Writers living on the fringes of the
nation-state in global border zones do not always feel that their identities
fit within the core of the mainstream societies in which they physically exist.
As societies grow and change, a certain artistic rigidity takes over in terms
of cultural identity and the creative nexus often shifts away from the dominant
foci of an aging civilization to the dynamic fringes of those “parent”
cultures. It is within these border zone fringe regions, whether physical or
intellectual, that writers address issues related to being dispossessed from
the mainstream, and how this fact both marginalizes yet simultaneously fuels
their creative self-concepts, forging a new identity that is fueled by
imaginative creation. The issues involved in creating a new identity are
explored by a diverse array of modern global writers, authors such as Amichai,
Nafisi, and Salih, who write from various regions of the world: Israel, Iran,
and the Sudan respectively; and include Mexican-American writers closer to home
such as Anzaldua, Martinez, and Santos as well. This diverse group of writers
explores how a modern global individual’s quest for identity is shaped by aspects
of location, tradition, hybridity, and the creative process. Each author offers
up a uniquely individual answer to the question: How does the modern response
to globalism shape an individual’s local, personal quest for identity?
The
Role of Location in the Forming of Identity
Location is the starting point for this
artistic dialogue in the quest for forming a unique and diverse identity.
Whereas in the past, members of a cultural group were bound by the limitations
that culture, religion, ethnicity, travel, finances, and historical geo-political
movements placed on them; today individuals can fly around the globe in a
matter of hours and communicate across the world via the internet in only
minutes. Media-scapes now move past the boundaries of the nation-state and flow
into all corners of the planet, often reinterpreted in various diverse regions
in surprisingly new ways. In many parts of the world, people feel freer than at
any previous historical time to consciously create a unique, multi- dimensional
personal identity that combines aspects of cultural, ethnic, religious or
gender-oriented traditional identities. It
is within this context of “anything is possible” that the search for local
meaning, played against the backdrop of a global stage, causes modern writers to
search for new metaphors to construct identity. Hall posits that “to return to
the local is often a response to globalization” (King, 33). This issue of how
the local environment evokes and shapes individual identity is explored in a variety
of different literary works, with a surprisingly diverse set of answers.
The
simple love story encapsulated in Demetria Martinez’s novel Mother Tongue reveals how individuals,
try as they might, never truly escape the lingering effects of global conflict,
no matter where they may go, physically. The hero of her story, Jose Luis
Romero, flees the torture and conflict of his native El Salvador for the
peaceful safety of Albuquerque New Mexico, only to find that the horrors he has
experienced in his former nation-state continue to haunt his dreams and his
body, impacting his relationship with Maria, the heroine. No matter how hard he
tries to start over in his new life, getting a menial job to pay the bills
while continuing the political activism for his homeland that gives his life
meaning, the violence he has experienced previously trickles down through him
into his romance with the naively simple woman in his new country who tries to
heal him. Jose Luis lashes out, although he does not mean to, harming Maria,
before he ultimately flees a second time, fearing for his own safety. Originally
a unique individual who was studying to be a priest, Jose Luis’ past life which
constituted his personal vision of “the local” as a seminary student in El
Salvador, dissolves away into a present identity that is continually and
forever shaped by the global consequences of the war he has experienced. He is
from now on a refugee, a political dissident, and a victim of violence. He can
never escape these versions of himself; he is a fractured individual and these
parts have irreparably shaped him into the new identity he has absorbed
unwillingly. Martinez offers the reader no vision of positive change or
redemption for her hero; he is only able to create a new more holistic version
of himself that meshes his old location (El Salvador) and new location (North
America) and their attendant issues via the conception of his son, who bridges
the identity gap by searching for his father’s history and heritage, and
combining this quest with his own career path as an environmentalist.
Martinez’s thoughts on how location and the culture and events that are tied to
it affect identity offer a view that people are too much the product of their
experiences, especially if those experiences are destructive. The events,
people and the places we come from can never completely leave us, and individuals
cannot remove the scars of the places they have been or what the past has done
to them.
Nafisi offers a contrasting view to this
argument, however, that one’s location irreparably shapes one’s vision of
personal identity. In her work Reading
Lolita in Teheran:A Memoir in Books, Nafisi lives and work in her native
Iran, even as political events during the Iranian Revolution gradually strip
away her individual rights as a woman, a scholar, and a employee. The politics
of the era negatively impact the lives and identities of many who live under
this regime, and still do to this day. Nafisi, however, does not give in to
despair as her rights and freedoms are slowly, one by one, taken from her.
Instead, she pushes back against the new culture of male dominated,
fundamentalist religion-based hegemony, creating a subversive all female
reading group that meets secretly while continuing to study and discuss works
of the now forbidden Western canon of literature. This response to global political
conditions attempting to force a submissive restrictive identity onto females
takes the form of the most local response possible: a small group of trusted
friends, discussing and journaling privately their innermost responses to life
and literature. While previously Nafisi had been a noted scholar, writer, and
teacher before the Iranian revolution, she was a respected professional but one
who did not yet have a global audience for her thoughts. Her strongly defiant
yet intimately personal refusal to accept a limiting, extremist Muslim vision of how she should think,
act and live her life led her to write
down her experiences in this book, which once published abroad ultimately led
to her leaving her native country and travelling about the world discussing
these very experiences. It is as though the events she lived through and her
creative response to them gave her a new identity, purpose and focus. This is
in direct contrast to the characters of Martinez’ book Mother Tongue, who are forever changed and cannot escape their locally
shaped, predestined identities. For Nafisi, the refusal to accept the identity
the global state wishes to impose upon her provides the impetus for new thought
and forging a new identity, one located in the world of ideas and transcending
the physical boundaries imposed on her in sheer defiance. As Stuart Hall writes, “I
want to talk about two forms of globalization, still struggling with one
another: an older, corporate, enclosed, increasingly defensive one which has to
go back to nationalism and national cultural identity in a highly defensive
way….and then this other form of the global post-modern which is trying to live
with, and at the same moment, overcome, sublate, get hold of, and incorporate
difference.”(King 33) Nafisi epitomizes this idea as she refuses to accept the
boundaries placed on her by the existing society in Iran, but struggles against
it in her own personal quest for meaning.
This
issue of the importance of location in determining one’s identity is further
explored in more activist ways by Anzaldua in her work Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldua begins by tracing her ancestry
through a geographical and historical route, retelling the story of the Spanish
conquest of Mezo-America. The 15th and 16th century invasions
and subjugation of the native peoples by the conquistadors provides an
especially brutal example of global forces at work on local identities: the Spanish
perpetuated a near genocide on the Aztec people, destroying their core culture
as a result. The worlds of both parties were never the same again; the
collision of these two cultures produced a violent and forceful blending with
the few survivors who remained, which resulted in a new identity created via
intermarriage and/or rape that had distinct ethnicities, languages, religions,
art forms, and even cuisine of its own. Similar scenarios occurred throughout
the Americas with other European nation-states, but Anzaldua chooses to draw on
the Spanish and Aztec past of her own unique individual ancestry. While the
Spanish attempted to create a “new Spain” in the Americas, what they did not
foresee was that the meshing of their own culture with that of local peoples would
produce a wide variety of local responses in the form of new societies that ripples through the
history and geography of various New World Hispanic nations and ethnic groups
to this day. In many ways, hundreds of years later, the offspring peoples and cultures
of this European conquest are more vibrant, and their cultures currently more
dynamic, than the existing parent cultures of old Europe. Anzaldua explores her
own unique creative blending of a Mexican-American identity that is not stuck
in the historical past or even in the dominant form of Mexican-American culture,
but instead she is determined to transcend the legacy of this cultural raping
of the Americas with its attendant violence, Euro-centrism, coerced religious
beliefs and male hegemony. Anzaldua feels inspired to respond to the ethnic
pride and diversity movements that began in the late 1960’s and continues to
this day, creating and celebrating a new personal identity for herself that is
not reliant on the past or on any particular place. Adopting the use of “Spanglish”
in her poetry and prose, Anzaldua flexes her creative cultural muscle by
contributing artistically to a growingly popular dialect, one that weaves
together two different traditions (Anglo-American culture with Mexican, as well
as other Hispanic heritages in other locales, such as Miami with Cuban Spanish,
etc) into a new identity that is all its own, one that transcends the
borderland or any specific location in Mexico or the United Sates. “Spanglish”
is just the tip of the cultural iceberg, a cultural marker that forms its own
abstract media-scape border zone of Tejuano culture that can be accessed via
radio, tv or the internet from New York to Miami to McAllen to Los Angeles to
Guanajuato and beyond. Anzaldua, writing in the 1980’s, is perhaps a pioneer in
introducing this complex and artistically rich cultural world to a wider
audience, and years later it is now clear that “Spanglish” is just the gateway
to open up the portals of this culture to others. The fact that “Spanglish”
words have found their way into every day American speech, that Taco Bell fast
food eateries (however inauthentic to a purist) exist on every street corner,
even in the northeastern cities of North America, and salsa surpassed ketchup a
few years back as the best selling condiment in the United States, speaks to the
power of this rich and creative cultural tradition that transcends any physical
local region. This is clearly a globally dynamic culture that is on the move.
