The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture

THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF HOSPITALITY IN US LITERATURE AND CULTURE Amanda Ellen Gerke Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan Patricia San José Rico (eds.) Amanda dedicates this book to VAG, PTG, LGG, GGG, NGG, and "Doña K": the roots, the trunk, and the branches. Santiago wishes to dedicate this volume to those teachers, now sadly fallen into oblivion, who taught him to read and write and revealed for him the unforeseen province of the written word. Patricia dedicates this book to the two pillars of her life; and to Luis, the third one. L1. TABLE OF CONTENTS L1. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................................................. i L1. INTRODUCTION: HOSPITALITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, Amanda Ellen Gerke, and Patricia San José Rico ....... 1 L1. HOSPITALITY FROM BELOW? NATIVE AMERICANS IN THE HOST-GUEST BINARY Puspa Damai ................................................................................................................................................... 15 L1. LANGUAGE INTERACTION AND HOSPITALITY: COMBATING THE HOSTED-HOST FIGURE Amanda Ellen Gerke.....................................................................................................................................27 L1. LATINO IMMIGRANTS AT THE THRESHOLD: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACH TO HOSPITALITY IN US BARRIOCENTRIC NARRATIVES Luisa Mª González Rodríguez ................................................................................................................... 43 L1. (IN)HOSPITABLE LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC HOSPITALITY IN HYPHENATED AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE CASE OF HA JIN José R. Ibáñez ................................................................................................................................................. 59 L1. THE CONTENTION FOR JOLLITY AND GLOOM: HOSPITALITY IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S HISTORICAL SHORT FICTION Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan .................................................................................................. 71 L1. (IN)HOSPITABLE ENCOUNTERS IN HERMAN MELVILLE’S CLAREL Laura López Peña ......................................................................................................................................... 85 L1. EATING, ETHICS, AND STRANGERS: HOSPITALITY AND FOOD IN RUTH OZEKI’S NOVELS Cristina Garrigós .......................................................................................................................................... 101 L1. “IT’S A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY”: THE RELATION BETWEEN RACE AND HOSPITALITY IN THE IRISH-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE AND ITS LITERARY REPRESENTATION Patricia San José Rico .................................................................................................................................. 117 L1. HOSPITALITY RITUALS AND CARIBBEAN MIGRANTS: TOM WOLFE’S BACK TO BLOOD, ANA LYDIA VEGA’S “ENCANCARANUBLADO,” AND FRANCISCO GOLDMAN’S THE ORDINARY SEAMAN Ana María Manzanas Calvo ...................................................................................................................... 133 L1. TIM Z. HERNANDEZ’S MAÑANA MEANS HEAVEN: LOVE ON THE ROAD AND THE CHALLENGE OF MULTICULTURAL HOSPITALITY Maria Antònia Oliver Rotger .................................................................................................................... 147 L1. “PARASITES IN A HOST COUNTRY”: MIGRANTS, REFUGEES, ASYLUM SEEKERS AND OTHER ZOMBIES IN THE WALKING DEAD Ángel Mateos-Aparicio and Jesús Benito Sánchez ............................................................................. 159 Acknowledgments i L1. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people and organizations have helped make this volume possible. First and foremost, the editors would like to thank Ana Manzanas and Jesús Benito for their support and assistance during the editorial process. We would also like to thank all the authors of the individual chapters for their valuable contributions and commitment to this project as well as for their patience and understanding through all the deadlines, edits, and even rewritings. Also, special thanks must go towards our friends and family for their support and the occasional shoulder to cry on. On a more personal note, Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan wants to thank the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder for the short-term stay at the Center to research hospitality. Likewise, Patricia San José is indebted to the English Department at Michigan State University for the time spent there as a visiting scholar. She would especially thank Dr. Gordon Henry, Dr. Jyotsna Singh, and all the lovely people she met there through the MSU Office for International Students and Scholars for showing her what true, unconditional hospitality feels like. Finally, this book is part of the research project “Historia crítica de la literatura étnica norteamericana: una aproximación intercultural” (MINECO FFI2015-64137-P), funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; without the economic help derived from it, this volume would not have been possible. Additional funding has been secured through the “Hostfilm: Hospitality in European Film” (2017-1-ES01-KA203-038181) research project, funded by the Erasmus + KA2: Strategic Partnership program of the European Union, and the “Las fronteras de la hospitalidad en los estudios culturales de Estados Unidos y Europa” (SA342U1) Research Project, funded by the Junta de Castilla y León. Introduction: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture 1 L1. INTRODUCTION: HOSPITALITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan Amanda Ellen Gerke Patricia San José Rico America has its purpose: it must serve that purpose to the end: I look upon the future as certain: our people will in the end read all these lessons right: America will stand opposed to everything which means restriction—stand against all policies of exclusion: accept Irish, Chinese—knowing it must not question the logic of its hospitality. [. . .] Our conditions, ideals, causes, all point one way: that way cannot but be the way of freedom. —Walt Whitman With Walt Whitman in Camden. Nov. 9, 1888 Despite Walt Whitman’s expectations, more than a hundred years later policies of exclusion are widespread across the world. Recent political and social events have shown several migratory and refugee crises that prove that countries are reinforcing their conditions on hospitality. Thousands of Syrian refugees remain in unwelcoming and almost uninhabitable refugee camps in Turkey. Simultaneously, laws restricting immigration have been passed in countries such as Denmark and Hungary, while other countries such as Italy ban rescue ships from entering their territorial waters in the Mediterranean. The American sphere is no stranger to these global circumstances. The implementation of migratory restrictions, as well as a calculated and outspoken campaign to stigmatize and criminalize migrants are sparking heated debates in the US. Since the summer of 2018, for instance, the family separation policy at the Mexican-American border, in which immigrant families are broken up and held in detention facilities likened to concentration camps, has caused controversy and uproar. Although “Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande,” as former President George W. Bush claimed, such a pronouncement bifurcates depending on which bank of the river you have in mind.1 The “zero tolerance” approach of the Trump administration is ostensibly intended to deter illegal immigration and enforce harsher legislation concerning border crossing. However, the accompanying cruelty and inhumane treatment seem to have become an end in themselves. Although some families have been reunited, many remain apart, housed in the numerous detention facilities that have popped up along the border, many of which remain unfit and unsafe for habitation since they were initially intended only for short-term use. Cases of physical and sexual abuse against detained adults and children continue to emerge, and it is still unclear whether some of these children will ever be reunited with their parents and guardians or will remain effectively orphaned. Reactions to these policies were, and continue to be, an indication of a profound rift in American society; some Americans are outraged, while others strongly defend and praise this practice. The ethical underpinnings of such policies were brushed aside by a Fox News commentator who defended the family 1 The Economist https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/06/02/a-cruel-and-unusual-border- policy. Santiago Rodriguez Gerrero-Strachan, Amanda Ellen Gerke and Patricia San José Rico 8 Walt Whitman offers a different side of hospitality in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass: “Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions . . . he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake” (1982, 7). Whitman, who regarded America as a nation composed of peoples from all over the world who would make America their home, did not regard himself as displaced. For him America is his native place, which is the soil, both geographic and cultural, from which he writes (Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 2018), and in which he offers unconditional hospitality to all the people who live in and come to America. L2. From Linguistics to Zombies: An Analysis of Hospitality in the American Scene In this volume, the ethics and aesthetics of hospitality explore a matrix of understandings, approaches, and conditions that form part of the current conversation about hospitality. Through a focused study on different literary and cultural manifestations, we aim to continue a conversation that can identify moments or hospitality versus hostility, and, at the same time, see how those illustrations can redraw the concept of hospitality itself. As a point of departure, the volume opens with two chapters that challenge the classical understandings of the host-guest relationship by offering new approaches to the underlying dynamics that each role encompasses. The first of these, “Hospitality from Below? Native Americans in the Host-Guest Binary” by Puspa Damai focuses on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of hospitality from below according to which a colonized subject acts as host to a colonizer guest. A new approach to the resident alien—a figure invisible in the immigrant model of hospitality—this chapter offers a postcolonial view on hospitality examining the place of Native America in the guest-host binary. It studies three novels dealing with the challenges faced by Native Americans in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century America: The Life and Adventure of Joaquin Murieta (1854); Ceremony (1977); and Flight (2007). While this chapter follows Spivak in tracing the notion of hospitality from below in these three novels, it also interrogates Spivak’s anthropocentric premise that flipping the roles and reinstating the colonized as host would be more hospitable, and constitute some form of decolonization. It argues that all three Native American novels mimic the immigrant/refugee model of hospitality. They depict hospitality from below not because Native Americans act as hosts but because a more immanent form of hospitality, of contiguity, cosmopolitanism and planetarity emerges from these narratives. The idea of ‘flipping roles’ presented in the previous chapter gives way in Chapter Three to another type of examination of role reversal, or rather, one that allows for a third plane of occupation. “Language Interaction and Hospitality: Combating the Hosted-host Figure” by Amanda Ellen Gerke opens the discussion of hospitality from a sociolinguistic point of view by demonstrating how the tensions within immigrant families can be seen as second-degree host-guest power relations. The chapter focuses on the concept of hospitality as rooted in the interactions, or non-actions between both the host and the guest. Hospitality is understood in this chapter through the dynamics of knowledge and power in which power is generated in relation to the Other, where one member has power and the other does not. Knowledge, or its lack, manifests in actions, and constitutes what pushes and pulls the hosts. Through readings of Junot Díaz’s “Invierno” in This is How You lose Her, and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Gerke explores the notion of speech acts and Introduction: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture 9 knowledge systems that create language interaction and, in turn, shake up the rules of engagement between the host and guest, lending a conceptualization of the hosted-host. This figure, once a primary-guest but converted to a ‘host of guests’ (migrant women and children who comprise his family) creates a subdivision of roles, fulfilling a need to exert power over subaltern figures and exercise control over the matriarchal group. These notions are presented from a sociolinguistic and sociocognitive approach, demonstrating that, in terms of designated spatial and epistemic systems, the migrant males in these two collections have reacted to their own guest-status, and as a recompense, have taken on the role of the violent host in order to achieve supremacy. This chapter also contends that where the secondary guests observe that the lack of linguistic agency creates powerlessness, the ability to pass through planes of linguistic space will enable their powerful emergence. Following the sociolinguistic discussion of hospitality offered in the volume, Chapter Four, “Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives,” by Luisa González Rodríguez, draws on Levinas’s predicament that language is inextricably connected to hospitality because it allows us to share the world with the Other. González Rodríguez explores controversial issues related to language exchanges and linguistic tensions that arise when power, hospitality, and space are questioned and contested. US barriocentric novels vividly portray how linguistic boundaries separate outsiders from insiders by delimiting a psychic and linguistic territory where the immigrant is at a disadvantage in a decidedly monolingual host country. Like the preceding chapter, this chapter focuses on Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, but this time it is coupled with Piri Thomas’s Down these Mean Streets and analyzed through the magnifying lens of language use and code-switching. The analysis seeks a deeper insight into the ways in which ethnolinguistic identities are constructed, and how power relationships are negotiated and challenged. In these novels, concepts of host/guest languages bring to the fore other concerns connected to displacement and unstable resettlement as well as identity issues that reflect a fractured mode of belonging. By challenging the power expressed through language, these characters also question the possibility of experiencing “migrant sites” (Kandiyoti 2009) as habitable places. Their refusal to use Standard English clearly proves they know that the spatial limitations are also linguistic barricades. Furthermore, by refraining from crossing the linguistic threshold, the viability of experiencing hospitable encounters and the host country’s capacity to open up spaces of hospitality are seriously questioned. Derrida’s preoccupation with the act of violence that comes from a host imposing linguistic conditions on the guest, together with other sociolinguistic concerns about linguistic hospitality, may result in a particular case of violence inflicted on a guest. This is the type of violence that may occur not only when the guest is forced into an imposed linguistic situation, but also the type of violence that is inflicted by part of the guest’s homeculture. Chapter Five, “(In)Hospitable Languages and Linguistic Hospitality in Hyphenated American Literature: The Case of Ha Jin” by José Ramón Ibáñez presents the inner conflict of a Chinese author, Ha Jin, who finds himself in a dichotomous inhospitable refuge. In its approach to hospitality from a sociolinguistic point of view, the chapter serves as a hinge between the discussion of hospitality from the realm of linguistic interaction and the analysis of hospitality in the American literary sphere. Forced to remain in the United States after seeing the response of Chinese authorities to the demonstration at Tiananmen Square Santiago Rodriguez Gerrero-Strachan, Amanda Ellen Gerke and Patricia San José Rico 10 in 1989, Ha Jin developed his entire literary career in English, a language that he learned after the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Writing in this language became a matter of survival and a safe haven to which this author retreated in an attempt to exile himself from Chinese, a language loaded with political jargon and unsuitable for the representation of his fictional worlds. Having accepted being an outcast from his native language—Chinese—Ha Jin’s adopted language became, metaphorically speaking, both a hospitable and an inhospitable space in which he could secure a successful literary career at the expense of being accused of betrayal by both Chinese intellectuals and authorities, and through criticism of his particular use of English. This chapter examines Ha Jin’s exilic condition and pays close attention to some of Ha Jin’s best known essays: “In Defence of Forgiveness” and The Writer as Migrant. Ibáñez puts a particular emphasis on language and spaces of exile, and questions the double nature of rejecting one’s own language and adopting another. From the sociolinguistic approach the volume moves on to literary representations of hospitality. The next two chapters dissect the vision of hospitality in two key figures of early American Literature: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In Chapter Six, “The Contention for Jollity and Gloom: Hospitality in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Historical Short Fiction,” Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan focuses on the author’s short fiction, written at an early stage of his career. These stories, though popular, do not always appear as the first choices in anthologies or discussions of Hawthorne’s works. The ambiguous status of being part of the canon while standing at its margin helps Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan discuss hospitality through a new reading of Hawthorne’s political ideas where hospitality is at the core of his narratives. Hawthorne was well acquainted with German Idealist philosophers, central among whom was Immanuel Kant. Rodríguez’s reading of hospitality revolves around Kant’s principles as expressed in Perpetual Peace. More specifically, the principle that the guest not be allowed to use hospitality to inflict harm on the host. In “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” and “John Endicott and the Red Cross,” Hawthorne discusses, in a typically ironical manner, the problems that hospitality posed to the Americans by fictionalizing the Puritans’ encounters with native inhabitants and other colonists, while playing the role of the displaced host that does not take into account the Kantian law of hospitality. In “The Gentle Boy” Hawthorne adds new nuances to the topic of hospitality and the question of national identity. Whether America would be a nation built upon religious tolerance or upon the strict principles of a single religion was an excuse to talk about concepts such as ‘Manifest Destiny’ and the ‘empire for liberty.’ Laura López Peña chooses a much-neglected text of Herman Melville, the long poem Clarel, to discuss the issue of hospitality in “(In)Hospitable Encounters in Herman Melville’s Clarel.” Melville, along with Hawthorne, is rightly regarded as a ‘dissenter’ from his contemporary American society. In her approach to hospitality, López Peña addresses the multiplicity of subjectivities that unfold in Melville’s works. Drawing from Derridean and Levinasian versions of hospitality, she converses with Martin Buber’s concept of openness towards the Other and Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the dialogic process by which people make sense of the world together. Thus, the dialogic nature of Clarel, and of Moby-Dick, accounts for the plural encounter of the characters where the ‘you’ is always an ‘I.’ Through the awareness that the Other’s strangeness is not so, unconditional hospitality is vindicated in Melville’s poem. The setting of the poem, Jerusalem, represents both the potentiality of unconditional hospitality and the site of inhospitable encounters. Introduction: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture 11 The next chapter, “Eating, Ethics, and Strangers: Hospitality and Food in Ruth Ozeki’s Novels” by Cristina Garrigós, focuses on yet one more aspect of hospitality: food and food offerings and analyzes it in the, to date, three novels published by the American-Canadian author, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki. By highlighting tropes of food preparation, food consumption, and even metaphorical cannibalism in the three novels analyzed, Garrigós shows how hospitality is very much related to food and to culture clash in Ozeki’s literary production, and she explores how offering or denying hospitality across different cultures and among strangers, as well as through and around food and food rituals, often results in the creation of specific host-guest relationships and even in the reversal of those relationships. This chapter, therefore, goes back to previously explored notions of conditional/unconditional hospitality and host/guest binaries by tackling the acceptance or rejection of difference in terms of differing cultures, ideologies, and food rituals. Chapters Nine, Ten, and Eleven also explore culture clash and hostility as portrayed in contemporary novels, but this time with a focus on race as a marker of otherness by taking into account that race, while an obvious marker of ‘othering,’ is not always construed in terms of mere physical difference. Chapter Nine, “‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’: The Relation Between Race and Hospitality in the Irish-American Experience and its Literary Representation” by Patricia San José Rico, draws on Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White in order to question the concept of race and illustrate how, especially in the case of Irish immigrants to the US, race can be read in terms of social status rather than physical difference. Through a review of the circumstances surrounding American Society’s initial treatment of Irish immigrants, such as the consistent stereotyping processes that labeled the Irish in the US as unavoidably poor, violent, and papist as well as the mechanisms by which Irish-Americans managed to revert those stereotypes, San José Rico illustrates how the Irish’s cultural, religious, and, most especially, social differences earned them the label of racialized Others despite their apparent physical and linguistic similarities with the dominant society. “Hospitality Rituals and Caribbean Migrants: Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, Ana Lydia Vega’s ‘Encancaranublado,’ and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman,” by Ana María Manzanas Calvo continues with the notion of hostility towards the racialized migrant Other and its representation in literature by analyzing, in this case, the experience of Caribbean migrants before and after their arrival in the US as portrayed in the two novels and the short story referenced in the title. Navigating between images of land and water, sea and coast, and the boat/ship as a transitional space of hostipitality, the chapter brings to the fore the ambivalent relationship between hospitality and hostility, exclusion and inclusion, as well as the double consciousness of being both guest and host and of the host turned guest. Resonating with notions from the previous chapters such as that of the hosted-host, or the power relations established as a result of language barriers among hosts and guests, this chapter goes back to the issue of racial and linguistic difference as a marker of otherness in the US and, consequently, as a rationale behind hostility towards the racialized migrant. If hospitality was mostly theorized on board the ship or the water in the previous chapter, Chapter Eleven, “Tim Z. Hernandez’s Mañana Means Heaven: Love on the Road and the Challenge of Multicultural Hospitality” by Maria Antònia Oliver Rotger, focuses on the road as a liminal space where hospitality between cultures and races can ideally take place, insomuch as it comes to be understood as a potentially transgressive force between boundaries. Discourses on race as a marker of otherness return in this chapter as the author Santiago Rodriguez Gerrero-Strachan, Amanda Ellen Gerke and Patricia San José Rico 12 compares the apparent forceful racialization of Bea Franco in the fictionalization of her relationship with Jack Kerouac that appears in the second chapter of On the Road and in his short story “The Mexican Girl” to the clearly white-looking yet more culturally distinct real Bea Franco as depicted in Tim Z. Hernandez’s metafictional retelling of this story: Mañana Means Heaven. Again, otherness as a realization of social status rather than physical difference is brought to the fore in Hernandez’s problematization of the “stereotyped cultural fantasies of the Other” and the myth of multicultural hospitality present in Kerouac’s work. Finally, to close the discussion of the Other, Chapter Twelve, “‘Parasites in a Host Country’: Migrants, Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and other Zombies in The Walking Dead” by Ángel Mateos-Aparicio and Jesús Benito Sánchez take up the notion of the parasitic migrant Other again, this time focusing on what we could call ‘the new race’: the Zombie. The chapter recaptures the previous discussions on conditional and unconditional hospitality in the face of the alien Other through the analysis of the popular TV series The Walking Dead. Mateos-Aparicio and Benito Sánchez provide an overview of the different interpretations of the zombie as the “fictional expression of Western anxieties over capitalist exploitation, consumerism, and mass immigration,” while at the same time problematizing acts of hospitality and hostility, whether it is among humans or towards zombies and paralleling them to contemporary American society. By drawing parallels between the representation of the zombie in the series with that of the migrant in American culture, the authors place emphasis once more on the issue of the migrant or the otherwise displaced person as the parasitic Other, which is refused hospitality or is met with acts of open hostility and violence in the face of its menacing difference. The zombie is, therefore, regarded as the result of the oppression imposed by the capitalist system on the hordes of cheap laborers, illegal immigrants, or asylum seekers that abound in our contemporary society and to which contemporary discourses of hospitality make reference. The volume’s broad scope, with myriad violent clashes and encounters, represents an exponential shift away from the fundamental and ancient rules of hospitality: the right of the stranger has been stripped from him, and the host has acquired a kind of entitlement that goes against the very nature of the virtue. The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in US Literature and Culture illustrates that hospitality is no longer viewed as a virtue but as a weakness in the texture of national identities. The welcome of difference in Whitman’s poem, quoted above, has given way to policies of exclusion. These are but a few of the issues that, through discussions on the image and subjectivity of the Other in a variety of linguistic and cultural representations, are addressed in the following chapters. L2. References Barnett, Clive. 2005. “Ways of Relating: Hospitality and the Acknowledgement of Otherness.” Progress in Human Geography 29 (1): 5-21. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia UP. Brown, Garrett W. 2010. “The Laws of Hospitality, Asylum Seekers and Cosmopolitan Right. A Kantian Response to Jacques Derrida.” European Journal of Political Theory 9 (3): 308- 327. Introduction: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture 13 Damai, Puspa L. 2005. “Messianic-City: Ruins, Refuge and Hospitality in Derrida.” Discourse 27 (2/3): 68-94. Damai, Puspa L. 2012. “Welcoming Strangers: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. De las Casas, Bartolomé. 1992. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin. Derrida, Jaques. (1997) 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Duformantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP. Derrida, Jaques. (1997) 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1999a. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford UP. Derrida, Jacques. 1999b. “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida.” In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by R. Kearney and M. Dooley, 65-83. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. “Hostipitality.” Angelaki 5 (3): 3-18. Kandiyoti, Dalia. 2009. Migrant Sites: America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College P. Kant, Immanuel. (1970) 1991. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.” In Kant’s Political Writings. 2nd ed., edited by Hans Reiss, 93-130. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Kearney, Richard. 2006. “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation” in Paul Ricoeur On Translation. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, pp. vii-xx. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1984. “Ethics of the Infinite.” In Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Tradition, edited by R. Kearney. 47-70. Manchester: Manchester UP. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the Other and Additional Essays. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburg: Duquesne UP. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Lilla, Mark. 2018. The Once and Future Liberal. London: Hurst. Manzanas Calvo, Ana María. 2013. “Junot Díaz’s ‘Otravida Otravez’ and Hospitalia: The Workings of Hostile Hospitality.” Journal of Modern Literature 37 (1): 107-123. Manzanas Calvo, Ana María. 2017. “The Line and Limit of Britishness: The Construction of Gibraltarian Identity in M.G. Sanchez’s Writing.” ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies 38: 27-45. Manzanas Calvo, Ana María and Jesús Benito Sánchez. 2017. Hospitality in American Literature and Culture. Spaces, Bodies, Borders. New York and London: Routledge. McCormick, Patrick T. 2004. “The Good Sojourner: Third World Tourism and the Call of Hospitality.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 24 (1): 89-104. O’Gorman, Kevin. 2007. “Dimensions of Hospitality: Exploring Ancient and Classical Origins.” In Hospitality: A Social Lens, edited by Lashley, Conrad, Paul Lynch and Alison J. Morrison, 17-32. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Plant, Bob. 2003. “Doing Justice to the Derrida-Levinas Connection. A Response to Mark Dooley.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (4): 427-450. Santiago Rodriguez Gerrero-Strachan, Amanda Ellen Gerke and Patricia San José Rico 14 Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, Santiago. 2008. “Exiliados y refugiados de la lengua.” En torno a los márgenes. Madrid: Minotauro digital, 77-102. Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, Santiago. 2018. “The Rhetorics of Hospitality in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days.” Miscelánea: a Journal of English and American Studies 58: 67- 82. Still, Judith. 2005. “Derrida: Guest and Host.” Paragraph 28 (3): 85-101. Still, Judith. 2010. Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Treanor, Brian. 2011. “Putting Hospitality in its Place.” In Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality, edited by Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, 49-66. New York: Fordham UP. Van Dijk, Teun. 2014. Discourse and Knowledge: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge U P. Vidal Claramonte, M. Carmen África. 2014. “Translating Hybrid Literatures. From Hostipitality to Hospitality.” European Journal of English Studies 18 (3): 242-262. Whitman, Walt. 1982. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: The Library of America. Winthrop, John. (1637) 2003. “A Declaration in Defense of an Order of Court Made in May, 1637.” In Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794, edited by E. S. Morgan, 145-48. Cambridge: Yale UP. Hospitality from Below? Native Americans in the Host-Guest Binary 15 L1. HOSPITALITY FROM BELOW? NATIVE AMERICANS IN THE HOST-GUEST BINARY Puspa Damai Marshall University L2. From Courteous Host to Dependent Nations Roger Williams (1603-1683), English colonist and Puritan minister, who founded the colony of Providence, Rhode Island by purchasing or receiving the land from “his Indian friends, Canonicus and Miantinomo” (Mudge 1871, 85), gives a curious title to his 1643 study of a local ‘Indian’ dialect: A Key Into the Language of America. He could have called the book A Study of Indian Language or How to Learn the Narragansett Dialect or The Tribal Language of the Bay Colony Indians. He not only calls the Narragansett dialect ‘a language,’ he also calls the study ‘a key’ and the dialect ‘language of America,’ thereby implying that the continent belongs to Native Americans. In his evaluation of the customs, manners, and religious beliefs of the natives of New England, Williams notes that the Narragansett Indians are “remarkably free and courteous to invite all Strangers in; and if any come to them upon any occasion, they request them to come in, if they come not in of themselves (Williams 1997, 7). Williams was in a unique position to approach and mingle with natives upon his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after his accusations that King Charles had no right to grant the land to immigrants because Native Americans were the true owners of it. Williams considered it a sin “to take and give away the lands and countries of other men” (Williams 2007, 461). About two centuries after Williams’s study, in 1831, the Supreme Court heard and ruled on a seminal case concerning the fate of Native Americans in the United States: Cherokee Nation vs. the State of Georgia. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Marshall (1755-1835) acknowledged that Native Americans “have an unquestionable, and heretofore unquestioned, right to the lands they occupy,” yet these tribes “which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States” may only “be denominated domestic dependent nations,” for “they are in a state of pupilage; their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian” (Marshall 2001). How did the status of Native Americans change from owners of the land to domestic dependent nations? What historical and political events reduced the “free and courteous” hosts to become “the ward[s]” of the United States? One obvious answer to these questions is the fact that between Williams’s attribution of host-status to Native Americans and Marshall’s reduction of them to that of mere dependence, lies the eventful and paradoxical history of simultaneous colonization and postcolonial nation-building in the United States. What these two textual examples (Williams’s study and Marshall’s majority opinion) reveal, however, is the role hospitality has played in American history. Hospitality not only helps us gauge the shift in the fortune of Native Americans, it also indicates how, potentially, it could be instrumental in any course correction of history towards what the Bureau of Indian Affairs has clearly identified: Native America’s self-governance and self-determination (Indian Affairs n.d.). If the use and abuse of hospitality represent the process of colonization in North America, hospitality also potentially foreshadows Native America’s post-colonial condition. Puspa Damai 16 L2. Hospitality and postcolonial theory Despite this crucial relevance of hospitality to the analysis of colonization of Native Americans in the United States, the topic apparently suffers a double disavowal: both American literary studies and postcolonial studies overlook hospitality. This chapter intends to examine these denials, particularly within the field of postcolonial theory in congruence with discussions on “the absence of hospitality as a critical concept in American studies” (Damai 2012, 9). To welcome hospitality to the discussion of American literature in general, and Native American literature in particular, will not only help us articulate America’s unique colonial history but it will also help us theorize the decolonization of Native America. And yet hospitality marks a space of insightful blindness at the heart of postcolonial theory. The anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements of the twentieth-century neither needed nor wanted to think about hospitality. Whether it is Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ or Marcus Garvey’s ‘Africa for Africans,’ hospitality figured as almost irrelevant to most anticolonialist movements across the globe. Postcolonialism, by contrast, is unthinkable without hospitality insofar as the postcolony calls for a relationship not of resistance or collaboration but of conviviality “fraught by the fact of the commandment and its subjects having to share the same living space” (Mbembe 2001, 104). And yet, none of the major postcolonial thinkers engages directly with hospitality. In fact, barring a few exceptions (e.g., Mireille Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality (2001)), postcolonial theory, in general, fails to dwell on hospitality. Even Homi Bhabha’s Our Neighbors, Ourselves (2011), which represents postcolonial theory’s almost solitary treatment of hospitality, dwells only remotely on the topic, for it lumps hospitality as one convenient term with other terms in the now all-too-familiar Bhabhaesque repertoire: liminalities, ambivalence, third-ness (Bhabha 2011, 6). Why would postcolonial theory deliberately or unwittingly refuse to engage with hospitality even when its very origin and nature imply that it owes its existence and survival to nothing but hospitality? One of the reasons, perhaps, is postcolonial theory’s inability to seriously come to terms with settler colonialism. Settler colonialism represents a process of displacing and in certain cases exterminating the indigenous population of a colony in order to claim it as home or mother country for the colonizers. The brutal nature of settler colonialism has led one of its critics to claim that one and only one logic dominates settler colonialism, and that logic is “negative articulation” or “elimination,” which “strives to replace indigenous society with that imported by colonizers” (Wolfe 1999, 27). However, other theorists believe that beyond the logic of elimination, settler colonialism “actively produces refugees” (Veracini 2015, 103) so that “that which remained could be subtly absorbed within the dominant culture” (Hixon 2013, 12). Settler colonialism turns indigenous people into refugees whereby colonists appropriate the role of hosts. Thus, any act of decolonization in a settler colonial society would have to imagine a politics of recognizing natives as hosts. L2. Hospitality from below? One unique model of such politics can be found in Gayatri Spivak’s very short piece “Resident Alien” (2002). Even though Spivak’s discussion of hospitality in this piece reads Hospitality from Below? Native Americans in the Host-Guest Binary 17 like an after-thought triggered by her encounter with Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality, and even though the map into which Spivak spreads her scattered thoughts on hospitality might not exactly be contiguous with settler colonialism, her model nevertheless is capable of opening up a space quite hospitable to indigeneity. At the center of Spivak’s text is her reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel: Gora. Tagore’s novel tells the story of the titular character Gora—the White One—who espouses an orthodox ideology of Hindu nationalism as a foil against the British Raj, only to discover that he himself is an outsider—an Irish foundling adopted and raised by a childless Bengali Brahmin couple. Spivak calls this historically unverifiable and fictional figure a “resident alien,” (47) who she juxtaposes with immigrants from Third World countries in search of citizenship in the multicultural metropolis of the West. Perhaps following a cue from Derrida’s juxtaposition of conditional and unconditional hospitality (Derrida [1997] 2000, 25), Spivak contrasts her own duplex of hospitality: one revolving around the figure of the immigrant and the other that of the resident alien. If we stretch the parallel a bit further, an immigrant in the metropolitan West belongs to the conditional hospitality of postcolonial diaspora and globalization. A resident alien must then mirror Derrida’s concept of unconditional hospitality in the sense that the figure defies conditions of law and citizenship. Spivak places the resident alien beyond the dyad of the immigrant-guest from the Third World and the citizen-host of the First World. However, the parallel between Derrida and Spivak ends right there, for Spivak questions the rigid, stable and therefore conditioned binary of immigrant-guest and citizen-host in Derrida’s putatively unconditional hospitality. A resident alien for Spivak proposes a new paradigm which she calls “hospitality from below” in which the colonizer is guest to the colonized host (Spivak 2002, 54). Spivak’s intriguing reading of Tagore’s Gora yields an illuminating perspective on hospitality vis-à-vis postcoloniality. The fact that her concept of ‘hospitality from below’ is premised on anagnorisis—the critical discovery of Gora’s outsiderness at a moment when he felt an unassailable insiderness—its resonance with settler colonialism is unmistakable. Settler colonialism institutes the false consciousness of nativeness in figures who refuse to recognize their resident alienness. The discourse of hospitality to immigrants not only perpetuates this ideology of nativeness, it also forestalls the moment of anagnorisis; the task of postcolonial literature and theory is, as Spivak seems to imply, not only to distinguish between a multicultural/immigrant model of hospitality and hospitality from below, but also to precipitate the moment of anagnorisis. If we summarize Spivak’s theorization of ‘hospitality from below,’ foregrounding of anagnorisis would intimate at least four key movements: (i) a subtle reversal in the hostguest binary in which the native reappropriates the role of host from the colonizer, (ii) the native critiques the law of the father, (iii) anagnorisis reveals a space of intimacy between colonizer and native; and (iv) the possibility of ‘a wild justice.’ If settler colonialism institutes the colonizer as host thereby turning the colonized into a perpetual resident alien, any attempt at decolonization must reverse the host-guest binary by turning the son against the law of the father even at the cost of endorsing a wild form of justice in which violence becomes necessary and justified. Spivak’s notion of wild justice refers to Mahashweta Devi’s story “The Hunt” in which Mary, daughter of a tribal woman raped by her white master, decides to kill her pursuer by luring him to a secret ravine, playing a game of love with him, Puspa Damai 24 I panic and roll away, thinking that the rat’s violent intentions might actually be amorous. What if I’ve dropped into the body of a rat? What if I’m about to get fucked by another rat? Shit. But no, I feel human. I am human. A human who rolls away from a rat. (Alexie 2007, 131) With this encounter, Zits completes the Ghost Dance by bringing his father back. Zits, who is named after his pimples, must co-coexist with, co-inhabit the alley with, and evolve with a rat. He not only has this intimate relationship with his father, with Indian-killing agents, and with ‘real’ Indian warriors, but also with animals. His perpetual flight refutes any possibility of a fixed, univocal and stable identity, and his frequent time-traveling, his constant deaths and reappearances alternately as a victim and a victimizer make his existence inseparable from simultaneous revelation and refutation of anagnorisis. Yellow Bird offered hospitality to a mass-murdering bandit, whom he considers worthier of welcome than many Americans of his time. Alexie reserves the honor of welcoming a “foster-kid with a history of fire setting, time traveling, body shifting and mass murder contemplation” (Alexie 2007, 173) to Dave, a white cop who eventually finds a home for Zits, who believes that by agreeing to live with Dave’s brother and his wife, Zits “can save [Dave] too” (177). L2. Conclusion Deploying the concept of hospitality in the context of postcolonial theory to study Native American literature enables us to revisit the history of colonialism in the United States. Particularly relevant to this task is Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘hospitality from below’ according to which the failure of decolonization for the natives would be corrected only when natives re-appropriate the position of host. Central to Spivak’s concept of hospitality is the figure of the resident alien whose identity depends on anagnorisis, an interplay between native and foreigner, and host and guest. While Spivak makes the reversal of the host-guest binary, parricide and wild justice of the machete (in which the hunter is hunted down) indispensable to the reinscription of ‘aboriginality,’ the three novels by Native American writers we have looked at in this chapter transform the meaning of both resident alien and wild justice by opening these concepts to include non-human animals and the planet as well. By narrating the stories of three eccentric and singular individuals, Yellow Bird, Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie question the guest-host binary by demonstrating that hospitality worthy of its name is bigger than the individuals involved in either welcoming or being welcomed. A politics of hospitality, they seem to imply, capable of generating energies powerful enough to precipitate the events of decolonization must come to terms with the land, the environment, and the shared destiny of the human and the non-human together. L2. References Alexie, Sherman. 2007. Flight. New York: Black Cat. Allen, Paula Gunn. 1990. “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Ceremony’.” American Indian Quarterly 14 (4): 379-386. Allmendinger, Blake. 1998. Ten Most Wanted: The New Western Literature. New York: Routledge. Hospitality from Below? Native Americans in the Host-Guest Binary 25 Beidler, Peter. 2002. “Animals and Theme in Ceremony.” In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook, 17-22. Oxford: Oxford UP. Bhabha, Homi K. 2011. Our Neighbors, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bird, Yellow. 2003. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. Grass Valley: Poitin P. Castillo, Richard Griswold del. 1990. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 1996. “American Indian Intellectualism and the New American Story.” American Indian Quarterly 20 (1): 57-76. Damai, Puspa. 2012. “Welcoming Strangers: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Derrida, Jaques. (1997) 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Duformantelle Invites Jaques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP. Devi, Mahasweta. 1995. “The Hunt.” In Imaginary Maps, translated by Gayatri C. Spivak, 1-18. New York: Routledge. Freed, Joanne Lipson. 2017. Haunting Encounters: The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Hixon, Walter. 2013. American Settler Colonialism: A History. New York: Palgrave. Indian Affairs, US Department of the Interior. “Programs and Services.” [Accessed online on December 16, 2017]. Marshall, John. “Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia.” PBS: The Archives of the West 1806-1848. [Accessed online on December 16, 2017]. Mbembe, Achile. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: U of California P. Mudge, Zacharia Atwell. 1871. Foot-prints of Roger Williams: A Biography. New York: Carlton and Lanahan. Owens, Louis. 1992. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novels. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. Rosello, Mireille. 2001. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford UP. Silko, Leslie Mormon. 2006. Ceremony. New York: Penguin. Silko, Leslie Marmon and Ellen L. Arnold. 1994. “Listening to the Spirits: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.” In Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, 162-196. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Spivak, Gayatri C. 2002. “Resident Alien.” In Relocating Postcolonialism, edited by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson, 47-65. London: Blackwell. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2015. The Settler Colonial Present. London: Palgrave. Weaver, Jace. 2003. “Leslie Marmon Silko.” In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Case Book, edited by Allan Chavkin, 213-222. Oxford: Oxford UP. Williams, Roger. 1997. A Key into the Language of America. Bedford: Applewood. Williams, Roger. 2007. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Eugene: Wipf and Stock. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Practice of Colonialism. London: Cassell. 26 Language Interaction and Hospitality: Combating the Hosted-Host Figure 27 L1. LANGUAGE INTERACTION AND HOSPITALITY: COMBATING THE HOSTED-HOST FIGURE1 Amanda Ellen Gerke Universidad de Salamanca The limits of my language are the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Against the backdrop of political turmoil surrounding the reception of migrants and refugees, notions of hospitality are at the forefront of political rhetoric and of various critical and literary analyses. The concept of hospitality is tied to the process of constructing dominant and subordinate identities, as well as to relational dynamics of knowledge and power. Furthermore, power is generated in relation to the Other; it creates the field of what is acceptable and what is not, creating a set of knowledge and ethics as well as giving sense to a worldview while, at the same time, building its limits. The action-oriented notion of hospitality is, moreover, anchored in the access—and its control. Receiving and being received are practical, social engagements comprising a complex system of roles which are constantly constructed and deconstructed. It is interactive, requiring equal participation by both host and guest. The dynamics of interactive hospitality can also be understood in relation to the concept of language interaction in that discourse itself is intrinsically a social phenomenon requiring the exchange or the withholding of knowledge in a social setting. The key to understanding language interaction is to recognize the power relations involved in social structures through the construction of ideologies and speaker identities. When the knowledge-power tandem in the hospitality relationship is viewed alongside linguistic agency or is recognized in congruence with speech acts, it in turn occupies its own space; it shakes up the rules of engagement between host and guest and poses the following questions: When hospitality roles are formed among migrants, how does the relationship manifest? Is there a push and pull connected to a hosted-host identity? In Junot Díaz’s (1968-) “Invierno” from This is How You Lose Her (2012) and Sandra Cisneros’s (1954-) The House on Mango Street (1984), the concept of linguistic space helps demonstrate the interplay of different occupied spaces that uncover overarching themes of knowledge, power, and oppression. In both collections, migrant families must come to terms with occupying a different, simultaneously physical and non-physical, spatiality: a geographic reality and a verbal reality. In The House on Mango Street, those who ‘No Speak English’ are reduced to occupying the bottom rung of society, and, in “Invierno,” speaking English is seen as the key to gaining access to the outside world. Norman Fairclough (2010) 1 This article was made possible thanks to the financial help provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach” (ref. FFI 2012–31250), directed by Prof. Jesús Benito Sánchez, and by the European Project “Hospitality and European Film 2017-1-ES01-KA203-038181” directed by Prof. Ana María Manzanas Calvo. Amanda Ellen Gerke 28 develops this notion of access and power and assigns a conceptual function to those who control this discursive access. The powerful enactors or “gatekeepers” have control over the flux of knowledge and access to discourse (47). This chapter claims that in both collections, figures alluding to a hosted-host identity permeate both physical and linguistic spaces, taking on a gatekeeper role, and that the passage through the gate becomes a driving force among the characters: key players in both collections observe that language barriers create powerlessness but, through linguistic and physical agency, they gain power. L2. The Hosted-host Identity Thinking about hospitality is not only to think about a generous and cordial welcome. Thinking about hospitality, more importantly, is to think about openings and recognition. Although boundaries form an inherent part of the notion of hospitality, without which such a notion would perhaps be unnecessary, hospitality, I want to argue, is about opening, without abolishing, these boundaries and giving spaces to the stranger where recognition on both sides would be possible. —Mustafa Dikeç “Pera Peras Poros: Longings for Spaces of Hospitality” The concept of giving spaces to the guest is impregnated with the notion that the recognition of rights is extended into physical spaces and a mutual understanding of each party’s vulnerabilities (Dikeç 2002, 229). However, even in the ideal situation in which the host and guest maintain those boundaries, the (perhaps) primordial need to exercise power does not escape the mind of each party. From this, hospitable violence manifests. When Dikeç speaks of the opening of spaces and recognition, hospitality in its ideal state is achieved. However, the giving or assigning of spaces also may lead to (in)hospitable situations in which control, oppression, and concepts of patriarchy overpower the host-guest relationship and construct a violent space of imprisonment. Understanding hospitality as a “refusal to conceive the host and guest as pre-constructed identities” and that it is “about a recognition that they are mutually constitutive of each other and thus relational” (Dikeç 2002, 239), conceptualizes the planes of hospitality, then, as deconstructed through actions and interactions and divided into sub-levels of hospitable identities. If the host-guest relationship relates to who is able to conquer or be conquered, the guest attempting to maintain some sort of hierarchical control may assume what I call a hosted-host identity and therefore create a subdivision of roles, fulfilling a need to exert power over subaltern figures. The hosted-host in “Invierno” and The House on Mango Street takes the form of the patriarchal figure. Here, the hosted-host is the dominant migrant male who exercises control over the subordinate matriarchal group (migrant women and children). Therefore, the migrant female and children are not only guests in the primary host space (the host country), but also guests in the secondary space (the home) governed by the hosted-host. The conceptual hosted-host also finds congruency in notions of power-plays in discourse directly rooted in the construction of social knowledge. Teun van Dijk, in Discourse and Language Interaction and Hospitality: Combating the Hosted-Host Figure 29 Knowledge: A Sociocognitive Approach (2014), states that since knowledge is socially shared and distributed among members of communities, it is through actions and interactions that the society-cognition interface manifests (142-143). Knowledge is often represented in episodic memory and represents the everyday experiences of social actors, including their own perceptions of their situational environment. Furthermore, this social knowledge is acquired during socialization alongside the acquisition of language thus creating a “semantic memory” representing the knowledge system of the community (van Dijk 2014, 143). In terms of designated ‘space’ and ‘knowledge,’ the migrant males in Díaz’s and Cisneros’s novels have, in a sense, reacted to their own guest-status and have subdivided those within their own community. They must recognize that they are given spaces and must not conquer the primary host. As recompense, and in order to regain conqueror status, they take on the role of the violent host in order to achieve supremacy. The migrant male’s modus operandi utilizes a set of strategies rooted in the knowledge/power tandem, as well as the control of physical (and sometimes linguistic) spaces to regain control. The space which the hosted-host constructs and controls, takes form in the concept of community. This point is crucial in understanding that the primary host, essentially, does not have as much power over the primary guest as one may assume, due to the fact that communities are defined by shared beliefs, knowledge and language and by their characteristic practices (Van Dijk 2014, 180), each of these aspects being formed by epistemic knowledge procedures. Even within a space ‘designated’ (figuratively or not) to a migrant group, it is those within the community who create, define, shape, maintain and govern its spaces and thus, create micro-hegemonies towards which they orient their actions (Blommaert & Varis 2011, 2). I claim that it is the patriarchal group that controls the community and the spaces within, yielding the hosted-host as the community’s powerful enactor, remaining elusive to the primary host. In the migrants’ case, the hosted-host relies on the transfer of socialized knowledge and language from the home-country and brings this into the new space in order to maintain dominance. In Díaz’s “Invierno,” it is young Yunior’s father who assumes the role of hosted-host upon bringing his family to the US from the Dominican Republic. Having spent much time already in the host country before bringing his wife and children over, he ‘welcomes’ his family to the new country only to keep them contained in the family apartment. Here, the opening of spaces is rather the assigning of a prison-like space. This act keeps his family in a guest position, even in their own home. His time in the US before his family arrives allowed a special type of access to the host-place, gained through time, experience, and knowledge. This includes seemingly banal knowledge about everyday tasks and acts that, with a deeper understanding, demonstrates the dichotomy of knowledge and ignorance between guest and host. He has gained access not only to the host-world, but also has special access to the subdivision of host spaces, taking full control. When the family first arrives in the apartment, he shows his wife and children how to run the sinks and flush the toilets (Díaz 2012, 122), simple acts that subtly draw attention to the father’s dominance. Books and TV are a source of knowledge in the apartment and the father’s actions show his integration by his fully taking part in them; “Those first few weeks in the States, Papi spent a great deal of his home time downstairs with his books or in front of the TV. He said little to us that wasn’t disciplinary, which didn’t surprise us” (125). The seemingly mundane tasks he shows his Amanda Ellen Gerke 30 family and his interaction with artifacts of the host country is a firm reiteration of his knowledge of the host world, of which his family remains ignorant. Yunior’s father constantly sets up situations of power and control by reminding his family of their shortcomings, a psychological tactic that ensures his position: Papi had a thing with shoelaces. I didn’t know how to tie them properly and when I put together a rather formidable knot, Papi would bend down and pull it apart with one tug. [. . .] Rafa showed me how [. . .] but when Papi was breathing down my neck, his hand on a belt, I couldn’t perform; I looked at my father like my laces were live wires he wanted me to touch together. (126) Reflecting on Foucault’s statements on the “correlative constriction” of fields of knowledge (1977, 27) and Van Dijk’s posit that societal knowledge is interactive (2014, 142-143), knowledge and ignorance are seen as actions that push and pull societal members. In the case of the hosted-host, the ‘knowledge actions’ are what sets them apart from their primary guest status and allows their dominant place. Yunior’s father exercises his power over his two sons with punishment and intimidation. He does not allow his family members to leave the apartment and his chastisements are harsh. He was free with his smacks and we spent whole afternoons on Punishment Row—our bedroom—where we had to lay on our beds and not get off, because if he burst in and caught us at the window, staring out at the beautiful snow, he would pull our ears and smack us and then we would have to kneel in the corner for a few hours. If we messed that up, joking around or cheating, he would force us to kneel down on the cutting side of a coconut grater and only when we were bleeding and whimpering would he let us up. (Díaz 2012, 130) The father’s authority is also metaphorically connected to the host environment around the family apartment, to which he also has undeniable access. In “Invierno,” winter is a penetrating force that both reminds the family of their status as guests—as the weather in New York is in stark contrast to that of the island home—and is also evidence of the father’s access to the host country. That is, while the family is confined deeper into the apartment because of the cold, “the apartment was cold in the morning and leaving the bed was a serious torment” (124), the father seems unaffected by it, even wearing short sleeve shirts. In fact, he is not only immune to the cold but also embraces it and uses it to keep his family contained. Winter, to the father, represents his integration into the host country where, to his family, winter is a threatening reminder of their guest status. After Yunior’s head is shaved by his father, Mami is concerned, “the cold is going to make him sick” (129). In response, Papi places his cold hand on Yunior’s head to remind his family that the cold is indeed a threat and that he is a part of it. The host-guest relationship within this family is further highlighted by the shift in behaviors and demeanor of the family members while in their ‘prison.’ As the family apartment is the space assigned to the family, Dikeç’s recognition of rights is seen in the father’s position of conqueror and the family’s position of conquered. The mother, who back in her home enjoyed the freedom of being nobody’s guest, is now met with a violent contrast and submits to her husband’s control. As Yunior reflects, “Mami, who had been our authority on the Island, was dwindling” (132) and her once fierce nature was subdued: “My mother was not a woman easily cowed, but in the States she let my father roll over her” (138). The father’s Language Interaction and Hospitality: Combating the Hosted-Host Figure 31 power as the hosted-host impacts Yunior’s brother as well. Rafa, like his mother, was spirited back at home, but when it comes to his father, he “obeyed him with a scrupulousness he had never shown anybody” (136). Yunior observes that in their father’s house, Rafa “had turned into some kind of muchacho bueno. [. . .] It was as if the passage to the U.S. had burned out the sharpest part of him” (136). Both for Rafa and Mami, the decomposition from free-spirits to contained guests is quick and sharp. They are prisoners in their own home, assigned a violent space and forced within a knowledge/power tandem that maintains their position. In The House on Mango Street the same attributes of the father in “Invierno” extend from the individual level, to a wide-spread patriarchal control over an entire neighborhood by many ‘fathers.’ In this novel, many spaces are constructed, occupied and assigned. Like “Invierno” the father-figure(s) fight back against primary host by exercising violent power moves and assigning spaces. As primary guests, the patriarchal group is placed into a sector of Chicago, designated for impoverished migrants, namely Latinos. In The House on Mango Street Cisneros presents concepts of ‘place,’ the space that Latinos occupy, on different planes. The first layer that makes up the conceptual area of the hosted-hosts’ space is in the contrast between places designated for Latinos and those that are not. On a broader plane, it is the Latino neighborhood itself. As Esperanza reflects, “Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who got here by mistake” (28). The people outside of Esperanza’s space are afraid of those inside; they do not venture into the neighborhood ‘allocated’ to this Latino group. Similarly, the Latino group finds it difficult to venture into the primary-hosts’ space, exemplifying the push and pull of spatial divisions. On the one hand, the people in Esperanza’s neighborhood are socially designated an area, impoverished and isolated from the non-Latinos. However, there is an internal pull to keep Esperanza’s neighbors inside these boundaries on the part of the male migrant, the hostedhost. The rules of engagement inside the community are kept by gender divisions; “The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls” (8). Esperanza finds herself in a setting designated to her and her Latino neighbors, but even within this space she is delineated by the shame that comes with this assigned space: “You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there” (5). Karen W. Martin (2008), reflects on these layers of space in The House on Mango Street and states that these designations “reflect the dynamic nature of urban community buildings and reinforce race, class and gender hierarchies imposed externally by the dominant Anglo culture, as well as those internally imposed upon the inscribed space of Mango Street by Latino patriarchy” (50). Martin also implies, however, that Esperanza is not only aware of her designation, but also attempts to negotiate her way through the spaces: Esperanza plays into hegemonic forces’ stereotypical notion of poor Latino space, using these tenements to evoke sympathy so that she can gain access to the bounded, privileged space of the canteen. [. . .] Her temporary negotiation of access to this idealized space points out the hostile, unwelcoming nature of partitioned space for the outsider who attempts to penetrate it. (57) Amanda Ellen Gerke 32 Esperanza, as representative of the migrant female, understands where she has been situated and, throughout the novel, (figuratively) negotiates her way through and out of it. Notably, the female space designated to Esperanza and her neighbors reflects a female domestic life that mirrors the prison-like experience that Mami is subjected to in “Invierno.” The women in The House on Mango Street are also secluded in the home in a type of nonspace in comparison to the ‘outside male world’ but with even more subjection than in Díaz’s story. On Mango Street, women are placed on the floor of the home: “a woman’s place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star, the one that appears early just in time to rise and catch the hind legs behind the sink, beneath the four-clawed tub, under the swollen floorboards nobody fixes, in the corner of her eyes” (31). The nature of the female migrant in Cisneros’s novel is inverted in her new space, similar to that seen in “Invierno.” Just as Yunior’s mother’s “once fierce nature is subdued” (138), Esperanza’s great-grandmother’s spirited nature is also overturned by the Latino patriarch: “My great-grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That’s the way he did it” (10-11). Although this episode presumably occurred in Mexico, it demonstrates the carrying-over of patriarchal control into the new space dominated by the hosted-host. The oppressed domestic space that the women in The House on Mango Street are assigned is passed on through the generations. It is a symbol of male-domination that pushes the migrant women further into their place on the floor; it is a dreaded and forsaken, yet inevitable inheritance. In the case of Alicia, who has to take her place on the floor because her mother has died, she has to juggle her dreams of studying and also the reality of inheriting “her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness” (31). Alicia represents the woman who, despite her intellect and strength, cannot overcome the oppression that passes through her bloodlines. She who “studies all night and sees the mice, the ones her father says do not exist. Is afraid of nothing except four-legged fur. And fathers” (32). The mice, as a symbol, here embody the oppression that Alicia experiences and tries to reject. However, as her father states that the mice do not exist, that the oppression is not real, her father exerts more control over her by denying there is even a problem. Alicia is afraid of her position (the mice) and also ‘Fathers,’ the patriarchal system that keeps her there and which her daughters will also inevitably acquire. Esperanza, like Alicia, fears her inheritance and what she may become. She sees her fate in the experience of her great-grandmother who was reduced to looking, “out her window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow,” (11) and as Esperanza, named after her great-grandmother and therefore tied to a certain plot in life, rejects this: “I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window” (11). The window itself is another strong metaphor for the domestic space the hosted-host has assigned the female migrant and children. In both The House on Mango Street and “Invierno,” the window serves as a physical space for the bottom-rung guests, the imprisoned. The window is the door’s counterpart; the hosted-host has access to the door, symbolizing not only his entry to the outside world that the migrant female is denied, but also the notion that he is the key-holder, warden, or gatekeeper of the cloistered-like experience of the secondary guests. In Díaz’s story, the metaphor is more clear-cut. The mother and children in “Invierno” are not allowed outside, they are not even allowed to pass through the front door. Instead, they see the wintry outside world through windows: “Beads of water gathered on the Language Interaction and Hospitality: Combating the Hosted-Host Figure 33 windows like bees and we had to wipe the glass to see outside” (121). It is no surprise that the windows themselves are threatening—wiping the glass to see outside is dangerous—as if they were covered with bees that would sting if the boys attempted to look out. These ‘bees’ are delineative of the winter weather that seems to aid the father in keeping his family imprisoned. In The House on Mango Street, the despotism that windows and doors represent is subtler, yet reveals a reality even more severe as it is hereditary and unavoidable. The migrant woman is not always kept inside by physical violence like in “Invierno,” however, her place by the window represents the invisible violence of patriarchal oppression over the female migrant experiencing various degrees of helplessness. Rafaela, a secondary character, for example, imagines herself throwing her hair out the window like Rapunzel to escape her situation. Instead, she throws out a clothesline which the children use to send up the coconut and papaya juice she asks them to buy. Rafaela “wishes there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet like the island” (79-80). Instead of a magical mane that will lead her to freedom, she remains imprisoned at the window with only a rope, symbolizing her bondage. Esperanza’s own house on Mango Street alludes to the prison that holds her hostage: “It’s small and red with tight steps in front and the windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places and the front door so swollen you have to push hard to get in,” (4) and with the windows barred so the family won’t fall out (or get out). In both “Invierno” and The House on Mango Street, the patriarchal figure(s), in an effort to regain some of the power lost as a primary guest in the host country, creates a space for the migrant women and children, maintained by physical violence and psychological strongholds. The matriarchal figures are kept in assigned domesticity, in the kitchen, on the floor, and by the window, but their positions are also maintained by an invisible ideological chain passed from generation to generation of women (and men). There is, however, a different kind of space occupied throughout both story and novel that takes form in a less ‘tangible’ way; the space of language. It is also keyed by the hosted-host figure whose position is strengthened by his control over this domain as well. L2. Language Interaction The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind. —Arika Okrent In the Land of Invented Languages Language as interaction forms a greater part of the terms of hospitality than any other aspect. The rules of engagement between a host and guest are continuously mulled over and reconstructed. The language system surrounding their interaction does not just reveal how each party should behave, but rather it explains the workings of the human mind and the intricacies involved in identity formation and reinforcement. The concept of language Amanda Ellen Gerke 40 One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I’ll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumble. Rat’s they’ll ask. Bums, I’ll say and I’ll be happy. (87) The rats in the attic—much like Alicia’s mice who haunt her on the floor, the ones her father denies exist and in essence denies Alicia’s oppression—are now replaced with guests in Esperanza’s attic. Her dream home will not be filled with evidence of her oppression like the scampering feet of the allegorical mice, but rather will be filled with a marginalized person who finds refuge in Esperanza’s home. She becomes a powerful host, gracious, generous, and welcoming. Esperanza’s language on the page becomes the movement of her feet and redefines her role as savior and free-walker. L2. Conclusion The concept of linguistic agency, as a byproduct of the interactive nature of knowledge and power, leads to the understanding that the action that occurs in speech acts gives agency. As we have seen in this analysis, it may manifest in a muting, an utterance, or in an attempt at breaking down linguistic barriers. Or, as Esperanza dreams, a chance to recreate, or rewrite, individual identity from a clean page as white as snow. This agency is precisely what I claim creates a space that has a trifold affect: one, it questions the rules of engagement in the hostguest relationship and reveals a substratum for a complicated host-guest relationship. In turn, it also pushes the patriarchal figure outside of his domain of control and, finally, it allows for the matriarchal voice to emerge as the ultimate mobile element in the host-guest equation. In “Invierno” and The House on Mango Street, the hosted-host exercises control over a perceived paltry matriarchal group of migrant women and children swept in to a domestic space that is governed not only by the primary host but also by a secondary, more violent and intrusive host. Women are silenced in both stories. Women are placed on the floor by the window and inherit a dynamic, yet fixed identity, from which they cannot escape. However, linguistic agency turns the tide and its interactive nature leads to a repossession of space, identity, and facility. Just as Mami’s voice consociates movement and freedom, Esperanza’s voice is found through an analogous parallel of physical and linguistic agency. Throughout the stories, notions of language restriction and inhibited enunciations are coupled with images of walking. One’s feet trace along one’s place in the world and although they want to forge a new path, they are bound to a prescribed labyrinth with no semblant exit. However, the matriarchal figures in both “Invierno” and The House on Mango Street break out of the hosted-host’s control by overthrowing their gatekeepers and, in turn, utilize linguistic movement to gain power and agency and allude to the power of the authors themselves in their diasporic context. Both Cisneros and Díaz give voice and freedom to the Other through their work. Both authors allocate space on their pages, rejecting a community’s assigned place, and act as a vessel of language that frees ‘the ones who cannot out.’ L2. References Language Interaction and Hospitality: Combating the Hosted-Host Figure 41 Betz, Regina M. 2012. “Chicana ‘Belonging’ in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” Rocky Mountain Review. Special Issue: 18-33. Blommaert, Jan and Piia Varis. 2011. “Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity.” Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 2: 1-13. Blommaert, Jan, James Collins and Stef Slembrouck. 2005. “Spaces of Multilingualism.” Language and Communication 23 (3): 197-216. Cisneros, Sandra. 1984. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage. Derrida, Jacques. (1996) 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP. Derrida, Jaques. (1997) 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Duformantelle Invites Jaques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP. Diaz, Junot. 2012. This is How You Lose Her. London: Faber. Dikeç, Mustafa. 2002. "Pera Peras Poros: Longings for Spaces of Hospitality." Theory, Culture & Society 19 (1-2): 227-247. Dikeç, Mustafa, Nigel Clark and Clive Barnett. 2009. “Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time.” Paragraph 32 (1): 1-14. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London and New York: Longman. Fairclough, Norman. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. 2nd ed. New York: Routlege. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by AM Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Gumperz, John. J., ed. 1982a. Discourse Strategies, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Gumperz, John. J., ed. 1982b. Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Manzanas Calvo, Ana María. 2013. “Junot Díaz’s ‘Otravida, Otravez’ and Hospitalia: The Workings of Hostile Hospitality.” Journal of Modern Literature 37 (1): 107-123. Martin, Karen. 2008. “The House (of Memory) on Mango Street: Sandra Cisneros’s Counter- Poetics of Space.” South Atlantic Review 73 (1): 50-67. Okrent, Arika. 2009. In the Land of Invented Languages. New York: Spiegel and Grau. Ramanathan, Vaidehi, ed. 2013. Language Policies and (Dis) Citizenship: Rights, Access, Pedagogies. New York: Multilingual Matters. Van Dijk, Teun A. 1993. "Principles of critical discourse analysis." Discourse & Society 4 (2): 249-283. Van Dijk, Teun A. 1996. "Discourse, Power and Access." In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard, 84-104. London and New York: Routledge. Van Dijk, Teun A., ed. 1997. Discourse as Social Interaction, vol. 2. London: Sage. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2014. Discourse and Knowledge: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wittegenstein, Ludwig. 2013. The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. London: Routlege. Wodak, Ruth and Norman Fairclough. 2004. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. 42 Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives 43 L1. LATINO IMMIGRANTS AT THE THRESHOLD: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACH TO HOSPITALITY IN US BARRIOCENTRIC NARRATIVES1 Luisa Mª González Rodríguez Universidad de Salamanca In a globalized world where large masses of people from poor or unsafe countries have been forced to migrate, the governments of First-World countries have adopted protective measures to contain massive displacement. The restrictive policies implemented by rich countries have contributed to reinforcing socioeconomic and spatial boundaries that become a demonstration of the host’s power over the guest (Pheng 2013) and unveil the oppressive side of hospitality by redefining it as hostility and racism (Ben Jelloun 1999; Dikeç 2002). The physical walls erected to stop immigrants at the borders of each country have not only promoted the construction of the Other as a threat or an enemy, but they have also resulted in the provocation of the threshold, where the collision of cultural values and different languages comes to the foreground. Within cities, psychic inner walls separate neighborhoods by using subtle barriers such as socioeconomic, ethno-racial, cultural, or linguistic parameters that stigmatize whole urban ghettos and widen the gap between privileged and marginalized populations (Watkins 2007). As a result, inner cities emerge where language is used by the host country as an exclusionary weapon that hinders hospitality and challenges the notion of the barrio as a habitable place. Therefore, an analysis of the verbal interactions in these ghettoized neighborhoods will raise questions of identity, hospitality/hostility issues, and power relationships related to the ownership of both physical and linguistic spaces. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ([1961] 1979, 254) pronouncement that language is inextricably connected to hospitality because it allows us to share the world with the Other, this chapter explores controversial issues related to language exchanges and linguistic tensions that spring up when power, hospitality, and space are being questioned and contested. US barriocentric novels vividly portray how linguistic barricades separate outsiders from insiders by delimiting a psychical and linguistic territory where the immigrant is at a disadvantage in a decidedly monolingual host country. This article examines the metaphor of hospitality in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Piri Thomas’s Down these Mean Streets through the magnifying lens of language use and code-switching in order to gain a deeper insight into the ways in which ethnolinguistic identities are constructed and power relationships are negotiated and challenged within US marginalized neighborhoods. In these novels, the use of the home language versus the host language brings to the fore other concerns connected to displacement and unstable resettlement as well as identity issues that reflect a fractured mode of belonging. Moreover, the use of Spanish, or Spanish interference in English, in an essentially English monolingual society separates individuals on the basis of race or social class and, thus, language becomes a weapon of exclusion used by the host society to negatively stereotype lower-class 1 This study is part of a larger research project entitled "Las fronteras de la hospitalidad en los estudios culturales de Estados Unidos y Europa" funded by a grant from the Regional Ministry of Culture of the Autonomous Government of Castile and Leon (ref. number SA342U14) and directed by Prof. Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo. Luisa Mª González Rodríguez 44 immigrants. A further aim is to explore how language is used in these two autobiographical novels to establish sociocultural boundaries and activate different social roles or multiple facets of their shattered identities. L2. Language as a Weapon of Sociospatial Exclusion The House on Mango Street ([1984] 1991), an autobiographical novel written by the Chicano writer Sandra Cisneros (1954–), subtly depicts how language can be used to delimit the boundaries between majority and minority society, and also serves to construct negative sociolinguistic stereotypes that are tinged with xenophobia. In fact, the novel addresses the notion that language divergence becomes a symbolic strategy for maintaining spatial, social, and ethnic hierarchies. The Latinos living within the ghettoized community of Mango Street become conscious of the fact that mastering the English language might entail prestige and acceptance while speaking Spanish, the lower status language, might provoke xenophobic reactions in the host society. When language is racialized in this way it is usually perceived as a hindrance to “the natural progress of social mobility” and “as an insurmountable barrier to such progress” (Urciuoli 2013, 18). As this novel clearly emphasizes, the notion of hospitality is closely connected to issues of language and identity. The immigrant is forced to adhere to the host’s cultural patterns in order not to be perceived as a stranger or an ungrateful person who refuses to accept the cultural values that will grant him protection. The insider-outsider dynamic reveals the mechanisms whereby language divergence contributes to strengthening the host-society’s systems of exclusion. Forcing the immigrant to speak the host’s language is the first sign of hostility as he is not only stigmatized but also situated at a disadvantage, particularly regarding social interaction. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza, the narratorprotagonist, sheds light on American society’s indifference and hostility towards immigrants by narrating her father’s experience: “My father says when he came to this country he ate hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew. He doesn’t eat hamandeggs anymore” (77). This experience illustrates the ways in which linguistic discrimination gives rise to the establishment of different hierarchies of belonging in which the immigrant is relegated to the lowest position. By disallowing the guest to use his heritage language, the host is also dispossessing him of his identity. Thus, minority members who do not master the English language become invisible to the mainstream society. An example of this is Geraldo, the main character of the vignette “Geraldo No Last name,” who, after being killed by a car that hit him and drove away without stopping, is described as “[j]ust another brazer who didn’t speak English. Just another wetback. You know the kind. The ones who always look ashamed” (66). Geraldo, a Mexican who is unable to speak English, embodies the social figure of the stranger who is relegated to a position below the threshold of social recognition. Pierre Bordieu in Language and Symbolic Power contends that “[s]peakers lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence” (1991, 55). Furthermore, the language politics imposed by the monolingual, hegemonic society also serve to construct negative stereotypes, thus generating low selfesteem issues and feelings of self-hatred among immigrants once those prejudices are internalized by them. Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives 45 As this novel clearly illustrates, language divergence often gives rise to segregation and prejudice since the majority group relies on norms of language choice to exert their power and manage foreigners. This creates two spheres of relations among immigrants that, as some sociolinguists have pointed out, are established along lines that connect social hierarchy or prestige and language (Bailey 2001). In diglossic communities, a rigid distinction is established between the low-prestige language spoken in the inner sphere among friends, neighbors, and family and the high-prestige variety spoken in the outersphere (Montes-Granado 2012; Urciuoli 2013). In the Chicano neighborhood depicted in The House on Mango Street, Spanish-speaking dwellers seem to be used to interacting in a mixture of English and Spanish and code-switching is considered a natural part of daily communication within this inner sphere. Although Cisneros uses Spanish sparingly in this novel, her heritage language looms steadily throughout her stories as an identity marker. The English-dominant narrator-protagonist intersperses Mexican cultural words like “frijoles” (37, 38), “tamales” (47), “tembleque” (51), “las comadres” (91, 103) or “los espíritus” (63) to describe the simple daily life of the barrio. Spanish is the language used to express emotions in intimate domestic spaces; therefore, when Esperanza’s father has to tell her that her grandfather has died he resorts to Spanish: “Your abuelito is dead, Papa says early one morning in my room. Está muerto” (56). Within the private space of the household and neighborhood, both languages are mixed because there are no clear boundaries between the two languages, as can be inferred from Cisneros’s vignettes. In fact, it could be argued that “in everyday speech, code-switching adds extra layers of meaning, defines situations and expresses ethnic identity simply through the chosen language” (Martin 2005, 408). Moreover, code-switching practices allow Latinos to overcome the English versus Spanish dichotomy, as well as reaffirm their hybrid cultural and linguistic identities. Yet, the Chicano characters are painfully aware that Spanish and Spanglish are only allowed at home or within the marginal spaces of the barrio, whereas English is required in outer-sphere interactions. Unfortunately, the “language that works for bilingual at home and around the neighborhood is disallowed by outsiders who take to themselves the power to judge language difference in moral terms” (Urciuoli 2013, 35). Interactions in Spanish or interference of Spanish into English are usually equated with marginalized, impoverished inner cities. These prejudices enacted through language induce a feeling of shame among minority members that force them to abandon their mother tongue for fear of being discriminated against by the majority society. Moreover, the forced choice between their native language and the host language also gives rise to identity issues both among immigrants who feel more attached to their home country as well as among those with a hyphenated identity. L2. Language, Identity, and Power Relations In Cisneros’s novel, the main issues posed by the dichotomy of the use of homeland versus host country language create a breach between immigrants who are willing to accept assimilation and sameness as a sign of empowerment and those who prefer to protect their linguistic space in order to maintain the link that connects them to their native culture and values, as well as to delimit identitarian borders. Whereas some of the Mexicans depicted in the novel perceive language as a tool to express and preserve their identity and, therefore, Luisa Mª González Rodríguez 46 they cling to Spanish; others, like Esperanza, her family, and Mamacita’s husband, think that they need to master the English language to achieve new levels of empowerment in terms of economic and political participation. The latter consider that being competent in English is crucial for overcoming the barriers erected by the receiving country and that it is the first step towards becoming full citizens. In so far as language, “dictates expectations others have of us and opportunities we are afforded, expectations and opportunities that help us rise or constrain us to remain where we are” (Domínguez-Rosado 2015, xiii), immigrants will be forced to admit that in order to be recognized they will have to yield to conditional hospitality and accept the rules imposed on them. Language racialization results in negative group identity, with some members seeking membership into the mainstream society by speaking the high-status language. However, Mamacita, the main character of the vignette “No Speak English,” a chapter entirely devoted to the theme of language and hospitality, refuses to accept both the language and culture of the host country. Language is crucial for preserving an individual’s social identity and, therefore, she refuses to lose her identity by yielding to the dominant English-speaking community. This character feels homesick; she is a foreigner in a monolingual country with a language “that sounds like tin” (78). She never goes out and Esperanza wonders why: “Somebody said because she’s too fat, somebody because of the three flights of stairs, but I believe she does not come out because she is afraid to speak English” (77). Mamacita does not want to be assimilated by the host country and she decides to remain a stranger. She belongs to the groups of immigrants who do not feel they belong to the new country and, therefore, they cling to the country they left behind. This country is not her home, she perceives the new place as hostile territory, a foreign place, which makes her long for her home: Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it’s not the same, you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would. (77) Her behavior brings her into direct confrontation with her husband, who has a completely different opinion about the host country. Thus, when Mamacita manifests her sadness and wants to know when they are going back to Mexico by asking “¿Cuándo, cuándo, cuándo?” (78), her husband replies: “¡Ay, caray! We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ!” (78). The use of Spanish versus the use of English clearly illustrates the underlying divergence between them. Both characters enact their identities in divergent ways and language choice helps us visualize those differences. Mamacita clings tightly to Spanish as a way of reclaiming her Mexican subjectivity. By contrast, her husband, inasmuch as he is striving for sameness, has decided to conform to the host country’s ways and language in order not to suffer rejection and exclusion because of being a foreigner. This only serves to further aggravate the conflict between them as does Mamacita’s sense of alienation and non-belonging: “¡Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country” (78). As the narrator suggests in this chapter, some characters like Mamacita perceive the English language not as a tool for empowerment, but as a barrier separating them from their own culture. She considers that speaking the language of the oppressor means absorbing all Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives 47 of his values and habits. For her, language is intrinsically linked to identity and, by adamantly refusing to speak English, she is resisting the idea of being dispossessed of her identity, which results in alienation and estrangement. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this is an example of how “language becomes a marker of displacement and reclamation, a marker of self-identity and self-empowerment” and of how “every Spanish word represents a refusal to capitulate to English ethnocentricity” (Pérez-Torres 1995, 227). Therefore, she has decided to stay at home and create her own safe space, a refuge which recreates a Mexican atmosphere and protects her against a hostile language and culture, and this is the reason why she “sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull” (77). For Mamacita moving from Mexico to the United States has led to ‘spatial dislocation’ and estrangement. As a result, she refuses to cut the umbilical cord that connects her to Mexican tradition, language, and culture. She clearly clings to the hope of returning to her country and the language is the only way of maintaining that link. As Betz cogently explains, “rather than assimilating or accepting her newfound double-identity, Mamacita denies the English language and views America as the distant road away from the home where she belongs” (2012, 24). It is clear that for some individuals within these marginalized communities rejecting the dominant language is a way of preserving their identities and avoiding the sense of not belonging, which causes alienation and unhappiness. However, as Erber aptly points out, “it is not just language as an instance of power that is being questioned; it is the very notion of hospitality, refuge and a habitable place that is being contested” (2015, 100). Another interesting issue that this vignette brings to the fore is the common scenario that children and grandchildren of Spanish-speaking immigrants will probably not develop proficiency in their family’s mother tongue. Kim Potowski, after analyzing the sociolinguistic dimensions of immigration in the United States, concludes that “immigrants abandon their heritage languages for a variety of reasons including peer pressure, lack of opportunity to use the language, or fear that it will interfere with their ability to learn English or get ahead in American society” (2013, 37). As language divergence becomes racialized and foreign or nonstandard linguistic codes are perceived as a constraint for social mobility, many secondgeneration immigrants decide to speak the prestige language and adopt American values. This creates a cultural and communicative breach between parents and children, which results in a weakening of family ties and the loss of parental authority. Thus, when Mamacita’s son begins to use English, she feels he is committing an act of betrayal against his Mexican linguistic heritage and identity: And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on T.V. No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can’t believe her ears. (78) Her words not only anticipate some of the aforementioned conflicts between parents and children, but also the possibility that her child may become an English-dominant bilingual whose heritage language and cultural values will be contaminated by those imposed by the host society. This prospect is very painful for Mamacita who foresees that her son’s words in English separate her even further from her beloved homeland. Luisa Mª González Rodríguez 48 L2. The Racialization of Language Difference or The Metaphor of the Threshold Piri Thomas’s (1928-2011) Down These Mean Streets ([1967] 1997) is another barriocentric novel that vividly epitomizes the signs of language prejudice within urban ghettos. By underlining the sociopolitical context to which ethno-racialized populations are relegated this novel renders itself ripe for anthro-political linguistic analysis. This perspective provides a revealing insight as to how the members of stigmatized groups are assigned to “static and disparaged ethnic, racial and class identities, and that identifies them with static and disparaged linguistic codes” (Zentella 1997, 13). As this autobiographical novel reveals, language boundaries are inextricably linked to the way in which Puerto Rican immigrants construct their identities and are allowed to socialize in the host country. These boundaries give the host a sense of superiority and control over the guest that turns hospitality into hostility. Thus, the power assumed by mainstream society in the US to judge language differences in moral and racialized terms reveals not only the oppressive side of hospitality, but also the impossibility for immigrants to cross the linguistic threshold set by the host. According to Smith, [t]he metaphor of the threshold allows issues to be raised concerning the use of home and host language, including the quite frequent instances of code-switching within single utterances, when speakers return to their native language: the almost complete rejection of complete thresholdcrossing, which throws doubt on the viability of a hospitality-based model for migrant meetings: and the relevance of these issues outside the central relationship, concerning the ambient language and the capacity for welcome of the host country as a whole. (2013, 82) The host country’s need to reaffirm its sovereignty over the place has a ghettoization effect, whereby spatial, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries are drawn to separate insiders from outsiders, natives from foreigners. In this context, whole speech communities associated with ethnic minorities are stigmatized and discriminated against for not abandoning their heritage languages or not speaking standard English, thus precluding contact and integration. For, as Jane H. Hill contends, “[w]hite public space is constructed through intense monitoring of the speech of racialized populations such as Chicanos and Latinos and African Americans for signs of linguistic disorder” (1998, 680). Language difference is, therefore, perceived as a barrier hindering access to socioinstitutional spaces as well as a boundary for establishing categories of social inclusion or exclusion. Down These Mean Streets vividly depicts how Puerto Ricans settle into New York City Spanish Harlem, an underprivileged neighborhood they call el Barrio, where they create close-knit communities that are “an important mechanism of language maintenance” (Milroy 1987, 182) due to the strong cultural links they maintain with the green island. Their knowledge of Barrio Spanish qualifies Puerto Rican immigrants as members of the community and yields them a positive social identity. Most of these immigrants naturally juxtapose or alternate between English and Spanish, thus their blurring of the linguistic boundaries imposed by the host becomes an in-group marker among the members of the Puerto Rican community living in el Barrio. In the inner sphere, when they are interacting with friends, family, and neighbors, they feel comfortable code-switching from one language to another. Spanish is usually chosen to interact with parents and other elder members of Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives 49 the community and that is the reason Piri addresses his father’s friends, who are firstgeneration immigrants, in Spanish: ‘Cómo está, Mr. Rivera?’ ‘Muy bien, Piri. Y tú?’ ‘Muy bien, gracias. Cómo está, Mr. González?’ ‘Bien, gracias. Y tú?’ ‘Bien, gracias. Cómo está, Mr. Rod –excuse me– er, Mr. López?’ ‘Fine, hijo. You are up late, eh?’ (6) This dialogue brings to the fore interesting sociolinguistic aspects regarding the use of Spanish and the negotiation of identity within this speech community. First, it could be argued that Spanish is preferred among first-generation, middle-aged immigrants. This means that they are not fully integrated into American mainstream society and that most of their interactions take place within the Puerto Rican community, where they have built a close-knit network structure. Second, Spanish is used by the younger generation in deference towards the elder members of the community as well as to show respect for their ancestors’ language and cultural heritage. Finally, Piri uses the Spanish language as a symbol of identity in so far as he wants to demonstrate his involvement and attachment to the community. The family is the first socializing sphere and, as this novel reveals, it is where Puerto Rican linguistic, ethnic, and cultural heritage is transmitted. The narrator-protagonist and his siblings like to lovingly gather around their mother to listen to her stories about Puerto Rico: “Tell us, tell us about Porto Rico,” says one of Piri’s sisters, to which her mother replies that “It’s not Porto Rico, it’s Puerto Rico” (9). The mother, who speaks English with a heavy Puerto Rican accent, here takes the role of the gatekeeper to the Spanish language, thus putting special emphasis on correcting her children’s pronunciation. In the chapter entitled “Puerto Rican Paradise,” Piri’s mother enjoys conveying an idealized view of their home country, which makes her feel homesick: “Moms copped that wet-eyed look and began to talk about her isla verde, Moses’ land of milk and honey” (9). In her description of the island, the narrator’s mother code-switches into Spanish, thus revealing that Spanish is the language of intimacy, the code they use to express emotions: “When I was a little girl [. . .] I remember the getting up in the morning [. . .] and the quiet of the greenlands and the golden color of the morning sky, the grass wet from the lluvia . . . Ai, Dios, the coquís and the pajaritos making all the música” (9). But code-switching also becomes a marker of their heteroglossic identity, which is connected to the family members’ sense of linguistic and cultural inbetween-ness. As Benjamin Bailey observes, “[t]he juxtaposition of diverse linguistic elements in single utterances [. . .] reflects social negotiations and a social reality in which neither linguistic practices nor social identities fit into static, unitary categories of language and identity” (2007, 270). Furthermore, in the intimate sphere of the household, all the family members constantly codeswitch into Spanish not only to erase the linguistic barriers imposed by the host society between English and Spanish, but also to recreate the comfort and racial tolerance of their Puerto Rican Paradise. At home, Piri feels that he can reconcile his two identities, black and Puerto Rican, for he is “a funny morenito” (18) or a “negrito” (19), as his mother lovingly calls him. Luisa Mª González Rodríguez 56 Ben Jelloun, Tahar. 1999. French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants. New York: Columbia UP. Betz, Regina M. 2012. “Chicana ‘Belonging’ in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” Rocky Mountain Review. Special Issue: 18-33. Bordieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia. 2017. “Spanglish: The Hybrid Voice of Latinos in the United States.” ATLANTIS 29 (2): 147-168. Cisneros, Sandra. (1984) 1991. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Contemporaries. Denton, Rachel Ann. 2014. Hablo español, You Know? Language and Identity in the Puerto Rican Diaspora. Master’s Thesis, University of Tenessee. Derrida, Jacques. (1997) 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Duformantelle Invites Jaques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP. Dikeç, Mustafa. 2002. “Pera, Peras, Poros: Longing for Spaces of Hospitality.” Theory, Culture and Society 19 (1-2): 227-247. Domínguez-Rosado, Brenda. 2015. The Unlinking of Language and Puerto Rican Identity: New Trends in Sight. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Erber, Laura. 2015. “No Man’s Langue: Rethinking Language with Ghérasim Luca.” In Socioaesthetics: Ambience-Imaginary, edited by Michelsen, Anders and Frederik Tygstrup, 96-116. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Ferreira Veras, Adriane. 2011. “Language and Identity in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” Antares. Letras y Humanidades 5: 228- 242. Hill, Jane H. 1998. “Language, Race, and White Public Space.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 680-689. Levinas, Emmanuel. (1961) 1979. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff. Martin, Holly E. 2005. “Code-switching in US Ethnic Literature: Multiple Perspectives Presented through Multiples Languages.” Changing English 12 (3): 403-415. McGill, Lisa Diane. 2005. Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation. New York: New York University Press. Milroy, Leslie. 1987. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. Montes-Granado, Consuelo. 2012. “Code-Switching as a Strategy of Brevity in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” In Short Story Theories: A Twenty- First-Century Perspective, edited by Viorica Patea, 125-138. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Pérez-Torres, R. 1995. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, against Margins. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, 88. New York: Cambridge UP. Pheng, Cheah. 2013. “To Open Hospitality and Alienation.” In The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible, edited by Thomas Claviez, 57-80. New York: Fordham UP. Smith, Alison. 2013. “Crossing the linguistic Threshold: Language, Hospitality and Linguistic Exchange in Philippe Lioret’s Welcome and Rachid Bouchareb’s London River.” Studies in French Cinema 13 (1): 75-90. Thomas, Piri. (1967) 1997. Down These Mean Streets. New York: Vintage. Latino Immigrants at the Threshold: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Hospitality in US Barriocentric Narratives 57 Potowski, Kim. 2013. “Sociolinguistic Dimensions of Immigration to the United States.” Lengua y Migración 5 (2): 29-50. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2013. Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland. Watkins, Mary. 2007. “Psyches and Cities of Hospitality in an Era of Forced Migration: The Shadows of Slavery and Conquest on the ‘Immigration’ Debate.” Spring 78: 1-25. Zentella, Ana Celia. 1997. Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, M.A.: Blackwell. 58 (In)Hospitable Languages and Linguistic Hospitality in Hyphenated American Literature: The Case of Ha Jin 59 L1. (IN)HOSPITABLE LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTIC HOSPITALITY IN HYPHENATED AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE CASE OF HA JIN1 José R. Ibáñez Universidad de Almería The question of language is critical—forcing the other to speak my language even as they ask for asylum is hardly hospitable. —Judith Still Derrida and Hospitality L2. Introduction Chinese immigration to Gam Saan (‘Gold Mountain,’ used broadly in Chinese to refer to the western regions of North America) dates back to 1849, the year after James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. In subsequent years, hundreds of Chinese arrived in America to work in the gold mines or to lay tracks for the Central Pacific Railroad’s transcontinental line. Chinese women in California were almost totally absent at the time, and it is said that San Francisco became, for the Chinese community, “a colony of ‘bachelors’” (Takaki [1993] 2008, 195). A natural disaster, nonetheless, changed the fate of Chinese immigrants in America. On April 18, 1906, an earthquake shook San Francisco, the ensuing fires destroying almost all municipal records. This disaster served as an excellent opportunity for many Chinese immigrants to bring their wives and children to the United States. According to US law, the children of American citizens were automatically considered US citizens, no matter where they were born (Takaki [1993] 2008, 202). Many of those Chinese children came to America as ‘paper sons’ and ‘paper daughters’ as they forged—or purchased—birth certificates to be used as their ‘passport’ to America. However, matters were not as easy for these new immigrants as it might have seemed. Thousands of Chinese entering San Francisco were compelled to disembark on Angel Island and were placed in barracks at the immigration station there. One of these immigrants later recalled how “they locked us up like criminals in compartments like the cages in the zoo” (qtd. in Takaki [1993] 2008, 202). After their long journey from China, they sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge but were not in fact allowed to enter the country. Their forged papers, which should have afforded them a simple means of entering the US, became their worst nightmare. To be sure, inmates on Angel Island Immigration Station were not released unless they could convince the American customs authorities that their papers were legitimate. It is estimated that ten percent of those ‘paper sons’ and ‘paper daughters’ who landed on Angel Island were forced to return to China. For those who were detained, Gam Saan turned out to be a great deal less hospitable than the ‘Gold Mountain’ they had dreamed of back in China. The optimism invested in those forged papers by the Chinese immigrants turned out to be misplaced, and the documents themselves did not become passports, but rather a means of turning them into hostages in the new country. 