Wretched Refuge
Wretched Refuge:
Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern
Edited by
Jessica Datema and Diane Krumrey
Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern,
Edited by Jessica Datema and Diane Krumrey
This book first published 2010
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2010 by Jessica Datema and Diane Krumrey and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-1904-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1904-6
Figure 1-1 Chicago Outfit and Satellite Regimes
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi
List of Illustrations and Information about the Artist ................................ xii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern
Jessica Datema and Diane Krumrey
Part I: Immigrants and Itinerants
Chapter One................................................................................................. 9
Media and Migration: Danticat, Díaz, Eugenides, and Scibona
Caren Irr
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27
Translocality in the New Post-American Immigrant Literature
Diane Krumrey
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41
Paul Bowles and the Problem of Postmodernity within the Colonized
World
Steve Weber
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 69
Border Crossing in the New Literature of Place
Wendy Harding
Part II: Fragmenting the Linear
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 89
“City of Clowns”: The City as a Performative Space in the Prose
of Daniel Alarcón, Junot Díaz, and Roberto Bolaño
Stacey Balkan
x
Table of Contents
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 109
“The Dividing Line Ran Through the Center of Town”:
Bob Dylan’s Own Exiles on Main Street
Paul Almonte and Lisa O’Neill
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 133
Cormac McCarthy: Itinerant Acts and Becoming Maps
Jessica Datema
Contributors............................................................................................. 155
Index........................................................................................................ 157
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as a Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
2009 panel in Boston entitled: “Wretched Refuge? The Postmodern
Immigrant Novel.” There others joined us to discuss the literary
projections and lived reality of the “new barbarians” in postmodern
globalized urban culture. We continued the dialogue as a faculty seminar
on Cosmopolitanism and Globalization, which Jessica continues to lead.
We wish to thank NeMLA and especially the executive director Dr.
Elizabeth Abele for their support of adventurous scholarship and Carol
Koulikourdi, as well as all our other editors at Cambridge Scholars Press,
for appreciating and engaging our work. We are indebted to the many
Cosmopolitanism seminar participants and the contributors to this volume,
colleagues and intellectual companions through many challenging periods.
They have helped shape the spirit and insights of this project. Thanks to
the Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg for graciously providing the Lombardi
images. Thanks to Eric for being the itinerant who always teaches Diane
how to live with the unknown before us. Finally, thanks to Jay, for his
incalculable editorial and indexing support, and being Jessica’s librarian
like Bataille. All of this made the project a coming into the world—across
a space peopled with stars—that, while infinitely unlikely, nevertheless
opened onto a totality of fundamentally improbable things.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Cover: Mark Lombardi: “World Finance Corporation and Associates,”
c. 1970-84: Miami, Ajman, and Bogota-Caracas (Brigada 2506: Cuban
Anti-Castro Bay of Pigs Veteran) 7th
Version
1999, Graphite and Colored
Pencil on Paper, 69 1/8 x 84 inches
Fig. 1-1: Mark Lombardi: “Chicago Outfit and Satellite Regimes,” c. 193183”
1998, Graphite on Paper, 48 1/8 x 96 5/8 inches ..........................................vi-vii
Fig. 5-1: Mark Lombardi: “George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson
Stephens,” c. 1979-90 (5th
Version)
1999, Graphite on Paper, 24 1/8 x 48
1/4 inches .......................................................................................................... 86-87
Fig. 7-1: Mark Lombardi: “Nugan Hand LTD.” Sydney Australia
1972-80 (6th Version) 1996, Graphite and Colored Pencil on Paper,
51 x 110
inches ............................................................................................................ 130-131
All images are from Mark Lombardi’s Global Networks exhibition and collection
at Pierogi 2000, 177 North 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211. Photo credits: John
Berens.
