How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?

When Psalm 137:4 (KJV) asks, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?,” it reminds us that both the need to tell stories of migration and the difficulties of doing so are very old problems. Human migration is, almost by definition, hard to recount. Its physical transience threatens to render memory, too, ephemeral. Those coerced into mobility may find their stories forbidden, while voluntary but illegal migrants have many motivations to be secretive, rendering their stories undocumented in both legal and imaginative registers. Of course, it is in the self-interest of perpetrators of coerced mobility to erase the evidence of their violence. The psalmist’s furious pledge that his “right hand [will] forget her cunning” and his “tongue [will] cleave to the roof of [his] mouth” if he forgets Jerusalem suggests the vast, uncomfortable energy necessary to keep oblivion at bay (Ps. 137:5, 6). Yet even as narratives of migration present a particular challenge to creative as well as historical representation, they also provide opportunities for the development of innovative artistic forms. The three articles under consideration here reveal the fascinating range of recent experiments in making the migrant experience part of the fabric of cultural memory.

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge to making that experience legible is that of translation. Many migrants cross linguistic borders as they cross national ones and must decide whether to try to tell their stories in their native tongue or their adopted one. In “Strange Homelands: Encountering the Migrant on the Contemporary Greek Stage,” Marissia Fragkou analyzes three productions between 2006 and 2017 that foreground questions of multilingualism in contemporary Greece. Multilingual theater is rare in Greece, Fragkou writes, and so theatrical presentations such as One in Ten (2007), Homelands (2012), and Clean City (2016), all of which incorporate languages other than Greek into their presentation of migrant experience, challenge cultural and political conceptions of the homogeneity of the Greek nation.¹

While Fragkou’s work foregrounds the question of linguistic mediation of the migrant experience, Dominic Thomas’s “The Aesthetics of Migration, Relationality, and the Sentimography of Globality” considers the fraught issue of affective mediation: whether migrants might be equitably brought into the polity through fellow feeling. Imagination is key here, as such empathetic responses demand that we put ourselves in the emotional place of the other. Drawing on Patrick Chamoiseau’s centering of “identification, symbiosis, and imbrication” in understanding migration, Thomas thus proposes that the map of migration is doubled by a landscape of feeling, and uses art to illustrate his point.² The installations he considers seek to bring cultural institutions into contact with the realities of the present migration crisis to disrupt conventional structures of feeling. Thus Ai Weiwei wrapped the columns of the Konzerthaus Berlin with lifejackets worn by Syrian refugees who came ashore at Lesbos, and Jason deCaires Taylor created the massive underwater sculpture called The Raft of Lampedusa, placing Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in a new physical and historical context. Thomas argues that such projects can generate “empathy, sympathy, understanding, consideration, pity, and compassion ... and conjure up the lives of others.”³ But I would argue that these terms sell short the defamiliarization wrought by these creative projects, which seem to me to demand structures of relationality and affect that go beyond such Enlightenment categories.

Another challenge to the legibility of stories of migration are the grand narratives of nation and empire building. In “The Migrant as Colonist: Dystopia and Apocalypse in the Literature of Mass Migration,” Nasia Anam addresses the way that anti-Islamic prejudices generated centuries ago by the early modern clash of empires continue to structure fictional narratives of migration. Shaped by these inherited narratives, even in contemporary fiction “the non-European migrant appears again and again in the European literary imagination as a ‘colonizer.’”⁴ When recent novels, such as Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, can free themselves from “the tethers of these centuries-old apocalyptic narratives of Europe and its Others,” however, they “suggest that what is actually coming to an...