DIASPORA AS METAPHOR
The perpetual condition of “diaspora” may contribute to this sense of “affiliation” across borders, with the spatial politics of diaspora being seen in intellectual terms. Rey Chow's view of claiming the metaphorical meaning of "diaspora" is relevant here. James Clifford has also exhorted us to move beyond the kind of theorizing of diaspora that is confined to maps and histories and to seek out its metaphorical value. For Chow “diasporas are emblems of transnationalism because they embody the question of borders”:
[If] diasporic consciousness is an intellectualisation of [the] existential condition ‘of dispersal from the homeland’, then ‘diasporic consciousness’ is perhaps not so much a historical accident as it is an intellectual reality – the reality of being intellectual.1
We are inscribed with the marks of one another not only in a country or nation state but in whole continents and across the globe. Our histories have been inextricably interwoven and grand narratives are constantly re-written from the point of view of petit recits. Indeed, as All Under Heaven shows, the one is implicated in the other. This is why, in redrawing our literary maps, we should not proceed in unilinear and one-dimensional ways, but find interconnections across multiple geopolitical spaces, seeing history and our literature in terms of diasporas upon diasporas rather than imagined margins writing to some imagined diasporic "centre" (as the project by Chetty and Piciucco [2004] would seem to suggest).2
All Under Heaven is yet another book that stretches our notion of affiliation, in the sense that Said uses the term. This, I believe, expands Anjtie Krog's "you" when she writes the following at the end of her evocative account of the TRC in South Africa, Country of my Skull:
because of you
this country no longer lies
between us but within
it breathes becalmed
after being wounded
in it wondrous throat
…
… retina learns to expand
daily because by a thousand stories
I was scorched
a new skin3
Being “scorched a new skin” by “a thousand stories” - this is true of living in South Africa as much as it is globally. This is true of the past as it is of today, where we have “new displacements, new diasporas”.4
We may choose to live with difference that is constructed as a binary or we may choose to live with difference which has implicit in it a sense of heterogeneity, plurality, multiplicity. And Brah shows how important it is, in the choices we make, to critique the 'regimes of power' that govern one:
The manner in which a group comes to be situated in and through a wide variety of discourses, economic processes, state policies and institutional practices is critical to its future. This ‘situatedness’ is central to how different groups come to be relationally positioned in a given context. I emphasise the question of relational positioning for it enables us to begin to deconstruct the regimes of power which operate to differentiate one group from another; to represent them as similar or different; to include or exclude them from constructions of the ‘nation’ and the body politic; and which inscribe them as juridical, political and psychic subjects.5
ALL UNDER HEAVEN
The book ends with Accone [Ah Nung], nine years old, and his family settling into yet another new home, moving from Asiatic Bazaar to Claremont, and expecting at this time (the end of the 60's) some stability in this "patch of paradise".6 The landscape that is evoked seems to anticipate, even if not realised in the immediate decades that followed in South Africa, the hope that this "home" will be expansive enough to connect them to a greater "China" - to "living all under heaven", a “China” that envelops the whole world. "Return" may take many forms, both physical and spiritual.7
The Epilogue fittingly ends with the beginning. Time moves forward, yet is also cyclical. If, as Ihab Hassan points out, "history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future", then the processes of uncovering the layers of history and adding new (and alternative) ones to it may occur almost simultaneously.
