EPILOGUE
MIGRITUDE—THE RE-MEDIATED WORK OF ART AND ART’S MEDIATING WORK
Have you ever set out to search for a missing half?
The piece that isn’t shapely, elegant, simple. The half
that’s ugly, heavy, abrasive. Awkward to the hand. Gritty
on the tongue.
—Shailja Patel, Migritude
Zadie Smith published “The Embassy of Cambodia” in 2013, in the midst of a surge of migration to Europe, particularly among African and Syrian refugees trying to escape violent conflicts and civil wars in their home nations. The years 2014 and 2015 saw a surge within that surge as Europe’s migration “problem” morphed into the “global migrant crisis,” as it is portrayed by the metropolitan news media. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had reached 59.5 million, up from 51.2 million in 2013 and the highest number on record.1
Although such numbers may be unprecedented, it is worth contextualizing them. The mass displacements of 2014 recall the aftermath of World War II, the only other time in recorded history that global displacement exceeded 50 million people. In the wake of that war, national leaders agreed upon the need for stronger international frameworks of cooperation, as evidenced by the founding of the United Nations (1945) and the issuance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)—imperfect but necessary attempts to protect peoples unprotected by nation-states. In the wake of 2014, the efficacy of such international frameworks is more than ever in question as small wars proliferate across developing nations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and others. UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres laments, “It is terrifying that on the one hand there is more and more impunity for those starting conflicts, and on the other there is seeming utter inability of the international community to work together to stop wars and build and preserve peace.”2 Nowhere is the pressing need for internationalism better embodied than in the matter of forced displacement brought on by, if not world war, a world of wars.
If, as political philosopher Thomas Nail has declared, “the twenty-first century is the century of the migrant,” then how do we square unparalleled levels of displacement with the retrenchment of national borders and the resurgence of xenophobic politics across Europe, North America, South Africa, and other nations confronted with the resettlement of migrant peoples?3 The answer is more complicated than an administrative rhetoric of scarce resources, high unemployment, or a lack of infrastructure would suggest. Indeed, the treatment of mass displacement as a “global migrant crisis” speaks less to the plight of the migrant than to the plight of states, which perceive themselves to be under assault. Their alarm is symptomatic of some of the most intractable elements within ideologically national models of belonging—elements that prize autarky over exchange and that link the reproduction of communal identity to racial and territorial continuity.
This book has been about how a revitalized concept of modernist internationalism can contest such isolationist aspects of national cultures and even take narratives of communal cohesion beyond identitarian claims. The tradition examined here shows how place-based models of belonging have begotten circulation-based models of expulsion, such that bounded territories become the unspoken foundations of obligation and fellowship. Modernist internationalism, reconfigured in historically specific and beyond-European terms, helps us to understand why mass displacement is perceived as an assault on states. Its analyses of global inequality and securitized borders offer vital insight into the ongoing resistance to internationalism, and its cultivation of transnational memories and supranational solidarities opens up pathways for overcoming such resistance.
The specters of criminality and fugitivity hang over nomadic collectives—whether vagabonds, emigrants, or refugees—because states moralize transience as part of their border-policing regimes. Such regimes are historical as well as territorial. The most vulnerable migrants, those most vilified and most denied political membership, often embody the unwanted memories and unacknowledged histories of host and transit nations. This has certainly been the case in the European Union and the United States, both of which have been reluctant to acknowledge the persistence of imperial legacies and the fallout of free trade as sources of forced migration to their borders.
Drawing borders around historical memory may seem abstract, but the consequences of such memory policing are palpable in the increasingly vehement calls for fences and walls to protect “rightful” citizens from “illegal” migrants, who are stigmatized on the basis of race and religion. In her study of walls, Wendy Brown observes that such physical structures form psychic defenses against a globalized modernity: “Walls cleave the reality of global interdependence and global disorder with stage set productions of intact nationhood, autonomy and self-sufficiency.”4 Yet, as the theatricality of “stage set productions” implies, such psychic defense is itself awash in angst because it rests upon exaggerated displays of state power and unenforceable definitions of national identity and domestic territory. Brown’s study reveals walls to be the Potemkin villages of contemporary states under globalization—concrete-and-metal manifestations of populist paranoia and sovereign power in crisis. Built to impose and intimidate, walls inadvertently convey the state’s distress; they are chilling twenty-first-century examples of what Rabindranath Tagore described as the despotic desire for “hard, clear-cut, perfect form.”
