A Literature of Flight: Writing against Necropolitics

In the aftermath and as a consequence of the canon debates in US literary historiography during the 1980s and 1990s, North American literature in both the United States and Canada has been cast as (at least also) a literature of immigration.Footnote 1 In Canada, immigrant literature has been frequently analyzed with reference to postcolonial theory, while US-American scholars have long shied away from that framework of inquiry; only recently have American Studies scholars broadly started to call the United States a settler colonial nation (see, e.g., Hixson 2013), with its literature as deeply ingrained in and influenced by this framework. Both settler colonial and immigrant writing, as paradoxical as it may seem, share an emphasis on settlement; immigration and the difficulties of new homes and transforming identities have thus become key tropes of writing and research in both contexts. This essay, in contrast and complementary to that literary history, is concerned with a repository of literary works focusing on the spatial and temporal before and in-between of emigration and immigration in narratives of flight: stories of refugees and migrants who never arrive anywhere geographically and/or stories that focus on the limbo in the aftermath of the refugees’ departure from war- and poverty-stricken countries. Transoceanic flight produces, following Françoise Vergès (who writes in the context of the Indian Ocean), “writing on water, layers of texts, narratives, and imagined worlds” (2003, 247). These narratives need to be explored beyond traditional, territorial archives. In the following, I discuss Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Children of the Sea” (1995) and Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter (2011) as exemplary texts, teasing out possible characteristics of such narratives of flight and establishing them as important supplements to the tradition of North American immigrant fiction.

To some extent, such refugee narratives can also be read as offering an epistemological supplement to contemporary theory as they can point to—by means of narratology, poetics, and literary language in general—theoretical blind spots and hidden subject positions. Thus, I understand these texts in their potential to help us think further and beyond established theoretical frameworks. My case in point in this article is the Deleuzian conceptual metaphor of “lines of flight,” pivotal to the trialectics of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Most extensively in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980/1987), Deleuze and Guattari refer to “lines of flight” as unpredictable, unruly routes, defying spatial control, which potentially break down a hegemonic spatial semantics through the mobility associated with the figure of the nomad.Footnote 2 “Deterritorialization” is cast as a strategy to contravene the normative structuration characteristic of regulated or “striated” space and produces “smooth space” beyond differentiation and regulation. “Territorialization,” in turn, comprises both deterritorializing and reterritorializing movements. For Deleuze and Guattari, this references the process of subject formation, in which identity is simultaneously constituting and defining itself (“territorializing”), while these acts of constitution are always already dissolving (“deterritorializing”) and substituted by new ones (“reterritorializing”). For them, deterritorialization has a positive, even idealist value, as is visible in an imperative phrasing early on in A Thousand Plateaus: “form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization” ([1980/1987] 1996, 11);Footnote 3 as Bryant et al. summarize, “since systems of any kind … can operate as territories, deterritorialisations activate freedom or movement” (2003, 150). The figurative language betrays an expansive underlying discourse of mobility in which the lines of flight that produce deterritorialization “increase” one’s territory; the imperative form reveals a residual falling-back on models of subjectivity that Deleuze and Guattari are actually abandoning in their theory of assemblages, challenging such Western models of subject formation—models that not coincidentally emerged with trans-Atlantic European expansion.

A strand of postcolonial criticism, most notably Gayatri Spivak’s, has held Deleuze’s philosophy accountable for reaffirming, in this and other ways, a European universal (male) subject.Footnote 4 Generally speaking, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak uses Foucault’s and Deleuze’s work as examples of an “interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject” (1988, 271). While I find her intentionalism (“interested”) somewhat problematic, dismissing an entire body of work that has arguably been highly productive for emancipatory projects such as feminism or surveillance studies (in the case of Foucault), Spivak’s argument itself points to the locatedness of philosophical discourse and the consequences of its disavowal. For Spivak, the work of Deleuze and Foucault gives

an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. (1988, 271–272)

Spivak requests any philosophical project to take “geo-political determinations” into account and argues that it is “[t]he failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity” that “renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interests” as “their indifference to ideology (a theory of which is necessary for an understanding of interests) is striking but consistent” (273). While the use of the term “determinations” here hints at Spivak’s own deterministic shortcomings, Spivak’s critique is difficult to dismiss entirely, particularly with regard to the dissimilarities between the (ideal notion of) the Western Subject and the subaltern in the ways desire is produced regarding the object of that desire—it is not flight and deterritorialization for everyone; mobilization is a desire for some and a life-and-death necessity for others. Deleuze’s vocabulary, despite its post-representationalist underpinnings, does not necessarily preclude essentialism or an imperialist epistemic, according to Spivak.Footnote 5

