, how he’d starved himself to death and during his life he was understood by no one.…He was reputed to be a hypochondriac and a deeply paranoid, frustrated man. He was, in addition, by all accounts, morbidly melancholic, given to fits of severe depression. He had trouble making friends. He never married, fathered no children. It’s commonly believed he died a virgin (Lahiri 91).

Gogol needs no further proof to realize the misgivings of his name. He resents his parents for bestowing on him a legacy where he will always be marginalized. While for most first-generation migrants the very space of the foreign cultures provokes the first symptoms of displacement––for Gogol it is his very name that displaces him from both his roots (India and America). Finally, when

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Gogol turns eighteen, he goes to the court and changes his name to Nikhil. He tells his parents that with a name like Gogol nobody takes him seriously. In her essay “Straddling the Cultural Divide: Second-Generation South Asian Identity and The Namesake,” Farha Shariff extends Zizek’s differentiation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic 7 as it applies to identities on naming. She says, “A decision to change our name, in effect, is our effort to resemble our I(O) or ego-ideal: s/he who speaks without an accent, who does not smell Indian, who does not act Indian, ultimately rejecting the symbolic order of our South Asian culture (Shariff 461). Yet for Gogol it is precisely the reverse. Gogol wants to at least hang to one side of his identity, his Bengali-Indian one and hence changes his name from the Russian “Gogol” to the Bengali “Nikhil.” Unlike Gogol, the names of the female characters in the novel are either East Indian or universal. Gogol’s sister’s name, “Sonia,” means wisdom. “Ashima” means one without borders, while “Mousumi” means the monsoon winds. In The Namesake, for the female subjects it is not so much their given name, but the traditional expectations of their name is what displaces them. These women (both new migrants and the second generation) in the novel assert agency of reclaiming home by rebelling against the traditional roles set forth for South Asian middle-class women. Moushumi (Gogol’s wife) represents levels of maladjustments and displacements experienced by second-generation South Asians in America. He is indeed like the monsoon wind that is sudden, rapid and changing. She first destabilizes the figure of the “good Bengali girl” by engaging in an extra-marital affair with Dimitri, and then rejects her marriage to a finely educated and good Bengali boy, Gogol Ganguly. She is simply bored by Gogol. Sonia, the protagonist’s sister, during her teenage years occupies herself with her altered sense of self and fashion, threatening to “color a streak of [her hair] blond…and have additional holes pierced in her earlobes in the mall” (107). She ultimately marries a racially hybrid gentleman named Ben (who is half Jewish and half Chinese). Unlike Gogol, Sonia is much more balanced and appears to be much better adjusted to the American and Bengali cultural divide than Gogol. While the second-generation women overtly display signs of res-

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tlessness by rejecting their parents’ prescription of more traditional ways of belonging, the first generation uses more covert tactics. Ashima Ganguly, Gogol’s mother, represents the firstgeneration woman’s will and ambivalence to belong to any one place. She is indeed borderless in her quest to find an identity that she can comfortably hold on to, one that is hers and not imposed upon by somebody else. Her own desires are constantly caught, negotiated and ultimately sacrificed against that of her intellectual husband. Ashima thinks of her past home where her parents live in Calcutta constantly. She looks at her watch and calculates the time in India. “It is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight” (Lahiri 4). She imagines how a servant “is pouring after-dinner tea into steaming glasses, arranging Marie biscuits on a tray” (5). In another instance during Gogol’s annaprasan, his rice ceremony, Ashima “regrets that the plate on which rice is heaped is melamine, not silver or brass, or at the very least stainless steel” (39). Yet she cannot return to India to regain her sense of everyday normalcy. Her migration has created a new type of uneasiness with the environment. Right before Ashima goes into labor to deliver Gogol, the nurse says that “everything is looking perfectly normal,” yet Ashima is acutely aware of her displaced status as the narrator reminds us: But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen months, ever since she’s arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. It is not so much the pain…It’s the consequence of motherhood in a foreign land …She is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare (Lahiri 6).

However, it is not until her husband, Ashok, suddenly dies that Ashima begins to assert her desires to unbelong in a nation where she had been forced to belong. Ashok’s death becomes symbolic of her own death of will to live in the immigrated country, a country in which she never assimilated. Upon her husband’s death she decides to temporarily return home, her origin, her nation, (leaving her grown children behind) to reclaim the cultural space of her belonging. It is in India that she claims she feels “normal” and can live in a space that doesn’t provoke for her a sense of alienation

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and unbelongingness. Yet this decision to return is conflicted. “For the first time in her life, Ashima has no desire to escape to Calcutta, not now. She refuses to be so far away from the place her husband made his life, the country in which he died” (183). Ashima’s memory in America with her husband and her children prohibits her from returning to her own nation permanently, yet she refuses to put this filter between her time spend in America and her longing for home back in Calcutta. Her longing is for a more physical sense, rather than a symbolic sense of places, things and people. Home and Displacement and Returns Upon returning to India the first-generation subjects feel much more at home than their offspring. Gogol and Sonia demonstrate their discomfort well. They know their relatives, but they do not feel close to them as their parents do. Within minutes, before their eyes, Ashok and Ashima slip into bolder, less complicated versions of themselves, their voices louder, their smiles wider, revealing a confidence Gogol and Sonia never see on Pemberton Road (81-82). They are no longer foreigners. While for the first generation being in their homeland provides some temporary relief of belongingness, the reality of returning acts as another form of displacement for the entire family. The shift in the time and space coordinates challenges them, and somehow they are unable to make the shift back into the Western space with any ease: “Though they are home they are disconcerted by the space, by the uncompromising silence that surrounds them. They still feel somehow in transit, still disconnected from their lives, bound up in an alternate schedule, an intimacy only the four of them share” (87). It is only upon their return to America that the entire concept of home for the Ganguly family is challenged. Chandra Mohanty best articulates the nature of such flux here by positing layers of questions that migrants may face upon coming back to their immigrated countries. What is home? The place I was born? Where I grew up? Where I live and work as an adult? Where I locate my community––my people? Who are “my people”? Is home a geographical space, a historical space, an emotional sensory space? Home is always so crucial to immigrants and migrants––I am convinced that this question––how one understands and

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defines home––is a profoundly political one…Political solidarity and a sense of family could be melded together imaginatively to create a strategic space I could call home (Mohanty, 351).

“Home,” according to Banner, is “neither here nor there…rather, itself a hybrid, it is both here and there—an amalgam, a pastiche, a performance” (1992: ix). This is also precisely where Ashima’s continuous longing for her past home, (as if her home is really “there”) provides her displacement in her present home. For Ashima being at “home” and “homeless” are not matters of movement just in physical spaces or the fluidity of socio-cultural times and places, as such, but also a mapping the coordinates of both time and place in the old home they’ve left and continuous memories of it. One is at home when one inhabits a cognitive environment where one’s identity is best mediated and homeless when such a cognitive environment is eschewed. John Berger articulates, “Once uprooted from the ‘original’ social space—no succeeding one becomes truly home” (Berger 128). For Ashok and Ashima home is no longer a concept that applies––for they re-imagine themselves as doubly displaced nationals. They are neither Indians by citizenship anymore, nor Americans by birth. One country was home, a country whose citizenship they have had to forego. Another country, i.e., America, which is their home, is also a country where they will never completely belong. This is precisely the kind of displacement that gives Ashok and Ashima the ability to simultaneously belong and not belong anywhere. They are constantly “in transit” everywhere. Ashima’s name even implies “without borders,” one that can transcend several spaces. Upon returning to Calcutta she will realize that she is truly without borders, “without a home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere” (276). Yet, this lack of residence, or home, as a result of having too many provides the ultimate fracture within oneself. Memories of both her dead husband and her grown children are not in India, but in America. In America, she has no purpose. Her identity as “the professor’s wife” no longer applies. The professor is dead. It is through this split that she realizes the loss of her original self. Hence, “the notion of pure origin

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and true self” as Trinh T. Minh-ha in her book, Woman Native Other, notes, [Is] an outgrowth of a dualistic system of thought peculiar to the Occident (The “onto-theology” that characterizes Western metaphysics). They should be distinguished from the differences grasped both between and within entities, each of these being understood as multiple presence. Not one, not two either. “I” is therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity…“I” is, itself infinite layers (90).

Ashima becomes the migrant figure who must embrace and negotiate these multiple layers of “I,” and without such acknowledgment she will become the migrant figure like the “Angel of History” whose back will be turned into the past, while the wind and the debris will propel her into the future. Displacement as Liberation The trope of trans-global migrancy has indeed proved useful in opening up conceptions of borders as it re-maps the self from its edges. Instead of disempowering the self, dislocation experienced by both the first- and second-generation South Asian subjects actually opens up an abundance of alternative locations, allowing the individual to own several different homes by first becoming homeless. Lahiri uses the trope of migrancy and displacement to provide us with another lens to understand not just the subject positions of her first-generation subjects, but also her more complex secondgeneration subjects who either migrate themselves, or are affected by the migration of their parents. This caught-in-betweenness creates transnational subjects with their scattered forms of trans/nationalisms, one whose articulation of the nation is as migrant, scattered in nature as he/she is. Through an array of loss, through the ambivalence of lost homes, these migrant narrators writing from the margins of the nation invoke new ways of imagining the possibility of the human spirit inhabiting different spaces simultaneously. They work through complex negotiations of belonging and unbelonging, identity and non-identity, learning new words and entering new worlds. As Bhabha states:

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This liminality of migrant experience is no less a transitional phenomenon, than a translational one; there is no resolution to it because the two conditions are ambivalently enjoined in the “survival” of migrant life…it is a strange stillness that defines the present in which the very writing of historical transformation becomes uncannily visible. The migrant culture of the “in-between,” the minority position, dramatizes the culture’s appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream…and towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity that marks the identification with culture’s difference (Location of Culture 224).

In determining Lahiri’s place within the postcolonial and South Asian American literature on migrancy, one must be reminded that the literature produced within either of these discourses is still “being written,” and hence Lahiri’s place within the canon is unclear. What is clear, however, is that her representation of hybrid forms of identity and displacement that are both “unique and universal” trouble issues of canonicity as they capture both a sociological and psychological profile of two generations of South-Asians post 1960 that constitute the make-up of (South) Asian America today. Notes 1

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See Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves in which she draws a parallel between actual act of being a “foreigner” with the feelings of alienation, aloofness, anxiety and loss, etc., that a stranger often experiences. In fact, Kristeva’s point precisely is that the act of being a foreigner is not something that a subject experiences upon leaving one’s home country to be in another, but one is already familiar with the feelings of being an “other”/stranger within oneself prior to any physical departure abroad. In previous theorizations of migrancy the migrant faced rejection, animosity, and forms of hostility from the “host” country. The “migrant” or the “guest” was often seen as a “parasite” (see Inda’s essay, “Foreign Bodies: Migrants, Parasites and the Pathological Nation” (2000). By taking the category of the Asian-American Min Zhou explains how nonwhite Americans are differentiated: “Second-generation Asian Americans who are considered assimilated, are still subjected to a pernicious system of racial stratification. One second-generation Chinese American described the discrimination she has faced: “The truth is, no matter how American you think you are or try to be, if you have almond shaped eyes, straight black hair, and a yellow complexion, you are a foreigner by default” (152).

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The Postcolonial Citizen Freud makes a specific distinction between subjects that undergo mourning versus melancholia. Melancholia borrows some of its features from mourning. For Freud mourning provides the subject to recover from the loss of a loved one, while melancholia “is marked by a determinant which is absent in normal mourning” (Gay 587). Freud defines melancholia as failed mourning because the loss is ungrievable. Lahiri uses an epigraph from Hawthorne’s “The Custom House” to convey the predicament of the migrants and their offspring: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn out soil.” The distinction between roots and routes is discussed by Susan Stanford Friedman in Mappings. According to her distinction, “roots signify identity based in stable cores and continuities; routes, suggesting identity based on travel, change and disruption” (153). In Imaginary identification, we imitate the Other at the level of resemblance, therefore identifying ourselves with the image of the Other. In Symbolic identification we identify ourselves with the Other at precisely the point at which he is inimitable, the point which eludes resemblance (Zizek 109).

Chapter 4 Threatening Bodies, Dangerous Knowledge, Legal Interventions When detainees are held without charge, denied access to lawyers, and in some cases convicted with secret evidence, a grave danger is posed not only to these individuals but to the rest of the society and to the practice of democracy” ––Tram Nguyen According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Section 411 of the Patriot Act has been used to exclude foreign scholars because of their political views. ––Beshara Doumani

Postcolonial intellectual migrants, whom Edward Said has called the “traveling theorists,” have been arriving into the American nation-space as early as 1950s. Their arrival, other than causing them physical and psychical sense of displacement in negotiating two homes, two selves, two nations, and two epistemes, has brought about new dangers associated with producing oppositional knowledge and thoughts. “More likely, the targets are those who are perceived, on any particular basis, to be threats to the continued existence of the country––as defined by the terms of the national security state. This is part of what some special observers

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have called “the image of the enemy,” which is proclaimed by the national government as a means of continually maintaining its claim to legitimacy in striking against the enemy” (Michaels 274). To address these issues of rising vigilance and hostility, The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) established a special committee on Academic Freedom and National Security on the first anniversary of September 11, 2001, and published it in the Academe. According to the report, Several imperatives led to the creation of the committee. Among them, still vivid memories of the McCarthy era yielded an awareness of the degree of vigilance needed to avert a recurrence of the excesses of that time: the sweeping claims of the threats to national security, the rampant accusations of guilt by association, and the unchecked powers of lawenforcement agencies… This report rests on the premise that freedom of inquiry and the open exchange of ideas is crucial to the nation’s security, and that the nation’s security and, ultimately, its well being are damaged by practices that discourage or impair freedom. Measures to ensure the nation’s safety against terrorism should therefore be implemented with no greater constraint on our liberties than is necessary (Academe 34).

