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Friday, August 29, 2014

Third Culture Authors and Travel Writing

It is no surprise that many third culture kids grow into adults who remain keen to keep moving.  If home is a state of change, transition, expatriatism, relocation, and unfamiliarity, then it is no wonder that some TCKs grow up to be professional travellers.

I am enjoying reading J. Maarten Troost (Dutch/ Czech CCK, and TCK via those countries plus Canada and the US).  I taught a fun class yesterday in which I argued that despite the apparent low-brow title, The Sex Lives of Cannibals is actually rife with fairly sophisticated allusions to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.  It may seem there's too much poop in the narrative, but the point is satirical, and it is typically Troost and the First World that are objects of critique.  America especially is critiqued . . . but that's easy.  America in the 21st century is so easy to critique that it may in fact be cliche to do so.

Yesterday I also made mention of Rory Stewart (TCK via the UK and Malaysia, with impressive travel experience and Middle Eastern language acquisition as an adult), specifically The Place Inbetween and The Prince of Marshes.  He aims for a different market, I think (no sex, drugs or rock and roll in his titles; lots of politics and history).  He's a British politician now.

I wonder if TCA travel narratives differ from travel narratives by others?

Kira Salak (not TCK) goes to Papua New Guinea,   Rosemary Mahoney (not a TCK) paddles the Nile, Bill Bryson (not a TCK) hikes the Appalachian trail, among other things.

What makes their works different from Stewart or Troost?  Perhaps this:  Troost and Stewart are very at home with outsider status.  They observe it, they write about it, and they inhabit it fondly, and without fear.  For Troost, dead geckos in the water cistern are not scary but another opportunity to poke fun at himself for looking like an idiot as he scours them out in the heat of the blazing sun.  For Stewart, the walking paths across Afghanistan pose dangers, challenges and discomforts, but they are food for reflection, not anxiety.

Salak, by contrast, is often scared witless (will the trail through the jungle ever end?).  Mahoney is continually anxious about how Muslim Egyptians will respond to her as a single, white woman alone in a boat.   Bryson, while jokingly unafraid, is not fond of feeling an outsider: outsiderliness fuels his jokes, but more because he does not enjoy it than because he relishes it.

Rory Stewart and the the dog he walked with in Afghanistan.  (I borrowed this picture from a blog.)

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Simultaneity (Mohsin Hamid)

I read Mohsin Hamid's (TCK via US and Pakistan) The Reluctant Fundamentalist and just attended his discussion of the work.

In brief (I'm tired: been a long day enjoying new students): what if it's not discontinuity that characterizes third culture literature, but simultaneity?

Hamid frames his novel as a protracted conversation between a Pakistani in Lahore and an American businessman.  The Pakistani tells the American at length about his career in New York and the events that resulted in his return to his native Pakistan.  Hamid argues that the frame (conversation in Lahore) and the topic (what happened in New York) mean that both places are inhabited simultaneously.

Boom!  Mind=blown.  I think this may be more apt than my argument about discontinuity in Ondaatje and others.

Throw in these details: the opening of Hamid's novel "Excuse me sir, but may I be of assistance?" as homage and reference to Albert Camus' The Fall which opens "May I, sir, offer my services without the risk of intruding?" and the fact that Camus was a kind of expat (raised in French Algeria) and there's a lot to free-associate with . . .

Camus' L'etranger: is it third culture literature?  If it influenced existentialism, is existentialism founded in part on a kind of detachment  and disenfranchisement specific to growing up expat?

And, I've badly wanted to write about The Doors (Jim Morrison was a military brat) and their lyrics.  What connections, if any, are to be made between L'etranger and "People are Strange"?

Write to me.  Tell me what you think.




Friday, August 8, 2014

Terroir and Third Culture Literature

Vintners acknowledge the influence of the soil in which a vine is grown on the taste of the grape, and thus the taste of the wine.  Terroir--loosely translatable as "sense of place"--matters in tangible, taste-able terms.

Third culture authors are not alone in their interest in food, nor is their acknowledgement that food is an essential part of culture, of what makes home.  Home has a taste: literature writes about it over and over again.

Perhaps, though, third culture authors are more highly attuned than most to conflicts between the soil and the food.  Kingsolver's Nathan Price (The Poisonwood Bible) plants a lavish vegetable garden that won't grow in the Belgian Congo because there are no pollinators for the American plants.  In Alison's Natives and Exotics (which uses imported plants as a metaphor for dislocated people) a grove of orange trees dies of an imported blight.

