{"id":169942,"date":"2025-03-06T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2025-03-06T15:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169942"},"modified":"2025-02-19T17:09:17","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T22:09:17","slug":"horrific-surrealism-writing-on-migration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/06\/horrific-surrealism-writing-on-migration\/","title":{"rendered":"Horrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Feliks Micha\u0142 Wygrzywalski, Charon\u2019s Boat<\/i>, 1917, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

My father has crossed many borders. Born in northern Vi\u1ec7t Nam under French rule in 1933, he was educated in a French Catholic school. More than eighty years later, a widower, he could still sing fragments of French songs when we sat together at the dining table. The meal I could prepare which he most enjoyed was filet mignon, medium rare, with a glass of red wine. He had a cupboard full of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, for when he liked something, he bought it in bulk. When he stopped being able to eat meat and drink wine, I took the last two bottles of Louis Jadot and brought them home with me, where they remain untouched. Perhaps I will drink one when he passes away. Perhaps I will open the second decades from now and see what I remember when I taste it, even if all I will taste is spoilt wine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By then, my father will have long ago passed across the last border any of us will see. I know of at least two other borders that he crossed during his life. In 1954, as a newlywed at twenty-one with his seventeen-year-old wife, my father left his childhood home and moved south across the border, where Vi\u1ec7t Nam had been partitioned into a communist north and anticommunist south following the defeat of French colonizers by Vietnamese revolutionaries. My mother\u2019s entire family chose to leave the north, along with eight hundred thousand other Vietnamese Catholics fearing communist persecution. My father\u2019s family chose to stay, so my father left behind his parents, his younger sister, and three younger brothers. He would not see them again for forty years. Ulysses was away from home for only twenty years. Does my father\u2019s journey away from home and back to it four decades later deserve the name of an epic? If not, what form should my father\u2019s story take?<\/span><\/p>\n

The question of form and its relationship to a life lived interests me as a writer and as a border crosser, as my father\u2019s son and as a father myself. A half century after my father left his childhood home, I visited the compound. My aunt had married and moved out long ago, but my three paternal uncles still live there, along with many of their children and grandchildren. From my youth until my visit and past then until the present, my parents have sent home money to the relatives every year to help them survive. On this visit, I gave all the adults envelopes of cash, the amounts determined by my father, and thought about what my life would have been like if my parents had never left in 1954, or in 1975, when they fled from S\u00e0i G\u00f2n and crossed yet another border to the United States. If I am inclined to see the journeys of my parents as heroic, the writer Amitava Kumar pushes back against the praise for those who cross borders: the immigrants, the refugees, the undocumented, the expatriates, the tourists, the settlers, the conquerors. He writes that “It is not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It is safe to say that perceptions of migrants are contradictory. In their countries of origin, they are sometimes celebrated for having embarked on adventures and sometimes criticized as having abandoned their homes. In the countries of their arrival, they can appear as terrifying threats in another people\u2019s history or be welcomed as fresh blood. If they face hostility and suspicion, migrants might feel the need to insert themselves into their new nation\u2019s chronicles of conquest. The migrant\u2019s heroism can then harmonize with their host nation\u2019s self-image, as well as affirming that nation\u2019s hospitality and generosity.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is what happens in Jhumpa Lahiri\u2019s short story \u201cThe Third and Final Continent,\u201d from her lauded collection <\/span>The Interpreter of Maladies<\/span><\/i>, which focuses on Indian immigrants to the United States. I admire the formal elegance of much of Lahiri\u2019s writing, especially her short stories, a genre in which she excels and in which I am at my most miserable. I spent seventeen horrible years writing short stories on a similar theme as Lahiri\u2019s, signaled by the title of my book: <\/span>The Refugees<\/span><\/i>. The book frustrated me because I did not understand, intuitively, the genre of the short story, where, generally speaking, less is more. Almost every single moment of writing the stories agonized me, and I am fortunate that, as a masochist and a Catholic, I enjoyed the suffering.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether or not Lahiri suffered in writing her book, her stories themselves appear effortless. Part of that gracefulness stems not just from the art of her writing but its ideology, at least as it is manifest in <\/span>The Interpreter of Maladies<\/span><\/i>. The shape of her thinking about being an immigrant and an American fits together seamlessly with both the streamlined qualities of a realistic short story and with the ways many Americans like to imagine their country, its hospitality, and its audaciousness. So long as the migrant comes to conquer the United States figuratively, by participating in our collective mythology of limitless capitalist progress into a democratic utopia with an SUV in every garage, the migrant is often, if not always, welcome. In \u201cThe Third and Final Continent,\u201d Lahiri captures the quotidian odyssey of this kind of migrant and the way his story illuminates the shadow-free national epic of the United States as a land of innocents pursuing happiness.<\/span><\/p>\n