Information about the Artist
Mark Lombardi received a BA in art history from Syracuse University
in 1974 and went on to be an artist, researcher, and curator. The first
noteworthy exhibition, The Teapot Dome to Watergate (1973) was a
multimedia presentation of slides, videos, and images pertaining to
infamous government scandals. From about 1977 to 1982, Lombardi
worked as a reference librarian in the Fine Arts Department of the Houston
Public Library where he became known for starting an archive of local and
regional artists. In this capacity his work began the method of utilizing the
archive as a way of framing a canvas to show the very conditions of
knowledge formation, in the Foucaultian sense. This research later proved
essential to Lombardi’s art, which can be construed as a set of visual
archives. He revolutionizes a new style with the global network series,
which are history paintings updated in terms of theories of globalism. The
Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern
xiii
F.B.I. consulted Lombardi’s dioramic paintings for clues pertaining to
terrorist financing since they contain such precise and detailed networks,
including links to terrorist cells, such as Osama bin Laden and his Al
Qaeda network. The global network series details a myriad of
interconnections, both political and financial, that extend beyond national
boundaries and show the face of new cosmopolitan forces that frustrate
any nationalistic aspirations for world hegemony. The first public showing
of his work was in the exhibition Greater New York: New Art in New York
Now, which opened at P.S. 1 on February 27, 2000. Included in this show
was his large drawing BCCI-ICIC & FAB, 1972, 91 (4th version) 19962000, which was the work examined by an F.B.I. agent a year and a half
later at the Whitney. Due to some damage to the third version of this
drawing, and other difficult circumstances in Lombardi’s life, he was
deeply troubled. Less than a month after the opening of the P.S. 1 show he
was found dead in his Brooklyn studio. The police report cited suicide by
hanging as the reason for Mark Lombardi’s death.
INTRODUCTION
WRETCHED REFUGE:
IMMIGRANTS AND ITINERANTS
IN THE POSTMODERN
JESSICA DATEMA AND DIANE KRUMREY
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883
Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern is a
reflection on the postmodern novel that takes a local approach to global
cosmopolitanism. The book’s chapters are divided into two parts. The
first section considers what it means to be an itinerant or wretched
refugee in a reconsideration of global, multicultural, or “foreign” bodies.
Correspondingly, the second section takes up the borderless refugee space
of the itinerant as wretched, cosmopolitan, and local to manifest its various
fractured permutations. The trace of the itinerant is a cosmopolitan
account that steers clear of émigré stories. The book weaves together
modern and postmodern tales of itinerancy in Cormac McCarthy, Junot
Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Roberto Bolaño, Paul Bowles,
and Bob Dylan that formally mirror their own thematic flow.
Immigrants have long deployed a type of “local-global” dwelling as an
assimilation technique, overwritten of late by theories of “Otherness.” In
response, these essays offer an alternative to what Slavoj Zizek identifies
as “the postmodern racism [that] is the symptom of multiculturalist late
capitalism, bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the liberaldemocratic ideological project.” Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants
in the Postmodern seeks to break the recurrent critical tendency to
tokenize ethnic Others, reinscribing the “liberal ‘tolerance’ [that] condones
the folklorist Other deprived of its substance---like the multitude of ‘ethnic
2
Introduction
cuisines’ in a contemporary megalopolis; however, any ‘real’ Other is
instantly denounced” (Zizek 37). Zizek’s critique of cultural studies with
its notion of the immigrant as a liberal “idea” or tabula rasa for inscription
by the state is critically echoed in our volume. Each chapter engages the
cosmopolitan positionalities of an immigrant or exile experience that is not
reducible to any universal citizen, nor yet to a local national or ethnic
persona. As a contradictory combination of local and global, inside and
outside, the real refugee faces erasure within the liberal multicultural
agenda.
The first two chapters challenge the literary canon as “ethnic cuisine”
to consider some limitations in current cultural discourse. Irr investigates
the revision of immigrant depictions in Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz
to reflect upon itinerancy in late U.S. capitalism as both a wretched and
“exceptional” state. The itinerant is, for example, the chimès (Chimeras or
ghosts) who are American-born and Dominican or Haitian. They are the
children of those parents who are underemployed, underinsured, or
disconnected, who finally become gang members to drum up business. Irr
elaborates the way that the mass media system has owned the “immigrant”
through utopian tales of idealistic self-realization and highly pandering
economic U.S. labor logic. This chapter reflects skeptically on the
inequitable power that organizes the culture industry through kitsch or folk
populist images. Finally, it discusses recent immigrant fiction that subverts
liberal racism through satire and other hybridized reinventions.
Krumrey’s chapter is also a striking affirmation of the itinerant who
challenges, reappropriates, or resists exploitation within global colonization.
