by
Eunice Liew
The
University of Melbourne
Year: 2007
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Contents
Abstract
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Dissertation
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Creative Work Title Page
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Appendix
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Bibliography
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***
Abstract
In 1990 the Hubble Telescope was
launched into outer space, and for the first time, human beings were able to
see the universe more clearly. It was also the year that I started to
understand myself in relation to the rest of the world. I have always felt like
an outsider because I left my country of origin when I was an infant. However,
1990 was the year that my family began moving from country to country more
frequently. I eventually lost my ability to identify with my first culture. I
was thirteen and I became a Third Culture Kid. I am now a Third Culture Adult
(or Adult Third Culture Kid).
This thesis
explores the writing of Third Culture experiences. I have chosen to discuss
Isabel Allende’s work because, as a diplomat’s daughter, she has lived in Latin
America, Europe, and the Middle East during her childhood (Allende 2003: 106-109).
Specifically, I will discuss her memoir of her first culture, My Invented
Country (2003) and her novel, The House of the Spirits (1985). I
will discuss Allende’s writing in relation to what Julia Kristeva calls “the
stranger within”, by which she means the uncanny within the self that Sigmund
Freud also calls the unheimlich or “unhomely” (Kristeva 1991: 191).
Allende’s writing, particularly The House of the Spirits, which is full
of magical images, is an example of the uncanny stranger within as it might be
expressed through storytelling. I will discuss Allende’s writing in relation to
Jerome Bruner’s storied self because Allende’s stories are undoubtedly affected
by her Third Culture self. Lastly, I will discuss my own writing in relation to
the Third Culture experience. I will also relate all of these things to David
C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken’s discussion of the experience, its challenges
and benefits, and its defining link to the life of the Global Nomad.
***
What is a Third Culture?
In the 1950s, children who did not identify with their
culture of origin, because their parents travelled internationally for work,
were named Third Culture Kids[1]. This term is still used to apply to
people who grow up in more than one culture, yet are estranged from all of
them, including their culture of origin. Third Culture Kids (referred to from
now on as TCKs) was a term first used by sociologists Drs. John and Ruth Hill
Useem[2]. More recently, David C. Pollock and
Ruth E. Van Reken discussed the TCK experience in their book Third Culture
Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds (2001). In it, the
authors quote the Useems saying that TCKs identify with the lifestyle of the
expatriate community[3] as an “interstitial culture
or ‘culture between cultures’” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 20-21). The authors go
on to say, “instead of simply watching, studying, or analysing other cultures,
TCKs actually live in different cultural worlds as they travel back and forth
between their home and host cultures” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 22, 27).
The Useems did their original
research on Western expatriates who were living in designated spaces usually
isolated from the local culture, including spaces “such as military bases,
missionary compounds, and business enclaves” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 20-21).
However, since the 1950s the world has changed and the meaning of the
expression TCK has come under review[4]. Indeed “some argue that the terms third
culture or third culture kid are now misnomers” (Pollock and Reken
2001: 20-21). In the twenty-first century, globalisation means that more
families live abroad, and most expatriate families do not live in communities
completely isolated from the culture of their host countries. “The Japanese
families who live in Kokomo, Indiana, and work for Delco-Remy don’t live in a
Delco-Remy compound” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 21). Since TCKs are no longer
restricted to the culture of isolated communities as it was in the 1950s, the
culture of a TCK has become one that is informed by the cultures of many
countries. Perhaps a more accurate definition of a TCK would be a chronically
uprooted child, uprooted not only from his/her first culture, but also from
many second cultures.
TCKs in countless countries still
share remarkably important life experiences through the very process of living
and growing up in and among different cultures. The experiences they share
arguably affect their sense of self – “the deeper parts of their being”
(Pollock and Reken 2001:20-21). For some TCKs, home is defined by whichever
country their parents happen to be working and living, and this means that
their point of origin changes frequently. “Often [TCKs] whose parents move
every two years rarely consider geography as the determining factor in what
they consider home” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 123).
Moving to different countries
throughout childhood is not the same as the experience of diversity within a
particular culture. Nor is it the same as experiencing diversity in other
countries as an adult, because “when people first go to another culture as
adults, they experience culture shock and need a period of adjustment, but
their value system, sense of identity, and the establishment of core
relationships with family and friends have already developed in the home
culture” (Pollock and Reken 2001:39). It takes more than “a two-week or even a
two-month vacation” in a foreign country in order to develop classic TCK
characteristics (Pollock and Reken 2001: 22, 27). “Families that are posted to
different countries experience their “entire world, value system and points of
reference changing overnight” (Pollock and Reken 2001:39). Also, the Third
Culture identity is formed during the “the developmental years – from birth to
eighteen years of age.” Therefore, it is important that the “cross-cultural
experience occurs during the years when [the] child’s sense of identity,
relationships with others, and view of the world are being formed in the most
basic ways” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 22, 27). Most children form their identities
in childhood, the period when many TCKs are moving from country to country. As
a result, the TCK’s worldview and cultural references are a mélange of
different cultural experiences, without a fixed frame of reference or home
culture with which to compare those experiences.
Because TCKs are constantly entering
new cultures, they do not have any choice but to identify as the “other.” The
shared identity of the TCK and of the Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK[5]) is one that is defined by
“otherness”. Being “foreign” within all cultures is their shared experience and
also their continuity. It is this experience therefore that forms the basis of
their stories. Pollock and Reken say “sometimes TCKs and ATCKs appear arrogant
because they have chosen a permanent identity as being ‘different’ from others.
[However] what is labelled as arrogance in TCKs is simply an attempt to share
their normal life experiences. […] Non-TCK friends don’t realise TCKs have no
other stories to tell” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 104-105).
Before I continue, I think it is
necessary to clarify two things. When referring to both TCKs and ATCKs, I will
use the term Global Nomad. I might also define such an experience as interstitial,
which means something between things. The Global Nomad is a person that is
(either metaphorically or culturally) between one culture and another.
That TCKs or Global Nomads[6] have no “other stories to tell”,
indicates how deeply ingrained their nomadic experience is in their core
identities. The TCKs and Global Nomads are interstitial by nurture[7], part of a modern, undefined
expatriate community, but in fact committed to nowhere in particular.
Jerome Bruner discusses the self as
both storied[8] and also “a remembered self, the
remembering reaching far back beyond our own birth, back to the cultural and
language forms that specify the defining properties of a Self” (Bruner 1994:
52-53). Basically, the “Self” of the TCK/ATCK is a result of remembering the
experience of leaving, entering, and living in different cultures. TCKs and
ATCKs live in a “neither/nor world […] that is neither fully the world of their
parent’s culture (or cultures) nor fully the world of the other [Secondary]
culture[s]” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 6).
In my thesis, I show that there is an undercurrent of grief
in the stories of Third Culture experiences. Unresolved grief of not having a
“home” is a key feature of the Global Nomad experience. This unresolved grief
is rarely discussed and much less understood. People say, “It must be great to
see the world.” Or they ask, “But what do TCKs have to grieve about?” (Pollock
and Reken 2001: 165). In conversations one then says, of course it’s great… (my
childhood friends do not know me anymore, but)… it’s really great here in
Shanghai/New York/Paris/Kathmandu… (I don’t remember anything about my passport
country, but)… etcetera. For the TCK grief is the last taboo: one travels to
lots of places paid for by one’s parents, therefore one is not allowed to be
unhappy.
Because of the richness of their
lives “some TCKs refuse to accept the idea that unresolved grief could possibly
an issue for them. […] They agree they’ve had wonderful, interesting lives”
(Pollock and Reken 2001: 166). But unresolved grief is present in writings
about the Third Culture experience. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are
“wish-fulfillments” and since the Global Nomad wishes for a home, these thoughts
become the catalysts for creative expression (Freud 1901: 644): “every child at
play behaves like a creative writer in that he creates a world of his own, or
rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him. […]
The creative writer does the same as a child at play [….] Language has
preserved this relationship between children’s play and poetic creation” (Freud
1901: 144).
Julia Kristeva discusses the grief of
the “other” in Strangers to Ourselves (1991). She says that there are
two kinds of foreigners: the kind that waste away in “an agonising struggle
between what no longer is and what will never be” and the kind that “transcend:
living neither before nor now but beyond, they are bent with a passion that,
although tenacious, will remain forever unsatisfied. It is a passion for
another land, always a promised one” (1991: 10). I believe that the Global
Nomad is in the second category – the outsider with a passion for a promised
land. Global Nomads can experience “nostalgia” for a “home” which doesn’t
actually exist in their experiences, and this “home” is not necessarily the
home of their first culture. Most Global Nomads are expected to repatriate to
their passport countries at some point and this can create grief for the
“homes” that they leave behind in their second cultures. The binary of
self/other relies on the idea of belonging to a place, and that lacking identification
with such belonging, the state of the Global Nomad is statelessness[9]. But this is a syllogistic argument:
statelessness is their state; the Global Nomad’s home is the unhomely[10] (Kristeva 1991: 182-183). This does
not mean that Global Nomads lack identification[11]. They identify with the unhomely
home. Sometimes, travel itself consolidates their sense of identity,
constituting an “anti-nostalgia” for an “anti-home.” Being uprooted is perhaps
the most consistent feature of their lives and because it is constant, many
TCKs “develop a migratory instinct that controls their lives” (Pollock and
Reken 2001: 121,125).
I argue that the unresolved grief of
the Global Nomad is manifested in the unconscious and because of this, it is
observable in writing. For the Global Nomad writing is a way to create identity
out of otherness and a state out of statelessness. In order to examine this
idea, I will discuss the writing of Isabel Allende, who was a child of a
diplomat and grew up in more than one country (Griego 2004: par. 1). I will
also discuss my own fiction, which explores the experience of being a Global
Nomad, who simultaneously belongs nowhere and everywhere.
What is a “Third Culture Text”?
In researching this paper on the Third Culture Kid
experience, I have found almost nothing written about its expression in (or
relationship to) creative writing. “Third Culture” and “Global Nomadism” are
not genres or author categories because there are not enough writers who
identify themselves in this way. Categorising authors as “Global Nomads” is
about as random as making a category for writers whose parents are mechanics.
For example, according to Chris Hall[12] the author J. G. Ballard[13] finds aspects of his passport
country alienating and this makes him an outsider. Though Ballard[14] is worth exploring for this thesis,
I believe that his work is more influenced by the horrors of WWII than by his
experience as a Global Nomad. I have found that the majority of writing by an
“other” is usually about the contrast between an originating culture and a host
culture. An example is Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1990), about Chinese
immigrant women and their daughters. Since the culture of the TCK is one that
encompasses many cultures, literature about the TCK experience is rare.
At this point, I would like to make a
brief allusion to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1945) because of
arguable similarities between women’s historical experience as outsiders and
the experience of Global Nomads. Woolf says, on the subject of women and
fiction, that it is a problem with no conclusion[15]. When A Room of One’s Own was
first published in 1928, women were not allowed into libraries unless
“accompanied by Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of
introduction” (Woolf 1945: 9). Also, historically, women have been excluded
from a system that allowed a nation’s citizens to vote, work, and use public
spaces. Because women have even been excluded from citizenship, symbolically
they have existed outside the social contract[16] (the implicit agreement among people
that results in the organisation of society) as contractually non-citizens,
“foreigners” or “outsiders”. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf implies that
because women were removed from the social contract that allowed the use of
public spaces (e.g. libraries), then for men they were outsiders. Likewise,
Global Nomads exist outside the social contract as it is known to non-Global
Nomads. Just like Woolf’s outsider, the subject of Global Nomads and fiction is
not a problem with a neat conclusion because the problem has yet to be broadly
acknowledged. One of the reasons for this is, although the experience of being
a Global Nomad has become increasingly common, most do try to fit in however
superficially and do not seek to identify themselves as “different” (Pollock
and Reken 2001: 107-119).
