Part One: Homing Culture (but not Third Culture)
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus rejects Kalypso and her offer of love/immortality, saying that though his wife is a mortal, she is at home and above all else he wants to go home:
Goddess and queen, do not be angry with me. I myself know
that all you say is true and circumspect Penelope
can never match the impression you make for beauty and stature.
She is mortal, after all, and you are immortal and ageless.
But even so, what I want and all my days pine for
is to go back to my house and see my day of homecoming.
And if some god batters me far out on the wine-blue water,
I will endure it (Lattimore 1991 94)
What Odysseus wants is home: the house, the wife he has left there. Penelope waits for him, cleverly fending off suitors, the house waits for him, even the dog waits for him. Odysseus' home is the ultimate object permanence. Home stays the same while Odysseus travels. He can roam far and fight and change: home waits for him.
In a similar, more modern incarnation of this fantasy, we see Donald Draper imprison Sylvia Rosen in a hotel room (Mad Men, Season 6). He tells her she cannot leave. He makes her wait for him. He doesn't say when he is coming back. He thereby creates a scenario in which the hotel room is home (waiting for him unchanged, with a dutiful "wife" also waiting there for him, unchanged) and he goes off to roam far and fight.
Both of these are fantasies; Don's is perhaps such an arousing one perhaps because it is a fantasy in the modern world to have a space and a person wait unchangingly for one to return. Who knows, maybe Odysseus' fantasy was a bit kinky too.
"Home" doesn't, in fact, wait for anyone. We move, places and people left behind change: that is the universal human condition. However, the feeling of having lost an anchoring vision of home is especially accute for those who have moved, as Salman Rushdie astutely observes:
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere." (Imaginary Homelands 1991 12).
Odysseus, Donald Draper, and Salman Rushdie each tell us this: being geographically away brings the idea of home into sharper relief. We yearn for the stable thing more the further away from it we are. Home is clearer, sharper, more compelling, from afar. Indeed travel is a kind of salvific: by going away we bring ourselves home to our truest selves.
But . . . not for third culture kids.
Part Two: Third Culture and the Absence of Home.
In third culture literature, the further the protagonist journeys, the more both "home" and the idea of a "true self" are lost.
In Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, Rachel feels herself transition from traveller (someone who can go home, or believes they can) to what I would call third culture kid (someone who is changed by their experiences as an expatriate and whose faith in a single "home" is lost): "Until that moment I'd always believed I could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened" muses Rachel, "I would go back to Bethlehem Georgia, and be exactly the same Rachel as before" (367).
What's especially revealing about Rachel's words is the conflation of "home" and her sense of herself: she can't go back to the same Bethlehem she left, and she is no longer the Rachel she once was. Home and self-identity are equated: they are one and the same.
When Odysseus comes home to Ithaca after 19 years, he is in disguise but his dog Argos recognizes him: the dog tells us truly that the real Odysseus has come home. No disguise can alter his identity.
When third culture kids travel, there is no more "real" identity, or perhaps more rightly, there is a proliferation of identities (plural). The single self is lost.
This may explain the numerous children who die in third culture literature: they symbolize parts of the self which are lost and left behind:
In Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, Ruth May dies and becomes a mamba-spirit in the trees. She becomes part of her mother Orleanna's self that is left behind, permanently, in Africa. In Sonnenberg's Home Leave, Sophie dies. She becomes part of her sister Leah's self that is left behind, permanently, in Singapore. In Alice Greenway's White Ghost Girls. Kate is left behind; in Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Adrian and Olivia. So many dead babies, configured as spirits that endure in places left behind.
The dead in these works of third culture writing represent parts of selves splintered away and left in disparate geographical locations. While Odysseus and Don Draper imagine homes and people waiting for them, third culture literature's protagonists imagine parts of themselves forcibly removed from them and left behind somewhere. Those lost fragments carry on, they continue, they persist where home does not.
(Those persistent selves become the eyes/Is in all of the various perspectives I write about in other posts)
shelves
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Notable Books of 2014: Internationalism
On December 2, The New York Times listed "100 Notable Books of 2014."
Of those 100, 50 books are "Fiction and Poetry."
The 50 authors hail from a variety of nations.
In addition,
8 are immigrants (Mengetsu, Galchen, Hustvedt, Henriquez, Sharma, Ulinich, Akhitiorskaya, Fishman)
4 are cross-cultural (Faber, Ullmann, Kehlmann, Lalami)
1 is described as a "nomadic adult" (Osborne)
and
3 are third culture (Wyld, O'Neill, Johnson)
16 out of 50: almost one third (32%) of this year's notable books are by authors who have experienced international transitions.
6% of this year's notable books are by third culture authors.
Of those 100, 50 books are "Fiction and Poetry."
The 50 authors hail from a variety of nations.
In addition,
8 are immigrants (Mengetsu, Galchen, Hustvedt, Henriquez, Sharma, Ulinich, Akhitiorskaya, Fishman)
4 are cross-cultural (Faber, Ullmann, Kehlmann, Lalami)
1 is described as a "nomadic adult" (Osborne)
and
3 are third culture (Wyld, O'Neill, Johnson)
16 out of 50: almost one third (32%) of this year's notable books are by authors who have experienced international transitions.
6% of this year's notable books are by third culture authors.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Brittani Sonnenberg's Home Leave
Sonnenberg's 2014 novel Home Leave follows the Kriegstein family from the American South to Hamburg, back to America, to London, Shanghai and Singapore, and back to America again. It is no surprise from the title that questions of home are fraught (what does it mean to go back to an increasingly foreign "home" when one gets "leave" from a job in an ever more comfortable "abroad" ?). Sonnenberg's own background as a TCK "raised across three continents" (book jacket) and her expertise as director of third culture workshops make it unsurprising that third culture themes drive the novel.
One certainly sees in this novel: dislocation (there is much moving); loss (death and unresolved grief); disenfranchisement (characters who don't know where they belong in terms of nation and only feel confident of "unquestioned belonging" at the expat "American Club" (214)); and guilt (most trenchantly over Sophie's death, but also over expatriate privilege: "we think you two are neocolonial alcoholics" college-age TCK children say to their parents, while enjoying a drink with them in the midst of "manicured grounds . . . panting dogs . . . fine silks [and] sweating glasses" somewhere overseas (213)).
One sees TCK lingo in the novel : "I hated how chameleonlike I had become," Elise complains, echoing Pollock and Van Reken's observations.
Sonnenberg clearly articulates how hard "repatriation" is for the college-aged TCK: While happy "to have our pasts erased. To be neatly, cleanly American," "repatriated global nomads, third culture kids restored to our first culture" are also panicked by their own ignorance of America when asked "our opinions by cute guys and girls who've grown up listening to NPR" (204-205).
Upon confronting ignorance of America, one choice is to try to go back to where one was raised. However, that will often painfully reveal how hard one had worked to fit in at the expat school, not how much one had been a local: "I had never tried to belong to the city or the country" Leah realizes when she tries to move back to Shanghai on her own after college "all my energies were concentrated on fitting in at the American school" (216). Moving back to Shanghai merely confirms that Leah is not Chinese: "I was white [and] I'd never learned how to use chopsticks properly" (215).
I am delighted that this novel is also beautiful in its quirks. For instance, Elise Kriegstein is approached by a bereft boy who presents her a letter intended for his dead mother Liesel Kriegstein: something beautifully unifying happens in the conceit that the dead woman and the live one come together because of a similar name.
Death (Liesel's, and Sophie's) bring me back to my thoughts about simultaneity and discontinuity. When Sophie dies, she persists: "because the death will happen in Singapore, its occurrence will be unimaginable anywhere else. Thus, in the parallel (irrational) universe . . . Sophie never dies" (106). The girl dies in Singapore, but because the family moves on from there there is no "closure" on the grief, and it can seems as though Sophie's life continues. Then "Leah's body is in Singapore and Sophie is buried in Indiana but in Leah's mind the two of them flit all over the world, everywhere they've ever lived: Philadelphia, Atlanta, London, Madison, Shanghai, Singapore" (174).
