It is increasingly easy to see evidence in daily life of transnationalism, and encounter people whose lives have followed transnational patterns.  As Appadurai states in the introduction of Modernity at Large, “…few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or already coming back home, bearing stories and possibilities (4).”  The most visible transnationalism comes from movement.  However, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera offers a look at a very different sort of transnationalism.  Rather than focus on the act of moving across borders, she focuses on the lived experience of those who exist between and are caught up in constantly shifting borders.  Because the experience of living in this Borderland is so deeply personal, and has had such a profound impact on those who experience it, I feel that the greatest strength in Anzaldúa’s project is how effectively she uses herself as an example.  She engages her audience in such a profoundly personal level and allows us to take part in the space in which she’s lived.  Thus, in responding to the first prompt for examining this text, Anzaldúa’s idiosyncratic approach to presenting the material is crucial to the effectiveness of the work.  Her use of language, cultural memory and biographical elements help allow readers to experience life between borders, between binaries.

Much of the transnational readings we have discussed this semester focuses on the movement of people, objects or ideas across borders.  Borderlands is unique in this regard for focusing on people who have had borders move across them.  Rafael Pérez-Torres highlights the unique circumstances of Anzaldúa’s community by explaining “Their transnationalism is not one borne of the movement from a national context to another.  Rather, it is one that is produced by the historical realities of shifting borders in the southwestern United States.  The borders here are linguistic, social, and economic borders negotiated and crossed by Chicano subjectivities working through multilingual cultural identities and dissident practices (Minor Transnationalism 318).”  The history of these people exists between national, cultural or linguistic borders.  The personal narrative offered in Borderlands shows the way in which people can exist without being defined by a clear border.

Borderlands begins by offering a historical context for the tejano people.  The narrative differs from what one is likely to hear in the United States, with people first immigrating south, into Mexican territory, before appropriating the land and becoming a republic.  As Anzaldúa puts it, “Tejanos lost their land and, overnight, became the foreigners (28).”  The border was imposed onto the people, creating a divide between those who remain in Mexico and those who stayed in the territory of what would become the state of Texas.  Despite the divide, the people remain tejano, and their identity is defined by elements that have no regard for the border.

Anzaldúa explains that “Culture forms our beliefs.  We perceive the version of reality that it communicates.  Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture (38).”  The culture of the tejanos play a much larger role in giving identity than the border that separates Texan from Mexican.  The people that Anzaldúa describes are, in a sense, outside of the border.  In giving us this personal account, she shows to us the fallacy of relying on binary concepts to analyze the world.  It is not a complete picture to only consider Texan and Mexican, as these people are at once both and neither.  Her personal accounts continue to bring attention to the insufficiency of using the binary.

Borderlands frequently switches between English and Spanish, but this too is not a binary.  Anzaldúa points out that her language is fluid, influenced by English and Spanish yet being fully neither.  She lists the various languages that she is required to know in order to exist between communities.  Chicano Spanish, her Spanish, is a “border tongue which developed naturally (77).”  For people that live in the border, language must be flexible enough to accommodate all sides.  She also uses another element of her life, her lesbianism, to highlight other false binaries.  Sexuality and gender are not binary, and she brings attention to the danger in viewing them as such.  She sees her culture as an inherently misogynistic one, with harmful norms for what constitutes masculinity.  The rigid binary between masculine and feminine continues these harmful practices.  For her it is, again, those who are between the binary that are able to push for change.  She says “Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity (106).”

It is easy, in examining transnational action and events defined by borders, to think of binaries.  Immigrant and native, English and Spanish, us and them.  Anzaldúa’s work shows the error in resting in a binary view of the world.  Neither English nor Spanish, neither prose nor poem, Borderlands is proof that life exists between the borders.

“We want to end gender inequality and to do this, we need everyone involved. […] feminism has become an unpopular word. Women are choosing not to identify as feminists. […] (Their) expressions are seen as too strong, ‘too aggressive,’ isolating and anti-men, unattractive, even. Why has the word become such an uncomfortable one? […] inadvertent feminists […] are changing the world today. We need more of those and if you still hate the word, it is not the word that is important. It’s the idea and the ambition behind it. […] Men […] Gender equality is your issue too […] It is time that we all see gender as a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. We should stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer, and this is what HeForShe is about. It’s about freedom.”

Emma Watson’s United Nations Speech on Gender, Women’s Rights. 21 Sept 2014.

Emma Watson’s speech is the most recent, powerful, current and innovative proposal addressing feminist issues and calling for gender equality. It has inevitably come to mind during my reading of Borderlands / La frontera, and made me think to compare it with Anzaldúa’s proposal which was equally important and innovative in the social context of almost 30 years ago, when gender studies began to be relevant and when the struggle for social equality and race started. Anzaldúa created her proposal regarding the feminine; she proposed a transformation of the miscegenation discourse into a new mestizo subject of the woman. She raises awareness for the new mestiza fight against sexism and she suggests the breakdown of sexual binaries, racial differences and exclusionary definitions that restrict women, their identities and their sexualities. She calls for a collective consciousness in which the Chicano culture and border subjectivities can be identified. She emphasizes that the Chicano woman was subjected to man’s superiority. In this sense, she thinks of men as an enemy figure and she calls for a new masculinity. Anzaldúa considers herself to be the voice and the way of progress and in writing her own autobiography and testimony, wanted to achieve recognition of equality. These ideas have been developed by other women writers in the last decades but Anzaldúa was also a case of intersectionality: a female writer oppressed not only by her race and gender but also by her sexual orientation. Even now, Emma Watson reminds us that equality is still not achieved, and proposes a step further: a total involvement that avoids gender binary divisions and transmits the message that equality is something that concerns all of us, both women and men, claiming a collective social consciousness.
On the other hand, Borderlands / La Frontera is not only a feminist proposal, it is also the basis on which Anzaldúa talks about the concept of borders. She proposed the border as geographical space and as a place of identity resistance and political positioning; the border as a place of negotiation and congregation of marginal and alternative subjectivities and sexualities, a geographic boundary that limits and excludes.  This raises the moral of the “new mestiza” which comes from feminism to reflect on categories that define and constrain their culture. Anzaldúa refers to the spaces silenced by history featuring Chicana women and emphasizes difference, questions of belonging and identity and she creates a different way of thinking about history and identity of the border.
Regarding the border as margin, limited space and land transition, Anzaldúa clasifies it as a “third” space that separates Mexico from the US, where Chicana race is also suppressed by the racially white subject. One alternative is crossing the border. Border crossing creates a culture shock separated from identity and history. This produces a case of transnationalism which inevitably leads me to a comparison with Bhabha’s theory… is it therefore, a place in between? In my opinion, it is a space that brings the subject to belong to a place that it does not feel part of which supposes a questioning and a redefinition of its identity. This subject is a product of its origins; and as an immigrant or foreigner in another space, there is a necessity to search for and claim her own place as well as adapting herself to the new reality, culture and language.
Despite the issues of identity, race, gender, transnationalism and movement, a collective consciousness becomes indispensable. Anzaldúa, in her claim to recognition and acceptance of her proposal based on Chicano race gender equality, concludes that it would be accepted “when we accept ourselves as we are and where we are going and why.” To conclude this post, I find it is particularly interesting that we are still calling for a collective consciousness for every social movement to be effective. Issues of race or gender equality need to take a step further: fight the binaries and achieve a collective consciousness involving men and women. As Emma Watson said a few days ago, “We are struggling for a word uniting but the good news is we have a uniting movement. […] I am inviting you to step forward to be seen and to ask yourself, ‘If not me, who? If not now, when? “

