Magical Realism in the Peripheries of the Metropolis: A Comparative Approach to Tropic of Orange and Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills

Don't be so surprised.… All of this is life.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Through the window they saw a lightrain of tiny yellow flowers falling.They fell on the town all through the night.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Qtd. in Danow 65, 33)

Addressing the question of migration and hybrid culture, Homi Bhabha suggests that "the colonial space [is] played out in the imaginative geography of the metropolitan space; the repetition or return of the postcolonial migrant to alienate the holism of history" (241). He then continues to underline the metropolis as a substitute for the postcolonial: "The postcolonial space is now 'supplementary' to the metropolitan centre; it stands in a subaltern, adjunct relation that doesn't aggrandize the presence of the West but redraws its frontiers in the menacing, agonistic boundary of cultural difference that never quite adds up, always less than one nation and double" (241). According to Bhabha, the migrant experience can turn into an "empowering knowledge," a subversive act against the "unisonance¹" of the nation to such an extent that the migrants can perform their own alternative identities in a metropolitan setting: "it is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out" (243).

In their discussion of the "Third World" diasporic presence within "First World" metropolises, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam assert that "Such hybrid identities are not reducible to a fixed recipe; rather, they form a changing repertory of cultural modalities. The hybrid diasporic subject is confronted with the 'theatrical' challenge of moving, as it were, among the diverse performative modes of sharply contrasting cultural and ideological worlds" (Unthinking Eurocentrism 42). While part of my purpose will be to underline this mobility of the migrants as has been emphasized by Shohat and Stam, I will also take issue with the naïve supposition that the third world diasporic presence in the first world finally hails the postmodern and multi-cultural society that celebrates its diversity. This article will pay equal attention to both the celebration and criticism of hybrid culture by drawing on Shohat and Stam's assertions: "A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with question of historical hegemonies, risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence. […] As a descriptive catch-all term, 'hybridity' fails to discriminate between the diverse modalities of hybridity: colonial imposition, obligatory assimilation, political cooptation, cultural mimicry, and so forth" (43). Hence, I will try to emphasize the fallacy of embracing hybridity as the ultimate solution to Eurocentric, imperialist, and colonialist discourse.

Considering Shohat, Stam, and Bhabha's arguments, this study will focus on the common points of representing city life from the peripheries and the traumatic experience of encountering modernity in the metropolis for the migrant population. In order to contextualize the problems of representation and self-representation, I aim to concentrate on the portrayal of migrants in two cities: Los Angeles and Istanbul. The focal point in my analysis will be two novels written about each of these two cities, Tropic of Orange (1997) by the Japanese-American writer Karen Tei Yamashita and Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (1983) by Turkish writer Latife Tekin. These texts have been chosen for specific reasons.

Both novels portray cities that stand as peripheries to European cities where the modernist movement emerged at the turn of the century. Both cities also present an unusual relationship with modernity. They confront the modernization process late: Istanbul as a third-world city and Los Angeles as the epitome of a "post-modern" city. I am interested in exploring non-European encounters with modernity, so choosing two cities that are located to the west and to the east of Europe conveniently serves my purpose. Since this examination focuses on representation, I will pay close attention to aesthetic questions such as language and narrative techniques that enable or disable representation. I would like to position Yamashita's and Tekin's novels against other European city novels (such as those of...