1 The research on this paper was supported by the project CEIPatrimonio, University of Almeria. José R. Ibáñez 60 Angel Island Immigration Center, also known as “The Ellis Island of the West,” was in operation for thirty years until its closure in November 1940. The United States Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1942 and the detention center was never reopened as an immigration station. Decades after this infamous episode of Chinese immigration in America, Angel Island was scheduled for demolition in 1970 until a park ranger who was touring the building with a flashlight in his hand noticed the Chinese calligraphy on the walls. Inmates had carved angry and bitter poems onto the cell walls and floors. Other poems by those detainees expressed their fear and shame at being sent back to China, or their hopes of being released and thus finding new opportunities in America (Su et al. 1997, n.p.). The barracks where the inmates had been locked up for weeks or months were eventually restored, becoming a memoria passionis of the suffering of those Chinese immigrants. Asian immigration to the US came in waves after the Second World War, and in the final decades of the twentieth century, many Chinese students were afforded the opportunity to continue their graduate education in American universities. One of those students, Ha Jin (1956), arrived in 1985 to pursue his doctorate in American literature, having promised to return to China upon completion of his studies. Like many other Chinese immigrants, Ha Jin sought refugee status in the United States following the violent response of Chinese authorities to the student protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. His decision to become a writer would be a difficult and painful one in that he had to abandon his native language and produce his works in English, the language of his adopted country. Alongside that decision came charges of treason for having renounced the Chinese language. As a migrant writer, as he views himself, Ha Jin has been a controversial figure, with his work both praised and attacked because of his particular use of English. On the one hand, the Chinese language for Ha Jin becomes a sort of inhospitable dwelling, in that he associates it with the Chinese repressive regime. On the other hand, English becomes both a hospitable and an inhospitable place for him, in that he has been confronted by the wrath of certain monolingual English readers who have reacted negatively to the hybrid nature of his fiction. This chapter examines issues of hospitality and hostipitality in Ha Jin’s literary production within a Derridean framework, paying close attention to Jin’s distinctive use of language. As a migrant writer in the United States, he felt compelled to write in a foreign language, English, bringing about a kind of hybrid literature characterized by conspicuous linguistic features coming from his own cultural background. Following Paul Ricoeur’s concept of linguistic hospitality, I intend to gain a better understanding of the hybrid nature of Ha Jin’s fiction which may be labeled as “linguistic creativity” (Ibáñez 2016; 2017; 2019), a concept devised by Indian linguist Braj B. Kachru (1932-2016). The singular nature of his literature has enabled Ha Jin to carve out a niche for himself in current literary America. Bearing in mind how the politics of hospitality have emerged as a crucial element in political debate aimed at providing an appropriate response to the refugee crisis, and how Derrida, in Monolingualism of the Other, also pointed out that making a guest conform to the norms of the language of the host could be considered an act of violence—a point reiterated by Judith Still when she observed that imposing the host’s language on the guest is hardly hospitable (Still 2010, 19)—one might well understand Ha Jin’s exilic condition and his fiction’s distinctive use of the English language. The ambivalent nature of his writing and the mixed reviews garnered by some early works may account for analysis that could be articulated within the (In)Hospitable Languages and Linguistic Hospitality in Hyphenated American Literature: The Case of Ha Jin 61 framework of Derrida’s notion of hostipitality, an approach which helps us to elucidate Ha Jin’s own existence in the current American literary scenario. L2. Ha Jin, or the linguistic dilemmas of a migrant writer in the US “As a fortunate one I speak for those unfortunate people who suffered, endured or perished at the bottom of life and who created the history and at the same time they were fooled or ruined by it” (Jin 1990, 2). Penned by a young Chinese Ph.D. student, these lofty words appear in the introduction to Between Silences (1990), Ha Jin’s first published book of verse. Who was the designated recipient of these words? Was Ha Jin addressing all those downtrodden Chinese who had left their motherland behind, or else, was he referring to those who, like him, had ventured to come to America in search of a new life? Did he have in mind the sufferings and misadventures of previous generations of Chinese immigrants who became naturalized via Angel Island? Born in 1956 in Liaoning, in Northern China, Jīn Xuěfēi, who uses Ha Jin as his pen name, suffered the upheaval of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which high schools and universities were closed down and professors accused of spreading bourgeois and capitalist ideas among their students. When universities eventually reopened in 1976, Ha Jin, who had been educating himself in the army, enrolled as a student in the Department of English at Heilongjiang University. After graduating from Shandong University, he arrived in the United States in 1985 to pursue a doctorate in American Literature at Brandeis University. His initial intention to return to China after the completion of his graduate studies was frustrated by the violent response of the Chinese authorities to the peaceful student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. This episode, which Jin has always referred to as “the source of all the trouble” (Fay 2009, 118), compelled him to seek asylum in the United States, where he has remained ever since. He had neither considered living permanently in the US nor becoming a writer originally, and he began writing seriously in English only after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Today he is a renowned author, with a number of literary prizes under his belt, including the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction for his second novel, Waiting (1999). His concerns about being a writer who uses the language of his adopted country has been expressed in The Writer as Migrant (2008) as well as in the essay, “In Defence of Foreignness” (2010). The former is a volume composed of a series of lectures delivered by Ha Jin at Rice University in 2006. In it, he explores identity issues, his exilic condition as a foreign writer who writes in English, and themes that in part resemble those explored by Salman Rushdie in “Imaginary Homelands” (Cheung 2012, 2). The first dilemma that an exile writer confronts is to determine the language in which he is going to work. In this regard, Stanisław Baranczak notes that “the exiled writer tries to write in the language of his adopted country” because of “his desire [. . .] to get his message across to a broader audience” (1989, 437). However, other reasons emerged beyond Ha Jin’s immediate horizon. Firstly, the impossibility of having a substantial and sustainable Chinese readership in the United States; secondly, the banning of his work by the authorities in mainland China2; and thirdly, the need to draw a psychological and linguistic border 2 Indeed, with the exception of his award-winning novel Waiting (1999) and also The Nanjing Requiem (2011), a fictional narrative based on a historical episode set during the Japanese invasion of José R. Ibáñez 62 between himself and Chinese state power which, in his own words, became a matter of survival. In this vein, he has frequently said in interviews that he sees the Chinese language as full of complex jargon, with such linguistic items acting like formulas for public speech (Fay 2009, 122). “The Chinese language is very literary and highbrow,” he said in another interview, a language “detached from the spoken word” (Gardner 2000, n.p.). Conversely, “English is more flexible, more plastic and very expressive. It feels quite natural” (Fay 2009). In a sense, this seems to express something about the hospitable condition of his adopted language, and also hints at his own estrangement from his mother tongue and its inhospitality. In what follows, I will explore the issue of how languages—both first and second languages—become a migrant writer’s homeland (Jin 2008a, 61). I will also examine the Derridean dichotomy between hospitable and inhospitable language in Ha Jin’s oeuvre. I will then discuss Paul Ricoeur’s concept of linguistic hospitality, which he devised as a term to be applied to the field of translation, and that, in the words of Richard Kearney, “asks us to respect that the semantic and syntactic fields of two languages are not the same, or exactly reducible the one to the other” (2006, xvii). Ricoeur’s articulation of linguistic hospitality allows us to get a better understanding of the hybrid nature of Ha Jin’s work. Based on these ideas, it is necessary to articulate the following notions within the field of hospitality. • As a paradigm, we can say that any language potentially becomes an abode, a dwelling, a sort of shelter, as anticipated by Derrida.3 • As with any home, language is inhabited by dwellers, that is to say, speakers who may determine whether a home is hospitable or inhospitable. Bearing this principle in mind, it follows that Ha Jin determines the inhospitable character of his mother tongue as a result of its stiffness, and that it is “polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon” (Jin 2009, WK9) • Native speakers who inhabit a language can claim themselves to be hosts in that dwelling on account of their having been born within its confines. By the same token, non-native speakers are regarded as guests in that home, and they can merely aspire to receiving a welcome in the dwelling. • Lastly, following Derrida’s articulation of hospitality, the final inclusion of the guest in the dwelling is contingent on the acceptance of the host, who has the right of admission into his home. As Tahar Ben Jelloun observes, the guest usually “makes me confront myself” while he or she also “teaches me what I am” (qtd. in Manzanas Calvo 2013, 108). Thus, the host may decide to welcome the newcomer as a guest, or else to impose a set of rules as a prerequisite for guaranteed hospitality. One of the most frequent rules the guest has to abide by is that of language. Judith Still has noted that “the question of language is critical—forcing the other to speak my language even as they ask for asylum is hardly hospitable” (2010, 19). In this sense, such an imposition, which may include overt violence, entails stripping the guest of his or her own China, none of his works have been published in China. In spite of governmental censorship, Ha Jin has remained critical of the kind of self-censorship that a writer can impose on himself (Jin 2008b). 3 “I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me” (Derrida [1996] 1998, 1). (In)Hospitable Languages and Linguistic Hospitality in Hyphenated American Literature: The Case of Ha Jin 63 identity, what becomes, in the words of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, an act of “cannibalism” (Rosello 2001, 31). Once the imposition is established, the guest may be forced to obey those rules, or else carve out a niche for himself or herself within that dwelling. In his articulation of the theory of hospitality, Derrida is concerned with those who become absolute strangers in a foreign land: displaced persons, exiles, rootless, nomads, or deportees. Such people always experience two types of nostalgia: for the dead and for their own language. In this respect, Derrida argues that exiles have in their mother tongue their ultimate homeland, their final resting place (Derrida [1997] 2000a, 87-89). I argue that Ha Jin is a member of this group, in that, in his exilic condition, he wrestles with the idea of whether or not English is the appropriate vehicle for his literary production. Having decided to become a guest in a new home, he becomes aware of his condition and the implications: the acceptance of the host’s rules. The initial decision to abandon his mother tongue, so as to embrace the seeming hospitality of his adopted language, generated hostile sentiments from many speakers of Chinese. Hosts of the writer’s native language accused him of betraying his own country, language, and people. In this regard, Ha Jin explains: Yet the ultimate betrayal [for a writer] is to choose to write in another language. No matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue and directs his creative energy to another language. (Jin 2008a, 31) At the outset of his literary career, Ha Jin was faced by a moral choice which would eventually seal his fate as a writer in America: either to remain close to his own cultural and linguistic background or else to adapt his writing to be more ‘digestible’ to those in the new home. In order to support his claim, Ha Jin reminds us of other writers who, just like himself, suffered Derrida’s condition of hostipitality in the English language dwelling. One of the bestknown cases is that of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), the Polish writer cited by Ha Jin as the founding father of the migrant-writer literary tradition (2010, 46). Conrad, who saw himself as a foreigner taking refuge in England, faced overt criticism by both hosts of his mother language and those of his adopted home, English speakers. Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841-1910), a Polish novelist and leading writer of the Positivism movement, lambasted Conrad’s literary production, accusing him of the desertion of both country and mother tongue: And since we talked about books, I must say that the gentleman who in English is writing novels which are widely read and bring good profit almost caused me a nervous attack. When reading about him, I felt something slippery and unpleasant, something mounting to my throat. . .Over the novels of Mr. Conrad Korzeniowski no Polish girl will shed an altruistic tear or take a noble decision. (qtd. in Jin 2008, 37-38) Orzeszkowa’s accusations were basically threefold: firstly, she accused Conrad of deserting his native country, Poland, when he emigrated to England. “He should have remained in Poland,” quotes Ha Jin from Orzeszkowa, “and let his creative talent serve the Polish national cause” (2008, 38). Secondly, she considered that writing in English instead of doing it in his José R. Ibáñez 64 native language was an act of betrayal to the Polish people. Finally, Orzeszkowa believed that making money out of it reduced Conrad to the level of a peddler, “which in turn will make the writer’s work insignificant to his own people” (2008, 38). Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is another example of this sentiment of hostipitality. Prior to his determination to switch to English, Nabokov had written extensively in Russian, a language that he considered to be in the process of extinction. When he eventually determined to switch from Russian to English, he found the process to be “extremely painful”, just “like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion” (qtd. in Jin 2008, 48). Though recognized as a genuine writer in American literature, Nabokov was nevertheless admonished in The New Yorker by Edmund Wilson, the American literary critic, for the abundance of solecism in Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin and his excessive use of literary puns, which Wilson regarded as “awful” (Jin 2010, 462). As Judith Still reminds us, hospitality is about letting the Other into oneself. This assertion brings about a sort of apprehension or invasive attitude on the guest’s part which affects the host’s self. As a result, the host’s response to this occupation of the home could be to ‘turn’ against the guest, while his/her generosity may depend on a series of duties to be fulfilled by the newcomer (Still 2010, 13). Abiding by those (language) norms and rules imposed by the host may impair the foreign writer’s capacity. In this respect, Ha Jin contends that the writer’s creativity may be affected and his linguistic abilities crippled. As might be expected, in his exilic condition, the migrant writer can never aspire to match his literature to that produced by a native speaker. Ha Jin recalls that when he began to study English at university in 1977, he, just like many of his classmates, found it difficult to recite phrases that “twisted your tongue, your muscles” and that made those students go to the clinic regularly to get painkillers (Gardner 2000). Later on, when he decided to become a writer in his adopted language, he was aware of the difficulty and of the great tradition of non-native writers producing their works in English: At the time, I thought about this and realized it would be very hard, but in the English language, there is a great tradition where nonnative writers became essential writers. I was aware of that tradition and thought my success would depend on whether I had the ability and the luck. (Varsava 2010, 8). When non-native speakers arrive as guests in a language, and are thereafter forced to obey the rules imposed by the hosts, they must accommodate themselves to the dwelling, find a shelter in their new home, and strive to sidestep unwelcoming rules as best they can. Being aware of his linguistic prowess, the exiled writer who has adopted a literary language has a particular goal: to reach the wide readership denied to him at home. In many cases, success may be achieved by means of cultural nativization and an adaptation of the author’s linguistic traits into the new home. Ha Jin affirms that it took him almost a year to decide to follow in the footsteps of Conrad and Nabokov (Jin 2009, WK9) and adopt English as the language of his literary production. Having taken this decision, however, he laid claim to hybrid forms of writing within the newly monolingual home. “Hybrid authors are torn by a complicated dilemma,” argues Vidal Claramonte, “whether to use the strong language or that of their minor culture as a creative weapon” (2014, 246). Ha Jin thus embarked on a process of readjustment in the English (In)Hospitable Languages and Linguistic Hospitality in Hyphenated American Literature: The Case of Ha Jin 65 dwelling which enabled him to carve out a niche for himself in the language, to found a new abode without asking permission from the host. As might be expected, Ha Jin’s claims garnered hostile reactions from hosts of his mother tongue and also from hosts of his adopted language. King-Kog Cheung reveals how Ha Jin’s Waiting was upbraided by Yiqing Liu, a prominent Professor of English at Peking University, for its content and its Orientalist appeal (Cheung 2012, 5). Furthermore, despite the visions of freedom and self-realization that Ha Jin might have projected for himself after his decision to write in English, reviewers of his literature have objected to its hybridity. Just as Edmund Wilson had previously admonished Nabokov for his fondness for word games, Nancy Tsai disparages Ha Jin’s Chineseness and his tendency to include Chinese proverbs and idioms as well as to provide translations from his mother tongue for the sake of adding an exotic touch to his fiction. In her view, the pages of Ha Jin’s novel Waiting “abound with Chinese expressions, idioms, and clichés translated into English and hammered into the sentences like nails” (Tsai 2005, 58). As a defender of the monolingual use of the English language, Tsai accuses Ha Jin of the transgression of language rules, and she painstakingly singles out a number of (mis)translations in his award-winning novel. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Tsai’s position is highly questionable in terms of her penchant for correctness in the use of grammatical rules, in that they leave no room for other (un)grammatical varieties of English (Ibáñez 2016, 203).4 Hence, a question arises within the hospitality framework: are we entitled, as native speakers of a language, to possess the ‘home’ and impose our rules on newcomers? A negative answer to this question might indeed lead us to reconsider our position as hosts. In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida had already wondered about the relationship between a language and its speakers: “But who exactly possesses it [a language]? And whom does is possess? Is language in possession ever a possessing or possessed possession?” (Derrida [1996] 1998, 17). If Derrida was right in his claim, we must also admit that the host does not own a language as he himself or herself is first and foremost a guest within the language, and the home itself does not belong to him or her. L2. Finding a middle position: Paul Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality In their study of Junot Díaz’s short story “Invierno,” Ana María Manzanas and Jesús Benito turn to Paul Ricoeur’s concept of ‘linguistic hospitality’ which they see as “an apt term that reminds us that the Other does not come alone, but has verbal and narrative baggage” (2017, 134). Although Ricoeur did not fully expand this concept in his philosophical works, he defined linguistic hospitality in the following terms: Just as in a narration it is always possible to tell the story in a different way, likewise in translation it is always possible to translate otherwise, without ever hoping to bridge the gap between equivalence and perfect adhesion. Linguistic hospitality, therefore, is the act of inhabiting the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving the word of the Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling. (qtd. by Kearney 2006, 16) 4 On similar lines, John Updike reviewed Ha Jin’s novel A Free Life and established that this novel, held in the United States, contains “more small solecisms than in his Chinese novels” (Updike 2007, n.p.). Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 72 desideratum rather than a reality and proposes the term hostipitality, which he defines as an aporetic hospitality that deconstructs itself (2000, 5). It can never be achieved completely as it risks the dissolution of national identities. Neither can it ever be totally negated since that would go against the humanist ideals of Western civilization, that is, democracy, equality, and tolerance. Judith Still argues that hospitality is letting the Other into oneself, to one’s own space (2010, 13). This understanding of hospitality, which is not far from Derrida’s, is pertinent in an analysis of Hawthorne’s hospitality. Letting the Other enter one’s place risks colonization, both territorial and of manners. Fear of the Other is expressed as fear of the loss of traditions and manners and of ethnic purity. It is, in short, fear of becoming the Other, which is an issue that in a period of nation-building may easily be exacerbated. Welcoming cannot be separated from the notion of place. This is defined as “a centre of action and intention [. . .] ‘a focus where we experience the meaningful events of our existence’” (Relph 1976, 42). While people welcome the Other in places that already have an experiential sense, the Other may threaten a possible change of paradigm of the place, that is, by making the place unintelligible due to the change of manners, traditions, language, or religion. It comes as no surprise then that Hawthorne dealt with hospitality in his regional short fiction. L2. The Poetics of Provincial and Historical narratives As Lawrence Buell argues, “New England writing codified the regional sense of place” (1986, 283), and, for that purpose, New England writers used Puritanism as a means of articulating New England culture (283). Puritanism and historical writing were part of the creation of New England regional literature to which Hawthorne made an important contribution. By the spring of 1829, Hawthorne “intended to write fiction steeped, as he said, in ‘the superstition of this part of the country’” (Wineapple 2003, 74). Although that part of the country was New England generally, Robert Milder has appropriately pointed out that Hawthorne uses Salem synecdochically for New England (2013, 116). There are multiple reasons that explain why Hawthorne chose Salem as the main setting of his stories. It might be that Salem’s history haunted him, as Margaret B. Moore has argued (1998, 2). And Michael Colacurcio has pointed out that Hawthorne might want to explore the lives of those who lived in the past due to the different affective quality of the lives they lived (1986, 19). This explains Hawthorne’s preference for the historical narrative, but sheds little light on the provinciality of his stories. Hawthorne as cultural anthropologist, as Milder terms him (2013, 116), does not fully explain his interest in Salem. Not even the frustration of living and writing in a society that did not at all care for literature, a fact that Henry James acutely observed (1984, 347-349), explains Hawthorne’s concern with Salem. It was the town where he lived but it also seems to have inhabited him, as Milder has asserted (2013, 117). Hawthorne thought of Salem as the legendary place where a writer can set his fiction, and I would add that the reason is not merely a matter of Romantic poetics and the long shadow that Walter Scott may have cast over American writers of the late eighteenth and early to midnineteenth century. Not even nationalism may satisfactorily explain Salem as the setting of Hawthorne’s fiction. The Contention for Jollity and Gloom: Hospitality in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Historical Short Fiction 73 I propose that we look towards the concept of provincialism. Provincialism implies restriction to a particular locale away from the center, but also “narrowness, ignorance, immaturity, bias one-sidedness” as G.R. Thompson points out (1993, 6), while Roy Harvey Pearce argues that provincialism opened up a world of creative possibilities for Hawthorne and was the source of his best works (1969, 169ff). Hawthorne’s problem is the same that Henry James or Wallace Stevens suffered. The American experience is too thin to nurture culture. While James and Stevens offered different solutions—James naturalizing himself as an English citizen, and Stevens struggling against that experiential thinness with the writing of, for instance, “Anecdote of a Jar”—Hawthorne accepted his provincialism not as a point of departure but as the focal point of his literary career, which, to a certain extent, may explain the paucity of his work. In this sense, Salem is the place where the conditions for fiction are possible. In this chapter, I will make use of Thompson’s explanation, particularly the moral connotation of provincialism, as it is my contention that it helps explain hospitality in Hawthorne’s stories. My analysis will be devoted to those stories written in the early period of his career and that were included in one of his early unpublished collections: Seven Tales of my Native Land (c. 1827), Provincial Tales (ante 1832) and The Story Teller (c. 1832-34) (Thompson 1993, 4; Adkins 1945, 119-155), two of which allude to provincialism in the title. Despite the disagreement among critics regarding the issue of the stories that were included in each collection (Adams 1957, 39-57; Adkins 1945, 119-155; Baym 1976, 30; Chandler 1925-26, 1-63; Thompson 1993, 25; Weber 1989, 14-19) it is my view that, in any case, the same impulse guided impulse guided these three unfinished collections as Hawthorne sketched them out. It is thus secondary to my thesis that “Endicott and the Red Cross” was not included in any collection insofar as it is provincial and deals with the issue of hospitality. The stories of these projected collections were later subsumed into Twice-Told Tales (1837; 1842) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). These two collections do not maintain the original schema that Hawthorne devised when he first wrote them. Though publication in magazines also decontextualized the meaning of the narratives, there was a design in the original collections as their framing indicates. The early design—which he later disregarded due to problems in publication—together with his comments about the collections suggest that Hawthorne was concerned with the issue of American identity (Bell 1971, 6-17; Cagidemetrio 1992, 35-46; Colacurcio 1986, 18), though more in particular with New England locale as Thompson has pointed out (1993, 24). Most of the tales are either historical, sometimes in a legendary guise, or gothic, quite frequently of the supernatural type. The blending of the historical and the gothic helps create a particular provincial narrative that deals with identity and hospitality with ironic detachment. L2. Jollity and Gloom in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (henceforth, “Merry Mount”) was published in The Token in 1836 and collected in Twice-Told Tales in 1837. Some critics agree that “Merry Mount” deals with the future of the national character (Deamer 1979, 327-339; Drinnon 1980, 385; McWilliams 1977, 3; Sterne 1970, 846-858). This is one of the reasons why the events taking place at Merry Mount have been rewritten in different periods of American history (Drinnon Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 74 1980; McWilliams 1977; Sterne 1970). Merry Mount represented an array of possibilities that were finally suppressed in favor of the Puritan worldview. The narrative poses some challenges to the critic such as the role of the few native inhabitants who appear in the story, the part played by the first settlers in the narrative, and the tone of the narrative voice. This is a story about two groups of colonists. A first group, identified as British, seems to be closer to a pagan worldview as shown in the ritual of the maypole, while the other, the Puritan group of Endicott, is clearly associated with the colonists that would later become American. Moreover, there is a group of Native inhabitants with a minor role in the narrative. The story, roughly divided into an introduction and two sections, each dealing with the first and second group of settlers respectively, revolves around the issues of American identity and tolerance. This reading, however, is complicated by the allegorical mode that informs the narrative and by the ironic narrative voice. The story is based on the opposition between the days of the early inhabitants of the colony and the period after the Puritans arrived in it. In general terms, the opposition between the past and the present generally creates a feeling of nostalgia. This is not the case in “Merry Mount.” Quite interestingly this narrative does not lead to that nostalgic stance that is so common in American literature. The reason for this is that Hawthorne is not concerned with the ‘good old days’ but with the creation of a nation and with the transition from the state of nature to the social state. For some critics “Merry Mount” is the story of paganism vs. Puritanism or of the opposition between pleasure and culture (Colacurccio 1986; Milder 2013). My reading is informed by political philosophy. It is well known that Thomas Hobbes’s (1588-1679) theorization on the state and the government in Leviathan (1651) has been interpreted as an explanation of the shift from the state of nature where social institutions did not exist to the social state in which a government is instituted (Hampsher-Monk 1996, 19-20). As such, jollity and gloom in Hawthorne’s story can be interpreted as the state of nature and of society respectively. The exact sentence reads: “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire” (T&S 360).2 There the term empire sounds problematic since it relates the colonial enterprise to the British empire. However, the reader must take into account that Hawthorne is writing the story after the 1812 War that brought about a flood of nationalistic feeling and during a period of continental expansion (J. Gerald Kennedy 2016; Wood 2009, 697). Hawthorne, though he was writing of the past, was describing the present as well. His concern was to write a national narrative that, in the guise of historical fiction, symbolized both the foundation of America as a nation and its development during the nineteenth century when the issue of hospitality was unresolved, as the cases of native inhabitants and Irish immigrants prove. His interest in that present helps explain the absence of nostalgia in the story. In any case, jollity and gloom have their referents in the text. Jollity is associated with the inhabitants of the colony prior to the arrival of Endicott and the Puritans while gloom is linked to Endicott. The first dwellers are described as a “wild throng” (T&S 361), an image which continues with a more minute description of its components. They are not fauns or nymphs, although of Greek ancestry, but rather Gothic monsters. Hawthorne gives them the 2 Reference to Hawthorne’s texts will be parenthetically indicated as T&S followed by the number of the page. The reference is to the following edition Tales and Sketches. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: The Library of America, 1982. The Contention for Jollity and Gloom: Hospitality in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Historical Short Fiction 75 visages, outlooks, and attributes of beasts with the aim of distancing them from the human complexion. The depersonalization of these inhabitants leads to the negation of human characteristics. It is thus not surprising that a few lines later Hawthorne wrote “Here might be seen the Salvage Man [. . .] By his side, a nobler figure, but still a counterfeit, appeared an Indian hunter” (T&S 361) going on to add “some already transformed to brutes, some midway between man and beast” (T&S 362). Hawthorne is pointing to the widespread notion that the British held that the Native Americans lacked human characteristics such as culture. The first element that deserves analysis is the contrast between the early inhabitants and the Puritans. There is a passing allusion to the Puritans: “but a band of Puritans [. . .] compared the masques to those devils and ruined souls, with whom their superstition peopled the black wilderness” (T&S 362). This sentence deserves some comment. In the first place, the reader finds that the ‘wild throng’ of colonists is using masques in the maypole festivities. Hawthorne makes the reader believe that these early inhabitants are brutes only to show that they simply appear as such as a result of living in the wilderness. Secondly, the narrator mentions the Puritan prejudice of associating wilderness and evil, an idea that is also present in “Young Goodman Brown,” for instance. Entering the forest implies the risk of losing the moral attributes that people are supposed to be born with. “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” gives a twist to this prejudice when the narrator acknowledges that this is simply a Puritan superstition. Nonetheless, this superstition is present in Hawthorne’s stories. Both in “Merry Mount” and in “The Gentle Boy,” the wilderness plays an important role. It is not a coincidence that it is in the wilderness that the main characters face the moral challenge that hospitality offers. In the opposition between the social state and the state of nature, hospitality is an element inherent in nature, while in society hospitality has to be accomplished, even negotiated, an idea that goes against the grain of common notion of both states. The second contrast comes with the presentation of the two main characters of the early colonists, “the two airiest forms,” as the narrator describes them (T&S 362). Literally, Hawthorne writes: “Within the ring of monsters, appeared the two airiest forms” (T&S 362). The contrast is sharpened by putting both groups, the ‘ring of monsters’ and the ‘two airiest forms,’ in the same sentence one after the other. These two characters are a young man and a maiden. The scenario that surrounds them resembles Botticelli’s Primavera: Allegory of Spring and functions as the setting for the wedding of the two young characters. This is described as a pagan ritual: “All ye that love the May-Pole, lend your voices to the nuptial song of the Lord and the Lady of the May” (T&S 362). This ceremony is linked to the ritual that the narrator describes in the opening of the story. The difference lies in the absence of history in the first two paragraphs of the narrative and in the writing in terms that makes the reader think time stands still in Merry Mount while the wedding ritual is already part of history. There has been a passage from paradisiacal timelessness to the historical colony that the narrator interprets in terms that are not philosophical but vital: “From the moment that they truly loved, they had subjected themselves to earth’s doom of care, and sorrow, and troubled joy, and had no more a home at Merry Mount” (T&S 363). The narrator suggests that love triggers the entrance into history, or, for our purpose, into the social state. Coherently, Hawthorne makes a survey of the colonization of the New World. The widespread assumption, as Hawthorne puts it, is that people went to America “some to Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 76 conquer virgin empires; and one stern band to pray” (T&S 364). The colonists of Merry Mount, however, do not enter into any of these groups. They “imagined a wild philosophy of pleasure” (T&S 364). They have transplanted English customs and manners from England, though what characterizes them is their “veneration for the May-Pole” (T&S 364-365). The presence of these colonists offers a new approach to an interpretation of the colonization. There were three groups, not two, that went to America: the merchants to buy and sell the natural resources, the Puritans who had left England due to religious intolerance and, finally, those who went to have a better life but were not concerned with religion or the development of commerce. This last group is represented by the early colonists who, it is implied, went to America in search of religious freedom, since religious tolerance was absent in Great Britain. There arises the question of whether, as immigrants, they expected hospitable hosts in the colonies on their arrival or they thought the newly discovered land was not yet inhabited. The answer to this question offers new views on the question of colonization and hospitality that I will discuss below. The second group the narrator describes in “Merry Mount” is that of the Puritans. As he says: there were men in the new world, of a sterner faith than these May-Pole worshippers [. . .] a settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches, who said their prayers before daylight, and then wrought in the forest or the cornfield, till evening made it prayer time again. Their weapons were always at hand, to shoot down the straggling savage. When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians. Their festivals were fast-days, and their chief pastime the singing of psalms. (T&S 365) The whole paragraph is the reverse of the scene in the Merry Mounters. The Puritans are led by the principle ora et labora (pray and toil), as opposed to the gay carnivalesque life of the other colonists. They are also characterized by the conquering drive symbolized in the weapons. These two main characteristics are the points around which the Puritans’ lives revolve as opposed to the other inhabitants of New England. The final sentence of the paragraph is an appropriate conclusion to the dark image of the colonists: “the whippingpost, which might be termed the Puritan May-Pole” (T&S 365). The narrator has been paralleling Merry Mounters and Puritans: “the wild throng” vs. the “most dismal wretches,” the festivities vs. the life of praying and toiling, the coexistence with Native Inhabitants vs. the conquest of the territory, the maypole vs. the whipping post to conclude that the Puritans are the dark image of the Merry Mounters. Initially, the coexistence of both groups is characterized by mutual ignorance though gradually the Puritans become aware of the Merry Mounters’ way of living which they consider a threat to their saintly lives: “Who but the fiend, and his bond-slaves, the crew of Merry Mount, had thus disturbed them!” In the end, the conflict is a political one as the narrator says: “The future complexion of New England was involved in this important quarrel” (T&S 366). This coexistence, with degrees of tolerance, ends the moment Endicott appears on stage. The scene resembles a Sabbath: “The leader of the hostile party stood in the center of the circle, while the rout of monsters cowered around him like evil spirits in the presence of a dread magician” (T&S 367). This scene provokes the attack of the ‘hostile party’ and shows The Contention for Jollity and Gloom: Hospitality in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Historical Short Fiction 77 that any possibility of coexistence is impossible. Consequently, hospitality becomes impossible as well. The closure of the story is also revealing: “Endicott, the severest Puritan of all who laid the rock foundation of New England” (T&S 370). Endicott acts as a function of inhospitality. The story ends with the victory of gloom over jollity, of which Endicott himself is an instigator. Hawthorne suggests that Puritanism is the moral and political foundation of New England. The final words of the narrator regarding the fate of the Lord and Lady of the May evoke Adam and Eve’s exit from Paradise, though in this case they are not leaving the paradise but hell as they are going “heavenward” (T&S 370). Hawthorne suggests that hell is New England under Puritan rule, that is, an inhospitable community. It may also be read as a counterexample of Kantian hospitality. For Kant the guest cannot do any harm to the host, as Garret Brown has argued (2010). There is a law of reciprocity that obliges both the host and the guest, and that cannot be violated by any of them. In “Merry Mount”, Endicott contravenes the law and abuses the colonists and the Native Inhabitants without any regard to the fact that he is simply a guest. The brief preface that Hawthorne places before the narrative plays an important role in the meaning of the story. Hawthorne acknowledges that, while the narrative is based on historical facts, it is an allegory. The question one may pose is why he is not writing a realist historical narrative or, at least, a historical romance, but rather chooses the allegorical mode. Hawthorne seemed more interested in the allegory than in the historical romance, despite the five romances that he wrote in later years starting with The Scarlett Letter. While allegory might distort the aim that underlies the writing of provincial narratives, the preface attempts to circumvent this objection when Hawthorne asserts “[t]he masques, mummeries, and festive customs, described in the text, are in accordance with the manners of the age” (T&S 360). The allegory may have served him in the creation of characters that are not fully rounded, or even verisimilar or else too candid. It may have served him to give an apocalyptical tone to the political struggle of Puritans against other colonists. This apocalyptic and mythological hue would have helped Hawthorne create a book on provincial customs that dated back to a legendary past, much in Walter Scott’s manner. It would have avoided any possible parallelism with the confrontation between conservatives and liberals in Hawthorne’s age. One might think that the use of allegory would present the meaning in a universalist style which, considering the religious overtones of the narrative, would not be problematical for Hawthorne’s contemporaries. Still, the emphasis on provincialism makes universalism problematic in the story. L2. Inhospitable Religious Communities “Endicott and the Red Cross” was published in The Token in 1838 and in the expanded edition of Twice-Told Tales in 1842. This is another piece of short historical fiction intended to reflect on the ideological foundations of America, or as Bell puts it: it portrays “the symbolic birth of the American character” (1971, 57). The main character, John Endicott, was a person whose religious sternness was well known in the colonies. What is at stake in this historical narrative is what Bell has described as “the conflict within Puritanism itself between the forces of tyranny and the forces of liberty” (34). This opposition explains the struggle between the two religious factions. Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 78 The narrator provides the reader with a brief historical frame that introduces both the character and the main topic of the story. Religious tolerance stands at the forefront of the story with the mention of religious exiles (T&S 542). The war of religion that took place in England during the reign of Charles I, the Republic of Cromwell, and the reign of Charles II forced many Puritans to flee to America and settle in the colonies. Among these were Endicott and other people represented in the story by the Wanton Gospeller and the woman who supported him, as well as Roger Williams, the minister of Salem. He is described as “an elderly gentleman, wearing a black cloak and band, and a high-crowned hat, beneath which was a velvet skull-cap, the whole being the garb of a Puritan minister” (T&S 545). The crowd includes a few “stately savages” (T&S 544) and the Governor, who is “a wise man,—a wise man, and a meek and moderate”, in Endicott’s words (T&S 546). They conform to a representation of colonial society in which religious compromise rules. Hawthorne deals with the way in which tolerance and compromise are finally replaced by a stern practice of religion that leaves no room for tolerance. This intolerance was already present in the Colonial Period. Both the Wanton Gospeller and the woman who encourages him have been sentenced, and in the crowd there are others who have been condemned to suffer more severe punishments than the gospeller and the woman. Endicott is the main character and the narrator’s description of him is tremendously rich for our analysis. Endicott is the narrow Puritan that Bell analyzes in the second chapter of Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (1971, 85-ff).3 The first description of Endicott focuses on what is mirrored in the breastplate of his armor: the house of prayer (T&S 542). Immediately after that, the narrator goes on to describe other elements of the town. Now he focuses on the whipping-post (T&S 543). The juxtaposition of the two architectural elements is intended to reflect both the ambivalence of the political foundations of the colony and the union of politics and religion that Endicott sought. While Endicott supports a view of a society in which religion and politics are blended, for Roger Williams, the “elderly gentleman” whose aspect was “that of a pilgrim” (T&S 545), politics and religion occupy different spaces in a society. This is one of the ironic reversals Hawthorne uses to undermine any stable interpretation of history and Puritanism in his stories. Though Endicott has not severed the ties of the colony with Britain, and consequently the stern law of Puritanism is not yet complete, the narrator mentions the punishments that some colonists have already suffered: “the whipping-post, – with the soil around it well trodden by the feet of evil-doers, who had there been disciplined” (T&S543) or “among the crowd were several, whose punishment would be life-long” (T&S542). Any straight explanation of a shift in the politics of the Puritans on the basis of Endicott’s severance of British rule is thus mistaken. Even before Endicott “rent the Red Cross completely out of the banner” (T&S 548), Puritanism ruled in the colony in both religious and political affairs. Endicott gives voice to this idea when he shouts: “liberty to worship God, not license to profane and ridicule him” (T&S 547) as an answer to the Wanton Gospeller. Before that moment he had rhetorically asked the crowd why they had come to America and his answer, in the form of a rhetorical question, is: “Was it not for the 3 Frederick C. Crews (1989, 33), Michael Colacurcio (1986, 24), and Robert Milder (2013, 123) offer biographical explanations of the Puritan type that Endicott symbolizes which, to my view, do not add anything substantial to a discussion of Endicott as a fictional character. The Contention for Jollity and Gloom: Hospitality in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Historical Short Fiction 79 enjoyment of our civil rights? Was it not for liberty to worship God according to our conscience?” (T&S 546). Though it was political and religious freedom that moved the Puritans to settle in America, curiously enough the latter is not granted to other settlers, as the description of punishments in the first pages of the story shows. The hospitality that Endicott expects from other settlers he does not grant to those who profess a different religious denomination. Endicott appropriates for himself and his fellow Puritans the status of religious exiles, thus making the Others dissenters. This is another of the ironical reverses in the story. While in Britain the Puritans are the dissenters, in America they become the enemies of religious tolerance. This leads them to a rejection of hospitality as Derrida theorizes. While he claims religious freedom for himself—a claim which will be completely established only when the ties with Britain have been severed—he does not allow such freedom to the others, who might have come to America even before he had. Hospitality, for him, means the total acceptance of the religious creed that he professes. He becomes the patron of the household in Derridean terms (Derrida 2000, 4). However, it must be noted that the presence of Puritans on American soil was recent and that, properly speaking, they had the same right to the title of patrons than any other person or religious denomination. Endicott’s behavior does not become an example of Kantian hospitality either, as I pointed out earlier. More importantly, Endicott must be analyzed as the displaced host that Levinas theorizes (Treanor 2011). It might commonly be thought that hospitality during the colonial period refers to the behavior of the Native Inhabitants towards the colonists. However, Hawthorne’s view is radically different. For him, the Indians do not have an existence of their own, at least in narrative terms. They are always part of the crowd of people who lived in the colonies before Endicott and the Puritans arrived. In fact, in “Merry Mount” the colonists are not so different from the Native Americans for Hawthorne. He creates a misunderstanding when he writes about the “wild throng” which is composed of the “Fauns and Nymphs” (T&S 361) who, in reality, were those who had been persecuted. While describing the attitude, countenance, and costumes of these exiles, Hawthorne mentions “the Salvage Man” only to add that there was also a “nobler figure, but still a counterfeit [. . .] an Indian hunter” (T&S 361). Hawthorne makes the distinction between the salvage man and the Indian since, according to the narrator, the latter is not a fake. Native Inhabitants have no other narrative presence in the story nor are they or their customs described. All descriptions of manners and traditions are related to the early settlers as a group in which British settlers and Native Inhabitants are included. In “Endicott and The Red Cross” the Native Inhabitants play the role of spectators. Still noble, they are described as “stately savages, in all the pomp and dignity of the primeval Indian,” the narrator also adds: “Their flint-headed arrows were but childish weapons” (T&S 544). Hawthorne equates the imagined state of nature in which the Indians lived with childhood, as if cultures developed as people do. The Native Inhabitants are human beings who live in a less developed, or more childlike, culture. The opposition is established in religious and political terms, British and Indians being included in the same group of early colonists, while the Puritans belong to the other group. I propose to read the tale in terms of the colonists in the role of displaced hosts. This approach sheds light on “Merry Mount” and “Endicott and the Red Cross”. By moving themselves from Europe to America, the colonists lose their place in society and have to find a new one. Endicott prefers to acquire the role of the owner of the house in Derridean terms as a prefiguration of the Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 80 imperialistic attitude the United States would hold later on. His placing as a host (while he is a displaced host in fact) creates a reversal of the roles of guest and host that in Hawthorne’s fiction is signaled by the ironical reflections of his fiction, of which the gest in the role of displaced host and the host proper characterized as guest are the two central reversals of these two stories. Besides, this displaced host is the embodiment of the guest that Kant harshly criticized in his essay Perpetual Peace. The guest (as a displaced host in this case) cannot act against the host’s interests and welfare. L2. The Gentle Hospitality “The Gentle Boy,” first published in The Token in 1833 (dated 1832) and then collected in Twice-Told Tales, is a model example of hospitality. The narrative has been read variously by Colacurcio (1986) and by Bell (1971), among others. For Colacurcio, it is a story about New England morality (1986, 160). Bell argues that the transformation of the English character in the American wilderness is Hawthorne’s main historical theme (117). For Thompson, the tales, together with The Scarlet Letter, provide a classic example “of the pervasive theme of sadomasochism” (1993, 118). It is an example of the way characters may be trapped between two worlds (Crews 1989, 65; Folsom 1963, 123-125; Newberry 1987, 48-49). Most critics agree that “The Gentle Boy” is one of the most sentimental stories Hawthorne wrote. Feelings are explicitly present from the beginning of the story. Pearson’s sympathy is “fully excited” when he meets the boy (T&S 112). A few paragraphs later, the narrator adds: “in the awakened warmth of his feelings” (T&S 112). As Abram van Engen argues “[t]he concept of fellow feeling [. . .] pervaded New England Puritanism and affected the shape of literature” (2010, 533). The expression of affection in literature would help to develop communal affection, van Engen points out, that latter would “b[i]nd political and religious bodies” (533). Putting an emphasis on feelings helped develop a human fabric that would be immune to religious intolerance. As such, sentimentalism would favor hospitality. The story opens with a brief historical introduction that contextualizes the narrative. Against this context, the narrative will offer insights into hospitality and tolerance. It is a story about religious intolerance and the way in which roles are easily reversed. If Puritans were persecuted in England and migrated to America in order to find a place where they could freely preach and practice their religion, once they arrived in New England they started to exert their religious intolerance over Quakers, a denomination associated with England. Tobias Pearson is the opposite characterization of the narrow Puritan Bell discusses in other stories (1971). Instead of a stern convinced Puritan, Tobias represents the man who desires to live in a tolerant society where people from various religious denominations may coexist. He converts from Puritanism to Quakerism in a shift that is intended to symbolize the tolerance of a society in which individuals are more important than abstract ideas. For Tobias, religion is not a fixed set of dogmatic rules that people must follow blindly. Rather it is a personal experience that serves the individual as a guide to living morally. Ilbrahim is the actantial object that unleashes Tobias’s hospitable feelings and his subsequent conversion to Quakerism. Catharine is Ilbrahim’s mother who accepts her son being raised by Puritans without being educated in the principles of Quakerism. This is a central moment in the story as it opposes Tobias’s initial hospitality. Catharine regrets that neither Tobias nor his wife, The Contention for Jollity and Gloom: Hospitality in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Historical Short Fiction 81 Dorothy, are Quakers (T&S 122) and asks them if they will bring him up as a Quaker. To that question Dorothy answers: if your child become our child, we must breed him up in the instruction which Heaven has imparted to us; we must pray for him the prayers of our own faith; we must do towards him according to the dictates of our own consciences, and not of yours (T&S 123). As Derrida has argued in discussions of Kantian hospitality (2000, 4), this is the act of kindness that the host makes to the guest, but it is never complete or unconditional. To a large extent, though a right of the guest, hospitality is still marked by the host’s preferences, or as Dorothy says in the story, “our own consciences.” Hawthorne is subtly opposing feelings to conscience—sentiments and morality. If Tobias acts in a way that conforms to what Derrida defines as total hospitality: “an intentional experience that proceeds beyond knowledge toward the other as absolute stranger, as unknown, where I know that I know nothing of him” (2000, 8), Dorothy is the representative of a restrained hospitality that has marked politics in Western civilization. Hawthorne, nonetheless, introduces a series of ironic reversals in the story. Tobias the Puritan becomes Tobias the Quaker, while Catharine the fanatic Quaker adopts a milder version of Quakerism at the end of the story. Hospitality in its most radical version is the cause of Tobias’s conversion as well as of Catharine’s acceptance of Dorothy’s comments on Ilbrahim’s education. Catharine’s acceptance must be understood as the guest’s acceptance of limited hospitality. Rather than rebel against this kind of hospitality that limits her rights, she agrees to it in order to save her son from the life of an outcast in the wilderness. While nature plays an important role in Hawthorne’s fictions—not uncoincidentally it is the chronotope of both “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” and “The Gentle Boy”—the wilderness has a meaningful function in the ideological characterization of America as either a hospitable or inhospitable place. There are significant differences between both stories as regards the location. In “Merry Mount” the wilderness plays a minor role in the story and is only part of it in the sense that there is no divide between the colony and the wilderness. The narrator describes it as a “melancholy forest” (T&S 361) where roses grow: “bringing deep verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds of Spring” (T&S 360). The dwellers in the colony live in harmony with that nature which, because of this harmony, ceases to be a wilderness and becomes a paradise. In “The Gentle Boy” the wilderness poses a threat to the inhabitants of the colonies. To begin with, the colony has been established quite recently: “The low, straw-thatched houses were scattered at considerable intervals along the road, and the country having been settled but about thirty years, the tracts of original forest still bore no small proportion to the cultivated ground” (T&S 109-110). The comment suggests that the colony creates a point of disruption in the center of that nature uncultivated until recent times. A couple of paragraphs later the narrator introduces another disruption. The murder of the Quakers in the forest creates an identification of death with the wilderness that is absent in “Merry Mount.” While the nature that is part of Merry Mount is vital and paradisiacal until the arrival of the Puritans, the nature that surrounds the colony in “The Gentle Boy” is tinged with the darkness of death from its beginning. This may be read as the complexion of nature before and after the Puritan colonization. To a certain extent, Hawthorne is dealing with the issue of a paradisiacal America colonized Laura López Peña 88 Melville’s travel experiences throughout his life, first as a sailor bound for the Pacific, and later as a traveler to Europe, Constantinople, Egypt, and the Holy Land, conditioned his perception of alterity, of both how similar and different the Other really was. They also made the author question and stretch his thinking parameters. As he would claim in his lecture “Traveling: Its Pleasures, Pains, and Profits” (1859), travel creates humble yet independent thinkers aware of the partiality of their own assumptions and capable of unlearning prejudices and stereotypes: For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices. [. . .] Travel to a large and generous nature is as a new birth. Its legitimate tendency is to teach profound personal humility, while it enlarges the sphere of comprehensive benevolence till it includes the whole human race. Among minor benefits is that of seeing for one’s self all striking natural or artificial objects, for every individual sees differently according to his idiosyncrasies. [. . .] It is important to be something of a linguist to travel to advantage; at least to speak French fluently. In the Levant, where all nations congregate, unpretending people speak half a dozen languages, and a person who thought himself well educated at home is often abashed at his ignorance there. (1987, 423, italics and line breaks in the original) Arriving in Jaffa on January 6, 1857, Melville reached Jerusalem shortly afterward, where he spent eight days before joining a short expedition to the Dead Sea and Mar Saba (Bezanson 1991, 515). In his journal, Melville depicts a Palestine that looks inhospitable and far from the idealized portrayals of the period; Jerusalem inspires images of wrecks, waste, dearth, oppressiveness, lack of ventilation and air, desolation, stones, and greyness: “Judea is one accumulation of stones—Stony mountains & stony plains; stony torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony feilds [sic], stony houses & stony tombs; stony eyes & stony hearts. Before you, & behind you are stones. Stones to right & stones to left” (Journals 1989, 90). In a succeeding entry, Melville adds that “[t]he color of the whole city is grey & looks at you like a cold grey eye in a cold old man” (90). Far from an idealized portrayal of the land of the Bible, Melville was rather skeptical that Palestine constituted a holy land, as even sacred spaces like the Holy Sepulcher had become places of confrontation and decay—not communion— reflecting spiritual barrenness and devoid of any divinity. Melville spent approximately three weeks in Palestine before returning to the US. As Melville wrote in his journal: “JC should have appeared in Taheiti [sic]!” (Journals 1989, 154). Not long after Melville’s voyage to the Holy Land, tensions exploded between millions of Americans in a divided United States. These tensions reached their peak with the Civil War, to which almost every American lost either a family member or close friend (Foote 1994, 272). The postbellum years, which Melville devoted to the writing of Clarel, were some of the most unstable and turbulent as, despite the official end of the war, the nation remained violently confronted, racial violence escalated in the south, and new borders were being established by the country’s westward expansion and battles against Native American peoples.2 On the other hand, if, as biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant has claimed, “for Melville, writing was as natural as breathing” (1996, 327), the material conditions for writing 2 For a detailed analysis of Reconstruction and postbellum racial violence see Foner 2002. For further details on postbellum corruption see Trachtenberg 2007. (In)Hospitable Encounters in Herman Melville’s Clarel 89 also changed radically over the almost twenty years following December 1866, when he managed to get a job at the New York Customs House; a confinement which must have been hard to bear for someone who had traveled so much and so far away. Despite these conditions, Melville continued to write, but the long narrative poem Clarel, written during this period, would not come to public light until 1876. In it, the author creates a polyphonic dialogic poem and a space of unconditional hospitality, continuing the tradition of his texts. Hilton Obenzinger has argued that Melville’s capacity of representing plurality at its most intricate complexities and even contradictions results from the author’s extraordinary “elasticity of mind,” which he defines as “the ability to cross over and entertain forbidden arguments, identities, and states of being” (2006, 195). Indeed, Melville’s texts become microcosms in which to explore alterity and hospitality while portraying contexts of interhuman divisions, (self-)isolation and segregation. However, Melville’s hospitality or accommodation of the Other does not rely on presumptions neutralizing difference. On the contrary, novels such as The Confidence Man (1857) display a critique of Kantianism as a universalist conception of humanity—based on Western impositions—which neutralizes and invalidates all others outside such claims to universality.3 Rather, as Timothy Marr remarks, “By accentuating the worldly diversity of his crew, Melville ‘federated’ a broad latitude of literary characters that empowered his challenge to the ethnocentric claims of universality held by the supposedly civilized” (2005, 136). While Marr refers to Moby-Dick when illustrating Melville’s federation of such a wide range of literary characters, Clarel is an even more highly populated microcosm. It constitutes what Stan Goldman describes as a “chorus of voices,” both expressive of conversations among characters representative of the diversity of humanity, and of chants, poems, inscriptions, songs, laments and theatrical representations within the text (1993, 97). In Vincent Kenny’s words, “Melville allows the characters to speak their own minds” (1973, 120). It is through this dialogic technique that the poem is turned into a text that hosts a plurality of worldviews, deconstructs one-sided narratives and encourages readers to be independent thinkers by considering the different sides of the same argument. Wyn Kelley, for instance, has argued that Melville “understands the relationship between writer and reader as an ongoing dialogue, a collaboration” (2008, 23), while Samuel Otter has analyzed the demands—though also rewards—of this collaboration in the particular case of Clarel, which he calls “a work of complex pleasures” (2006, 480). Among these complex pleasures is the readers’ understanding of the impossibility of answers, as they are challenged by the poem/pilgrimage to form new questions because “Truth, for Melville, is a question, not an answer” (Seelye 1970, 10). Most importantly, scholars such as Amy Kaplan have valued Melville’s works as embracing human collectivities and interpersonal bonds based on dialogism and plurality. (2010, 50). These dialogic texts move away from individual or community-based identities posing interpersonal barriers and monologic thinking and, instead, make those who come together enter a plural encounter where “you” is always an “I.” In this process, the potentiality of ethics in a Levinasian or Derridean way emerges, as it is through the awareness that the strangeness of the Other becomes less strange that hospitality may become more 3 As Judith Butler theorizes in a way similar to Jacques Derrida, presenting Kantian cosmopolitanism as the only possible way to articulate universality is already a cultural imposition which defeats plurality by clinging to a parochial conception of the universal and imposing it to others (1996, 52). Laura López Peña 90 authentically unconditional or empathic. Read in a similar way to Hannah Arendt’s image of the table both uniting and separating the people sitting around it (1998, 53), Clarel can be said to constitute a dialogic meeting ground bringing together a wide range of characters who are strangers to one another. Some have praised this dialogic nature of the poem, its “mercurial narrative [. . .] that constantly shifts focus and perspective, allowing a rich texture of disparate ideas, voices, and points of view” not offering “a single answer but a combination of answers in dialogical relationship to each other” (Potter 2004, 14-15; Goldman 1993, 17). Thus, Clarel is a dialogic poem in Bakhtinian terms: “It is constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as [. . .] the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other” (Bakhtin 1984, 18). Throughout this dialogic process based on alterity, difference, and plural thinking, the poem denounces monologic conclusions, forced silences, and one-sided thinking. L2. Inhospitable Holy Land The setting of the Holy Land and the particular city of Jerusalem represent a potentially dialogic context, but also a scenario of inhospitable encounters. As I have argued elsewhere,4 the Palestine in the poem contains resonances of postbellum United States, but it is also undeniable that Jerusalem is a global microcosm. In an aerial sight from the top of the city’s wall, the young Clarel is amused by the arrival of pilgrims of all kinds, all of them strangers to the young American and to one another: Like envoys from all Adam’s race, Mixed men of various nations pace, Such as in crowded steamer come And disembark at Jaffa’s stair. (Clarel 1991, 1.41.48-51) It is interesting that, instead of conceiving such assorted humanity in a mass, Clarel’s eyes make an effort to individualize the newcomers. As Melville had already warned in Moby Dick, Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. (2007, 408) When the last pilgrim enters Jerusalem, the gate is locked, leaving the wilderness outside and, with it, neighboring strangers such as Arabs or Bedouins whom Jerusalem’s dwellers conceive as threatening. In these global spaces that Palestine and Jerusalem suppose, the young Clarel himself is a stranger roaming amidst humanity and acquiring some wisdom from his encounters with fellow travelers who are also strangers to him. In this context of in/hospitable encounters, learning and unlearning constitute processes that complement rather than exclude one another. The main problem comes when characters themselves 4 See López 2015. (In)Hospitable Encounters in Herman Melville’s Clarel 91 become victims of walls, or, victimizers imposing walls on others, a process by which interhuman divisions are enforced by worldviews sustained by inside/outside forms of belonging creating foreign and alien human elements. This promotes fear of the Other and, therefore, hinders hospitality. Walls may be considered a central character in the poem. Their artificiality is highlighted due to their creation of two realities—inside-outside, here-there, insider-foreign/stranger— which otherwise would not exist because they would simply be part of the same continuum. Particularly, the gate as a connecting bridge with the potentiality of either remaining open or becoming an impassable wall is highlighted in the poem, as well as its inability to stop the desert from infusing the human soul with a sort of universal wail conveying a suffering that unites “every creature in human form” (Journals 1989, 83, italics in the original): ‘The gate’, cried Nehemiah, ‘the gate Of David!’ Wending thro’ the strait, And marking that, in common drought, ’Twas yellow waste within as out, The student mused: The desert, see, It parts not here, but silently, Even like a leopard by our side, It seems to enter in with us— At home amid men’s homes would glide. But hark! that wail how dolorous: So grieve the souls in endless dearth; Yet sounds it human—of the earth! (Clarel 1991, 1.24.77-88) The universal wail will be analyzed in connection with Clarel’s ending, but it is important to note at this point how Melvillean characters die due to those interpersonal fences they build towards others or because of the walls they encounter in their efforts to generate some bonding. Thus, returning to the instances of walls in Israel Potter which opened this chapter, it is also significant that both the enigmatic scrivener in Bartleby, and Celio in Clarel are made to die—alone and rejected—with their eyes fixed on thick walls. This may be juxtaposed to Ishmael’s survival thanks to his friendship with Queequeg: the fact that he is rescued by Queequeg’s coffin as if fulfilling the Polynesian’s former promise that “he would gladly die for me, if need should be” (Moby Dick 2007, 63). By falling in love with the American-born Jewish Ruth, Clarel also experiences the negative consequences of walls. Despite belonging to the same nationality as Clarel, Ruth is part of to a religious community to which Clarel cannot belong. Clarel becomes an outsider and his relationship indeed encounters the hostility of Jerusalem’s Jewish community who closely surveils the relationship of the young couple. The highest authority figure in this community, the Rabbi, is far from welcoming Clarel and extending his/the community’s hospitality. Even if he is merely alluded to in some passages, this character develops a crucial function making sure that Clarel does not overly influence the two members of the community he must preserve, Ruth and her mother Agar: by the sage was Clarel viewed With stony and unfriendly look— Fixed inquisition, hard to brook. Laura López Peña 92 And that embarrassment he raised The Rabbi marked, and colder gazed. (Clarel 1991, 1.23.59-63) This becomes even more evident the moment Ruth’s father, Nathan, dies—killed by the strangers living outside the city, Arabs whom he aims to convert—and Clarel is banned from accompanying Ruth and her mother in their mourning retreat. Not only is Clarel forbidden from joining the Jewish community during Nathan’s funeral, he is also prevented from entering the physical space. The Rabbi is the person in charge of protecting the fences against alien elements such as Clarel and, in consequence, he symbolically locks the door connecting the house to the outside world in front of Clarel’s face: He [Clarel], waiting so, Doubtful to knock or call them—lo, The rabbi issues, while behind The door shuts to. The meeting eyes Reciprocate a quick surprise, Then alter; and the secret mind The rabbi bears to Clarel shows In dark superior look he throws: Censorious consciousness of power: [. . .] No word he speaks, but turns and goes. (1.42.59-69) It is significant that, had there been any true hospitality, far from bringing any destructive consequences, the Other, in this case represented by Clarel, may have saved Ruth and Agar from dying of grief during their retreat. Thus, it is not the contact with alterity but precisely the non-contact with it that brings about some of the (self-)destructive consequences some characters suffer in the poem. In Clarel and Ruth’s relationship, hospitality is mutual and emancipative because Clarel embodies freedom to two women who feel repressed within the walls of their religious patriarchal community. As their friendship evolves, the outsider grows closer in affection than those inside the community. Here, alterity is the generator of interpersonal togetherness. Another character which exposes the destructive consequences of lack of hospitality is Celio, a young Catholic Italian whose community can neither understand nor accommodate his doubting nature. Celio is an outsider, and the only solution the Catholics can propose is to assimilate him and neutralize his questioning nature. Celio’s outcast status is emphasized when he is locked out by the gates of Jerusalem and spends the night alone in the wilderness outside St. Stephen’s Gate, which symbolically connects him to the Christian martyr with a doubting nature like his own. Introduced in the poem as if he was Clarel’s alter ego, Clarel and Celio are immediately drawn to one another despite their differences—“The spiritual sympathy / Transcends the social” (1.19.3-4)—but this magnetism or openness to the Other does not bring about any eventual togetherness, as Clarel is unable to respond to Celio’s call for “a brother that he well might own / In tie of spirit” (1.11.43-44). Even if their silences— Clarel and Celio probably speak different languages—are powerful, Clarel’s paralysis in front of the stranger maintains the interpersonal distance Celio longs to abridge in his desperate need for human connection. Through this example of an interpersonal wall, and contrary to Derrida’s affirmation that authentic hospitality be unreciprocated, the poem seems to point (In)Hospitable Encounters in Herman Melville’s Clarel 93 out that unreciprocated hospitality leads to disastrous consequences. As Vincent Kenny explains, “Clarel sensed in Celio an alter ego, but his inability to speak prevented the friendship they might have had” (1973, 73): Again, as down in Gihon late, He [Celio] hovered with his overture— An overture that scorned debate. But inexperienced, shy, unsure— Challenged abrupt, or yea or nay, Again did Clarel hesitate; When quick the proud one with a look Which might recoil of heart betray, And which the other scarce might brook In recollection, turned away. Ah, student, ill thy sort have sped: The instant proffer—it is fled! (Clarel 1991, 1.15.69-80) Celio is hurt by Clarel’s unresponsiveness. As this encounter, or rather non-encounter, is narrated, the narrator adds a brief interlude describing the muezzin’s call for prayer which Jews ignore: “Is Zion deaf?” the narrator muses (1.15.32). This passage pointing out the deafness among neighboring communities mirrors Clarel’s blindness to the yearning in Celio’s eyes and physical disposition as the Italian rises to greet the American. Clarel’s incapacity to answer the call of the Other in Celio’s call can be said to reflect a paralyzing fear to open himself to alterity. This failed reciprocity has a violent closure for Celio: consumed by doubt, shunned by his community and seeing his last efforts to create a bond with someone for whom he had felt a special connection fail, Celio dies emblematically facing the wall: Yes, some retreat to win Even more secluded than the court The Terra Santa locks within: Celio had found withdrawn resort And lodging in the deeper town. There, by grasping ill distressed— Such as attacks the hump-bowed one— After three days the malady pressed: He knew it, knew his course was run, And turning toward the wall, found rest. (1.19.7-16) Ironically, only after Celio is dead does Clarel want to approach the stranger by reading his journals. This can be interpreted as an example of conditional hospitality, as it is when the Other cannot pose a threat that Clarel opens himself to him and discovers that Celio was his alter ego. Another example of conditional hospitality is the fact that Celio’s body is claimed by the Franciscans who had despised his doubting nature but who now bury him as Catholic. Rolfe notices the irony in Celio’s imposed posthumous conversion when, upon reading Job’s inscription at Celio’s tombstone—“I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVETH”—he exclaims, “Poor Ethelward! Thou didst but grope; / I knew thee, and thou hadst small hope” (4.40.48; 49-50). Laura López Peña 94 The central theme of withdrawing from human society is retaken later in the poem in a play about the wandering Jew Cartaphilus which the pilgrims watch during the celebrations of Saba’s festival inside the walled monastery of Mar Saba. This play can be said to evoke the incapacity of reciprocated hospitality, which provokes the deaths of characters like Celio in the general context of the poem—“More lonely than an only god; / For, human still, I yearn, I yearn” (3.19.76-78)—what William Potter has called “the inability to transcend one’s own self and experiences, to achieve, as it were, an ‘intersympathy’ of any kind” (2004, 189). L2. Unconditional Hospitality: Rolfe Despite these instances of rather inhospitable encounters, or encounters in which hospitality is carried out with conditions to neutralize the difference of the Other, Clarel also provides readers with positive models who embody the very dialogical nature of which the poem itself, as so many of Melville’s works, is an example. The character Rolfe, also an American like Clarel—frank, kind, social, extroverted, “a messmate of the elements” and “indiscreet in honesty” (Clarel 1991, 1.31.21 and 1.31.25)—is a role-model of a plural thinker open to exploring alterity and the different sides of any story. He is also a crucial piece of Clarel’s construction of plural dialogue, since the character is always disposed toward Others, making them talk, while at the same time showing a deep respect for silences and human nature. Joseph G. Knapp calls Rolfe an “intellectual pioneer” who “probes the frontiers of the mind to search out those truths which haunt all men” (1971, 85). His main role in the poem is to gather the scattered individualities and corresponding thoughts of different characters embodying different cultures, ethnicities, worldviews (religious, atheist, nihilistic, scientific, etc.), feelings, moods, and life experiences. Rolfe constitutes a Socratic figure in Plato’s dialogues who, by questioning and evaluating, establishes connections, exposes contradictions, and analyzes specific notions both transnationally and historically. William Potter has likened this capacity to evaluate different points of view at the same time to that of a whale, which can look in two different directions simultaneously—due to the position of its eyes—and which Ishmael describes in Moby-Dick (2004, 15). Rolfe can, therefore, be interpreted as the figure of a host capable of unconditional hospitality; he places opposites together in an effort to understand them, yet without neutralizing differences and, what is more, embracing others and their worldviews as interpretive possibilities with which he infuses his own thinking parameters. Rolfe is not afraid to face the bleakness many of his fellow travelers represent either. The different perspectives he encounters, no matter how desolate, are taken in by a mature mind like Rolfe’s, who can still retain his balance and not fall into despair (Miller 1998, 213): Rolfe’s great virtue lies in his balance. He, too, can doubt, and can ponder long his doubts, but without abandoning himself to despair and death. But if he is capable of following, without monomania, the intricate paths of the intellect, he is also capable of making his way, without being duped, through the labyrinths of the heart. His is the ideal maskless nature—‘a genial heart, a brain austere’. He is ‘frankly kind’ [. . .]. Rolfe can acknowledge the rightness of the dark views of Mortmain and Ungar without assuming their despair. He can understand the value of Vine’s solitude without joining him in retreat. And he can comprehend Derwent’s commitment to optimism without condoning his hypocrisy. Between a shallow optimism and a deep-plunging (In)Hospitable Encounters in Herman Melville’s Clarel 95 pessimism, between foolish hope and dark despair, Rolfe does indeed remain ‘poised at selfcentre and mature.’ (Miller 1998, 213-214) The character is attributed a special place in the poem, as he is likened to the Hindu God Rama, who lived among humans unaware of his divine nature. As Rama, Rolfe sees deeper than any other character in the poem. Rather than being scared by the darkness other characters represent, or simply dismissing it, Rolfe’s “Manysidedness” (Clarel 1991, 3.16.263) and capacity for in-betweenness are distinct from Derwent’s, the Anglican priest who, with Rolfe, is the other main generator of dialogue in the poem due to his social openness. However, Knapp acknowledges that “Derwent expects a dialectical progression of truth, [whereas] Rolfe does not” (1971, 89). The poem exposes dissimilarities between them: while Rolfe can empathize with Mortmain’s heroic but dark nature, understand Ungar’s anger, respect Agath’s gravity, and even appreciate Nehemiah’s simple nature, Derwent predicates mere tolerance and often censors beliefs or doubts that cannot be contemplated within his own cheerful thinking parameters. His hospitality, in consequence, is simply conditional. He dismisses as “queer”—a word he often uses, together with “mad” or “terrifying”—the ideas he cannot grasp or that are too gloomy for his optimistic mindset (Kenny 1973, 130). In his private encounter with Clarel, for example, Derwent censors young Clarel’s doubting nature, thus showing he has little patience for doubt—“Alas, too deep you dive” (3.21.307), the priest claims. Derwent is unable to develop the deep understanding of human nature of which Rolfe is made an embodiment. As Vincent Kenny notes, Rolfe also differs from Derwent in that the former accepts that evil exists, and even admits its inseparability from goodness (1973, 205) since “Evil and good they braided play / Into one chord” (Clarel 4.4.27-28). If, on the one hand, Rolfe stands for the capacity to examine one idea from diverse points of view, Derwent is limited by his cheery optimism, his inability to comprehend doubt, the fact that he regards his own beliefs as superior to others’ and his rejection of darkness: “Derwent will not dive and—in Melville’s values—will never arrive at greatness” (Knapp 1971, 52). Rolfe, however, is what Richard Chase named “Melville’s ultimate humanist” (1949, 257), perhaps only comparable to the Lebanese Djalea in the poem, another wandering figure suspected to have been a Druze of noble origin and who becomes an example of human dignity while guiding, in Ada Lonni’s words, a “caravan of displaced pilgrims” (2011, 47). Djalea can also be taken as a role-model of hospitality, since his job as dragoman and translator places him between languages and cultures, and he has learned to host these languages and cultures within his own personality: A dragoman (Turjuman in Arabic) interprets, translates, and transposes words and ideas from one language to another, from one culture to another. Translation builds bridges, creates transparencies and reciprocal comprehension between persons and cultures. But to create links between different realities and thought systems, we must enter those other realities and systems: the translator cannot understand and, at the same time, remain extraneous and immune from the culture to be translated; it is not possible, in other words, to avoid one another’s influence. (Lonni 2011, 42-43) Djalea’s translating and mediating role unites, moves across, and gives voice to “things all diverse” (Clarel 1991, 3.16.173). To him, hospitality is a part of his job and his nature, as he is in the middle and, like Rolfe, connects different cultures and worldviews. However, Rolfe goes Laura López Peña 96 even beyond Djalea’s mediating/translating role. He feels at home with difference. His openness to others exposes him to the dangers of self-annihilation, of letting himself be carried away by the self-destructive gloomy natures of some of his fellow travelers with whom Rolfe empathizes. Yet it also enables him to learn and be liberated from one-sided worldviews that trap most other characters in the poem. These views make them keep to themselves and develop certain forms of monomania which are, in some cases, selfdestructive, and, in other cases, destructive of the potentiality to create bonds with other companions. Rolfe embodies what philosopher Hannah Arendt would describe as fermenta conditionis. This way of thinking is “not the search for truth, since every truth that is the result of a thought process necessarily puts an end to the movement of thinking;” its aim is the generation of more thoughts “to stimulate others into independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers” (1968, 10). According to Arendt, such a thinking process is itself a political process that allows its participants to “humanize” the world by speaking of it with others who are different, and, in this very process, “learn to be human” by making sense of the world together (1968, 24-25). Rolfe’s manysidedness thus lays bare the (self-)imprisoning interhuman walls posed by the individualist and communitarian mindsets that most of the characters in the poem cannot traverse. As Merlin Bowen acknowledges, Rolfe’s resistance and constant questioning of definite beliefs demonstrate an “opposition to all attempts to freeze experience into rigid artificial forms” (1960, 260). His open personality, by which “unlike things must meet and mate” (Melville 2009, 280), transcends Derwent’s embrace of mere tolerance combined with censorship of those aspects he considers too difficult to understand or too uncomfortable to sympathize with. This nature has the potentiality of making human thinking more plural, and therefore, less exposed to be polluted by fear of the Other. Rolfe is one of the most respectful, humane, and globally conscious characters in the poem. This relational nature and unconditional hospitable openness to alterity is the one the young Clarel is encouraged to imitate, since, “Clarel’s destiny,” as Robert Milder affirms—and perhaps also readers’—, “if he [or we] can rise to it, is to mature into Rolfe” (2006, 216). Thanks to his several travel experiences, Melville widened and enriched his thinking parameters. His own contact with alterity from a young age made the author question the ethnocentrism his culture and education had made him interiorize. In a way similar to the humbling effect Ishmael experiences through his friendship with Queequeg, Melville learned to question monolithic truths and realized the democratizing potentiality of interhuman contact. The author transmitted such wisdom to his oeuvre by creating literary spaces of unconditional hospitality, which give expression to individual experiences of pain— otherwise silenced and invisible—and connect them to a wider human awe that transcends any walls, separation, or difference. Melville’s works portray both hospitable and inhospitable encounters. These interhuman contacts—or, as this chapter has shown, lack of contacts as a consequence of factors such as fear—emphasize the tensions that arise between characters who represent different forms of alterity to one another, at the same time that they also underline the transformative possibilities enabled when the Other is embraced as other. Melville creates in Clarel characters such as Derwent, only able of conditional hospitality, or the Rabbi, who does not tolerate any opening to another who is external to the community he protects. The young Clarel himself enforces such partial hospitality or complete inhospitality principally with (In)Hospitable Encounters in Herman Melville’s Clarel 97 Celio, who begs for Clarel’s opening the same way Clarel does to the Jewish community in Jerusalem. However, the poem also portrays in Rolfe a positive role model who is capable of true hospitality while knowing—and exposing himself to—the risk such unconditional hospitality involves. Thus, if Derrida argued that pure hospitality is impossible because some conditions are always necessary to prevent hostility, aggression, and even war, Melville seems to indicate in Clarel that it is not hospitality, but the lack of contact with the Other which provokes (self-)destructive consequences in characters who die alone and alienated. By the end of the poem, Melville incorporates Clarel—grieved by Ruth and her mother’s death—to his literary community of sufferers. Turning him into a small part within a universal—human—wail, the poem concludes that each individual is ultimately a solitary loner who cries alone, unable to grasp, or care about, the pain of others. As Ishmael would observe in Moby-Dick: “Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable” (2007, 49). Melville’s literary production strives to communicate this grief. It shows deep understanding that no human being is foreign or illegal in a world of interconnected strangers exposed to suffering, vulnerability, mortality, and even the opposing forces of good and evil inherent to our very nature. Although characters in the poem are generally unable to move away from their own subjectivities and connect with one another, Clarel, following Melville’s literary production, performs a dialogic exercise in unconditional hospitality expressive of the varied emotions, questions, preoccupations, worldviews, and internal or external struggles that each character within it represents. L2. References Arendt, Hannah. 1968. “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” In Men in Dark Times, 3-31. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Edited by Margaret Canovan. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Bezanson, Walter E. 1991. “Historical and Critical Note.” In Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. The Writings of Herman Melville, Volume 12, edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, 505-637. Evanson and Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library. Bowen, Merlin. 1960. The Long Encounter: Self and Experience in the Writings of Herman Melville. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Buber, Martin. 1992. Martin Buber. On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity. Edited by S. N. Eisenstadt. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. Butler, Judith. 1996. “Universality in Culture.” In For Love of Country. Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, 45-52. Boston: Beacon Press. Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” Lecture given at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, July 2011. Caputo, John. 1997. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham UP. Cristina Garrigós 104 new towels for the bathrooms and lots of extra sodas for the Japanese crew. They never wanted any. They were so well prepared, with their own cooler in the van, filled with mineral water from France. They were polite about it, but Suzie figured that the Japanese people just didn’t like American pop. (Ozeki 1998, 31) Suzie’s hospitality fails because it is fake. She has no empathy and makes a generalization out of the fact that the crew prefers to drink water rather than sodas: in her mind, it means they prefer classical Europe (France) versus modern America. She takes this as a rejection of her country and as a projection of her husband’s affair with another woman, making her feel a failure as a wife and as a host. The relationship between the Japanese film crew and the families provides numerous examples of Derridean hostipitality throughout the novel, as the author offers a wide perspective of multicultural hospitality including episodes with US families from different origins: French, African, Polish, and so on. In most cases where the image of the US conforms to the idea of the ‘authentic’ US hospitality does not work because it is fake. Instead, real hospitality is to be found in those families that are not traditional, or that do not conform to the image of the perfect country that Ueno wants to project. For instance, for the Beaudrouxs, who live in a little town in Louisiana, hospitality is both related to food—Vern, the father, runs a restaurant—and to adoption: they have ten children from different ethnicities, apart from two biological children. This family represents the reality of Southern hospitality: “Welcoming strangers into their home was a way of life” (Ozeki 1998, 402). In their case, the relationship with the Japanese crew works reciprocally. The cameraman, Suzuki, teaches Vern that he can use kudzu for culinary purposes: “He showed Vern how to turn them into starch, then to use the starch to thicken sauces and batters. He made a salad with the shoots and the flowers, and even a hangover medicine that resembled milk of magnesia. Vern was astounded. He’d never thought of the plant as anything else than an invasive weed” (Ozeki 1998, 92).6 In this case, the host receives the new plant in his kitchen, adopting it for his own culinary purposes and the guest teaches the host how to prepare the food. That is, hospitality is based on sharing knowledge and experiences and dissolving the boundaries between the guest and the host in an act of ethics. The Japanese film crew is also welcomed with hospitality in Harmony, Mississippi. At first, the black community is reluctant to meet them, but they soon overcome their fears to invite them to take part in the Sunday service. However, the hospitality of the black community is not reciprocated since the Japanese boss, Ueno, decides not to film the chapter there because he believes that the Dawes family are not ‘authentic’ enough: they are too poor, speak bad English, and eat pork loins instead of beef. In his view, they do not represent America. In this case, the rejection of this family on the grounds of lack of authenticity is a sign of hostility from the representative of the Japanese company who shows his racial prejudices against the African-American community. Instead, he asks Jane 6 As Ozeki explains in the novel, kudzu was introduced in 1933 as part of the Soil Erosion Service to rehabilitate the land devastated after careless cotton and tobacco farming and the abandonment of the farms. The government paid farmers to plant kudzu but soon it outgrew and engulfed the indigenous vegetation (Ozeki 1998, 92). As we shall see in the next novel, All Over Creation, seeds are identified with human beings and become metaphors for transplantation. For more information, see Nancy J. Loewenstein, “The History and Use of Kudzu in the Southeastern United States.” Eating, Ethics, and Strangers: Hospitality and Food in Ruth Ozeki’s Novels 105 to choose a white family that is representative of the country. Jane opts for the Bukowsky family from Indiana, a white family of Polish descent which she selects knowing that Ueno would not approve of them since this episode deals with lamb, a fraught meat in Japan, and not beef.7 This case is an example of hospitality in reverse. The community acts as a host offering food, comfort, and solace to the family whose daughter has suffered an accident and is left in a vegetative state. Her parents open the house to visitors who spend time with her and bring her food and share their favorite things with her. After seven months of people coming into the house, she is cured. This episode illustrates a very special case of hospitality, which defies Levinas’s ethics. For Levinas, the giver of hospitality does not expect a reward. In this case, by ‘using’ hospitality to obtain something in exchange, the hosts are reversing the Law of hospitality. For Levinas hospitality takes place when the individual ventures outside and becomes an ethical subject welcoming the Other and experiencing pity, compassion, and proximity, as he said in Otherwise Than Being (177). Thus, hospitality for Levinas is based on care since the self is obliged to respond to the Other who needs it. In the case of the Bukowsky family, hospitality is unethical, since they open their home to strangers because they are expecting to receive something in exchange. In this way, the idea of hospitality that Ueno had imagined the show would reinforce—an ideal community of submissive and fertile wives cooking meat for their husbands—is subverted by Jane when she shows different types of families, thus dismantling the traditional notions of hospitality as representative of U.S society. By showing the multiculturality of US society, Ozeki questions the image of the nation as unitary and “perfect” and presents other possibilities for real hospitality. Jane’s subversive and radical version of American hospitality presents an alternative view of the US as a hospitable country. Akiko, Ueno’s wife, in Japan, receives the message and decides to flee from her oppressive marriage to the US where she expects to be welcome. The turning point for her is the episode of Lara and Dyann, a lesbian, vegetarian, and biracial couple. When Jane tells them about Akiko’s letter and how watching the episode was decisive for her, they decide to invite her to stay with them proving that they conform to the Levinasian ethics and they are hospitable because they do not expect anything in return, although they establish some conditions for her to stay: ‘You guys mean a lot to her. Gave her the courage to leave a really bad situation. She wants to come to Northampton. . .’ ‘Fine,’ said Lara. ‘Lara!’ said Dyann. ‘What?’ said Lara. ‘We have a guest room. She can stay with us.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ Dyann groaned. ‘How long is she coming for?’ (Ozeki 1998, 402) Dyann and Lara help Akiko find an apartment and settle in the US Jane’s TV food programs have thus been a vehicle for hospitality and ethics after all. Moreover, the program where Jane shows the medical abuses of the animals in Texas also serves to dismantle an image of authenticity based on appearances. By revealing the dark 7 Japan buys lamb from Australia. There are references in the novel to Australia as being considered a land of criminals and traitors for the Japanese (Ozeki 1998, 170). Cristina Garrigós 106 side of the food industry, the bond of trust that is supposed to be created between host and guest (Telfer 1996) is shown to be based on a lie. Food becomes a means of illegal communication and, therefore, does not promote the human exchange where empathy, friendliness, and courtesy are involved (Douglas 2011). By exposing the lies behind the appearance of hospitality both in the TV programs and in the food processing, Ozeki points to the need to dismantle false myths and go back to the real, which is where radical hospitality is to be found. L2. Eating with Strangers: Potatoes and Seeds in All Over Creation Ozeki’s second work, All Over Creation also has food as the central element of the narrative, and again, eating becomes a metaphor for the relationships between hosts and strangers. As in her previous work, most readings on the novel focus on the environmental critique in the text (Mchugh 2011; Wallace 2011), but no study to this day has focused on the role of hospitality in the novel, even though there are obvious connections between environmentalism and Levinas’s ethics. The work articulates the tension between a community of farmers in Liberty Falls, Idaho, and a corporation that aims to grow a genetically engineered potato in their fields. Yumi, the protagonist and narrator, is the estranged daughter of one of the farmers; she acts as the catalyst of the tension between belonging and not belonging, as she describes at the beginning of the text: And as for the description ‘land belonging,’ well, that’s a condition measured by human time too. But for one quick blip in the 5 billion years of life on this earth, that three thousand acres of potato-producing topsoil and debatably the slender cone of the planet that burned below, right down to the rigid center of its core, belonged to my father, Lloyd Fuller. (Ozeki 2003, 3) As the only child of Lloyd Fuller and his Japanese wife, Momoko, Yumi presents herself as a bad seed: “That’s what it felt like when I was growing up, like I was a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes. Burbanks—that’s what people planted . . . Honestly, I never liked potatoes much” (Ozeki 2003, 4). After many years away, Yumi has returned from Hawaii with her children to take care of her sick parents. Once there she is faced with the double role of being both guest and host at her parents’ house. She belongs and does not belong there, but she acts as the mistress of the house when she is faced with the arrival of “The Seeds of Resistance,” an anti-establishment activist group that comes to Liberty Falls looking for Lloyd. They consider him their guru because he sells exotic seeds—homegrown by Momoko—that are in danger of disappearing. The Seeds dress differently from the rest of the youth in town, they have piercings and tattoos, and seem dangerous to the people they meet on their travels. They arrive in the Spudnik, a biodiesel-fueled Winnebago in which they travel through the United States: “We target a range of food-related issues. Right now, it is genetic engineering. We drive around the country to communities and engage with the people and do actions” (Ozeki 2003, 52-53).8 In contrast to the mobility of the Seeds of Resistance, the farmers conceive of the land as their property and are hostile to the menace of strangers. Thus, hospitality in the novel is related to the idea of land/country ownership and the rejection of outsiders who are perceived as invaders. 8 The name of the Winnebago could also be a reference to the word spud, potato. Eating, Ethics, and Strangers: Hospitality and Food in Ruth Ozeki’s Novels 107 The people of Liberty Falls become hostile towards the nomads who are regarded as parasites and potential threats to the peace of the community. The Seeds are considered uncomfortable and unwelcome strangers who appear unexpectedly seemingly wanting to receive and not give anything in return. Yumi who, as noted above, has adopted the role of the owner of the house, is skeptical from the moment the Seeds enter her parents’ home, and wants them to leave: I turned to check Cassie’s pot roast in the oven. I was looking forward to their flowing right on out of here, but Phoenix’s eyes were shining, and Ocean was entranced. ‘We came here from Hawaii to meet our grandma and grandpa,’ Ocean was saying, ‘How come you came here?’ ‘Are you gonna stay?’ Phoenix asked. ‘You can eat dinner with us. We got lots of food, and you can camp out in the yard and—’ I spun around. ‘What the fuck, Phoenix!’ The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Everyone was looking at me now, and in a lash, I saw myself as they were seeing me, wearing Momoko’s faded, flowered apron and brandishing a wooden spoon. Two months in this house and I’d turned into what I would have become if I’d stayed—a small-town lunatic housewife.’ ‘That’s okay,’ Y said. ‘We don’t eat flesh.’ ‘But,’ Geek said smoothly, addressing me, ‘now that you mention it, we would like to camp out here for a while. We came here to learn about the seeds. (Ozeki 2003, 139-140) Yumi does not want to offer them food because she considers them dangerous. In other words, she is not hospitable. Yumi’s open hostility towards the strangers who have invaded her space is contrasted with the unconditional hospitality of her children who offer them food and a place to stay without asking for anything in return and without setting any limit on their stay. They are, in their innocence, offering radical hospitality. However, Yumi proves to have the same reluctant attitude that other people had towards her in the past due to her mixed ethnicity and unconventional lifestyle. Now, she feels uncomfortable with the Seeds in her house because she is putting herself in the shoes of her parents (and she is literally wearing her mother’s apron). She came as a guest to her parent’s house, but she has become a host, imposing limits to hospitality. All the limits that, as a racialized guest, were imposed on her in the past are now in her power. That is, she has become traditional, not open to dialogue, and not willing to welcome strangers according to the rules of hospitality. In this reversal of roles, Lloyd and Momoko have become the guests of Yumi, as she has the power of mastery over them since they are both dependent. They cannot act as hosts in the house and must rely on the hospitality of their daughter and of their neighbor, Cass, who has become the actual owner of their land and provides them with food. Thus, they become strangers in their own house, and as such they side with the newcomers. When Melvin (Y) demonstrates his proficiency by nursing the old man, despite his dreadlocks and ‘strange’ ideas about society, Lloyd starts to ‘like’ him: “He grew to tolerate them, Melvin and his friends. He liked the way they gathered in his room, settling around his bed, to listen to him talk about seeds and farming. [. . .] Momoko liked them, too” (Ozeki 2003, 144). The Seeds are welcome to Lloyd and Momoko, but for Yumi her parents’ hospitality is inappropriate: ‘Don’t they drive you nuts?’ She asked. Cristina Garrigós 108 ‘No. I like them. You drive me nuts.’ She looked hurt. ‘Me? Why?’ ‘The way you’re standing there. Either come all the way in or get out.’ [. . .] ‘How can you tolerate them?’ She asked at last. ‘You hate hippies.’ ‘Is that what they are?’ (Ozeki 2003, 147) Now that they have swapped positions, Yumi feels threatened by strangers. She has started to think like the other farmers and to see anything/anybody different, as potentially dangerous, whether they are plants, or an activist group (the Seeds). The Seeds do not belong to the land, they are the Others. Unlike Yumi, her friend and neighbor Cass sides with the strangers and not with the locals: “They seem okay” (Ozeki, 2003,160). Thus, it is the former ‘rebel’ Yumi who openly opposes the stay of the young activists in the house while her neighbor and best friend, Cass, her children, and even her parents welcome the strangers. They receive them unconditionally because they believe they are peaceful and can contribute their work to help with the care of the elderly, as well as to put the catalog of seeds in order. They are, hence, beneficial for the community. Yumi does not share this idea: “No, they are not, Phoenix,” she tells her son, “I know the type. They’re parasites and freeloaders” (Ozeki 2003,160). For Derrida, a guest who does not have the benefit of the right of hospitality is a parasite: In principle, the difference is straightforward, but for that, you need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome offered had to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction. Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don’t have the benefit of the right to hospitality or the right of asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced ‘in my home,’ in the host’s ‘at home,’ as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest. (Derrida [1997] 2000, 59-61) According to this definition, the Seeds are wrong because they seem to be interested in taking and not giving anything in exchange. They are parasites who arrive in the house to eat from the owner’s table, as Serres said: “Parasiter veut dire: manger à coté de” (2014, 22).9 Thus, they are illegitimate and liable to expulsion or arrest by the police. Of course, unlike Yumi, Cass does not see them as parasites at all. She opposes her husband, Will, when he presses charges against them for trespassing on their property and damaging the new genetically modified potatoes that he had planted. She takes Charmey, a member of the Seeds, with her to her house when the rest are taken to jail. Cass proves to be hospitable, providing the care and attention that the pregnant Charmey needs without asking for anything in exchange, in opposition to the wishes of other people, including her husband. However, she receives a reward for her hospitality when Frankie decides to leave their newborn daughter, Tibet, with Cass and Will to raise her, after Charmey’s death in the explosion of the Spudnik. For Yumi and the rest of the farmers in the community, the strangers are not welcome in ‘her’ house until they propose a deal which consists of taking care of her parents through a growing season so that they can learn from the seeds that Momoko planted. Only then, 9 To parasite means: eating alongside of Eating, Ethics, and Strangers: Hospitality and Food in Ruth Ozeki’s Novels 109 considering the possible benefits of the deal, does Yumi, sitting on her father’s old checkered recliner and taking the position of the master of the house, decide to accept their offer: So, I capitulated, with the provision that the Seeds divest themselves of illegal substances while on the property and refrain from political agitation within the country line. The children were happy, and, watching them, I started to feel an overwhelming sense of relief as well. Charmey said she would help with the cooking. Y and Lilith would see to Lloyd’s needs, Geek and Frankie would work with Momoko in the garden, first cataloging, then planting, and finally with the harvest: It seemed too good to be true. My mind slid over the inevitable, and I focused on short term possibilities. If this worked out, maybe I could leave, take the kids back to Hawaii, as long as I came back at the end, to wrap things up. (Ozeki 2003, 167) Yumi’s decision to accept the deal comes from her selfish interest to have some help in the house so that she can delegate to them and go back to Hawaii. The hospitality that Yumi can offer is conditional, because there is a time limit for their stay, and certain conditions, but it is more than she was willing to offer at the beginning. Thus, the Seeds become guests in ‘her home’ and not parasites. However, she is reluctant to consider them as full guests with the rights of hospitality, and when she asks Geek if she can trust them, he answers: “Listen, I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll stick around as long as you do” (Ozeki 2003, 168). Thus, she becomes the one who must prove that she can be trusted and that she is not a parasite taking advantage of their free labor. She has become a guest to her guests in another inversion of roles. Thus, the ‘deal’ implies a commitment on both parts and a dissolution of the boundaries between host and guest. Before they leave, Yumi accuses Geek of using the Fullers for their interest: “I don’t go around exploiting people and using them to further my political agendas” (Ozeki 2003, 409). To which he replies, “I didn’t use you! I loved you! All of you!” (Ozeki 2003, 410). Then, finally, she understands: Somehow, though, I got it. The bigger picture. Standing in my mother’s greenhouse that night, surrounded by mounds of wormy seeds and chaff, I felt the brittle coat around my heart crack open at the hopeless beauty and fragility and loss of all that is precious on earth. He was right, we are responsible. Intimately connected, we’re liable for it all. I had to take responsibility for myself and my kids, but also for Geek and Elliot, and for Charmey and Lloyd, too, and yet at the same time, I realized I was powerless to forecast or control any of our outcomes. But maybe that was the trick—to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectations? A paradox for sure, but such a relief. (Ozeki 2003, 410) Yumi’s understanding of what it means “to love without expectations” is close to Derrida’s idea of unconditional hospitality. For her, the relationship with the unexpected guests is key to her personal growth. It enables her to come to terms with her past and connect with her family and her native land. As Levinas said, hospitality is an act of ethics. It implies accepting the Others and understanding that there is a connection between all human beings that goes beyond the notion of place, property, and belonging. Thus, the novel questions the notion of the host, the guest, and the meaning of parasitism, as well as suggesting the possibility of radical hospitality as a reality. Cristina Garrigós 110 L2. Eating the Strangers: Cannibalistic Hospitality in A Tale for the Time Being In Ozeki’s last novel, A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth, a writer who lives in British Columbia, finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox on the beach containing the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl, Naoko Yasutani (Nao). Ruth becomes intrigued by the narrative of the girl and eventually loses herself to her story, although her first impulse is to throw the plastic bag into the garbage. Indeed, when her husband places it on the kitchen table to inspect it, she sees it as an invader: She winced, anticipating the stench of someone’s rotting picnic, or worse, that would ruin the fragrance of their meal. Lentil soup. They were just having lentil soup and salad for dinner, and she had just put in the rosemary. ‘Do you think you could dissect your garbage out on the porch?’