If plot lines in fiction are typically driven by time, one can imagine them as 1,2,3,4,5 etc. Even if the times are presented out of order as in 2,3,5,4,1, one knows that 4 belongs between 3 and 5 and 1 is the incident which starts the sequence. In third culture literature, narratives are often sequenced by place: in Home Leave we have Philadelphia, Atlanta, London, Madison, Shanghai, Singapore. This order is logical to its characters but a reader does not know how to imagine those as a sequence: they aren't a sequence. They are discrete places and times. Separate.
The way Sonnenberg writes about Sophie's death clarifies how they also overlap: Philadelphia, Atlanta, London, Madison, Shanghai, Singapore happen simultaneously. Sophie lives in all of those places at once.
Even though Leah, who does not die, has different selves, different "films" of herself in China and America (143), I think that both actually play/exist simultaneously. "Which film--the one taking place in the US or the one taking place in China-- is the real one?" muses Leah (146). Both are real. Both exist at the same time. The American film plays in America while the Chinese one plays in China, at the same time. Perhaps the film version of ourself that plays in the country (ies) in which we are not physically present never stops playing? Like Sophie, that other version, those other versions, of ourself persists, still living a life a long way away in an alternate land?
Elise, Leah, Sophie and Chris all get their own voices and their own sections of Home Leave to narrate. Maybe the fact that this narrative has many voices reflecting on the same thing, many perspectives and points of view on the same events, reveals something about TC Authors like Sonnenberg and their feeling of having many selves at once? Perhaps someone with a single national background and identity--Dickens, Thoreau and their ilk--can write an ominiscient narrator. Muddy the author's identity even a little and one gets slides, slips, transitions between different narrating voices: multiple points of view. Those multiple points of view come from the author's own fractured perspective and the coexistence, for them, of many different simultaneous selves.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
TCIs (third culture individuals), TCAs (third culture authors)
Just re-read the wikipedia page for Third Culture Kids: I like that the label is evolving. TCI (third culture individual) catches the third culture-ness while not misleadingly suggesting that the phenomenon only happens to kids. Yes, the dislocation during developmental years is key, but yes, it is also the case that adults raised in dislocated circumstances are third culture too.
And Jessica Sanfilippo still deserves credit for introducing me to the term third culture author (TCA).
And Jessica Sanfilippo still deserves credit for introducing me to the term third culture author (TCA).
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
TCKness and the Fictive Memoir
"A memoir," writes Gore Vidal,* "is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked."
Memoir isn't a bald truth, but rather the remembered truth of an experience (memory and experience are both remarkable for their pliability and unreliability). Fiction is a truth too, the truth of individual subjectivity being something fiction can represent better than any other genre.
.
The Cat's Table is a "novel" by Michael Ondaatje. Its protagonist is named Michael, like the author. As a young boy the fictional Michael travels from Ceylon to London by boat in order to be reunited with his mother; the author undertook a similar journey, at a similar age, for the same reason.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is a memoir by Alexandra Fuller. She is the protagonist (but goes by her nickname "Bobo" which makes her sound like a fictional character). Its chapters are crafted around key images: the dogs, the come-back baby, chimurenga. They read like well-wrought fiction, careful in its deployment of adjectives, in creating juxtapositions, and in providing the reader with amusing punch-lines.
Ondaatje is a TCK (Ceylon, the UK, Canada).
Fuller might be one by virtue of travel (The UK for a scant two-year period as a very young child, then Rhodesia, Malawi and Canada for college), disorientation (Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe), and dispossession (a white African nurtured in a white expat world which is conquered by black Africa).
In both texts, characters are nationally disenfranchised. Fuller writes "My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English nor am I of the sea" (36).
Her past reads like a fiction, a dream. This dream is set in a place which doesn't even exist any more: "Rhodesia has more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass in less than a hundred years, without cracking" (149).
Ondaatje writes a pivotal moment in The Cat's Table as dream-like. Traversing El Suweis at night on board The Oronosay "turned out to be our most vivid memory of the journey, the time I stumble on now and again in a dream" (127-128).
Here's my theory:
TCK personal history feels unreal. It is hard to substantiate because, moreso than for most people, the past lies a substantial geographical distance away. We can't prove it in conversation with others because so few (often only immediate family) shared experiences of movement, transition, travel, and re-adjustment with us. Places, acquaintances, pets, houses, foods and experiences are long gone, and are often incommensurate with where we have wound up in life. The truth of the past sounds like a fiction. The past feels like we dreamt it.
Thus Fuller's memoir (which reads like fiction) and Ondaatje's fiction (which reads like memoir) occupy a hazy liminal zone which reads as fiction but expresses a truth about TCKness and dislocation. The books share a style which seems, perhaps, magical realist (but isn't) while it documents a past which seems, to non-TCKs, impossible.
(*Is Vidal a TCK? He is a military brat whose father taught aeronautics at West Point. H e very briefly attended school in France, aged 13, just as the war was beginning.)
Memoir isn't a bald truth, but rather the remembered truth of an experience (memory and experience are both remarkable for their pliability and unreliability). Fiction is a truth too, the truth of individual subjectivity being something fiction can represent better than any other genre.
.
The Cat's Table is a "novel" by Michael Ondaatje. Its protagonist is named Michael, like the author. As a young boy the fictional Michael travels from Ceylon to London by boat in order to be reunited with his mother; the author undertook a similar journey, at a similar age, for the same reason.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is a memoir by Alexandra Fuller. She is the protagonist (but goes by her nickname "Bobo" which makes her sound like a fictional character). Its chapters are crafted around key images: the dogs, the come-back baby, chimurenga. They read like well-wrought fiction, careful in its deployment of adjectives, in creating juxtapositions, and in providing the reader with amusing punch-lines.
Ondaatje is a TCK (Ceylon, the UK, Canada).
Fuller might be one by virtue of travel (The UK for a scant two-year period as a very young child, then Rhodesia, Malawi and Canada for college), disorientation (Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe), and dispossession (a white African nurtured in a white expat world which is conquered by black Africa).
In both texts, characters are nationally disenfranchised. Fuller writes "My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English nor am I of the sea" (36).
Her past reads like a fiction, a dream. This dream is set in a place which doesn't even exist any more: "Rhodesia has more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass in less than a hundred years, without cracking" (149).
Ondaatje writes a pivotal moment in The Cat's Table as dream-like. Traversing El Suweis at night on board The Oronosay "turned out to be our most vivid memory of the journey, the time I stumble on now and again in a dream" (127-128).
Here's my theory:
TCK personal history feels unreal. It is hard to substantiate because, moreso than for most people, the past lies a substantial geographical distance away. We can't prove it in conversation with others because so few (often only immediate family) shared experiences of movement, transition, travel, and re-adjustment with us. Places, acquaintances, pets, houses, foods and experiences are long gone, and are often incommensurate with where we have wound up in life. The truth of the past sounds like a fiction. The past feels like we dreamt it.
Thus Fuller's memoir (which reads like fiction) and Ondaatje's fiction (which reads like memoir) occupy a hazy liminal zone which reads as fiction but expresses a truth about TCKness and dislocation. The books share a style which seems, perhaps, magical realist (but isn't) while it documents a past which seems, to non-TCKs, impossible.
(*Is Vidal a TCK? He is a military brat whose father taught aeronautics at West Point. H e very briefly attended school in France, aged 13, just as the war was beginning.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 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.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Monique Roffey
Does it matter? The novel tells a story likely to appeal immensely to anyone. A middle-aged man escapes his terrible job and recent family trauma to take his young daughter sailing around the Caribbean for months. Anyone can empathise with, and desire, this kind of escapism. The sailing and the travel experiences are likely to appeal to anyone who has travelled and anyone who wishes they could travel, perhaps right now.
In in terms of literary tropes and TCL tropes, Archipelago is rife with loss (an infant drowns in a flood, and later a much-loved dog falls overboard and drowns too), and also dislocation (Gavin and his daughter are out-of-place and adrift on the wide ocean). In these respects, it is like third culture literature.
In other respects, however, it clearly is not.
There no secrecy, guilt, disenfranchisement, sexual dysfunction, abandonment of children or even malaria (each of which is a prominent trope depending on whether the TCA you are reading was an affluent business person's child, dipkid, a brat, or an MK).
Picking up on this week's writing about point of view: here it resides solely with Gavin, and though he reflects more than once on the circumstances of his son's death, it is not at all like the TCAs below who focus almost exaggeratedly on the issue of multiple perspectives.