Disclaimer: Blog prompt #2 led me down a path that I’ve never attempted going down before.  I realized, early in, that I would fail to present a condensed and cohesive blog post within the constraints of time/space/assignment, but I couldn’t resist the attempt.  What I am posting here is a ROUGH beginning of a longer draft outline (I’m frantically trying to log-in and edit it every chance I get).  It represents one of several bodies of memories I have as a foreigner considered to be in a ‘dominant’ or ‘privileged’ position.  It is one that this course, the last two weeks of reading in particular, have caused to re-emerge.  The larger draft is outlined to reflect three different micro-locations at three different times, and although they are all within the same general region of Western Indonesia and in response to the same natural disaster, to me, they differ significantly. 

Here I have included only a shortened version (believe it or not) of location #1. MY APOLOGIES FOR HOW LONG IT IS.  FEEL FREE TO SKIM!!! 

A Problematic (IN)Dominant Categorization of a Borderland. 

Or, The “Shallow Pond” of Stagnant Tsunami Water

“Perhaps if their situation becomes completely intolerable and we can do something about it at reasonable cost, we may even have a duty to intervene” (Appiah, 153). 

“Charitable giving in the wake of the tsunami of Christmas 2004 was remarkable and heartening; but…” (170). 

A Summary from (a)location:

A. September 28, 2014 Wikipedia search:  “2004 Tsunami”

“The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea megathrust earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, 26 December 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia…The earthquake…triggered a series of devastating tsunamis along the coasts of most landmasses bordering the Indian Ocean, killing over 230,000 people in fourteen countries, and inundating coastal communities with waves up to 30 meters (100 ft high). It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Indonesia was the hardest-hit country, followed by Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.”

B. Out of the estimated death toll of 230,000 people and 1.5 million people displaced, over 165,000 of those deaths and one third of those displaced people were in Indonesia.  Regardless, the majority of the media coverage in the United States was on Thailand.  One can’t be too annoyed.  Many U.S. citizens were taking vacations there at the time. As a result, there were terrifying and heartwarming stories to be told accompanied by actual footage.  The focus on Thailand drove up the ratings.  It also drove up the charitable contributions.  I wonder what coverage was more effective elsewhere. Phuket is a pretty big tourist location. As they say in Indonesia: “Ada gula ada semut.” Where there’s sugar there’s ants, meaning, common people are attracted to interesting events.  


It is equally unsurprising that Sumatra Indonesia did not make for good coverage.   Indonesia is made up of over 13,000 Islands, only three of which are of particular interest to Western foreigners. There is a large missionary tradition in Papua.  Java holds the capital, Jakarta, which is considered to be very cosmopolitan.  And then there’s Bali, well, apart from being a gorgeous and close-range vacation spot for Australians, it is a well prepared paradise for expatriates who like to surf, write books and paint pictures.  That’s why it got bombed in 2005.  

Sumatra, on the other hand, especially the North West–“Aceh Jaya”–prior to the Tsunami, was without tourism or a “Western presence” since roughly 1976.  ‘Officially,’ the primary reason for this inaccessibility was political instability caused by “The Free Ache Movement,” a group of separatists who are referred to, by the Acehnese, as “GAM” (Geraken Aceh Merdeka) and to the Indonesian government, as the “Aceh Security Disturbance Movement.” Un-‘officially,’ Aceh is considered to be–by those from without and from within–a religiously conservative Islamic society.  The GAM, some say, were fighting for the maintenance and preservation of their values.  How many Acehnese were on/off-board with GAM is ‘unknown.’  People, of different religious faiths and ethnic backgrounds, including predominant public Islamists figures, believed, for a variety of reasons, that the tsunami was divine punishment.  I, for one, do not believe in such things. But, whatever the cause, I think everyone could agree that the wave brought with it a surge of the foreign. GAM reluctantly reached peace agreements approximately one year after the disaster.

C. After the wave(s), that witnesses described as a “dark 30-meter cobra rearing its head,” it took three days for help to come. “The Australians” say they were there first.  But so do “The Americans.”  In either case, to hear the story from a local official who was near the water searching for the bodies of family and neighbors, whoever it was, they looked like aliens invading.  It was the great apocalypse. What he was actually seeing was a military hovercraft, launched from a U.S. aircraft carrier.  But to the people standing amongst the rubble, having been shut off from the outside world and being in an early stage of a kind trauma few can relate to, aliens were invading.  The Indonesian government took longer to arrive, though it is difficult to get an official confirmation.  People with whom I was acquainted said it took 10 days. There are many reasons why.  And they do not all point to Western superiority.  

D. I arrived in Aceh 6 months after the disaster—as part of the “3^rd wave” relief effort.  I had recently defended a thesis for an MA in Gender Studies, when I was offered a job coordinating the opening of a “women’s vocational training center,” for widows of the tsunami.  I was the “perfect fit.” Single.  Young.  Western.  I was “well-educated,” had an MA in “women’s issues” (a rare commodity).  I had “international and crisis work experience.”  And most of all, I had a “big heart.”  Really, I was a Canadian atheist woman, who had just written a thesis called “(Re)conceptualizing Utopian Movement”—completely built on abstractions—and was going to work for an overtly Christian organization, predominantly comprised of Americans to address the needs of women in a country she knew nothing about.  I couldn’t imagine what I could possibly have to offer, but I felt compelled to do what I could and was excited by the interesting opportunity.  For a “white trash” Canadian, first of her family line to get a college degree and one of very few to leave the country, this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. 

Location #1: Meulaboh, June 2005

Description: By the standards of foreign aid workers, Meulaboh was a little bit on the “hardcore” side, but “not quite hardcore,” especially that long after The Tsunami.  A foreign aid worker could only access the town via a 4-6 seater aircraft that took high-standing to arrange.  When a foreigner fell ill, he/she had to be evacuated out.  But, there was clean water, plenty of delicious food stalls and, if you wanted to, you could avoid ever seeing an IDP camp (internally displaced people).  Plenty of structures remained further inland, so there were places for NGO (non-government organizations) to set up shop, and they did.  Local property owners moved in with extended family and charged exorbitant rent.  The NGOs paid.  In fact, the NGOs would fight to outbid each other, to get the best ones, which drove the prices up further.  Locals could no longer afford rent.  Small organizations couldn’t either.  Overhead costs for relief projects were increased.

