— Mariam Pirbhai
Last of the last, first of the new,
Wake up to yourself,
Imaginary soils bear no fruit.
—“Per Antonio,” The Other Shore
The prose-poems which comprise The Other Shore, remarks Antonio D’Alfonso, are no more than “broken verses, broken thoughts, about broken feelings . . . a notebook without a beginning, without an end, only a flowing towards being, a growing; contradictions and explanations” (TOS 7). D’Alfonso’s insistence on both the fractured and fluid nature of The Other Shore coincides with his understanding of identity as a “process of becoming” (“The Road Between” 211). In The Other Shore, this “process of becoming” is most resonant in the section entitled “Guglionesi.” Here, the poet slips in and out of subject positions to mirror the differing degrees to which he is alienated by or in sympathy with the geography of his ancestral past. These slippages are represented through a series of pronominal shifts which at times negatively highlight the anxiety of fragmentation and rupture, and at times positively alight upon the potential of identitarian plurality and flux. These pronominal shifts thus symbolize the diasporic poetics of selfhood that is typified in the Guglionesi section, given the poet’s epiphany that land, memory and culture are invariably contained with the individual, making recovery a highly personal aesthetic project that is only ever as complete as the self-pronouncing “I.”
The “Guglionesi” section serves as a poetic articulation of the “process of becoming.” Through a close reading of the section’s pronominal shifts, I will trace the particular contexts—following the order in which the poems are themselves presented—in which such shifts occur, and the manners in which they reflect the poet’s emerging diasporic subjectivity. By so doing, I will attempt to illustrate how D’Alfonso’s developing poetics functions as a series of often disorienting rifts between seemingly competing cultural identities. These rifts are progressively fused into a self-affirming poetic voice that engages in continual negotiations of self and, by extension, opens itself up to the possibility of growth and change.
As a second-generation Italian-Canadian, D’Alfonso’s sociocultural and familial field of reference extends beyond Canada’s borders. D’Alfonso’s identity is thus hyphenated as an Italian-Canadian in cultural and linguistic terms. As a member of Quebec society, D’Alfonso’s identity is further fractured between the French, English and Italian communities. Rather than being assimilated within “one” or more of his sociolinguistic parts, then, D’Alfonso wishes to bring together the seemingly disjunctive parts of his identity, arriving at a more coherent, centred sense of self that embraces, rather than rejects, the differences which comprise it.
D’Alfonso insists that such a cultural convergence cannot occur without a concomitant search for that part of himself from which he has been most acutely severed. To this end, perhaps, he writes: “An Italian in Canada and Quebec cannot be transcultural or a ‘citizen of the world’ unless he is first an Italian . . . It is by being ourselves to the core that we will learn to offer the best of ourselves to others, to go beyond ourselves” (“The Road Between” 226). D’Alfonso’s use of the term “core” appears to contradict his open-ended aesthetics of selfhood as a “processual,” ongoing formation. However, when D’Alfonso speaks of “being ourselves to the core,” I do not believe he is speaking of an essentialist or static notion of “Italianness” to which it is possible for the Italian immigrant to return. Rather, he is speaking of an “Italy” that is otherwise inaccessible, or only partially accessible, in the adoptive country, and points to a necessary return to the site which symbolically and literally marks this absence. “By being ourselves to the core,” then, D’Alfonso urges the immigrant to confront this loss, a confrontation without which the immigrant’s multifaceted identity is only partially acknowledged.
In “The Return of Immigrants to Their Native Communities,” Cesare Pitto poetically suggests that “the search for the village of our memories, in which ideally we wish ourselves to be, is tied to that need to return to the past, which haunts the soul of whoever has lost his accustomed surroundings” (193). In The Other Shore, Guglionesi is the poet’s point of return—a paradoxical step backwards so as to move forwards toward a more stable and coherent sense of cultural and personal identity. Guglionesi—the place of D’Alfonso’s origins—offers the poet a chance to recover that part of his identity from which he has been physically and historically removed. The poet’s return is thus an attempt not simply at retrieval but also at finding a way to articulate the significance of memorial recovery for the present moment. Far from signalling a step back to a static past, the poet’s return to Guglionesi is an essential step forward in the “process of becoming.”
