Bodies On The Move - A Poetics of Home and Diaspora

University of Tulsa
Bodies on lIe Move A Foelics oJ Hone and Biaspova

AulIov|s) Susan SlanJovd Fviednan
Souvce TuIsa Sludies in Wonen's Lilevaluve, VoI. 23, No. 2 |FaII, 2004), pp. 189-212
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Bodies on the Move:
A Poetics of Home and Diaspora
Susan Stanford Friedman
University of Wisconsin, Madison
One without a home becomes a traveler.
Jyotirmoyee Devi'
Identity is changed by the journey.
Madan Sarup2
I'd like to begin with a common story, a tale of migration full of contra
dictions. The heart of it is so familiar that it seems more like an American
cliche than a suggestive point of departure for an exploration of the poet
ics of dislocation. Saleema is my daughter's friend, her roommate during
their first year of law school in New York City. Saleema is the eldest of
three children born in the United States to parents from an elite family in
Pakistan. Her father is a surgeon living out on the Island, and the family
goes back and forth "home" at the drop of a hat. Saleema is vibrant, full of
infectious laughter and whimsy, warm and endlessly generous. Irreverent
with her friends, she is also ever the dutiful daughter to her family, religion,
and homeland. Gleefully, she showed my daughter how she persuaded her
father to let her wear a skirt just below the knee-with tights and high
leather boots not an inch of skin showed, and yet she could take pleasure
in a stylishly short American skirt. She laughed at her ruse, at herself, at
her father-but she kept her skin covered on legs and arms, in deference
to the requirements of modesty and decorum, in accord with the necessity
to be a proper model to her younger siblings. In the week after September
1 1th, she wore her "I love Pakistan" t-shirt to the mall, not to spite griev
ing New Yorkers-she is not a spiteful person and she doesn't have a chip
on her shoulder-but to affirm goodness and humanity in Pakistan and to
defy the hate and suspicion she saw in so many American eyes.
Three years ago, Saleema's father arranged a marriage for her with a
young man she had never met. Amazed, my daughter watched Saleema's
initial shock fade and then turn into eagerness as she and the young man
fell in love. A year later, her father abruptly canceled the engagement after
a serious disagreement with the young man's family. Saleema was devas
tated but accepted her father's decision. After awhile, Saleema announced
to my daughter with some pride of independence that she would not select
189
a mate of her own, but she also wouldn't accept an arranged marriage. She
would remain single-a space in between having her father choose and
choosing for herself. In this space between worlds, Saleema allowed herself
to become "just friends" with a fellow law student, a white man so differ
ent on the surface of things but so alike in their laughter and dreams.
Inseparable as "just friends," they are in the eyes of their classmates clearly
an "item," one of the many couples forming in the pressure cooker of law
school. Over winter break a few weeks ago, Saleema goes back "home," as
usual, to Pakistan. She returns with a bombshell. Her father has
announced a new engagement: she is to be married in June to a young man
in Pakistan she has only just met. She speaks to my daughter of her anguish
and confusion, her sense of duty, the competing loves she feels for her
boyfriend and her family. To defy her father would mean to lose her fam
ily. What to do? My daughter, the product of a mixed marriage, in an inter
racial relationship herself, does not know what to say.
I don't know the end of this story. At multiple removes, I am haunted
by Saleema, even though I know there is nothing particularly unique in
her story, even though I know that her family's wealth and privilege in
both Pakistan and the United States cushion the dilemma of being
between worlds, separating her greatly from the migrations of the poor and
the refugee. Maybe it's having heard so many of my daughter's stories about
Saleema's antics and seeing for myself the bursting vibrancy of her laugh
ter and joie de vivre. Will it be silenced?
What happens to the human spirit between worlds, to desire and long
ing as they cross and recross geographical and cultural borders, to the
domains of intimacy and family in migration, dislocation, and relocation?
For some Asian Americans, Meena Alexander writes in her essay/poem
"Alphabets of Flesh," "assimilation translated into doing well, very well,
not just making do. But the streets lined with gold are hard to walk and
what happens with the heart can give one pause."3 In her poem
"Estrangement Becomes the Mark of the Eagle," lovers "lie in a white
room, on a bed with many pillows":
You whisper: exile is hard
let me into your mouth, let me blossom.4
Whether or not "the streets [are] lined with gold"-and for most migrants,
they are not-diaspora is hard on intimacy.
Intimacy begins in the body, needs the body-the body of touch, the
body of sensation and feeling, the body of speech. What is the "place of
desire, pleasure, and the affective body" in our "understanding of the
ambivalent mechanisms of social authority?" asks Homi Bhabha.5 The
affective body-the body that feels-can be the site of pleasure but also of
pain; the place of resistance but also of mutilation and abjection. "One is
190
marked by one's body," Alexander observes in "Alphabets of Flesh," "but
how is one marked?" (p. 149). No matter what passport one carries, the
body that looks "foreign" is subject to a variety of gazes-from the curious
and rude to the dangerous and violent. As the Lebanese expatriate writer
Etel Adnan notes in her epistolary volume of travel meditations, Of Cities
and Women, "The problem is that the heart can never be separated from
the flesh."6
The body is the home of the heart. Flesh is the body of home. But what
is home? Who feels at home while at home? "I had to leave home so I
could find myself," writes Gloria Anzalduia in Borderlands/La Frontera. "But
I didn't leave all the parts of me: I kept the ground of my own being....
So yes, though 'home' permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I
too am afraid of going home."7 Both home and elsewhere-wherever she
travels and relocates-are sites of dislocation. Anzalduia works and reworks
the itineraries and terrains of multiple dislocation-the bodily, psycholog
ical, and spiritual effects of belonging fully nowhere. She is rooted in a
sense of home as a place she can never be at home and from which she
must escape to feel at home with herself. "I am a turtle, wherever I go I
carry 'home' on my back" (p. 21).
Longing for Home: Adages
Sayings are puzzle boxes of words. Opened, they tell stories. In her great
war trilogy, the American poet H.D. locates a poetics of the word in the
midst of the Nazi bombing raids over London during World War II: "I
know, I feel/the meaning that words hide;//they are anagrams, cryp
tograms/little boxes, conditioned//to hatch butterflies . . ."8 Buried in the
word Sword is the word Word-"remember, 0 Sword,/you are the younger
brother, the latter-bom,//your Triumph, however exultant,/must one day
be over,/in the beginning/was the Word" (11. 11-16, p. 17). Far from home,
she longs for home, but not the stifling home she grew up in-rather
"home" as reimagined:
Take me home
where canals
flow
between iris-banks:
where the heron has her nest. (lI. 1-6, p. 32)
Longing for home is the body's desire-a feeling of homesickness expe
rienced viscerally in the flesh, in the "affective body." But homesickness too
is a cryptogram; the word opens up into opposites: sick for home and sick
of home.9
Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz is doubly homesick. First, she's sick of
191
home, her rage surrealistically embodied in the whirling tornado that
transports her away from Kansas. Then, she's sick for home, pining for the
Kansas homestead intensified with each fantastical scene on the journey to
Oz. She longs for home-but only after she fulfills her wish to leave it. The
lesson she leams in the far away of fantasy land is that she can get home
simply by reciting a mantra: There's no place like home. There's no place like
home. There's no place like home. Once said and repeated, the words trans
port her back home in a flash, undoing the displacement from home
brought about by her home-sick-ness, her anger at home.10
The magical phrase-there's no place like home-is also doubly cryptic.
