Arrivals and Departures: - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Arrivals and Departures:

Mapping Diasporic Identities

Chae-Pyong Song, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

Marygrove College

Baekdo Island, Yeosu, KoreaSlide2

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow—

even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving

to be a bud on a Spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death

of all that is alive.

(

Thich

Nhat

Hanh

, “Please Call Me by My True Names”)Slide3

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

(T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets")Slide4

in High School UniformSlide5
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Jacques

Lacan

(1901 – 1981)

The biggest separation is the separation from the intimate union we experience with our mothers when we are babies.

T

his separation constitutes our most important experience of loss, and it is one that will haunt us all our lives. All of our subsequent desires and needs derive from this place of loss. We will seek substitutes great and small for that lost union with our mother.Slide9

Salman Rushdie describes this exilic condition “an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking backward” (

The Satanic Verses

205). Slide10

Korean Presbyterian Church of Metro DetroitSlide11

A Korean Poet, Jung Ji-yong’s “Nostalgia” (1923)

This is the place

where, toward the eastern end of that vast field,

the small brook that babbles old stories turns around,

and the brindled cow

cries sadly and slowly in golden glow

How could you forget this place even in a dream?Slide12

This is the place

where, when ashes in the clay stove get cold,

the sound of the night wind on the empty field runs like a horse,

and the old Father overcome with shallow sleepiness

lays himself down, propped up by a straw pillow

How could you forget this place even in a dream

?Slide13

This is the place

where, longing for the blue light of the sky,

my heart has grown in this soil–

it would drench itself in the grassy dew

in search of the arrows I shot at random

How could you forget this place even in a dream

?Slide14

This

is the place

where the young sister would run, her hair flying behind her ears,

like the night waves that dance upon the legendary sea,

and the ordinary-looking wife,

with her feet bare in the field for all four seasons,

would glean through what remains with the hot sunlight on her back

How could you forget this place even in a dream

?Slide15

This

is the place

where the stars sparsely dot the sky

and shuffle their footsteps toward the unknown sand castle,

the frosty crows pass by the poor rooftop, howling,

and family sits around the faint light to talk together softly

How could you forget this place even in a dream

?Slide16

Bound

for the South

by

Koh

Jung-

hee

(

남도행

/

고정희

)

When the moon is full in mid-July, envisioning home,

I run down the road to Haenam, the place that I miss–

the road I take to watch the evening glow below Mother’s grave,

the road the typhoons Thelma, Alex, Vernon, and Win swept over,

the road that the floods ravaged and devilish waters shredded

.Slide17

The end of the peninsula, the clouds of solitary spray.

Giving my heart to the South, to the South,

I suddenly want to bow, putting my two hands together.

Passing the Honam Plain, I want to bow

.Slide18

The rice stalks that sway vibrantly

are like the veins of Father hunching over the field.

The horseweed flowers that bloom wildly

are like Mother’s attentive care that lingers

around the mountains and streams of my home

.Slide19

The

Mudeung

Mountain that rises up purely,

the white-

naped

crane that hops,

the white poplar tree that dazzles–

today these do not look ordinary,

and I want to bow to the picturesque landscape.

I want to kneel down and kiss the land of the South

.Slide20

Homi Bhabha (1949 - )

The “unhomed” subjects dwell in a border zone, “as though in parenthesis” (

The Location of Culture

9). Slide21

Edward Said (1935 – 2003)

Displaced people “exist in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, and adept mimic or a secret outcast on another” (

Representations of the Intellectual

49). Slide22

Salman Rushdie says

,

“

Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory . . . to occupy” (

Imaginary Homelands

15). Slide23

James

Clifford says,

“diaspora

consciousness lives loss and hope as a defining tension” (“Diasporas” 312). Slide24

Salman Rushdie (1947 - )

“The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained” (Salman Rushdie,

Imaginary Homelands

17).