Krumrey surveys the fiction of Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gish Jen,
Aleksandr Hemon, and Bharati Mukherjee to draw out the itinerant voice
that is nurtured in and self-identified with translocality. All radically
ethnic, at the same time they refuse to re-inscribe the presumed nonethnic, a slippage into the modernist universal self. Instead, she argues,
they extend a tentative cosmopolitanism. Still, the postmodern wretched
refugee has always already been at play as in the negation or dislocated
exception of U.S. patriotism. Another chapter by Weber details how Paul
Bowles’ modernist work prefigures the postmodern itinerant in exiled
depictions of onto-social wandering.
In tracing figures of the itinerant that appear within modernism,
Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern shows an
itinerant flow that exists prior to the postmodern. The book draws out
modernism’s prefiguring of the postmodern cultural and political itinerant.
It continues the project identified in Geomodernisms to “unveil both
unsuspected ‘modernist’ experiments in ‘marginal’ texts and suspected
Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern
3
correlations between those texts and others that appear either more
conventional or more postmodern…across their differences, these works
share… a self-consciousness about positionality. Here, positionality is
onto-social as well as geographical, entailing a sense of situated and
disrupted social presence. Thus in some sense, however local their
settings, their [the itinerant] horizon is global and their voicing is refracted
through the local-global dialectic of inside and outside, belonging and
exile…” (Doyle and Winkiel 3). Juxtaposing native-born foreigners and
foreign-born natives, the book chapters branch off into itinerant
formulations that eventually merge as cosmopolitan tales.
All the chapters in Part One: Immigrants and Itinerants rethink the idea
of “nativity” as inadequate to describe an itinerant in the U.S. cosmopolis.
They present itinerancy as a cultural balancing act that locally presents a
collective or cosmopolitan act. Itinerancy as “local” is not reducible to the
“native” since it involves being thrown into a state of cultural exception.
Indigenous ethnicities no longer make sense in a post-nationalistic
situation without representation or clear geographical boundaries. The
cosmopolitan iterant is a collection of dissimilar non-entities, found in
common articulations of being the exception. Hence, we are all the
wretched itinerant refugee.
Part Two: Fragmenting the Linear takes a critical approach to
immigrant space as less interpretive than self-conscious about itinerant
place. Balkan’s chapter closely analyzes the urban as presented in Roberto
Bolaño’s fourth novella of 2666 as not simply a snapshot of the postapocalyptic absurd, but an eclectic assortment of urban perspectives that
destabilize the new global Other. As nomadic riffs on nationalistic
independence, the essays in the second section of Wretched Refuge
reiterate the dislocation or free drifting of itinerant identities. This part
emphasizes their turn away from hierarchical or linear tales of the “third
world,” into wretched or “exceptional” states. The wretched or
transnational refugees establish a trajectory despite what Homi Bhabha has
termed their “in-betweenness.” Their path is found in characters that are
comfortable with uncanny freedom or “unhomeliness.” Endeavoring to
live tenaciously in historically and culturally contested locationalities,
itinerants forge emergent cosmopolitanisms.
Another chapter in Part Two: Fragmenting the Linear by Datema
closely reads Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a post-apocalyptic parable
on existing outside the order of any civilized Other. This chapter follows
McCarthy’s narrative thread, which is made from the flames and
wretchedness where a father and son find themselves. Their dreams
provide the raw material for their survival, as they forge a farsighted path.
4
Introduction
While culture has succumbed to rampant cannibalism, these refugees set
out limits to avoid being consumed by global expenditure. In their indirect
movement as guided by dreams down the road, they construct an itinerant
path. This chapter goes over The Road as an anti-Oedipal account and an
uncommon survivalist chronicle.
The second section concludes with a chapter on Bob Dylan’s work,
which ultimately constructs a cosmopolitan answer to multicultural
anxieties about global hegemony. This chapter stresses that we listen to
those “wicked messenger(s)… who multiply the smallest matter” if one
wants to escape tyranny or a lifetime of exile. Dylan’s assumed alterities
provide us means to study the roles and messages of a series of itinerants
and seers—the “wretched” and the prophetic—as a way to examine the
possibility of seeing these exiles find meaning or solace in that nomadic
space.
