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In the last few months I've been doing the final revisings
of 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora, though its working
title for a number of years was Adventures of
Identity. In Genesis, God declares
to Abraham, then in his nineties, that if he circumcises,
God will establish a covenant between Abraham and his
descendants. "I will give unto thee", God says to
Abraham, "and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein
thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an
everlasting possession" (Genesis 17: 6-12). Indeed, God
tells Abraham that the covenant means that Abraham and his
seed will with God's assistance be able to possess land
"from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the
river Euphrates", that is to say the land not only of
the Canaanites but of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites,
Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaims, Amorites, Girgashites, and
Jebusites (Genesis 15: 18-21). Bloom is at liberty
not to observe God's instruction to the Israelites that in
Canaan they "destroy the names out of that place"
(Deuteronomy 12:3). In this injunction, the Canaanites are
to be destroyed as history, as memory, as heritage. God
directs the Israelites to render history into a single new
layer (the name of the Canaanites having been destroyed)that
has an absolute new existence and authority.
John Docker presented this paper at the
"Belonging Conference", Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University,
in November 1999.
Autobiographies
John Docker
The book addresses the challenging debates that have been
raging for over a decade, in many ways inspired by Edward
Said's Orientalism (1978), that focus on issues of
colonialism, postcolonialism, migration, diaspora, exile,
belonging, identity, ethnicity, 'race'. I am interested in
these debates for autobiographical as well as intellectual
reasons; indeed, I can see no distinction between the
autobiographical and the intellectual, ideas and being.
Philosophy, said Walter Benjamin, is the representation of
ideas, and so is autobiography. By 'poetics' I mean that we
necessarily understand or try to understand identity and
belonging, or not belonging, through cultural forms –
through representation as in genre, myth, novel, poem,
allegory, parable, anecdote, story, sayings, metaphors,
riddles. The autobiographical 'I' is never itself in a pure
sense because it always represents itself through culture;
the autobiographical eye can never perceive directly much
less remember directly; further, there are continuous inner
journeys that beckon deep within oneself to the scattered
islands and mirages; I think of myself as a pathological
hermit, yet one can make long voyages in the mind, prompted
and pursued by desires entwinedly utopian and dystopian.
1492: The Poetics of Identity is my utopian quest to
reach towards a sense of entitlement to belong to a pre-1492
Judeo-Islamic trading, social and cultural world that
stretched from Moorish Spain through the Mediterranean to
India and China; a cosmopolitan world with its own poetics
of heterogeneity, the convivencia and interaction and
imbrication of many communities, Muslim, Christian, Jewish;
a multi-ethnic multi-religious multi-cultural world that
prized the scholar-merchant and travel as necessary for
education, yet also revealed deep attachment to particular
cities. My utopian quest, conducted in imagination and
fantasy, genealogy and the body, with an intellectual method
that seeks a kind of derangement, a cultivation of the art
of madness – my quest is inevitably accompanied by
farce, delusion, self-parody, self-mocking. Here the
autobiographer is a shlemiel,revelling in comic stories of
his own incompetence, humiliation, and banality.
In the last few years I have felt an extreme disenchantment
with both white Australian society and Western monotheistic
history. We talk of Europe as the old world, but I don't
register either white Australian history or Western history
as old: on the contrary. While writing the chapters for
1492: The Poetics of Diaspora my thinking took a
bizarre theological turn; bizarre for the child of an
atheistic Communist family, odd too in a Western
intellectual environment, including most contemporary
cultural theory, that is determinedly secular. I was
puzzling over some whimsy of a fictional character I regard
as a doppelganger: Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses,
when he says that in his view the Israelites came "out
of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage".
Here Bloom reverses the usual meaning of the story of
Exodus.
Bloom's heretical interpretation recalled for me Edward
Said's essay on Exodus, where Said points out that the
Canaanites were already in the Promised Land. Said's
Canaanite reading has stimulated an exciting new strand
within recent postcolonial and diaspora theory – in
authors like Ella Shohat, Regina Schwartz, Deborah Bird
Rose, Ann Curthoys, Roland Boer – examining the impact
of the Exodus story as a foundational narrative in the
history of Western colonialism, seductive for both
colonizers and colonised. I was stimulated to relate Bloom's
vagaries and thoughts to some of the Old Testament stories.
In Ulysses we don't know for quite a while if Bloom
is circumcised or not. I don't know – my mother having
died many years ago – if I am circumcised simply
because after World War Two circumcision became a routine
surgical procedure: a very odd procedure given how much in
European Christian history the male Jew was despised and
excoriated precisely for that feature.