In light of these problems, I have
chosen to explore the writing of Isabel Allende. In her memoir, My Invented
Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile (2003), Allende describes her
passport country as one that is an invention of her mind: a “mythic
country that from being missed so profoundly has replaced the real country” (2003: 180-181). Although she has
often identified herself as Chilean, Allende is a Global Nomad and her writing
contains elements of the self as other as well as of the self as an invention.
Within her work there is also evidence of unresolved grief and nostalgia for a
home that does not exist. In addition to My Invented Country, I will
also examine her novel The House of the Spirits (1985) as an example of
her fiction.
My Invented Country is an autobiographical-based narrative of Allende’s
relationship to Chile, the country of her birth. In this work, she describes
her extended family and her way of life in Chile before she went into exile
during the military coup that eventuated in the death of the president (her
fraternal relative) Salvador Allende. Allende now lives in America where she
has been since 1987 (Griego 2004: par. 1). As explained in chapter one, Allende
was born the child of diplomats and lived in various countries during her
childhood. Her experience can therefore be identified as similar to that of a
TCK.
In chapter two, I discuss the
importance of storytelling and identity formation as it relates to the TCK
experience. The narrative of The House of the Spirits emphasises the
importance of storytelling, especially its importance to outsiders. In chapter
three, I define Third Culture writing as writing that is informed by the
memories of a TCK. I also attempt to discuss my own creative writing, which is
the writing of such a Third Culture experience.
Chapter One
Isabel Allende’s Invented Country
I lost the world where I belonged. Now I don't belong anywhere.
-Isabel Allende (Umpierre
2002:129).
In the introduction of My Invented Country: A Nostalgic
Journey Through Chile, Allende admits that she decided to write a memoir
about Chile because a stranger at a conference asked her what role nostalgia
played in her novels (2003: x-xii). She says that she didn’t realise she was
writing about nostalgia (2003: x-xii). She also says that she only started to
feel “American” after the September 11th 2001 attacks on the World
Trade Centre (2003: x-xii). It was because of the attack that she started to
think of what America meant to her; she realised that it was also her home,
even though she identified herself as Chilean (2003: x-xii). However, Allende
says that she is a person of varying cultural influences, and the Chile that
she remembers isn’t so much the geographic Chile, but the Chile of her memory,
the Chile of her imagination. She says that “every book contributes to the
completion of that ‘country inside [her] head,’” (Allende 2003:179). Allende is
the foreigner that Kristeva describes as always being drawn to the imaginary
home that doesn’t exist (1991:10).
Allende wrote My Invented Country
as a memoir of the home of her ancestors (Allende 2003: 177; Rodden
2004: 67). But even though
Chile is an important part of her identity as an author, by identifying Chile
as the country of her memory and imagination, Allende has effectively written a
memoir about the effect of being a TCK:
I have often said that my nostalgia dates from the
time of the military coup of 1973, when my country changed so much that I can
no longer recognize it, but in fact it must have begun much earlier. My
childhood and adolescence were marked with journeys and farewells. I hadn’t yet
put down roots in one place when it was time to pack our suitcases and move to
another. I wrote everything down in my notebook with the industry of a notary,
as if even then I foresaw that only writing would anchor me to reality. […]
When she gave me that notebook, my mother somehow intuited that I would have to
dig up my Chilean roots, and that lacking a land into which to sink them I
would have to do that on paper. […] In my childhood and youth, I lived in
Bolivia, the Middle East, and Europe […] I learned a little French and English,
and also learned to eat suspicious-looking food without asking questions
(Allende 2003: 106-109).
Allende was born to Chilean diplomat parents in Lima in 1942
and, after her parents separated, her mother’s second partner, Ramón Huidobro,
was also a diplomat (Griego 2004: par. 1). When she was ten, Huidobro was
appointed secretary of the embassy in Bolivia so she went to an American school
there. When they then went to live in Lebanon, she attended a British school in
there (Zapata 2002: 8 and 12). As was mentioned earlier, as a child she also
lived in Europe (Allende 2003: 106-109; Griego 2004: par. 1). Also, from 1973
to 1986, Allende lived in Caracas to escape a military coup against the
president Salvador Allende, her relative (Griego 2004: par. 1). In 1987 she
moved to San Francisco to be with her second husband, William Gordon, who is an
American lawyer (Griego 2004: par. 1; Rodden 2004: 131). She says that from the
moment she left Chile and began to “travel from country to country” she “became
the new girl in the neighbourhood, the foreigner at school, the strange one who
dressed differently and didn’t even know how to talk like everyone else”
(Allende 2003: 78-79). She says, “I couldn’t picture the time I would return to
familiar territory in Santiago, but when finally that happened, several years
later, I didn’t fit in there either”(Allende 2003: 78-79). Like most Global
Nomads, Allende “never develop[ed] true cultural balance anywhere” (Pollock and
Reken 2001:93).
After having recommitted to Chile
from a childhood of wandering and then having to leave Chile again as an adult,
Allende describes herself as becoming “homeless, a woman without a
country. […] For some writers exile is a desired location out of which they can
write” (Umpierre
2002:133-134). In the introduction to My Invented Country Allende says:
Once
I heard a famous Afro-American writer say that from the time she was a little
girl she felt like a stranger in her family and her hometown. She added that
nearly all writers have experienced that feeling, even if they have never left
their native city. […] Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to
understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence,
including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists,
many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings.
(2003: xiv).
Allende’s description of the reason one writes – “an attempt
to understand one’s own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence”
– is something that many Global Nomads spend a lifetime trying to do. According
to Pollok and Reken, the Global Nomad often goes through a period of delayed
grief as an effect of their fractured childhoods (between the ages of
twenty-five and forty) (2001: 181). Delayed grief is actually something like
nostalgia – both sentiments look back to the past. For Allende, this nostalgia
is something she has worked through by writing about Chile, which is depicted
in her writing through the haze of her imagination. She says, for example, that
in Chile at her grandfather’s house, they would eat lunches that could “provoke
heartburn in the healthiest eater” and that her parents, who are “over eighty,
consume ninety eggs, a quart of cream, a pound of butter, and four pounds of
cheese per week” (2003: 87-88). One can assume that Allende’s
parents don’t really eat that many eggs or that much cream, butter, and cheese
in a week. Allende represents her memories, the basis upon which she forms her
view of the world and her self, as mysteries she attempts to decode through
writing. Allende says that most of her work “is an attempt to bring an illusory
order to the natural chaos of life, to decode the mysteries of memory, to
search for [her] identity” (Rodden 2004: XI). Allende admits that she “can’t
pretend to know what part of [her] memory is reliable and how much [she has]
invented, because the job of defining the line between them is beyond [her]
ability” (2003: 178-179). In an effort to recover phantom memories, things from
the past with “fuzzy outlines”, she (re)invents them as fiction (2003: 78-79).
Outsider Magic
It’s as if my life has been nothing but a series of
illusions […] and the landscape is no more substantial than a dream.
- Isabel Allende (Allende 2003: 78-79).
The genre or narrative style of Magical Realism (realismo
mágico), also known as “marvellous realism” (realismo maravilloso),
has been defined as an attempt “to create ‘new realities’ or to treat the
existing ones with a different perspective from that of the social realism of
the 1930s” (Angulo 1995: xi). It is a style that gives culture, history, and
geography precedence and juxtaposes those elements with a subjective view of
reality. It has been described as an “ontological and ideological” way for
South American writers to “define their culture within the western context”
(Angulo 9). Initially, Magical Realism was used by “Franz Roh [to] address
post-expressionist art in the 1920's. The term was later taken up by Venezuelan
writer Arturo Uslar Pietri in 1948 in reference to a literature with surrealist
elements” (Zapata-Whelan 2003: par 3). However, the Magical Realism I would
like to discuss is not the same as the one by the surrealists, that is, it
“isn’t as grounded in reality” (Angulo 1995: 4).
Due to the difficulty of a highly
mobile childhood, the surrealistic elements of Magic Realism is, albeit
indirectly, an apt description of the Global Nomad experience. Pollok and Reken
have described the Global Nomad experience as “intangible” (Pollock and Reken
2001: 72). It is the uncanny experience of flying to and from different homes
in different countries, and not the other elements of Magic Realism such as the
historical and geographical aspects commonly associated with the style, that
affects the Global Nomad.
In the first chapter of Gabriel García Márquez’s Magic
Realist novel, A Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), magic is introduced
into the story by Melquíades who comes to the village with “two metal ingots”
(magnets) that are able to attract lost items (1970: 1-2). Melquíades is a
gypsy, in other words, Márquez introduces magic through a character who is an
outsider. Similarly, in Allende’s My Invented Country the outsider is
the country itself because the country is foreign to Allende; and in The
House of the Spirits, Rosa introduces magic through her physicality, her
beauty and her green hair, both of which make her an outsider (Allende
1985: 6). For Kristeva,
magic is related to the experience of being an outsider itself, as it is also
the experience of the uncanny, or that which is foreign within – the Freudian unheimlich:
When
we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious
– that ‘improper’ facet of our impossible ‘own and proper.’ Delicately,
analytically, Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect
foreignness in ourselves. (Kristeva 1991:191).
According to Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves,
“everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden
but has come to light” (Kristeva 1991:181). Unheimlich in English means
“uncanny, and the Greeks simply call [it] xenos, ‘foreign’ (Kristeva
1991: 191). Kristeva says that the direct translation of unheimlich is
“unhomely”. Kristeva interprets Freud as saying that “foreignness, an uncanny
one […] irrigates our very speaking-being, estranged by other logics, including
the heterogeneity of biology” (Kristeva 1991: 170). “Freud wanted to
demonstrate at the outset, on the basis of a semantic study of the German
adjective heimlich and it’s antonym unheimlich that a negative
meaning close to that of the antonym is already tied to the positive term heimlich,
friendly comfortable” (Kristeva 1991: 182). This notion of antonyms is similar
to the contradictory nostalgia of the Global Nomad: where there is no nostalgia
for a home, but rather a nostalgia for a home that doesn’t exist, a home of the
imaginary, a home wherein resides the unresolved grief of the Global Nomad. In
writing, the uncanny is the bearer of unresolved grief and once the grief is
resolved through an exploration of the uncanny, where the Global Nomad can find
his/her true home. According to Kristeva “we are foreigners to ourselves”. In
other words: we all contain “foreignness” within ourselves (Kristeva 1991:
170). As such, the Global Nomad, the ultimate gypsy, is not only foreign on the
outside but also foreign on the inside. A hybrid of many cultures, he/she
belongs everywhere and simultaneously nowhere at once (Pollock and Reken 2001:
124-125).
Allende longs for what Kristeva
describes as a “passion for a promised land” (Kristeva 1991:10). Maybe this is
why she has been called a writer who “relies increasingly on formula [;]
formidable parental figures, love at first sight, illegitimate birth, and
mansions that expand over the years (Graham
2001:39). Allende also says that she remembers “fleeting images” and her
landscapes are “no more substantial than a dream” (2003: 78-79). With her repetitive themes and subjective
realities, Allende appears in her autobiographical writing as a melancholic
person forever obsessed with the thing she lost, the missing “maternal object”,
her mother-land (Kristeva 1989: 9). Absence allows Allende to “mythologize” the
gaps in history caused by displacement and she is compelled to fill in the gap
by recreating history as fiction. “In general, exile is advantageous for a
writer, Allende believes, precisely because it generates imaginative
space and multiple perspectives” (Rodden 2004: 14).
Allende is
not strictly a writer of Magical Realism, but she is sometimes identified as
one because The House of the Spirits was influenced by Gabriel García
Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude[17]. Márquez
is perhaps the best-known Latin American author of this style of writing[18]. Allende
says that “if the brutality of Latin American history and politics were
recounted without this element of imagination, its true dimensions would not be
reflected” (Zapata-Whelan par 7-8). This “element of imagination” allowed
Allende to safely write about the brutalities of Latin American history and
politics, the activists lost in the struggle of Latin American history and
politics, and also her own loss: the loss of her home through exile (Rodden
2004: 79). Allende’s use of Magic Realism is more of an “early influence than a
personal language. Each of her subsequent novels after The House of the
Spirits makes progressively less use of ghosts, inexplicable occurrences,
and a casual reordering of reality” (Graham 2001: 38-39). One may therefore
ask, “after shedding the influence of Márquez what is Allende left with?”
(Graham 2001: 38-39). I would argue that Allende is left with the other
distinguishing thread that runs through her fiction: the theme of families and
histories in which the narrators are often feminists[19] and the
images are typically dream-like (Allende 2003: 78-79).
Memory in Third Culture Writing
I can’t pretend to know what part of my memory is
reliable and how much I’ve invented.
- Isabel Allende (Allende 2003: 178-179).
One of the most important aspects of the Global Nomad’s
developed awareness of self and other is that their “cross-cultural experience
occurs [when they are children and their] sense of identity, relationships with
others, and view of the world are being formed in the most basic ways” (Pollock
and Reken 2001: 27).
In “The ‘Remembered’ Self” (1994),
Jerome Bruner says that the “Self is not an entity that one can simply
remember. It is a complex mental edifice that one constructs by the use of a
variety of mental processes, one of which must surely be remembering” (1994:
41). One of the processes of remembering is remembering things selectively, and
the selections that we remember are guided by a need “to emphasize agency,
to recover memories related to the initiation of relatively autonomous acts
governed by our intentional states – our wishes, desires, beliefs, and
expectancies” (1994: 41). In other words, we remember things that allow us to
be the focus of the memory – hence the word “agency”, meaning you are the
subject of your own story. Thus, all our stories, be they dreams, memories, or
stories that we write, make us the protagonist. Similarly, Freud says that
children dream in order to satisfy the innermost desires of their egos – they
dream as wish fulfillment – and creative writers are like children at play
(Freud 1901: 644, 659). We are the subjects of our dreams. We are the subjects
of our stories.
Bruner says that “the Self
is ‘storied,’ or narrative in structure. When you ask people what they are
really like, they tell a great many stories involving the usual elements of
narrative […]: there is an agent [meaning, an autonomous active Self] engaged
in action deploying certain instruments for achieving a goal in a particular
scene, and somehow things have gone awry between these elements to produce trouble”
(1994: 43). It makes sense that as a writer, Allende is drawn to magical and
dreamlike images in her writing because she writes about the home within
herself. Allende has a home within her memory, and her memory is her home.
Allende’s inventions are not only a way that a writer of fiction might tell
their story, it is also a way that she understands herself. But perhaps the
elements of narrative that she uses are not so usual: Magical Realism is a
manifestation of the unconscious in Allende’s writing and a method through
which she deals with her outsider identity.
As was suggested before, the most
common themes of Allende’s fiction are families, histories, and memories. “Repossessing
historical experience which reclaim[s] the past is Allende's [life work]. In The
House of the Spirits, she writes to keep alive the memory of her country,
Chile” (Foreman,
1992:369), and in Portrait
in Sepia, Allende uses a narrator to tell the story in order to make sense
of and remember the past.
For Allende,
memory is grounded in a
recuperated relation to the historical. Allende […] like the storytelling women
protagonists [she creates], [is] animated by the desire to preserve pasts too
often trivialized, built over, or erased, and to pass them on. (Foreman, 1992:369).
It makes sense then to understand Allende as a TCK addressing
her loss of home through her creative writing.
Because nostalgia is a longing for
the missing object and TCKs spend a lifetime being uprooted from the missing
object – their first culture, longing becomes what Kristeva describes as an
obsession (Kristeva 1991:10). Kristeva says that the nostalgic person can be,
confronted
with ‘the omnipotence of thought,’ which, in order to constitute itself
invalidates the arbitrariness of signs and the autonomy of reality as well and
places them both under the sway of fantasies expressing infantile desires or
fears. (1991:186).
The Global Nomad is one that is obsessed with the absence of
inclusion and is nostalgic for the home he or she had been exiled from: “the
foreigner is a dreamer making love with absence, the exquisitely depressed”
(Kristeva 1991:10).
Allende says that she thinks “nostalgia is a melancholy and slightly saccharine
sentiment, like tenderness.” Yet the idea that her writing is nostalgic makes
her look deep within herself to write about Chile (Allende
2003: x-xii).
But nostalgia informs Allende’s
writing about Chile and America. It enabled her to position herself within
America as a migrant. Nostalgia in Allende’s writing is driven not by an
attachment to her country of origin, but to the fact that she felt like a
foreigner in both her culture of origin and her second culture (Umpierre
2002: 129). Nostalgia
led Allende to write about her country of origin as if it were an “invention”
or a home of her imagining. (Allende 2003: x-xii). On this basis, Allende is
the second kind of foreigner that Kristeva describes,
living
neither before or now but beyond, they are bent with a passion that, although
tenacious, will remain forever unsatisfied. It is a passion for another land,
always a promised one. (Kristeva 1991: 10).
Chapter Two
The House of the Spirits
She was already in the habit of writing down important
matters, and afterwards, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never
suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past
and overcome terrors of my own.
- Isabel Allende (1985: 3)
The House of the Spirits can be identified as historiographic metafiction[20]. It is also most commonly considered
a magical realist novel. It is perhaps the Allende novel most influenced by
magical realism[21]. In the
novel, corrupt politicians are overthrown by idealistic communists and they
inturn are overthrown by a corrupt military. Throughout there are mystical
figures: women born with green hair and women who are clairvoyant (1985: 6,
23). The events of The
House of the Spirits start in the early 1900s and end in the late 1960s.
The style of the story is influenced by A Hundred Years of Solitude.
[Image removed: graphic not showing up correctly in blogger.]
Here is a plot outline: Nívea and Severo del Valle have a daughter, Rosa (also known as Rosa the Beautiful). Rosa is engaged to marry Esteban Trueba. When Rosa dies, Esteban marries her sister, Clara, who can foresee the future. Clara has a child, Blanca. When Blanca becomes pregnant by Pedro Tercero García, Esteban forbids her to marry him because he is of lower caste. Instead, he forces her to marry Jean de Satigny. Later, Blanca separates from Jean de Satigny, gives birth to her daughter, Alba, and continues to see Pedro in secret. Her mother Clara dies. Her daughter Alba falls in love with Miguel, the younger brother of Amanda, (Amanda is the lover of her uncles, Nicholas and Jamie). While all this is happening, Esteban becomes a senator of the conservative party, the communists overthrow the conservative party, and then they are overthrown by a military regime. Esteban’s granddaughter, Alba, is put in detention and tortured by the military police. By the end of the novel, Alba is pregnant with either Miguel’s child or the child of one of the men who raped her while she was in detention. Here is a pictographic representation of character relationships in The House of the Spirits [Image removed: graphic not showing up correctly in blogger.].
Here is a plot outline: Nívea and Severo del Valle have a daughter, Rosa (also known as Rosa the Beautiful). Rosa is engaged to marry Esteban Trueba. When Rosa dies, Esteban marries her sister, Clara, who can foresee the future. Clara has a child, Blanca. When Blanca becomes pregnant by Pedro Tercero García, Esteban forbids her to marry him because he is of lower caste. Instead, he forces her to marry Jean de Satigny. Later, Blanca separates from Jean de Satigny, gives birth to her daughter, Alba, and continues to see Pedro in secret. Her mother Clara dies. Her daughter Alba falls in love with Miguel, the younger brother of Amanda, (Amanda is the lover of her uncles, Nicholas and Jamie). While all this is happening, Esteban becomes a senator of the conservative party, the communists overthrow the conservative party, and then they are overthrown by a military regime. Esteban’s granddaughter, Alba, is put in detention and tortured by the military police. By the end of the novel, Alba is pregnant with either Miguel’s child or the child of one of the men who raped her while she was in detention. Here is a pictographic representation of character relationships in The House of the Spirits [Image removed: graphic not showing up correctly in blogger.].
Storytelling is an important theme in The House of the
Spirits. The novel begins and ends with Clara writing the story as a child
in order to make an account of the time her uncle, Mateo, spent away from home.
It starts with a line from Clara’s notebooks, “Barrabás came to us by
sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy”(Allende 1985: 3).
It ends with that exact same line, revealing that Alba used the notebooks to
write and narrate The House of the Spirits as the family history:
My
grandmother wrote in her notebooks that bore witness to life for fifty years.
[…] I have them here at my feet, bound with coloured ribbons, divided according
to events and not in chronological order, just as she arranged them before she
left. Clara wrote them so they would help me now to reclaim the past and
overcome terrors of my own. The first is an ordinary school copybook with
twenty pages, written in a child’s delicate calligraphy. It begins like this:
Barrabás came to us by sea…. (Allende 1985: 368).
Barrabás, the gigantic dog, is a construction that bookends
the story in the same way that storytelling – another construction – is used to
structure The House of the Spirits. Similarly, Blanca invents imaginary
animals in her craftwork and she doesn’t know that many years before her, Rosa
also invented imaginary animals (1985: 148-149). Allende suggests the talent of
inventing things – imaginary animals or histories – is a trait that females can
inherit; but perhaps this is because the female characters in The House of
the Spirits are also indirectly representative of Allende, who wrote the
story to make sense of, and to preserve the past. She says that writing The
House of Spirits was a way to “recapture [her] lost country” and to
“reunite [her] scattered family, to revive the dead and preserve their
memories, which were beginning to be blown away in the whirlwind of exile”
(Allende 2003: 177). Perhaps she felt that “words could
capture the country and the family she [lost by moving away, and it was also] a
way of putting in a scrapbook family memoirs or, metaphorically, making a video
to remember her own country” (Umpierre 2002: 133-134).
Allende
started writing the novel during her grandfather’s demise and perhaps this was
her way of imagining death as another way of being rather than an ending,
granting her grandfather a sort of immortality. Allende’s grandfather told her
that “if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever” (Rodden
2004: 55). In the book, Clara’s
death is described as “being born: just a change” (Allende 1985: 247). Alba
says that “if [Clara] could easily communicate with those from the Hereafter
[…] she would be able to do the same with those of the Here-and-Now. Thus,
instead of whimpering when the time came, [Clara] hoped Alba would be calm,
because in her case death would not be a separation, but a way of being more
united” (Allende 1985: 247). Allende describes the “skeletons hidden in [her family’s] armoire” as
having “planted the seeds of literature” in her life. She says that in every
story she writes she tries to “exorcise one of them” (Allende 2003: 90).
There is evidence of Allende’s
Global Nomad or TCK experience in The House of the Spirits as TCKs often have unresolved family
stories because they are removed from their extended family connections at a
young age and some “TCKs grieve for the past no longer available to them”
(Pollock and Reken 2001: 172). Many of the characters are outsiders or displaced
people. For example, Nicholás, the family eccentric, goes to India and returns
with a desire to “find God on less travelled paths” (1985: 253). Allende admits
that she writes characters that identify with “marginals” or are “outcasts”
(Rodden 2004: 80-81). Allende also includes references to her childhood
experience living in Europe. For example, the Count de Satigny is described as
a man from France who smoked cigarettes imported from Lebanon (1985: 157). When
not describing a character’s exotic origins or a character’s incompatibility
with their home culture, Allende describes characters that invent their own
realities. When Blanca avoids school and stays in the country so she can
continue sneaking out at night to see Pedro Tercero, she makes clay objects to
pass the time during the day. Blanca creates a “miniature world of house-hold
animals and people engaged in every trade: carpenters, laundresses, cooks, each
with his or her own tiny tools and furniture” out of clay (1985: 148-149).
Eventually, Blanca starts to make “imaginary animals, gluing half an elephant
to half a crocodile”, carrying on a tradition that Rosa the Beautiful, her
grandaunt, started when she embroidered imaginary animals onto cloth. Her
mother, Clara, decides that “there must be a genetic memory that prevents it
from being swallowed by oblivion” (1985: 148-149). In The House of the
Spirits, the magic of Allende’s writing and imagination is also Allende’s
“genetic memory” and her “home”.
In the previous chapter, I mentioned that Jerome Bruner said
that the self is remembered: the self is “a complex mental edifice that one
constructs by […] remembering [and also the things we remember are selectively
guided by] our wishes, desires, beliefs, and expectancies” (1994: 41). Because
the Global Nomad moves from country to country, they create sections of memory
punctuated by fast transitions via modes of transport – airplanes, trains,
ships – and this in turn creates a series of memories of each country, stuck
together like pieces of a puzzle. Allende says that “nobody is carved in stone”
and that “most of [her] writing is an attempt to bring an illusory order to the
natural chaos of life, to decode the mysteries of memory, to search for [her]
own identity” (Rodden 2004: xi). For Allende, “writing is like a catharsis;
it’s a way of getting inside the past” (Rodden 2004: 79).
Because the self is
constructed by memory, and the Global Nomad has many memories of different
countries, the identity of the Global Nomad is a kind of jigsaw puzzle. In The
House of the Spirits some of the characters actually attempt to put their
stories together “as if […] assembling a jigsaw puzzle” (Allende 1985: 368). By
the end of the story, Alba attempts to “put the puzzle together” by writing
about her family, and also by using Clara’s notebooks to tell the story:
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile
and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a
chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences
of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future.
(Allende 1985: 368).
Alba writes in order to make sense of the past and to
construct her family history, that is, to construct her identity (Bruner’s
remembered self).
Inventing
identities is not a new experience for the Global Nomad. In a way, invented
countries, invented memories, and invented identities are the Global Nomad
heritage. In The House of the Spirits there are many examples of
storytelling as replacement realities or as a way to create the self. For
example, when Blanca tells Alba about her secret meetings with Pedro, she only
tells her “anecdotes about him” and teaches her “his songs [because the past]
had grown hazy with time” (Allende 1985: 265). As Bruner says the self “is a
perpetually rewritten story, [and also] the Self is a remembered self, the
remembering reaches far back beyond our own birth, back to the cultural and
language forms that specify the defining properties of a Self” (Bruner 1994:
53). Allende says, “most
of my writing is an attempt to […] decode the mysteries of memory” (Rodden
2004: xi).
If Allende’s stories were her dreams,
this would be congruent with Freud’s ideas about childhood dreams being a form
of wish fulfillment. Thus the TCK or Global Nomad survives a childhood of
unresolved grief because of the telling of stories, explaining why Allende
wrote about children and families in The House of the Spirits.
By inventing her identity through memory and also through the
culture and language of her Global Nomad experience, Allende manages to
construct her own lexical archetypes and “myths”. For example, most of her work
is about strong, goddess-like, female figures, and weak or violent, male
figures. Portrait in Sepia (2001) and Eva Luna (1988) are both
works with these lexical archetypes. In The House of the Spirits, the
characters’ descriptions and characters’ actions act to bolster the image of
the archetypical feminine and archetypical masculine. For example, Rosa, who
exists “squarely on the tenuous line between human being and a creature of
myth”, is eviscerated on the table in the kitchen which, at the time, was where
many women spent the majority of their day (Allende 1985: 6). And another
example: the hyper-masculine Esteban Trueba spends his youth terrorizing and
impregnating the young women in the countryside and lives his old age in war
rooms (Allende 1985: 260).
Some of this
“myth invention” occurs in The House of Spirits quite literally. For
example, Blanca tells Alba stories about “the magic books of the enchanted
trucks of her great granduncle Marcos, which her poor memory had transformed
into new tales,” and in some of these tales there are princes who sleep a
hundred years, damsels who fight dragons, and a wolf lost in a forest who is
“disemboweled by a little girl for no reason whatsoever” (Allende 1985: 258).
Blanca could never repeat the stories exactly as she told them the first time,
so Alba started writing the stories down to remember them, and this led to her
recording the things that she thought were important, “just as her Grandmother
Clara had before her” (Allende 1985: 258). There are many Scheherazade
characters in Allende’s stories. For example, Eva Luna (1988), published
three years after The House of the Spirits, is a novel about a female
storyteller. “Allende freely acknowledges that she identifies with Eva Luna.
[…] The Stories of Eva Luna begins and ends with quotations from A Thousand
and One Nights” (Rodden 2004: 15). Consistent with this, there are many
selves in Allende’s stories, and many invented mythologies and figures. In the
interview excerpt below, Allende re-tells the story of Santa Claus a magical
realist figure:
“Mai, tell
me a story.”
Mai is the affectionate name
Alejandro invented for Isabel when he was learning to talk.
“Do you want a story about pirates?”
“No, about Santa Claus.”
“Once upon a time,” begins the young, attractive
grandmother, “there was a horrid old man with horns and a devil face who peeked
in windows at night, and if the children were poor, he didn’t bring them any
gifts – gifts were just for rich little boys and girls….” (Zapata 2002: 135).
It is just like a Global Nomad to say that they believe in
the kind of story that can be told in any language or in any community. Allende
says the story of The House of the Spirits could have happened anywhere
and that “human beings are the same everywhere; the differences are not so
great” (Rodden 2004: 52). Allende believes that through writing “all sorrows
can be borne […] if you put them into a story or tell a story about them”
(Rodden 2004: 23). Allende works through the unresolved grief of a TCK
childhood not only through nostalgic writing about Chile but also through the
creation of her own Third Culture mythology.
Chapter Three
What is Third Culture Writing?
In the slow practice of writing […] I have constructed
a land that I call my country. That is where I come from. (Allende 2003:179).
- Isabel Allende
Third Culture Writing is a writing that is informed by
memory, by the experience of being an outsider, and by an awareness of an
uncanny strangeness within the self. It is also writing as a means to resolve
unresolved grief. By losing a specific landscape, language, accent, and
everything that surrounds them, the Global Nomad as a writer creates these
things through the creation of worlds within fiction. The Global Nomad writer
makes a magic make-believe country in which they can live. Travel itself becomes a new stratagem, a sort
of punctuation in the syntax of the stories by Global Nomads, much in the way
that it has punctuated their lives. The gaps (journeys) become like the
punctuation in a sentence, the white space in a poem, or a gap between
chapters, creating a structure based on ongoing movement.
According to Bruner, even though the
“Self is a remembered self, the remembering reaches far back beyond our own
birth, back to the cultural and language forms that specify the defining
properties of a Self” (Bruner 1994: 53). For the Global Nomad, the cultures and
languages that inform their understanding of Self are diverse, so the
remembered self stems from a Third Culture heritage that informs their core
values. One can say that the language of a Global Nomad depends on the state of
being interstitial, of living in between spaces.
Kristeva says that language
is a symbolic barrier that structures the repressed and that, because
intellectual uncertainty weakens them, signs and reality are not autonomous;
they can merge to produce the uncanny (Kristeva 1991:186-187).
Uncanniness occurs when the boundaries
between imagination and reality are erased. […] The clash with
the other, the identification of the self with that good or bad other that
transgresses the fragile boundaries of the uncertain self, would thus be at the
source of an uncanny strangeness whose excessive features, as represented in
literature, cannot hide its permanent presence in ‘normal’ psychical dynamics.
(Kristeva 1991:188-189).
In Allende’s and other TCK or Global Nomad writing,
this is evident in the way that magic realism and language become a means for
expressing the remembered “reality” of a place, as opposed to its actual
reality.
Luz
María Umpierre, who writes about Allende as a marginal writer, is herself
marginal in being a lesbian who, she says, found her home in writing. For
Umpierre, being exiled from home meant that she was able to “stand in
opposition to [her] own victimization” and to be able to speak about her truth
from abroad, thus making language her home and “creating [her] own home of
words” (Umpierre 2002:135-136). Like Umpierrie,
Allende, found a home in her words, which allows her to identify and locate
herself in relation to her past and present.
Writing of Third Culture Experiences
Exile has had an effect on hundreds of thousands of
human beings. We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a
hostile planet, desolate and violent.
-Isabel Allende (Rodden 2004: 58).
In this section, I will attempt
to discuss some of my own creative writing in relation to the topic of Third
Culture Writing, and attempt to understand my own writing in relation to the
syntactical landscape of the interstitial person. I will contrast my analysis
of Allende with an exegesis of my own creative writing about memory, time, and
space. I am also a Global Nomad as I left my country of origin, Malaysia, when
I was a year old and my family travelled to four different countries between
1977 and 1997. I have also continued to travel and from 1997 to 2007, I have
lived in four more different countries.
Initially, I wanted to write a series
of short narratives from the point of view of a travelling storyteller or a
gypsy. I wanted the stories to be “cultureless” or compatible with experiencing
many cultures (the Third Culture experience is both “cultureless” and part of
many cultures). I wrote the stories in this thesis – “The Path of Dreams” and
“The City of Lights” – as a response to what Allende calls “a tragic
contingent”, the experiences of “refugees, immigrant, exiles” and “deportees”
(Rodden 2004: 58). As I don’t necessarily believe that a displaced person is
tragic, I wanted to see where the Global Nomad fitted into Allende’s
“contingent” category. I acknowledge that Allende has never actually used the
words “Third Culture Kid” or “Global Nomad.
“The Path of Dreams” was inspired by Allende’s Eva Luna
as well as by Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
(1979). The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories are retold fairy tales and Eva
Luna is narrated by a female Scheherazade[22], almost as if she is telling
fairy tales: “My name is Eva Luna, which means life, according to a book of
names my mother consulted.” Eva goes on to describe her father as coming from a
place where “the hundred rivers meet” and her mother as coming from an
“enchanted region” (Allende 1988: 1). “The Path of Dreams” contains a number of
“magic” or fairy tale-like elements. For example, characters include the
fish-like (mermaid) or fairy godmother figure, a groom who turns into a sock,
and a clock striking twelve “on a distant shore […] far away”. The fairy tale in
“The Path of Dreams” contrasts with the “reality” of the narrator who is
writing a letter to her absent roommate. By the end of the story, the
differences between reality and fairy tale finally merge. By
adopting this style, I hope to illustrate an uncanny strangeness akin to the
TCK and Global Nomad experience: the world as un-reality, the home as
“unhomely”. After ending
her relationship with her boyfriend, the narrator chooses to leave the country
rather than stay for her roommate’s wedding. Many TCKs “define their sense of
rootedness in terms of their relationships rather than geography [so they] go
to greater lengths than some people might consider normal to nurture relational
ties with others” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 131). So for the narrator, the end
of her most defining relationship – “I was home wherever he was home. I
always had a suitcase, two pairs of shoes, and Jason” – meant that she had
become a person without a home except the “uncanny” home in her memory.
Kristeva says that the outsider “is from nowhere, from everywhere, [a] citizen of the world,
cosmopolitan” (Kristeva 1991: 30).
For the TCK, some of the most
“chronically disrupted relationships are the core relationships of life”, for
example, the relationship between relatives and in the case of “The Path of
Dreams”, the relationship between childhood friends (Pollock and Reken 2001: 169). Some TCKs struggle
with a fear of intimacy because they fear loss and for that reason they refuse
to say their goodbyes (Pollock and Reken 2001: 139, 141). In “The Path of
Dreams” the narrator never actually says she mails the letter she is writing to
her roommate – she mails the mermaid back to her instead. But this is not to
say that the ending to “The Path of Dreams” is pessimistic. Kristeva also says
that “the strange happiness of the foreigner consists in maintaining that
feeling eternity or that perpetual transience”, and in “The Path of Dreams”, by
sailing away in a paper boat, the narrator is most at home (Kristeva 1991: 4).
As Pollok and Reken say, “ultimately, coming to terms with grief means learning
to feel at home within ourselves” (2001: 318).
My second story, “The City of Lights” is about a young woman
who goes “home” to India after a lifetime of exposure to different values. This
short story explores unresolved grief, relational effects, and repatriation. In
Paris, when the taxi driver asks Rakhi where she is from, she is initially
unable to answer because she is from as many countries and cultures as she has
ever lived in. Back in India, Rakhi becomes a “hidden immigrant”. Pollok and
Reken describe a “hidden immigrant[23]” as someone who looks like the rest of
the population but thinks differently. They describe this experience as one of
the greatest challenges of the Global Nomad (2001: 54-56).
Rakhi denies her feelings of sadness
or grief. She avoids talking about the people she left behind in Paris. Pollok
and Reken suggest that rather than admitting sadness or grief, the TCK says, “I
don’t really like those people very much anyway” (2001: 64). When the narrator
suggests that Rakhi might miss her friend Francis, Rakhi accuses the narrator
of not knowing anything. In the end, Rakhi’s “lost paradise is the mirage of
the past [she] will never be able to recover” (Kristeva 1991: 10), and her
“Hard-hearted indifference is perhaps no more than the respectable aspect of
nostalgia.” (Kristeva 1991: 10).
Pollock and Reken say that if grief
is unresolved, we “arrive at our next destination with this unfinished business
clinging to us and influencing new relationships. Bitterness in one area of our
lives almost always seeps out in another” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 65). In “The
City of Lights”, by the time the wedding ceremonies start, the narrator comes
to understand the meaning of being an exile within a first culture when she
vicariously experiences the destruction of Rakhi’s former self. “Exile always
involves a shattering of the former body” (Kristeva 1991: 30), and the narrator
starts to see herself in pieces symbolically reborn through the experience: “if I dared
to look down I might have seen myself disappearing – first my toenails, my
toes, my ankles, and then everything else”.
Free of the ties that bind them to other people, the Global
Nomad feels “completely free. Nevertheless, the consummate name of such a
freedom is solitude” (Kristeva 1991:12). For Kristeva the word “solitude”
implies that there is no other providing a defining guidepost for the self
(1991:12). But, according to Pollock and Reken, as the world changes “we are
careening toward the global village […], where the campfire in the middle is a
TV set telling us what we should all buy and how we should all look” (2001:
52). Pollok and Reken also point out that the “deeper levels[24] of culture are slower to change than
the surface ones” (2001: 52). So while on the surface level, the Global Nomad
appears to be completely free of national ties, on a deeper level, he/she is
shaped by the particularities of his/her Third Culture experience; and this
experience becomes their heritage. As such, neither “The Path of Dreams” nor
“The City of Lights” end on a pessimistic note. In both cases, the narrators
construct “homes” in their memories of different cultures. They construct, as
Bruner suggests, remembered selves informed by their unique heritage (Bruner
1994: 53).
Conclusion
Kristeva says that “by recognizing our uncanny
strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The
foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners” (Kristeva 1991: 192). Recognizing the uncanny within, the Global
Nomad is such a foreigner, able to find the place within him/herself that
connects to everyone else. Kristeva also suggests that the recognition of the
uncanny within us all might lead to “a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that,
cutting across governments, economies, and markets, might work for mankind
whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious – desiring,
destructive, fearful empty, impossible” (Kristeva 1991: 192). Consistent with
this idea, the Global Nomad experiences a sense of belonging not to anything,
but to everything.
As
Umpierre suggests, if we are exiles, we can see “our societies from a distance,
our homes from afar, and our homelands from abroad, we can regain the realm of
words which returns us always to language, our ultimate home” (Umpierre 2002:136). Similarly, the “home” of
the Global Nomad is informed by Bruner’s storied self, a Self informed by the
memories of homes we are exiled from and also homes we are exiles in.
Considering that the creative writing
of Global Nomads is not often discussed, this discussion itself might be an
adequate conclusion for the time being. I shall end this part of my thesis with
a quote from Allende in which she demonstrates the entwining of writing with
wandering and homelessness that is so profound for the Global Nomad or TCK:
I am a writer because I was born with a good ear for
stories, and I was lucky enough to have an eccentric family and the destiny of
a wanderer. The profession of literature has defined me. Word by word I have
created the person I am and the invented country in which I live. (Allende
2003: 197-198).
***
Short
Stories
by
Eunice Liew
The Path of Dreams
George and Mary sat in the
dark, under the flickering screen of a Frank Capra film. They held hands,
fingers entwined, their ankles crossed and uncrossed, feet shuffling popcorn
under their seats. When the film ended, they followed the trail of Technicolor
gum out to the lobby, and walked through the doors of the run-down 70mm movie
theatre. Once outside, the sun burnt the tips of their ears and shoulders. As
they walked, Mary felt a breeze of foreboding cut between them. Her feet felt
chilly.
They walked
to an expensive restaurant. Mary laughed at the kissing double-duck motif on
the menu. She ordered sushi. George ordered ribs and mashed potatoes. She ordered
a peppermint sundae. He ordered champagne. The waiter arrived with the glasses
and inside Mary’s glass something glittered, and diamonds asked the question: will
you? Their feet twisted inwards with tension: one pair in espadrilles and
the other in runners, where beads of sweat collided and made socks as wet as
lakes.
On the path
of dreams, summers are never long enough. The chill-grey wind swirled dry,
brown leaves around the front porch, caused the swing to rock itself. Inside
the house there was candlelight and white, paper roses dangled from doorknobs
as if in bloom. Everyone was in semi-formal dress and sitting around a
rectangular table. There was a partner for every partner and the guests ate
salmon soufflés with spoons engraved with the date. Two caterers, their tea towel aprons tucked into their waistbands, walked
in and out of the kitchen, moving deftly around the table re-filling glasses
and whisking plates away. As soon as the table was cleared, they re-emerged
with bowls of sorbet balanced along the length of each arm, wearing one as a
hat. George and Mary sat at one end of the table. They both wore white. They
fiddled with their rings.
As the night wore on, the
dishes were collected and the glasses were drunk dry. Everyone ate slices of
peppermint cake before pushing back their chairs. It was between night and
morning and on a distant shore, in a house far away, a clock could be heard
striking twelve. It was the hour when everyone started to think of home. But
the front door swung open and into the house swept the chill-grey season with
its leaf skeletons and dust. A dull clunking of shoes came right after it.
A woman wearing a silvery
gown and a mother-of-pearl encrusted crown walked casually through the front
door. Her face was as white as a creature from the deepest waters, a
woman-fish. She walked slowly to the table and tipped a guest – a man – out of
a chair. She sat down, fishing a cigarette out of her purse and lighting it.
Everyone watched as she inhaled, exhaled, and stubbed out her cigarette in the
remainder of the cake, knocking apart the tiny bride and groom figures. Her
watery eyes watched them watching her, in silence.
Suddenly, she tapped a
spoon against a glass and exposing a row of little fish teeth she raised the
glass in front of her.
“A toast!”
She leaned into the table, some tinsel from her sleeves plunging into the
frosting of the cake. She adjusted herself, smoothing the strange gown she’d
bought so long ago, in another time and place, when it was the height of fashion.
She coughed, raised her glass, and then looking directly at George and Mary,
declared.
“Congratulations! May you
live like socks!”
Everyone was quiet. Then
there was a cough. Then someone sneezed. And, “Hear, hear!” said the father of
the groom suddenly standing, swaying, raising his glass, and slapping the
table, “Live like a pair of socks!”
“Live like a
pair!” responded the guests drinking merrily. Why shouldn’t George and
Mary live like two matching socks? But as they lowered their glasses, it was
Mary that heard the woman start to chuckle. It was a chuckle that grew louder
and louder, until it was so distorted it was a deafening cackle that all could
hear. And the more she cackled, the more she became obscured by the thickening
cloud of cigarette smoke that surrounded her.
“She’s
disappeared!” cried the bridesmaids, aghast. Everyone stared and blinked,
silently, eyes watering in the smoky room. But slowly, the smoke cleared and
there was the woman looking at them with her cigarette hanging off a dry lower
lip. Then the woman stubbed her cigarette in the cake, adjusted her crown,
which was slipping, and made her way to the front door. She was gone. Mary
almost ran after her, almost screamed, stay, but the strange urge
quickly vanished. And she stood watching as a leaf skeleton drifted towards one
of the candles and disintegrated in the flame, lifting the spell or so it
seemed. Another bottle of wine was uncorked. And the wine was poured out. And
the room became noisy with chatter and laughter. Outside, the wind beat
violently against the front door.
I look at the cherry tree
scratching the windowpane, trying to claw its way inside. It is almost five in
the evening and already it is getting dark. I am in Boston and you are in
Minnesota. I see the shadows deepen in the courtyard of the student dormitory,
which used to be a church, and I think of you, Mary, writing the wedding
invitation that I now hold in my hand. I imagine that you wrote the invitation
in your mother’s house. You took a white card from a stack of fancy cards
festooned with intaglio roses, and wrote in cursive, dipping your lilac quill
into your lilac ink, to tell me: You must come! Love, Mrs. Bailey. You
sign your name as if you are already married. Your little joke. And then you
wrote the date. And then you wrote your address.
I imagine your wedding will
be exactly the way you have described it. You will have a bouquet of white
roses and you will eat salmon soufflés at your reception. Everything will be as
you have described it many times: a big house with four children – one for each
year that you endured in Boston away from George, every year talking about your
dream to anyone who would listen.
Mary…
my college roommate… your side of the room was a rainbow explosion, mine was
like an Edward Hopper painting: shades of black, brown, and grey, the colours
of facts (sometimes nightmares). In this room, while talking about your George,
you once told me that I lacked romance. I didn’t understand you… because I
remember telling you that I was born in an aeroplane and one day I would like
to die in one.
It is completely dark in the dorms now. Almost everyone has
gone home for the spring break. I look out the window and see the wind snatch
cherry blossoms off the branches, dashing them against the glass. I see petals,
snow-white, spinning, and suddenly it starts to snow: a late blizzard in
spring. I wish you had stayed for the rest of the semester.
Do you remember when you were packing
to go home? Your shoes took up exactly an eighth of the floor space between the
dresser and the front door. Your faerie collection was in a big box with
Styrofoam packing peanuts. I could never own so many things because my luggage
would weigh too much. Now your side of the room is empty. Your shoes, your
faeries and your business texts are gone. And now everything is the colour of
fact. I can hear the janitor running the water in the common bathrooms. His
shoes echo against the tiles like the footsteps of a ghost. I have been
thinking that I need to go too… somewhere….
Mary’s new
home with George is littered with paper roses, dirty dishes, and leftover cake.
It is late, the guests have gone home, and the candles have burnt to stubs,
their flames sinking into pools of wax.
“It’s
dandruff,” says George, kicking the confetti on the carpet. He kicks the
confetti around the living room – like a kitten with a ball of yarn. He is
kitten-like, thinks Mary, easy to distract by confetti… and maybe balls of
yarn.
“Should we
vacuum?” says Mary.
“No. Let’s tango,” says
George, putting a paper rose between his teeth.
“Shouldn’t we switch off the
lights?” says Mary.
“Let’s tango upstairs,”
says George, spitting out the rose, swinging Mary’s small frame
over his shoulder, and struggling up the stairs.
Upstairs, there are boxes in place of
furniture and a bed with no sheets. Two suitcases are lying open on top of the
boxes, one for George, one for Mary.
Mary takes
off her dress and folds it into the suitcase. George takes some sheets out of
his suitcase and fits them onto the bed. He takes off his tuxedo and puts on
long johns, pyjama bottoms, an undershirt, and a pyjama top.
“What are
you doing?” says Mary.
“I’m tired
and drunk,” says George, pulling off his pyjama top, and then his pyjama
bottoms. “Okay, let me brush my teeth first.” He takes his pyjamas to the
bathroom, closing the door behind him. His shadow breaks the slit of light
under the door and Mary hears him turn the tap on. Mary unpins her golden hair.
After five minutes, the tap is still on. Mary lies on the bed. After ten
minutes, the tap is still on. Mary closes her eyes. After fifteen minutes, the
tap is still on and Mary sits up to stare at the slit of light under the
bathroom door. It is now a long slit of light unbroken by shadow.
Mary looks
at the digital clock by the bedside. After another five minutes, she goes to
the door and knocks and the sound echoes as if the bathroom were empty. So she
opens the door slowly. George’s long johns and undershirt are on the floor in a
heap and his toothbrush is in the sink. She sees nothing else at first but
there on the edge of the bathtub she thinks she sees something moving in rapid
jerks.
A sock is
sitting on the edge of the bathtub! A sock, crying on the edge of the bathtub.
Although the sock has no eyes to make tears with, Mary knew that it was crying
because it was making sobbing noises and jerking about. Apart from this, Mary
could see that it was as much as sock as a sock can be. If it had a chest, it
would have heaved with sorrow.
“Jesus. What?” exclaims Mary.
“I don’t
know,” George replies in a soft, muffled voice, because socks don’t have mouths
to speak with. “I was just, you know, standing there with my toothbrush and
then suddenly. I don’t know, it just happened.”
“Oh!” says Mary, and then she added, rather soothingly,
“Honey, it’s not so bad.”
“Not bad?”
cries George in horror. Mary tries to look at him but her gaze drops to the
floor. She can’t help it. He looks so small, so weak, and naked… since socks
don’t wear clothes.
“Why don’t
we sleep on it?” says Mary. She turns off the tap. She switches off the
bathroom light and picks up George with two fingers. She tucks him into the
bed covers and gets into bed herself. Mary lay awake staring at the moonlight
illuminating the dark cracks in the ceiling. It’s only a nightmare, she thinks,
everything will be fine in the morning.
“You don’t
love me,” says George after a while.
“Don’t be an
idiot, George. I married you,” says Mary.
“You married me before I was a sock,” says George. “Before,
I could eat mashed potatoes and barbecued ribs, now I have no mouth! Before,
I could watch movies, now I have no eyes! I wanted to go sailing around
the world and I could do that before, and now, well….” George wrinkles
his toe and rolls limply off the bed. He manages to cross the bedroom floor
like a caterpillar. George inches over to the bedroom door and slides under it.
He will sleep on the couch.
The next
morning Mary tries not to think. She avoids the couch but vacuums the confetti
in the dining room and takes down the paper roses. She cleans up the dinner
things: plates, glasses, the engraved spoons, and the leftover cake. She
unpacks box after box of things to put on shelves: teapots, cookbooks, photo
albums, seashells, and a miniature sailboat collection. She puts the boxes into
trash bags, takes the trash bags out.
After a
while – maybe hours – Mary remembers that she hasn’t made time to brush her
teeth that morning. Mary goes to the bathroom and starts picking up clothes:
George’s trousers, underpants, t-shirts, and socks. George’s socks are
everywhere, socks that she had asked him not to leave on the floor. Then she
fills the bathtub and sprinkles bath salts into the steaming water. She gets
into the water and thinks about the sock. She closes her eyes to try to get the
image out of her mind. She opens her eyes. She sees her toes become thinner and
thinner until they are threads, knotted, knitted, like the view of certain
fabrics under a microscope. And in close-up the threads start to fray. She
closes her eyes again. She sinks deeper into the bathtub, swallows and
splutters. She had fallen asleep for a moment. She gets out of the bathtub and
goes to the sink to brush her teeth. As she squeezes the toothpaste onto her
toothbrush, she notices that George left his razor in the sink and shaving
cream on the tap. As she brushes her teeth, Mary looks into the mirror and
regards her own eyes. It occurs to her that she had not looked at her face in a
long time. Mary put on some trousers and a turtleneck sweater. On the way down
the stairs she picks up more of George’s socks. She takes the dirty socks to
the laundry room. She puts them in the washing machine with his other clothes.
She walks to the kitchen to make breakfast… or lunch… or dinner. Where did the
time go? Was George still on the couch?
She puts
pork ribs in the oven and pours instant mash potato mix from a packet into the
mixer. She sets the table for two: two forks and knives, two plates, a teacup
and a can of beer. She takes the TV and VCR from the lounge, plugs it into a
kitchen power outlet, and puts on It’s a Wonderful Life.
Soon George,
awoken by the overture, inches into the kitchen.
“Why don’t
you turn back into a man?” says Mary, putting some mash into her mouth,
watching as George struggles to inch up the chair leg.
“Why can’t
you make less noise when you eat?” says George. Mary puts down her fork, picks
him up and puts him on the table in front of the TV and the plate of steaming
mash and ribs. George’s small woolly frame shakes with joy. He bends his toe
towards the plate and takes a great leap into it, rolling over and over into
the gravy. He pounds himself into the mash. He tries as hard as a sock can try
but he can’t taste a thing. At last he stops and lies limply in the brown
sauce.
Mary can’t
look. George has become a wrinkly, moth-eaten thing. She goes to the living
room to get her keys and trips over an unopened box with the words, BUSINESS
TEXTS, written on it. She has a flashback of a younger Mary who wanted to start
a rare-fish aquarium. The younger Mary filled the box with university lecture
notes. The younger Mary wrote BUSINESS TEXTS on it. It was many moons ago… in a
faraway and forgotten town. But remembering reminds Mary that she never got
around to starting a rare-fish aquarium. She slams the front door on the way
out.
Mary, I am
thinking of your faerie collection on top of your bookshelf full of business
texts. I remember there were faeries made of clay and glass, and a
silver-tailed mermaid with a mother-of-pearl crown in her tinselly hair. You
gave her to me, remember? You picked me up at the airport one Christmas. I had
been waiting for Jason for three hours. You found me asleep in the food court
with my face in my suitcase, sucking my thumb. You told me that Jason had gone
away with some work colleagues. One of them was the woman in his graduate
Spanish Studies classes. They were sailing somewhere on the West Coast. So we
drove to his apartment and rummaged through his drawers, found and destroyed
all the letters I had sent to him, all the pictures I had painted for him, all
of our history. We also put naphthalene in the bag of cat food.
Later that evening we ate two pints of
Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby and Mint Chocolate Chunk and watched It’s a
Wonderful Life on TV. The thing about that movie, you said, was that “the
female fixes everything”. As I started crying for the umpteenth time that
night, you handed me the mermaid and told me to keep it. Are you sure? I asked.
I’ve got an extra, you said, and you lifted your shirt and showed me the
mermaid tattoo on your stomach. You said that you were worried that after you
married George, the doctor might have to cut the mermaid to get your baby out
when you had a baby, which of course we were sure you would. And you said it would
be a girl named Mary, just like you and your mother. And she would be born in
your house, just as you were born in your mother’s. And she would grow up in
your town, where you grew up. You would grow roses in the garden. You would
collect more faeries. And then you said that I should go home to see my parents
for the spring break.
I burned our letters in the snow that
night – the letters I wrote to Jason, the letters we found in his drawers. I
stared into the flame and in my mind, I could see the words writing themselves
backwards off the pages, going back into my pen, and back into my heart. I gave
his ring to the janitor. It was four o’clock in the morning when I finished
talking to the little mermaid about everything: ten and a half years of memories
trashed in a single afternoon; we even left a bowl of cat food out and killed
the kitten that I got with him from the pound.
I have known him forever. We were
babies together. We played with paper boats in the bathtub and our sailors were
coat buttons. We lived in Rome together. We lived in Tokyo. We were teenagers
in the same schools. I always had a suitcase, two pairs of shoes, and Jason.
Because our families worked together, they travelled together, and it was easy
for me to be with him. When I woke, I felt as if I’d left my dreams on another
planet.
In one hand I have your letter, Mary, and in my other hand I
am holding the mermaid. I tell her that I am going to take some time off from
my art history degree. I tell her to tell you that I’m sorry – about missing
the wedding. I tell her that my air-tickets are non-refundable. I have even
sold my telephone.
I open my window. I can feel the
wind on my face – like a million tongues of a million cats: rough, sharp, and
wet. I close my window. I want to walk all the way to Harvard Bridge – in the
dark, through the wind and snow – I imagine walking to Harvard Bridge in the
middle of a blizzard. I would throw the mermaid into the Charles River. I would
watch her swim home to you, Mary, and she would deliver my message to you: I am
going away… somewhere.
Mary is not
thinking straight. She is not thinking about cleaning or cooking or business
texts or George. She drives up and down streets, and then onto a highway. She
drives until she reaches Kmart… Target… “Movies: Seven Dollars on Wednesdays”…
in the strip mall where she circles the enormous parking lot in her car. She
waits and watches as it starts to snow. She watches couples walk out of shops
with swollen shopping bags, and couples walking out of the movies with fingers
entwined, watching each other as if dazzled by the lights on a movie screen.
She waits and watches the many feet of couples coming and going – their meeting
the earth and springing upwards in unison. Among the shoppers, Mary sees a woman
wearing a tinselly gown and mother-of-pearl crown was coming out of the
supermarket. Mary’s feels her heart catch in her throat. The woman is pushing a
cart full of groceries with her skirts wrapped around the cart handle so as not
to get her hem wet. She pushes the cart slowly; it’s as if she were a water
creature unused to moving on land. Mary watches as no one stops to help the
woman. Suddenly, Mary gets out of the car and runs towards her.
"Wait!" says Mary. But the
woman seems not to hear her. She even looks in Mary’s direction but her watery
eyes look straight through Mary as if she isn’t there. The woman keeps walking.
"Wait! I need to talk to you!" Mary tears off her mittens and without
thinking she gets back in the car. Once in the driver’s seat, she thumps her
foot down on the gas and drives straight at the woman with the cart. Groceries
shoot through the air as the woman is thrown backwards against the windscreen,
over the top of the car, and off the boot. Mary gets out of the car and sees
that the woman is face down in a box of frozen fish fingers. Couples coming out
of the store stare at the scene. A child is screaming. A security guard emerges
wanting know what is happening. Mary watches as a young woman points a finger
at her and says something that sounded like:
“Look at Mary!” Her mouth moving
slowly, it seems, as if in slow motion. “Mary,” she says, “doesn’t know how to
keep a house!”
Mary could feel her heart
pounding through her toes, through her boots, against the frozen asphalt, painted
black, crusted with the white of snow and salt, merging to produce the shade of
her nightmares. Snow fell on her face. Her mascara streaks down her cheeks like
black tears. She gets back in the car and turns on the wipers. She quickly
drives home.
Mary runs
upstairs and gets her suitcase. She empties it and refills it with things that
they might need – male things, female things. She drags it down the stairs and
throws it into the trunk of the car. She digs George out of the dinner plate
and washes him gently, wiping him dry with a towel. She lays him on the
passenger seat. She gets in. She drives.
“Nice of you
to come back,” says George. After a while he says, “Where did you go?” Still,
Mary says nothing. “You missed the end of the movie.”
“We’ve seen
it a dozen times before,” says Mary.
“I never remember the ending,” says George.
They drive
for hours. They run out of gas. They get out of the car. They are at a lake.
Mary sits facing the lake. She has her suitcase. She has her sock, her George.
She hugs her knees and tries not to see or think about the suitcase and the
sock on either side of her. She stares out at the icy lake, which is vast and
white, impenetrable.
I pack the mermaid into a little
box. I copy your address from the wedding invitation onto the front. In the
morning, I will mail the box and after that, I will go to the airport. I put
the little box on the floor. It is almost too dark to see. I do not turn on the
light. I feel my way to the door and lock it. I feel my way back to the bed and
lie down on the mattress, which does not have sheets because I sold my bedding.
I am fully dressed: overcoat, jeans, turtleneck, mittens, socks and boots. I
know that only one thing is certain: inside the airplane cabin, the feeling
that there is air above and below me. I have no ultimate destination. I will
eat re-heated foods, adjust wristwatches, and watch the seasons change in the
course of one flight. But now I close my eyes and in my mind I drift away. I
drift away to somewhere.