In spite of AAUP’ s mandates to protect academic freedom, punitive measures continue to be taken by university authorities on those who critique the U.S. government’s involvement in this “war on terror” and critically expose students to the neo-conservative and neo-liberal strategies of empire building and the expansion of the military industrial complex throughout the world. Unfortunately, foreign-born scholars who are resident, or non-resident aliens 1 and not citizens of the United States of America execute most of these teachings in U.S. colleges and universities. The university, which ought to be a space for open dialogue and a voice of critical dissent, post September 11, 2001, has become a space where speech is regulated and stifled, and voices of dissent are silenced, detained and punished. It would be too reductive to propose that it is only post 9/11 that intellectual migrants have become threats to the U.S. academy. The shift has been gradual in the way foreign-born intellectuals are treated within the U.S. university space. Globalization

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coupled with a need for skilled labor (both within the U.S. industries and the universities) post 1960s, resulted in the arrival of the “third world” foreign-born academics, engineers, computer specialists, and medical professionals within the U.S. university space. Although this deracialized new immigration policy 2 was hailed by the supporters of the civil rights movement as a gesture to end legal discrimination based on race and nationality, it also provoked a new kind of racism, i.e., a resentment toward the third world subjects over crowding the United States and depriving U.S. citizens, particularly of Caucasian origin, from gainful employment. Coupled with racism toward these newly arrived Asians and Africans in America, such arrivals simultaneously produced a systemic institutional resentment in the form of a deep xenophobia toward subjects either producing “oppositional and counter knowledge”–– knowledge that exposed the exploitative, manipulative and often violent policies of the empire. What makes the shift in the rising xenophobia against “aliens” dangerous and significant since September 11, 2001, is the loss of constitutional protection provided previously by the U.S. Constitution, where one’s right to “due process” is denied if he or she is charged with “terrorist activities” or guilt by association. Needless to say, the United States Constitution that protected the legal well being of the foreign national residing in the U.S. as stated in Amendment 14, Section 1, (“Right to Due Process”), First Amendment (“Academic Freedom”), and Title 7 of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 (“Discrimination on the Basis of National Origin”) have been under severe attack since September 11 under the guise of “war on terror.” The war on terror, rather than prosecuting the actual “terrorists,” has terrified innocent foreign-born civilians of Arab, Muslim and South Asian decent, denying them their right to live, teach, and research in their areas of academic training. Migrant as Detainee Scholar Tariq Ramadan’s 3 visa was revoked in 2004 by Homeland Security after he was appointed the Henry R. Luce Professor of religion, conflict and peace building at Notre Dame University. Ironically, Ramadan holds a Swiss citizenship, yet his subject of

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inquiry, Islamic theology, provoked a response of denial of entry into the United States. In 2002, Rohinton Mistry, an awardwinning South-Asian Canadian writer, was constantly targeted and profiled at American airports. This experience gave him what he called “visions of Guantanamo [Bay] and of concrete slabs.” Mistry decried feeling like a second-class citizen and decided to not return to the U.S. in the future. In December 2001 my own position as an assistant professor on a tenure track hired to teach postcolonial literature and theory was not renewed. I will return to my own story toward the end of this chapter. Pre-September 11, 2001, the image that I hold of a postcolonial scholar is the image of educators and writers like Ramadan and Mistry, the ones who hold a book and read. Yet this dominant image of a foreign scholar reading a book has been replaced by an image “not of a man with a book but with a bomb,” as Amitava Kumar notes in an interview given during the 2008 Wisconsin Book Festival. The image of a postcolonial scholar as a collaborator, an educator, a reporter, a researcher, a scientist, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a doctor, or a painter serving the national interest of America and the Western world, has been replaced by the image of a conspirator or a supporter of a terrorist organization attempting to blow up America, or cities in the West. Contemporary postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Meena Alexander, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nuruddin Farah, Michael Ondaatjee, V.S. Naipaul, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Arundhuti Roy, Vijay Prasad, Amitava Kumar, Rohinton Mistry, Tsiti Dangaremba, Chinua Achebe and a host of others––celebrated figures in their own right––are no longer able to speak and write freely without knowing how such writing and speaking can affect their relationship to America. Any critical reportage by foreign-born scholars, particularly belonging to the “third world,” critiquing America under the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 411 (which amends the Immigration and Nationality Act) can result in the deportation of a non-citizen suspected of any terrorist activity. According to Nancy Chang in her book, Silencing Political Dissent: How Post September 11 AntiTerrorism measures Threaten our Civil Liberties, “the term ‘engage in terrorist activity’ has been expanded to include,

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soliciting funds for, soliciting membership for and providing material support to a “terrorist organization,” even when that organization has legitimate political and humanitarian ends and the non-citizen seeks only to support these lawful ends. In such situations, Section 411 permits guilt to be imposed solely on the basis of political associations protected by the First Amendment” (Chang, 63).

It is important that I lay out the actual PATRIOT Act as it affects non-citizens before discussing the geo-political consequences of its regulation practices on the foreign-born scholar, a non-citizen of the United States who is in danger of being charged, arrested, detained, and deported back to his or her country unwillingly. Such a “state of exception” 4 (see Georgio Agamben) producing state-regulated acts of detention and deportation imposed by the “host”(America) on its “guest” (the non-resident alien) provides a very different reading of dislocation and fragmentation that migrant intellectuals are forced to undergo. In a pre-9/11 world the issue of fragmentation and dislocation was more self-imposed and philosophical for the postcolonial scholar rather than one that was deliberately forced upon and sanctioned by the state. If the migrant scholar who was once seen as a symbol of enablement (particularly after the 1965 Immigration Act that allowed third-world scholars to migrate to the United states) has become one of disablement, then one can only imagine the image one now holds of a common postcolonial citizen, a taxi driver, a motel clerk, a parking garage attendant in a post-9/11 antiimmigrant, anti-foreign, anti-Islam world of America. Not only did the Twin Towers in NYC collapse that day in 2001, taking thousands of lives with them, but also what simultaneously collapsed immediately following September 11 were issues of civil liberties and constitutional protection and justice for the ones who survived the attack. In spite of the existence of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and the Civil Rights act of 1964 (giving birth to Title VII), prohibiting discrimination against individuals employed in the United States, and torture and detention of civilians regardless of citizenship––immediately following September 11, thousands of non-resident aliens (non-citizens), mainly of Muslim, Arabic and

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South-Asian descent, were rounded up, questioned and detained. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) 5 received 10,601 charges of national origin discrimination right after the events following 9/11 and the rise of the National Security State and the PATRIOT ACT. Many of these discriminations were filed by foreign-born scholars and teachers living and teaching in the U.S. as a result of being black-listed and the mushrooming of faculty surveillance organizations such as Campus Watch and Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), “which boasts chapters in more than 130 institutions, demonstrates a victory of the Right’s attempt to contain resistance and discipline academia into becoming an ideological apparatus of the security state” (Schueller 41). Such state-regulated policies began to have direct impacts on scholars who were either engaged in postcolonial theory, or were ardent critics of the role of the United States and its relationship to imperialism. In 2003, Dr. Sami Al-Arian, of Palestinian decent and a tenured professor in the Department of Computer Science in South Florida, was fired from his job by university administration based on his outspoken views and support for Palestine. On February 20, 2003, Dr. Al-Arian was charged in a bloated conspiracy case. Attorney General John Ashcroft personally announced his arrest on live television, claiming that Dr. Al-Arian was “a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” Interestingly enough, Dr. AlArian earned his Ph.D. in the U.S. and has legally resided in this country for more than 30 years with his wife and five children (all U.S. citizens). He was born in Kuwait, and his parents were Palestinian refugees. After his arrest he spent two and a half years in prison under harsh conditions of solitary confinement, conditions that Amnesty International called “gratuitously punitive.” Although he was a U.S. citizen, Dr. Al-Adrian’s foreign-born status and his relentless support for Palestine deemed him as supporting terrorist organizations. Since September 11, 2001, within the United States the migrant’s (who by definition is/was a non-citizen) subject position has been repositioned by the rise of the “National Security State” with its draconian policies of immigration, detention, surveillance, and the erosion of academic freedom. The very category of the “mi-

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grant” that houses assortment of “others,” (the “foreigner,” the “non-citizen,” “the non-resident alien”) are perceived as threats to this new form of democracy and the pluralistic concept of America. America, which once acted as the “host” to these migrant scholars and non-citizens, now sees these guests as intruders. This alteration in the relationship between the host and the guest has caused the migrant subject to be less concerned by the “terror of misrepresentation” but terrorized by the representation of the migrant as a non-subject, as a non-guest, one that must be under surveillance. On June 20, 2006, Mohammad Ramadan Hassan Salama, an Egyptian citizen and professor of Arabic Studies at San Francisco State, “got a rude awakening when a consular official, without explanation, stamped “canceled” on his temporary visa and refused to issue another visa. Instead, Salama said, he “was fingerprinted, questioned and told he could not return to the United States until he received security clearance.” 6 Salama, as a result, was stranded in Canada for three months after the U.S. State Department canceled his visa and began reviewing his security status. 7 Salama’s encounter with the draconian policies on immigration and surveillance policies began when he traveled to the U.S. Embassy in Toronto to upgrade his temporary scholar visa status and exchange it for a more coveted O-1 visa, granted only to those with extraordinary ability in sciences, arts, education, business or athletics. By law, he was required to travel outside the country to get the visa. In Toronto he learned he was prohibited from re-entering the United States until a “security clearance” was granted by the U.S. Department of State. Salama was shocked and described this entire experience as “Kafkaesque.” He had lived in the United States for a decade lawfully, had completed a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin and was married to a U.S. citizen. Aside from the “security clearance,” Salama said he was completely left in the dark and was not given specific reasons why he was being barred from re-entering the country. When he inquired about the reasons for his being stranded and asked, “Could I still return to the U.S. on my original visa?” he was told, “No, we have canceled all your previous visas to the U.S., so you can’t go back.” Interestingly enough, Salama, in an interview given

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to the San Francisco Chronicle, said that “one of the men convicted in the first World Trade Center bombings in 1993 was named Mohammed A. Salameh. It is a very common name. This is laughable, just because my name is Mohammad Salama,” 8 he was put on a watch list. I cite these above cases of academics like Professor Salama and Professor Al-Arian as I locate this historical and timely shift, as evidence, threat and influx in the migrant condition during the post-9/11 Bush-Cheney era. The postmodern theorization of identity per se and its obsession with slipperiness has detrimental consequences on understanding the “real” geo-political effects of post9/11 policies on race, ethnicity, nationality and origins. The postcolonial citizen/scholar who up until now had been seen as a “liberatory” figure––who embodied “excess” possibilities—is now one of suspect, a “detainee” 9 that must be contained in limited spaces. As a result of these new forms of containment, the migrant is both reterritorialized and recolonized, provoked by the global war on terror. Ironically, these very scholars who study and critique forms of colonization and imperialism are now colonized and detained within the state, denying them any right to “due process” and legal representation. The post-9/11 climate and the subsequent passing of the USA PATRIOT Act make it legal to take any non-citizen suspected of any engagement that threatens “the national security of the United States” into custody and be detained indefinitely. What this has achieved is no longer suspend the migrant on a slippery slope of indeterminacy, but rather establish a state of being, as Georgio Agamben puts it, in which the non-citizen, the alien, the detainee is “legally unnamable and [becomes a] unclassifiable being” (3). 10 The shift here is significant in contemporary understanding of intellectual migrancy. Here the migrant subject position no longer hinges on temporality, but what is uncertain and temporal is the terminology of the detainee itself “as it is [becomes] a suspension of the judicial order” (Agamben 4). This uncertainty and suspension in judicial order mark the migrant as a long-term threat that must be “kept out” and “contained” rather than any gesture of a “voyage in” and a “guest” status that previous articulations of mi-

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grancy have produced. After September 11 the migrant’s relationship to America is in flux due to the passing of new policies under the U.S. PATRIOT Act and the rise of the national security state that allows officials to monitor the migrant’s movement, speech and other activities. According to C. William Michaels, a national security state targets individuals and groups. “A national security state exists in response to a threat. The threat must be identified, declared and made real. The national government must be seen as responding to this threat on a daily basis…Now, the targeted groups are of Middle Eastern descent. Anyone who looks like an Arab may be a suspect” (Michaels 274). Post 9/11 the incidents of violence against Arabs and South Asians have been on the rise. On one hand the national government has condemned such actions. On the other, since late 2001, subjects who are Arab nationals between the ages of 18 and 40 have been asked to report to the INS. Federal and local police agents “had begun a program of interviewing 5,000 persons mostly of Arab nationality, asking questions about employment, salary, phone use, associates and activities” (Michaels 275). Immediately following September 11, 2001, more than 1,000 individuals of Middle Eastern backgrounds (both U.S. and non-U.S. citizens) were seized and held for investigation regarding the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The majority of these men were innocent Arab nationals living and studying in the U.S. and had no relevant connection to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organizations. In her introduction to We are all Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11, Tram Nguyan reports that “in the two months following September 11, more than twelve hundred Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men were detained and held indefinitely…No names of those detained were released, and none were connected to terrorist-related activity (Intro XV11). Post 9/11 it became common practice for federal and state level agents to round up Muslim college students of Arab and South-Asian descent and question them around the country. Many of those held were detained with little or no substantial evidence. 11 Most of these college students were foreign born. As a result several legal actions were brought forth by organizations such as the ACLU and

