Writing Across Worlds

Literature and Migration

John Connell, Russell King, Paul White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134846405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

International migration has long been a dominant feature of world literature from both post-industrial and developing countries. The increasing demands of the global economic system and continued political instability in many of the world's region have highlighted this shifting map of the world's peoples.
Yet, political concern for the larger scale economic and social impact of migration has effectively obscured the nature of the migratory nature of the migratory experience itself, the emotions and practicalities of departure, travel, arrival and the attempt to rebuild a home.
Writing Across Worlds explores an extraordinary range of migration literaturesm from letters and diaries to journalistic articles, autobiographies and fiction, in order to analyse the reality of the migrant's experience. The sheer range of writings - Irish, Friulian, Italian, Jewish and South Asian British, Gastarbeiter literature from Germany, Pied noir, French-Algerian and French West Indian writing, Carribbean novels, Slovene emigrant texts, Japanese-Canadian writing, migration in American novels, narratives from Australia, South Africa, Samoa and others - illustrate the diversity of global migratory experience and emphasise the social context of literature.
The geographic and literary range of Writing Across Worlds makes this collection an invaluable analysis of migration, giving voice to the hope, pain, nostalgia and triumph of lives lived in other places.

1
GEOGRAPHY, LITERATURE AND MIGRATION

Paul White¹

INTRODUCTION

We live in what has recently been termed ‘The Age of Migration’.² Geographical movement can be seen as a crucial human experience. Such movement occurs within a striking concatenation of economic, political, social and cultural circumstances which provide both structural forces driving mobility and also the controlling mechanisms that limit and channel the selection of people and places involved. These circumstances lie within the range of traditional social-scientific concerns for the aggregate forces and developments occurring within human populations.

At the same time population movement transforms all the elements involved, not only in the structural circumstances that underpin migration systems, but also within the places and the people bound up in migratory experiences. Places of origin, of passage, and of destination of migrants are altered as a result of the flows of people that affect them. Transformations also occur in the lives of all those involved; not just the migrants themselves but also those who directly come into contact with them and those who, indirectly, are affected by social, political and economic changes induced by migration. The role of human agents is a determining one, but only within the structural context in which those agents are located.

Migration therefore changes people and mentalities. New experiences result from the coming together of multiple influences and peoples, and these new experiences lead to altered or evolving representations of experience and of self-identity. Such representations are then manifest in cultural artefacts of many kinds—new forms of dress, of food cultures and of consumerism, new styles of music and of poetry, new political ideologies, new forms of literary production. All of these can be seen to have their own claims as authentic materials. However this book, and this introductory chapter, explore just one aspect of these representations—that of literary output—without seeking to privilege or prioritise this over other artefacts.

Literary output can be considered at a variety of levels, of which two merit attention here. At one level we can consider individual works, but at anotherwe can consider a full body of literature that arguably hangs together through a relationship with a migratory record or history, often on a societal scale. At the first level, therefore, we may be dealing with individual authors and with the representation of the experience of particular people; at the second we may be concerned with responses in whole societies or nations that have been affected by population movement.³ The remainder of this chapter will seek to develop a framework and to highlight a series of issues in which the concerns of the social scientist and of the student of literature can be seen to converge fruitfully in the analysis of texts relating to migratory experience.

MIGRATION AND IDENTITY SHIFT

A useful starting-point for the discussion of the representational outcomes of migration experiences lies in setting up a conceptual framework consisting of a series of possible shifts in identity that occur in relation to migration, both at the individual and at larger-group levels.⁴ Such realignments of identity may both precede migration (and in a sense, therefore, ‘cause’ it), and they may also occur as a result of movement to a new location. Migration ‘events’ therefore occur within personal biographies that neither start nor end at those events, but which provide the context for them.⁵ We may, perhaps, conceptualise a number of overlapping multiple identities which are the subject of constant renegotiation in the face of the conflicts and compromises of everyday life. At any point in our lives we can think of ourselves as relating to a number of identities—in gender terms (concerning gender roles and gendered behaviour: sexual identity may perhaps be better considered as a separate element), in terms of a stage in the life-course, in terms of age and family status, in terms of economic identity (related to occupational identity but also to attributes of consumption and savings propensities), in terms of linguistic, religious and other cultural identities and in terms of ethnic identity. In the analysis of identity shift through migration it can be argued that creative literature contains some of the most effective explorations of identity issues.