People groupings :

(Organized not in order of my perception of rank, but rather by my degree of confidence in categorization. All too telling.)

1. ‘My’ NGO (which we will call XX)

a. The Foreigners: All Christian.  Well, except for me. But note, despite being faith-based, their work was entirely relief and development based in nature, as opposed to evangelical.  All were well-educated, and most had relevant work and educational experience.  No one was making much money, by their standards, but they weren’t spending money either.  Back home, their jobs were considered to be nobel, courageous, and exciting. Unlike non faith-based NGOs, what these XXers were doing “overseas” was referred to as a “missions trip.” The group was predominantly American—including a Korean-American, Chinese-American, there were a few Canadians, a German, and an expatriated Brazilian.  The majority had little to no interest in learning the language. There were translators for that. They would only be there temporarily so it was a bad use of energy. A minority learned as much as they possibly could, if not to ease the tasks of their day, to show respect for the culture and (although no one admitted it) to feel really cool in front of other Foreigners.  

Me vs a.  This is the to category to which I ‘belonged.’  Though I wasn’t a Christian, which was perceived to make me weak.  For reasons I still don’t understand, I failed to bond with other people in this category. There was a comeraderi laced with an unspoken competitiveness.  You won if you were “on the ground” sooner, had been there longer, had more previous experience in similar situations. I had trouble engaging in these types of conversations.  

b. The Missionaries: There were the missionaries that had invested their lives in Aceh long before the disaster.  They spoke fluently, they knew people, they ‘understood’ the culture.  XX used them. 

• The Hardcore Assimilators: These people weren’t at all what I had expected.  They completely defied my assumptions about “missionaries.” They were the very rare foreigners who had somehow assimilated themselves into Aceh.  They were well respected and integral parts of the community. After the Tsunami, the Hardcores were not only forced into association with the “Western invaders,” but were guilted into “partnering” with Christian NGOs.  Many of them tapped out and tried to keep their distance.  Some of them, after the fact, suffered assault from their Acehnese community due to their affiliation with the infiltration. There life’s work was destroyed. 
• The Expats with a Mission:  I’ll admit, I only knew one by this time (I have since met others), but she deserves an entire subcategory—“Catherine.” She was the wife of a wealthy British venture capitalist who lived in an enormous house in South Eastern city of Medan.  She held a bible study for well-educated Christian, mainly Chinese-Indonesian women whom she affectionately called “her girls.”  She agreed to partner with our NGO, because her affluence and residency gained XX easier access through a myriad of bureaucratic channels.  She was highly suspicious of the influx of aid, thought our team, in particular, was a disaster of its own and fought for control.  She fought.  And she left a trail of foreign product managers behind her.  Including me. 

Me vs b: I nicknamed one of the Hardcore Assimilators, “my guardian angel.”  He was from my home town, he helped me in indescribable ways, he was my father figure.  In contrast, “the Expat with a Mission,” among other things, thought I was a dumb punk and devised a coup against me at the vocational training center.  The last time I saw her she was laughing at how horrible I looked while being transported due to a mysterious illness. 

c. The Nationals: Appriah’s “collective obligation” (164).   All Christian.  XX would only hire them if they were.  They were the “well-educated,” somewhat “westernized,” who had been hired by XX from other parts of Indonesia to come and help. They lived and worked, side-by-side with the Foreigners.  Their salaries were generously based on the income standards of their local economy, skills, training and experience.  It was less than the Foreignors.  But, like the foreignors, their jobs were considered as noble “mission” work, were considered to be well-paid, and, in addition, working for a foreign aid org was considered very prestigious and paved their way for future travel and residency in the West. 

Me vs c. This requires a gender distinction:

• Males: My relationship with the guys was jovial.  We didn’t mix on any close basis. I knew girls from other NGOs that had intimate relationships with them (one recently married).
• Females: My category as a female foreigner, generally speaking, had an amiable, simple, and unequal relationsip with the female Nationals.  It was friendly.  They kept to themselves, for the most part, and the Foreigners did too. The Foreign women practiced their authority with confidence, without a thought, it seemed.  And it also seemed to work very well for them. The female Nationals appeared to adore the Foreign men, in particular.  They were overtly polite, flirtatious, laughed at every joke, went above and beyond their job descriptions to be helpful.  For me, it was hit or MISS.  I shared a small room and every minute of my day with a National for three months in location #3.  Just the two of us and the local men that we managed.  She was my stronghold.  We made it. But that was very rare. There in Meulaboh, my authority was questioned, my intelligence mocked. I had to stumble my way through tasks that weren’t part of my job description.  They stopped talking when I entered a room.  They stole my clothes, wore them openly and denied that they were mine.  I asked the laundry ladies, with awkward gestures (I did not yet know much of the language, and my household translators were my thieves) to place my clean clothing in a separate, hidden place. I suspected the Acehnese ladies wouldn’t tell the Nationals about it.  I sensed that they didn’t like them very much because they spoke with an air of superiority.  I also surmised, though it troubled me, that this is why, unlike me, the Nationals and other Foreign women were so much more successful in maintaining their authority.  The laundry ladies and I, nevertheless, enjoyed our little secret.  We were in cahoots. 

“They will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead” (107).  Was I the “they”?  Had I come to “see”?  At least a little?  And was my lead the Nationals or the Acehnese?  Could the Nationals only seeing me as a threat? They saw me getting paid more, stealing the attention of the foreign men, doing a job that they could not only do, but probably do better?  Was our unity too difficult to forge because we had too much in common.  It only accentuated our differences? 

d. The Acehnese Locals: These were the people that lived in the community, but were employed by XX.  They were our security guards, our drivers, our cooks, our cleaners, our electricians and sometimes even our buffer.  They were all muslim.  We respected their religious practices and they respected, if not protected, ‘ours.’

Me vs d.   