Transcending local circumstances and exploring
new worlds, as well as new identities while moving towards the global, is a
journey taken in a reverse direction from Anzaldua by John Phillip Santos in
his semi-fictional memoir, The Farthest
Home is in An Empire of Fire. This, the second book where Santos traces an
initial historically based family lineage, first on one side of his parents’
genealogical tree then on the other, Santos begins his quest for identity with
tales of his Mexican-American family growing up in south Texas, with homesteads
and family members located on both sides of the Mexican-American border. It is
clear from his personal experiences that the concept of a “border” between
Mexico and the United States, so arguably important to many Anglos on the
northern side of this imaginary line that roughly follows the Rio Grande, is a
much more flexible, floating, relative and porous concept to those who have
grown up with family histories that straddle its boundaries. When individuals
trace local family history back to a time where the “border” existed much
further north, before Tejas/Texas formed its own separate geo-political
identity, one could easily understand why the current location of this current border
seems transient and relatively unimportant to current populations who inhabit
it. As Santos continues exploring the history, real or imagined, of his family,
he eventually journeys to Spain in an effort to discover if he can find any
traces of his collective or individual identity from that supposedly “mother”
culture and land. While there, he encounters several key individuals, notably a
border guard with whom he exchanges shoes in a moment of detente where both
parties realize that have more in common than they differ, in spite of the fact
that each claims a very distinct and locally different heritage identity. Santos
also undergoes DNA testing to see just what percent of his lineage he can scientifically
trace back to Spain. This produces the unexpected consequences that Santos
discovers his genome contains, in fact, no Spanish blood at all; he is of 100 %
Native American descent. Rather than taking this new discovery as a setback, his
concept of the “motherland” still matters in an iconic, if not an actual,
sense. It is from this perspective that Santos begins to move outward in his
journey of self exploration, from a homeland and self- identity bound by
geographical constraints into an imagined world that transcends both time and place.
Much like Dante exploring the Inferno accompanied by Beatrice, Santos explores a
new idealized imaginary homeland, which he calls “La Zona Perfecta”, with his
imagined ancestor from the future, Cenote Siete or “C7”. Santos is thus
exploring the idea that individuals can create a new self- identity based on
imagined boundaries, ancestors, or histories, with no actual physical link to
time or geographical place at all. He takes Anzaldua’s creative process one
step further.
