Napkins for Martel

I found my letter-on-a-napkin today, the one addressed to Yann Martel.  It was folded inside the pages of his book Self which I am thinking of re-reading as perhaps relevant in addressing TCL questions of self (that and Liliana Meneses PhD thesis "Homesick for Abroad: A Phenomenological Study of Third Culture Identity, Language and Memory", which looks like it will rock my world).  Anyway, this is what I say about Martel and the note in the introduction to my 2014 The Writer and the Overseas Childhood:


In 2003, I sat in a café in Halifax, Canada and scribbled a fervent letter, a love-letter of sorts, on a napkin.  It was addressed to Yann Martel, whose novel Life of Pi I had just read, but it responded especially to my discovery that Martel was a diplomat’s son, and, though Canadian by passport, had been raised all over the world.  Essentially my absorbent little billet doux argued that because we had such similar backgrounds (myself also Canadian and raised around the world) we should know each other—in fact we kind of  already did (that convinced was I that his internationalized experience and mine meant we would understand things about each other that no other Canadian possibly could).  Embarrassing, ardent, and I never sent it.  It was not until 2007 that I encountered Ruth Van Reken, author of Letters Never Sent (her title uncannily reiterating the heartfelt feeling of shared experience that catalyzed my own un-sent letter to Martel), and one of the key proponents of research into the lives of “third culture kids,” a term that was new to me at the time, and is still new to the field of English literary studies, but aptly describes Martel and authors like him: raised outside his passport nation (one culture), in a series of host countries (second cultures), as an expatriate (third culture).      

And here's the note, rediscovered today:

 I wonder if Cabin Coffee in Halifax still exists?  Ha!  A quick google suggests it does!   Fans, head on over for a pilgrimage.

The note says:

Dear Mr. Martel,

I had to travel all the way to Singapore to find a copy of Self--and I was consequently skeptical.  How good could a book be if it fell off the radar so fast?  Silly me.  Of course good books fall off the shelves and under beds or into dusty warehouses of obscurity or into expatriate exile.  I ought to have known that.  I do teach literature, after all.  Anyway, Self is terrific.  I love its pseudo-autobiographical sleights of hand.  If you are its pseudo-protagonist, I love you too (and I am no more crazy than the next person, I assure you).  I write this in a cafe in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada at the end of August 2003 (depressingly near my 33rd birthday, ah well).  Should you find yourself in this part of the world, I would be delighted to meet you .  (Perhaps my own peripatetic upbringing delights with recognition at your literary themes.)

Antje (Canadian via Germany, Holland, Singapore, Wales, Britain, Texas, Ghana and now, again, Canada)

(This might be an alarming note: it is an unprofessional one.  Treat it with some flippancy.)
 
 Going backwards in my progress forwards . . .

Fishing and New Ideas

In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf writes

Thought--to call it by a prouder name than it deserved--had let its line down into the stream.  It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until--you know the little tug--the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?  Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

I am concocting a new book outline.  See photographed below the catch of the week (the culmination of years worth of fishing!), the fragile nub of a beginning.

Lots of Questions about Gender

At the March 2015 Families in Global Transition Conference, during a keynote session entitled "Panel Of Dudes," Tayo Rockson was asked about his upbringing on four different continents, and about whether his sister had experienced the transitions across cultures differently.  He wasn't sure.  He thought about how different her adolescent  friends were and how hard it was to talk to them.  In the audience, I instantly had myriad questions for his sister: while growing up, or even now, could she be as fashion-forwards as her brother?  (Short-skirts, or even short sleeves, on girls must resonate differently in secular parts of Sweden and Muslim parts of Nigeria?).  Could she be as outgoing, as outspoken, as Tayo?  Were there limits for her conduct, aspirations and self-development that her brother couldn't even see?