"There's no place like home" means home is the best, the ideal, everything
that elsewhere is not. Places elsewhere can never bring the same happiness
as home. Alternately inflected, the phrase turns into its opposite. "There's
no place like home" also means that no place, anywhere, is like home.
Nowhere is there a place like home. Home is a never never land of dreams
and desire. Home is utopia-a no place, a nowhere, an imaginary space
longed for, always already lost in the very formation of the idea of home.
With another slight shift, no where morphs into now here. Home is now
here and no where at one and the same time. I borrow this orthographic
homonym from sociologists Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, who
titled their collection of essays on space, time, and modemity with the sin
gle word, NowHere-capital N, capital H. Shift the capitalization of "h"
and "w": presto. NowHere becomes NoWhere. For them, the experiential
space and time of modernity are newly configured-"in a real sense
nowhere yet everywhere" and "our experience of here and now has increas
ingly lost its immediate spatiotemporal referents and has become tied to
and contingent on actors and actions at a distance."11 Within these terms,
"home" is forever constituted through its relations with "elsewhere." Now
here and no where are mutually constitutive.
Home is where the heart is. Born in the Punjab, migrating to Britain at
age nine, the sociologist Madan Sarup reflects on the adage. "Home is
where the heart is," he muses:
But what makes a place home? Is it wherever your family is, where you have
been brought up? The children of many migrants are not sure where they
belong. Where is home? Is it where your parents are buried? Is home the place
from where you have been displaced, or where you are now? Is home where
your mother lives? ("Home and Identity," p. 94)
If home for the migrant, the exile, the refugee, is the place of tradition, he
writes, then what is lost in the need for security is how that homeland is
ever-changing. "Tradition is fluid," he writes, "it is always being reconsti
tuted. Tradition is about change change that is not being acknowledged"
(p. 97).
192
Aisha Ravindran, a friend and Fulbright scholar from Kerala, India,
explains to me that people far from home often reconstitute the traditions
of home as unchanging, frozen in time. Saleema, she tells me, might have
more freedom to choose her own mate in Pakistan, where marriage tradi
tions are changing for some, than she has as part of a diasporic family in
the United States.
Another adage: You can't go home again. From Thomas Wolfe, the other
"wolf." Other than Leonard and Virginia. A migrant from the southern
hills of North Carolina to New York City, an itinerant wanderer across the
Atlantic, in Europe, and on the North American Continent, Wolfe moves
from Look Homeward, Angel in 1929 to You Can't Go Home Again in 1940.
Again? Does this mean once you COULD go home, and now you can't?
That once upon a time in fairyland you could go home? You can have one
return, but no more, never again?
To market, to market to buy a fat hog. Home again, home again, jiggedy jog.
But you can't go home again. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy
stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none. And this
little piggy went weeweewee aaaalllll the way home. But you can't go home
again.
So sayeth as well former
Jamaican
cultural critic Stuart Hall: "You can't
'go home' again."
I knew England from the inside. But I'm not and never will be "English." I
know both places intimately, but I am not wholly of either place. And that's
exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of
exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always-post
poned "'arrival."12
He can't go home again. But some men can. An Englishman's home is his
castle. A man's home is his castle. You've heard the sayings before. A castle
is a fortress, a retreat behind moat and walls to make one safe, a place to
ride out a siege-a haven in a heartless world. Castles are safest for the
men who rule them. If the world chews him up and spits him out, at least
a man can be a man within the walls of his castle-home. Inside the walls,
he can lord it over others. His home is no one else's castle. It's for him to
decide if the walls will protect the others from the outside. Inside the cas
tle, what walls protect people from him?
The nation too is home-the homeland as fatherland or motherland to be
defended by Homeland Defense and Patriot Acts. Domestic politics
is
national politics, the govemment within, at home.13 The nation is family,
the imagined community of Us against Them. Whoever Them is, we know
they are not US. Not the U dot S dot of A dot. But if Them is Us, a
part
of US, everywhere in U.S.A., doesn't the defense of the homeland become
an attack on US, all of US in the U dot S dot? Do you feel more secure
193
now that the Acts of Patriots are trained against some of us, all of us?
Jailing the stranger within, who can't join the motherland, the fatherland,
the homeland, can't ever be one of us because of the home he left behind?
Have you figured out how to protect yourself from Homeland Defense?
Have you bought your duct tape to cover up your mouth, your eyes, your
ears: Say no evil, See no evil, Hear no evil? Just let the Acts of Patriots do
it all for you! While you retreat to a sealed up room.
Once upon a time, there were three little pigs who were all afraid of the Big
Bad Wolf. One built a house of straw. One built a house of sticks. And one
built a house of bricks. When the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed and blew
down the house of straw and blew down the house of sticks, the pig inside
the brick house locked the door so nobody could get in. Yes, a man's home
is his castle. A man's nation is his home. The king was in his castle, counting
out his money.
And where was the queen? She was in the parlour eating bread and honey.
Oh yes. The Queen was eating. The Queen was swelling, queen bee of the
home as hive. She's the hub of Mamaland, the omphalos of universe. She's
the body of desire, the body as food, the body as blanket of comfort. The
navel of love. The nipple of suck. She is the apple pie she makes. She is
the chicken soup of soul. Home Sweet Home. She is the sweets of home, to
be licked in need, to be lapped in desire, to be suckled for unconditional
love. She is homeland security of a different sort. The sky is falling, the sky in
falling, cries Chicken Little. Run to Mamaland. "'Ome Sweet 'Ome,"
intones the Gramophone behind the bushes in Virginia Woolf's Between
the Acts."4
The Queen is also the Mother/Other, the Other Mother, the wicked
evil stepqueen who would eat you up. She is the (m)other, m/other as
womb/tomb: the imaginary origin and end of life. Motherlove can be smoth
erlove. Think of Paul Morel, the budding artist in D. H. Lawrence's auto
biographical Sons and Lovers. Cancer is eating his mother alive, the mother
who is eating him alive. So he smothers the mother who is smothering
him.
Or Joan in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle. She becomes the trickster
queen of harlequin escape once she wins the battle of the body with her
mother. Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? "In the image
of her that I carried for years, hanging from my neck like an iron locket,"
Joan reflects, "she was sitting in front of her vanity table, painting her fin
gernails a murderous red."'15 Eating-eating always, eating anything-is
Joan's weapon of choice: "The war between myself and my mother was one
in earnest; the disputed territory was my body.... I swelled visibly, relent
lessly, before her very eyes. I rose like dough, my body advanced inch by
inch towards her across the dining-room table, in this at least I was unde
feated" (p. 73).
194
And the mother of Mamaland? Is she safe at home? So busy homemaking
that no one notices how the home makes her. As everybody's homebody,
Mama turns to stone as fast as Lot's wife. Anne Sexton writes a nightmare
of home, the uncanny maternal body-as-house in "Housewife," a poem
very much of its time and place in Middle America, 1961:
Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.... 16
There's no place like home. Home Sweet Home.
Home Away from Home
Is home a place? A memory? An ideal? An imagined space? The black
hole of desire? Born of displacement, diasporas spawn the creation of an
imaginary homeland, a place of fixed location and identity. "Home is an
idea," Janet Zandy writes, "an inner geography where the ache to belong
finally quits, where there is no sense of 'otherness,' where there is, at last,
a community."'17 In her essay "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance," bell
hooks finds that community in the homes black women create as havens
from an outer world of ruthless heartlessness. But for her, this home resides
in memory, in the place not where she lived but where she went to visit:
her grandmother's home surrounded by white neighbors staring hatred at
the little black girl. In an adjoining essay, hooks opts for the margins and
the ultimate instability of home: "At times, home is nowhere. At times,
one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no
longer just one place. It is locations. Home is that place which enables and
promotes varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discov
ers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference," a world apart.18
Being home involves the condition of being away from home.