In a shared appreciation for the spirit of cosmopolitan consciousness
and its varied geopolitical histories, the first and second sections
sometimes overlap, as for example with the McCarthy and “Translocality”
chapters where definitions of the Post-Apocalyptic and New PostAmerican Immigrant Literature relate. These chapters highlight
contemporary authors, such as Cormac McCarthy and Jhumpa Lahiri, who
allegorically take itinerant liminality to its aporetic limit. Thus, the
discussions of The Road and immigrant translocality both undercut
nationalistic and allegorical discourses to present an alternate cultural
bearing. Itinerant fathers teach without commanding or “fixing” the next
generation to carry their genealogy not as a burden but to go into the
farthest future point.
This overlap is found in itinerant stories that make a wretched
genealogy into postmodern history, as illustrated in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The
Namesake. As itinerant family, the Gangulis frequently wander to the
ocean to “anticipate the moment the thin blue line of ocean will come into
view. [The main character, Gogol,] and his father wander barefoot, their
pant legs rolled halfway up their calves. He watches his father raise a kite
within minutes into the wind, so high that Gogol must tip his head back in
order to see, a rippling speck against the sky…. His mother cries out,
laughing, as she lifts her sari a few inches above her ankles, her slippers in
one hand, and places her feet in foaming, ice-cold water. She reaches out
to Gogol, takes his hand. ‘Not so far’” (Lahiri 53). Their step into
overdetermined water figures the real flow of itinerant bodies as historical
fissures or whitewashed events. Consequently, the ocean is also the
alleged “destination” that keeps the father and son moving in The Road.
Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern
5
The book provides a way of rethinking diversity and community after
cosmopolitanism and the effects of U.S. globalization. The postmodern
itinerant tale has a movement, push, or change that drives its translocal
ethos. As a figure of cultural becoming, the itinerant stands for
displacement, dispersion, and a non-lucrative cultural exchange. It exceeds
the confines of physical location and nationality to recreate culture on a
figurative margin. The volume is a combined effort to situate immigrant
and itinerant acts that put down new stakes in the cosmopolitan field. In
both their content and formal flow, the book chapters refuse “Western”
narrative centrality to privilege more nomadic reconfigurations. Likewise,
the tales ultimately roam around language itself, where the itinerant
exceptionally lives and dwells to construct alternative idioms.
What the itinerant ultimately means for local and global culture is
shown in the wretched refugee voices that make exception to a hegemonic
rule. Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern
presents some itinerant tales that overturn an outmoded multicultural
model of “foreigner” and “other.” The itinerant is the postmodern avantgarde, the non-native hybrid citizen of the cosmopolis whose dwelling is
both local and global, inside and outside. It is the wretched refugee whose
story disrupts the banality of multicultural history and rewrites the
genealogical exception. This volume pulls together some unprecedented
itinerant voices to amend the transnational immigrant subject position as
essentially cosmopolitan.
Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. “The World and the Home” in Dangerous Liaisons:
Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. Anne McClintock
and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Print.
Doyle, Laura & Laura Winkiel. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism,
Modernity. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
2005. Print.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Print.
Zizek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, Or the Cultural Logic of Multinational
Capitalism.” New Left Review 225 (1997) 28-51. Web.
PART I:
IMMIGRANTS AND ITINERANTS
CHAPTER ONE
MEDIA AND MIGRATION:
DANTICAT, DÍAZ, EUGENIDES AND SCIBONA
CAREN IRR
During the 1980s and 90s, U.S. immigration narratives were frequently
routed through trauma. Figuring immigration as the agonizing loss of a
home culture, widely read writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Julia
Alvarez, and Jhumpa Lahiri developed a lexicon of wounds and scars. In
their works, painful memories of events in the home country mark the
protagonists' past, while the stresses of social exclusion define the
American present. Mourners, ghosts and zombies populate a limbo
between two territorially defined national cultures. In these and other 80sera immigration narratives, personal traumas, rather than political crisis or
a struggle for success in the public forum, take center stage.
In the first decade of the 21st century, however, despite continued
contributions to the trauma subgenre (see Desai, Cisneros, Brooks, Dean,
Jelloun, Seliy, Lalami), a number of writers have begun to move beyond
this preoccupation. Often for reasons as immediately governed by their
engagement with literary as social history, recent works by Edwidge
Danticat, Junot Díaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Salvatore Scibona turn away
from personal psychology and towards a complex, multi-media system of
communications as the central motif for their migration stories. Treating
contemporary media in its various forms as a coherent but non-national
institution, the new migration fiction renews some of the concerns
characteristic of early 20th-century immigrant and ethnic writing, as
described by Boelhower and Sollors.