Apart from a brief (and perhaps overstated) comment that “the ferocious motif of ‘deterritorialization’” (291) functions as one example of “screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism,” Spivak does not specifically discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of lines of flight or deterritorialization from the perspective of a subaltern Other whose mobility is restricted as a result of political upheaval, war, genocide, and socioeconomic injustice. Caren Kaplan’s seminal 1996 study Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement critiques, next to the nomad and “becoming minor” (which she reveals as “a strategy that only makes sense to the central, major, or powerful, yet it is presented as an imperative for ‘us all’” 1996, 88), deterritorialization and its celebration in Deleuze and Guattari, drawing on many more of their works than just A Thousand Plateaus. For Kaplan, the trope

links the Euro-American modernist valuation of exile, expatriation, defamiliarization, and displacement and the colonial discourses of cultural differences to a philosophy that appears to critique the foundations of that very tradition. … [D]eterritorialization itself cannot escape colonial discourse. The movement of deterritorializiation colonizes, appropriates, even raids other spaces. … Deterritorialization is always reterritorialization, an increase of territory, an imperialization. (1996, 89)

Kaplan emphasizes that those “smooth” spaces of deterritorialization prominent in Deleuze and Guattari—desert, steppe, ice, and sea—are all prime sites of the colonial sublime, sites onto which colonial imaginaries have projected their utopias as well as their horrors. What if deterritorialization does activate movement without activating freedom and an “open future” (Bryant et al. 2003, 150), thus producing involuntary flight and responses that limit (refugee) mobility? Investigating the representation of the sea through contemporary refugee subjectivities, deterritorialized in toto—physically, culturally, and psychologically—in Danticat’s and Thien’s poetics, quite different territorialities of flight come to the fore. Danticat’s story focuses on the Haitian ‘boat people’ that attempted to reach Florida shores in the 1980s and 1990s, while Madeleine Thien examines the Red Khmer genocide in Cambodia and its consequences for the children that came to Canada as orphaned refugees.

I refer to Spivak and Kaplan neither to argue that we have to throw out Deleuzian vocabulary from our writing and thinking (quite the opposite, in fact); nor that Deleuze and Guattari worked in the service of neo-imperialism, as some have argued. Bignall and Patton succinctly summarize this critique as follows:

For some, his [Deleuze’s] failure to relate expressly to postcolonial issues does not simply suggest a careless lack of concern on Deleuze’s part, but also the more worrying possibility that his silence on colonialism conceals a certain Eurocentric self-interest, a neo-imperial motivation or a hidden or unacknowledged desire to deflect attention away from the political concerns of the postcolony. (2010, 1)

Disproving such accusations of disinterest, Bignall and Patton (2–4) demonstrate that Deleuze did engage with decolonization in some of his writings and list points of postcolonial critique brought forward there. Rather than rejecting Deleuze and Guattari, I critique a language of theory that uses such Deleuzian concepts in a purely affirmative, even celebratory manner. While it exceeds the scope of this essay to present a sustained theoretical discussion of Deleuze’s writings, I try to bring the concept of lines of flight into a critical dialogue with other discursive renderings of flight, by ‘minor’ voices pervading literatures that Deleuze and Guattari indeed deeply cared about: “to the established fictions that are always rooted in a colonist’s discourse, we oppose a minority discourse, with mediators,” as Deleuze himself put it (qtd. in Bignall and Patton, 2010, 17; see also Deleuze’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1986). It is not just the language of theory—Spivak’s or others’—but also literary language that can work as such a mediator by making its readers question the tropes and metaphors in which we talk about the world. Following Kaplan, my essay continues the examination of historically bound “metaphors and tropes from an earlier era … that continue to construct colonial spaces in postmodern, poststructuralist theories” (1996, 65) with the help of oceanic narratives of refugee im/mobilities. As such, rather than denigrating postmodern theory, I hope to add to critical “negotiations of modernist and postmodernist impulses in Euro-American production and reception of critical practices and theories” (100) and that in the end, “the primary terms of displacement and movement construct this critical space” in ways “less romanticized and more responsive to the histories of imperialism and economic and cultural hegemonies” (100). I am also inspired by philosopher Thomas Nail’s discussion of the term in The Figure of the Migrant, which complicates the simplistic opposition between the metaphorical and the empirical: While there are empirical migrants, nomads, or refugees, their “meaning and potential extend beyond their empirical features under the current conditions of social expulsion” (2015, 17); vice versa, while there are metaphorical lines of flight, their meanings and potentials likewise extend beyond the figurative under necropolitical conditions (see below). If we apply Nail’s argument not just to figures but also to figurations—like lines of flight or deterritorialization, his idea of a “vague essence” (16) points to an essence in any such figure, or figuration, that lies “between the ideal and the empirical” and is “irreducible to either” (16).