Being away from home engenders fictionalizing memories of the past
and dreams of the future. Sandra Cisneros begins the story of a Mexican
immigrant to Chicago who feels homeless in her new home on Mango
Street: "Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house,
pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light."19 For the young protagonist
of The House on Mango Street, home is the hope of a writer-to-be. Esperanza
indigenizes Woolf's famous trope of "a room of one's own" in longing for
home as a form of independence:
195
A House of My Own. Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's
house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my
pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories.... Nobody to shake a stick
at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after.
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clear as paper before
the poem. (p. 108)20
And what is home for people on the move? Chandra Talpade Mohanty
grew up in Bombay, came to the U.S. as a student, and has stayed, with her
Indian passport and green card, to live and teach. She reflects,
I have been asked the "home" question (when are you going home?) period
ically for fifteen years now. Leaving aside the subtly racist implications of the
question (go home, you don't belong), I am still not satisfied with my
response. What is home? The place I was bom? Where I grew up? Where my
parents live? Where I live and work as an adult? Where I locate my commu
nity, my people? Who are "my people"? Is home a geographical space, a his
torical space, an emotional, sensory space? ... I am convinced that this ques
tion-how one understands and defines home-is a profoundly political
one.21
Dr. Marianne Ferrara, a retired physician and friend, tells me simply,
"Home is where I am." She was a Jewish child in France who was hidden
in the early days of the Nazi occupation with a Catholic family to whom
she expressed her gratitude by becoming and remaining a devout Catholic.
Hating France, she fled to the United States for college, practiced medi
cine in the Northeast, and retired to Dallas to be near her five American
sons. She doesn't even like to visit France, let alone think of it as her
home. But things French continue to exert their hold, however ambiva
lently, and not only in the trace of an accent. As perfect recapitulation of
her multiple dislocations, she fell in love again with an old college flame,
a woman with whom she had acted in a French play at Bryn Mawr College,
a secular Jew who had become a famous professor of French, a Francophile
par excellence who nonetheless articulated with brilliance the meanings of
phallogocentrism and anti-Semitism in French tradition: Elaine Marks.
That Elaine should die suddenly of cancer one year after their reunion
brings home the ironies of human existence in the face of which Marianne
states complexly, "Home is where I am."
Wandering peoples are variations on the theme of Anzalduia's turtle,
carrying multiple homes on their backs-layered diasporas, some forced,
some chosen. Reflecting on the passages that produced the multicultured
"crucible of the Caribbean,"22 novelist and critic Caryl Phillips finds the
roots of his homelessness in the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans, but
its contemporary expression in the multiplicity of locations he has called
"home": St. Kitts, where he was born; Leeds, where he grew up after emi
196
grating at age six; the West Coast of Africa, which he visited at age 20; the
Antigua, which he visited with his mother on his first return to the
Caribbean in 22 years; New York City, where he lived and worked.
Remembering each different place, he repeats the same refrain: "I recog
nize the place, I feel at home here, but I don't belong. I am of, and not of,
this place" (pp. 1-4). His ambivalence toward each physical home gener
ates its opposite: "I have chosen to create for myself an imaginary 'home'
to live alongside the one that I am incapable of fully trusting. My increas
ingly precious, imaginary, Atlantic world"-a place he locates somewhere
in between the coordinates of West Africa, Britain, and the Americas (p.
308). As the visual artist Annalee Davis, another wanderer born in the
Caribbean, remarks about her transience, "Increasingly, we are all forced to
reckon with the fact that 'home' may no longer be a real physical space but
a notion we carry deep within our selves. The ultimate journey is within."23
Filmmaker Mira Nair expresses a similar sentiment in a New York Times
interview: "I used to have a joke when people asked where I live.... I'd
say, 'I live on Air India.' But the other side is that you live between your
ears. You carry your home within yourself. That's a nice-sounding cerebral
concept, but the truth is that you're torn."24 Nair comes from a Punjabi
family that fled to New Delhi at Partition in 1947. She grew up in eastern
India, went to college in Delhi and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and mar
ried an African Indian from Uganda, who teaches at Columbia University.
New York, New Delhi, and Kampala are all "home" for Nair. Her film
Monsoon Wedding (2001) features a large cast of mostly her own relatives
as a comedy of manners about upper-middle-class Punjabi yuppies-that is,
"puppies," as they are called-and the relations of forbidden love and
incest that underlie a modern arranged marriage between a "peaches-and
cream, Cosmo-reading Punjabi princess" and a handsome computer soft
ware expert who lives in Houston.25 Perhaps for Nair, home is
"NoWhere"-that is, "now here" and "no where," everywhere and always
elsewhere. Her "home" resides in the eyes that film the existence of being
"torn." Her cinematic muse is the spirit of identity in motion-motion pic
tures for identities located through repeated dislocations. Bodies in motion
too. The bodies of intimacy and sometimes hunger.
The hunger to come may be the desire to go home, feel at home in the
body. To her lover in "The Floating Poem, Unnumbered," Adrienne Rich
plays with metaphors of travel, of coming and going, to taste the sweet,
natural home: "Your traveled, generous thighs /
between which my whole
face has come and come- . . . reaching where I had been waiting years
for you/in my rose-wet cave."26 How far must I travel, Rich asks in "Sibling
Mysteries," to recover the "woman's flesh . .. made taboo to us" (L. 51, p.
49). "Remind me," she muses,
197
how we loved our mother's body
our mouths drawing the first
thin sweetness from her nipples....
The daughters never were
true brides of the father
the daughters were to begin with
brides of the mother
then brides of each other
under a different law
Let me hold and tell you
(11. 31-33, pp. 48,11. 123-29, p. 52)
Her poem Your Native Land, Your Life accompanies the long wail of Kol
Nidre with lamentation:
and my own
unhoused spirit trying to find a home27
For Rich, home is the long lost, forever gone-maternal body, motherland.
To live is to be away from home.
Stranger Bodies
Fostering the dream of home is the experience of being alien, of being
forever marked as the stranger who doesn't belong. "A stranger," Sarup
suggests,
is someone who refuses to remain confined to the "far away" land.... S/he
is physically close while remaining culturally remote. Strangers often seem to
be suspended in the empty space between a tradition which they have
already left and the mode of life which stubbornly denies them the right of
entry. The stranger blurs a boundary line. The stranger is an anomaly, stand
ing between inside and the outside, order and chaos, friend and enemy. (pp.
101-02).
The body as a sight of cultural determination first marks someone as
"the stranger"-it might be the skin, the eyes, the hair, the shape, the sex;
it might be the walk, the posture, the angles of movement; it might be the
clothes, the jewelry, the shoes, the decorations, adornments, and accou
trements of the body; it might be the sounds that come out of the mouth,
off the pen or keyboard-the cultural materiality of speech, accent,
rhythm, style, writing.
"In Europe today," Sarup writes, "it is largely black migrants who per
form the function of marking the boundary. Harsh sanctions are taken
against migrants who, feeling threatened, often emphasize their cultural
identity as a way of self-protection" (p. 103). Sarup's Europe is home to the
198
demographic implosions of past empires, and the U.S. has its own history
of the color line as demarcation of strangeness: conquest of others as pre
condition of the new city on the hill, the New Eden; uneasy assimilations
of immigrant others, generations in the making; assimilations denied for
"darker" brothers and sisters, all the visibly "different."
