MIGRATION AND HOMELESSNESS IN JEAN RHYS´ A VOYAGE IN THE DARK AND V.
S. NAIPAUL´S “ONE OUT OF MANY”
Denise Almeida Silva1
RESUMO: Esta comunicação examina o deslocamento e senso de não pertinência
experimentado por personagens que negociam suas fronteiras culturais, sociais e geográficas em A
Voyage in the Dark (Viagem no Escuro) de Jean Rhys e “One out of Many” (“Um dentre muitos”),
de V. S. Naipaul. Examinam-se as estratégias empregadas por cada um dos protagonistas neste
processo, bem como a progressiva distorção por que sofre o conceito de lar em cada uma das obras
examinadas.
KEY WORDS: Migration. Homelessness. Jean Rhys. V. S. Naipaul.
Colonial experience is intimately associated with displacement. Migrating obviously implies
geographical displacement; more significantly, though, as associated to colonial experience,
migration often involves political, social and psychological unrest, a feeling of painful otherness
experienced by both the colonized and the colonizer. Not surprisingly, themes like migration,
displacement, subalternity, slavery and exile are often to be found in colonial literature. Having
been affected by the colonial experience, Caribbean literature offers abundant reflection on these
issues, along with universal themes such as joy and pain, love and hatred, identity, home and
homelessness. This essay addresses homelessness as related to migration, analyzing it in narratives
that involve two different kinds of crossings: Caribbean migration in reverse to England in Jean
Rhys´ A Voyage in the Dark and the migration into large metropolitan centers in V. S. Naipaul´s
“One out of Many,” the first of the three short stories in In a Free State. The essay will examine
how displacement and entrapment are experienced by the characters while negotiating cultural,
social ad geographic borders.
The questioning of what to call home, and above all, where to feel at home are at the heart of
Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. The initial paragraph is exemplary in the expression of the
protagonist’s sense of displacement on arriving to England, which radically differs from everything
she used to call home. A sharp sense of discontinuity underlies her estrangement:
It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again.
The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself
was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in
the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. I didn’t like England at first. I couldn’t get used to the
cold (p. 3).
A “real West Indian”, fifth-generation born on her mother’s side, Anna Morgan experiences
her attachment to her home country through a sensuous connection with it. Sensations are valued
according to the feelings they trigger. While West Indies are associated with warmness, light and
vivid colors, England is associated to grayish tones, and stands for coldness and darkness. In
contrast with the varied landscape and openness of her rural home community, England seems to
Anna to display an awful sameness, tidiness and compartmentalization.
1
Universidade Regional Integrada do Alto Uruguai e das Missões –URI/Santo Ângelo. [email protected]
Alone in England, abandoned by her stepmother, who brings her to England but who will not
take responsibility for her well-being there, unemployed after shortly earning her life as a chorus
girl, Anna desperately looks for love, sympathy and a home. Instead, she keeps moving from place
to place, and is most of the time confined in small rooms. Her life comes to be a succession of
movings from town to town and from one lodge to another, and a succession of lovers. Frequently
sad and sick, Anna experiences a sensation of coldness, physical and spiritual, from which she
escapes through the evocation of the warmth she would find back home at Morgan’s Rest.
Memories from home mingle with the evocation of two contrasting mother figures, Francine,
her black servant, and Hester, her stepmother. Francine tends Anna in her sickness, comforts her
with her smile and friendliness, and feeds her imagination with stories; Hester bears a rather
impersonal relationship with her, and often scolds her for mingling with the black population.
These women stand as symbols of, respectively, the West Indies and England
In spite of the fact that by the end of the novel hope of a new start replaces the sense of
desperate closure experienced soon before the abortion (“the cold; and the houses all exactly alike,
and the streets going north, south, east, west, all exactly alike (p. 111)), there remains the fact that
her England stay has brought her the dark knowledge that there is nothing “as cold as life” (p. 94)
and that it is doubtful whether she will ever be able to feel the coziness of home in England.
Santosh, the protagonist from Naipaul´s short story, feels equally displaced in America.
Life in Washington is described through the perception of its differences from life back in India.