A young Indian graduate student has arrived in sixties Boston after a short stay in London. The United States is his third and last continent. He rents a room from an elderly widow who was born during the Civil War. Despite her age and connection to a time of racial and national horror, she welcomes this Indian immigrant and, when his Indian fianc\u00e9e arrives, welcomes her as well, blessing the start of an Indian American family who will be part of a new, nonwhite generation. One arc of the narrative is about progress past the country\u2019s racial sins. The other narrative arc concerns heroism, for Neil Armstrong lands on the moon during the Indian student\u2019s time in the widow\u2019s house. Decades later, as a happily married American citizen with successful sons, the narrator reflects on his American life via the moon landing:<\/span><\/p>\n

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I look at my father, who no longer recognizes me, I wonder if his accomplishments bewilder him. Lahiri\u2019s understatedly heroic immigrant template attracts me, with my desire to see my father as a bold voyager whose achievement parallels those of the astronauts. If Neil Armstrong became the ideal for the nation and of the nation, then so does the immigrant in his own quiet, anonymous manner, his story resonant with a nation he has come to accept.<\/span><\/p>\n

Armstrong\u2019s story comforts in another manner: he survives and returns home. What of the migrant who does not survive or who does not return? The American mythology of immigration is perhaps too life- and nation-affirming to consider migration as an experience of death or exile, a condition from which one cannot return and where one does not feel truly at home. The writer Ha Jin, in his book <\/span>The Writer as Migrant<\/span><\/i>, argues that \u201cthe most significant literature dealing with human migration has been written on the experience of exile. By contrast, immigration is a minor theme, primarily American. Therefore, a major challenge for writers of the immigrant experience is how to treat this subject in response to the greater literary traditions.\u201d My father is not an immigrant but a refugee, whose experience is closer to exile, especially if we consider how exiles typically die far from their homelands. My father has now spent more of his life here than there. He expressed his commitment to this country when he bought burial plots for himself and my mother in that California cemetery where she now rests. That burial plot, he told me years later, was a great investment. What cost three thousand dollars then is worth more than twenty thousand dollars today. In AMERICATM<\/sup><\/span>, even death makes for smart investment and real estate opportunities.<\/span><\/p>\n

While capitalism has helped to shape the form of my father\u2019s eventual passing, so too has Vietnamese Catholicism. Vietnamese Catholic death rituals involve a viewing from morning to evening, a Mass with biblical readings and choir hymns, the scent of incense, the chanting of prayers, the burial itself. My father has planned every last detail of his departure, and oversaw this form for my mother when she passed away five years ago. The ceremony was executed so perfectly that my father-in-law said he wanted something of equal quality, a wish his daughters granted when he passed away last year. The repetition of the form of mourning comforts the living as we contemplate our final exit. I grew up with a deep sense of this, for every night in childhood I encountered the scene of my parents seated on the couch in a dim living room praying the rosary together in a language I only poorly understood, facing a wall furnished with a crucifix and pictures of a white Jesus and Mary. My parents were between two worlds that were alien to me\u2014Vi\u1ec7t Nam, in the past, and the afterlife, in the future. The afterlife was bright, but death was a continent from whose depths the explorers never returned. The ones who clinically died and came back to life saw only the shores of death.<\/span><\/p>\n

