The Many Voices of Europe

Mobility and Migration in Contemporary Europe

Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Nicole Shea, Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Nicole Shea

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110646108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This volume explores the rich, evolving body of contemporary cultural practices that reflect on a European project of diversity, new dynamics between and across cultures in Europe, and its interactions with the world. There have been calls across Europe for both traditional national identities and new forms of identity and community, assertions of regionalized identity and declarations of multiculturalism and multilingualism. These essays respond to this critical moment by analyzing the literature of migration as a (re)writing of European subjects. They ask fundamental questions from a variety of theoretical and critical standpoints: How do migrants write new identities into and against old national (meta)narratives? How do they interrogate constructions of identity? What kinds of literary experiments are emerging in this unstable context, e.g. in the graphic novel and avant-garde film?
This collection makes a unique contribution to contemporary European literary studies by taking an interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspective, thereby addressing readers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and stimulating new research on the ambitious writing and thinking taking place across the borders of Europe today.

Part I:Crossing Borders: (Re)configuring Identities

Vanessa D. Plumly

Linked Security and “Rhetorical Ethics”: Breaking Frames and Opening Cracks of Identification through the Narrative Fissures of Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes’s breach (2016)

Note: I would like to thank Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Nicole Shea for inviting me to participate in the panel “The Poetics of Crossing Borders” at the 24th International Conference for Europeanists held at the University of Glasgow, July 12–14, 2017 and for the feedback and commentary I received as part of the panel from which this book originates. This research and my presentation at that conference were financially supported by the Women in German Professional Development Award for Contingent Faculty, which I received for research in the summer of 2017.

From 2015 to 2016, on the northern coast of France in the city of Calais, refugees from North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula erected a camp. “The Jungle,”1 as it was known among the refugees who inhabited it from countries as disparate as Ethiopia and Afghanistan, was a place of convergence for those in transit to the United Kingdom via the Channel Tunnel.2 According to the editors of Voices from the Jungle: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp (2017) – a collection of autobiographical texts, poetry and photographs that inhabitants of the camp created during their time there and with the help of volunteers through an initiative called “University for All” – “[t]he camp was also an emblem of the impact of forced displacement within Europe, and the mostly ineffectual efforts of European countries to address it” (Godin et al., 2017: 3). While Voices from the Jungle remains one of the only comprehensive texts focusing on the refugee condition in Europe told from the refugees’ own perspectives, another important work that predates it – published in 2016 – is breach, a fictional text that draws on interviews conducted with members of the Calais camp in 2015 by Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes. London-based Afro-German author Popoola and her white Zimbabwean co-author Holmes were commissioned to compose this work based on the narrated and lived experiences of refugees in Calais that they documented. Both authors currently live and work in London and have known each other for some years through Hedgebrook, a women’s collective network for writers who focus on social justice and social change.3

As Meike Ziervogel from Peirene Press reveals on the opening page of breach, she commissioned the authors

to go to the Calais refugee camps to distil stories into a work of fiction about escape, hope and aspiration. On another level, however, these stories also take seriously the fears of people who want to close their borders. It’s that dialogue that isn’t happening in real life. A work of art can help bridge the gap.

(Popoola and Holmes, 2006: n.p.)

The current discourse of the West’s so-called “refugee crisis,” mostly articulated through the media, has become increasingly more difficult to separate from the pre-existing mediated discourse on terrorism since 9/11, especially in Europe and the United States, where security has taken center stage as the fundamental topic, and anxieties have fueled pre-existing Islamophobia and racism.4 Fear, thus, serves as the underlying factor for the desire to maintain security – whatever might be meant by this floating signifier in today’s socio-political contexts – raising many questions: Can borders actually be “secured”? How can both current citizens of and refugees fleeing to Europe feel safe and less threatened/feared by one another? Who is protected, and who is sequestered and at what cost? This begs the ultimate question: what happens if “security” is also breached?