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Center for Constitutional Rights seeking information regarding the detainees, but without much success. Thus it becomes clear that post 9/11 the migrant/non-citizen is no longer a free subject, but is “under watch” by Homeland Security. This shift from being “free” to being “under watch” is not only an act of colonization, policing and surveillance to threaten and monitor the migrant subject, but also undermines the basic foundational principles of democracy, freedom, and one’s First Amendment rights as protected by the U.S. Constitution. Post 9/11 one such space that is constantly monitored is the university, the very place where the intellectual migrant resides and calls his/her “second home.” The University As an Unsafe Space The U.S. university is no longer a safe haven for the migrant and is closely monitored by Homeland Security. This “second home” (a professional home) is where the postcolonial intellectual migrant performs primary functions (studying, writing, teaching, lecturing and research). This home has been repositioned as a decolonizing space seeking to regulate the public discourse and sabotage the promotion of blind nationalism. “Within this regulatory mechanism, radical raced based multiculturalism and critiques of imperialism, both legacies of civil rights and decolonization movements are deemed national security threats” (Schueller 50). Post 9/11 any critical discourse that spreads an awareness of the United States’ zeal to dominate globally in the name of justice and security is fraught with tensions both within and outside the university. Said’s assertion in his final completed book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, that the American university remains the “one public space” that is still available to “real alternative intellectual practices” is no longer valid. Ironically enough, in October 2003, a month after Said’s death, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Select Education approved and passed H.R. 3077 limiting both funding and scope for university-based international education and area studies across the nation. The goal of H.R. 3077 has been to establish an advisory board to monitor area study centers in the U.S. to ensure that they advance the “national interest” and “a government-appointed investigative body [is] allowed to police the class-

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room by deciding, for example, what constitutes a “diverse” or “balanced” lecture” (Doumani 22). The disruptive goals of H.R. 3077 raise serious questions regarding the protection of academic freedom for those whose field of study, namely postcolonial studies, can easily be construed as one that does not “advance the national interest” of America. Judith Butler’s fear that lies at the heart of such a dangerous policy, i.e., “What happens to academic freedom in this climate, when the ‘threat to national security’ can easily be involved to brand whole fields of knowledge and modes of inquiry?” (Doumani 131) is now a reality. In the H.R. 3077 document itself Said was mentioned as an exemplary “danger” more often than any other scholar in the field. Said’s vision of the American university as a site of refuge has shifted drastically and dramatically post 9/11 and its subsequent attack on liberal education and the erosion of academic freedom. Punitive measures have been taken by university officials on nonU.S. scholars/students residing in the U.S. for exercising their speech and academic freedoms. Unfortunately, any retaliation against such punishments by seeking federal protections as set forth by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Discrimination on the Basis of National Origin) has led to more irresolution. A simultaneous reading of the erosion of both the civil rights protections provided by the U.S. Constitution and a gradual erosion of academic freedom in the name of protecting America’s national interests raises the question of stakes for the migrant intellectual. According to many scholars, incidents of scrutiny and secret surveillance by the U.S. government post 9/11, followed by blacklisting scholars and students, revocation of visas and visitation rights, and imprisoning subjects in state-run detention centers for their perceived alliance with terrorism have created a return of the age of McCarthyism. Beshara Doumani, in his book Academic Freedom After September 11, cautions the intellectual migrant coming, or already present in the United States: Be careful if you are a non-citizen who is coming to the U.S. to teach, learn, or participate in scientific research. Barriers to entry or reentry based on political “profiling” (selective implementation of new restrictive policies depending on one’s national, ethnic or religious background)

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Organizations such as Campus Watch, 12 a Web-based network led by Daniel Pipes (Director of History News Network), is an infamous Web site whose agenda is to critique the Middle Eastern Studies. Campus Watch claims that scholars of the Middle East promote extremism, intolerance, are apologetics, often exercise abuse of power over students and lack intellectual diversity. The site published dossiers of eight prominent Middle Eastern scholars denouncing them as presenting bias in their teaching and promoting anti-Americanism. These targeted eight scholars received hundreds of hate mails, including death threats. After vigorous criticisms by faculty nationwide, Pipes removed the dossiers, but he continued to blacklist scholars promoting anti-Americanism by showcasing in the “Quote of the Month” Middle Eastern scholars exhibiting sympathy to terrorism or terrorist organizations. Such acts of censoring the intellectual scholar’s right to speech and action are not only undemocratic, but also exemplify a show of blind nationalism that has spread through North America like a disease. In one of the recent articles published by Campus Watch titled “Terrorist in the Ivory Tower? The Curious Case of Hassan Diab,” 13 Cinnamon Stillwell writes: “Do the ranks of Middle East studies professors include terrorists?” Its recent victim is University of Ottawa’s professor Hassan Diab who is a Lebanese-born dual Canadian citizen and author of Beirut: Reviving Lebanon’s Past. He holds the position of a lecturer in sociology at the University of Ottawa and “his job ended last month following allegations by French authorities that Diab was the leader of a commando team that perpetrated the 1980 bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris.” Diab maintains his innocence. As reported in a National Post 14 editorial: Evidence from the files of the old East German secret police, the Stasi, leaves little doubt that someone then going by the name “Hassan Diab” was responsible for the bombing. The French investigating authorities are certain they have found the right man, and have witnesses who are

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prepared to say so, as well as other evidence implicating the Ottawa prof. But Mr. Diab, who has a common Lebanese name, insists that he is a wholly innocent victim of mistaken identity.

Diab’s friends and colleagues insist that Diab is a “peaceful, non-violent man who has never shown anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist leanings.” Justifiably so, the university’s firing of Professor Diab caused an uproar among his academic peers and supporters. An August 1, 2009, Ottawa Citizen 15 op-ed signed by thirty members of Carleton’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology described Diab’s firing as “an attack on widely held democratic values, and on the need to achieve justice through the law and due process” and “a bleak chapter in the story of injustice and discrimination in the dark shadow of 9/11.” I bring to attention this recent case of Middle Eastern professor Hassan Diab, along with other scholars that I have mentioned before (Professor Salama and Professor Al-Arian) to precisely point to the kind of erosion of justice and academic freedom that is imposed on the intellectual migrant post 9/11. Sadly, it is Said’s own field of study, namely Postcolonial theory/Middle Eastern studies, that often generates thoughts in opposition to the increasing U.S.led global domination that are targets of such attacks. In the view of neo-conservatives such as Martin Kramer and other advocates the field of area studies, particularly Middle Eastern studies has been injected by postcolonial theory. In their opinion postcolonial theory and its scholars not only actively question the operation of the American empire and promote a pro-Middle-Eastern ideology, but dissemination of such information in and of itself aids in the spread of anti-Americanism. According to advocates of organizations such as Campus Watch, postcolonial and Middle Eastern Studies scholars lack any appreciation of U.S. national interests and often use their positions of authority to disparage these interests. Kramer, in his book, Ivory Tower’s on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, actually argues that Said is responsible for what went wrong in American Middle Eastern studies. It is no doubt that Said’s Orientalism influenced the American understanding of the Middle East, and like any scholarship, the book, although widely received, is not without its flaws. But to

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single out a scholar and a text to prove how an entire field of study, i.e., postcolonial studies, is acting against the national interest of the U.S. is preposterous at best. Fortunately, Said was an American citizen with a large intellectual following, and although he was a postcolonial scholar, legally he was not a migrant or a non-resident alien. Had he been a non-resident alien or a writer/scholar visiting the U.S. he too, like Rohinton Mistry, would have had “visions of the Guantanamo Bay.” Post 9/11, the relationship the postcolonial migrant scholar shares with the public is deemed as one intended to contaminate the minds of the public by actively providing them with the knowledge to participate in critiquing the rise of the “National Security State.” Kramer and others have exploited the rise of blind nationalism post 9/11 and its accompanying racism and anti-Arab sentiments toward Muslims around the world. Their attack is particularly targeted against foreign students/scholars and paradigms they cannot tolerate, namely postcolonial and Middle Eastern studies. The neo-conservatives have insisted that the very paradigms that scholars of postcolonial and area studies are trying to push are fundamentally set against the workings of the ideal university. Campus Watch cites from the 1915 Declaration of Principles (put forward by “American Association of University Professors”) that laid out the operations of an ideal university. The freedom of the academic teacher entail[s] certain correlative obligations…The university teacher…should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators…and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves.

Campus Watch warns Middle East studies specialists to recognize their “correlative obligations.” However, what they omit, and deliberately so, are principles of academic freedom set forth by AAUP in the same 1915 Declaration of Principles. It is worth quoting this 1915 declaration at length here:

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The term “academic freedom” has traditionally had two applications—to the freedom of the teacher and to that of the student, Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit. It need scarcely be pointed out that the freedom, which is the subject of this report, is that of the teacher. Academic freedom in this sense comprises three elements: freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action. The first of these is almost everywhere so safeguarded that the dangers of its infringement are slight. It may therefore be disregarded in this report. The second and third phases of academic freedom are closely related, and are often distinguished. The third, however, has an importance of its own, since of late it has perhaps more frequently been the occasion of difficulties and controversies than has the question of freedom of intra-academic teaching. All five of the cases which have recently been investigated by committees of this Association have involved, at least as one factor, the right of university teachers to express their opinions freely outside the university or to engage in political activities in their capacity as citizens. The general principles, which have to do with freedom of teaching in both these senses, seem to the committee to be in great part, thought not wholly, the same. In this report, therefore, we shall consider the matter primarily with reference to freedom of teaching within the university, and shall assume that what is said thereon is also applicable to the freedom of speech of university teachers outside their institutions, subject to certain qualifications and supplementary considerations which will be pointed out in the course of the report.

Unfortunately, the three elements as articulated in the 1915 declaration of the academic freedom, “freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extra-mural utterance and action,” have been severely revamped under the security state. Academic Freedom for the Intellectual Migrant Constitutional principles of “academic freedom” have developed in two stages, each occupying a distinct time period and including distinct types of cases. The earlier cases of the 1950s and 1960s focused on faculty and institutional freedom from external (political) intrusion. These cases pitted the faculty and institution against the State. 16 Since the early 1970s, however, academic freedom cases have focused primarily on faculty freedom from institu-

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tional intrusion. In these latter cases, faculty academic freedom has collided with institutional academic freedom. Issues of academic freedom continue to be threatened in the United States since the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Under the PATRIOT ACT the government agencies and private organizations “have been subjecting universities to an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure of surveillance, intervention and control. “Be careful what readings you assign to your classes,” alerted Doumani in his brief article that is based on issues raised at a University of California, Berkeley conference in February 2004 under the title “Academic Freedom After September 11.” “The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was sued by the America Family Association Center for Law and Policy for assigning a brief introduction to Islam for incoming freshman students” (Doumani 22). In February 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department’s office of Foreign Assets Control declared that American publishers couldn’t edit works authored in nations under trade embargo, which includes countries such as Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba. The consequences are fines up to a million dollars and jail in terms of up to ten years. In the fall of 2003, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed Resolution 3077, under which an advisory board was set up to monitor area studies to ensure that these fields of inquiry advance the “national interest.” Vijay Prasad asserts, “HR. 3077 is not a break from U.S. government policy, “but more an attempt to return area studies to its Cold War origins when it was part of the struggle for world hegemony against Communist states. According to Prasad, it is also a reaction against the decolonization of the field that occurred in the late 1960s and as a result of the student struggles that pushed the academy to turn a critical eye toward its relation to the state (Prasad in Counter Punch). Post 9/11, even U.S. permanent residents who are now “resident aliens” cannot escape punitive measures taken by institutions if one can merely pass as an Arab. “Anyone who looks like an Arab may be suspect” (Michaels 274). I know the repercussions of this first hand. I received a hate letter on English Department letterhead during my first tenure-track job at a university in East Texas shortly after September 11, 2001. The display of hyper-nationalism

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and the rhetoric of “war on terrorism” both in the town where I lived in East Texas and the university where I taught were thoughtless, hateful and uncritical at best. I was quite vocal and out-spoken about my socio-political ideologies regarding the U.S.initiated “war on terror” as another way to spread global domination and promote xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments within this country. As a result of my vocalization what followed were several punitive measures taken by the institution, and an attempt to derail me in my intellectual pursuits. Unlike Mohammed Salama and Dr. Sami Al-Arian, I was neither detained nor imprisoned. Yet, my story is telling of the everyday practices of xenophobia and intolerance and punitive measures taken against postcolonial scholars that rampaged the country after September 11. A Historical Precedent The Palmer Raids of World War I (June 1919) under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson interrogated, arrested, and detained as approximately 10,000 resident aliens based on their political ideology. “These detainees were physically tortured, forced to sign confessions and resulted in deportation of more than five hundred immigrants, none of whom proved to be threats to the United States.” 17 In 1941 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and United States’ entering World War II, 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry were put in internment camps. While the government did not have any evidence as to who among these detained collaborated with Japan and the bombing, two-thirds of whom were United States citizens, 18 they were kept in preventive detention under harsh and punishing conditions for much of the war. 19 In 1988, more than forty years after the detention of people of Japanese descent in the internment camps, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 in which it acknowledged the internments’ “fundamental injustice” and pledged to “discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future.” 20 Given the above historical precedent of detaining and torturing innocent non-resident aliens to create and contain the image of the enemy in times of national crisis in the United States, what fol-

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lowed September 11, 2001, should not be a surprise. Yet, what is surprising and perhaps shocking is the complete disregard of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and the Bush administration’s failure to recognize the lessons offered by the shameful chapter in the history of the United States. After September 11, 2001, the third worldborn “foreign intellectual,” engaged in critiquing the hastily declared “war on terror” became an obvious target by the U.S. government as seen through a few cases I’ve selected to represent. In spite of vigorous objections by civil liberties organization on both ends of the political spectrum, Congress overwhelmingly approved the PATRIOT Act. According to Chang, “this hastily drafted complex, and far reaching legislation spans 342 pages. Yet it was passed with virtually no public hearing or debate, and it is accompanied by neither a conference report not a committee report. On October 26, 2001, it was signed into law by a triumphant President George W. Bush” (Chang, 43). Following the passing of the PATRIOT Act, forms of surveillance, followed by punitive measures, started being imposed on foreign-born scholars and other non-citizens, producing what Franz Fanon calls “a nervous condition” on the migrant worker/scholar. The policies as drafted in the PATRIOT Act deprive non-citizens of their right to due process and their First Amendment rights through two mechanisms that operate in conjunction with each other. First, Section 411, according to Chang, “greatly expands the class of non-citizens who are subject to deportation on grounds of terrorism through its broad definitions in terms of “terrorist activity,” “engage in terrorist activity” and “terrorist organizations” (Chang 62). Under Section 412, the attorney general’s authority is greatly enhanced, where he can “place non-citizens he suspects are engaged in terrorist activities in detention while their deportation proceedings are pending”(Chang,62). Professor Sami Al-Arian’s arrest and detention and Professor Salama’s trials with the INS and the U.S border services demonstrate this long drawn-out procedure. Self in Context: Dangers of the Brown Body Everything I have been articulating, i.e., the consequences of September 11 on academic freedom, punitive measures taken

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against foreign scholars and erosion of constitutional protection came full circle for me. In early December 2001, I received a hate letter in my department mailbox written on the department letterhead. The letter stated the following: What do you think? You minorities will take over the department? You minorities will take all our privileges and you want us to sit back and watch!!! Get the f--k out of here bitch! We have no need for you here. Go elsewhere and spread your liberal democratic agenda. And if any more complaints are made to the police about me I’ll erase everything from your computer. All your damn files!!!! And take me seriously. I’ve access to all your files and e-mails. I’ve keys to your office and you work at night. So be careful of what you do and what you say. I’ll implicate you in more things than you already have been implicated with. You will be out of here in no time. We’ve been here much longer and if you want to wipe us off, BE WARNED you’ll be wiped off first. LEAVE!!!! LEAVE!!!!! LEAVE!!!!