The
Role of Tradition in the Forming of Identity
Traditions
spring forth from the nexus of specific locations, with their attendant
histories, religions, art forms and culture, both local and global. Our
traditions provide a scaffolded framework for individuals to begin the process
of identity creation: individuals tend to either adopt them or rebel against
them, but the role of local traditions in this process remains undisputed. Just
as there are an infinite number of cultural traditions around the globe, so
there are as many differing responses to traditions, old and new, as there are
people on the earth. There is an interesting dichotomy as to how this response
to tradition is interpreted, and how individuals use their unique cultural traditions
as a “spring board” for self identity formation. This contrast can be seen in
writers from the Old World, notably several writers from the Muslim world of
the Near East and Africa, versus those arising from the New World, specifically
Mexican-American cultures. Contemporary poet Yehuda Amichai, in his collection
of verse The Selected Poems of Yehuda
Amichai, explores traditional themes stemming from his Jewish heritage in
his poem, “An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion”. Here he
writes about an imagined moment when the religions of Judaism and Islam began,
and how similar and parallel those moments actually were. The poet’s imagery,
syntax, meter and diction are all drawn from similar sounding verses such as
those found in books of the Old Testament; Amichai celebrates the qualities
these two world religions share, which to him seem to be more than their
differences. Amichai expands his theme of the universal qualities that all
humanity shares in his other poems about family, children, love, weather,
seasons, or flowers. Amichai’s topics and perspectives are shaped not only by
the traditions of his native Jewish culture, but also from his graphically
violent experiences as an Israeli who has fought in combat. The fact that daily
violence is an integral part of Amichai’s personal traditions and background
can be seen in poems such as “The Diameter of the Bomb”, “Elegy on An Abandoned
Village”, and in his lines:
“Half
the people in the world,
love
the other half,
half
the people
hate
the other half” (Amichai 14)
It
seems clear that for Amichai, his personal traditions involve a blending of his
identity as a Jewish man, Israeli citizen, a soldier, and an artist/poet with
an almost calm acceptance of violence, war, hate and bloodshed as integral if
destructive traditions of his daily life. This is simply the unusual, if unique
combination of what he knows and who he is. The fact that he is such a beloved
Israeli poet speaks to his many other countrymen who have shared similar juxtapositions,
which contrast the beauty of the world around them mingled with graphic violent
destruction.
Sudanese author Tayeb Salih offers a
different perspective on the value of traditions in shaping individual identity
in his novel Season of Migration to the
North. In this story, the main character, Mustafa Sa’eed, is contrasted with
the nameless modest narrator with greatly diverging results. Both men are
intelligent local village boys, given a chance through hard work and ability to
move up in their imperialist Anglophone cultures, located on the fringe of the
British Empire. Each boy is given a chance at schooling in the British system,
and each eventually moves to London to make his way in that quintessential
“hub” of the 19th century global imperialist universe. From here, though,
their fates differ drastically. Mustafa Sa’eed becomes a misogynistic serial
killer, who eventually returns to his village attempting to escape the law and
the consequences of his previous actions by hiding out in this remote outpost,
a village along the Nile River in the Sudan. He continues his dream of Empire
that reflects his self concept, however, with a secret book room tucked away inside
his outwardly rustic village home that is an exact re-creation of a proper
English gentleman’s study, a highly symbolic lair that evokes images of power,
education, domination, escapism, wealth, and the tangential nature of learning
and knowledge without context. Mustafa Sa’eed
is contrasted with the nameless narrator of the story, so like him in many
regards save for the most important: while Sa’eed is adrift on the global
currents of humanity, learning all that civilization has to offer and achieving
wealth, he does this while jettisoning the native cultural ties, traditions and
values of his home and past. He is a lost man. Even when he returns to his
village, he does so without meaningful local connections. He lives emotionally apart,
not partaking in local traditions or family but secretly clinging to his
British affectations. Mustafa Sa’eed is living in the midst of his homeland but
not interacting with it, not using it to forge a new identity that is
hybridized in a positive way that could provide him with a moral compass or
nurture him. He is amoral and thus, broken. The narrator, who also returns to the
small Sudanese village but does so to live and work and be fully connected to
his past traditions, people and culture via personal human relationships to its
various members, remains “centered” in a way that provides him with character,
morality, direction, and hope. Salih emphasis the symbolic nature of being
connected versus roaming in an errant fashion in his choice of title for this
work - “migration to the north”, an image recalling a migratory flock of birds,
transient, rootless, adrift and purposeless other than to feed - symbolizes
those very peoples, such as the narrator and perhaps the author himself, who
are located on the fringes of the British Empire and feel the push-pull towards
the center to “advance” oneself (in learning or career) that is ultimately
empty and self destructive, like Mustafa Sa’eed ‘s life. Salih offers readers in
the contrasting character of the narrator the idea that one must flow back to
the fringes, to one’s home location and culture, in order to find meaning and
connectedness in identity formation, and his novel offers a cautionary tale for
individuals who fail to do so.
