This comparative critical study arises out of my wish to investigate and understand the process of dislocation in crossing
boundaries and adapting to social norms, despite a sense of loss and/or nostalgia for the home country and/or past life. To me, as an immigrant creative writer, the focus of my reflective research becomes the subjective, lived experience of individual perspectives and emotion, offering a way of investigating the quest for identity among dislocated people. I often face the question of why I left my country, and whether this departure has resulted in the loss of my relationship with those valued places where I grew up. I am therefore undertaking an investigation into dislocation and the remaking of self as a writer through critical reflection and creative expression to investigate the influence of dislocation on self-perception and remaking connections both through the act of writing and the attempt to transcend social conventions. I approach writing as a cognitive process that is replete with the personal insights of authors as they put their world under the microscope. In a state of in-betweenness, writing means finding ways to express the conflicted perceptions of identity and sense of un-belonging. It also means a continual rewriting of the social and cultural boundaries of norms and conventions, and a negotiation of the struggle of dislocated/exiled writers with place and identity.
This book comprises five chapters to explore how the consciousness of not belonging is negotiated and experienced through the act of writing as a reconstructive project. I investigate how dislocated writers practice writing as a tool to heal their sense of alienation and detached identities. The second chapter, “Writing in Exile”, explores the idea of writing in exile as one of the most practical ways in which a writer can keep up his/her imaginative practice and independence. The third chapter, “Malouf’s An Imaginary Life”, examines Malouf’s attention to the creative connection between language, nature, and imagination through the acts of writing and how the novella represents the ways in which landscape reflects various phases of self-understanding. I argue that Malouf’s romantic perspective of Australians’ sense of marginality involves the reconsideration of Australia as a place where individuals can become reconciled with their surroundings through the experience of exclusion and exile. In Reflections on Exile, Said claims that exiles feel “an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives” (2000, p. 177), and much of the exile’s life is taken up with “compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule” (p. 181). Therefore, exiles choose “to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people” (p. 177). By “triumphant ideology”, Said means nationalism, in the sense that exiled persons attribute complete truth and superiority to their nation and deceit and inferiority to outsiders. However, Malouf’s Ovid does not let his underlying conceptions develop into dogma. His is not so much a triumphant ideology, but rather what we might term a romantic connection developed through the interrelationship between language, imagination, and nature in an act of writing.
While there was no simple or singular romantic movement, certain aspects of romanticism are especially pertinent to the question of exile that underpins An Imaginary Life. In particular, the state of exile can represent the self-consciousness of the romantic artist, which is “the product of a division in the self” (Hartman 2004, p. 183), and which the artist seeks to overturn through a return to the “Unity of Being” associated with childhood, imagination, and through “recovering deeply buried experience” (ibid.). To Malouf, the suffering of exile can be healed when past and present homes co-exist happily without exiles attempting to ascribe complete truth and superiority to themselves in relation to social and political power, and deceit and inferiority to outsiders. He pays careful attention to the creative connection between language and nature by representing the means in which landscape reflects the various phases of self-understanding. As Kate Rigby puts it, “The Romantic reconceptualization of nature as a dynamic, self-generative unity-in-diversity, of which humans are integrally a part … did foster a new awareness of the pertinence and power of place as well as of time” (2004, p. 53). In this sense, Malouf’s romantic perspective of Australians’ sense of marginality involves the reconsideration of Australia as a place where individuals can develop an experience of reconciliation with a sense of self and unity through exclusion and exile, independent of historical and social relations.
The fourth chapter, “Parsipur’s
Women Without Men
and Iranian Diaspora Women’s Literature”, attempts to place an analysis of Women Without Men in the context of Parsipur’s overall literary concerns and themes with reference to some pertinent works of Farzaneh Milani and Kamran Talattof, who were among the first scholars to introduce Parsipur to Western readers. This chapter explores intellectual and internal displacement within the borders of one’s country. Parsipur’s novella offers a significant way to understand the sense of exile for those individuals who are intellectually dislocated within their own country. The chapter discusses Parsipur’s experience of dislocation within her home country and her dissatisfaction with the 1979 revolution through her portrayal of the 1950s, a period full of challenges where a nation’s conflicts and hopes stood together. By choosing to write in an oppressive situation where writers were denied freedom of speech and literary expression, Parsipur faced the inevitability of the experience of dislocation in Iran. Despite the fact that the Islamic Revolution promised freedom of expression, it resulted in increased religious, political, and physical censorship.
Edward
Said (1994, p. 39) has offered one of the most significant figurations of intellectual exile; he divides the intellectual members of a society into insiders and outsiders:
Those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yea-sayers; and on the other hand, the nay-sayers, the individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned.
The “nay-sayers”, therefore, are in a constant process of transformation and never experience a sense of being fully adjusted or belonging to their society and may even abhor the traditions and superstitions common in their country. The intellectual exile’s self is continually forming, as they are challenging social norms and conventional identities and in turn being challenged. For Said (1994, p. 62), exile involves deviations from a prescribed path and “being liberated from the usual career, in which ‘doing well’ and following in time-honored footsteps are the main mile stones”.
The Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur (1946–) was not isolated or separated from her place of origin, but her inner forces and beliefs never let her feel completely at one with her country, from which she was intellectually detached. In writing in an oppressive situation where authors are denied freedom of speech and literary expression, Parsipur chooses an intellectual existence in exile while attempting to traverse ideological boundaries. Moreover, drawing on the feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti’s
conceptual analysis of nomadic subjects, this section puts forward the claim that Parsipur’s characters can be interpreted in terms of nomadic experience as they attempt to go beyond the emotional and cultural sense of dislocation. It also reads Women Without Men in reference to the Algerian/French feminist writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine
coined in
The Laugh of the Medusa
(1976) as a model that follows feminine desire and the language of the body in pursuit of a nomadic experience of being. This study explores the inner exile and dislocation experienced by Parsipur and her characters, whose identities are constructed and continually reconstructed, rewritten, and reinterpreted through the narrative.
This chapter also explores a body of work that originated during and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, both in Iran and in exile. The 1979 revolution in Iran resulted in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, which was replaced by the Islamic Republic. Writing in exile, articulating one’s narrative, sense of alienation, and the challenges of multiple identifications, may be therapeutic, because it allows writers to create their own imagined community and articulate their stories. To reclaim the missed years of their lives in their homeland, therefore, some writers developed shared narratives, centered on the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime and 1979 revolution, the institution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, their diaspora community, and social and cultural relations, unsettled by a sense of un-belonging to their new home. The Iranian women writers not only try to construct their gender identities but also to challenge the sexual objectification and prevalent Islamic symbolism of themselves as women with hijabs, the icon that dominates society’s perception of their womanhood, both inside and outside Iran. This chapter approaches Iranian diaspora literature through a brief explanation about the status of women after the revolution and an outline of the most successful creative works in Iranian diaspora literature, with a focus on Goli Taraghi, Azadeh Moaveni, and
Marjane Satrapi.
References
- Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs, 1, 875–893.Crossref
- Hartman, G. (2004). Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness. In G. Hartman & D. T. O’Hara (Eds.), The Geoffrey Hartman Reader. New York: Fordham University Press.
- Rigby, K. (2004). Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville/London: University of Virgin Press.
- Said, E. (1994). Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage.
- Said, E. (2000). Reflections on Exile. London: Granta.