The act of migration often relates to the calling into question of many of these aspects of identity that make up the individual’s personality and psychological self-image. This is not to say that migrants, before migration, have necessarily ‘fitted in’ to a homogeneous societal structure with no traces of discordance: indeed, sociological and anthropological studies have often suggested that migrants may be effectively ‘lost’ to their home communities long before they actually pack their bags and leave,⁶ and of course not ‘fitting in’ may be a primary cause of migration. However, the words ‘migration’ and ‘change’ can almost be regarded as synonyms in this context—why migrate if such movement does not result in change, or does not accommodate an identity change that has already occurred?

Migrants, whether individually, in groups, or as whole displaced societies,are open to new influences. Many of these provide a challenge to earlier self-perceptions and self-images, and through such challenges the compositional elements of multiple identities may be redefined. This is probably most significant in terms of ethnic identities, where many migrants may not have held a particularly strong view of their own ethnicity prior to movement, but where they may find themselves in situations where they are confronted by an alternative ethnic awareness that labels them and confines them to a stereotyped ‘otherness’ from which there appears little chance of escape, although a number of differently constrained responses are possible.

Other aspects of individual, group or societal identity are also open to transformation through migration. Much academic writing about migration has tended to ignore the significance of gender issues, but gender roles may be crucially affected by movement.⁷ In other spheres, families are often broken up, temporarily or on a more long-term basis. Economic status is altered, with changed employment, changed income and wealth, and with changed patterns of consumption being very common. Secularisation may ensue, or alternatively there may be reassertions of cultural (religious) distinctiveness through a re-energising of attributes of distinction. Habitual language use may slide or be jolted from one tongue to another, with all that such a change implies about the means of representation in words—spoken or written. Projects, dreams and ultimate goals may be revised. All of these changes are discernible in creative writing about migration.

Shifts of identity are highly complex, sometimes unstable, and often have reversible elements built into them. The titles of various works on migration, produced by creative writers or by social-scientific researchers, suggest that migrants may live in a number of worlds, and move between them on a daily, annual or seasonal rhythm.⁸ Other changes resulting from migration include attempts to re-create elements of former lives (possibly accentuating significant icons of that existence into quasi-talismans of high symbolic or ritual significance); attempts to integrate or assimilate completely (which may be blocked by a number of mechanisms within the ‘host’ society); or the creation of a new identity which is characterised by a feeling of independence from both the society of origin and the social structures of the destination. These changes in identity cannot be pinned down to a rigid linear continuum, for they represent the multiple and continually renegotiated outcomes of complex multifaceted phenomena operating both within individual biographies and for societies as a whole.⁹

A common feature of many migrants and migrant cultures is ambivalence. Ambivalence towards the past and the present: as to whether things were better ‘then’ or ‘now’. Ambivalence towards the future: whether to retain a ‘myth of return’ or to design a new project without further expected movement built in. Ambivalence towards the ‘host’ society: feelings of respect, dislike or uncertainty. Ambivalence towards standards of behaviour: whether to cling to the old or to discard it, whether to compromise via symbolic events whilst adhering to the new on an everyday basis. The choices (or the paths taken, since in many cases ‘choice’ is not actually perceived to exist) depend not just on the individuals involved but also on the constraints of the situations in which migrants find themselves. And since these situations change on a variety of temporal scales, so the identities expressed through attitudes, behaviour and artefacts also change and may be marked by ambiguity.

The act of migration concerns people and places, but it also concerns time. The first movers settle down. More migrants follow the path of the earlier pioneers. The world these latter move to is not the same as for the first arrivals, since the existence of past movement will have in some way altered the conditions of reception, whether directly from people of similar origin, or in terms of the underlying social, economic and political conditions that will influence the experiences of the later arrivals. So, too, circumstances at the places of origin of the migrants change, in part because of earlier departures. Through time the identity of migrant groups and individuals changes, not simply because the people involved age, but because the experiences undergone progressively build up to influence the evolution of identities. What are at first immigrants, singly or in groups, progressively become something else. Here perceptions of what they become may actually be divergent. External labelling may see ‘them’ as ‘communities’ (often ‘ethnic-minority communities’) which may not, in fact, accord with the view from within. Externally driven categorisations can be over-rigid, with a great deal of over-generalisation so that, for example, all people of Afro-Caribbean origin in Britain are thought of as ‘West Indians’, ignoring the facts of individual island identity that are of great significance to the people concerned,¹⁰ or in France labelling all North Africans as ‘Arabs’ when some are Jews and others are Berbers rather than of Arabic culture. Internally (and the very word is questionable since it implies a homogeneity of outlook amongst those involved) the ambivalence and ambiguity of identities already referred to often produces a much more circumspect approach to labelling, with divergences between generations, genders, and classes reflecting the different experiences undergone.

