Reprezentari ale Imigrantului In Proza Contemporana a Romanelor Americane

REPREZENTĂRI ALE IMIGRANTULUI ÎN PROZA CONTEMPORANĂ A ROMÂNILOR AMERICANI

TEZĂ DE DOCTORAT

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE

IMMIGRANT IN CONTEMPORARY

ROMANIAN-AMERICAN PROSE WRITING

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The subject and questions on identity and representation of immigrants have always been a central aspect of literature produced by immigrant writers and the Romanian writers who emigrated in America are no exception to this rule. After 1989, as a result of the new transnational dimension acquired by the Romanian diaspora in America within the context of globalization and the fall of communism in Europe and in Romania as well, it is obvious that the representations of the migrants receive new dimensions, a phenomenon that has led to a new relationship between the Romanian culture and the American space.

The doctoral thesis ‘Representations of the Immigrant in Contemporary Romanian-American Prose Writing’ takes into account as main objective the reconfiguration of the contemporary prose of Romanian diaspora in America to reveal the changes in the representation of Romanian immigrants, within the context of an openness toward the transnational structures specific to the process of globalization. The second objective of the thesis is the location of Romanian cultural space that exists in exile within the multicultural theoretical context created after cultural flows, geographic and ideological depreciation of the territorial borders.

The criteria necessary to approach this study take into account a large number of factors which actually determine a rethinking of the intellectual Romanian immigrant portrait: the linguistic factor (the language they write in), historic and socio-political factors that build the relationships with the native culture and country, motivations and forms of dislocation, to what extent this exilic literature is recognized by the critics and the circulation rate, type and time/period of dislocation, the role of the dialogue in exile’s memory, globalization and forms of de-diasporization by adding a new transnational dimension and the reconfiguration of Romanian diasporic identity.

Following these criteria and objectives, this study aims at focusing on the representation of the immigrant in the diaspora Romanian- American prose perceived under the changes produced by the fall of communism and globalization.

To achieve the objectives of the thesis, it is necessary to make a clear distinction between two concepts of the migrating phenomenon, exilic and diasporic identity.

Diaspora has seen a multitude of definitions, all based on the idea of dislocating groups of individuals from native space through migration and / or exile, followed by the development and conveyance of a self cultural identity, which retains and preserves elements from the national heritage, along with those acquired in the country of adoption, through a mixture obtained in the process of hybridization.

Exile, either perceived as a voluntary (self-exile) or involuntary phenomenon, deportation or emigration of the individual, represents in the end a geographical displacement, after which the exile finds it impossible, were it only temporarily, to return. However, there is a clear difference between voluntary exile and emigration, on the one side, and involuntary (forced) exile and deportation. In the first case, which is to be under our observation, the decision to leave the native country or homeland and its assumption belong entirely to the exile, regardless of reasons (economic, political or personal). The decision to exile can be traumatic or can provide a new horizon by the level of utility gained in the country of adoption, namely: they have a purpose and they avail. Even so, exiles leave in order to return, oppose assimilation, their eyes being turned permanently to the country of origin. Moreover, writing in Romanian, their native language, the exile self-walls up inside, keeping the language as a shell, as Norman Manea does, amplifying many of the solitudes his exile life is interlaced with. In case of the emigrants, they accept the existential risk of losing identity or rather their reconfiguration, their re-birth in another community, another language, another culture, in relation to which they sometimes become more zealot than those born in the country of adoption.

The displacement and crossing into another space need to be followed by the redefinition of the self, especially in case of a writer, which implicitly leads to a transformation in an unfamiliar space. This transformation, i.e. a redefinition, is subconsciously outlined under the sign of “the fear of disappearance”, a collocation used by Andrei Codrescu, of physical and psychical trauma generated by the dispossession of the native space, culture, fragmentation of identity in order to be re-born, a painful process as in every birth, but more than that the dispossession of the mother tongue which can be neither rebuilt, nor re-born. It may be, nevertheless, locked up in the shell of a snail, as Norman Manea does with his native language, kept untainted and let free only when the exile needs to re-consolidate his identity.

Beyond the trauma generated by exile, there is always outlined a new image of exile: a redeeming exile, the chance of a new existence in a country that will bear the mark “of adoption” for the whole life, and which obligatory means to adopt a new language and adapt to a new culture transcribed by this.

The nostalgia of return cannot be separated from the memory of a geographical, emotional and cultural space, often besetting, yet fading in time, as they are getting closer to another space and another language, which means the chance of another integration, but also the pain of living in a permanent suffering of losing identity through the language of adoption.

In case of the Romanians settled in America, professor Ștefan Stoenescu distinguishes between the two categories, exile and diaspora: “some consider themselves exiles in their origins, while others feel better under the label of immigrants trying hard to get assimilated and become naturalized citizens” (2006). As such, “exile has never ceased to hope in a final comeback, yet forever postponed, to the idealized country of origin”, whereas “diaspora, on the contrary, seems to be willing to ignore old values and avails, Romanian language being no exception, but gradually becoming an alternative way of communication” (2006).

Our intention is to reveal through brief images and sequences the cultural and historical postwar and post-December ’89, accordingly, which generated not only an involuntary exile, but a voluntary one as well, and also to make an analysis, through the agency of several literary works on exile, of certain involved phenomena, such as: disrooting, severance, identity fragmentation, alienation, returning from exile in a process of dediasporization, the impossibility to reintegrate in the native space or space of origin (homeland), the preservation of a nostalgic feeling and the option for a final and determinate exile, a rediasporization, in the hostland or the country of adoption. Our research has in view several writers from different spaces and waves of exile, through their exilic novels, as well as through exilic theatre. The study focuses on contemporary Romanian-American writers whose works enables us to demonstrate not only the traumatic character of exile, but also its transgression by approaching a creative exile, in the positive sense, observed and brought up by recent literary works, such as Saviana Stănescu’s stage plays Aliens with Extraordinary Skills and Waxing West, which created a new image of the cosmopolite exile, under the label of the “global immigrant”.

The selection of the writers included in works cited as primary sources have in view: Norman Manea The Lair (2012) in Romanian translation Vizuina (2009), The Black Envelope (1995) in Romanian translation Plicul Negru (2010), Curierul de Est: Dialog cu Edward Kanterian (2010), The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (2012), Sertarele exilului: Dialog cu Leon Volovici (2008), Întoarcerea Huliganuluui (2003), Gabriel Pleșea Trilogia Exilului (2002), Andrei Codrescu Disparitia lui “Afara” – Un manifest al evadării (1995), The Hole in the Flag – A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (1991) in Romanian translation Gaura din steag – Povestea unei reveniri și au unei revoluții (2008), Petru Popescu Intoarcerea (2001), Domnica Rădulescu Train to Trieste (2008) in Romanian translation Trenul de Trieste (2008), Aura Imbarus Out of Transilvania Night: A Story of Tyranny, Freedom, Love and Identity (2010), Saviana Stănescu Waxing West (in the New York Plays) (2010), Aliens with Extraordinary Skills (2010).

The works which are to be subjected to analysis are enclosed in a large variety, from fictional novels to memoirs and novels with a journalistic feature, non-fictional essays, stories, and last but not least, stage plays. Both writers and their works have been selected to offer more comprehensive and farther-reaching realities of the Romanian diaspora.

The approach of the study from the perspective of cultural studies and methods specific to American Studies, requires the use of texts belonging to more than one disciplinary areas. The scientific character of the thesis is assigned by the specific methods of the American Studies, which frame it in the large spectrum of Cultural Studies, as well as the comprehensive associated bibliography. Therefore, the thesis uses literary histories, chronicles, encyclopedias, essays and studies of authors and scholars from the country and abroad published mostly after 1990, as well as interviews offered by writers who came back from exile or in case of launching their writings in hostland, published in magazines or in other writers’ volumes. A considerable number of literary and criticism theories, both Romanian and foreign, is to be explored for a correct interpretation of the literary texts.

The originality of the paper derives from the personal selection of the writers and works, by means of which we attempt to present novels, volumes of short stories and plays, signed by authors who were born in Romania, but less known in the country, in some cases due to distance or a false perception that all that is written outside the borders is no longer Romanian. By means of the selected examples our intention is to prove that the literature written outside the borders of the native country, both in Romanian and in English, by the writers living in the United States of America, is as valuable as the Romanian literature written in homeland, hence being essential and integrating part of it.

The topicality of the thesis emerges from the desire to recover and highlight the writers and their works, that are endowed with a true cultural value and which in the middle of a society confused and fragmented by social, economic and political crisis, could offer a moment of temper and support in front of the danger of losing an identity acquired during a millenary effort and without of which the existence of the nation itself is endangered.

The innovative character of this paper comes from highlighting the new features of the ‘89 post-December exile, which manages to get out of the linguistic trauma pattern established by Norman Manea and Gabriel Pleșea and is resized at global scale by means of Aura Imbarus’s memoirs and Saviana Stănescu’s cosmopolitan theatre.

As for the writers, a distinction is to be made between authors well-known and with audience in U.S.A. such as Andrei Codrescu, Petru Popescu, Gabriel Pleșea, Norman Manea) on the one hand, and writers who have more recently published in America (Domnica Rădulescu, Saviana Stănescu, Aura Imbarus) but addressed primarily to the Romanian audience.

The diasporic identity of the writer is doubled by his/her personal one. The experiene experience of communism lived by the Romanian writers at different intensities and ways, makes the research area to be as interesting as laborious. In the context of a diasporic environment, we talk about the necessity of building the cultural self of the writer settled on a different realm than the native one, and about how the experience of "the other" is perceived and accepted and can influence the self under a double shock: breaking from the restrictions and rules imposed by communism, on the one hand, and the sudden shift to a different kind of culture and perception.

The methodology of the research is interdisciplinary, the object of the research being the one underlining the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary character performed under the cultural influences and the globalization.

The theoretical premises stand upon concepts such as diasporic identity, cultural space, exile, representation, and involve literary, post communist, postcolonial and transnational studies related to a critical attitude of the postmodernism by means of which the writer becomes a presence in the reader’s mind. Along with them and through the agency of historical and literary examples, we intend to carry out a theoretical and empirical research on transnational migration and the diaspora, in an attempt to understand the complex relationship between migration and belonging, the ways in which diasporic and transnational identities are applied and represented in the context of “home” mobility through the process of dediasporization and rediasporization. The paper also focuses on the influence of migration over the diasporic cultural identity through cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism.

Thereby, the study uses theoretical concepts elaborated within American Studies, such as: identitary geographies (Lavie & Swendenburg), deconstruction of the nation-state concept (Arjun Appadurai), the culture of globalization and diasporic studies (Anita Mannur, Jana Evans Braziel), diasporic globalization (Michel Laguerre), post-colonial studies (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, Hellen Tiffin), approaches of the cultural diversity in terms of multiculturalism as discourse of a late modernity (Werner Sollors, Will Kymlicka, Kottak and Kozaitis, Ronald Takaki, Michael Novak, Philip Gleason, Andrew Heywood, Michael Featherstone, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Rodica Mihăilă a.o.). To highlight and confine the corpus for analysis, an extensive bibliography of the primary sources of the Romanian-American writers is to be developed, followed by a secondary bibliography comprising critical works on authors and periods. The identification of relevant criteria in selecting the authors and the representative texts will fall into the objectives of the present study.

Multiculturalism pleads for preserving the identity of each culture, aiming to retrieving a genuine sense of cultural identity, a principle perfectly applied in literature. The Romanian cultural heritage allowed Aura Imbarus, Domnica Rădulescu or Saviana Stănescu to assert themselves in front of an English audience and acquire a great success in another culture, though they may have struck first the discrimination barrier related to sex, gender, a barrier which multiculturalism aims to overcome. We consider that this essential feature, coming out of the Romanian authors writing in English, is a valuable resource which needs to be cultivated and emphasized as generating novelty.

Although, over the time exile has been perceived and charged with mostly negative connotations that abase the soul, we cannot fail to notice the positive side of it, when exile revives and generates experiences which by means of writing talent turn into valuable literary works and the authors and their creations presented in this study prove to be references in this respect.

As a place of the exile diasporization, the American space is present in all the literary works of the writers subjected to analysis, most of them revealing the paradoxes of the American world, the multiethnic and multilingual “melting-pot”, alienating and lacking of illusions for the exiles, the uncertainty, the solitude, the anonymity, the linguistic and cultural uprooting.

In the novels written by Gabriel Pleșea, Norman Manea, Aura Imbarus or Domnica Rădulescu the exiles are intellectuals, writers, artists, who left for political or non-political reasons over which real experiences are transferred into fiction. The Romanian writers’ propensity for notable and iconic heroes, symbols of the intellectual exile in the Communist totalitarian regime, finds an explanation in the authors’ intention to make disclosures about their own experience. Gabriel Pleșea’s exiles belong to the postwar era, being political exiles, whereas Aura Imbarus’s and Saviana Stanescu’s exiles belong to different waves of exile, especially emigration, in post-Communist period. Plesea’s exiles are characters obsessed by the mirage of the New World, which is a generic obsession of the Romanians living in totalitarian communism, in many cases the characters’ biography overlapping the author’s. Behind their biographies one feels the same desire to unmask a totalitarian regime in which the perverse game of the dictatorship power annihilates the individual, crushing him by repression, or to disclose the uprooting and the struggle for survival in the western space.

The process of diasporization takes place from without and within at the same time. Thereby, America does not work so much as a desired material, fixed space, but as the ‘idea’ of freedom: “it was the international Idea-State, the only functional anarchist system in the world” (Codrescu 48). At this extent, the idea of America as crest of superior experience is relativized; its immanent superiority is being fractured, deterritorialized and reterritorialized with the imagination of the diasporic subject in search for an Ideal and not a strictly place-bound location. Actually, the American Dream begins at home. In order to run off communism, as Petre Popescu confessed in Intoarcerea (1991), “I was living in my country and dreaming about America. […] I saw America, America in a forsaken cinema in Bucharest at the end of the 60s during a short cultural break between capitalism and communism[…] the dream of a Third World boy about a country he had never seen could not be censored” (4).

As Michel Seidel argued in his study Exile and narrative Imagination (1986), the exiled writer lives paradoxically in two worlds, incapable to disembarrass of the past which is projected into his literary work and who lives in a new place while going back in his memory to the native place, thus evoking simultaneously two realities. In both Norman Manea’Lair and The Return of the Hooligan and Gabriel Pleșea’s Aruncă pâinea ta pe ape (Cast Thy Bread Upon the Waters, 1994), part of the Trilogy of Exile, the Romanian space coexists with the American space before and after 1989.

As for the structure, the paper comprises 5 chapters, preceded by an introductory section and ending with a section devoted to the conclusions.

Chapter 1 has in view as “exiled” only those writers and artists who are in some sense geographically displaced, whether by force or design. However, within this definition, it is essential—in probing the convergence of exile and creativity— to allow for an understanding of exilic experience which acknowledges the experiences of geographic rupture and creativity shared by artists and writers whose lives may be otherwise radically different in social, economic and political terms. In mapping how creativity and exile converge, how exile is experienced and described by artists and writers is essential. Whether it was known as “displacement” or “severance”, the meaning of exile has undergone many changes over the time: exile as an escape, salvation, adventure, trauma, punishment, courage, therapy, revenge, denial, choice, political or personal decision, impossibility to find solutions, elopement, or destiny. This study will try to seek the many faces of the exile and see how much trauma or myth lies within it. Being a multidisciplinary field, I will try to investigate it by making a survey onto post-colonial theories, psychoanalysis, post-structuralist theory, history, literary studies, and cultural studies.

Edward Said notes that “Exile is a solitude experienced outside the group: the deprivations felt at not being with others in the communal habitation” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 2000:177). In case of a voluntary exile, as well as in others that will be discussed here, there is a paradoxical situation offering a special meaning to the act of leaving one’s homeland: what makes the individual uncomfortable may be his own nation. I have also decided to make an overview of the modern exile, following that in the next chapters to try and find out how much of it is “assumed” and how do modern exiles reassure themselves as true immigrants. The discourse of exiles speaks for the continuing conflicts between cultural identity and adjustment. By means of descriptive discourses, immigrants, exiles and expatriates rave out real creative powers, changing tensions rising from social, especially political and cultural factors into comprehensive narratives of identity.

A great number of academics in cultural studies come up with most detailed analyses of exilic discourse. Their studies situate exilic discourse in the limens of the society, showing to what extent expatriation, identity and culture are merging in building the foreigners’ public role in the society and in the world. Moreover, cultural studies advance helpful details on the condition of exile in marginalized public spaces, on struggles of justifying their legitimate condition, and/or negotiations of cultural identity within diasporic contexts. In Reflections on Exile, Said defines the condition of exile, outlining the existence in the Outside, in the “nomadic”, as a “contrapuntal” Other in the dominant social culture (149). Echoing Said’s way of understanding the complex relationships developed between culture and exilic identity, Stuart Hall links diasporic context to cultural identity showing that they are a two-fold process of recreating borders of reference. Hall’s first definition of diasporic identity is useful in understanding the “common historical experience and shared cultural codes which provide the[ir] people with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (225). The second dimension of exilic identity offers expatriates the ability to transform themselves through processes of “difference” (234). Hall writes that:

Cultural identity…is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power. (225)

What Paul Ilie (1980), a famous Hispanic scholar, points out is that exile is a “bilateral phenomenon”, suggesting a “reversibility principle”….positing territorial exile in an “axiological interrelationship” with “inner exile”, or what the author calls the “residential exile”. This “residential exile” is actually a perceptive or emotional condition of estrangement in relation to a lost Other. This leads to a brief conclusion: between exile and non-exile there is a conditioning relationship; it is “less a severance of one part from a larger entity, than a mutual excision of two part”. (10-12) The feelings both the residential exiles and the expatriate exiles experience is one of mutuality, meaning that the phenomenon represents far more than a simple physical removal from the homeland. The territorial severance loses its relevance when the émigré decides to return to his homeland and finds out that he remains an alien, thus becoming, more or less metaphorically, an inner exiled. Michael Seidel defines exile as a metaphor for writing. Actually, this idea has been advocated by many scholars in the field of literary criticism: Julia Kristeva, in her essay “A New Type of Dissident: The Intellectual” states that “writing is impossible without some kind of exile.” (298) Andrew Gurr, in Writers in Exile, considers that exile is a major theme of the modern literature, claiming that it creates the “kind of isolation which is the nearest thing to freedom that a 20th century writer is likely to attain” (17) and that “the normal role for the modern creative writer is to be an exile.” (13) After reiterating many of these themes in Representations, Said argues that the most important ethical responsibility for all intellectuals, whether they are exiled or not, is to behave as if they were. Although “exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid or secure”, it still remains “a mind of winter” (149). While McLeod emphasizes the binary opposition of these categories, Bhabha opposes his view by considering them as a crossing. Bhabha explains that these categories interact by colliding and melding, creating a sort of a bargain which leads to an act of crossing over from one state to the other. Reflecting on the word ‘beyond’, Bhabha underlines its transitory character, involving also McLeods’s terms as ‘liminal’, ‘interstitial’ and ‘hybrid’ as well.

At this stage, we find it necessary to explain the term ‘liminality’ which is very important in understanding the in-betweenness phenomenon. The term ‘liminality’ derives from the word ‘limen’, which according to Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts indicates the threshold between the sensate and the subliminal, the limit below which a certain sensation ceases to be perceptible (2007:117), a term that in psychology indicates a level below which a sensation stops being perceptible.

Considered both a phenomenon and a specific literary term, liminality has been given much credit by the scholars working in the field of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. Reflecting on the concept of division of human experience in sacred and profane, Victor Turner introduced a third value: a ’liminal space’ as a space of transformation between phases of separation and reincorporation. It indicates a period of ambiguity, of marginal and transitional state. Turner relates threshold experiences and liminality to rites of passage (The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure, 1995: xvi).

He creates a theoretical basis for the ritual process which involves ‘threshold, transition and margins’ (94), citing Arnold van Gennep who defines rites of passage as ‘rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age’ (The Ritual Process: 94). Van Gennep identifies three phases within the process of transition: separation, margin and aggregation. Separation, the first phase, implicates detachment of the person from the group. In the next phase, considered the liminal period, the individual finds himself into an ambiguous territory which carries features of both the past and the coming state. The passage ends up in the third phase, where the individual rehabilitates himself and finds again stability. In Saviana Stanescu’s plays we can identify all the phases of the transitional process. In Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, the first two spaces almost merge as the actors find themselves already detached from the native country, carrying just a small luggage, the memories and the strong desires to meet the Land of Dream. The liminal space includes spaces which are associated with temporary visits, such as Nadia’s small rented place in Lupita’s apartment, Borat’s cab or the places where Nadia is playing her clown job. These spaces exist literally in-between one place and the other and include doorways, staircases, cabs and costumes. Later, in chapter 3, I will elaborate why Nadia’s clown represents a liminal space in her transitional process. Anyway, it is very difficult to determine exactly the phases of the transitional process and as Turner explained, the “attributes of liminality and ‘threshold people’ are ambiguous because these persons ‘slip through the network of classification that normally locates states and positions in cultural space” (Ritual Process: 95). In response to Turner’s description, Arnold von Gennep argues that a liminal or threshold world is a space between the native world where the individual is departing from and the receiving world which mesmerizes the emigrant.

Consequently, the concept of liminality as a quality of “in-between” space and/or state is important for Homi Bhabha in relating the highly specific social and cultural phenomena of transcultural space which is strongly associated with the concept of cultural hybridity. In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha connects liminality to cultural hybridity and then makes use of this term to link it to the modernist insight, describing the process individuals undergo when they enter liminal spaces in-between ignorance and knowledge. He considers ‘beyond’ from a postcolonial perspective, stating that it “signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; […] – the very act of going beyond” (Bhabha 6).

This limen is often symbolic and metaphorical and its temporal side is immediate when it appears in literature. Because of this promptness of time, Bakhtin considers that it has no time consistency, crossing beyond biographical time, thus exceeding it. With respect to the space of the limen, Bakhtin considers that times becomes ‘palpable and visible’ in it and therefore works as the primary mode for materializing time in space (249).

Writers in exile confronted their voluntary or involuntary severance by writing books that express their search for identity through ‘self-discovery and self-realisation’, a search which may be summed up metaphorically as a ‘quest for home’ (Gurr, 1981:14).

Within a thorough investigation resulting in an article called “Sociology and Exile: Banishment and Tensional Loyalties”, published in 2000, Hammed Shahidian goes back into the former times of the concept ‘exile’ bonding it to its actual conditions and positions under a sort of “mosaic of exiledom” and calling attention to the “multiple experiences framed in forced migration to geographies, histories and cultures not of one’s own choice” (Shahidian 71). Based on the former theories on exile that emphasized the scientific knowledge of its origins, as well as the literary interpretation and the social impact on exilic process, Shahidian’s survey bates sociology an ace arguing that “exile is the outcome of defeat; exile sociology, a reflexive inquiry of that” (Shahidian 93). Such a thorough research into exiledom and its meanings on those forced or not to leave their origins, offer a large space for a deep critical thinking on exile and its effects.

Being or living far away and giving thought to subjects related to severance and disrooting, forces exiles to recall the country of origin and, implicitly ‘home’, hence laying the basis of new surveys in diasporic life beyond borders. In the same article, Hammed Shahidian argued that exiles are liable to an alteration of status or a change in condition, because exiles “may become immigrants, just as in other circumstances migrants may become exiles” (Shahidian 71-72).

Exiles always carry inside the double consciousness of their homeland (origin home) and the actual place of living, it is what Norman Manea metaphorically defines “the house of snail”, in other words “their homes: the language, customs and traditions of their countries. They transpose and translate: they live between two shores. Their homes and landscapes live within them, although they are no longer places of physical dwelling” (Armand cited in Gener 2003: 22). Referring to both limiting aspect and the liberating potential of the double consciousness, Shahidian concludes that it represents “an opportunity to view society from bottom up, through the wide angle of having seen and experienced the sufferings of being exploited, oppressed, persecuted and ousted” (Shahidian 78).

Chapter 2 is dedicated almost entirely to diaspora and primarly focuses on the understanding and definition of this term as developed by the pioneering scholars in this field. The reason I choose to begin with diaspora is that I realized during my research that through a right understanding of diaspora, it will be easier to make and understand the relations that have been made between theories of transnational migration and diasporas, which are to be interpreted in the subsequent subchapters. I also believe that for a dynamic understanding of migration, the concept of both ‘diasporic’ and ‘transnational’ fields should be used together; I find this beneficial because this kind of approach makes possible to take into account the migrant experiences in their homelands or place of origin, as well as the way they manage to respond to living in the new country. During our research, I have noticed in studies a sort of an ‘academic upgrowth’ from the term ‘migrant’ to that of ‘diaspora’, which led to ‘transnational social movements’. Between diasporas (deriving from cultural studies object) and sociology of migration theories there is an area of convergence represented by the transnational migration. Beyond transnational migration, diaspora may be separated in two categories. On the first level, diaspora studies’ are interested in how the members of diasporas self-identify as pertaining to the diaspora communities, and on the second level, diaspora is concerned with how its members relate not only in the host country and the homeland, but also in the way they relate to each other. These levels came across the scholars studies as problems in their intention to categorize people who cross the borders and enframe them as “migrant” or “transmigrant”. Therefore, I argue that regardless of the widely used concept of diasporas, members of the diaspora cannot correspond entirely to the theoretical typologies or characteristic features, hence the studies of diaspora differentiate with respect to migration studies. To sum-up, diaspora is also a social process, not only a concept meant to introduce a person to a group. Moreover, the process of migration involves movement, as migrants are actively engaged, and so does the diasporic phenomenon. This means that theories of migration should take into consideration the deep connections shared by the members of the diaspora with each other, in translation with the meaning of how do we understand these people are defining themselves, how deep the process of changing their life is and what is the impact they have on the current global world. While studying diaspora, Khachig Tölölyan observes that terms such as exile, migrant, expatriate and transnational have been wrongly interpreted, as they present no similar significances. According to him, “diaspora” is a more comprehensive area that involves “immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (1991, 5) as well, stating that between ‘diaspora’ and ‘migration’ there is a clear distinction. According to Alan McLeod in Beginning Postcolonialism, a migrant is a person affected by the past exodus history of his ancestors (207). McLeod claims that the differences between ‘diaspora’ and ‘migration’ arise from experiences and attachments shared in the past.

Another resemblance seems to be seen between diaspora and exile, although the two terms use different notions of severance. Diaspora involves the idea of displacement, arising from a voluntary movement, whereas exile speaks about forceful migration. In their work Theorizing Diaspora (2003), Braziel and Anita Mannur refer to the difference between diaspora and another term it has been associated with, namely ‘transnationalism’. In their view, diaspora points out the idea of a forced or voluntary movement of people, from one place to another. Transnationalism is more about neutral and disinterested powers such as globalization or global capitalism, deriving from migrant movement (8). These few interpretations clearly emphasize the impossibility of homogenizing the diasporic experiences. Stuart Hall underlines the heterogeneous character of diaspora, arguing that diasporic experience is “defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (1990, 235). He confirms the acquirement of the diasporic identities to constantly constructing and reproducing themselves again and again “through transformation and difference” (1990, 225).

However, a very important and defining feature of diasporans is the construction of self identity. The place occupied by diasporans is what has been marked as “diasporic space”, that is a place including both metaphoric and physical homeland, as well as some of the assets of the new host society – a space imbued with multiple identities. What results is a very global outlook of the diaspora communities, living in the ‘local’ but residing global identities. In his study Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (2003), Gabriel Sheffer points out that diaspora community preserve much of their identity with people back home and, thus, he sustains the term ethno-national diasporas, as they are additionally called. On the other hand, because ‘diaspora’ is developed on the image of journey, it cannot be considered a natural or accidental travel. On the contrary, it involves the idea of “settling down, about putting roots ‘elsewhere’” (616). As each diaspora has its own story, one should focus on the process of arrival and establishing a residence in a settled location, thus being able to answer for inquiries like “when, how and under what circumstances” (616) one started the journey? In Brah’s opinion, diasporic communities have a different view on the word ‘home’ depending on the “politics of location” (628) and based on subjectivity and politics and their influence upon their existence. Brah follows Deleuze and Guattari's process of deterritorialization which claims the need for diaspora to involve ‘border’ with respect to political aspect, as both terms share the same “notion of ‘border consciousness’” (631), although ‘diaspora’ distinguishes since “there are multiple semiotic spaces at diasporic borders, and the probability of certain forms of consciousness emerging are subject to the play of political power and psychic investments in the maintenance or erosion of the status quo” (631). Diaspora once understood as a concept, it is necessary to be confronted with transnational migration theories and see if and where they meet.

In Tölölyan’s opinion the investigation of diaspora needs to involve the concept of transnationalism and border crossing. He defines the term transnational as the transit of state boundaries by people. Following the same idea, Knowles states that “the concepts of diasporas and transnationalism are ‘not distinct but bleed into each other in describing similar sets of people, circumstances and social processes’” (as cited in Ramji 2006). Roger Brubaker (2005) emphasizes the existence of a “fuse” between the works on diasporas and the works on transnationalism. In 1979, long before transnationalism earned its place and recognition among the migration theories, Elsa Chaney, quoted by Blanc and Schiller in the book Nations Unbound, considered immigrants as “people with feet in two societies” (Blanc & Schiller, 1994, p.7) when she tried to define the process by which immigrants create social relations bridging their native lands and the land of choice, while crossing political, geographical and cultural borders. This led to the concept of transnationalism, or the process of turning from ‘immigrant’ to ‘transmigrant’.

If diasporic practices have led to forms of cosmopolitanism as the analysis will later on involve in the trans-territories outside states, the exercise of such diasporic practices and politics within national territory has led to forms of denationalization, pluralization and multiculturalization along with the subsequent state authority counteraction or agreement, directing to an entire body of research examining the impact of migrant groups and their interests as political actors and related importuning (Tucker et al. 1990, Uslaner 1991, Huntington 1997, or Shain 1999 as promoters of U.S. interests abroad). The idea of transnationalism enabled scholar debates to go beyond multiculturalism, pluralism, globalization, or postcolonial paradigms. Mostly concerned with how America is seen through the filter of Romanian diasporic writing, the present study deals also with problems of representation, ethnicity, multiculturalism, identity politics and transnationalism in order to re-shape the mechanisms of diasporic writings.

This also made scholars see America as a complex ethnic blend, dividing their opinions with respect to how ‘pure’ America became after absorbing the huge masses of immigrants.

The melting-pot concept was first introduced by, the dramatist Israel Zangwill, an English Jew who, in 1908, had a sudden epiphany in which he saw a four-act play he put on stage the same year, under the title The Melting-Pot, and the very next year he even published it. In his book Beyond Ethnicity (1986), Werner Sollors states that “the rhetoric of Zangwill’s play shaped American discourse on immigration and ethnicity, including most notably the language of self-declared opponents of the melting-pot concept” (66). Zangwill’s play illustrates the life of a Jewish family in New York, the author himself being Jew and “in a good company with much American ethnic sentiment” (70). The playwright states that “American ideals are not transmitted by descent but have to be embraced afresh, even if that requires opposing the actual descendants of American founding fathers”, which makes “The Melting-Pot a drama of opposition, but also a drama of a development” (71). When Zangwill first brought The Melting-Pot on the American stage, there was no plan or intention of creating a United States as a universal melting pot, everything was purely virtual, or perhaps hypothetical having in view an earlier rhetorical discourse of a few American liberals like Emerson and Jefferson regarding universalist ideas. Since Zangwill’s popular play in 1909, the melting pot concept has been rapidly spread and, in time, has received various paradigms until 1960s when the concept has become an icon: inter-ethnic alliances have been accepted, ethnic groups have gained socio-economic equality and the concept has been recognized even by liberals who disagreed with multiculturalism in education and politics. (Salins 1997, Fukuyama 1995, Schlesinger 1991, Sollors 1986, Hollinger 1995)

Sollors highlights the tension between the responsibility for one’s ethnic and familial traditions and patrimony – the consent – and the disputing desire to change or influence one’s own destiny, even knowing that it is against one’s inner heritage – the descent, and asserts that ethnic awareness is part of the modernism structure, not a feature of its antithesis. Anyway, the melting pot icon remained, as Zangwill defined it, “a symbol for the process whereby immigrants are absorbed into American society and somehow changed into Americans” (quoted in Gleason 5).

The differences between multiculturalism and postcolonialism arise from the perspective they are perceived. While postcolonialism is based on historic legacies taking effect on the past, multiculturalism deals with diverse cultures, traditions and values within the same contemporary geo-political society. The global discourse of multiculturalism concedes the movement of migrants, refugees, diasporas as well as their relations with homelands and hostlands. Together with these movements, at the beginning of the 21st century, America reshaped socially and culturally around the rallying of multiculturalism (Mihăilă 2007) and additionally, the emergence of transnationalism (Mihăilă 2003). While the borders were more able to flow easily and the leading categories were weakening their potentials regarding a sole nation, one structure, only one of a kind power, critics in cultural studies seek to examine and see through the configuration and the variables of a post-Cold War, globalized world, going back to concept that demonstrates resistance and power of readjustment to a flexible community that can no longer be postulated. This does not represent a complete theory of multiculturalism, nor does it merely refer to different cultures, values or traditions. It goes rather with an approach of the evolution of marginalized or disadvantaged groups within the same society. The lack of a single, unifying theory derives from the fact that multiculturalism as a social, political and cultural movement is rooted in the respect for multiplicity, various and divergent viewpoints and counter streams to previously domineering paradigms. The core subject of multiculturalism is a positive agreement of cultural difference enabling peripheral groups to come into their own selves by retrieving a genuine sense of cultural identity. According to Andrew Heywood in Multiculturalism, identity and diversity (1998), the specific rights of a multicultural group concerned are based on: public recognition and respect as defined by religion, language, ethnicity or native origin, minority, 'special' or 'polyethnic' rights, namely legal rights allowing specific cultural groups to preserve their identities and characteristic lifestyle, the right to some degree of self-determination, that is to give the specific groups the possibility to have control or influence over their rules of life. In other words, multiculturalism symbolizes: acceptance of dissimilarity and distinction, the belief that all social and cultural segments have equal value, encourage equal scholarly interest and deserve social representation, the practice of searching for economic, political and cultural congruence by and for minority groups. Paying attention on social groups and individuals with multidimensional identities, structured along crossings of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ideology, physical disability, generation, mobility, migration, occupation, multiculturalism has endeavored to come to an understanding of what is called a ‘diverse society’. As multiculturalism has been thought to hold culture for its fundamental role in the political and social identity, the present times have brought up an important force: the identity politics. Identity politics is a large concept comprising a vast and open field of political tendencies and ideological evolution, which share a common view on the limited and oppressive character of the liberal universalism which aims only to demoralize and marginalize individuals and groups. Edward Said (2003) explained the tendency of considering subordinate groups and individuals as inferior, moreover encouraging them to associate and relate to values and morals of the oppressors, by using the notion of ‘orientalism’, thus emphasizing the process of degrading and denigrating non-western people and culture by European colonialism. Identity politics comes to offer subordinate groups and people the sense of freedom and empowerment, by growing a “‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ sense of identity” (Heywood 4).

Chapter 3 makes a brief transit through cosmopolitanism. This concept has been extended to transnational practices with a wrenched nuance, in that experiences are not only attached to institutions and national bodies, but also to particular instances. Keeping the same line, Rabinow develops the idea telling that cosmopolitanism should be defined as “an ethos of macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness (often forced upon people) of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical trajectories and fates” (Rabinow in Robbins 258). However, time has rendered evident that cosmopolitanism is not an intractable and inflexible category, it has different aspects which may be positive or negative, it is as shaped and limited in versatility as particular and territorial experiences are, hence, not only an abstract ideal, but bounded and confined to specific collectivities and individual ways of sensing the world. In proof of this, in her article “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity” (1998), Amanda Anderson realized how versatile the concept of cosmopolitanism is, and describes it as having "forms of detachment and multiple affiliations [that] can be variously articulated and variously motivated. Overall, cosmopolitanism endorses reflective distance from one's cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity"(267). As cosmopolitan is regarded in a partnership with nationalism and considering Robbins’s “transnational altruism” in “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms” (1998:2), it is possible to assume that cosmopolitanism has managed to create an attitude towards the world as an entity. Within this context, the cosmopolitan exile seems to build creative circumstances based on high cultural grounds, experiences, habits, traditions and values in which people bring along their homeland, irrespective of their place of living, acknowledging what Kwame Anthony Appiah puts forth in "Cosmopolitan Patriots" (1997): "[t]he cosmopolitan ideal—take your roots with you—is one in which people are free to choose the local forms of life within which they will live" (622). According to Appiah the cosmopolitans’ feelings of being rooted in their homelands grow perfectly together with their privileges as citizens in a foreign country or hostland, as they consider truthful that “not everyone will find it best to stay in their natal patria” (Appiah 618). Drawing on Appiah’s ‘moving vision’ of “cosmopolitan patriotism”, James Clifford appraises the status of the cosmopolitan to the quality of a traveling signifier, “always in danger of breaking up into partial equivalences: exile, immigration, migrancy, diaspora, border-crossing, pilgrimage, tourism” (“Mixed Feelings” 362-70). Clifford considers that the notion of cosmopolitan leads to alternative “cultural” identity, thus compromising the “naturalness” of ethnic absolutisms and making room for a cultural separation resulting in compound and incomplete passages between local and global realities, thus rethinking identity as alternative to displacement and replacement. At this point, Clifford introduces “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” which, in his opinion “begin and end with historical interconnection and often violent attachment” (362-70).

In 2003, in his article “Transnationalism and Globalization”, Victor Roudometoff distinguishes between the common and the different characteristics arising from the transition from transnationalism to cosmopolitanism, focusing on their interplay. In Roudometoff’s opinion cosmopolitanism is “the prospect of global democratization and the decentering of values, attitudes and lifestyles associated with the nation-state”, even though there are voices that consider it “expresses the very inability of upper and middle classes to assume their responsibility towards the ‘silent majority’ of those excluded from their wealth and privileges” (Roudometof 116). As the interpretation of cosmopolitanism is different in literature, Roudometoff also included in his study Ulrich Beck’s opinion, made in 2002, which stipulates that ‘cosmopolitanization represents an ‘internal globalization’ from within the national societies (Beck cited in Roudometoff 116), hence being experienced differently by individuals. The idea deriving from Beck’s opinion is a welcome extension pluralist conceptualization of the borders, even if individuals share the same “life-world” space, in the same time. In other words, individuals living in the same space, may live a totally different life from those inside that space, but closer to other people who dwell outside the borders of their actual living space. With respect to this view then, Beck (96-7) appraised as indicators of cosmopolitanization – dual citizenship, transnational ways of life, or mobility, which he considers to be various performances of contemporary transnationalism. This process of cosmopolitanization made Beck come up with an ideal type of cosmopolitan society – a “deterritorialized society” in which the cosmopolitan values outbalance the national ones.

Chapter 4 launches an invitation to the theatre, as my intention is to show a new face of exile through the ‘eyes’ of the theatre.