The poet’s journey through Guglionesi opens with the poem “Babel.” The poem is appropriately titled since it marks the beginning of a journey compelled by a crisis of identity that is most evidently felt in linguistic terms. Several critics have commented on the linguistic shifts in their analysis of D’Alfonso’s work, and of “Babel” in particular. Pierre L’Hérault, for instance, draws upon the notion of “le trinôme linguistique” (79) in his reading of “Babel.” In fact, D’Alfonso’s poem shifts between four languages: Italian, French, English and Spanish. By way of introduction to his parents’ (and, by extension, his) native Guglionesi, the poet withholds all personal pronouns in “Babel” until the objective case “me” arises: “finding thousands like me suffering/me casé y divorcié en tierra fria” (TOS 57).
The self emerges in the context of fellow-immigrants, the only community with which the poet may unproblematically identify at this stage of his journey. The poet’s total implication of self is withheld until the last three lines; until, that is, the poet’s linguistic schizophrenia is felt in full-blown proportions. Here, the poet’s tongues are no longer neatly separated, line by line, but intermingle in the single existential and/or spiritual question, “Dio where shall I be demain/(trop vif) qué peudo saber yo/spero che la terra be mine” (57). The poet is only able to identify himself within the many-tongued voice of his multilingual heritage: the “babelian” clash or convergence of tongues is apparently the poet’s most honest expression of self.
This syntactical mixing of languages hints at a return journey that must necessarily transcend the particular region of Guglionesi and its dialect, given the fact that the poet is approaching the region from the perspective of an already variegated subject position. Thus, while the final imperative “be” together with the possessive “mine” refer to the “terra” the poet seeks to reclaim as his, “espero” (the expression of his desire) undercuts what appears to be his singular will to possess. As this desire shifts between Italian, French, English and Spanish, so, too, does the imperative “be” shift to the subjunctive “be.”
Indeed, the poet’s physical, cultural and linguistic slippages between Canada and Italy mirror his psychological movement from a headstrong imperative to a hopeful and tentative desire in his reclamation of his origins. These slippages further hint at the “imperative” nature of his journey as a necessary return to his origins. They also hint at the likelihood that, despite his desire to reconcile the linguistic and cultural confusion out of which this journey is compelled, Guglionesi, as a singularly comprehensible and reclaimable entity, will remain elusive.
“Babel” is accordingly followed by the poet’s complete immersion in his native Guglionesi not in the imperative or the desirous “be mine,” but in the prevaricating “Where Do I Begin?” From the outset, the poet’s return is not the mythic, epic journey back to the homeland — not the return of the prodigal son to the motherland — but a tentative step toward self-discovery. Subsequently, Guglionesi is at once questioned as a cultural point of origin and as an acceptable starting point along a journey that is itself ambiguous: “Where do I begin?/In this landscape beneath the mighty Maiella?/Is one moment to remember worth so much effort and concentration?” (58)
In the context of uncertainty, pronominal shifts occur between “I” and “you.” These shifts signal the interchangeability of the poet’s subject position and, by extension, the poet’s sense of insecurity as he hovers precariously between them. In this respect, the reader cannot fully ascertain whether “you” refers to the inhabitants of Guglionesi or to the poet himself. In either case, “you” distances the poet from his undertaking at the point at which he can question the nature of the journey itself; hence, the speaker asks: “Who are you trying to get at?” (58). The distance between “you” and “I” also signals the mutually exclusive distance between the poet and the inhabitants of Guglionesi: Both the people of Guglionesi and the poet are the excluded and excluding “you” (the “other”) simultaneously.
The subsequent poems, “To Maintain Your Identity,” “The Loss of a Culture” and “The Family,” further complicate the poet’s process of identification with the community. From one poem to the next, this collective identification is progressively undermined in cultural, familial and individual terms. The title/statement “To Maintain Your Identity” seems to answer the poet’s preceding title/question (“Where Do I Begin?”). Given the ontological confusion already emphasized in the first two poems, however, the title is clearly an ironic affirmation of self, which leads to the inevitable question: “How easy is it for you to maintain your identity?” (59). Although the poet is in the throes of attempted recovery and retrieval, the poem itself reinforces the distance between the poet and the people. Hence, the “you sitting on a bench writing” is still a distant observer of “your people” and “your dialect: mixture of Frentani, Latin, French, Slav, German, Turkish, Arab” (59).