This is similar to the approach that
Nafisi takes in her memoir, Reading
Lolita in Teheran, only she uses her traditions and cultural background in
more intellectually interactive way. The author describes how she was born in
Iran, spent several sojourns being educated abroad in the USA and Switzerland,
yet returned to Iran because it is her home, her culture, and the center of her
world. Nafisi returns to Iran not only to work as a college professor but to
take what she has learned, share it with others and by doing so, move towards
creating something new. The novels her study group read collectively and
discuss are interpreted by the members of the group through the lens of their
own background traditions and experiences. The author has a particularly strong
response to the novel she selectively places in the title of her memoir; many Westerners
reading Nabokov’s Lolita might simply
interpret it from the point of view of gender roles, male domination over
women, as a depiction of pederasty, or Western sexual freedoms taken to the
extreme that they ultimately destroy perpetrators as well as victims; there are
countless interpretations and emphases possible. Yet Nafisi approaches the
meaning of this book through the lens of her own cultural background and
traditions. Through that lens, this one book encapsulates what she sees as the
enforced will or domination of one over another and thus symbolic for the
oppression of Iranian women by the Iranian nation-state after the Revolution.
Nafisi’s love of literary debate and the traditions she experienced of academic
and personal freedom prior to the Revolution make her eventually realize that
her geographical home has become so hostile to her self concept that she must
leave it and move away, back to the West, taking the best of her culture,
learning and traditions with her as she goes. As a result, Nafisi’s new
personal identity becomes not Iranian native, but that of immigrant, and she
reinvents herself in that context. She is not rootless, as Mustafa Sa’eed, but
continues to center herself on her home culture re-imagined in a new global
way.
The
weaving of traditions into a new forged personal identity is a much less sad
and more positive and creative process for Mexican American authors such as
Anzaldua and Santos. Refusing to be bound by the role(s) society tries to
impose on her, Anzaldua in her work Borderlands/La
Frontera uses her cultural heritage
and traditions as a vast reservoir of possible identities to draw upon, picking
and choosing those aspects that are most meaningful to her. Anzaldua delights
in the word play available to her by having two languages from which to draw,
Spanish and English, and fully flexes her creativity not only with established
“Spanglish” vocabulary, but inventing some new ones of her own. Refusing to be
bound by male patriarchal imagery in her traditional Catholicism, she chooses
instead to study how an Aztec goddess, Coatlicu, was historically morphed into
the modern Virgin of Guadalupe, and adopts her as an archetypal patron. Using
this female centered iconography as a stepping stone, Anzaldua moves towards
rejecting all forms of male dominated traditional Chicano culture that she
feels she has grown beyond or does not truly represent her, and instead
celebrates the validity of her personal identity as a lesbian who happens to be
of Mexican-American culture, picking and choosing those aspects that contribute
to her creative vision as poet, artist, woman, and Latina. Anzaldua is an
inspiration not only to individuals from her particular ethnic group, but to
anyone who feels bound in a constraining way by the traditions of their own
local native culture. She provides a template for how to reinvent one’s
identity, selecting the empowering aspects while discarding those that limit
one’s creativity or self vision. In this way, she transcends those boundaries
that seek to confine anyone by issues of nationality, class, gender, sexuality,
religion, artistry, ethnicity, etc. and moves out towards the global process of
what she calls “the new mestiza”, a hybrid self-identity that incorporates
multi-faceted aspects of one’s traditional heritage into a wholly new and original
blended creation.
Likewise,
Santos views this process as empowering; his personal explorations differ from
Anzaldua’s only in time and space. Santos’ work Farthest Home/Empire of Fire takes that journey of self exploration
and identity creation to a new level, first via a geographical journey, then
through a spiritual, historical/futuristic, imagined journey through time.