The attractive idea of a modern “multicultural” image of the American theatre has enabled the emerging interest in dramatic staging by and with immigrants to the Land of Dreams. Such productions are usually mentioned in a category of theatrical works called the “ethnic” American theatre, or better classified as “immigrant theatre”. After a risky voyage across the sea, in search for a better life and happiness, voluntary immigrants interact with English language as both “a home” for their words and an alien tongue. Their performances have been framed within the "ethnic" American theater, a newly approached concept involving stage performances by subsequent ages of so-called "hyphenated" Americans. Our aim, within this chapter, is to find an answer to how terms like “immigrant theatre” or “ethnic theatre” have been orchestrated during the history of the theatre, on the one hand, and if the newly Romanian play writers on the American stage managed to outline the concept of “hyphenated theatre”. This chapter focuses on such framings and we intend to draw attention on an example of hyphenated Romanian–American theatre, represented successfully by Saviana Stănescu, briefly introduced by professor Rodica Mihăilă in Saviana Stănescu and a Post-Colonial Reading of Ovid’s Exile, as “poet, playwright, performer, journalist and teacher, New York-based and one of the most acclaimed representatives of the New Wave of Romanian playwrights who emerged out of Romania after 2000 (Mihăilă, 299)”.

In this respect, two symbolic plays staged by Saviana Stanescu are to be discussed, in an attempt to render the author’s ingenious and witty insight into the challenges of understanding Romanian-American Immigrant Theater: Waxing West and Aliens with Extraordinary Skills. I brought into discussion Saviana Stănescu who falls naturally into the paradox induced by the positive side of the exile. When Saviana Stanescu first arrived in America, she was more concerned with the social and political identity. There are two special events in Stănescu’s life that must be mentioned as they had a major impact on both her career and in the way her perception on identity strengthened. In 1989, during the revolution, Saviana Stănescu was in Romania. She took part in this revolution meant to overthrow a corrupt and brutal dictatorship by marking through art her native country’s emerging democracy and freedom in an open society. Being an award-winning journalist, poet and playwright, Saviana had stood the battle for her principle, regarding the free speech. Ten years later, she got a Fulbright Program grant and went to United States to study the relationship between America’s theatre and its democratic institutions. She arrived in New York in 2001, two weeks before the tragic attempt known simply as ‘9/11’. This second event she witnessed in her life gave Saviana the chance to see America facing its limitations, unable to prove and explain the lack of security and freedom it had been so proud so far. As John Clinton Eisner remarked, Saviana “had ventured to America as an outsider in search of new ways to see the world and had gotten more than what she bargained for: a front row seat to witness America’s shock and anger at its own vulnerability at Ground Zero” (The New York Plays, A Writer in Revolution, p.8). Waxing West is a play that speaks to Stănescu’s position, not entirely an immigrant but living in exile by choice for a limited period, and expresses a double image of an exiled author who turns to her home country a North-American insight look, while still retaining her Romanian image of American land. As it has been produced, read, published and performed in both newly adopted and native lands, Waxing West seems equally easy to approach for Romanian and American public, each of them being represented in their own lights and shadows. Therefore, I believe that Stănescu’s Waxing West belongs to the territory of the transnational dramatic literature, as part of the category of those displaced writers who write back to their native countries, discussing about their problems but writing in the language of their adoptive country, hence targeting audiences from both lands and cultural spaces. This aspect strengthens in a paradoxical way the cultural and political borders, its bare existing defying them. However, my intention is to outline the Romanian-American perspective of Waxing West, involving not only its features as a transnational play, but also as a hyphenated work which, according to Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, turns into a third time-space.

Chapter 5 focuses on the analysis of the texts from the primary corpus of the works mentioned in the beginning of this presentation and represents the most important section of this thesis, as it is dedicated to highlight the features of the Romanian diaspora after having been examined according to the modern terminology of the diasporic globalization – dediasporization, rediasporization – as documented by Laguerre, Tölölyan, Van Hear a.o. This chapter is about returning to a post-communist Romania, in a process of dediasporization, conceived as a therapy of the exilic trauma. Through this process, the nostalgia of the past and of the lost identity theoretically disappear, but remain as a historical reality or on a psychological level. The nostalgia of the native space is lessening until fading over, not through an ecstatic happiness of returning home, but thorough its failure, because of the impossibility to recover a historical and psychological time related to a place that belongs to the past. The real return of the exile in the country of origin makes him face a paradoxical situation of feeling stranger in his own native place. The dediasporization does not mean a reintegration in the space of origin, or homeland, on the contrary, the exile confronts the alterity of a space changed in time, and with the paradox of ‘to be or not to be’ in his native space.

For Gabriel Pleșea, the displacing to another space meant a re-definition of the inner self, an operation made under the fear of ‘disappearance’ as a result of an uprootal from the native land, language, culture and a continuous fragmentation and re-construction of identity. In Gabriel Pleșea’s Aruncă pâinea ta pe ape, the main characters, Ion and Jenny, are two Romanian emigrants in America living under a psychological unbalance due to the displacement and severance from the native identity space. However, the displacement experience of the Romanian exiled does not remain confined to the parameters of a traumatic and painful exile. If the exilic experience in the case of Romanians shows an ideology of inadequacy, this phase is but a stage. As we tackle late 20th century and early 21st century, writers and scholars leaving Romania or already living in America after ’89, being no longer exiles, but citizens of the world, mark the beginning of the so-called nomadic turn in transnational studies, as actuated in the Romanian diaspora context. Romanian writers feel the need to return to their homeland having a multitude of feelings inside their souls, out of which the desire to talk about the reality in which they live nowadays and to see how the roots of their identities have changed are foremost. Norman Manea, Andrei Codrescu, Gabriel Pleșea, Sanda Golopenția, Domnica Rădulescu etc come home and go back to America in a trans-border movement adding the transnational dimension to the Romanians displaced in the New Land.

Somewhere, between home space and host space there is an in-between space where both individual and collective memories collide, re-assemble and re-configure, protecting exiles, offering them the necessary time to adapt, re-invent and finally integrate and become successful in their land of choice.

As documented in chapter 2 regarding the transnational features of the diasporic communities, a conclusion arising from this study is that Romanian transplants to and from America bear away from the settled exilic parameters and direct closer to the transnational characteristics rooted inside the term diaspora, the latter being more adequate to examine processes in their complexity, and we mention here globalization and trans-local spaces. In other words, the essence of identity lies under the sign of a paradox: constancy and search. Katherine Verdery, in her article “Beyond the Nation in Eastern Europe” (1994), states her desire to enhance the use of the paradigm transnationalism in the case of Eastern Europe, making use of the two components of the word: the prefix ‘trans’ meaning across, as in ‘transport’, on the one hand, and ‘trans’ meaning beyond, as above the range or limits of normal experience or transcendent (Verdery 3), on the other hand.

In Verdery’s opinion, transnationalism “describes movements of peoples, commodities, ideas, production processes, capital, images, as well as possible alignements across boundaries between sovereign states” (4). In case of the Romanian diaspora in America, there has been a change in both perception and motivation of those who decided to leave the country. Before the ’89 Revolution, Romanian emigrants belonged to the family of ‘exiles’ or émigrés, after this historical year their condition has been enhanced with transnational characteristics. Consequently, the conditions and nature of the deterritorialization of the people from homeland and their new hostland come with new perceptions regarding identity formation, different debates on acculturation and adjustment to the new habitat.

Using a conventional way of approaching the relation settled between two nations as separate entities, the former accounts for internal politics, whereas the latter involves international connections. Consequently, the nation is included in the state and complies with the ruling principles organized by it.

This is the reason why everything happens in close connection with the two states, homeland and hostland, under strictly outlined borders, be they economic borders, political borders or geographical ones.

Besides the international circumstances that belong to the late modernity and capitalism, the free circulation of people and the cultural assimilation, another important perspective arises, defined by Laguerre, in Diaspora, Politics and Globalization (2005), as diasporic globalization. According to Laguerre, the two concepts of ‘homeland’ and ‘hostland’ must be reconsidered taking into account the multinational circumstances and the bilateral exilic phenomenon involving reciprocal relationships, as described by Paul Ilie in Literature and Inner Exile (1981), a subject already discussed in the first chapter. In case of Romanian diaspora, this new perspective strengthens and supports it, with enhanced characteristics and creative sources of ideas meant to resettle the connections between homeland and hostland during the process of globalization, by introducing concepts as dediasporization and rediasporization. These concepts have been brought to attention within the studies on international migration by Nicholas Van Hear in 1998 and brought into theory by Michel Laguerre in 2006. Dediasporization has been described “as the regrouping or in-gathering of dispersed people […] when a community returned to its place of origin” (Van Hear cited in Laguerre 133 – 134). Laguerre specifies that this definition underlines the process in only one direction and corresponds to “the physical relocation to homeland” (134). This theory applies in case of Andrei Codrescu’s exercise of returning back home, to his homeland, as an exercise mentioned in The Hole in the Flag, where only one side of this process is underlined, that of the physical relocation to his place of origin. Obviously, dediasporization comes together with a complex set of characteristics which comprise the whole process, from diasporization and the foregoing assimilation in the hostland, coming back to the native country and finally, rediasporization, namely a process of re-entering the transnational circle by moving back to hostland. This looping itinerary is neither geographical, nor physical, but assisted by cultural objectives where the three specific steps of de- and rediasporization take place, namely homeland, hostland and the translocal realm brought in by the dual transplant.

Codrescu’s example rendered evident one aspect, which is dediasporization is not a lasting condition of the diasporan, being followed by rediasporization. According to Van Hear rediasporization happened “when a migrant community was … further dispersed” (Van Hear 195). As Laguerre describes in his Diaspora, Politics and Globalization, the “rediasporization refers to two different processes: the relocation of the group to another diasporic site, or the new diasporization of a dediasporized group” (159). What Laguerre insists upon is that the process of rediasporization involves obligatory dediasporization and it involves voluntary, involuntary, self-initiated or urged by external circumstances relocations. Even if we consider the years before 1989 or after the fall of communism, all the writers referred to as within this study enter for voluntary and self-imposed rediasporization.

In the course of recording the translocal aspect involved by the Laguerrian dediasporization and rediasporization processes, this survey advances the idea that the immigrant moves actively between homeland and hostland enriching the diasporic process with transnational characteristics. As debated and agreed upon in chapter two, the translocal generates the third space, in which the diasporan citizen doesn’t belong to either homeland or hostland. The immigrant feels that he is connected to both spaces as a member with full rights. As an ‘agent’ between the two spatial locations, the immigrant also conveys manifestations of assimilation, multiculturalism, inclusion, in brief, what Tambiah defined “the right to difference” (439). It is the case of Andrei Codrescu and Gabriel Plesea, who use this translocal dimension to see the differencies and similarities between Romania and America. For Codrescu, what he found in America was a “cultural shock” with “therapeutic” effects, when referring to the openness of the receiving society and comparing to how he sees Romanians after 1989, it makes him “find points in common and build bridges between the “Balkan style” and the “American style” (90). The translocal space turns out be a space of meditation, self-exploration and reconsideration. It also represents a space of constant dediasporization and rediasporization for individuals who choose to live in another country, while always “gazing backward and forward” (Braziel and Mannur 9). It is the in-between space for diasporan writers to imbue with culture, thoughts and long dialogues on identity, moving freely and constant back and forth.

The decision to emigrate and leave the native country mirrors a mandatory removal from homeland under a process that resembles a pattern-like situation for Romanian emigrants involving escaping from a communist dictatorship regime that chains freedom, in an attempt to set up a new life and lay foundation of a new existence in a new territory. Emigrants vindicate their lost identities, search for freedom and a land of fulfilled promises and a little more, as Gilroy admitted that “some of us came to America to be free. The majority of us came to eat” (57).

However, the displacement experience of the Romanian exiled does not remain confined to the parameters of a traumatic and painful exile. If the exilic experience in the case of Romanians shows an ideology of inadequacy, this phase is but a stage. As we tackle late 20th century and early 21st century, writers and scholars leaving Romania or already living in America after ’89, being no longer exiles, but citizens of the world, mark the beginning of the so-called nomadic turn in transnational studies, as actuated in the Romanian diaspora context. Romanian writers feel the need to return to their homeland having a multitude of feelings inside their souls, out of which the desire to talk about the reality in which they live nowadays and to see how the roots of their identities have changed are foremost. Norman Manea, Andrei Codrescu, Gabriel Pleșea, Sanda Golopenția, Domnica Rădulescu etc. come home and go back to America in a trans-border movement adding the transnational dimension to the Romanians displaced in the New Land.

If we consider Alexandru Nemoianu’s opinions, written in his book “Tărâmuri” (2003), the history of the Romanians in America, especially after 1989, underlines an alteration or more a conversion from the position of exile or outsider to a whole range of “merging” and “symbiotic relations” experiences.

Chapter 1. Surfing through Exile to the Shores of the Diaspora

1.1. Exile between Myth and Reality

Motto: The most amazing place you will ever be

in your life time is where you are each day

In the last decades, exile has been a subject much argued, one might say even in fashion among scholars and writers. However, after the fall of communism in Europe and in Romania, as well, the many aspects of the exilic myth identified in the works of Romanian immigrant writers: exile – the myth of liberty, exile – the myth of escape, exile – the myth of trauma, exile – the myth of success, exile- the myth of nostalgia, exile-the myth of severance had to be rethought as a result of the new social and political changes which have brought to light a new aspect- the exiled exile. After 1989, the postcolonial writers have sensed the existence of different forms of migration and in the context of the new diasporic globalization, highlighted new processes of the diaspora, namely dediasporization and rediasporization, as documented by Laguerre, Tölölyan, Van Hear a.o., conceived as a therapy of the exilic trauma.

Within this chapter, I will consider as “exiled” only those writers and artists who are in some sense geographically displaced, whether by force or design. However, within this definition, it is essential—in probing the convergence of exile and creativity— to allow for an understanding of exilic experience which acknowledges the experiences of geographic rupture and creativity shared by artists and writers whose lives may be otherwise radically different in social, economic and political terms. In mapping how creativity and exile converge, how exile is experienced and described by artists and writers is essential. How do they view exile, refuge or escape? How do they experience the artistic self, and how do they place that self into the world?

Postcolonial theory and literature have thoroughly asked and answered questions about the many faces of severance, such as exile, diaspora, and migration. We will be particularly interested in identifying the theoretical coordinates of this aspect of post colonialism. Although diaspora has undeniably brought about profound changes in the demographics, cultures, epistemologies and politics of the post-colonial world, whether the sole emphasis on displacement–as opposed to indigeneity, belonging, or residence – is true to the postcolonial condition, remains an issue. The 20th century indicated a wide uproot and spreading of populations all over the world pursuant to important political turnovers, out of which it is worth reminding the two World Wars, and the Cold War.

Under these circumstances, the process of globalization, prompted by free trade, huge capital flows, advanced technologies of communication and information, has increased the dynamics of population, merchandise, cultures and traditions all over the world. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the world of ‘diaspora,’ in which some of the following topics will be approached: the material aspects of migrant labor and livelihood, the experiences of displacement and homelessness (the ‘politics of dispossession’ as Said called it), the ideologies of ‘home’ and nation, the cultures of diaspora, the politics of multiculturalism, the predicament of minorities, the exilic perspective, the redefinition of cosmopolitanism, identity questions (belonging, ‘national origins’, assimilation), and issues relating to Homi Bhabha’s „third-space”, „in-betweennes” and the „borderland work of culture”. Postcolonial cultural studies has a special interest in theorizing the ‘new’ phenomena of borders and borderlands, mixing, hybridity, language (for example, global English), translation, double consciousness, history and its lack; and in the affective dimensions of migration and diaspora (homesickness, memory, nostalgia, melancholy). Being a multidisciplinary field, I will try to investigate it by making a survey onto post-colonial theories, psychoanalysis, post-structuralist theory, history, literary studies, and cultural studies. Scholars to be studied will include among other names: Andrew Gurr, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, James Clifford, Paul Gilroy, Rey Chow, Arjun Appadurai, Theodore Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Mary McCarthy, Karen Kaplan and Salman Rushdie.

But let’s take things each at a time.

Although “exile” has been one of the most commonly discussed subjects in literature, it is, however, difficult to write about it, as long as you yourself haven’t experienced it. On the other hand, literature may be powerful than reality, offering the perfect challenge to discover the most intimate nuances lying behind the shadows of an exile. The concept is almost as old as written literature itself, but it has never stopped being popular, even prevalent. This form of leaving or severance, is a very strong experience compulsory followed by farther, as the feeling of being exiled may arise in both your homeland, before emigration, and in the country of adoption. Whether it was known as “displacement” or “severance”, the meaning of exile has undergone many changes over the time: exile as an escape, salvation, adventure, trauma, punishment, courage, therapy, revenge, denial, choice, political or personal decision, impossibility to find solutions, elopement, or destiny. This study will try to seek the many faces of the exile and see how much trauma or myth lies within it. Here is a brief historical description and the evolution of its meaning throughout the past:

“The exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the wandering of Odysseus, the diaspora of the Jews all speak to a fundamental sense of loss, displacement and desire, to regain a paradisiacal sense of unity and wholeness, whether spiritual or secular. For many, though, that loss is transformed from the pain of dispossession into an alternative way of seeing. For Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus the “silence, exile and cunning” of his self-imposed expatriation provides the means to express untrammeled his artistic vision. For Salman Rushdie, the idea of homeland is intrinsically “imaginary”. For scholarly émigrés such as Edward Said and Julia Kristeva, exile is the necessary condition of the intellectual.” (Ouditt, xii)

According to this description, exile appears to be an essential aspect of the human condition that may have been present in the literatures of all times. Though endowed with universality, exile proved to be a rather difficult term to define. The word “exile” originates from the Latin word “exsilium”, meaning prosecution or banishment and from “exsul”, meaning a banished or an exile person, but it is also related to the Greek alashtai, meaning to wander, to saunter, to loiter, to troll. If we consider the preliminary word being composed of the prefix “ex-“, meaning from or out of, and the base “salio”- meaning jump, deriving from the Sanskrit “sar” – go, then there is a great possibility for the word “exile” to describe mostly the movement, dislocation or bound carrying a person from one world into another, where loitering or wandering, in a spiritual and physical sense, represents the only form of the person’s rest. All these necessary elements to define the exile are present in its semantic values: self, act of denial, homeland and trauma. It can be associated with a social phenomenon, a political status and most of all, a literary subject. Obviously, the prevalence of each of the above elements will vary from one instant to another. The differences appear when trying to characterize the term from a literary perspective and consider its social-cultural counterpart. The following paragraph describing exile with clear-cut features is proposed by Jo-Marie Claassen, in her book Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (1999):

“Exile is a condition in which the protagonist is no longer living, or able to live, in the land of his birth. It may be either voluntary, a deliberate decision to stay in a foreign country, or involuntary. In some cases, exile can be merely the result of circumstances, such as an offer of expatriate employment. Such instances will usually cause little hardship to the protagonist. However, exile may be enforced. This last occurrence frequently results from a major difference of political disagreement between the authorities of a state and the person being exiled. Often such exiles are helpless victims of circumstances beyond their sphere of influence; sometimes, however, the exiles are themselves prominent political figures, exiled because of the potential threat to the well-being of their rivals.” (Claassen 9)

Outlining the basic features of “exile”, this generous description appraises the separation between the subject and his homeland. Yet, this perspective focuses more on its socio-political aspects: “expatriate employment”, “political disagreement”, whereas literature is concerned mostly with the impact the exile has upon the inner world of the subject, as well as the alteration of his attitude in textual form. In the literary domain “exile” can be approached from two angles: the first is the writer’s view, creating a motivation behind a certain creation. The second is the critics’ perspective, where the analysis of a text uses the “exile” as a key element. In order to see exactly how does exile affect the mindset of a writer and to what extent this altered mindset influences his creation, this study will focus on the relationship between the writer’s exile status and its effect upon their creation. For most of the writers, the main effect of exile has proved to be a state of continuous suffering. Turning as far back as the first century B.C., we meet Publilius Syrus who wrote what was to become a traditional viewpoint in the future: “Exsul, ubi ei nusquam domus est, sine sepulcro est mortuus.” Around the same time, Ovid’s Tristia creates the ageless image of the displaced artist: a person prosecuted and banished from his own country by the regime in power. Within the same image, the disposition of “displaced writers” was perceived until lately as spinning around “a binary logic where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia.” (McClennen, 2004:12) The modern and post-modern age has raised the overtones and the importance of exile to a special level, turning it into a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, though this binary logic remains valid even today.

Both modernism and post-modernism are deeply marked by the idea of displacement, even when the person involved is still an integral part of his homeland: “It would appear, almost by definition, that ‘to be’ in the postmodern sense is somehow to be an Other: displaced.”(Bammer, XII) If this statement proves to be true, one could draw a conclusion that the contemporary writer is almost incited to see himself as an exile. Writers who have opted for an exile or who have been forced to exile by the Communist totalitarian regime in postwar Romania, are currently in aloof geographical and cultural spaces, on different continents, which made them perceive their person as “outsiders” considering their native culture; modern writers tend to define themselves as ‘global citizens”, persons with intellectual support, founded on universally applicable references. The most important factor leading to these aspirations is based on the construction of his identity around the idea of alterity, one of the specific features of the modern intellectual. Alterity is increasingly prevailing in the context of a ‘global village’, where the self is difficult to define among the many substitutes for the existence and identity of the individual. What the “global village” represents is a place in which the inner world becomes “reality”, whereas the outer world will change as an essential requirement into the “artificial” or “constructed” one. Within this context, the writer is left to shuttle for an unspecified time in a limited space, somewhere between his own reality and the society he chooses to dwell – the exile person. In many cases, the reaction to suchlike conditions results in a quest for identity, the need for a homeland – even if a fictional or alien one, such as Saviana Stanescu’s Global Immigrant – by means of self-discovery or self-accomplishment. In the case of many writers of Romanian origin, such a quest turned into one of the main intellectual impetus for striving to belong to a better culture and world. The most important consequence of living in this limited space is the possibility offered to the writers to construct fictive worlds whose alterity or in-betweenness calls for special aesthetic grounds. “The effect” explained by Salman Rushdie,

has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to defend themselves – because they are so defined by others – by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier. (Imaginary Homelands,124-25)

However, between the traditional perception of exile and the factual situation in today’s world, there seems to be a significant difference. Andrew Gurr notes in Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature (1981), “deracination, exile and alienation in varying forms are the conditions of existence for the modern writer the world over” (14).

It is an estrangement one feels towards his or her environment. In other words, it is the alienation a person feels from what he/she does, or what he/she is. According to Michael Seidel, an exile is a person "who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another."(x) It represents a form of reminiscence, from our current isolated standpoint, of our past, our youth, individual values and personal dreams. Life itself is a journey. From the moment of birth, one is forced into exile from the mother's womb. It is a common mentality for all human beings to trace back their identities to their origins, and from which they affirm their worth as persons.

The primary state of ‘exile”, in its old sense, the act of deportation, belonged mostly to the political domain, usually in the form of banishment imposed upon someone by an oppressive authority. Yet, after 1898, the modern examples (including the works I intend to scrutinize) prove that this is no longer always the case. The modern exile testimonials go beyond the traditional perception of the phenomenon in terms of denial, loss, challenge and regret. At the end of the 20th century, exile became often self imposed, primarily as a matter of personal choice, where the arguments belonged to the intellectual domain, rather than politics. Even if exile has been interpreted in many ways, from physical expatriation caused by specific political, economic or social conditions, we must not forget the particular case of inner exile, when the involved immigrant feels deeply alienated even in his homeland, which will make impossible to feel as a home the space where is meant to live. The estrangement between the artist and his contemporaries will continue to be an important issue. While not explicitly an exilic condition, this estrangement contains elements that resemble facets of exile, internal and physical. With only these few arguments I have presented, there is no doubt that the phenomenon has evolved in both size and complexity during the last century, which means that studies of exiled artists’ writings based on the idea of exile in its “classic” acceptance may no longer suffice for a proper understanding and exploration of a writer’s mindset. In many instances new recognitions are possible, whether not requested, so that the subject should be laid on in a manner suitable for its intricacy.

For instance, Eugen Ionesco and Norman Manea, are two examples of writers who were already well-regarded names in the Romanian literary society at the time when they chose to move to America and France, respectively. Eugen Ionesco’s relocation to France is commonly attributed to the onset of the Communist regime in Romania. While this may be in part true, such an explanation does not account for his mentality at the time of his leaving, hence this sole reason simply cannot justify the writer’s decision. If we consider the social perspective, Eugen Ionesco might have had as many reasons to stay as he had to leave. The literary society was separated in two camps: the camp supporting Ionesco within the cultural circle of that time and a group of detractors. He was facing not only possible political persecutions, but also the endangering of a successful academic career. Many of his colleagues chose to remain in their native country, and while some of them really suffered the inflictions of the communist oppression, others managed to survive, both as individuals and as writers. The decision to leave must have come from the inside, based on suspicion, if we consider his own testimony:

“I felt all the time that I was taken in tow and animated by an automatic suspicion regarding my work, my Romanian characters, the Romanian culture, a suspicion that was reinforced and justified by my later experience.” (E. Ionesco, Nu, 208 -209, my translation)

This sounds like a literary “mistrust” or even suspicion, which existed before Ionesco decided to change the place and belong to the French culture.

Manea’s exile, irrespective of its ambiguities, has sealed his severance as a final option. His homeland had been unappreciative and in 1986, Manea could no longer bear with the pressure and restraints of the Communist regime. In order to respect the truth, it was not Romania but the regime’s fault, as Manea testified in one of his essays included in the volume On the Contour (Pe contur), published in 1984, about the duty of the writer to remain “at any price, the moral consciousness of his time, in which contemporaries should regain the regenerative chance”.(48) The final decision to leave the country came after his novel The Black Envelope, published in 1986, became subject of a severe censorship which Manea later referred to under the title the Censor’s Report in the On Clowns: The Dictator and The Artist(1992), where the writer relates with autobiographical details the whole story of The Black Envelope’s publication. Manea felt as if he had been exiled in his own literary world. In the end, his artistic swelter, desperation, desolation, and the regeneration of his tenebrous past into the same tenebrous present have finally inclined the balance towards the severance in 1986.

I chose these two examples of exiled writers, to show that their decision to leave the country was motivated by reasons going beyond the mundane, political aspects of their lives. Their choice prove what actually constitutes the object of this inquiry: the voluntary exile or escape from a socio-cultural context perceived as detrimental by the writers, despite the traumatic sense induced by the idea of abandoning the homeland. Edward Said notes that “Exile is a solitude experienced outside the group: the deprivations felt at not being with others in the communal habitation.” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.2000:177) In case of a voluntary exile, there is a paradoxical situation offering a special meaning to the act of leaving one’s homeland: what makes the individual uncomfortable may be his own nation. As a consequence, the entire process will shift from a displacement accompanied by nostalgia, trauma and regrets to an act of courage. If, previously, exile was seen as an entirely ‘passive’ phenomenon (such as in imposed, rather than chosen), it seems now it should be reconsidered and described by new words, emphasizing this particular difference: decession or severance or even uproot. In what follows, I will try to describe these terms and their evolution in time.

The Faces of Exile

Although the word exile oozes an austere meaning, it is almost strange or paradoxical to see it is perceived more like a promise of generous and needed achievements, which should without doubts be crowned with a successful return. In a broad sense, exsilium means “to reside outside the motherland’s boundaries.” In Latin, by joining the prefix ex-, meaning “to go out”, but also “absence”, “lack” or “shifting from one state to another”, with an Indo-European root –el, we get the noun exsul and the verb exsulo, exsulare. Exsul represents the person, the individual, the expatriated individual, or what we refer to as an “outlaw”. Exsulare, the verb means “to leave your own country”, that is “to be exiled”. Naturally, in order to be functional, the exsilium needs to take place in a context where both “motherland” and “boundaries” have significance. This means we must have a certain social structure and a system of laws as two obligatory elements of the equation. According to Knapp, once they were satisfied, “instances of exile begun to appear in historical records.” (Exile and the writer: exoteric and esoteric experiences: a Jungian approach, 1990:2) The rudimentary nature of the society seems to be reason for this fast appearance of the exile, which also leads to the conclusion that exile is a natural consequence of the social organization.

“Countries with a rather simple structure of power and limited social facilities (e.g., no extensive prison system) developed a kind of criminal justice that knew of only two punishments for major crimes: exile or death” (Claassen, 11).

Exile was defined in Roman law as civitatis amissio (loss of citizenship). Loss of civic status was immediate only if it was a case of solum vertere exilii causa (change of location because of exile), involving escape from capital condemnation or if the sentence imposed was interdictio aqua et igni (prevention from enjoying the privileges of water and destination. A Roman exsul could take up local citizenship. During the first three centuries of the Roman Empire, exile, as a form of punishment, was changed to deportation and relegation.

In spite of the old ‘age’ of the Roman exile, the first “official exile” and the most renowned was Cicero, whose banishment from Rome gave him the chance to be the creator of a myth of exile. His poems are double-valued: formerly they manage to offer a detailed view of the “real exile” in the “real world” and latterly his poems manage, for the first time, to reproduce an exsul’s mentality in a literary form.

Another famous bearer of an exile was Dante. The sentence to exile and the later sufferings were to become Dante’s main subjects at the base of his work. Hugo wrote some of his greatest poems during an exile that lasted for eighteen years James Joyce preferred to exile himself, to loosen himself from the exhausting and breaking down events going on in his native country, Ireland.

This brief overview was meant to show how deeply connected is exile to the history of world literature. In each case, the displacement of the artist was the real source of artistic expression. As the centuries inevitably flow within the history, the list of exiles is getting heavier and heavier, turning the phenomenon into a tradition. Its importance grew until it reached a global prevalence in the modern world. Therefore, I have asked myself, where does, in fact, begin and end this phenomenon? Being considered a tradition, its flowless aspect may be a motivation for its still relevant existence. But when its consistence becomes even heavier in cases of artists who are no longer confronting exile, neither as original motivation, before 1989 (see Norman Manea), nor as actual state of being (see Saviana Stănescu), I believe that a deeper investigation inside the exile and the cluster of terms carrying similar semantic, yet different in meanings, from an artist to another, will be more than appropriate.

In Search for New Exilic Identities

Today, when the international community resembles more and more the “global village”, exile writing has evolved into a widespread phenomenon. The nationalistic trends of the romantic period, involving the idea of “exotic”, yet distant realms, have been replaced by “integration” and “interaction” of latter periods. New concepts like “relativity” are naturally linked with the “universality” brought out by the modern era:

“Those of us who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties have perhaps had modernism forced upon us.” (Eagleton, Jameson, Said: 1990:59)

This situation raises new questions regarding the exile: how can exile be re-considered today, given such complex circumstances? And how truly can someone become assimilated, when the subject’s desire for integration does or will not guarantee the suppression of exile?

The literary landscape holds a huge number of works related to exile, which makes almost impossible an all-encompassing definition. On the other hand, it will not be helpful at all, if we try to restrict the research area to the works dealing straight with this phenomenon itself.

Therefore, I have decided to make an overview of the modern exile, following that in the next chapters to try and find out how much of it is “assumed” and how do modern exiles reassure themselves as true immigrants.

Exile is not a metaphor, although it was the “muse” of many exile artists. Exile is a hard, terminal decision, if not an ontological transition, not by its intrinsic meaning, but for the subject who chose it as an existential alternative. A difference between emigration and exile is that emigration is always caused by economic circumstances, whereas exile has been given to the subject, it was not a matter of choice. Exile is also a paradoxical phenomenon. Gabriel Stănescu knows that “inside the exile subject, next to his own identity, a new acquired identity demands its right to exist.”(Where did I run from home? An Interrogation on Exile.2001:8-9) And this is the moment when adaptation must begin. The accent, the name, the mindset are (first) betraying the exile and soon the fear installs, the fear of being marginalized, ignored, even rejected unless accepting the dialogue. That is why exile has been a tragic and continuous social phenomenon throughout human history. Today, immigrants, political refugees, émigrés and a great number of literary exiles are all over the world stage, sharing migrating conditions, crises of identity, traumas of the language in their attempt to fit in the new ‘world’. What is exile? Seidel (ix-16) defines an exile as “someone who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another”, while the condition of exile represents “a metaphor for the alienated or marginalized modern consciousness” (xi). For Codrescu, the meaning of exile translates into “a cluster of paradoxes” (The Disappearance of the Outside.1990), while for Shain, exile signifies political exile (The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State.1989: 1-28). For Said exile is “at the core of political oppression and offers a dramatic insight into this state of difference, which, unfortunately, is carried into the new country” (1990:357) while the individual is “a foreigner perpetually haunted and alone in an incapable of understanding society” (Said:362). Seen from this perspective, the new land chosen by the exile remains continually hostile to what made once a difference for him. Exile is an experience or an occurrence with many faces blooming by the power of globalization and surpassing the frontiers of cultures, societies, social, political regimes and organizations, ethnic categories, as deported people decide on leaving their native countries in order to live in what they have been longing to experience in the world of their dreams.

No matter whether they are poets, writers or political exiles they bring along this phenomenon to the forefront of alienated experiences in the world. They gave philosophers and theoreticians the chance to explore the concept so deep, that perhaps at no time in human history has the exile been as pregnant as at the end of the twentieth century. If we take a deep insight and consider the emerging pressure carried out/ wielded by forced migration and also take into consideration the striving and endeavoring diasporic experience, the eloquence of exiled people turns into a discourse of entrenchment or over thrust.

The discourse of exiles speaks for the continuing conflicts between cultural identity and adjustment. Through their discourse, immigrants, exiles and expatriates rave out real creative powers, changing tensions rising from social, especially political and cultural factors into comprehensive narratives of identity.

The major interest of the theoreticians is to express the exilic discourse by means of various embodiments of reconstructing and deconstructing the concept of identity in language. Foucault writes that “discourse….is so complex a reality that we not only can, but should, approach it at different levels with different methods” (The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences.1970: xiv) A large amount of scholarship in cultural studies provides some of the most detailed analyses of exilic discourse. In Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1993), Stuart Hall bridges diasporic construct to cultural identity in order to prove that they represent a twice as great process of rebuilding contextual borders. The reason Hall came up with the statement concerning the diasporic identity is to show intellectuals the “common historical experience and shared cultural codes which provide the[ir] people with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (225). Another variable of the exilic identity is capable to show and teach expatriates how to transform themselves by means of a process of “difference” (234), as follows:

Cultural identity…is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power. (225)

Just like Hall, Paul Ilie agrees on the idea of culture being critical in exilic life. Ilie argues that émigrés leave a culture that is well-defined in both geographical and historical sense, as they make efforts to exist in a different world, going through a process of deculturalization. The loss of identity or deculturalization in exile represents “….a falling away by residents from the original national whole” (Ilie, 1981, 20). When referring to exile and intellectual displacement and relocation, Said emphasizes the issues of the exilic identity in relation to social and political power, relying, like Bauman mostly on the “condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted” (47). Ilie draws the conclusion that

exile is more a mental condition than a material one, for more important than geographical isolation is the internal structure of exile. Exile then is a ‘state of mind” whose emotions and values respond to separation and severance as conditions in themselves. The live apart is to adhere to values that do not partake in the prevailing values; he who perceives this moral difference and who responds to it emotionally lives in exile (Literature and Inner Exile 2)

What Ilie (1980) points out is that exile is a “bilateral phenomenon”, suggesting a “reversibility principle”….positing territorial exile in an “axiological interrelationship” with “inner exile”, or what the author calls the “residential exile”. This “residential exile” is actually a perceptive or emotional condition of estrangement in relation to a lost Other. This leads to a brief conclusion: between exile and non-exile there is a conditioning relationship; it is “less a severance of one part from a larger entity, than a mutual excision of two part”. (10-12) The feelings both the residential exiles and the expatriate exiles experience is one of mutuality, meaning that the phenomenon represents far more than a simple physical removal from the homeland. The territorial severance loses its relevance when the émigré decides to return to his homeland and finds out that he remains an alien, thus becoming, more or less metaphorically, an inner exiled. Michael Seidel defines exile as a metaphor for writing. Actually, this idea has been advocated by many scholars in the field of literary criticism: Julia Kristeva, in her essay “A New Type of Dissident: The Intellectual” states that “writing is impossible without some kind of exile” (298). Andrew Gurr, in Writers in Exile (1981), considers that exile is a major theme of the modern literature, claiming that it creates the “kind of isolation which is the nearest thing to freedom that a 20th century writer is likely to attain” (17) and that “the normal role for the modern creative writer is to be an exile.” (13) Two paradigms are used in sustaining the metaphorical origin of the exile: the former deriving from the biblical story of Genesis and the expulsion from Paradise and the latter, which has already been mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, originating from Oedypus Myth.

Exile among Theories

According to Paul Tabori’s description in The Anatomy of Exile (1972), exile is a universal social, political, even biological phenomenon, but he does not find necessary to make a clear difference between an involuntary and voluntary exile, as

an exile is a person who is compelled to leave his homeland – though the forces that send him on his way may be political, economic, or purely psychological. It does not make an essential difference whether he is expelled by physical force or whether he makes the decision to leave without such an immediate pressure. (Tabori 37)

Such a psychological description may appear slightly simplifier as human beings reaction to banishment and life in exile is different with respect to particular circumstances and reasons of their exile. Still, certain regular characteristics arising between territorial and involuntary exile are worth rendering clear. What separates exile from cosmopolitan immigrant or the voluntary emigrant is a distinct identity of the exilic mindset shared between nostalgia, on the one hand, interpreted by a hidden hope of returning back home or a dediasporization, sometimes combined with the feeling of living disrooted, and abiding by the idea of dwelling in another country, which happens to be a hostland or the land of adoption, on the other hand.

In “Varieties of Exile” (1998), Hallward Dahlie defines briefly exile as a “displaced individual” who “continues to be at odds with both the world he has rejected and the one he has moved into” (Dahlie, 93). Raymond Williams compares the exile and the rebel from a social perspective pointing that the

exile is as absolute as the rebel in rejecting the way of life of his society, but instead of fighting it goes away. Usually, he will remain an exile, unable to go back to the society he has rejected or that has rejected him, yet equally unable to form important relationships with the society to which he has gone. (Williams, 2001, quoted in Wagner 105).

Williams’ dissimilarity between exile and rebel does not apply to the Romanian exile, who managed to create strong and reliable connections with the world they chose to live in, yet there is an insightful perspective in revealing the exilic mentality, as Peter Wagner (in Theorizing Modernity) acknowledged:

there is something unrecoverable, once one leaves one’s place of origin. The social bond cannot be recreated in the same way in which it existed before; the same density of social relations and the density of meaning in the world around oneself can no longer be reached (Williams, 2001, 105).