In Lively's The Photograph a prominent character is a gardener who derides the recent vogue for imported pampas grasses . . . she too is aware of what is native and what is not.

TCKs are famously non-judgmental.  All that cultural awareness makes us open-minded.  Except, perhaps in the matter of food?  I wonder if this is one area in which we allow ourselves to taste authenticity, belonging and terroir, and deride imports.




Thursday, August 7, 2014

Discontinuity

Yesterday I blogged about the possibility that the chameleonesque TCK worries that s/he has no authentic self.  I cited Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal.

Here's a different spin: if the TCK is a chameleon, exceptionally adept at adapting to different circumstances, perhaps the self which is fashioned in each distinct environment is a distinct self.  For example,  if Ondaatje is "Canadian" via Ceylon and the UK, maybe when he thinks of himself he imagines the Ceylonese boy as a whole different person, distinct from the UK public school boy, and certainly separate and different from the Canadian author.

If experiencing oneself as different kinds of people depending on where one is/was is true of other authors, then third culture literature bears it out in an array of ways.

- Time-lines are frequently discontinuous, or confounded.  For example, both of Catton's novels which provide dates as chapter headings, but paired with such garbled plot lines they perplex rather than assist the reader.  Or Susi Wyss's linked short stories in The Civilized World which are subtitled according to location and follow geography first and narative teleology second.

-Characters fail to know themselves. Ondaatje's protagonist in The Cat's Table calls himself "he" when writing of his childhood self.  In his poem sequence Tin Roof, the speaker alternates between calling himself "I" and calling himself "You."  Characters are schizophrenic (Wray's Lowboy), they are split in two (the separated Siamese twins in DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English), they are actors (Catton's The Rehearsal).

-In Netherland O'Neill's Hans rifles through a box of photos.  The pictures are of different selves in different eras.  There is no honest way to put them in an album and imply they connect to one another.  In Lively's The Photograph there is a picture of a woman which reveals that she had a whole other self, one no one knew about.  In the poem Billy the Kid, Ondaatje includes many archival photos of Billy , but also includes one of himself as a child dressed as a cowboy!  Amongst so many different selves, why not also be Billy the Kid?

Stylistically TCL features discontinuity.  This too is one of its fingerprints.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Chameleons

Pollock and Van Reken write:

TCKs usually develop some degree of cultural adaptability as a primary tool for surviving the frequent change of cultures.  Over and over, TCKs use the term chameleon to describe how, after spending a little time observing what is going on, they can easily switch language, style of relating, appearance and cultural practices to take on the characteristics needed to blend better into the current scene (100).

This is a good thing, but "TCKs may never develop true cultural balance anywhere" (Pollock and Van Reken 101).

What if the issue of not being able to find "cultural balance"  reflects a deeper problem in terms of self-identity, perhaps even a conviction that there is no authentic self, but only the performed surface?  What if the camouflage is so good, the lizard really feels like s/he has disappeared?

Catton's The Rehearsal features characters who are actors (the drama college students), and characters who are performers (the saxophone teacher's students). These young people are all good chameleons.  However, the novel also features mothers who should be individuals but are instead positioned as though they are all different performances by one very talented actor.  It also involves saxophone students performing conversations they've had with other people for their teacher to listen to, and actors performing versions of their father or parents.  Perhaps everyone is performing in this novel .

Everyone is in "rehearsal for everything that comes after" (236): they are not living really, they are just practising.  In order to be good chameleons and blend in everyone steals parts of other people's stories to use as their own ("you lied about your favorite thing.  You stole it from someone else and used it as your own" 277). 

Not having an authentic self is a strange kind of relief.  Catton writes "We are speaking someone else's lines.  It's a comfort" (191).

In more explicitly TCK works like Sarah Bird's The Yokota Officer's Club or Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies (both about military brats), much is made of the opportunity a TCK has on arrival in a new place to utterly reinvent themselves.  This is part of being a chameleon too.

But in Catton continual reinvention is exaggerated, it becomes extreme.  Everything is performance, and there is no real "self."  In that respect her novel examines a TCK anxiety: what if there is nothing but performance?