This new writing does not entirely abandon the language of trauma, but
it does consistently bend trauma to new purposes. Rather than fixating on
the loss of a homeland associated with the mother, for example, recent
migration fiction often redistributes families—dispersing members
geographically and differentiating them by levels of media engagement as
well as linguistic assimilation (Morley). The heroes of 21st-century
10
Chapter One
narratives are often highly mobile subjects who continue to receive and
interpret the messages of a sending culture from several locations while
also actively transmitting and translating new codes to institutionally
defined publics. Often reaching a crisis point in a public space (such as a
church, prison, palace, street, monument, festival or café), the plots of the
new migration novels frequently turn on characters’ discovery of maps of
transnational arenas, rather than the revelation of secrets so crucial to
romantic fictions of self-discovery. In short, the fundamental time-space
coordinates (Bakhtin’s chronotope) of mediated migration fiction have
shifted, relative to those of the traumatic immigration novel. These new
coordinates influence the overall affect of 21st-century migration fiction-muting the characteristically melancholic voice of the traumatic subject
and amplifying a sharper satiric strain that addresses the nation. This
satiric element is crucial to the revival of politics in the new mediated
migration fiction.
That said, in the new migration novel, important variations in tone,
literary historical consciousness, and degrees of detachment from
narratives of wounding certainly appear. Some variations arguably arise
from the regionally specific narrative predecessors with which authors
struggle. In this essay, I examine some interesting new works treating
Caribbean (Díaz and Danticat) and Mediterranean (Eugenides and
Scibona) migration, briefly tracking the relation to regional precedents that
each author establishes as well as his or her turn away from the trauma
motif so dominant in the US literary marketplace. Although demonstrating
that these four works participate in a transformation of the migrant novel
as an entire genre would require more scope than can be taken here,
perhaps these influential examples will begin that discussion.
The Divided Island: Danticat and Díaz
To illustrate the emergence of a new migrant novel, we can turn to two
writers and friends born in the two nations that share the island of
Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz. While Danticat (b. 1969,
Port-au-Prince, Haiti) has made liberal use of the tropes of trauma in
earlier writings, her 2004 lyric novel The Dew Breaker moves in a new
direction. Díaz's even more ecstatic turn away from trauma is evident in
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). In this Pulitzer-Prize
winning novel, Díaz (b. 1968, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)
employs what he calls, in an interview with Danticat, “narratives of the
impossible: sci fi, horror, fantasy.” Taking a multidimensional detour
Media and Migration: Danticat, Díaz, Eugenides, and Scibona
11
through genre fiction, Díaz’s textured, code-switching novel offers the
clearest example of the mediated migrant fiction.
Díaz and Danticat make their swerves away from trauma in terms
partly provided by literary traditions specific to their pre-migration
cultures. For Danticat in particular, a specifically Caribbean literary
nationalism is relevant. In the postcolonial context of the Caribbean,
assertions of nationalism have played a vital and complex role; they have
helped writers define a distinctly New World sensibility at odds with the
mentality of the former colonial powers, distinct from the neocolonial
presence of the U.S., and resistant to techno-global historical amnesia
(Nesbit). Nationalisms deriving from Aimé Césaire’s Négritude displace
the heart of the imagined nation to the African diapora, while works in the
indigenist vein base themselves in the particular forms of racial and
cultural mestizaje that have arisen in the Caribbean (Benitez-Rojo). A
number of indigenist works written by men living in exile arguably
partake of a romantic nostalgia specific to exile, even as they reflect on the
incompleteness of the nation-building project (Munro). A skeptical antinational strain addressing this exile generation appears in many recent
writings by Caribbean women—voicing concerns of those who might best
be described as economic migrants rather than political exiles
(Mardrossian).