In the first few poems, the poet’s return to his Italian heritage is tinged with failure. As such, the return does not emphasize gain as much as it signals loss. Indeed, “The Loss of a Culture” arises as a series of negations and antagonisms between the clearly ill-maintained “you” and the seemingly foreign territory to which the poet has returned. Alienated by the very culture he hoped to possess, the poet instinctively turns toward the more tangible family history to which he is undeniably attached. But even in the context of the family, the speaking subject assumes the alienated voice. Here, the use of the third-person (the impersonal) “one” presents a double-bind, for “one” may imply singularity as unity or singularity as apartness. From a seeming reclamation of identity to a paradoxical “oneness,” the pronominal shifts in the above poems move the poet farther away from the projected landscape of his desire.
It is in the poem “Guglionesi” that the poet assumes the possessive stance once again, switching from the alienating “your people” to the inclusive “my people,” “my culture.” However, we are not to be fooled by the poet’s confident use of the possessive pronoun. Only as an “enumerator” of Guglionesi’s resources — as a detached observer of the factual, physical realities of Guglionesi’s geography — is the poet able to speak of the “energies that participate in the making of a person, of a country” (62).
The moment the poet allows the self-conscious “I” to speak, however, his memory slips between the “innumerable” cracks of his own geographic points of reference. Thus, when his subjective train of thought supersedes his objective “enumerating,” he is able to envision Italy through a body of writers as geographically and temporally removed as Ovidio and Mary di Michele. Alienated within and exiled from without, the geography he wishes to reclaim (to “be his”) doubly thwarts the poet’s desired kinship with Guglionesi and its inhabitants. As much as he tries to be the “I” who speaks of and for his people, such self-implication necessarily takes him elsewhere (namely, to his other point of reference: Canada).
“Sant’Adamo Came Here” is a significant stage in the poet’s process of becoming since it is here that the poet’s possessive identification with “my people” first emerges within the context of the adoptive country: “There are more of my people in Montréal than there are in Guglionesi” (64). Having realized that Guglionesi has been subject to innumerable cultural and linguistic invasions or occupations throughout its history, the poet is unable to “relate” to the region’s inhabitants because he is unable to establish any stable sense of “their” identities, given their own internally shifting histories. This poem offers the poet his first inkling of the impossibility of returning to the past in order to find a “core,” an essential centre: “There is no return, only a coming to, a coming towards. No linearity in experience or identity, only the awareness. The more I look ahead, the more I look inside. This is my geography” (64).
Here D’Alfonso arrives at the diasporic subject’s quintessential epiphany: namely, that the object of loss as a stable, recoverable entity is the émigré’s projected myth, an illusion that usually shatters upon arrival in the geographic site of one’s ancestral past. Consequently, the poet is forced to re-imagine or re-map the object of loss, not in the cartography of ancestral memory and its signposts of meaning, but in the cartography of individual meaning production: that is to say, through an individual excavation of selfhood. This, perhaps, is the “core,” the notion of “being ourselves,” of which D’Alfonso speaks. For the first time, then, the poet assumes a self-pronouncing “I” that is free of ironic undertones. This is the first sign of the poet’s self-possession as opposed to his nostalgically or outwardly projected desire for a stable sense of self through idealized, essentialist or projected versions of his land/country/people.
In his study of Italian-Canadian writing, Marino Tuzi suggests that for the Italian immigrant and his/her offspring “a stable sense of self remains a hypothetical enterprise, since the Italian Canadian is constantly choosing from, and being shaped by an array of infinite and changeable subject positions” (The Power of Allegiances 15). As seen in “Sant’Adamo Came Here,” this shifting sense of identity applies not only to the Italian living outside Italy’s borders, but also to the Italian living within Italy. Indeed, D’Alfonso’s aesthetics underlines and embraces a play of difference to which we are all subject: “Difference, or the awareness of being different, has finally dawned on us” (“The Road Between” 219).
In “Il vero divorzio è l’emigrazione,” this play of difference is manifested in a full-blown spectrum of pronouns and pronominal shifts. Here, the pronouns (I, his, her, their, us, my, our and we) disrupt any stable position from which the poet may be identified as a part of, or apart from, the goings-on of Guglionesi. Indeed, the poet speaks of the disruptive effects of emigration, of the splitting apart of families and peoples, to the extent to which all parties involved (they and we) become the dispossessed and dispossessing subjects. The eruption of pronouns mirrors the poet’s recognition of the fractured geographies and diasporic histories to which both native and immigrant are “subject,” albeit to differing degrees.