 Like FIGT president Killian Kroll, Rockson is one of the up-and-coming movers-and-shakers of the TCK world, one of the handsome, well-dressed new vanguard of young TCK Men.  In a field in which the "seminal" first stage research  was dominated by American women  (Useem, Van Reken, and Cottrell, but with the exception of David Pollock) the rise of the well-dressed Male and (not necessarily "American") TCK scholar (Doug Ota, for instance) or advocate (Rockson, Kroll) is a pleasant surprise for those among us who are middle-aged female scholars of TCKness and/or are TCK themselves (mon semblable, mon soeur?) and it raises at least three questions:

1) (OH, bang my head against the wall in frustration) Will it take the engagement of young handsome Smart Men to garner "third culture" the recognition and credibility it has been struggling to attain since Useem coined the term in the 1960s?

2) Does the experience of growing up TCK vary significantly depending on a child's gender or emergent sexual orientation?  I suspect it does.  I don't think anyone has studied this systematically.

3) What can Third Culture Literature tell us about question #2?


What does third culture literature tell us about gender?

First, Have a look at my author list: there are more women on it in men.
Possibly romance writing is the only other contemporary market dominated by women.  Why?
Are women more interested in processing their TCKness through writing (fiction and non)?  Are women better at it?  Do they have a different level of need? of insight? of understanding?  Did they have different experiences growing up TCK than their brothers and therefore a higher predilection towards writing? 

Second, third culture authors (like any other author) have to make choices in terms of gender.  What gender is the protagonist?  While someone like J. M. Coetzee (not a TCK) frequently writes men aging flaccidly, he also does impressively female narrators (see Age of Iron, or his troubling character Elizabeth Costello).

Do third culture authors tackle this question differently?  Perhaps.  Perhaps TCAs systematically, intentionally, try to write both male and female sides, opposing sides, of the TCK experience:

Kate Greenway has female protagonists Frankie and Kate in White Ghost Girls (a fiction that draws somewhat on her own TCK biographical experiences), but a male one in The Bird Skinner (which does not: protagonist Jim Kennoway is an alcoholic veteran who used to have a talent for skinning and collecting birds).  Kennoway is the flip-side of the girls, their opposite.  He is old: they are young.  He is in America looking back on travel during WWII; they are in  Hong Kong during the Vietnam war looking back on life in America.  He was the one who worked; they were the ones who trailed.  He is male; they are female.

Ian McEwan's  The Children Act's successful female judge parallels  Saturday's successful male surgeon: music lovers, both of them, finding time and solace in music. Both are at the top of their professions, both make a quick mistake that ruins them.  It's as if McEwan has quite consciously sought parallel figures, in order to explore what destroys men at the peak of their careers, as well as what destroys women.  

But O'Neill (Netherland, The Dog) is tirelessly male.  Interestingly his characters are male in ways that are distinctively "expat" in that they aspire to a Hemingway-esque heroic masculinity.  They enjoy material privileges because of their race and education, and yet instead of centrality and authority ultimately find themselves steeped in alcohol, dislocation and marginality.

I wonder: is gender stereotyping in third culture literature more prevalent than in other contemporary literatures?
I can imagine why it might be: if the crop of authors writing now was born in the 1950s through 1980s, chances are it was their fathers who were posted overseas (for business, or mission, or military, or diplomatic work) and their mothers who "trailed": the TCK worlds of those decades was retrogressive in its gender norms. 

The world of international work (business, diplomatic, mission, military) is gendered differently, slightly more equally, these days: what will happen when TCKs born in the 1990s and later start writing?

So many questions!

I am, I know, terrible at writing about gender.  So much so that I wonder if I can blame it on being myself  the product of a fairly sexist era of TCKness?  In Malaysia when I was 8 or so my father asked me if I'd rather be a boy or a girl.  "Boy" I replied quickly "because then I could pee standing up" (a skill perhaps more valuable in some countries than others).  But I marvel at my response.  In that long ago neo-colonial world of 1980s and 1990s expatriatism, it was clear to me that my father got to have all the fun (business trips, in-flight drinks, scuba gear, linen suits, respect, acclaim, authority) and my mother had to deal with a lot of difficult stuff (menstruating in the tropics, finding herself a job in country after country, continually reinventing herself, finding food, clothing, schooling and shelter for my brother and I, and often being too-much in the public eye as men ogled her red hair and speculated, openly, about whether her pubic hair matched). It was clearly easier to be my dad than my mom.

Tigers, Zoos and Images of Creatures Out-of-Place (Martel and Obreht)

Above you'll see William Blake's 1792 poem (and his illustrative plate) "The Tyger."  My students and I talk about how the poem's descriptions of the tiger as strong ( "fearful symmetry," "fire") are contradicted by the nervous look about the creature's eyes, and by it's asymmetrical stance in the illustration.  This tiger is fearful (frightening) and full of fear (frightened); it is scary, and scared.

I've met similar tigers in two works by third culture authors:  Richard Parker (a tiger) in Yann Martel's 2001 Life of Pi, and the tiger in Tea Obreht's 2011 The Tiger's Wife.

These tigers are zoo animals cast adrift in foreign circumstances.  Both the zoo and the adriftness amidst the foreign are powerfully evocative of TCK experience:

Zoos house animals from all over the globe; zoo animals are abroad, and they live in an "expat bubble" of other foreigners.

In both Life of Pi and The Tiger's Wife, the zoo tigers (both male, both solitary) escape.  Martel's tiger winds up on a boat with a small boy; Obreht's tiger escapes a zoo and ends up in the Eastern European countryside cared for by a young pregnant mute widow.  These tigers are vulnerable because they are out of place.  Their immense strength is subdued, almost to nothing, because they are too foreign.

Both Martel and Obreht's tigers have close relations with a single human, on whom they must rely, but the humans need the tigers too, for powerfully emotional reasons.  Martel's Pi relies on the tiger for companionship.  Without the tiger he would probably give up on his castaway life and die.  Obreht's mute "tiger's wife" and the young boy who skirts the periphery of their relationship, trying to understand it need the tiger's protection and companionship too.  They need the myth of the tiger's strength.

Rudyard Kipling (the progeny of British Colonists and thus a colonial-era TCK) and his 1894 Jungle Book is  a frequent intertext in Obreht.  The young boy who understands that the mute woman must care for the tiger (and vice versa) tries to talk to her about it using Kipling's stories to help him.
 

The title of Kipling's story "Tiger Tiger" in this collection evokes  Blake's Tyger and "Tyger tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night."  In Kipling the tiger Shere Khan is Mowgli's enemy and the reason the young protagonist winds up orphaned and cared for by wolves.  The tiger causes Mowgli to be who he is.

Perhaps Obreht and Martel's tigers do the same?  They embody the dislocations (the orphanings) that cause Pi and Obreht's boy child,  the mute Tiger's wife to be who they are.  These tigers, like Blake's, symbolise the power of dislocation to transform (strong and mighty), and the terrors of being alone and unfamiliar (scared and vulnerable).

p.s. Obreht's immortal man, the man who never dies, Gavran Gaile, links up with my previous thoughts on simultaneity in third culture literature:  His life persists, and is ongoing, simultaneous with the several generations that Obreht's novel encompasses.

(Re) Defining TCK, or Swimming with Jeans On

I spent this past weekend at the FIGT annual conference. It was full of inspiring encounters with people whose work and ideas are amazing and with whom I could happily spend weeks, and months, rather than a scant few days.

One issue that Ann Baker Cottrell raised, at the research forum and during one of the discussion sessions, was whether the definition of TCK (Third Culture Kid) needs to evolve.  After all, the term has been used since the 1960s when Useem coined it, much has happened in the field since then and, as one person put it, all three words in the term are problematic: "Third" confuses people (we aren't talking "third world"), "Culture" (but it's more than that) and "Kid" (but we are typically talking about how a childhood experience has effects in adulthood).

