In an interview, Sylvia Plath was once referred to as a “poet and person who straddled the Atlantic.” With a laugh breaking through her words, she said: “That’s a rather awkward position, but I’ll accept it!” Over drinks, my friend, a brown immigrant like myself, confessed that she felt a gulf between herself and overwhelmingly ‘rooted’ Western authors. She feels more connected to Toni Morrison than Joan Didion, a literary giant as rooted in California as the thousand-year-old redwoods surrounding her. I sympathised completely with her sentiment. I realised I sought in poetry and literature experiences of ‘uprooting’. Though I grew up in India, my conception of ‘literature’ was narrow– beginning with an introduction to nationalistic voices like Tagore, or the canonical Charles Dickens in an Anglophile English-medium school. It was only through reading migrating authors like Plath, Joseph Conrad, Michael Ondaatje, and Jean Rhys that I discovered the possibility of my voice.
Plath was American, born in chilly Boston, but went on to study at Cambridge. After marrying English poet Ted Hughes, Plath felt attracted to the austere old-world charm of England and continued to live there. However, she felt English poetry to be stuck “in a straight-jacket;” an apt metaphor from the author of The Bell Jar. She found the suffocating stranglehold of English gentility and tidiness to be dangerous. Interviewer Peter Orr once asked Plath her opinion of the weighty and oppressive tradition of English literature. Plath was quick to spring to agreement. Young women would ask Plath how she dared to write: as an American, as a woman, as a pioneer in the face of criticism, to which she responded, “I remember being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne, but not quite finishing like John Donne, and I felt the weight of English literature on me at that point… almost paralysing.”
Poet-author Michael Ondaatje, who resides in Canada, echoes a similar trauma regarding John Donne. Born in Colombo, then the capital of the British colony of Ceylon, Ondaatje immigrated to London at the age of eleven. Though his school, Dulwich College, was a ‘haven for young writers’ like Raymond Chandler and PG Wodehouse, Ondaatje only felt free to write upon moving to Montreal, Canada, at nineteen: “I wouldn’t have been a writer if I’d stayed in England… where you feel, what right do you have to do this because of John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney.” With the rise of immigrant literature, have we finally broken past the need to follow canonical tradition?
The development of postmodern immigrant literature has its seminal forefathers, such as Joseph Conrad. His masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, is a lucid portrait of the experience of being Othered: on a ship in the Thames, Charles Marlow narrates to his listeners his tale of being a captain of a colonial Belgian company vessel, deep in the heart of Africa. Conrad penetrates the story through layers of voices that narrate the experience of outsidership;as he writes of Marlow, “to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.” Marlow the Englishman is too confronted with the cold indifference of a foreign landscape, unknowable and treacherous.
Polish-born Conrad was born to a proudly nationalistic family exiled to Volgoda, Russia, before he chose a sea-faring life at the age of sixteen, working on merchant ships. He seemed to espouse, in his constant voyages, Simone Weil’s command: “We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.” Like Weil, Conrad recognises that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” and the experience of ‘uprooting’ finds voice in his works. Conrad doesn’t see indigeneity and rootedness as givens. His recurring character Marlow, captain of a Belgian steamer in Heart of Darkness, views the indigeneity of the black bodies in the heart of Africa with some envy and awe: they appear as “natural and true as the surf along their coast… they wanted no excuse for being there.” Rootedness may provide a pre-ordained justification for our existence – something the ‘stranger’ feels the burden of creating.
Only through hearing snatches and fragments of English from his fellow sailors did Conrad learn his third language, after French. Conrad was keenly aware that the lack of a common cultural background with Anglophone literature meant he would write about the Asiatic, Oceanic, and African settings to which he travelled, with stories set on stateless ships granting him a freedom as wide as the expanse of sea he sailed. Freed from the gauntlet of English literary tradition, Conrad knew he had redefined English literature: “I am something else, and perhaps something more, than a writer of the sea—or even of the tropics.” Conrad’s influence as a master of fiction is palpable in both ‘rooted’ writers known for their connection to home like Irishman James Joyce as well as travellers like T.S. Eliot, Jean Rhys, and Ondaatje himself.
From when I read the very first pages of Ondaatje’s masterpiece In the Skin of A Lion, I could feel Conrad’s indelible traces. Ondaatje’s novel is an intricate weaving of several stories pieced together by Patrick Lewis, a ‘searcher’ or investigator. Though Patrick has lived in Canada all his life, his childhood encounters with immigrants flip the experience of being Othered. In a scene that neither Patrick nor I have forgotten, Patrick is inside his house, looking out a window at the immigrant labourers skating on homemade blades, navigating his homeland in a manner unbeknownst to him:
“Skating the river at night, each of them moving like a wedge into the blackness magically revealing the grey bushes of the shore, his shore, his river… To the boy growing into his twelfth year, having lived all his life on that farm… nothing would be the same.”
Patrick thereafter slides through life anonymously, traversing other people’s landscapes, reversing the immigrant/rooted experience. Ondaatje captures in the other migrating characters, Alice and Nicholas, the nascent moment of ‘choosing oneself’ in a foreign world that is pre-formed, choosing to learn the language and the arteries of the streets in order to not be lost, changing the masks of their uncertain identity. Oondatje jokes about his own mélange of Tamil, Sinhalese, and Dutch origins: “My background is a real salad, so it’s difficult to know who I am.”
Another migrant writer who is enshrined within the English literary canon is Jean Rhys, Dominican-born to a Welsh father and White Creole mother. In her oeuvre Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys grabs at canonical source material – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – and writes something so unique and truthful about being Othered. Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, Antoinette Cosway, is both granted subjectivity and estranged for being a woman, a white Creole, and ‘mad’ in Rhys’ narrative. I must reproduce the madwoman’s bluntest words: “I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why I was ever born at all.” À la Conrad, Rhys shifts perspective to Antoinette’s English husband Mr. Rochester, who is equally driven mad on their honeymoon in Dominica, confessing: “The feeling of something unknown and hostile was very strong.”
I myself am the granddaughter of a Tamil ship engineer who has travelled to corners of the world, possibly on the same routes as Conrad. I have always wondered why I could not fathom writing from the vantage of ‘rooted’ characters like Alice Munro’s, until I discovered an affinity with Conrad, Ondaatje, and Rhys’ multiple existences. My life, like theirs, is an artery that has split into red threads that all thrum with blood.