In this chapter, I argue that this breach in security and the blurring and rupture of the clear boundaries between self and other are precisely what opens up sites of vulnerability for recognition of the self’s dependency on as well as the fundamental need to trust in the other. The power differential maintains its authority between those who are actually protected citizens and those who are not. Moreover, the security of some often comes at the insecurity of others, further reinforcing racist structures and cognition as well as reifying Otherness.5 While a breach in security can bolster the appeal for more control, surveillance and containment, it also signals susceptibility, permeability and the impossibility of being completely removed from vulnerability, in whichever form it may manifest itself. The factual basis for the short stories in breach intensifies their impact on the reader, while the fictional reworking enables the reader to identify and empathize at a deeper level than would have been possible if the work had been composed simply of autobiographical narratives.

Through examples of rhetorical questions posed for ethical reflection and empathic effect, instances of framing connected to (a lack of) information and the expansion of the frame’s boundaries and second-person narration as a vehicle through which to identify, albeit not equate one’s self with the protagonist, I underscore the ways in which the short stories in Popoola and Holmes’ collection enact the titular action of rupture, producing gaps for the reader to fill, slip through and further unsettle prevailing knowledge and information. This enables the reader to gain access to divergent perspectives, thus allowing the audience to comprehend human precarity more fully. The textual openings that breach offers provide the reader with sites of entry that question mediated discourses and individuals’ perceptions. Together, they can generate a recognition of the self and other as precarious beings, affected by unequal structural circumstances.

By way of close textual analysis of three chapters, I argue that, through such cracks in the text, breach articulates a holistic approach to security and human precarity otherwise imperceptible, yet this recognition of vulnerability cannot be forced given that, as Judith Butler has argued, “there is no guarantee that this will happen” (2004: 43). In addition to the rhetorical textual opening first offered in the inaugural chapter “Counting Down,” I examine two further chapters, “The Terrier” and “Extending a Hand.” The former presents rhetorical interrogatives that produce suspicion and result in the reader’s own questioning of the narrator’s (mis)interpretation of the unfolding events. The latter utilizes the second-person point of view to narrate the short story. As such, it places the reader in the position of the protagonist and allows us to consider how our own actions and decisions might play out in such a scenario.

1“Counting down”: Adding “you” to calculated questions

“When you claim asylum you sum it all up.” He laughs and his eyes become so small they fade into his unshaven face until you only see two lines with a little hair.

I can make jokes at any time but even I don’t understand why he laughs. “How do you sum up genocide?”

He is quiet after that.

(Popoola and Holmes 2016: 19)

A character who wishes to go by the nickname of Obama poses the above rhetorical question, ‘how do you sum up genocide?’ that hits not only the other character Calculate hard, but also the reader. The silence that follows is deafening, given not only its contemporary political contexts, but also its historical weight, in addition to the incomprehensibility of the act itself, despite its omnipresence. This affirmative rhetorical question produces a response that Kamila Karhanová cites from the work of L. Dušková as “a negative universal quantifier” (2005: 204), meaning that any response to such a question is both generally assumed to be the same for all to whom it is posed and that the answer implies a negation of the posed rhetorical question. The anticipated replies are thus: you do not sum up genocide; you cannot; it is simply impossible to do. However, these are not the only possible answers to the question. The word “genocide” does not actually seem to bear the weight of its signified meaning, so the question of how to sum it up is meant to force the reader to reflect on the word’s definition, its connotation and even its ineffectualness. The only way to allow readers and listeners of stories to obtain the full impact of the word is to pose it as a question. While this question is simultaneously posed to the reader, the actual question posed by Obama to Calculate articulates what he must do for the authorities with whom he will claim asylum; he will be forced to summarize, as briefly and accurately as possible, his experiences and grounds for seeking asylum in Europe; his response to such a question must be calculated.

More than affirming the negative universal quantifier that this rhetorical question elicits, in this moment, the text yields what Nita Schechet terms a “sit[e] of textual entry” that promotes “a boundary challenging intimacy” here between the reader, the text and the characters (2005: 11, 12). The rhetorical opening invites the reader to respond to and reflect on this question. This is in contrast to other rhetorical questions posed in the short story “Counting Down,” as they are tied directly to the characters’ histories and present experiences, thus maintaining their diegetic boundaries. An example is when Calculate poses the question “Can you be quiet now?” explaining, “I don’t want to get caught here” (Poopoola and Holmes 2016: 12), or when Obama asks “[h]ave we not made it most of the way without Calculate?” (Poopoola and Holmes 2016:13). The difference is that the question of “how do you sum up genocide?” is a general one, one that could just as easily be directed at the reader in this moment, anticipating a response. Thus, the rhetorical question reaches beyond the diegetic bounds of the text and pulls the reader into the discourse surrounding the characters’ circumstances. This question, in particular, does not rely on the narration to function, instead penetrating the reader’s mind with a sharp impact.

