So this will probably come off as a little ridiculous, but I had never been asked to discuss my ideas on “transnationalism” before enrolling in this class. While this may seem a broad topic, it really took a lot of my energy and focus to fully comprehend transnationalism and all of its qualities, many of which we discussed in class. I feel like I identified the most with the novels we read for the class and how they exemplified transnationalism as a whole. I learned a lot from Teju Cole’s Open City, which is the text I will use here to describe how I came to truly comprehend the idea of transnationalism (as opposed to cosmopolitanism, globalization, internationalism, etc., that we discussed on the first day of class this semester). To begin, I find that the idea of transnationalism (or using a transnational approach to writing) is crucial to creating a paper/thesis, mainly because while many of us our stuck in our ways of taking psychoanalytical, Marxist, or feminist approaches to literature in our respective language fields, it is imperative for us to realize that other nations and peoples influence the foreign literature that we study.

Something I used to find distinctly and only French in nature, one of my favorite literary forms from Charles Perrault, are the contes de fees, or fairy tales. To put it in basic terms, nothing is black and white. Nothing can be purely French in my eyes anymore. There are always other factors—namely, transnationalism. Yes, Perrault wrote them in French and he was inspired by tales from French history, the idea of the fairy tale comes from the more general folk tale, a genre that comes from numerous regions around the globe; thus, delving deeper into Perrault’s influences, I found that he may have read texts from other countries such as Spain, Germany, and Italy. That’s just one way in which transnationalism has affected my academic work thus far.

In Cole’s Open City, at first glance I perceived the story as merely that of an immigrant now completely enmeshed in New York City life. But it was so much more! His life, as well as that of his friend, Professor Saito, proved a network of transnational experiences. Regarding Professor Saito, “[Following the Second World War] The last subject was so total in its distance from my experience that it was perhaps of most interest to me. The war had broken out just as he was finishing his D.Phil, and he was forced to leave England and return to his family in the Pacific Northwest. With them, shortly afterward, he was taken to internment in the Minidoka Camp in Idaho” (Cole 9). Saito’s life cannot be condensed into his tenure at Maxwell College; rather, his life experiences and movement from country to country, across multiple borders, fashioned him into the scholar he is at the moment when Julius visits him at the beginning of the novel.

The reader is only introduced to the transnational elements surrounding the life of Julius in Chapter Six. “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…Being Julius in everyday life thus confirmed me in my not being fully Nigerian. [On his name being taken from his mother who, in turn, was named after a relative] She had in her early twenties extricated herself from Germany and run off to the United States; Julianna Müller had become Julianne Miller” (Cole 78). We discover more about circumstances surrounding our narrator’s youth and his disembarkation from Nigeria for university later on in the text, but from this passage we learn of his Nigerian and German descent and how both nationalities held a profound influence over his upbringing as well as his identity. His name, Julius, is not Nigerian but German in origin. So we discover our narrator is more than his Nigerian heritage; he is profoundly linked in multiple ways, transnationally speaking, to other countries. Here we find he is linked to Germany; later we find his link to Belgium.

While I’ve only cited a few examples in this post of the importance of transnationalism in Open City, the text is full of many other examples. This book, along with Satrapi’s Persepolis and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, greatly influenced my final group project members and I to look at transnationalism and border-crossings on many different levels, including historically, physically, and politically. We wanted to demonstrate a creative method (a virtual museum) to utilize, in depth, our comprehension of transnationalism.

The concepts of temporality and spatiality reoccur throughout Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. Both issues arise in the initial pages of the text, when the narrator writes, “I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I’ve got no memory for dates anymore, or exactly where my wanderings took me” (2). As Auxilio introduces herself, immediately the reader is introduced simultaneously to transnationalism, seeing as she is from another country and now lives in Mexico. “My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I am Urugayan—I come from Montevideo—although when I get nostalgic…I say I’m a Charrúa…and it confuses Mexicans and other Latin Americans too” (2). This confusion surrounding time and space engages the reader at the very commencement of the novel, demonstrating perhaps the lack of importance of specificity in regards to the when and where about which people are so often concerned, as well as the dynamic, innovative, and unusual structure to the text. While utilizing the first person is considered “normal” to texts, the narrator subverts this norm by expressing her thoughts in a manner more akin to a stream of consciousness, and later, expressing dialogue without quotation marks (as we saw in Cole’s Open City).

The narrator begins to explain her involvement in the events of 1968 on page 21, as she sits in the bathroom in the university’s Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. Yet after realizing the chaos that was occurring outside of the restroom, Auxilio specifically notes that “five seconds later, someone, maybe the son of a b**** who had spoken before, opened the door of the bathroom and came in” (27). So at this point, time and even space as Auxilio (“I estimate that I must have spent about three hours sitting there” (31)) sits in the stall are clearly marked for the reader; however, her time remaining in the bathroom becomes speculative. “Time folded and unfolded itself like a dream” (32). Auxilio’s memories (if the reader can be assured of the authenticity of said memories since she mentions over and over her confusion regarding them) become skewed, changing from the 60’s to 1956 to the 1970’s, and she leaves the reader hanging in the balance of the time spent in the bathroom, as she moves her narrative along, changing in time and space to discuss her specific rendezvous with Arturo Belano at the Encrucijada Veracruzana in 1970.