I am alone,
somewhere, on the shore of a lake, which connects to a river, which connects to
another lake, which connects to a river connecting all the lakes and all the
rivers of the earth like the many arms of an ancient deity. I run out to the
water where I see a paper boat. The paper boat is a galleon for coat-button
sailors. I am a coat-button sailor. I climb into the paper boat. I sail away
and a clamour of ducks watch the boat cut the skin of the lake. The sun sets.
The shore fades from view. It is spring and I am home.
The City of
Lights
I am wearing airline earphones. I
am flying to Mumbai, India. In-flight announcements are seconds of synaptic
stillness in a frenetic life. I stay awake through time zones, dreaming in
unblinking snatches. It’s a habit I’ve had since I was little: not sleeping or
sleeping in fact-bytes, like an anti-sleep. I anti-sleep across America,
Europe, and Asia.
I am
listening to Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now”. In 1969 she sang it to the
plucking of an acoustic guitar. But now, in the year 2000, her voice is
different. If the song were a texture it would be velvet. If it were a colour
it would be maroon. Some of the lyrics stick in my brain: clouds got in my
way. I lean against the airplane window and close my eyes. I am flying to Mumbai,
India and I am thinking of Paris; eating warm crêpes from vendors on the
street; gazing into the speckled mirrors of the Café de Flore. Everything in the techno-beat Le Paradis du Fruit is fluorescent in the evening. I remember a
bathroom with a toilet that won’t flush, dew dripping down French windows, and
grey waves on the banks of the Seine. But I am getting ahead of myself. I am
flying to Mumbai and I am not in Paris, even though that is where this story
starts, almost a decade ago.
Rakhi chose
our apartment because of the view. I opened the windows of the French balcony.
Power lines criss-crossed the sky: black, white. In the night it was possible
to see the electronic sign on the Eiffel Tower, counting down the days to the
new millennium. By morning the Tower was obscured by clouds and the city was
shrouded in winter grey.
Rakhi was making toast and
ginger tea. She gathered our street maps. We drank the tea, put on our coats,
and left our apartment on the Rue de Charonne. Soon we were walking through
the streets, elbow-to-elbow with the morning rush.
Francis was waiting for us
on a bridge over the Seine. He was an American student in our class at the Spéos
Photographic Institute. We stood on the bridge and watched the morning tour
boats pass below. In the afternoon we explored the museums and gardens. In the
evening back on the bridge, watching shadows creep into corners as lights went
out, I wished that I could freeze the moment. I wanted to watch the boats and
banks of the Seine forever. But it was getting colder. I turned to ask Rakhi
the time and was surprised to see her kissing Francis. The breeze unfurled his
scarlet curls into her bushy sea-green hair – wild from home-dye kits. When
they stepped back, I could see his moonlike face dancing on the surfaces of her
dark irises.
We took a taxi partway home.
The Middle Eastern driver caught Rakhi’s face in the rear view mirror and
thinking she was an compatriot, asked her, “D'où venez-vous?” She was
going to answer the question. But we were already getting close to the Rue
de Charonne. We paid the driver, merci, bonsoir, got out of the taxi
and started walking.
“Where are you from,
anyway?” I asked Rakhi. I’d never thought about asking the question before. She
was just Rakhi. Nothing else was important. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“India,” said Rakhi.
“Are you ever going home?”
asked Francis.
“I am home,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. We were home
wherever we were. Weren’t we?
“But are you ever going to
repatriate?” asked Francis.
“Why would anyone want to do
that?” said Rakhi.
We walked up the street to
our apartment and Francis stopped to take our photograph. He set his Olympus
SLR on a stand and pressed the timer. Francis stood between us on the wet
street, smelling thickly of rose incense. When we got back to the apartment, we
made pancakes. Then Rakhi and I showed Francis the photo album we made in Hong
Kong where we went to high school together. We showed him images of things we
thought we would never forget: street lamps sprouting from pavements like
weeds, at night the city glowing in phosphorescent outlines. In Hong Kong,
Rakhi and I leaned over the balcony of her parents’ twenty-eight-floor
apartment and watched planes take off between the high-rise buildings. We felt
as if our lives would soar in the same way, that one day we would do amazing
things.
When I felt
the plane touch down in Mumbai, I was still remembering Paris. There were no
announcements, just a soft bump and a glide across the tarmac. I expected
moving escalators and the refrigerated air of airports the world over but it
was breezy and quiet, except for leather sandals shuffling dust across the
marble floor and stamps slapping the Immigration desk. I felt a sudden panic as
I tried to reorient myself. I was in India because Rakhi was going to marry
Siddhartra Rai. The words were without meaning for me: Siddhartra Rai. I didn’t
even know what he looked like.
On the telephone Rakhi said that she had met him twice, she
was going to marry him and I must come to the wedding by any means, at any
cost. She thought I would like him because he spoke his mind without a care for
controversy. “Like you,” she added. She meant this as a kindness, but
disconnected phrases from previous conversations overcame me. I said that the
groom was faulty… didn’t she once say that he only bathed once a week?
She shouted down the line: “I am almost twenty-eight years
old! I want to get married!” What did that have to do with anything? It
was time? Was that it? I could hear her exasperated voice through the
receiver, “When are you going to grow up?” What if I’d said that a woman
needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle? Did Gloria Stienem say that? We had
both been fond of quoting feminists when we were younger.
I was still
thinking of fish and bicycles when I realised I had made my way from the
airport to the front door of Rakhi’s family home. The female servant who had
fetched me from the airport was unfamiliar. But otherwise it seemed like
nothing had changed even though I had not seen Rakhi’s family for eight years.
In every corner of the family home was a familiar assortment of souvenirs from
around the globe: jade and silk screens from the markets on the outskirts of
Hong Kong, stone statuettes from Nepal, geometric tapestries from Bahrain. When
I saw the familiar miniature Swarovski animals on the chessboard, I felt as if
I were back in Hong Kong. I could almost the smell sulphur dioxide so
characteristic of Hong Kong harbour. On closer inspection, some of the
menagerie had been decapitated by the Mumbai sea air. Their heads balanced
precariously on their necks.
Rakhi was out – shopping or something – and I sat with her
parents, Ashok and Rina, while two female servants brought tureens of stewed
vegetables and cardamom rice from the kitchen for lunch. Rina insisted that I
not go out alone because, she said, foreigners quickly become disoriented by
the crowds of untouchables. I asked what time Rakhi would be home. I listened
to Ashok and Rina talk. I was surrounded by endless chatter like the continuous
honking from the traffic outside.
“I
have decided – after much deliberation –”
“Ashok,” said Rina interrupting the leggy, pot-bellied man
sitting on the opposite sofa.
“I have decided that it will
be the best course of action, for the father of the bride, which is me,”
Ashok paused dramatically, “to go out and buy many alarm clocks, you know, the
annoying cheap ones.” He grinned at us and started to imitate the sound of an
alarm clock.
“Yes. We
know what they sound like,” said Rina.
“Shush!”
said Ashok, and he snapped his fingers. By this one of the servants understood
that he wanted biscuits and tea and she started clearing the table. Ashok, who
was energetically massaging his teeth with his tongue, continued. “It will be
the best course of action – listen – that we should take these alarm clocks and
set the alarms so that one should ring at one o’clock, one should ring at two
o’clock, one should ring at three, and so on and so forth, and the last clock
will be set at six o’clock ante meridiem, and then – listen to me – we sneak
into their room on the wedding night and hide the clocks in various places, and
at one o’clock, the first clock will go beep-beep-beep-beep-beep, and at two
o’clock, the second clock will go beep-beep-beep-beep-beep, and so on and so
forth.”
“Of course,
they will be sleeping on their wedding night,” said Rina.
“Ah-ha! I
was telling the Rai’s – ”
“Oh my
God!” Rina rolled her eyes.
“I said to
them, we should get some of those miniature video cameras and hide them around
the room –”
“Can you
believe that he told the in-laws his idea about the video cameras?” Rina said,
jumping up from her seat. “I was so humiliated! I almost had a heart-attack!”
She sat down and her pink and yellow sari, which was like a gauzy magic-eye
puzzle, deflated around her birdlike frame.
“Rakhi!” Ashok was the
first to see the front door open, because he had been watching it during his
monologue. “Why is your hair brown? I am not giving away a brown-haired
daughter, I refuse!” Rakhi entered the room with her shopping bags. It was
clear that she had gone to the hairdresser to dye her hair, which was now the
shade of maple syrup and as limp as string. I almost didn’t recognise her. She
sank into the sofa next to me and gave me a quick hug. She was wearing a
cloyingly sweet rose perfume.
“Where is it?” Rina said, rummaging through Rakhi’s shopping
bags. “I told the seamstress that the sari must come today. I don’t understand
what could be so difficult. You don’t need to say anything! They will hear from
me directly! They will send it directly or –”
“Do
whatever!” said Rakhi, exhausted, frustrated, exasperated. She spoke sharply. I
had never heard her talk to her parents like that before. Her parents looked
shocked. But the moment passed as the servant came out of the kitchen with
sugar biscuits and tea.
“Come,
baby. Eat. Biscuit?” said Rina, offering Rakhi the biscuit plate. Rakhi took
the biscuit plate away from her mother. She looked forlornly at the plate and
then put it down. Suddenly many hands were passing the biscuits and the chai
and many hands were stroking her hair, with voluptuous fingers. I was
witnessing some sort of body-speak. I wish I knew what was going on. I felt as
if I had unintentionally seen the family with no clothes on.
And that
was how it was. Every time I tried to get out of the way of a seemingly private
moment, someone would make me stay to help move champagne flutes, silverware,
lingerie, necklaces, or earrings. The dowry itself was enough for the rest of
Rakhi’s life. So there were saris in every colour were draped over every
surface – like the tears of rainbows. She bought enough saris for every event
of the next week, which is how long the wedding ceremonies would take. And then
there were saris that had come as gifts.
“Where on earth will you
wear a sari again?” I said. I didn’t remember ever having seen her in one
before. We were moving stacks of saris from the floor to a table.
“I always
wear saris,” she said, defensively.
I thought of the newlyweds
outside, sleeping at the intersections of congested roads, living in shacks
with walls made of plastic garbage bags, and the tuk-tuks and taxis and trucks
with ‘horn-ok-please’ painted on them drove past and sometimes through these
fragile homes. I saw a man washing his face in the gutter. His mother-in-law
rinses half a cup of rice in it. His niece squats into it, making the water
yellow. His son is sewing a kurta, pumping the motor of an antique sewing
machine with black, bare feet. He will sell that kurta so that his family can
continue to sleep in their shack of garbage bags, as they had been doing for
generations.
We saw these things as we
drove from the apartment to a café where we were served raspberry cheesecake.
On the way, shoeless children tapped our windscreens with fingers that left
thick white trails, offering to sell us their magazines. We locked our doors
against them. I cleaned my feet when we got home. I scrubbed my feet with a
cheese grater, scrubbing layers of dirt off dirt.
India, in a constant breeze
of earth as fine as flour, flew into the apartment. From the fifteenth floor I
felt as if I were standing on the peak of a mountain. I looked down and I could
smell the odorous streets while over my head the fans continued to spin the
warm air. While pieces of India flew off their blades, settling into my hair,
my ears, my mouth.
I anti-slept through my
nights in Mumbai, watching the digital clock on the DVD player, watching
late-night television, and falling asleep at dawn. In my dreams, flashes of the
day would reappear. The mendhi-wala would say are you getting an arranged
marriage? And Rakhi would say yes. And the mendhi-wala would say do you want to
get married? And Rakhi would say it’s too late to think about that now, it’s
too late too late too late too late, the words breaking up and repeating until
I dreamt only in sounds. I have a recurring dream: I dream that I am asleep and
the floor is a chessboard, and the kings and queens are being decapitated by a
salty breeze, and I am a knight but I cannot save them. I cannot even save
myself.
