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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Monique Roffey

Is Roffey a TCK or an immigrant, and does it matter?  She was born in Trinidad (father British, mother Mediterranean), went to England for school and stayed.  I would err on the side of immigrant.

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.

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)

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.

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?
 
 

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).