An argument against "Immigrant Literature"

It is the nature of programmers and publishers to create order, sets, and means of categorization, and it is the nature of artists and writers to resist such rank ordering. So it was perhaps inevitable that a little controversy should erupt at Comings and Goings, an event that brought together four disparate writers under the rubric of "the immigrant experience." It occurred when moderator Anne Giardini asked Rawi Hage if he considered himself to be Canadian. Hage visibly bristled; "It's becoming an insulting question!" and a nervous frisson murmured through the crowd.

But it would be equally reductive to hold the entire evening up against that one moment. Because the experiences of coming and going are not just, as Giardini put it in her introduction, quintessentially Canadian, they are quintessentially human.

(left to right: Anne Giardini, Rawi Hage, Donna Morrissey, Gillian Slovo, Nam Le)

As Nam Le remarked at one point during the discussion, "we're all immigrants to ourselves." And what the four writers onstage had in common was more than immigration/emigration stories. They spoke about class and caste, writer's block and substance abuse, and all forms of awkwardness that come from being human. They spoke about the fiction of the ‘immigrant makes good story' -- which is perhaps a fiction of nationalism, these founding myths that sweep away all discord. But these four writers -- Rawi Hage, Nam Le, Donna Morrissey and Gillian Slovo -- instead write about the ugly and uncomfortable truths of the immigrant experience. They write about discomfort, and struggle, and racism. They write about the discomfort of s/he who leaves and the discomfort of s/he who is left behind.

"I stays so you can go," says brother to sister in Morrissey's What They Wanted.

The writers also mentioned that all writing is in essence regional, that it is where you come from that makes or unmakes you as a person. They spoke about an infrastructure of immigrant literature that is unfortunately open to exploitation. They spoke about the frustration of writers with labels like "immigrant literature," because these labels often reference a kind of stereotypical and formulaic writing that is much smaller than what they are trying to express through their writing.

They also mentioned that migration is an old topic in literature -- I believe someone mentioned Homer -- and that many peoples throughout history have been vagrants and wanderers.

I leave you with a final thought, courtesy Hage, "Maybe instead of immigrant literature we should call it cosmopolitan literature."