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Failed attempts at empathy, recognized (plus death and sex)

TCKs are, as I write in the post about Point of View, particularly good at seeing all sides of an argument or issue, and their literature reflects this.  But what if this does not mean they are good at empathy?  In fact, what if it means they are more than usually bad at  "identifying themselves with  . . . a person or object of contemplation and so fully comprehending them or it" (OED, lightly paraphrased)?  What if their ability to see so many perspectives precludes their ability to fully inhabit any?  What if seeing many sides all at once makes them extra aware of how prone they themselves are to misunderstanding people and getting things wrong?

Here are five third culture novels in which characters are acutely aware that they do not understand other characters.  They desperately want to understand, they know there are different ways of understanding, and they see that they themselves have failed to understand.

In Eileen Drew's The Ivory Crocodile,  Nicole likes and wants to understand Diabelle but comes to see very clearly that her misunderstanding directly contributes to Diabelle's death.

In Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, characters try to understand who they are now that they are in a remote village in the Belgian Congo.  Their failures result in the death of the youngest child (Ruth May).  Leah, Adah and especially Orleanna perceive their own inabilities to demystify Africa as contributing to her death.

In Alice Greenway's White Ghost Girls,  Frankie doesn't understand her older sister Katie, and she sees that her father doesn't understand either.  Both lapses in comprehension result in Katie's death.

In Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Hans fails to comprehend his wife and nearly loses her to divorce.  He also fails to understand his friend Chuck Ramkissoon, and Chuck winds up dead.

In Catton's The Luminaries (no, I haven't read to the end yet) every one of those 12 men wants desperately to understand.  Did Emery Staines die?  Why?  Where'd the gold come from?  Where'd it go?  There's a likely death for which someone is to blame, and in the meantime characters like Moody cry when they realize they have misunderstood things (482).

You'll notice misunderstanding  more or less equals death in these novels, and that the characters who have misunderstood recognize they have done so (which must be distinctively TCK/ TCL).

It is worth pointing out that in these books sex, often inappropriate sex, indicates efforts to communicate effectively, or bridge misunderstandings.  Drew's teenaged African Diabelle sleeps with an expat aid worker; Kingsolver's beautiful young Rachel sleeps with (and marries!) middle-aged and alcoholic Eeben Axelroot; and in Greenway, Katie sleeps with one of her father's colleagues while Frankie kisses and licks a deaf boy until he kisses her back.   In Catton, it seems like Anna, the town whore (with whom everyone has slept, pretty much, even the marginalized Chinese opium dealer) will be the figure who connects all parts of the story; she holds the key to everyone's understanding.

O'Neill's Netherland doesn't quite fit this mold (unless I can argue that here cricket replaces sex as the game played in hopes of gaining intimacy with another).  Hans's wife chastises him for not really wanting to understand Chuck: "You never really wanted to know him [ . . .] You were just happy to play with him.  Same thing with America.  You're like a child.  You don't look beneath the surface" (166).  Maybe Rachel's critique unveils a dirty TCK secret?  Maybe, the literature suggests, we play at empathy and intimacy rather than actually succeeding at it?  And maybe we are quite good at perspective so we see how our failure to really understand adversely affects people.



Monday, August 4, 2014

Where'd the World Go? On Reading TCL by Hidden Immigrants

I really like Nicola Barker.  I discovered her writing on a melancholy December afternoon in White Rock, BC, Canada.  I had been stood up by someone I loved.  The tide was out, I walked the beach for hours, it was cold, I took refuge in a cafe/ bookstore and read this on the frontispiece of Wide Open:

I dreamed I saw you dead in a place by the water.
              A ravaged place.
     All flat and empty and wide open.

It was one of those moments of a work of literature grabbing something at the core of me, and yanking it exactly right, at exactly the right moment.   I read several of Barker's works before even encountering the term "third culture kid" and then I had to dig really hard through numerous "she lives in Hackney" bios to find out that in fact she is also one, having spent years from her early childhood through to the age of 14 in South Africa. 

(Does anyone know of a really good bio of Barker?  I'd like to know more.  Also, not pictured above is The Yips, which though vast and about a has-been golfer, is one of my favorite books ever and includes the best adulterous sex scene I've ever read.  It was so good I gave it to a friend; I must buy another copy.)

Barker's books feature dislocation and disenfranchisement, loss, confusion, perplexed identities: all good TCL stuff.  Other folks I work on a lot lately are similar (McEwan, and though I haven't worked on him I'm excited by Stoppard).  Barker, McEwan, Stoppard are all fixtures of the British literary canon, and are heralded as award-winning British writers.  Their international pasts are hidden.  Indeed they are very much like the hidden immigrants Pollock and Van Reken describe in Third Culture Kids; they "look alike, think different" (55).  On the surface of things they look British, so British, but the reviewers acclaim the ways  these writers are oddballs.