The only other returnees are ghosts, who may really exist but do not usually appear in realist literature. The immigrant literature of realism\u2014of which Lahiri\u2019s story is an exemplar, both for its artistic and personal grace, as well as its deep love for the immigrant as intrepid traveler\u2014often forestalls, occludes, hedges on death and the final border crossing into the ultimate otherness. While Lahiri\u2019s immigrant does not mention death as the actual final continent and destination of every one\u2019s last journey, death certainly does appear in a great deal of this realistic literature, from the ends of individuals due to personal circumstances and the demise of many from various ghastly calamities. But the realism of the literature insulates readers somewhat from the incomprehensibility of death, both of the personal and collective kinds. In Lahiri\u2019s story, for example, not only is the future death of our immigrant narrator forestalled, even in his old age, but so is the death of his landlady. By the end of the story, she has conveniently disappeared, along with the Civil War history from which she emerged.<\/span><\/p>\n

The seamlessness of effective realism serves as a buffer against the emotions generated in those who die, those who witness and remember the death of others, and those who seek to recover the deaths for which they themselves were not present. How can realism adequately confront something so unreal as the final undoing? Death was not merely abstract to me as a child\u2014it was unreal, unimaginable, unknowable. The story of the immigrant arriving as a stranger in a strange land, who then becomes a part of that land, affirms life, not death. But if we imagine immigrants as heroic, we should ask why. What did they escape? Was it, perhaps, mass death, or premature death, due to forces beyond their control? And if the ones who stayed were also heroic and unvanquished, was it because they confronted these conditions of mass or premature death? By celebrating the courage of mi grants, do we foreground their accomplishments in order to obscure, in some cases, how our interventions as a country required them to be brave in order to survive? And what of all those who failed to survive?<\/span><\/p>\n

The poet Ken Chen has also approached the issue of death and his father through what he calls \u201cmigration surrealism.\u201d In his text \u201cI Was Ostensibly Searching For My Father, But.\u201d he descends into the \u201cunderworld\u201d in order to find his departed father. Instead of imagining the abyss, he finds himself \u201ctrying to recuperate my right to hallucinate.\u201d Hallucination is the right response to the scale of death and its terrors for so many who have reached the infernal regions through \u201cdeath as migration.\u201d The dead he hallucinates died when they stayed at home, or died when they traveled, but died because of forces beyond their control that rendered their staying or their departure heroic, in the eyes of some. Some of those forces were unleashed by colonizers and conquerors for whom borders mattered not\u2014at least the borders of others, always open, ready to be transgressed, versus their own borders, which were to be defended.<\/span><\/p>\n

The continent of death has no guards, however. All are welcome, and, like Orpheus, Chen wanders into the underworld, seeing<\/span><\/p>\n

everything that ever died. I saw the beginning, the true beginning, the beginning of modern capitalism \u2026 I saw that the beginning had twin poles: in the New World, where the indigenous people fled the conquering hordes, strange men who would casually behead the people they encountered and set their hounds to tear the flesh of infants, and in the west coast of Africa, where there came a story that these traders of strange cargo must be cannibals, piling up as they did colossal mounds of bones, whitening in the sun. I saw men in India strapping the bodies of insurrectionary sepoys to the mouths of cannons. And there was the Congo, where I saw the West come carrying bags of hands. They had taken the hands from the people who lived there. In My Lai, was it ears? What was it in Malaya? \u2026 Listing these horrors in such a casual way\u2014it shames one to write it, shames one to read it. How then to represent what I have come to call sublime trauma, the absolute terror of colonialism that is too gargantuan to be represented, words whose monument deforms our mouths as we speak them, events too much almost to even bear glimpsing?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If the language and form of realism is insufficient for grasping the scope of the underworld, the mythology of the heroic traveler is also not enough, for in elevating the individual this mythology cannot address the scale of collective conquest and death, resistance and survival.<\/span><\/p>\n

