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19. Border Crossings: Retrieval and Erasure of the Self as Other
- Temple University Press
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--------------Border Crossings Retrieval and Erasure of the Self as Other Shantanu DuttaAhmed For now I am hidden, nearly invisible in this dark that is the inside of the mango tree. Here it smells of a sweet ripening and camphor. In the topmost branches, the monkeys make sorrowful noises and shake the boughs. Just beyond the shadow-pool of the tree, the heat is strong enough to lean on. Through the chinks in the leaves, I can see the boy strip off his clothes and lie naked in the tall grass. He thinks he is hidden, but I can see him clearly-his brown body dappled by the sun-from where I am crouched, low and invisible in the shadows. Someone begins reciting a poem: if is my uncle "practicing his Wordsworth." The foreign words Hoat out the window and evaporate in the heat; this climate cannot sustain them; they dissipate. This labor, at least initially, must invoke memory, which is where the border dweller usually begins. For me, working from the shadows of -the diaspora, the border does not mark a specific location so much as it does a material condition.1 And if memory helps us frame the borderlands we do inhabit, then it seems that any field ofinquiry within these parameters can potentially become charged with the personal. As a result, what is contained in these pages cannot be detached from me in any significant sense. Although the Western academy demands the impersonal skeleton only-the cool and immaculate bones presented as academic discourse --I must offer instead a cumbersome creature replete with flesh and blood, stumbling, Circling, unable to roost: For me, there is indeed no place like home. Often, the risks or value of such self-representation are overshadowed by its presumed arrogance: After all, what right have I to impose the personal? Patricia Williams has usefully noted that "the personal is not the same as 'private': the personal is often merely the highly particular ... [which] we have lost the courage and the vocabulary to describe ... in the face of the enormous social pressure 'to keep it to ourselves.' "2 Thus against cultural opposition and even 338 Shantanu DuttaAhmed self-imposed silence Williams urges us to articulate the personal. This essay is about such speaking. Its discussion of visibility versus invisibility is not meant to be understood as an oppositional binary, or a closed nexus of ultimately fatal or polar choices, but rather as a recognition of fruitful tension-a place of infinite beginnings as opposed to epistemological closure. Like many other writers working from the margins, Toni Morrison, in describing the genesis of Beloved, refers to her poetics as an act of "literary archeology " wherein memory facilitates the retrieval of lost narratives-those stories that have been disavowed by the hegemony and even repressed by the Self in Willful acts of forgetting. 3 Similarly, Michael Frisch locates memory as a catalyst for identity: "Memory simply cannot exist without presuming the active verb, to remember.... For all the dilemmas of subjectivity, then, the evidence of memory is indispensable" (emphasis added).4 Within Frisch's formulation, memory becomes teleologically driven, and the very act of remembering implicates subjectivity. More important, Frisch is concerned with the ensuing products of subjective consciousness, the "Public History" that memory makes possible. He articulates a trajectory for any act ofretrieval at the border: Memory-History-Text. If Frisch's formulation is somewhat optimistic in suggesting too direct a correspondence between the three terms, he nevertheless isolates the teleological impulse behind acts of retrieval at the border. Caren Kaplan has,also noted that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari "use the term 'deterritorialization' to locate [the] moment of alienation and exile in language and literature" ;5 she suggests that diasporic memory then becomes a redemptive psychic locus, and text the revisionist manifestation of the physical and historic displacement.6 For the deterritorialized, however, to remember is not necessarily to be renewed ; memory is not an obliging muse, nor is it home. At best, memory can be the site of involved transactions where varying selves are dialogically reck0ned With. But what of the texts that signify this re-membering, however momentary or accidental? What ofits marking, like a buoy on the vast and treacherous oceans, the point at which we author our own words, articulate our differences, or even render ourselves (in)visible? Since attempts to speak from the margins are so often thwarted, doesn't every public word make it easier, at least more...