Barker has a "determinedly perverse and ungovernable imagination" according to the Guardian  (from the jacket of Five Miles from Outer Hope).  McEwan is accused of being "obsessed with the perverted, the depraved, the macabre" (Kiernan Ryan).  The Independent says Stoppard takes "perverse delight" in showing the long swath of time  during which humans have been both brilliant and cuckholds.  "Perverse" in descriptions of all three . . .

These writers are praised so highly because something about their imagination smacks of oddity to the British reading/ viewing public.  Something these writers do takes what is expected and twists it.  They are not reasonable, they go too far, they cover uncomfortable ground breaching moral norms and social expectations.  I'd argue that they do all of these things less out of strategy and more because it's what TCKs do.  It's one thing we are good at: we don't really know where the walls of the box are so we go beyond them . . . less because we are trying to be iconoclasts and more because some bit of us (sometimes stubbornly and by desire) is an outsider.

I love the work I do exposing the hidden immigrants as TCKs, stripping the "British" away from a nationally acclaimed writer and posing them as international and dislocated instead.  I really love it.

I started, way back when, reading more obvious works of third culture literature in which authors wrote explicitly, not implicitly, about dislocation, and in which they described travelling and airplanes, boats and hotels, unfamiliar food and culture shock upon repatriation.  This afternoon, I miss the world.  Once I am done reading Catton (don't ask, no I am not done), my next novel might have to be more openly international in subject, perhaps Brittani Sonnenberg's Home Leave.




Friday, August 1, 2014

Dysfunctional Mothers



In Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, Mary Edwards Wertsch writes about the difficulties faced by military mothers, among them isolation (due to frequent re-locations and the deployment of the father) and alternating bouts of too much responsibility for the family when the father is away, and too little control when he is home.  The effects on children can be difficult: they are forced to grow up too soon, to be adult partner to their lonely mother, or they are subject to her depression, or they resent her powerlessness and inability to challenge the father when he does come home.

Military Brat Ian McEwan's work is filled with mothers who languish or suffer (Atonement), or force their children to be either too grown up (The Cement Garden) or too infantalized ("The Cupboard Man"). 

Suzanne Collins is also a Military Brat, raised on US military bases and in Belgium.  A distinctive feature of The Hunger Games is how dysfunctional Katniss's mother is in the first volume of the series.  Floored by the death of the father in a mining accident, her depression means Katniss and Prim nearly starve to death until Katniss grows up (too soon) and starts providing for her family.

Quenby Wilcox writes insightfully of the difficulties inherent in being a "Trailing Spouse" for business or other purposes.  Are there studies indicating the effect of non-Military "trailing" mothers on their TCK children?  Certainly fiction indicates that the mother's relationship to her children is profoundly influenced by international transitions, and that children sometimes wind up  in suffocatingly close relationships with their mothers, or devastatingly remote ones.

Other TCL examples (bios for many of the authors below in previous posts):

Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal writes about mothers as interchangeable, as though there is one archetypal Mother and all of the world's various embodiments are merely a single actor playing the role a number of different ways, with different costumes: "The saxophone teacher marvels privately at this woman's performance, this single unitary woman who plays all the mothers so differently, each performance a tender and unique object like the veined clouding on a subtle pearl" (146).  This is strange, right? No child gets their own mother, everyone just gets Mother, and that role is played by an actor, someone invested in performing the part, not in embodying motherhood.

In John Wray's Lowboy, Yda/ Violet is "obsessed with her own son" (157).  She's jealous of his friendships, and seeks to isolate him.

Michael Ondaatje (Ceylon, the UK, Canada) writes The Cat's Table, in which an 11-year-old boy  has been left in Ceylon, but finally travels to England to re-unite with his mother after "four or five years" (264).  The separation is long and so complete the boy doesn't know exactly how long it is, and he isn't sure if he and his mother will even be able to recognize each other.

Penelope Lively  (Egypt, England) writes a novel in which the suicide of a young woman is ultimately traceable, at least in part, to her mother's early death.  The Photograph, is, incidentally, another example of a TCL work with many perspectives given of the same thing.  In this case the thing is a photograph of long-dead Kathleen and her sister's husband.  Various perspectives on this photograph and what it meant, how and when it happened, if it mattered and why comprise the novel.