The Need to Belong

The Need to Belong Writers' Voices at the2008 Gothenburg Book Fair Anna Paterson above Literary enthusiasts make their way through the massive crowd at the Gothenburg Book Fair. The Gothenburg Book Fair represents cur rent publishing and reading in a small, remote country?Sweden?but there's nothing provincial about it.The literaryreach is ambitious and the coverage truly international. Current-affairs enthusiasts are treated to a terrific selection of topicalwriting and debates, andmore than a quarter of the massive, four-day seminar program is conducted in English, as is a large proportion of theadditional talks,demonstrations, and debates. Thinking back on the hubbub of writers' voices arguing about intersections between the personal and thepolitical, the theme thatrecurred most frequently was "identity." What does it mean to identifyone's individual existence with something outside it?nation, class, gender?or with a group experience of any kind? At this most thoughtfulof book fairs, many of thepoets, novelists, academics, and journalists seemed bent on articulatingwho they truly are, and whether knowing itmatters, and what the consequences are, for better or forworse, of such self-definition. Some, like theborn cosmopolitan Ian Buruma, seemed untroubled by a lackof roots. "What am I? Iwouldn't know: educated inHolland and Japan, worked in theFar East at first,then in theUSA. Japanesewife, one Anglo-German Jewishand one Dutch parent..." Buruma has written with non partisan insight about "his" countries, including an inquiry into the limitationsof tolerance in the context of an?arguably?identity-driven killing (Murder in Amsterdam,2006).More recently,he has fictionalized theextraordinary storyofan identity changing Chinese-Japanese-American actress (The China Lover,2008). Herta M?ller was given dual national alle giances at birth: she grew up in Romania, but z o to z I o 5 < b o i Q. 46 i World Literature Today currents her familybelongs to a German-speaking part of thepopulation. Formixed political and personal reasons,which she explores inher books, she left the county of her birth to live inGermany, and towrite: M?ller was tipped for thisyear's Nobel Prize but isbest known inEnglish-speaking coun tries forThe Land ofGreen Plums (1996), the impac award-winning book about a child in thedictator Ceau?escu's Romania. Elsewhere, writing about a woman who is inmany ways like herself, she makes theprotagonist say: "I'm inGermany, and in the country I leftbehind at thesame time,"and reflectsthather personal integritycan't escape the trauma: "I cannot come away from the encounter unscathed." Then, cryptically: "This iswhy I can never belong inGermany, and why I cannot leave Germany." M?ller has written incisive essays on politi cal topics,but her fiction is focused on emotional tangles caused bymixed loyalties and conflicting memories. "Literature and Memory," her seminar title, is also a reference to her current work-in progress (due out in 2009), which is a retelling of the experiences of Romanians deported after World War II toUkrainian gulags. This time, the bittermemories of displacement do not belong to herself but tohermother and a now-dead friend, surrealist poet Oskar Pastior, who was another German-Romanian. Buruma and M?ller represent two strands in thedebate about theparadoxes of identityand its role in personal survival. Their contrasting reac tions to theemotional claims of identification with a group, and with nationality in particular, are externalized indistinctiveways ofwriting: docu mentary nonfiction and introspective fiction. Are they conditioned by the very identities theydeny? Buruma apparently fitsthe role of the self-assured Westerner: theworld is his oyster, because he's the financially and educationally secure child of theNetherlands and Great Britain, both European countries that are among those least troubled by theirhistory.On theother hand, it is only too easy to see M?ller, tense, brilliant, focused on how emotion shapes themind, as one of thewandering intellectuals of a politically inse cure Mittel-Europa. But this is far too neat a pattern: among the many who show up itsarbitrariness is thenovelist and poet Mircea C?rt?rescu (seeWLT, July2006, 41-45). Of the same generation as M?ller, he is one of the most successful native-born writers in today's Romania and, it seems, unequivocally Romanian. In Europe, he is hugely admired for his poetry and his autobiographical but fantasy infusednovel trilogy, Obitor l-lll. All threenovels are set in Bucharest and reflect,as if in a dark, distorting glass, the reality of being tyrannized both by poverty and a crazed dictator. The name means blinding (reflection),but the respective sub titlesof thesemasterful, wildly loquacious narra tives,straightout of a tormentedcentralEuropean consciousness, refertoanatomizing: TheLeft Wing, The Body,The RightWing. Obitor isnot available in English translation,but Nostalgia, an earlier col lectionof storiesby C?rt?rescu, was published by New Directions (2005). All this suggests a writer who is truly"root ed" ina distinctive literarytraditionand ina single country.But inhis recentessays and other literary journalism, as well as on stage in Gothenburg, C?rt?rescu will have none of it.He distrusts all thispreoccupation with belonging.Inhis fractured, expressive English, he spoke more cogently than anyone else about both the tiresome generaliza tions and real dangers inherent inwanting toget a fixonwhat is "typical" of a place, a people, or a nation. "Don't look for the Romanian inme, look for the writer," he insists. He doesn't care "where Bulgarov's Kiev is on the map," nor does he read "Catullus or Rabelais or Cantemir or Virginia Woolf on somemap. I read ina library.There, the books stand side by side." A closer look at thehost nation, Sweden, and its Nordic neighbors, including Latvia (whichwas thenation of honor), confirms thatassociating the "liberalWest" with cosmopolitan ease and self assurance does not hold water either. The writers, in the main, came out strongly in favorof theneed to belong, of identityshaped by your class, your gender, and the place where you were born?of roots. In a seminar focused on two new Swedish novels, the highly regarded authors turned out to be two of a kind. Their narratives both draw on an archetypal Swedish past of rustic austerity and simple satisfactions. InGl?djestranden (Happi ness beach), EllenMattson writes about her home county some two hundred years ago and a female dominated fishing family; in Ljus frdn ingenstans (Light fromnowhere), Lars Andersson returns to his home county and follows no less than seven generations of his own family. More than a hint here ofwhat C?rt?rescu distanced himself from: a comfortable, trusting identification with a place and its customs. 3 March-April 2009 i47 The Latvian writers seemed to share a fas cination for their homeland. Their ex-president, Vaira Vi e-Freiberga, is surely one of most cul turally aware politicians anywhere. She is a bril liant debater, an accomplished musician, and an authority on Latvian folklore. Like so many people in the small northern European states, she combines being a passionate defender of her tiny country's cultural uniqueness and of thevirtues of transnational unity: "The European Union is the best defense for the integrityof smaller states." Now, that is a neat paradox. Memory and Place The literature of place, of "psycho-geography," is driven by the need to explore the terri torywhere one feels at home, through personal memory or a sense of affiliation. When home is where the heart is, exile becomes an inescapable source of pain. Writers from theMiddle East, however cos mopolitan by personal choice, evoke theirhome land and thedespair of exilewith singular inten sity. Identificationwith place is so strong,and the region's national politics so relentlessly confron tational, that itwas reassuring to see aggression and bitterness remain undercurrents, rather than main themes, in contemporary literature from the region. In a joint seminar, two leading Lebanese novelists, Hoda Barakat and Elias Khoury, had chosen, with a kind of inevitability, to talk about "memory and national identity." Both are well traveled urbanites, and both return in their writ ing to the country and theArabic language of theirbirth. Barakat has lived inParis for the last twenty years but writes dreamlike, intricate tales set in Beirut. Her best-known book in English is The Tiller of Waters (Harital-miyah,2000). Although shewouldn't be drawn into the subject ofwar and politics, a stay inBeirut at theoutbreak of chaotic civilwar in 1975made a lasting impression, and her books are always set in thatplace and at that time. Khoury, an ex-member of Fatah and of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, is stilldeeply engaged inpolitics, but too good awriter to rant. He empathizes with theheritage and aspirations of the Israelis, makes subdued, ironic references to being a Christian, and, in thewords of a critic, is an exponent of "the poetics of uncertainty." But in his fiction,timeand place tend to remain the same; he rarely strays.Khoury's famous novel Gate of the Sun (BabAl-Shams, 2005; see WLT, January 2006, 12-16) tells of events before his birth?the "over looked stories [that]are leftfor thevanquished to tell"?but he shares the long Palestinian memory of displacement and loss.He says he is surprised by the lack ofhistorical documentation about their Naqba (1948 exodus): "The Israelis have done the scholarly research. It's always thevictorwho writes history,... but these modest stories encom pass true suffering_Literature can approach the hidden, the unspoken, the human." Suffering is a common language. Palestin ians need to understand theHolocaust, Khoury writes: "In the faces of those people being driven to slaughter, didn't you see something resembling your own?" In his latestbook, Yalo (2008), he is once again on the side of the losers. Yalo, a root less drifter in a war-torn Beirut, is imprisoned and tortured into writing a confession, which makes him endlessly rethink who he is. Trying to understand what happens to your personal identitywhen you also identify with a group is a preoccupation that takes many forms. Ian Buruma spoke about it in a more academic but deliberately controversial sense. In Occidentalism (2004), Buruma and his Israeli co-author, Avishai Margalit, confront the concept of "Orientalism," as once defined by Edward Said:Westerners' disdain for what littletheyknow of Eastern culture. Said, accepted and indeed honored personally, gen eralized a region's sense of isolation?and so do Buruma and Margalit, as they analyze the East's suspicion and, often, hatred ofWestern values. Apart from overtly political seminars, "the