Along the way he too plays creatively with various traditions from his local
family back home in Texas, all the way to a variety of local traditions in his
mythic “homeland” in Spain. The fact that New World authors Anzaldua and Santos
feel so free to re-invent themselves must be a legacy of the historical traditional
attitudes of the immigrants who first came here, personality traits that have become
inborn or part of our global “American” identities: the willingness to relocate
means that at some core level, the self concept of these people was fluid and
dynamic. It took a great amount of courage and powerful motivation in those
earliest settlers to board a tiny ship and fling oneself into the trusting
hands of an unknown sea captain for untold weeks and months on the open sea,
out of sight of land; to leave all that was known in terms of family, friends,
geography, foods, crops, profession, religion, culture, and way of life and
just venture out into the vast universe, confident that it would all work out
well at the other end of the journey. A willingness to say to oneself: “ I am
no longer a ____(fill in blank: Spanish conquistador, Englishman, French woman,
Dutch businessman, Italian priest, etc) but am now a person who was once from ____(nation
such as Spain) who now lives on this other far shore, doing ____(new
occupation).” The imagination to see oneself in that new way, and the
willingness to take a risk in the process of self-creation must be an
underlying characteristic of the descendants of those original immigrants, all
these generations later. How else could Santos and Anzaldua so fearlessly
re-invent themselves? They take joy in their new self-reinventions, and seem to
find that it fuels their creative process.
The Role of Hybridity
in the Forming of Identity
Hybridity is the end
product when an individual responds to various global realities and then meshes
together aspects of local experiences, preferences, and traditions into a new self
concept. In the modern world where individuals feel freer to explore and create
new versions of themselves, hybridity
results as various diverging parts of one’s cultural traditions are blended
into a unique new concept that is different from either one or the other of its
parent components. A hybridized identity is not a patched up conglomeration,
but a dynamic new thing unto itself. For an author such as Amichai, the
Israeili poet seamlessly blends, without much visible conscious effort or
psychic conflict, various aspects of his life: soldier, poet, lover, Jew,
father, scholar, destroyer, and nurturer. Which identity is paramount? Which is
more valued? It is not clear; none of them seem to be. The many diverse topics
of Amichai’s poetry reveal a multi-sided
personality, like a tetrahedonal dice, and his self concept draws equally on
his many diverse life experiences as he rolls through whatever life throws him.
It is to the poet’s credit that he can incorporate all these various forces
into one complex yet integrated whole version of himself. Perhaps these vastly
differing parts of his identity offer up a melting pot of strengths upon which
Amichai draws, as needed, in a variety of situations. Not everyone can be a
poet and a soldier who has both seen and caused death so frequently and yet remain
mentally balanced. Amichi channels his experiences with various forms of death
and destruction as a way to sensitize himself to the transient beauty of this
world, and to make anew his appreciation for the fragility of the current
moment, or a tiny flower, that is sublime.
Martinez
offers up a vision of hybridity that is not as smoothly integrated as
Amichai’s. In Mother Tongue, Jose
Luis is a man who has experienced warfare, too and is a sensitive soul who had
been studying at seminary. After the violence he experienced when he escaped
from a mass killing event, Jose Luis is so scarred by what happened to him that
it haunts his dreams forever. He never can seem to create a new version of
himself that incorporates both his past and his present, his global (old)
experiences with his local (new) life, no matter how safe he feels at the
moment and no matter how hard Maria, his lover, tries to heal him via her
nurturing earth mother persona. Perhaps it is because by destroying that which
Jose Luis valued most, i.e. his previous family, his religious studies, and his
former way of life, the globally destructive forces he has internalized have
altered his self identity forever in a way that destroys him. He is unable to
recover and truly heal or create a new version of himself from the pieces. For
Jose Luis, no hybridity is possible – until the next generation, when his son
picks up the mantle of cultural traditions from both parents and weaves them into
his own hybridized (American and Salvadorian; science, and faith; old world and
new) mestizo identity.