The many exclamation marks, the usage of the pronoun “you” and the threatening nature of the letter compelled me to report the letter to the department chair. The chair of the department, who also was an East Indian woman, asked me if I knew who could have written such a letter. She had received a similar letter, and had been asked by some colleagues whether she was from Afghanistan. After the department chair reported these two incidents to the newly hired dean, the dean called a meeting with all faculty in the English department the next day. In the meeting the dean chose not to disclose the names of the faculty who had received these hate letters. This reluctance to name the faculty members provided an extremely mysterious environment. However, after I mentioned to a few faculty members that I was one of the people who had received a “hate letter” and openly spoke about the contents of the letter threatening me and asking me to “leave” the institution, the climate of the department became openly hostile. I did not immediately leave, nor was I provided any measure of security or concern from either the dean or the senior faculty members in the department. This is when I decided to seek some legal counsel regarding my rights as both a faculty member and a permanent resident of the United States. Given that the dean re-

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peatedly disregarded my requests for investigation and protection from harm, coupled with the rising hostility within the English department, my lawyer filed a report with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the EEOC has documented a significant increase in the number of charges alleging workplace discrimination based on religion and/or national origin. “Many of the charges have been filed by individuals who are or are perceived to be Muslim, Arab, South Asian, or Sikh. These charges most commonly allege harassment and discharge.” 21 What followed the filing of a report with the EEOC was blatant retaliation by the department. The dean removed the East Indian department chair without following any “due process.” Then the English department put an ad-hoc committee together and asked all first-year faculty within a week to submit a “Faculty Activities Report”––a review that was unprecedented in the department. The review was not conducted in accord with the department procedures as documented in the department’s guidelines for tenure and review (where there were no documented procedures about reviewing first-year faculty members). Given such lack of documented procedures, I was denied the right to “due process” under six different counts by the department’s failure to follow its own procedures. Within a week of submitting the report, I received from the dean a letter of non-renewal of my contract, citing “concerns with teaching” and “collegiality” as reasons for the non-renewal. I had been hired to teach postcolonial literatures, had excellent teaching evaluations and an active research agenda. Students who took my courses reported that they were exposed to new ways of thinking and learning, and were excited that I was exposing them to a field of study that they otherwise would not have encountered in the department. Under Texas’ “Open Records” policy, I was able to witness the illegal nature of the voting that took place to not renew my contract and the comments made about my teaching, research and collegiality in my file. Some senior colleagues reported that my teaching was more political than literary in nature, and that my research agenda was “troubling” since it was geared toward criti-

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quing the “empire” and the role of the United States within the global empire. Also, my questioning the administration’s failure to investigate the hate letter I had received and openly talking about the rising hostile climate within the department constituted my lack of collegiality. EEOC’s investigation revealed “probable cause” based on written evidence and gave my lawyer the “green signal” to file suit. Legally, there was enough and more evidence to file a lawsuit against the university based on evidence of the retaliation against me. Yet, the consequences of charging an institution for discrimination against national origin and violation of academic freedom became more and more difficult after September 11 and the passing of the PATRIOT Act. Moreover, my lawyer informed me that discrimination cases that had race and national origin as pretexts for nonrenewal of contracts were not only difficult to prosecute at both a state and federal level, but anyone advocating and prosecuting such cases was marked as “guilty by association.” My lawyer, who lived and practiced in the same town in East Texas, expressed to me his own fears regarding prosecuting my case and informed me that he already had received threats from unknown sources about taking my case. The environment was no longer safe for me to stay in Texas. I returned to the University of Minnesota as a teaching fellow. Given my lawyer’s apprehension and threats received, I decided not to file a lawsuit against the university. By then, it had become clear to me that any case dealing with “Discrimination based on National Origin” could not go forward, given the lack of protection provided by the federal government, the erosion of civil rights and civil liberties, and the passing of the PATRIOT Act, prohibiting any right to “due process” for non-citizens of the United States. I was still a green card holder and bearer of an Indian passport. Unlike Professor Salama, I did not have to be detained outside the country for months, or like Dr. Sami Al-Arian, have to spend time in prison for years under harsh conditions. My own case, however, makes it amply clear that for an intellectual migrant any engagement with issues relating to the critique of the nation and its actions in times of national crisis is never neutral. Yet, a post-

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colonial scholar cannot be silent when his/her second home (the university) becomes a site of blind patriotism, racial profiling, and unconditional support for the U.S.-led war on terror. My personal experience of being a part of this shift from being a teacher-scholar to a threatening subject almost overnight was neither anticipated nor desirable. Yet, the reality of such a state of being marked as a “suspect” due to one’s intellectual interests, and the repercussions to speaking out against wrongdoing are shared by hundreds of intellectual migrants across the country as a result of the state of exception that was declared after September 11, 2001. The Unwelcome Guest The first wave of postcolonial scholars/students post 1960s to enter the U.S. were primarily “foreign-born.” According to recent statistics, (three decades or so later) most postcolonial and area studies scholars are still “resident” or “non-resident” aliens in this country. What has changed, however, is not so much the profile of these migrant subjects post 9/11, but the treatment of these subjects who are predominantly “foreign born” when they do exercise their academic freedom––“freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extra-mural utterance and action.” These foreign-born subjects now constitute a threat to national security. In this regard it becomes urgent more than ever before to understand and interrogate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), particularly the section “Discrimination on the Basis of National Origin”––along with the first Amendment protecting “Academic freedom” for these foreign scholars. Within the U.S. Constitution “foreign-born” subjects are distinctly different from a race/historical-origin-based “protected class.” By using the legal protections provided by federal regulations, namely “Academic Freedom” and “Discrimination on the Basis of National Origin,” along with the traditional colonized/colonizer relationship already developed in postcolonial studies, it becomes clear how the postcolonial intellectual migrant is no longer the “guest” and America is no longer the benevolent “host.” This host/guest relationship is now one of suspicion as a result of changes in the legal protection for these

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“guests.” Under the legal regulations (as articulated under the PATRIOT Act) the postcolonial intellectual migrant (the guest) is categorized as “at risk” as a result of producing counter knowledge/ideology critiquing the changes in social and foreign policies introduced by the government of the United States post 9/11. Any criticism against America’s involvement in this “war on terror” has categorized these guests as “enemy of the state” under the Bush doctrine, “if you are not with us, then you are against us” policy. This unfortunate shift in the host/guest relationship can be attributed to the logic that comprises the immigration terminology as to who is an “alien,” and why these aliens suddenly have become dangerous enemies who must be detained and contained. One simple look at the number of detainees (particularly of Arab, African or South Asian decent) and subjects who have been subjected to harsh interrogation by INS leaves little doubt in one’s mind as to who, according to Homeland Security, constitutes the single category of “the image of the enemy” and hence ought to be deemed as dangerous. Both postcolonial theory and immigration terminology have offered a logical link as to how one that is perceived as an alien is also synonymous with the term “foreign,” strange, an outsider who owes an allegiance to another country or government. Accordingly, anything that is foreign is strange and functions as a site of curiosity and mystery. In America’s history, as I have discussed earlier, such “unknown” and “unknowable” sites of curiosity in times of national crisis have often led to punitive measures to “contain” these foreign subjects by using methods of detention and torture, and reducing these bodies to a state of statelessness where all their legal rights are suspended. Butler has aptly said (in the case of detainees at Guantanano) that “bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy” (Agamben 4). Any critiques by postcolonial and area studies scholars provoking new ways of establishing counter agency against the colonizing forces and their Western neo-liberal ideologies of global domination have been deemed by the Bush administration as unpatriotic and fueling a sentiment of dissent. Such over-reactions by the state have ultimately produced a condition that has undermined

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the role of false and blind nationalism by instilling irrational fear of the “other”—the foreigner and the alien. Under the Bush doctrine of “you are with us or against us,” any postcolonial and area studies scholars critiquing the role of the American empire and its problematic and often self-serving methods of spreading democracy in non-Western countries have been interpreted as spreading a doctrine that aligns postcolonial scholars to the agenda of terrorist organizations. November 4, 2008, marks another shift as Barack Hussein Obama was elected the first African American president of the United States. In his victory speech given in Chicago addressing millions of people around the globe, he said, “If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where anything is possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.…Change has come to America.” In the age of Obama what the future holds for the intellectual migrant is still unknown. What can be speculated, however, is that Obama’s victory is a testament to the end of a racial crisis “sweeping away the last racial barrier” 22 as reported by The New York Times. As the celebrations honoring Obama’s victory subsided, and less than a year into his presidency on October 15, 2009, a young African American fourth-grade boy named Tyren Scott asked Obama, “Why do people hate you?” This question ought to give us a pause. Hated by whom and why? After all Obama is not just a black man, but is the son of a “foreigner,” and it is this status as a hybrid that still fuels charged anti-racial and xenophobic sentiments in the United States. Under his presidency, it remains to be seen whether the migrant subject’s position will revert from being a threat back to being a guest. Until then, the migrant hangs like a pendulum in a state of suspension, waiting. Notes 1

Non-resident aliens in the United States are foreign nationals and not citizens of the United States. Their stay in the U.S. is also temporary contingent upon renewal of visas. Most of the non-resident aliens reside in the U.S. as foreign students and have an F-1 visa status, or subjects who have acquired a legal work permit to work in the U.S. and have been granted an H-1B visa

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status by INS. In contrast to the non-resident alien, the resident alien is a permanent resident of the U.S. and has a green card. A green card holder is not a citizen of the U.S. and therefore is not allowed to vote in any election within the U.S., but has more legal protection than a non-resident alien. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 replaced the quota based 1924 Immigration Act. Under this new act subjects from non-European countries were allowed to immigrate in order to balance the ethnic make-up of the US. This act, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act according to not only allows more individuals from third world countries to enter the U.S. (including Asians, who have traditionally been hindered from entering America), but also entailed a separate quota for refugees (see Otis). Ramadan is the author of Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2003) as well as many articles on contemporary Islam in dialogue with the West. Here the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence As published on the EEOC Website (http://www.eeoc.gov/origin/index.html) http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/12/BAGSPL3S0S1. DTL&feed=rss.bayarea “S.F. STATE Professor of Arabic barred from returning to U.S. from Canada S.F. State scholar’s visa gets canceled; case under review.” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 2006. http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/12/BAGSPL3S0S1. DTL&feed=rss.bayarea According to Nancy Chang in her book Silencing Political Dissent (2002) “in its first few days [after September 11, 2001] 75 individuals [non-citizens] were rounded up, interrogated and detained. By November 5, 2001…the number of detainees had soared to 1,147. In April 2002…the total had exceeded 2000” (69). Also, there is much historical trail to this present phenomenon as evidenced by the Sedition Act of 1798, the Espionage act of 1917, Palmer Raids of World War 1, the Japanese Internment of World War 11, and the age of McCarthyism. Under the “Special Registration” (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System) the Department of Justice announced a new order that required noncitizen men age sixteen and over from twenty-five countries to register with the government. According to Nguyan, who gathered the information from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “changes to National Security Entry/Exit Registration System” Fact Sheets (Dec. 1, 2003) “a total of 290,526 people registered, including 83,519 men already living in the United states…Of the total number 13,799 were placed in deportation proceedings and 2,870 were detained. This process yielded no terror-related convictions. (“Intro” XV111).