• The men: I was what I always thought of as a “third sex.” Meaning, within reason, they did not expect the things from me that they did from Acehnese women.  They gave me special allowances.  Example: my big white calve exposed to all the security guards as I clumsily get off the back of the truck.  If I showed that I was trying, if I shot them a horrified, apologetic glance when I messed up, they were gracious. Amused even.  After all, they weren’t worried about my negative influence on them.  But I had to remember that they were quick to disapprove.  Especially when it came to my interaction with Aceh women.  I was not to be an example. 
• The women: There were far fewer local females employed by us.  In this location I had minimal interaction with them.  I had entered a home/office situation where the domestic machinery was already in motion.  Since training and instructing them wasn’t part of my job at this point, I interacted with them outside of work (without a translator) and so we were reduced to smiles.  I would say my few terms of polite exchange. They were always friendly. They seemed undisturbed by my presence in a room. They were silently accepting if I sat on the floor with them and peeled shrimp in silence while they told stories in the local dialect.  They taught me how to wear a hijab.  They liked giving my outfits a nod of approval or a shake of the head.  They cleaned my room even when I told them they didn’t need to and saved me plates of my favorite dishes when I was late to dine.  They didn’t expect anything from me, it seemed.  They seemed grateful that I acknowledged their existence.  Sometimes it made me feel like an asshole, sometimes it made me feel grateful in return. 

e. The Beneficiaries, or, The People: They were the reason we were there.  The remembrance of them was what kept us motivated. Tough day?  Remember the people. The Bupati (local official) won’t allow you X, Y or Z?  Remember the people.  Always an effort to remember the people.  They were everywhere.  They worked for us.  They sold us our food, our gasoline.  We were inhabiting their space to help them.  Why were they so hard to see?  Who were ‘they’?  What did that ‘they’ really want? 

Me vs. e: These were the people I saw the least, and I was with them far more than many of my coworkers ever were.  Perhaps due the nature of my position?  Or because I insisted on it?  I don’t know.  ‘My’ beneficiaries were, very often, the only people that I liked spending time with.  I guess you could say it was because they made me feel good about myself?  Because I had a savior complex?  If that’s the case, it sure didn’t feel that way. Was I romanticizing them?  Objectifying them for the pleasure of my own spectatorship?  Maybe they were only kind to me because they appreciated my efforts? Because they thought they had to? I don’t know.  I do know that, at least in location #1, this would be my most positive exchange with the “people.”  Later, in the GAM region, there would be strikes.  Angry mobs of armed men would hold ‘us’—foreigners, nationals, local employees alike—hostage in our makeshift home because, in our effort to help them experience the pride in ownership, were making them work too hard to build their homes.  The tools we were providing them with to do so were not good enough.  They were angry that we fired men that were cutting corners making brick and pocketing the money.  The money that was going toward their homes.

2. All the Others:

i.  

• For group a, the Other includes a little bit of c through e, sometimes b, and occasionally a.
• For group b, the Other was a, c, d, and, by default, e. But just because they were “missionaries.”
• For group c the Other was a, b, d and e.
• For group d the Other was obviously a-c, but sometimes not as much c.
• For group e the Other was everyone except themselves, and a tiny bit of d was growing.

“…we are coming closer to identifying the fluidity and complexity of our transnational moment, where migration, travel, and diaspora can no longer be clearly distinguished by intention and duration, or by national citizenship and belonging” – Shu-mei Shih.  Were we? 

 ii. The non-Christian NGOs: There were other nations presented in Meulaboh: Germany, France, England, Indonesia.  But if they had no “faith-affiliations” it seemed ‘we’ did not interact with them.  Unless it was at a UN OCHA meeting.  I couldn’t blame my coworkers. This work was hard.  You were catching a country at its lowest moment.  A time of pure turmoil.  People’s lives and livelihood were literally depending on your work performance.  There was no beginning or end to the work day.  While you ‘rested,’ you worried about whether the batu (brick) you’d been overseeing the construction of is of good quality.  Or if it will crumble like sand in the next earthquake.  You worried you were housing people in a death trap.  And then there is the cultural hurtle.  You struggle to speak and understand, you rely on the translations of a practical strangers.  There is no time to process.  But you push on because you know, unlike the people of this country, there is an end to this for you.  You will leave the rubble behind (though I later learned this is not the case for all foreign aid workers.) My coworkers had little time to socialize, and when they did, they wanted comfort, familiarity, connection, community.  Even if it was feigned.  They filled the gaps between each other easily.  Hungrily.  They stuck to their own.  

Me vs ii.  I didn’t have access to non-Christian NGOs until my third relocation, during which ‘they’ became ‘my’ community.  But ‘my’ current NGO people seemed resentful, weary of secular NGO power—they had more money, more experience, more government involvement, more resources.  But they also had less respect for the local culture.  Apparently.  They had liquor shipped in, which was forbidden in Aceh.  And they consumed it openly, had parties, let off steam, Western style.  There were stories about foreign women wearing bikinis on the beach.  Bikinis.  In a place where women were covered head to toe and wearing hijabs.  Bellies, thighs out in the sun, trampsing about in the local community’s site of trauma, in a way that violated their beliefs. 

iii.  The Acehnese people we didn’t know – conflated with me vs iii.  They may have been employed by an NGO, or may have been benefiting from a program, who knows.  But these were the people, we, I, did not know.  They were the families piled on motorcycles, the shop owner smoking on their front steps, the women padding her faces with bright-white powder, the young boys walking to the mosque.  Like other countries I have been, I was looked at.  Very freely looked at.  I was the subject of obvious and open conversations that I did not understand.  Unlike other countries, however, there was no curiosity or entertainment behind these looks and conversations.  And there was certainly no reverence.  If there was an assumption that ‘we’ were more educated, a people of higher standards of living, unlike other countries, this did not mean admittance into the ‘very important guest’ category.  This made sense to me, I was undeserving of the celebrity treatment solely based of my country of origin.  But beyond this, far beyond, there was resentment, disgust, distrust.  A tangible tension. I was an invader.  An unwelcomed guest. 

Sometimes I wanted to beg for forgiveness.  Other times I wanted to scream in their faces.  Always, I wanted to become invisible. 

Post-Category Complications:

One night, an Australian coworker who was rarely in Meulaboh (she worked mainly in the “much more hardcore” location #2) was there.  We disliked each other very much.  I couldn’t stand her stereotypical ‘Aussie’ style.  She had a nickname for everything, ‘mozzie,’ ‘ciggie’…everything.  She had been in country for 6 months and only knew how to say ‘thank you’ in the local language. And she said it very poorly.  And I, well, the American boss that she liked, like me instead (we’re married now). But we had recently been deprived of Foreign female bonding and had to make due. 

Although our NGO outlawed partaking in the vices (even when not in Muslim territory), the two of us would sneak around to relish in the occasional cigarette.  This particular night, we snuck a company truck out and drove to the nearby beach.  There wasn’t a building around.  Complete darkness.  Silence. Privacy.  We had barely had a third drag, when we heard to swarm of motorcycles and saw the rapid approach of their headlights across the land where the tsunami ruble had been cleared away.   I don’t know what we said to each other, or how long it took us to realize we needed to get the hell out of there, but on their feet around the truck with bats and sticks before Leslie had closed the passenger side door.  When she saw the bats, now that a few men were visible in the head lights and from the interior light spilling out the door, Leslie froze up. And when they saw us, they froze too.  Until I reached over Leslie, slammed the door closed and put the truck in motion.  The began yelling and chasing.  But were soon left behind.  We drove straight back to our living quarters.  Shaking.  And we told no one.  We should have known better.  But we were unspeakably surprised nevertheless. 