From Tagore onward, the writers converging in this study have rethought the boundaries of the work of art in order to challenge despotic and autarkic theories of national community. In particular, they have revisited the principles and practices of the literary form that we call modernist to imagine more interdependent models of nationhood and to reflect upon as well as diversify styles of political belonging and internationalist expression. Approaching the work of art not as the transcendence of resistant material but as the mediation of it, they generate a modernist internationalism in tune with its various medium dependencies—with the translations that make it available to multiple audiences (Tagore); with the processes of collation, printing, and reprinting that necessarily destabilize notions of formal unity (Michael Ondaatje); and with the sheer force of language, which overwhelms attempts to shape it into an emblem of national culture or global transparency (James Joyce and Zadie Smith). Modernist internationalism’s deliberate chimeras of form are a riposte to the fortress state’s despotic forms of “intact nationhood.” They take apart, with language, those walls and fences that are intended to detain racialized migrant bodies and to secure borders that always, somehow or another, end up being crossed.
Some might ask what such a dismantling is worth. What can language, especially literary language, really do in the face of such solid objects and the rising tide of displacement? Literary form is precisely the mechanism by which writers have tried to answer that question. They have used form to explore the limits and possibilities of the artwork and of art’s work with respect to political agency. In wryly contemplating the value of literary experimentation as a kind of sociopolitical intervention (recall Joyce’s “genial illusion” and McKay’s jovial self-definition as an internationalist who is also a politically “bad nationalist”), modernists have refined literature’s capacity to reveal the world by reflecting on its capacity to change it. Beyond this, they have advanced new techniques within the realm of form to address the abstract causalities and long-distance accountabilities of a globalizing modernity as matters of figuration and feeling.
By teasing out the semiotic dimensions of the solid world and the cosmopolitical dimensions of various types of chimeric longing, modernist internationalism beyond Europe does not just invite readers to imagine communities differently—outside the paradigm of bounded, discrete, and singular entities. It also asks us to contend with the increasing unknow-ability of communities as collective membership, political agency, and social obligation grow more diffuse and deterritorialized. Most importantly, it confronts us with the partiality of knowledge, making legible in literary form the epistemological illegibility, confusion, and opacity that arise when writers, readers, and works cross lines of power.
The works that populate the present book have tested the limits of cosmopolitical knowledge in various ways—by bringing major and minor languages into contact, by directing attention to small islands and (for metropolitan readers) faraway wars, and by broaching large-scale economic processes in local ways. Their writers have questioned the adequacy of literary form for such tasks and, by working within its constraints, have widened its repertoire. Their innovations have come from wrestling with rather than aggrandizing the agency of literature.5 But formal experiments also serve as absolutely necessary exercises in hubris, inasmuch as each writer comes to question rather than accept those lines of political compromise that separate legitimate desires from illegitimate ones, achievable goals from unachievable chimeras.
This account of modernist internationalism brings me to a work that explicitly thematizes the mediated nature of its agency in the world and uses its self-reflexivity to theorize forced migration not simply as a tragic sociological condition or troubling demographic pattern but as the will to survive. Shailja Patel’s Migritude premiered as “a 90-minute theatre show complete with set, choreography, dance, soundscape, and visuals” in Berkeley, California, in 2006.6 It tells the story of Patel’s origins in displacement as a Kenyan of Indian descent and her subsequent migrations to Britain and the United States. Patel unfolds her tale by unfolding and displaying a series of saris from her trousseau—a gift from her mother for a marriage that Shailja knows will never take place. Patel recontextualizes the saris (symbols of her mother’s unfulfilled wishes, as well as costumes of straight femininity) and uses them as tapestries that trace out the legacies of imperialism. Her family’s story of expulsion from Uganda under Idi Amin’s dictatorship and their resettlement in Kenya crosses with a larger indictment of the ills of empire and postcolonial nationhood, especially as they have been enacted on the bodies of women. Patel performed Migritude in Austria, Italy, Zanzibar, and elsewhere, including Nairobi, where it was the closing event at the World Social Forum in 2007. She subsequently re-mediated the show into an experimentally written book, and it is specifically the print version of Migritude that I offer as this study’s closing chimera of form.