Accone’s impression of his grandfather when he was a little boy on the brink of departure from China is sketched. To the very end of his days Ah Leong treasures the memory of the China he left behind, painted in large brushstrokes:
What remains indelible is that things were always bigger and better in China. Snakes were longer, summers hotter and more humid; the rivers were broader and an incomparably beguiling colour. For an eleven year old, such must have been the world, and its image remained perfectly preserved, captured forever in the amber of Ah Leong's memory and forming the substance of dreams".8
The red silk cord given to Ah Leong when he left China constantly takes him back in time. "This cord will bind you in Namfeechow to us in Chung-kwok… it symbolises holding kin together. It is a lifeline to your family that will never break. It will bring you back again".9
It also connects his offspring to their ancestral homeland, clearly mediated to them by their parent. When Ah Leong's daughter, Julie, and her husband, Giddy [also known as Jewel and Kit - Accone's parents] move into their new home it seems to connect earth with sky, sky with earth…roots connected by routes to [new] roots…
Summer eased into its last days as the Accones settled in. The mornings were clear and there was a curious absence of red dust. Out of the kitchen they could see, not the neighbouring semi's wall, but the sun rise. On the south side of the house, protecting it, was the poplar, its trunk many rings thick. Looking north, the family saw mountains that seemed like a gigantic sea frozen in motion, cliff faces cresting steep south slopes, which swept downwards in an ever more gentle wave to the broad valley floor and their home. It had been a long journey to this patch of paradise that seemed to reach, with the purity of fire, from the earth to the sky. Here, Giddy and Julie thought, it was as if they were living ALL UNDER HEAVEN.10
Accone is clearly here the "artist of scale", referred to earlier11. One gets a sense of a coalescing of both the temporal and spatial, of the vast and the infinitesimal. What a journey has unfolded for Ah Kwok when he first stepped out to explore "unexpected tracts of the topography of heaven".12
Arguably, the title of this concluding section, Fire, and its epigraph - I Am Lost In The Murk And Darkness As I Start On My Journey To The East – suggests that the “journey to the East” – is a journey always, ever, to (a new) SUNRISE…that time/space where/when, purified and purged, “home” and “arrival” signify a new understanding of living all under heaven, even when (especially when), that sky is blighted…
In another sense the veil that had settled when Ah Kwok left China has not completely lifted. There will be the scourge of the dire excesses of the Cultural Revolution; there will be "Tiananmen Square" which will come to epitomise (a part of) modern day China as much as "Sharpeville" does of the apartheid regime in South Africa. And it would become increasingly difficult to "say something about the glorious situation of our socialist motherland".13
This is why "memory work" such as that exemplified by All Under Heaven, and our work as critics of such literature, as we constantly try to read texts against the historical moment and vice versa, is fundamentally important. "Memory is central to social theorising and critique in contemporary South Africa today"14, and more widely in the world, and constantly gives greater depth and new meaning to our efforts to create a common world...
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to acknowledge the assistance of Darryl Accone, who made available articles on his book, All Under Heaven, as well as some of his other writings.
1 Chow, Rey. 1993. Writing Diaspora – Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, Indiana. p15
2 Chetty, Rajendra and Pier Paolo Piciucco [eds]. 2004. Indias Abroad - The Diaspora Writes Back. STE Publishers: Johannesburg.
3 Krog, Antjie. In the Country of my Skull. Random House: Johannesburg.
4 Brah, Avter. 2003. "Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities." In: Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (editors). Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. p614
5 "Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities." p617
6 All Under Heaven. p280
7 See the works of Amy Tan.
8 All Under Heaven. p283
9 Page 11
10 Page 280
11 de Kock, Leon. 2004. "Review of All Under Heaven - Writing in the Margin". In Sunday Times Lifestyle, July 11, 2004.
12 Brink, Andre. 2004. Before I Forget. p2
13 Chang, Jung. 1992. Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China. Flamingo: Harper/Collins:London. p668
14 McEachern, Charmaine. "Mapping the memories: politics, place and identity in the District Six Museum, Cape Town." In Zegeye A [ed]. 2001, pp. 223-249.
This essay was presented, in the form of a paper, at the conference of The European Association of Commonwealth Literatures and Languages (Malta, 21-25 March 2005) and the conference of the English Academy of South Africa/Auetsa/Saval/Saaclals: "Africa in Literature" (University of Cape Town, 10-13 July 2005.
D. (Betty) Govinden teaches at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, in Durban, South Africa.