other side" of the Middle Eastern divide was rep resented in literature: the Jewishwriters included Dov Elbaum, a young Israeli with an ultra-ortho dox past, and thegreat lawyer and judge Thomas Buergenthal, a Jewish American. Buergenthal didn't focus on his legal interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian war of words but on his extraor dinary childhood, narrated inA Lucky Child: A Memoir ofSurvivingAuschwitz as a Young Boy (due out in theStates inApril, with a foreword by Elie Wiesel). Taking sides isboth approved and frowned upon in the context of the socially aware, left-of-center 48 i World Literature Today political thinkingthaton the whole dominated the debate inGothenburg. Rebellion was at itsmost explicit, but still very decorous, at the fair's "inter national marketplace." Some of the more radically minded Swedish publishers had setup shop there, including Leopard, a firmsupported by thebest sellingwriterHenning Mankell. There, too, every possible liberal convictionwas represented in the steady stream of speakers and, naturally, each by its own stall?free hemp tote bags, anyone? apples? mints? campaign literature?The goals of thespeakers, apparently so different,could almost all be grouped into two categories: counteracting thepolitical consequences of class and ofnational identity. RevisitingRevolt Despite the internationalist spirit and the shared aim of serving suffering individu als, everyone seemed tohave identity issues. The presence of the eighty-three-year-old Nicaraguan poet, sculptor, Sandinista fighter,and liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal was electrifying,and a huge audience turnedup to listen tohim. Carde nal has always believed in individual expression throughpolitically inspired art and literature,and has consistently taken up arms against the pow ers-that-be, regardless?the president, the United States, even thehead ofhis church, thePope. But although the Sandinista struggle was won, thereare now reports suggesting that it was a hollow victorywhich has not healed a divided society. In Europe, Germany's Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion or RAF) illustrates how identification with a faction?"those who are not for us must be against us"?can generate its own terribleabsurdities. No revolutionary group?at least, not since the anarchists of the early nine teenth century?has been as controversial and as irresistiblyspiced with celebrityas theRAF. Now it is in thenews once more as a subject of books and a new, powerful film. The RAF's early recruits, including themost famous ones?Ulrike Meinhof, the withdrawn intellectual; Andreas Baader, thecharismatic action man; and Gudrun Ensslin, the passionate moral ist?joined during the rebellious 1960s.Articulate, attractive, and lethally violent, themembers of the "Baader-Meinhof gang" took up arms against what they,and many otherGermans, thought an oppressive and unjust society. By now, theRAF is Europe's most thrilling, most pondered-over terroristcell. Several of the leading figuresdied in prison, in circumstances that are stilldebated, as are theirarguments and theiraggressive strategy. In theUS and UK, the translationof thenew, revised edition of The BaaderMeinhof Complex,by Stefan Aust (firstpublished in 1985, before the officialend of theperiod ofRAF guerrillawarfare in 1998) arrived in bookshops to coincide with the 2008 filmadaptation. Aust's account isbeing questioned, however, both on grounds of accuracy and objectivity.His most combative critic is Jutta Ditfurth, a journalistand formerleader of theGer man Green Party,who spoke at theGothenburg fair.Her biography, UlrikeMeinhof (2007), is the result of careful research and passionate partisan ship. Her main argument is against self-protective nationalism: "German history is being tidied up and redefined."Her two books on the subject (the second isRudi und Ulrike: Geschichte einerFreund schaft, her version of a politically potent friend ship) have not yetbeen translated intoEnglish. Yet another instance ofwhat Mircea C?rt?rescu once hopefully called "the great ongoing conversation about literature between Europe and the USA" not being quite as intense as itcould be. Conclusions? Is my selection ofwriters prompted by a not-so hidden agenda? Or is theEuropean andMiddle Eastern writing that dominated theGothenburg fair truly preoccupied by a personal, generally liberal engagement in social and political actual ity?This is certainly true, though I admit to the former, too. Overall, the fair reflected a powerful new trend; even conventional fictionoften contained a core of news worthiness. Just one, final example: Kinesen (2008; The Chinaman), by Henning Man kell, is a detective story well on its way tobecom ing yet another blockbuster. But the elaborate, violent plot is actually a vehicle for the author's political opinions on subjects such as slavery, international trade,and Chinese expansionist poli cy inunderdeveloped countries,notably inAfrica. I rest my case. Aberdeenshire,Scotland Anna Paterson writes literaryjournalism and translates from the Scandinavian languages and German, most recently from the Norwegian: Powerand Politics, byDag Ove Skjold (dueout inJuly 2009). She isalso working on a book of her own called Romantics at Heart? Nature and Politics in Northern Europe. March-April 2009 i49

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