The literary articulations of flight I analyze in what follows evoke what Achille Mbembe defines as the necropolitics of genocide and demographic control, rather than immigrant narrative tropes and plots, which usually begin with arrival and focus mostly on cultural difference, new homes, and the difficulty of adapting. Part and parcel of a contemporary biopolitics, this necropolitics, Mbembe claims (citing Foucault), constitutes the ultimate expression of sovereignty (2003, 11) by “dictat[ing] who may live and who must die” (11), who finds shelter and who is left to drown. In what Sikho Siyotulu termed a “theory of the walking dead” in a discussion of Mbembe’s concept at the Graduate School “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” at the University of Potsdam in May 2017, Mbembe asks how the place of life, death, and the body is “inscribed in the order of power” (12) and enquires into the “work of death” performed by necropolitical structures. Life and death are reconceived in the context of a “politics as the work of death” (16) as foundational categories, “less abstract and more tactile” (14) than reason “as the truth of the subject” as “the human being truly becomes a subject … in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death” (14). Sovereignty is affirmed through the right to kill and the division of people into the living and the dead, which constitutes the base operation of Othering in general and a “politics of race … ultimately linked to the politics of death” (17, in reference to Hannah Arendt and Foucault):

Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the one and the other. (2003, 17)

This quote can be read as a comment on contemporary refugee camps as infinite, dehumanizing, and immobilizing in-between spaces threatening the hope of getting anywhere. They create new territorialities, in effect territorially fragmenting whole regions or islands and restricting democratic laws and human rights to an exclusive group of those who are recognized by law—as legitimate asylum seekers or as European Union citizens. According to Mbembe, this territorial fragmentation is characteristic of necropower (27). In this “new moment … of global mobility” (31), the biopolitics of resettlement rests on the Othering of massive amounts of people, whose movement is rendered both impossible and illegitimate by a “management” (34) approach to the multitudes:Footnote 6

As a political category, populations are … disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices, while the “survivors,” after a horrific exodus, are confined in camps and zones of exception. (34)

The power of recognition as a form of violent categorization is crucial here and connects Mbembe’s theories to Judith Butler’s post-9/11 theorizing of “precarious life.” In her book of the same title (2004) and its successor Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), she asks “whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. … An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” in the context of wars that “defend the lives of certain communities, and … defend them against the lives of others” (Butler 2015). Ungrievable lives such as those of drowned refugees, whose names and identities often remain unknown, correspond to Butler’s earlier concept of precarious life and its differential distribution across the globe. As Butler explains:

To say that a life is injurable … or that it can be lost, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death, is to underscore not only the finitude of a life (that death is certain) but also its precariousness (that life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life). Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. (2015)

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Mbembe, and Butler in my critical readings, I examine Danticat’s and Thien’s narratives as attempts to make ungrievable lives grievable by literary intervention into mainstream media discourses (such as Butler calls for). By telling stories of loss and dying in highly fragmented ways, both texts offer insights into such overly precarious, deterritorialized subjectivities and perform a grueling critique of the necropolitical structures that continue to produce transoceanic diasporas of both living and dead people in flight from oppressive global and/or state regimes. I discuss the short story and the novel for their aesthetic and discursive negotiation of refugee subjectivity, flight, and survival. Danticat and Thien write transnationally, multivocally, and fragmentarily, and talk back to postmodern theory jargon about fluid subjectivities and deterritorialization as resistance to oppressive spatial structures. Both texts place their readers as witnesses to drowning scenes as a corrective to an “oceanic cartography of liberal humanism” (Sharpe 2009, 106) that often remains within Othering epistemologies.

The Prec(ar)ious Lives of Refugees: De/Territorialization in Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea”

Flight as an involuntary form of escape is an important trope in many of Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat’s novels and short stories. Paradigmatically, “Children of the Sea,” the opening tale of the short story cycle Krik? Krak! (1995), dramatizes a young Haitian dissident’s treacherous oceanic journey toward Miami to seek asylum in the United States. Initially titled “From the Ocean Floor,” it was first published in October 1993 at the height of the Haitian exodus following the September 1991 military coup. Haitian refugees had been pathologized as an AIDS risk and routinely denied asylum, setting them in competition with Cuban refugees, who more easily received refugee status (Braziel 2010, 155). The US government differentiated Haitian and Cuban boat people, defining Haitians as economic (rather than political) refugees, which

allowed the Coast Guard to return [them] to the civil war they were escaping. Danticat’s story makes it evident that the distinction was not only politically motivated—since it was based on Cold War politics that led the United States to support anti-communist dictators … but also racial, since Cubans tend to be white-identified. While hundreds of Haitian boat people drowned in the Caribbean Sea, thousands more were tortured and murdered [in Haiti]. (Sharpe 2009, 104)

The dissident’s story is intertwined with that of his left-behind girlfriend, whose father plans her family’s escape from the constant threat of rape and murder by the soldiers of the Duvalier regime in Port-au-Prince. The cycle is itself geographically split, with the majority (seven stories) set in Haiti and only the final two in the United States (Brooklyn). Its geographic hybridity is echoed formally in its hybrid genre—as a short story cycle, it is less unified than a novel but characterized by more coherence and thematic integrity than a collection of unrelated stories, as James Nagel explains (2001, 17). Furthermore, the genre is linked to the oral narrative tradition (Davis 2001, 65).

“Children of the Sea” is equally split in terms of narrator, switching back and forth between a young man’s and a young woman’s first-person narrative perspective.Footnote 7 Danticat uses the form of the epistolary exchange, presenting alternating letters that the young man and woman have promised to write each other; the letters have an addressee but no address. They thus function like diaries the protagonist-narrators hope to exchange upon their reunion in an indiscernible future. In fact, then, a juxtaposition of two monologues, the two plot lines they represent are eventually reconnected via a black butterfly that, in line with Haitian mythology, brings news of the young man’s death and thus further dramatizes the impossibility of direct communication (Davis 2001, 70; Misrahi-Barak 2012, 442).

The difference between the characters’ stories and perspectives is also visually marked on the page, with the young woman’s voice in bold and lower case and the man’s in regular typescript. The bold typography can be read as counteracting the erasure of voices of nameless, ‘ordinary people’ during political upheavals and wars; in this respect, it is also quite telling that both narrator-protagonists remain nameless. Rather than merely denoting educational difference, as other critics have claimed (e.g., Davis 2001), the lack of an upper case points to the historical denial of subjectivity to Caribbean women in patriarchal structures (or all women of African descent in North America, as bell hooks famously argued).

The imaginary dialogue between the protagonists serves to reestablish their connection, severed by the boyfriend’s flight (Misrahi-Barak 2012, 441), and moreover provides an empowering interpellative structure of subjectivity. Also, the letters produce a narrative structure marked by spatial and temporal gaps. As Judith Misrahi-Barak suggests, the story’s duplex structure does not lead to a duality of here and there but opens up onto a multiplicity of sites and voices (442). The here and there are constantly shifting, as the characters’ involuntary journeys to escape violence and death dramatize repeated dislocations in search of a place to hide.

By telling the story from two refugee perspectives, “Children of the Sea” counters these violent, absolute deterritorializations by a heightened sense of the importance of space and time as structuring the chance for survival. The male protagonist’s deterritorialization not only refers to its absolute, physical dimension, but also to a more strictly Deleuzian sense of deterritorialized subjectivities, as his mind increasingly wanders, trying to escape its containment in the boat; likewise, his girlfriend’s deterritorialization also refers to her imagined Self in the arms of her lover. Their mobile subjectivities, however, are contextualized by pain. When the male narrator-protagonist describes the ocean, for instance, he first perceives the sea as seemingly undifferentiated, Deleuzian smooth space: “There are no borderlines on the sea. The whole thing looks like one. … At night, the sky and the sea are one” (Danticat [1995] 1996, 6; 9). The quote highlights the visual and geographic erasure of difference at sea; after a day, however, the materiality of the patchy boat puts the ultimate difference, that between life and death, at the center of his story; “[t]he promise of a new horizon, a chance to begin life anew [in the US] is at once evoked and taken away” (Chen 2011, 39). Another refugee, Justin, discusses the differential treatment of Haitian and Cuban refugees as well as the hostility of Bahamians toward Haitians aboard (“[t]o them, we are not human,” 8), revealing “the imperially imposed barriers to cross-national identification for those of African descent in the Americas” (Braziel 2010, 156; also Sharpe 2009, 108) as well as the uneven construction of precarious life in this postcolonial scenario.

The leaking vessel here resembles a spatial assemblage in the Deleuzian sense, in which territorializing and deterritorializing impulses—both with regard to regimes of maritime mobility and refugee im/mobility—violently clash in a life-and-death manner. The physical conditions of the refugees aboard, from sea sickness and sunburn to giving birth and starvation, and their material effects—the sights, sounds, and smells—soon take center stage. Imagining the sea as territorial, in the increasingly hopeless situation of a confined, unfit vessel torn asunder by the waves, functions as a coping strategy for the narrator at this point: He imagines that the world may be flat after all; he conjures up the US Coast Guard to save them; he dreams of heaven as sinking to the ocean floor and living with the creatures of the sea: “I feel like we are sailing to Africa. Maybe we will sail to Guinin, to live with the spirits, to be with everyone who has come and has died before us. They would probably turn us away from there too” (Danticat [1995] 1996, 14).Footnote 8 This last sentence shows that even though the journey of these ‘boat people,’ full of allusions to the Middle Passage, is transformative in terms of defining ethnic identity—“[y]es, I am finally an African” (11), he says elsewhere—, his fledgling diasporic subjectivity knows it has no home, not even in Africa, not even in death: There is no safe haven.

In the end, drowning off the coast of the Bahamas, the young man becomes part of a Black Atlantic imaginary collective of the dead, joined a few pages before by a pregnant fifteen-year old refugee, Célianne, who jumps overboard after she is forced by her fellow passengers to drop her stillborn baby, conceived in rape, into the sea. These are his last words: “[A]ll those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me. I go to them now as though it was always meant to be … to live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live” (27). This prayer-like, poetic and final enunciation forms an instance of a necropolitical aesthetics, harking back to the death politics of the Middle Passage and bringing it to the present: “blood-drenched earth where you live” halts the rhyme, pointing to an ongoing historical continuum of precarious black lives at sea.