.(Ozeki 2013a, 9) The work alternates excerpts from Nao’s diary and other texts found in the lunchbox with Ruth’s reflections on what she is reading and the narrative about her present life in Canada. The autobiographical references abound in the novel and have been the subject of critical attention (Davis 2015; Lowell 2018). Rocío G. Davis considers the novel “a scavenger hunt” where the fictive and the real are interlocked (Davis 88). However, again, the topic of hospitality in the novel has not received critical attention. In an interview with Eleanore Ty on the novel, Ozeki declared: “So much of what I am writing about in this book is informed by basic Buddhist principles—of interdependence, impermanence, interconnectedness—these kinds of things” (2013, 161). These principles, which she takes from her Buddhist beliefs, are articulated through the metaphor of food and literature. She said: “I wanted to play with that in an overt kind of way but also look at the way this relates to the Buddhist understanding of self and no-self: the idea that we are all only the stories that we tell ourselves. . . I think that is very much what the book is doing: it is playing with the idea of how you hold the story of yourself” (2013, 162–163). According to Buddhism, hospitality implies doing something good for other people. The Sanskrit word atithisatkara, which translates as “hospitality,” combines atskara, “doing something virtuous,” with atithi “guest,” a person who wanders, a traveler, somebody who may show up unexpectedly, maybe even at an inappropriate time (Rotman 2011, 115). As shown in the stories of the Buddha, the host should spare no effort, whether it is putting his/her heart into cooking or making sure the guest is at home. In other words, according to Zen, hospitality is something that you do actively, that requires putting your mind and heart into it. The host must work on it, and the guest, in turn, is expected to reciprocate. This bears resemblance to Kant’s idea of hospitality based on reciprocity, that is, the “right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory” (105) provided that he “behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to be in” (106). Besides being a meditation on memory and time, and on the interaction between reality and fiction, as well as the role of the author and the reader, the novel, according to Marlo Starr, “introduces a model of feminism that balances material and bodily experiences with ideas of equality that emerge from cyber-, Buddhist, and transnational feminist projects” (2016, 99). As such, although some readings of the novel have focused on the Buddhist philosophy that pervades the novel, for Morja Krevel, the ethical and philosophical Eating, Ethics, and Strangers: Hospitality and Food in Ruth Ozeki’s Novels 111 implications of Ozeki’s Zen Buddhism have not been sufficiently explored (2019, 91). Krevel interprets Zen Buddhism in the novel in connection with the postmodernist ethos, which could lead to the “dissolution of the notion of Otherness on all levels, as well as to the comprehension of the critical importance of connectivity and connectedness and the resulting awareness of the fundamental agency of being” (2019, 105). Buddhism seeks to eliminate difference by dissolving the individual ego. The idea that the self is unitary and separate from the others is illusory in Buddhist thought (Starr 2016, 101). Where cyber technologies supposedly create equality by eliminating conceptions of ‘Other,’ Buddhism is thought to create equality by denying conceptions of ‘self.’ It is in this light that we can address the concept of hospitality in the novel. Hence, hospitality is conceived as something that includes the spiritual and the physical, transcending both. In the novel, Ozeki is moving beyond known theories of hospitality to include cyborgs or egoless subjectivities. She is opening our understanding of hospitality by going beyond humanistic philosophies and ethics. The first reference to hospitality in relation to food that we find in the novel is the fact that Nao, a teenage girl who had recently moved back to Japan after some years abroad, writes her diary in a French cafeteria in Akiba, a commercial area in Tokyo, where she can write while drinking black coffee surrounded by the French music of Edith “Pilaf” (sic. Ozeki 2013a, 4) and by a maid called Babette. In this international atmosphere, Nao feels safe enough to express herself, away from her school, where she is rejected for being a kikokushijo (repatriated child) (Ozeki 2013a, 43), and becomes the object of ijime (bullying) by teachers and classmates: The minute he turned his back, they would start to move in. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where they show a pack of wild hyenas moving in to kill a wildebeest or a baby gazelle? They come in from all sides and cut the most pathetic animal off from the herd and surround it, getting closer and closer and staying real tight, and if Dad had happened to turn around to wave to me, it would have looked like good-natured fun, like I had lots of fun friends, gathering around me, singing out greetings in terrible English—Guddo monigu, dear Transfer Student Yasutani! Hello! Hello!—and Dad would have been reassured to see me so popular and everyone making an effort to be nice to me. And it’s usually one hyena, not always the biggest one, but one that’s small and quick and mean, who lunges first, breaking flesh and drawing blood, which is the signal for the rest of the pack to attack, so that by the time we got through the doors of the school, I was usually covered with fresh cuts and pinching bruises, and my uniform was all tucked with new little tears in it made by the sharp points of nail scissors that the girls kept in their pencil cases to trim their split ends. Hyenas don’t kill their prey. They cripple them and eat them alive. (Ozeki 2013a, 48) In this passage, Nao is the prey eaten by predators. This cannibalistic act reverses the meaning of sharing food as a hospitable act and becomes the opposite. Manzanas and Benito discuss Jean Baudrillard’s equation of cannibalism with a radical form of hospitality. According to this notion, hospitality and cannibalism navigate similar cultural demarcations. Cannibalism rewrites the discourse of hospitality, for it implies the total dissolution of boundaries (2017, 11). In Ozeki’s novel, Nao is eaten by the predators. References to her as smelling bad also reinforce the idea that she is rotten or dead flesh: Cristina Garrigós 112 Basically, it went on like that all day. They would walk by my desk and pretend to gag or sniff the air and say Iyada! Gaijin kusai!10 or Bimbo kusai!11 Sometimes they practiced their idiomatic English on me, repeating stuff they learned from American rap lyrics: Yo, big fat-ass ho, puleezu show me some juicy coochie, ain’t you a slutto, you even take it in the butto, come lick on my nutto, oh hell yeah. Etc. You get the idea. My strategy was basically just to ignore them or play dead or pretend I didn’t exist. (Ozeki 2013a, 48-49) Nao is attacked because she is different; she spent some years away from Japan in the US In a country renowned for its politeness, where omotenashi, or selfless hospitality—the idea of helping others without expecting a reward—is a cornerstone of Japanese culture, the high rate of suicide and bullying at school is a paradox. In Nao’s story, her school is a place of open hostility towards the different. This lack of empathy, as well as the loneliness pervasive in Japanese society, is the subject of Ozeki’s critique in this novel, as it was in My Year of Meats. Nao suffers different insults from her teachers and schoolmates, including namecalling, teasing, ostracism, physical abuse, and extortion. They even stage her funeral, as if she had died, by placing her photograph on a desk with candles and posting a video on the Internet titled “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Nao Yasutani” (Ozeki 2013a, 107). Nao thus becomes a dead body whose remains are ‘eaten’ by the scavengers. Accordingly, the Internet becomes a heterotopia, a conflicted space in terms of hospitality. Whereas Nao looks to cyberspace as a place to transcend her material and hostile reality and tries to find a community there, the web is also a place where Nao is exposed and humiliated. It is the symbol of hostipitality. The Internet becomes a place that creates an illusion of connection, that acts as a poor surrogate for intimate relationships (Starr 2016, 104). As a result, Nao sees her physicality connected to her virtual self and becomes aware of how her body has become repulsive: I swear, even on the Internet people can give off a virtual smell that other people pick up, although I don’t see how that’s possible. It’s not like a real smell, with molecules and pheromone receptors and so on, but it’s just as obvious as the stink in your armpits or the vibe you give off when you’re poor and don’t have any confidence or nice stuff. Maybe it’s something in the way your pixels start behaving, but I was definitely starting to have it. (Ozeki 2013a, 125–26) Nao’s stay in the convent with her great-grandmother, Jiko, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun, helps her to transcend her body through meditation. She becomes one with the mosquitos that bite her: “There was no difference between me and the mosquitoes. My skin was no longer a wall that separated us, and my blood was their blood” (Ozeki 2013a, 204). Thus, from being the ‘food’ eaten by the hyenas and the rotten flesh on internet, she comes to see the act of being eaten by the mosquitoes as an act of communion: she becomes one and the same with the mosquitos. Every being is connected. The difficulties that Nao finds in not belonging to a community—both a ‘real’ one and a virtual community on the Internet—are only overcome when she leaves the country. The educational system in Japan proves to be openly hostile to a student like her who is not like the rest. Hospitality is nowhere to be found among her classmates and teachers in Japan, or among her old friends in the United States. Hence the importance of her father’s work 10 Gross! She stinks like a foreigner! 11 She stinks like a poor person! Eating, Ethics, and Strangers: Hospitality and Food in Ruth Ozeki’s Novels 113 designing a program for cleaning and erasing all trace of shameful evidence on the web, “Mu-Mu the Obliterator” (Ozeki 2013a, 382). Nao’s failure to be received with hospitality in a community, either in the real world or in the virtual one, makes her transcend her physical self to become a story. This is the superpower that her Buddhist great-grandmother, Jiko, teaches her. Like her, Nao becomes a time being. Thus, she lives in the texts in the lunchbox which are received and hosted by Ruth. She becomes the writing in the diary to be consumed (eaten) by the reader, as we are the hosts of the stories written by Ozeki. The novel is thus a defense of literature as communion and communication in the era of social networks and media. Literature is a space where we can find hospitality by having access to a community of time beings. L2. Conclusion This chapter has explored the connections between food and hospitality in the three novels published by Ozeki to date. Whereas the first two novels explore hospitality as a Levinasian act of ethics, in the sense of offering and sharing with the Other, and the idea of reciprocity, Ozeki’s last novel gives another turn to the concept of hospitality beyond the humanist approaches of Kant, Levinas, or Derrida. As Ozeki has acknowledged, her Zen practice transformed her understanding of the world (Ozeki 2003b, 38-39). Thus, Buddhism taught her to see the Others and the self as interconnected. There are no Others but in one-self which is dissolved in many. This radical form of hospitality suggests we consider hospitality through disembodiment. While in her first two novels Ozeki considers our relationships with the Others and with the ownership of the land through the metaphor of food, in her last novel to date, she moves beyond the material aspects of food, to explore the spiritual aspects of eating as hospitality, considering acts of cannibalism and communion with the Others. In this sense, for Ozeki, all the beings that share this universe are united by a bond of interdependence that includes what we eat and who we are. In other words, we are both hosts and guests at the same time, dissolving the boundaries between the different selves and becoming all part of the same connected world. L2. References Davis, Rocío. 2015. “Fictional Transits and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Biography 38 (1): 87-103. Derrida, Jaques. (1997) 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Duformantelle Invites Jaques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP. Douglas, Mary. 2011. “Food studied as a System of Communication.” In The Active Voice, edited by Mary Douglas, 82-104. New York: Routledge. Fish, Cheryl J. 2009. “The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender and Corrective Eco-Justice in Ruth Ozeki My Year of Meats and Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold’s Blue Vinyl.” MELUS 34 (2): 43-62. Harrison, Summer. 2017. “Environmental Justice Storytelling: Sentiment, Knowledge, and the Body in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats.” ISLE 24 (3): 457-76. Patricia San José Rico 120 Such a differentiation in religion and class leading to racial labeling was not new to the Irish though; a similar process had already taken place for some in their native country. Eighteenth-century Ireland was governed by the Penal Laws; a series of regulations that limited the liberties of Irish Catholics and effectively turned them into an oppressed race or, in the words of Ignatiev, “imposed upon them a caste status out of which no Catholic, no matter how wealthy, could escape” (2009, 42). Prior to the massive migratory movement towards North America during the Great Famine (1845-1855), most of the Irish immigrants in the US had been Ulster Presbyterians, but most importantly, they had been noticeably wealthier. Once the poorer, mostly Catholic Irish of the Famine started to arrive, the formerly established Irish descendants chose to differentiate themselves from the more socially contemptible new arrivals by reenacting the racialized class difference they had witnessed at home, thus helping to perpetuate the Catholic-racially inferior model that had previously been enacted there (Ignatiev 2009, 46-47). This differentiation between Protestant (white) and Catholic (racially marked) Irish can be explained by introducing the concept of ‘ethnicity’ as opposed—or better yet, complimentary—to that of ‘race.’ In the words of Chandler and Watkins, ethnicity “is usually defined in terms of cultural criteria—common language, social customs, national and political identification, religion, group processes” (2006, 51). However, physical characteristics “are not usually tied to definitions of ethnicity” (Coates et al. 2018, 42). It could be argued, therefore, that what marked the Irish as inferior upon arrival to the US was not their race—understood in terms of physical difference to the dominating society—but their ‘ethnicity’ as poor, rural, and Catholic Irish-borns. Poor Catholic Irish migrants (but not their wealthier, Protestant kinsmen), thus, were labeled as racialized Others and therefore cast out as aliens, as potentially dangerous parasites unworthy of unconditional hospitality. L2. The US as the Land of Hope While the Irish migration to the US during the Great Famine is the most readily remembered Irish migratory movement due to its traumatic connotations and great numbers, the Irish had been migrating to North America since the 1600s. A sum of all the estimated figures of Irish emigrants across the centuries amounts to approximately ten million people having left the Irish shores since 1607 (Fitzgerald and Lambkin 2017, 2), out of which a vast majority chose North America, particularly the United States, as their preferred destination. According to Mike Cronin, by 1900 around two million Irish had settled in the United States, which allowed for thirty-three million people (ten percent of the total US population) to identify themselves as Irish in their 2013 census (2017, 2-3). Irish migrants have traditionally chosen the US as a host country primarily for economic, religious, linguistic, and family reasons. The perceived image of the US as a land of religious freedom, great farming expanses, and opportunities for upward mobility led many oppressed and impoverished Irish to create and perpetuate the myth of the US as the “land of hope,” which accounts for their extensive migration there. This mythical image of the US as “the mother of exiles extending an expansive welcome” (Damai 2012, 3) is reinforced by the US itself as expressed by the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty, which marked the entrance to the country for many of those same immigrants arriving by boat to “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary”: The Relation Between Race and Hospitality in the Irish-American Experience and its Literary Representation 121 New York Bay. This inscription is taken from the last verses of Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” which read: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! (Lazarus 2002, 20) This message became a beacon for many Irish migrants who, especially during the midnineteenth century and the 1950s, were fleeing famine, poverty, or exclusion and “viewed emigration as a voyage of survival” (Kinealy 2017, 4). This was encouraged and magnified by those who had made the trip before them and is amply represented in the Irish-American literature of migration. In Mary Gordon’s The Other Side, for example, we can find Vincent, one of the protagonists, reminiscing about his decision to move to the US in the early nineteen hundreds: Of course boys like him and Martin would come to America: they’d been brought up on the dream of it. Chicago, Butte, Philadelphia were more real to them than the Wicklow Mountains or the Giant’s Causeway or the Galway Bay. America was an invented country and yet one where people they had known had gone and prospered, not returning, sending money home. And exhortations: Pack up, come with us. Their voices rang across the ocean like the voices of the damned crying for clemency, or like the siren crying: Follow; like the Angel with the flaming sword or like the angel breaking, with a touch, the prisoner’s chains. Of course he and Martin would come to America. (1990, 245-246) Something similar is portrayed in Taylor Caldwell’s Captains and the Kings, only this time the period is that of the Great Famine: It was real for him, for he had dreamt that scene a thousand times on this sorrowful voyage. His father would meet his family on the dock and enfold them all, and then he would take them to the ‘flat’ in the Bowery where he lived with his brother, Jack, and it would be warm and there would be soft beds and a hot stove and joy and the fragrance of boiling potatoes and turnips and beef or lamb and safety and comfort and peace and hope. Had they not received letters from him, and money, and had he not told them of this? He had a good job as a janitor in a small hotel. He ate to repletion for the first time in years. He worked hard, and he received money for his labour. He would provide for his family, and no more would they be hunted like vermin and despised and execrated for their Faith, and thrown from their land to die on the highways of exposure and hunger. ‘Ah, and it is a land for free men,’ Daniel had written in his careful hand. ‘The lads will go to school, and the little one will be born in America, and we will be Americans together, and never part again.’ (1973, 11-12) What these two fragments have in common is the description of the US as the land of plenty. In both cases, the soon to be emigrants have heard tales of the warm welcome and hospitality they would receive in their host country; the reality, in most cases, turned out to be a far cry from what was advertised. Taking into account the fact that inhuman working and housing conditions meant that life expectancy for Famine Irish migrants after arrival in the US—if, that is, they had not perished on the voyage there, as so many did—amounted to Patricia San José Rico 122 an average of six years (Kinealy 2017, 4), plus the prejudice and signs saying “no Irish need apply”, we can easily conclude that, at least at that time and although “the United States [. . .] proclaimed itself as the ultimate hospitable space for all citizens, it nonetheless maintained a certain Land of Nod where all those who did not belong were cast out” (Manzanas and Benito 2017, 55). In this case, what made the Irish ‘not belong’ was their racialized social, economic, and religious difference; a distinction that was maintained throughout the following century. Even in the twentieth century, Frank McCourt experienced a similar reality check, as expressed in his memoirs: New York was the city of my dreams but now I’m here the dreams are gone and it’s not what I expected at all. I never thought I’d be going around a hotel lobby cleaning up after people and scouring toilet bowls in the lavatories. How could I ever write my mother or anyone in Limerick and tell them the way I’m living in this rich land with two dollars to last me for a week, a bald head and sore eyes, and a landlady who won’t let me turn on the light? [. . .] They’d never believe me. They’d say, Go away ower that, and they’d laugh because all you have to do is look at the films to see how well off Americans are, the way they fiddle with their food and leave something on their plate and then push the plate away. (2000, 54) What McCourt expresses here is the realization of the discrepancy between the perceived image of the US as the paradigm of hospitality and the actual acts of hospitality towards Irish and other immigrants. Whereas the former would comprise the Derridean concept of the law of (unconditional) hospitality, the latter would make reference to the application of the laws of (conditional) hospitality, that take into account the preservation of the self against the stranger, the different Other. Insomuch as the Irish were perceived as racialized Others on account not of their physical appearance, but of their culture, social status, and religion, they were often met with prejudice and even denied entrance. This represents a contradiction between America’s perceived and (self-) publicized image as the land of perpetual hospitality and the conditions—or plain refusal—met by many immigrants upon arrival there. When legislating hospitality, this contradiction between the law and the laws of hospitality must be met and recognized, trying to find a balance between good—as in generous, charitable—hospitality practices and what is safe for the host community. Was it charitable to deny entrance to hundreds of sick Irish arriving on boats to the different American ports and later to Ellis Island? Clearly not, but was it in accordance with the laws of conditional hospitality? If those sicknesses were considered a threat to the well-being of the American community, then the answer is yes according to Derrida. There is, in sum, a “non-dialectizable antimony” (Derrida [1997] 2000, 77) between the law and the laws of hospitality, or rather between the ideal of hospitality and the actual practice of it, as the Irish came to know very well upon their arrival to the US. L2. Social Prejudice and Nativism as a Catalyst for Failed Hospitality When accounting for hospitality—or lack thereof—towards immigrants, one must not fail to acknowledge the role of political and historical events in the host country. We are not unaccustomed to seeing how nationalistic political movements are often accompanied by an inhospitable discourse towards the migrant, especially when that migrant is, by class, race, or both, considered a hostile invader. A self-imposed need for preservation of the racial and “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary”: The Relation Between Race and Hospitality in the Irish-American Experience and its Literary Representation 123 national identities’ purity is then called forth against a perceived threat from the outside, and that is where the laws of conditional hospitality come into place. More often than not, the migrant Other might be deemed acceptable under the law of hospitality, even needed, but social practice and thought under the influence of intense nationalistic movements might declare him/her unwanted. Prejudice then comes into play, which is the reason why we can conclude, as Manzanas and Benito do, that “American history and culture [. . .] is traversed by hospitality and its own parasitic double, hostility” (2017, 7). This was precisely the case in mid-nineteenth-century America and the reason behind part of the nation’s attitude towards the Irish migrants. Arriving in a highly nationalistic society, the mostly Catholic Irish Famine migrants to the US found themselves amidst a climate of marked nativism. Even though Catholicism was a presence—albeit minor—in the US before the arrival of the Famine migrants, the sudden increase in Catholic population that this migratory peak caused during the mid-century years was used by nativists to reinforce already-existing anti-papist discourses and direct them against the new arrivals. The Irish migrant was therefore immediately identified with Catholicism, which in turn entailed racial labeling. According to McCaffrey, [i]n the United States [. . .] Anglo-Protestant and Scots-Irish Presbyterian prejudices against Irish Catholics had racial dimensions. They insisted that indigence and disorderly conduct were inherent in the Irish Catholic personality, and that their religious choice of Rome indicated an inferior intellect. They said that Catholicism locked the Irish into ignorance, shiftlessness, superstition and disloyalty to the American nation” ([1976; 1984] 1997, 93-94). In this way, the nationalistic anxieties of mid-nineteenth-century America targeted the Irish migrant as a threat on the grounds of their cultural, religious and—fabricated—racial difference and therefore barred them from receiving true, unconditional hospitality. Sometimes, as aforementioned, these nationalistic anxieties barred them from receiving any hospitality at all. In her novel Captains and the Kings, Taylor Caldwell provides an account that, although fictional, illustrates the effort of many Irish to rise above this initial rejection and achieve a place among the elite of white privileged people. The novel opens with the protagonist’s arrival in the States after escaping the Famine in Ireland and reflects precisely on the aforementioned discrepancy between America’s reputation as the perfect hospitable country and its actual implementation of conditional hospitality upon the arrival of the feared Other: “Joseph knew of the many little ships that had been turned back at various ports in America: they were not wanted. They were the destitute and the starveling, and they were ‘Romans’ and Irish and trouble-makers and strange. The Religious were especially despised and secretly feared” (Caldwell 1973, 13). This distinction between Catholic Irish and non-Catholic (or Scotch-Irish) was, as previously mentioned, one not established by the Americans themselves, but one that was readily accepted by the white American society and used by nativists to spread a fear of the outsider among the population and diferenciate between acceptable guests and unacceptable—poorer—guests in relation to the Irish. And yet, as many of those learned Irish must have realized, persecution and prejudice on the grounds of religion should not be a new idea to the descendants of the early American settlers—let alone a condoned one. Patricia San José Rico 124 When confronted with a man who refuses to allow his daughter to marry an Irish-Catholic descendant, Joseph, the boy’s father and Caldwell’s protagonist reflects on the following: But, sir, we were destroyed as ruthlessly as Russian serfs are destroyed by their masters. We were hunted down like animals, like vermin, for no reason at all but that we wanted to be free, as a nation, and to practice our religion. That was quite a heinous crime, wasn’t it? [. . .] Your own ancestors left England for just the same thing. But you have forgotten. Your ancestors were poor driven English yeomen, who wanted nothing but peace and to serve their religion. This they were denied, as my people were denied. So they emigrated—here. (Caldwell 1973, 342-343) Frank McCourt comes to a similar conclusion in his autobiographical novel ‘Tis, and also hints at the apparent irony behind the American’s disdain of the Irish on account of their religion: The professor is saying the Pilgrims left England to escape religious persecution and that puzzles me because the Pilgrims were English themselves and the English were always the ones who persecuted everyone else, especially the Irish. I’d like to raise my hand and tell the professor how the Irish suffered for centuries under English rule but I’m sure everyone in this class has a high school diploma and if I open my mouth they’ll know I’m not one of them. (McCourt 2000, 194) The lack of a clear referent for the pronoun ‘them’ in the last sentence in the previous quote leaves it open for interpretation as to which group Frank does not feel a part of: high school graduates or white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Perhaps both. In any case, what these two passages illustrate is that, in the words of Puspa Damai, America, which has always sought to distinguish itself from the cursed nations without hospitality, forgets its natural and constitutive part [sic?], and needs to be reminded of its forgetfulness. America forgets hospitality because it periodically lapses into amnesia with regard to hospitality [. . .] and therefore needs to be reminded of its repression; it needs a project of memory [. . .] which reminds the ‘just maturing youth’ of America to be hospitable. (2012, 50) America, as the narrators in these two novels suggest, needs indeed to be reminded that it was prejudice that drove the Pilgrims away from England, and that it is prejudice of a very similar kind that kept—keeps still—hundreds of those tired, poor, and homeless others in search of shelter from benefiting from the hospitality their host country professes but does not practice. This prejudice is, more often than not, based on stereotypes, and the case of the Irish was not an exception. According to Coates et al., “[p]eople often associate an elaborate array of behaviors, attitudes, and values with particular racial groups, presuming that these reflect innate or culturally specific traits” (2018, 40), which accounts for the Irish’s typical stereotyping. Even if “not all were poor, not all were Catholic, and not all even spoke English” (Ignatiev 2009, 45), especially after the mass migration during the Famine years there grew in the American society—aided by the nativists’ anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discourse—the preconceived image of all Irish as, indeed, poor, illiterate Papists. To this were added charges of violent temperament and a tendency towards excessive drinking. Most of these stereotypes are maintained today and shape the picture of the typical Irish from which the Scotch-Irish tried to distance themselves. “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary”: The Relation Between Race and Hospitality in the Irish-American Experience and its Literary Representation 125 The three novels analyzed here are full of instances in which the Irish or Irish-descended protagonists encounter examples of such stereotyping, like when the Jewish lover of one of Mary Gordon’s protagonists openly tells his Irish-descended girlfriend they all thought “the Irish were a bunch of crazy drunks” (1990, 327), or when a powerful businessman, reluctant to let his daughter marry the daughter of Taylor Caldwell’s protagonist, encounters the man himself and is shocked to see a well-groomed gentleman instead of the dirty rogue he was clearly expecting, explaining his disappointment to himself by assuming he was “Scots-Irish, perhaps, with a background of Covenanters” (1973, 339). This question of religion, as has already been explained, is perhaps the strongest and most perpetuated stereotype of all. Surely not all the Irish who migrated into America were Catholics, but most of the poorest and therefore most contemptible of those Irish emigrants were, which served to catalog all of the unwanted Irish under the same label. Frank McCourt reflects on this in the following passage: At the next meeting of the psychology class the professor asks me a question about Jung and the collective unconscious and the moment I open my mouth I know everyone is staring at me as if to say, Who’s the one with the Irish brogue? The professor himself says, Oh, do I detect an Irish accent? and I have to admit he does. He tells the class that, of course, the Catholic Church has been traditionally hostile to psychoanalysis. Isn’t that right, Mr Mc Court? and I feel he’s accusing me. Why is he talking about the Catholic Church just because I tried to answer his question on the collective unconscious and am I supposed to defend the Church? (2000, 223) The fact that Catholicism was immediately brought to the professor’s mind as soon as he identified McCourt as Irish illustrates the fact that the connection of Irish-Catholic has been deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious the class was discussing. This classifies the identification as a stereotype, and the fact that it was traditionally used to degrade and reject the Irish in America makes it a prejudice. Of course, the exposure to these stereotypes and prejudices permeates the Irish themselves, which might result in a feeling of inferiority in comparison to the more privileged members of their host society. If the rejected Other is not made to feel welcome among his/her unwilling hosts, this might result in a tendency to hide one’s otherness; whatever it is that makes one different, therefore, makes one rejected. This is illustrated when, in Captains and the Kings, the protagonist Joseph Armagh passes as Scottish in order to get a job (Caldwell 1973, 22), or when Dan, one of the protagonist’s descendants in The Other Side feels as an imposter for hiding his family’s roots while at the same time knowing that “if they did know him and the history of his family, they’d be appalled” (Gordon 1990, 24). His cousin, Cam, knows of this concealment and is conscious of its source: “He knew that she knew his double shame; he was ashamed of how his grandmother stood out in the world, that she was not like others, but he loved her and was shamed by his own shame” (Gordon 1990, 81). Dan is aware of his Irish grandmother’s otherness, and is shamed by it as well as by his efforts to hide it in himself. Cam, for her part, does not show such ambivalent feelings towards their grandmother, but does not partake of a very positive image of the Irish either: “It’s no accident the Irish built the subways. And then stayed there. It was the perfect place for