On the surface, Nafisi seems to ignore the
concept of hybridity altogether in her memoir Reading Lolita. Her book selections for the study group are all Western
titles, mostly American novels, and while the author laments the societal
conscriptions she faces, she seems focused on those aspects of her life from
the West that have become an integral part of her previous identity, as the
bulwark of her stand against societal tyranny and the fundamentalist Islamic
script for women’s identity she faces. Her love of academic discourse,
philosophical debate, civil freedoms, rights of (wo)men, satellite television,
books, Western clothing, food, hairstyles, and makeup, etc. is evident in her
poignant descriptions of the removal of these itemsfrom her life. She chooses
not to dwell on aspects of her native cultural traditions that might lend
strength or comfort to her during this process, such as family, friends, religion
(even if her own interpretation of it), mythic or iconic images from Persian
traditions, pop culture (movies, music, etc) or any of Iran’s native literature.
Nafisi mentions briefly A Thousand and
One Nights but chooses not to dwell on the lead female character even
though Scheherazade is a clever woman who evades death by using her
intelligence to out-manipulate and thus control a cruel dominating king. The
form that hybridity takes in Nafisi’s work is subtle yet provides a valuable
lesson to any reader: instead of consciously choosing to create a new vision of
herself by integrating various aspects of her home land culture, Nafisi almost
without realizing it transforms not only herself but shines a light on a path
for her students as well, through the books that they read and their responses
to them. Nafisi models how to face down oppression via her actions. Using the
stories and the characters from Gatsby to Lolita, the reading group discusses
various strategies for dealing with oppression and confronting one’s dreams in
the face of obstacles. It is clear that the discussions of this reading group
provide each member with ideas that nurture their souls and give them strength
to face the differing and unique challenges each member confronts. Characters
such as Huck Finn get re-interpreted through the eyes of an audience very
different from the readers who first encountered him, and what the women take
away from these fictional lives is different from traditional Western
interpretation of their meaning or importance. Huck Finn, for example, is often taught in American schools by
focusing on the controversial (for its day) father –son relationship between
Huck (a runaway white boy) and Jim (a runaway African American slave), or the
conflict that lies in Huck’s heart between what he feels is “the right thing to
do” (i.e. to help to free Jim) versus what society tells him is “the right
thing to do” (i.e. to report Jim as a runaway slave). Nafisi’s reading group
instead interprets this novel from the aspect of personal freedom, both for
Huck and for Jim, as the two characters create their own self identities in a
transient border zone that exists only so long as they are away from the
confines and laws of society and are floating freely down the Mississippi
River. The dialogue that ensues regarding this work and others among Nafisi’s
students, with its resultant construction of an imaginative, creative, abstract
literary zone, free from the constructs’ of current time, history, or place,
forms the version of hybridity that Nafisi, almost without realizing it,
creates – a hybridity of experience, of the creative moment, blending local and
personal thoughts via global literary constructs, into a newly imagined vision
of the literary time and space that transcends the actual real world
geo-political time and space.
It is important to note that for Sudanese
author Salih, the role of hybridity comes at a price. His novel Season of Migration is a cautionary
tale, warning against the destructiveness of self-creation without context. Mustafa
Sa’eed is a man who abandons his traditional past and ties to location, family,
and local culture in an attempt to re-invent himself according to some plan not
authentic to himself and his hybridized background. Is he simply a stereotype
of how “white men” and the dominant colonizing society view people of color, or
a foil that enables us to better understand the narrator’s character? Clearly,
Sa’eed forgets who he once was in his attempts to be successful in the global
environment; he loses all his native traditions in his attempts to become more
“English”. Exactly why he is a broken
man is not truly explored in Salih’s work – it is never clear if society is
what breaks him, or if it results as a matter of personal choices gone wrong-
but the reader can draw the conclusion that something is amiss. The narrator,
who manages to successfully integrate his old village traditions with his new
educated professional self, to take what he has learned and apply it in a new
context that blends old and new traditions, is able to straddle that
local/global divide in a way that does not destroy him. He survives with his
identity intact. Sa’eed ends up not only with a broken self concept, but also dead,
and the novel leaves ambiguous if he died due to a natural flooding disaster or
whether it was self inflicted. However, people who grow up along the Nile River
treat this body of water almost like a deity unto itself, with a vengeful personality
all its own. However Mustafa Sa’eed dies, it is clear that fate or karma or the
universe, in the form of this mighty river, has literally swallowed him up and
tossed his dead carcass aside. The only part of him that remains is his
library, hidden and forever isolated,
useless to others and not even current.
