• 1 Said, Edward, ‘The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile’, Harper’s 269 (September 1984), pp (...)

It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.

Hugo of St Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony, as quoted by Erich Auerbach, and by Edward Said1

• 2 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. (...)

1Auerbach’s exile in Istanbul during the Second World War functions almost as a talisman in Edward Said’s theorising of the exilic frame of mind. Repeatedly quoted and cited, Auerbach’s classic, Mimesis, and the process of its production obviously strikes a chord with the Palestinian cultural critic in exile, even as he takes issue with some of the work’s Eurocentric humanist assumptions – and Said is never less than ambivalent about the value of those, either.2 The vastness of the achievement of the writing of Mimesis testifies to the status of exile as a productive sealing-off from the world, given bittersweet credit in both Said’s and Auerbach’s work. Unable to access the well-established and well-stocked libraries of his European capital, Auerbach had to make do with what he had in his possession, the classics. Isolating himself from the world war raging around his ears, he is reputed to have concentrated on writing the narrative of European realism across centuries. The location of his exile, Istanbul, is here irrelevant, and only becomes explicit in a throwaway sentence in his epilogue: ‘I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies’ (p. 557). Another aspect of the production of Mimesis for Said, however, is its implication of exile as creative self-deception: there is more than an implication in Said that this modern classic is a product of Auerbach’s defiance and denial of the development of Europe that excluded him as a Jew, and threw him outside its limits, to the city of Istanbul, a city whose only meaning for Auerbach seems to have been the bitter fact of its not being Berlin. The figure of the ageing exiled academic, writing a continuous account of European realist fiction, from within the confines of his personal library is, in this context, extremely poignant, and telling.

• 3 ‘The Mind of Winter’, p. 55.

3Such a notion of exile-as-process, leading to an ‘awareness of simultaneous dimensions’ that is the basis of his ‘contrapuntal’ criticism,3 is perhaps integral to reading Said’s own work, and his status after Orientalism, as the elder statesman of colonial and postcolonial criticism, the master interpreter of texts of cultural encounters. The received, though not necessarily projected, image of Said as icon is cosmopolitan, urbane, cultured, in control and comfortable – not the nervous conditions habitually, since Fanon, attributed to the colonised. Said as suave cultural commentator appears as a voice to be trusted, having risen through sophisticated exile above the worldly allegiances that are seen as a barrier to be overcome in Auerbach’s quotation. Said’s attitude to his own exile, however, is consistent with his reading of the production of Mimesis. In articles published variously in Raritan, Critical Inquiry, New Left Review and Salmagundi, where he allows himself to adopt a less than academic tone, Said expresses not only the bitterness and isolation of exile (most explicitly in ‘The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile’), but also his awareness of the ambivalence of his position as one of the most prestigious academics in the world today, holding a well-paid chair in a major American University.

• 4 Ahmad, Ajaz, ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Sa (...)

4The presumed suave comfort and control is in fact variously an edgy defensiveness and a weary defiance in Said, and certainly much more subtly inflected than is usually perceived. One commentator on the complications of Said’s self-perception is Aijaz Ahmad, the Marxist Indian critic who expresses both solidarity with and dissent from Said’s work in his essay ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said’.4 In this lengthy and well-known critique of Orientalism, Ahmad problematises the position that Said is, or seems to be, writing from. This is not, surprisingly enough, a predictable critique of Said’s prestigious position in a Western academic milieu, the implied privilege and ambivalence of his eminence as a world academic. What, to Ahmad, makes Said’s work tenuous, is the ambivalence of his identity, the confusion of his self-positioning within that world.

• 5 Said, Edward, Orientalism, Penguin (London, 1985 [1978]), p. 25.

5Ahmad takes issue with the premise of Orientalism, presented by Said in his introduction: ‘In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject.’5 In Aijaz Ahmad’s reading, Said’s formulation of himself as Oriental subject is problematic to begin with, ‘for anyone whose own cultural apparatus is so overwhelmingly European and who commands such an authoritative presence in the American university’ (p. 171). Yet more importantly, he finds irony and inconsistency in this formulation:

• 6 Bhatnagar, Rashmi, Lola Chatterjee and Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, ‘The Post-Colonial Critic,’ in Sara (...)
• 7 Rushdie, Salman, ‘Imaginary Homelands,’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, Gra (...)

