What about Kipling?

Should Rudyard Kipling (born in Colonial India, raised in England) be considered a TCK?  Is there a start-time limit on TCKness (is it a postcolonial phenomenon)?

I have shied away from the Colonials because they raise so many questions.  Recently a colleague/ co-conspirator in matters of TCK reading/ friend sent me a list of authors to add to my list, noting in her email to me "Rudyard Kipling – I’m sure you know this one, but I didn’t see him on the list."
I do know this one . . . but I don't know what to do with him.

Empire.
Is being part of an empire like being part of a really huge organization?
TCKs of Empire have exaggerated social and racial privilege, and exaggerated separation from their host nation (s) because of their privileges.
In what respects are colonial subjects like or unlike later 20th and now 21st century TCKs?

Really: there is a full-on study required.  Someone, out there, in search of a good PhD or MA project should jump on this.  Here, I gift the idea to you, gratis.

Open the floodgates on Kipling, and in comes George Orwell (also born in Colonial India, with colonial Burma on his mother's side, and Jamaica on his father's) as well as a host of others (Rumer Godden, Sybille Bedford, Henry Bromell and actress Felicity Kendall to name but a few).

The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell), All The Birds Singing (Evie Wyld)

Narrative time is distinctive in third culture literature.  In TCL, place tells you what time it is (the different eras or chapters in a story are determined by where the events happened more than when); in most other fiction, time orients you and place is subsidiary. You can juxtapose a contemporary TCL work and a contemporary non-TCL work and spot the difference.  Consider the two above, for instance.

David Mitchell is an English author who spent adult years (not childhood, developmental ones) travelling and living abroad in Japan, Italy and Ireland.  I would say he is well-travelled, but not a TCK.  Evie Wyld "grew up in Australia and London" (book jacket).  I would say she IS a TCK.

Mitchell's  Bone Clocks centers on Holly Sykes, telling Holly's life story in a series of episodes which feature a repeating cast of characters, some of whom do not age because they prey on the souls of others and enjoy  the suspension of time's aging properties (Anchorites, 452), and others of whom live again and again, albeit in different bodies, because their souls are reborn into fresh corporeal bodies when their old bodies die (Atemporals, 451).  His novel spans 1984-2043 (don't quit reading before the superbly rendered "endarkment" of the last 100 pages)

Wyld's fantastic, surprising and unnerving All the Birds Singing centers on a woman named Jake who is born in a roughly contemporary Australia, runs away from an accident, and then a pedophile, as a teen, and becomes a sheep-shearer, eventually moving to and buying a English sheep farm.

Mitchell's novel is all about time, and what it means to the mortal, or immortal, human.  We are continually reminded by its cover (with a clock face on it), section breaks (which state the year), chapter breaks (which state the day and month), and even page headers (which feature a clock face on which the hands progress as we move chapter by chapter through the novel).   Time clearly leads the way in terms of orienting the reader. It is linear, it moves only forwards and it is not disrupted. We know where we are in the plot because of time.  (Though readers hungry for representations of travel and many different places will enjoy that it is also profoundly international.  When atemporals are reincarnated they "die, wake up as children forty-nine days later, often on another landmass" (432).  The novel spans Europe, North America, Japan and Australia.)

Wyld's novel is all about Jake.  We want to find out what happened to her, and how she wound up where she is.  The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time, often with what are, initially, perplexingly abrupt transitions (or even a lack thereof) . . . Well, they are perplexing only until one sees that place will tell us where we are.  Her chapters open with  details that identify place. "Outside Kambada" (44); "We drive through an old flaky gate and up to a homestead . . . black hills in the distance"  (130) ; "working at the Hedland" (163): we learn that places are the settings for different eras in Jake's life.  The narrative is not linear, place leads the way, not time, and time is repeatedly disrupted.

Going Home: How Third Culture is Different

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)

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.

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. 

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).

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.)