Turning a show into a book is a paradoxical sort of task because it involves creating something new that is also a tribute to an antecedent and, for many readers, missed occasion. By constantly alluding to a highly orchestrated event, the print version makes us privy to the prior life of the object in our hands, but in such a way as to make us aware of the distances and proximities being negotiated in the move from stage to page. The print Migritude is thus a self-reflexive work of art but not a self-contained one. It suggests that migration stories must be told in migrating ways. They must convey differential degrees of access (some parts of a re-mediated story will be well preserved while others will be transformed or lost), and they must make participants think about where they arrive in the history of a work’s production and reception.
Migritude foregrounds the life cycles of a work of art and proceeds by dividing the reader’s subjectivity. On one hand, we are made to feel like migrants ourselves—groping our way through a story that has already begun and whose premises are never going to be completely available to us. On the other, we are made to feel our own sedentariness as the work migrates to us through a subsequent media form. Given that no one—not even the author herself, as we shall see—has access to the whole history of this re-mediated work of art, Migritude comes to incarnate the ideas of partial knowledge and medium dependency, which philosophically underpin modernist internationalism beyond Europe. Because the work’s print iteration emerges out of the conjuncture of theatrical performance and textual form, it also lends some external purchase on the specificities of the literary mode that has preoccupied Chimeras of Form.
Migritude accentuates the idea that its own survival is predicated on its ability to theorize its changing mediums and audiences. This technological and aesthetic lesson is also an epistemological one, in that the work provincializes the choice of reading (as opposed to viewing or embodying) as the preeminent way of coming into knowledge about such a viscerally painful experience as forced migration or expulsion. Moreover, it is a political lesson, in that the work’s re-mediation from show to book inflects its author’s anxieties about crossing the borders between protest and art, stage and page. As a self-identified artist and activist, Patel’s challenge is to address empirical histories of forced migration sensitively, without turning migrant bodies into sterile statistics or spectacles of a state crisis that is extensively covered in the news media but only cursorily felt through it.7
Patel’s rearticulation of mass displacement turns away from journalistic discourse by exploring what Carrie Noland calls, in the context of Negritude poetry, “the constructive process of subjectivation in writing.” Noland’s emphasis on the Negritude poets’ implication in “modernist print culture” revises the dominant reception of these poets as political because their poems were expressive of empirical selves and representative of an oppressed people’s collective experience. By emphasizing the mediation and modulation of print in the making of a subjectivity, Noland argues that the political dimension of Negritude poetry is never reducible to empirical expressivity, nor is it irradiated by an extreme aestheticism. The political quality of art lies in its negotiation of aesthetic play within historical parameters of responsibility—parameters that the work of art is not just subject to but is also, itself, capable of setting.8
Patel’s Migritude, like the Negritude poetry with which it resonates, faces the problem of subjectivation in print and of giving voice to collective pain through a medium that disembodies voice, especially when it is compared with theater. Patel approaches this problem by hybridizing print—that is, she grafts principles of performance theory onto her practices of literary form and book design. The print version of Migritude comprises four main parts that are relentlessly recursive and occasionally tangential. Part I (“Migritude”) presents the text of the play itself, under sixteen chapter headings. Part II (“The Shadow Book”) rehearses the play again by repeating the chapter headings of part I. However, instead of Patel’s stage monologues, we get her interior monologue and reminiscence about how she and her collaborators put the play together. Collaborators here include people with both strong and weak ties to the production: those who officially worked on the play, such as Patel’s director, Kim Cook; those who informed Patel’s memories in the play, such as her mother or people she dated; and those who viewed the play, such as a bookshop owner in Italy. Part III (“The Making and Other Poems”) features poems, several of which had appeared in earlier drafts of Migritude but had been cut from the stage script.