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http://www.campus-watch.org/ http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35916 http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/07/29/ national-post-editorial-board-the-b-nai-b-rith-and-hassan-diab.aspx http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Carleton+wrong+fire+Hassan+Diab/ 1852462/story.html Earlier cases of violations of academic freedom such as Roemer v. Board of Public Works of Maryland, 426 U.S. 736, 756 (1976); Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 672, 681-82 (1971); Keyishian v. Board of Regents of the State Univ. of New York, 385 U.S. 589 (1967); Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234, 250 (1957) See Edwin P. Hoyt, The Palmer Raids 1919-20: An Attempt to Suppress Dissent (1969) See Eric Yamamoto et al., Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese Internment (2001). See Philip Tajitsu Nash. Moving for Redness, Yale L.J. 94 (1994): 743. See Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 50 U.S.C. http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/backlash-employee.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05elect.html

Chapter 5 Remapping Home Days in Calcutta The old red house is hunching back like a fish just caught, gasping to breathe. The house has been red for many years now, red like blood––dry in the air. The color fades every three years. Bricks hang like old skin. Shrubs hang loose from the edges of the balcony, and under the thick iron curved railings crows have begun to build their nests again. Green paint is stripping from the large wooden door, but my father says we’ll have to wait until next summer. So, we wait. And watch the colors fade like denim. Early morning, when the sun slants across the ceiling, forming thin lines like the strings of a guitar, and the heavy breeze coming through the large wooden windows moves the fan in a light motion, sparrows that have made nests on the blades of the fan chirp. They are afraid to fall. They are hungry and cold, and it’s winter. The rays of the sun make them shiver, and as they flutter, white and brown feathers shaped like commas descend on my unmade bed. Our house is not very far from the main road. The humming has begun. My mother is still asleep, her arms crossed on one side, her hair all sprawled on the pillow, her eyes tightly shut, forming thin marks of wrinkles on her eyes. She looks as if she’ll wake up

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any minute, but she doesn’t. As the sun tries to penetrate the little aperture in the window, my mother lifts her arms to cover her eyes. And I can already hear the morning trams dragging their wheels across the tracks. I can already hear a few shops lifting their steel shutters to start the day. I can hear my father turning the crispy pages of the morning newspaper. His fingers have smudges of black print by now. My father has placed his one hand under his head, as he balances the newspaper on his stomach. His glasses have become loose––he uses his nose to keep his glasses from falling. He keeps his feet exposed to the sun, rubbing them against each other to keep the sun from heating the skin. I hate the sun. It makes me tired, like dry leaves that collapse after the monsoons are over. That’s why I keep all the shades down in my room. I like the darkness. I like to dream, and I like the clouds. I like to walk on concrete as the rain splashes on my feet. I like the smell of wet clay, when the cold wind begins to blow across my breasts right before a thunderstorm. I like the clashing sounds and then the lightning like arrows that spreads across the sky. I like to walk on grass as drops of cold dew settle on my toes; I shiver. And I like the starched collar and the blue striped tie my father wears to work. I can hear my mother in her room. She is awake now. My father is getting ready to put the newspaper aside and rush to the bathroom to take a cold shower. And I’m watching the thin row of ants making their way to my closet. Like an army wearing red coats. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, dead faces blur my vision. I don't want my people to die. Then I think of my father. What would it be like if my father were dead? My mother called the other day and said that my father was not well, but didn't name his sickness. Just said he is going to be seventy soon. I was not at all concerned about his sickness, but kept thinking about the horoscope my grandma specially got made for my father, on a large yellow paper with thin red horizontal lines indicating months, years and significant events. My father’s horoscope ended at age seventyfour, and I kept counting how many more years he could still live, to live for me, with me before he disappears and I completely break down.

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A thought paused and then sat in a clustered corner. It’s not him I would miss, but his large shadow over me would linger like the summer breeze that caresses my shoulder and circles me with its large arms. The force of his breath, the tightening of his eyebrows, the heat of his palms and the hidden few tears when I left cannot be captured by a photograph. Who would keep his glasses? I wonder. Me or my elder sister? It’s true I never liked them, but I wanted to see men and women and my ancestors sitting coiled in their own branches through my father’s dusty glasses. I asked my mother, once, I think I was just eight then, what would it be like if Father were dead? She pretended not to hear me, but I knew she couldn’t have missed those words. Words I had uttered like two swords hanging crossed on the wall––their shadows pointing toward my mother’s heart. That evening, as I rested my back against the kitchen wall, stiff like a teacher’s new chalk, I heard my mother scream, "I have a crazy child!" Her voice lashed against the window, bursting and cracking like a delicate china cup. Then the echoes dissolved completely in the cold night air, except my mother’s cold stares every time I crossed her path. I felt a block of wood being shoved down my throat. I don’t want my father to die. I don’t want my mother to think that she held an evil child in her womb for nine months. It’s a fear that chokes me now and then. I don’t want to lift my hands anymore to cover my ears. I don’t want my mother to scream that I’m crazy. I don’t want to hear her voice vibrating against my thin, pale skin. I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to dream alone. In silence. I just want my silence to tell my story. Stories of my father cooking without salt, stories of my mother knitting over-sized sweaters for us all winter long that we couldn’t wear that winter. They itched against my skin, leaving dark oval marks like overripe tomatoes. Stories of my dreams counting ants all night as they made their way to my grandma’s closet, Stories of me dancing in circles in the dark, falling and bleeding until blood dried on my knees like faint lines on a map. And I danced all night until morning broke and I fell asleep as the first rays of the sun hit my eyes. This time my father appears in my morning dream. I always dream of my father in the morning. Mother always said that morn-

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ing dreams are never fake. They are very real, like a hungry child who anxiously waits for warm milk to moisten his throat. But I still thought about my father. Dead. Cold. Blue. When I was young, I always thought my father was brown. But brown didn’t last too long on him. It was too dull and lifeless, like a hot summer night when leaves didn’t sway. But then, one day, I saw him coming back from work––his black leather bag hanging from his shoulders, his shoes brushing against the ground making the dust swirl all around him––until dust had covered his body and almost made him invisible; invisible like the blue, the color of the sky on a cold, cold morning before frost can settle on grass. The blue that was see-through, the blue that my mother used on white clothes to make them whiter, and the blue through which I could see very far, where the roads curved until I saw the dimly lit lamppost standing alone. Later, when I told my mother how I thought Father was blue, she seemed puzzled, but anxious. Then she said, “Do not let your imaginations run wild. Imaginations are like weeds. They grow and spread too fast; like conversations. They end, yet they don’t.” I couldn’t understand what she meant. I was just twelve. Young, pale and thin with big bushy hair, round lips, perfect teeth, and large brown eyes. Nothing like the way my mother looked. And then my mother abruptly left to see my grandma. She didn’t come back for almost a month. But I still wondered about what she said long after she caught the last train and left us for days. I wondered how she knew that imaginations can run wild. Did she ever imagine? Did she ever dream? *** Mother says that I’ll have to grow up one day, soon. Mother also says that my father will have to sell the house one day, before it collapses. Repainting the house is becoming a routine. They want to break all routines. They want to build a new house. They want to paint the house blue. They want to forget the red. They want to forget the past. I don't know why. I remember everything from my past. The past clings to me like a feather caught in my skirt by the wind that suddenly stopped. I remember the smell of hot oatmeal

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on winter mornings; I remember the white-washed walls, the odor of lime before the house was painted red; I remember my first hand-painted bicycle that belonged to my sister; I remember the English coin my father gave me after I polished his black shoes for many hours. Then I remember seeing the reflection of my face on his shoes shining just like the English coin; I remember the smell of starch on my blue school skirt every Monday morning, and I remember the dog that cried all night before Grandma died. But then, memories become too heavy, not like a burden, but more like an old piece of furniture, essential and lonely. That’s when I want to get rid of my old memories and move on to see new countries, new faces, collect fresh new memories like souvenirs. And then I stop remembering and keep staring at the white walls. It has become a routine. Staring at these walls, I fall asleep sometimes. As soon as I fall asleep, memories start rewinding again. And then I dream. Real dreams. Dreams of me growing up, my dark hair curling at the edges, my mother screaming, her voice screeching like an early morning crow, and me holding a cold red apple between my teeth, standing still against a freshly painted wall, watching thick smoke rising from the chimneys. I tilt my head and watch the smoke dancing in the air, until they all disappear. And then I see my mother again, standing in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by her plants, adjusting her sari, as my dad carries her suitcase out into the taxi. This time she is leaving with her old leather brown suitcase to see her mother again. I want to go with her, but it’s too late. My suitcase is still unpacked. I somehow never get to leave. I always see my mother in my dreams, seldom my father, my many past lovers, my sister. I always see these mothers—my grandmother, my great- grandmother, my great-great-grandmother. They are all watching me with large bulging eyes from above. They all want me to leave the house; they teach me how to pack. But nobody wants to give me a map or a destination. They want me to trace my own map, my own destiny. I don’t want to remember anything, anymore. I don’t want to dream. Dreams of my father selling our house, dreams of summer mornings and walking on heated bricks that burned my feet, and

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winter nights when I want to cover my toes with thick cotton sheets because I can’t bear the cold, and dreams of me leaving home for a long time. I always thought dreams to be thick like the roots of trees––with a history. Mother always said, though, dreams are like fine glass. They crack too fast. Mother always said dreams are useless and time-consuming, like crossword puzzles. Unconnected. Every time I shared my dreams with her, she seemed disturbed; her face changed colors–– the color of the sky, first like almond clay, then like muddy waters—before a long waiting thunderstorm was about to begin. A thunderstorm that would momentarily shake her, bite her, crush her like hard ice into pieces. And I sat alone consoling myself, humming John Lennon’s Woman––woman I can hardly express, my mixed emotions at your thoughtlessness, or was it thoughtfulness? I can’t remember. Maybe she was afraid of my dreams. She said there were no cures for my dreams. My mother wanted to believe I was a normal child with an extraordinary imagination––or did she think I was just crazy? One day, while frying eggs, she did tell me that she was tired of my crazy dreams. I was a crazy child with a crazy imagination. This needs to stop! I believed every word she uttered. I was a crazy child. My mother was damn right. Every time our eyes met, I knew she was crazy, too––crazy after all these years of feeding us, walking by our shadows, tall shadows, little shadows that blocked her way. Shadows of our strawberrypatterned dresses that brushed on her smooth face, shadows of us, my sister and I holding her hands, desperately wanting to be free– –like birds. Weightless. And then my father’s very large shadow shaped like a sky that she could never cross. She called it love, intense love, burning love, love that never vaporized. I remember my mother sometimes kissing me at night, hugging me until I could feel her heartbeat racing with mine, and whispering in my ears, “You are my mad child. You are me. You are my madness.” I saw my reflection in my mother’s eyes as she held me close in her arms sometimes. Reflections of my fears swelling, and then releasing white fumes that enlarged my guilt. And my mother silently watched the contours of my face as she rocked me, humming to herself a tune I had often heard her whistle as she

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brushed the fine dust off the furniture in our living room. Her humming slowly dissolved as I fell asleep in her tender arms. I think of my mother often as I sit by my kitchen table, watching Minnesota welcome another season of fall. Crimson-colored leaves covering the grass in the backyard. Mother is probably making tea for my father. Or maybe she is sitting by the window waiting for my father to come home from work. Sometimes, when the summers became hot, and sweat dripped down my cheeks, Mother would buy me mango popsicles. I licked and licked until my tongue completely changed color. It would become so orange that people thought I had painted my tongue. Then I would show my tongue to the girls. Some would call me Kali, while others would run away. Today, as I sit by the window, I can still feel the chill of the mango popsicles on my tongue, but I cannot remember the faces of those girls. I remember the names, but not the faces. Does distance kill memory? I try to remember the colors they wore when we climbed trees and picked apples; colors on their faces when my mother caught us all naked, touching each other’s bodies to feel the difference. I only remember the color of my name. It was red, very red, the red with a thin black border that hung from the mango tree shaped like the sign of always. But I get all lost when I can't seem to find a color that fits my sister. My sister had long, dark, curly hair that always shone. Sometimes I thought she was a mixture of blue and green, the kind of candy wrapper you would see inside the glass case of Lalu’s shop, the candies that taste sweet, so sweet that you have to close your eyes like a prayer to stop your teeth from crashing. But then the color of her name turned orange for a while, not exactly the color of fresh carrots, but close to our flag that had saffron on it. But the colors of her name changed so many times after that, that I lost track. I lost track of her, her clothes, her smell, her electric blue black hair, her polished shoes. But we always wanted the same things: the same furniture, the same plate, the same pillow, the same fabric. When Grandma died, we both wanted her chair shaped like a bassoon.

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Then my thoughts get disconnected. My sister disappears from my thoughts. It’s already mid-afternoon and I can hear many voices coming from the main street. Children are coming back home from school, holding hands and feeding birds bread crumbs from their lunch boxes. Young lovers removing the thin red shells of peanuts as they walk hand in hand, dressed in bright clothes, perhaps going to the movies. My mother is in the kitchen, transferring fish from the frying pan to a closed stainless steel container for my father. She is singing to herself––I can’t hear the words; only the tune strikes my ears. It is a song of love, my father loving her, she loving my father, they loving us. She is happy; her face shines like new salt. I watch her fingers dance in rhythms as she bends forward over the sink scrubbing the burnt stains in the frying pan. Her hands are moving in circles, gently across the surface, and I imagine my mother making love to my father. Or maybe it’s the other way around. My father making love to my mother. What does it take to love so much for so many years, I wonder. And then my thoughts overlap, like a hopeless cross-connection on a telephone. Hawkers outside are screaming. They insist that the fruits are fresh, the mangoes in their carts are so sweet, the best in town. Then their voices become faint. Their carts are still full. They choke thinking about their wives and children waiting for them to return home so that they can buy some rice. Their voices slowly dissolve in the air with the humming of the buses and trams passing by. Dozens of people rush past the hawkers, missing their faces scared with pain. Nobody cares. Why should they? Slowly the afternoon ends and the sky looks clear and white like cellophane paper. I see birds retracing a homeward route in a big bunch. Sometimes they look like a dark woolen blanket with tiny holes across the sky. I wait for my father to come back. I wait for my mother to wash her face and tidy her hair before she starts knitting again, I wait for the night to begin so that I can go up to the terrace and spot some constellations. I wait for the clouds to blanket my views like thick milk. I like to wait and never get tired of waiting.

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My thoughts are beginning to disintegrate. I am all confused about home. Home is past tense, scrambled and disconnected, and time is racing ahead. My past cannot keep pace with time and is falling behind in the race. So I talk to myself. I begin to bark to myself. Minnesota Why do I feel ashamed when I see my own people? The same people I saw everywhere, in the municipal buses, black-stained railway trains, rickshaws, in front of the corporation house, electricity office, post office. Has America transformed me? Does America want me to forget my past? Does America want to give me a new name, perhaps easier to pronounce? My restlessness has taken a new shape. I’ve finally escaped from familiar surroundings. I’m a stranger here. I somehow don’t seem to fit anywhere, and nobody seems to find the missing puzzle piece. They all tell me to go home. Where is home? I ask them. Why do I feel ashamed when I see my own people? I ask them. That’s when they seem to get all uptight. That’s when I know they have no answer. They all seem to stare at me for a while, frozen. I tell them that sometimes I dream––I’m back on the overcrowded streets of Chowringee, people rushing from all sides, pushing me, stepping on me, knocking my brown leather side-bag to walk by me. I feel the elbows, but I never see the faces. I watch the hawkers on the streets sprawled with plastic toys, smuggled perfumes, foreign jackets, fake Nike shoes. People bargaining like mad cats, bursting into fights. And then the skinny khaki police running to the scenes to stop the howling. And I just watch, as I circle my way around the mob to go past them to the man who sits in front of the Calcutta Museum. He has been sitting there for years now, wearing his dusty dhoti, torn rubber chappals and a green parrot with a red hunched beak picking cards for our future. I get tempted, tempted to know my future, and ask the man, “Can you tell my future?” “Yes! Yes! Give one rupee and fifty paisa to the bird and she’ll pick up the card that holds your future.”

