Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women's Writing

Kate Averis

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351567480
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Languages

Women in exile disrupt assumptions about exile, belonging, home and identity. For many women exiles, home represents less a place of belonging and more a point of departure, and exile becomes a creative site of becoming, rather than an unsettling state of errancy. Exile may be a propitious circumstance for women to renegotiate identities far from the strictures of home, appropriating a new freedom in mobility. Through a feminist politics of place, displacement and subjectivity, this comparative study analyses the novels of key contemporary Francophone and Latin American writers Nancy Huston, Linda Le, Malika Mokeddem, Cristina Peri Rossi, Laura Restrepo, and Cristina Siscar to identify a new nomadic subjectivity in the lives and works of transnational women today.

Part I
Nomadic Consciousness, Nomadic Narratives

Chapter 1
Exile, Identity, Nomadism: Key Terms and Concepts

Despite increased academic interest in recent decades in the multiple, interstitial subjectivities produced in and by transnational displacement, there is still much anxiety surrounding its key terms and concepts. Scholars argue the need to elucidate the terms and tropes used, and to consider the ways in which these politicise research practices. The ongoing debate regarding the naming and categorisation of experiences testifies to a continuing need to critically examine, and rethink, the way in which displacement is named, classified, and theorised.

Euro-American discourses of displacement have been criticised for glossing over differences and creating ahistorical amalgams. Caren Kaplan cautions against assembling universalised tropes of displacement which have the adverse effect of conflating experiences and overlooking historical specificity.¹ Clearly, the issues at stake differ greatly for individuals who have experienced radically different circumstances of displacement. How can the experiences of Latin Americans who fled military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s in fear of their lives be constructively compared to the struggles of those from economically and politically stable countries who departed in pursuit of cultural affinity and intellectual freedom? The negotiation of a sense of self within the space of displacement differs for those who have left the homeland for reasons which can range from political persecution, economic need, cultural disaffinity, intellectual dissonance, or for more personal reasons. Conditions such as gender, the age at which an individual leaves the birth country, whether he or she leaves alone or accompanied, whether a future return is possible or even desired, and the perception of the homeland in the new country of residence also have profound effects on the experience of displacement, as well as on the strategies that are employed to negotiate the new identity that displacement necessitates.

Kaplan counters her warning against universalised tropes of displacement by suggesting, on the other hand, that overemphasising the differences between types of displacement through a rigid allocation of terminology can bring about a counterproductive moralising evaluation of experiences and behaviours. Looking, for example, at the mechanisms and strategies that disparate groups of displaced peoples do in fact share elucidates the inevitable processes of renegotiation of id entity incurred by the removal of the familial, social, and linguistic bonds through which identity is produced and sustained. Despite obvious differences between different groups, such as, for example, those displaced by the threat of violence at home, or a privileged international elite able to relocate for more personal reasons, they do, in fact, prove to undergo common processes of identity re-adjustment in displacement that reinforce the primacy of shared experience over differentiating factors.

James Clifford advocates a thoughtful and sensitive approach in his appeal for an inclusive theoretical and discursive framework which allows for difference without homogenising experiences.² In his examination of the discourse of diaspora, Clifford states that while it is useful to define terms, we must be wary of classification by recourse to an 'ideal type' where experiences become more or less exemplary according to the frequency with which they display defining features. To use Clifford's terms, an inclusive theoretical framework would allow the 'tracking', rather than the 'policing' of experiences, and avoids the kind of moral evaluation of experiences against which Kaplan warns. Winifred Woodhull builds on such efforts to avoid the conflation of experiences, and to seek out historical specificity by highlighting that it is essential to differentiate not only between but also within groups of 'cultural others' living in displacement.³ The terminology and paradigms circulating in current discourses of subjectivities produced in and by displacement offer a useful framework when these are permeable and subject to questioning, rather than exclusive and hierarchical.

This introductory chapter considers the ideological associations of the terms and concepts used in current theoretical discourses of displacement in order to establish a conceptual framework for the analysis of displaced women's identity as explored and expressed in the recent fictional works analysed in the Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Terms such as 'exile', 'displacement', 'home', 'nation', and 'nomadism' are the cornerstones of discourses of displacement, and ones which require clarification in order to draw out the ideas and assumptions that they evoke. Their frequent use as metaphors expands their meanings so that these can signify quite differently in different situations. Kaplan describes how research practices can be politicised through questioning how these metaphors work, and opting to use them in specific ways rather than merely assuming their value and currency.⁴ That these are contested and fluid terms is further reinforced by the changes these concepts undergo with translation. The currency of the English term 'exile' is certainly far removed from the resonance the Spanish 'exilio' holds, particularly in the context of Latin American Spanish. Broadly speaking, and for diverse cultural, economic, and political reasons, English-speaking cultures in recent history can be said to have been societies of reception of exiles, while Spanish-speaking cultures have Sent large numbers of their populations into exile. This pattern has had a distinctive effect on each linguistic community's literary canon: the canon of modern English literature has absorbed practitioners born beyond its shores and comprises a significant number of exiled writers,⁵ whereas Latin American literature has been, and continues to be produced in great geographical diversity, and writers such as Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, who remained in his native country throughout his life, have become the exception rather than the rule. The English term 'home' provides another example: the absence of terms in both French and Spanish that combine the domestic and the affective meanings of 'home' with the notion of a place that is also a site of origins and belonging underlines how these meanings are located differently in different languages as well as how terms signify differently within the same language. Whilst the French foyer and the Spanish hogar adequately, albeit in different measure, convey the domestic meaning of 'home', as well as its association with shelter and refuge, these terms lack the association of origins and belonging present in 'home', as well as the term's spatial elasticity which can expand to include a hometown, a community, and/or a nation. Additionally, the English term's more frequent use in both discourse and in the cultural imaginary differentiates it from both its French and Spanish counterparts, thus highlighting the fluidity and shifting nature of the location of affect and meaning both within and between languages.

