LITERATURE of MIGRATION – Migrant writers perspectives, struggles and innovations

The so-called “literature of migration” is written by a series of authors who come from the most
diverse places and share the choice of writing in the language of the country they have migrated to.
This is probably the main characteristic of the literature of migration, which thus becomes a sort of
testimony. The second language these writers use is the medium through which they convey their
message to their audience, the witness of their need to say something; their effort not only
demonstrates that this message is important and worth being heard by the ‘host’ country, but also
tells us that those who are transmitting have chosen to leave the shield of their mother language and
are now disarmed: they come in peace.
The relationship with the second language, of course, is far from being easy: it is often full of
conflicts, made difficult by the fear that the new language could supplant the mother language and
offend it. In the context of a hard life in a foreign country, learning the local language can become a
really hard task: getting in touch with the language as an immigrant, forced by necessity, will never
be as funny and easy as studying it at school, for the pleasure of learning it. Plus, getting to learn a
language deeply enough to use it for literary purposes is an extremely difficult challenge, which
requires a long time, infinite patience and humility. This is why migrant writers initially prefer short
stories or biographies; writing a novel is usually a further step, to deal with when the mastery of the
language is strong enough to allow the writer to play with it.
The struggle for the second language starts as soon as people land in the new country and continues
for the entire life, like a battle to enter body and soul in the new dimension. Many aspects
contribute to keeping alive this never ending challenge: the desire of reaching the ‘host’ audience,
to shift from the status of simple ‘foreigner’ to that of ‘foreign writer’; the aspiration to show
oneself in their completeness, not only as work force but as people, who in Ben Jelloun’s “old
luggage” have closed their education, their titles and intellectual curiosity.
Using the new language to write facilitates the communications with the host community, which
will hardly think this exchange can take place in the language of immigrants: ‘they’ must learn
‘our’ language, certainly not viceversa. So ‘they’ accept the challenge; they tell us about themselves
and demonstrate they can take advantage of their condition, because that is the exact, principle
condition of contemporary age. They display a brilliant irony and make fun of our prejudices,
destroying them with a smile.
It is a challenge with the world around, but it is an even bigger challenge with oneself; the challenge
of people who can stake on their own independence and intelligence, and are willing to claim their
freedom to finally describe themselves.

I belong to that minority often offended, which is therefore also angry and often
disgusted, but which also persists in hoping. But I keep silent, and I think. I think
and I keep silent, in the belief that one day I will speak. Where? Now, here. I call
upon myself to speak: now it’s my turn.
[…] I am 42 now; I need and want to write, take notes of my observations. But
where do I observe? From where do I take the things to observe? I look behind, I
look at the preset, I look at those who have made my diversity a guilt, forgetting
their own diversity; there are always at least two diversities. I look at those who
have made my skin colour a disease; I look at those who firmly believe I can only
serve. I want to look at those who wage against me, as if I were stake. I look at
myself looking at those who have always looked at me.
[…] I have ripened the awareness and the belief that – to say it with bell hooks –
there is the need to make my voice heard, since I can talk about myself better than
anyone else. There is the need that my voice is heard. I am not going to talk about
my pain only. I want you to know my story, which must not be told by someone
who I think is another or, which is even worse, my colonizer.
[…] I must not be celebrated by those who think they can tell my story better than
I can do. 1

Only in the context of this finally claimed freedom, can start that “equal debate which is the true
nature of new Weltliteratur, in which we are all immersed […]. We all are in the Weltliteratur,
finally, but old roles and classical rules are subverted […]. The World literature is no longer a
system of European aesthetics and cultural values to be projected over the rest of the world.”2

Undoubtedly, writers of migration often deal with biographical themes, concerning the hardships of
the journey from their homeland to a foreign country, the difficulties in adapting to a new world,
language and way of life and the frustration they experience as foreigners, when facing prejudices.
But these are not the only issues these writers choose for their stories and novels: gaining a growing
confidence in their mastery of the ‘host’ language, most writers start experimenting all diverse
literary genres, so that the label ‘writers of migration’ becomes an improper definition. The only
1
Makaping, G., Traiettorie di sguardi: e se gli altri foste voi?, Rubbettino Editore, Soveria Mannelli 2001, p. 36, 37,
40, 53 (translated by the author).
2
Gnisci, A., Creolizzare l’Europa : letteratura e migrazione, Meltemi, Roma 2003, p. 25 (translated by the author).
characteristic they actually have in common is their choice to write not in their mother language,
but in a second language. Just like writers of so-called “Commonwealth literature” do not share
anything but the fact of writing in English.
Among the multiple identities these writers have, their geographic belonging becomes a question of
minor interest, and often is not even revealed by their literary production; a label which tries to
represent these authors, making them a sub group of the host country literature, falls into a mistake,
the same mistake which makes Salman Rushdie so harshly critic about “Commonwealth literature”.
The danger in which “literature of migration” incurs is to become a ghetto:

“Commonwealth literature” seems to be a corpus of writings created, I suppose, in

English, by people who are not white skinned British citizens, nor Irish, nor
citizens of the United States of America. It is not clear if black skinned Americans
are part of this bizarre Commonwealth. Probably not. It is not very clear also if
Commonwealth countries citizens who do not write in English – those who write in
Hindi, for example – or who disregard English, like Ngugi, could be admitted to
the club or if they would be asked to wait outside.
“Commonwealth literature” had thus become a very sad thing. Not only was it a
ghetto, but a really exclusive one. And the result of the creation of such a ghetto
was and is that the sense of the wider expression “English literature” – which had
always meant, to me, literature written in English – has been transformed in a much
narrower thing, a segregationist concept, from a topographic, national and maybe
even racial point of view.3

3
Rushdie, S., Patrie immaginarie, Mondadori, Milano 1991, p. 71 (translated by the author).

“Consider the case of Britain and two of its most accomplished living writers: Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul. Both
were born outside Britain but spent most of their working lives there. Both are mainstream figures who are nonetheless
affiliated to diasporic (South Asian/Caribbean) minority cultures. Both have been subjected to a vigorous, at times
vindictive, politics of labelling, where conspicuously indefinite terms such as ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘migrant’, ‘postcolonial’
and ‘Third World writer’ have been appropriated, deployed and renegotiated in the continuing effort to stake out
territory in wide-ranging cultural debates. […] Significantly, it is rare for either to be designed as a British writer. Even
some of the most culturally sensitive of critics have been known to persist in the view that Naipaul and Rushdie
originally come from ‘other’ places – to suggest that in some deep rooted, almost atavistic sense, they are immigrant
writers who ‘really belong’ somewhere else. Are these two obviously well known writers still marginal on account of
their ethnicity? Or because they choose in their work to fictionalise their own experiences of displacement? Or because
they’re seen, in spite of themselves, as First World informants for their Third World cultures?”
Huggan, G., The post-colonial exotic, Routledge, London and New York 2001, p. 85.
Like the label “Commonwealth literature”, even the expression “literature of migration” talks about
a division, a difference from the rest of literary production written in the same language. The
“literature of migration”, as well as the “Coomonwealth literature”, has a meaning only if it respects
a certain code; if it infringes it, the definition looses its meaning.
For what concerns the “Commonwealth literature”, one its main rules is that “literature is the
expression of a certain nationality”, so “books are praised mostly because they contain motifs and
symbols belonging to the author’s national tradition, or because they remind of the authors’ kind of
traditional form, which is obviously pre-English”.4 As for “migrant literature”, it is asked to deal
with migration issues; otherwise, the definition would be meaningless.
Rather than insisting in “the madness of trying to define a writer according to his own passport”5, it
would be more interesting “if we realized that a large part of literature, in many languages, shares
common traits, emerging from those corners of the world which we could define as less powerful,
or ‘powerless’”. We could thus “start theorizing the existence of common features between writers
who come from those societies – poor countries, or minority groups in rich countries – and say that
a great many of innovations inside world literature come from those groups. This seems to me to be
a ‘real’ theory, based on frontiers which are not political nor linguistic, but which concern
imagination.”6
According to this theory, the important characteristic of writers would not be the place where they
were born. In the fields of art, more than in any other field, the artist’s nationality has no great
importance; because, if it is true that “human diversity is the primary theme of literature, besides
being the reason of its existence”7, this diversity feeds also on several dislocations, distances, a
multiplicity of belongings and frequent departures.
As Salman Rushdie has stated, “literature has little or nothing to do with the author’s home
address.”8

4
Rushdie, S., Patrie immaginarie, Mondadori, Milano 1991, p.75, 76 (translated by the author).
5
Ibid., p. 76.
6
Ibid., p. 77.
7
Brodskij, I., Dall’esilio, Adelphi, p. 15 (translated by the author).
8
Rushdie, S., Superate questa linea, Mondadori, Milano 2007, p. 177 (translated by the author).