Schechet proposes that such sites serve “as openings into textual intentionality (‘what the text does, rather than what the text is meant to mean’ [Iser 1993, 6])” (2005: 12). In inviting the reader in, the intent is to grapple with defining the concept of genocide and with taking its meaning, its weight, its historical and present contexts, and the possibility of experiencing or the reality of having experienced it into account. The positive effect of such an opening is that it serves as a powerful tool for the readers or audiences to enter into the narrator’s diegetic discourse, even if their own experiences might be far removed from those of the speaker or rhetor. The question, though posed to Calculate within the narrative, extends in a Brechtian-style break beyond that specific frame, reaching out to readers and inviting them into the picture, the story and the discourse. It addresses them as part of the “you,” asking, how would you formulate or calculate a response to such a loaded and incomprehensible question?

Rather than an unwillingness to respond to this question, I interpret the authors’ intention in having Calculate withhold commentary as a means through which to create space for the reader’s own reflection. Calculate’s laugh is stifled because his pun/joke (Calculate says you have to sum it up) becomes sticky;6 it attaches itself to Obama’s experience of genocide multiplying or intensifying his pain instead of simply adding an element of comic relief. As such, this is but one example of the many narrative and rhetorical fissures Popoola and Holmes employ throughout breach that produce critical and ethical contemplation on the part of their readers.

The role rhetorical questions play in contemporary literature continues to be examined. According to Kamila Karhanová, “the rhetorical question [. . .] is not one of those figures of speech to which much attention is paid in literary theory or linguistics, it seems to be regarded as a banal phenomenon of little interest to researchers” (2005: 203). There is much to be uncovered about the affect and effect/impact that rhetorical questions can have in literature, especially on their readers. Karhanová provides multiple definitions for a rhetorical question, stating that, in order “to define ‘rhetorical question,’ literature refers to its answer or, to be exact, to the hypothetical answer to a rhetorical question” (2005: 203). This means that more important than the question itself is the answer or the calculated response. Other definitions she offers are “a question to which no answer is expected,” “that the answer to this question ‘is by implication obvious’,” or “a rhetorical question suggests or implies an emphatic contrary assertion” (2005: 203–204). The latter is that which we encounter in this first passage I cited from breach. But this specific rhetorical question also represents an iteration of Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin’s feminist interpretation of an invitational rhetoric – one that Kathleen Hardesty views as “challeng[ing] a strict definition of rhetoric as persuasion and work[ing] instead toward the possibility of an ethical encounter with others” (2013: ii). Hardesty further asserts that

[i]t is this ethical encounter, that seeks to understand rather than convert, support camaraderie and mutuality (if not unity) instead of reinforcing dominant power relationships, challenge the speaker as much as the audience, and privilege listening and invitation over persuasion where appropriate.

(2013: 2)

Of course, in a written fictional text, albeit based on real life, invitational rhetoric functions differently than when employed in a face-to-face dialogue, given that the reader can respond to the text’s prompt, but receives only the feedback that is written into the text. Nevertheless, this exercise provides what Foss and Griffin deem “an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and see it as the rhetor does” (1995: 5). Yet persuasion is not the end goal, as they note, “the invitational rhetor does not judge or denigrate others’ perspectives but is open to and tries to appreciate and validate those perspectives.” “Invitational rhetors do not believe they have the right to claim their experiences as superior to those of their audience members and refuse to impose perspectives on them” (1995: 5). Therefore, in returning to Schechet’s point from earlier, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Crossing Borders: (Re)configuring Identities
• Part II: Shifting Frontiers of National Belonging
• Part III: A New Europe On Different Grounds
• Part IV: Maxi Obexer, Playwright, Novelist, Activist
• Notes on Contributors
• Index