I wonder . . . Who is the stranger in India? In China? South Africa,
Morocco, Australia, Argentina? Each location creates its own strangers.
Perhaps the measure of any society is how it treats the ones it marks as
strangers. Can strangers ever become homebodies? Landsmen? Homies?
Bros? Must bodies remain ever the trace-the sign, the symptom-of for
eignness? And thereby the justification for exclusions and violations?
"I do not know the face of this country," writes poet
Janice
Mirikitani of
the United States. "It is inhabited by strangers
/
who call me obscene
names. //Jap. Go home.
/Where
is home?"28
(I remember myself in the body of the stranger: thirty-two years ago,
pregnant with swollen feet, just arriving in Japan and having no shoes I
could wear any more, being followed by young men, laughing and point
ing, pointing at the foreigner, pointing at the woman waddling in the san
dals made for Japanese men.)
I think of a friend in Madison-flaming red hair, freckled pale skin....
She opens her mouth to speak about the war in Iraq, the patriotic fervor of
American rage ... in the foreign tongue of South African English. Letters
to the local newspaper attack her as un-American. Love it or leave it. She
gets thanks too-emotional expressions of gratitude for doing what the for
eigner with a green card may have subtle permission to do, refuse loyalty
to the patriotic fervor of Homeland Defense. Is she any less foreign to those
who love her than to those who hate her? How does the accent of her dif
ference predetermine her reception? The body's speech is marked by the
sounds of its dislocation.
The migrant and the refugee, writes Homi Bhabha in
"Frontlines/Borderposts," are the "the 'unhomely' inhabitants of the con
temporary world." Invoking Freud's notion of the uncanny, Bhabha says
that strangers are doubly "homely" and "unhomely"-familiar and unfa
miliar, inspiring fear and dread (p. 271). To a nation that imagines itself
homogeneous, the alien is an uncanny reminder of repressed difference, a
ghostly presence that must be expunged to restore the sense of oneness.29
Those who feel at home in the world need strangers to remind them of who
they are not.
Violence on the Home Body
To inhabit the body of the stranger is to be never at home. But what if
home itself is the site of violence to the body? Home may in fact be con
199
stituted upon an act of violence against the body, even as that body trav
els, migrates, or goes into exile. Safety might reside neither in home nor
homeland but only in flight. Diasporic narratives often tell the story of
travel to a new land where memory and desire produce an idealized image
of the homeland. But violence done to the body in both old and new
homes disrupts this familiar pattern.
Think of Edwidge Danticat's novel Breath, Eyes, Memory: on the face of
it, the typical Bildungsroman of immigration, the "coming to America" for
the adolescent Sophie, a journey that produces generational strain, con
flict with her mother, and the limbo of between-worlds existence. A closer
look, however, reveals a complex interrogation of home and homeland as
overlapping sites for violence against the female body-in both Haiti and
the United States. The novel revolves around the Haitian custom of "test
ing"-that is, mothers regularly inserting a finger into the vaginas of their
teenage daughters, feeling for the hymen that will ensure the family's
honor until marriage.30 Virginity as prize and badge of masculine honor is
common to many cultures, but the regular testing for it in this way is not.
Danticat likens the custom to rape by setting up an uncanny parallel
between the politics of the Haitian state and the politics of the Haitian
home, wherever that home may be.
Sophie's initiation into adulthood is not the flowering of womanhood
but rather its deflowering. She comes to understand the random fragments
of her life: how the violence of the state and the home echo each other,
how the violence passes down through the generations of women who
serve and service the needs of men. Once upon a time, Sophie learns, her
mother got relief from her grandmother's probing finger only after she is
raped by a soldier, not a foreign soldier, but one of the vicious ton ton
macoutes in Haiti. She is disgraced, half-crazed with nightmares, pregnant.
She leaves her baby with her unmarried sister, migrates to the States, and
twelve years later abruptly calls her daughter north. Torn from her home,
Sophie finds the repetition of home elsewhere, when her mother tests her
nubile body nightly to ensure the family honor, in an act of bodily inva
sion that imitates the rape that produced her.
Where can the daughter go to feel safe? She flees to Providence with a
man of her own choosing, but she cannot escape the effects of violence on
her body. How can she break the cycle of bodily invasions in Haiti and
New York when her own baby daughter grows up? She goes back to Haiti
to bury her mother, to find a way out of the maze in which at every turn
mothers rape their daughters in the service of men. Does she find her
answer?
I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from
which you carry your past like the hair on your head.... a place where, if you
200
listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the
end of the tale, she will ask you this question: "'Ou libere?' Are you free, my
daughter?" (p. 234)
You can't go home again and anyway, do you want to?
The Partition of India in 1947 forced millions from their homes and
unleashed massive communal bloodletting. The mutilated body of Mother
India found its avatar in the violated bodies of its women-tens of thou
sands abducted, recaptured, refused home by their families; untold num
bers killed to preserve their family's honor by their own hands or those of
their relatives. "Sutura seemed like the bloody symbol of the mother figure
we call our country," wrote Jyotirmoyee Devi in her Partition novel of
1967, The River Chuming, in which the young Hindu girl who is assaulted
and left for dead is saved and cared for by Muslim neighbors, only to be
refused a home with her surviving relatives because she has become pol
luted by those who fed her (p. 38).
"Pariition: a metaphor for irreparable loss," writes Ritu Menon the oral his
tory, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition. And yet she also
found that some women "saw in this rupture a moment of unexpected lib
eration for themselves as women."'31 For some, the violence on the body at
home before Partition was worse than after, when Partition's chaos opened
pathways formerly closed. This is the story Shauna Singh Baldwin tells in
her more recent Partition novel, What the Body Remembers (2001 ).32 The
novel is about the two wives of a prominent Sikh engineer in the Punjab
in the '30s and '40s: one, Satya, the lover and soulmate who bears no chil
dren; and the other, the fecund child-bride Roop, who leaps at the chance
to escape the purdah of home without understanding her fate as a breeder
destined to lose her children to the barren wife. Paradoxically, Roop comes
the closest to feeling at home only in the midst of Partition's violence, the
dispersal of millions, and her own family's exile. Satya dead, her husband
destroyed, Roop thrives on dislocation, becoming the backbone of the
family's survival. Home is where the heart is, but the body's heart can be
riven. A Partition of the heart.
Riven too in the Heartland, the American Heartland, Alice in the
Wonderland of Dairyland. Think of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres.33 The
novel revisits Shakespeare's story of dutiful and undutiful daughters. Right
there in the wholesome acres of comland. America's breadbasket, feeder of
the nation, hub of the national imaginary. The midwestern farm family,
descendants of pioneers in Conestoga wagons who broke the virgin sod of
the prairie and tamed it to produce a cornucopia of dreams. People tied to
the land. Good people. People who live the ethic of hard work and clean
living. But what is the deep dark secret the family refuses to remember?
The father's violence upon the bodies of his daughters. The daughters
201
riven, split: the bad daughter who remembers and insists on telling; the
good daughter who forgets and keeps the faith of innocence. Partition
within the family.
Home Lost
Home comes into being most powerfully when it is gone, lost, left
behind, desired and imagined. "Home," Carole Boyce Davies writes, "can
only have meaning once one experiences a level of displacement from it"
(p. 113). June Jordon quips in her poem, "Notes towards Home": "every
body needs a home
/
so at least you have someplace to leave."34 Home is
what you imagine, she continues, when you're "on the road" (p. 47).
