Becoming National

This shaping of political imaginations within and against empires reveals how historical trajectories are more complicated than simply a movement from empire toward nation-states.^[881] The violent effects and messiness of making nation-states in the wake of empires have been prominent themes in literatures shaped by imperial legacies.

This messiness is staged on a number of levels in Wu Zhuoliu's poignant novel Orphan of Asia (1946). Set during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945, World War II, and the period leading up to these epochal events, it dramatizes how, in the words of Taiming, its central character, Taiwan is “caught in the vicissitudes of history.”^[882] The disorientating effects of the multiple formative cultural and linguistic influences of China and Japan on Taiwan are brought to a head during the war and Japanese occupation, with Taiming forced to make harsh choices as a collaborator with the Japanese, while at the same time resisting the political and cultural demands placed on him by both nationalists and imperialists for “clearer self-definition.”^[883] Vacillating between identifying with China and Japan, partly exemplified through his troubled relationships with different women that highlight his own fragile masculinity, he becomes a “small rudderless boat drifting between the currents of two epochs,” and in his troubled sleep he flits “from Shanghai to Taiwan to Japan.”^[884] The burden of these choices posed by both empire and nation precipitates his final descent into madness, expressed in the daubing of enigmatic aphoristic statements on the walls of his home village. The novel hollows out the genre of a nationalist bildungsroman with a narrative of repeatedly frustrated homecomings. Prior to becoming deranged, Taiming denounces the “depths of delusion” required to make nationalized selves:

The mass murder that had taken place during the war had been rationalized and even made heroic in the name of the “nation.” Every possible contradiction had originated in the belly of “the nation.” Taking “the nation” as a presupposition had distorted the study of history; textbooks were nothing more than propaganda meant to justify the nation and protect its power.

In short, the curriculum from elementary school to university was nothing more than a continual reiteration of that propaganda. This education had accustomed people to the idea of nationhood until it became a custom and then finally a system unto itself. The purpose of such a system is to cast human beings into one identical mold. Those who refuse to be made over in such a fashion are labeled heretics and troublemakers.^[885]

Taiming's moment of clarity and final act of self-definition against nationalism precipitates his descent into madness, bearing testimony to the hegemonic force of the compulsion to become national, and the difficulties of living outside the idea of the nation in the twentieth century.

Such difficulties are intensified in regions where the legacy of colonialism has been particularly divisive. In Israel/Palestine the statelessness of part of the population has foregrounded the liberating potential of the nation by its absence, while problematizing the creation of a nation-state that has displaced an existing population. Even here, though, authors have been concerned to distance their writings from the perceived philistinism of nationalist aesthetics. In his Arabic novel, I Saw Ramallah (1997), Mourid Barghouti defines himself against “the poetry of the stones,”^[886] while Amos Oz has expressed his frustration at readers reading “our literature as political allegory” alone.^[887] These assertions against “the simplifying tendencies of writing at the command of a nation” are paralleled by the complex staging of the nation in their texts.^[888] The centrality of newspapers and novels in imagining the nation (as argued by Anderson) is supplemented by Barghouti, who calls attention to how the Palestinian is a “telephonic person”; global telephone lines are a crucial component of the diasporic Palestinian nation dispersed in multiple time zones, just as the radio is central to the fantasy of the Indian nation in Midnight’s Children.^[889] Barghouti also uses the experience of exile to reflect upon the act of writing as a “displacement from the normal social contract,” forcing the writer to become a stranger to his own tribe; for him, becoming a poet is linked to his “discovery of how faded all abstracts and absolutes” like the nation are.^[890] Amos Oz's My Michael dramatizes this fadedness of the nation through its disaggregation in the psychological distress of Hannah, the first-person narrator who cannot become a healthy, fully signed-up citizen-protagonist. Troubled by Zionist triumphalism, and haunted by sexually charged and violent dreams of the Arab twins she knew in her childhood, she remains alienated from her motherly role of reproducing the nation.

The gendered tensions of becoming national are evoked through the relationships between dreams, literature, and poetry too slippery to fit in with national paradigms (Hannah is a student of literature), and the technically dry and scientific geological treatises of her nationally committed husband (although there are affinities between the two, noted in passing by Hannah).^[891]

These tensions are also captured in Miles Franklin’s (1879-1954) My Brilliant Career, ironically published in the year Australia became a federation (1901). Despite the narrator’s own criticisms of the conventions of romance in her introduction, the text slips in and out of realism and romance, with her resorting to the language of the Victorian heroine of romance or melodrama at crucial points of the text.^[892] The generic instability of the text reflects the inability of its narratorprotagonist to find a stable subject and class position in the landscape and economy of an emerging nation rooted in patriarchal norms and an overtly masculine ethos. Henry Lawson’s preface unconsciously reflects the gendered politics of writing in becoming national; he points to the “girlishly emotional parts of the book” as being in tension with “descriptions of bush life and scenery”; the latter are “painfully real” and “true to Australia.^[893] Lawson’s masculine aesthetic governed his own Short Stories in Poetry and Prose (1894), and was aggressively expressed in the influential Bulletin, founded in 1880 as the National Australian Newspaper, with its subtitle “Australia for the White Man” reflecting a racialized masculinity as the cornerstone of the emerging nation.

The destabilizing effects of nationalism and the psychological distress it engenders in individuals as they switch allegiances, form new ones, and reidentify and re-locate places within newly defined territories are captured in the bleakly comic Urdu short stories of Sadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955). His “Toba Tek Singh” (1955), set in a lunatic asylum, is a consummate example of the genre of partition literature.^[894] The unhinged utterances of its central character, Bishan Singh, in an inchoate mixture of Panjabi, Urdu, and English, scramble the politics of difference and, like Taiming’s own mad wall writings in Orphan of Asia, express his inability to become national, while relativizing the term “lunacy” in the extreme situation of partition.

Similarly, Salman Rushdie’s comic epic Midnight’s Children (1981) parodies nationalism’s grounding assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between individual selves and the nation. It plots the fantastically extravagant attempt of its protagonist to embody the whole of India, and to engineer an “equation between the State and myself” in a subcontinent where there are “as many versions of India as Indians.”^[895] This results in the comically deranged psyche of its narrator-protagonist Saleem Sinai, who is difficult to categorize in terms of nationality and cultural affiliation, and it draws attention to the messy attempts to map nation-states onto the diverse and heterogeneous Indian subcontinent.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

Becoming National

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