Part IV (“The Journey”) presents an unusual timeline that mixes the political history pertinent to Migritude’s empirical scope with the self-reflexive history of its theatrical performance and print re-mediation. The timeline draws on deep time and implies that the production of Migritude began in the sixth century B.C. (when one of its visual motifs, “boteh / ambi / paisley,” was first recorded, in Central Asia) and ends with its 2010 print publication by Kaya Press in New York (Migritude, 129–133). Then, however, two subsequent interviews with Patel in this section stretch the work’s life further. The first, conducted by Emanuele Monegato, is based not on the play (which Monegato never saw) but on a translated version of Migritude, which he first encountered in an Italian/English edition. The second interview is by Vanita Reddy, who attended the first performance of Migritude in Berkeley but presumably did not read the Italian/English edition of it.
The organization of materials in part IV extends the idea of collaboration in part II, wherein many participate in the “journey” of the work by entering into it at different points in its life, from conception to performance to translation. Those who enter into its life also crucially extend that life, making the model for the production of Migritude more evolutionary than stationary. Indeed, the allusion to the sixth century B.C., the deep time of human history, suggests that Migritude itself extends the life of ancient arts, like paisley design, which become re-mediated motifs displayed on Patel’s stage saris and, later, on her book pages.
Patel’s evolutionary approach to re-mediation seems less indebted to a technologically determined media theory than to one of the major principles of performance theory, that “performance is an executed copy of an original that does not exist, except as a retrospective understanding or prescient expectation, an implicit compact between the performer and the spectator, but one subject to renegotiation in a heartbeat.”9 Joseph Roach’s quote emphasizes iteration and revision as key aspects of performance. Through them, an auratic version of the “original” work is replaced by a temporalized one in which “an original” becomes the product of cumulative and collaborative knowledge (“a retrospective understanding”) or acts as the placeholder for anticipating that form of knowledge (“a prescient expectation”). Either way, Migritude transposes the iteration and revision of multimedia theatrical performance to multigeneric print in order to bring the evolutionary ambit of performance into its specifically literary forms of migritude.
I have taken the time to delineate the contents of the book because they bespeak the printed work’s capacity to orchestrate text and paratext, to mix up genres of poetic performance with those of information storage and documentary retrieval. Even if read in silence and isolation, Migritude is a textual object that conveys the ritual tied up in public performance. It uses each generic iteration to widen its circle of actual and potential collaborators, to include readers of the book in multiple languages as well as spectators of the play in multiple locales.
Migritude, in other words, makes a point of its internationalism by making a point of its re-mediation from performance to print. Re-mediation is also the method by which the printed book dramatizes the thorniness inherent to subjectivation, particularly when an individual self becomes entangled with the voicing of an oppressive collective fate. The word migritude is a portmanteau of migrant and attitude, but migrit- is also a homophone of “my grit,” a reference to the resistant material of migrant life, which becomes the artist’s possession to transform and yet is also beyond her capacity to shape utterly. The neologism migritude further sparks the polysemy of attitude as a concept that blurs the boundaries between individual and collective, mental disposition and embodied gesture, historicized perspective and aesthetic category.
By mobilizing these many aspects of attitude, Patel generates the communal voice of migritude while also voicing her struggle with her own aesthetic agency and the political agency of art. This approach necessarily veers between the Scylla of self-indulgence and the Charybdis of unreflectively speaking on behalf of others. Take, for example, sections of Patel’s timeline that compress her work history with world history:
2003: Kenyan survivors of rape by British soldiers begin legal action against Britain’s Ministry of Defense. I am laid off from my job—become a full-time artist…
2009: Mau Mau veteran survivors and Kenya Human Rights Commission file suit in the British High Court for reparations from the British government for torture. Lieto Colle edition of Migritude is shortlisted for the Camaiore International Poetry Prize.
(Migritude, 132–133)
In these sections, Patel affords stories of legal redress and reparation the same weight as stories of personal setbacks, decision-making, and professional success. Such a tactic is motivated by the staid conviction that “we cannot know ourselves or our nations—or meet the truth of our present moment—until we look at how we got there” (128). Yet it is the method of convergence, in which self-witness and self-gratification enmesh with projects of collective witness and transitional justice, that gives the print Migritude a controversial edge that is distinct from the theatrical version. The self-reflexivity associated with tracking the work’s life and the artist’s autobiography leads to dilemmas of representation and proportion. How does one balance an interest in the aesthetic and the personal with a commitment to the historical and the collective? Pondering this question, as we shall see, allows Patel to address head-on the relationship between poetic invention and political change.