Also, my sawhorse Time. If a distinctive feature of TCL is that narrative is organised according to place, not time then Archipelago doesn't fit. On line three we are told it is 7pm, and though there are flashbacks, the novel's plot unfolds pretty systematically from that moment. Throughout, Roffey steers her reader using the clock more than the globe "They set sail for Curacao at dawn. It is mid-December 2010" (141). (Contrast this with another ship-board novel, Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, which is TCL. In this novel place always trumps time as a way of orienting the reader: "And now I was going to England" (114), "She went inland and south" (179), "We slipped into England in the dark" (263)).
Does it matter? No, not if you are simply looking for an appealing and well-written piece of travel fiction. Yes, if you are thinking that maybe TCKs who grow up to become authors (TCAs) share literary tropes and styles because of a culture they also share.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Tom Stoppard isn't who I thought he was. (A preliminary theory turns out to be, at least in part, correct)
Yesterday I wrote about TCL and Point of View. To sum up, it seems that TCL often includes multiple perspectives on the same event, in the form of different characters seeing their own version of the same event, or of a single character trying to see all possible interpretations of a specific event.
(A note to my friend S---: I think I answered a question about perspective and Point of View when you asked one about empathy. Those are different things, aren't they?)
Yesterday evening, long after my blog post, I was having a shower and was struck (often it is in the shower that I am struck) with this question: What about Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ? This 1967 play is a prominent feature of the British literary canon. I studied the play as an undergraduate, in a course about British postmodern literature. It seems impossible to get more British than a canonical author like Stoppard.
The play lifts a one-liner about two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead") and builds a play around who these characters were, and how it was they wound up dead. Stoppard's play assumes we know Shakespeare's, and parts of the play we know as Hamlet get repeated in it, as we see the same events, but from Rosencrantz and Guildentsern's perspectives. In other words, the play does exactly what I contend TCL does: it presents multiple perspectives on a single event.
How happy am I then, to discover this morning that Stoppard, though lauded (Knighted!) for his work as a British author, is clearly also a CCK and a TCK (and an exile/ immigrant too). To quote Lary Opitz, "Stoppard was born Tom Straussler in Zlìn, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on July 3, 1937. When he was two years old, his family fled from the Nazis to Singapore where his father, a company physician, was killed at the start of World War II. Stoppard and his mother lived in India for the duration of the war and then moved to England in 1946. There she wed Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British Army. Tom assumed his stepfather's surname."
Here's an example of how one might use observation of literary tropes and devices (in this case a use of multiple Point of View in a way that seems to be specific to TCL) to fingerprint a work (in this case, seeing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead might not actually be as British in its tropes as I had previously assumed).
Stoppard: I happily fingerprint him as a Third Culture Author. Whoopee!
(Promotional image from The New American Shakespeare Tavern's 2012-2103 season)
(A note to my friend S---: I think I answered a question about perspective and Point of View when you asked one about empathy. Those are different things, aren't they?)
Yesterday evening, long after my blog post, I was having a shower and was struck (often it is in the shower that I am struck) with this question: What about Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ? This 1967 play is a prominent feature of the British literary canon. I studied the play as an undergraduate, in a course about British postmodern literature. It seems impossible to get more British than a canonical author like Stoppard.
The play lifts a one-liner about two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead") and builds a play around who these characters were, and how it was they wound up dead. Stoppard's play assumes we know Shakespeare's, and parts of the play we know as Hamlet get repeated in it, as we see the same events, but from Rosencrantz and Guildentsern's perspectives. In other words, the play does exactly what I contend TCL does: it presents multiple perspectives on a single event.
How happy am I then, to discover this morning that Stoppard, though lauded (Knighted!) for his work as a British author, is clearly also a CCK and a TCK (and an exile/ immigrant too). To quote Lary Opitz, "Stoppard was born Tom Straussler in Zlìn, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on July 3, 1937. When he was two years old, his family fled from the Nazis to Singapore where his father, a company physician, was killed at the start of World War II. Stoppard and his mother lived in India for the duration of the war and then moved to England in 1946. There she wed Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British Army. Tom assumed his stepfather's surname."
Here's an example of how one might use observation of literary tropes and devices (in this case a use of multiple Point of View in a way that seems to be specific to TCL) to fingerprint a work (in this case, seeing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead might not actually be as British in its tropes as I had previously assumed).
Stoppard: I happily fingerprint him as a Third Culture Author. Whoopee!
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
TCL and POV
After sushi with author-friend S---
Third Culture Literature and Point of View
What, my friend S--- asked, about empathy in third culture literature? Is it distinctive?
It must be, surely, for Third Culture Kids benefit from knowing about cultural difference early in their lives. They know that what is frowned upon in one place may be encouraged in another (for instance the issue of asking a friend or distant relative for money: very uncomfortable for an American, normal and acceptable for a Ghanaian). TCKs are especially adroit at seeing all points of view. Does their fiction writing reflect this?
1) Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Catton: TCK via Canada/ NZ). (I am on page 382 of 832: I am an expert. ha). There are 12 men in a room at the start of the novel and it seems we may get some portion of the same complex and interlocking story about one night (14 January, 1866) from each of them. It seems that Anna Wetherell's perspective might provide the synthesis. Definitely many different voices get to speak here (there is much dialogue), narration changes hands from character to character and the novel seems to have an omniscient narrator who refers to him/herself with a royal "we" : "rather than transcribe this sentimental exchange, we choose to talk above it, and instead describe in better detail . . ." (295). One of the men (Moody) says this most TCK thing: "I contend there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths--and pertinence, you must agree, is a matter of perspective" (282).
(In Catton's other novel , The Rehearsal, the conceit of acting is explored--more on the TCK chameleon in another post--but here too we see different perspectives on the same thing. A girl has a relationship with her teacher. We see one set of high-school-aged students confess their opinions to their saxophone teacher, but we also see students of the nearby drama college interpret the story for stage).
2) At the other extreme, Ian McEwan's Saturday (McEwan: British Military Brat via Libya and Singapore). All of this happens from the perspective of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, and the whole novel focuses on a single day. Like The Luminaries, the component parts of a single day's drama are taken apart, assessed, discussed and thought through. Thus though we are in Perowne's perspective the whole time, he is exploring as many different points of view about his day and its events as he can. He spends a lot of time looking in mirrors too, I think (I need to go back and look for page numbers), and looking out of windows: these provide perspectives on himself and different vantage points on the world around him.
3) What's better for splitting a single point of view than mental illness? Consider John Wray's Lowboy. (Wray: TCK and Cross Culture Kid or CCK, via Austria and the USA). Lowboy/William is schizophrenic, so is his mother Violet/Yda and the policeman searching for William struggles with the fact that his father renamed him Ali when his birth name was Rufus. Each of the main characters expresses at least two perspectives.
4) A nice segue from Lowboy is DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English (bio in preceding post). Here we have Siamese twins (two consciousnesses presenting contradictory accounts of events), separated as adults. We follow their alarming, yet successful, quest to buy a wife from a small, war-torn, Republic (formerly part of the USSR).
But, is this multiplicity of View Point typical to ALL contemporary literature? Not quite. Perhaps everyone is interested in Point of View, but I see other writers handling it quite differently. (How valid is my random sampling, you ask? Hmn. Yes. That is a good question. Nonetheless, here are my thoughts.)
1) Dan Rhodes' (Britain) Marry Me is a compilation of very (very) short stories, all about relationships (primarily heterosexual). Many perspectives. Unlike Catton, or McEwan these perspectives reflect on a thematically similar scenario but not exactly the same event.
2) Like McEwan, Wilma Stockenstrom's (South Africa. Trans J. M. Coetzee) Expedition to the Baobab Tree inhabits one perspective. However, this one individual thinks widely, beautifully, dreamily about a broad range of historical event and personal experience. A swath of time, all from one view.
3) In That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott (Australian, CCK white and aboriginal) occupies an amorphous universal perspective and creates a dreamtime or creation myth which includes the arrival of white settlers. In some senses, this is completely opposite to what happens in the TCL works I list above: here all perspectives are shown to be one. Ultimately there is only one perspective.