Enforced and Voluntary Exile: A False Dichotomy

The complexity of the arguments surrounding the terms used in the discussion of displacement is demonstrated by Amy K. Kaminsky's criticism of what she refers to as the 'evacuation of meaning of the term "exile"'.⁶ Kaminsky's very specific use of the term defines a particular experience of displacement resulting from enforced removal, or banishment from the homeland for reasons of political persecution. For Kaminsky, 'voluntary exile' is a misnomer which, at best, suggests ignorance of, and at worst, indifference to the resonance of the term in the context of the military dictatorships in Latin America that murdered, disappeared, and displaced tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in the 1970s and 1980s. By insisting on a narrow definition of the term, Kaminsky raises the problem of using exile as a metaphor to describe various types of displacement and alienation from an originary culture which differ from the conventional definition of violent political exile. Whilst the indiscriminate overuse of the term can clearly have a detrimental effect on understanding the impact of the singularly traumatic experience of violent ousting from one's country of origin, the term 'exile' nevertheless has a valuable purchase not present in other terms. The scope of the term includes a resonance that is not present in the more neutral 'displacement', and which is key to understanding the psychological processes of displaced individuals across the wide range of situations of displacement. While 'displacement' has sufficient flexibility to express a variety of historical constructs of movement, its advantageous neutrality consequently dilutes the nuance of trauma present in the term 'exile'.

The cautious and contiguous use of both terms affords benefits to the discussion of the processes of identification in alienation where specificity is recognised, and perhaps more importantly, where unexpected commonalities are identified. One of the main aims of this study is to identify common processes of identification of exiled women writers, whilst drawing distinctions within and between the variously exiled writers at hand. What is at stake here is the way in which different modes of displacement generate cultural practices, and in particular, how exiled women formulate and express their identity through literary discourse. Greater importance will thus be given to elucidating the ways in which exiled women negotiate and define their identity in displacement, than to the task of hierarchising types of displacement according to a hypothetical scale of trauma. In this, I follow the example set by Marina Franco in her study of Argentine exiles in France during and following Argentina's most recent military dictatorship (1976—1983) where she distinguishes between the self-designation of exiles as such, and researchers' designation of exiles.⁷ Sophia McClennen also identifies the problem of the non-coincidence of the designation of exile by its actors, on the one hand, and its theorists on the other, in The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures, a work 'dedicated to reconciling the exile of theoretical discourse with concrete cases of exile'.⁸ That there exists a need to reconcile theoretical discourse with actual cases of exile implies theory's tendency to disregard exiles' own agency in the analysis of their own displacement. The recognition of subjects' self-designation in displacement allows for the heterogeneous nature of displacement to surface, and perhaps most importantly, works to avoid the kind of neocolonialist gesture that critics risk when they fail to recognise the agency of their subjects of study, which this book likewise aims to avoid. Here, particular attention is paid to each writer's own designation of their position in displacement, in addition to their explicit or implicit literary self-representation.

The six women writers who form the focus of study here come from diverse backgrounds, and represent different permutations of exile. Cristina Peri Rossi, Cristina Siscar, and Laura Restrepo, from Uruguay, Argentina, and Colombia respectively, most closely adhere to a conventional notion of political exile. Nephrologist Malika Mokeddem's professional migration from Algeria to France was instigated by political violence in her native country, as was Linda Lê's family migration from Vietnam to France in childhood. Nancy Huston is alone in having emigrated to France from her native Canada for cultural reasons and in the absence of the threat of violence. The patterns of displacement manifested in these women's lives can be traced back to the different trajectories of each of their birth country's colonial legacy! The wars in Vietnam and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century can be directly attributed to French colonialism, only dismantled in the last century and whose history has played out very differently from Spanish colonial history. The political instability that engulfed Vietnam and Algeria in recent history, and that also characterised Latin America for most of the twentieth century, can be said to have similarly arisen from conflicting notions of nationhood and national identity that has been one, and certainly not the only, unfortunate legacy of colonial rule. Likewise, I would argue that Canada's relatively peaceful postcolonial history, as a colonised nation that, like Australia and New Zealand, exterminated the vast majority of its indigenous population, has a role to play in Huston's decision to emigrate to Europe by virtue of her location in the white, cultural elite of a country that enjoys political stability and economic prosperity precisely because of its violent colonial past. As an exile and an intellectual, Huston has scrutinised this problematic position in her literary output which repeatedly addresses such issues.

While differentiating between the various types of political, cultural, and intellectual exile, common and overlapping processes as well as problems arise and become evident. The displaced individual's struggle to accommodate apparently conflicting psychological, cultural, and linguistic aspects of subjectivity into a coherent identity in the new environment throws up a number of similar strategies despite vastly different displacements. While distinction between individual circumstances of displacement is necessary to establish the divergent difficulties that varying situations of displacement pose — and certainly, not even displaced individuals within the same 'type' of exile can be said to suffer similar difficulties — the aim here is to avoid making the (contrived) distinction between 'true' and 'false' exile, or establishing a moral order or hierarchy of different experiences. The rather forced polar distinction between 'true' and 'false' exile stems from assumptions about the relation of exile to the exercise of will, and as such, exile has commonly been qualified as either 'enforced' or 'voluntary'. Yet even scholars working within the field of what conventional wisdom refers to as 'enforced exile' problematise this distinction as difficult to pin down. Franco, for example, questions the validity of such a binary distinction:

suele superponerse que la migración política ο exilio define la situación de quienes salieron ...