Even this feminist work, however, speaks to a complex of nationalisms
specific to the postcolonial Caribbean. A concern for the personal or
familial consequences of state failures should not be read exclusively
through a U.S. anti-national lens. As George Yúdice reminds us, race and
gender are not universally constant terms any more than nationalism is
constant in its definition, origin, or effects. Instead, argues Ileana
Rodríguez in House/Garden/Nation, it is useful to bear in mind the way
that revolutionary nationalism oriented towards equality, land rights, and
the redistribution of wealth is distinguished in the Caribbean and Latin
America from both a bourgeois nationalism that commodifies the cultural
expressions of women and indigenous people and the cosmopolitanism of
a conservative oligarchy. For Rodríguez, Caribbean women writers do not
simply reject nationalism or politically engaged writing tout court. They
instead make a pointed intervention that reveals the romantic underpinnings
of revolutionary nationalism while sustaining an engagement with this
tradition and refusing the amnesia produced by the adoption of a purely
American frame. The engagement of contemporary Caribbean writers with
issues centered on the home and private experience should be understood,
she argues, as a politically charged moment in an on-going literary
discussion of the nation as home, rather than as a retreat from public life.
12
Chapter One
This perspective is crucial to understanding Danticat’s Dew Breaker, a
novel that directly revises “the most celebrated literary work of Haitian
indigenism”—Jacques Roumain’s 1944 Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters
of the Dew) (Munro 16). The exile Roumain’s romantic nationalism
focused on the landed peasant as the ideal citizen, but Danticat’s revision
refuses the pastoral imagery of dew and the political utopianism of
Roumain’s treatment of the peasant-turned-master. She works instead with
a 21st-century layered, urban, and transnational space as the migrant’s
home territory. She investigates the emotional and political consequences
of restricted nationalism in a transnational context.
After all, Danticat’s participation in a specifically Haitian tradition of
the national novel occurs in the U.S., Anglophone context that has
provided her with the second or “stepmother” tongue in which she writes
(Shea). Danticat signifies on Roumain’s indigenism in a media-savvy
fashion attentive to the industrial circulation of images in both the
metropolitan US and the Haitian periphery (Kaussen). The characteristic
figures of The Dew Breaker are urban graffiti, prison tattoos, telephone
calls, answering machines, community radio, and local newspapers. The
kind of authentic, indigenous and matrilineal orality associated with
trauma narratives is always carefully filtered through the communications
technologies of the modern state in The Dew Breaker, a novelistic story
cycle that takes the titular father's legacy, not the mother's, as its central
topic.
The significance of media figures in The Dew Breaker is magnified by
Danticat's lyric minimalism. For example, at the climax of “The Book of
Miracles,” the volume’s central family trio attends a Christmas Eve mass
at a Haitian-American church in Brooklyn and imagines they recognize
Emmanuel Constant, the organizer of death squads during the postAristide period in the early 1990s (Brick). This passage introduces a kind
of historical data (number of victims, names of political organizations,
proper names of the enemy) unusual in Danticat's spare and symbolic
prose, in addition to presenting a microcosm of the primal scene of the
volume (the daughter Ka's discovery that her father was a dew breaker or
torturer). The passage also operates by means of a recognizably
postmodern layering of mediated images. Danticat's characters do not
simply point and see. Anne, the mother and focalizer of this passage, has
only a “limited view of the man's profile” (78). She does not experience an
instantaneous flood of memory and sensation (a delirious excess that
Danticat has elsewhere identified as an effect of trauma) (Danticat,
“Interview”). Instead, Anne checks her observation against “the picture a
community group had printed on the WANTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST
Media and Migration: Danticat, Díaz, Eugenides, and Scibona
13
THE HAITIAN PEOPLE flyers, which had been stapled to lampposts all
along Nostrand Avenue a month before” (78). The flyer enables this
moment of recognition (later recoded as misrecognition). It also produces
a popular desire to avenge Constant's crimes against some five thousand
people, confirming and building on the reports that circulated “through
Haitian newspapers, Creole radio and cable access programs” (79). The
flyer is crucial to the migrant community's networked sensibility, and it is
itself repeatedly rewritten. A “fragmented collage with as many additions
as erasures,” the flyer acquires “demonic-looking horns” that later fade,
much as its inflammatory writing “started disappearing so that the word
rape became ape and the 5 vanished from 5,000, leaving a trio of zeros as
the number of Constant's casualties” (79). In this unusually detailed
description, Danticat explores the leaky, faulty circuits of transmission that
undergird memories of trauma as well as purportedly cathartic moments of
recognition. Reiterated zeros and apish, faded demons are the stuff of a
less-than-miraculous public memory, this ironically titled story
emphasizes. Firmly stapled to a lamppost on Nostrand Avenue in the
Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, the flyer also insists upon
the US location of the mediated migrant's memory.
