“Just because I came by boat… To escape the Taliban. The prison guard abused me. But I am a refugee. I only came here to save my life and Australian politicians are destroying me.”

I thought this section’s illustration and words were powerful together. The words are somewhat linear and so are the drawings, so a black background of seawater contrasts with a boat sailing the dangerous waters, the Taliban, a prison guard calling Yusuf a queue jumper, and finally an image of Yusuf’s face cracking and falling to pieces. I noticed that each of those images was progressively bigger, almost as if the obstacles that Yusuf has to overcome only get worse even though he is supposed to have escaped. And the words about the oppressors are accompanied by scary images, but the scariest image of his cracking face is accompanied by “But I am a refugee.” There’s significance in the pairing of words to images when it comes to Yusuf’s journey, how his identity is formed, and how he is broken down the most by treatment in detention centers and of refugees in Australia.

“Au revoir, Papa,” I said, trying out the word Papa just this once. I had always wondered what it would be like to call someone Papa.”

“Aujourd’hui, papa est mort.”

I thought that Danticat’s word choice in this section was meaningful. In this moment, Nadia is speaking to her father for the first time. Her desire to use the word “Papa” comes from the surface level wanting of a father in her life, but also from wanting a connection to the culture her father represents. Nadia’s first and last words to her father are in one of the languages spoken in Haiti, French. Yet, even French is a language of colonizers, and Danticat makes the choice for Nadia to speak in French rather than Creole. In addition, “Aujourd’hui, papa est mort” is an allusion to the first line of Camus’s “L’Étranger” which Nadia’s students are reading in class. That line has sparked debate about translation work and makes us question Danticat’s own translation of the line to “My father died today”. What does temporality mean in death– to die “today?” Does culture die in this moment, or is it reborn? Danticat uses language and allusion to make us question these notions.

“They do not like you. They do not like me! That thought never actually occurs to you . Still, you feel a little uneasy. Still~ you feel a little foolish. Still~ you feel a little out of place.”

Something that struck me was Kincaid’s switching between different pronouns to identify the roles of the reader, the author, and the people of Antigua. The “you” pronoun places us in a position we are meant to feel comfortable and familiar with (a tourist in Antigua). It presupposes that Kincaid is writing to an audience that is privileged and likely unwilling to look beyond the surface of Antiguan life and history, especially in their complacency to poverty. The “I” pronoun underhandedly criticizes the “you” for this ignorance and establishes itself as an authority on living in Antigua. The “I” speaks to the “you” in a didactic way, as if the “I” has grabbed the “you” by the shoulder, sat them down, and told them to listen. Finally, the “they” pronoun for the Antiguan people almost creates an othering effect in relation to the familiar and informal “you,” showing how far apart their worlds can be. In the text, the “you” feels indignation at the thought that “they” could dare to dislike or feel superior to “you.” The “you” wonders– how could that be when the “you” is so nonchalant and easy to have power, while the “they” is unknown and detached. I felt that these pronouns were great at forcing you into a position you may not feel comfortable to realize you are in, which is all the more powerful of an effect.

“Freud suggested that, in normal mourning, one internalizes the dead. The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. In mourning that does not proceed normally, mourning in which something has gone wrong, this benign internalization does not happen. Instead, there’s an incorporation. The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living” (209).

Although Julius relates this to 9/11, and there also may be applications of this to the death of Julius’s father and the school girl, I felt Julius’s literary reading of Freud’s analysis of death foreshadows his rape of Moji. We have learned previously from Veena Das how how women’s bodies show pain and need languages to express those pains, as well as the relationship between mourning and life. Perhaps Moji’s mourning of the harm to her body has been lost between introjection and incorporation for many years as she encounters Julius again and is forced to find a language for her pain. For Julius, his repression mirrors a death that is sectioned off and haunts him every day, prohibiting him from connecting with others. I’m unsure whether either of them can reach Freud’s introjection despite Moji’s confrontation of Julius as they are so fundamentally harmed. Julius relating to this text also points to a lesson Cole is pushing– that we can learn more about internal processes from looking at our relations to external objects.

In many instances now, when Julius is faced with a profound or traumatic moment, he abruptly disengages from the situation. While Julius portrays himself as an intellectual, he is actually afraid to cross a boundary or hold an opinion. In this conversation where Farouq is brimming with passion claiming Palestine “the central question of our time,” Julius’s thoughts are underwhelming. He lackadaisically distracts himself with a “meaningless visual”. The switch from the central question of our time to something inconsequential makes me feel less like we are seeing the random patterns of a stream of consciousness. Rather, Julius makes deliberate attempts to divert his attention from topics that have deep roots in things such as violence or trauma. Even in this trip to Belgium where he wants to find his Oma, his approach is extremely passive and he spends a majority of his time checking his email and engaging in frayed relationships. Going back to our conversations about Julius’s mental state, I don’t think we need to classify him as unwell based on his haphazard or jumbled stream of consciousness. His way of thinking feels more a reflection of the disconnect and isolation that permeates into all of his relationships.

Cole’s comparison of atrocity towards humans and animals is laid out starkly and abrasively. Cole switches between different stories/lines of thought a lot, so at first I thought this was just another random shift. But upon further reflection, throughout these four chapters there is a lot of reference to man confining man, such as Dr. Saito’s internment camp, Idi Amin, slavery, and colonization. Cole uses metaphor as Julius makes his way down into the train station like an animal in a pen, and includes animalistic confinement alongside the list of atrocities man commits to man. In this way, we can feel the dehumanization Cole conveys to the fullest and he evokes shame, sadness, and helplessness in the reader of people’s tendency to entrap bodies. Particularly, Cole’s attention to the “well-organized” characteristic of all these techniques of confinement aligns with the well-organized grid of the city and the overlapping subway lines.

I like your connection of this quote to Julius’s roots. At times, it feels like Julius is walking around the city without aim and without a root, and I wonder if this also stems from his family’s rejection of his Oma, which may symbolize a rejection of part of himself. It would explain the “sort of solidarity” between them. I like that Cole writes Julius to be introspective and aware of this, but also stuck as a result. Even though he is a psychiatrist, he is still helpless in some ways. I also think it’s relevant that you connected Oma and Julius as being open-minded, considering the “small-minded” way his mother described Oma as.

“Although she goes quite ugly with anger when Grace says, You English people from overseas… I’m Scottish, Miss McAllister snarls, actually baring her teeth. Now what kind of putting on is that, she said to Tracy-Anne, when everybody knows it’s the same place, same people.”

When Fiona gets mad, and even offended, for being mistaken as English rather than Scottish, I was reminded of the Gloria/Nina name change in Black Psychiatrist, as both women want to change other’s perceptions of the historical context of their identity. I think Fiona wants to distance herself from the ‘clipped white world of middle England’, seen in her criticism of Grant and his ‘irrational hatred of Glasgow’. She tries to distance herself from the image of being an oppressor by claiming Scottish identity, maybe since Scotland too wanted independence from England and many Scottish people came to SA as missionaries. However, to Grace, this distinction does not actually mean anything, possibly due to the way race was designated under apartheid. As Grace’s thoughts are juxtaposed with Fiona’s, we may interpret Fiona’s activism as a white savior, where Grace is simply a passive recipient of Fiona’s white benevolence. Grace, however, is clearly her own person with her own experiences and thoughts on her interactions with Fiona. 

“But even you can see in the offspring the traces of your father’s-our father’s-diabolical seed. Here, feel those arms. I’m nerved with sinews. Of steel of black mortar mixed with the blood of Dutch immigrants…It was my mother he exploited. A poor ignorant girl out of the bush, she came to work for your damned family a young woman unaccustomed to the ways of white men, full of goodwill and trust-and your damned father (Softly) our father-used her.”

When Nkosi revealed to us that Dr. Kerry and Gloria are in fact half-siblings by their father, I thought back to Deleuze and Guattari’s brief mentions of the Oedipal complex in our earlier reading. They bring up the idea that every individual concern (including an Oedipal complex) in minor literature is inherently a social concern. Case in point, the climax of Dr. Kerry’s revelation about his relationship to Gloria is not about the implication of incest so much as it is about the effects of oppression and colonization running through his blood, the “steel of black mortar mixed with the blood of Dutch immigrants.” In one of Deleuze and Guattari’s footnotes, they include Kafka’s notion that the father figure is a representation of other political figures. Applying this idea to Nkosi, Joubert may be a representation of the white colonizers in South Africa. Despite leaving the country, the effects of colonization are inescapable in Dr. Kerry’s very existence.

–Jane Ekhtman.

“Did her way of seeing the world.
Or recollecting it.
Cast a spell on my own brain?
The way that everything I wrote returned.
To the image of a woman’s body.
Poked, upright or inverted.”

This excerpt from the reading stood out to me most due to Kapil’s mastery of interlacing the past, present, and future of trauma. For one, Kapil points to gendering of Intergenerational trauma through motherhood, the mother-daughter relationship, and violence against women. Kapil looks at her mother’s lived experiences, how those experiences have tinted her mother’s existence and parenting, and how Kapil is now burdened with an image of violence that she hadn’t even witnessed firsthand. Interestingly, this even affects Kapil’s own parenting to her son. I also love the theme of mysticism and magic, with Kapil having subconsciously “cast a spell on her own brain” to be trapped in a loop of trauma in her artistry. She doesn’t blame her mother for putting herself in a loop, just herself. It makes it even more powerful when she decides to cast a new universal spell to break out of restrictions. This mysticism is a tool of empowerment. I just love the progression of past to present in just this little excerpt, and in the rest of the reading as well.

–Jane Ekhtman.

“She is alive. My daughter is alive,” Sirajuddin shouted with joy. The doctor broke into a cold sweat.

The last three lines of ‘The Return’ stood out to me as capturing dehumanization due to war, in different ways. There is Sirajuddin who shouts with joy merely at the fact that Sakina is alive, despite her traumatized condition. The reality that Sakina’s state is a good outcome in Sirajuddin’s eyes points to depravity and terror being normalized in a time of conflict. We also have the doctor’s contrasting perspective to Sirajuddin of breaking into a cold sweat because he can recognize that Sakina has been raped.

However, the last lines do not give the perspective of Sakina at all. Throughout the story, Sakina progressively loses agency over her body and never regains it, even when she is reunited with her father and receiving medical care. Just as the last few lines give us information on what the doctor and Sirajuddin feel at the sight of Sakina, we can only interpret Sakina’s perspective on the rapes and surviving in the context of her physical reactions to men. This lack of Sakina’s perspective really stood out to me in these lines and speaks to her overall loss of autonomy.