Once the poet resists the notion of a static geographic and cultural identity, he is able to assume a more socially conscious and critical voice. The poet’s sudden involvement in the political and social reality of Guglionesi may be attributed to his recognition that neither the site of his past (Italy) nor the site of his present (Canada) escapes the “process of becoming.” In this manner, he is able to critically “look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible” (Said 60).
The poem “Who Are We” thus begins to question the bureaucratic and social systems that give rise to the émigré’s departure, together with the native’s complacency — the choice “to remain silent and smile” (TOS 68) — as his/her compatriots disperse. Moreover, when the poet identifies himself with the collective “we” of Guglionesi, he does so in the awareness that the political and ethical choices that produce such trajectories are neither static nor uni-dimensional, but also continually responding to a complex interplay of historical and other forces. Thus, by questioning who “we” are, the poet suggests that identity-formation as a conscious and critical process of self-confrontation extends as much to the community as to the individual.
Once the diasporic subject is able to resist nostalgic and static versions of his past, he is able to acknowledge that both native and emigré have been affected, often adversely, by emigration as a form of destabilization or loss: “When we look at ourselves, we do not see pink and yellow satin ribbons in the sky . . . We see oil-stained faces and bags of tired skin under our dog-wet eyes” (67–8).
This newfound self-consciousness enables the poet to straddle culture or continents simultaneously to the extent that observer and participant are no longer seen to be mutually exclusive roles but rather compatible perspectives that combine to produce a critical subjectivity. Finding himself implicated, however indirectly, in Guglionesi’s affairs, the poet is able to observe as well as participate in the unfolding of both Italian and Canadian history. He is accordingly able to remember family history without the former anxiety with which he confronted the notion of the family unit in “The Family.”
In other words, the poet is free to delve into one history without losing sight of the other. For instance, in “Living Beside Santa Maria Maggiore,” the poet tours the personal landscape of his father and the events which may have led to the latter’s decision to leave Italy; in “Nonna Lucia” he revisits his ageing grandmother. In this way, the poet attempts to ascertain his family history as a composite of individual yet interrelated testimonies and events. Here, the personal pronouns “you” and “she” refer to father and grandmother respectively. They are not evoked as the alienating or paradoxically impersonal pronouns of former poems, but as unproblematic symbols of his familiarity with and connection to his family members and their particular histories.
Many of D’Alfonso’s critical notions regarding the immigrant experience — particularly as (it) pertains to the Italian community — appear to have been developed in dialogue with writer/critic Fulvio Caccia. In the subsequent poem, “Cameleonte,” D’Alfonso seems to be alluding directly to Caccia’s understanding of the symbol of the phoenix in relation to the immigrant experience. Caccia writes, in his introduction to Interviews with the Phoenix: Interviews with Fifteen Italian-Quebecois Artists:
From object, it [the immigrant community] becomes subject that acts inside and through the history reflecting the community, refracting it in its own metamorphosis, like the Phoenix that dies and is reborn every morning. What other term can we apply to the delicate work of cultural mutation every society undergoes and even more so when it is an immigrant community? (7)
Indeed, D’Alfonso’s “Cameleonte” answers Caccia’s question. While the phoenix evokes the image of metamorphosis — the cultural and individual process of transformation of which D’Alfonso is keenly aware, its continual “death” is nonetheless an inadequate symbol for the unconscious as well as the “conscious” processes of struggle, adaptation and change involved in identity-formation. Alexandre Amprimoz and Sante Viselli also allude indirectly to the notion of the phoenix in their contention that “Di Cicco, di Michele, Salvatore, D’Alfonso and others are obsessed by the idea of death” (“Death Between” 113). D’Alfonso himself rejects this idea in The Other Shore, in Fabrizio’s Passion and in his critical essay: he writes, “. . . the best image to describe what Italian writers are is not the phoenix, but the chameleon” (“The Road Between” 220). D’Alfonso’s dismissal of the phoenix symbol underscores his understanding of identity formation as a conscious welding together of different and often seemingly disparate elements which bring to the fore, rather than bury or absorb, a composite and complex diversity within a new and dynamic whole.