In my book I wrote a chapter called "Mr Bloom's
Penis" where I point out that in the Nausikaa episode,
on the edge of the sea, a lonely Bloom masturbates, an
activity that comes to reveal as it were that indeed he is
not circumcised. In Judaism as I understand it, it is held
that Jewishness for men and women is passed down through the
mother. A boy born of a Jewish mother is automatically
Jewish, whether or not he has been circumcised, and there
have been long periods of Jewish history, especially in
times of persecution as in Inquisitional Spain and Portugal,
where circumcision has been foregone. The rite of
circumcision is held to reprise a common ancestry with
Abraham, the first Jew to be circumcised by God's command,
in an unbroken line: circumcision goes back and forth from
Abraham to the present and future.
In not being circumcised, Bloom can exercise a kind of
trickster-freedom from the violent project of colonial
conquest that God here enjoins on Abraham and his
descendants. Because of such trickster-freedom, Bloom can
resist an associated injunction of the covenant, as in the
following passage from Deuteronomy (12: 2-3).
Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations
which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high
mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green
tree.
Because of his trickster-freedom, Bloom does not support one
of the great disasters of European and world history, a
disaster strongly urged by God in Deuteronomy and certainly
continued in official Christianity and I think in Islam the
other world monotheism as well: the attempted total
destruction of paganism and its polytheistic religions, of
pagan landscapes, and of even the memory that there had been
pagans in the land now being occupied.
And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break down their
pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew
down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names
of them out of that place.
With his trickster-freedom, Bloom wishes to inhabit a
history of layered meanings, palimpsestial. His mind dwells
in diaspora, a consciousness that roams in time and space,
at once here and there, now and then.
With Bloom, my fictional doppelganger, I feel that I belong
to histories, not to a place, not to a land. I know that
histories are always torn, always bitter. I cannot belong to
a Promised Land, because the Promised Land is a colonized
land, haunted by the fate of the Canaanites, who could only
be displaced by brutality and cruelty. If my circumcised
body is supposed to represent the covenant with Abraham and
his descendants, then I don't belong to my body. I don't
belong to a so-called ethnic community, because the
community I could relate to, like many other diasporic
communities, is fond of espousing multiculturalism in
Australia yet believes in nationalism and ethnic absolutism
in its claimed society of origin. I don't like the way
ethnic communities European or Asian will not admit to any
complicity in the history of colonialism in Australia, the
multiple ways they have been advantaged by it; they prefer a
victimological narrative. I keep thinking about a Cavafy
poem, "Ithaka", that suggests that it is the
journey itself that offers riches of knowledge, not arriving
home to where one apparently belongs. And remember that when
Homer's Odysseus did at last arrive back at Ithaka, he and
his son Telemachus slew Penelope's suitors with
extraordinary violence, including cutting off their
testicles and throwing them to the waiting dogs.
I am forever haunted by lines I studied for my long ago
honours thesis, in 1966, on T.S. Eliot's The Waste
Land, lines I roughly remember as with these
fragments I shore up my ruins.I feel I can only journey
towards a state of paradoxical negation in Australia in
relation to its topological features of so many kinds –
its landscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, cityscapes,
beachscapes. I can only journey towards a state of
neither belonging nor non-belonging.One has to stay
haunted and tormented; one's mind has to stay with
fragments, ruins, shadows, with ambiguity and
contradictoriness. I grew up in Bondi, on the edge of the
sea, the edge of the continent, it is where also my
grandparents lived whom I would visit every day after school
when I was in primary years. I recall that my
internationalist Communist father loved to go to Bondi beach
and sit reading on the hill at the south end, sheltered from
the cold southerly wind; I recall that my English mother
would never go from our block of flats in Edward Street to
the beach, fearing the sea, and I still feel fear when
putting my face in the water while swimming. I still love
going back to Bondi to swim and catch waves or walk along
its promenade as a flaneur,stroller, voyeur,
enjoying gazing at humanity from around the world, the
diversity, the bizarre differences, my own bizarreness in
their eyes. Yet Bondi too once belonged to its Canaanite
peoples.
In Baudelaire's opening poem to The Flowers of Evil,
"Au Lecteur",the poet addresses his
reader as a hypocrite, then admits that he too is similar,
is a hypocrite. I too live in hypocrisy. I reject Australian
nationalism and lordly say I cannot understand a society
which says its legendary hero is someone who once hit a ball
with a piece of wood. Yet I am desperate that Australian
sporting teams win and obsessively read and watch the
sporting news. I despise Australian society for its
anti-academicism and anti-intellectualism, for its
despicable public sphere of opinion and commentary; yet
overseas, especially in England, I feel a common nostalgia
for Australian landscapes and relaxed social style, and in
particular for the dazzling beauty of Sydney, an exciting
cosmopolitan port city like other great port cities in the
world past and present, brazen and corrupt – 'my'
city.
I feel and write that the intellectual should be a stranger
amongst the nations, a trickster critical of any society, a
permanent outsider. Yet I know the trickster, the outsider,
the stranger, also has an aching longing to belong.
In Australian Humanities Review,see also by John
Docker:
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http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/copyright.html for copyright notice.