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4 V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid Rhetoric of National Dis-Allegiance The whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu As Stuart Hall observes, “What we say is always ‘in context,’ positioned.”1 Admittedly , determining the context of the enunciative production is a crucial step in the reception of a statement given that the point of emission helps define the meaning of the enunciation. To that effect, Stuart is right to assert that cultural identities are not a question of essence but of positioning, provided that the idea of positioning embraces more than the context of emission. The context of reception is indeed equally important and potentially even more instrumental in producing meaning. Gaston Bachelard famously argued in La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space, 1964) that writing is always logée (housed)2 in the childhood home. But Bachelard’s axiom has yet to be applied to the context of reception. Not enough emphasis in literary scholarship has been put on the residence of the reception, even though reception is undoubtedly , in so many ways, also attached to the birthplace and the childhood home. In instances in which enunciation is determined by geographical distance, the distance will inevitably affect—positively or negatively—the quality of the communication between the migrant enunciator and the home recipient. Many years ago, when a traveler called home, there was often a lot of interference on the telephone line. Because of the technology of the time, it was expected that distance would affect the quality of the call. Even today, some people who get an international call are surprised when they hear the unobstructed voice of the remote caller as though he or she were calling from just next door. Geographical distance is meant, or at least expected, to make communication between the migrant and the home particularly strenuous. The V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid: Rhetoric of National Dis-Allegiance 131 same applies to migrant writing. In English, disturbing noises on the line are commonly referred to as “static,” a word that underlines the, ironically, not so static status of the caller. In French, those interferences are called parasites. As Michel Serres pointed out in Le parasite (The Parasite, 1982), the French “parasite ” refers to both disruptive noises in communication (phone) and foreign organisms feeding off a body. The French polysemy is interesting because it pinpoints the dual condition of the diasporic writer. Due to distance-induced static (parasites), displacement makes it challenging for the writer to come to an understanding with his home community. But also, the migrant writer is herself a parasite, since home, though now foreign to her, still remains the main fodder for creative production. That being said, an important distinction needs to be kept in mind while addressing parasitic writing. Technically speaking, the migrant writer does not specifically feed off home but rather off the trouble with home. Indeed, when there is static on the line, the reaction is not to bring the phone nearer to oneself but rather to keep moving until the communication becomes clear. Likewise for the writer, migrant writing is motivated by the very trouble with reception at home. In that sense, migrant writing is a form of sustainable parasitism feeding on its own migrancy. To put it concisely, the migrant writer is by nature, technically, a troublemaker. The controversial figures of the Trinidad -born writer V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) Naipaul and the Antigua-born writer Jamaica Kincaid exemplify a genre of migrant writing in which the question of bad reception at home, the native home, is the defining quality of its production. England versus North America V. S. Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trinidad, and Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 on the island of Antigua. Both left their islands at an early age. Kincaid left Antigua for Westchester, New York, at the age of sixteen, with the prospect of working as an au pair for an American family. As for Naipaul, he left Trinidad at barely eighteen with a view toward studying in England at Oxford University. Their departures were driven by comparable motivations; their early and irrevocable departures were, in both cases, the consequence of feeling like misfits on their respective islands. But in spite of the fact that they share a common experience of national severance, it needs to be stressed that Naipaul...

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