About two days later, we overheard a conversation among foreigners in our office.  It was about a series of attacks on people by a group of men taking Sharee’ah law into their own hands.  Local Emums had been teaching that infidels were trying to destroy their values, women were starting to walk about freely without their hijabs, men and women were sneaking off into the darkness together.  It couldn’t be tolerated.  A national couple had been beaten nearly to death just last night.  Leslie and I looked at each other.  They must have been surprised to see two girls. 

This was their country. But who was that? GAM? The young Indonesians Christians from Java?  The imum who shouted ragefully about ‘us’ from the loudspeakers of the Mosque? The woman who lost her husband and children and is trying to use this time of turmoil to gain the right to own her own shop? And what are we really doing here?  Does it matter what our motivation is?  What if we hadn’t come?  Have we done more harm than good?  How can we know?  They didn’t ask us to come here, the Tsunami did. 

I read Gloria Anzaldua words over and over: “we are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people on the knees of the gods.  In our flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures.  It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we’ve made some kind of evolutionary step forward” (103).  I wonder: Who can this ‘we’ include? And how can I find my way there?  Despite my place of dominance and privilege?  Or am I simply guilty of what Shu-Mei Shih describes as “…this logic of narcissism and dismissal of the other, all marked by supposedly well-intentioned liberal soul-searching and guilt-induced critical self-reflection”? (79).

Anzaldúa’s Borderlands exemplifies the notion of transnational literature and understanding that we seek to understand in our course of the same name. She authors her narrative as a transnational subject in the process of redefining the concept of a ‘border’ identity that is created in those liminal spaces where differing people engage in cultural exchange. For this post, I specifically want to focus on Anzaldúas use of language and the effect it achieves. I firmly believe that she gives a new voice to the understanding of what is means to be both a transnational author and subject, outing her experience in a form of unique self-expression. Her amalgamation of Spanish prose and personal anecdotes with her narrative in English is quite intentional, and she blatantly expresses the need for such a juxtaposition early in the text:

“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself”… Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate… I will overcome the tradition of silence” (Anzaldúa 59).

She describes her use of language as a mechanism ‘toward a new consciousness’. This is a solid argument when we take into consideration that culture is created and maintained by the means of storytelling. Hence, relating her culture and experience in strictly the English language when her Spanish and Indian heritage were so intently shaped by the languages she experienced would solely serve to devaluate the authenticity of her lived experiences. As an author of Spanish and Indian descent, the production of a narrative to conform to expectations of an English speaking audience would thus be no more than confirming and accepting the subjugation of transnational identity to that of an English speaking, westernized world.

In this sense, it is not incredulous to argue that Anzaldúa brings into question our own role as students and scholars of transnationalism. We must realize that transnationalism speaks for moving beyond traditional boundaries while examining those areas in between imagined borders that become zones or areas of cultural interrogation. In this case, Anzaldúa contributes to our often discussed idea of so called ‘border zones’ be redefining them as ones that are not limited to fixed spaces between nations. Language becomes the borderland for her, both as a transnational subject and author. It is a boundary between the expected and the lived, the expectation to conform and the reality of lived experiences in need of being legitimized. Her weaving of language and experience of both English and Spanish paints a representation of how liminal spaces are created and negotiated between borders of language. It showcases the exchange between culture and language as a productive one, an exchange that results in a new hybrid identity which cannot be placed within one boundary or another and must be recognized as such.

With that being said, I find it of importance to briefly mention that Anzaldúa not only problematizes this border, but actively attempts to redefine it:

“Subconsciously, we see an attack on ourselves and our beliefs as a threat and we attempt to block with a counter stance. But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions… At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes” (Anzaldúa 78).

While Anzaldúa focuses on a binary opposition between the ‘patriarchal, white’ and her own cultural background and identity, such a clash can be extended to apply to our studies of all transnational literatures. It signifies a first step towards acceptance of ameliorating the dissonance that is dramatically increasing with the advent of globalization and competing fields. It is not dissimilar to the critical position Spivak takes on the growing opposition between area, ethnic, cultural, and comparative literature studies. Relevent here is Spivak’s position that “the proper study of literature may give us entry to the performativity of cultures and instantiated in narrative” (Spivak 13) while still holding an awareness that “crossing borders… is a problematic affair”(Spivak 16). Reading Anzaldúa in this light creates a work that supports Spivak’s position on the cooperation between these formerly divided fields. As Spivak puts it: “we stand outside, but not as anthropologists; we stand rather as reader with imagination ready for the effort of othering, however imperfectly, as an end in itself” (Spivak 13). In other words, being able to fulfill our role as readers and scholars without predetermined expectations highlights the insight one can find in the creation and expression of identity that one would be oblivious to if confined to one specific field of focus. I thus believe that both Anzaldúa’s production of a legitimized identity through interrogating borderlands of language and the reception thereof by us, as readers and scholars of the literature, play an equally important role in our discussion of transnational studies and their role in an ever globalizing context.

Reading Anzaldua’s book, I remembered the first class of our seminar in which the board was divided into four concepts and below them, there were some words. Transnational was the first concept and after the brainstorm there appeared words like “change in location”, “immigration”, “economic policies” and “exile/expatriate.” It was complicated for me to relate these words with and have a clear idea of how to mix them in order to get the “Transnational” meaning, however after works like Open City and Borderlands, those words began to make sense and I think I am approaching this concept. I could notice that both texts mention the “open” word to define a place, Cole uses it even as the title of his book and I think it is not by chance. He wanted to prove that everybody can feel isolated and with no identity in a city like New York, an open city. When Julius walks along the city, it is for him like walking in an opened country, it means, a big extension around his house where the landscapes overlap with one another, with one being unsecure and inhospitable. Also Anzaldúa talks about an “open” wound in her work. Aída Hurtado and Norma Cantú comment on this in their introduction“Living in the borderlands: The life of Gloria Anzaldúa”;

“The U.S- Mexican border es una herida abierta (it is a wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country-a border country.”

Anzaldúa has an open wound but knows that convergence has created a border culture, a third country, a closed country. Paradoxically her wound is opened in a close country. This play on words of close vs open makes me think about both the importance of the language in the Anzaldúa´s work and the meaning of these concepts. Her language is an important feature of her experience and she constructs her own lens by her writing style. Other than open vs close, her poems and narratives not only show her mestizaje, but the idea of mixing Spanish, English and Indian tell us about the way she was jailed between three cultures. When reading an article about Herta Müller, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2009, I understood better why Anzaldúa wanted to show her experience through her poetry. Müller explains that  poetry is the most concentrated way to express small sparkles of emotions and states that literature doesn’t understand borders. Then, I realize the big importance of her language.

The meaning of concepts like identity, solitude, home, freedom, duality, and faculty–the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities–are vital. Precisely, one of these realities reminds me of another word mentioned in class, “in between”, deeply analized by Bhabha. Anzaldúa denominates it “borderland”and she named herself a border woman in her anguish, myths and incomprehensions of her life due to that fact that she is involved in three worlds-white, mexican and indigenous. Her hybridity makes me think of my life and how different the US culture is from mine. I am not in Spain but I do not belong to the American culture because my identity and culture are Spanish but something has changed since I have been here because I had to adapt myself into another culture (in which I am living). Then, sometimes, I feel like I am “in between” two realities or in a third world: neither Spain nor US, but a new one that I(re)create every day. In terms of Anzaldúa, you carry your home–with all your experiences– like a turtle.

I also experienced this feeling/idea with a movie that I saw the other day, “In Between Days” by So Yong Kim. This movie deals with two Korean teenagers that live in some city in North America and the female character, Aimie, struggles to find a place outside herself where the past–South Korea– and future—US– connect, and a place within herself where friendship and love do not cancel each other out. Anzaldúa states that living in the border produces knowledge inside a system whereas the knowledge is retained outside the system and Aimie lives in the border and talks to her dead father, -like Anzaldúa also does through the indigenous ritual- whereas the boy is called Tran, coincidence or not,  reminds me of the short name of Transnationalism.

All of these experiences through movies, articles and life experiences add to Anzaldúa´s words by themselves, what they mean and how they are written are the best engagement to figure out the concept of Transnationalism. Also, I agree with Cantú and Hurtado’s introduction when they confirm that her ideas are applied to different socio politic realities.

From the opening lines of Gloria Anzaldúa’s chapter titled “The Homeland, Aztlán: El otro México”, the reader encounters various literary discourses: a title written in both English and Spanish, a stanza from a Spanish poem, an ethnographic citation and a longer poem that transverses the discursive borders. This longer poem, which is written mostly in English, with Spanish lines used strategically throughout, offers a historical, yet not entirely nor universally accessible, account while the affective properties open the borders, at times, allowing the reader to pass through unscathed.

Before analyzing the literary and aesthetic importance of this juxtaposition, it’s important to understand how Anzaldúa defines borders: “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (3). In Global Matters, Paul Jay concludes that Anzaldúa’s “borderland” is “an improvisational space in which languages and identities hybridize and evolve” (77). Even though Anzaldúa’s definition is most explicitly referring to the geographical and physical boundaries between cultures, I want to focus specifically on her notion of “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” and its relationship with these opening pages.

This longer poem opens with an affective description that activates not only the reader’s imagination but also produces a corporal reaction:

Wind tugging at my sleeve

feet sinking into the sand

I stand at the edge where the earth touches ocean

Where the two overlap

a gentle coming together

at other times and places a violent clash. (1)

Not only can I imagine myself standing along the water’s edge, feeling the ocean breeze, I am forewarned that this imagined translocation could end in a violent clash, which I believe occurs at the end of this poem. Over the nearly two full pages of text, Anzaldúa takes us on a historical journey that begins textually in English and at an unidentified oceanic location. One can imagine the beaches of Maryland, Florida, Mexico, Italy, among others, with which s/he has a personal connection. Immediately in the second stanza, Anzaldúa introduces the geographical domain by stating that “across the border in Mexico” (1) there are “houses gutted by waves/cliffs crumbling into the sea/silver waves marbled with spume/gashing a hole under the border fence” (1). This image, while continuing the maritime motif offers a more violent relationship between the sea and the border, which is symbolized through the materialization of the border fence. Anzaldúa references the barbwire fence multiple times throughout, with each reference becoming more personal, while interchanging between English and Spanish to narrate her personal journey.

In a way that the ocean water has eroded the border fence, Anzaldúa emphasizes its long-term effects on her culture:

1,950 mile-long open wound

dividing a pueblo, a culture,

running down the length of my body,

staking fence rods in my flesh,

splits me     splits me

me raja    me raja

This is my home

this thin edge of

barbwire.

Not only does she underscore the nearly two thousand mile physical and geographical boundary, she problematizes the notion that the fence only divides land by emphasizing how it has divided a pueblo and a culture. On a textual and aesthetic level, she literally splits the words with more spaces, which breaks the reader’s focus and internal pace. Ultimately, for non-Spanish speaking readers, the use of Spanish represents a fence that, without the aid of a dictionary or metaphorical ladder, can’t be crossed.

Recognizing that she lives along “this thin edge of barbwire,” Anzaldúa concludes this poem with a stanza entirely in Spanish:

Yo soy un puente tendido

del mundo gabacho al del mojado,

lo pasado me estirá pa’ ‘tras

y lo presente pa’ ‘delante.

Que la Virgen de Guadalupe me cuide

Ay ay ay, soy mexicana de este lado.

Analyzing the linguistic nature of the stanza, we find that she has expressed her artistic license by using abbreviations and regionalisms in order to fully express her authorial role, bridging the past and present from either side of the fence, which she explicitly reaffirms in the last line. She is a Mexican woman from this side. Returning to the opening imagery, this concluding stanza, in my opinion, represents a violent clash between the text and a non-Spanish speaking reader. In literary terms, beginning and ending a text in different languages represents Anzaldúa’s notion of an “emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” because the reader confronts a conclusion that clashes with his/her preconceived expectations; or rather, the unwritten contract that the text will deliver a solution or answer addressing the reader’s relationship with it. For me, the importance of Anzaldúa’s text resides in the fact that she writes in a way that invites the reader inside her borders while unexpectedly rejecting them through her language usage, which symbolizes the process of migrating and confronting the choice between assimilating into the host culture or maintaining one’s identity to their home culture.

“It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond,” writes Homi Bhabha in the introduction to The Location of Culture. Elaborating on this “realm of the beyond,” he continues:

The ‘beyond is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past . . . Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years, but in the fin de siècle, 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. (Bhabha 1)

The reader of Teju Cole’s Open City is immediately aware of his narrator, Julius’s “restless movement” within this realm of the beyond – the au delà, the here/after. Indeed, in the novel’s very first line, as Julius sets the scene of his seemingly aimless wandering that will characterize the whole novel, the name of the New York City neighborhood of Morningside Heights stands out as an incommensurable confusion of time and space (the heights on the side of morning?). As “an easy place from which to set out into the city”(1), it is from within this very confusion that Julius guides his readers through the “open city”­ (a place, and title, that unsurprisingly also connotes the dissolution of time and space borders) that he inhabits, and indeed, that he never escapes: on the last page, the reader finds him still aimlessly wandering, still inhabiting a disorienting, liminal space (and time). Just as it began in media res, the narration also leaves off in transit. 

Time-space confusions are inescapable throughout the entirety of Open City. They appear as other places and times (re-) present themselves to Julius and the reader through the city’s architecture (as with the Loews 175^th Street Theater), in seemingly irrelevant asides—9/11 being described as a “great empty space”(52)—and in more direct reflections: “The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space”(155) or “they left, and time’s shape was restored”(213). In fact, Julius’s musings at moments seem to echo Bhabha directly: where Bhabha says that being in the beyond is “to touch the future on its hither side”(Bhabha 7), Julius wonders, “Why did I feel suddenly that they were visiting from the other side of time?”(55).

It is thus within a framework of Bhabha’s beyond, I would probably argue, that the novel’s major themes (which certainly include transnationalism, globalism, and post-colonialism) are best understood. Conversely, it is perhaps only through fiction’s manipulations, fragmentations, and concentrations of time that Bhabha’s beyond can truly become palpable, present, for the reader.

As he introduces the scene in which he crosses paths with Moji for the first time in New York, Julius muses, “we experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities”(155). The reader later recognizes this musing as foreshadowing for the disturbing, forgotten fragment of Julius’s life that reveals itself later. These two episodes (the first meeting, which foreshadows the later revelation) thus appear as discontinuous both in the novel and in Julius’s life, but they later reveal themselves to be part of a continuum—albeit an invented one. In the very recognition of foreshadowing, the reader thus realizes that the experience of reading the novel is much like what Julius has just described life to be like. It first appears as continuous: one reads novels linearly, just as, on a day-to-day level, she experiences time linearly. But in the life of the mind, one’s life becomes disjointed; some moments return, others are lost, and time, spaces and history are reconstructed out of simulacra.

It is a full 75 pages earlier (from his place in New York) that Julius has revealed an episode from his past in Nigeria, in which his mother “decided to take [him] with her into her memories”(79). His memory of his mother’s disjointed memories become part of his own narrative as he discloses to the reader that he has pieced together his mother’s past (perhaps much like his readers later piece together the fragments of the novel) to realize that his mother was a child of war—a child likely born of a rape. Here, he similarly reflects on his and her overlapping past: “It was an entire vanished world of people, experiences, sensations, desires, a world that, in some odd way, I was the unaware continuation of”(80). The reader must wonder: is Julius’ past act, which re-presents itself much later in the novel, a repetition of his past? Regardless, this fragment seems to join in the continuum with the other two episodes presented above, despite its displacement and disjuncture from them in the time and space of the novel.

“The present,” Bhabha asserts, “in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced”(4). The reading of novel itself seems to perform this return to the present, then, that the inhabiting of the beyond entails.

I want to write about the difference it makes to read and write fiction in a class on theories of transnationalism, but I feel out of place writing about a novel when I am not a literary scholar, having no disciplinary training in literary analysis or critique. It is perhaps a feeling of transdisciplinary out-of-place-ness not so dissimilar to the dislocations and dissonances produced through transnational encounters and processes. Let us not forget that disciplinary boundaries are no less imaginary than national ones, and their fortification—especially the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences since positivism has reigned as the dominant epistemological paradigm in the West—is intimately related to nationalist and imperialist knowledge projects, knowledge production in the name of, and as a tool of, nation-building and imperial expansion. So crossing the imagined and disciplined/disciplinary borders of knowledge production can be fraught and complex, at once encouraged by the neoliberal university for its own reasons in a climate of austerity measures in academic capitalism (themselves imbricated in the machinations of global capitalism), at least in theory, and yet sometimes so vexingly challenging, at least when the assumption seems to be that most scholars engaged in transdisciplinary scholarship are themselves rooted in a discipline of their own and crossing borders into new territory.
Yet I find myself without a disciplinary home, having studied in two interdisciplinary fields and now pursuing doctoral work in one of them, and also convinced that transdisciplinary engagement is all the richer for the fragmented and self-consciously partial perspective it provides. And so when I wonder what role fiction plays in thinking through the transnational, I think first of how postcolonial feminist Kamala Visweswaran has argued for writing fiction as a viable ethnographic method for researchers coming up against the dilemmas of power inherent in ethnography. Transnationalism has been engaged from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including both literary studies and anthropology, and so it seems fitting to engage Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, as a knowledge project that operates through and across the borders of nations and disciplines.

We have, in our class, situated the study of transnationalism as one part of critical projects that denaturalize and thus illuminate the contours of the nation-state and its ideological projects. Cole’s novel, too, is a piece of these projects, and arguably in conversation with others in the field. Teju Cole’s novel opens abruptly with his protagonist’s description of how “New York City worked itself into [his] life at walking pace” as Julius began his habit on going on evening walks through the city, a habit that coincided, he tells us, with the habit of watching bird migrations from his apartment (3). Julius’s interest in “the miracle of natural migration” frames his entrance into a year of wandering through the physical geographies of New York City, which become the vehicle for his affective and intellectual wanderings through history and memory, and among transnational encounters that shape his articulation of an increasingly fraught relationship to the nation-state. The narration driving the story follows his wandering mind as it journeys across place and time, so that multiple pasts and presents (and presences) comingle in ways that feel natural and familiar. In the final passage of the novel, Julius’s narration comes back to the theme of birds and their migrations as he ruminates on the history of the large number of migratory birds fatally disoriented by the flame in the torch of the statue of liberty. If Julius’s own wanderings, physical and intellectual and spiritual and social, are framed by his interest in “the miracle of natural migration,” they are also an expression of this “miracle,” and by the end of the novel, we have the impression that people’s migrations might be just as natural if not for the complex (of) violences committed by nation-states. What is the Statue of Liberty, after all, if not a national symbol for the myth of our “nation of immigrants”? In the final passage of the novel, it is also a site of massive and seemingly arbitrary avian deaths, deaths which are not only a direct product of modern industrial technologies (specifically the statue’s use as a light house for ships in the nineteenth century), but also a site at which the nation’s institutions capitalized on these mass deaths for its own knowledge projects, conducted by the military via national museums. In this, Julius finds a persistent sense “that something more troubling was at work” (259). I might have to re-read the novel to get a more complete sense of Cole’s critique of the nation-state, but it certainly is in there somewhere.

Teju Cole starts his novel Open City with the narrator’s recently acquired pastime of evening walks through New York. A recounting of the various routes and their particular sights follows, along with one of the preceding hobby, namely, bird watching. While these descriptions do not ground the narrator’s initial interest or the subsequent change, they do share a common theme: movement. The movement of both the narrator and the birds immediately evokes a pattern of migration, of travel to a destination and of return to an origin, or home. One could easily interpret this imagery through the lens of trans-national studies and make the connection with people, or peoples, who set out on journeys to new and unfamiliar places, whether out of necessity or desire. However, I would like to consider Open City not from the perspective of movement, but from that of boundaries and restrictions of movement. The barriers found in the pages construct an inability on the narrator’s part to connect with other people, and blocking cultural accessibility.