The reader is returned to that unspecified amount of time, thus a vague temporality, spent in the bathroom (here, a place firmly entrenched in spatiality) in September 1968, this time through the narrator’s own personal transnational lens: “I thought about those Asians crossing the Bering Strait, I thought about the solitude of America, I thought about how strange it is to emigrate eastward rather than westward” (54). Auxilio’s transnational lens (here, her affinity for British poets) reappears in her thoughts concerning poets, those who were teachers and pupils and those who didn’t live to become either. “I thought about the dead poets, like Darío and Huidobro, and about all the encounters that never occurred. The truth is that our history is full of encounters that never occurred. We didn’t have our Pound or our Yeats; we had Huidobro and Darío instead” (63).

Auxilio also touches on the idea of transnationalism in a paragraph discussing Mexico City’s poets’ voices. “No one could understand those voices, which were saying: We’re not from this part of Mexico City, we come from the subway, the underworld, the sewers, we live in the darkest, dirtiest places…” (78). Clearly, this vision of transnationalism does involve crossing countries’ borders, but rather focuses on the idea of a completely different culture of people (poets) living within Mexico City, explicitly different from the city’s other citizens.

Returning again to the concepts of temporality and spatiality, Auxilio’s use of the word “frozen” seems to represent a sort of “time standing still” situation. “The everyday is like a frozen transparency that lasts only a few seconds” (105). In taking apart the phrase, the reader recognizes aspects of time and space, i.e. “everyday” as something temporal, “frozen” in regards to space, and also “transparency,” which relates again to spatiality in that the everyday may exist, but if it’s transparent, ergo no one can see it, is it truly there? Does it, in fact, belong in the genre of spatiality? This confusion regarding space and time arises yet again in Auxilio’s thought process later on. “And that is when time stands still again, a worn-out image if ever there was one, because either time never stands still or it has always been standing still…” (126). While time here can once again be “frozen,” as noted before (an impossible characteristic of temporality), it is called an “image.” An image can be interpreted as a picture or a photo, and if viewed as such, the image therefore becomes a concrete object, thus rooted in the concept of spatiality.

In Teju Cole’s Open City, transnationalism emerges again and again in various ways. It presents itself in many themes; one such theme is immigration. Many characters in Cole’s novel have been displaced, whether by choice or by the will of others. Professor Saito, whom the narrator befriends during his university days at Maxwell, becomes an integral character, one woven throughout the text. Saito, along with his Japanese family, “was forced to leave England” and return to the Pacific Northwest. “With them, shortly afterward, he was taken to internment in the Minidoka Camp in Idaho” (Cole 9). While we as the readers meet Saito in his New York City apartment, the aged professor holds memories from his travels made throughout his lifetime. His apartment holds decorations such as a Papuan ancestor figure and six Polynesian masks. The professor sees himself thus: “We were all confused about what was happening; we were American, had always thought ourselves so, and not Japanese” (Cole 13). To reference another example, I turn to Saidu, an inmate who the narrator happened to meet while with the Welcomers. Saidu began in Liberia, escaped to Monrovia, hitchhiked to Gbarnga, walked to Guinea, crossed between Bamako and Tangier and Ceuta. He continued his journey in Spain, crossed the border in Portugal where he endured hard work for two years before saving enough money to fly into New York. When he reached New York, officers took him away. His home? “I don’t want to go back anywhere, he said. I want to stay in this country, I want to be in America and work. I applied for asylum but it wasn’t given. Now they will return e to my port of entry, which is Lisbon.” If he is allowed to stay in America, Saidu will be an immigrant. If he is deported to Lisbon, he will be an immigrant. Part of his identity for the rest of his life will be that of an immigrant. There are many more characters who are presented to the reader as immigrants, including Nadege and Moji, two female protagonists who interact with Julius in various ways. We only see glimpses of Nadege’s life due to, I believe, the strain in her relationship with the narrator. As for Moji, we are granted the knowledge that she knows Julius from their adolescent years growing up in Nigeria. Both women seem to have become inundated in their new lives in the United States, but Moji in particular retains strong ties to her birth country.

The narrator has only returned once to Nigeria after leaving to attend college in the United States. Despite a good relationship with his father, he and his mother became estranged, and it’s logical that this is the reason he chooses to stay in the States and, even when taking a vacation, chooses to go to Belgium to search for his oma. The narrator certainly appears to be comfortable and settled in his life in the States, with little or no nostalgia for his birth country.

While Open City is a work of fiction, the settings, themes, and characters (whether major or minor) serve as excellent engagement with the reader. While not a real-life story, it is evident that the text works to seem like a real-life story. It is a believable story, and why wouldn’t it be? There are numerous biographies in bookstores today that parallel Cole’s story. Even when the narrator sits down to a film, he describes the people around him. “The ticket buyers were young, many of them black, and dress in hip clothes. There were some Asians, too, Latinos, immigrant New Yorkers, New Yorkers of indeterminate ethnic background” (Cole 28). Throughout the entire novel, the narrator provides little stories or anecdotes about various people, whether his patients or people from history. Each patient he discusses in detail and each historical personage demonstrate, in some way, an aspect of transnationalism. The book contains movement across countries’ borders, but it goes much further than examining physical location, looking into lives of immigrants and how they’ve adapted or struggled to adjust to their new lives in other countries. The novel presents a multilayered critique on transnationalism.