Danticat’s two voices territorialize flight—as oxymoronic as this may seem—through detailed descriptions of physical and social spaces and settings, mediated by the characters’ first-person perspectives. They contravene deterritorializing mechanisms by emphasizing micro-territorialities that provide shelter. These, however, are always under erasure: the enclosed space of the boat, invaded by the forces of the ocean entering through its leaks, for instance, paralleled by the apartments and latrines that function as temporal hiding places for the girl but are likewise invaded by destructive forces (here, human), and by a resulting sense of immobility, especially for women. The female perspective emphasizes flight as gendered, creating a space to contemplate questions about those who are left behind—who are, much more often than not, women. What seems like a binary opposition—mobile men and immobile women—is questioned by the story through the figure of Célianne, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, because those left behind are also in flight to find shelter; thus “Children of the Sea” exposes “the male gendering of black Atlantic narratives by extending the uncertainty of undocumented travel to the presumed sanctity of domestic space” (Sharpe 2009, 105). Yet gender difference is not erased: The female narrator-protagonist’s trajectory is governed by her father, whose patriarchal authority and sense of masculinity are deeply affected by the emasculating threats of soldiers forcing Haitian men to rape family members. Bringing his family to a safe place seems of restorative importance for his sense of self in this respect; the decision, however, produces an ethical dilemma as the father cannot spend the family money on bribery, in order to save a neighbor’s life when her home is invaded by soldiers.

Throughout Krik? Krak! the gruesomeness of the descriptions—such as the recurrence of dying infants and intra-family rape—is countered by ancestral discourses of community, such as the Creole call-and-response practice “Krik? Krak!” that helps the refugees “wile away the fearful hours” (Davis 2001, 68) on the boat. The phrase lends the story collection its title: The storyteller asks the audience “Krik?” to which the response is an enthusiastic “Krak!” motivating the narrator to proceed. Other examples Danticat evokes in this and other stories include black Atlantic legends such as that of the flying Africans who escaped slavery by literally taking flight (Chen 2011, 41),Footnote 9 throwing themselves off a slaver near the Georgia coast. A poetic rendition of this mass suicide, reminiscent of the belief that the souls of African Americans will return to Africa after death, the legend became a story of magic, freedom, and community: Two interpretations (suicide v. escape) that perfectly express the “diasporic predicament” (46) of people of African descent in the Americas. In addition, many of Danticat’s stories in Krik? Krak! rewrite the patriarchal trope of the too-mobile woman, the witch-like “flying woman” or lougarou (49–50), appropriating the figure as one of female empowerment (see also Nge 2003). By these means, Danticat transforms fleeing subjects into flying subjects (unified in the noun “flight”), posthumously restoring agency to the dead and transforming mourning into empowerment. Even the sea itself is reclaimed in the end in its infinity, as the Haitian woman declares that the sea is “endless” like her love for her dead boyfriend (Danticat [1995] 1996, 21): The existential threat of an ocean indifferent to the fate of boat people is transformed into a metaphor of endless love; a “space of death” (Sharpe 2009, 109) becomes a sea of love and a site of memory.

In sum, “Children of the Sea” constructs a continuum of violent forms of displacement from the times of slavery to its late twentieth-century present, a “fictional charting[] of multiple passages [that] remind us that the diaspora is shifting and changing as populations continue to move and be displaced” (Sharpe 2009, 109). The story highlights the complexities of forced migration and counters the necropolitics of the Atlantic with a vibrant, affective narrative web of resilience “in a context where migration flows across oceans and between countries are mapping out new geographies and demographies” (Misrahi-Barak 2012, 432). Doing so, “Children of the Sea” renders lives lost and unmourned grievable, presencing their historical predecessors during Atlantic slavery. As Danticat remarks in an interview: “No one knows how many people were lost on The Middle Passage. There are no records or graves—and the ocean floor where our fossils are. The journey from Haiti in the 1980s is like a new middle passage” (qtd. in Shea 1995, 12), a “journey to nowhere” and a “state of limbo” (Sharpe 2009, 106). In a more recent essay entitled “Message to My Daughter,” Danticat brings her story into the present, recounting her visit with her daughters to a Haitian refugee camp on the border to the Dominican Republic and connecting it to the daily violence people of African descent face in the United States. Both groups are constantly threatened with erasure:

We, immigrant blacks and African Americans alike, were treated … as though we were members of a group in transit. The message we always heard from those who were meant to protect us: that we should either die or go somewhere else. This is the experience of a refugee. …

We are in America because our lives meant nothing to those in power in the countries where we came from. Yet we come here to realize that our lives also mean nothing here. … [U]ltimately, we realize the precarious nature of citizenship here: that we too are prey, and that those who have been in this country for generations—… they too can suddenly become refugees. (2016, 207; 210–211)

Thus Danticat extends the experience of precariousness, constitutive for refugee subjectivity, to those whose violent deterritorialization and in-betweenness has continued for many generations, far beyond the Middle Passage and into the present-day United States and its necropolitical structures.

Genealogies of Violence and Survival: Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter

Like “Children of the Sea,” Dogs at the Perimeter is concerned with long-term effects of deterritorialization, in a literal and metaphorical sense, on refugee subjectivities. It is the second novel by Chinese-Malaysian-Canadian writer Madeleine Thien, who can be grouped with a cohort of contemporary Canadian authors experimenting with the global aesthetics of diasporic narratives (among them Michael Ondaatje or Dionne Brand). The novel recounts the flight of refugees from the Cambodian genocide of a minimum of two million people killed—about a quarter of the population—during the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979, and articulates the threat of psychological disintegration caused by traumatic memories haunting refugee Canadians.

Dogs at the Perimeter is populated by well-educated Cambodian, Japanese, and other people of Asian descent in the Americas, who came to Canada and the United States, mostly as child refugees from war-torn countries involving the US military. The novel revolves around the interconnected lives of two refugee characters, displaced from their respective homes by genocide and war: Janie, the protagonist, who arrived in Canada as an orphaned Cambodian refugee and now works as a neuroscientist, and Hiroji Matsui, her mentor, whose family fled to Canada in the aftermath of the US bombing of Tokyo during WWII (which actually resulted in more immediate deaths than the nuclear bombings; Troeung 2013, 155). While Janie struggles with the ghosts of her past—her dead parents, her brother Sopham, and her friends—and with fears and aggressions that come to the fore when she is with her son Kiri, Hiroji disappears. As it turns out, he has left for Cambodia in search of his brother James, who was abducted while working for the International Red Cross in various refugee camps during the Khmer crisis. Janie finally finds the courage to search for Hiroji in Laos and to confront her past. The novel ends on a hopeful note that Janie and her son will be reunited in a future less disturbed by past trauma.

Dogs at the Perimeter is set in a transnational context that transports its readers back and forth between Canada and Southeast Asia on different temporal levels from the 1970s to today, interspersed with stints in the United States and Europe. Through its nonlinear, fragmented temporal structure, contemporary events are interrelated with the complex history of North American involvement in Southeast Asia—the bombs on Japan, the Vietnam War, and US air raids of Phnom Penh, as well as Canadian support in many of these cases. Hence, the novel is a case in point that “Southeast Asian refugee populations reveal the intersection between U.S. military and imperialist actions overseas with immigration access, and conditions of settlement during the late twentieth century” (Hsu 2017, 117).

Canada is present as a setting at first, but recedes behind the locales of the characters’ past in Southeast Asia. Here, it is the protagonist’s mind that becomes increasingly deterritorialized as she suffers from a psychological breakdown that carries her back to her native Cambodia and the Red Khmer period. The transnational setting also emphasizes how the story of Cambodian Canadian refugees is interconnected with that of other histories of displacement and survival so that “[t]he figure of the Cambodian Canadian refugee emerges from these entwined genealogies of violence in twenty-first century world history necessitating new frames of epistemological inquiry to understand the complexity of refugee experience and its links to political macro-histories” (Troeung 2013, 156).

When Janie arrives in Canada, she has “no photographs from her childhood” (Thien 2011, 164), no mementos, only the intense memories of a child. Her white Canadian foster mother shows her a film about her vacation in pre-war Cambodia, and interestingly, Janie starts going back to these films night after night; for her, the “clicking [of the projector becomes] the wordless sadness of a lost time” (23). The films have “no order, no chronology” (124) for Janie, and as the camera gives “a 360-degree tour” of Phnom Penh, they make the city feel “so real” that Janie can “smell it” (124). She is comforted by the recordings that feature the past as it can never be retrieved. The scene hints at her repression of trauma from the war, as she relishes in substitute, wishful memories.

The contemporary United States and Canada are also, however, represented as refugee destinations, as places of education and of diasporic kinship. Notably, one of the Montreal settings is the Café Esperanza, and it is the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an NGO established through a Yale University project with funds from the 1994 Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, that helps Hiroji and Janie locate his lost brother. Yet despite the novel’s Canadian framework, the main characters are never even halfway there. Only by turning back to their homes in Asia and to the memory of their refugee experiences, the ending suggests, can the refugee subject transcend herself/himself and truly move on with life—geographically in Canada and psychologically without passing on violence to the next generation.Footnote 10

The characters’ family histories are permeated by both geographical displacement and the traumatic effects of Khmer Rouge terror. The dead appear to her in sramays (ghost hauntings) caused by the visitation of Kmauit or Khmoch, spirits of loved ones not properly buried, or restless, wandering souls (pralung). Ghosts constitute a spectral presence transcending time, an alterity that is continually haunting and uncontainable within linear signification (here, similarities with Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost are most clearly apparent). They mix up past and present—both for the protagonists and the reader, trying to follow a sequence of events. Ghosts constitute a presence that knows no temporal, but also no spatial boundaries, as Florian Tatschner summarizes with regard to Jacques Derrida’s hauntology: “The specter implies spatio-temporal transgression. It cannot be confined in one fixed space: it walks through closed doors, defies linear temporality, and poses a challenge to the pastness of the past by still presencing from afar” (2017, 71). Through the pervasive fort-da logic (recalling Freud’s trauma theory) of spectral presences, the novel opens up toward readings that go beyond the discursive and take account of the presence of the unspeakable, or also ungrievable (especially in Sopham’s case) in literary texts.