7The issue of cosmopolitanism, particularly in the case of postcolonial critics – and writers – working within Western circles, is a contentious one. There is a tendency to categorise, on the part of both critics and practitioners, the types of exile and migration – according to frame of mind and vision, as in the case of Hugo of St Victor, and according to class and political affiliation, in the work of more than one contemporary postcolonial critic. It is perhaps possible, though, to see reflections in these categories more of the critic / author’s own self-positioning than anything else. A symptomatic clash of categorisation takes place in an interview included in Sarah Harasym’s The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, a collection devoted to the work of Gayatri Spivak. The three Indian academics interviewing Spivak, teaching back in India for a year, start with an assumption, as Indian intellectuals, of their difference from Spivak, a non-resident Indian, and also assume that Spivak does the same: ‘There are several questions that arise out of the way you perceive yourself (‘The post-colonial diasporic Indian who seeks to decolonize the mind’), and the way you constitute us (for convenience, ‘native’ intellectuals)’. Spivak counters by arguing against this division, and by emphasising their similarity through reference to another category: ‘I thought I constituted you, equally with the diasporic Indian, as a post-colonial intellectual.’6 The spectre of that initial distinction, however, colours the tone of the interview. Similar variations of self-positioning are evidenced in Ahmad’s discomfort with Said’s postcoloniality as a fragmented and ambivalent self, Rushdie’s defensive posture that British Asians share a similarly fragmented vision, ‘whether writers or not,’ and Bharati Mukherjee’s sharp distinction between her past incarnation as a superior, ironic expatriate, and her new self-image as a ‘chameleon-skinned’ immigrant who can choose her material ‘up and down the social ladder’.7

• 8 JanMohamed, Abdul, ‘Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Spe (...)

8Abdul JanMohamed, in his spectacularly titled article ‘Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual’ names two new categories of ‘border intellectuals... located between two (or more) groups or cultures,’ which he defines in opposition ‘based on the intentionality of their intellectual orientation’:8

• 9 Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, Picador (London, 1982), The Satanic Verses, Viking/Penguin (N (...)

There is no mistaking JanMohamed’s preferred mode of ‘border intellectual’ here. Whether or not one wishes to adopt this sharp distinction between the urge to combine and harmonise as opposed to the inability to feel at home in any culture, however, one is struck by JanMohamed’s allocation of Rushdie and Achebe firmly to the first group, and Said to the second. As with most strictly conceived categorisations of exile and migration, it is surely possible to read most critics / writers into either position. Rushdie, for example, displays more than a little anxiety about his in-betweenness, and foregrounds his refusal of choice, as much as his cultural eclecticism, in his fiction and his more journalistic work. The ambivalence is doubtless shared by his readers: JanMohamed bases his categorisation on the observation that Rushdie’s ‘‘English’ novels are often articulated in Urdu syntax’ (p. 97). To one reader, Rushdie has thrown his lot in with the West, as he has stayed on and functions in its systems, to another, he is unquestionably otherwise, judging from the subject matter of his fiction. His own categorisation of types of minority imagination in ‘Imaginary Homelands’ is perhaps similar to JanMohamed’s formulation of the syncretic and the specular. (Rushdie contrasts these utterances by two black American writers, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison: ‘black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality. Their descriptions were incompatible’ (p. 13), as opposed to ‘I was taken very early, with a passion to link all I loved within the negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond’ (p. 20)). The repeated journeys back and forth between India and Pakistan in Midnight’s Children, between Bombay and London in The Satanic Verses, and between even more convoluted multiple locations in The Moor’s Last Sigh surely testify to a sense of identity more uncomfortably constructed, and more elusive than is suggested by the notion of being ‘at home’ in two harmonised cultures.9

• 10 Mukherjee, Bharati, Jasmine, Virago (London, 1991).
• 11 Mukherjee, Bharati, The Middleman and Other Stories, Ballantine (New York, 1988), and Darkness, Faw (...)

11Such a shifting point of view and its political ambivalences are, in fact, issues that need to be dealt with by a travelling or migrating writer. For all her protestations of affinity with the Indian communities in America from the most privileged to the voiceless underclass, Bharati Mukherjee’s short stories are most interesting when identification and affinity are questioned. Though Mukherjee has written a number of stories, which use first-person narratives of underprivileged immigrants, not least, her novel Jasmine, the entirety of her work displays a much more complicated and politically complex attitude towards point of view.10 Her stories employ not just immigrants looking at America, but Americans of various descriptions looking at immigrants as well. The ‘I’ of the stories in Middleman and Other Stories and in Darkness shifts variously between an Indian mature student in America noticing her husband’s provincial Indian gaucheness when he visits her; an Italian-American woman watching the way her Afghani refugee lover stands out at a thanksgiving dinner with her family; and Vietnam veteran Americans through whose resentful eyes Mukherjee scrutinises her one-time compatriots.11 An American citizen, Mukherjee defines herself as an American writer, and she places herself in a distinct category from Indian writers in English. Her Indian-American identity, however, can only be defined through nervous, shifting means and allegiances.

• 12 Seth, Vikram, The Golden Gate, Faber and Faber (London, 1986). Further references are in the text.