4) And what about mental illness? In I. J. Kay's Mountains of the Moon we have another mentally ill protagonist, and she (like Wray's Lowboy) has a mentally ill mother. Her identity is markedly unstable (she has many different names over the course of the novel), but she presents a single point of view at each juncture, not several perspectives on the same moment. She says "All these years and we never arsts, where we come from or who we is" (287). That line alone makes Kay's protagonist different from the TCL ones who seem to be examining and re-examining everything from as many perspectives as possible with the hope of answering exactly those questions.
Third Culture Literature and Point of View
What, my friend S--- asked, about empathy in third culture literature? Is it distinctive?
It must be, surely, for Third Culture Kids benefit from knowing about cultural difference early in their lives. They know that what is frowned upon in one place may be encouraged in another (for instance the issue of asking a friend or distant relative for money: very uncomfortable for an American, normal and acceptable for a Ghanaian). TCKs are especially adroit at seeing all points of view. Does their fiction writing reflect this?
1) Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Catton: TCK via Canada/ NZ). (I am on page 382 of 832: I am an expert. ha). There are 12 men in a room at the start of the novel and it seems we may get some portion of the same complex and interlocking story about one night (14 January, 1866) from each of them. It seems that Anna Wetherell's perspective might provide the synthesis. Definitely many different voices get to speak here (there is much dialogue), narration changes hands from character to character and the novel seems to have an omniscient narrator who refers to him/herself with a royal "we" : "rather than transcribe this sentimental exchange, we choose to talk above it, and instead describe in better detail . . ." (295). One of the men (Moody) says this most TCK thing: "I contend there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths--and pertinence, you must agree, is a matter of perspective" (282).
(In Catton's other novel , The Rehearsal, the conceit of acting is explored--more on the TCK chameleon in another post--but here too we see different perspectives on the same thing. A girl has a relationship with her teacher. We see one set of high-school-aged students confess their opinions to their saxophone teacher, but we also see students of the nearby drama college interpret the story for stage).
2) At the other extreme, Ian McEwan's Saturday (McEwan: British Military Brat via Libya and Singapore). All of this happens from the perspective of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, and the whole novel focuses on a single day. Like The Luminaries, the component parts of a single day's drama are taken apart, assessed, discussed and thought through. Thus though we are in Perowne's perspective the whole time, he is exploring as many different points of view about his day and its events as he can. He spends a lot of time looking in mirrors too, I think (I need to go back and look for page numbers), and looking out of windows: these provide perspectives on himself and different vantage points on the world around him.
3) What's better for splitting a single point of view than mental illness? Consider John Wray's Lowboy. (Wray: TCK and Cross Culture Kid or CCK, via Austria and the USA). Lowboy/William is schizophrenic, so is his mother Violet/Yda and the policeman searching for William struggles with the fact that his father renamed him Ali when his birth name was Rufus. Each of the main characters expresses at least two perspectives.
4) A nice segue from Lowboy is DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English (bio in preceding post). Here we have Siamese twins (two consciousnesses presenting contradictory accounts of events), separated as adults. We follow their alarming, yet successful, quest to buy a wife from a small, war-torn, Republic (formerly part of the USSR).
But, is this multiplicity of View Point typical to ALL contemporary literature? Not quite. Perhaps everyone is interested in Point of View, but I see other writers handling it quite differently. (How valid is my random sampling, you ask? Hmn. Yes. That is a good question. Nonetheless, here are my thoughts.)
1) Dan Rhodes' (Britain) Marry Me is a compilation of very (very) short stories, all about relationships (primarily heterosexual). Many perspectives. Unlike Catton, or McEwan these perspectives reflect on a thematically similar scenario but not exactly the same event.
2) Like McEwan, Wilma Stockenstrom's (South Africa. Trans J. M. Coetzee) Expedition to the Baobab Tree inhabits one perspective. However, this one individual thinks widely, beautifully, dreamily about a broad range of historical event and personal experience. A swath of time, all from one view.
3) In That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott (Australian, CCK white and aboriginal) occupies an amorphous universal perspective and creates a dreamtime or creation myth which includes the arrival of white settlers. In some senses, this is completely opposite to what happens in the TCL works I list above: here all perspectives are shown to be one. Ultimately there is only one perspective.
4) And what about mental illness? In I. J. Kay's Mountains of the Moon we have another mentally ill protagonist, and she (like Wray's Lowboy) has a mentally ill mother. Her identity is markedly unstable (she has many different names over the course of the novel), but she presents a single point of view at each juncture, not several perspectives on the same moment. She says "All these years and we never arsts, where we come from or who we is" (287). That line alone makes Kay's protagonist different from the TCL ones who seem to be examining and re-examining everything from as many perspectives as possible with the hope of answering exactly those questions.
Monday, July 28, 2014
Does TCL have a distinctive "fingerprint"?
In my book, The Writer and the Overseas Childhood, I argue that there are prevelant themes in third culture literature:
dislocation
loss
disenfranchisement
and, depending on the kind of third culture literature:
secrecy and guilt (often in the literature of diplomatic kids, or others raised with significant material privilege) or
precocious underage sex (often in military brat writing, perhaps an expression of the need to make intense connections quickly, before being posted to a new location or an expression of the need to challenge the rigidity of military hierarchy) or
abandonment (often in the writings of missionary kids, perhaps expressing the difficulty of being raised as subordinate to one's parents' mission).
But, going on from what's in my book, is there a third culture fingerprint of some kind, a stylistic marker, a shared rhetorical device?
I thought, and I still think, that the way time unfolds in third culture literature is distinctive. If the stereotypical first line in fiction is "it was a dark and stormy night" then time (when was it?) generally drives literary narrative. In Michael Ondaatje's work (poetry and novels) place comes before time (where was it?). I have gone in to a big pile of TCL reading to see if my theory holds up with other authors.
Here's the big pile:
You'll notice some things about the pile right away:
I. J. Kay's Mountains of the Moon and DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English are set out in front. DBC Pierre is a TCK. His real name is Peter Finlay. He was born in Australia, spent early years in the US, the South Pacific and Great Britain and then the rest of his childhood in Mexico (someday I really want to compare him to that other strangely Irish-US-Mexican figure, comedian Louis CK, but that's for another day). I.J. Kay is ostensibly uncomplicatedly British, though she now lives in the Gambia. There is a dearth of information about her, and the name is clearly a penname. A subsidiary question I had when I began this big pile o' reading was are IJKay and DBC the same person?? I don't think they are, actually (DBC never uses semi-colons, IJKay uses them almost every sentence), but it was a fun place to start.
Starting with those two led me to refine my experiment: in order to tell if third culture literature is distinctive, I have to contrast it with literature that is contemporary but not third culture. Hence two piles.
On the left, literature by writers who are not TCKs : I J Kay, Dan Rhodes, Susan Minot, Evie Wyld, Chimamandah Ngozi Adiche, Russell Hoban, Wilma Stockenstrom (Trans J.M. Coetzee), and Kim Scott.
On the right, third culture literature by: DBC Pierre, Brittani Sonnenberg, Ian McEwan, John Wray, Susi Wyss, Gerald Durrell, Francesca Marciano, Penelope Lively and John Lanchester. Also in this pile, though perhaps not TCK (more investigation required): Monique Roffey.
And of course Eleanor Catton, both The Rehearsal (already read) and The Luminaries which is so long I feel like time has stood still and I will be reading it forever . . .
Here're some questions to end on:
Is Eleanor Catton (Canada/ NZ) a TCK in the same way as someone like McEwan (Britain, Libya, Singapore)? How many places do you have to have lived in to be really TCK? Why are all the folks in my pile white? Are you "more" TCK if you've got a first world passport but moved repeatedly through the third world?
How does the literature, the fiction, answer these kinds of questions?
dislocation
loss
disenfranchisement
and, depending on the kind of third culture literature:
secrecy and guilt (often in the literature of diplomatic kids, or others raised with significant material privilege) or
precocious underage sex (often in military brat writing, perhaps an expression of the need to make intense connections quickly, before being posted to a new location or an expression of the need to challenge the rigidity of military hierarchy) or
abandonment (often in the writings of missionary kids, perhaps expressing the difficulty of being raised as subordinate to one's parents' mission).
But, going on from what's in my book, is there a third culture fingerprint of some kind, a stylistic marker, a shared rhetorical device?