Some of the boundaries found in the novel are ordinary, physical obstructions. Early, as the narrator makes his way to visit a friend, he finds one path blocked by police cordons (7). As he remembers a visit he once made to a detention center for undocumented immigrants, he describes the meeting room as “split down the middle by Plexiglas, with…small perforations at face level” (64), yet another border to cross. Even at home in his own apartment building, he is cut off from his neighbors. He is stunned at the revelation that the woman who lived next door died, and that he had not known. The gap between apartments twenty-one and twenty-two seems too great for him to manage without engaging in “false intimacy” (21). While the narrator is often able to engage with other figures and hear their stories, these physical blockades prevent the type of intimate interaction that could lead to a more complete understanding.

Other boundaries in the novel are more inter-personal in nature, without any physical obstacles. The narrator describes a trip on the subway after one of his evening walks. Lost in thought about one of his patients, he fails to exit the train and misses his stop. As he considers possible reasons behind this momentary lapse, he becomes aware of the other passengers on the train, and how they all ride in total silence. After switching to another train, he notices its passengers are livelier, but although some are talking with each other, and others’ reading materials seem to invite interaction, he makes an escape through closing doors and is left “all alone on the platform” with “this assortment of inwardly focused city types still swirling in [his] mind” (45). Even in one-on-one interactions, as is the case in the scene with the African taxi driver (40-41), he is unable to bridge the distance and reach another person. Their shared African identity, whether real or imagined, leads not to harmony, but instead discord due to a cultural misunderstanding.

The last boundary I would like to address is that of time and space, one that Cole addresses both directly and through metaphor in his novel. The many memory scenes—I would not refer to them as flashbacks—serve to provide biographical information about the narrator, as well as some of the other characters he encounters. Further, these memory scenes provide the chance to grapple with events and places from the past that have shaped the narrator’s present, and continue to do so. Memories of his grandmother, for example, set the stage for his chapter-spanning trip to Belgium, where he must cope with multiple cultural identities in a multicultural setting. In addition to distinct intervals, past and present, Cole also writes of elastic time (74) imbuing it with a physical quality. Carrying the metaphor further, he occasionally blurs the boundary between time and space. As the narrator wanders the streets of New York, a tourist asks for directions to 9/11, “not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones” (52). At the site of another memorial for fallen officers, he describes “a vast, blank face of polished marble, awaiting those among the living who would die in uniform, and the not yet born, who would be born, grow up to be police officers, and be killed while doing that work” (57).

As a fictional work, Cole’s Open City is able to create a context for the reader, in which questions of heritage, identity, nation, and culture can be asked. The form allows Cole to present these questions outside the structured outline of a theoretical argument. In fact, the reader is under no obligation to follow, accept, or even identify an argument at all. Instead, the narrator guides the conversation(s) important to a trans-national critical understanding through plausible settings and experiences. The reader is able to engage first with the characters and story, and then (or simultaneously) with an examination of what it means to be African, or German, or Belgian, or American, or some hyphenated combination of national identities. The fictional form brings with it both a freedom from strict theoretical analysis, as well as an environment where such analysis can be carried out organically.

Like the multicultural space of New York through which the narrator of Open City wanders, Teju Cole´s novel can also be regarded as an expansive dialogue with different types of texts, theories, discourses, languages and writers. Within this framework, Kwame Anthony Appiah´s Cosmopolitanism constitutes one of these instances. In this case, Appiah´s essay dialogues with the Anti-Western ideology that had been previously expressed by Farouq, a character defined by Julius as a radical, the image of a young Vito Corleone, “one of the thwardted ones” (129). On the contrary, the narrator articulates some of the ideas manifested in Cosmopolitanism such as his disapproval of fundamentalisms or his emphasis on pluralism. In particular, the obligation towards the others becomes a central concern in both texts. In Open City, this issue is explicitly formulated in a number of chapters, particularly regarding the suffering of the others. Even from the beginning, Julius conveys his distress when he finds out that the woman next door has been dead for weeks: “I had not known nothing in the weeks when her husband mourned, nothing when I had nodded to him […] I had not noticed not seeing her around” (21). The suffering of others is tackled throughout the novel, becoming particularly relevant with respect to collective traumas, like 9/11, the Holocaust, Haiti, Nigeria or the genocide in Rwanda. These collective traumas can be interpreted as a starting point in order to delve into the relations with others and the creation of the imaginary communities that are interrogated throughout Cole´s work.

The significance of layers leads the narrator to identify the multiple levels that comprise cities like New York or Brussels, personal and collective stories, history or different subjectivities. The connection between self and the others is problematized in different ways. To start with, the representation of different characters trying to establish some kind of identification with Julius due to their sharing of an allegedly common origin questions the grounds on which identity politics lies. Instead of identifying as a Nigerian or as an African, Julius feels emotionally detached from these strangers, contributing to the implosion of the imaginary community. While in America he is being “interpellated” to recognise himself as “Nigerian” or “African”, this category proves to be narrow and reductive at best. “The name Julius linked me to another place and was, with my passport and my skin color, one of the intensifiers of my sense of being different, of being set apart, in Nigeria” (78). Nevertheless, even though the recognition in those cases is unilateral, Julius cannot avoid being part of this community. Furthermore, Julius learns to cope with the fact that the self is partly the product of others´ s projections, desires and identifications.

On the other hand, not only is the idea of an “African” or “Nigerian” identity questioned, but Julius also demonstrates that identities can never be conceived as monolithic. In fact, the novel undertakes different journeys, both physical displacements around New York and Brussels and the imaginary journeys that take the narrator back to Nigeria or Germany. Displacement -more specifically, migration- is precisely where I consider that Open City diverges from Cosmopolistanism. Cole´s fiction problematizes globalization, offering a critical analysis that is missing in Appiah´s essay. This is remarkable in the case of Saidu´s story. Even if Julius seems to mock the idea of the emphatic listener and refuses to visit Saidu again, he tells his story, which is in itself an ethical act.

Through Saidu´s story, the most brutal side of globalization is exposed. Open City unmasks how the free market, the free exchange of ideas and images does not concur with freedom of mobility as far as human beings are concerned. Images of the West circulate around the world, but individuals´ mobility is constrained and strictly regulated. It is tragic that Saidu´s image of America as the country of freedom urges him to embark on a journey that will come to an end when he is in imprisoned on his arrival at JFK airport. This story raises an issue that Cosmopolitanism does not fully address. Appiah refers to criticisms on globalization centered on the erasure of local cultures, but he overlooks the material approach that could provide a larger picture. In so doing he fails to address central issues, such as the unequal balance of power established between countries, extreme poverty or oppression. To conclude, even if Open City, unlike Cosmopolitanism, is a work of fiction, its ultimate goal is not necessarily to articulate ethical principles, I personally consider that it succeeds in its representation of the problems raised by globalization.