The family hi/stories assist the novel’s acts of consciousness-raising regarding what Lisa Lowe describes as a “reckoning for an American public engaged for much of the twentieth century in wars in Asia” (2010, 240) and, by extension, for a Canadian public that remains largely unaware of its governments’ historical record of supporting US imperialism, US exceptionalism, and US exemption at human rights trials such as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Troeung 2013, 156). When the novel begins, Janie already inhabits a third name and identity. Her given name is irrecoverable after the Khmer Rouge have forced a second identity onto her, calling her Mei. The following quote articulates the process of uprooting: “[W]e had to cut loose our dreams, … our worldly attachments …. You have no possessions, no history, no parents, the cadre said” (Thien 2011, 79, 98). Once in Canada, she decides one night that she wants “a new name, a new existence” (24) in order to fit in, signifying that one part of her identity—prewar Cambodian—is lost to her for good. With her departure, Janie attempts to leave atrocious memories behind; notably, her last image of Cambodia is darkness (135), signifying both the horror of her experience as well as her memories of this time being repressed, left in the dark.

The novel’s construction of space is closely tied to its temporal framing: here, deterritorialization and smooth spaces are the result of Khmer Rouge terror, whose very aim was the complete deterritorialization of bodies and subjectivities through geographic dislocation and the separation of any personal or past relationships. By forcefully recording citizen biographies (25), Angkar (the regime) is creating a repository of memory that is turned against its citizens—who are clever enough to fake these biographies in order to protect themselves and their families. All of this leads to Janie’s Cambodian past haunting her Canadian present to an extent that present and past become inseparable, which is aesthetically reflected through the nonlinear interweaving of past and present plotlines to a degree that results in a confusion of these temporal planes.

Forced to confront unassimilated episodes of her past after her breakdown, Janie feels like something has “broken and come undone” (139) in her, de-territorialized in a way that can no longer contain the fragments of a traumatized, shattered self. She describes the collective subjectivity of Asian-diasporic refugees as eventually empty, displaced by the ghosts of those who disappeared and/or died: “Hiroji knew what it was to have the missing live on, unending, within us. They grow so large and we so empty that even the coldest winter nights won’t swallow them” (9). Hiroji’s view highlights the psychological consequences of Mei’s forced deterritorialization—feeling little and empty—, which continues as her family members disappear one at a time, until the only one left, her brother Sopham (renamed Rithy), now a child torturer, rescues her from a children’s brigade, but eventually drowns during their attempt to escape the Khmer Rouge when their boat breaks apart, a moment that links the novel to Danticat’s short story.

Thien’s novel is pervaded by an ambivalent water imagery that bears both positive and negative connotations: it drowns, dissolves, deterritorializes identities, but also feeds and heals (e.g., the saline quality of tears paralleling the ocean’s salt water), evoking Deleuze’s smooth space in both cases. In the book, however, this smooth space is certainly a far cry from being the result of resistance. Not only does Janie/Mei lose her family, she also loses any sense of place and self along with it, being reduced to mere survival. While her character asks how traumatized refugees can come to terms with genocide, Sopham poses another important and troubling question in the context of a novel in which promises that cannot be kept under the circumstances of war lead to a life-long sense of guilt among the survivors. Sopham is both victim and perpetrator; we are told that he obsessively washes his hands after acts of torture in order to distance himself psychologically; his death at sea, in this vein, can be read as an ultimate cleansing, symbolically restoring him to his innocent, pre-Khmer Rouge self (Morris 2014, 317). By blurring the victim–criminal divide, the figure of Sopham hence asks the reader how nations like Canada would react toward a refugee child torturer had he survived.

In carrying her memories of the war, however, Janie is bound to Cambodia by the responsibility to bear witness to the war as a survivor. Having suffered under the Khmer Rouge, Janie realizes her responsibility to pass on her story, her memories, so that others who have suffered but can no longer speak out will not be forgotten. This responsibility is, of course, burdensome: That her brother’s ghost haunts her, for example, is something she “couldn’t live with” (Thien 2011, 146). Also, there is fear in voicing precious memories, because they seem safe inside and vulnerable when put into the world, as the following quote shows: “We take in too much, too many people and places, we try to keep them inside us where the world won’t alter them” (168)—which is why these memories remain unspoken during her years in Canada; Janie and her partner Navin never talk about their countries of origin, represented as “two lamps dimming” (164). Another Cambodian survivor tells her: “Hardly anyone outside the country remembers this war. Only us, only here” (162) as there is no space for memory in the new environment.