Secular and religious epics might be better, being decidedly unrealistic, even hallucinogenic, as is the Bible. This particular holy book is replete with fantastic tales of exile, migration, and displacement, beginning with Adam and Eve, refugees from the garden of Eden who have bequeathed their Christian descendants with a perpetual nostalgia for the lost land of innocence from which they have been exiled. Then there is Noah, cast afloat in a mass extinction event, repopulating the world with his living cargo. Isn\u2019t his ark a boat for the very first boat people? This is why, in my novel <\/span>The Committed<\/span><\/i>, the rickety boat with which my band of Vietnamese refugees flees Vi\u1ec7t Nam is described as an \u201cark,\u201d finding itself on a \u201cwine- dark sea,\u201d in allusion to Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In epics and fables from the Bible to Greek mythology, the hero can cross the last border and return from the dead. Realism is not required, and even contradicts the promises and lures of these kinds of stories, which involve a reversal of time. We mere mortals go from birth to death, but resurrection exists in divine time and implies what Chen calls \u201cdeath as time travel.\u201d I gesture at how the migrant also travels in time in my novel <\/span>The Sympathizer<\/span><\/i>, which I did not think of as a realistic work but rather a European modernist version of the Great American Novel, or maybe just a debased refugee knockoff. Against the linear optimism of American mythmaking, the narrator of my Not-So-Great American Novel, a refugee and a spy, enters the United States on a mission of sabotage rather than patriotic affirmation. In the land of plenty, he sees a clock on the wall of a Vietnamese restaurant<\/span><\/p>\n

carved from hardwood into the shape of our homeland. For this clock that was a country, and this country that was a clock, the minute and hour hands pivoted in the south, the numbers of the dial a halo around Saigon. Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his refugee countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return? <\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026 <\/span>Refugee, exile, immigrant\u2014whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a child, I saw that clock hanging in more than one Vietnamese restaurant in San Jos\u00e9, where Vietnamese refugees engaged in Proustian moments over bowls of ph\u1edf. Could realism capture the malaise of homesickness that plagued some migrants? Can realism show me what whirls inside my father\u2019s head as he approaches the final border?<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps, but my sense that realist linearity might not be sufficient in telling all the stories of migrants, border crossers, and my father led me to writers who have dealt with memory by foregrounding the act of remembering itself, and how remembering shapes and perhaps distorts reality. For <\/span>The Sympathizer<\/span><\/i>, I was interested in memory\u2019s density, so I drew on writers fascinated by memory and who exhibited a particular richness of prose and style, from Toni Morrison to Maxine Hong Kingston, Ant\u00f3nio Lobo Antunes to W. G. Sebald. For <\/span>A Man of Two Faces<\/span><\/i>, I thought about how my existence as person and writer was possible because history had blown up Vi\u1ec7t Nam and scattered millions of its people all over the world. Since memory could be a jagged assembly of shards as much as a thick stream of consciousness, I sought a style even more fragmentary, circular, and occasionally feverish for this blend of memoir, history, and memorialization.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some books that have influenced me are difficult to classify, in the way migrants can be hard to classify, in transit between nation-states with enforced borders. Genres and styles have borders too, which is why conventional realism, with its clear boundaries marking how fiction should and should not look, suits immigrant narratives that affirm national identities. Nationalism and realism mold both citizens and immigrants, the latter into being or becoming knowable others. But what if the migrant is unknowable, someone who threatens national identities and borders? The violence of partition, of borders being changed by forces beyond the migrant\u2019s control, may lead these anomalies to question the very foundation of the nation-state, and persuades some writers who deal with unknowable others to be skeptical of realism itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gloria Anzald\u00faa\u2019s <\/span>Borderlands \/ La Frontera<\/span><\/i> is situated on the U.S.\u2013Mexico border, a line established by the American conquest of what was once the northern half of Mexico. Anzald\u00faa calls herself \u201ca member of a colonized people in our own territory.\u201d Mixing prose and poetry, memoir and criticism, the theoretical and the spiritual, the personal and political, and English and Spanish, often untranslated, she describes the border as a<\/span><\/p>\n