According to his opinion, nationalism develops from “a condition of estrangement”, while the building of a “home” is “created by a community of language, culture, and customs”, hence a way to keep away from exile (Said, 2000, 139-40). The idea developed by Said is that of a reverse face of the nationalism, which, in time emerges as a new system, inhabited by insiders and outsiders, in a “collective ethos”, called habitus. In his attempt to solve his own predicaments, Said sees himself as part of a restored nation:

….exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. (Said, 2000, 140)

Being aware that such a ‘defensive’ nationalism may turn into an unpleasant form of self-assertion, Said points out the positive role played by exile nationalism in ‘reconstitutive projects’, that is in the construction of ‘national history’, the revival of endangered languages and the foundation of ”national institutions like libraries and universities” (146). In Said’s opinion, exile is the manifestation of an ‘intellectual freedom’, pledging for “an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life” (184). Even if the experience of exile is terrible, there are „things to be learned” from it, Said suggesting that both suffering and losses of exile can produce a fundamental form of intellectual enlightenment.

What are the advantages that exile brings to the intellectual’s integrity? Said specifies five in Reflections. Firstly, it can provide a better vision of the self, fostering as it does „self-awareness” and a „scrupulous….subjectivity” (184). Secondly, exile encourages a radically secular vision of the world, proving that the history is man-made. Since exile breaks up habits of thought and perception, here comes its third advantage in helping to provide immunity against “dogma and orthodoxy” (147) The fourth and fifth advantages involve the ‘pleasures’ of exile and its multiple frames of reference:

Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions (148)

that leads to a “contrapuntal” awareness (148), and to specific epistemological advantages. Echoing Erich Auerbach’s version of going beyond ‘national or provincial limits’, Said considers that “only by embracing this attitude can a historian begin to grasp human experience and its written records in their diversity and particularity; otherwise he or she will remain committed more to exclusions and reactions of prejudice than to the freedom that accompanies knowledge” (148). After reiterating many of these themes in Representations, Said argues that the most important ethical responsibility for all intellectuals, whether they are exiled or not, is to behave as if they were. For all that “exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid or secure”, it still remains

“a mind of winter” in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. Perhaps this is another way of saying that life of exile moves according to a different calendar, and is less seasonal and settled than life at home. Exile is life outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew. (Said 149)

In-Betweenness and Liminal Spaces

Said discusses about the kind of exile which often derives from censorship, political prosecution and banishment, but which applies to self-imposed exile as well. As voluntary exile may also be a state of ‘never being satisfied, placid or secure’ (186), it is rather difficult to decide whether Manea experienced the sense of disroot or displacement caused by exile in Said’s argument. According to Ashcroft, writers from settler colonies strive after treating recurrent thematic aspects in their written work: the problem of defining home, exile, as well as their physical and emotional encounters with the ‘new’ land (The Empire Writes Back 27). A subject often treated in the literature from settler colonies is the dialectic relationship between the ‘Old World’ and the ‘New World’. The distance between the two worlds creates a kind of a swirl or a vortex in which, according to Ashcroft, the new represents ‘something different, something nobody counted on’ (136). This swirl requires the treatment of in-between positions, and negotiation between the dominating inside culture and the settler culture.

In the range of postcolonial theory, one particular aspect the critics have focused on is the in-betweenness of the exile position. One of the most influential postcolonial critics is Homi K. Bhabha. Among many related issues, he had particular concerns in diaspora and exile. In the introducing chapter of his Location of Culture (2007), Bhabha explains that the role of our times is ‘to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond’ (1). People who live ‘border lives’ between nations, experience situations involving thresholds, barriers and boundaries. In Beginning Postcolonialism, McLeod argues that borders are ambivalent and full of contradictions, and function as intermediate locations where the subject can move beyond a barrier (217). Bhabha explains that:

[…] the ’beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past […], we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion (2)

While McLeod emphasizes the binary opposition of these categories, Bhabha opposes his view by considering them as a crossing. Bhabha explains that these categories interact by colliding and melding, creating a sort of a bargain which leads to an act of crossing over from one state to the other. Reflecting on the word ‘beyond’, Bhabha underlines its transitory character, involving also McLeods’s terms as ‘liminal’, ‘interstitial’ and ‘hybrid’ as well.

At this stage, I find it necessary to explain the term ‘liminality’ which is very important in understanding the in-betweenness phenomenon. According to Oxford English Dictionary, ‘liminality’ is ‘a transitory state between culturally defined stages of a person’s life; […]a state occupied during a ritual or rite of passage, characterized by a sense of solidarity between participants’. The term ‘liminality’ derives from the word ‘limen’, which according to Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2007) indicates the threshold between the sensate and the subliminal, the limit below which a certain sensation ceases to be perceptible (117), a term that in psychology indicates a level below which a sensation stops being perceptible.

Liminality, as a phenomenon and as a specific literary term, has been broadly accepted among the scholars working in the area of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies as well as gender studies. Thinking of the concept of division of human experience in sacred and profane, Victor Turner introduced a third value: a ’liminal space’ as a space of transformation between phases of separation and reincorporation. It indicates a period of ambiguity, of marginal and transitional state. Turner relates threshold experiences and liminality to rites of passage (The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure, 1995: xvi). He creates a theoretical basis for the ritual process which involve ‘threshold, transition and margins’ (94), citing Arnold van Gennep who defines rites of passage as ‘rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age’ (94). Van Gennep identifies three phases within the process of transition: separation, margin and aggregation. Separation, the first phase, implicates detachment of the person from the group. In the next phase, considered the liminal period, the individual finds himself into an ambiguous territory which carries features of both the past and the coming state. The passage ends up in the third phase, where the individual rehabilitates himself and finds again stability. In Saviana Stănescu’s plays we can identify all the phases of the transitional process. In Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, the first two spaces almost merge as the actors find themselves already detached from the native country, carrying just a small luggage, the memories and the strong desires to meet the Land of Dream. The liminal space includes spaces which are associated with temporary visits, such as Nadia’s small rented place in Lupita’s apartment, Borat’s cab or the places where Nadia is playing her clown job. These spaces exist literally in-between one place and the other and include doorways, staircases, cabs and costumes. Later, in chapter 4, I will elaborate why Nadia’s clown represents a liminal space in her transitional process. Anyway, it is very difficult to determine exactly the phases of the transitional process and as Turner explained, the “attributes of liminality and ‘threshold people’ are ambiguous because these persons ‘slip through the network of classification that normally locates states and positions in cultural space” (Ritual Process 95). Following a similar description, Arnold von Gennep argues that a liminal or threshold world is a space between the world of status that the individual is leaving and the world of status into which the person is being attracted.

Therefore, the concept of liminality as a quality of “in-between” space and/or state is important for Homi Bhabha in describing the highly specific social and cultural phenomena of transcultural space which is strongly related to the concept of cultural hybridity. Bhabha associates liminality to cultural hybridity and uses this term to relate to the modernist insight, describing the process individuals undergo when they enter liminal spaces in-between ignorance and knowledge. He states that ‘“beyond” signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; […] – the very act of going beyond’ (Bhabha 6)

This limen is often symbolic and metaphorical and its temporal side is immediate when it appears in literature. Because of this promptness of time, Bakhtin considers that it has no duration, crossing beyond biographical time, thus exceeding it. With respect to the space of the limen, Bakhtin considers that times becomes ‘palpable and visible’ in it and therefore works as the primary mode for materializing time in space (249).

Exile or Expatriate

The exile writer who finds himself placed in a foreign settlement will always look back to his homeland in search of a literary background. His exilic condition is actually an in-between position which may be either limiting or liberating. McLeod, in Beginning Postcolonialism, states that the effect or the feeling of in-betweenness caused by shifting places can provoke pain, disillusionment, fragmentation, trauma and discontinuity, but, in the same respect, can be a creative force and source of new ways of expression. To discuss the effects of exile in general and Romanian writers’s situation in particular, we need to revisit the definition of exile and make the necessary underlining. I wrote about exile as being an ‘enforced removal from one’s native land according to a sentence or an addict; ‘a penal expatriation’; ‘enforced residence in some foreign land’, ‘a condition of being banished’. What resides from all these definitions is the involuntariness of exile, in other words, exile is a condition which is forced upon a subject. If we keep the aspect of removal from homeland, but we add a different situation, which is that of voluntariness, we find that the term “expatriate” is more suitable to describe the position of a great number of writers throughout history. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, an expatriate is ‘denoting or relating to a person living outside their native country’, emigrant, non-native, émigré, and refugee, displaced, living in a foreign country especially by choice’. These distinctions draw different images of the exiled and the expatriate writer. Whereas the exiled writer is associated with the displaced fugitive, the expatriate is merely living abroad in search of comfort. I tried to see if these distinctions are straight-forward and, in need to have a clear image I took a step into the exile’s theoretical world of Andrew Gurr, who argues, in his Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature (1981), that the experience of exile and the state of being cut-off from one’s own culture is understood as liberating. He suggests that

[d]eracination, exile and alienation in varying forms are the conditions of existence for the modern writer the world over’ – in other words the late eighteenth-century into the first half of the nineteenth-century – but that exile in this period became particularly associated with colonialism (14).

Writers in exile resisted their voluntary or involuntary severance by writing books that express their search for identity through ‘self-discovery and self-realisation’, a search which may metaphorically assimilated to a ‘quest for home’ (Gurr 14). What the writer feels is a blustering need to re-shape his own identity, hence his writing focuses on ‘home’ or ‘homeland’ i.e. the place he was relegated from. In 1971, Mary McCarthy, distinguishing between various degrees of exile, considered the exile as “’a bird forced by chill weather at home to migrate but always poised to fly back’(2), constantly waiting for the chill weather to change (Gurr:18). McCarthy reminds us that

In early use, an exile was a banished man, a wanderer, a roamer: exsul „For I must to the greenwood go, alone, a banished man.” In ancient Greek times, a man with a price on his head unable to return home until he had ransomed his blood guilt. The Wandering Jew, I suppose, is the archetypal exile, sentenced to trial about the earth until the Second Coming ….The exile is essentially a political figure, though the offence he had committed may have been in the sphere of morals. He has incurred the displeasure of the state by some sort of levity of conduct or looseness of tongue – a political crime in a tyranny, ancient or modern (Exiles, Expatriates and Internal Emigrés, 2)

In McCarthy’s opinion the condition of an exile is that of waiting for a change in his homeland’s political system or government that will give him the possibility to come back. This condition is “concentrated in the land he left behind, in memories and hopes”. On the other hand, McCarthy argues that “in recent times” a new sense of a displaced person is used to explain his condition, a refugee. The difference between these terms resides in that “the exile is singular, whereas the refugees tend to be thought of in the mass.” (3) Further in her analysis, McCarthy explains what differentiates the exile from an expatriate who:

is almost the reverse. His main aim is never to go back to his native land or, failing that, to stay away as long as possible. His departure is wholly voluntary. An exile can be of any nationality, but an expatriate is generally English or American. He has no politics or, if he has any…he has acquired them from the country he has adopted. …The average expatriate think about his own country rarely and with great unwillingness. He feels he has escaped from it (1971:4).

Further to Mary McCarthy’s opinions, Andrew Gurr separates exiles from expatriates, considering the former as expelled victims haunted by their nostalgia and desire to return to their homelands. Gurr explains that expatriate writers relocated from one country to another, whereas exiles, most of them short stories authors relocated from smaller cities or communities into larger areas, such as metropolitan centers. This difference seems to come from the exilic writer’s need to have an audience capable to listen directly to his experiences. Another characteristic is the exilic writer’s willing to expect the universality of the image of the world he carries inside. The exilic writer has two tasks: to rebuild his own identity and to produce creative works of artistic quality, otherwise his newly created world may seem both stuck in time and incongruous with the living moments:

All art, whether produced in physical exile, by internal exiles or by determined traditionalists, is static, backward-looking, concerned primarily with a stable image and identity in the individual or in his society at large. […] The expatriate seeks to identify or create a cultural history and therefore a cultural identity which is necessarily based on the past. […] And the exile is still more deliberately concerned to identify or even create a stasis, because home is a static concept rooted in the unalterable circumstances of childhood. Insecurity [of homelessness] prompts the writer to construct static worlds, to impose order on the dynamic, to see the dynamic as chaos. (Gurr: 23-4)

Even if he feels detached from the traumatic past, the exilic writer is steadily searching for a secure, personal identity which forces him to a retrospective yielding of solid images of home from the pieces of personal memory. What makes them attractive to modern readers is the accuracy and universality of an exilic narrative in rendering their inside ‘home’. Norman Manea is one of the best examples that proves the artistic benefit for an exile writer. Manea’s exile image and the consequences of living on a foreign soil are subjects to be discussed in the subsequent chapter.

The term ‘creative exile’ seems to associate elements from the term “exile” and “expatriatism”. While the definition of ‘exile’ involves a negative sense, suggesting displacement, bereavement, and deprivation, ‘expatriation’ suggests freedom and personal benefits from dwelling abroad. ‘Creative exile’ involves a condition of voluntary removal from one native’s land, which is a basis for the pursuit of artistic goals and effective work, but which at the same time may induce a sense of alienation, loss and displacement. Salman Rushdie’s considerations stand for the creative benefits of exile, without excepting the negative consequences altogether. In his essay Imaginary Homelands (2009), Rushdie argues that a writer in exile is always influenced by the distance to the home country, a distance which is meant to hall-mark his writing irrespective of whether the writer thinks of himself as an ‘emigrant, ‘exiled’ or ‘expatriate’:

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands […]. It may be that when the Indian writer who comes from outside India tries to reflect the world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (428-429)

Rushdie also considers that the writer’s condition of being ‘out-of-country’ enables him to address themes of universal appeal more directly. Norman Manea, Domnica Rădulescu or Saviana Stănescu have expressed the same impulse as Rushdie to ‘reclaim’ and ‘look back’ to their ‘undiscovered country’, and their literary productions show that the ‘broken mirrors’ may be as valuable as the ones that are “unflawed” (Said 186)

As mentioned before, in Literature and Inner Exile (1980), the Hispanicist Paul Ilie regards “exile as a bilateral phenomenon” (24). Since the ‘70s, Ilie has made his personal point in showing the too much debated and over concerned politically, demographically and economically exile, in relation with the reasons individuals or groups are displaced or how they succeed in sharing their experiences through various means such as writing, playing, dancing and singing. Ilie has been interrogating and analyzing the critics and their works in an attempt to answer a question about what he considers to be a ‘fundamental’ feature of exile, namely its reciprocal relationship:

“Separation from one’s country means more than a lack of physical contact with land and houses. It is also a set of feelings and beliefs that isolate the expelled group from the majority. Once we acknowledge that exile is a mental condition more than a material one, which removes people from other people and their way of life, then the nature of this separation remains to be defined not only as a unilateral severance, but as something more profound. Excision is a reciprocal relationship; to cut off one segment of a population from the rest is also to leave the larger segment cut off from the smaller one.” (Ilie, 1980: 2)

Ilie is very much convinced that “rarely has anyone wondered about the hollow left after the exodus, about the repercussions upon those citizens who shared émigré values but who remained in the homeland”, and he underlines the fact that these “internal structures of exile” are, by far, more salient and critical than those conventional questions related to geographical displacement, silence inside the territory and physical disunion (1980:3). Exile creates and works with its own mentality, but it uses it as a reaction to physical disunion or severance and, sometimes, as a clash over effectiveness and worth:

“I would contend that exile is a state of mind whose emotions and values respond to separation and severance as conditions in themselves. To live apart is to adhere to values that do not partake in the prevailing values; he who perceives this moral difference and who responds to it emotionally lives in exile.” (Ilie, 1980, 3)

For Ilie, an inner exile is part of those who remain home, in their homelands, undoubtedly influenced by the existing circumstances in their countries, almost in the same way those who are forced to leave are affected, thus deciding to become immigrants for political or social grounds. Ilie also believes that the inner exile is subjected to psychological and cultural experiences which manifest either through sensations of being kept apart or isolated, in case of individuals or groups forced to interconnect to a commanding or authoritative entity, or through the feeling of a “partial asphyxiation of an entire culture” (1980: 47). Speaking of the cultural exile, Ilie underlines the idea of culture being fundamental for the exilic existence, explaining that immigrants leave behind a definite and distinct culture well-located both geographically and historically, in order to experience life, through a deculturalization process, in a totally different community. Therefore, a community headed by exilic strategies is meant to be estranged or distanced from itself as it continuously tries

to compensate for the missing segment through self-sufficiency, which it accomplishes by negating the value of what has been lost […] Beyond those exclusionist centers lies the alienated periphery, where citizens for various reasons decide to maintain their residence even without benefiting from the fruits of the established orthodoxy. The tendencies of both segments, centripetal and centrifugal, interact within the same deprivations. Consequently they constitute and function as a single cultural rootedness […], despite their antagonisms, in distinction from the wandering cultural entity […]. But within the home culture, the further distinction between orthodox and dissenting segments remains, a division that may be described in yet other terms and that always exhibits the incompatibilities of the original, larger rift. (1980: 4)

In 1980, Deleuze and Guattari first brought up the concepts of “nomad thought” and “nomadology” along with the subsidiary concepts of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” in Anti-Oedipus and, further, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze and Guattari’s innovative ideas first had a bearing on a theory of “territories”, as well as to accompanying simultaneous processes of deterritorialization, meaning breaking of habits, and reterritorialization, in the sense of building or re-building habits. Later, the scholars’ two concepts have been enlarged in order to cover a wider area, and then metaphorically rendered in A Thousand of Plateaus:

How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritalization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). (Deleuze and Guattari, 11)

In “Sociology and Exile” (2000), Hammed Shahidian argued that exiles are liable to an alteration of status or a change in condition, because exiles “may become immigrants, just as in other circumstances migrants may become exiles” (Shahidian 71-72). Another myth proved reality is that exiles always bear and assume from inside the double consciousness of their homeland (origin home) and the actual place of existing, practically it is what Norman Manea metaphorically defines “the house of snail”, in other words “their homes: the language, customs, traditions of their countries. They transpose and translate: they live between two shores. Their homes and landscapes live within them, although they are no longer spaces of physical dwelling” (Armand cited in Gener 2003: 22). Referring to both limiting aspect and the liberating potential of the double consciousness, Shahidian concludes that it represents “an opportunity to view society from bottom up, through the wide angle of having seen and experienced the sufferings of being exploited, oppressed, persecuted and ousted” (Shahidian 78).

Norman Manea’s Ways of Capturing Memories of Exile

During the experience of exile, the identity of an individual faces at least one limit situation, unless it is confronted with a crisis. Dislocated, provoked, frustrated, facing more directly than in other cases with alterity/ otherness, interpreting, not always prepared, the role of the stranger, the exile finds himself in a position to ask: “ Who am I?'', “Who are the others ?'', “Who will I be reflecting myself in the others?'' “How can I be myself anymore while I’m turning into someone else?” If between exile and identity (individual or collective) there is, without any doubts, an interdetermination relationship, what kind of relationship arises from the encounter between the biographical self in search for identity through exile experience and the creative self?

The writers of the Romanian exile in the United States live in the very heart of this paradigm shift, which has become an identity matrix for the contemporary world, revealing all its aspects; while they are continually “at the border'', they recover the tracks of the exile. From the space of communist censorship to the country of all opportunities, from exile to post-exile, from modernity to post-modernity, from a world hung on “national values'' in time of globalization, arises a literature questioning the being prospective, using a story of exile as a handle.

What Foucault used to call, “the return to self ", recovery, retrieval and reconciliation with the self, demands getting over a way from the outside to inside. How we get over this road depends largely on how occurrences, the subject took part in this process, are viewed, received and accepted. Recovery of the Self is defined by Foucault through a negation, because it should not be done mechanically, by external impulses.

Located in the core of the radiating mutations, in our case America, Romanian exiles explore on different scales the reconfiguration of identity, the self-seeking through fiction. Elements of reality and of the self are projected into a new knowledge, that of the road towards self.

As an essayist, in his articles, studies and interviews, Norman Manea defines his position towards the exile, Judaism, country, and the Romanian language. Trauma, sufferance, hiatus, nostalgia – all determined by the experience of the exile become a superior understanding of life and generate an ethic attitude that can be found in all his writings. This is simply because the exile is, as the author says, in Brecht's words "the best school of dialectics."

Evolution, phenomena strongly related and interconditioned the art of discovering the truth by confronting opposite judgments – all evolve in Norman Manea's writings in order to situate themselves against the world's spectacle, bringing intransigent questions when it comes of braking Hegel's dialectics fundamental principles such as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Norman Manea's writings don’t break the rules determined by a dialectical living of individual, collective or historical existence. Uncertainty is a way of relating to literature, and in his essays Norman Manea proves to be an intransigent polemist, a very sensitive analyst, a combatant which clearly formulates his "synthesis".

For Norman Manea exile means dispossession. In an interview for the magazine Contrafort, in 2008, Manea confesses

“In exile, you are stripped of everything. And not just about material things. You are anonymous, you are taken away the language and the friends, library books, it is practically a dislocation in the unknown, in a word it is a huge shock. Moreover, in our case, those coming from , it was not only a great leap in space, but one in time.” (7)

However, the exile had also a positive side. It is a great school of self- reassessment, judgment and prejudices re-evaluations you have lived in, is a school of modesty. "The writer’s condition is the exile", Manea stated, the terrible trauma being an extreme experience, which in time turned into a privilege, offering the chance of a continuous initiation, which actually means the chance to knowledge and self-knowledge.

Psychological tension has been exacerbated by the fact that the immediate period of time following the exile affected his joy and the therapeutic effects of writing, Norman Manea sharing those present that he cannot write in any circumstances, and that writing keeps him alive. One of the most difficult to overcome consequences was taken under discussion – the displacement by language, "stillness through absence of language”, especially in case of a writer which defines himself by the language he is writing in. Romanian language represents for Norman Manea its inner self language, unlike other languages, which are mere means of communication. The idea that "language binds the writer and the writer is related to language" was also rendered evident by Ion Vianu, for which the exile was an inherited problem.

Nevertheless, the effect of globalization on identity formation was considerable. One of its major contributions to the shifts in the way identity is perceived and theorized nowadays, is highlighting the constructed character of many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about identity.

Norman Manea’s identity was, in his first stage as a writer, less familiar, practically unknown to the West or to the critics, the writer himself cutting it out of all feathers. In the novels "variations on a self-portrait”, the author invests himself as a character of fiction in Captivi(Trapped) (1970), Atrium (1974) and Cartea fiului (The Son's Book) (1976), the last composed of two distinct parts, Simona and August. None of these three (or four) novels has been reprinted from its first publication. Captivi is a difficult novel about a troubled state of consciousness of a traumatized individual, Mihai Burlacu. Reality gets the inconsistency given by its relativisation from the perspective of other possible realities. Assumptions, presumptions concerning the evolution of life are homogeneous and lived variant equivalent.

The objects are run over by a filming view, neutral or pathetic, obviously borrowed from the new French novel: the conscious recording of the film memory. We could say that this is an interesting experiment in narrative technique. Specific to the prose of Norman Manea (young or mature) is the character defining in closed circle. Rafael Banu in Atrium of striving to become "his only master." The tested or desirable experience is one of complete freedom of choice, but he is "still got entangled in wires of the night, delaying his release”. Waiting for another one, more powerful to grow inside him, he crosses the circle of the years. In “August” from Cartea fiului/ The Son’s Book maturity settles in an uncomfortable, oppressive way, as a threat to mediocrity. By joining the artist's portrait from Simona, the profile of a surfeited engineer, outlined in August as a result of a common existence, becomes prominent through contrast: the first, more theoretical and artistic, second part, elegance of the professional grey, euphemism of mediocrity.

"Variations on a self-portrait" of the three (or four) novels are assumptions about himself: traumatized prisoner, the child and the adolescent emerged from an uncertain age, the engineer, the artist – through successive release of formative stages and their converting into a spiritual autobiography. The Return of the Hooligan novel may also be integrated into this overall narrative. The sense of politicization is more pronounced, but the experimental perspective on his own biography is the same.

Norman Manea's prose lies in a very interesting point of junction between modernity and postmodernity. It could be regarded as a continuation of a tradition or assumptions on a channel combining suggestions of existential perspective from Musil, Proust and Kafka.

If we look into the writer’s biography with a scrutinizing eye, we see that Norman Manea’s personality was built up at the intersection of three experiences: as a Jew, still heard the echoes of deportation, the looming Holocaust aspect, as a Romanian, had to provide testimony about the condition of the artist under communist dictatorship, as an American, lived and is living the cosmopolite experience of full freedom of expression, but without being able to ignore the risks of the consumer society in the sense of alienation, buffoonery or underestimation of the artist.

The Artist, always unhappy, is not at home anywhere, not even in his own text. Yet, there is a place where the writer identifies himself: it is the Romanian language, which is the language he is writing in.

A preoccupation in Norman Manea's literary work is defending self identity by preserving the liberty of thinking, by staying detached from everything that is pre-made, from everything that is self-sufficient and would serve to label, as the author himself confessed in an interview: "When I came to the West, few years ago, the urge to describe my experience under the Romanian dictatorship – and even more important, the lessons that could stand out from such a biographical experience – faced my fear of increasing the clichés of a suffering already classified and commercialized by the east-European dissidents” (Manea, Textul nomad, 2006).

The identity journey represents severance. In Manea’s case, his dislocations turn into several relocations processes, as his spaces of adoption are not singular during his life. Exile is “an emblem of our times” (27), argues Manea, in which the exile does not necessarily start a completely new life in the new society, thus not being an irreversible breakage or an adamant abyss. On the contrary, exile is a toing and froing between worlds – the one endowing the exile with the substance of narration and the hostland meant to receive the exile’s confessions.

Of the Romanian prose writers, Norman Manea represents, by far, adding up as if under the sign of a fatality, almost all kinds of exile that have ever been given to an individual. Sometimes, this exilic experience is met by another representative writer’s view and is brought to the light by means of a written dialogue. The exchange of views and personal memories between Norman Manea and the publicist Hannes Stein, published in a volume under the title Words from the Exile, in Berlin, may be enlisted in the long and good “dialogic” tradition of the European culture.          

"Exile starts as soon as we are born" – says in a Freudian tone Norman Manea, in his most successful book “The Return of the Hooligan” (12). In Întoarcerea huliganului, Norman Manea remakes almost the same ontological route backwards, from maturity to childhood, rebuilding separate sequences of the initiating experience of a child who was forced to face his first exile in the dehumanized space of the ghetto. There is a fundamental difference between Pleșea’s child-character and Norman Manea’s. Even if Pleșea’s character lives inside the communist Romania, the child is kept outside the communist inferno by the innocence of the age and by his family, therefore he is only an involuntary witness of certain events that might be suspicious even to a six-year-old boy. At home, the child listens to a secret conversation between his parents about a round-up and arrest of certain acquainted persons, about the way neighbors were squeaked to the Securitate, about mysterious disappearances, about seizing things, about events that were typical for the communist society, typical for the reality adults had to face and how they tried to keep out their children from tragic realities and fear:

“Did you see what happened to Maria? They came in the middle of the night and arrested her. Popeasca squeaked her that she was listening to The Voice of America. They did the same with her son, Nicu, he is supposed to have said the Americans were coming. […] Olga sent me word that Gicu had also been taken. Also during the night. She doesn’t know where he is: they won’t tell her, they are giving her the round-up. And aunt Hortansa, they have taken away her pharmacy in Adjud.” (550)

The child feels the presence of an unknown danger around him and his family and understands that he has to forget whatever he sees or hears and even makes a promise in front of God that he won’t tell anything to anybody.

In contrast with Pleșea, Norman Manea’s child is thrown into full underworld, into the inferno of the Nazi concentration camps together with scores of children and adults relegated for the only reason of being Jewry. It is the first exile of the child Manea, forced to live at the edge of the world because of his Jewish origin that throws him into the atrocious universe of death in a concentration camp.

In Întoarcerea huliganului, Norman Manea’s naration, which doesn’t follow a chronological order, is divided into three major episodes, the first two sequences being separated from the third by the chapter called “Anamneza”. The first part of the book, “Preliminarii”, refers to the present and to the recent past and starts with the anxieties expressed by the author, who lives in New York now, before taking the decision to come back to Romania for a short visit, after ten years of exile. The second part, called “Prima întoarcere (Trenul, ca ficțiune)” (The first return – Train, as a fiction), is an immersion into his personal and historical past and includes, along with summoning of the relatives, many pages of self analysis and meditation on the art of the writer. The third part, having the title “A doua întoarcere (Posteritatea)” (The second return – Posterity), is a detailed description of the days when the writer visited Romania in 1997, more precisely 12 days interrupted by many flashbacks that retain and hold the narrative tension, continuous balance, though always unpredictable, between past and present. What Norman Manea does is actually an invitation to a journey in the past, in the atmosphere of his childhood with the doors locked. Living in America, in exile, Manea rebuilds, in a free, warm and captivating style, the image of his own biography through the eyes of a person who was forced to escape from his birth place. This could be an explanation for the first part of the title “Intoarcerea…” (The Return..), if we want to answer the question : “why this title?”, “why a return?”. A simple interpretation is related to the significance of the word return as a come-back, recovery, recursion, re-emergence, or briefly a returning from the world of exile. But, what about the second part of the title, hooligan? Why hooligan, when Manea had within his reach synonyms such as: marginal, into the woods, unaligned. The pages of this memoir enlightens us, revealing us that his maternal grandfather, Avram, was a bookseller and sold, among thousands of books, Mihail Sebastian’s De două mii de ani and How I became hooligan. The latter, though was selling like hot cake, was also a moot point, being controversial, as it presented the years 1935 – 1936 as ‘hooligan-like’ years, politically and socially. Whether or not a coincidence, these years carried the most important events in Manea’s existence: his parents’ marriage and his birth. This means that the writer was meant to become “hooligan”. The significance of the term ‘hooligan’ in Norman Manea’s book is rather that of a ‘untoward’ or ‘trouble-maker’, disturbing, disquieting the already settled order (including conformist, even repressive ones). The hooliganism – a concept overtaken from the inter-war Romanian literature and used by Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade as a symbol of rebeldom, resentments and errancies of the youth, is used by Norman Manea in a way that characterizes the disorders of the times through the hooligan years of the legionary and communist absurd and unjustifiable manifestations. The Return of the Hooligan is a memoir, but not in the usual sense of the word: because all over the book there are pages of pure fiction, as well as many elements that are characteristic to the moral essay. Manea’s memoirs are based on three major, iterative, reflexive and interlaced themes, both fictional and non-fictional, representing the first exilic experience during the Holocaust, as a child, then the experience of the writer Norman Manea during the Romanian communist totalitarian regime, and the third and final, the voluntary exile. From a personal point of view, Întoarcerea Huliganului is another piece or fragment from the cycle ‘variants for a self-portrait’ made of Captivi (1970), Atrium (1974), Primele porți (1975) and Cartea fiului (1976). These variants to a (self) portrait combine, in a rather complicated fusion, biography with imagination, reality with fiction, combinations that are fundamental in the author’s past and present journeys. The ‘variants’ of his literary self-portrait concern “the different situational complex, the various temporal aspects (childhood, adolescence, adulthood), the frame and the background, variations of light or fadings, all being as many ways as possible to re-make one and (sometimes) the same self-portrait. The best proof is given by the frequent flashbacks over the same subjects, motifs, characters, memories that are more vivid than ever irrespective of the writer’s age.

Norman Manea is very much aware that to separate real fact from fiction is an ethical duty of the memorialist writer and, from this point of view, Manea’s memories are both historical and internal verifiable. Moreover, we, his faithful readers, realize that even when the author opens fictional “windows” towards possible worlds or dramatizes certain meditation passages, his purpose is always the truth, including the personal truth. Manea’s exiles ‘suffer’ from sincerity, a special and almost dedicated honesty preceding all the crucial moments of his family life. The naught felt with brutality in the first part of his life seems to be reinterpreted through the eyes and soul of a person who has found a piece of the desired stillness. Manea’s Întoarcerea Huliganului is like a huge genealogic tree whose branches carry the burden and violent marks of time. His paternal grandfather had 10 children. His maternal grandparents were booksellers. They all lived in a world in which nothing was changing from one day to another and you could know for sure what was going to happen the next day. Their image is very much alive in the writer’s memory, especially because, at an old age, they had to know the drama, the restlessness, the interrogations, suffering and anxiety for the times marked by the war and, moreover, by the bad fortune of being born Jews. Manea’s first exile is born during deportation time, when together with all the children and grandchildren and nephews from Transnistria, his grandparents met their end at Moghilev. The memories of a five-year-old-child’s exile are awful, as they are scenes of life marked by war, a childhood full of incurable wounds, impossible to heal because they are still bleeding even after over 50 years and prove to be alive in the description of the deportation moment:

Today, October 9th, 1941 leave by train the Jewish population from Itcani parish and from Burdujeni, as well as those from Suceava, Ciprian Porumbescu Street, till Petru Rareș Street turning off to Sf. Dumitru Church and the Jewish House, Regina Maria Street until Reif colonial chandlery, Cetatii Steet, first street after the hotel “La Americanul”, till Industrial School for girls, Bosancilor Street up to its end (211).

At the age of five, Manea’s exile happens, as the author himself confesses in the beginning of his memoirs, “because of a dictator and his ideology, apparently opposed” (25). This dramatic, but most of all traumatic sequence in the life of a 5-year-old boy ended four years later, in 1945, when the writer and his family turned back to Romania and, since that moment, they witnessed the long process through which the country changed from a Stalinist orientation to communist totalitarian society, ferocious and ludicrous, under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose dictatorship ended up in an aggressive and bloody year 1989.

Cornel Ungureanu states in La Est de Eden (1995) that “any native country is a sacred geography” (81). Echoing Ungureanu, Norman Manea considers Bucovina a holy and mythical space:

The renowned beech woods of the Up-Country had asserted eventually, even in relation to the name, its ascendency. The beech woods!!! Silvae Faginales! In Slavic language, buk, in the Romanian chronicles, Bucovine….Bucovina. (Intoarcerea huliganului 81)

After repatriation, in 1945, the members of his family seem to rebuild their life, yet the blemish of being Jew isolates them into another world, a world of the inward exile or the exile of the soul. Manea’s father, Marcu, does not share the ideology of the political system and, consequently, faces a new punishment in Periprava prison. One of the carefully chosen themes of the novel and very actual as well, is the condition of the individual and the writer implicitly, in a society that was and meant to be broken off from the Western realities. If, in Manea’s novels written and published before 1989, one can observe a kind of a “masked” self-portrait, as an unusual, yet remarkable human document of disappointment and disillusion, in Intoarcerea huliganului the reality is denuded of semblances. The language remains mysterious, inviting the reader to meditation and to discover reality, as well. Therefore, we find ourselves wondering who are August Prostul, Jormania, Jumătate-de-Om-pe-Jumătate-de-Iepure-Șchiop, Cap de Aur, Elefantul Zburător a.o. They are all characters that inhabited the unknown and fabulous realm of fairytale and continue their existence on the new land, the chosen land of freedom, democracy, but above all, the land where dreams come true. No matter how numberless the characters are, the only actor narrating is the author himself. He has a special gift asserted through attracting or rejecting those around him, hence creating awareness or consciousness. But when the information coming from the personal experience is unreliable and the author feels unsecure, he simply submits the narrating part to his mother or to his father; hence the details are even more convincing, as Manea confesses in the chapter entitled Necunoscuta where he asserts that “the memory feeds from the regret that chains us to those we can no longer bring back or fetch up” (116). Even the parents’ memories talk about “youth, about the speed the daily events happen in a fair in which the static condition of the country town should have annihilated the eventfulness or incidents even before they boil over.

The last part, called A doua întoarcere, is imbued with emotions, the author’s emotions on running back over and seeing again his place of birth, his native country, after the years spent in exile. Mircea Eliade considered that for those who left it, their childhood and youth town turns always into a mythical place. Manea’s sense of dediasporization is revealed by the writer’s attempt to find again his lost space. In Suceava, doctor’s Albert home, the Moga’s family dwelling, “Ștefan cel Mare” highschool, even his parents’ last home remained unchanged. The memories come again and again, as if they were meant to heal hidden wounds. His memories are a bridge between his exile and his home, between his past and his present. And memories come together with reconciliation, the writer’s reconcilement with the Romanian past and the American present. His reconcilement happens at the same time with the new revolutionary clothes his home town was putting on. New buildings accompanied by bar and companies with Coca-Cola and Non-Stop advertisements were elevating next to old architectures, making him anxious about recognizing old streets or familiar places.

Changed into an obsessive truth of the author's identity routes, the reflection serves as the motto for another dialogic foray into the Norman Manea’s intellectual world, Words from the Exile, and is the result of more conversations initiated by another sharp and refined spirit, also marked by the exile experience, the journalist Hannes Stein.    

Held in English, the "language of all expatriates" – as it describes Hannes Stein – the dialogue in 2009 revives sequentially Norman Manea’s biography, discusses the implications of exile in his existential-creative economy, and shows how strongly connected he is with great personalities such as Philip Roth, Nabokov, Proust or Kafka and also provides a very strict diagnosis over the current situation in literature.
Plunging into the past brings first Early Disorder and Suffering, a childhood marked by the horrors of the Holocaust. Paradoxically preceded by happy memories of sunny days in front of his grandfather’s library, the experience of deportation to Transnistria between 1941 and 1945 is recovered by intense images and perceptions of the child Norman Manea, but also through the family histories and evocations of the Night of Edgar Hilsenrath. Extremely rich in details is the memory of Russians’ arrival and chaotic withdrawal of the German soldiers. At the age of eight, the child Norman Manea registers with surprise The Time of Liberation, a not too heroic ‘colour’ of the event, resulting from the fact that instead of the "victorious Soviet army" there arrived a band of riding young partisans and ending with the forced enlistment of the men in the camp, including his father, and their sending to the front, the front line.

The “Liberation” coincides with the child initiation in the existential and ritualistic regime of the Soviet communist system, the Russian school he attended in Bessarabia contributing to a mitigation of the Jewish religiosity.

Remembered in the third dialogue, About Happiness, the return to Romania and those two years spent at Rădăuți are part of a happy time, contaminated by the revival spirit of the postwar, marked by a first encounter with the magic of Christmas, in the house of his teacher, but also by a strong and fast reconnection with the Hebrew identity, in a Zionist formula, promoted by Zeev Jabotinsky.

After being accused of having written only about the Holocaust, Manea summarized his bio-bibliography and remarked he had “remained at the theme of alienation, oppression, annoyance, wherever he might find himself: the Nazi camps, under communism, in exile”.

Drawn into an exciting dialogue, carefully and skillfully directed by the German journalist, the "adventurer" Norman Manea is drawing his own identity in a demanding but also playful manner within the gaps of his multiple inside and outside exiles, generated by his first allogenetic condition, consolidated by his wandering through the world and reflected literary in his creation.

In case of the dialogue with Leon Volovici, the questions he was addressed by Norman Manea were never arbitrary; they belonged to a writer obsessed by his own identity, by his successive redefinitions, by his cosmopolitanism and dramatic existence, as well. Some of the questions are old (from the years when Bellow visited Romania – an experience evoked in The Winter of the Dean), some questions are new, concerning the « new world », the « dictatorship » from the American university camps, but there are also questions, actually debates, on those special « noble…. things » like writing, creation, and huge spirit and energy of literature.

