Meaning in Transit: Framing the Works of Boutros, Dridi, Ennadre, Gasteli and Naji

ders for and within itself), is an overwhelming sense of dislocation. The dissolution of any sense of belonging is particularly haunting to those immigrants who have spent most of their lives in Europe, or have become its citizens. Relocated in that home which defined and controlled their very existence for so long, these immigrants, more than just being confused and decentered, are disconnected, if not completely severed from their origins - not only in place and time, but also in terms of their social, economic and cultural experience. While this is not the place to engage in a discussion of the criteria which prompted Nader Alexander Mousavizadeh to assert that, psychologically, these immigrants' "minds have become European"1 (not ascribing this claim to the aforementioned photographers), it seems apparent, contrary to his assertion, that immigrants are suspended between origin and destination, rather than affixed to an ontologically and epistemologically coherent domain which is distinct from that of their past. They are aliens, both in their adopted countries and in their countries of origin. As if in perpetual transit, they seem unable to procure a place which they could call their own. For these immigrants, there is no home to return to. Even if such a place does exist for them, their bond to it is ambivalent. In an insightful piece which discusses expatriation and the anxiety of the return, Olu Oguibe explains that this bond "is born out of a onesided loyalty and a proclivity to possess, a desperate striving to belong, to lay claim to something that lays no claim in return. Severed from the womb and the body that bore us and hauled into the void of life and existence, we crave to attach ourselves to something , a moment, a location, an event; we crave an anchor, which we readily find in the contours of the house of our upbringing, in the streets of our childhood, in the city of our birth. But the city has a different desire and a different response, for we need the city more than the city needs us."2 On the one hand, the country or the city which the immigrant leaves behind - both geographically and as a site of colonial interpenetration and mediation - changes and adapts itself to the necessities of its own inhabitants. On the other, through an ongoing process of adjustment and through the concatenation of internal and external social configurations, the city poises itself to guarantee its own future. Even if distinctly African, the city that the immigrant leaves behind has continued to grapple not only with its own internal dynamics, but also with the shifting forces that are the legacy of global economic realignment: debt crises, environmental crises, political impotence and social upheaval. As Olu Oguibe maintains, "The idea of our city's special love is a fiction of our own making, a necessary justification for our possessive fixation on it" (my own emphasis). He comments further that "...this apprehension transforms into a romantic longing in the hold of which we are blinded to the specifics of our relationship. Everything takes on a different hue; the ugly turns unique, the trivial symbolic."3 Mousavizadeh maintains that immigrants "inevitably view their 'home' culture through European prisms, through the language of the colonizers;" that they look at their world through European eyes - "eyes that question, suspect, often despise, and sometimes hate;" that they "see their world as the Third World;" and that in this "they bear no guilt, for it is the only set of eyes they have been given in the new world."4 Whatever the case may be, this dialectic of self and other has been internalized, because the immigrants experience their selves as part of the international culture and they relate to their own culture as other. In this situation, they disconnect memory from the historical experience of their places of origin when taking on the memory of their past, caught as they are in a different cultural dynamic. This is a particularly clear instance in which memory and history deviate from one another. Here, memory is disconnected from experience, often seeming to deadlock the possibility of reconciliation between the past and the present. Yet memory is...