1,950 mile-long open wound
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/em>dividing a pueblo<\/em>, a culture
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>running down the length of my body,
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>staking fence rods in my flesh
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>splits me\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 splits me
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 me raja\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0me raja
\n<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>This is my home
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>this thin edge of
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>barbwire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Lahiri\u2019s Indian immigrant identifies with the heroic nation and its space-exploring heroes, Anzald\u00faa stands with and on the tense, potentially violent southern border that defines the nation-state, preventing people from moving freely. If Lahiri\u2019s Indian immigrant establishes a family as a claim to the nation, enabling his family and the national family to merge seamlessly, Anzald\u00faa reminds us that both the nation and the family can abuse those who do not fit in.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Anzald\u00faa, national borders are reinforced by borders between languages and religions, genders and sexualities. These human borders contrast with \u201cthe skin of the earth,\u201d which is \u201cseamless,\u201d and the sea, which \u201ccannot be fenced.\u201d Anzald\u00faa sees herself as part of nature and counts herself among the border crossers, whom she describes as \u201cthe squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead\u201d\u2014in short, the less-than-human and the nonnormal, who threaten both the conventional family and the nation that envisions itself through that family. The geographical border makes very visible, with actual walls and real barbwire, what is true for so many other borders. Anzald\u00faa\u2019s claim is that one can cut through that barbwire, and turn the border into the cutting edge.<\/span><\/p>\n

Theresa Cha\u2019s <\/span>Dictee<\/span><\/i> pushes this cutting edge. The book is a strange, compelling, unclassifiable work of enormous, unruly, unrealistic aesthetic ambition. Cha was born in South Korea two years before the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War for the United States but not for Koreans, who remain divided into two countries facing off over the demilitarized zone. After migrating to the United States during the Cold War, which certainly was not cold for the approximately two million Koreans who died in the war, Cha studied film theory and became an experimental filmmaker at the University of California, Berkeley, where, a decade later, I studied her work, including her mystifying and unforgettable short films. Cha was educated in English, Korean, and French, all three languages appearing in <\/span>Dictee<\/span><\/i>, along with Chinese and Latin. Despite her multilingualism, Cha emphasizes a halting relationship to language: \u201cBroken speech \u2026 Cracked tongue. Broken tongue. Pidgeon. Semblance of speech.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Dictee<\/span><\/i> can be understood as a broken mold, leaving behind shards of a shattered self in juxtaposed fragments of letters, found documents, photographs, film stills, enigmatic images, mysterious movies. There are evocations of Greek mythology and muses, the Japanese colonization of Korea, the martyrdom of Joan of Arc and the teenage patriot Yu Guan Soon, the patriarchy and rituals of Catholicism, and dictation and translation exercises between French and English. Writing from the position of a shattered self who cannot be classified, she composes a list of questions that might be directed at such an anomaly:<\/span><\/p>\n

What nationality<\/span>
\n<\/span>or what kindred and relation<\/span>
\n<\/span>what blood relation<\/span>
\n<\/span>what blood ties of blood<\/span>
\n<\/span>what ancestry<\/span>
\n<\/span>what race generation<\/span>
\n<\/span>what house clan tribe stock strain<\/span>
\n<\/span>what lineage extraction<\/span>
\n<\/span>what breed sect gender denomination caste
\n<\/span>what stray ejection misplaced<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She concludes with a response that mixes Latin and English:<\/span><\/p>\n

Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Being neither one nor the other could apply to Cha herself or to her mother, who grew up under Korean colonialism and immigrated to the United States. Cha depicts her mother\u2019s life as epic and historic, interwoven with Korea\u2019s twentieth-century tragedies. When her mother finally returns to Korea late in life, however, she finds neither the heroic opportunity to be a Ulysses, recovering her home, nor a sentimental chance at wholeness and healing. Instead, \u201cYou return and you are not one of them \u2026 the papers give you away \u2026 They ask you identity. They comment on your inability or ability to speak. Whether you are telling the truth or not about your nationality.\u201d This interrogation by border guards shows how violence against the unclassifiable, anomalous other can be linguistic, symbolic, and discursive, as when Japanese colonizers forced Koreans like Cha\u2019s mother to speak Japanese. This violence can also manifest in invasion, war, and colonization, when a people exults in \u201cthe suffering institutionalized on another \u2026 one enemy nation has disregarded the humanity of another.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The nation can also aim this violence within, as when soldiers and police massacre students engaged in antigovernment protests. In the us-versus-them world of harsh nationalism, these student rebels had become unknowable others, neither one thing nor the other. Lahiri\u2019s patriotic immigrant stands in contrast. Realism, a reassuring literary form, posits this immigrant as a knowable other fitting the mold, reassuring the nation rather than terrorizing it like the unknowable other threatens to do. Like Anzald\u00faa and Cha, I am more attracted to this kind of other, perhaps because unknowability comes closer to the enigma and danger of the writing process, approximating the fear a writer feels about unlocking what hides inside. Both <\/span>Borderlands \/ La Frontera<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Dictee<\/span><\/i> are accounts of narrators becoming writers, with Anzald\u00faa finding what she calls her \u201cwild tongue,\u201d while Cha writes of her narrator, who might be herself, that \u201cShe says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live.<\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps living through writing motivates my final example of a border crosser who courted death and resisted realism: Behrouz Boochani, author of the memoir <\/span>No Friend But the Mountains<\/span><\/i>. A Kurd from Iran, a self-described \u201cchild of war,\u201d Boochani flees Iran due to repression of the Kurdish people and their movement for an independent Kurdistan. He embarks on what he calls an \u201codyssey\u201d: a perilous three-month journey by land, to Indonesia, and a more hazardous voyage by sea, aiming for Australia. \u201cGetting on any one of those boats is an extraordinary risk \u2026 It is truly a battle against death.\u201d Boochani understands his journey as a mythic one, writing his account as epic and allegory mixed with poetry. Seeing himself and his fellow travelers are not so much individuals as types because the authorities they encounter treat them as stereotypes, he bestows epithets instead of birth names on his companions: the Cadaver, the Insomniac, the Cow, the Giant, the Prophet, the Comedian, the Hero, all facing existential questions of life and death, courage and humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Australian government intercepts the boat and exiles the refugees to Papua New Guinea\u2019s Manus Island, \u201cin the middle of the ocean,\u201d among inhabitants that Australian officials see as \u201csavage\u201d and \u201ccannibals\u201d but whom Boochani, as a Kurd, sees as fellow Indigenous people. This island exile evokes Robinson Crusoe<\/em>, except with masses of refugees as antiheroic castaways instead of Daniel Defoe\u2019s titular, singular hero. The story becomes a prison diary, full of awful experiences that he narrates as hallucinations. Boochani finds himself in \u201ca prison of filth and heat,\u201d a \u201czoo full of animals of different colors and scents,\u201d where the refugees are given numbers, strip searched, monitored even in the toilets, kept in cages, and given ill-fitting clothes that \u201ctransform our bodies \u2026 [and] utterly degrade us.\u201d The list of humiliations, from disgusting toilets to a diet bordering on starvation, reduces the refugees to Anzald\u00faa\u2019s \u201chalf dead\u201d and pressures them to seek voluntary deportation.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the face of such degradations, prison diaries or memoirs are often narratives of resistance, self-transformation, and rebirth, given that the prisoners have become writers through their incarceration. Prisons are where states keep official and unofficial enemies, including writers, with the Australian government regarding refugees as \u201cthe enemy\u201d invading by boat. For Boochani, the prisoners are \u201ccaptured soldiers,\u201d \u201cprisoners of war\u201d and \u201csacrificial subjects of violence.\u201d They are also \u201chostages,\u201d Boochani says, \u201cmade examples to strike fear into others, to scare people so they won\u2019t come to Australia.\u201d He wavers between feeling \u201ccrushed\u201d and \u201cworthless,\u201d and being the \u201cperson who conquered this great expanse of ocean on a rotting boat \u2026 I feel a kind of victory \u2026 I can erase all the sinking feelings \u2026 [and] replace them with hope and joy.\u201d By the end, the hostages rebel and seize the prison, some at the cost of their own lives. Although Papua New Guinea declared the prison illegal in 2016, Boochani remained there, as unaware of his fate at the conclusion of his narrative as a character from Kafka, Camus, or Beckett\u2014fitting for an existential drama.<\/span><\/p>\n

