Halfway house - art of cultural hybridization

ArtForum, May, 1997 by Homi K. Bhabha

Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It's not mine. I had another, sweeter, brighter With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats; Of fields wide as arms open for me. This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?

- Toni Morrison, "Whose House is This?" 1992

What does it mean to be at home in the world? Home may not be where the heart is, nor even the hearth. Home may be a place of estrangement that becomes the necessary space of engagement; it may represent a desire for accommodation marked by an attitude of deep ambivalence toward one's location. Home may be a mode of living made into a metaphor of survival: Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?

The general drift of Morrison's lyric may evoke the precarious political displacements, the poignant psychological and cultural disjunctions, that too frequently underlie the claim to "world" citizenship: according to the latest report of UNESCO'S World Commission on Culture and Development, recent decades have seen greater movement and settlement across national frontiers than ever before. "The number of foreign workers is estimated at over 40 million, the number of refugees at about 15 million and the number of people who had to leave their country because of political upheaval since the Second World War at no less than 37.5 million." Forced and unforced migrants form a scattered nation unto themselves, a state without sovereignty whose population is almost twice that of Britain, France, or Italy. Morrison's song, however, is much more than a hymn to the "homeless" or a dirge for the displaced. Her concluding question - Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key? - changes the tenor of the discussion to the contingent forces of survival: perhaps, an existence unfolding through a quotidian quest for what may be, day by day, the experience of transition without seamless transformation. Or learning to survive in a new landscape of identification where anguish becomes a way of working through alienation toward a tryst with history - for when "this house is strange" you encounter a shadow of yourself that is nonetheless animated and creative as shadow puppets can be, concealing their secrets from the light, casting their darkness into a profound suggestibility. The door opens onto a room that is not my own, the window unlatches to display a country that hurts the eyes, this is neither my locale nor my lock, but in this milieu of mischance, suddenly my key turns . . . and I have no choice but to choose to belong.

Such choosing is not free, as the freedom of choice purports to be; nor does such estranged belonging endow authenticity, in the manner to which "national" belonging accustoms us. For those who bear the mien of the minority freedom is paradoxical, and choice is the contingency of claiming one's subaltern presence as it is projected in and through the power of another's possession. To choose to belong in this peculiar sense, with its double consciousness and split identifications, is also to commit oneself or one's community to an agonistic existence: "Each, in his own way, rages against the dread requirement to represent; against the demands of 'authenticity,'" writes Henry Louis Gates. "People who have been vested with meaning [define themselves] by struggling against other meanings, other allegories. . . . Somehow the choice is always between alternate inauthenticities, competing impostures. Another approach toward the question: How does it feel to be a paradox?"

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, a recent collection that brings together the profiles he has written over the past few years for The New Yorker, Gates lavishly illustrates the paradox of the representation, and representativeness, of "blackness." This paradox is embodied in a norm raging against itself, a paradox of racialized subjectivity forever playing Freud's fort/da game in the space between what can be symbolized and what must remain spectral. Gate's argument, as I understand it, does not suggest that, somewhere over the rainbow, behind or beyond the "inauthentic," lies the aura of the sincere and the true. What emerges most forcefully for me from his portraits of black men bearing the "burden of representation" (including James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Anatole Broyard, Bill T. Jones, Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell, and Harry Belafonte) is the stark confrontation between the "social fantasy" of race or masculinity that projects them into the public sphere - fort! - and the eerie awareness that a sense of "agency," any deliberative or subversive action, must be derived from working, at once, within and without those very mechanisms of "representation," or strategies of regulation and discrimination - da! It is as if home is territory of both disorientation and relocation, with all the fragility and fecundity implied by such a double take: Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?

Such an anxiety of belonging moves beyond both the black American and the national contexts to become embedded in particular forces at the heart of the old empires and the thresholds of new ones. 'The anxiety of belonging," Toni Morrison writes in the recently published The House That Race Built, "is entombed within the central metaphors in the discourse on globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the break-up of federations, the rescheduling of alliances, and the fiction of sovereignty." As we make our global leap - a leap in technology as well as faith - we must return to that early form of globalization that we have known for at least the last 250 years in its different phases as the histories of imperialism, neocolonialism, or postcolonialism. Can the inequalities of power and wealth between First and Third Worlds, North and South in each nation itself, allow us to celebrate the global as if we are all participants in the same local festival? What these ambiguities in the global condition produce are profound anxieties about the way in which we see ourselves as part of a "shared" history of human civilization and barbarism.