I thought, and I still think, that the way time unfolds in third culture literature is distinctive. If the stereotypical first line in fiction is "it was a dark and stormy night" then time (when was it?) generally drives literary narrative. In Michael Ondaatje's work (poetry and novels) place comes before time (where was it?). I have gone in to a big pile of TCL reading to see if my theory holds up with other authors.
Here's the big pile:
I. J. Kay's Mountains of the Moon and DBC Pierre's Ludmila's Broken English are set out in front. DBC Pierre is a TCK. His real name is Peter Finlay. He was born in Australia, spent early years in the US, the South Pacific and Great Britain and then the rest of his childhood in Mexico (someday I really want to compare him to that other strangely Irish-US-Mexican figure, comedian Louis CK, but that's for another day). I.J. Kay is ostensibly uncomplicatedly British, though she now lives in the Gambia. There is a dearth of information about her, and the name is clearly a penname. A subsidiary question I had when I began this big pile o' reading was are IJKay and DBC the same person?? I don't think they are, actually (DBC never uses semi-colons, IJKay uses them almost every sentence), but it was a fun place to start.
Starting with those two led me to refine my experiment: in order to tell if third culture literature is distinctive, I have to contrast it with literature that is contemporary but not third culture. Hence two piles.
On the left, literature by writers who are not TCKs : I J Kay, Dan Rhodes, Susan Minot, Evie Wyld, Chimamandah Ngozi Adiche, Russell Hoban, Wilma Stockenstrom (Trans J.M. Coetzee), and Kim Scott.
On the right, third culture literature by: DBC Pierre, Brittani Sonnenberg, Ian McEwan, John Wray, Susi Wyss, Gerald Durrell, Francesca Marciano, Penelope Lively and John Lanchester. Also in this pile, though perhaps not TCK (more investigation required): Monique Roffey.
And of course Eleanor Catton, both The Rehearsal (already read) and The Luminaries which is so long I feel like time has stood still and I will be reading it forever . . .
Here're some questions to end on:
Is Eleanor Catton (Canada/ NZ) a TCK in the same way as someone like McEwan (Britain, Libya, Singapore)? How many places do you have to have lived in to be really TCK? Why are all the folks in my pile white? Are you "more" TCK if you've got a first world passport but moved repeatedly through the third world?
How does the literature, the fiction, answer these kinds of questions?
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Joseph O'Neill, TCK, Nominated for Man Booker Prize
Joseph O'Neill's "The Dog" has been nominated for this year's Man Booker Prize. It will not be available in the US until September.
O'Neill is identified as "Irish," but his story is rather more complicated.
He was born in Ireland, of mixed Irish and Turkish ancestry. He went to preschool in Turkey, then lived in Iran, Mozambique and Holland. He went to college in England, and now lives in New York (The Writer and The Overseas Childhood 32).
O'Neill won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner award for Netherland.
As far as I can tell (having not seen it, never mind read it), "The Dog" involves expats from New York and elsewhere living in Dubai (a quintessentially bizarre expatriate hub).
O'Neill is identified as "Irish," but his story is rather more complicated.
He was born in Ireland, of mixed Irish and Turkish ancestry. He went to preschool in Turkey, then lived in Iran, Mozambique and Holland. He went to college in England, and now lives in New York (The Writer and The Overseas Childhood 32).
O'Neill won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner award for Netherland.
As far as I can tell (having not seen it, never mind read it), "The Dog" involves expats from New York and elsewhere living in Dubai (a quintessentially bizarre expatriate hub).
Friday, July 18, 2014
Third Culture Kids Who Write: A Growing List of Third Culture Authors
Updated June 2017
What you will find here is Third Culture Authors's Names in six sections:
1) New stuff that I am adding this round (also integrated into sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 as appropriate)
2) TCAs whose work reflects their identity.
3) TCAs whose work doesn't necessarily reflect their identity
4) TCA memoirs
5) Colonial-Era TCAs
6) Misc. of related interest.
How do I choose authors for this list?
I go by David Pollock's definition of third culture kid: "[A] person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of the same background."
I recognize that definitions are infinitely adaptable and that Pollock's can be broadened to include CCKs (Cross-Cultural Kids) and other interesting, valuable experiences. For the sake of establishing that TCAs are vast in number, and perhaps proving as much to any doubters, I keep to Pollock's definition fairly rigidly.
Note that most of these authors have published more than one work. The list below represents thousands of published works by TCAs. Enjoy!
1) New Stuff that I am adding this time round
(With thanks to Jessica Sanfillipo Schulz, Nina Sichel of Writing Out of Limbo, and Displaced Nation for their numerous tips and leads.)
Baranay, Inez. (Novels, Essays)
Eggerz, Solveig. (Novels)
Ghosh, Amitav. (Novels, some set in India, Ecocrit)
Gregson, Julia. (Military Brat, with substantial and diverse adult travel too, reflected in huge range of contexts in her novels)
Haddad, Saleem. (Novels--war, coming of age, sort of TCK ish in theme, definitely so in biographical terms)
Handal, Nathalie. (Poems, Plays, Travel narratives)
Harrar, Randa. (Novels, Essays)
Jeffries, Dinah. (Novels, re: Colonial Malaya, and inspired by her son's tragic death)
L'Esperance, Mari. (Poetry!)
Mawer, Simon. (Thrillers, including one that astute Jessica Sanfillipo noticed shares a title with TCK Heidi Durrow's novel by the same name The Girl Who Fell from the Sky!)
Sharif, Somaz. Iranian-American, but perhaps because of frequent dislocations in the US before age 11, a TCK. (Poems)
Yanagihara, Hanya. Frequent US moves as a child, almost a military brat-type pattern in terms of repeated dislocation, but because of her father's medical, career (Novels).
Memoir:
Arbuckle, Les. Saigon Kids: An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960s Vietnam.
Gardiner, Marilyn. Essays (Between Worlds) and Memoir (Passages Through Pakistan).
Hervey, Emily. Memoir (also practical guides for expatriation and academic work in Writing Out Of Limbo.)
Rice, Elizabeth. Rituals of Separation: A South Korean Memoir of Identity and Belonging.
Young, Melody. Fragments and Faith: An Adult Third Culture Kid Experience in Evangelicalism.
Interesting academic connections:
Dagnino, Arianna. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015.
Sanfillipo Schulz, Jessica. "Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists." Transnational Literature Volume 9, Issue 1, November 2016
By Me, Rauwerda, Antje. “Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Mosaic 49.3 (Sep. 2016): 39-53.
Trivia: Joe Strummer was a diplobrat! And Jim Morrison was a military brat.
5) The Colonials (Many of these names also cross over into the Memoir section)
Blixen, Karen. Out of Africa
Cloete, Stuart.
Godden, Rumer. (and sister Jon)
Gordon, Katherine. The Emerald Peacock.
Greene, A.H.M. Kirk.
Huxley, Elspeth.
Kaye, M.M..
Keating, Barbara and Stephanie. (Lots of co-written novels)
Kendall, Felicity. White Cargo.
Kipling, Rudyard.
Markham, Beryl.
Master, John.
McCall Smith, Alexander.
Pearce, Michael.
Orwell, George.
Smith, Wilbur.
Thesiger, Wilfred.
6) Misc but noteworthy:
Meneses, Lilliana "Homesick for Abroad: A Phenomenological Study of Third Culture Identity, Language and Memory." (PhD thesis for GWU, 2006)
Canadian Artist and Military Brat Leslie Reid http://www.lesliereid.ca/paintings.html (interesting that her website's bio doesn't say anything about her childhood)
Dagnino, Arianna. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015.
Rauwerda, Antje M. "Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Mosaic 49.3 (Sep. 2016): 39-53.
What you will find here is Third Culture Authors's Names in six sections:
1) New stuff that I am adding this round (also integrated into sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 as appropriate)
2) TCAs whose work reflects their identity.
3) TCAs whose work doesn't necessarily reflect their identity
4) TCA memoirs
5) Colonial-Era TCAs
6) Misc. of related interest.
How do I choose authors for this list?
I go by David Pollock's definition of third culture kid: "[A] person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture. The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of the same background."
I recognize that definitions are infinitely adaptable and that Pollock's can be broadened to include CCKs (Cross-Cultural Kids) and other interesting, valuable experiences. For the sake of establishing that TCAs are vast in number, and perhaps proving as much to any doubters, I keep to Pollock's definition fairly rigidly.