On the Road one longs for home. That's Odysseus to a T. He's on the
road and on the sea for ten years. And when he gets home, the story stops.
The story about home is the story of trying to get there.
"Benkn A Heim: Yearning for Home." So writes Grace Feuerverger,
daughter of Holocaust survivors, about her first language, her mamaloshen,
her mothertongue, her "comfort and home."35 Yiddish is the lost home, the
motherland that tongues the body of a people lost. "To look back at
Yiddish," she reflects, "represents the tortured landscape of my people's
exile and ultimate genocide-linked inexorably to the concept of 'home'
and the (im)possibility of return" (p. 11). She yearns for the lost home of
Yiddish but distances herself from its "woundedness" at the same time (p.
19). "My relationship with Yiddish is one of excruciating pain and precious
delight," she writes (p. 12). "This is not sentimental nostalgia. It is the fac
ing of the evil that tore apart my family, my people, my culture, my lan
guage-my home. I cannot ever return because it was razed to the ground"
(p.19).
The story of home making is often the history of home razing-that is,
the razing of some one else's home to clear the way for one's own settle
ment. The end of one people's wandering can be the beginning of another's
diaspora. "My feet are lacerated, homelessness has exhausted me," wrote
the Palestinian poet Taufiq Sayigh in 1960.36 Home making built upon the
unmaking of the homes of others; it's history's return of the repressed. It
happens again and again-the uncanny repetitions of a territorial species,
of peoples yearning for home and making others homeless out of the force
of their own desire and suffering. Feuerverger aims to break the cycle in
Oasis of Dreams, her ethnography of the schools teaching peace in a Jewish
Palestinian village in Israel.37 Will the cousins ever kiss?
Homeland lost becomes the dream of the land as home. America's
heartland was once other peoples' homelands-stolen, now lost, now
shrunk to a fraction of its early range.
Oh, Dorothy, Dorothy, what history of loss does your Kansas home
202
sweet-home plow under? For Diane Glancy, the farmlands of her German
Irish lineage fester atop her Cherokee ancestors, the "old tribes disc-har
rowed/into the ground."38
Oh, Dorothy, Dorothy, in that Home, Home on the Raaaaange, where
the deer and the antelope roam, the prairies were once the range of
Indians, the homeland as a range for patterned movements with the sea
sons. There's no place like home on the Rez. "I guided the last buffalo
hunt. I saw the last bear shot," says Nanapush to his granddaughter in
Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks about the Anishinabe's loss of their native
lands.39 "I spoke aloud the words of the government treaty, and refused to
sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and lakes" (p.
2). But his defiance was shortlived as he watched how the Land Allotment
Act of 1887 led to the theft of their lands by speculators and loggers: "We
stumbled toward the government bait, never looking down, never noticing
how the land was snatched from under us at every step" (p. 4). He knows
now "the uncertainties of facing the world without land to call home"
(p. 187). Exile is "a wind from the east ... a storm of government paper"
(p. 1).
The lullaby of an old Navajo woman in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller
mourns for her lost children and comforts a dying man by singing of the
earth as homeland never lost, always there:
The earth is your mother,
she holds you.
The sky is your father,
he protects you.
Sleep,
sleep.
Rainbow is your sister,
she loves you.
The winds are your brothers,
they sing to you.
Sleep,
sleep.
We are together always
We are together always
There never was a time
when this
was not so.40
Lost at Home
Home too can be a place of loss, of being lost. In "Alphabets of Flesh,"
Alexander remembers going back to her first home in Kerala: "I may feel
quite at home-all the smells and sights of India, in fresh combinations
203
but I cannot live there either" (p. 150). What is it about home that she,
that others don't want to return to? About exiles, Edward Said writes, "The
exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always pro
visional. Borders and barriers which enclose us with the safety of familiar
territory can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or
necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience." 41
And for those who don't even go into exile? Who want to leave, but
can't? Americo Paredes, the Chicano poet, literary scholar, and anthro
pologist, writes in his poem "My Community's Corner" in a volume titled
Between Two Worlds in 1950, long before the current cache of the intersti
tial:
At the comer of absolute elsewhere
And absolute future I stood
Waiting for a green light
To leave the neighborhood.
But the light was red...
That is the destiny of people in between
To stand on the corner
Waiting for the green.42
Some people stuck at home feel lost at home, "homeless at home," in
the words of Emily Dickinson. She was a quintessential homebody of
Amherst, Massachusetts.43 But what is a homebody? Someone who likes to
stay home? Someone confined to home? Someone at home in her body?
Someone stuck in her body?
Gayatri, the protagonist of Going Home by the bilingual Tamil/English
writer Lakshmi Kannan, is a woman caught in another kind of in between.
She moves back and forth from her spacious childhood home in the south
of India to the cramped quarters of a Delhi government flat, hungering for
something beyond her family. For her, the house is a body that cages, and
the body too is a house that cages. Gayatri thinks:
A house. A receptacle that receives us. A chrysalis that contains. A house or
this body that houses our being. It absorbs the vibrations of our mind and our
heart. Together with time, it records these vibrations and we try to free our
selves from the fetters of its calculations. We struggle against them but fail in
our efforts and return grudgingly to the shell of our body like disappointed
tenants, to continue with our lives half-heartedly.44
"Freedom." How to get "free," Going Home asks: "Freedom from what?
From our selves. From this 'mediocrity' that binds us, restricts us. We
should grow. Grow bigger than this cage that is our body, bigger than the
kraal that is this cage-body. We should grow bigger than our fate, our des
tiny. Kick against the shackles of the body, escape from it.... "
(p. 22, ellip
sis in original). Kannan breaks the the utopic pattern of the Bildung plot:
204
Gayatri tightens the bar of the cage the more she struggles to get free. The
novel ends in an image of the self-mutilated body that shatters the notion
of the body as home, of the homebody as avatar of coziness:
Should I change my clothes? Or should I discard the clothes altogether? Cast
them off?
And then? Rip off my ears, my eyes and nose, toss them away... Peel off my
skin and fling it far away. Throw away. Rub off my name with my own feet,
efface it, wipe it off clean and then...quit! Just leave. Run, run.. .run away,
breaking through this house that suffocates me, this house that closes in on
me, break through this cage that is my body, pressing upon me till I cannot
breathe, break through my skull, spring up from this centre.. .fight free of it
all, and run, run, keep running.... (p. 160, ellipses in original)
Some might say that Gayatri's fantasy of flight from the enclosure of
home is bourgeois Western feminism, reflecting the author's successive res
idences at the University of Kent in England, University of Iowa's
Intemational Writing Program, University of California-Irvine, and insti
tutions in the north and south of India. Shirley Geok-lin Lim raises this
issue in thinking about the blending of her Chinese-Malaysian childhood
and her adult life in the United States: "My Westernization took place in
my body," she writes. "Every cultural change is signified through and on
the body."45 But in Dislocating Cultures, the Vassar College philosopher
Uma Narayan defends her feminism as the product of the home in Bombay
she can't return to rather than the result of her exposure to Western femi
nism in the United States. "My mother," she writes,
insists on seeing my rejection of an arranged marriage, and my general lack
of enthusiasm for the institution of marriage as a whole, as a "Westemized"
rejection of Indian cultural values. But, in doing so, she forgets how regularly
since my childhood she and many other women have complained about the
oppressiveness of their marriages in my presence; she forgets how widespread
and commonplace the cultural recognition is in India that marriage subjects
daughters to difficult life-situations, forgets that my childish misbehaviors
were often met with the reprimand, "Wait till you get to your mother-in-law's
house. Then you will leam to behave."46
She wants to tell her mother but cannot: "'My earliest memory'... is of see
ing you cry. I heard all your stories of your misery. The shape your 'silence'
took is in part what has incited me to speech" (p. 7).