 I believe Norman Manea felt the need to give a consistent and articulated shape to some of his thoughts, reflections, dilemmas which could be better expressed in writing, without the intention to publish the manuscript a long way round. Both Manea and Volovici had the feeling that they were doing a free game: Suppose we are free to write what we think.

Within the gender combination, between the autobiography narrated on the first person and the Romanian narration, at the third person, the fiction gives life and identity to the strictly historical-autobiographical element. The fundamental subjects – the Holocaust, Communism, exile – scrutinized as both collective and individual destiny, situate the tragedy of the 20th century within the context of the conflicts between modernity and the tensions of our global contemporaneity which seems to be disputed between solitude and solidarity. Norman Manea’s existence is tragic and complex. With few exceptions, the writer’s essayist work after 1989, is of a deep confessional nature and autobiographical interpretation, in an attempt to make his retreat in himself and over his self, foreshadowing the awesome confession from Intoarcerea huliganului; Being a very ambitious project, as Matei Calinescu observed, endowed with rich and powerful interior harmonies, Manea’s memoires is full of extended and awakenings evocations, reflections, and analysis from the previous essays, sometimes even by reproducing ad literam of certain phrases or fragments. The best example is the recent collection of suchlike reflections, essays and articles written in journals and most of all for non-Romanian readers, gathered under the title The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (2012). As Mircea Iorgulescu mentioned after reading Manea’s collection of essays, “only few writers are capable to put into a written page such a consistent web, and also full of a polychromic set of facts, sensations, reflections and thoughts as readers usually meet in Norman Manea’s prose” (M. Iorgulescu, 6 ).

For Norman Manea, exile becomes an absolution from a system and an integration into another system, o change or alteration in identity perceived in a linguistic, mental, cultural, even meme context, but not as an acculturation, on the contrary as a transculturation, that is a complex process through which the new western culture assimilates elements of foreign culture in a hybridization or interlace of cultures specific to the cosmopolite world of the great western metropolises.

Chapter 2 – Diaspora beyond Migration

2.1. How many ways are there to say: Diaspora?

After the Cold War, diasporic studies have increased much in interest to such an extent that involved many academic disciplines, especially cultural studies. In this chapter, I focus on discussing between traditional sociological migration theory and theories of diaspora emerging out of cultural studies. I will take into consideration the common aspects that exist between the two fields of study as well as points of divergence, to try and explain how these two fields can work together to help us understand much better what happens when persons migrate.

As diaspora is the main aspect of this chapter, I will primarly focus on the understanding and definition of this term as developed by the pioneering scholars in this field. The reason I choose to begin with diaspora is that I realized during my research that through a right understanding of diaspora, it will be easier to make and understand the relations that have been made between theories of transnational migration and diasporas, which are to be interpreted in the subsequent subchapters. I also believe that for a dynamic understanding of migration, the concept of both ‚diasporic’ and ‘transnational’ fields should be used together; I find this beneficial because this kind of approach makes possible to take into account the migrant experiences in their homelands or place of origin, as well as the way they manage to respond to living in the new country. During my research, I have noticed in studies a sort of an ‘academic upgrowth’ from the term ‘migrant’ to that of ‘diaspora’, which led to ‘transnational social movements’. Between diasporas (deriving from cultural studies objet) and sociology of migration theories there is an area of convergence represented by the transnational migration. Beyond transnational migration, diaspora may be separated in two categories. On the first level, diaspora studies’ are interested in how the members of diasporas self-identify as pertaining to the diaspora communities, and on the second level, diaspora is concerned with how its members relate not only in the host country and the homeland, but also in the way they relate to each other. These levels came across the scholars studies as problems in their intention to categorize people who cross the borders and enframe them as “migrant” or “transmigrant”. Therefore, I argue that regardless of the widely used concept of diasporas, members of the diaspora cannot correspond entirely to the theoretical typologies or characteristic features, hence the studies of diaspora differentiate with respect to migration studies. To sum-up diaspora is also a social process, not only a concept meant to introduce a person to a group. Moreover, the process of migration involves movement, as migrants are actively engaged, and so does the diasporic phenomenon. This means that theories of migration should take into consideration the deep connections shared by the members of the diaspora with each other, in translation with the meaning of how do we understand these people are defining themselves, how deep the process of changing their life is and what is the impact they have on the current global world.

2.2. The Rise of the Diaspora

Among other scholars who dedicated their works to the concept of ‘diaspora’, Edward Said stated that the modern usages of the term diaspora underlines an idea of movement that is self-contained, and the current significances combine related terms – yet distinct – such as migration, exile, scattering, transnationalism, immigration, expatriation, minority or refugee, as well as racial or ethnic differences. In the literary field and not only, diaspora literature has become a fashionable concept, especially after the Cold War. This literature is meant to focus on writings and discussions of and by the diasporic community, the diasporic writers disseminating by means of their works their contradictory attitude and opinion in the world, as well as their swinging condition between the settled country or hostland and the homeland. Among the parts played by the diasporic writings, questioning identity and the sense of belonging are prevalent. In this chapter I choose to focus on this type of writing, in order to try and find the various meanings associated with the term diaspora and also to contextualize briefly the historical outlook of diaspora. The dictionary defines diaspora as originating from the Greek verb ‘diaspeirein’, meaning ‘to sow widely’. The association with the Greeks is made as a result of their having moved away from their land for trade and business. The same term was later used for the Jews when they were forced to leave and disperse from their homeland, which caused great ailment and pain. Until today, the term diaspora has been dealt with in a great number of studies and in this chapter we try to overview some of the most representative and comprehensive opinions of this controversial phenomenon. My reference points are, among others, Gabriel Sheffer who created a collection of definitions from dictionaries in his study Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (2006). Robin Cohen offers another viewpoint of diaspora in his work Global Diasporas: An Introduction (2008) referring to different communities of people living in a new country and placing under a debate the question of how intrinsic the terms “homeland” and “home” are to the diasporic condition. Sudesh Mishra, in Diaspora Criticism (2006) shows the three stages of the diaspora: the classical, the modern and the postmodern diasporas (14). Critics have also found similarities and dissimilarities between old and new diasporas in their attempt to motivate the migration to a hostland, the determination in preserving identities, the arising of a sense of solidarity, the creation of a self identity, the desire of assimilation or the settling of a “diasporic space, or if the connotation of diaspora can be closer to dislocation than it was to exile earlier. William Safran and Martin Baumann differentiate between Jewish diaspora and other diasporas. In Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return, Safran argues about the definition of the term ‘diaspora’ as “we may legitimately speak of the Armenian, Maghrebi, Turkish, Palestinian, Cuban, Greek, and perhaps Chinese diasporas at present and of the Polish diaspora of the past, although none of them fully conforms to the ‘ideal type’ of the Jewish diaspora” (84). Following the same idea, Baumann in his article Diaspora: Genealogies of Semantics and Transcultural Comparison observes that at present diaspora shows no similarity with the Jewish history and it can “refer to any process of dispersion and to relate to countless so-called dislocated, deterritorialized communities” (314).

Although diaspora has been largely analyzed, its popularity has begun to increase since 1960s. At first, its equivocal and abstract meaning was clarified by Phil Cohen and Martin Baumann’s observations. In Rethinking the Diasporama (1999), Phil Cohen indicates that

Diaspora is one of the buzz words of the post modern age; it has the virtue sounding exotic while rolling sibilantly off the English tongue; it whispers the promise of hidden depths of meaning, yet assimilates them to the shape of a wave breaking gently on native shores…it offers a desirable feminine ending, and much versatility. (Rethinking the Diasporama, 3)

Baumann completes the description, arguing that

The idea of “diaspora” has been celebrated as expressing notions of hybridity, heterogeneity, identity fragmentation and (re)construction, double consciousness, fractures of memory, ambivalence, roots and routes, discrepant cosmopolitanism, multi-locationality and so forth”. (Baumann 2000: 324)

Time has passed, the world has progressed and so have technology, media and communication network, bringing changes to the diasporic concept, in that it has more than a single, unified significance. In spite of all the debates and progress of humanity, the emotional attachment with home and homeland shared by the diasporic community remains one unchanged feature. More diasporic individuals are determined to preserve their ethnic, religious and cultural identities in the newly acquired land and sometimes even encourage and support the longing for returning to their homelands.

Said has argued that "'Textuality' is the somewhat mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory", it

has therefore become the exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history …. As it is practiced in the American academy today, literary theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical circumstances that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work. (The World, the Text, and the Critic, 1991:3)

While studying diaspora, Khachig Tölölyan observes that terms such as exile, migrant, expatriate and transnational have been wrongly interpreted, as they present no similar significances. According to him, “diaspora” is a more comprehensive area that involves “immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (1991, 5) as well, stating that between ‘diaspora’ and ‘migration’ there is a clear distinction. According to Alan McLeod in Beginning Postcolonialism (2000), a migrant is a person affected by the past exodus history of his ancestors (207). He goes on arguing that between the two terms there are differences as a result of shared experiences and emotions. Another resemblance seems to be seen between diaspora and exile, although the two terms use different notions of severance. Diaspora involves the idea of displacement, arising from a voluntary movement, whereas exile speaks about forceful migration. In their work Theorizing Diaspora (2003), Braziel and Anita Mannur refer to the difference between diaspora and another term it has been associated with it, namely ‘transnationalism’. In their view, diaspora points out the idea of a forced or voluntary movement of people, from one place to another. Transnationalism is more about neutral and disinterested powers such as globalization or global capitalism, deriving from migrant movement (8). These few examples and explanations as well, clearly emphasize the impossibility of homogenizing the diasporic experiences. In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990), Stuart Hall underlines the heterogeneous character of diaspora, arguing that diasporic experience is “defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (1990: 235). He confirms the acquirement of the diasporic identities to constantly constructing and reproducing themselves again and again “through transformation and difference” (1990: 225). Thus, moving from a simplified Greek definition as diasporic studies have been perceived so far, today, diaspora is fully apprehended as a combination of heterogeneity and differences. Endowed with such a mixture yet confusing attributes, it was easy to associate the term ‘diaspora’ with negative overtones such as forced displacement, alienation, victimization, trauma, nostalgia and loss, as well as Safran observes its association with other themes of “deracination, legal disabilities, oppression” (2005: 36). Moreover, people belonging to a diasporic group, live in a permanent state of suffering, grief and torment, longing for their native countries, torn between the feeling of returning, yet striving to adapt to the new land. This ambiguous situation has been defined by Dayal as a sense of doubleness combined with “nostalgia, filial piety and credulity” (47) and, later, upheld by Clifford as

“experiences of loss, marginality, and exile (differentially cushioned by class) are often reinforced by systematic exploitation and blocked advancement. This constitutive suffering coexists with the skills of survival: strength in adaptive distinction, discrepant cosmopolitanism and stubborn visions of renewal” (312).

2.3. The Origins of Diaspora

Among the scholars interested in diaspora studies from inside the postmodern patter, Homi Bhabba, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and James Clifford distinguished themselves as the pioneers (see, Baumann, 2000: 324).

Postmodern scholarship regards diasporas as the exemplars of the evaporation of all sorts of boundaries and borders and the flourishing of hybrid and fluid identities in the global era. Consequent to this understanding, “being here and there simultaneously”, “rootlesness”, “routes rather than roots”, “disputing the essentialist ethno-national identities that are associated to the nation states” are the reoccurring themes and emphases in this scholarship. In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990), Stuart Hall defines diaspora through its postmodern sense of understanding:

“Diaspora does not refer to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must to all costs return. This is the old, the imperializing, the homogenizing form of “ethnicity”…. the diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogenity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and differences”. (235)

Even if exile involving the compulsory displacement is rendered evident, one cannot avoid the hope of creating a new life and, most important of discovering a new home. In all the definitions that have been attributed to diaspora and diasporic identities, two elements are common: the process of dispersal of people around the world and the movement translated by the act of displacement or removal, as it arises from Stuart Hall’s (1995) description:

Diaspora refers to the scattering and dispersal of people who will never be able to return to the places from which they came; who have to make some kind of difficult settlement with the new often oppressive cultures with which they were forced into contact, and who have succeeded in remaking themselves and fashioning new kinds of cultural identity by consciously or unconsciously, drawing on more than one cultural repertoire… They are people who belong to more than one, speak more than one language (literally and metaphorically); inhabit more than one identity, have more than one home; who have learned to ‘negotiate and translate’ between cultures and who… have learned to live with, and indeed to speak from difference. They speak from the in-between of different cultures, always unsettling the assumptions of one culture from the perspective of the other, and thus finding ways of being both the same and different from the others amongst which they live, of course, such people bear the marks of the particular cultures, languages, histories and traditions which ‘formed’ them…They represent new kinds of identities… beginning to think of themselves, of their identities and their relationship to culture and to place in these more open ways (Hall 206 – 7).

“Diaspora” term derives from the Jewish experience. Khachig Tölölyan and Robin Cohen wrote comprehensive studies of the origins and the historical pathway, describing how Jewish diaspora has come to represent a paradigm for this phenomenon. According to their researches, the word “diaspora” has Greek etymological roots deriving from the term diasperien, which consists of the preposition dia (over) and the verb speiro (to sow), which in a literal translation means to sow over (Cohen 1997). Even if the term diaspora refers to a scattered population, there has, through the process of settlement in different countries, also been a reconfiguring of diasporic space, with mobility eventually becoming settlement, albeit in new and creative ways that reflects the tension involved in belonging and longing for multiple geographically distant places.

Among the scholars that studied diaspora, Simon Dubnow, a Jewish historian and Safran, stated that the Jewish tradition is at the heart of any definition of the notion diaspora. Safran went even further and made a list of criteria based on the model of Jewish history in order to confront the diversity of diasporization in other communities. According to this list, Safran argues in “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return” (1991) that the collective experience of diasporans has six characteristics:

the dispersal of “expatriate minority communities” or their ancestors “from an original ‘centre’ to two or more foreign regions”;

a “collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland”;

partial or full alienation from their host societies;

desire or idealization of the return to “their ancestral home”;

commitment to “the maintenance or restoration of the original homeland”;

a sense of collective consciousness and solidarity from this continuing relationship with the homeland (83–4)

These characteristics which are based on Jewish tradition seem to be an ‘ideal type’ of paradigm, in both Dubnow and Safran’s opinion. Yet, not all the scholars embraced this paradigmatic type. In his Global Diasporas: An Introduction (1997), Robin Cohen argues that although the modern concepts of the diaspora settlements has changed drastically from the view of victimized exile diasporans, a deep understanding of the Jewish diaspora is vital in seeing through today’s dispersed communities. He argues:

In trying to draw generalized inferences from the Jewish tradition it is necessary both to draw critically from that tradition and to be sensitive to the inevitable dilutions, changes and expansions of the meaning of the term diaspora as it comes to be more widely applied (22).

Yet, Robin Cohen does not approve of Safran’s six features of diaspora and he elaborates, nine diasporic characteristics, according to which he believes the diasporas exhibit:

1. Dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two or more foreign regions.

2. Alternatively, the expansion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions.

3. A collective memory and myth about the homeland, including its location, history and achievements.

4. An idealization of the putative ancestral home and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety and prosperity, even to its creation.

5. The development of a return movement which gains collective approbation.

6. A strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history and the belief in a common fate.

7. A troubled relationship with host societies, suggesting a lack of acceptance at the least or the possibility that another calamity might befall the group.

8. A sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries of settlement.

9. The possibility of a distinctive yet creative and enriching life in host countries with a tolerance for pluralism. (Global Diaspora 162)

He is also specifies that the diasporas may not entail all the nine features, but only some of them.

Cohen brings two arguments in his need to go beyond the Jewish diasporic tradition. Primarly, he argues that the forcible scattering of the Jews cannot assimilate to the history of Jewish migration as “there is considerable evidence to suggest that the Jews are not a single people with a single origin and a single migration history” (21). This means that not all Jewish migrations are the result of a forced displacement which further leads to the conclusion that not all the Jewish diasporans, such as the Zionists, are longing to physically return to their native countries or homeland. Secondly, Cohen raises questions on the orthodox definition of diaspora because “the word diaspora is now being used, whether purists approve or not, in a variety of new, but interesting and suggestive contexts” (21). The term “diaspora” that used to describe the Jewish scattering now has been framed in theories as a result of many other traumatizing diasporic experiences such as East Asian, Chinese, Indian, Armenian, Irish or African diasporas. There is much more variety today in the diaspora communities that are being explored, with a shift from a focus on historical, traumatized diasporas to that of a living and active diaspora, giving birth to a different framework for reviewing and discussion of an active migrant movement. As Clifford argued,

Membership in diaspora now implies potential empowerment based on the ability to mobilize international support and influence both the homeland and the hostland (Clifford, as cited in Butler, 2001).

What this quote implies is that “diaspora” appeals to a sense of agency and action within those who take part in it. In other words, those who have migrated seem to live a greater sense of involvement in a community when they perceive themselves as belonging to a “diaspora” as opposed to being only a migrant. This should be not understood as a removal or an obsolete view of the traditional pull/push patterns within the process of migration. The idea is that diaspora studies, compared to traditional migration theories, seem no longer interested in describing reasons why people migrate and, instead, choose to focus on what happens after they migrate. This means that diaspora studies go beyond the traditional models of migration which made a twofold analysis of the factors that ‘push’ migrants out of their homeland and attract or ‘pull’ them to the hostland. On the contrary, diaspora studies are more interested in finding and understanding the process of community settlement and assimilation after the migrants’ arrival.

In proof of this idea and going back to Safran’s list of diasporic characteristics, Cohen made amendments on it, insisting to depart from the traditional paradigm of the Jewish diaspora. He suggests, “[T]wo features should be ‘tweaked’, while features need to be added, mainly concerning the nature of the diasporic group in its countries of exile” (Global Diasporas 23). He rethinks the first characteristic by adding that “dispersal from an original center is often accompanied by the memory of a single traumatic event that provides the folk memory of the great historic injustice that binds the group together” (Global Diasporas 23; my italics). With this traumatic memory, diasporic people develop a strong sense of “imagined community” to which they become faithful. Cohen also adapts the penultimate characteristic in order to “allow the case of not only the ‘maintenance or restoration’ of homeland, but also its very creation,” which will “cover the case of ‘imagined homeland’ (Global Diasporas 23; my italics). This leads to the idea that, for most diasporas, the relationship of the diasporic group to its homeland is metaphorical, instead of being exclusively physical. Then, Cohen explains the next four characteristics, and begins by hoping that “groups that scatter for aggressive or voluntarist reasons” may be part of the “category diaspora” (24 my italics). The second feature renders that not all ethnic migrants can be included in the diaspora category or considered diasporan, forasmuch as “[a] strong tie to the past or a block to assimilation in the present and future must exist in order to permit a diasporic consciousness to emerge or be retained” (24, my italics). In case of the third feature, Cohen argues that more “positive virtues of retaining a diasporic identity” ought to be recognized (24, my italics). Moreover, Cohen brings arguments in favor of a beneficial connotation of the ‘diaspora’. He does not believe in the bland narratives of diasporas, on the contrary, he emphasizes that what motivates the need of diasporas to an achievement is exactly its amount of anxiety and unease. He explains that owing to connections of religion, language and a tendency to a common fate, there is “a common identity with co-ethnic members in the countries” (25). Cohen’s new range of characteristics seems to be a broader appraisal of multiplicity of diasporic experiences than the one made by Safran. What Cohen claims is that the term “diaspora” should be enlarged to embrace new and various paradigms of diasporas, without suggesting to include them all into a single term for all variants of dispersions. Therefore, he comes with an additional point to Safran’s list concerning “a diasporic consciousness” as the constitutive element of becoming diasporans. Khachig Tölölyan goes even further stating that only by a constant and lasting practice of “diasporic consciousness” will someone be defined as a diasporan. Tölölyan criticizes Walter Connor’s versatile definition of diaspora as “that segment of a people living outside the homeland” (cited in Tölölyan, 15). He asserts,

It [Connor’s definition of diaspora] does not, for example, seek to define just what a community – whether made up of refugees, exiles, immigrants or diasporans – or its individual members need think, feel, experience, or do in order to be considered a ‘segment’ of the transnational people that dwells in homeland and outside of it. (15, my italics)

To be more precise, one who pretends to be a diasporan because that one dwells away from native home “risks mere biologism” (Tölölyan 30); what makes one a diasporan is one’s constant practice and continuous enhancement of a “diasporic consciousness” (Tölölyan 17). Through the agency of the immigrant’s political, social and emotional intercommunion with his communities away from home, with his homeland and his hostland, the diasporan manages to “enhance the articulations between the past and present, homeland and hostland segments of the transnation” (Tölölyan 30). Tölölyan reasons out that “without some such minimum stringency of definition, most of America – or Argentina, or New Zeeland, or any modern immigrant-nation – would just easily be a diaspora” (30). Even if Tölölyan underlines the importance of the “diasporic consciousness”, he does not extend the idea further. It is James Clifford who elaborates on it in his essay “Diaspora”:

Experience and loss, marginality, and exile (differentially cushioned by class) are often reinforced by systematic exploitation and blocked advancement. This constitutive suffering coexists with the skills of survival: strength in adaptive distinction, discrepant cosmopolitanism, and stubborn visions of renewal. Diaspora consciousness lives loss and hope as a defining tension. (312, my italics)

What differentiates diasporans from immigrants is the diasporic attachment to homeland. According to Clifford, when diasporans are faced with assimilationist national policy in a hostland, the process of assimilation is partly difficult because diasporans “whose sense of identity is centrally defined by collective histories of displacement and violent loss cannot be ‘cured’ by merging into a new national community” (307) and partly because they “maintain important allegiances and practical connections to a homeland or a dispersed community located elsewhere” (307). Nevertheless, immigrants are “only en route to a whole new home in a new place” (307), even if they get through the trauma of nostalgia and loss. In other words, to become a diasporan, the immigrant has to be aware of his identity crisis and also to inure to compromise himself in such difficult situations.

It becomes obvious that the issues of home and identity are fundamental for the diasporic consciousness as they are rendered evident by scholars. In contrast with ethnic communities that feature positive and implicit connections with their host countries, diasporic communities are somehow chained in their identifying process with their homeland and host countries. As highlighted by Cohen in Global Diasporas, one of the common features of a diaspora community is “a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history, and the belief in a common fate” (166). More detailed, between the members of a diaspora there is a strong connection based on a shared belief of owning a unique and definite cultural and national identity and, furthermore, owing to this identity, they strongly trust in having a common and bonded future. If the transnational migration paradigm sometimes neglects the relieving of identity, the diaspora studies cannot lose sight of identity. It is as Butler (2001) states, “[diaspora] calls attention to the relationship between identity and active participation in the politics of hostland and homeland”. In fact, it is the identity that enables finally the active participation in the diaspora community and supports the connections and relationships that are built among the members of the diaspora. In 1997, when Tölölyan edited his journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transitional Studies, he stated that the publication would be “concerned with the way in which nations, real yet imagined communities are fabulated (to fabulate = to engage in the composition of a fable) brought into being, made and unmade, in culture and politics, both on the land people call their own and in exile” (as cited in Cohen, 1997). Accordingly, diaspora communities are at the same time “real” in the geographical sense (people that are presently dispersed), and “imagined”, in a conscious sense (the shared imagination of pertaining to a community). Either way, their existence is based on effective reasons. This approach of the diaspora is closer to the postmodern definitions proposed by scholars like Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall. What must be remembered is that the process of becoming a part of the diaspora community involves the aspect of consciousness as a mental reality evolving and adapting through a collective action, thus creating the diaspora through the process of “rooting and branching” (Cohen 165). Even if diaspora communities do not always have a physical infrastructure, legal constitutions or legislative policies, they are often built as a consequence of lifetime experiences, narrated stories, and mostly through communication and interaction with people from homeland. As a result of this constant arising and changing, the term diaspora community has been preferred instead of immigrant or migrant society, as the association of the word ‘community’ to diaspora not only implies action and agency, but also involves a powerful engagement and bond with the homeland on the most important levels, be they political, economic, cultural or social. Clifford argues that the difference between diaspora communities and the conventional conceptions of immigrant communities comes from the more permanent sense as well as the less concerning with assimilation or incorporation into the new culture of the diaspora community. The concept of diaspora community also incorporates post-colonialism, as the stories of longing to go home, to redeem or to reflect one’s home culture, to help the family members who remained in the homeland, these are features of the post-colonial subjects (Brah, 1996). Brah also argues that this “homing” desire does not resemble the wanting to return to a physical or geographical homeland. Instead, it is a strong perception that they carry inside their souls the conception of home which will always represent the main part of their identities and to which they will never cease having responsibility irrespective of their actual location.

However, a very important and defining feature of diasporans is the construction of self identity. The place occupied by diasporans is what has been marked as “diasporic space”, that is a place including both metaphoric and physical homeland, as well as some of the assets of the new host society – a space imbued with multiple identities. What results is a very global outlook of the diaspora communities, living in the ‘local’ but residing global identities. In his study Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad, Safran points out that diaspora community preserve much of their identity with people back home and, thus, he sustains the term ethno-national diasporas, as they are additionally called. Sheffer’s arguments in support of ‘ethno-national’ diaspora are based on trades and identities, on the one hand, and on how they choose to settle permanently and associate with people of the hostland, or decide to remain as a sort of core diasporic community keeping distance from citizens of the settled community, on the other hand. Sheffer also argues that the nomenclature of ethno-national diasporas is organized and specifically divided as follows:

‘Core members’ are those persons who are born into the ethnic nation, who avidly maintain their identity, who openly identify as members of their diasporic entity, who are ready to act on behalf of their community and homeland, and who are recognized as such by the community itself and by its hosts. ‘Members by choice’ are descendants of mixed families, converts, and so forth, who fully participate in the life of the diaspora. ‘Marginal members’ are those persons who maintain their ethnic communal identity but do not identify as such or purposely distance themselves from the community. ‘Dormant members’ are those persons who have assimilated or fully integrated, but know or feel that their roots are in the diaspora group; under certain circumstances those persons will identify with the diaspora and can be mobilized by its leaders and organizations. (100)

As a conclusion, Safran brings arguments in favor of the strong confidence of the actual diasporas in their ability to survive and succeed in the settled land, based on the relationship held with both their homeland and the hostland.

2.4. Differences and Similarities between Border Theories and

Diaspora

James Clifford explains in his article Diasporas the similarities between diaspora and the border theories by bringing into discussion Safran’s six principles, mentioned previously in this subchapter. Clifford claims that Safran’s principles cannot cover the entire areas of diaspora and discerns among ‘diaspora’, ‘immigration’ and ‘exile’. To support his arguments, Clifford introduces into discussion the Forth World People (autochtonists) such as the dispersed tribal people who should also be considered diasporic, if their tribal groups scatter from their native land, which means they are enframed in the same category of spread people who share common “historical experiences of dispossession, displacement, adaptation…” (309). He summarizes, “it is not possible to define diaspora sharply, either by recourse to essential features or to privative oppositions” (310). The similarities he recognizes belong to the diasporic consciousness and experiences that may be influenced by gender roles. In a section of his study called “The Black Atlantic”, Clifford mentions one of Paul Gilroy’s ideas that diasporic cultures arise as an effect of both economic discrepancies and political constraints. In Diasporas and the Nation-State: From Victims to Challenges, Robin Cohen observes the contrast between the actual diaspora and the classical one. He suggests that grasping the idea of the concept of Jewish diaspora is obligatory in perceiving the nature of the actual diaspora. He brings into discussion four groups sharing the same victim tradition circumstances, such as the Armenian diaspora, African diaspora, Irish diaspora and Palestinian diaspora. In a brief analysis, he sums up that the African diaspora is a result of slavery, the Armenian diaspora arises after invasions, the Irish diaspora occurred due to starvation and the Palestinian diaspora migrated because of the war. The analyses of each region led Cohen to a contrastive conclusion that people engaged in the diasporic process experienced different beings from “enriching and creative” to “enervating and fearful” (513) within their modern nation-state. Cohen concluding remarks are that “diasporas have predated the nation-state, lived uneasily within it and now… transcend and succeed it” (520). Another scholar interested in the debates on diaspora and borders is Avtar Brah, who in a study called Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities wrote an article about Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities (1996) in which she brings in four ideas out of which two points on the terms diaspora and border with respect to location. She believes that the new displacements and, accordingly, diaspora are caused by recent migration. In this concept of space Brah includes all humans, not only the scattered ones: “the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native” (632, in Feminist Postcolonial Reader). The result is newly acquired meanings of the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘border’, by which Brah evince that the term diaspora involves “multiple journeys” (616) while the term ‘border’ refers to random constructions representing “part of the discursive materiality of power relations” (625). Because ‘diaspora’ is developed on the image of journey, it cannot be considered a natural or accidental travel. On the contrary, it involves the idea of “settling down, about putting roots ‘elsewhere’” (616). As each diaspora has its own story, one should focus on the process of arrival and establishing a residence in a settled location, thus being able to answer for inquiries like “when, how and under what circumstances” (616) one started the journey? Brah suggests that, for the diasporic communities, the word ‘home’ has a different configuration depending on the individual subjectivity and the different political infliction, or, as Brah states, a different “politics of location” (628). In case of the term ‘border’, Brah argues that diaspora necessarily involves border with respect to political aspect, a border theory following closely Deleuze and Guattari's process of deterritorialization. Although ‘diaspora’ and ‘border’ share the same “notion of ‘border consciousness’” (631), the term ‘diaspora’ yet differs since “there are multiple semiotic spaces at diasporic borders, and the probability of certain forms of consciousness emerging are subject to the play of political power and psychic investments in the maintenance or erosion of the status quo” (631). In Brah’s opinion the “world as text, is more fraught, contradictory, complex, and problematic than is often acknowledged” (628).

As mentioned in a previous subchapter, the diaspora lives in what Brah develops as a new concept called ‘diaspora space’ created by interlacing three notions: diaspora, border and location. It is generally believed that concepts and theories can be apprehended from the point of “confluence and intersectionality” (633). This point has been labeled by Brah as “theoretical creolisation” (633), a theory deriving from times of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean and carrying at its basic various conflicting experiences between oppressed and tyrants.

2.5. From Melting-Pot to Multiculturalism

Homi Bhabba joins many of his contemporary critics who give credit to old definitions of diaspora and homeland / hostland, highlighting the positive consequences of immigration. In The Location of Culture he states that “the very concepts of homogenous national cultures” must suffer “a profound process of redefinition” (5), as in his opinion human beings have “no necessary or eternal ‘belongingness’” (175) to be deprived of, thus an essentialist culture would be unnecessary. According to Bhabba,

cultures come to be represented by virtue of processes of iteration and translation through which their meanings are very vicariously addressed to – through – an Other. This erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures (58)

Echoing Bhabba’s idea, Stuart Hall states in his “Introduction” to the Questions of Cultural Identity that “identities are never unified”, on the contrary they are “increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across” diversified “discourses, practices and positions”, which finds them “constantly in the process of change and transformation” (2003, 4). Following this change, “the self” multiplies, being “produced and positioned – that is subjected to and determined within – discourse” (cited in Procter 2004, 110). Both Bhabba and Hall considered that the models that didn’t give much credit to motherland or residing country were not enough. A “middle ground” is highlighted by Bhabba as “the third space” (12), where it is “in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationess, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (Bhabba 1-2). Going further on Bhabba’s idea, this ‘third space’ is making efforts to leave the past behind and receive wholeheartedly the attractive marks of the “free world”, which is an in-between space. Throughtout the course of adjustement and transformation, hybrid shapes arise, giving birth to modern categories of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991) and “imagined geographies” (Said 1978) if the reference is made to the ability in understanding the space generated by means of identities, discourses, written work, beliefs, principles as embodiments of community-based constructionism.

When discussing the ethnicity, many scholars mention the difficulty in finding the accurate definition. In his article Pluralism in Humanistic Perspective (1980), Michael Novak argues that “ethnicity is not a simple phenomenon; it is not easy to define in terms that apply in precisely the same way to everyone” (42). Philip Gleason in Speaking of Diversity (1992) is totally against considering the terms ‘pluralism’, ‘melting pot’ and ‘ethnicity’ as being interchangeable and “handled as though they had one univocal meaning, which everyone understood and to which everyone attached the same positive or negative significance” (41). The melting pot became the prevailing self-description of the American nation for the various ethnic groups which should fuse together and produce a new, American identity. In the case of the United States, no other country in the world has ever provided so much disposition and desire to absorb the multitude of ethnicities, or so much willingness on the part of the immigrant to acquire as much of the identity of the host country with the purpose of social renewal. A social phenomenon of such magnitude was bound to create an entire mythology related to a promised land of personal achievement and the role of the immigrants in building the American nation. Mythology became so strong that it almost exceeded actual experience and became constitutive of the national imaginary. This imaginary portrays America as the land of freedom, leaving behind the shadows of previous experience. This also made scholars see America as a complex ethnic blend, dividing their opinions with respect to how ‘pure’ America became after absorbing the huge masses of immigrants.

The melting-pot concept was first introduced by, the dramatist Israel Zangwill, an English Jew who, in 1908, had a sudden epiphany in which he saw a four-act play he put on stage the same year, under the title The Melting-Pot, and the very next year he even published it. In his book Beyond Ethnicity (1986), Werner Sollors states that “the rhetoric of Zangwill’s play shaped American discourse on immigration and ethnicity, including most notably the language of self-declared opponents of the melting-pot concept” (66). Zangwill’s play illustrates the life of a Jewish family in New York, the author himself being Jew and “in a good company with much American ethnic sentiment” (70). The playwright states that “American ideals are not transmitted by descent but have to be embraced afresh, even if that requires opposing the actual descendants of American founding fathers”, which makes “The Melting-Pot a drama of opposition, but also a drama of a development” (71). The Melting-Pot is about immigrants of Jewish descent in America and shows in a dramatic form the problem of assimilation within a single group of immigrants. As Sollors describes,

Three generations of Quixanos are making the transition from past to future. The orthodox and the Yiddish-speaking Frau Quixano strikes up an entente with the Irish maid, Kathleen. Mendel, the secularized “second generation” in the Quixano family, reflects, as his name suggests, the mixture of Jewishness and American surrounding. (71)

Zangwill highlights the assimilation process using astute stage directions which increase the effect by creating a “curious blend of shabbiness, Americanism, Jewishness, and music…(1-2)” (71). Carl Gustav Jung also remarks in his essay Your Negroid and Indian Behavior (1930) that Zangwill depicted the ethnic assimilation in a very modern manner without involving a specific physical action, but explaining that “the Jew may be Americanized and the American Judaised without any gaming interaction” (207)” (71), hence the main character’s “transition to the future comes by a loving union with his absolute “other” (at least by descent definition)” (71).

Gleason (1992) remarked critically that "the notion of the United States as a melting pot – a place where Old World nationality drops away and various elements fuse into a new nationality – operates in the play as a general framework within which the drama of the Jewish protagonist is enacted"(8). Moreover, The Melting-Pot renders the idea that "the doctrine of complete assimilation", completes the idea that "immigrants should actively will their own assimilation" (9-10).

When Zangwill first brought The Melting-Pot on the American stage, there was no plan or intention of creating a United States as a universal melting pot, everything was purely virtual, or perhaps hypothetical having in view an earlier rhetorical discourse of a few American liberals like Emerson and Jefferson regarding universalist ideas. Since Zangwill’s popular play in 1909, the melting pot concept has been rapidly spread and, in time, has received various paradigms until 1960s when the concept has become an icon: inter-ethnic alliances have been accepted, ethnic groups have gained socio-economic equality and the concept has been recognized even by liberals who disagreed with multiculturalism in education and politics. (Salins 1997, Fukuyama 1995, Schlesinger 1991, Sollors 1986, Hollinger 1995)

Werner Sollors highlights the tension between the responsibility for one’s ethnic and familial traditions and patrimony – the consent – and the disputing desire to change or influence one’s own destiny, even knowing that it is against one’s inner heritage – the descent, and asserts that ethnic awareness is part of the modernism structure, not a feature of its antithesis. Anyway, the melting pot icon remained, as Zangwill defined it, “a symbol for the process whereby immigrants are absorbed into American society and somehow changed into Americans” (quoted in Gleason 5).

The differences between multiculturalism and postcolonialism arise from the perspective they are perceived. While postcolonialism is based on historic legacies taking effect on the past, multiculturalism deals with diverse cultures, traditions and values within the same contemporary geo-political society. The global discourse of multiculturalism concedes the movement of migrants, refugees, diasporas as well as their relations with homelands and hostlands, or as Rosado (1997) claims:

Multiculturalism is a system of beliefs and behaviours that recognizes and respects the presence of all diverse groups in an organization or society, acknowledges and values their socio-cultural differences, and encourages and enables their continued contribution within an inclusive cultural context which empowers all within the organization or society. (2)

As multiculturalism has been thought to hold culture for its fundamental role in the political and social identity, the present times have brought up an important force: the identity politics. Identity politics is a large concept comprising a vast and open field of political tendencies and ideological evolution, which share a common view on the limited and oppressive character of the liberal universalism which aims only to demoralize and marginalize individuals and groups. Edward Said (2003) explained the tendency of considering subordinate groups and individuals as inferior, moreover encouraging them to associate and relate to values and morals of the oppressors, by using the notion of ‘orientalism’, thus emphasizing the process of degrading and denigrating non-western people and culture by European colonialism. Identity politics comes to offer subordinate groups and people the sense of freedom and empowerment, by growing a “‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ sense of identity” (Heywood 4).

CHAPTER 3. Cosmopolitanism from Root to Global

3.1. “Home” versus Nation

“A better world is possible” has become the latest emblem of the anti-neoliberal globalization movement. David Harvey, in Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009), goes further arguing that “a better cosmopolitan theory is possible”. The arguments of the current cosmopolitan theorists insist on premises about “space” (local, national, international, and global), but do not succeed in bringing a critical analysis on this concept. They have been meshed into the “ruses of geographical reason”, accepting what Harvey calls the “banalities of geographical evils” (249) that end up re-shaping our conception of the world, drawing and limiting our cosmopolitan imagination. In the ‘Epilogue ’he argues that:

“Most of the hegemonic social theories…that have shaped dominant interpretations and political practices…over the last three hundred years… have paid little or no critical attention to how the production of spaces, places, and environments might impinge upon thought and action. In practice, we almost everywhere find tacit assumptions about the nature of space and time, the cohesion of places (the nation- state), and the idea of what is or is not given by nature…. The effect is like trying to navigate the world with any old map, no matter how arbitrary or erroneous it may be” (Harvey 251).

Leaving the security and comfort of her "home," Saviana Stănescu's poetic and dramatic persona travels back and forth in space and time in order to reach a fuller appreciation and final reconciliation with the faces, places, values, habits, and dreams she had left behind when she embarked on the life of the cosmopolitan exile. Referring briefly to the notions of "home" and cosmopolitan exile, which provide a productive theoretical context for my discussion of Stănescu’s writings, I will focus on the particular function of memory, myth, and tradition as these are challenged by modernity and problematized in the work of a very significant playright of the Romanian diaspora in the United States.