14The Golden Gate, the book that first made Seth’s name, advertises its internationality just as much as it does its Americanness.12 The yuppie cast of characters dwell on the home-grown American conflicts between WASP, Jew and Japanese in an affluent tale of sexual, political, environmental and artistic morality. The sense of comfort and confidence in the book is striking, not only in its chosen genre of verse novel, but in the audacity of this Indian writer, a graduate student in San Francisco at the time, daring to write what Gore Vidal has described as ‘the great Californian novel’ on the dust jacket of the hardback edition. The ostensible position that this cosmopolitan work insists on is the comfort of imaginative access. Having left his native India, it is possible to argue, Seth’s imagination does not dwell on his foreignness, but achieves the ideal of Hugo of St Victor as quoted in Auerbach and Said, of a radical rootlessness that affords access to an international cultural field, where one can pick any culture for imaginative inquiry.

• 13 Achebe, Chinua, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ in Hopes and Impediments (...)

15This is dissimilar to writing by figures such as Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, who, along with Conrad, can be accused, in Chinua Achebe’s well-known words, of using third-world locations as ‘setting and back drop’ to a European drama, which, Achebe argues, ‘eliminates the African as human factor’ in Heart of Darkness.13 Seth’s Indianness is marginal to his American text in more ways than one – the only, easily missed Indian character appears, a social outcast, in a house-warming party:

• 14 Saleh, Tayeb, Season of Migration to the North, trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies, Three Continents Pr (...)

16The position of the migrant intellectual / writer is a conflictual one. If a postcolonial writer writing in English chooses to foreground the notion of migrancy in fiction, then there are unavoidable Western fictional and political antecedents that need to be dealt with. Exiles figure prominently in the work and the biography of writers of modernist fiction, especially Joyce, already a powerful model for contemporary writing. Conrad’s parable of colonialism in Heart of Darkness is, for many African writers, a direct source that needs to be subverted and reversed: in Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih’s reversal of Conrad’s narrative pattern, the theme of the quest, of the voyage into the unknown prevails, illustrating the condition of the colonial subject.14 Travel writing, anthropology and other research into the Orient have been discussed by Said in Orientalism, and shown to be complicit in colonialist projects. This awareness necessarily haunts the contemporary travel writer, especially a postcolonial one.

• 16 Kureishi, Hanif, My Beautiful Launderette and the Rainbow Sign, Faber and Faber (London, 1986), and (...)

This is an accusation of Orientalism, implying that the writer of postmodernism / postcolonialism is entering into an act of cultural ransacking similar to the one of which colonialism was guilty. Many postcolonial and minority writers have, in fact, been accused of ‘a new Orientalism’: the Rushdie affair speaks for itself; Hanif Kureishi faced criticism after My Beautiful Launderette for creating ruthless Pakistani businessmen and drug-smugglers, and the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, after the publication of The Woman Warrior, was condemned by some for perpetuating the myths of ‘the yellow peril’ and of ‘the inscrutable Chinese’ in an autobiographical representation of a girl facing racist and sexist prejudice in a Chinese-American environment.16 Are these acts of cultural translation and mediation, benign and welcome gifts of a voice to the voiceless, or unwelcome exercises of power?

• 17 The term is Sara Suleri’s: ‘The more such a text as Shame represses and censors its own ambivalence (...)

18Rushdie states in ‘Imaginary Homelands’ that ‘Western writers have always felt free to be eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form... I am sure we must grant ourselves equal freedom’ (p. 20). However, the militant optimism of this statement of intent ignores the presence of a considerable bulk of scholarship critiquing just such eclecticism on the part of the Western writer, whether colonial or contemporary, as exemplified by Appiah’s critique of an unquestioned link between postmodern and postcolonial theories of writing. Such comfortable selectivity is not available to an art of the sort practised by Rushdie, however eclectic his work might be, his selectivity is ‘neurasthenic,’ not consumerist, not comfortable, not organic.17

• 18 Said, Edward, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’, Critical Inquiry 9 (1982), pp. (...)

19The issue of authorial responsibility in the writing of postcolonial migration is bound up inextricably with the notion of cultural translation – who is doing the translating, and why? What does the choice of subject matter signify? Who are the intended and the actual audiences? A comparable list of questions is articulated by Edward Said in ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community’: ‘Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances? These, it seems to me, are the questions whose answers provide us with the ingredients making for a politics of interpretation’.18

• 19 Kureishi, Hanif, ‘Some Time with Stephen: A Diary,’ in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid: The Script and The (...)

20The awareness of such specific political positionality necessitates an engagement with the issue of potential readership, and the response of such readers. Even a writer like Hanif Kureishi, whose instincts reject the obligation to act as a ‘public relations officer’ for ‘his people’,19 to be a ‘professional Pakistani’ (My Beautiful Launderette, p. 82), finds himself engaging with the issue in his texts, satirising a stereotyped Western / British / mainstream reading as well as a black / minority / politically correct one.

