Caesura - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Brian Castro
HISTORICALLY DEFINED BY RACE, AUSTRALIAN POLITY HAS NOT yet been able to unshackle itself from it. This is most apparent in its official self-perception, from government to tourism. For all the decorative indigenous motifs that now adorn it, the "experience" of Australia that is advocated is almost entirely a white one. Until these historical tendencies are severed from the general culture, new ways of belonging will not arise. There will be no hybridised forms, no cosmopolitan identities, no ease with languages suitable for living in a globalised world. Above all, no real civic solidarity. As fewer people travel to countries of vastly differing cultures, as lower numbers of people read "foreign literature", or any literature at all, ordinary Australians will become more fearful and more inquisitorial. Already a legitimation crisis is developing. To ask people their cultural identity is to negate their humanity. It presupposes that only one identity is possible; and this, an unconsidered one.
I am infinitely interpretable, but it is only because you are so curious.
Never really "at home", writing inhabits the "elsewhere" of the mind. It tries to make strange the phenomenon of conscious existence.
In 1570, that great sceptic Michel de Montaigne withdrew to his library at the age of 37. "We are always thinking somewhere else," he wrote. To be conscious is to be elsewhere, but also thinking about the "elsewhere". One day, Montaigne went out for a ride. It was an era in which gentlemen-warriors practised the art of reading while riding. He was involved in a collision and his steed shied. Having fallen from his horse, he languished in a peaceful limbo between life and death. The border was sweet; the self diffuse. Pain only set in when consciousness, or as Montaigne called it, "discourse" returned.
Life is anxiety. In writing, one is always thrown by one's horse. But that doesn't mean one should desire coma.
Lines of flight.
The desire not to be suffocated by one's own culture is a common cause of flight. In an interview with the magazine L'Express, the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf had this to say about family:
A tradition of silence occurs in the family, not from masking unspeakable secrets, but from a feeling of shame.
Anthropologist Ghassan Hage, in reviewing Origines (Grasset, 2004), Maalouf's book on the Lebanese diaspora, writes that the family
... can be the source of pride and they can be the source of shame. When we are near them, we want to leave and we strive for "routes", and when we are far away we want to be near them and we strive for "roots". Most often, we want to be near and far away from them at the same time, so we become forever hanging in a state of in-between-ness not really knowing what we want.
Leaving home is not about ideas of progress or of modernity. In many cases these ideas turn out to be illusory, tunnels without vision. Leaving is a flight "from" rather than an escape "to". There is no "outside", no border. Whether flâneur or fugueur, the levanter follows no linear path of desires. The world is his living room and he understands his illegitimacy and ambiguity as nothing more than a kind of poetry.
Exsilium: from ex(out) + sal(Skr. Sar – to go), root of sal?re ? to leap.
Having exited the old system, the exile (whether self-imposed or not) creates alternate forms by leaping over what he or she cannot own or promulgate with any authenticity: the mythology of blood and soil, the cosiness of the well-rounded story, the seductions of the conventional melody. For the exile, only dislocation can enable a newness that simultaneously ruptures the idea of progress. To be able to speak at all is to be aware of not playing the game, by refusing celebration, the desire to be adopted, the rites of inclusion. Language overthrows everything.
But such dislocation, a leap into the unknown, can also mean a jarring and painful landing. Recall the sad names of ships not too far removed from memory: St Louis, Dunera, Tampa. In November 1934, the Czech writer Egon Kisch was invited to Melbourne by an anti-fascist congress. Kisch arrived on board the Strathaird. He was immediately declared a prohibited immigrant by the Australian Government. Forbidden to land, Kisch leapt overboard, breaking his leg in two places. In order to deport him, the authorities gave the multilingual writer a dictation test in Gaelic, guaranteeing his failure as an immigrant as surely as it confirmed his success at warning Australians about fascism.
"Truth" is itself a diaspora. It cannot have a home because it turns the home upside-down. It breaks all the rules of friendship. Welcomed into other people's homes as a child, I felt a deep abyss within; a mask of silence through which I could not speak. Truths became untruths and vice versa. It was a form of welcome, as Derrida wrote, that "recalls the haunt as much as the home".
Exiles will change direction, renew departures, nomadically cover the same ground. Their journeys will consist of jumps, disjunctions, disconnections. Their traces will form texts that interrogate the dark spaces inside old cultural vessels, shattering them. A scattering of light. A desire not to live hemmed in by one single cultural imagination. Both a homelessness and a questioning, this is a writing that is in pieces. Its form is the caesura. A pause before the fragment continues its leaping, in an attempt to express the irreparable.
... without interruption – between letters, words, sentences, books – no signification could be awakened ... [writing] proceeds by leaps alone.
– Jacques Derrida
AT THE AGE OF 14, I FOUND MYSELF STRANDED ON THAT STRANGE BEACH. I was lugging a heavy surfboard and was cut off by a rocky, God-forsaken point below a sheer cliff. A squall seemed to be approaching. The only way back was to leap into the water and head out to sea. In order to call anywhere "home" one first had to take on all its contradictions.
In any case, it was a way of getting around the point. ♦