Displacement

An abstract journey of reality and illusion

Tahira Aziz

Daastan Publishing 2025

First Published in Pakistan by Daastan PVT LTD

House # A-41, Madni Street, Lala Rukh, Wah Cantt, Punjab 47040

www.daastan.com

www.meraqissa.com

Text copyrights © Tahira Aziz

Book Design Copyright © Tahira Aziz

Edited by: Syed Ommer Amer

The moral rights of the writer, illustrator, and editor have been asserted.

All rights reserved

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or distributed in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN 978-627-526-035-6

 *****

For my parents whose unconditional love voiced my unheard words.

“Time is displacement for replacement towards a new placement.”

*****

1        Contents

2       Preface. 8

3       Chapter One: Introduction. 1

4       Literature Review.. 7

5       Research Methodology. 16

6       Chapter Summaries. 18

7       Chapter Two: Migrants Encountering the Layered Discourse of Partition in At the Time of Partition. 21

8       Chapter Three:  Immigrants Carrying the Weight of Dual Traditions  50

9       Chapter Four:  The Fantastic Mode Redeeming Immigrants’ Crises  85

10     Conclusion: 113

11     Works Cited. 122

12     About Author. 126

2        Preface

This book, primarily, focuses on the discursive representation of immigrants encountering the challenges of living life in a multicultural Britain depicted in Moniza Alvi’s poetry. Interestingly, the immigrants, more precisely Pakistani and Indian diaspora with which Alvi empathizes both for autobiographical and poetic reasons, have also witnessed the horrors of the event of the partition of 1947. Therefore, this book investigates as how a migrant figure paradigmatically transforms into an immigrant subject and correspondingly how Alvi’s poetry registers this shift in tropes of exile, dislocation, and mobility. I argue that both migrants and immigrants share an epistemic structure of consciousness revealing nostalgia, memory, and remembrance of their homelands and the past. However I also argue that migrants relocate to new geographies and embrace new cultural packages under less duress as compared to immigrants who permanently carry the weight of both the physical and mental scars of dislocation. Consequently, the book benefits from the theoretical direction on the intertwined discourses of immigration and diaspora by the well-known Black British writer Stuart Hall who is of the view that “the past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual past, since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to the mother, is always-already ‘after the break’. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” (Hall 226).  This theoretical assumption is in consonance with Alvi’s poetic rendition of the migrant and immigrant subjects both rooted and deracinated from their past. As result Chapter 2 focuses on her collection At the Time of Partition (2013) in which she structures a polysomic perspective on the migrants relocating to new spaces of identity-formation in the aftermaths of the event of the partition. Needless to say, the migrants also experience ethnic and ideological relocation on multiple levels. Chapter 3, by close reading of The Country At My Shoulders and A Warm Bowl of Air, turns its focus to the sub-continent’s diaspora and immigrants who are consumed by the discontents and dilemmas of choosing life in the western metropolis. In her early work Alvi employs ironic and realistic modes because she deals with a vast range of crisis migrants and immigrants face. However, in her later work, Souls and Carrying My Wife, she employs the fantastic mode and isolates immigrants’ unconsciousness of self from their conscious being verily embodied in a non-sequential pattern of images overlapping between fairytale, myth, and horror.

Tahira Aziz

3        Chapter One:
Introduction

The vocabulary of social description, past, and present, brims with mobility and displacement.    Hamid Naficy.

Moniza Alvi is a British poet of Pakistani origins, and her work carries the conceptual trajectories of multiculturalism and diaspora. Present research focuses on the achievements and failures of the immigrant communities depicted in her poetry. She herself is partly rooted in South Asian culture therefore an immigrant caught between the nostalgia of homeland and his inability to leave his adapted home is a seminal situation in her poetics. I venture to argue that the conditions and circumstances in which immigrants survive and which are depicted in Alvi’s poetry carry an acute sense of identity crisis. Nevertheless, what makes this process of identity crisis more unique is the immigrants’ shifting Weltanschauung. The epistemic disillusionment and discontentment in the wake of not finding home in global and multicultural spaces add to an immigrant’s anxiety of existence. Correspondingly, Alvi presents a poetic landscape of immigrants encountering their choices and dilemmas of living in metropolitan centers. Hence, the British colonial history is also in the background of her poems. In other words, Alvi recognizes the value of colonial past of which an immigrant is an inescapable bearer. Stuart Hall is of the view that “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific” (Hall 222).  Here the specific refers to both the national and the indigenous landscapes. Hall counterviews his opinion on the specificity of place and culture opining that “cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as one people, with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (Hall 223). Using this theoretical direction to deconstruct the ways spaces influence the lives of immigrants, the current project further argues that Alvi’s poetry questions the complexity of immigrant’s identity constantly reshaped by the contradictions and constraints of living in multicultural spaces. Since an immigrant is a figure of dislocation and displacement therefore he carries the baggage of past and ‘the past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual past, since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to the mother, is always-already ‘after the break’. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” (Hall 226). Therefore, nostalgia for one’s past is an ineradicable feeling and it voices through various imaginative modes and narratives.

