Last week I just started reading a new novel by Amin
Maalouf and the excerpt below is I think very relevant to
both readings and the class in general.
How many times, since
I left Lebanon in 1976 to live in France, have people asked me, with the best
intentions in the world, whether I felt “more French” or “more Lebanese”? And I
always give the same answer: “Both!” I say that not in the interests of
fairness or balance, but because any other answer would be a lie. What makes me
myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two
countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. It is
precisely this that defines my identity. Would I exist more authentically if I
cut off a part of myself?
…Half French and half
Lebanese, then? Not at all! The identity cannot be compartmentalized; it cannot
be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I
do not have several identities; I only have one, made of all elements that have
shaped it’s unique proportions.
So far I’m on my way of
reading ‘Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow’ by Faiza Guéne and recently finished Leslie A.
Adelson’s article ‘Against Between: A Manifesto’ article which is
physically short but written in a concentrated way. Reading the article
and the Maalouf book consequently is musing.
Apparently from the quote one
has a sense of positive attribution to being in between, that is through
migration, one has inherited different parts of his/her identity which is
considered as a richness in this case. But contrary to this idea Leslie Adelson
is opposes to this idea. Her claim is that in todays world; ‘the trope of “betweenness“
often functions literally like a reservations designed to contain, restrain and
impede new knowledge, not enable it‘. That’s why she says she has her manifesto
against the between!
What do you think of
this? And with reference to her article, do you think that, for the case of
Turks in Germany, all this talk of “between the two worlds” does carry the
misperception that she mentions in the paper.
Thanks for bringing Maalouf into the discussion.I'm not so sure that Adelson and he are in disagreement. I don't think he would say he's "in-between" -- just the opposite. He's saying that he can't compartmentalize his identity into French and Lebanese, that there's no clear dividing line where one ends and the other starts.
YanıtlaSilI'm intrigued by by how Adelson uses the metaphor of the house (she's not the first one to use this). On the one hand, she doesn't like to think of language as a substitute home; on the other, she quotes Zafer Senocak to the house as thinking, "in which people gather and join forces and from which they sing and shoot together." This notion of the house as a place where people from anywhere can meet is worth thinking about.