“The Making,” the titular poem of part III (the section containing poems cut from the stage version), claims the immediacy of disclosure. It is about taking a leap forward over “everything I didn’t know, all the skills and resources I didn’t have, the gut terror of not knowing what I was doing” (100). The lyric “I” here confesses Patel’s inner turmoil at the very moment of deciding to make Migritude, yet it also, by virtue of being written, modifies and improvises upon that personal confession to take on the tumultuous leaps of migration as a policed public activity. The poem’s most compelling stanzas render the mediation of the migrant plight impossible without the artist’s risk and fortitude; in turn, the referent for such risk and fortitude quickly exceeds the artist:
Make it from rage / every smug idiotic face you’ve
ever wanted to smash / into the carnage of war every
encounter / that’s left your throat choked / with what
you dared not say excavate / the words that hid in your
churning stomach through visa controls / words you
swallowed down / until over the border they are / still
where they knew / you would return for them
(124)
This stanza, at first, seems born out of Patel’s own experience of migrating from the Global South to the Global North. In using apostrophe to address herself, however, she expands and elevates the referent “you” beyond herself. It begins to name and encompass members of a wider migrant collective who not only have shared similar experiences of rage, silencing, and impotence in the face of border control but also have found themselves performing obedience in ways that put their words at odds with their feelings. By performing on stage, Patel would reclaim her body from imposed regulations through motion, gesture, and costume. By performing on the page, she uses lineation and punctuation to evoke a body choking and churning—a body that, precisely because it is disembodied by print, becomes less yoked to Patel herself.
This pained and disoriented body, the migrant body, is not exteriorized, as in journalistic or photographic accounts, but is interiorized through the breakdown of poetic lines. The line is often described as the basic unit of poetry—a segment that, like the chapter in prose, indicates internal wholeness even if it is only part of a larger work. Patel slashes that wholeness typographically in ways that sometimes set off meaningful syntactic phrases and other times interrupt them so as to inject opacity into transparent language. For example, in the line “you dared not say excavate / the words that hid in your,” excavate is slashed or amputated from the phrasal body in which it makes the most semantic sense. Lineally, Patel performs the “carnage of war” by bringing meaningful syntactic units into collision and creating the debris of dangling or misplaced words. In another poetic line from this stanza (“swallowed down / until over the border they are / still”) the slash marks combined with enjambment suggest a brief respite from turmoil as the churning stomach goes “still,” once over the border. In the pause created by that respite, the speaker returns to the scene of violence and retrieves her words (“where they knew / you would return for them”).
For a work obsessed with motion in both topic and form, stillness stands out. It connotes a sense of refuge drawn from within the migrant body rather than from without. In that sense, the stillness within migritude expresses a core power and consistency internal to displaced people (migrants or refugees) for whom places like Europe and the United States represent not beacons of hope but gambles for survival. Counter-intuitively, the abstractions of print abet Patel’s efforts to express migritude viscerally and collectively. Using the affordances of print to write poetry that sticks in the throat, she recovers the innards of migrant bodies and reimagines the unspoken language of border crossing in a specifically literary medium. It is from within the province of the literary that Patel crafts a migrant voice and reconnects with art’s political potential:
Make it knowing that art / is not political change / make
it a prayer / for real political change / a homage to your
heroes a libation / to your gods
(124)
As if to suggest the limits of art’s power, poetic language grows plainer here. Patel reminds readers that she knows the difference between art and “real political change.” Art is not regime change, reparation, transitional justice, or asylum—a variety of real-world causes that appear in Migritude and to which an activist might pledge herself. In not being those things, Patel seems to suggest, “it”—the aesthetic production that is Migritude—must throw its lot in with putatively unreal, devotional acts like prayer, homage, and libation.
Patel rightly acknowledges the limitations of her stage and page performances as interventions into the empirical conflicts that they figure. However, her shuttling from history to theology, empiricism to spirituality, too quickly cedes the specificity of art’s agency by metaphorically conflating it with religiosity, ethereality, and subordination. In Patel’s positive definition of art as “a prayer for real political change,” “real” is the test by which art’s worldly agency fails. The real separates Patel’s activism from her artistry, which veers toward the otherworldly. But is the implication that art’s work must consign itself to the realm of the unreal accurate?