• 20 Gayatri Spivak argues that Bharati Mukherjee’s heroines are ‘privileged native informants of libera (...)

21The concept of representation in fiction necessarily involves several contentious issues: representation in political terms, assuming that the writer is ‘speaking for’ the migrant community he is writing of; ‘representativeness,’ implying an identification that would enable the writer to give voice to the community unambiguously; and of course, the necessary consideration of the act of fictional representation in its social context, especially its relationship with its audience. How unified or divided is the audience for a postcolonial, especially migrant text, and what does this entail even at the level of basic communication – from the use of non-English words, idioms, to cultural, political, religious references and literary antecedents? Does the text need to code itself for multiple audiences, and deal with the political problems of privileging one over the other? But the most problematic issue, perhaps, is the power relationship that is seen to be constructed by such a text’s position as ‘native informant,’ translating the postcolonial culture of origin to the judgmental gaze of a Western readership.20

• 21 Edward Said, ‘Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture,’ Raritan IX, 3 (Winter 1990), pp. (...)

23The impossible task of ‘inventor[ying] the traces’ on the postcolonial subject becomes surely more involved when the subject in question has migrated. Many critics do include the study of migrancy as a legitimate aspect of the reality of postcoloniality today. For example, in Said’s formulation the ‘voyage in’ (from the periphery to the centre) is a continuation of the project of decolonisation, and the work of third-world intellectuals in the West ‘is not simply the work of individuals, but mainly an extension into the metropolis of large-scale mass movements.’21 He states categorically in ‘Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture’ that ‘the contest over decolonisation has moved from the peripheries to the centre’ (p. 36). It is a truism that decolonisation cannot be seen to evolve naturally from the achievement of independence, but requires an alteration of the systems of power that still persist politically, economically and intellectually. However, the location of migrancy, migrant intellectuals, and of immigrant writing in this process must be more contentious than is suggested by Said’s optimistic statement.

• 22 Parameswaran, Uma, ‘What Price Expatriation,’ in Alastair Niven, ed., Commonwealth Writer Overseas: (...)

27The place of migrancy in postcolonial theory is ambiguous, though at the same time peculiarly central. It is surely not a coincidence that many practitioners of such criticism are based in the West. One certainly has to take into account the realities of academic ambition and validation which more often than not are involved in the choice of migrating: a brand of academic exile unlike those of Auerbach and Said, but no less valid for that. Such a brain-drain is a very particular type of migration, and its place in the theorising of the postcolonial is often coupled with the mass migration of Third-World and postcolonial peoples to the North and the West, but the two are in no way synonymous. Critics as various as Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, Abdul JanMohamed and Said himself draw distinctions between the immigrant and the exile in class terms. Especially in the Asian community in Britain, distinct waves of population movement that differ in size and in kind are historically documented. Class distinctions, and the question of bourgeois complicity with the coloniser are already touchy subjects. Uma Parameswaran, for example, in her discussion of expatriate writing, argues that this may not be a new category at all, but simply an extension of what may be termed ‘native-aliens’ – the class of Indians who were ‘anglicized in their social, behavioural and educational patterns,’ who did, in fact, then become the new Indian ruling class.22 Rushdie’s Midnight Children does rely on such an identification of groups of privilege: a novel written by a migrant author in English, it nevertheless finds self-reflexivity in the figure of an upper-class Muslim narrator, who admits self-consciousness about his speaking voice of ‘pure’ Urdu. This conjunction of class privilege and minority status then found its way into a proliferation of novels inspired by Rushdie’s self-conscious model.

• 23 Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Hele (...)
• 24 Parry, Benita, ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories: Edward Said’s Postcolonial Cosmopol (...)

28With migration, the stresses and strains of this past of colonial class differential are perhaps carried over to the metropolitan location. In the case of immigrant writers, Spivak’s question, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ applies to the writer’s relationship not only with the masses of the Indian subcontinent but the voiceless bulk of the sub-continental immigrants in Britain (or in the States) as well, the so-called elusive Asian community about which claims are made and hearts are broken.23 Benita Parry is one critic among many who draws distinctions, in discussing Said’s position as post-colonial critic, between mass diaspora and intellectual brain-drain, a ‘chasm’ of which Said is ‘more aware than most’.24 Distinctions between exiles, emigrés, scholars, anthropologists, tourists and travellers, and the frames of mind they engender, have been traditionally finely drawn. However, the newly strained relationship between the representer and the represented in the fiction of migration is now possibly more significant and more strained than any of these. The migrant intellectual, perhaps specifically the writer, has necessarily become an aloof and suspect figure after the Satanic Verses affair. It is in this context that the politics of the writing and reception of The Satanic Verses, the Rushdie affair, can be cited as a paradigm for immigrant writing today.