In his response to Caccia’s phoenix symbol, then, D’Alfonso appears to beg another rhetorical question: If the death of the phoenix symbolically enacts the mutual annihilation of both cultures from which the unhyphenated ItalianCanadian may be (continually) reborn, how can the reborn self utilize his/her awareness of “The here, the there” (TOS 73) to its fullest potential? Thus, in his clearly “anti-phoenix” poem, “Cameleonte,” the poet unproblematically adopts the first person “I.” By so doing, he embraces the notion of the self as a living, breathing entity which, like the chameleon, recognizes the changing nature of his/her environment and, as a result, actively transforms with it. This is a transformation of self that assumes a conscious and active role in an ongoing process of development: “I engage myself to be the one I am. This, my struggle, my right to be. . . . If you have to compare me to an animal, let it be the living and sly chameleon, not the non-existent phoenix” (73; emphasis added).
Critical self-engagement naturally dovetails into an interrogation of the discursive systems that define individual and collective identities. In the poem “On Being a Wop,” the poet directs a series of interrogative pronouns (who, what, where) toward the “you” of a purportedly secure national body politic. Interestingly, this “you” interchangeably includes and excludes the speaking, questioning subject: “Who can say what national pride means? . . . O Italia, nation beyond nation, where will we take you now? You are not nervous when you walk among your citizens in Rome, Montreal or Frankfurt . . .; What does struggle stand for, if not the people who gave you birth? . . . The Italian culture: what does it mean to be Italian today if you live outside Italy? ‘If you don’t live in Italy, you’re not Italian.’ . . . To be anywhere just as long as you live your culture . . .” (74–75)
D’Alfonso complicates nationalist sentiment by juxtaposing his own feelings of “national pride” with those of the Italians who ironically dismiss him as an outsider. (This dismissal is further ironized by the ethnophaulism “wop” that is more commonly used outside Italy’s borders to discriminate against the peoples of the Italian diaspora.) Within his native Italian soil, the poet subverts an exclusionary nationalist discourse by ironically referring to the “nation” as the outsider, in the alienating persona of “you”: “You are not nervous when you walk among your citizens in Rome, Montreal or Frankfurt.” Here, the poet is engaged in what Tuzi refers to as “roleplaying,” one of several recurring formal strategies in Italian-Canadian writing. As Tuzi suggests, in “roleplaying . . . there is the use of the interrogative stance, in which the characters question the legitimacy and value of particular social roles that have been foisted on them by parts of mainstream society and the Italian Canadian community, or which they have chosen for themselves as a way to resolve their identity crisis” (31).
In the above poem, D’Alfonso adopts this “interrogative stance,” not simply in the Canadian or Italian-Canadian context, but in the Italian context as a whole: “Who can say what national pride means?” (TOS 74).
It is important to note that it is also in the above poem that D’Alfonso questionably seems to posit his own poetics of essentialism: “To keep your batteries in full charge in order to become what you essentially are” (75; emphasis added). In the essay, “The Road Between Essentialism: For an Italian Culture in Quebec and Canada,” D’Alfonso provides a working definition of his poetics of “essentialism.” Here, D’Alfonso aligns essentialism with “synthesis — namely, the synthesis of traditionalist and modernist extremes” (218). As the essay’s title suggests, Italian culture proffers “the road between essentialism,” because it is a third element which, in cutting across extremes, destabilizes a binary discourse.
The statement “to become what you essentially are” may at first seem to undermine D’Alfonso’s view of “becoming” as an ongoing, dynamic process. For D’Alfonso, however, this “essential” self is the invisible, dynamic other “being felt” in Canada/Quebec — a presence that, by cutting across the Canadian/Quebecois literary and cultural landscape, is in the process of bringing several elements together in a new light, and thereby transforming them: “fusion brings about something new” (D’Alfonso, “Babel and the Welder” 207). In other words, the notion of becoming “what you essentially are” is inherently paradoxical in D’Alfonso’s poetics of diasporic selfhood: it is at once a process of identification with one’s cultural and linguistic origins as well as an awareness of the dynamic, diverse and transformative nature of those origins.