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I shove my hands deep inside my purse and count coins, one by one, leaving just fifty paisa for my bus ride home. As soon as I drop the money on the cloth spread in front of me, the parrot forces himself out of the cage, picks the coins one by one, gripping them tightly in his beak, and brings them to his master. And then, I feel my heart collapse. I watch the bird make noises, like eggs cracking, crushing. Almost cursing me, warning me as if the long waiting storm were about to begin. The parrot flaps his wings rapidly. He picks up an old cardboard card from the pile of about a thousand cards stacked in front of him. A somber look, and then a lean smile breaks at the corner of his mouth, as the man holds the card in his hands, reading every scribbled line on the card. And I wait, the longest wait in my life. “You'll cross oceans, seas, and will never come back,” he says as he rips the thin cardboard piece in half, and then another half before he tosses it in a pile with others. I knew he was lying. They always lie. That’s what my mother said. But this time I was afraid of his terrible lies. I felt every muscle in my stomach contract, then release energy like water from a cracked pipe in full force, that gushes from all sides. I haven’t seen my mother for years now. I talk to her in my sleep. I tell my mother now that nobody understands my unsettled emotions. She asks me why? I’ve no answer to her question. I tell my mother I’ve no past, no present, no future. I have no home. My mother tells me that I can always go back home to them. That’s when I begin to think of my journey––my migration to America, an escape from my restlessness to explore new forms of life. New people, new food, new flowers, new roads, new soil. And I want to start all fresh, all transformed. *** I saw my mother in my dreams the other night. Age has made her beautiful, shiny like polished brass. Her dark curly hair, all pulled back in a neat bunch, a red dot in the middle of her forehead glowing. She was sitting on the bassoon chair my grandma left, that both my sister and I desperately wanted. Now the chair is hers. We are gone. But she asked me in my dreams when am I coming back.

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Her voice echoed a few times, and I woke up. I don’t remember anything after that. I never told my mother that part of the story, of never coming back. I could never keep secrets, and my mother always said, “Never tell all your secrets.” I wanted to claim just one story of my own: the story of never coming back. That’s when I ask myself if I have really transformed. It’s a fearful suspicion that haunts me now and then. But I still wait to find out. As I walk around the city, as I walk around the university campus, I see my fellow Indians. By their looks, I can tell that some have metamorphosed, and I smile at them. Others I watch as I pass them on the sidewalks, hesitant to talk since the freshness on their face is so soft, so raw. I’m afraid to touch them. They are still wearing their Mafatlal tailored pants, short-collar shirts, Bata shoes—all stiff and new. I pretend not to know them. Afraid to talk in case they utter their heavily accented English in public. I’m not afraid of them. Why should I be? They are the only ones who still pronounce my name right. I’m afraid of myself. I keep thinking of my accent, my thick Indian accent coming back if I talk to them. I keep thinking of home. I keep thinking of veiling my pain. Pain of not knowing who I am, not knowing what I want anymore. Pain that has left me stiff like a cane with fear of not being wanted when I return home. I keep thinking of Britanina biscuits, the sweet round ones smelling like coconut, and I ache. I keep thinking of trains and my overnight journeys to see my cousins, rocking and sleeping. I don't talk to the freshly-arrived Indians right away, because I cannot relate to them anymore. I just want to pretend not to know them. I know I am pretending. I just wait for them to become addicted to America and change. I wait for them to lose their sense of home. America is sticky like superglue, and I am suspended in the middle. When the breeze is heavy, I swing. I feel dizzy. Sometimes I swing back to the old brick red house, cold walls, cold floor, my mother knitting, my father resting on the recliner with his glasses on his stomach. Birds dropping twigs and their shit everywhere. I can’t see the other side anymore. I wait for the breeze to swing me again. Until then, I dream. I wonder what my mother

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dreams. Does she dream of love? Or does she dream of me––her restless child—never coming back? Opaque Exile Mother always said, “Imaginations can grow wild like weeds.” I never quite understood what it meant. Then. Has America transformed me, or is this a dream like my mother’s fast-growing weeds? I lie through my teeth when I say, “I’m so Indian.” And then my grandfather’s husky voice strikes my ear––“Child, we can teach you how to pack, but cannot tell you where to go or how to trace a map. ” Even in my dreams these words send back haunting echoes. I have forgotten to trace the map of my home. Home has become an obscure, unfamiliar word to my ear. Home sounds more foreign to me than the foreign land in which I now reside. Every time I go back home, I see new children in the family. My sister’s daughter, my cousin’s son, new-born twins in the neighborhood. I’m a stranger to them. Then there are others––all grown up and squinting at me to find shades of familiarity. They all hide behind their mothers’ sarees and peep reluctantly to see this stranger. These same children, when I left home for the first time, wouldn’t leave my side. Cried until their eyes bulged out like red tulips. As I give each of them their presents I have brought for them from America, they are still shy to take their gifts from me. They are afraid to come close to me. I’m not one of them. Anymore. They don’t cry for me––anymore. I don’t smell like them–– anymore. And then I think of my own son. American by birth. Half Indian and half German by origin. Doubly hyphenated––IndoGerman-American. How would I explain to him what it means to be an Indian, when I don’t even have an Indian passport anymore? Will my son ever bond with his cousins in India? Will he speak in Bengali as fluently as my sister’s daughter? Will he feel ashamed to speak Bengali with an American accent? If people mock him, how will I ever forgive myself? Maybe then I will be forced to confront my restlessness––for willingly dislocating myself from my own people in search of a new home.

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Now, when I go home my mother serves me water from an expensive filter. She doesn't want me to get sick, and I don't have the words to explain to her how sick I am already. “Mother, treat me like everybody else, stop treating me special––I want to feel at home.” She doesn’t understand my pain because I never say these words out loud. How do I explain to her that by feeding me pure distilled water she is distancing me from her—from who I am, and giving birth to a deformed gap. She is even more cautious with her American-born grandson. Over time, this large gap will grow larger—so large that my son will have to choose one side of the gap to hang onto. I, too, will have to make a choice, a choice full of compromises. Will I choose to go to the land where I was born and spend my youth, or will I live in a foreign country (where I am now a citizen), but always will be a foreigner, a second-class citizen of some type? And I want to tell my mother now that all this is not a wild dream anymore. Her grandsons will always be extra members in the family, and she will have to provide for them distilled water–– for they will be as weak and brittle as china. But I will not let my mother make special beds for them. They will sleep with all their other siblings, as their bodies would brush against each other, and they will all scream to fit into the large blanket with tiny dark holes. Giggling––they will all fall asleep. And as my son sleeps, I will think of my foreign cousins who never felt a part of our family. They were always visitors who spoke laughable Bengali, and English with such a strong British accent that we stumbled to understand. But I longed to speak like them; I would eat half my words so that people would think I’m foreign. The word “foreign” was a longing. Then I wanted to come to America. Tall buildings, colorful people, large cars, beautiful libraries, manicured lawns, no dust, no cows on the streets. I wanted to speak English at home, and when my mother declined to reply in English, I spoke to my own reflection in front of the mirror. Although my mother never spoke to me in English, she took pride in claiming that both her daughters knew English so well––the best speakers in the neighborhood. Convent educated. She also took pride in the fact that her daughters could speak Eng-

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lish with such poise and grace with their British cousins. I never quite understood the dual message she gave my sister and me all along. I remember my mother often saying that when she and my father took my sister, their first born, to be admitted to Auxilium Convent School, the nuns told her to speak in English with my sister, so that she could learn the language fast. But my mother never did. In spite of her refusing to speak with us in English, when we mastered English so well, my mother somehow felt very proud and pretended that English was in our system all along. I went to both Protestant and Catholic-based English Medium schools. Paid particular attention to the study of the King’s English, so that I could become foreign one day. My struggle was never with English, but always with my vernacular––Bengali. The night before my Bengali exams, my mother panicked as I sought help pronouncing every difficult word on the page. All wrong spelling and terrible grammar filled the pages of my notebook. But I never felt quite ashamed for not knowing my language––as I did with people who spoke English all wrong. After a few years in America, and taking literature classes about the minority culture, I became aware of the concept of assimilation in the dominant culture, the urge and the necessity to learn English the right way to survive. But why was I struggling to perfect my English in India? *** At home, I have always been the fair-skinned child––the fairest in the family, the fairest in school, the fairest on the playground. Even fairer than my cousins in England, who are more English than any Englishman I know. Only now do I realize how my color made me a pariah. A pariah in my own family. A pariah whose desire to come to America was never objected to. Only I didn’t know that I didn’t belong in a place I called my home. What I called home for so long was only in my wild imagination––and I let it grow like wild weeds, as my mother said many years ago. The day I left for America, a feeling of strangeness pulverized me. I was starting a new life, with a brand-new suitcase, new clothes, new shoes, a new leather handbag that my parents had bought for me from New Market on Lindsey Street. Along with all

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the new clothes in my suitcase, my mother stuffed some of my favorite salwars. “In the summers, when it is warm in Minnesota, you can wear these, Reshmi,” she said. The only essence of Indian clothing in my suitcase were these few pieces of Salwar Kameez. I stayed in London for two weeks before I came to America. In London, I left the last layer of my Indianness––my Indian clothes. My aunt bought more clothes for me, some English brandnamed jeans that nobody recognized in America, more shirts, a heavy overcoat from Marks and Spencer. The night before I left for America after my brief stay in London, my suitcase would not shut. It was almost bursting. So the only option was to take out all my Salwar Kameez that my mother had packed for me. It was too long to wait for summer to wear some Indian clothes. Besides, I didn’t want to wait. I was too eager to become displaced in the new land. A dislocation that would give me a fresh life, devoid of the past. A past filled with longings to become a foreigner. I had already been in America for a few months, had not spoken a word of Bengali, and was beginning to feel choked. I couldn’t connect my thoughts in English anymore. I couldn’t think of home in English. It sounded fake, somehow. So I started writing letters to my mother back home in Bengali, wrong spellings all over, but I couldn’t stop. I began to learn a language that I despised, and somehow thought was inferior. And now that language was my only survival. I began to search for familiar places––a search I hoped would lead me to find traces of home that I had left behind. My life in America was beginning to unfold. The snowfall had begun again. As I walked back one night after closing the library, it was already midnight. The huge bottle green jacket hung over me like the loose skin of an old man. The freezing temperature outside made me feel as if the outer shell of my face would drop onto the huge parking lot in front of my apartment on Summit Avenue. As I looked down, I noticed steel-colored, star-shaped snowflakes had covered the ground. I had never seen such shiny snowflakes before. So I picked a lump of flakes from the ground and watched them disappear in my palm. As I bent to pick up more, I lost my shadow under the lamppost. I turned around, walked backward and jumped like a frog, but still could not see my

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shadow. I touched my face, I touched my nose, I touched my lips. I could feel nothing. I was still standing erect in the parking lot when the freezing wind began to blow against my cheeks, pricking my cheekbones. But I was feeling extremely warm, as if a furnace had been lit beneath my green coat. Hastily, I unbuttoned the first two buttons near my neck and slowly began to feel my heartbeat–– hitting like a hammer against the walls of my chest. Where was I? At that moment, all I wanted to do was see my mother, but I could not remember her face. I desperately imagined holding on to my father’s hands, but every time I went closer to him, he moved away beneath a cloud of fog. For the last time, I wanted to be held in my grandfather’s bony arms. I could distinctly hear his heavy footsteps like an echo of a drumbeat in a hollow cave, but as I approached him closer, his footsteps rapidly faded away. They all deserted me. Once again. I rushed back and called home. The phone kept ringing and ringing. I figured my parents were asleep. So I fell asleep, too. The next morning as I woke up, I turned the globe to see how far away I was from home. I hated the huge globe that sat on my study table by the window. The globe was a lie. India wasn’t that closely situated to America. The gap between the two nations was much larger than anybody could ever comprehend. Suddenly, through a little hole in the curtain, I saw a black crow in the parking lot. It looked exactly like the crow back home that would come every morning and sit by the window near my bed. I jumped out of bed, pulled the faded Levis up past my hips, grabbed my huge black shawl, and ran outside to see the crow. All crumpled, I stood under the shade of a tall oak tree and watched the crow hop from the roof of one car to another. Then suddenly it spread out its jet-black wings that looked like the fine strings of a varnished harp, flapped them twice, and flew away. I watched it glide and rise higher and higher in the air, until it completely disappeared. I almost never cry, but that night I cried. An aspect of dark, gloomy loneliness had slowly crept into my life and was becoming a part of it. I knew I could not go back to India, because the possibility of turning back had been closed to me. I was trapped. I wanted

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to burn all the immigration papers that my Baba and the immigration officer had told me to keep safely. A feeling of suffocation invaded my breathing space. I opened the window near my bed, but shut it immediately. The warm summer air that gushed against the skin of my face felt like acid. I suddenly remembered the plastic-covered sky-blue photo album I had brought with me the first time I left home. It lay in my dilapidated suitcase in the hall closet. As I started flipping through those photos, the rhythm of my flipping fingers stopped. There was a photo of myself, stern and serious, standing against the background of the white-walled house where we lived in Durgapur when I was five. It was a small industrial town near Calcutta, where my father worked for a multi-national company. I never smiled as a child, especially when I saw a camera. Cameras always seemed to threaten me. So most of my childhood black-andwhite photos depicted a grim expression on my face. I could vividly remember when the picture was taken. My grandfather had stayed with us for a month and was leaving that day by the morning train, going back to Calcutta. My Baba had already carried his old big brown 1920s-style suitcase into the car. My grandfather, whom I called dadu, had a plastic yellow bag with some dry food in it that my mother had packed for the five hours of his journey. With one hand he held the yellow bag; with the other tightly grasped my tiny little hand. There was a camera hanging around his neck. He slowly released my hand and asked me to go and stand in the backyard. My hair was all unruly and wild since I had just woken up. I hadn't even brushed my teeth, but had my red boots on, unlaced. Just before my grandfather clicked the shot, I had unconsciously stuck my thumb in my mouth. My grandfather captured that moment before I grasped him tightly, buried my face in his shirt and burst into tears. Returning Writing about home is much harder now than it was a few years ago. Sometimes I think I am losing it all, layers of myself–– all lost in translation. When I’m alone at night I keep thinking about my father, especially how his voice shakes sometimes on the