A similar although more detailed media-inspired misrecognition
provides the frame narrative for The Dew Breaker. In the first story, “The
Book of the Dead,” the author figure (a daughter and sculptor) not only
discovers that she has misunderstood her own her father; she also learns
how her own sculpture of his scarred back, a work she is delivering to its
new owner, a Haitian-American actress, keeps this false story in
circulation. In The Dew Breaker, building shrines to pain and ritually
commemorating loss are not necessarily virtues; in fact, repetition
characterizes a dictatorial use of the media. The unnamed dictator speaks
through “a taped message” recorded in “a droning nasal voice,” and
“daylong speeches were continually rebroadcast on the radio each year”
(171, 150). Against that one-way flood a new style of communication is
necessary.
Triangulated, time-shifted telephone conversations are one sign of a
new practice in The Dew Breaker, but finally it is the multi-layered figure
of Claude in “Night Talkers” that provides Danticat’s strongest emblem of
a new mediated migrant sensibility. A patricidal ex-con—“too young, it
seemed, to have been expatriated twice, from both his native country and
his adopted land”—Claude has heavily tattooed skin that is the symbolic
equivalent of a flyer rewritten with graffiti (100). Having returned to Haiti,
Claude is learning to speak Creole as well as English, and more crucially
learning to understand himself. “It's like a puzzle, a weird-ass kind of
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Chapter One
puzzle, man” he tells the narrator; “I'm the puzzle and these people are
putting me back together, telling me things about myself and my family
that I never knew or gave a fuck about” (102). With this newly assembled
self, the distinctly masculine, multiply migratory, and heavily encoded
Claude can speak “in the nighttime as well as in the hours past dawn”
(120). He becomes a utopian figure who suggests the possibility of a
successful, hybridized communication system and style emerging out of
migration. Claude represents an essential corrective to the dictatorial radio
broadcasts with which the final story closes: the news of a tortured
prisoner supposedly setting himself on fire at dawn and “leaving behind no
corpse to bury, no trace of himself at all” (242). In the place of that
traumatic absence, the memorable figure of expatriated Claude offers a
style of communication that foregrounds the repressed political processes
of dictatorship as well as US toleration/participation in torturous
imprisonment of persons of ambiguous citizenship. With this figure,
Danticat effectively shifts her focus in The Dew Breaker from the
traumatic memories of individual victims of torture to the public and
political questions surrounding media systems that report (or fail to do so)
on the migrant’s world.
The title character of Díaz’s exuberant Oscar Wao is essentially a
magnified, tragi-comic version of Danticat's repatriated Claude. A sci-fiobsessed, overweight “ghetto nerd” whose story bridges Santo Domingo
and suburban New Jersey, Oscar vividly exemplifies some of the most
characteristic tendencies of the 21st-century mediated migrant narrative.
His drama of marginality, exclusion, and erotic return introduces
outlandish political history of the Dominican Republic to readers
presumed not to know it while also scrutinizing the responsibilities of
writers. Throughout the novel, treatments of the contemporary media
system displace both a nostalgic focus on the past and a too easily
affirmative celebration of mass media.
Like Danticat, Díaz seems especially interested in overturning
indigenist or folkloristic tendencies in Caribbean literature. Rather than
supplanting a modern calendrical realism with the surreal temporality and
causalities of myth (as in magical realism), Díaz’s postmodern array of
mediated images and supposedly premodern figures confuses the
differentiations required for “magical” effects. At the sentence level as
well as in a sustained revisiting of the territory carved out by Mario
Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat (2000), a gruesome quasi-documentary
novel on the assassination of Trujillo, Díaz wrangles with some of the
most influential conventions for representing hispanophone Latin America
generally and the Dominican Republic in particular.