In “Per Antonio,” then, the poet is less concerned with a national identity which may or may not include him. Instead, he is concerned with the aesthetic project through which he might articulate a more open-ended identity between the self-implicating “I” and the excluding “you”: “Between marriage and divorce, between marriage and solitude, the land of mixed extremes . . . Between the yes and no, between the possible and the indecision . . .” (TOS 77). Similarly, the subsequent poems, “The Look of a Child” and “My Mother’s Advice,” illustrate that an acceptance of an unfixed “I” permits the poet to embark on a creative journey that reveals the interrelated threads of his familial and cultural connections much in the same way that a child’s “scrapbook opens up to the world of intimate revelations” (78).
In “Simmetria” and “La tua fotografia,” the speaking “I” may again be attributed to the poet and his perceptions of both the familial and the estranged. These poems are concerned with the perception of another in relation to change and the distances it creates, such that difference itself is relative to the perceiving eye. Like the poetic project, perception involves the tendency to palimpsestically impose one image over another; conversely, it highlights the uncontainability of any given image: “I see the photograph change but you remain always the same. You are my Molise in all her guises. You are Molise” (82–3).
Subsequently, self-perception is both an attempt to create order out of a chaotic “rolling” landscape (an uncontainable image), as well as a fertile interchange between perceiver and perceived: “I put my pen down and walk inside my own symmetry. . . . To slide my fingers in the sleeping earth and awaken with my saliva the world’s sex” (81). Although these poems are not as obviously immersed in Guglionesi’s geography as some of the earlier poems in the section, they underline the poet’s growing poetics of diasporic selfhood as a relative process, a process that involves the psychological as well as the physical geography of his vision.
When we reach the last poem in the Guglionesi section, “Italia Mea Amore,” we do so in the context of an impassioned confrontation between “I” and “they.” Here, it is the pronoun ‘they’ that is an interchangeable signifier. The speaking “I” is no longer a site of positional instability; rather, it is an all-embracing inclusion of the speaking subject’s personal and historical “relations.” As such, the poet can be identified as the individual who claims: “They laughed in my face because I did not dress like them, because I did not speak like them” (84). He can also be identified as one of several speaking subjects when using the possessive pronoun “my”: “They raped my grandmother, my mother, my sister, my daughter, my granddaughter” (84). “They,” on the other hand, interchangeably refers to an unspecified Canadian, Quebecois or Italian body politic. For instance, when the poet claims, “They threw me out of my house” (85), he appears to be referring to the native country from which he (or his ancestors) was (were) initially forced to flee. On the other hand, when the poet claims, “They gave me a diploma for losing my mother-tongue and history” (85), “they” alludes to the new body politic of the adoptive country.
The governing and, perhaps, stabilizing voice in the confrontation between the individual and the relative terms in which the expression of his identity has been challenged or denied arises in the context of self-discovery: “But it took just one look, one kiss, one caress, one night beside you, to rediscover myself and understand what I am all about” (85). This self-discovery has been channelled through the poet’s (re)discovery of his native Guglionesi; that is, through his return to the originary homeland. Self-discovery thus leads to self-possession (e.g., to “myself”). No longer relegated to the position of the nostalgic immigrant alienated within a country to which he feels he no longer belongs and yearning for a past that has escaped him, the poet’s return has permitted him to simultaneously contain and express his “love” for Italy. Now the poet can pronounce or assert a self that is free to conceptualize filiative and affiliative relations without the trappings of loyalty, and declare a love for, or connection to, Italy within the self-affirming sentence: “I take the ink from your earth and beside Antonio D’Alfonso I sign Amore” (86).
D’Alfonso’s unabashed identification of the poetic “I” in relation to Guglionesi (i.e., the proclamation of his “love” for Italy) suggests that the return journey has enabled the poet/author to re-articulate his Italian heritage as an “essential” part of his identity. This is not to suggest that the section entitled “Guglionesi” resolves the tensions between D’Alfonso’s mixed identity. It does suggest, however, that Guglionesi provides the poet with a vital stepping stone along his journey toward self-pronunciation. The poet is indeed one step closer toward a pronunciation of self that embraces the plurality of its parts, as well as discerns the “changing” fabric that constitutes its relative parts. In the context of the self-pronouncing “I” found at the end of the Guglionesi section, then, we may assume that the poet’s identity and the aesthetic project(s) through which it is articulated are each still in the “process of becoming.”
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