The Czech-born French writer Milan Kundra in his novel Ignorance (2013) writes that ‘The Greek word for "homecoming" is nostos and algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return” (Kundra 10). Clearly, one of the hallmarks of an immigrant’s life is the intensity of nostalgia he experiences after he relocates to a foreign land.  Since Alvi’s poetry traces the origins of nostalgia experienced by an immigrant subject in her poems she also pays attention to the physical landscape of immigrant’s origins. Undoubtedly, an immigrant subject burdened with the dual cultural heritage, a split consciousness, and hybrid spatiality emblematizes vulnerability and resilience. In many poems, in a confessional tone, she says that she has “no fixed nationality” (CAMS 66). It seems that she tries to identify herself by recognizing other immigrants’ ethnic groups and by the reminiscence of their native homes.  She suggests the ironic necessity of  negotiation with various nationalities and this she does by showing an immigrant’s attachment to his home, physical landscape, and the nostalgia evoked by remembering the sites and locales of past. In other words, the nostalgia experienced by an immigrant also reveals the fused memories of the colonial past and the postcolonial present. Postcolonial writing after all is a nostalgic look back at the past dominated and directed by the colonial imaginary. Therefore, in her poetry the element of nostalgia is both a way of countering and escaping the horrors of dislocation. Besides, after decolonization and transference of the native communities to western metropolitan centers, this feeling of horror rooted in the colonial past reconfigures in immigrants’ interaction with the native British ethnicity.

By that very fact, to tap the ingredients of nostalgia, Alvi goes deep down into the colonial history and consequently her work is engrossed in historical memories. Therefore, the narratives on partition are “narratives of memory” (Roy XIV). Since nostalgia is a feeling often associated with past and history too therefore Alvi engages with the representational discourse of the event of the partition of the Subcontinent. Like standard literary narrations on the event of partition, Alvi’s poetic discourse also focuses on the plight of the displaced and homeless. The refugees both psychologically and geographically are figures of displacement hence their nostalgia for their forsaken land is of paramount significance. The mental distress of leaving homeland under political coercion is an inimitable trademark of the migrant refugees. Therefore, immigrants, political refugees, and ideological migrants resist the import of nationalism which is evident in the case of both India and Pakistan. Thus, by accepting geographical dislocation, refugees, migrants, and even immigrants share more or less similar fates. The prospective figures of immigrants choose multiple identities at the risk of losing their ancestral ethnicity because they do not have many choices so their nostalgia for their homeland continues to shape and re-shape their identities.

Conversely, an immigrant remains caught between the demands of ethnic nationalism and multiculturalism. Postcolonial literature has increasingly responded to this situation and Moniza Alvi is also not an exception in this regard. She describes the predicament of immigrants by means of poetically nuanced perceptions which filter through different literary modes. One can say that she produces an alternative imaginative landscape of disillusioned immigrants in her poetry. In her poems, the difference between the actual and the imaginative immigrant often thins down. Nonetheless, the image of an immigrant, nostalgic for his homeland, stands out alone and sublime. Correspondingly, she also employs the fantastic mode in her poetry. As irony would have it, the transformation from the real world into the fantastic realm does not eliminate the scope of escaping the day to day realities of immigrant life.

Therefore, modernity has also contributed to the existential and social crisis of immigrant communities. Obviously, the struggle to “…escape from the modern world is beneficial” (Hume 67). The subsequent generations of immigrants, the hybrid denizens of modern world, find their adapted homeland as their only homeland though this conviction is often met with a rude awakening. Of course, the need to address the plight of emerging generations of immigrants cannot be side-lined. Though not dogmatic in intension, Alvi’s work seems to suggest that it is better for the new generation of immigrants to neither think about their fixed identity/nationality nor their duality/multiplicity of identity. They should rather culture while simultaneously adjusting to the demands of monolithic nationalism.  In other words, immigrants are supposed to participate in all cultures making sure that they are not mentally transfixed and are neither rejected for showing an arguably inflexible adherence to their native nationalism.  In global spaces, a zealous resistance to hybridity and multicity entails serious repercussions and leads to obscurity, erasure and marginalization. The wave of religious fundamentalism in Europe spearheaded by violent ethnic outfits is an evidence of this situation. Therefore, transcultural identity is more viable than a fixed national identity. Consequently, the nostalgia of a transcultural subject is also hybrid nostalgia. Therefore, I shall now turn to the concept of transculturalism as a conceptual prism to refract on the socio-political setbacks faced by the Asian immigrant communities in Britain. The concept of transculturalism is conceptually akin to globalization which is “the name that has been given to the social, economic, and political processes that have, taken together, produced the characteristic conditions of contemporary existence” (Hawley 209). In a more specific term, globalization refers to the “ways in which previously distant parts of the world have become connected in a historically unprecedented manner, such that developments in one part of the world are now able to rapidly produce effects on geographically separated localities” (Hawley 209). As this project unfolds in subsequent chapters the epistemological paradigms of transculturalism and globalization would be used as templates to read the poetics of immigrant identity in Moniza Alvi. By way of implication, this research locates the presence of nostalgia in her poetry as a way of looking back at one’s past more critically and objectively. Insistently, of Alvi’s major concerns is the life of an immigrant who is the carrier of colonial history relocated in western metropolis which constructs a space structured to accommodate and defend transculturalism and globalization as the redemptive myths.