The territorialization—perhaps akin to, though less static than what Thien calls “containment” in an interview (Leighton 2011)—of memory, rather than the forgetting, appears as a desire in the book through the figure of the improperly buried, restless spirits of the dead as well as through the need to locate trauma as a prerequisite for healing. To some extent, then, Dogs at the Perimeter can also be read as a critique of Western therapeutic frameworks that treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) increasingly by means of pharmaceuticals. It highlights the tensions between Khmer Buddhist notions of health and healing which Janie’s mother teaches her children and a model of psychology that assumes suffering as following generic patterns and universalist notions of mental health (Troeung 2013, 161). The book’s title, which draws on a striated spatial metaphor based on the military notion of the perimeter, and on the recurring image of dogs as both potential protectors and attackers, suggests that striated, ordered, delimited space has to be defended rather than subverted from the perspective of a refugee subjectivity. It appears in the body of the text when Janie remembers her mother’s words before entering the refugee boat: “Long ago it had not seemed necessary to note [love’s] presence, to memorize it, to set the dogs out at the perimeter. I felt her [i.e., her mother] in the persistent drumming of water against the boat’s hull. Guard the ones you love, she told me. Carry us with you into the next life” (Thien 2011, 135). While Janie and Hiroji professionally explore how psychological processes restructure the brain, Janie’s exploration of her own past suggests that any working through trauma needs to go beyond the biomedical approach and take into account the historically situated circumstances from which trauma arises, as well as non-Western narratives and frameworks of knowing and understanding the world as alternative sources for healing (see Aguila-Way 2014).

In sum, Thien’s novel suggests that Canadian literature, defined once and seminally by Margaret Atwood as a literature of survival, now has developed this theme in a slightly different way than Atwood had in mind, mostly talking about settler colonials confronting a hostile natural environment (Atwood [1972] 2013). This literature is also a literature of survival in terms of flight to Canada, with its predecessors perhaps being fugitive slave narratives (e.g., as retold by Ishmael Reed in Flight to Canada, 1976), but also of the surviving trauma in diasporic spaces and the need to activate memories that will ensure cultural survival for refugee groups.

Conclusion

What Achille Mbembe terms “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death,” that is, necropolitics (2003, 39), is articulated through literary means in both Danticat’s and Thien’s works, which examine “the status of living dead,” to summon Mbembe once more (40). The increase in human flight today and the literary engagement with individual and collective repercussions of traumatic refugee experiences, as represented in contemporary narratives like Thien’s or Danticat’s, emphasize the need to counter dehumanizing discourses about refugees and recognize the “repressed topographies of cruelty” (Mbembe 2003, 40). Articulating refugee subjectivity through acts of writing and reading has the possibility to become an act of “emphatic witnessing” across generations, to use Robyn Morris’s term (2011, 311), referring also to a definition of literature as a communicative system that always involves a plurality of producers and readers. Emphatic witnessing escapes the postcolonial conundrum of how to speak for Others, how to give them a voice; turned into a narrative act, it highlights its own literariness rather than claiming to speak ‘authentically’ on behalf of an Other and thus responds to Cathy Caruth’s (and others’) understanding of trauma as an unclaimed experience impossible to witness (Caruth 1995). Literary writing counters this impossibility by presencing trauma, however imperfectly, by aesthetic means.

In sum, a literature of flight counters the ungrievable erasure of precarious lives threatened by necropolitical structures, taking up the notion of lives “sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost” (Butler 2015); rendering these lives grievable, they “make[] possible the apprehension of the living being as living.” Rewriting the immigrant narrative, Thien’s and Danticat’s works represent flight and deterritorialization—of subjectivity, of memory—as continuing conditions, rather than desires, of refugee subjectivities. What Jenny Sharpe says about “Children of the Sea” is equally valid for Thien’s novel: Both place “the reader within … scene[s] of drowning, not simply to give visibility to the misery and suffering of … boat people, but also to suggest a worldview that exists outside of the oceanic cartography of liberal humanism” (2009, 106). In this, narratives of flight also respond to the idealizations of those forms of postmodern theorizing that forget to take into account their own discursive locatedness. But not only do these texts provide a conceptual corrective; they constitute a discursive space in which flight and its consequences can be articulated and remembered. Both constitute what Gaëlle Cooreman has called “écriture-violence/violence-écriture” (2011, 37)—the representation of violence and the violence of representation, of what cannot be represented—by representing the trauma of total deterritorialization and flight as conditions of refugee subjectivities. Hence “Children of the Sea” and Dogs at the Perimeter offer narrative and aesthetic spaces that highlight the necropolitical borders deemed to secure the integrity and identity of contemporary nation-states. Literary works like Danticat’s and Thien’s—other examples would be Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2010) for the Afrodiasporic context or Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees (2017) concerning Vietnamese refugees—are all the more important in a world of renewed nationalism as a textual repository of an alternative imaginary, beyond Othering metaphors such as refugee ‘floods’ and ‘hordes,’ from the perspectives of those whose homes and identities have been repeatedly deterritorialized. Bringing to the fore this alternative imaginary with its aesthetic and epistemological potential is one of the main tasks of a humanities practiced and taught at a specific historical moment and from a specific location, within a Europe currently shattered likewise by its inability to deal with refugees in humane ways.