Prosthetics in Pairs: Reading the Act of Writing in the Diaspora

For Salman Rushdie, every-time is a foreign country. He echoes the famous words of L.P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there;”^c1 but he, unlike Hartley, does not have the comfort of a homeland in the present. An old photograph of his family home in India reminds him that “it’s my present that is foreign and… the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.”^c2 To remember home in the diaspora, then, is to remember one foreign country from another.

This act of remembering, though, is not a simple or neutral one. Our concept of memory is inextricable from our concept of knowledge — to remember is to recall knowledge.^c3 For Plato, to know is to recall the eternal forms of things in themselves outside of sense perception. The soul (as a thing in itself) has always known these forms — to know is to remember.^c4 It is in Plato’s moment, Bernard Stiegler points out, in which the philosopher accuses the Sophist of using rhetoric against knowledge, and defends his epistēmē (philosophical knowledge) against the Sophist’s tékhnē (technical knowledge).^c5 In the very same moment in which he devalues tékhnē, he brings memory to his side. But Stiegler pushes back: “it is the tool, that is, tékhnē, that invents the human… the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool.”^c6 The human is a prosthetic being. As Plato saw it, birth into the body was the moment in which one forgot things in themselves and came into this world of particulars. But for Stiegler, this claim is the forgetting. It forgets that we are essentially constituted by particulars in the form of prosthetics. One cannot know — one cannot remember — without prosthetics that lie outside of one’s biological being. The contemporary, literate subject knows and remembers with the prosthetic of writing: writing is a tool with which one produces memory external to them; it is constitutive of the contents of our memory. If there is an epistēmē, it is constituted by tékhnē.

To write about and remember home in the diaspora, then, is to remember one foreign country with the prosthetics of both that one and another. It is from this fact that I offer my reading of the act of writing in the diaspora: an act that is special, I think, because it is easier to remember that one’s prosthetics are prosthetics when they come in pairs.

The irony, though, is that remembering this is only made possible by the deep forgetting inherent to being in the diaspora. Rushdie, after years of remembering his homeland through a black and white photo, expresses that:

… my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood monochromatically. The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellow-edged green of the cactus-leaves, the brilliance of the bougainvillea creeper.^c7

In being forced to come to terms with the fact that the colors of their memories are not the colors of their homeland, writers in the diaspora confront more than just a personal and artistic problem. Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré worried that her years in Washington, D.C. “had become a false paradise, a panacea where life was a pleasant limbo, far removed from the social and political problems of the island.”^c8 She positions her present geography as a fiction, a lie; her homeland is grounded in political realities. In conversation with Rushdie, this makes the act of writing in the diaspora lie on shaky ground: if State power concerns itself with the distortion of reality to its own ends, “then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized.”^c9 Rushdie follows Milan Kundera in conceiving of writing as a struggle of manⁿ¹ against power, which is embodied as a struggle of memory against forgetting.ⁿ² But who are those in the diaspora to render an alternative memory in this struggle? Who are those, to borrow from Ferré’s formulations, who write from a pleasant limbo-paradise, to offer a panacea to those who experience political struggle first hand? As Rushdie puts it “is this the proper function of those of us who write from outside India? Or are we just dilettantes in such affairs, because we are not involved in their day-to-day unfolding, because by speaking out we take no risks, because our personal safety is not threatened? What right do we have to speak at all?”^c10

To write about and remember home in the diaspora, then, is to do so while having to justify the ethics of that very act. It is when confronted with the need of ethical justification that the writer in the diaspora — looking at what their work is in the most fundamental sense — looks at the nature of their prosthetics.

Salman Rushdie, conceiving of his writing as an act of reflection, reads himself as creating his memory of his homeland with the prosthetic of a broken mirror, “some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.”^c11 Examining the nature of his prosthetic, he first comes to an account of the creative potential it provides: the fragmented, partial nature of his memory makes the trivial symbolic and the mundane numinous.^c12 This discussion brings him to remember what was forgotten when epistēmē was separated from and placed over tékhnē:

…human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable of only fractured perceptions. Partial beings in all senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved… Writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries. And those of who have been forced by cultural displacement… accept the provisional nature of all truths.^c13

The experience of writing in the diaspora brings Rushdie to his version of an account of the prosthetic constitution of all people and all knowledge. For him, inherent to our prosthetic nature is a pain and an anxiety: we are wounded creatures; we are mal-constituted; we are incomplete. His defense of the ethics of his writing is inextricable from pain: his experience of himself as a prosthetic being is inextricable from the pain of being in the diaspora, and his ethical justification lies in universalizing that image of what it means to be a prosthetic being to all human experience. But Rushdie does not conceive of himself or his work as “despairing or nihilistic”^c14 — beyond the beauty of the reflections of his broken mirror, Rushdie believes that his prosthetics are paths to reclamation. “To conquer English,” given that it is implicated in colonial-imperial history, “may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.”^c15 He is uneasy in this belief, though, diminishing his claims with a dry “Or it may be that that is simply what we must think in order to do our work.”^c16 Rushdie uneasily believes in the possibility of liberation, but the liberation he hopes for is the liberation of wounded creatures from the violence of other wounded creatures. We can find beauty and liberation in our prosthetics, but nowhere in his reflections can we heal from the wound that they constitute in our being.