4        Literature Review

As I have already stated the relevance of transcultualism and globalization as two major templates to read the conditions of immigrants so I find it instructive to examine their saliency for the current project. However, the concepts such as transnationalism, transcultuarlism, and multiculturalism will be of limited significance unless underpinned by the entwined discourses of nationalism and ethnic nationalism.

Historically speaking, “The word nation was used before 1800 in Europe to refer to the inhabitants of a country as well as to collective identities that could include shared history, law, language, political rights, religion and traditions, in a sense more akin to the modern conception” (Gat 214). Alvi writes about Asian diaspora in England concerned about preserving their indigenous cultural heritage. Evidently, revisiting historical, national, and religious memory is a part of the process of reliving imaginary homelands. It has been observed that most of all “nationalism conventionally denotes the doctrine and ideology that a people is bound together in solidarity, fate, and common political aspirations” (Gat 26). Every nation has its own ideology on which a nation forms its roots and the ideology makes a nation different from other nations of the world. The barest bone of the discourse of nationalism is that the very notion of nation is based upon the concept of fixed identity. Postcolonial Indian critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay “Nationalism and the Imagination” says that “Nationalism is produced by tapping the most private attachment to ground for the purposes of the most public statecraft. It is predicated on reproductive heteronormativity: birthright. To "naturalize" is to legalize a simulacrum of displaced birth, which becomes an actual birthright for the next generation” (Spivak 75). Spivak seems to suggest that inevitably national identity is based upon an inflammatory rhetoric of allegiance. In nationalism, the affiliation to an inflexible notion of allegiance defies elements of pluralism and heterogeneity. Behind the idea of nationalism and ethnic clustering there is human instinct of selective togetherness. The very process of finding common religious and ethnic grounds is as old as human history. The stereotype of man being a gregarious animal is still relevant. Therefore, it is not surprising that the “named social category of people based on perceptions of shared social experience or ancestry [and] ethnic group see themselves as sharing cultural traditions and history that distinguish them from other groups” (Peoples 389).

Taking further this point, Alvi in her poetry too responds to myths and stereotypes based on nationalism. But being a diasporic immigrant writer, she equally appropriates the anxieties and agonies of exilic subjects. In an interview with Muneeza Shamsie responding to a question about her roots and identity as a writer of Pakistani origin, she said that: “I was aware that my father was of a different colour and a different background and my parents’ best friends tended to be Pakistanis or Indians who had married Europeans. So I was aware of it through our social life, and then my parents used to make Indian food for special occasions” (193). The personal circumstances of Alvi’s diasporic sojourn is an evidence of her being an observant member of a consolidated multicultural family integrated with a larger European family however the more recent event of Brexit puts this faith on Eurocentric fusion into serious contentions. Interestingly, the father figure in Alvi’s biographical narrative is a Pakistani, an outsider, who prefers to socialize with Asian community besides the fact that they participate in native cultural activities which definitely evoke strong sense of past, history, and nostalgia. It is for this sake that Moniza Alvi re-visits Pakistan and resultantly in her poetry there is a range of stories and images depicting her mental struggle to find a balanced association with the land that belongs to her father and which she had left in her early childhood. But it is space with which she could not sever ties permanently hence nostalgia mixed with a feeling of estranged alienation fuels her poems. For that matter, re-visiting and homecoming are recurrent archetypal motifs in postcolonial, diaspora, and world literature. In Alvi’s poetry, the process of reconnecting with the imaginative and actual topographical recesses of the native homeland sustain a diverse scale of poetic metaphors and narratives about allegiance to national prescriptive. But on the other hand, there is also a consequent shift from national to transnational values.