Media and Migration: Danticat, Díaz, Eugenides, and Scibona
15
After all, despite its concern with Trujillo’s excesses, Oscar Wao is not
a conventional dictator novel. It expresses profound skepticism about any
opposition between writers and dictators, describing dictatorial tendencies
in narration and writerly tendencies in dictatorship. Furthermore, as the
title indicates Díaz directly confronts an American literary tradition that
celebrates revelatory expatriation. Borrowing its titular syntax as well as
narrative situation and the logic of its climax from Hemingway’s widely
read story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Díaz’s novel
upends the romance of exile. While Hemingway’s narrator is an
expatriated hunting guide in Tanzania who reflects skeptically on the
media clichés he suggests have prevented the doomed title character from
experiencing more than a moment of masculine self-mastery in the hours
before his death, Díaz’s hip-hop-loving, web-surfing narrator Yúnior fully
embraces the media and ultimately the less than macho hero as well. In the
end, Díaz’s narrator and lightly autobiographical author-figure is neither
an anti-dictator nor a cosmopolitan aesthete reflecting wisely on the sordid
homeland. He is, instead, entangled with the persons and places he depicts
and embedded in the mass media that he compulsively records and
recodes.
In short, Yúnior is a closet nerd. From the first clauses of Oscar Wao,
rumor, sci-fi cosmology, and comic book fantasy mingle with a
postcolonial critique: “They say it came first from Africa, carried in the
screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered
just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn
into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the
Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse
or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New
World” (1). Geographically and linguistically mobile, Yúnior's voice
reclaims a political history by extending its media network from the
colloquial language for terror to a more formal, print vocabulary. The
bridge from here to there, the structure connecting the aporia where “the
nightmare door … cracked open” to the U.S. reader's presumed tabula
rasa, is a set of images provided by media systems. A media-circulated
fantasy of death banes and demons, curses and dooms, and ultimately their
reification as “the Curse and the Doom” (a Tolkien reference) launches
Díaz’s narrative.
As this paragraph and the novel unfold, we step back from this
hyperbolic rhetoric but never from Díaz's continuing concern for the
popular narratives that mediate his tale. There is always an element of
“they say” in Oscar Wao, and that collective voice always combines
folk/slang/popular mythology and consumerist/mass-produced/culture
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Chapter One
industry to build its bridge of rumor. In another climactic moment, for
example, when Oscar's mother receives a terrible beating at the hands of
Trujillo's thugs, we discover an even more intense pastiche of mediated
images. Placing himself on the same plane as the mother’s “wracked
imagination,” Yúnior calls himself the Watcher, referring to the DC
Comics alien who cannot (but yet occasionally does) venture beyond “the
Source Wall” separating him from the humanoids he observes. He then
describes the appearance of “a creature that would have been an amiable
mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt”
(149). Seemingly a totemic protector straight out of diasporic folklore, this
recurring figure of the black mongoose not only revives Beli (and later
Oscar, in a similar scene) with a reminder of her role as font of the family
line; it also sings to her “in an accent she could not place: maybe
Venezuelan, maybe Columbian” a well-known lyric: “sueño, sueño,
sueño, como tú te llamas … Yo me llamo sueño de la madrugada” (150).
Communicating with Belí in the mobile voice of New World popular
culture, the creature with the “chabine eyes” that indicate its mixed-race
roots (see Praeger), the mongoose is characterized in the narrator's
footnote as “one of the great unstable particles of the [Marvel?] Universe
and also one of its greatest travelers” (n. 18, 151). Like the fukú, it is
attributed with African origins, although arriving in the Caribbean via
Kipling’s India (recalling “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”), and possibly having
extraterrestrial comic book aspects as well. The ultimate migrant as well as
a salvational force, then, the mongoose operates in Díaz's novel as a multilayered and multinational figure for the power of the mediated
imagination.
It is not, however, only a deluded populace that Díaz endows with the
hybridized folk-media sensibility; it is also the first-person plural of “we
postmodern plátanos” that inhabits this plane (144). Since the fundamental
metaphor of the novel is the repeated two-directional analogy between
genre fantasies and the surreal conditions of the Antilles (“who more sci-fi
than us?” the narrator asks at one point), all the characters, not just the
titular and symbolic excluded nerdy Oscar, are understood as inhabiting
this mediated plane (21). Díaz's novel is organized around the proposition
that by exploring the mental world and preconditions of Oscar's brief life,
readers do not merely empathize with and share the wounds he endured.
Instead, by entering Oscar and the narrator's fantasy space, readers
provisionally embrace a collective condition of being “sci-fi,” that is to
say, Antillean.