Departure and Arrival

288 Pages·2014·13.25 MB·English

by  Golnar Nabizadeh

Departure and Arrival: Loss and Mourning in Literary Migrant
Narratives

Golnar Nabizadeh

LL.B. (Hons)/B.Com

Discipline of English and Cultural Studies
School of Social and Cultural Studies
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University
of Western Australia

2011

ABSTRACT

This thesis contends that complex forms of loss constellate literary migrant narratives.
Specifically, I argue that loss in migrant narratives is found to be central to the formation
of subjectivity in journeys of migration. Building upon the distinction between mourning
and melancholia as distinct reactions to loss, the productivities of both processes are
analysed in four contemporary literary texts concerned with migration. While the selected
texts dramatise a response to loss, they do not offer redemptive or consolatory
resolutions to the pain of grief. Instead, they retain an open-ended melancholic
engagement with the past, and demonstrate an attempt to register the pain of loss
through different modes of productivity.

Chapter One examines The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, and configures the narrator’s
relationship with his second uncle Tridib as one bound by a melancholic—and
traumatised—devotion to the past. In this way, the analysis engages with this novel’s
exploration of the separation and recovery of the lost other. The second chapter, on
Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy, addresses post-colonial melancholia as an inflection of
Lucy’s separation from her mother. The analysis pays particular attention to the impact
of gender in this process and on the formation of post-colonial subjectivities more
generally. Chapter Three examines Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, and
focuses on Satrapi’s return to her homeland of Iran. Here, I argue that her physical
return to the ‘origin’ precipitates the dissolution of the melancholic subject, and the onset
of grief, as the losses of her traumatic childhood reveal themselves belatedly. The final
chapter (Chapter Four), examines Shaun Tan’s graphic text, The Arrival, and uses Ann
Anlin Cheng’s work on racial melancholy to investigate how the visual representation of
nostalgia and postmemory can be read in this work. Through close readings of the four
primary texts—The Arrival, The Shadow Lines, Lucy, and Persepolis—this thesis investigates
the functions of melancholy in literary migrant narratives.

The work of this thesis attests to the polyvalent qualities of melancholia and its operation
in literary narratives of migration. The analysis considers the interstices of literary
memory, trauma, language and visual ideograms to describe the fraught, fertile space of
migratory loss. Moreover, by establishing a dialogue between written and visual texts, this
thesis brings to light the under-examined interaction between these two distinct modes
of literary representation. In this way, the thesis extends scholarship on loss and
mourning by examining melancholia, trauma and memory in literary narratives of
migration.

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Departure and Arrival: Loss and Mourning in Literary Migrant
Narratives

Table of Contents

Abstract .................................................................................................................... i
Table of Contents ................................................................................................. iii
List of Figures ......................................................................................................... v
Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. vii
Author’s Declaration ............................................................................................. ix
Introduction: ........................................................................................................... 1

Chapter One: Talismans of the Past: Amitav Ghosh’s TThe Shadow Lines .......... 37
Memories in the Space of the Shadow ............................................................................... 37
Through the Looking-Glass: Journeys in Desire .............................................................. 41
Mourning the Ghosts of Nationhood and a Crisis of Movement ................................. 58
The Erotics of Loss ............................................................................................................... 63
Photographic Emanations and the Trace of Loss ............................................................ 69
Silence and Melancholy ......................................................................................................... 75
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 80

Chapter Two: Mourning the Maternal in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy ...................... 85
Ambivalence as Recovery of the Past Anew ..................................................................... 85
Unravelling a Ball of Rage: Deconstructing Colonial Myths ........................................... 89
Inscription, the Act of Naming and Recitation ................................................................. 98
Material Modalities of Mourning ....................................................................................... 103
Failures of Old and New Worlds ...................................................................................... 112
Bodies of Water/Maternal Bodies ..................................................................................... 115
Decolonising the Body and Departure ............................................................................. 119
Creativity and the Photographic Impulse ......................................................................... 124
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 129
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Chapter Three: Behind the Painted Veil: Vision, Witness, and the Politics of Loss
in Marjane Satrapi’s PPersepolis ....................................................................... 135
Ambivalent Oscillations: Suicide and the Return ........................................................... 135
Belatedness and the Imprints of Trauma ......................................................................... 144
A Crisis of Witnessing ........................................................................................................ 159
Humour and the Work of Mourning ............................................................................... 177
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 182