I, like Cottrell, have tended to adhere to a pretty "traditional" definition of TCK, based on David Pollock (time spent outside of parents'/passport "home" between ages 0 and 18, with expected repatriation to that "home" and with attachments to expat cultures as much or more than attachments to host cultures). Because there is no expectation of repatriation, I consider immigrants, exiles, and refugees as different from TCKs.

Include immigrants or not?  While I think not, Cottrell concisely argued the case for a proper study of immigrants and TCKs to settle the question of the similarity or difference.  Good call.  Someone Social Sciency needs to do this.  Personally, I'd also like more on how much developmental stages matter:  is a stint abroad ages 1-3 the same as one ages 10-13, for instance?  Again, this is a great job for someone Social Sciency.
 
In updating my TCL booklist recently I struggled, as I always do.  How much time has to be spent abroad in those developmental years to count?  Pollock and Van Reken indicate it is flexible, but probably a year or more. What is "abroad" on continents where one might travel across national borders easily and frequently (or in places like the US where one might remain in a single country but travel between very different regions and cultures)?  What about people with mixed parentage (Cross Cultural Kids or CCKs).  What about CCKs who are not TCKs?

This in fact was a thread  in the conference discussion: should TCKness be considered a kind of CCKness or vice versa?

A European perspective adds this: in Europe "TCK" is considered a problematic and uniquely American term, redolent of neo-colonial privilege (apparently "expatriate" is similarly reviled).  Far better to resuscitate "secondment" as a concept, as far as the English are concerned.   People go abroad because they are "seconded" to places overseas.  (Can you imagine a newbie trying to figure out how Third Culture and secondment go together--Oh dear!)

And then I heard Naomi Hattaway talk about her  viral "I am a triangle" blog post.  A TCK student of mine had mentioned the triangle idea to me, and I had shrugged it off, misunderstanding the triangulation for some kind of cultural mingling.  Which it is . . . but isn't.  Hearing Hattaway herself talk about it, and then actually reading the post, I really like what it articulates: we all start as circles in our "home" country.  When we move, we move to a different culture (somewhere square), and then the effect for us is that we become triangles.  When we repatriate, we have pointy parts and don't become circles again.  (Hattaway's post comes with pictures: check 'em out for a better explanation than I give here).

What I love about the triangle is that it IS in some key respects exactly TCK.  Three-sided (Third Cultured) and with both excess cultural knowledge (pointy bits that stick out) and bits missing because we've been away (the triangle doesn't fill up the full circle anymore).

In my own panel on Third Culture Literature, Brittani Sonnenberg described the TCK problem of having too many different kinds of cultural knowledge as weighing one down: it is like swimming in jeans.  Jeans are great, but not in the water.  Her observation, and Hattaway's triangle make me think about context: TCKs accrue lots of cultural knowledge, most of which is useful only in specific contexts: we have to do a lot of whittling and editing to present the pertinent parts of our cultural knowledge in any given context.

Our pointy bits are the moments of excess: we know too much "other stuff" for the cultural context in which we find ourselves and (here's the clincher) to look at us, the people around us have no idea why we know that stuff.  Likewise, our flat sides lop off bits of the circle people expect us to know about  and the people around us have no idea why we don't know that stuff because we look like we should.  I look and sound pretty American: why don't I know anything about the American TV shows from my childhood years?  Why do I know so much about sambal badjak and fetishize rooms with white-washed walls and tiled floors? 

Hattaway underscores how hidden a TCK upbringing can be once one repatriates: "It’s a secret that isn’t a secret" she writes.   This is because when we come back, we look like everyone else.  We look like all the other circles (I am only talking TCK here: CCKs do not necessarily look like everyone else, and they can and might experience this totally differently), but we are triangles.  Do we tell people?  Do we hope they don't notice?  Do we feel superior (hey! look at all my amazing pointy bits of exotic knowledge) or humiliated (please don't ask me anything about how the political structure here actually works because I haven't a clue, and I have no idea how many inches are in a foot)?  

Maybe we are swimming with jeans on, and we keep swimming that way because we aren't wearing a bathing suit underneath.

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.