Note that most of these authors have published more than one work. The list below represents thousands of published works by TCAs. Enjoy!
1) New Stuff that I am adding this time round
(With thanks to Jessica Sanfillipo Schulz, Nina Sichel of Writing Out of Limbo, and Displaced Nation for their numerous tips and leads.)
Baranay, Inez. (Novels, Essays)
Eggerz, Solveig. (Novels)
Ghosh, Amitav. (Novels, some set in India, Ecocrit)
Gregson, Julia. (Military Brat, with substantial and diverse adult travel too, reflected in huge range of contexts in her novels)
Haddad, Saleem. (Novels--war, coming of age, sort of TCK ish in theme, definitely so in biographical terms)
Handal, Nathalie. (Poems, Plays, Travel narratives)
Harrar, Randa. (Novels, Essays)
Jeffries, Dinah. (Novels, re: Colonial Malaya, and inspired by her son's tragic death)
L'Esperance, Mari. (Poetry!)
Mawer, Simon. (Thrillers, including one that astute Jessica Sanfillipo noticed shares a title with TCK Heidi Durrow's novel by the same name The Girl Who Fell from the Sky!)
Sharif, Somaz. Iranian-American, but perhaps because of frequent dislocations in the US before age 11, a TCK. (Poems)
Yanagihara, Hanya. Frequent US moves as a child, almost a military brat-type pattern in terms of repeated dislocation, but because of her father's medical, career (Novels).
Memoir:
Arbuckle, Les. Saigon Kids: An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960s Vietnam.
Gardiner, Marilyn. Essays (Between Worlds) and Memoir (Passages Through Pakistan).
Hervey, Emily. Memoir (also practical guides for expatriation and academic work in Writing Out Of Limbo.)
Rice, Elizabeth. Rituals of Separation: A South Korean Memoir of Identity and Belonging.
Young, Melody. Fragments and Faith: An Adult Third Culture Kid Experience in Evangelicalism.
Interesting academic connections:
Dagnino, Arianna. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015.
Sanfillipo Schulz, Jessica. "Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists." Transnational Literature Volume 9, Issue 1, November 2016
By Me, Rauwerda, Antje. “Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Mosaic 49.3 (Sep. 2016): 39-53.
and
“Katniss,
Military Bratness: Military Culture in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy.” Children’s Literature 44 (2016):
172-191.
Trivia: Joe Strummer was a diplobrat! And Jim Morrison was a military brat.
Contemporary Third
Culture Fiction
(* denotes a text I’ve written about in The Writer and The Overseas Childhood)
2) By
TCKs who write about TCK experience to some degree
Aitken, Neil. Poetry.
*Alison, Jane. (Novels)
*Alison, Jane. (Novels)
Alameddine, Rabih (Novels)
Allende, Isabel. (Spanish language, but very available in translation)
Anam, Tahmina. A Golden Age.
Banerji, Sara. (Novels)
Baranay, Inez (Novels, Essays)
Baranay, Inez (Novels, Essays)
Bedford, Sybille. (Novels and memoir)
Bell-Villada, Gene H.. (Academic
Writing, but also TCK fiction and a memoir)
Berg, Elizabeth. Durable Goods (but many other novels, some not about military brat/ TCK experience at all).
Berg, Elizabeth. Durable Goods (but many other novels, some not about military brat/ TCK experience at all).
*Bird, Sarah. The Yokota Officer’s Club (other novels not explicitly TCK)
Blaise, Clark. (Novels, Short stories)
Boyd, William. (Novels)
Boyers, Peg. (Poetry Honey With Tobacco is very TCK, Hard Bread less explicitly so)
Bromell, Henry. (Novels, short stories, screenplays for Homeland and others)
Buck, Leila. (Plays)
*Buck, Pearl S.. The Good Earth.
Burns, Helen. (Military Brat) A Lovely Light.
Burns, Helen. (Military Brat) A Lovely Light.
Castro, Brian. Birds
of Passage and other novels (multiracial as well as TCK)
Chun, Trudy. The
Buddhapest (adolescent literature)
*Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini
Cowhig, Frances Ya-Chu. Plays.
Cowhig, Frances Ya-Chu. Plays.
Desai, Kiran. (Novels, eg The Inheritance of Loss. Anita Desai’s daughter)
Drew, Eileen. The Ivory Crocodile and Blue
Taxi.
Duncan, Brian. The
Settler.
Durrell, Gerald (novels for adults and
adolescents, in addition to a wealth of memoir)
Durrell, Lawrence. (Novels)
Durrow, Heidi. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.
Eggerz, Solveig. (Novels)
Evans, Maya. Poetry.
Eggerz, Solveig. (Novels)
Evans, Maya. Poetry.
Forna, Aminatta. Three novels and a memoir
Girardi, Robert. (Novels and stories, some more
internationalized than others)
Glover, Merryn. A House Called Askival.
Glover, Merryn. A House Called Askival.
Gregson, Julia. (Military Brat, with substantial and diverse adult travel too, reflected in huge range of contexts in her novels)
*Greenway, Alice. White Ghost Girls. And The Bird Skinner
*Greenway, Alice. White Ghost Girls. And The Bird Skinner
Handal, Nathalie. (Poems, Plays, Travel narratives)
Harrar, Randa. (Novels, Essays)
Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire.
Harrar, Randa. (Novels, Essays)
Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire.
Iyer, Pico. (Novels, memoirs, essays)
Jeffries, Dinah. (Novels, re: Colonial Malaya, and inspired by her son's tragic death)
Johnson, Denis. (The Laughing Monsters and others)
Jeffries, Dinah. (Novels, re: Colonial Malaya, and inspired by her son's tragic death)
Johnson, Denis. (The Laughing Monsters and others)
Khan, Uzma Aslam. The
Geometry of God.
Kuegler, Sabine. ( "German." Novels, some of which deal with growing up in Papua etc.)
Kurtz, Jane. Children's lit explicitly about TCK and transition issues.
Kuegler, Sabine. ( "German." Novels, some of which deal with growing up in Papua etc.)
Kurtz, Jane. Children's lit explicitly about TCK and transition issues.
L'Esperance, Mari. (Poetry!)
Lee, Don. (Though he is a TCK, his novels focus on Asian-American identity)
Lee, Don. (Though he is a TCK, his novels focus on Asian-American identity)
Lessing, Doris. (Many novels)
Lewis, Susan Kiernan. (MB upbringing; murder mysetries in international settings)
Lewis, Susan Kiernan. (MB upbringing; murder mysetries in international settings)
*Lewis, Richard. The Flame Tree (and other novels)
Lokko, Lesley Naa Norle. (CCK issues, Scots-Ghanaian)
Lokko, Lesley Naa Norle. (CCK issues, Scots-Ghanaian)
Manyika, Sarah Ladipo. In
Dependence (Novel), Short stories, Academic writing.
Matar, Hisham In the Country of Men
Markowits, Benjamin. Novels
Markowits, Benjamin. Novels
*Martel, Yann. The
Life of Pi (other novels less internationalized)
*Moser, Gene. Skinny
Dipping and Other Stories.
Moyer, Kermit. Short Stories, MB focus
Moyer, Kermit. Short Stories, MB focus
Meyers, Margaret. Swimming
in the Congo (MK)
*Nangle, Paula. The
Leper Compound. (Linked Short Stories)
Nothomb, Amelie. (French language, but
fairly available in translation)
Obreht, Tea. The Tiger’s Wife.
Omotoso, Yewande. Novels.
*O’Neill, Joseph. Netherland.
Ondaatje, Michael. (Many novels, and
many collections of poetry—most, but not all, international in scope)
Orr, Elaine Neil. A Different Sun.
Parfitt, Jo. Sunshine Soup.
Parfitt, Jo. Sunshine Soup.
Parssinen, Keija. The
Ruins of Us.
*Palmer, Catherine. The Happy Room (and many romance novels not as internationalized)
Phoenix, Michele. Novels and blog. Active MK.
Porte, Joyce Baker. Stormbird of the Serengeti.
Rashkovich, Zvezdana. (Novels)
Porte, Joyce Baker. Stormbird of the Serengeti.
Rashkovich, Zvezdana. (Novels)
Revoyr, Nina. The Age of Dreaming.