"Home" can also refer to a wider public sphere, such as a community of origin, a nation, a nation-state, or an ethnic group all of which demand a certain level of allegiance from the one that claims to be a member of them. In a short parenthesis, I feel necessary to point out Kwame Anthony Appiah’s opinion about the community of origin. Embracing Benedict Anderson's idea of the nation as an "imagined community" (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983), Appiah offers what he calls "a loose and unphilosophical definition" of the nation. He argues that the nation "is an 'imagined community' of culture or ancestry running beyond the scale of the face-to-face and seeking political expression for itself” (Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 617-39.623). Appiah distinguishes the nation from the state on the grounds of morality. He also argues that the nation is morally arbitrary, while the state is not because people live in political orders where the questions of public right and wrong are argued and decided and hence it is not morally arbitrary to be a fellow citizen to other citizens within a state. States "matter morally, intrinsically" not because people care about them but because "they regulate our lives through forms of coercion that will always require moral justification. State institutions matter because they are both necessary to so many modern human purposes and because they have so great a potential for abuse." The nation, on the other hand, is arbitrary "but not in the sense that means we can discard it in our moral reflections." Although nations often matter to people more than states, the reason they do so is because they matter to people themselves "as things desired by autonomous agents, if we cannot always accede to them" (623-24).

The demand of commitment is felt strongly by the individual who is away from "home" in imposed or self-chosen exile and needs to prove and reinforce his or her loyalty and patriotic devotion to the "home left behind." In both its private and public manifestations, "home" essentially denotes roots. However, the way people are related to these roots and the manner in which they have been cut off from their roots is crucial to the understanding of the practices they adopt in order to participate in their new situation of being away from "home." Whether roots are willfully "extracted," 5 as in the case of cosmopolitan expatriates and transnational migrants, or they are violently cut off, as in the case of refugees or political exiles, what is sadly felt that is left behind and what is always sought after to replace the lost center of belonging is "home." As Caren Kaplan succinctly notes in Questions of Travel, "the poor might look exotic in foreign settings when the poor at home seem invisible, uninteresting, or threatening" (44). Residing in their "fantasy of escape," immigrant writers advanced two remarkable standpoints: "the exoticization of the past in another location or country and the exoticization of another gender, race, or culture" (45).

In particular, a person who is away from "home" does not simply yearn for the localizable idea of "home" as a physical shelter. Rather, one craves for the structures and elements of "home" that are thought to guarantee happiness and security and are perceived as immutable and coherent despite the inevitable changes brought about by the passage of time. It is the feeling and the structures of the idea of "home" that are lost and cannot be readily replaced when one experiences homelessness or exile.

In the discussion of exile, an important distinction should be drawn between the political experience of exile and the aesthetic perception and manifestation of it. Edward Said remarks that "at most the literature about exile objectifies an anguish and a predicament most people rarely experience at first hand" ("Reflections" 357).

3.2. Cosmopolitanism as a Home Bearing

The events of the 20th century brought cosmopolitanism on the 21st working agenda of the scholars. In 1993, Jonathan Reé begins his essay “Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Nationality” scrutinizing the century that was about to end:

It began with high hopes, and dreams of peace and plenty. It proceeded with ambitious schemes for political and cultural reform, and using science to eliminate want from the world. But, as the century ends, its achievements – whether in education, wealth, health, or political emancipation – appear compromised, while its failures – wars, genocides, disaffections, inequality, fear, political murders, misbegotten revolutions and ecological disasters – look absolutely catastrophic. (77)

Though ethical values have crumbled, the disaster seems to attack even deeper, as,

what makes the century disconcerting is the battery of calamities brought about not by greed, irresponsibility, and malevolence, but by active sacrifices on behalf of others and future generations. […] Righteous fervor has turned out to be a source of corrosive evil. (77)

The most dramatic effect deriving from this collapse of ethical values, occurred on the politics of international cooperation level, where peace and a borderless world at the will of travelers regardless of reason (be they political, economic, cultural or just consumerist), appeared, for most part, give-and-take ideals. In the need to find answers and truth, scholars have set their face towards the cosmopolitan viewpoint and to a universal cosmopolitan existence as alternative for humanity to keep evolving. To demonstrate where the national feeling and the emigrants’ belief in being part of the world, Reé develops “a kind of pyramid of internationality” (83) and makes a demonstration of how it works:

[…] I am constructing a kind of pyramid of internationality. At its base are the empirical illusions of national experience – historical, biological, geographic and cultural-linguistic. On the next level are the two conceptual illusions associated with the principle of nationality, the other pretending that nationality is a spontaneous sentiment that precedes internationality. This leaves, at the apex of the pyramid, the dialectical illusion of internationality – the illusion from which it is most difficult, if not impossible, to escape. (83)

On the other side, Richard Rorty doesn’t want to involve “cosmopolitanism” such as Reé does when imagining “a world where local peculiarities are no longer subsumed under national types” (Reé 88), because he conjures up an image of justice as “larger loyalty”, like “the tougher things get,

3.3. Cosmopolitan between Ethnicity and Transnational Spaces

This concept has been extended to transnational practices with a wrenched nuance, in that experiences are not only attached to institutions and national bodies, but also to particular instances. Keeping the same line, Rabinow develops the idea telling that cosmopolitanism should be defined as “an ethos of macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness (often forced upon people) of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical trajectories and fates” (Rabinow in Robbins 258). However, time has rendered evident that cosmopolitanism is not an intractable and inflexible category, it has different aspects which may be positive or negative, it is as shaped and limited in versatility as particular and territorial experiences are, hence, not only an abstract ideal, but bounded and confined to specific collectivities and individual ways of sensing the world. This concept has been extended to transnational practices with a wrenched nuance, in that experiences are not only attached to institutions and national bodies, but also to particular instances. In proof of this, in her article “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity” (1998), Amanda Anderson realized how versatile the concept of cosmopolitanism is, and describes it as having "forms of detachment and multiple affiliations [that] can be variously articulated and variously motivated. Overall, cosmopolitanism endorses reflective distance from one's cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity" (267). As cosmopolitan is regarded in a partnership with nationalism and considering Robbins’s “transnational altruism” in “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms” (1998:2), it is possible to assume that cosmopolitanism has managed to create an attitude towards the world as an entity. Within this context, the cosmopolitan exile seems to build creative circumstances based on high cultural grounds, experiences, habits, traditions and values in which people bring along their homeland, irrespective of their place of living, acknowledging what Kwame Anthony Appiah puts forth in "Cosmopolitan Patriots" (1997): "[t]he cosmopolitan ideal—take your roots with you—is one in which people are free to choose the local forms of life within which they will live" (622). According to Appiah the cosmopolitans’ feelings of being rooted in their homelands grow perfectly together with their privileges as citizens in a foreign country or hostland, as they consider truthful that “not everyone will find it best to stay in their natal patria” (Appiah 618). Drawing on Appiah’s ‘moving vision’ of “cosmopolitan patriotism”, James Clifford appraises the status of the cosmopolitan to the quality of a traveling signifier, “always in danger of breaking up into partial equivalences: exile, immigration, migrancy, diaspora, border-crossing, pilgrimage, tourism” (“Mixed Feelings” 362-70). Clifford considers that the notion of cosmopolitan leads to alternative “cultural” identity, thus compromising the “naturalness” of ethnic absolutisms and making room for a cultural separation resulting in compound and incomplete passages between local and global realities, thus rethinking identity as alternative to displacement and replacement. At this point, Clifford introduces “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” which, in his opinion “begin and end with historical interconnection and often violent attachment” (362-70). He argues that:

Cultural separation and claims for ethnic purity appear as strategies within this historical context, moments not ends. Such a perspective opens up a more complex, humane understanding of hybrid realities. For example it makes room for immigration policies which do not presume all-or-nothing assimilation. "English only" legislation, in this view, appears not as a reestablishment of something normal or natural but rather as a violent, probably futile, attempt to create and police an area of cultural homogeneity. (“Mixed Feelings”, 362-70)

In 2003, in his article “Transnationalism and Globalization”, Victor Roudometoff distinguishes between the common and the different characteristics arising from conversing transnationalism into cosmopolitanism, focusing on their interplay. In Roudometoff’s opinion cosmopolitanism is “the prospect of global democratization and the decentering of values, attitudes and lifestyles associated with the nation-state”, even though there are voices that consider it “expresses the very inability of upper and middle classes to assume their responsibility towards the ‘silent majority’ of those excluded from their wealth and privileges” (Roudometof 116). As the interpretation of cosmopolitanism is different in literature, Roudometoff also included in his study Ulrich Beck’s opinion, made in 2002, which stipulates that ‘cosmopolitanization represents an ‘internal globalization’ from within the national societies (Beck cited in Roudometoff 116), hence being experienced differently by individuals. The idea deriving from Beck’s opinion is a welcome extension pluralist conceptualization of the borders, even if individuals share the same “life-world” space, in the same time. In other words, individuals living in the same space may live a totally different life from those inside that space, but closer to other people who dwell outside the borders of their actual living space. With respect to this view then, Beck (96-7) appraised as indicators of cosmopolitanization – dual citizenship, transnational ways of life, or mobility, which he considers to be various performances of contemporary transnationalism. This process of cosmopolitanization made Beck come up with an ideal type of cosmopolitan society – a “deterritorialized society” in which the cosmopolitan values outbalance the national ones.

Julia Kristeva, who gave herself a great deal of time to write on cosmopolitanism, comes with a possible solution to these emerging dilemmas, although she sensed the suspiciousness of the new universalism and the utopianism of the cosmopolitan. In Nations without Nationalism, Kristeva states clear the need for a renewed kind of cosmopolitanism, pleading for a one rising from psychoanalysis residing in detachment from provincial identity and pervaded by the therapeutic recognition and exploration of strangeness within and outside the self. As Sara Beardsworth argues (in Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity 2004) “it comes as no surprise that Kristeva’s recommendation of a “new cosmopolitanism” in Nations without Nationalism asserts a “transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries” (1993b, 16: 206). For Kristeva, “only through the exploration of otherness and the crucial acknowledgment of strangeness within the self” would people “give up hunting for the scapegoat outside their group” (Kristeva cited in Anderson 285).

As Bruce Robbins points up,

Even the most humanitarian of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) require strict supervision and they are less likely to receive it because the transnational domain they inhabit is not fitted with the usual well-tried domestic alarms. (9)

Beside the requisite semantic specifications, the intellectual traffic and the concept definitions generated, transnationalism, diaspora, cosmopolitanism have come to portray at different moments in time, a whole world in motion, an active space of alternative reflections and urgencies for which a proper lexicon and precise descriptions never find time enough to entirely comprehend and describe reality, to fit the fast leaps of the same world into the newly coming period of evolution.

So, as long as "home" is never reached, ‘nostos’ turns exile into a remarkably challenging place that consolidates ethnic and national roots, creates new perspectives for the self and its consciousness, and, finally, enables a cosmopolitan exploration of life and art.

3.4. Norman Manea’s cosmopolitanism and “the world left behind”

In order to assuage his feelings of existential isolation, to exorcise his insurmountable “happy” guilt for abandoning his "home," and to resist cultural homogenization in America, Norman Manea is deeply committed to constructing a discourse of authentic rootedness in the "home left behind." In self-imposed exile in America, where he has been highly honored and distinguished for his academic and intellectual achievements, Maneas needs to prove to his fellow natives, to himself, and, by extension, to the members of his adopted culture and society, that his physical dislocation has not affected or corrupted his ethnic identity or patriotic sentiments.

His Romanian "home" is Manea's cultural metropolis from where ideals, traditions, religious and folklore customs, myths, and popular stories emanate. Past, present, and future enter a simultaneous and multidirectional relationship within this imagined literary “nostos” that ultimately determines the trajectory of the individual's journey into exilic consciousness and existence.

Apart from making a myth out of his ancestral "home," another salient aspect in Manea's work which functions as necessary tactics of formidable resistance to Americanization as well as a corroborative live bond between the writer and his fellow natives, is that he writes in Romanian. By writing in Romanian and by incorporating many elements of the Romanian idiomatic dialect in his novels, Manea makes a cultural and social statement. Not only does he foster and consolidate a quintessential Romanian subjectivity in America, but he also authenticates and solidifies his ethnic and national identity more forcefully, compared to Romanians who may have assimilated within the mainstream culture and society in a more active and thorough way. However, the discussion of authenticity necessarily involves "an element of closure and conservation, as though peoples and cultures existed outside the languages of time [. . .] where they are kept in isolation and at a `critical distance,' as though they do not experience movement [and] transformation" (Chambers 82). By writing in Romanian, Manea falls in with a simultaneous enclosure and exclusion, which necessarily impose a boundary between himself and the Other, in his case America. The enclave he constructs, where only a few "chosen" ones who speak the same language can enter, engenders a reverse discrimination process in which anyone who is not competent in this particular language, and hence culture, is expelled from the privileged community of those who are—as if Othering both the Anglo-American subjects and the ethnically "marginal" Others in America. Manea, claims that he is native expatriates who may have incorporated himself in America professionally, but who, nevertheless, refrain from "translating" himself in linguistic and cultural terms for the Western or non-Western individuals who might develop a curiosity for or genuine interest in the author's culture. As an effect, he never intended to explain and reconceptualize his artistic identity along categories that would be contextualized within the American culture and society. Writing in one's native language does not necessarily preclude a writer's adherence to the American assimilationist rhetoric. No matter how culturally accommodating the writer's discourse is, however, the sheer fact of not employing the language of the majority substantiates his or her repudiation of the dominant culture and society. Unless he or she lives within a multicultural and multilingual context, where the ethnic particularities of his or her work would be acknowledged, the writer who uses a language other than English has little hope of achieving recognition or success in America. However, such a context does not yet exist, even in such a multiethnic society as that of the United States.

Werner Sollors suggests that a revised multiculturalism instead should start with an "English plus other languages" educational ideal. This way, multilingualism would provide a clearer understanding of the language rights of minorities, would bring about a higher degree of literacy in English, would prepare students better for world citizenship in the age of transnationalism, and would reduce cultural friction (3). In addition, multilingualism would supply the missing part in the multiculturalism debate:

"Giving multiculturalism an `English plus' character is likely to extend the beneficial sides of multiculturalism by helping to correct one of its major blind spots, for how can one talk convincingly about 'cultural diversity' without talking about language? How can one advocate a better understanding of others without learning the others' language?"(4).

Following an opposite line of thought, Peggy Noonan, in “Why the World Comes Here” (1991), commends the migrants for their ability to become what they could never imagine in their home country. "In return, the newcomers get the possibility of dreams. But these dreams aren't free. There's a price to pay: once you're here, you have to become Americanized" (179). Noonan concludes: "The fact is, America is an English-speaking country, and it won't help us to communicate with one another if, in the twenty-first century, we become a Tower of Babel" (180). However, she does not provide a sustainable solution on the possibility of imposing monolingualism. Consequently, the writer does not enjoy a wide readership, while his or her chances of being included in any canonical study of ethnic literature(s) in the United States are few, unless his or her work is translated into English by large publishing houses. Although gaining large-scale recognition and success in America as a novelist does not seem to be one of Manea's primary concerns, his use of English in most of his scholarly works presents an interesting contradiction that sheds light on the writer's ambivalent position towards his host “home”. For Manea to protest in his novels written in English about the sadness and loneliness of immigrant life in America might have jeopardized his flourishing career as a university professor at Bard College and a critically acclaimed scholar of European Culture and Studies literature (Manea has also the title of “writer in residence”). Manea’s novelistic expression of firm dissent from Americanization articulated in English would have directly interfered with his desire to fully belong and ultimately become accepted within the intellectual circles of American academia and society. As Mary Louise Pratt argued in “Arts of the Contact Zone” (1991), simultaneous and parallel effort to gain artistic and professional recognition and acceptance on both sides of his "contact zones", by manipulating the linguistic medium of expression according to the form of writing he is engaged in, indicates not only that Manea makes full use of his exile but that he enjoys the limitations and misfortunes of his circumstances by exploiting their cosmopolitan parameters. I use Mary Louise Pratt's term "contact zones" by which she means the "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination— like colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (4).

Chapter 4. Saviana Stănescu’s Cosmopolitan Immigrant

4.1. An Invitation to the Theatre

Exile, either political or social, known as an act of severance and banishment brought into our existence by the historical narrative of the Greeks, remains nowadays a very strong paradigm of physical, spatial, and temporal displacement from one’s native land. Consequently, exile, literary or existentially, involves meanings as nostalgia, trauma, impossibility of reconciliation, loss, sorrow and a lack of personal or collective closure. Obviously the list would not be complete if we did not add the displacement and the giving up the time phenomenon. Related to this tradition, Edward Said defined exile as a metaphor of death, offering an image of the exilic journey as a crossing of the River Styx from the world of the living to that of the dead, in our case the new land. He considers it a circumstance

irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that…is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death without death’s ultimate mercy, … has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography (Said, Reflections of Exile, 174).

Said’s definition strengthens once more the lasting tradition of perceiving exile as doubt, regret, sorrow, pain and nostalgia. Nowadays, what we call exile covers both the enforced removal from one’s native country and the self-imposed privation of living in one’s homeland. This difference manifests itself either as internal exile – a voluntarily choice to stand up and confront the country’s politics from within – or as an external exile (living far away from one’s native home). Paradoxically, sometimes exile may induce a state of happiness and even a bittersweet taste of nostalgia for one’s home or one’s history. It may release artistic sources and discoveries and result in economic fulfillment or benefit. The least, but not last, the condition of ‘exile’ may serve as an invitation to recognize and one’s capacity for creativity, for a reinvention of the self, in other words a fruitful and rewarding growing up.

Because of the language barrier, exile may sometimes risk being misunderstood or misinterpreted. But when the exile is endowed with a strong cultural experience being familiar with the language, even mastering the new language, the exilic state will be experienced as a creative act in alterity, in which social, psychological and artistic challenges dictate “an immense force for liberation, for extra distance, for developing new structures in one’s head, not just syntactic and lexical but social and psycho-logical” (Brooke-Rose, “Exsul”, 40). Nowadays, exile can be experienced in various complex forms. Nevertheless, it will always depend on the conditions of translation, adaptation, and integration orchestrated by the cultural and linguistic challenges one faces in a new country.

As my intention is to show a new face of exile through the ‘eyes’ of the theatre, I would mention that Saviana Stănescu falls naturally into the paradox induced by the positive side of the exile. When Saviana Stănescu first arrived in America, she was more concerned with the social and political identity. There are two special events in Stanescu’s life that must be mentioned as they had a major impact on both her career and in the way her perception on identity strengthened. In 1989, during the revolution, Saviana Stanescu was in Romania. She took part in this revolution meant to overthrow a corrupt and brutal dictatorship by marking through art her native country’s emerging democracy and freedom in an open society. Being an award-winning journalist, poet and playwright, Saviana had stood the battle for her principle, regarding the free speech. Ten years later, she got a Fulbright Program grant and went to United States to study the relationship between America’s theatre and its democratic institutions. She arrived in New York in 2001, two weeks before the tragic attempt known simply as ‘9/11’. This second event she witnessed in her life gave Saviana the chance to see America facing its limitations, unable to prove and explain the lack of security and freedom it had been so proud so far. As John Clinton Eisner remarked, Saviana “had ventured to America as an outsider in search of new ways to see the world and had gotten more than what she bargained for: a front row seat to witness America’s shock and anger at its own vulnerability at Ground Zero” (The New York Plays, A Writer in Revolution, p.8).

The attractive idea of a modern “multicultural” image of the American theatre has enabled the emerging interest in dramatic staging by and with immigrants to the Land of Dreams. Such productions are usually mentioned in a category of theatrical works called the “ethnic” American theatre, or better classified as “immigrant theatre”. After a risky voyage across the sea, in search for a better life and happiness, voluntary immigrants interact with English language as both “a home” for their words and an alien tongue. Their performances have been framed within the "ethnic" American theater, a newly approached concept involving stage performances by subsequent ages of so-called "hyphenated" Americans. This chapter will focus on such framings and I will try and draw attention on an example of hyphenated Romanian–American theatre, represented successfully by Saviana Stanescu, briefly introduced by professor Rodica Mihăilă in Saviana Stănescu and a Post-Colonial Reading of Ovid’s Exile, as “poet, playwright, performer, journalist and teacher, New York-based and one of the most acclaimed representatives of the New Wave of Romanian playwrights who emerged out of Romania after 2000 (Mihăilă, 299)”.

4.2. The American Theatre between Immigration and Hyphenation

Theories of “Immigrant Theatre” are based on immigrant experience, a subject that might underline a certain edgy or minor position in the scholarship’s perspective on “hyphenated” identities which makes possible the birth of more progressive ‘hyphenated’ ethnic artistic productions. This approach arouses two questions to which I thought it necessary to find answers. First, I needed to know if there were any concerns in the so-called ‘immigrant’ or ‘ethnic’ theatre in the past or if there were art critics interested in identifying the existence of such like theatre. The second thought, deriving almost inherently, concerns the Romanian-American theatre that seems to have come to a very high position thanks to Saviana Stănescu’s brilliant theatrical productions that generated a true challenge in understanding the ‘hyphenated’ Global Immigrant Theatre. If we go on a short journey back in time, we find Maxine Schwartz Seller, who in 1983, wrote an impressive wide-range study about “immigrant” theatre called Ethnic Theatre in the United States. Seller’s study provides extremely useful information on non-professional and professional creations in theatre performed by or for groups of people living or not in the same area, but distinguishing themselves through their ‘ethnic’ features. Her theatrical collection comprises articles and discourses on ‘ethnic’ theatre written by authors coming from various nations. Some of these works originated from emigrants’ homelands and brought along in America and others written after emigration and sharing their experiences of adjustment in the receiving country. Seller’s collection also covers articles about the productions brought out and staged by recent generations of so-called “hyphenated” ethnic Americans. Back in 1983, Christa Carvajal first promoted the idea of “the pattern of immigrants as first trying to “establish and maintain an ethnic identity”” ("German-American Theatre", cited in Seller, 186), before being taken up by the ‘mainstream’. According to Seller, theatre has a great part in proving the strength and coherence of a culture, making immigrants responsible in harboring its history, language and ancestry, thus protecting it from total Americanization. The structural evolution of the concepts of “immigrant” and “ethnic” theatre underlines the alteration of the term “immigrant” to the term “minority” with respect to the theatre, which later emerged as a ‘hyphenated’ theatre.

In the Introduction of her collection, Seller glimpses upon the 1960s and 1970s, drawing attention on what she sensed as a ‘new ethnicity’ which was in favor of a cultural pluralism, as opposed to what had been the American’s model for a society, the well-known ‘melting pot’. The idea ensuing from most of Seller’s collection essays is the accreditation of the ‘immigrant’ experience existence as an entity capable to settle rules for American identity and manages to separate or differentiate between ethnic groups and racial groups. On the other hand, Seller does not consider that immigrants and natives may access the same past “ethnic heritage” as a desire to belong to the same “American” experience, which means that immigrants themselves cannot confront the same obstacles (for a limited time) in loosing native customs and language. The history enables to keep in memory that racist history such as genocide, slavery or different types of embargoes and banning policies, or simply because of ignorance, made assimilation impossible for many Asian or African immigrants. Moreover, Asian or African immigrant groups arrived and settled in America under totally different circumstances than European immigrants did and the way they were treated was distinct from the beginning, thus their entirely keeping out from being recognized as full “American” citizens. They had no voting rights, had minimum or no access to school, no legal possibility to own land and had extreme restriction on the market labour. Velina Hasu Houston creates some clear-cut distinctions in the introduction to her anthology of Asian American plays, The Politics of Life (1993): “An Asian is someone who is native Asian. An Asian American, on the other hand, is not Asian. An Asian American is an American of Asian descent, born and reared in the United States” (9).

This is the moment when the history of theatre must play its important part in reconceptualizing the concepts by means of which the ‘ethnic’ and the ‘alien’ identities should work together and bring out American identities, immigrant experience, cultural differences and similarities and the ways to exchange their rich values. This process of scrutinizing the latest Romanian immigrant theatre leads to creating a new and distinct perspective on the Romanian-American concept, taking into account the existing trend in the legitimate drama critics to merge “immigrant” and “hyphenated” stage performances with the concept of “ethnic” theatre. One of the positive aspects and benefits a research in any field creates is the necessity to find new words and terms to describe the multi-faceted concepts developed within the study. In our case, the ‘immigrant theatre’ has acquired a new feature, through the agency of Saviana Stănescu’s staged performances, that is the “global immigrant”, a subject to be dealt upon in detail in the next sub-chapters.

4.3. The Theatre of the Alien

Joanne Tompkins argues in her study Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre, that “frontiers signals the anxiety of absence, even as it tries to suppress it” (Tompkins 33), by making a distinction between us and the Other and, at the same time, indicating our presence at the risk of the Other’s absence. Following our discussion on borderlines, I realized that Waxing West is an archetypical urban borderland set at the beginning of the 21st century, in which Saviana Stănescu underlines its effects on the development of her main character, rather than trying to make her acknowledge it. The play is a parody related to the everlasting Romanian dream to immigrate to the Dream Land, America, in which the author examines the way in which values have shifted during her transition period, especially after the tragic events on 9/11. Old and new Romanian values were place in conflict with one another.

1989, the year of the Romanian revolution, marked a turning point in the life of both the country and its artists. A major victory gained after this fateful day was the freedom to travel abroad and even leave the country, but the financial means proved to be a serious obstacle in taking advantage of this sudden gained right. As Krishnaswamy observed, in The Postcolonial and the Global (2007), while generally discussing East European former communist countries, in Romania emigration also “increasingly became the supreme reward for citizens of impoverished or repressive ex-colonies. Millions of people dream of becoming exiles at any cost”(96). For some of the immigrants for whom this dream comes true, post-communist and post-colonial identity crises become a heavy load due to the exilic self-renegotiations. Some of the authors reacted to this traumatic burden by going on writing after leaving their homelands, thus situating themselves in a sort of borderless but insecure territory of not-belonging. Most of them expressed through their writings the tragic or ridicule of the exilic condition.

Saviana Stănescu is a Romanian-born writer and only relatively recent resident in the United States and even though American policy concerning immigrants is a tough one, she was fully accepted for her academic and literary skills, placing her among the foreigner that did not need to be tolerated, on the contrary she was needed. “I came to the U.S. a Fulbright fellow in 2001, and now I am an ‘alien with extraordinary skills in arts,’ meaning I hold an O1 visa for exceptional artists” (Stănescu, “American Visa”). In spite of being first a poet and a journalist, for Saviana Stănescu the theatre has become an existential subject, especially because it is performed in two languages. For her, being an immigrant is like living in another language, not only geographically but with respect to the cultural space. For 4 years, she made a lot of research work, not only in reading English scripts and plays, but trying to acquire and assimilate the specific of the new language and its slangy features. She feels that she belongs to two worlds and this makes her competition even tougher. Writing in English is like a battle she feels she has won, because this is an important condition to survive in a city like New York, you must show all the time that you are capable to face competition and gain a foothold in their cultural space.

Waxing West is a play that speaks to Stănescu’s position, not entirely an immigrant but living in exile by choice for a limited period, and expresses a double image of an exiled author who turns to her home country a North-American insight look, while still retaining her Romanian image of American land. As it has been produced, read, published and performed in both newly adopted and native lands, Waxing West seems equally easy to approach for Romanian and American public, each of them being represented in their own lights and shadows. Therefore, I believe that Stănescu’s Waxing West belongs to the territory of the transnational dramatic literature, as part of the category of those displaced writers who write back to their native countries, discussing about their problems but writing in the language of their adoptive country, hence targeting audiences from both lands and cultural spaces. This aspect strengthens in a paradoxical way the cultural and political borders, its bare existing defying them. However, our intention is to outline the Romanian-American perspective of Waxing West, involving not only its features as a transnational play, but also as a hyphenated work which, according to Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, turns into a third time-space. In their opinion

“Borders and diasporas are phenomena that blow up – both enlarge and explode the hyphen: Arab-Jew, African-American, Franco-Maghrebi, Black-British. Avoiding the dual axes of migration between the distinct territorial entities, the hyphen becomes the third time-space (Introduction: Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, p.16)”

The authors of this article distinguish time and space placing them between interstices, such as “nonsynchronic fragments and essentialist nostalgia” (Hicks 1991:6) in case of time and “charted in the interstices between the displacement of “the histories that constitute it” (Bhabha 1990b:211) and the rootedness of these histories in the politics of location” (16) in case of space. Consequently,

The third time-space is thus an imaginary homeland (Rushdie 1991:9) where the fragmentation of the identity” is conceived not “as a kind of pure anarchic liberalism or voluntarism, but… as a recognition of the importance of the alienation of the Self in the construction of forms of solidarity (16).

To sum-up, this third time-space is of the “lives of those who dare to mix while differing…[in] the realm in –between, where predetermined rules cannot fully apply” (Trinh 1991:157).

4.4. Waxing to Exile

While reading Waxing West, I realized that Saviana Stănescu managed to treat in the same line the border-crossing as both geographical and psychological markers of her characters. Her main character, Daniela, is trying to redefine herself as an immigrant and, at the same time to rebuild her imagined home from an exilic standpoint, which is an aspect I am going to analyze and explain during this chapter. Stănescu’s characters have different resident statuses, which range from (former) war refugees to illegal residents. They voluntarily live in the U.S., mostly determined by economic reasons, and are legally allowed to return to their native post-communist countries. On the other hand, they relate to their situation as to “a condition of terminal loss” (Said 173) and perceive themselves as living in exile, a term which traditionally means “enforced removal from one's native country” (”Exile”). Waxing West tells a stereotypical story of a Romanian-born cosmetologist, Daniela, who is ‘sold’ as a mail-ordered soon-to-be-bride, but fails in achieving the dream to become an American citizen. Her mother, Marcela, arranges the marriage with the mother of a rich American engineer, Charlie Aronson. Both Daniela and Charlie suffer the same pressure of being married. Daniela is pressured by her mother and most of her acquaintances to marry the American-born she has never met, while Charlie is pressured by his mother, Mrs. Aronson, as she is the one who prefers a Romanian daughter-in-law and found Daniela using her personal connection. Neither Daniela, nor her younger brother Elvis, is vibrant with this marital arrangement, but deep inside she is anxious to leave Romania and Elvis is pleased with the VCR and the video camera sent by Charlie.

Once Daniela arrives in America, she realizes how isolated she feels. Unfortunately, Mrs. Aronson dies before Daniela’ arrival in New York on an American fiancé visa. After a short living together, Daniela feels sad and marooned, realizing that Charlie is not eager to marry and, worse, does not feel compelled to fulfill his mother’s wish. To make things complete, beside this totally unsuccessful relationship, Daniela’s American Visa expires, so she decides to return home. Nevertheless, in the last moment, Daniela decides to give her American life another chance and decides to go on with their relationship. But life and misfortune seem to prevent Daniela from adding her story a happy end; Charlie most likely dies in the tragic 9/11 terrorist attack or that is what the play suggests. The whole play is made up as a series of flashbacks, which recompose the events that took place in Romania and in the U.S. and have brought her to the fragile status of an illegal immigrant. Even if most scenes develop in a realistic manner, the play altogether is not. Daniela’s role is that of a bitter storyteller who connects the audience in a direct manner, introducing each re-enactment with irony:

“I have to calm down. To calm down….[…] Here is the story…[…]

MY story, MY story (she calms down) I am Popescu Daniela, …”

(Stanescu 45)

Stanescu uses the same bitter irony when Daniela practically re-introduces herself: “Me….At my dad’s grave. Bellu Cemetery, Bucharest. Smoking like a Hamletian vamp. Hiding in the smoke.” (78) A strange, yet similarly alienating effect has the ongoing presence of the Romanian dictators “Comrade Nicolae Ceaușescu, the former Romanian president…executed on Christmas night in 1989, and Academician Doctor Engineer Comrade Elena Ceaușescu, his wife..” (54), who are exiled vampires. The sense of trauma and severance from homeland goes beyond life itself even in case of this pair of dictator vampires who: “miss home and are nostalgic about going back to Romania and sucking some delicious Romanian blood, the blood of their ‘childhood’” (55) The Ceausescu vampires watch Daniela’s each re-enactment of her story and accompany all the events in her life with bitter-tongued comments, eventually, even attacking her while at her father’s grave. Daniela’s father is held up as a perfect example of the old ideals in the native country. He represents the standards of a generation before the dictator’s generation. He rebelled against Ceausescu’s dictatorship, facing imprisonment, while the others lacked the courage to rise against him. Even amidst the chaos of the revolution he held on to a position of honor, rather willing to starve than to steal from the common wealth, and always thought himself incapable of lying irrespective of everyone else around him doing it. On the opposite, Daniela’s mother lives with post-Ceausescu ideals that approve thinking about yourself first and taking what is rightfully yours. She not only disrespects her husband, but also resents him for not showing any desire to earn money after the revolution like all the other ‘smart’ Romanians, by stealing what was left after the dictators couple’s execution and/or selling it to the foreigners, more precisely, the Americans.

MARCELA: […]…All the smart guys in Romania, in Russia, in the

whole Eastern Europe, did what was to be done, robbed the damn

dead socialist state, seized those ugly gray factories, buildings, lands,

Ceausescu’s gold, something, everything, everybody with a tiny bit

of brain stole what was to be stolen, in ’90, in ’91, in ’92, one could

make a fortune in a blink, one smart enough to be in the right place

at the right time and sign a damn piece of paper, “this factory is mine”,

“those tons of oil are mine”, “I’m the owner, I sell them to you,” to the

foreigners, to the Americans, for dollars, REAL money, That’s all,

MONEY, privatizing yourself, bribing who was to be bribed,

opening businesses! Everybody moved around but your father…

ELVIS: Played chess in the park with the other retired guys.

MARCELA: “I cannot lie,” “I cannot steal from the public wealth,”

like there was anyone there to judge him if he would. Everyone

was doing the same. Everyone who had the / brain to….(48 – 49)

To prove that Marcela’s words were not just momentary gusts due a soul mourning on her husband’s disappearance, but mirrored her own mentality, Stanescu shows us another example of communist mentality when Daniela receives a letter from her poor neighbor begging for an opportunity to work in America, for a short time, just to have enough money to have heat in winter. Even if Marcela is moved by the desperate cry of her neighbor, she is not a bit willing to show any generosity to those that happen to be less fortunate than she is. Moreover, she insists that Daniela should have a more “western” approach to the situation and better think of herself first. As if she were in an invisible dialogue with her husband’s respect for the old values and almost trying to convince herself that everything related to the past is worthless and useless, Marcela is afraid that her daughter might have inherited from her father the terrible sense of ‘loserness’. Therefore, when Daniela suggests lending some money to the poor neighbour, she is warning her daughter that:

“If you keep thinking like this, you’ll be a loser even in America.

This is how people get rich there: they take care of each Mr. Green,

they save every cent. There is no such thing as “lend” if you don’t

get something in return.” (73 – 74)

Saviana Stanescu describes the shift produced in Romanian ideals by the generation gap between Marcela and her husband, on the one hand, who celebrated the death of their dictator, but without shedding their own blood or rebelling in the name of revolution. On the other hand, Daniela was the one who preferred to fight in the streets, rather than going to college. She chose to surrender her youth fighting for political reasons in her country and wants nothing more than to live in a peaceful place. Using a parodic frame, Stănescu managed to challenge some of the most common political, social, and cultural clichés that emerged over the last few decades, in the literature by and about exiles. The outcome is a tragicomedy whose characters have little psychological determination and parody the immigrants’ “need to reassemble an identity out of refractions and discontinuities” (Said 179), and also the common East-European and specific Romanian infatuation with the U.S. The various and often contradictory perspectives are intertwined, and result in paradoxical hierarchies, hybrid value systems, and unstable identities, linked together by a sarcastic perspective. I used the term ‘parody’ in the sense defined by Linda Hutcheon, namely as “repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity” (1988:26). Hutcheon also explains that postmodern parodic writings “foreground the historical, social, ideological contexts in which they have existed and continue to exist” (Hutcheon 1988: 24-25). I believe this aspect is mostly appropriate for post-colonial and post-communist parodies whose political plans are based on re-evaluation of their connections to reality.

Owing to the double status of her author and main character, Waxing West’s parody is twofold. On the one side, America looks as recreated from a stereotypical Stalinist point of view, alienated by boredom and sexually frustrated. Daniela, on the other hand, is in compliance with the stereotyping image of a native North-American type and seems to accept, what Kristeva stated as the “multiplying masks and ‘false selves’” (1991: 8) that are imposed upon her, in accordance to the official U.S. assimilation policy and the common prejudices towards immigrants. According to Kristeva, “strangeness manifests itself within identity every time we become aware of it, and it disappears when it is recognized by all. The stranger is ‘without a home’…[…], never completely true or completely false” (1991: 8). Bearing the strangeness in her blood, Daniela introduces herself to us from an American official viewpoint, as if reading her INS file but with a seed of irony:

“I am Popescu Daniela, nationality: Romanian, age: 32, height:

165 centimeters, color of eyes: black, passport number 2670222,

sex: female, tourist visa number 555257, expired, accent: strong,

hair: long, place of birth: Bucharest, place of death: to-be-announced…”

(Stanescu 2010: 45).

The structure of the play is practically based on the character’s attempt to redefine herself according to the American standards. Her inner journey, however, shows that Daniela is unable to live behind her East-European identity, although she gradually drifts away from it. Moreover, she makes huge efforts to adapt to the twenty first century U.S. and develop a new American identity, which seems close, but remains unattainable. As a result of her unsuccessful efforts to reconstruct herself, she starts perceiving herself as the Other in relationship to herself, to Americans, and to her family and the people left behind in Romania.