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phone, and I can’t figure out how he looks now with a few more wrinkles near his neck. I also think about my mother. She was always thin and frail, with a large forehead and freckles on her cheeks. I wonder whether her freckles have faded with age. My sister’s baby girl, Bushka, is four months old now, and I’m her only aunt. I haven’t seen her either. My sister tells me on the phone that Bushka will stand up any day now. I long to see my sister in her motherly role. Bushka grabbing her glasses and then her hair, and my sister letting her play with it without a moment’s hesitation. Then, Bushka supporting herself against my sister’s redwood dresser, standing up as my sister makes her bed. Suddenly she rushes toward Bushka, grabbing her by the waist and lifting her into her arms before she can fall. It is this distance, this space in between that sometimes suffocates me, and I don’t know how to close these gaps anymore. With each passing year this gap is growing larger and larger, and memories are fading like jeans washed with strong bleach, forming irregular patches of familiarity here and there. I don’t have vivid memories of places back home. Memories of places through which I walked back every day from school, how the street from the post office curved to the bakery, the smell of freshly baked bread, still hot inside as I poked a finger at its center, and how I burned my finger tips––are all becoming conflated. This is where it gets complicated and I try not to retrace anymore. I still can’t remember the exact taste of that bread that I ate back home. Too many types of breads here, multigrain, wheat, whole wheat, honey wheat, stone wheat, oat and honey, bran and honey, cranberry, cinnamon raisin, and many others have over-shadowed my memory of the only white bread that I had eaten for eighteen years there. It is this mixing up of memories that bothers me, and I don’t know how to stop this loss. I am caught between this “here” and “there” all the time. I can never be at one place anymore. Comparison after comparison has caused growing discomfort as to what I really like, who I really am, and where I really would like to be. It is this lack of attachment, lack of love, lack of familiarity, lack of comparisons that is causing all the ache. Their very absence has created a presence for me. Here.

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It’s November again. I look out of the window and see that the sun is making the snow glitter. Twenty years ago, when I first came to Minnesota, I walked on ice, and I slipped and fell and broke my arm. Since then I have learned how to walk on ice, and I can’t remember whether I broke my right arm or my left. There is neither any pain, nor any scar left. But I still watch out for ice. Thin ice that covers the ground every now and then.

Chapter 6 The Question of Returns: Irresolution of Locations “Location,” here, is not a matter of finding a stable “home” or of discovering a common experience. Rather it is a matter of being aware of the difference that makes a difference in concrete situations, of recognizing the various inscriptions, “places,” or “histories”…“Location” is thus, concretely, a series of locations and encounters, travel within diverse, but limited spaces.

—James Clifford

The first visa that is attached in my adult Indian passport is that of the United Kingdom, a single entry visa, restricting my stay in England only for three months, with no possibility of re-entering the country, until and unless a renewed visa is granted. Thus, my first arrival date from the postcolonial nation space to the West is marked in my passport as January 11 (instead of January 10, 1990, because I missed my British Airways flight from Bombay after oversleeping––an oversleeping that perhaps delayed my first displacement, only to be postponed by a day). Although my first arrival date (officially) into a new nation (England) is January 11, 1990, in my mind I still hold January 10, 1990, as my first entry into a new nation space, since that is the date I had rehearsed in my mind over and over again. Missing the plane was never a part of the plan.

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The imagined date signifying my imagination of departure from my old postcolonial nation space to the West, (that up until then had existed only through books, newspapers, the voice of BBC, and films) looms much larger in my mind than the reality of what is stamped in my official passport. However, what is much more significant is my second arrival date, my second entry into another new nation space. January 24, 1990, is marked as my arrival date in America, a date that is stamped in my old Indian passport at the port of entry (Chicago)––my very first entry inside the country that was not just a transit stop, but also a terminus. I had finally arrived in America. This was an arrival where I could “stay” much longer, leave the country and come back over and over again within the first five years given the nature of the multipleentry visa that I was granted from the American consulate. This was also the first time an I-94 form, the arrival record, was stapled in my passport. Before every return to what is called “home” or elsewhere outside the United States, the I-94 was ripped out from my passport. Thus, this I-94 form has been stapled and ripped multiple times in my passport, each attachment and detachment marking a push and pull toward and away from home. I do not need such stapling and ripping of I-94’s in my passport anymore because my status has changed from being a non-resident alien (a migrant), to a permanent resident alien (an immigrant), and finally to becoming an American citizen. These gradual changes in my legal status within America have also led to a more expansive and complex understanding of my own continuous state of (un)belonging in America, and my infrequent state of being in the country of my birth, India. My country of citizenship also is no longer my place of birth, but my migrated country. In fact, in 2004 my Indian passport was “cancelled without prejudice” by the Indian consulate in San Francisco. My arrivals and departures in both nations are not questioned anymore, although in my own mind I’m not quite sure whether I’ve either arrived or departed from anywhere. My continuous philosophical state of being is still that of a migrant, a state that denies any capacity to embrace rooting or complete loyalty to any given nation––is the most fitting state of my “neither here nor there” subjectivity.

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When I enter the U.S. now, I stand in a line under the sign “Citizens/Green Card Holders” instead of the sign that reads “Visitors.” The push and pull of feeling at home and subsequently feeling displaced increases every time I go back to India. New roads, new billboards advertising Western ethos, the sprawl of fast-food centers such as McDonald’s, Baskin-Robbins, Pizza Hut and others have replaced my fond memories of the boxy yellow Bhelpuri and chat carts, egg-wrapped mutton rolls and grease-dripping Biriyani. I have become a “visitor” and a familiar stranger at the same time. Also, without an Indian passport I am no longer a legal citizen of India. I am, as Chambers would say, “a stranger in the house,” “the mystery of that sense of belonging deposited in the desire, the need, to be a part of a historical, social and cultural unit that is called ‘home’ and ‘homeland’…(Chambers in Culture After Humanism, 161). Yet, there is no assurance this desire to belong will ever be realized. As a naturalized citizen of the United States, the question of return has a double emphasis now. Every time I go back to India, I say, “I’m going home.” Days before leaving India to return to Oregon, I say, “My holidays have ended. I’m returning home again.” Both entries and exits into and from either nation space are tied to the rhetoric of home and dwelling, although the nature of homelessness in both nations differs in degrees, as I have articulated most clearly in the creative chapter. This backward and forward movement doesn’t jar or bother me anymore. I’ve become used to it, and I feel that I belong to both places and spaces and yet do not feel at rest in either. The above narrative, although personal in nature, is a narrative that can be closely identified by intellectual migrants (with variation in details and conditions of multiple leavings and returnings). Since this book started with the signification of the document I-94 emphasizing “arrivals” into new nation spaces using García Canclini’s trope of what he calls Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, I want to end the book with the ramification of “returns” from and to these hybrid cultures. Canclini uses the term “hybridity” in a way that the tensions between the conceptual polarities remain hanging and unresolved.

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No amount of return(ing) for the migrant can ever restore the subject’s original relationship to home with any resolution. Renato Rosaldo, in the foreword to Canclini’s book, writes: On the one hand, hybridity can imply a space betwixt and between two zones of purity in a manner that follows biological usage that distinguishes two discrete species and the hybrid pseudospecies that results from their combination…On the other hand, hybridity can be understood as the ongoing condition of all human creatures, which contain no zones of purity because they undergo continuous process of transculturation…(Canclini 15).

As subjects are caught in this “continuous process of transculturation,” what is at stake is not so much the identity of the already hybrid subject, but the hybrid’s relationship to home and nation. Chambers, in his book Culture After Humanism, on one hand reminds us that “home is the place where things and relations, materials and bodies, fantasy and fact can be dominated and domesticated, governed and articulated” (Chambers 161). Yet, it is this very home that traumatizes the migrant when faced with “social ostracism, economic exploitation and racial discrimination to war, physical elimination, and planned, ultimately industrialized genocide” (Chambers 162). Such threats manifest in trauma as the migrant begins to feel unsafe and threatened under these circumstances in his/her adopted home. Nico Israel, in his book Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora, has articulated the overlap between the conditions of exile and migrancy quite aptly. According to him, exile “denotes banishment from a particular place in an institutional act of force; but, appropriately for a word that probably derives from the Latin exsalire, it also expresses a sense of ‘leaping out’ toward something or somewhere, implying a matter of will” (Israel 1). Here, what is shared between the exiled and the migrant subject is an overlap of the “will” while what is not shared are the cultural, intellectual and geo-socio-political conditions that make “leaping out” of each of these categories possible. After September 11,, 2001, as my chapter on “Threatening Bodies, Dangerous Knowledge, Legal Interventions” has demonstrated, any leaping out for the migrant is forced and no longer a mat-

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ter of will. This forced leaping out has caused the migrant to become not only homeless, but also stateless in many situations. Conditions that produce the state of migrancy, exile, and nomadism might differ, but what links these experiences is a particular kind of abandonment, a “leaping out” of/from both one’s nation and psyche to step into another. This gesture of “leaping out” starts a chain of displacements; spatial, linguistic, legal, cultural and ideological, where subjects (to borrow Lukács’s Hegelian notion in the expression of the novel) feel “transcendental homelessness” (Theory of the Novel 124). The German word obdachlosigkeit does imply homelessless (lack of shelter), but the word heimat signifies not only “home” but also “homeland” and “home nation.” Israel also reminds us of Lukács’ regular use of the expression grazen (“border, territory, state”) and grenzenlos (“boundless”) to convey a more geographic sense of home. Such homelessness, not so much in a material sense of the term but more as a philosophical mode of being, has long been cited, although not adequately translated, given the awkwardness of the translation. My own experience of living in a state of suspension as articulated in the creative chapter, and its subsequent implications through Lahiri’s fictional characters who exhibit and perform these moments of “leaping out” are attempts to explore such philosophical modes of being for the migrant. Drawing on texts from literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, and legal studies, this book speaks across and within disciplines about the cultural and geopolitical conditions of postcolonial migrancy. In “DessimiNation” Bhabha proposes that we need “another time of writing that will be able to inscribe the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the problematic ‘modern’ experience of the Western nation” (Bhabha 315). As Bhabha articulates such a time, he first draws upon and then uses Freud’s theory of the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), a term that he translates as “the unhomely”––a jarring period of repetition and disjuncture in the thought process. Throughout this book, such “uncanny” moments are captured as they are metaphorically explored through lan-

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guage, memory, forgetting, travel and displacement and, finally, legal (de)regulations. Given the rhetoric of repetition and disjuncture that is tied closely to displacements and travel, the idea of “return” simply to revisit a dwelling, i.e., to turn back and return fully to what is called one’s homeland in the hope of reconciling one’s displaced authenticity, hardly seems feasible anymore. In other words, it is impossible to “go back home again” and reclaim one’s past dwelling. However, for Heidegger “dwelling” not only involves a kind of homelessness, but this state of homelessness also “enables a degree of freedom, freedom to rethink being” (Israel 15). Such a degree of “freedom to rethink being” allows the intellectual migrant to inhabit a new state of being––one in which s/he is not terrorized by ruptures and multiple displacements, but embraces such a state where multiple ruptures precisely allow the migrant to have multiple dwellings. In the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger, while thinking about displacement, offers a relationship that dwellings share with place and space, using the relations between bridge, horizon and boundary and argues that space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their essential being from locations and not from “space” (Basic Writings 332).

While one can hardly understand all the various implications that Heidegger’s writing on dwelling convey, one cannot overlook the example of the bridge as a structure that links different locations while itself being in a state of suspension. A bridge, then, provides the in-between link to the two points of locations–– arrival and departure. On this bridge resides the migrant who has access to locations, yet is devoid of any sense of complete belonging in any of these locations anymore. Yet, in times of national crisis that provoke blind nationalism and xenophobia, such a bridge collapses, taking down with it the migrant’s sense of temporary habitat.

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In this movement or collapse, identity can never be resolved. In the process of this movement, the migrant engages in a journey that is open-ended and incomplete, punctuated by moments of identification and alienation that do not culminate in final moments of arrival. In the intermingling between fact and autobiography, memory and forgetting, fragmentation in the psyche, the trauma of living at the edge of two nations, yet being unable to claim loyalty to either, the migrant sense of living between two worlds, between two times (between a lost past and a fragmented present), resulting in “rootlessness” but hanging on to one’s “routing” is perhaps the most appropriate description associated with migrancy. Movement and migration from the ex-colonies to the Western imperial centers, from rural to urban metropolitan centers, involves a complex transformation and transmutation of self, psyche, language, and the experience of citizenship. The romanticized notion associated with travel and traveling, promising a return home in the modern times, is replaced by a betwixt and between stage of being in a suspended state of agitation in the postmodern times. Here the postcolonial intellectual subject who voluntarily engages in travel and displacement has no place to go back to and claim a permanent sense of home. These cosmopolitan migrants, as they perform transgressive citizenships, reside in a world that is removed from any sense of national belonging. Geographic displacement as a result of pleasure travel, intellectual travel, war, genocide, and forced deportation and detention as a lived experience has brought the articulation of home and subjectivity as explored under the rubric of migrancy to the forefront. Throughout I have provided new strategies of not just theorizing the migrant predicament, but offered ways of reading such predicaments that categorize the experience of migrancy, and in particular the “migrant” as a distinct cultural experience, one that is quite different from being in exile, or a refugee, or a nomad–– although there are overlaps between the migrant and the exiled subject (as I have discussed earlier). For the migrant this lack of a genuine sense of national belonging precisely acts as a threat post 9/11. As a result of the rise of the

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National Security State after September 11, 2001, these intellectual migrants experience long periods of exile in their adopted countries. These intellectual migrants Hamid Naficy describes as figures having “more in common with their exilic counterparts at home and in their West than they do with their fellow citizens–– either at home or in their host country. This displaced intellectual, according to Naficy, constitutes a “universal category,” “cutting across geographical cultural boundaries” (The Making of Exile Cultures 2). This cosmopolitan postcolonial migrant intellectual signals both liberatory and restrictive effects of an increasingly transnational and transgressive world. Such subjects do not completely belong to any one country. Their citizenships are not based on a sense of national belonging, but more an effect of a historical process that affected their subjectivity. These subjects are not Indian, Philippine, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Peruvian, or Somalian or American citizens. They are postcolonial citizens––a citizenship that is beyond the rhetoric of simple passports, where a migrant’s name, photo, sex, place of birth, date of birth, nationality and identifying marks define only a minute trajectory into the psyche and the actual routing in the migrant’s journey from there to here. Beyond these passports and numerous types of visas attached within the passport, narrating one’s history of travel and work lies the reality of the migrant condition. The postcolonial intellectual citizen comes from such beyondness––a beyondness that is elsewhere in the world, a beyondness that disallows the migrant to psychically claim any sense of residence permanently, yet physically be able to reside in multiple locations.