These features of migrant identities might be argued to lead towards concepts of pluralism or syncretism at a number of levels, both concerning migrant and non-migrant individuals and groups but also as describing the multiple experiences, reactions and self-identities of migrants themselves and of those of migrant origin. To seek to research pluralism is to seek to elucidate worlds of meaning and belief, of attitude, interpretation and behaviour, and to do so, as argued above, in a context of instability and change within these attributes. Among the representations of these worlds, those that occur through literature present exciting opportunities for analysis as inputs to research. Since the contexts for these worlds expressed in literature are sodiverse, the overall project is one where social scientists and humanities scholars can fruitfully come together.

MIGRATION AS A MOTIF IN LITERATURE

The discussion that follows is confined to representations of migration defined from a geographical viewpoint as ‘a change in the place of residence’.¹¹ No reference will be made to the very extensive genre of travel writing, part of which actually considers certain aspects of human character as discussed here. The equally extensive corpus of writing that has as a theme the relationship of people with place will also be put on one side, again despite the existence within it of certain elements common also to true writing about migration.¹² This is especially so of literature concerning the city—a significant proportion of which takes the viewpoint of the newly arrived migrant as one of its devices for exploring the human condition within the metropolis.¹³

Even leaving this body of literature on one side, the theme of migration per se is extremely common in writing produced over the last century—the period during which we have moved into the ‘Age of Migration’. The frequency with which the theme appears is not simply a reflection of the realities of human existence, but also has an internal literary justification to it. Put simply, the theme of migration and its outcomes has been an inherently attractive one over recent decades to writers working in a number of different literary movements and traditions.

Accepting for one moment David Harvey’s suggestion that the evolution from modernism to postmodernism reflects more elements of continuity than of change,¹⁴ we can see that throughout the literary endeavours represented under these headings a number of themes relating to migration and its outcomes are of significance. Modernism takes the ‘bewilderingly problematic’ nature of human existence in the contemporary world and, emphasising the fragmentation of human experience, nevertheless still seeks to penetrate what is taken as a general, unifying, underlying reality, albeit through writing which makes use of multiple viewpoints and discontinuities.¹⁵ Postmodernism is suspicious of such metanarratives, abandoning the belief in universals, and stressing the multiplicity and relativity of experiences while also regarding each strand as of potentially equal validity.

The relationships of both modernism and postmodernism to migration are strong. Fragmentation, dislocation and alienation are all very common themes in modernist writing: indeed as Hawthorne has pointed out, ‘alienation becomes close to a cliché...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: GEOGRAPHY, LITERATURE AND MIGRATION
• 2: LITERARY REFLECTIONS ON IRISH MIGRATION IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
• 3: FROM PAPPKOFFER TO PLURALISM: MIGRANT WRITING IN THE GERMAN FEDERAL REPUBLIC
• 4: ‘RIVERS TO CROSS’: EXILE AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE CARIBBEAN MIGRATION NOVELS OF GEORGE LAMMING
• 5: NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN THE METROPOLIS: GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN SOUTH ASIAN BRITISH FICTION
• 6: PERCEPTIONS OF PLACE AMONG WRITERS OF ALGERIAN IMMIGRANT ORIGIN IN FRANCE
• 7: FROM FRANCITÉ TO CRÉOLITÉ: FRENCH WEST INDIAN LITERATURE COMES HOME
• 8: PIED-NOIR LITERATURE: THE WRITING OF A MIGRATORY ELITE
• 9: FRIULANI NEL MONDO: THE LITERATURE OF AN ITALIAN EMIGRANT REGION
• 10: SUNDAY TOO FAR AWAY: IMAGES OF EMIGRANT EXISTENCE IN THE LITERATURE OF SLOVENES IN THE UNITED STATES, CANADA AND AUSTRALIA
• 11: MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY MALTESE FICTION
• 12: LITERARY PERSPECTIVES ON JEWS IN BRITAIN IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
• 13: RETURN MIGRATION IN AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE 1920s AND 1930s
• 14: BIRDS OF PASSAGE OR SQUAWKING DUCKS: WRITING ACROSS GENERATIONS OF JAPANESE-CANADIAN LITERATURE
• 15: VULCAN’S BROOD: SPATIAL NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
• 16: FAR CITIES AND SILVER COUNTRIES: MIGRATION TO AUSTRALIA IN FICTION AND FILM
• 17: IN SAMOAN WORLDS: CULTURE, MIGRATION, IDENTITY AND ALBERT WENDT