Santosh´s employer recurrently reminds him that “Washington isn´t Bombay”; difference is
experienced in the form of restriction to familiar habits and spatial deprivation. Perceiving how
little he can do with the salary he earns in America, Santosh thinks to have become a prisoner. He
comes to accept closure and even adjusts to it, associating it, if not with well-being, at least with
safety. A new preference for indoor life leads him to apprehend life in America through the
mediation of TV, which becomes the only vehicle that allows him to see the intimacy of American
life. Santosh lives then in a world of simulacra, a world forever opposed to either his memories
from Bombay or to the world he comes to know through the TV commercials. Americans impress
him as people not quite real, but as people temporarily absent from TV; barely can he cope with
the simpler tasks of everyday life. A liberating moment is experienced when, during a wave of
protests, he has first hand contact with the scenes shown by the television. At this moment TV,
instead of being a surrogate for reality, becomes an instrument that doubles what his senses
apprehend. Soon after the burning is over, he ventures for “the long wide streets . . . to see trees and
houses and shops and advertisements.” and for the first time Washington seems him “like a real
city” (p. 35). This is also when he meets Priya, the Indian countryman who offers him a better
paying job and who tells him how to stay legally in America. From then on, Santosh´s adjustment
to life in America suffers ups and downs: discovery that his former employer knew his whereabouts
and would not claim him makes him feel abandoned; on the other hand, ability to negotiate a higher
salary boosts his self-esteem and results in improved semf-esteem. However, the adjustment which
makes Santosh “a citizen” and therefore a “free man” (p. 49), opens up his eyes to his essential
solitude in America—he, who has already family in Bombay, can only get married in America
because Washington “isn´t Bombay,” and “nobody cares what [he does]” there. Besides, the only
housing he can afford to provide himself and the woman he marries with is in a poor neighborhood,
far away from the restaurant and the parks and green streets where he likes to stroll. Deprived of
his two indicators of wellness, friendship and open space, Santosh feels again a stranger.
As expressed in Jean Rhys´ A Voyage in the Dark and V. S. Naipaul´s “One out of Many””,
the notion of home as referring to a basic reality—i. e., home in its usual acception of place where
one is born and/or lives, and to which one feels attached—doesn´t apply in face of migration, a
distortion that can be best examined with the help of the Baudrillard´s description of the successive
phases of the image (1988, p. 170-171). Both Anna Morgan and Santosh only feel at home when in
their native country. In Jean Rhys´s Voyage in the Dark, Anna Morgan resorts to memories of her
native West Indies to mask the absence of the feeling of being at home in England. In V. S.
Naipaul´s “One ouf of Many” the notion of home undergoes gradual perversion through the
progressive disappearance of the protagonist´s indicators of wellness, reaches a level close to
hyperreality, as when part of his American experience is TV-mediated, becomes a virtual absence
during the periods of closure in his employers’s rooms, and finally comes to be a distortion of the
concept of home as known in his native India. In the light of these works it seems, thus, that the
price to be paid by the ones who acutely feel their Otherness in an alien environment and who
remain unable to negotiate difference seems to be uncomfortable homelessness.
REFERENCES
BEAUDRILLARD, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. In: Mark Poster (ed.). Selected
Writings. Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1988. 166-184.
NAIPAUL, V. S. One Out of Many. In: In a Free State. New York: Picador, 2002. 15-53.
RHYS, Jean. The complete novels. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985.
Oi Vanessa,
como diz o ditado, "casa de ferreiro, espeto de pau". Provavelmente fui a última a mandar a ficha, mas está
aí conforme as regras. Junta naquele grupo que eu tinha te indicado antes.
Quanto às regras para apresentação, basicamente o que se tem que observar em cada artigo é o que vai
abaixo:
1 Título do trabalho, centralizado em MAIÚSCULA E NEGRITO;
2 Autor (ou autores) - nome completo em forma direta e sem abreviaturas alinhado à direita,
seguido de uma chamada para Nota de Rodapé onde devem ser dadas afiliação e endereço
eletrônico. Deixar uma linha em branco entre a linha de identificação de autor e o resumo
3 Abstract ou resumen, seguido de uma linha em branco;
4 Palavras-chave, key words ou palabras clave - duas a cinco, separadas por ponto e também
encerradas por ponto, e seguidas por duas linhas em branco;
5 Texto, seguido de duas linhas em branco;
6 Notas explicativas;
7 Referências-- Correspondem às obras citadas no decorrer do trabalho (não usar o termo
Bibliografia ou Referências Bibliográficas).
Dá uma olhadinha se estes elementos estão nos textos.Se estiverem fora de ordem, dá para arrumar,
mas e faltar alguma coisa( muitos não mandaram abstract e palavras-chave; a Ingrid Finger e uma das
alunas dela mandaram um texto"provisório" enorme e elas mesmas disseram que iam ter que arrumar
depois), para estes temos que mandar e-mail pedindo retificação urgente ( dá uns três dias como
prazo). Acho que se na semana do dia 07 estivermos com todos os textos digitados, só para a
comissão editorial rever, está mais do que bom. Uma vez entregue, o CD é produzido em pouco tempo.
Bjs,
Denise