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Chapter Four: Folding and Unfolding:
Repetition and Loss in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival ........................................... 187
Photography, Nostalgia, Surrealism ................................................................................. 187
Framing Devices, Folding and the Politics of Migration .............................................. 205
Arrival and the Migrant’s Re-production ......................................................................... 217
Within the City’s Walls: Establishing and Dissolving Images ..................................... 225
Cyclicity ................................................................................................................................. 232
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 234

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Afterword: ........................................................................................................... 237
Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 241

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FIGURES

Origami Bird (Shaun Tan “The Arrival”) ......................................................................... Cover page

Figure 3.1: The Goodbye .................................................................................................................... 136
Figure 3.2: Execution ......................................................................................................................... 140
Figure 3.3: Anti-Shadow .................................................................................................................... 153
Figure 3.4: Breaking the Fourth Wall ................................................................................................ 162
Figure 3.5: Demonstration in Tehran .................................................................................................. 165
Figure 3.6: Demonstration in Vienna ................................................................................................. 165
Figure 3.7: Departure from Vienna .................................................................................................... 173
Figure 3.8: Performing Grief ............................................................................................................... 180
Figure 3.9: Evine Prison ..................................................................................................................... 184

Figure 4.1: Illegible Alphabet (Title page) ........................................................................................... 190
Figure 4.2: Visual Traces ................................................................................................................... 193
Figure 4.3: Endpapers ........................................................................................................................ 194
Figure 4.4: Origami (Author’s composite of images) ............................................................................ 207
Figure 4.5: Gestural Mirroring ........................................................................................................... 210
Figure 4.6: The Great Hall ................................................................................................................ 219
Figure 4.7: Transition ......................................................................................................................... 229

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis journey has been about accessing my voice as a writer. Without the special
people in my life, this significant task would have been impossible. Firstly, my supervisor,
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has provided inestimable support and insight throughout my
candidature. His perceptiveness and guidance has made this project possible.
I would also like to thank Gail Jones for her encouragement throughout my candidature, as
well as Shalmalee Palekar and Tanya Dalziell for their support as secondary supervisors. It
has been a genuine pleasure to work with all the staff in English and Cultural Studies, and I
would like to particularly thank Judy Johnston, Van Ikin and Kieran Dolin for their tireless
assistance, as well as Hui Chuin Poa and Ines Bortolini in administrative and financial
matters.
The Graduate Research School Office generously provided a Completion Scholarship and
Travel Grant, which, in extension to the financial support of the Australian Postgraduate
Award, were essential to enabling me to complete my doctoral dissertation. I would also
like to thank CATL and the 2009 UWA Teaching Internship cohort with whom I learnt
many lessons and continue to do so.
I am also grateful to Shaun Tan for his generous responses to several questions about The
Arrival.
Along the way, the following friends and colleagues have made the thesis journey delightful
through their conversation and humour; Marco Ceccarelli, Rebecca Crawford and Michelle
Baker, Rajesh Krishnamuti, Chris Lin, Adam Nicols, Rebecca Rey, and Wendy Grace. I
would like to particularly thank Sophie Sunderland, Lee-Von Kim, Hessom Razavi, and
Stacey Fox for their generosity in reading through various chapters. Their attention to the
technology of my writing has been invaluable, and I thank them deeply for their sensitive
and informed readings of the various chapter drafts to which they were exposed.
I would like to thank my life-long friend Narges Razavi for her sisterhood, support and
love throughout my candidature. I am also grateful to Ferydoon and Tina Nabizadeh who
provided me with a wonderful home in Göttingen, Germany where I worked for several
weeks in 2011.
I would like to thank my parents Mali Valamanesh and Sorab Nabizadeh for their steadfast
love and encouragement. My father’s literary and cultural interests have inspired me
beyond anything else. In my early teenage years, he recommended that I read Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment, and thus unwittingly set into motion an unpredictable sequence of
events culminating in the production of this thesis.
Finally, I would like to thank Matthew Crowe, for his support and love. Matthew proofread
the thesis in its entirety and provided insightful feedback at every stage.

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