Magazine: Southern Review, Summer, 1993 BEYOND EXILE: A POSTCOLONIAL INTELLECTUAL ABROAD It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge . . . that our physical alienation [from India] almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands" I BORN IN EGYPT, I have lived all my life-so it seems-in America. I babbled first in Arabic and French; now I speak, write, think, dream in English. How many thousands, how many millions, share some similar displacement-I will not call it exile-in space, in time, in language? I regard my birth in Cairo as fortuitous, an accident, not a destiny. But it is an accident full of resonances, gravid with memories. How, after long silence, give that accident its due in terms I have professed through forty years: reading, writing, teaching? What has it meant for me to live in the shadow of a rubric-for ours has become preeminently a time of ideological rubrics-that of a "postcolonial intellectual abroad"? The question occurs to me now only because it is so widely bruited and mooted in various disciplines of the humanities. It has not been, in my case, a live or existential question, a predicament. Raising the question late in life, though, I find it all the harder to answer in current parlance. Perhaps I can do no more here than touch the matter, touch, pass, and feint. II The first difficulty, I repeat, is that I lack an adequate language for the topic, a topic in which criticism and autobiography, reason and desire-yes, all the grit of the heaping years-implacably mix. I have no language, in part, because I do not inhabit the same ideological world many colleagues inhabit; they speak to me in a mildly foreign accent. Between them and myself, the margin of sympathy shrinks, that of irritation widens. For as Richard Rorty perceived, valid convictions can be justified only to those who hold certain other compatible beliefs, not "to anyone and everyone." This condition may derive from a larger paradox. No nation has been more generous in its welcome to me than America, yet no profession has been more resistant to my work than cisatlantic academe. France or Japan would never have granted me a research professorship in French or Japanese literature, yet France and Japan-indeed Europe and Asia-have been more hospitable to my work than has the United States. The mystery is worth some emphasis because it suggests a complicity of incomprehension-we are never wholly innocent, you know. The distance I feel may be a distance I have myself created. In any case, it is a distance felt. I offer a few small instances of my professed disaffection-again, I will not call it alienation or internal exile-to make the point. The other day, riffling through a new anthology on postmodernism, I came upon a noted critic who began his essay thus: "The following sketch starts from the position that History is Necessity, that the 60s had to happen the way it did . . . marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation...." The H in History, the N in Necessity were both capitalized. I thought: Necessity, whose? Perhaps only the critic's. For history has never revealed its necessity to mortals, not even in hindsight, as those who continually rewrite it, like the critic in question, must know. I laid it to theosophic or perhaps autistic Marxism and closed the book. But bad habits die hard. Some time later, I undertook to review a book called Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ever hopeful, I began my review thus: Edward Said's signal and tendentious work, Orientalism (1979), has opened many doors for critical thought-and let in much ideological noise. The present work is more thoughtful than noisy. It is a sustained reflection on Orientalism, with feminist accents. A challenge as well as hommage to Said's work, Critical Terrains finds its own directions, qualifying, diversifying, restoring nuance to the subJect.... An auspicious start, you might say. Alas, I found the book crumbling gradually in my hands as it rehearsed the pieties of its subject. I had to end the review thus: [Questions crowd] . . . where does an American locate herself in a discourse of seemingly immanent and inescapable complicity with colonialism? Is cultural hegemony avoidable, or always objectionable, in a historical (that is, non-utopian) world? Are the perceptions of Western Orientalism invariably false? Is there no defensible moral standard by which we can distinguish the "civilized" from the "less civilized" and "uncivilized"? Or must cultural relativism-concerning slavery, torture, suttee, cannibalism, female circumcision, live burial of female infants, castrated eunuchs or castrato singers, etc.-remain the only "enlightened" attitude? Put another way, when should differences be maintained, overcome, transacted? Finally, what are the limits of historical or anthropological explanations themselves, what the role of error, slippage, contingency, misprision, in discourses about other times, other places, other people? In mild desperation, I looked next to Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature for instruction. Three celebrated critics, together with their editor, advert there to the titular question with much intellectual sophistication-and some sophistry. But the high-minded tendentiousness of the volume began to grate. A key statement in the editor's introduction helps to identify my resistance: The bulk of the Irish people are ignorant of and alien to the Irish language and its ancient literature; northern Protestants are alien to both that and to their own complex earlier history in Ireland. To remove ourselves from that condition into one in which all these lesions and occlusions are forgotten, in which the postmodernist simulacrum of pluralism supplants the search for a legitimating mode of nomination and origin, is surely to pass from one kind of colonizing experience into another. For such pluralism refuses the idea of naming; it plays with diversity and makes a mystique of it; it is the concealed imperialism of the multinational, the infinite compatibility of all cultures with one another envisaged in terms of the ultimate capacity of all computers to read one another. From "nomination" to pluralism as "the concealed imperialism of the multinational," to the infinite, cybernetic "compatibility of all cultures"? I can project myself into the writer's historical experience: nearly seven hundred years of English colonialism in Ireland, all the intricacies of pain, pride, rage, remorse. But I also know something about the other side of nomination, all those two-bit tyrants around the world who hope to change reality by calling it by another name-the Avenue of 15 August, the Bridge of 16 