The Role of Creativity
in the Forming of Identity
Authors
of global literature offer up a nuanced variety of responses to the roles that location,
tradition, and hybridity (i.e. integrating various aspects of one’s identity
into the creation of new self) play in shaping individuality in the modern
world. In each of these works discussed, creativity is the integral part of the
process of taking all these factors and blending them together to come up with
something new. This dynamic activity not only fuels the imagination and
provides ideas and material for artistic expression, as it does for Anzaldua
and Santos, but the process itself contributes, in an endless looping, to their
newly formed visions of self, which leads back to more new ideas for artistic
expression. The creative process allows individuals to incorporate diverse
parts of their unique local experiences into a blended new whole, so that they
can heal their fragmented souls and turn painful experiences into something
beautiful and positive, as Amichai does via the writing of his poetry. Characters
who are unable to do this remain frozen, as do Jose Luis or Mustafa Sa’eed. Artists
and athletes often speak of being “in the zone”, that transcendent experience
where one is so focused on the activity at hand that one loses a sense of the here
and now or even of the self, and instead flows into, through, and around the
activity and the moment. Action and actor become one. Time stands still and
details of location become irrelevant. It is clear here that in a sense, our
global writers, whether Mexican Americans such as Azaldua, Matinez, and Santos,
or writers from other global realms of the Near East or Africa, such as Nafisi,
Salih, and Amichai , have each transcended the local border zones in which they
find themselves, and move towards an artistic version of being “ in the zone”.
These writers speak to issues of identity creation that refuse to be locked
into a specific location or defined by historical traditions, gender shaping,
religious, or geopolitical movements. While
searching for that vibrant new blending of various aspects of their unique,
local realities, each author has utilized the creative process not only to form
a new identity as a painter draws on a canvass, but also to develop a creative
process, a mixing of media and cultures that is, in and of itself, a creative
border zone that exist beyond the realms of time and place, forever in the
present “now”, the moment of creation. It is easy to imagine that as the
internet and mass media grow more pervasive, reaching even the most remote
corners of the planet, this creative mixing of local traditions with global
paradigms will continue to fuel this shift into new hybridities beyond the ones
discussed here. Individuals will have so many more choices with which to draw in
that identity formation, the possibilities are endless. Hall reminds us that
“…the most profound cultural revolution has come about as the consequence of
the margins coming into representation – in art, in painting, in film, in
music, in literature, in the modern arts everywhere, in politics, and in social
life generally. Our lives have been transformed by the struggle of the margins
to come into representation. Not just to be placed by the regime of some other,
imperializing eye, but to reclaim some form of representation for themselves.
“(King 34) It is this process that leads to the formation of new self identities
and the development of the creative space as border zone all its own.
Copyright 2010 K.S.Reidy
Works Cited:
Amichai, Yehuda.The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
Berkely: Univeristy of California Press, 1996.
Anzaldua, Gloria.
Borderlands/La Frontera.San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books , 2007.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
King, Anthony, ed. Culture, Globalization, and the World System.
Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2001.
Martinez, Demetria. Mother Tongue. New York : Ballantine
Books, 1994.
Nafizi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Teheran. New York:
Random House, 2008.
Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. New
York: New York Review Books, 2009.
Santos, John Phillip. The Farthest Home is an Empire of Fire.
New York: Viking Penguin, 2010.
Above: Elsie, Karen, Bill, Kevin. Who knew that summer of 1984 we'd see each other again, still be friends ?
Kevin and Karen at MOMA...the person who looks like Andy Warhol, behind us, is just serendipitous 
View from my hotel room