Daniela strives to adopt a folkloric/exotic mask, which does not correspond to her genuine identity but to the expectations of her American partner. Consequently, her grotesque efforts ridicule not only the host society’s stereotyping perspective but also the immigrants’ submissiveness. Charlie and his mother’s attitudes speak of “parameters of admissible immigrant placement within the American symbolic configuration” (Marciniak 54). Mrs. Aronson loved Romanians because she “had a Romanian cleaning lady for 20 years” (Stănescu 2010: 51). Thus, she decided to intermediate her son’s marriage to a Romanian woman who is expected to make him happy, fulfilling the stereotypical duties of a domestic worker. In her selection process, she disregarded the mail-order bride’s identity, while perceiving her housekeeping skills as an affordable commodity. After his mother’s death, Charlie denounces Mrs. Aronson’s old-fashioned values and refuses to marry Daniela and, thus, legalize her status, while taking advantage of her. His attitude mirrors the openly acknowledged American duplicity towards second and third world immigrants, which Marciniak, among others, observes: “The United States eagerly utilizes many Mexican migrant workers as a cheap labour force for grueling seasonal jobs in fields and sweatshops but conveniently keeps them within the discursive and material space of alienhood” (39). Moreover, Charlie’s refusal to have an East-European wife reveals the more general North American rejection of non-Western immigrants. However, the host communities perform an act of reversed imagined exile, through which they stereotype immigrants and raise impenetrable legal, social, and psychological borders to keep them segregated. After her arrival in the U.S., Daniela discovers very quickly that Charlie shares this attitude but struggles to live up to his clichéd image, against her own natural tendencies. Americans also regard food as one of the main markers of ethnic identities and expect immigrants to use it as a form of representation and, thus, to make their national dishes accessible for the consumption of the majority. The Otherness is translated in terms of class and professional status in addition to ethnicity, as the majority attempts to isolate the aliens within firm social borders. Charlie assigns Daniela to the stereotypical category of migrant workers, without even enquiring about her previous social status. Accordingly, the American demands that his East-European fiancé cook traditionally for him, regardless her skills and culinary preferences. If her desperation is genuinely tragic, Daniela’s attempts to fulfill Charlie’s wishes are hopelessly ridiculous:

I hate Romanian food, Charlie, I hate ‘sarmale’ and ‘mamaliga’ and

the Romanian traditional smell, and the Romanian exotic flavours,

and the Romanian claustrophobic kitchens, but for you Charlie, I

stick two cotton pads in my nostrils, I play my energizing tape with

applauses, and I do it for you Charlie, I cook for you. (61)

Stanescu uses a similar type of parody in depicting Daniela’s attempt to change her sexual identity. The “silly Thanksgiving-game” (62), in which Charlie takes on the role of the turkey and Daniela the one of the cook, involves the two characters in the mockery of a specifically North American deviant sexual routine, reminiscent of Soviet propagandistic depictions of the U.S.: “I play this silly part, Charlie, and see you coming and shouting out of PLEASURE when I start cutting you with the plastic knife, and I have to say 'Oh, you're such a good turkey, yum-yum, but I don't yum-yum, and I don't like to yum-yum, and I generally don’t eat meat, so I yum-yum only for your sake” (62). After being rejected by Charlie, Daniela attempts to use sex once again to secure an American visa. She tries to change her sexual orientation and become Gloria’s lesbian lover but fails (141). Her various efforts to remodel herself according to the liking of her possible American relatives determine a gradual de-structuring of her identity. Daniela traps herself in a carousel of interchangeable masks, accepting to give up completely her sense of self as a price for American residency:

“I am your ashtray. Your tomb. Your Disneyland. Your past.

Your present. Your future. You can do with me whatever you want.

I am here to stay. I am here to endure. I am here to live…

(134, my italics).

In addition to depicting an immigrant’s personal crisis, Stănescu also gives Daniela the capacity to represent metonymically her fellow citizens whose value scale, self-respect, and identity have been shattered by communism and the subsequent post-communist transition. As I mentioned, the ghosts/vampires of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu represent their former dictatorship, responsible for the collective alienation and desire to leave Romania. To this purpose, Stănescu parodies in grotesque limericks the couple’s documented contempt of the people they led: “They nod at each other and start dancing and singing in a vaudeville style.

CEAU.S.ESCU:

I am a good dictator

Everyone can confess

The tender fine impalements

Relieve you from the stress

ELENA:

Report for us dear comrades

Describe your DYING seasons

We need to know exactly

For scientific reasons.” (97, original upper cases)

The Ceausescu vampires employ the stereotypical communist point of view, “No American husband… (…) No aristocratic houses in my socialist republic!” (94), and treat her as one of people they strived to depersonalize: “A bunch of worms. No spines, no brains. We should have kept them in the darkness forever. Send them all to Prison. Starve them to death. Crash all those ugly dirty pipsqueak-thieves, those Romanians” (94). The torture scene, the “Second Nightmare” (93), enacts Daniela’s rape by the communist dictators, which recalls the famous Romanian Dracula but also the anti-communist jokes, swearing, and innuendos that expressed the inefficient, and maybe cowardly, anti-communist protest that occurred during their dictatorship:

ELENA: I know! She must be impaled. In her vagina.

CEAU.S.ESCU: That’s not impaling, it’s rape.

ELENA: Whatever. Let’s have her impaled and put an end to this.

(Stanescu 94).

Daniela’s post-communist memories, however, speak of the series of collective attempts to regain self-respect and freedom, which unpredictably followed the 1989 revolution: “‘We work, we don’t think!’ – remember the miners storming into THIS square ten years ago? Shouting and singing in the rhythm of hitting us, the anti-Iliescu18 protesters. What a joke. That communist ‘with a human-face’ elected after the revolution” (Stănescu 101). During the uprising Stănescu recalls, thousands of miners came to Bucharest to “protect” the government, destroying the offices of the Opposition parties and violently attacking anyone who looked like a protester or an intellectual, such as men with beards. The event is considered by many analysts as one of the government’s most violent attempts to preserve the communist regime in Romania. Among others, Vladimir Tismăneanu and Matei Călinescu describe the two days when “Bucharest lived under terror, with miners’ squads patrolling the city, ransacking the headquarters of independent parties, groups and newspapers, and molesting all those who have even appeared to have been engaged in anti NSF20 activities” (“The 1989 Revolution and Romania’s Future”: 52). Their conclusion emphasizes the subsequent international perception of Romania as a country “unable to get rid of its despotic heritage” followed by a new stage of isolation,” and thus once again “dramatically isolated, both in the West and in the East” (57). Romanians’ freedom is now restricted from the outside, as the democratic world appear to reject the troubled post-communist country and exile it within its borders. Whereas communism closed the borders to protect its dictatorial powers, after a first stage of massive immigration to the West, post-communism isolates people through Romania’s bad international reputation and internal poverty, i.e. the visa system and the financial incapacity to travel abroad, as I have explained at the beginning of this chapter. Subsequently, the ordinary citizens develop even more conflicting attitudes towards their national identity and their collective inferiority complex and the need to escape is aggravated. Daniela is a victim of Western stereotypes in New York. The Romanian immigrant perpetuates the obedience induced by the communist dictatorship and strives to adapt to the images projected onto her. The multiple definitions of self she pursues further alienate her and the intersection of several political, social, and psychological borders transform her into a victim. In her case, the North-American cosmopolitan borderland becomes similar to a no-man’s land, where she desperately searches for a place and a way to belong.

Stănescu’s characters are luckier. Mrs. Aronson actually arrives, looking for a bride for her son, and is regarded as Daniela’s and eventually the entire family’s saviour:

“Your sister has the chance to marry an American. An American BUSINESSMAN. Mrs Aronson’s son. Charlie! Rich, decent, well-educated. American! The luck-rain has come down over Daniela. She is going to go to America and take all of us there!” (Stanescu 52).

Elvis, Daniela’s brother, highlights the cynicism of the transaction the two mothers agree upon: “Just don’t sell Dani for less than a VCR, a DVD player and a video camera!” (54). The interaction between the Romanian mail-order bride and his future American family belongs, however, to the type of borderland, which reinforces the ethnic, social, and cultural barriers. Determined by the long-term communist-Western dichotomy and even more so by the Americans’ superiority complex, Charlie’s meeting with Daniela gives a concrete form to the inherited animosity and dislike and further nurtures them. As Newman states, “The experience of meeting the ‘other’ for the first-time, especially after long periods of fear, suspicion and distrust, can in some cases heighten the mutual feelings of animosity” (151). Forced into the position of the inferior Other, Daniela decides to go back “To Romania. Back home” (132) but cannot do so. Assuming her mother’s point of view, she perceives her return as a major failure: “I’m not sure of this going back … Mom will have a heart attack… she tells every neighbour and his uncle … everyone in the elevator, in the peasants market, all the saleswomen in the supermarket know how HAPPY I am with my American husband…” (Stănescu 134). Furthermore, her return would deny her family the opportunity to imagine themselves following her and living happily in the U.S. ever after. In Waxing West the post-communist imagined exile does not consist of imagining the national community as alienated not only at home but also abroad, “elsewhere versus the origin, and even nowhere versus the roots” (Kristeva 29) and preferably in the U.S.

Daniela’s story is perfectly mirroring Romania’s struggle for a national identity after the fall of communism, yet only a decade later is Daniela trying to decide her own future. The rest of “Waxing West” moves back and forth between Bucharest and New York over a 17-month period, from April 11, 2000, to Sept. 11, 2001. Surprises are all over the place. If Charlie turns out to be kind of kinky, his sister, Gloria, may be even kinkier, and Daniela ends up cooking and cleaning for Charlie, who finds all the reasons in the world to postpone the act of marriage.

In anything she does, Daniela strives to adjust to a living beyond her dreams. But, the more she tries, the more tangible her nightmares incarnated as Romania’s former dictators, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu become, as they return as vampires to haunt her. The reason why Stănescu chose Daniela as the Ceaușescus’s favorite victim to haunt is probably related to her active participation in the street to fight for the reign removal, although the dictators’ death was celebrated mostly by the non-participants rather than those directly involved. But Daniela was “guilty” of more than participation to a fight. In the communist vampires’ opinion, Daniela had to pay for her hidden capitalist thoughts, for her hidden American Dream desire, for rejecting what Romanian communist ideology had strived so much to imprint into people’s minds. The play moves in mobile flashbacks between Daniela’s former life in Bucharest and her new life in the U.S., between the past and the present, and between an ideal image of the American Dream and the disillusion felt on the New Land.

Caught in the middle of an unwanted but induced identity crisis, Daniela strives to escape from her Romanian heritage in exchange for an American one. But, the more she becomes westernized, the more she feels losing herself. It is not only difficult, but also an exhausting task to be removed from one’s cultural identity to another. Feeling trapped between two worlds, Daniela finds a way to disengage from doubts and questions through waxing. She turns waxing into a battle against the ugly and unnecessary moments in her life. She finds the process of removing the redundant hair

like fighting. Against the unwanted hair that keeps reminding you

it’s there, inside your skin, ready to show its ugly head….[…]

Like fighting against death…(Stănescu 67)

It is like Victor Turner argued “an expression of displacement [that] can be understood as an identity in transit” in which Daniels’s liminality suggests, according to Linda Camino “that s/he is “caught between old and new surroundings” (1993: 30) Describing waxing, as a ‘little bit’ painful, Daniela offers a very practical perspective of a displaced exile who finds a way to detach from the past:

DANIELA: See? You spread the wax in the direction of the hair growth,

but pull off the strip in the opposite direction…It hurts a bit of course.

No little victory without a pain.

GLORIA: That’s….painfully TRUE (Stănescu 67, my capitals)

In this context, Gloria’s answer seems to be the perfect characterization of the exilic process, that of being painfully true. The act of waxing is a paradoxical one. The more you remove the hair, the more, sometimes even faster, it grows back, as dead as it is. However, back in the native country, the painful act of waxing was replaced by the pleasure of going to beauty salon, where Daniela remembers it was

…Warm and cosy. From heating the wax…I could spend

days and nights there…At home it was so cold and ugly,

you know, the heat was supplied in rations…[…]…It was this

smell of…Beauty….All those women, young, old, fat, skinny,

lying there, on the same bed, fighting the same fight, believing they

can change, they can become beautiful just like this, snap your

fingers, pull off the strip…When they paid, you could see in their

eyes the sign of victory….I was like their….hair-fairy! (68, my italics)

For Daniela, the pain of waxing is as important as the removal process itself. What counts is the result, the effect on both the body and the spirit. When Gloria asked her whether she likes to wax herself, Daniela replies “I like to see the wax destroying the hair” (68) The perfect body, as well as the perfect life, must be free from ugliness, shiny but “each one with its own particular charm and its own sad story: the hairy tale” (68) The process of uprootal from the body of any hints of imperfections must be done with strong determination, skill and motivation. The tragic side of this ‘hairy story’ comes with the acknowledgment that any seeming clearance of imperfections proves to be successful on a surface level. We can wax and wax, in any directions of its growth, but the ‘ugly hair’ will return, and will always be there, inside our skin, making us continue to fight a losing battle. Daniela carries the same useless fight with her own identity. No matter how hard she tries to change the way she speaks, moves, dresses or even thinks, just to look as much American as possible, she is almost condemned to remain Romanian below the surface. This inevitable gap between Daniela’s two worlds will never give her the chance to be truly Romanian or American, yet she will always be a hyphenated Romanian – American. She is an unhappy alien whose only connection to this hyphenated world is made through pain.

The tragedy of the World Trade Towers collapse is chosen by Stanescu for the final of the play as a collapse of Daniela’s American Dream as well. The last scene of Waxing West means for Daniela an unfortunate interlacing of the horror of September 11th and the panic of the Romanian revolution, to which she stood as a witness. Furthermore, she feels caught in a spider web in her search for Charlie and completely isolated because of her ‘alien’ status. Along with the WT towers collapse, Daniela’s hopes of safety and peace collapse as well, and the dreams of living in a world far from the ugliness of her past knock to pieces.

Her inner world is disintegrated and she feels as if the ‘unwanted hair’ of her past is showing again “its ugly head”. The author does not tell us whether Charlie is dead or not, and this makes us believe that Daniela may still hope for her dreams to come true, but for this she must again go through the painful act of ‘waxing’ her existence, as she knows that “pain speaks all languages” and that she “may be hairy, but not dead” (154)

In Waxing West, the play I discussed in this chapter, the main characters benefit from the actual freedom to travel, previously denied by communism, and by the life in “a hybrid cultural space” (Bhabha 11), disregarded by colonialism. They challenge political and social borderlines and try to re-evaluate themselves as a part of a collective, from the family ones to the national communities, only to discover that, as Newman concludes, “the transformation of the borderland into a space of transition cannot be taken as given just because the borders have undergone a process of physical opening” (152). Overcoming inclusion/exclusion stereotypes and accepting the borderland condition comes with unexpected challenges and sacrifices. From this alienating position, however, the one’s most obvious choice is to benefit from the proximity of geographical, cultural, and/or psychological borders because “[t]he presence of margins […] gives a culture choices” (New 27), as well as an individual. Arrived in the U.S. at the beginning of the twenty first century, Waxing West’s Daniela loses her identity and eventually accepts the underground existence of an illegal immigrant. Paradoxically, when confronted with physical and/or psychological conventional borders, both post-colonial and post-communist dramatic characters perceive themselves as belonging to and/or being a borderland.

4.5. Saviana Stănescu’s Global Immigrant

For someone like me, a person who has never been in a position to search for a new identity in a foreign country, nor has ever tried to live as an immigrant in a ‘foreign soil’, as Manea likes to name the place he is living on, the turmoil of alienation arising in the soul of an exile is very difficult to understand. Things become easier when the exile is a writer, especially a writer who chose to live in a foreign country as an “alien”. Saviana Stanescu is a woman with a great personality, impossible to avoid, on the contrary, you feel an indefinite attraction to be in her presence. She is a unique writer who, unlike the Romanian post-war writers, has managed to create a modern realism in the world of poetry and theatre rounded by a great humanity and a large amount of disarming sincerity when she admits being a piece of each of her characters. The alienation Saviana Stănescu refers to is related to the language. Leaving the homeland meant also leaving the native language. And this change of languages is almost like geologic shift. You are forced to recover you identity, to reshape your worthiness and, to reinvent yourself in a new land and language, eventually. Saviana Stănescu succeeded so well, that beyond everyone expectations, she invented a global immigrant through the agency of her plays. Soon after she arrived in the U.S., Saviana Stănescu thought of a first project she named “To write about the Immigrants Experience”, which she managed to put into practice around 2000 and has proved to be a very successful experiment, consisting in taking pictures, interviewing and creating large collages with the immigrants she met there. She started to talk to them, many were poor and still illegal immigrants and she discovered so many stories that had nothing in common with the American Dream cliché. As she considered herself an alien, Stănescu needed to understand their lives, their dreams, their nightmares. And then, she used everything they said in her plays. Stănescu’s characters are Romanian, Russian, Latino, Moldavian immigrants. Moreover, the actors and the stage directors she worked with, also belong to the world of immigration. Her characters are so divers, she likes to call them “clowns in the circle of life” and very easy to “read”, but the way they handle difficult or dangerous situations have a specific good-humor that help them survive in a clean and honest manner. None of them is trying to cheat and this makes them easy to love.

As John Clinton Eisner remarked in the prologue of Saviana Stănescu’s New York Plays, Aliens with Extraordinary Skills “focuses more on the present moment rather than the past and is more about the New York experience than about immigration” (33). Stănescu creates a unique blend of international immigrant characters in a delicate lighthearted way. It is perhaps the first time when a self-exiled author manages to re-create the image of the immigrant theatre in a cosmopolitan manner. Even if the main characters are foreigners, in the sense the author herself declares as an “alien”

their immigrant stories are distinctive and fundamental to their identities as newly-hatched Americans. But they have tapped into the city’s heartbeat and know they are part of it. They are ready to build a place for themselves, to dream beyond the current challenges, to negotiate the system (even U.S. Homeland Security) because they are ready – even determined – to call New York their home (Eisner in Introduction, 34)

Unlike the other plays and in spite of the same struggle in a new and unfriendly territory, Aliens with Extraordinary Skills is a happy ending story. In fact, ‘happiness’ is the utmost desire of one of the ‘aliens’, Nadia. If Daniela realized that the fulfilling of her dream to become American was a painful process, based on repeated waxing, Nadia, a clown from Moldova wants nothing but

To live among normal people, harmless people, free people, happy people, like your work, to be appreciated, to have a family, a husband…[…]…I want to be happy! It’s written in [your] constitution. This country is about happiness. I know that! (Aliens with Extraordinary Skills 278, my italics)

To understand the cosmopolitan face of this American alien story, we must know the origins of these characters. Our two immigrants are Nadia and Borat. The former, Nadia, comes from Moldova where she lived in a family of professional clowns. Unfortunately, her parents died and she decided to journey to a new land, accompanied by a suitcase filled with balloon animals and anxious to live a new happy life by making what she had learnt from her parents: to make people laugh. The latter, Borat, is from Russia and his reasons for this journey as an immigrant is different from Nadia’s. His mother is ill and he hopes to make enough money as a taxi driver, to help his mother recover.

The most touching was undoubtedly the metaphor of the destiny of an alienated love –the so-called affective episodes between the squirrel and the dog. Immigrants do not have access to real Love, as they are uprooted. They have to be invented wings, to be able to reach a form of identity. Eternal lovers, in fairy-tales and real life, the squirrel and the dog are going through the hoops, anguished by clashes and inconsistencies and haunted by fears. Their effort to stay together, ridiculous as it may look sometimes, touches and makes you think. The squirrel and the dog represent ironical hypothesis and stances, like a couple of Chinese shadows, on our case of Bob’s and Nadia’s, two clowns learning the get the perfect kiss under the silly disguise of a sausage and a can of Coca-Cola, in order to make some money at MacDonald’s. However, Bob and Nadia remain together, like the dog which remains with the squirrel, even after being seriously wounded.

Chapter 5. Representations of the Immigrant in Contemporary Romanian-American Prose Writing

5.1. When Did Andrei Codrescu’s ‘Outside’ and Petre Popescu’s ‘Return’ Disappear?

As acknowledged in the first chapter, exile represents an empty space whose negative connotation increases the interest of the actual critics. It is a fact that identity comes into being when it is either missing or endangered. Exile is the phenomenon that places identity between parentheses, initiating the fracture of the individual from homeland. Actually, the same as in the case of identity, to try and define the concept of exile according to its phenomenological features is the equivalent to an illusion. Scholars, who thoroughly analyzed the concept of exile, agreed upon one sense, namely a phenomenology of this concept is impossible to evaluate due to the large number of individual forms of exile, as well as of the various motivations it involves. Laurențiu Ulici emphasizes this aspect in an article dedicated to exile, Ovid’s Avatars, concluding through a formula already known, that "there is no exile, there are only exiles" (1995: 7). If Stefan Augustin Doinas defined exile as a “tragic farce of the History…. the proof of our complete incapacity to be born a second time and, thus…[…]…we permanently struggle in the ‘placenta’ of our existence” (Between tragic farce and destiny, 6), Mircea Eliade in his Journal in 1993 describes the feeling of fragmentation derived from his exile as the place where

“…everything left there: my youth, my past, family, friends. And everything I did or I did not do, my teenager papers, manuscripts, my correspondence with so many friends who no longer exist, the files with my first articles from high-school and university, absolutely everything. Here, in the West, I am nothing but a fragment” (243, my italics)

Migrations over the last two centuries create new diasporas, new displacing territories, new types of banishment and different categories of exiles and refugees.

Along with the end of the Cold War and the open and unconfined movement of people between East and West, the propagation of the border crossing was endowed with an even larger interest in ‘diaspora’ and its conceptualization. Diaspora has and offers the necessary premises for an introspective and insightful examination of the ‘discourses’, taking into account the most particular historical, political and social experiences of both individuals and communities. At the same time, diaspora leaves the doors open for the newly acquired experiences of Romanian immigrants in the Land of Dreams. Following the classical model of severance and identity politics, most of the Romanian immigrants in America begin their diasporization as exiles.

Before the end the Cold War, the exilic condition of the Romanian writers was an in-between position which may be either limiting or liberating, nevertheless labeled with feelings of loss and trauma in a new, hostile and unpredictable host land, most of the time isolated from both inside and outside communities. The new realities, the new surrounding community and, especially the new language create an effect of in-betweenness caused by shifting places which can provoke pain, disillusionment, fragmentation, trauma and discontinuity, but, in the same respect, can be a creative force and source of new ways of expression. The first stage of inability to survive or manage with a new reality, another language and, the emerging longing for home caused by shifting places can turn in a creative force and source of new ways of expression.

To discuss the effects of exile in general and Romanian writers’s situation in particular, we need to revisit the definition of exile and make the necessary underlining. I wrote about exile as being an ‘enforced removal from one’s native land according to a sentence or an addict; ‘a penal expatriation’; ‘enforced residence in some foreign land’, ‘a condition of being banished’. What resides from all these definitions is the involuntariness of exile, in other words, exile is a condition which is forced upon a subject. In a wonderful collection of interviews, sub-entitled 46 Romanian and Friends of Romania from the Country and Outside, Mihaela Cristea had an interesting dialog with Octavian Paler who, in an unmistakable style, emphasized that “not long ago, exile had for us something in common with death. It was definitive. A Romanian who left Romania had to say to himself: I am doing it for good” (6). In favor of Octavian Paler’s opinion stands the Romanian exile literature created before 1989 which was concentrated on identity creation, brought out personal experiences from the traumatic causes of the displacements, throughout the traumatic and painful, either or not forced, removal and the final settlement.

Andrei Codrescu emigrates to America at the age of 19, but he will never forget his homeland which continuously nourishes him spiritually, as the author himself confessed from over the ocean, and makes him write Romanian poems bearing "American mask", whereas the English poems are written while he was learning this language. But once arrived in America, Codrescu feels more and more attracted to the words of the new language, first in poetry, then in novels. He also notes that this is a perfect way of socializing and integration into the culture of adoption. As the language of adoption becomes familiar, Codrescu start looking for another America, to which he cannot find any cultural identity within the diversity of the multiethnic events.

The writer is aware that cultural identity cannot be reduced only to appearances: Coca-cola, bright advertisements or Mc'Donalds and its quality will not be reduced or rejected because of the volume or quantity. The sensitivity of the Artist which is doubled now by his thorough knowledge of English language takes over all immediate feelings and impressions, turning platitude and cliché into artistic miracle.

Being familiar with two different and full of paradoxes worlds, Romania and America, as a true connoisseur writer, Andrei Codrescu is able to return, in an attempt of de-diasporization, back to his homeland capturing with high accuracy the moment of Romania’s changing colors, in the country’s attempt to regain an honor stained and draggled by too many years of communism. Andrei Codrescu is a postmodernist writer. His novels are the result of direct observations, ‘translated' in a non-figurative art style: fragmentary images, collage images, sequences played in a true road show language, which brings him very close to the postmodern technique.

As far back as 1965, Codrescu’s mind was haunted by the idea of uprooted, having a kind of “Sturm und Drang” animus to live and sense what famous exiled ancestors had experienced during the history:

I wanted to suffer just as our great exiled poets had suffered and in a sense that only a teenager can do it when he devotes himself to a more important thing than his own person. The suffering is very pleasant, painfully attractive due to drum beats on the some smuggling magnetic tapes playing Western music, letting the whole world know that the young generation was going up the wall of revolt, irrespective of the place they were living. (The Disappearance of “Outside”, 1990: 47, my translation)

In his winged and warm-inflamed teenage mind, Codrescu connected his desire to become a famous poet with the necessity of involving exile and uprooted as the obligatory state of being:

As for what the poet is doing, the answer was easy: wandering. From Miorita to Ion Barbu’s poems, the Romanian literature is a long Odyssey of renaissance, based on a metaphorical journey. But the metaphor and the reality are not separable in our culture. (47, my translation)

Just like other immigrants, Codrescu no longer considers America a wish-come-to-an-end journey, but only another shifting point (Appadurai 2003) and, consequently, a chance to imagine a new beginning:

I imagined Exile as a concrete territory, a psychological place of vast dimensions, with precise borderlines, with own customs and typical tourist attractions. Geographically, this could be Paris, Rome, New York, Buenos Aires or San Francisco, but, spiritually, it began at the borders of the Soviet Empire. (48, my translation)

Nothing scared young Codrescu or prevented him from fulfilling his desire. Neither the bureaucratic impediments, nor the idea of running from the army made him change his mind or lose ground, on the contrary, the unusual and attractive perspective to emigrate in a quite ‘select’ company such as Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade or Vladimir Nabokov, overwhelmed him in the best way possible:

I did not really care where I was heading for. I asked for a visa for several countries and I was accepted by three of them: Australia, Canada and United States. All of them were countries of English spoken language which was to become my new speaking language. I did not hang too much in the balance: the drums I had heard on the magnetic tapes playing Western music were from the United States. […] By deciding this way, the destiny was ready to offer me a lucky strike. An air of freedom was obvious everywhere, making possible for a failure crack to carve up in the solid wall of the political nightmare. (49, my translation)

The simple existence of an ‘alien’ creates in the mind of the American society a sort of an amalgamation, leading to a dangerous feeling, which is the peril of becoming racial, in the sense described by Lavie and Swendenburg, namely the fear that the “savage” invades “home” (2).

I discovered my country of exile not in a company of my fellow expatriates, but in the middle of the American youth. At that time (late 60s), exile was a status-quo. Generations were in an exile one from the other, thousands of young people were traveling the continent in a state of deliberate religious abandon. Exile was part of the popular culture, and its sense had been extended … […]. An entire generation self-exiled itself for a weekend in a place called Woodstock, thus creating a “nation of the youth”, which became a paradigmatic, original social riotousness unmet before in the history. (Codrescu 50, my translation)

According to Laguerre, the diasporization process is a two-way process, taking place from within and without simultaneously. In other words, America-the Dream Land, is not a wish embedded in a fast corner of his youth, but the sense of a fresh air of freedom in “the international Idea-State, the only functional anarchist system in the world” (Codrescu 48). Therefore, the image of a superior America suffers both a deterrritorialization and a reterritorialization with respect to the emigrants’ dreams and desire for freedom, instead of another place to settle. In case of Andrei Codrescu, the American Dream begins in his adolescence fed by the magic of his hometown, Sibiu, and described in his book The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius (New York: George Braziler, 1976). The metamorphoses suffered by his creative personality have not remained only at the level of poetry, but crossed the bridge of his talent toward literature. Once he started breathing freedom under the sky of his land of choice, Codrescu clinches almost desperately to the words of the new language, associating them in poems. Codrescu’s process of diasporization lies under his adoration for poetry, used as radiography of a boundary or barrier state. His writing arises almost spontaneously as a result or provoked by the miracle of the immediate experiences. Codrescu does not challenge reality, does not look for inspiration at any price, on the contrary, the reality or his diasporic life is the one that “writes him”, sometimes masters him, and involves him up to the last detail: “my biography, in the absence of facts, lies on uncertain ground” (The Disappearance of Outside 38). Codrescu’s entire diasporization lies under the sign of inkhorn, inside of which there is his Outside, long wished since he was teenager. If one day he refuses to the bookishness of his life and “leave[s] the pages of books, [he] go[es] back on the streets” (75).

Echoing Codrescu’s teenage American Dream, Petre Popescu confesses in Intoarcerea (1991), “I was living in my country and dreaming about America. […] I saw America, America in a forsaken cinema in Bucharest at the end of the 60s during a short cultural break between capitalism and communism[…] the dream of a Third World boy about a country he had never seen could not be censored” (4). The communist regime used an entire stockpile of means combined with threats to persuade and knock the spirit out of Romanians with respect to the immorality, corruption and degradation embodied in the capitalist societies. Romanian documentaries or American movies shown on TV or in cinemas were blaming and accusing the effects and the consequences induced by capitalism incorporated in the American consumerist society. However, the effect on the Romanian people was far from what the communist political regime wanted to attain:

I don’t know exactly how this happened but we, dumb Romanians who went to the movies to laugh, to cry, to make out, to feel good and eat sunflower seeds and to utter an Oh! or an Ah! at the sight of the dresses worn by stars and at the sight of their cars, us, we were never horrified by capitalism. Or by America, as it appeared on the celluloid. On the contrary, we loved that America was bad. Let’s take for example The French Division or The Homecoming, both of them seemed to support communist propaganda; still we loved New York’s energy, we loved that the character of Jon Voigt, the impotent paraplegic, stays in the end with Jane Fonda. Even at its worse, America couldn’t be wrong. (Popescu 90)

The literary world has always mirrored the human evolution and the condition of a society. In an insightful manner, Codrescu explains that there is also a consequence in the large desire and opening of the American society to receive practically the ‘invasion’ of emigrants. Soon after the emigrants’ arrival, whether forced or willingly, they kept on the wrong side of the native who began to force the ‘aliens’ to choose between their efforts to re-link with their roots and commit full integration into the new society, in a metaphorical sense, to leave behind the Old World (Codrescu 60).

This was the time when Codrescu saw the exile in a ‘historical light’:

In this context I began to see the way my literary exile fellows think and I rushed to make a belated connection. For them, exile was indeed a unifier experience, but not as I believed at the beginning. It was holding on, not by its heroes, but by dignity […]. The contact among its famous citizens was made sporadically and was marked by long silences. During this moment of silence the “story” of exile was reeling. As if each exiled person had been an unfinished sentence, a phrase impossible to understand without the original text of which it had been cut. (55, my translation)

Codrescu defines his immigrant state as a “strange position” (56), in other words, he chooses to live a “mythical” exile instead of a “real” one:

I did not feel I was separated from the culture of my home country in a painful way. Obviously, I was to some extent tormented by the thought that I might never be able to return; from time to time, a strange nostalgia Romanians call “dor”-longing, came over me, through fragments of times and places approachable only in my memory.(56, my translation)

But for Codrescu, the reality of exile was less important as he “was in love with the myth of exile” (56), a myth that had overreached the West. Going on another illustration, Codrescu argues that a successful integration comes together with the desire to forget. He claims that while the first immigrants settled in a new world in order to forget the old world, some of the later immigrants decided to settle in a new land in order to remember homeland and this makes him feel like “the cartographer of the lost space”, while trying “to fill in gaps that need to be filled” (67). Hence immigrants prove the radical loss of all spheres and the desire to re-build in the new world. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), Milan Kundera suggested an interesting theory of the memory, indicating the precise places inside of it where the creative impulse looses the fear from present and devoutness. In order to keep body and soul together after his leaving in exile in 1970s, Kundera realized he “had to write to remember and to forget, because forgetting is “such a sweet narcotic” (Kundera cited in Codrescu 162). On the other side, Codrescu admits the superiority of the emigrants coming from their faith and hope in culture (101), the force resulting from gaining freedom generating creativity, while they find Western people already “suffocated, drowned by the electronic environment” (100).

Being aware of the significant place the immigrant has acquired in the “collective imagination of the Western public” (100), Codrescu renders evident the intense need and curiosity of the native American literary public to assimilate the exile’s cultural heritage:

The literal exile brings along a fresh air: it moves to the outside and has the ambition to create an equally large and high quality space, compared to what the actual geopolitical borders offer. […] The Western postmodernist language becomes self-contained from scraps. […] The immediate effect of their [exiles] trust in art is the kind of pleasure of a rather liberating text than a suffocating one. (101, my translation)

Assaulted by the violence of every aspect of the consumerist society that burst into his daily existence, Codrescu’s writing acquires the aspect of a ‘heretical medium’, being in a permanent war with the aberrances, paradoxes and contradictions they involve. In love with the new language, Codrescu searches for another America which is neither the one of Walt Whitman’s immediate experiences, nor the one of the 60s’ Beat Generation; an America for which he is not capable to find any cultural identity in the diversity of multiethnic manifestations. America cannot be reduced to appearances and superficies: blue jeans, Coca-Cola, illuminating commercials; quality can and must never be amended or neutralized by quantity or volume. For Codrescu, experiences, adventures, immediate effects and sensations coming right from the street are essential, as he manages, according to many literary critics, to change “clichés into miracles”.

Petru Popescu impersonates the famous writer in Communist Romania who became émigré defecting to the United States in 1977, where he made himself a name as both popular fiction and non-fiction writer. Through his journal Întoarcerea ( 2001), Popescu attempts a negotiation with his Romanian readers who felt disappointed and betrayed when he chose to leave the country. Întoarcerea is not only a rich and fascinating saga based on the memory of a troubled family life and the trauma suffered after losing his twin brother to polio, but also Popescu’s inner fights before deciding to run away and then the plunge into a new society and culture to which he perfectly adapted, while never ending to rediscover his own Romanian past. As he recognizes in the beginning of his journal,

“I was born and raised in a communist country. I ran away, I came to America, I lived in freedom and, yet, at a certain level of my being, I continued to lie in an undercroft, under the ground, in that complete silence- until, in spite of my own expectations, I have decided to come back to surface to see again the place where I was born. When I decided to return to that space, the silence I kept inside me, gave way” (3)

Petru Popescu finds his roots again and much to his surprise, he realizes they are renewed, more powerful, yet old. Just like other Romanian émigrés writers, at first, he finds complicated to adapt:

When I ran away, I thought that freedom could be relished like water after crossing a dessert. But I have never felt that savour. After I ran away, freedom, as I imagined it under communism, as an antithesis of the lack of freedom, as an element of an antonymic pair: hunger – satiety, need – abundance, fright – safety, tragedy – euphoria, that freedom, as I have learned, did not exist. (2)

America did not allow Popescu to enjoy his freedom without compelling him to assume his responsibilities and priorities in his new life through relishing, yet stressing and traumatizing processes. On the brief, “America is the place where people re-invent themselves, finding here besides a new future, a new past as well” (3).

Not only demands America assuming responsibilities on behalf of immigrants, but the welcoming and the process of adjusting to the new community are far from being delicate and understanding. The first interview of the immigrants with the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization inside the Department of Justice proves to be a wicked and unvarnished first contact with the Land of Dreams. This first visual appointment is related by Codrescu in Domnul Teste în America, in an unsparing manner, thus revealing a horror-struck America for immigrants who, eventually, “pay tribute as foreign poor, masked in blue suits of celebration like bad verses on an absolutely stuttering song; and I am about to pay the same tribute” (79). The image of this first encounter to get the desired American citizenship has been deeply ingrained into Codrescu’s memory as “the long sought after green card, an official fillip in the well mannered outfit” (79), during an abasing and mortifying process involving both physical interference and cranky enquiries such as “Have you ever practiced sexual perversion?” or “have you ever had homosexual relations?” (80). For moments, during this meeting, America lost the gilded image and dreams began to pale, while an obstinate bitter taste was spreading from mouth to soul.

The only tradition, in the most human terms, are the hands, resting on my hips, these ox hoofs of a well fed policeman, taking their time on my waist like they would also do on the other waists and hips of the millions of immigrants that could come here from now on: a sort of silent dance, samba de Los Americanos. (Codrescu 80)

The terrifying description abundant in realistic details produces a striking and arousing fear scene that drives the reader back in war times, remembering the Nazi concentration camps or the encounters with the unconcealed cruelty Securitate back in Romania, as if poor immigrants had the misfortune to escape from a communist and totalitarian regime only to meet another one.

The bureaucracy of hands has its own hierarchy: the fist punching in full face the emigrant, who, stumbling when descending from the ship, gives the impression that he wants to run and disappear into the night; the index finger pointing towards his owner, meaning “come here, worm!”, the same index finger pointed towards the ill young man, unshaved for two weeks, harshly asking him to step out of the line in order to be sent back where he came from; the vertical fist hitting the metal office, signifying that, after the owner calmed down, the guilty might be forgiven […]. (81)

Strange, but true, echoing Codrescu’s description, after 20 years and the emergence of a globalized world, Domnica Rădulescu encounters the same rusted, bureaucratic and stiffed American Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization inside the Department of Justice, which seems to have not change a bit, following the same bizarre interrogations in a similar hostile manner, destined to dishearten whoever wants to emigrate and fulfill a dream. This time the questions go even farther, irrespective of the gender:

The officer has just asked me something from the very end of the questionnaire; about whether I would fight in a war should the United States go in a war. The question took me by surprise. I say, “On whose side?”

The officer looks at me with mean eyes and wipes the sweat off his flat, shiny face before he answers. I correct myself and ask him, “What weapon […] would I be using?”[…] This is not the way naturalizing interviews are supposed to go.(Train to Trieste 210)

The dialogue has nothing of a true examination; the questions are meant to put the immigrant in difficulty of not knowing what should satisfy the officer, the atmosphere is meant to discourage the subject, overall haunting the permanent threat that, in case of non-cooperation, the file will be rejected. A discouraging feeling arises from inside the confused mind and Mona Manoliu realizes that “this scene stops making sense: the square, windowless room, the neon lights, the man with a flat, shiny face filling out a form and asking [her] questions about wars and the wounded” (210) and, suddenly, she doesn’t want to be “naturalized” anymore, because “the word makes no sense to [her], as if [she] were unnatural” (210). But, an eventual deportation back to Romania is even more frightful, that the mere thought of it made her tremble as if she “fidget in front of the naturalizing officer, feeling overdressed and ridiculous” (211).

Both Codrescu and Rădulescu described so explicitly the harsh and ugly faces of reality that they managed to develop a ‘phenomenology of exile’ by opposing inside and outside. As Ioan Petru Culianu mentioned in the preface of Codrescu’s The Disappearance of “Outside” (6), the two opposed political categories

“turn constantly one into the other: “outside” becomes the “inside” of the immigrant, while the absolute “inside”- the country of escape – becomes either impossible to attain, or as in case of Codrescu, who broadcast the short and lack of glory Romanian revolution live for NPR, an “inside” of the memory and a necessary pole of the infinite dialectics between “inside” and “outside” (6)

According to Culianu, Codrescu offers us an important lesson of politics in which the author considers communism a distorting mirror which was capable to create the the reality of the world along an entire century. In the absence of this mirror, once the immigrant is outside, the “outside” practically disappears, as it lack mirroring imagined reality and the reality collapses in itself.

5.2. Norman Manea’s and Gabriel Pleșea’s Past and Present Impossibilities

As an essayist, in his articles, studies and interviews, Norman Manea defines his position towards the exile, Judaism, country, and the Romanian language. Trauma, sufferance, hiatus, nostalgia – all determined by the experience of the exile become a superior understanding of life and generate an ethic attitude that can be found in all his writings. This is simply because the exile is, as the author says, in Brecht's words "the best school of dialectics."

Evolution, phenomena strongly related and interconditioned the art of discovering the truth by confronting opposite judgments – all evolve in Norman Manea's writings in order to situate themselves against the world's spectacle, bringing intransigent questions when it comes of braking Hegel's dialectics fundamental principles such as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Norman Manea's writings don’t break the rules determined by a dialectical living of individual, collective or historical existence. Uncertainty is a way of relating to literature, and in his essays Norman Manea proves to be an intransigent polemist, a very sensitive analyst, a combatant which clearly formulates his "synthesis".

A preoccupation in Norman Manea's literary work is defending self identity by preserving the liberty of thinking, by staying detached from everything that is pre-made, from everything that is self-sufficient and would serve to label, as the author himself confessed in an interview: "When I came to the West, few years ago, the urge to describe my experience under the Romanian dictatorship – and even more important, the lessons that could stand out from such a biographical experience – faced my fear of increasing the clichés of a suffering already classified and commercialized by the east-European dissidents” (Manea, Textul nomad, 2006).

The identity journey represents severance. In Manea’s case, his dislocations turn into several relocations processes, as his spaces of adoption are not singular during his life. Exile is “an emblem of our times” (27), argues Manea, in which the exile does not necessarily start a completely new life in the new society, thus not being an irreversible breakage or an adamant abyss. On the contrary, exile is a toing and froing between worlds – the one endowing the exile with the substance of narration and the hostland meant to receive the exile’s confessions.

Of the Romanian prose writers, Norman Manea represents, by far, adding up as if under the sign of a fatality, almost all kinds of exile that have ever been given to an individual. Sometimes, this exilic experience is met by another representative writer’s view and is brought to the light by means of a written dialogue. The exchange of views and personal memories between Norman Manea and the publicist Hannes Stein, published in a volume under the title Words from the Exile, in Berlin, may be enlisted in the long and good “dialogic” tradition of the European culture.          

"Exile starts as soon as we are born" – says in a Freudian tone Norman Manea, in his most successful book “The Return of the Hooligan” (12). Converted into an obsessive axiom of the author's identity routes, the reflection serves as the motto for another dialogic foray into the Norman Manea’s intellectual world, Words from the Exile, and is the result of more conversations initiated by another sharp and refined spirit, also marked by the exile experience, the journalist Hannes Stein.   

Following the same subject of exile as initial model of the Romanian association with America, Norman Manea himself reveals in an interview in Suplimentul de Cultură (no. 245/2009 17-23) that the core subject of one of his latest novels The Lair (2009) is exile embroidered in a story of pilgrimage in which the word ‘exile’ defines the errant stranger, a waif rather than an exile in a new Babylon. According to Manea, his characters live in another culture, in another society, another world but in the same life that tightly connects them to the past, the same past full of memories, loves and hates. Although the book is built on the pattern of a detective novel, The Lair is marked by the search of identity in which the heroes struggle to recover their own selves usually hidden for exiles. Beside an unsolved crime, the novel has all the elements traditionally used by the successful writers of the moment, a triangle love story, an ambiguous, yet poetic threatening, and American adventure. It is the story of Professor Augustin Gora, exiled in America because of the communist regime from his native country, defying his ex-wife Lu and her cousin and lover, Peter Gaspar, also Dima Cosmin and Mihnea Palade (and his fiancé Ayesha) the latter turning into the victim of an assassination; dr. Koch, Boltanski-the taxi driver, even the Italian woman Beatrice Artwein and the Vietnamese who is chief of security at the university where Gașpar teaches – they all impersonate exiles, as according to Manea, once arrived in America, an exile is a “stranger among strangers” (Manea 14). This first person narration at the beginning of the last sequence, looks ahead the conversations between Norman Manea and Saul Bellow as

the following weeks and months, I spoke at length with Augustin Gora about old age. The subject didn’t strike him as somber, not even after the confirmation, albeit in dubious circumstances, of the death of our younger friend, Peter Gaspar. (317)

Moreover, although the protagonists often talk about the "magical and superrealist small country at the edge of the world" (211), about the "ambiguous transition to anywhere of the country," being concerned about what may bring "a postmodern revolution in a superrealist country" (213), that is " if after the Communist regime the transition goes towards the year 2000 instead of the year 1938" (214) and although they evoke places or moments from a common past, Romania's name does not appear at all.

The characters balance against this labyrinth the image of the fragile, subtle, yet personalized lair, sending the reader to Max Blecher’s illuminated Lair, in Manea’s case the lair representing a double-side metaphor: the library (“are you in your lair? – What lair? – Between book covers” (159)) and the intrinsic body, thus sending us to another two emblems of the novel: reading and sickness or knowledge and impermanency. Reading is another lair in which both Gora and Gașpar are trapped by passion and profession as they find themselves through dialogues; explicit or allusive, blending in a fluent network the books of their libraries and lives. At the same time, they are prisoners of their own bodies in which “the shadow of death is stretching”, yet living at the highest level the decay metamorphosis, meaning you are “neither mole nor bug, but elephant, untrained for the little somersaults of the day”, and the forthcoming death which “does not exist without life” (320). In Gora’s exile, challenging a pragmatic America is a daily torment that does not take place in the lair of his library, but in the hospital, at school, in cabs and most of all in the tragic terrorist episode of September 11th. It is not the appropriateness that is looked for, but the motivation of an eccentric exile that penetrates invisibly a professional utopia while dreaming a kind of a blessed academic life:

“America! Peter bumbled ecstatically. Universities hidden in the woods, like in the Middle Ages. University professors ready for adventure! Historian who plead in famous cases, musician chemists, psychologists bankers, athlete film directors, mathematicians blocking the mise-en-scene, actors turned senators, governors, presidents”. (54 -55)

Driven by avant-garde aspirations, Peter Gașpar let himself be reeducated by America, tells his students about the communist penitentiary colony, accepts to write a review for Dima, in a word he is almost subdued by the routine of the adapting process. America seems to be not only the need for freedom and a “land of the wanderers” (97), but also a taste for “irresponsibility” (99), as exiles are capable to create a sort of a “metabolism of survival” (90). Until one day, when he receives a letter containing a threat to death, sent by a Bosniac student, Deste Onal, as a response to her esthetic and political visions: “Next time I kill you, I promise you the labyrinth made of a single strait line which is invisible and everlasting”. This event makes Gașpar disappear, he practically exits the fiction. For Gașpar, exile is a ‘suspended moment’. His life unreels in emptiness, as if he were waiting for someone to unlatch its significances, settle back its values and make order into its institutions. It is, actually, the ontological genesis which most of Manea’s exiles is waiting, while being trapped in their own memories.

As Michel Seidel argued in his study Exile and narrative Imagination (1986), the exiled writer lives paradoxically in two worlds, incapable to disembarrass himself of the past which is projected into his literary work and who lives in a new place while going back in his memory to the native place, thus evoking simultaneously two realities. In both Norman Manea’Lair and The Return of the Hooligan and Gabriel Pleșea’s Aruncă pâinea ta pe ape (Cast Thy Bread Upon the Waters, 1994), part of the Trilogy of Exile, the Romanian space coexists with the American space before and after 1989.

For Gabriel Pleșea, the displacing to another space meant a re-definition of the inner self, an operation made under the fear of ‘disappearance’ as a result of an uprootal from the native land, language, culture and a continuous fragmentation and re-construction of identity. In Gabriel Pleșea’s Aruncă pâinea ta pe ape, the main characters, Ion and Jenny, are two Romanian emigrants in America living under a psychological unbalance due to the displacement and severance from the native identity space. Jenny finds exile an inspiring state of being, making her meditate and inducing her the desire to find answers to her own decision to live in another world:

I was thinking of all those people, of all the immigrants that wandered about this place, of their dreams as well as of my own dream. I’m trying to see beyond them. What were they doing here or what am I doing here? […] Those people had all the reasons to leave their country: starvation, poverty, persecution. I, on the other hand, ran from myself, from my endless problems, from my own unhappiness and until now I haven’t managed to define my objectives and preoccupations. (100, my translation)

Jenny admits that it is very difficult to get used to the new world because her “body is here” while her “mind is there”, as an American-Italian character characterized her. Jenny’s inner fights with her identity make Ion become conscious of his never being “anything other than what he was born” (106). He is not convinced that marrying a native American, namely Sue, is the right decision to take as “this was not only a simple relation man-woman, but a union between two different cultures, two ways of sentimental engagement” (106). Ion realizes that the differences in mentalities and behavior a ‘partnership’ like a marriage with a native woman bring along, involves an obligatory Americanization and thus another kind of totalitarian autocracy, though different from communism: looking for a job through working agencies providing he already has two years of American experience, which is almost impossible to acquire as his diplomas attained in Romania are not officially accepted and neither the experience he got in other countries than America. As all Plesea’s characters, Ion is also an intellectual struggling to survive a society that wants re-invented immigrants without taking into consideration their past achievements. Therefore, a graduate in Faculty of Letters in Romania has to re-orient to a totally different field, Economics, which does not stop him from making comparisons between the university he was attending there and the work in an American company.

He had to find a way to feel better in that place. It was as if he was captured, even more so as the room had only one window. Suddenly, Ion felt depressed. That question “And here… what are you looking for?” obsessed him. He felt useless as he was sitting there doing nothing, ignored by everyone else. He thought that it was going to be different. […] But nothing happened. Everyone was busy going about their own business in their daily routine established long before his arrival there. (152)

Even if Ion graduates an American Master, he is still confused in getting a job, feeling unprepared to make an entrance in the real American life, as he thinks he no longer has his “aura, his academic identity, he was about to become a small wheel in the great machinery of society” (234). Knowing he has no other option but to survive in this new world, Ion realizes that there is no time to let himself disheartened and decide to let America know that a Romanian can be better than an American as he saw that “bigots and schlumps are all over the world and this country was no exception” (53).

As soon as all the links have been made and the individual feels fit into the new world, the debates on exile and identity rebuilding reshape following a transnational and cosmopolite diasporic stance, enabling America to come out conspicuously in “contact zones” (Mary Louise Pratt, 1991). This is what Domnica Rădulescu explains in Train to Trieste, when her main character, Mona Manoliu, confesses: “I feel my little stringy roots spreading out, taking hold with a ragged determination like a stubborn plant sprouting through the Chicago sidewalk” (206) and “slowly, in the Chicago cold, I learn how to live within freedom. I make a little place for myself within its wild vastness. And there is me, the little piece of me in the mosaic of America” (194). The more Mona is rousing her chilled identity and finds a strong and real path towards her own place in the host land, she needs to give it out

Do you see me there? I’m the one with the maroon down coat from a secondhand store and gray boots that are too tight for my frostbitten feet. I’m right there, standing on State Street between the Russian woman selling apples and bananas and the Mexican man with the hot-dog. Do you see me now? I’m so excited I could just scream right here in the middle of State Street, so loud they can hear me all the way to Romania. (194)

In the beginning of his novel The Lair (2009), Norman Manea draws almost the same figure of the typical Russian emigrant, Lev Boltanski, who is driving the typical “yellow box” (3) i.e. the taxi in New York, briskly introducing the theme of uprooting and taunting from the very first moments the typical American ignorance:

Above the steering wheel, the mug shot and name of the driver: Lev Boltanski.

(GASPAR): “Are you Russian?”

(LEV BOLTANSKI): “I was.”

A hoarse voice. A wide face, small eyes.

(GASPAR): “Where from?”

(LEV BOLTANSKI): “Odessa.”

(GASPAR): “I thought Odessa was in Ukraine.”

(LEV BOLTANSKI): “The Soviet Union! Like me, Odessa is from the Soviet Union. Few people know the difference between Russia and Ukraine. You’re not American.”

(GASPAR): “I am now. Just like you.” (3)

A recurring subject in the Romanian argument of the translation experiment is the scholar, the highly academic and learned emigrant compelled to leave behind the intellectual attainments because in America the need to survive prevails over any attempt to keep an intellectual’s concerns. Gabriel Pleșea’s main character Ion is also an uprooted philologist trying to re-convert into an Economist, because this is what the New Land best requires and values. In Aruncă pâinea ta pe ape, the first novel of the Trilogia Exilului, the author ends in a smoke the American Dream of the exiles form East by revealing the American multiethnic pot, its mindset and pragmatism through the hard times and risks taken to integrate, on behalf of the intellectuals exiled in the Land of Dreams, compelled to survive only by giving up their intellectual condition to some inferior job, during which they “were trying to forget their country, their origins, even their crafts and skills, and who were throwing themselves without fear into this motley conglomeration representing all the nations on the globe” (34-35). Ion’s and Jenny’s diasporization process lies under the sign of disorientation and incapacity, even disability to integrate, though they seem completely decided to make a living in this New World, without giving up their intellectual condition.

Pleșea’s exile encompasses a second phase of a totalitarian system, the communist-nationalist one, when socialism had definitely been installed in post-war Romania. His main character, Ion, is an intellectual manifesting a voluntary exile, in order to escape from a totalitarian system into the freedom of the Western world. Ion is the same protagonist in the whole Trilogia exilului, yet only in the third novel, Dosarul cu bârfe, the motifs of his exile are made clear. Ion leaves his homeland legally, forced by political reasons which turn him into an unwanted person in the communist Romania, thus the political regime gives him the passport in order to disembarrass someone considered unfit for the country. Pleșea’s character meets the features of a regular intellectual, living beyond the domain of politics, as described in Aruncă pâinea ta pe ape:

Ion avoided entering the communist party by absenting himself from any of the responsibilities this quality asked him and by showing himself less active. He minded his own business, fulfilling his job duties in good faith and taking care never to want something that might contradict his own principles or criteria. He took more pleasure in playing tennis after the hours spent at the office than participating in all kind of social or political activities representing the sine qua non condition to get a special rank or privilege. (16)

Ion realizes the impossibility to live and work in his communist country and for a moment in his life, he manages to rebuild the atmosphere of a time lying under the ideological dictatorship, the Romanian individual mindset warped by the regime, cancelled as a personality, and turned into a simple doer or player, a fact that underlies and causes the Romanian intellectuals exile of those years. Being aware of the danger, Ion prefers the exile and has the courage to take upon him the consequences of a gesture difficult to imagine in communism, that is a political scandal and to ask for the right to emigrate in a foreign country. During his diasporization process, Ion experiences moments that are specific to all the exiles, involuntary returning in the past, recollecting memories that marked the most important stages of his life. Irrespective of the moments he recollects, Ion realizes the perversity of the regime he escaped to exile, so that in the third novel of the trilogy, Dosarul cu bârfe, he no longer feels the trauma of severance, on the contrary, we find him socially integrated in the American space, and owing to the English language studied in the Faculty and his will to succeed, he is totally adapted to American mentality and, somehow, healed from the nostalgia for the country of origin. However, an unexpected episode forces Ion to go back in time and remember events of the past. A childhood friend manages to steal Ion’s file from the Security and brings it along in America. At first, Ion shows no curiosity to look inside his own file, but then, little by little, he feels that his almost forgotten past comes back to live and is aware that it has never vanished and continues to exist. Moreover, these escapes in the past are both intriguing and fascinating. The recollections help him go back in his childhood, in the world of his youth, reflect upon to the events experienced or witnessed in the past through the eyes of the present adulthood, and make him understand from a different view the world he left behind. Unlike Codrescu, Pleșea’s character comes back after the fall of Ceausescu’s communist regime, but not out of his own head, but to break the grounds for possible business his American friends want to make in Romania. This coming back manages to heal him of any traumas and nostalgia, making him aware that an eventual return to homeland is impossible.

In Intoarcerea huliganului, Norman Manea remakes almost the same ontological route backwards, from maturity to childhood, rebuilding separate sequences of the initiating experience of a child who was forced to face his first exile in the dehumanized space of the ghetto. There is a fundamental difference between Pleșea’s child-character and Norman Manea’s. Even if Pleșea’s character lives inside the communist Romania, the child is kept outside the communist inferno by the innocence of the age and by his family, therefore he is only an involuntary witness of certain events that might be suspicious even to a six-year-old boy. At home, the child listens to a secret conversation between his parents about a round-up and arrest of certain acquainted persons, about the way neighbors were squeaked to the Securitate, about mysterious disappearances, about seizing things, about events that were typical for the communist society, typical for the reality adults had to face and how they tried to keep out their children from tragic realities and fear:

“Did you see what happened to Maria? They came in the middle of the night and arrested her. Popeasca squeaked her that she was listening to The Voice of America. They did the same with her son, Nicu, he is supposed to have said the Americans were coming. […] Olga sent me word that Gicu had also been taken. Also during the night. She doesn’t know where he is: they won’t tell her, they are giving her the round-up. And aunt Hortansa, they have taken away her pharmacy in Adjud.” (550)

The child feels the presence of an unknown danger around him and his family and understands that he has to forget whatever he sees or hears and even makes a promise in front of God that he won’t tell anything to anybody.

In contrast with Plesea, Norman Manea’s child is thrown into full underworld, into the inferno of the Nazi concentration camps together with scores of children and adults relegated for the only reason of being Jewry. It is the first exile of the child Manea, forced to live at the edge of the world because of his Jewish origin that throws him into the atrocious universe of death in a concentration camp.

In Întoarcerea huliganului, Norman Manea’s naration, which doesn’t follow a chronological order, is divided into three major episodes, the first two sequences being separated from the third by the chapter called “Anamneza”. The first part of the book, “Preliminarii”, refers to the present and to the recent past and starts with the anxieties expressed by the author, who lives in New York now, before taking the decision to come back to Romania for a short visit, after ten years of exile. The second part, called “Prima intoarcere (Trenul, ca ficțiune)” (The first return – Train, as a fiction), is an immersion into his personal and historical past and includes, along with summoning of the relatives, many pages of self analysis and meditation on the art of the writer. The third part, having the title “A doua intoarcere (Posteritatea)” (The second return – Posterity), is a detailed description of the days when the writer visited Romania in 1997, more precisely 12 days interrupted by many flashbacks that retain and hold the narrative tension, continuous balance, though always unpredictable, between past and present. What Norman Manea does is actually an invitation to a journey in the past, in the atmosphere of his childhood with the doors locked. Living in America, in exile, Manea rebuilds, in a free, warm and captivating style, the image of his own biography through the eyes of a person who was forced to escape from his birth place.

However, the displacement experience of the Romanian exiled does not remain confined to the parameters of a traumatic and painful exile. If the exilic experience in the case of Romanians shows an ideology of inadequacy, this phase is but a stage. As we tackle late 20th century and early 21st century, writers and scholars leaving Romania or already living in America after ’89, being no longer exiles, but citizens of the world, mark the beginning of the so-called nomadic turn in transnational studies, as actuated in the Romanian diaspora context. Romanian writers feel the need to return to their homeland having a multitude of feelings inside their souls, out of which the desire to talk about the reality in which they live nowadays and to see how the roots of their identities have changed are foremost. Norman Manea, Andrei Codrescu, Gabriel Pleșea, Sanda Golopenția, Domnica Rădulescu etc come home and go back to America in a trans-border movement adding the transnational dimension to the Romanians displaced in the New Land.

Somewhere, between home space and host space there is an in-between space where both individual and collective memories collide, re-assemble and re-configure, protecting exiles, offering them the necessary time to adapt, re-invent and finally integrate and become successful in the land of choice. If we consider Alexandru Nemoianu’s opinions, written in his book “Tărâmuri” (2003), the history of the Romanians in America, especially after 1989, underlines an alteration or more a conversion from the position of exile or outsider to a whole range of “merging” and “symbiotic relations” experiences. Nemoianu argues that,

Essential in the history of Romanian-Americans, was the voluntary association in a community of a great number of the Romanian emigrants arrived in the New World, their constituency as integral part of the American nation, bearing distinctive features, and, moreover, bearing the Romanian existential model of understanding the difference between right and wrong, as well as understanding the purpose of each and everyone in the observed world. (90)

Informing a more comprehensive field of investigation into contemporary movements of displacement and due to a vast literary work, the concept places discourse of home and host in creative opposition involving the gaze back while criticizing discourses of fixed roots and creating a contemporary restlessness with the ‘host’ and ‘in-between’ spaces. In terms of perspective upon America, diaspora goes beyond the paradigm of exile by invoking the imagery of traumas and suffering of dislocation and severance which definitely comes from an entire aspect of exilic experience.

Being placed between borders, giving up customs and beliefs of the native family, being continually considered an alien in relation to all the communities from everywhere, are factors meant to abate any chance to build a strong identity. But Norman Manea considers this permanent state of uncertainty and irresolution as rightful, even of good omen. The affront turns into homage and his Jewish origin, easier to bear in America than in Romania, is eventually perceived as “a privilege, an elevating honor”. In fact, there are no conclusive answers, meaning there are no other questions. And so, one of Manea’s older interrogation might be reiterated: “What about afterwards, afterwards? Aren’t you, after all, what you were in the first place?” It seems that the essence of identity lies under the sign of a possible paradox: constancy and pursuit.

5.3. Identity as bonding De- and Re-diasporization

As documented in chapter 2 regarding the transnational features of the diasporic communities, a conclusion arising from this study is that Romanian transplants to and from America bear away from the settled exilic parameters and direct closer to the transnational characteristics rooted inside the term diaspora, the latter being more adequate to examine processes in their complexity, and we mention here globalization and trans-local spaces. In other words, the essence of identity lies under the sign of a paradox: constancy and search. Katherine Verdery, in her article “Beyond the Nation in Eastern Europe” (1994), states her desire to enhance the use of the paradigm transnationalism in the case of Eastern Europe, making use of the two components of the word: the prefix ‘trans’ meaning across, as in ‘transport’, on the one hand, and ‘trans’ meaning beyond, as above the range or limits of normal experience or transcendent (Verdery 3), on the other hand.

According to Verdery, transnationalism “describes movements of peoples, commodities, ideas, production processes, capital, images, as well as possible alignements across boundaries between sovereign states” (4). In case of the Romanian diaspora in America, there has been a change in both perception and motivation of those who decided to leave the country. Before the ’89 Revolution, Romanian emigrants belonged to the family of ‘exiles’ or émigrés, after this historical year their condition has been enhanced with transnational characteristics. Consequently, the conditions and nature of the deterritorialization of the people from homeland and their new hostland come with new perceptions regarding identity formation, different debates on acculturation and adjustment to the new habitat.

Using a conventional way of approaching the relation settled between two nations as separate entities, the former accounts for internal politics, whereas the latter involves international connections. Consequently, the nation is included in the state and complies with the ruling principles organized by it. Even so, this approach cannot keep abreast with the massive number of people involved into these continuous back-and-forth transplants between homeland and hostland, as Gabriel Sheffer explains that

in international relations, the homeland inscribes the diaspora in its economic planning because of the remittance factor, a source of extra national income. In domestic politics, the receiving state, while maintaining the diasporans in a condition of marginalization, is mainly interested in their socioeconomic integration, their cooptation in the political process, and their participation in civic organizations. (Sheffer 2003)

This is the reason why everything happens in close connection with the two states, homeland and hostland, under strictly outlined borders, be they economic borders, political borders or geographical ones.

Besides the international circumstances that belong to the late modernity and capitalism, the free circulation of people and the cultural assimilation, another important perspective arises, defined by Laguerre, in Diaspora, Politics and Globalization (2005), as diasporic globalization. According to Laguerre, the two concepts of ‘homeland’ and ‘hostland’ must be reconsidered taking into account the multinational circumstances and the bilateral exilic phenomenon involving reciprocal relationships, as described by Paul Ilie in Literature and Inner Exile (1981), a subject already discussed in the first chapter. In case of Romanian diaspora, this new perspective strengthens and supports it, with enhanced characteristics and creative sources of ideas meant to resettle the connections between homeland and hostland during the process of globalization, by introducing concepts as dediasporization and rediasporization. These concepts have been brought to attention within the studies on international migration by Nicholas Van Hear in 1998 and brought into theory by Michel Laguerre in 2006. Dediasporization has been described “as the regrouping or in-gathering of dispersed people […] when a community returned to its place of origin” (Van Hear cited in Laguerre 133 – 134). Laguerre specifies that this definition underlines the process in only one direction and corresponds to “the physical relocation to homeland” (134). This theory applies in case of Andrei Codrescu’s exercise of returning back home, to his homeland, as an exercise mentioned in The Hole in the Flag, where only one side of this process is underlined, that of the physical relocation to his place of origin. Obviously, dediasporization comes together with a complex set of characteristics which comprise the whole process, from diasporization and the foregoing assimilation in the hostland, coming back to the native country and finally, rediasporization, namely a process of re-entering the transnational circle by moving back to hostland. This looping itinerary is neither geographical, nor physical, but assisted by cultural objectives where the three specific steps of de- and rediasporization take place, namely homeland, hostland and the translocal realm brought in by the dual transplant. According to Laguerre,

the capacity for dediasporization is not simply a state affair, but falls also under the domain of the individual who must act to pursue this option. The maintenance of a diaspora status depends on the ability of the individual or community to maintain “two types of autonomy”: vis-à-vis the hostland, to prevent full assimilation and a lack of cultural specificity, and vis-à-vis the homeland, in order to be able “to freely select its strategies of integration and its own criteria of identification and socialization.” (Van Hear cited in Laguerre, 136)

Codrescu’s example rendered evident one aspect, which is dediasporization is not a lasting condition of the diasporan, being followed by rediasporization. According to Van Hear rediasporization happened “when a migrant community was … further dispersed” (Van Hear 195). As Laguerre describes in his Diaspora, Politics and Globalization, the “rediasporization refers to two different processes: the relocation of the group to another diasporic site, or the new diasporization of a dediasporized group” (159). What Laguerre insists upon is that the process of rediasporization involves obligatory dediasporization and it involves voluntary, involuntary, self-initiated or urged by external circumstances relocations. Even if we consider the years before 1989 or after the fall of communism, all the writers referred to as within this study enter for voluntary and self-imposed rediasporization.

Laguerre also explains the circumstances a diasporan chooses rediasporization as when

Sometimes they find that although they thought that they could reintegrate with the homeland society, they would be better off in the diaspora. Sometimes political circumstances such as a revolution force them to seek asylum elsewhere. Other times, unable to find employment or because of pressure from their diasporic children, they end up re-emigrating to their former diasporic sites. All of these examples illustrate the diaspora-dediaspora-rediaspora scheme as it is experienced in everyday life. (159)

Because Andrei Codrescu turns America into his reference point, he is the perfect candidate for the self-dediasporization model, which according to Laguerre, means that the receiving state is not just a melting pot in which diaspora is trying to melt, but there is an active participation on both sides. Codrescu’s provoking debates, estimates and reviews made on a regular basis on National Public Radio’s speak in favor of this model.

In America, he says, I discovered citizenship, which in communist Romania was the affair of the state and not of the individuals. And I totally fell in love with the possibility to be the voice of community existence: so much I liked the idea that in me awoke the spiritual moralists, Maimonides and Spinoza, who up to then had been sleeping in my inert hump […]. After reading Democracy in America-Tocqueville, I became an unsettled dibbuk flying ceaselessly from America’s town to town to intrude in their life, understand their functioning, to upset and praise citizens. (All Things Considered 97)

According to Michel Laguerre’s researches, the assimilationist dediasporization pattern was the major procedure applied to accomplish dediasporization. This pattern is based on two well-defined groups, one focused on state and the other on individual. The group focused on state involves assimilation in order to avoid state fragmentation or disintegration, as well as conflicts. The group focused on individual is based on the leading step made by the diasporic individual judgment to attain a new identity, remove cultural differencies and form a “new group consciousness” allying and melding into the mass in an attempt to come to be one with it.

As mentioned before, dediasporization is not a lasting state, when the reference is made to homeland. In Codrescu’s case, the diasporan condition has twists and turns when thinking of a return to the place of origin. His rediasporization is likelihood: he may be dediasporized in a spatial sense, but he does not want to come back and remain in Romania. In 1989, Codrescu returns only to provide news live about the Revolution in Romania, for the American National Radio. Being both an outsider and insider, Codrescu’s eyesight and perception prove to offer a strong and succinct insight image of those terrifying days:

in December – January 1989-1990, I thought, like everyone else did in Romania, that the end of the communist system was the moment of a moral and psychological renewal. “Capitalism”, in the eyes of Romanians back then was a mystical notion, equal to “communism”, a sort of utopia. The idea of Romanians about “capitalism” was like one of those religions of the Polynesian people after the 2nd World War who believed that American planes full of good things would come to the island and restore paradise. For a moment, this hope transformed the society of the island men into a gentler one because the dwellers of the island felt kindness towards their kinsmen and an unusual generosity. As Paradise failed to appear, the best of them committed suicide, the others became evil. (Miracol si Catastrofa 187)

Having deep roots left in his country of origin, Codrescu analyses in a lucid manner the fake of the revolutionary event and the impossibility of the Romanians’ dream come true:

What they did not understand was that the idea of a moral renewal was momentarily impossible. The Truth is that the names were changed but not the people, that the “revolution” was a hoax in which people played a role especially created for them. One thousand two hundred people were murdered to give the show authenticity and to convince that it was for real. (188)

In The Hole in the Flag, Codrescu admits that over the two decades and a half of his exile he has returned to his homeland many times, in a “countless fantasies of return”, but only in his imagination and, yet, his real return turns into a diasporic consciousness, arising from the mind and soul of a self-exiled who needs to understand what happens in his homeland and see through the lenses of the writer who experienced both being inside and outside. The critic eye of the writer uses harsh words to explain the transformations of his homeland

Romania is a country of voices, long-suppressed voices, speculating, debating, shouting, wondering. I closed my eyes and listened to them; they lurched like the road, filling my head with all the forgotten charge of sound of my childhood and adolescence. The main product of this country was now theory; there was little else. They feared their own obsolescence. […] (The Hole in the Flag 235)

Codrescu comes from an America where people have dynamic lives, love searching for what is best and change as many times as need may be. Therefore, he “does not value stability as highly as his Romanian folks. Romanians, on the other hand

want peace and quiet. In other words, just like before, when the peace and quiet of the dictator gave life, their life, an illusion of permanence. But I’m afraid that nothing will be the same ever again, and my friends know it. A long period of unrest, violence, suppressed strains, and unpleasant truths awaits them. They know it, too. Unfortunately, they are rallying about the obsolete facts of their imaginary national identity, which is mostly a fairy tale. (235-36)

Although Codrescu came to Romania decided to involve not only in the Revolution, but also in helping his country understand easier and faster the new post-communist identity, he ends up being disappointed by the stiff mentalities and the political dangerous turn into stealing what people thought it was the Revolution. He saw the ugliness of a bureaucratic and corrupted society at all levels: political, commercial and, most of all social:

This ugly, looming monster of cement and corruption, where all the news reporters stayed, was the only place to get cold beer in Bucharest. The slim of this country sloshed against the police beige walls. I spotted liver-coloured vampires of both sexes who stood ready to spread infection under the ghastly neon. I saw people dealing in anything foreign from disposable light to condoms. I saw the money changers, now paying 150 lei to the dollar, up from three days ago. Was this the beginning of the famous change to the market economy touted by everyone from government ministers to street corner philosophers? If so, there was little to sing about. (236)

Therefore, his rediasporization is not only a consequence, but a desired process, at the end of which, the writer is ‘happy’ to leave homeland. The moment of leaving is marked by a moment of memory flash-back in time, back in 1965, which gives Codrescu the chance to compare the two moments separated by twenty-four years:

At Otopeni Airport I clutched my Air France ticket tightly, happy to be leaving. I experience, in an attenuated form, the same mixture of intoxicated elation and fear that I had experienced when I first left Romania in that faraway year 1965, sure that I would never return. I was brought suddenly to my senses by the barking of the immigration officer holding my passport. (237)

The bitter taste of disappointment makes Codrescu remember what was that made the difference and convinced him that his diasporic choice was the right one:

what I found in America was the fact that you could trust friends, neighbors or an institution. I found a society where one would have a reasonable chance to believe that people keep to their word. At first I found it ridiculous, even dangerous that Americans would confess everywhere – television, in public etc. This society oriented towards total honesty was opposed to the sneaking I had grown up with. Everything was therapeutically exposed. (88)

In the course of recording the translocal aspect involved by the Laguerrian dediasporization and rediasporization processes, this survey advances the idea that the immigrant moves actively between homeland and hostland enriching the diasporic process with transnational characteristics. As debated and agreed upon in chapter two, the translocal generates the third space, in which the diasporan citizen doesn’t belong to either homeland or hostland. The immigrant feels that he is connected to both spaces as a member with full rights. As an ‘agent’ between the two spatial locations, the immigrant also conveys manifestations of assimilation, multiculturalism, inclusion, in brief, what Tambiah defined “the right to difference” (439). It is the case of Andrei Codrescu and Gabriel Plesea, who use this translocal dimension to see the differencies and similarities between Romania and America. For Codrescu, what he found in America was a “cultural shock” with “therapeutic” effects, when referring to the openness of the receiving society and comparing to how he sees Romanians after 1989, it makes him “find points in common and build bridges between the “Balkan style” and the “American style” (90). The translocal space turns out be a space of meditation, self-exploration and reconsideration. It also represents a space of constant dediasporization and rediasporization for individuals who choose to live in another country, while always “gazing backward and forward” (Braziel and Mannur 9). It is the in-between space for diasporan writers to imbue with culture, thoughts and long dialogues on identity, moving freely and constant back and forth.

Andrei Codrescu is not the only Romanian-American writer illustrating the dediasporization – rediasporization process. The ideology of return involved in this process is present in the diasporic writings of Norman Manea, Petru Popescu and Gabriel Pleșea as well. Out of the ones that address this subject, a further study has been dedicated to these writers who make frequent reference to both home and host country, as our main concern is the representation and the image of the Romanian – American writers via dediasporization – rediasporization process.

After fifteen years of being away and making a successful name in America, Petru Popescu decides to return and visit his native country. In his journal, Intoarcerea (2001), Popescu is trying to blow off the evil spirits that tormented his youth and is decided to ask and answer the endless questions that were meant to reconcile with himself and his family and bring back peace with his past where “the silence inside [him] broke” (2). The effect of his return is devastating as “the noise and the light invaded my inner foundation” (2). What Popescu finds out upon his return is a country “completely different, in no rush, ignoring the world and ignored by it, with one exception…. everywhere there were TV antennas” (178). While wandering around the same places in a desire to meet his old streets from the youth, wishing to recognizes details known only by him, Popescu can’t help making the difference between his communist past places and postcommunism lying under his eyes, or what is supposed to have changed in his absence, trying to watch the differences from the perspective of the dediasporized American (now) – Romanian writer. But the re-connection is difficult as Popescu wears too many of the far away-gone immigrant marks and the reality of his homeland is far too alienated.

Why did you come back here? – His eyes (the newspaper salesman n.a.) weighed my bag, my camera hanging from my shoulder. To take pictures of our dirt and show it to the world? You should be ashamed! […] He showed me a clenched fist. (161)

On his return to Romania, Petru Popescu attends a warm and full of admiration welcome on behalf of his friends and colleagues, especially that he comes as an American journalist to chronicle, interview and write about the Transfiguration of the postcommunist Romania. Back in the 70s, before voluntarily leaving to America, Popescu was a successful writer, even if the communist system, the Ceausescu’s nomenclature, didn’t feel quite comfortable with his books.

The writer left Romania back in 1973, on a rainy November, after a hectic face-to-face conflict with Ceausescu on whether he should be given his passport or not. This peppery conversation with the dictator is rendered in detail in his book The Return (“Intoarcerea”, 2001). Being provided with such an unexpected “gift”, Popescu’s father warned and advised him to give a better thought to his future, as it was obvious he wouldn’t be allowed to write audacious books anymore. His father remark was based on the reality that was changing its face day by day. Communism began to ‘walk’ naked on the streets, in the cities, in people’s lives and mind. The old class struggle was no longer a metaphor and the entire existence became harsher every day. Being a writer, thus enhanced with a “sixth” sense of perceiving life, and inheriting the literary gene from his father, Radu Popescu, a literary man himself and editor-in-chief for “Teatru” magazine, and it’s worth mentioning, having the chance to be in the neighborhood of the dictator’s family, Petru Popescu sees the shadows coming down his country and starts dreaming about America. America was freedom and he needed freedom as a man that chokes and must breathe to live. Although he didn’t even know how freedom tasted, he was feeling trapped behind impassable borders, about nine thousand kilometers far from the target of his dreams, so he decide to grow first, become a true writer, attain national success while building in his soul the bridge meant to get him closer to America. American dream is Popescu’s first inner diasporization process, the silent part of his exile. And that was the moment when the writer received the invitation to go to America for five month, enough time to decide to never go back to his homeland. After escaping from communism, Romania became the part of his soul plunged into silence. The diasporization process was painful, because “to leave your language in which you have come to write grated, to leave your friends is like taking a limb off your own person” (Intoarcerea 8). He didn’t think that freedom was so difficult to enjoy, as he had thought it as an antithesis of a communist lack of freedom, as one of the elements of the hyphenated constructions such as: hunger –satiety, poverty – abundance, fear – security, tragedy – euphoria, the kind of liberty that proved to be lacking. Once arrived in the American society, one of his first concerns was to make a priority of what was important in life that is to be aware of what responsibility involved, with respect to his own potential. And what is more traumatic and stressing than to look into the mirror of your soul every day and see if you have enough potential to sustain yourself, as the new world comes along with loneliness. You are on your own with no allies to support, starting from the scratch, building up from nothing and losing the self confidence achieved in the native environment. Popescu is aware he is in a new world, as in a reborn new life in which he has to dwell, to make himself needed, heard and read, and that in “any way [he] can” (3). In a dialogue with Laurențiu Orășanu, held in 2006 and published in Conexiuni, Petru Popescu confesses the painful process he had to go through after his voluntary exile from Romania:

I left the country, bearing a huge sadness in my soul. I had no idea I could be able to write in English. I left as a Romanian writer, carrying inside the human Romanian themes. My Americanization was difficult, though it seems it hasn’t taken too long. I had to change my inner priorities. […] I thought that maybe, sincerity and truthfulness were finally appreciated. I never wanted to lie; neither in Romania, nor in America. (Conexiuni, nr.15, 2006)

In a way, Popescu never left his country, at least not in his mind and soul. As he confesses

“his inner world if made up of the friends here [Romania] or those who are spread all over the world, like I am. […] But, you cannot live next door with the dictatorship, unless you are Michelangelo” (4). It would have been impossible for me to live under a system that considered art as a propaganda weapon, and the artists were survived by the dictator’s faithful Securitate” (Cotidianul, 2008).

