Homing Instincts

We're in the "home-stretch" now, too, I guess, or coming full circle, or merely arriving at 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" and end with Okwe's emotional message to his daughter "I'm coming home." This class 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 was 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.

I think our post-film discussion gave us some very useful leads to pursue, especially in that apparent tension between romanticized sub-communities and more responsible, nuanced gradations of migrancy and homelessness (something that Elizabeth brought up with her observations, I believe). The film's poignant rendering of the latter 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. Here is James Clifford, from that important 1994 essay "Diasporas" (I hope you had a chance to look at the first 10-12 pages or so): "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, in an essay that also would have been relevant in these final weeks, 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" (102). Rushdie's fiction and his personal example have created a wonderfully rich and complicated test case for these questions and ideas (recall the questions we raised, for example, when we discussed Chamcha fleeing burning Brickhall for India).

(ibid. Between that last paragraph and this one I left to spend thirty minutes on the elliptical machine downstairs, and, listening to Iron Maiden on my iPod (ah, the things I admit to! Yes, lest you think from this class that I only listen to Ravi Shankar, Judy Garland, Nitin Sawhney, and Andrew Bird, now you know about this guilty pleasure left over from my heavy metal days of youth!), I just happened to hear the songs "Coming Home" and "Running Free" (the latter with such elevated lyrics as "I've got no place to call my own / Hit the gas, and here I go"). So our course, Rushdie, Okwe, Dorothy & Toto, et al., pursue me even when I'm working out. And that makes me think of other rock and roll links, such as Rushdie's friends U2, whose song "Walk On" offers this: "Home, hard to know what it is / If you never had one / Home, I can't say where it is / But I know I'm going / Home, that's where the heart is.")

Anyway, where was I?! Do you have any other thoughts about/reactions to the film?? The connections with our readings and contexts are legion, aren't they? These "nobodies" circulating furtively and invisibly in a remapped London (another palimpsest? remember the Under World beneath the Over World in Abraham's Bombay in The Moor's Lsst Sigh?) remind me not only of Bhabha's "gatherings" in the "Dissemination" essay, but also of those "maybe thirty human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent" (273) that Chamcha sees through a crack in the door in the Shaandaar -- lives in deferral, spectral individuals who can't even be migrants yet, much less citizens. The emphasis on doors, stairs, elevators, hidden entryways, etc., was appropriate, too, as was the fact that this was a very kinetic film: the characters were always on the move, it seemed, flowing from one frame and location to the next (and, in the case of Okwe and Senay, never sleeping). Back to Bhabha, I can't help but cite again that quote I had on the board all those weeks ago: "We find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the 'beyond': an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà - here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth."