Orpheus in the Alpujarras: Metaphors of Arrival in Chris Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons

Abstract

At some point in their narratives of migration, diasporic subjects will cross some physical Rubicon, some natural or political boundary marking off or separating one territory from another. Sooner or later they will also traverse some psychological Rubicon as their hitherto markedly monocultural identity transforms into a transcultural one (‘a being in becoming’ [M. Parry, 2003: 102]. Original emphasis), then perhaps a bicultural or culturally hybrid one and even, though far less frequently (if at all) into a fully fledged cultural convert, an originally alien subject turned well and truly native. It is this second Rubicon which interests me here. The migrant’s arrival in the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1992: 6) also marks his or her entry into an uncertain and ambivalent psychological hinterland where in the public sphere — at the level of interpersonal relations and administrative transactions — his or her deracinated identity is all at once up in the air, bandied around like a shuttlecock between competing versions of self-image and counter-image, while privately, with more or less resistance, reluctance or relief, the migrant subject’s self gradually adapts to the new land or community through a process of ‘cultural mimesis’ (Whitehead, 1997: 38) or doing in Rome as the Romans.¹