But just as Anzald\u00faa and Cha mix discourses, so do Boochani and his translator Omid Tofighian, who use theory and criticism in an important afterword that serves as the real ending for the book. This afterword frames the reading of the book and suggests that refugees are not only objects of study, but also potentially critics. Their prison is not only a site of punishment and mortification but a school where some refugees can teach themselves and learn to theorize their own existence. \u201cWhat is a border?\u201d Boochani asks after his informal prison education. \u201cMy whole life has been impacted by this concept of \u2018border.\u2019 \u201d While Lahiri\u2019s law-abiding immigrant accepts the existence of borders and praises his host nation, Boochani and Tofighian express their deep skepticism when they write how<\/span><\/p>\n

There is an island isolated in a silent ocean where people are held prisoner. The people cannot experience the world beyond the island. \u2026 They only see each other and hear the stories they tell one another \u2026 they are frustrated by their isolation and incarceration, but they have also been taught to accept their predicament.<\/span><\/p>\n

News somehow enters the prison about another island where the mind is free to know and createt \u2026 The people on the other island \u2026 see things that the prisoners cannot \u2026 create things that the prisoners cannot \u2026 know things that the prisoners cannot. \u2026 One island kills vision, creativity and knowledge\u2014it imprisons thought. The other island fosters vision, creativity and knowledge\u2014it is a land where the mind is free.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first island is the settler-colonial state called Australia, and the prisoners are the settlers.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second island contains Manus Prison, and knowledge resides there with the incarcerated refugees.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After Boochani transmitted that knowledge via text messages from a smuggled, contraband phone, Tofighian assembled Boochani\u2019s book from these messages. On the one hand, a hostage with a cell phone. On the other hand, the Australian nation-state, its prison apparatus and client states, its armed guards and lawyers, its ships and airplanes. An asymmetric conflict, waged by the refugee with words and symbols. As Boochani says: \u201cI create my own discourse and do not succumb to the language of oppressive power. I create my own language.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The nation-state upholds the language of realism, for against the brutal punishments of a prison island, the realistic response for the refugees should be submission and voluntary deportation. Boochani resists both deportation and realism, writing what his translator describes as \u201chorrific surrealism.\u201d I can think of no better term or genre to describe the voyage of the illegitimate, uninvited border crosser, blamed by countries and citizens for breaking laws and borders. Nation-states are essentially conservative, their autocratic violence enforcing borders along the nation\u2019s edge and within the nation as well, policing potentially unruly others. Many of these nations are responsible for creating conditions depriving millions of opportunities for life, forcing them to make a choice between heroism at home or heroism in exile. That difficult choice is the reason refugees and other border crossers become the avant-garde for a world without borders\u2014a world that can be nightmare or dream, hell or heaven.<\/span><\/p>\n

I return to my father, his earthly journey nearly complete. He has already, in the words of Homer, sailed \u201cover the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech.\u201d In the epic that is his life, his epithet is the Father, mine the Son. I always thought of my father as a conservative man who enforced the borders of my life with lessons about Catholicism and capitalism, authority and respect, suffering and sacrifice. But in so many ways he has preceded me by making choices I never had to make, as when he fled his homeland, twice. Sometimes his choices showed me that I could make them too, as when I finally became a father. He will continue being my own personal vanguard, venturing before me once more across the final border to the ultimate exile, showing me, his son of strange speech, the inevitable way to our last continent.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

From\u00a0<\/em>To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other<\/a> by Viet Thanh Nguyen, to be published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press next month.<\/em><\/p>\n

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning author of\u00a0<\/em>The Sympathizer\u00a0and<\/em> Nothing Ever Dies. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cCan realism show me what whirls inside my\u00a0father\u2019s head as he approaches the final border?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2063,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68569],"tags":[67827,25703,176],"class_list":["post-169942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lectures","tag-featured","tag-migrations","tag-vietnam"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHorrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration by Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 6, 2025 \u2013 \u201cCan realism show me what whirls inside my\u00a0father\u2019s head as he approaches the final border?\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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