Afterword A Postcolonial Citizen’s Oath “That you absolutely and entirely renounce all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince potentate, state or sovereignty of whom or which you have been a subject or citizen” Like a good daughter I call home every Saturday. My mother waits by the phone. I haven’t called home yet to let Ma and Baba know what I mumbled “under oath” in front of a room full of people. I am breaking all ties, with my homeland, your homeland. I can no longer claim any loyalty to my mother’s womb. I will need a “visa” to go back home, I will no longer stand beside them but in a separate line marked for “Non-Indians”/foreigners.

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From now on I am a “visitor” in my own country of birth. “And that you take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion…so help you God” I am searching for a new God now–– A God that will help me cope with this willing disruption I have chosen for myself. I’ve to break free from the memories of the old red house belonging to my great grandmother. The walls smelled lime, and I see flashes of my grandma making her way down to the kitchen with a cane to support her deformed right leg. Then, she made all of us sit in a half circle forming an arch as she fried hot puris in pure ghee and we waited impatiently––for her to serve a perfectly round puri in the center of our plate. Now I’m obligated to put this past behind me “without any mental reservation.” My mother secretly hopes I will go back home one day, and watch her age with grace. Now I’ve to tell her “without any mental reservation” I’ve promised: “to serve and protect America by bearing arms.”

Afterword Tomorrow I will apply for a new American passport. My old Indian passport, along with my old photo will be “canceled without prejudice” For tomorrow, I keep practicing flicking a quick smile and saying Thank You! I anticipate––many more congratulations coming my way from my American comrades. Every good wish getting one more step closer to canceling my past and replacing it with “Welcome to America” With one new passport and a canceled one I am a indeed a citizen–– A Postcolonial Citizen for which a passport and an oath is yet to be decided and legalized.

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Index A AAUP. See American Association of University Professors ABCD (American Born Confused Desis), 11 Academe, 84 academic freedom. See freedom, academic Agamben, Georgio, 87, 90, 105 Al-Arian, Sami, 88–89, 90, 95, 99, 101, 103 Alexander, Meena Fault Lines, 27–51 and mimetic fragmentation, 10 and 9/11, 48 and the “questions we ask,” 17 sexual abuse of, 28–29, 34–36, 40, 45 and the Shock of Arrival, 21 aliens as “unclassifiable being,” 91 immigration terminology on, 105 non-resident, 106n1 detained and tortured (1919), 99 and the I-94 card, 2 foreign-born scholars as, 84

and the migrant’s passport, 22 status, xi perceived as threat, 89 transition to resident alien, 22 resident, 106n1 foreign-born scholars as, 84 as green card holders, 19 status, xi, 23, 66 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 84, 96 Angel of History, 16, 80 Arrival-Departure Record. See I-94

B Baudrillard, Jean, 13–14 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 38 Bennington, Geoffrey, 11–12 Berger, John, 17, 46–47,79 Bhabba, Homi K. on “being in the beyond,” 12 on dislocation, 56 and “frontiers of the modern nation,” 7 on hybridity as “third space,” 15

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on “liminality of migrant experience,” 80–81 citing Rushdie, 18 and the “splitting of a subject,” 45 and the “unhomely,” 7, 133 Boym, Svetlana, 47 Brah, Avtar, 23 Bush, George W. administration policies, 24, 90, 100, 105–106 Butler, Judith, 93, 105

C Calcutta. See Kolkata Campus Watch, 88, 94, 95, 96 Canclini, Néstor García, 131–32 Carter, Paul, 5–6, 23, 25 Caruth, Cathy, 30 Chambers, Iain on the home, 6, 131, 132 on the journey, 14–15 on migrancy, 20, 22 on the “mobile habit,” 19 Chang, Nancy, 86–87, 100 Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 87, 100 Civil Rights Act of 1964, x, 24, 85, 87, 94, 105 Clifford, James, 22, 129 Constitution, U.S., 85, 92, 93, 104 Culbertson, Roberta, 34, 37, 39

D DCBA (Desis Confused by America), 11 Deblo, Charlotte, 39 Deleuzem, Gilles, 15 Derrida, Jacques, 45–46, 65 Diab, Hassan, 94–95 Doumani, Behsara, 83, 93–94

E EEOC. See Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Eliot, T.S., 3

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 88, 102, 103

F Fanon, Franz, 100 Felman, Shoshona, 35 Field, Robin E., 70–71 Fischer, Michael M. J., 39 Foucault, Michel, 41 fragmentation, 31, 48 of Kaushik, 63–69 mimetic, 10 psychic, 9–10, 11, 135 of the second-generation American-born, 58 freedom, academic and the AAUP, 84, 96–97 erosion of, 88, 93, 95 issues at stake, 24 protection of, 93 questioning of, x and the U.S. Constitution, 85 See also Students for Academic Freedom (SAF); American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Freud, Sigmund, 38, 133

G Gay, Peter, 59 Gonzales, N.V.M., 55 green card, xi, 19, 22–23, 104 Guattari, Felix, 15

H Hall, Stuart, 24–25, 47 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 62 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 134 home, 7 Homeland Security, 92, 105 homelessness of Alexander, 34, 51n2 caused by constant movement, 18 Heidegger on, 1, 134

Index

149

intensified forms of, 11 JanMohamed on, 21, 47 in The Namesake, 69 of a second-generation subject, 71 transcendental, 133 Unheimliche, 19 hooks, bell, 50 Howe, Florence, 47–48 H. R. 3077, 92–93

I Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 4 I-94, 1–3, 20–23, 130 INS (Immigration and Nationalization Service), 91, 101, 105 internment camps, 99 Israel, Nico, 132, 133, 134

J JanMohamed, Abdul R., 12–13, 21, 47, 48

K Katrak, Ketu, 56 Kolkata, 1, 55, 66 Krishnaswamy, Revathi, 9 Kristeva, Julia, 53–54 Kumar, Amitava, 11, 86

L Lahiri, Jhumpa and second-generation Americans, 8, 19 and mimetic fragmentation, 10 Interpreter of Maladies, 11, 55, 56, 69 The Namesake, 53, 55, 69–70, 76 Ashima Ganguly, 64–65, 66, 69–70, 72, 74 Gogol Ganguly, 57, 58–59, 60–63, 67–69, 72–78 Shariff on, 76

Unaccustomed Earth, 11, 55–59, 63–64, 66, 70 language loss of, 9, 31 of memories, 38 of money, 32–38 Lennon, John, 106 Lim, Shirley, 56

M Mallot, J. Edward, 35 Michaels, C. William, 84, 91, 98 Min-ha, Trinh T., 80 Mistry, Rohinton, 86, 96 Mohanty, Chandra, 78–79 Morin, Edgar, 11–12

N Naficy, Hamid, 136 National Security State, x, 5, 24, 88, 96, 136 Nguyen, Tram, 83, 91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41 9/11. See post-911 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, 25, 87

O Obama, Barrack, 106 O’Hare International Airport, 3

P Palmer Raids, 99 Patriot Act approval by Congress, 100 as challenge for migrants, 23–24, 105 and challenges of discrimination, 88, 103 and deportation, 86 and non-citizens, 87, 90–91 Pipes, Daniel, 94 post-9/11

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civil liberties, 84, 87–88 climate, 90 image of migrant scholar, 86 immigration regulations, x, 4–5, 90, 91–92 “Migrant’s Migraine,” 23–25 roundup of non-resident aliens, 87–88 U. S. academy, 84–85 93, 95–96, 104 violence against Arabs and South Asians, 91 Prasad, Vijay, 58, 71, 98 Pratt, Mary Louis, 3–4

R Ramadan, Tariq, 85–86 Ray, Sangeeta, 33–34 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 99 Rosalto, Renato, 132 Rushdie, Salman cited by Bhabba, 18 and the imagination of “home,” 14 and memory, 35 and the U. S. Patriot Act, 86 on the post-colonial writer as migrant, 9

S Said, Edward and America, 86 on the American university as safe place, 92–93 on double consciousness, 9 field of study of, 95 Kramer on, 95–96 on liberation, 1 on memory, 28, 31, 42 and migrancy, 20 on being “out of place,” 69 and “traveling theorists,” 83 and the “voyage in,” 14 Salama, Mohammad Ramadan Hassan, 89–90

Salwar Kameez, 123 Scott, Charles E., 44, 46, 50 Scott, Joan, 43, 44 Scott, Tyren, 106 September 11, 2001. See post-9/11 Shariff, Farha, 76 Stillwell, Cinnamon, 94 Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), 88 See also freedom, academic Sutton, John, 42

T Title VII, x, 85, 88, 105 transmigrants, 5

U U.S. Constitution, 85, 92, 93, 104

V Vander Kolk, Bernard A., 28

W war on terror Bush administration policy on, 24, 105 and the U.S. Constitution, 85 migrants seen as threats to, x punitive measures for critics of, 84, 100 rhetoric of, 99 and the university, 104 Wilson, Woodrow, 99

X xenophobia, 86, 99, 134

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES Maria C. Zamora, General Editor The recent global reality of both forced and voluntary migrations, massive transfers of population, and traveling and transplanted cultures is seen as part and parcel of the postindustrial, postmodern, postcolonial experience. The Postcolonial Studies series will explore the enormous variety and richness in postcolonial culture and transnational literatures. The series aims to publish work which explores various facets of the legacy of colonialism including: imperialism, nationalism, representation and resistance, neocolonialism, diaspora, displacement and migratory identities, cultural hybridity, transculturation, translation, exile, geographical and metaphorical borderlands, transnational writing. This series does not define its attentions to any single place, region, or disciplinary approach, and we are interested in books informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives. While seeking the highest standards of scholarship, the Postcolonial Studies series is thus a broad forum for the interrogation of textual, cultural and political postcolonialisms. The Postcolonial Studies series is committed to interdisciplinary and cross cultural scholarship. The series’ scope is primarily in the Humanities and Social Sciences. For example, topics in history, literature, culture, philosophy, religion, visual arts, performing arts, language & linguistics, gender studies, ethnic studies, etc. would be suitable. The series welcomes both individually authored and collaboratively authored books and monographs as well as edited collections of essays. The series will publish manuscripts primarily in English (although secondary references in other languages are certainly acceptable). Page count should be one hundred and twenty pages minimum to two hundred and fifty pages maximum. Proposals from both emerging and established scholars are welcome. For additional information about this series or for the submission of manuscripts, please contact: Maria C. Zamora c/o Acquisitions Department Peter Lang Publishing 29 Broadway, 18th floor New York, New York 10006 To order other books in this series, please contact our Customer Service Department: (800) 770-LANG (within the U.S.) (212) 647-7706 (outside the U.S.) (212) 647-7707 FAX Or browse online by series: www.peterlang.com

The twentieth century has witnessed the rise of a large population of postcolonial intellectual migrants “willingly” arriving from formerly colonized countries into the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada to pursue intellectual goals. Embedded in this movement from the formerly colonized spaces into the West is the vexed question of dislocation and displacement for these intellectual subjects. The Postcolonial Citizen traces how such modes of (un)belonging are represented within literary and cultural space and how migrancy, and in particular the postcolonial “intellectual” migrant, is symbolically and philosophically understood as a cultural icon of displacement in the West. Using literary texts, autobiographical narrative of displacement, and cultural criticism, this book treats the cultural reception of intellectual migrancy (particularly within America) as both an uneasy and ambiguous condition. What is timely about this book’s treatment of migrancy is the current threat imposed on postcolonial writers and scholars in the United States post-9/11. The book examines and exposes the consequences of intellectually intervening into democratic ideals after the rise of the “national security state”—giving the migrant sensibility of dislocation a socio-political dimension. Thus, in dealing with the cultural reception of migrancy, The Postcolonial Citizen clearly marks the shift between pre- and post-9/11 migrant subjectivity and particularly addresses how the “third world” intellectual migrant has become synonymous with the voice of dissent and threat to the established democratic order in the United States. “Immigrants rarely speak in one tongue alone, but, alas, academics often do. While laying claim to her postcolonial citizenship, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt shows us that academia too can be a foreign country. The form of her book, its multiple registers and idioms, announces a new polyglot nation. This is the work of a true intellectual migrant.” Amitava Kumar, Professor of English, Vassar College; Author of Passport Photos “Suspended in the complex constellations of planetary modernity, where migration and the migrant set the critical stage for a radical revaluation of ‘citizenship’ and belonging, The Postcolonial Citizen bravely and brilliantly travels into the unfolding languages—both poetical and political—of the agonistic fusion of horizons which, however viciously resisted and cruelly denied, is the becoming of today’s world.” Iain Chambers, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is Associate Professor at Linfield College in Oregon, where she teaches postcolonial literature, creative writing, and gender studies.

W W W. P E T E R L A N G . C O M