A poetics of dislocation may begin for some in recognizing "home" as no
place they want to be, as a place where the heart may be, but a place that
must be left, as a place whose leaving
is the source of speech and writing.
Writing Home
Travel, migration, exile-these are the itineraries of being as becoming,
identity forming in the movements through space, identity in motion.
205
Fragments of each place remain as locations to which memories are
attached, out of which identities are formed. In each, the body as marked
and read is catalyst for reflection. The body in motion is the muse.
"For some writers," Davies reflects, "exile is a desired location out of
which they can create" (p. 114). "Writing home" has a double meaning
writing as a "means of communication with home" and writing as "finding
ways to express the conflicted meaning of home in the experience of the
formerly colonized" (p. 129). Home is created in the act of writing about
what has been lost in leaving and what has been gained in moving from
place to place. "Migration," Davies continues, "creates the desire for home,
which in turn produces the rewriting of home. Homesickness or homeless
ness, this rejection of home or the longing for home become motivating
factors in this rewriting" (p. 113). As Phillips puts it, "This migratory con
dition, and the subsequent sense of displacement, can be a gift to a creative
mind" (p. 131). "Writing is a means of reclaiming territory," Feuerverger
says. "I will never know 'die alte heim,' my old home. I must therefore
invent a new one-on the margins, within the cracks of in-betweeness. I
need to recreate my home using my own words, just as a bird garnishes its
nest with twigs and leaves" ("My Yiddish Voice," p. 19). "Language is the
only homeland," writes Czeslaw Milosz in exile.47
Memory is the first rewriting of home, an act of re-presentation of what
was as the precondition for writing home in the medium of text-the page,
the book as the corpus of memory. About diasporic migration, Azade
Seyhan writes: "Insofar as culture is memory, it is embedded in the past and
will have to be retrieved in symbolic action. Memory marks a loss. It is
always a re-presentation, making present that which once was and no
longer is."48 Writing the narrative of identity in motion fills the gap with
sign symbols of homes lost and new homes in the making.
Homes lost and found through writing is no walk in the park. There's
blood on the ground of being. Hear Alexander's plea: "Come ferocious
alphabets of flesh
/ splinter and raze my page / That out of the dumb and
bleeding part of me
/
I may claim my heritage" (p. 147). And Anzalduia's
image: "Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland is what makes
poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the
flesh" (p. 73).
Virginia Woolf's needle in the flesh is the sensation of shock, of dislo
cation, of unmooring to which writing is the curative response. "And so I
go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a
writer," she reflects in A Sketch of the Past. "I hazard the explanation that a
shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel I have
had a blow, and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting
it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its
206
power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the
pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together."49 For Woolf, this
writing induces "rapture" as she enters into the body of words, of the Word.
"We are the words," she writes; "we are the music; we are the thing itself'
(p. 72). The rapture of writing rupture.
It is the "shock of arrival," of multiple arrivals, that compels the writing
of Alexander's memoir: The Shock of Arrival. Growing up in India and the
Sudan, educated in Britain, and living in New York City, she has learned
"that even as time and localities shift, there is very little we can take for
granted as we etch ourselves in complex palimpsests of knowledge and
desire" (pp. 68-69). Alexander's palimpsest is an image that emphasizes the
linguistic mediation of bodies on the move: the self as tabula upon which
the meanings of location and dislocation are etched, the self as etcher
upon layers of being across space and through time.
Long before 9/11, Etel Adnan wrote about living, speaking, and writing
in the body of an Arab woman traveling away from "home" where no one
feels "at home": "I tell myself that we are terrorists, not terrorists in the
political and ordinary sense of the word, but because we carry inside of our
bodies-like explosives-all the deep troubles that befall our countries
. .
.
and traveling doesn't change anything in any way. We are the scribes of
a scattered self, living fragments, as if the parts of the self were writing
down the bits and ends of a perception never complete" (pp. 54-55, ellip
sis in original). The echoes here are unmistakable: Isis, keeper of the secret
name of God, gatherer of the scattered body parts of the slaughtered Osiris,
sorceress of the word. Like another Isis, the muse of H.D.'s final poem,
Hermetic Definition, who "draws the veil aside,
//
unbinds my eyes,
/
com
mands, / write, write or die."50
Writing contains the locations of identity in motion, the palimpsests of
the scattered self. "I wrote a long poem called 'Ashtamudi Lake' and later
pondered the last lines in the poem," Alexander remembers in The Shock
of Arrival. "Trying to move between two worlds, the vision ends in a house
filled with flames. Reading the lines again I thought, I can't bear it, this
here-there business. In any case, I would choke in a house filled with
flames. So I quarreled with myself. And out of the quarrel with the self
came writing" (p. 143). A house in flames, between two worlds, now here,
no where: a poetics of dislocation.
The poetics of shock-of rupture, dislocation-involves emotional,
spiritual, and often physical partition-a severing from "home," however
imaginary, as the muse that commands "write, write or die." Writing about
the loss of home brings one home again. You can't go home again-except
in writing home.
The rapture of writing rupture.
207
A Meta-Moment
Poets, writers, artists, intellectuals, teachers-we feed off contradiction,
the space in between. It stimulates us. It engages the heart, even while it
tears us apart. It serves as our muse and occasions the words that are symp
toms and signs of survival. It has led me to string a strand of jarring juxta
positions-beads of longing, belonging, and dislocation. A necklace of dis
tinct inscriptions: not equivalences, not blending one into another, but
echoing each other across chasms of place and time. In their echoes lie
hope.
And Saleema?
What about Saleema's unfinished story-Saleema marrying the stranger
in June? In the domains of intimacy, dislocation can be at its most painful.
She is living between worlds without the compensatory pleasures of poetry
and fiction. The cactus of the Borderland needles her flesh too. Sometimes
pain is just pain and not a poem.
On the other hand, Saleema has her laughter. She has her family, her
culture, her religion. Maybe she'll do just fine. Maybe she won't feel lost at
home, homeless at home. After all, choosing one's own mate has not
always produced Home Sweet Home. Then again, the families we are bom
into and the homelands to which we belong don't always make us feel at
home either. We are left with the wish, the hope:
You whisper: exile is hard
let me into your mouth, let me blossom.
NOTES
This
essay
has been
presented
in various versions at the
Symposium
on Poetics of
Dislocation:
Writing
Selves at
City University
New York Graduate
Center,
March
2002;
the
University
of
Tulsa,
March
2003;
National
Cheng Kung University,
Taiwan, May 2004;
American Lebanese
University, Lebanon, June 2004;
as
the
Chancellor
Jackman Distinguished
Lecture at the
University
of
Toronto,
March
2004;
also at Purdue
University,
October
2004;
and
University
of
Bologna, Forli,
and
University
of Macerata in November 2004. For their
invitations,
challenges,
and
suggestions special
thanks
go
to Meena
Alexander,
Patricia
Clough,
Kate
Adams, Holly Laird,
Melba
Cuddy-Keane, Kai-ling
Liu,
and Ken
Seigneurie.