Migritude would suggest otherwise. By contemplating its own interventions as an actor in the world and maker of audiences/collaborators, the “performance book” ends up lending a sharper understanding of art’s activity in the world. The re-mediated work negotiates between the empirical description of migration situations (including its own) and the un-empirical sentiments that compose a migrant attitude, between external reference to history and current events and internal reference to structure, style, and its own processes of production and reception. The constant oscillation between the documentation of historical events and a printed performance that, through generic organization, figuration, and lineal patterns, reshapes the perception of history and collective resilience is what determines the making of the poem. Making—a gerund that derives noun from verb, an object from an action—signals the particular craft and graft of Migritude as a work that crosses the desire for empirical political change with the unempirical but nonetheless perception-altering figurations of literary form. This work of art’s embodied self-reflexivity, its attention to itself as a vehicle of and for mediation, becomes an unexpected resource for critically examining the “real” of politics and for undoing the presuppositions of immediacy and transparency that underlie it.
If it is the ultimate chimera of form to imagine that art’s work may effect political change, then, as the writers gathered in this study have shown over and over again, that is a chimera worth pausing over. Rather than overstate or discredit art’s political agency, these writers have grappled with it to better understand when to build and when to question the bridge between the indirect action of literary form and the direct action of protest. Art’s work, as they have modeled it, has been to develop medium-specific strategies for engaging and analyzing internationalism as an actually existing and often internally riven discourse. Those strategies, as each chapter here has argued in its own way, have channeled and reshaped the incompatibilities of internationalist discourse to render more articulate the possibilities for political transformation latent within them.
Such aesthetic projects alone cannot solve problems of policy, but they exert agency by being propaedeutic. That is, they offer readers preliminary instruction in discerning the power dynamics, social struggles, and intellectual impasses of modernity as a globalizing force. They show us how state and cultural violence are implicit in established ways of thinking about collective membership as bounded and territorialized, and they devise new metaphors, images, words, and categories for rethinking belonging and political obligation with feeling and force. Propaedeutics exist to prime the faculties for more advanced study; they do not circumscribe judgment but cultivate its exercise. Their value is shot through with utopian impulses, to be sure, but it is not the concept of utopia that best articulates the methods or stakes of modernist internationalism beyond Europe.
I have turned to and fleshed out the comparatively undernourished concept of the chimera to offer a model of illegitimate longing in place of utopia’s grandly empowered visions. The chimera’s conjunction of possibility with impossibility, triviality with intensity, and fantasy with self-deception is most appropriate to theorizing a modernism of colonized and minoritized writers who found themselves unable to follow the party lines of liberal or socialist, nationalist or antinationalist internationalisms. As these writers wove their political frustrations and desires into aesthetic form, they found a suppleness in literature that is missing from more propositional kinds of discourse. They used that suppleness to address the blind spots created by clear ideological oppositions and to stimulate new categories of relation among contradictory views. The internal conflicts that led them astray from organized politics led them to social scenes of impracticality, failed aspiration, and ambiguous agency. Mining these chimeric sites for critical insight, they arrived at unpredictable configurations of anticolonial and global imagination.
The conceptual power of their chimeras differs markedly from the conceptual power of utopia as defined by Fredric Jameson and Theodor Adorno. Jameson identifies the power and paradox of utopia as rooted in its “constitutive secessionism, a withdrawal or ‘de-linking’ from the empirical and historical world.” For Adorno, such secessionism guarantees utopia’s autonomy from the existing world, as does its heroic refusal to be tamed by the representational resources available to that world.10 The defiance of form is the source of utopia’s prestige and its radicalism. Chimeras, on the contrary, exist in form; they yoke imagination to empiricism, aesthetic innovation to historical exigency. They are weaker, less absolute figures of hope but also more attached ones. Chimeras of form carry the taint rather than the glamour of impossibility because they remain immanent to modernity, attentive to its domains of discounted experience, and embroiled in disputes with its most authoritative ways of knowing.