Riley, Lucinda. The Orchid House and lots of others.
Rinsai, Rosetti. (Novels, various places)
De Rosnay, Tatiana. (Novels, 12 in French, 3 in English)
Rinsai, Rosetti. (Novels, various places)
De Rosnay, Tatiana. (Novels, 12 in French, 3 in English)
Rispin, Karen. African settings for
romance novels.
Scott, Jack. Turkey Street (and others)
Scudamore, James. Heliopolis.
Scholes, Katherine. The Rain Queen (and other novels).
Scott, Jack. Turkey Street (and others)
Scudamore, James. Heliopolis.
Scholes, Katherine. The Rain Queen (and other novels).
Shafak, Elif. (Novels)
Shakespeare, Nicholas. (Novels)
Slaughter, Carolyn. (Novels and memoir)
Snell, Ron. Rani Adventures Trilogy (for children)
Sonnenberg, Brittani. Home Leave.
Sonnenberg, Brittani. Home Leave.
Tan, Hwee Hwee. Foreign Bodies.
Tearne, Roma. Mosquito.
Tuck, Lily. (Novels)
Windle, Jeanette. (Missionary Colombia reflected in works)
Tuck, Lily. (Novels)
Windle, Jeanette. (Missionary Colombia reflected in works)
White, Robb. Novels (missionary Phillipines)
Woodman, Betsy. Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes.
Wyld, Evie. All the Birds, Singing.
Woodman, Betsy. Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes.
Wyld, Evie. All the Birds, Singing.
Wyss, Susi. (Stories, Novels)
3) By
TCKs who don’t write about TCK experience explicitly
Aridjis, Chloe. The Book of Clouds (and others)
Baldwin, Shauna Singh. (Novels).
Ballard, J. G.. (Sci fi)
Ballard, J. G.. (Sci fi)
Barker, Nicola (Several Novels/
collections of short stories)
Black, Tony. ("tartan noir" crime, according to wikipedia)
Black, Tony. ("tartan noir" crime, according to wikipedia)
Carle, Eric. Iconic children's books for very young readers.
Carroll, James. (Plays, Novels, Spy novels, Theological novels)
Carroll, James. (Plays, Novels, Spy novels, Theological novels)
Catton, Eleanor The Luminaries and The
Rehearsal
Clare, Cassandra. (Several Fantasy Novels)
Collins, Suzanne (Several adolescent
novels incl. The Hunger Games
trilogy)
Cortazar, Julio (Prominent Spanish language novels, all available in translation)
Cortazar, Julio (Prominent Spanish language novels, all available in translation)
*Dekker, Ted. (Many thrillers)
DeWitt, Helen. (Many novels—The Last Samurai is TCK in content)
Espey, John. Novels.
Foreman, Amanda. Many novels.
Fox, Kate. Watching the English (non-fiction, social anthropology)
French, Tana. (Crime)
Espey, John. Novels.
Foreman, Amanda. Many novels.
Fox, Kate. Watching the English (non-fiction, social anthropology)
French, Tana. (Crime)
Girardi, Robert. (Crime)
Graham, Frederick Cork. (Thrillers)
Graham, Frederick Cork. (Thrillers)
Ghosh, Amitav. (Novels, some set in India, Ecocrit)
Haddad, Saleem. (Novels--war, coming of age, sort of TCK ish in theme, definitely so in biographical terms)
Hamid, Moshin. (Novels set in Pakistan—some international/global themes but not explicitly about dislocation?)
Hawkins, Paula. The Girl on the Train (Thriller)
Hooman, Majid. (Non fiction works about Iran--diplomatic parents. Grandson of Ay. Khomeini)
Houellebecq, Michel. Submission (and other novels)
Horrocks, Heather (Romantic Comedies and Mysteries)
Hosseini, Khaled. (Afghani novels eg The Kite Runner, childhood years in France)
Haddad, Saleem. (Novels--war, coming of age, sort of TCK ish in theme, definitely so in biographical terms)
Hamid, Moshin. (Novels set in Pakistan—some international/global themes but not explicitly about dislocation?)
Hawkins, Paula. The Girl on the Train (Thriller)
Hooman, Majid. (Non fiction works about Iran--diplomatic parents. Grandson of Ay. Khomeini)
Houellebecq, Michel. Submission (and other novels)
Horrocks, Heather (Romantic Comedies and Mysteries)
Hosseini, Khaled. (Afghani novels eg The Kite Runner, childhood years in France)
Hyland. M.J. (Three novels: How the Light Gets In may be the most
TCK in themes . . . though I suspect all three have TCK themes throughout--as
do all the others in this section!)
Jaquiery, Anna. Crime fiction.
Jaquiery, Anna. Crime fiction.
*Kingsolver, Barbara. (The Poisonwood Bible is very TCK, other
works less explicitly so)
Khoo, Rachel. Cookbooks and Cooking TV.
Lanchester, John. (Novels)
L'Engle, Madeleine. Fiction for children, primarily.
Lanchester, John. (Novels)
L'Engle, Madeleine. Fiction for children, primarily.
Lively, Penelope (So many novels! Also children’s lit)
Lowry, Lois. (Children's chapter books)
Lowry, Lois. (Children's chapter books)
*MacDonald, Ann-Marie. (The Way the Crow Flies is very TCK, other novels and plays less explicitly so).
Maugham, Somerset W.. LOTS of expat novels, but his background is European TCK.
Mattich, Alen. Zagreb Cowboy.
Maugham, Somerset W.. LOTS of expat novels, but his background is European TCK.
Mattich, Alen. Zagreb Cowboy.
Markowits, Benjamin. Novels.
Mawer, Simon. (Thrillers, including one that astute Jessica Sanfillipo noticed shares a title with TCK Heidi Durrow's novel by the same name The Girl Who Fell from the Sky!)
McCallin, Luke. Crime (Eastern Europe)
Mawer, Simon. (Thrillers, including one that astute Jessica Sanfillipo noticed shares a title with TCK Heidi Durrow's novel by the same name The Girl Who Fell from the Sky!)
McCallin, Luke. Crime (Eastern Europe)
*McEwan, Ian. (Novels, typically not
explicitly TCK)
McIntosh, Fiona. (Fantasy novels)
McKinley, Robin (Adolescent Fantasy)
Messud, Claire. Several novels (some evoke TCK and especially CCK--Algerian/French--themes)
Mina, Denise. Crime!
Mina, Denise. Crime!
Peake, Meryn Laurence (Gormenghast
novels—fantasy)
Pierre, DBC (Several Novels)
Poe, Edgar Allen. (English and Scottish boarding schools--who knew?)
Poe, Edgar Allen. (English and Scottish boarding schools--who knew?)
Powers, Richard. (Several Novels)
Pullman, Philip. (Many fantasy novels)
Purves, Libby. (Novels-- I want to read How Not to Be a Perfect Mother ;-) )
Purves, Libby. (Novels-- I want to read How Not to Be a Perfect Mother ;-) )
Rubinstein, Gillian (aka Lian Hearn. Engl/ Nigeria. Kids lit and recent adult fiction set in
feudal Japan)
Rasheed, Leila. Kids lit (TCK and CCK--not sure how much of that comes up in her work)
Say, Alan. Some novels with TCK/ CCK themes, others more Japanese in focus.
Rasheed, Leila. Kids lit (TCK and CCK--not sure how much of that comes up in her work)
Say, Alan. Some novels with TCK/ CCK themes, others more Japanese in focus.
Schaeffer, Frank. (Portofino is very TCK, but there are a wealth of other works on
theology, Christanity, Evangelism and politics)
Sharif, Somaz. Iranian-American, but perhaps because of frequent dislocations in the US before age 11, a TCK. (Poems)
Smith, Cordwainer. (Penname for Paul Linebarger. SciFi novels, and other genres under other pen names)
Smith, Cordwainer. (Penname for Paul Linebarger. SciFi novels, and other genres under other pen names)
Stoppard, Tom (plays)
Taylor, Laini. Lots of novels (some YA)
Treloar, Lucy. Salt Creek (and others)
Tolkein, J.R.R. (Many fantasy novels)
Taylor, Laini. Lots of novels (some YA)
Treloar, Lucy. Salt Creek (and others)
Tolkein, J.R.R. (Many fantasy novels)
Ubukata, Tow. (Fantasy, Manga)
Vandermeer, Jeff. (Sci fi/ Fantasy)
Weldon, Fay. Novels.