them, dark, underground, dangerous, hidden” (Gordon 1990, 60). L2. Climbing the Social Ladder: The Irish’s Process of Becoming ‘White’ Patricia San José Rico 126 In order to get out of the subways, in order to get over their self-shame and revert the lack of hospitality they faced in their new country, the Irish needed to acquire ‘white’ status, positioning themselves over other non-white groups. This, of course, marked the relations of the Irish to other races in America. Cast out as socially contemptible, the Irish were thrown together with other non-privileged groups upon arrival and treated with similar contempt. According to Ignatiev, “[i]n the early years Irish were frequently referred to as ‘niggers turned inside out’; the Negroes, for their part, were sometimes called ‘smoked Irish’” (2009, 49). The Irish were among the first non-whites to be enslaved in New England in the early 1600s (Coates et al. 2018, 112), and in the late 1890s it was common to believe that the Irish were in fact descended from Africa, acceding to the “Iberian hypothesis” (Coates et al. 2018, 39). This racialization of their social, cultural, and religious differences with the dominant white society allowed nativist groups to perpetuate a stereotype of the Irish migrant as a dangerous—racial—Other that would threaten their racial purity, their cultural specificity, and their religious independence from Rome. A group, in sum, subject to being denied access under the laws of conditional and preservative hospitality. In order to revert this racial labeling, in order to shed their otherness and become admissible guests under the laws of hospitality, the Irish migrants needed to turn the spotlight on other racialized groups, making use of their physical if not social difference. In other words, even though “Irish immigrants experienced a tremendous amount of prejudice in the United States and were not considered to be among the country’s elite White ethnics” (Coates et al. 2018, 39), they learned to utilize the privilege of their skin color in order to become part of the US’s “matrix of oppression and privilege” (Ferber, Herrera, and Samuels 2007; Ferber, Jiménez, Herrera, and Samuels 2009). As Ignatiev puts it, “[t]he Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [. . .] came to a society in which color was important in determining social position. It was not a pattern they were familiar with and they bore no responsibility for it; nevertheless, they adapted to it in short order” (2009, 2). Consequently, even though at the beginning there was a fair share of intermingling between Irish and African Americans, as soon as the African Americans became competition in the job market, the Irish stood against them and made use of the most apparent difference between the two groups to prevail. As David Roediger puts it, “white workers [. . .] created racialized class identities by reflecting not only on their roles as the producers and the exploited, but also in reference to their positions as non-slaves, and as refusers of ‘nigger work’” (1998, 57). Once the poor and desperate Irish workers replaced African Americans in the marketplace by accepting lower wages in menial jobs, they endeavored to make use of the color line by barring blacks from ever returning to those jobs. “As members of the privileged group,” Ignatiev points out, “white workers organized to defend their caste status [. . .] [by prohibiting] free Afro-Americans from competing with them for jobs” (2009, 115). Of course, since physical appearance was not for the Irish a guarantee of white status, if they wanted to be recognized as whites they needed to do so by establishing a contrast between themselves and other groups, most noticeably, their direct opposition: African Americans. White man’s work, Ignatiev argues, “was, simply, work from which Afro-Americans were excluded” (2009, 130). Consequently, “[t]o be acknowledged as white, it was not enough for the Irish to have a competitive advantage over Afro-Americans “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary”: The Relation Between Race and Hospitality in the Irish-American Experience and its Literary Representation 127 in the labor market; in order for them to avoid the taint of blackness it was necessary that no Negro be allowed to work in occupations where Irish were to be found” (2009, 130). Frank McCourt illustrates this process in his autobiography ‘Tis, although, in his experience, the differentiation in the workplace was made with reference to Puerto Ricans, not African Americans. In one of his first jobs as a young boy in America, Frank encounters this particular—Irish—union shop steward who greets him by saying that “it’s a good thing [Frank is] Irish or it’s down in the kitchen [he’d] be with the spics” (2000, 37). And he continues by saying that Frank is paid two dollars and fifty cents a week more than the dishwashers and [he has] opportunities for advancement they’ll never have because all they want to do is not learn English and make enough money to go back to Puerto Rico and sit under trees drinking beer and having big families because that’s all they’re good for, drinking and screwing till their wives are worn out and die before their time and their kids run the streets ready to come to New York and wash dishes and start the whole goddam thing over again and if they can’t get jobs we have to support them, you an’ me, so they can sit on their stoops up in East Harlem playing their goddam guitars and drinking beer outa paper bags. That’s the spics, kid, and don’t you forget it. [. . .] They are like the Negroes, they don’t take nothin’ serious. (38-39) If the irony that the Irish are usually accused of exactly the same things—not working, drinking in excess, and having excessively big families of more, poor, Catholic children—by the dominant society is lost on Eddie (the union shop steward), it is by no means lost on Frank, who fills his novel with several instances of the same such stereotyping directed at him as Irish. If we take hospitality to mean the process by which a stranger is allowed to feel at home in someone else’s territory, then we could argue that, being able to work in America—and therefore provide for themselves and their families in order to thrive there—was the first step that this community had to take in order to be finally welcomed there. That they needed to achieve this by reverting the racial labeling they were initially given and making use of a similar pre-existing racial labeling for other minorities shows how their initial rejection was linked to their racial—through social and religious differences—othering and therefore their falling into the category of the unacceptable parasitic guest. And yet, racial relations were not the only means by which the Irish achieved inclusion in the hegemonic social group; politics also had a great deal to do with the process. Many Irish immigrants chose politics as a way to fulfill the American Dream, and many are the names of Irish or Irish-descended who made their way in the political sphere. The most famous one would be, of course, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose election notably helped the Irish cause in America since his “whiteness was ratified by popular vote” (Jacobson qtd. in Durso 2002, 99). However, he was not the only US president with Irish ties. According to Nathan Mannion, twenty-two of the forty-five US presidents to date can claim Irish ancestry, including Barack Obama (2017, 8). This process is clearly depicted in Taylor Caldwell’s Captains and the Kings when, from early on in the novel, Joseph Armagh realizes that the only way to achieve respect and equality in his new host country is to acquire power and wealth: Patricia San José Rico 128 He needed more money. Money was the answer to all things. [. . .] He thought of his mother, given to the sea after the ship had left New York, and his father in a pauper’s grave, without stone or remembrance, and Joseph’s mouth became a slit of pain in his stark face. He must have money. He no longer cared how he would obtain, not a comfortable wage, but money in profusion. [. . .] He thought of Mr Tom Hennessey, the Irishman who had made his fortune, it was said with truth, in blackbirding, and he had many interests in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and all of them, it was hinted, equally nefarious. It was his money which had made him mayor of this town, and which had given him a luxurious home in Green Hills, he the son of an Irish immigrant like Joseph Armagh himself. [. . .] Even an Irishman with money was to be respected and honoured, and caps lifted at his passing. (1973, 36-37) According to Puspa Damai, “[h]ospitality as furnishing [. . .] depicts America as the land of plenty and promises of prosperity, which are actualized and achieved by treating the land as a means to acquire or amass property” (2012, 197). This is precisely what Joseph has in mind when he conceives of his plan to make money whatever the cost. It is his vision of the American Dream, the only way he finds for an Irishman to be, if not fully respected, at least tolerated. He, in fact, makes it his life’s mission, which reaches its peak when he sets his mind to making his son president. All these schemes do not, of course, fail to have some part of vengeful sentiment in them, as is made evident towards the end of the narrative: ‘Pa,’ he said, ‘why do you want me to be a Congressman, then a Senator, perhaps a Governor, or, as you used to say, President of the United States of America?’ He smiled as at some happy jest, but his father gave him one of his fierce glances and Rory no longer smiled. ‘I thought I told you,’ said Joseph, in slow but emphatic words. ‘The country that would not accept me and my family, the country which rejected me, the country which despised me – it will accept my sons as Representatives, Senators, or whatever. That will be my . . .’ He stopped, snipped a little wine. (1973, 307) What Joseph’s words evidence is a desire to turn the lack of hospitality he encountered in his host country back on itself, and force his unwilling hosts to be ruled by his descendants, the class of people they formerly despised, now whitewashed through money and power. L2. The Assimilation of Irish-Americans According to Manzanas and Benito, “the melting pot, as a metaphor for American identity, participates in [a] cannibalistic trope because it reduces immigrants to a common denominator of Americanness” (2017, 11). This is achieved through a process of assimilation, or incorporation, which “implies a blurring of boundaries between two entities that can be tantamount to consumption, for one element is dissolved into the other, and the foreign is assimilated within the familiar” (Manzanas and Benito 2017, 83). Of course this process comes at the cost of the assimilated group’s losing what makes it different, its uniqueness. This de-othering goes against the law of unconditional hospitality, under which the guest is to be accepted despite its “inescapable differences” (Manzanas and Benito 2017, 20), yet it repeatedly takes place within the United States. As Patricia Williams reminds us, “one loses sight of the fact that some ‘successfully assimilated’ ethnicities in the United States have become so only by paying the high cost of burying forever languages, customs, and cultures” (1998, 253). “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary”: The Relation Between Race and Hospitality in the Irish-American Experience and its Literary Representation 129 Is this what happened to the Irish in America? Is the fact that St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated throughout the US enough proof that the Irish retained their cultural identity or is it rather indicative of an appropriation of certain ‘acceptable’ Irish traits on the part of American society? If we agree that what constituted the Irish non-white status was their poverty, rusticity, and Catholicism, we can surmise that, insomuch as their journey into whiteness entailed an improvement in living conditions through the acquisition of increasingly better jobs at the cost of other races as well as an acclimatization to urban life through participation in politics and law enforcement, at least some of their identifying traits were lost in the process. Religious identification has also shifted since, according to Shaun O’Connell, “[b]y the end of the 20th century some 44 million Americans claimed some Irish identity, divided loosely into 24 million of Protestant descent and 20 million of Catholic lineage” (2003, 254). Patricia Williams describes this process—as witnessed in a Russian neighbor of hers—as compulsive because so tied to fear of being bounded, so linked to fear of being made fun of for becoming ‘too ethnic,’ too closed, too ignorant of ‘the larger society.’ While this should be in no way taken as a necessarily bad thing, it can also signal a lost balance, a sacrifice of appreciation for the bonds, the links, the ties that bind, that make family, connection, identity. (1998, 254) All this can only result in an ambivalent relationship between the wish or even the need to fit into the host community and a feeling of melancholy and shame for the lost ties to the motherland. Such a situation is very well portrayed in Mary Gordon’s The Other Side, especially in the MacNamara original couple: Vincent and Ellen. She, having fled Ireland after a troubled childhood, does not wish to retain any of what links her to her original country. Her husband, for his part, having been kept from his wife’s past, fails to understand her rejection of the homeland and, although he recognizes his life is much better in the US, cannot help but feel an attachment to Ireland to which he gives way in the form of songs. This became a common source of contention for them, as one of their grandsons remembers: Oh, this beautiful thing, Ellen would say, through furious cruel teeth, we loved it so, that’s why we couldn’t wait to leave. And when his grandfather would send unto the air a nice memory, rising like a balloon to give them pleasure, when he would say: The greenness of the grass, the goodness of the milk, the lovely bread, the songs, the smell of the peat fire, she would raise the hammer of her scorn. She would begin to talk in a false brogue. ‘Yes, dad,’ she’d say, ‘’tis little enough ye knew of it. You left at fifteen and lucky for you. ’Twas a lovely life you had. Breaking your back on the farm that went all to your brother, then apprenticed out at twelve, ’Twas what ye wanted for yer children, wasn’t it. Everybody slaving till they died or wore out. ’Twas wonderful. If only I could have it back, my carefree youth.’ And she would flap and dance and invent a song. ‘My carefree youth / The cowshit and the toothless mother / And the starving tinkers out to steal me blind / Back, back to the auld sod of my dreams.’ (Gordon 1990, 159-160) This juxtaposition of attitudes is transferred onto their descendants, who, as has already been mentioned, have a tendency to feel ashamed both of their roots and of their shame of that shame. Except for Sheilah, another of their grandchildren: A former nun who left her order to marry a priest, she is determined to recover the cultural heritage that was denied to her—a common process in third-generation immigrants—which is not understood nor shared by the rest of her family: Ana María Manzanas Calvo 136 precious treasures they conceal in their gardens [. . .] The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. —Michel Foucault “Of Other Spaces” The image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micropolitical system in motion—is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons [. . .] Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts. —Gilroy, Paul The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness The image of the sea as an intersection of different trajectories and crossings returns in Vega’s short story. Two centuries after slave ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean and distributed slaves in the Caribbean and the southern United States, Ana Lydia Vega introduces a small boat carrying disposable crossers like the Cuban migrant in Wolfe’s Back. As a “floating piece of space, a place without a place,” the boat turns into “the heterotopia par excellence,” as Foucault explains. As a location that is a “counter-emplacement” (2008, 17) and that is located outside all places (2008, 17), the boat has the ability to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements—and several roles, we may add—that are in themselves incompatible (2008, 19). The roles of host and guest, the story demonstrates, come to the fore on the heterotopic boat, as the three protagonists of the story find themselves in an absolute break from traditional time. The boat brings echoes of former pilgrims—also illegal—that arrived on the American continent to pursue their religious freedom and of the human cargo taken to the Caribbean to be distributed in North America Just as Gilroy proposed in The Back Atlantic, the boat may start the circulation of peoples and ideas, but may also contribute to the reinforcing of historical, racial, and cultural barriers. Such potential for transcultural communication initially sets the tone for the crossing, which can be seen as an opportunity for the creation of a nascent Caribbean Confederacy, as the epigraph to the story reads (“A la confederación caribeña del futuro / Para que llueva pronto y escampe”4). The difficulties of establishing such a transnational confederation, however, become clear in the story. Three representational logics collide as the initial passenger of the boat, a Haitian called Antenor, welcomes two other castaways, a Dominican man called Diógenes, and a Cuban man named Carmelo. They happen to be on the same heterotopic boat on their way to Miami. Vega uses the comic mode to chronicle the voyage and structures the story along the well-known lines of the formula “three men on a boat.” The omniscient narrator is a privileged speaker “from a social class considerably higher than that of the narrative subjects, a position explicitly shared with the reader” (Castillo 2005, 64). The writer deploys a constant balancing act, “jostling high culture and popular culture language registers” (Castillo 2005, 64) French, Spanish, and English phrases. This instability at the linguistic level mirrors the literal instability of the boat and the changing relations and alliances the 4 “To the Caribbean confederacy of the future, may it rain soon and clear up” (My translation). Hospitality Rituals and Caribbean Migrants: Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado,” and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman 137 passengers create among themselves, as hosts become guests and guests become hosts. The different languages and linguistic registers, the different interpretations of the journey, the rapid succession of actors and their different forms of mastery over space contribute to the instability of the text-boat and the increasingly difficult balancing acts on board. As in Wolfe’s Back, only a liquid line, referred to in the story as “ese morelludo brazo de mar” separates the three men from the ironic “pursuit of happiness” (Vega 1992, 13). The English phrase, inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, sets the distance between English and Spanish, but also between individual dreams, aspirations and reality. The Haitian man, Antenor, starts the journey alone. His reasons for leaving Haiti are well known: “Atrás quedan los mangos podridos de la diarrea y el hambre, la gritería de los macoutes, el miedo y la sequia” (1992, 14).5 Against this backdrop of terror and famine, his diminishing water reserves and his adventure at sea feel more like a pleasure cruise. He is about to fall asleep when he hears the cries of a drowning man, whom he manages to help onto the boat. As a gracious host, Antenor welcomes a Dominican man, Diógenes, and shares the water jug with him, only to take it away when the latter holds on to it for too long. Thus the threat of the abusive guest starts to loom in the horizon. There is no need for a common language between the two men, for, according to the narrator, both share the internationalism of hunger and the solidarity of dreaming. This initially smooth interaction between Haitian host and Dominican guest shifts when the men hear new cries from another man at sea, a Cuban. The Dominican as guest expresses his exasperation at welcoming yet another passenger, as his comment, “Como si fuéramos pocos parió la abuela” (1992, 15), 6 conveys. The Haitian, on his part, also translates the appearance of the new guest as a burden, for another passenger means another mouth to feed. Not withstanding their reservations, the two men haul the Cuban onto the boat once he makes sure they are also en route to Miami. The third man rearranges the power dynamics on board. The Dominican and the Cuban establish what Antenor terms a “Cervantine monopoly” (1992, 15) and he can only interject timidly. Significantly, initially the host language, the language of mastery on board, French becomes a guest language in the face of the power of Spanish. Still there is some ground to share between the host and the new guest, and both men can relate to working in sugar cane fields. The exchange of experiences triggers the first point of friction within this bourgeoning camaraderie, for the Dominican voices the popular claim or representational logic that immigrant madamos are brought in, thus taking away Dominican jobs. This word strikes a cord for Antenor, for he knows it is a pejorative term for Haitians. The Haitian senses further upheaval when the Cuban, calling him prieto,7 endorses such representation of Haitians, and demands that Antenor hand over the shoe box where he kept food, rum, and tobacco for the journey: “Levanta el corcho, prieto”8 (1992, 16). When Antenor pretends not to understand, the Dominican, siding with the new guest and forgetting everything about the Haitian’s hospitality, rephrases the Cuban’s words: “Alza el 5 “He left behind the rotten mangos of diarrhea and hunger, the uproar of the Macoutes, the fear and the drought” (My translation). 6 “As if there weren’t enough of us, now grandmother’s gone and popped a baby” (Velez’s translation 1994, 829). 7 In the Caribbean, prieto refers to a dark-skinned person. 8 “Move your ass” (My translation). Ana María Manzanas Calvo 138 cagadero, madamo, que te jiede a ron y a tabaco”9 (1992, 16). The demand marks a shift in the power relations on the boat, for it is now the guests who gang up and displace the host. Dispossessed and disempowered, Antenor is almost kicked off “his” boat. But nothing is stable at sea, and dissent soon breaks out between the new competing hosts. After increasingly aggressive statements between the guests-turned-hosts, the water jug ends up at Antenor’s feet. In his resentment towards his former guests, the Haitian throws the water jug into the sea and a fight breaks out. Unable to balance the power relations on board, the boat capsizes and the three men end up in the sea. When they are about to succumb to the dangers of the Bermuda Triangle they hear a whistle and are finally rescued by an American ship. Since the migrants cannot make it to America, America comes to them in anticipation of the Promised Land. The first intimations of the “pursuit of happiness” and the encounter with America are not encouraging, however. The narrator describes the captain at length, and focuses on his Aryan and Apollonian features, blond hair and blue eyes. The emphasis on the captain’s whiteness is crucial to assess his vision of the rescue and the specificity of his instructions to accommodate the three men: Get those niggers down there and let the spiks take care of ‘em. Palabras que los incultos héroes no entendieron tan bien como nuestros bilingües lectores. Y tras de las cuales, los antillanos fueron cargados sin ternura hasta la cala del barco donde, entre cajas de madera y baúles mohosos, compartieron su primera mirada post naufragio: mixta de alivio y de susto sofrita en esperanzas ligeramente sancochadas.10 (1992, 20) The three men, who fought so hard on the boat to reaffirm their national differences and their linguistic monopoly over each other, are finally united under the American captain’s gaze as “niggers.” It is another re-enactment of the color line that disrupted alliances on the boat. Migrants and readers alike are reminded that English is the dominant language, the host language that establishes and administers categories and an overwhelming representational logic. The three men are finally in the same boat, both figuratively and literally (Vélez 1994, 832), on the same level of otherness. Thus the Captain denies the men the cultural specificity for which they viciously fought, a denial that “operates as the confirmation of an assigned space and order (if only down there with the spiks), erasing national identities in favor of a single racialized otherness relegated to the fringes of U.S. subjectivity” (Castillo 2005, 66). The confederacy that failed to be established on the original boat is ironically achieved from without, as the United States discards national differences and relegates the migrants to a pervasive marginality, a confederacy of blackness. Hospitality becomes indistinguishable from hostility towards these undifferentiated and unwanted Others. Their total lack of agency is emphasized in the use of the passive voice in “fueron cargados,” just like cargo or merchandise. Even if different migration policies await each migrant, as noted in the previous section, what is clear from the captain’s instructions is that 9 “Move your ass, madamo. It stinks of rum and tobacco” (My translation). 10 Words that the uncultivated heroes did not understand as well as our bilingual readers. After being pronounced, the Caribbeans were unceremoniously taken to the hold of the ship, where among wood crates and moldy trunks they cast their first post-wreck, gaze: a mixture of relief and fear stir-fried with slightly poached hope” (My translation). Hospitality Rituals and Caribbean Migrants: Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado,” and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman 139 the three men occupy the same space in the American imaginary, the hold of the boat, the space traditionally reserved for African slaves. The journey to freedom turns into its very opposite, and the future and the past collapse in the hold of the ship. Étienne Balibar (2005, 39) has argued that the colonial heritage has structured the way immigrants are being introduced into contemporary metropolises. Managing immigrants has become a form of “imported colonialism” (Hoffman 2009, 248) that reproduces previous encounters and modes of dealing with contingents that are deemed deficient and in need of development and civilization. Unlike Camacho’s role as the United States’ gatekeeper in Wolfe’s Back, Vega introduces a “spik” who is in charge of administering the hospitality rituals on board. The Puerto Rican grumbles in the dark: “Aquí si quieren comer tienen que meter mano y duro. Estos gringos no le dan na gratis ni a su mai” (1992, 20),11 and in saying so, “a black arm” hands them dry clothes. Survival, the Puerto Rican implies, can only rely on brotherhood, on that sense of confederacy that failed on the boat. The Puerto Rican also lays out the kind of hospitality the migrants will encounter in the Promised Land. They will not find the unconditional hospitality they dream of, only a limited hospitality that is based on “limits and borders: calculations and the management of finite resources, finite numbers of people, national borders and state sovereignty” (Rosello 2001, 11). There is nothing free in the land of the free, and immigrants are nobody’s guests. Their place in American society will always resemble the space reserved for the dark Other. L2. Stasis: Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman12 A similar moment of anagnorisis on an American ship awaits Francisco Goldman’s characters in The Ordinary Seaman. The allocation of migrants to the hold of the American ship in Vega’s short story recalls previous colonial practices and ways of dealing with alien Others. Goldman goes a step further and explicitly compares the journey towards America with that of the African slaves that arrived in New York in the nineteenth century. From this perspective, Goldman’s characters impersonate the image of the neo-slave: disposable, dispossessed, and trapped in mysterious capitalist practices. They embody the figure that Nancy calls “abandoned being” (1993, 36) and that Butler and Spivak call “spectral humans,” beings deprived of “ontological weight,” and who, failing the tests of social intelligibility required for minimal recognition, not only are disqualified for citizenship but also actively qualified for statelessness (2007, 15). The crew also becomes the embodiment of Bauman’s concept of “wasted humans” as elaborated in Wasted Lives. Bauman has argued that the global spread of the modern form of life has set loose and put in motion enormous and constantly rising quantities of human beings. They are what he terms “the collateral casualties of progress” that are regularly disposed of because they are disposable (2004, 7, 15, 12). Set in the 1980s, the story opens with the beginning of a journey that takes two Nicaraguans, the young Esteban and an old man, Bernardo Puyano, to a dream job in New 11 “Here if you want to eat you have to work hard at it. These Gringos won’t give anything away for free” (My translation). 12 A different and longer version of this section is forthcoming in A Critical Gaze from the Old World: Transatlantic Perspectives on American Studies. Isabel Durán et alia, eds. (Peter Lang). Ana María Manzanas Calvo 140 York. Together with the rest of the Central American crew they are taken to a “deserted and apparently defunct end of the port” (Goldman 1997, 19) where the ship, the Urus, which was to leave New York in four days, was docked. Because of technical difficulties, however, the ship never leaves port, and the men are abandoned. The dilapidated buildings of the port reveal the decline of industrial port jobs and the rise of neoliberal capitalism and its attending practices, such as the trans-localized division of labor, national policies and economies increasingly porous and less sovereign, and the setting of many people in motion (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, 25). The Urus, newly named for this new economic venture, refers to the “urus,” an extinct large, long-horned wild ox of Europe that is the ancestor of domestic cattle, according to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary (1971, 1573). As the novel unfolds, the crew will reveal itself as the cattle, the Third-World labor that has historically sustained commercial ventures from colonial times to the present. Significantly, the word Urus refers to a particular ox, but is also the “you are us” and the “UR-US,” the UR-text (Silva Gruesz 2003, 67) that creates a repeated sense of history from slavery to the present. On board the men are welcomed to a broken ship by the captain and his “primero oficial,” Mark (Goldman 1997, 23). Captain Elias explains that they would be delayed in port until some spare parts arrived from Japan. Bernardo is aghast at the explanation, and the image of the ship as a disastrous carcass gradually and painfully reveals itself. Unsurprisingly, when the crew looked south over the waterfront warehouse and terminal roofs and trees, they did not see the majestic and welcoming image of the Statue of Liberty. They just see its upper portion, a green, oxidized arm in the air. The statue did not salute the newcomers with the promise of a new life. Rather, its static and threatening quality becomes a symbol of the crew’s immobility, as Bernardo will remind them throughout the novel: “When that statue walks, chavalos, this ship will sail” (Goldman 1997, 45). The men’s liminal position as seamen that will never be at sea is reinforced when the captain lays out their legal status. While on board, the crew is in Panama and protected by Panama sovereign laws since the Urus has a Panamanian registry. Onshore, the Captain clarifies, they are in the United States and they are perfectly legal until their transit visas expire. But the protection of the sovereign laws of Panama is limited, for the country operates what is known as open registries or “flags of convenience” that allow a series of advantages to shipowners: They have neither the will nor capability to impose domestic or international regulations on registered ships (Naimou 2015, 71). To make matters worse, the boat is not even Panama’s responsibility since the sailors, as Bernardo keeps repeating throughout the novel, are unlicensed seafarers. The captain, however, projects this lawless space onto the shore, and cautions the crew not to leave the ship. Port cities, he clarifies, are dangerous, especially if the crew left the port yard and entered the streets around los proyectos, government housing for the very poorest people, controlled by gangs who did not like strangers wandering through. The men do leave the ship and cut through the proyectos on their way to Brooklyn and are attacked and mugged by men who look like them. The transgression reinforces the captain’s authority and his admonition to stay in what he calls “Panama.” Unsafe on American ground, unprotected by Panama sovereign laws, immobilized and gradually abandoned by the captain and his first mate Mark as the economic venture flounders, the sailors become hostages and refugees. L2. Ship, Anti-Ship, and the Welcome to the Past Hospitality Rituals and Caribbean Migrants: Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado,” and Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman 141 A specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back. —Jacques Derrida Specters of Marx Unable to leave the ship, the men turn into what Bauman calls “the outsiders incarnate.” They are outsiders everywhere “except in places that are themselves out of place—the ‘nowhere places’ that appear on no maps used by ordinary humans on their travels” (Bauman 2004, 80). As a place of containment, the ship becomes a “nowhere place” that folds the sailors within and perpetuates their externality. There is no need for barbed wire or watchtowers around the stranded boat, for its separation from the land secures its out-of- placeness. Discipline, Foucault argues, “sometimes requires enclosure,” as it organizes an “analytical space” (1977, 141, 143). The ship stands as the enclosed and disciplined space that harbors the “docile bodies” (1977, 152-156) of the sailors. For the crew the ship becomes another example of heterotopic space, a rerouted home and place of exile, a refuge, a disciplined space, a place of exception, a prison and also a hospital, as the novel unfolds. The image of the static ship and the stranded crew converses with Paul Gilroy’s vision of the boat as a mobile signifier in The Black Atlantic. The liminal position of the Urus, situated in a middle passage of sorts, emphasizes not the circulation of ideas but rather the persistence of different forms of subservience and colonization, a conceptual continuity with the past that, according to Étienne Balibar (2005, 39), articulates contemporary contacts between immigrants and citizens. Just as there is no need for barbed wire around the ship, those contained within do not need to be shackled either. As Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado” illustrates, there is a persistent dynamic that assimilates migrants to previous experiences of bondage. A new version of slavery thus returns as a revenant to structure contemporary interactions between immigrants and host countries. The Urus, once again, appears as the UR text that speaks back to a hemispheric racial history, but also as the “you are us,” as Silva Gruesz (2003, 67) argues, a cautionary voice against a repeated history of exploitation. The stasis in time and space is confirmed when, on the third Friday on board, the captain lets the crew quit work early and announces a meeting and a barbecue. After assuring the men that he and the ghost owner are satisfied with their work, he adds that due to the delay in port the owner is unable to pay them. The bright side to the situation, Captain Elias assures the men, is that they really do not need the cash since they are illegal off the ship. Bernardo speaks first to state that the situation is not a blessing. The ship is a swamp of safety and maritime violations and not getting paid was just a great insult. In Bernardo’s assessment, the captain is asking them to be slaves. The captain corrects Bernardo claiming that slaves do not get paid, whereas they were going to be paid or the ship was never going to move. Moreover, he argues, the laws protected them, Panamanian law, international laws, United States law. In fact, as stated before, there is only one law on board, the law of the master/captain/owner. As if to placate the possibility of a mutiny, the captain announces promotions for the whole crew. The old man is promoted to Segundo oficial. Significantly, the charade creates a zone of indistinction where opposite concepts mean the same. Promotions are the same as demotions; discipline is equal to non-discipline; hospitality is the same as hostility, and lack of violence is a form of coercion. As a hostile abode and as a disciplined space, the ship appears as an open space the migrants are free to leave, for the [Document text truncated for crawler view.]