edited by Angelika Bammer
Indiana University Press
When editors assemble a collection of essays from various contributors, they are challenged to find cohesiveness among several authorial voices. Angelika Bammer's Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question includes essays and stories of individuals and groups who have struggled to be heard in their own "different" terms; and so instead of smoothing out or glossing over the differences in the voices, the editor has accentuated the differences and provided a common meeting place for a chorus of otherwise displaced utterances.
Bammer, associate professor of German studies with a joint appointment in Women's Studies, outlines the organization of the book in her introductory essay, in which she cites "the separation of people from their native culture" or "displacement" as "one of the most formative experiences of our century."
The opening essay of the collection, "Interrupted Journeys: The Cultural Politics of Indian Reburial," centers on the struggle of Native American Pemina Yellow Bird and her fight against governmental bureaucracy and racial prejudice to secure the right to rebury thousands of Native American human remains that were being stored in museum vaults. Kathryn Milun interviews Yellow Bird in the essay and presents some of the intrinsic cultural conflicts, which she dubs "post-colonial politics." Yellow Bird relates the story of how she discovered the North Dakota Historical Society's repository of human remains believed to be Native American graves and the problem of viewing Indian remains and sacred objects as "archaeological resources." Much of this essay and the actual conflict center on language, which becomes a larger issue and focus for many of the works.
Bammer points out in her introduction that "one of the issues around which debate, hopes and hostilities often crystallize is language." The interesting and cryptic "Les mots canins" or "Dog Words" by Abdelfattah Kilito (translated by Ziad Elmarsafy) follows the introduction. The selection about a lost traveler who is searching for other humans by barking like a dog serves as a prelude to the collection and sets the tone for the language debate that pervades the larger discussion of cultural displacement. Elmarsafy writes, "At issue in `Les mots canins' are language and identity, how one creates the other, and how the act of speaking a different language threatens to strip the speaker of his or her self."
Indeed there is a problem in finding the proper terms to even describe some of the works in the collection. They range in type from personal essay to poetic construction. Not surprisingly, the personal stories put into real life terms what is discussed in theory and are, finally, the more compelling pieces of the book.
Marianne Hirsch's "Pictures of a Displaced Girlhood" is the author's remembrance of three friendships that are built on mutual struggles to fit into their new American homes. The essay ultimately becomes the discovery of a kinship through similar conditions of displacement and the author's eventual intellectual understanding of her own life events. Hirsch juxtaposes her own story against Eva Hoffmann's Lost in Translation, demonstrating how the feeling of being "a pretend teenager among the real stuff," as Hoffmann writes, is an experience shared by many, which finally crosses all of the cultural boundaries.
The poetic "Year of the Ram" by James Clifford is a series of notes sometimes expressed in incomplete sentences. The work reads like the sound bytes heard while channel surfing, but in this context, we are forced to project our own references and analogies to phrases like "In slow motion the building implodes." Ironically, the nontraditional forms provide needed relief from the weighty and sometimes exhaustive works, which pull from many of the same sources and seem to be discoursing with each other without regard for a reader.
In Bammer's essay, "Mother Tongues and Other Strangers," she uses animated movies, comic strips and Freud to create a context for her discussion of home, family and community. The organization of this essay mirrors the larger organization of the book--posing the various conflicts and then offering options for resolution.
The afterword, "Aller à la ligne" by Theresa Hak kyung Cha, expresses the layers of grammatical structure that language can require. Like Clifford's work, "Aller" causes the reader to refer to earlier parts of the selection or maybe even "translate" it into traditional form in order to get at its meaning. It seems that the editor wants the reader to have to rethink notions of translation and interpretation to understand the works. Finally, it is in the exercise of "getting at" the meanings of the works that we can fully know what it is to be the lost traveler of the desert searching for other humans who speak our language. --Matt Montgomery