I am
indebted as
well to
many
others who stimulated
my thoughts
about home and else
where
long ago, especially
R. Thomas
Foster,
Minnie Bruce
Pratt,
Biddy Martin,
and Chandra
Talpade Mohanty.
1
Jyotirmoyee
Devi,
The River
Churning,
a Novel
of
Partition,
trans. Enakshi
Chatterjee (1967; rpt.
New Delhi: Kali for
Women, 1995), p.
107.
Subsequent
ref
erences will be cited
parenthetically
in the text.
208
2
Madan
Sarup,
"Home and
Identity,"
in Traveller's Tales: Narratives
of
Home and
Displacement,
ed.
George Robertson,
Melinda
Mash,
Lisa
Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry
Curtis,
and Tim Putnam
(London: Routledge, 1994), p.
98.
Subsequent
references
will be cited
parenthetically
in the text.
3
Meena
Alexander,
"Alphabets
of
Flesh,"
in
Talking
Visions: Multicultural
Feminism in a Transnational
Age,
ed. Ella Shohat
(Cambridge:
MIT
Press, 1998), p.
149.
Subsequent
references will be cited
parenthetically
in the text.
4
Alexander, "Estrangement
Becomes the Mark of the
Eagle,"
The Shock
of
Arrival:
Reflections
on Postcolonial
Experience (Boston:
South End
Press, 1996), p.
89.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
5
Homi K.
Bhabha, "Frontlines/Borderposts,"
in
Displacements:
Cultural Identities
in
Question,
ed.
Angelika
Bammer
(Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press, 1994),
p.
271.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
6
Etel
Adnan, Of
Cities and Women
(Letters
to
Fawwaz) (Sausalito,
CA: Post
Apollo
Press, 1993), p.
61.
7
Gloria
Anzald?a, Borderlands/La
Frontera: The New
Mestiza
Consciousness
(San
Francisco:
Spinsters/Aunt
Lute
Press, 1987), pp. 16, 21;
subsequent
references will
be cited
parenthetically
in the text. For recent cultural
theory
on the
meanings
of
home,
see for
example, Sarup,
"Home and
Identity"; Bammer, ed., Displacements:
Cultural Identities in
Question, esp. pp. 57-202;
Robertson et
al., eds.,
Travellers'
Tales: Narratives
of
Home and
Displacement;
Avtar
Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora:
Contesting
Identities
(London: Routledge, 1996);
Minnie Bruce
Pratt,
"Identity:
Skin Blood
Heart,"
in
Elly Bulkin, Pratt,
and Barbara
Smith,
Yours in
Struggle:
Three Feminist
Perspectives
on
Anti-Semitism and Racism
(Brooklyn: Long
Haul
Press,
1984), pp. 9-64;
Biddy
Martin and Chandra
Talpade Mohanty,
"Feminist Politics:
What's Home Got to Do with
It?,"
in Feminist
Studies/Critical Studies,
ed. Teresa de
Lauretis
(Bloomington:
Indiana
University Press), pp.191-212;
bell
hooks,
"Homeplace:
A Site of
Resistance,"
in
Yearning: Race, Gender,
and Cultural Politics
(Boston:
South End
Press, 1990), pp. 41-51;
Roberta
Rubenstein,
Home Matters:
Longing
and
Belonging, Nostalgia
and
Mourning
in Women's Fiction
(New
York:
Palgrave, 2001); Rosemary Marangoly George,
The Politics
of
Home: Postcolonial
Relocations and
Twentieth-Century
Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996);
Catherine
Wiley
and Fiona R.
Barnes, eds., Homemaking:
Women Writers
and the Politics and Poetics
of
Home
(New
York:
Garland, 1996);
Carol
Boyce Davies,
Black
Women, Writing
and
Identity: Migrations of
the
Subject (London:
Routledge,
1994), esp. pp. 113-30;
subsequent
references to which will be cited
parenthetically
in the
text;
Iain
Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London:
Routledge, 1994);
Linda
McDowell, Gender, Identity,
and Place:
Understanding
Feminist
Geographies
(Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota
Press, 1999), esp. pp. 71-95;
R. Thomas
Foster,
"Homelessness at Home:
Oppositional
Practices and Modern Women's
Writing,"
Diss.,
University
of
Wisconsin, Madison, 1990;
Susan Stanford
Friedman,
Mappings:
Feminism and the Cultural
Geographies of
Encounter
(Princeton:
Princeton
University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 107-31,
151-78.
8
H.D., Trilogy,
ed. Norman Holmes Pearson
(1944-46; rpt.
New York: New
Directions, 1972),
11.
5-9, p. 52;
ellipses
in
original. Subsequent
references will be
cited
parenthetically
in the text.
9
Thanks to
Rubenstein,
who reads "homesickness" two
ways
in Home
Matters,
209
p.
2. She
argues
that the dismissal of homesickness as
nostalgic
as well as the fem
inist critical
emphasis
on home as
confining ignores
the
way
women writers
deploy
tropes
of home and homesickness for
"imaginative repair"
in the face of
displace
ment
(p.
5).
101 am indebted to feminist
sociologist Audrey Springer,
whose class I observed
in
2000,
for
stimulating
me to think about the contradictions of home in The
Wizard
of
Oz.
See also
Virginia
Woolf 's extensive
play
with "There's no
place
like
Home" and
'"Orne,
Sweet 'Orne" in her Between the Acts
(1941; rpt.
New York:
Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1969), pp.
172-73. After
drafting
this
essay,
I discov
ered that Rubenstein also references The
Wizard
of
Oz,
Thomas Wolfe's You Can't
Go Home
Again,
and Homer's
Odyssey,
but for somewhat different
purposes
than
mine in her defense of
nostalgia
for home
(p. 2).
11
Roger
Friedland and Deirdre
Boden, eds.,
NowHere:
Space, Time,
and
Modernity (Berkeley: University
of California
Press, 1994), p.
6.
12
Kuan-Hsing Chen,
"Cultural Studies and the Politics of Internationalization:
An Interview with Stuart
Hall,"
in Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues
in Cultural
Studies,
ed. David
Morley
and Chen
(London: Routledge, 1996), p.
490.
13
George asks,
"When is the word 'home' shrunk to denote the
private,
domes
tic
sphere
and when is the 'domestic'
enlarged
to denote 'the affairs of the nation'?"
(p. 13).
The rhetorical link between home and nation is
widespread;
see
McDowell's
overview,
"Unsettling Naturalisms,"
in Forum on
Interdisciplinary
Perspectives
on Home and
Garden, Signs,
27,
No.3
(2002), 815-23;
Nira
Yuval-Davis,
Gender and Nation
(London: Sage, 1997).
14
Woolf,
Between the
Acts, p.
172.
15
Margaret Atwood, Lady
Oracle
(New
York: Avon
Books, 1976), p.
71.
16
Anne
Sexton, "Housewife,"
in No More Masks! An
Anthology of
Poems
by
Women,
ed. Florence Howe and Ellen Bass
(New
York: Anchor
Press, 1973), p.
188.
17
Janet Zandy, Calling
Home:
Working-Class
Women's
Writings (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1990), p. 1;
qtd.
in
Wiley
and
Barnes, Homemaking,
p.
xix.
18
hooks,
"Homeplace:
A Site of Resistance" and
"Choosing
the
Margin
as a
Space
of Radical
Openness,"
in her
Yearning: Race, Gender,
and Cultural
Politics, pp.
41-49; p.
148.
