Homing Instincts

We're in the "home-stretch" now, too, I guess, or coming full circle, or merely approaching our final class meeting (which is not in fact an end, I hope, being the intellectual migrants that we all are). It seems appropriate that we began our time together with Grace Nichols's declaration that "wherever I hang me knickers that's me home" (though we never did end up reading and discussing this poem together after I gave you the handout, did we) and end with Okwe's emotional message to his daughter "I'm coming home" (and with Jack Dodds's journey to his last resting place). This class, at times, has been quite centrally concerned with the poetics of home, on so many levels (the family as nation, the national motherland, the alternative spaces and sanctuaries, the rhetoric of pedestrianism, the writer who is forced to move from one temporary home to the next to evade a fatwa, the exiles and migrants who know home as much as an idea as a geographical place, etc.). In contemplating the converging discourses of "the home" and "the nation" in Dirty Pretty Things (what ideas of the nation require these ghosted non-citizens to seek homes on rented couches and in the subterranean shelter of a crematorium?), we might think more generally about the implications of our spatial imaginaries and our terminology. In our own country and our own cultural moment, what kind of work is being accomplished with a designation like "homeland security"? What kind of logic of belonging and exclusion is being installed with the word "homeland" in this case? One senses how importantly our inquiry this semester branches out to our own modest migrant sensibilities, to our own understanding of ourselves as citizens of a national space.

Frears's film's poignant rendering of more responsible, nuanced gradations of homelessness seems to me to be an important contribution to our inquiry this semester, even as it may in some respects cross over into the former. Recall James Clifford, from that important 1994 essay, "Diasporas," that we discussed earlier this semester: "How do diaspora discourses represent experiences of displacement, of constructing homes away from home? What experiences do they reject, replace, or marginalize? ... What is the range of experiences covered by the term [diaspora]? Where does it begin to lose definition"? (302, 306). Caren Kaplan, another theorist of postmodern travel and migrations, cautions us against homogenizing the terms and understandings of displacement and travel, fearing that we'll end up "masking the economic and social differences between kinds of displacement in a homogenized 'cosmopolitanism' and generalizing nostalgia through a celebration of the condition of exile." The Satanic Verses certainly created a wonderfully rich and complicated test case for these questions and ideas (at times Rushdie has seemed to fail the test, such as when Chamcha flees burning Brickhall for India, but not always and probably not ultimately). The perils of not understanding discourses of displacement in a nuanced way were also evident (if you recall) in Barbara Bush's apparently callous reading of the experience of Katrina refugees who ended up seeking sanctuary in Texas: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Do you think she might learn something from Okwe?