Whedon, Joss (Buffy—JW did his last two years of highschool in England)
Wray, John. (Novels. Wray is a Penname. As John Henderson he writes for the New York Times Magazine)
Yanagihara, Hanya. Frequent US moves as a child, almost a military brat-type pattern in terms of repeated dislocation, but because of her father's medical, career (Novels).
Yapa, Sunil (An adult traveller . . . and CCK, but perhaps not TCK)
Yanagihara, Hanya. Frequent US moves as a child, almost a military brat-type pattern in terms of repeated dislocation, but because of her father's medical, career (Novels).
Yapa, Sunil (An adult traveller . . . and CCK, but perhaps not TCK)
*Young, Wm Paul. The Shack.
4) Memoirs
Addleton, Jonathan. Some Far and Distant Place.
Alter, Stephen. All the Way to Heaven.
Arbuckle, Les. Saigon Kids: An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960s Vietnam.
Barcoft, Jane. Pink Sand Poems (poetry)
Belcher, Wendy Laura. (memoir and academic work on Ethiopia)
Dalton Bradford, Melissa. Global Mom.
Dartnell, Ashley. Farangi Girl: Growing up in Iran: A Daughter's Story.
Duncombe, Kristin Louise. Trailing: A Memoir.
Durrell, Gerald, Lawrence and Margaret.
Fuller, Alexandra. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and others (TCK by virtue of England and Rhodesia/ Zim transitions???)
Gamble, Kathleen. Expat Alien.
Lawlor, Mary. Fighter Pilot's Daughter.
McKay, Lisa. Love at the Speed of Email.
Murray, Taylor. Hidden in My Heart: A TCKs Journey Through Cultural Transition.
Osborne, Marilyn Stewart . Child of the Outback and Footprints
Penhaligon, James. Speak Swahili, Dammit.
Phillips, Hudson. The Oyster Stuffed Locker (poems)
Rice, Elizabeth. Rituals of Separation: A South Korean Memoir of Identity and Belonging.
Ritter, Michael ed. The Brat Chronicles.
Samuelsson, Marcus. Yes Chef (memoir) and cookbooks.
Seaman, Paul Asbury. Paper Airplanes in the Himalayas: The Unfinished Path Home.
Sichel, Nina. Essays and Stories.
Shigo, Cynthia Cunningham (memoir and novel)
Taber, Sarah. Born Under An Assumed Name and other travel narratives
Tait, Derek. Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans: A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya.
Young, Melody. Fragments and Faith: An Adult Third Culture Kid Experience in Evangelicalism.
Zweig, Stephanie. Nowhere in Africa.
4) Memoirs
Addleton, Jonathan. Some Far and Distant Place.
Alter, Stephen. All the Way to Heaven.
Arbuckle, Les. Saigon Kids: An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960s Vietnam.
Barcoft, Jane. Pink Sand Poems (poetry)
Belcher, Wendy Laura. (memoir and academic work on Ethiopia)
Burklin, Linda. This Rich and Wondrous Earth.
Coleman,
Dan. The Scent of EucalyptusDalton Bradford, Melissa. Global Mom.
Dartnell, Ashley. Farangi Girl: Growing up in Iran: A Daughter's Story.
Duncombe, Kristin Louise. Trailing: A Memoir.
Durrell, Gerald, Lawrence and Margaret.
Fuller, Alexandra. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and others (TCK by virtue of England and Rhodesia/ Zim transitions???)
Gamble, Kathleen. Expat Alien.
Gardiner, Marilyn. Essays (Between Worlds) and Memoir (Passages Through Pakistan).
Gardner, Rita M.. The Coconut Latitudes
Godwin, Peter (two memoirs in English)
Graham, Frederick Cork.
Hartley, Aidan. The Zanzibar Chest.
Gardner, Rita M.. The Coconut Latitudes
Godwin, Peter (two memoirs in English)
Graham, Frederick Cork.
Hartley, Aidan. The Zanzibar Chest.
Harvey, Vivian Palmer. The Missionary Myth
Hervey, Emily. Memoir (also practical guides for expatriation and academic work in Writing Out Of Limbo.)
Hawkins, Paula. The Journey to the Girl on The Train
Henderson James, Nancy. At Home Abroad.
Hudson, W.H. Far Away and Long Ago: A Childhood in Argentina.
Hervey, Emily. Memoir (also practical guides for expatriation and academic work in Writing Out Of Limbo.)
Hawkins, Paula. The Journey to the Girl on The Train
Henderson James, Nancy. At Home Abroad.
Hudson, W.H. Far Away and Long Ago: A Childhood in Argentina.
Jentzsch, Michael Blutsbrueder (translation from German)
Kaplan, Alice. French Lessons.
Kastner, Christin Kriha. Soldiering On: Finding My Homes.Kaplan, Alice. French Lessons.
Lawlor, Mary. Fighter Pilot's Daughter.
McKay, Lisa. Love at the Speed of Email.
Murray, Taylor. Hidden in My Heart: A TCKs Journey Through Cultural Transition.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Neudorf, Bob . Journeying Mercies: Tuesday Was Gone.
O'Shaughnessy, Chris. Arrivals, Departures and the Adventures Inbetween.
Obama, Barack. Dreams of my Father
Oglesby, Sam. Wordswarm (edited collection of short memoirs by TCKs) and Encounters and others O'Shaughnessy, Chris. Arrivals, Departures and the Adventures Inbetween.
Obama, Barack. Dreams of my Father
Osborne, Marilyn Stewart . Child of the Outback and Footprints
Penhaligon, James. Speak Swahili, Dammit.
Phillips, Hudson. The Oyster Stuffed Locker (poems)
Rice, Elizabeth. Rituals of Separation: A South Korean Memoir of Identity and Belonging.
Ritter, Michael ed. The Brat Chronicles.
Samuelsson, Marcus. Yes Chef (memoir) and cookbooks.
Seaman, Paul Asbury. Paper Airplanes in the Himalayas: The Unfinished Path Home.
Sichel, Nina. Essays and Stories.
Shigo, Cynthia Cunningham (memoir and novel)
Taber, Sarah. Born Under An Assumed Name and other travel narratives
Tait, Derek. Sampans, Banyans and Rambutans: A Childhood in Singapore and Malaya.
Young, Melody. Fragments and Faith: An Adult Third Culture Kid Experience in Evangelicalism.
Zweig, Stephanie. Nowhere in Africa.
5) The Colonials (Many of these names also cross over into the Memoir section)
Blixen, Karen. Out of Africa
Cloete, Stuart.
Godden, Rumer. (and sister Jon)
Gordon, Katherine. The Emerald Peacock.
Greene, A.H.M. Kirk.
Huxley, Elspeth.
Kaye, M.M..
Keating, Barbara and Stephanie. (Lots of co-written novels)
Kendall, Felicity. White Cargo.
Kipling, Rudyard.
Markham, Beryl.
Master, John.
McCall Smith, Alexander.
Pearce, Michael.
Orwell, George.
Smith, Wilbur.
Thesiger, Wilfred.
6) Misc but noteworthy:
Meneses, Lilliana "Homesick for Abroad: A Phenomenological Study of Third Culture Identity, Language and Memory." (PhD thesis for GWU, 2006)
Canadian Artist and Military Brat Leslie Reid http://www.lesliereid.ca/paintings.html (interesting that her website's bio doesn't say anything about her childhood)
Dagnino, Arianna. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015.
Migration, Diversity, and Education: Beyond Third Culture Kids. Editors: Dervin, Fred, Benjamin, Saija (Eds.) (I can't wait to read this one! Work in here by Bell- Villada, Tanu and others)
Trivia: Joe Strummer was a diplobrat! And Jim Morrison was a military brat.
Rauwerda, Antje M. "Third Culture Time and Place: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table.” Mosaic 49.3 (Sep. 2016): 39-53.
and “Katniss,
Military Bratness: Military Culture in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy.” Children’s Literature 44 (2016):
172-191.
Sanfillipo Schulz, Jessica. "Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists." Transnational Literature Volume 9, Issue 1, November 2016
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