The revisiting to her father’s homeland is poeticized in Country at My Shoulder and A Bowl of Warm Air. She mentions about her visit to her relatives in Pakistan in an interview with Muneeza Shamsie: “I made my first trip back shortly before The Country at My Shoulder was published. I think some people misunderstood and thought I was writing about my memories of Pakistan, when I was writing about my fantasies – I hadn’t been there. But my second collection, A Bowl of Warm Air, was inspired by my visit to Pakistan and India” (Shamsie 195). Quite clearly, she manages to represent the landscape of Pakistan and India even without visiting these places regularly. Of course, she too inherited the imaginative legacy of her father’s country. The word ‘country’ echoes the inevitability of reconnecting with one’s home, landscape and nationalism. She clearly mentions that Country at My Shoulder is not the outcome of her memory rather the book consists of her reworking of her memories of the places she has not physically travelled to. Furthermore, the very idea of dispensing off the burden of one’s immediate and distant past and history is suggested by the title The Country at My Shoulder. Symbolically, as a diaspora writer she carries the dual weight of traditions both Asian and European. By all means, she is eligible to invoke the memory of her homeland and its attendant territorial mappings through her physical and imaginative contacts.

On the other hand, her poetry also acknowledges the immigrant’s desire for a permanent home. However, multiculturalism defies the idea of a fixed home. Alvi not only associates herself with her Pakistani identity but also capitalizes on the notion of imaginary homeland in order to gratify her sense of belongingness. While living in England, Alvi empathizes with the discontents of Muslim diaspora as they come into contact with English culture. This feeling of discontent also generates nostalgia and a yearning for origins. The antidote to the melancholic yearning for one’s past is to internalize the discourse of multiculturalism. According to Gred Baumann multiculturalism is “not the old concept of culture multiplied by the number of groups that exist, but a new, and internally plural, praxis of culture applied to oneself and to others” (Baumann 6). Arguably, multiple cultures become merged at one geographical space but this also runs the risk of grandnarrativsing the discourse of multiculturalism. So, the concepts such as emergent and fluid homes are more sustainable and discursive. However, Baumann further argues: “Multiculturalism is not about absolute cultural differences because crosscutting identities are omnipresent even for the essentialist. It is, instead, about a proactive awareness of these crosscutting cultural cleavages and a culture concept to deal with them” (Baumann 85). Here, Baumann perhaps suggests cultural diversity within a culture. He says that it is due to cultural diversity, that an individual also remains attached to specific identity. Moniza Alvi also enunciates the diverse and specific sides in her poetry and arguably separates her residual Pakistaniness from the Englishness added to her identity. In an interview she said: “I always felt growing up [in Britain], that a bit of me was Pakistani, particularly having been born in Pakistan. If Pakistan wishes to claim me in some way, I am very pleased about it” (Shamsie 193). The owning of her dual identity living inside a multicultural Britain is actually an evidence of her contesting the idea of constant home in her poetry too hence an immigrant is a nostalgic wanderer.

The wandering immigrant is a dreamer whose fantasies exemplify his position in a culturally diverse place. Katy Evans Bush reviews Alvi’s poetry as: “Alvi’s poetry is imbued with a spirit of duality, partition, fractured identity and transformation: her early work was concerned with homelands – real and imagined – in poems which are vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the surreal” (Bush np). Bush clearly indicates that despite transforming the suffering of immigrants through fantasy, even Alvi cannot forget her dual nationality (Pakistani-British), the events of partition of 1947, and scattered identity which is an outcome of displacement too.

In line with this thought the concept of cultural difference and cultural diversity in Alvi’s poetry takes another dimension  as she envisages the locus of identity-formation in fantastic mode. Unable to counter the demons of his past and the history of oppression, the immigrant subject recedes into world of escapist fantasy. David Morley while reviewing Moniza Alvi’s poetry point out: “Moniza Alvi makes her readers more aware of talismanic variations in her handling of language and subject, especially their binding of myth and fairytale” (Morley np). It is by combining myth and fairytale that Alvi constructs an imagined homeland in which the immigrant enjoys a greater spatial freedom, and in which ideological and ethnic tags are removed.  Even the very idea of finding a permanent home becomes a secondary concern.  Morley explains the thematic configuration of imagined home in Country at My Shoulder as he says that “The real (and unreal) country at Alvi’s shoulder is her imagination, another-world of myth, power and strangeness” (Morley np). Therefore, to imagine the actual homeland through fantasy is basically an attempt to create an imagined homeland in order to redress the ethnic discontents of immigrant communities.

Moreover, the pain of dislocation is perhaps the most visible and yet the most contained element of an immigrant’s life. Jehane Markham while reviewing Souls says that the book is: “A mixture of wit, bravado and instinct, inform these quirky, surreal fables, which, I’m sure, will amuse a lot of readers. The souls are restless, amorphous creatures, who get married and divorced, are good travellers, good lovers and good sports. Yet despite the relentlessly playful tone I think many of the poems are about loneliness and dislocation” (Markham np).