Five
o’clock, the eve before the wedding. I was lying on Rakhi’s bedroom floor
watching the ceiling fan slice through the unyielding air. Rakhi came in and
lay down next to me, sighing heavily, closing her eyes. I wanted to speak to
her, to say something to bridge the gap of so many years. “Rakhi,” I said, “do
you remember Francis?”
“No,” she
said.
“You were
in love,” I insisted because sometimes I am thick.
We were silent for a minute. Then she got up and shouted at
me, “You don’t know anything!” She stormed out of the room… to find her mother…
to try on a sari… or to do something else.
I was alone on the floor and could smell someone frying fish.
I went to shut the door but the smell of fish was impossible to shut out. I
walked around the boxes, which were everywhere. Rakhi had packed and left only
a few things she wouldn’t need for her new life. On the bottom shelf of her
bookcase were the things she would forget: some used wrapping paper smoothed
and folded into an untidy square, two rubber bands, and the photo album of Hong
Kong. I took it in my hands and carefully opened it. On the inside cover was
the black and white photograph that Francis had taken: the three of us are on a
street in Paris. Behind us there is a bureau de tabac, a métro
entrance, and a yard of glossy wet pavement that stops in the far distance,
fading to grey. I remembered that in Paris, I saw a man with no trousers
walking the streets drinking cheap wine and looking for Jim Morrison’s grave.
Or maybe that was in Hong Kong, although Jim Morrison’s grave isn’t in Hong
Kong. I sat on the floor staring at the photograph and wondered what I knew.
The first
ceremony was beginning. It was one of many ceremonies in a sleepless week of
eating and waiting. I felt light. If I dared to look down I might have seen
myself disappearing – first my toenails, my toes, my ankles, and then
everything else. It was time to bless the bride and relatives were walking
around the living room in seemingly choreographed movements. I didn’t know what
to do with my body. I was outside myself, deaf, unable to decipher the language
of their private mime.
Knight to
which square? Where do I go? Where is my body? Who am I supposed to be? Rakhi,
give me a sign that you are here too. Give me a sign.
But it was
as if Rakhi had become someone or something else, she had become a She-thing –
but who was this She, in the scarlet sari? Who was this She, who knelt before
the eggplant dinner, unseeing, eyes bent to the silver dishes, while the others
moved around the room significantly, speaking significantly, looking at the
She-thing with great significance.
Where do I
go?
Stand over
there.
What do I
do?
Take the
grain. And this. Take the grass. Touch the bride. No. Take this. Stand there –
no – over there. You do not belong here.
Someone
blows on a conch shell. Between each long blow there is not a single blink and
for the first time in a long time this week there is a silence so thick it is
like being underwater – or under blood – and I bit hard on the inside of my
cheek but feel nothing. Outside the sea rises out of the harbour and the waves
swallow me: I am trying to keep afloat, a primitive creature with only
sensitive protuberances for eyes and ears. I hear the splash of water. I smell
salt. I hear the mother of the bride wailing endlessly, as if for death or the
pains of childbirth. I look out the window. I see a plane taking off between
the high-rise buildings.
I am on an airplane wearing
earphones. I press my face against the window. India disappears behind pillowy
clouds. I close my eyes against the warmth of the sun. It disappears too. As
the airplane rises into the night, I am back in our apartment on the Rue de
Charonne in Paris.
The Eiffel
Tower is counting down the days to the new millennium. Rakhi, Francis and I are
looking through the photo album of Hong Kong. Rakhi goes to the stove to
re-heat the tea from our breakfast. She fills our mugs and a sweet steam wafts
around the room, momentarily dispelling the stench of toy dog excrement coming
from the courtyard.
“Remember Times Square?” I say, looking at a photograph taken
in Hong Kong. We are fifteen or sixteen and standing in a crowd of shoppers in
front of an enormous Christmas tree. We are turned towards each other and
laughing. And just because it occurs to me, I say, “Hong Kong, The City of
Lights.”
“Isn’t
Paris ‘The City of Lights’?” Francis asks. But it doesn’t matter. It is all the
same. We drink ginger tea together. We make pancakes. We go over street maps.
With indelible pens we map out our journey and we dream of doing amazing
things.
Appendix
- Third Culture Kids often go to International Schools, which are private schools that cater to children of foreign nationals. International Schools differ from regular schools because they offer curricula based on either the American, British, or French systems – although other curricula also exist – and they offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme[25], which is a university entrance course. Global Nomads are as much a product of this type of schooling as they are a product of their Second Cultures (Pollock and Reken 2001: 45-47).
- “For many TCKs […] what and how things are taught at school may be vastly different as they shift from school to school while moving from one place to another. In addition, in an international community the individual teachers themselves often come from any different cultures” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 46).
- Furthermore, Global Nomads are often bilingual or bi-racial. “In 1960 one-quarter of American children living overseas had parents from two cultures, according to Ruth Hill Useem. In 1995 Helen Fail found that 42 percent of her ATCK survey respondents had grown up in bicultural families.” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 44).
- Although there are many types of stateless people, this thesis will only explore the Third Culture experience as I have already described it in the Introduction. Excluded from my description of stateless people are Parachute Kids[26], immigrants, refugees, and Indigenous peoples such as Australian Aboriginals and the Stolen Generation[27]. Parachute Kids are students and not necessarily from an expatriate lifestyle and the Global Nomad experience is not comparable to the indigenous experience, which can be much more complicated as indigenous people are often disenfranchised. It should be noted that these are not the only categories of stateless people that I am excluding from this discussion. I do not claim that statelessness is unique to the Third Culture experience, only that the Third Culture Kid childhood is unique because it is the experience of a Third Culture Kid.
- In Nations Without Nationalism Julia Kristeva says that when confronted with personal and social identity struggles we tend to retreat into our “shield of origins” (Kristeva 1993: 1-2). Because Global Nomads do not have the same kind of “shield” in which to retreat, their “origin” is their identification with otherness and this otherness is the base upon which their identity is formed. Research by sociologists Ann Baker Cottrell and Ruth Hill Useem seems to indicate that Global Nomads are comfortable with their otherness: “92 percent have at least yearly contact with people from other countries. Nearly a quarter associate with Internationals at least once a month, some daily.”[28]
- Allende’s subsequent novels are also family romances although, in my opinion, they are not as skilfully rendered because they have veered away from Magic Realism. For example, in Portrait in Sepia the first half of the story is set in California and only the second half is in Chile, but the magic in the story seems split between Chile and California – there seems to be an attempt to make Chile more realistic, and many details from The House of the Spirits (such as character types and themes) are repeated in Portrait in Sepia. For example, Allende writes:
If
it weren’t for my grandmother Eliza, who came from far away to light the dark
corner of my past, and for the thousands of photographs that have collected in
my house, how would I tell this story? I would have to create it from my
imagination, with no material but the elusive threads of the lives of many
others and a few illusory recollections. Memory is fiction. Through photography
and the written word I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my
existence, to trap moments before they evanesce, to untangle the confusion of
my past (Allende 2001:303).
This parallels to what Alba says
about writing her family history in order to “reclaim the past
and overcome terrors” (Allende
1985: 368). It is almost as if Allende were making facsimile copies of
the same picture and in subsequent pictures and image of the original loses
some of its intensity. Allende may be obsessed with the home that only exists
in her memory, but by attempting to make her novels realistic and removing the
magic, she removes the uncanny from her narrative and dilutes the impact of her
work: it is less “believable” because “life is stranger than fiction”,
especially in the Global Nomad experience, a TCK can experience numerous living
situations in one lifetime.
Allende,
Isabel. Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Knopf, 1988.
My Invented Country: A Nostalgic
Journey Through Chile.
Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Portrait in Sepia. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New
York: Harper Collins, 2001.
The House of the Spirits. Trans. Magda
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[1] “Sociologists Drs. John and Ruth Hill Useem first coined the term third
culture in the 1950s when they went to India for a year to study Americans
who lived and worked there. […] The Useems also met expatriates from other
countries and soon discovered that [the expatriates] had formed a lifestyle
that was different from either their home or host culture, but it was one they
shared in that setting” (Pollock and Reken, 2001: 20).
[3] See Appendix 1.
[4] “Because there are frequently no well-marked expatriate enclaves
anymore, some argue that the terms third culture or third culture kid
are now misnomers. How can there be a culture if people don’t live together?
[…] Dr. Useem […] said, “Because I am a sociologist/anthropologist I think no
concept is ever locked up permanently. […] Concepts change because what happens
in the world is changing” (Pollock and Reken 2001: 21).
[5] Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs) are people who have grown up with
the TCK experience (Pollock and Reken 2001: 6).
[6] On October 21st 1994, in the Virginian-Pilot, Gary
Edwards describes a “global nomad” as someone who has spent a large part of
their youth living outside their passport country because of their parent’s
occupation.
[7] Paul G. Hiebert is a cultural anthropologist who believed that
“culture is learnt rather than instinctive behaviour”. In relation to the TCK
lifestyle, “learnt behaviour” applies because TCKs are constantly having to
learn new cultures which forms a part of their third culture (Pollock and Reken
2001: 40).
[8] “The narrative mode is one of the few ways we have for organizing
indefinitely long diachronic sequences involving the activities of ourselves,
our fellows, and the symbolic world of culture” (Bruner 1994: 52).
[9] See Appendix 2.
[10] “With the Freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the
strange in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the
assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and
symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same” (Kristeva 1991: 181).
[11] See Appendix 3.
[12] “He is always going to have an outsider’s perspective; one that,
for example, finds the London suburb of Shepperton where he lives “lunar and
abstract” in the summer” (Hall 1997: par 6). Accessed 22nd September
2007, from
[13] J. G. Ballard was raised in Shanghai and also Britain
.
[15] “When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on
the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. […] But when I
began to consider the subject […] I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I
should never be able to come to a conclusion” (Woolf 1945: 5).
[16] “If the social contract, far from being that of equal men, is based
on an essentially sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of
differences which in this way produces communicable meaning, what is our place
in this order of sacrifice and/or of language?” (Kristeva 1986: 199).
[17] Allende doesn’t believe that she is consciously influenced by Márquez, but she admits to telling
similar stories: “I think that is has much more to do with the fact that we
were both raised by our grandparents. He tells the stories his grandmother told
him, and I do the same” (Rodden: 2004: 254).
[18] Gabriel
García Márquez was influenced by Kafka’s Metamorphosis and lived overseas as an
adult; but technically this does not make him a TCK <http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_biography.html>.
[19] “All the women in my book [The House of the Spirits] are feminists
in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be
able to fulfil themselves, not to be dependent on men” (Rodden 2004: 51).
[20] “[Historiographic metafiction] both install[s] and then blur[s] the
line between fiction and history […] but the simultaneous and overt assertion
and crossing of boundaries is more postmodern” (Hutcheon 1988: 113).
[21] See Appendix 4.
[22] In the index, Allende wrote this from A Thousand and One Tales
of the Arabian Nights: “Then he said to Scheherazade: ‘Sister, for the sake
of Allah, tell us a story that will help pass the night….”
[23] “Community
members look at the hidden immigrant TCKs, presuming they can do every common
task others around know how to do, [but] their expectations are wrong, [and] neither
side forgives the other as they would a true immigrant or obvious foreigner for
unexpected behaviour or even ignorance” (Pollok and Reken 2001: 54-56).
[24] L. Robert Kohls defines “surface culture” as: behaviour, words,
customs, and traditions. He defines “deep culture” as: beliefs, values,
assumptions, and thought processes (Pollock and Reken 2001: 40-41).
[25] .
[26] The TCK is also not a “parachute kid” (also known as an
“unaccompanied minor”) who is defined as a child that is dropped into another
culture for purposes of education.
.
[27] The Stolen Generation: from 1869-1969 Australian Aboriginal
children were wards of the state and removed from their families to be raised
in internment camps, orphanages and other institutions.
.