When she was about to leave Washington, D.C. for good, Rosario Ferré once dreamed in dialogue with the question of the ethics of her writing. In her dream, the other side of Washington D.C.’s C. & O. Canal had “bright green, African daisy-covered turf [that] suspiciously resembled the Puerto Rican countryside.”^c17 Wading through the canal to cross back to the Puerto Rican side,

A swell of water began to travel down the canal, lifting me off my feet and sweeping me down the current, so that it became impossible to reach either of the two shores…I soon realized the current was much too powerful and I had no alternative but to let it take hold of me. After a while, as I floated face up like Ophelia over the green surface of the water, I began to feel strangely at ease and tranquil. I looked at the world as it slid by, carried by the slowly moving swell of cool water, and wondered at the double exposure on both shores… perfectly fitted to each other and reflected on the canal’s surface like a traveling mirror on which I was magically being sustained.^c18

Ferré, as an author, finds herself at home in the space in which her dream-self resided. Borrowing from George Steiner, she posits that “Every civilization is imprisoned in a linguistic contour, which it must match and regenerate according to the changing landscape of facts and of time:”^c19 In Ferré’s eyes, to exist in between each landscape and its civilization is to be liberated from the prison of its linguistic contour. For her, this opens the door to a creative exploration of her pair of prosthetics — Spanish and English — as just that: tools constituted by the contingent histories and landscapes that created them. For Rushdie, our prosthetic nature means we are necessarily wounded beings; for Ferré, our prosthetic nature means we are necessarily imprisoned ones: we are confined to being constituted by the prosthetics of the societies we live in. Ferré, like Rushdie again, finds beauty in the magical potential of her two prosthetics;ⁿ³ She has faith in their liberating potential. We should not forget, though, that Shakespeare’s Ophelia died. For Ferré, that beautiful and free state of being in between two cultures, like for Rushdie, is inextricable from an attack on life. For Rushdie, to accept one’s nature as a prosthetic being is to accept one’s nature as a wounded creature; For Ferré, to accept one’s existence as being constituted by two sets of prosthetics is to die. In Ferré’s dream, one is presented with an ultimatum: either live life as a prisoner of one’s linguistic contour (one set of prosthetics) or liberate oneself in death, residing and writing in the “crevice”^c20 between two prisons (with two sets of prosthetics).

...

In Afternoon Raag, Amit Chaudhuri’s has his unnamed narrator — a Bengali in the diaspora studying at Oxford — reproduces his version of this attitude in the last moment of the work. His friend Sharma reads him a passage from D.H. Lawrence: “Have you built your ship of death, O have you? / O build your ship of death, for you will need it.”^c21 The rest of Lawrence’s poem evokes images of, in Rushdie’s language, wounded creatures:

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,

already our souls are oozing through the exit

of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end

is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,

already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark

and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine

for the dark flight down oblivion.^c22

The soul here exists only in relation to the body — in it and moving out of it — or not at all. There is just that and oblivion. The soul is no thing in itself here; there is no elevation of the epistēmē. There is only the broken body and the ship it builds; there is only the broken body and its tékhnē. This poem, written with the prosthetics of the foreign land he is in, reminds Amit Chaudhuri’s narrator of

The memory of daal and sweet-potatoes being ground and mashed all day in the kitchen, then patted, shaped, and fried into pithhas, and left overnight in syrup; my mother choosing the brownest one for me, and the little less perfect one for my father.^c23

Amit Chaudhuri’s narrator’s relationship with death and woundedness remind him of his homeland, too.

He never narrates himself as wounded or dead, though. He is in the diaspora, but he does not write in the diaspora: never in the book does he mention creating art with the English prosthetics. He speaks of creating with Bengali prosthetics, though, with a deep care and intimacy. His descriptions of the raag, an improvisational form in Indian classical music, render it as a living universe: he understands the harmonium in aquatic terms, it has eyes that open and close;^c24 the raag’s curving meends are impermanent, arching, and serpentine;^c25 the tanpura’s notes are mothers and fathers, its posture can be male and perpendicular or surrendering, full, poised and feminine.^c26 His relationship with creation came from his father’s family in Sylhet:

Creation was worship... [my father’s] family was excited and full of love for that image; they had made it together, my cousin doing the sculptor’s work while his sister and her child helped him to hold it still and achieve its proportions. It was still unpainted, its colour the colour of clay, but the eyes of the saint and the expression of his face and body no longer belonged to earth and mud but to the realm of the imagination. For the first time I could see where my own private joys came from—the love of songs, of music, of pride and delight in creation. That delight is my family’s gift.^c27

His inventory of prosthetics he used creatively was a Bengali one, and when describing his creations, he uses the language of things in themselves. The raag is “a self-created galaxy of notes,”^c28 “Inside the great architecture of the raag, through the clear archway of notes, [there is] a world without humans.”^c29 Unlike Rushdie’s “partial beings,”^c30 Chaudhuri’s narrator’s creative universe is whole.

Chaudhuri’s narrator, in the diaspora but not writing in the diaspora, is not confronted with his partial and prosthetic nature in his relationship with his creativity. Nevertheless, when reading poetry — constituted by the prosthetics of his current geography — on death and wounded creature-hood, he is reminded of his homeland. Salman Rushdie and Rosario Ferré differ from him, then, in that when they create, they create with that reminder. That is what it means to write in the diaspora.

To end on an optimistic note, I offer my suggestion for a re-reading. Could it be possible for the diasporic writer to acknowledge the wounds and the death in their experience without tying this to their prosthetic nature? Could the diasporic writer, ever-reminded of their prosthetic nature, see this instead as a reminder of life: healing and freeing themselves by becoming a partial, patchwork being that grows larger than anything that claims to be whole?