Movement characterizes Open City from the very first pages of the novel in which Julius, the narrator, describes his evening walks through NYC and habit of watching bird migrations. While human migration is an obvious global phenomenon, I had strangely never thought about this type of global movement in its relationship to many other species in the animal kingdom. Like humans, other animals migrate to escape certain situations such as inhospitable climates and waning resources, but they also travel long distances for many other reasons including social, economic, and political conditions, to name a few. I found the way in which Cole placed human migration into the many other types of animal migrations to be very engaging. Julius considers bird watching to be a “miracle of natural immigration,” admiring the organization, curious “how our life below might look from their perspective,” and imagining “that were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs masked in a grove” (Cole 4). Despite my admittedly limited knowledge on science, I very much enjoy learning about animals, and happened to have read an article the other day that named “how animals migrate” as one of the top ten current unsolved mysteries of science. (The article can be found here < http://www.iflscience.com/physics/top-10-unsolved-mysteries-science>). The connection between his description of migration as a miracle and its scientific mystery is very much distanced from the political rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon that characterizes much of the common media coverage today. Migration as one of the transnational elements in the world Cole constructs in this novel seems to serve as a means to awareness, understanding, and perhaps even a sort of enlightenment.
Migration is one of many transnational topics that appears in this syncretic novel whose intertextuality weaves different times and places, history and fiction, and spirituality and art into an amalgamation of itineraries and connections that link the world through space and time. Descriptions of interconnectivity help to blur boundaries, especially national, while still allowing for difference (very much in-tune with Appiah’s concept of cosmopolitanism). While on the surface of this multifaceted work the majority of the plot takes place in New York City and Brussels in the present, many other places and time periods are evoked. Images from a movie about Africa stay with the narrator, songs follow him home, books, personal stories, and history itself allow him to see the landscape of New York as a palimpsest in which all of time and space can exist simultaneously, “written, erased, rewritten,” where repressed and mis/underrepresented histories are incorporated into the present (Cole 59). New York City and Belgium are portrayed as hubs of different cultures, languages, and experiences intermingling, connecting but allowing for differences to flourish.
Julius’s relationship to his mixed heritage is characterized by transnationalism. In NYC, his interactions with an African cab driver and a locked-up undocumented Liberian immigrant connect him to his African past, however, as a person of mixed ancestry whose life is a journey in which the constant exchange of worldviews, in particular ethical and moral, contributes to his evolving ideologies, he is always reluctant to fully embrace this somewhat imposed identity. Cole’s narrator describes his own hybrid identity:
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. I had a Yoruba middle name, Olatubosun, which I never used. That name surprised me a little each time I saw it on my passport or birth certificate, like something that belonged to someone else but had long held in my keeping. Being Julius in everyday life thus confirmed me in my not being fully Nigerian. (78)
Julius also at times castes aside his German side, failing to mention in conversation with Dr. Maillotte when they meet for dinner in Brussels that his second language is actually German, not English. While he does try to understand and respect people’s connections to culture and nation, he seems to reject these categories for himself as totalizing, veering more towards a cosmopolitan community as seen as his growing relationship of mutual respect with Farouq.
However, another metaphor in the novel struck me as particularly strong despite its minor role: bedbugs. The apartment of Dr. Saito, Julius’s former professor, mentor, and friend, is infested with bedbugs, and the narrator contextualizes their presence and movement among serious diseases and outbreaks. Cole writes:
But bedbugs were not fatal, and were happy to stay out of the headlines. They were hard to fumigate into oblivion, and their eggs were almost impossible to kill. They did not discriminate on the basis of social class and, for that reason, were embarrassing […] I suddenly felt sorrowful for Professor Saito. His recent encounter with the bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, homophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life. The bedbugs trumped them all. (173)
While transnationalism serves in many ways as a positive force that encourages growth and understanding in Cole’s work, the bedbugs’ cannibalistic and invasive nature seemed to me to be a critique or at least a warning of the negative potential of the erasure of difference and globalization. Bedbugs have no concept of borders or limits, even ignoring class differences (as well as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality). Their involvement in “a kind of low-grade warfare, a conflict at the margins of modern life, visible only in speech,” makes them the representation of the underside to transnational exchange and cross-cultural communication in which this concept of a cannibalistic invading force falls in line with many of the contemporary critiques surrounding economic and cultural globalization (173). By presenting the tensions between the praise of transnational communities and the condemnation of globalization through fiction and metaphors, Cole is able to shed new light on these theoretical and real-world concerns.
You know, I had not thought about the bedbugs that way—that is, as a metaphor which serves the purpose of critiquing the negative effects of globalization, in this case the cultural cannibalism that might be associated with it. When I read that passage, personally, I did not make that connection, namely because when I think of cultural cannibalism due to globalization, I think of a culture invading another within the parameters of a hierarchy which favors the invading culture. And usually this invading culture has the capital means to manage the “invasion.” (Hollywood and its movies comes to mind.) But in the case of the bedbugs, “an invasion in a wealthy home is just as likely” (173), which means that hierarchies are erased in this case and no one gets favored. On the other hand, you did acknowledge that these bedbugs ignore class differences and ethnicity, which then makes me think that maybe we are thinking of this cultural cannibalism on two different ways.
I’ve also thought a lot about how Cole’s text interweaves human and non-human migration. When I initially consider this, I imagine human migration as forced or desired, while bird migration seems like more of a natural, annual occurrence. I also think of how birds who migrate don’t have permanent homes, for they change their surroundings constantly and make grand migrations annually. This might initially seem different from human migration, but, as we have been learning in this class, migration is not always fixed; someone might move from one place to work in a different country for so many months, fully intending to return to the place of origin or another place without ever permanently settling. And, as we see a lot in Open City, sometimes migration can be uncertain and turn into a kind of “aimless wandering” throughout a city (10).
Along similar lines, I worked as a dramaturg a few years ago on my friend’s play, Camino, which was a story of three sets of migrants: a Latino couple living in America that get separated when the husband is deported and trapped in a for-profit immigration detention center, an American couple that also become separated when the husband travels to the U.S.-Mexico border on a security mission and also finds himself locked in an immigration detention center, due to miscommunication and mistaken identity issues, and a flock of birds who run into obstacles during their annual flight because of environmental concerns. As a part of the narrative, the wives also find themselves traveling to the border with the same coyote so that they might rescue their husbands from prison. I won’t go into the details too much, but I think a story like this one, in addition to Cole’s, reveal how migration is so multifaceted and affects people (and species!) along all different national and class lines. Plus, in the age of globalization and high-speed technological development, we are seeing how relatively quick and easy it is for some migrants to travel, in addition to how difficult and dangerous it can be for others. And yet there are some things that migrants may share that remain unsaid, such as the “[reenactment of] unacknowledged traumas” that Julius sees on the faces of his fellow metro riders (16). If you’d like to read more about the play I worked on, feel free to check out the casebook I made: http://caminocasebook.wordpress.com