19
Sandra
Cisneros,
The House on
Mango
Street
(New
York:
Vintage Books,
1991), p.
77.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
20
See also
Juta
Ittner's
"My Self, My Body, My
World:
Homemaking
in the
Fiction of
Brigitte Kronauer,"
which
opens
with the
query
of what and where is
"home": "Is it a
fortress to be
guarded against
invasions
by
outsiders? Is it a woman's
workshop,
walled in and
commodified,
a
place
filled with icons and consumer
goods,
the house beautiful? A shelter for
day-dreams,
or
private family utopia?
A
mirror of
myself
and
my longings?for stability
in an
alienating world,
for a
space
that is
safe,
for a retreat where I can
finally
be
myself
all
by myself,
'chez
moi'?,"
in
Wiley
and
Barnes, eds., Homemaking, p.
53.
21
Mohanty, "Crafting
Feminist
Genealogies:
On the
Geography
and Politics of
Home, Nation,
and
Community,"
in
Talking
Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a
Transnational
Age, p.
497.
210
22
Caryl Phillips,
A New World Order
(New
York:
Vintage, 2001), p.
131.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
23
Annalee
Davis,
"Coming
Home to the
Self,"
Feminist
Studies, 27,
No. 2
(2001),
460.
24
Elisabeth
Bumiller,
"Of a
Big Punjabi Family, By
a
Big Punjabi Family,"
The
New York
Times,
17
February
2002, p.
12.
25
Mira
Nair, dir.,
Monsoon
Wedding,
with Naseeruddin Shah and Lillete
Dubey,
Universal
Studios,
2001. Nair's Salaam
Bombay (1988)
blends
fiction,
ethnography,
and
journalism
in a feature film
depicting
homeless
boys
in the streets of
Bombay;
Mississippi
M?sala
(1991)
deals with racial
complexities
of
Ugandan
Indians and
African Americans.
26
Adrienne
Rich,
"The
Floating Poem, Unnumbered,"
The Dream
of
a Common
Language:
Poems,
1974-1977
(New
York: W W
Norton, 1978),
11.
5-6, 11-12, p.
32.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
27
Adrienne
Rich,
Your Native
Land,
Your
Life:
Poems
(New
York: W W
Norton,
1986),
11.
9-10, p.
93.
28
Janice Mirikitani, Shedding
Silence
(Berkeley:
Celestial
Arts, 1997), p. 7;
qtd.
in Leslie
Bow,
Betrayal
and Other Acts
of
Subversion:
Feminism,
Sexual
Politics,
Asian
American Women's
Writing (Princeton:
Princeton
University
Press, 2000), p.
12.
29
Bhabha,
"DissemiNation:
Time, Narrative,
and the
Margins
of the Modern
Nation,"
in Nation and
Narration,
ed. Bhabha
(London:
Routledge, 1990), pp.
294
95. For other invocations of Freud's "The
Uncanny" (1919)
in discussions of
migrancy, identity, difference,
and national
identity,
see
Sarup, pp. 94-95;
Chambers,
Border
Dialogues: Journeys
in
Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1990),
pp. 103-04;
and Lars
Engle,
"The Political
Uncanny:
The Novels of Nadine
Gordimer,"
Yale
Journal
of
Criticism, 2,
No. 2
(1989),
101-27.
30
Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New
York:
Vintage, 1994);
for ref
erences to
"testing"
and its relation to
rape,
see
especially pp. 151, 154-56,
170.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
31
Ritu
Menon, Preface,
in Menon and Kamla
Bhasin,
Borders and Boundaries:
Women in India's Partition
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998),
pp. xi,
19. See also Urvashi
Butalia,
The Other Side
of
Silence: Voices
from
the
Partition
of
India
(New
York:
Penguin, 1998).
32
Shauna
Singh Baldwin,
What the
Body
Remembers
(New
York: Anchor
Books,
2001).
Baldwin was born in Montreal and now
lives in Milwaukee.
33
Jane Smiley,
A Thousand Acres
(New
York:
Ballantine, 1991).
34
June Jordan, Living
Room: New Poems
(New
York: Thunder's Mouth
Press,
1985),
11.
22-23, p.
123.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the
text.
35
Grace
Feuerverger, "My
Yiddish
Voice," Journal
of
Curriculum
Theorizing,
16,
No.4
(2000),
19.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
See also Maeerra Y. Shreiber's discussion of Yiddish
as
the
language
of
"linguistic
homemaking"
in the work of Holocaust survivor Irena
Klepfisz
in "The End of
Exile:
Jewish Identity
and Its
Diasporic
Poetics," PMLA, 113,
No. 2
(1998),
273-87.
36
Al-Qasida K,
qtd.
in Mona Takieddne
Amyuni, Introduction,
in Season of
Migration
to the North: A
Casebook,
ed.
Amyuni (Beirut:
American
University
of
Beirut, 1985), p.
21.
211
37
Feuerverger,
Oasis
of
Dreams:
Teaching
and
Learning
Peace in a
Jewish
Palestinian
Village
in Israel
(London:
Falmer
Press, 2001).
38
Diane
Glancy,
"Portrait of
Spring,"
Lone
Dog's
Winter Count
(Albuquerque:
West End
Press, 1991), p.
71. Thanks to
Hsinya Huang
for
pointing
out that L.
Frank Baum wrote The
Wizard
of
Oz
out of the Dakota territories and that some
critics read his Oz
fantasy
as a rural
populist allegory
for the extermination of
Indians.
39
Louise
Erdrich,
Tracks
(New
York:
Henry Holt, 1988), p.
2.
Subsequent
refer
ences will be cited
parenthetically
in the text.
40
Leslie Marmon
Silko, Storyteller (New
York:
Little, Brown,
and
Co., 1981), p.
51.
41
Edward W
Said,
"Reflections on Exile"
(1984), rpt.
in his
Reflections
on
Exile
and Other
Essays (Cambridge:
Harvard
University
Press, 2002), p.
185. See also
Chambers,
"An
Impossible Homecoming,"
in his
Migrancy, Culture, Identity, pp.
1
8.
42
Qtd.
in Ram?n
Sald?var,
"Transnational
Migrations
and Border Identities:
Immigration
and Postmodern
Culture,"
South Atlantic
Quarterly, 98,
No. 1-2
(1999), 227;
ellipsis
in text.
43
Emily Dickinson, "#1573,"
The
Complete
Poems
of Emily Dickinson,
ed.
Thomas H.
Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown,
and
Co., 1960), p.
653.
44
Lakshmi
Kannan,
Going
Home
(New
Delhi: Disha
Books, 1999), p.
22.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
45
Shirley
Geok-lin
Lim,
Among
the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American
Memoir
of
the Homelands
(New
York: Feminist Press at the
City University
of New
York, 1996), p. 89;
qtd. by
Bow, p.
8.
46
Uma
Narayan, Dislocating
Cultures:
Identities, Traditions,
and Third World
Feminism
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp.
8-9.
Subsequent
parenthetically
in the text.
47
Epigraph
from Irena
Kelpfisz's
"Fradel
Schtok,"
qtd.
in
Shreiber, p.
279.
48
Azade
Seyhan, Writing
Outside the Nation
(Princeton:
Princeton
University
Press, 2001), p.
16.
49
Woolf,
A Sketch
of
the
Past,
in Moments
of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical
Writings,
ed.
Jeanne
Schulkind
(New
York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976), p.
72.
50
H.D.,
Hermetic
Definition (New
York: New
Directions, 1972),
11.
12-15, p.
7.
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