September, the Plaza of 17 October-not to mention all the Stalinist bosses who throve on the business of (re)nomination. As to the animadversions against pluralism, they always leave me uneasy. For their bottom line is this: I am right, you are wrong. Pluralism has its failings, and there is right and wrong, or at least, righter and wronger, in the field of human endeavor. But in the ideological mind, the nuances of pluralism quickly dissolve. Like the detestable concept of "repressive tolerance" (Herbert Marcuse), the attack on pluralism ends as an attack on otherness-an attack, I am free to believe, against myself. Finally, anent cultural compatibility. Cultures may not coexist pacifically for centuries to come, nor will they prove "infinitely compatible" despite all the Super-Cray computers of the world; but they had better learn to translate more than they do now, translate into each other's values, codes. I refer the editor of Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature to the poet James Merrill: all life is translation, and we are all lost in it. I offer these instances to suggest a climate of assumptions, an ambience of discourse, different from my personal apprehension of exile. The differences, no doubt, are due to temperament; but they are intellectual as well. I begin with the former. First among my predispositions, I count an allergy to the "routinized production of righteous indignation," as Henry Louis Gates put it, and he ought to know. I count also distrust of the strong leftist bias only a rightist bias would prove more repressive in the educational enterprise-which skews, indeed warps, humanists, rendering them grotesque in Sherwood Anderson's sense: all those sweet, twisted crab apples carpeting academe. And I count crescive antipathy for politics, always the same kind of gauche politics, about which I have written in The Postmodern Turn: For what is politics? Simply the right action when ripeness calls. But what is politics again? An excuse to bully or shout in public, vengeance vindicating itself as justice and might pretending to be right, a passion for self-avoidance, immanent mendacity, the rule of habit, the place where history rehearses its nightmares, the dur desir de curer, a deadly banality of being. Last, I count a spontaneous affection for America, uninhibited by its current travails and miseries, an attachment that many academics find quite infra dig. These are matters of temperament. But there are also matters of cognitive assumptions, which would fill a book I firmly intend never to write. Perhaps I can make the point provocatively thus: many academic humanists dwell in a soft, fantasmic world, a space of desire made verbal. In that space, they indulge post-Oedipal dreams of self-empowerment. In that space, anything--and its opposite--can be said with impunity. This is generally called theory. Thus, for instance, some condemn "dualism," "essentialism," "totalization," while hurrying to give their own reductive explanations of "classism," "racism," "sexism," "imperialism." Others, inward with Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, write: "History is Necessity." In that fantasmic world, only fashions and desires constrain. But I have not forgotten that my theme is the putative exile of "third-world" intellectuals. I meant only to hint that my own distance from the Weltanschauung--or Weltblindheit--of certain academic ideologies requires me to improvise a language, made of bits and pieces, quotations from others and myself. This is the motive for fragmentary autobiography in this essay. Autobiography, though, diverts, distracts. Ineluctably, it confronts us with its own lie. And it reminds us at every turn of the spiritual vulgarity of self-affirmation. For the intolerable paradox of human evolution is this: the ontic imperative has brought us where we are, surviving tyrannosaurus and saber-toothed tiger, and the ontic imperative is now what all wisdom--Aldous Huxley's "perennial philosophy"--requires us to shed. I have grazed, distantly, the double horns of this dilemma in a memoir called Out of Egypt. And I will be grazing them, from afar, in these comments, repeatedly. How else can I speak of exile, real or imaginary, or of a homelessness that is home? And how avoid the insidious call to self-vindication? I quote from Out of Egypt: Men and women have flocked to America, fleeing or seeking, driven by the most diverse motives. But the psychological exile stands apart, his case shadier, thicker with complicity and silent intrigue. Who are these beings, full of dark conceits, rushing to meet the future while part of them still stumbles about, like a blind speleologist, in caverns of the past? What urgency speaks through their self-banishment? All leaving is loss, every departure a small death--yes, journeys secretly know their end. III I commenced by invoking some difficulties of the topic. These did not prove adamantine. Let us move on, without extravagant punctilio, to query the notion of exile in another, a colonial perspective. Colonialism, we know, is a kind of exile--all those gentlemen in white pith helmets who lived and died in the tropics mirror perversely the "third-world" intellectual abroad. We also know something about the horrors of colonialism, the horrors, though I suspect few of us have ever crawled in atonement on a jungle floor. It is enough to read a casebook on Heart of Darkness to recognize the abominations of Belgium in the Congo. It is realize the ultimate degradations of convicts in Australia. (Nota bene: the first gulags in history were perpetrated by an enlightened colonial power against its own English and Irish poor, white on white, you might say.) Colonialism, in any color, is blight. Where's the surprise? I have never regarded Europe with untrammeled esteem, nor regarded Europeans as paragons of the human race. Cultured, creative, even genial, they are murderous still. Think for a moment about their "civilized" nations: within living memory alone, they have filled trenches with the blood of a generation while the century was young; decimated Spain, bred the unsurpassed malignancies of Fascism, Nazism, Communism; gassed, bombed, and tortured their way through Ethiopia and Algeria; and continue their "ethnic cleansing" to this very day. Can Asia or America begin to match this record? I understand well Fanon when he cries: "Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the comer of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe." Copyright of Southern Review is the property of Southern Review and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. Source: Southern Review, Summer93, Vol. 29 Issue 3, p453, 12p. Item Number: 9312211840