These words coming from a writer who didn’t have to fight so much against censorship in Romania and may be considered privileged with respect to the political treatment he enjoyed until escape, are far from being considered insincere or even false. Popescu left Romania confused, his basement being dominated by darkness. As weird as it may seem, the most information about the Self is kept in the darkness, being aware of its existence, but incapable or too afraid to dislodge it and bring it to the light. His inside vault gas been kept in a never troubled silence for more than fifteen years. His return, as in a dediasporic liberating process, has given him the chance to get over the fact that he was born and raised in a communist country, and gather his strengths to bring his under soil up into the light and break the silence. For fifteen years, Popescu thought that his roots had broken or vanished in that silent, deep basement, but when he decided to return, the silence broke and the light invaded the hidden place. What he saw was amazing:

The roots I had cut long before have sprung again. Now they looked different. We usually say that we come to America to put down new roots, but the truth is that what we plant in this generous foreign soil are in fact our old roots, renewed and full of new life. New roots, yet old. In a nutshell, America is the place where people re-invent themselves, as they find here not only a new future, but a new past, as well. (Intoarcerea 4)

The dediasporization journey has been long desired and psychologically prepared:

I was in California, at the end of the 80s, when I began to tell myself: I want to go back and visit. I want to roam about the streets of Bucharest, surrounded by its grey, wadded colors. I want to get close to everything that has left from the past, to be able to explore them as if they were sparse rags and tatters from an old box. (Intoarcerea 11)

Popescu needs to return to his homeland to find his roots again, to find himself again, and to see if he can meet the same person he was before his voluntary escape. Moreover, he wants and needs to write about Romania as he stopped doing it for too long. He needs his memories back, he wants to remember those times when people were smothered by history, but managed to have solid friendships. Being an American now, Popescu is dediasporized being marked by the consumerist western society that lacks the emotion of the written word, which he wishes to regain and reconnect it, over the generation and the time irreversibly passed, to the writer he is today. Popescu comes back with an insatiable desire to feel Romanian again. He is eager and fervent to find Romania, the place he claims he never completely abandoned to dwell in an unknown territory. When describing Bucharest as he sees it know, after twenty-four years, Popescu proves to have the same skills remarked by George Pruteanu back in 1973, in a review on his novel Prins where he considered Popescu had made a true literary creed out of the urban nexus as he “feels the city like a womb you come from, with all the ancestors, and to whom you belong, wherever you might be” (Magazin, 1973)

The Bucharest I had left – old and with a certain style, with a certain posture, with a certain order of life – was now chaotic. On the streets, you see all kind of characters looking as they had got out of prison or a mad house, who were assaulting the tourists. Since the last time until now, I realize that a part of me hasn’t changed a bit, moreover that part wishes to resume the past, to reconnect with the moment the character Petru Popescu left. He wishes to tell his story and, at the same time, he discovered that he keeps in store many soul layers which laid locked under a key, which went on with their lives”. (Intoarcerea 210)

While flying back to America, Popescu begins an inevitable process of rediasporization by asking himself new existential questions: Who was he now? He was a person born in that country below the plain that was carrying him back to America. He is a migrant that belongs to two places equally, but with his roots inside of him. Popescu rediasporizes, but this time he is bearing a limpid soul, with whom he has reconciled.

But the diasporization involves also language. As argued before, many writers adopted the language of the receiving country, while others express themselves better in their native language. Petru Popescu, like Andrei Codrescu, has always wanted to write in English, as he believes he needs safe and accurate tool as a novelist. In an interview on one of his visits in Romania, Marius Tuca asked Popescu how much of what he had told so far, turned from Romanian to English in his writing. Popescu’s answer came prompt and with an astonishing sensibility:

Just when I started to write in English very well, the longing for Romanian language tackled me. I was thinking: “How would this sound in Romanian?”. I awfully missed the connection I had with written Romanian language, as literature. After all, Romanian language was the first literary instrument in my life! I had always carried inside a sort of an undeclared second consciousness…” (Jurnalul.ro, October 2008, my translation)

Asked during the interview what is the bridge between the two languages and the two writers dwelling inside together, Popescu answered straight and simple: sincerity, as he has always been honest in both literature where he sometimes is one of the characters and in historical novels where his characters are created after a solid research.

For Popescu, Romanian language is a folkloric language containing poetic idioms full of metaphors. It is not the case of English language, which, according to the writer, is no longer a folkloric one. Popescu claims that he feels more ‘at home’ in English than in Romanian because English enables him to write about subjects and concerns that he could not treat accordingly in his native language. For him, English is completely satisfying, liberating, supportive, capable to reward efforts, as well as a great experience that can be used to express an Eastern mentality completely at antipodes. The writer admits that “this moment, there are two writers in me, a Romanian one and an American one. Between the two there is a permanent dialogue” (2008).

Popescu evidences in his journal that the journey to his homeland was not only sentimental, but also engaging, as he feels closer to his friends from his youth, that from the times of enduring together the communist regime. He is aware that for them, as well as for his family and acquaintances, he represents the (still) impossible dream of living in America: “America…sighed uncle Nicu, with an intonation which mixed adoration, disappointment and a constant longing” (Intoarcerea 165). However, as against Codrescu, what Popescu senses on his way back to America is compared to drowning (129) seeing that, in Romania, “no one takes care of anything anymore” (127), thus his rediasporization is marked by sadness and confusion, wondering: “who was I now?” and realizing that he lives in worlds, his roots being in neither of them. Yet, the translocal space of self-exploration and reconsideration is a space of constant dediasporization and rediasporization for Popescu, who returns to America reconciled with his soul, satisfied with his past and present, unlike Codrescu whose dediasporization proved that America was and remains the best place to live, as his roots are there now. In contrast, Popescu enjoys the idea of having two places to belong to and confesses “I thank God that America’s roots are in other countries. To carry my roots along with me is an American gesture” (Intoarcerea 192).

Gabriel Pleșea is a writer who chose to leave communist Romania in 1976, where he still lives in New York. After 36 years of exile, Pleșea returns for short stays in his homeland, feeling himself physically and mentally on two continents. Pleșea declares that his American exile hasn’t been able to call off his Romanian identity, it merely rebuilt and adapted it to the American realities. In his novel Imposibila întoarcere, part of the Trilogia Exilului (2002), Ion is haunted by the idea of returning to Romania and, after ’89 Revolution, decides to return to his native country only begin some business and to re-connect to family and friends as well. From the very beginning, Ion makes the differences between the Romanian character and the American one:

Ion regarded his new business “partners” with admiration. They had the idea in their head and they did not give up. They believed in it, in its success and would have argued for it until Judgment Day. He couldn’t break the disappointment that the ones back home did not have the same predisposition, the same courage, the same enthusiasm. The same preoccupation or desire to discuss these matters and come up with a solution. He thought how frivolous the conversations back home seemed, in comparison. So much cynicism and disregard for such ‘materialistic’ preoccupations. (Pleșea 383)

Though is not a journal as in Popescu’s Intoarcerea, Pleșea also comes back to Romania after the fall of communism and so does his character Ion. He comes back as an American and he behaves like one. He chooses to register in one of the best central hotels in Bucharest, eats out and uses a car even for distances that could be walked in five minutes. As Ion is totally dediasporized, he finds it difficult to come back to old habits, such as to walk instead of driving because there are no parking places and dining out is sometimes too expensive and unpleasant. All his relatives are looking forward to seeing him, but they are disappointed to see Ion prefers to stay with them indoors, because spending money with them in town would be too much waste. No matter how hard was for Ion to accommodate in America as a new-comer and emigrant, he compares Romania to New York where “life is more alive than here. I pity them, he adds, with a choke in his throat”(379). No matter how much he strives to readjust, “the disadvantage was that he had grown out of the back home mentality, much too complicated and slow for his taste. “His taste” was refined in America” (365) and “one thing was for sure: he and his family were no longer on the same wavelength” (338); “what he called “home wasn’t home anymore. The bliss of the return, imagined by Ion, is nothing but a failure, a fiasco, a proof of the alienation from homeland, which destroys the nostalgia and calls in question concepts like home and identity. Through his return as a process of dediasporization, as a natural step of the exile’s existential circle, the character perceives the relativity of the concept of home, has a lucid and rational consciousness that the matrix space he has been exiled does no longer represent the only ‘home’. Just like Petru Popescu, Ion realizes that ‘home’ is no longer a single place, his homeland, which he feels alienated. A new home comes into his sight, confusing him. His identity replacement must be done in terms of the place corresponding to home. If Popescu is asking himself who he is, Pleșea’s character, Ion, is wondering where home is, here, in Romania, his native country, or there, in exile, the receiving country. In America, being busy to adapt to the new society, Ion didn’t take too much time to feel his roots, as he was bearing in mind the place he was born as a compulsory connection, whereas now, back to his homeland he realizes he is uprooted and almost incompatible to a world that cannot understand his new habits and is confronted to the inherited mental attitude of “one of ours” which is meant to leave him out of the family and lacking of interest. Uprooted and left aside, Ion suffers a self dediasporization, due to his sense of belonging to America more than to his homeland, while, paradoxically, his native country is the one that rediasporizes him by making him feel an alien at home, among his own kinsfolk. Where is home then, here in his native country, or there, in exile, in the country that adopted him? Is the question Ion asks himself on his return to post-communist Romania:

When he came back home, he was under the impression he would be busy paying many visits, with recaps, and now, as if all of a sudden, everything stopped: there was nothing else to be seen and he could go back. A thought even tempted him to say that he was going back “home”, but it seemed too grotesque. Home was here. Or perhaps he was wrong. What he used to call “home” was no longer home. He had left long ago and, besides the nostalgia for the native places, he could no longer pretend he was at his home: in the real sense of the word.” (Imposibila întoarcere 341)

What highlights the dediasporization process in Romanian-American prose is the strength with which American society continually flashes due to descriptive comparisons with countless details. The process of dediasporization helps to emphasize more America, through habits, marks and spotlights, rather than to focus on the loss of identity, the feelings of insecurity or the interest for re-acquiring the personal roots of the diasporan. In proof of this, here is a dialogue between Ion, who is drinking a glass of red wine in the bar of the hotel where he is staying in Romania, and the bartender:

BARTENDER: You stay in the hotel? asked him the bartender, cleaning the glasses.

ION: Yes. Why do you ask me? answered Ion wildly, ignoring the fact that he was asked in English.

BARTENDER: For the clients of the hotel we have something special, said the bartender in a conspiracy tone. We can charge the extra costs to your hotel room.

ION: Well, yes, that’s more like it! I see that you have adopted some of the western hotel practices. Nice…

BARTENDER: Well, we are trying…And then we have some extra services as well…

ION: Oh yeah? Such as what, for example?

The bartender moved closer to him and whispered with implicit tone.

BARTENDER: Well, you know…something of quality, hygienic…a kind of escort service, as you call it there. […] You know, it is not something official, it is not the policy of the hotel. I just know a lady from my neighborhood who opened this kind of business. She got inspired from that lady in New York.

Ion was mesmerized hearing how easy this bartender was jabbering about forbidden, almost “saintly” things. He would have liked to know how this guy assumed that he was coming from abroad and that he was not from the police or even from the control service of the hotel. One thing was sure: the bartender was not afraid. In New York this kind of matters were done more discreet and carefully, without too many details and by no means declaring oneself as part of the “network”. (343)

The fact that America exalts people’s mind with common perception that it is a land of choice and freedom, where everybody expresses freely, is reflected in the dialogue between an American foreigner and the bartender of the hotel. Simply because a dictatorship has fallen, makes people believe that they may approach subjects that have been forbidden or used to have unpleasant legal consequences. Though enchanted to receive an “American” in their house, Ion’s relatives manage to make him feel uncomfortable and abashed, rediasporizing him and inducing him the alienation feeling. Moreover, not all the people who never had the chance or courage to leave Romania are delighted to see him, on the contrary, they choose Ion to put the blame on all those who return as “Americans” for all the worst of their communist experience:

[…] him and the ones like him who left the country are to be accused of all the things that went bad. He, and all those like him, who left the country are to be blamed. The others, the one like him, like Victoraș, the ones who remained got the worst of it. Now Ion was coming to give them lessons, to tell them how they made it, how they became millionaires in America and found themselves wives with money. He also knew a writer, one he had never heard of before, who published a book in New York, then he translated it in Romanian and published it here. The same! …came with stuff like these: journeys, success, women. No wonder that troika of „re-oriented” critics, signing under pseudonyms, trashed him down in their literary magazine. What we need is a Proust, a Dostoievski, aTolstoi, not this frivolous stuff à la Sandra Brown. (439)

What finally becomes the mark that gives evidence of a complete dediasporization and deep involvement into the realities of the American society is the theme of the “I” that turns into “we”, whereas “them” turns into “us”, which indicates a growing hybridization arising especially in literary texts, such as “I never stopped to be a Romanian poet when I became an American poet. Romanian language became my secret dimension, a hidden motor, much like my childhood, while American English covered all my daily activities. In the end they fused, but it took time” (Codrescu 54), and continued with:

he tried hard to re-breath down his folks, his family, his friends, but he realized that, meanwhile he had been reborn and had borrowed entirely the pragmatic character of the New World. He had no more patience for the slow tempo of “oh, forget about it….we’ll see” and suffered unspeakably when he understood that a real return was impossible. (Pleșea 554-555)

For Norman Manea the process of diasporization was overwhelming and burdensome, as it presumed total displacement, without any chance to return. Therefore, in Manea’s case the dediasporization is fragmented as, from the very beginning, he captured the exile as an inherent condition. In a comprehensive article published in România Literară, Ion Simuț seizes Norman Manea’s de facto condition as it were in a possible determinate returning to Romania:

Needless to say that he (Norman Manea) is not coming back for good. There are many aspects for which repatriation would be impossible for the writer. He has settled permanently in New York and teaches literature of the Holocaust at Bard College. This would be an objective reason. There are, in addition, subjective reasons and abstract motifs, easy to imagine. The exile, though it has its ambiguities, doomed a running away as a final option. The original homeland was ungrateful. (Simuț, 2008)

However, exile was also the path to freedom – first of all, freedom of speech and freedom of expression of his thoughts, without the system’s pressure and censorship he had to face back in Romania. Norman Manea chooses exile in 1986 (first Germany, then, in 1988, the United States). This is neither an isolated case, nor an exception. Norman Manea will notice that American exile resonates with his own life experiences. What in Romania used to be encrypted, hidden, forbidden, banned, concealed, on the great American literary stage becomes a normal fact, emboldened by reviewers and the American public as well. This means that Manea tries to take advantage of his diasporic condition and, in a pragmatic manner, manages to transfigure in fiction his own life, starting with the camp experience. In Cuvinte din Exil (2011), during his dialogue with Hannes Stein, Manea confesses:

It was a great shock for me when I came to America and discovered that this subject was so present, here, in the public space. People talk about it, they talk about their personal experiences… At the beginning I was extremely reticent and not feeling comfortable to make a public exhitbition of the suffering. (53)

Manea’s exilic condition exceeds the ethnic condition, thus being primordial. This means that Manea has never considered himself only a Jew describing the horrors of the Holocaust, on the contrary, his overlapped memory layers transposed within his writing kept the childhood deportation in Transnistria only as a background. Returning to a communist Romania, make his memory blow up, complicating his existence and offering the opportunity to become a writer of the humanity drift into a totalitarian system. The diasporized Manea is not corrupted by the American society of consumption, but, instead, he is able to offer America a founding experience with no trace of superficiality. In a conversation with Leon Volovici, included in the volume The Drawers of Exile (2008), Norman Manea admits he had a dilemma, wondering whether “my fidelity to my truth, or the appreciation, exaggerated perhaps, I am granting to authenticity, does not mean an artistic sabotage” (28). His journey in search for identity means displacement, wherever it takes place. Therefore, displacement becomes also ‘relocation’, while the adopting spaces are increasing in number and imbued with exilic features. In Textul nomad (2006), Manea states that exile is “an emblem of our times” (27), and explains that the exile does not necessarily begin a completely new life in the hostland. Nor does the exile break his ties with the past, making it an unbearable ridge. For him the exile is a toing and froing between two worlds – the homeland where he laps off the narrating essence, and the hostland that embraces his confessions. Therefore, Manea’s dediasporization and rediasporization processes are the same as the author carries his Romanian language everywhere, as it were a house of a snail, according to his own words:

The exile is often and for a long time oscillating, if not for ever, between the past and the present. Between constructing– deconstructing – reconstructing, between the possible beings, gradually occurs a “double” which represents him on the new social stage. Whether split or multiplied, the identity needs a long time to regain its coherence and to present intelligibly in the new existential framework. (199)

Living in a free society and keeping his Romanian language as his best ally, Manea can dediasporize into his past where he rediscovers his identity. The American space is only a re-birth of the Romanian writer, or a re-location in time and space of his voluntary diasporized identity. I argue that Norman Manea does not need a physical rediasporzation, as his American exile has the characteristics of an anamnesis. Manea recall scenes from the life prior to 1986, a limen having the features of an existential border which separates two worlds (the author assimilated his leaving in exile with leaving a life). In The Return of the Hooligan, when Manea returns to Romania, the image of the writer is that of a tourist of posterity, of a ghost of the place, making possible for both processes – dediasporization and rediasporization – to happen at the same time, which, in my opinion, leads to a simultaneous de- and rediasporization.

5.4. Domnica Rădulescu’s Train to Exile

Many of the Romanian writers constantly rediasporize, as they don’t always feel fit inside the American society and customs. One example is Domnica Rădulescu who feels she doesn’t belong there, although she is on her own in the receiving country: “between me and the homeless guy from the street there is the difference that he is an American citizen, protected by his powerful state, while I do not belong to any of the two worlds and I am not protected by anyone” (Train to Trieste 218) for,

I am made for crossroads, always choosing this direction or that one, greedy and ambitious, always running up against new obstacles or creating my own ones. This flat land of crossroads is soothing to my heart. […] Now more than ever, I want to up all the evil capitalists and lawyers I raged against that night when I was high on pot and did a headstand in my blue satin skirt, I have a she-wolf’s hunger for blood, for lawyers’ blood. (245-46)

Echoing Radulescu’s inner fights, Petru Popescu uneasily asks: “is it worth to commit cultural suicide in exchange for freedom?” (95)

Mona Maria Manoliu, Domnica Rădulescu’s main character, undergoes the experience of communism, manages to flee from Romania through Italy, and after twenty years of diasporization in America decides to dediasporize in an attempt to find her lost identity and teenage love. In America, Mona fights hard with the states of things as they exist in her Land of Dreams. The American couple, Ron and Gladys, who offered to assist her to accommodate the new life in an unknown world, seems to be difficult to live with or to perceive the paradoxes in their own living. The couple dwells a typical American life, Ron works in an insurance company, while his wife “goes in her call all day, not really working for money, but meeting other women and doing voluntary work for the church, then preparing dinner for Ron” (179). Mona realizes that through the church they found out she needed help and she understands now why they take her everywhere they go, including church, parties, dinner, as they consider her “their work of charity”, introducing Mona as “the young Lady form Romania” (179). As the couple’s life is so much involved in church, on the one hand, and their belief in being “pro-life activists”, Mona starts feeling terrified that she will be forever trapped into this superficial and alienated stereotypical life and, if ,at the beginning she thought they were just curious when they

[…] ask me polite questions about my country and my parents. They ask me what language people speak in Romania, and whether there are McDonald’s restaurants in my country. When I say there aren’t any, they say they’re sure Romania is a beautiful country, but they couldn’t live there without McDonald’s. (182)

she turned into complete declining of the weird couple:

I get really scared when Gladys and Ron ask me to convert to their religion and accept Jesus Christ in my life, and when they take me to their meetings in the church basement where they talk about the evils of abortion and about how black people and Jewish people are the Antichrist and are corrupting the country with drugs and abortion and homosexuality. They talk about some Jewish conspiracy. They say the Communists will take over, and the pornographers. They worship President Reagan. (182)

The contradiction between American people behaving as Jesus Christ’s religious messengers and their insurgent and inflammatory convictions, fill Mona’s heart with hatred, driving her away and hence leading to the denial of the relation immigrant-hostland.

I feel as terrified as when the secret police had asked me to become an informer, but it’s even worse now because I’m supposed to be starting a new life here, walking freely in the streets of Chicago, listening to jazz and studying to become a journalist. This is supposed to be my experience of freedom. (182-183)

The entire excitement and hopes Mona felt at the beginning of her journey turned into rage and disgust making her see everything “dull and embarrassing”, comparing the Chicago with Hamlet’s Denmark, only worse. The Land of Dreams, seen from this suburb, is almost “submerged in a thick gooey substance with something poisonous mixed up in it” (183) showing “no grandeur, no beauty, no throbbing life” (183).

During my first winter in Chicago my feet get frostbite. I have a tooth abscess. My face swells and I look like a fish again. […] I’m still working at the drugstore as a cashier.[…] I take two trains and a bus to get to the university. There’s graffiti on the train that says things like Life’s a bitch and then you die. The word fuck is written everywhere. (Train to Trieste 190)

Domnica Rădulescu’s characters are confronted with the same theme of the transplanted or uprooted intellectual. Mona Manoliu’s father, a university professor and an outspoken activist against Ceaușescu’s communist regime, manages to leave Romania together with Mona’s mother and come to see their daughter in America before the ’89 Romanian revolution, but he ”regrets every day he wasn’t there to work for the Romanian Revolution. He feels like a coward to have left everything for a country he doesn’t even like” (248). The trauma of this intellectual is deep and he “writes poems about an exile’s sufferings” (248) and “talks sadly about how much he would have wanted to go back to his country to see what Romanians are doing with their freedom, to see his old friends. “My country, my country,” he repeats”(268). It is all about a Romanian for whom freedom has come too late, the intellectual whose dissident fervor kept him alive and active back home where “he was happier when he typed manifestos on a forbidden typewriter” (248) and now “he is sad all day long because he doesn’t have the Communists to fight against, and because he doesn’t have the music of his native language around him, and because he doesn’t like the tomatoes in the supermarket. They are tasteless, bad, bad tomatoes” (228) and who, when set free into the New World finds himself spaced out, mystified and hopelessly unable to get along with the new land:

My father is not well: his heart, his lungs, his kidneys, all of him is slowly melting, stopping. He looks haggard and has lapses of memory. Sometimes he is not sure whether he is in Chicago or in Bucharest and asks my mother to go with him to the University Square, to his favorite tobacco store, where his friend Lucian […] is selling cigarettes and pipes. (268)

Codrescu’s horrifying sequence bears a resemblance to Domnica Rădulescu’s snapshot taken at her naturalization interview for receiving citizenship by Mona Maria at the end of her sixth year of residence in the United States:

This scene stops making sense: the square, windowless room, the neon lights, the man with a flat, shiny face filling out a form and asking me questions about wars and the wounded. […] I don’t want to be naturalized anymore. The word makes no sense to me anyway, as if I were unnatural. (210)

Domnica Rădulescu shows the same proclivity towards an irresolute feeling when Mona Manoliu tries to convince herself,

Perhaps my own country will become the country I had once missed so deeply in the composition I had written more than thirty years ago. And maybe I will get used to having two countries, to having no country, to being my own country and stretching over the Atlantic Ocean, one foot in the Indiana cornfields, the other in a berry-field meadow in the Carpathians, like a huge baobab tree. (301)

In Mona’s case, dediasporization occurs first as a deep longing for her homeland,

I miss my native earth and its special smells. I decided I have to go back to touch and smell and taste everything again, to assure myself it all actually happened, that I was in fact born, and had grown up in troubled country cuddled in the curl of the Carpathians and washed by the green waters of the Black Sea. (271)

Later, Mona’s rediasporization emerges marked by an incapacity to adjust, or better say to re-shape to Romania, when returning to her home as a Romanian diaspora representative, she discovers an ‘alien’ reality: “freedom, it turns out, comes with popping breasts and glue sniffing and many, many American cigarettes”, (284), remembering that in the past

Bread and butter were available in the stores with no waiting in line, no ratio coupons. Mămăligă was now served in restaurants where you could pay with a credit card and where people spoke on the cellular phones about shady businesses. August 23 no longer meant anything to young people the age I’d been more than two decades earlier […] The files of the secret police were now being officially released and studied […] More than the opening of secret-police files, more than rocketing rate of inflation, Romanians were excited about their cell phones. So excited, in fact, that a family buried their dead father with a cell phone next to his head – just in case he wasn’t completely dead and might want to call them. (277)

Domnica Rădulescu’s account of dislocation, dediasporization and rediasporization, features the elements of the trauma while displacing and reinventing herself as a hyphenated Romanian-American writer through the power of individual means. As much as Mona Manoliu tries to build herself a life in America without meddling with her past memories in the process, she realizes the impossibility to eliminate the bridge between her two worlds. Therefore, Mona appeals to flashbacks from her Romanian past cleverly interlaced with a vividly lived present. A leit-motif crossing the novel is the train to Trieste, which

wasn’t really the train to Trieste. We just called it that, because it went to the last little Romanian town at the border with Yugoslavia called Jimbolia, from which you could get to Trieste – if you took the train to Belgrade and convinced the Serbian authorities you needed to get to Trieste because you would be killed if you were sent back to Romania. (131)

and represents an allegory of freedom used by people forced to live in a totalitarian leadership and meant to prevent their dreams from falling apart. The ‘train’ is Mona’s point of both diasporization and dediasporization, built around the same image, the girl sitting on a suitcase, dressed in almost the same colors on departure

when I board the train to Trieste from Bucharest one afternoon in September – my last train, my last passage through the Carpathians – […] I am wearing a pink-and-white-striped dress, […] absorbing every bit of landscape that rushes past me. (140)

as on the way back home, after almost twenty years of a continuous reinventing in a land of choice

I returned to my homeland on a real train to Trieste, only in the opposite direction […] (I) strolled around the streets of Rome […] in front of which I had once stood in a red dress and white shoes with black bows feeling unattached […] trying to turn back time. […] (275)

Mona’s life in America is that of a successful immigrant, as she managed to cover almost all her projects and wishes. Her family is with her in America, she married, has children, became a doctoral candidate, got out several languages which brought her up new worlds like “little fireworks” (265). Mona Manoliu returns home to find answers to the many questions she had when she left Romania. Her dedisporization is a narrative one. Endowed with a great sensitivity of words, the writer uses the newly acquired language to keep a perfect bridge between the two worlds, in which homeland prevails

Although there were no signs along the tracks, no stops with Romanian names, I knew I was on my native soil. I felt it in the way dawn filtered through the tall, symmetrical fir trees. In the way sunflowers swayed in the warm-cool summer air that caressed my face […] from the smell of wet tree bark, pine resin, and the unique scent of the flower called queen of the night that opened up at dusk and filled the air with its dizzying fragrance until dawn all summer long. (276)

Irrespective of the rich hyphenated condition acquired in the land of choice, Rădulescu is aware that what she feels in her limbs is “the right size” and “her name, her laughter and moans will be forever stuck in the valleys” (276).

5.5. Aura Imbarus’ Out of ‘Homeland’

An educator, journalist, movie translator and reporter on the local paper in Romania, Aura Imbarus realizes that she works too much, without her expectations to be fulfilled the way she wants and sees no future in Romania. Imbarus paints her economic situation and living conditions in Romania in such grey colours, enough to understand her reasons to diasporize to America. Her story Out of Transylvania Night: A Story of Tyranny, Freedom, Love and Identity (2010), is a powerful memoir woven in a complex narrative about the experiences of a young Romanian woman who believed that life post-revolution would be different, but saw that little in the country changed, so, together with her husband and lucky to have won the Lottery of Visas, went to the Land of her Dreams where she discovers that, in both countries – the native and the land of choice- freedom is a continuous innovation of the self.

But in America, Aura had to pass thorough the same extremes and hard work, and in addition she continued her education, up to a point she realized she had no extra time. Obviously, trying to turn Americans is much more complicated than she expects. The scenery becomes more complicated: the stock market crash affects them in the worst way possible and they lose their savings, house, and cars; moreover, thieves, remained undiscovered, steal three centuries' worth of heirloom jewels

You have to fight for what you want. Whatever it takes. I had forgotten. I’d forgotten to look for wolves, forgotten to be a wolf in defense of my own. I had thought that in this country the wolves were not so hungry. I had thought I’d purchased security. Yet a wolf in America had accomplished what the Communists in Romania could not. The last of the Imbarus heirlooms, entrusted to me to keep here in this safe country, were gone. (257)

Laid waste inside and outside, she asks herself, "How much of one's life is owed to others?" (257) and "Is it possible to straddle two cultures and not lose one's identity?" (259). She is disappointed in the non-reaction of the authorities to investigate the robbery, raising questions about the true meaning of “freedom”. Having to face so many quirks of fate, Aura realizes that to rise again, she must reconsider her life in what turned to be an attempt to dediasporize. Therefore, she “couldn’t wait to get out of that house – forever” (260). I argue that Aura Imbarus develops an inner rediasporization that helps her find the necessary strength to overcome the American misfortunes, in times when she felt she was no longer connected to her own soul

I had grown up a prisoner in Romania, We were all prisoners, every man, woman, and child living under Ceausescu’s Communist regime. Even after the revolution, little changed. I had to escape and I did. Yet I quickly found myself in a prison of my own making. Walled off by responsibilities and wealth and material things, I had lost track of myself and my connections to my husband, my family, my community, my history. I had lost that hereditary strength on which the Imbarus family prided itself. (282)

Aura finds in her past and family the answers to her questions and the power to go on what she had promised in Romania: to live in freedom and to be successful. I may say, Aura’s rediasporization has a name, Imbarus, both name and family, who always found a way to survive, no matter how many losses they had to endure: land, money, yet they still have a heritage impossible to forget: the family history, the “unshakeable rock upon which I could stand” (281). After a clear-cut reevaluation of her past and present condition, Aura Imbarus is even more determined to go on what she had come from in America

I had had nearly five months to process all I’d been through and all I’d become, and determine what I wanted from life once I emerged from my self-imposed exile and began to re-connect. Perhaps my visions would be restored, and I would once again have a sense of myself and my place, both in my past and my future. (282)

If Norman Manea manages to adapt by choosing to keep his native language in the house of a snail, Andrei Codrescu himself succeeded in adapting by choosing to live in his native country’s myth, whereas Pleșea’s characters need more time to integrate as they have to face directly and forced a harsh reality.

As for Mona Manoliu, Rădulescu’s main character, after finally leaving the strange American couple, she has to confront a rigid and inauspicious Chicago, which causes her a deep trauma combined with physical suffering.

The decision to emigrate and leave the native country mirrors a mandatory removal from homeland under a process that resembles a pattern-like situation for Romanian emigrants involving escaping from a communist dictatorship regime that chains freedom, in an attempt to set up a new life and lay foundation of a new existence in a new territory. Emigrants vindicate their lost identities, search for freedom and a land of fulfilled promises and a little more, as Gilroy admitted that “some of us came to America to be free. The majority of us came to eat” (57). The existing pressure between Self and Other draws attention on W.E.B. DuBois’s “double consciousness”, a theory referring to a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” or as part of “a world yielding him no true self-consciousness, but only letting him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (The Souls of Black Folk 34). When trying to draw the image of the immigrants, we see there is always a conflict between essential and circumstantial identities. This means that exile depicts a solid and unyelding relation with homeland, whereas diaspora reveals a doubled relationship, mirrored in a dual loyalty directed to both homeland and new land.

The Laguerrian concept of dediasporization – rediasporization based on beliefs of return develops a particular mode to render the American globalized world, using a technique of flashback meant to create a bridge between the two worlds and realities, homeland and hostland, keeping in mind that diasporization processes uses the memory backwards to be able to see the forwards.

Concluding Remarks

Is there a Postmodern Exile?

After 1989, Romanian exile literature emerged as one of the paradigmatic, creative and innovative manifestations of the Romanian literature. Exile, entailing movement, running away or relocating of people from one social place to another, either willingly or coercively, and transnationalism have become paradoxical as they both generate cultural ambivalence and resentfulness in the exile.

The consequence of the disrooting of peoples, be they forced to migrate or not, their shift to new territories where they manage to turn themselves masters over others or even became subjects of the masters of their hostlands, resonates among the globalizing theories, changing their traumatic features into a new attitude toward exile.

It is known that fiction has its own laws, other than those of the immediate reality and therefore similarities with real facts and characters are not always beneficial, in that they do not explain or motivate certain attitudes, reactions, behaviors or existential situations. The writer converts exile from an extreme situation, into an exquisite fact of consciousness: the discovery of what is deeper in his own being.

In this alien world, in which the exile is thrown by an arbitrary decision, the past passions become grounds for suffering, understood as the supreme revelation of the self, while the moments of despair and doubt are a constant presence.

For Ovid, the gods have disappeared without a trace, he himself surviving according to the enmity and vagaries of the higher-up powers. That’s why, Augustus, who sent him in exile to suffer was somehow the instrument of his destiny; if Augustus had not exiled Ovid to Tomis, the poet would have never met the Dacian priest and had never lived that revelation that only true faith can give you. Like God, who was born in exile, Ovid is born for the second time through knowledge. Thus, exile is not only a way of knowledge, but in his case can be the equivalent of a new birth.

The exile is an uprooted being who, assuming this condition, does not despair but seeks grounds for knowledge, obeying himself to a lucid judgment. What distinguishes the exiled from those who remained at home is the great opportunity to reflect upon his condition with dignity, but also with an obsessive fear of not being able to return. In contrast with the tormented, unfulfilled and frustrating past in the country of origin, the present in the country of adoption, unbearable at first glance as it might seem, is attractive through the novelty of its discoveries, discoveries that will transform the exile gradually, but permanently. Even if the writer feels the distance between his present and his past self, the exile is place where he starts to know the world. He is exiled, but free to write secretly what he thinks, and in addition, he gains the freedom to be himself.

Talking about freedom to write and express his thoughts, Robert Graves (1895 – 1985), a renowned specialist in Greek mythology, offers a memorable remark used to motivate his choice in a writing career in front of his family, worried about the precariousness of such a career: “it is true that poetry does not make money, yet there is not much poetry in money as well!”. Such a remark made up of an intelligent wordplay hides a truth that has been certified by centuries of experience, namely the paradox of the two types of disinterest: the writer’s, on the one hand, for notions like 'welfare' or 'fortune', and the society’s, on the other hand, that proves ungrateful or inappreciative, or simply indifferent. Exile becomes, in many cases, a means of escape or defense of both writing creation, and freedom of thought. But exile comes bundled with poisonous consequences for the writer as a person. He becomes, in most cases, a misfit, an alienated living, besides the drama of expressing the truth, the drama of an alienation from the civilization that belongs to him by birth and education, which now he feels it more filtered through his own being and writing. There are also cases when exile turns into a triumph, through vocation and talent, and the language of adoption becomes an ideal receptacle of the writer’s freely expressed sensibility. It is the case of France, with writers such as Eugen Ionesco, Emil Cioran, Panait Istrati, and so is the case of America, with writers such as Andrei Codrescu, Petru Popescu, Aura Imbarus, Domnica Rădulescu or Saviana Stănescu.

On the other hand, there are writers who don’t give up their native language, fighting to make out of the unknown American realm a reasonable host through which they manage to reinvent themselves without ever diminishing their quality of Romanian writers, such as Norman Manea, Gabriel Pleșea or Gabriel Stănescu. Moreover, Norman Manea uses the power of memory to preserve his own identity by means of his native language, and writes, as Robert Boyers argues in his In Exile from Exile (2005), as if “his rightful place on earth had not yet been discovered, as if his true place were anywhere, but somewhere else. He looks back with longing not to a place but to a sense of place” (88).

Exile represents, in the full of twists-and-turns life of the intellectual immigrant, a rather limited situation. Beyond eras and generations, beyond literary styles and genres assumed by writers through their literary creations, there are undoubtedly common aspects and touches of the exilic literature. The questions arising are whether and by what is the exile literature different from the one written in the native country? It is obvious that the answer can and will not be a global one, but one that takes into account each case. Taking into account the difference between writers who use the language of adoption and those who write in their native language, another question has come up, wondering if the writers who basically re-started in exile, using the language of adoption to express themselves, can still be considered Romanian writers, or should be classified as 'writers of Romanian origin'? We have assumed this question thinking of George Călinescu who in his "History of the Romanian Literature …" no longer considered Panait Istrati a Romanian writer because his literary prose was written in French.

Here comes the role of multiculturalism and the appearance of the generation of "hyphenated Americans". Being adults and educated in Romania, the exiles arrive on the other land bearing in their mind that they are Romanians. Even if the exile writer crosses the stages of detachment, he does not want to go up to the last consequences his severance from homeland. Therefore, the detachment is more a physical one, while mentally the writer remains in his country of origin, hoping, even planning in his mind, a possible return. The exiles’ central problem is an eternal insoluble disagreement between everyday life and their inner life; between their inner perception and perception coming from both Romanians from homeland and from those among they are living. This disagreement is often rendered and ‘played’ by the hyphen, which besides its bonding function performed between two different worlds, it also represents the gap or the missing element from the exile consciousness, the one that does not give him the chance to be ‘whole’.

Andrei Codrescu emigrates to America at the age of 19, but he will never forget his homeland which continuously nourishes him spiritually, as the author himself confessed from over the ocean, and makes him write Romanian poems bearing "American mask", whereas the English poems are written while he was learning this language. But once arrived in America, Codrescu feels more and more attracted to the words of the new language, first in poetry, then in novels. He also notes that this is a perfect way of socializing and integration into the culture of adoption. As the language of adoption becomes familiar, Codrescu start looking for another America, to which he cannot find any cultural identity within the diversity of the multiethnic events.

The writer is aware that cultural identity cannot be reduced only to appearances: Coca-cola, bright advertisements or Mc'Donalds and its quality will not be reduced or rejected because of the volume or quantity. The sensitivity of the Artist which is doubled now by thorough knowledge of English language takes over all immediate feelings and impressions, turning platitude and cliché into artistic miracle.

Being familiar with two different and full of paradoxes worlds, Romania and America, as a true connoisseur writer, Andrei Codrescu is able to return, in an attempt of de-diasporization, back to his homeland capturing with high accuracy the moment of Romania’s changing colors, in the country’s attempt to regain an honor stained and draggled by too many years of communism. Andrei Codrescu is a postmodernist writer. His novels are the result of direct observations, ‘translated' in a non-figurative art style: fragmentary images, collage images, sequences played in a true road show language, which brings him very close to the postmodern technique.

The American space offers the Romanian immigrant writers a hapless paradox, a paradox of the misfit or non-integration. This paradox has been remarked by Norman Manea in Intoarcerea Huliganului, by Gabriel Pleșea in Arunca painea ta pe ape (from the Trilogy of Exile), by Domnica Rădulescu in Train to Trieste, and by Saviana Stănescu in Waxing West as well.

In Out of the Transylvania Night, Aura Imbarus transposes the American readers into the dark years of her native country, Romania, when Nicolae Ceaușescu was holding the rein of a Communist regime, contriving to, literally and figuratively, famishing a whole nation. The accurate, even scrupulous descriptions of the author’s thoughts and actions throughout her autobiographic novel, as well as the rendering of the oppressive environment that had invaded Sibiu, her native town, create a thrilling image of the terror instituted by the Securitate which could have arrested a person for smuggling with Swiss chocolate, bought illegally from the shop.

But, the American Dream is a complicated dream. Aura Imbarus realizes that the desire and running for the precious things from “the land of the free people” leads to the exhaustion of an irreversible resource: time. As time goes by, everything that has been important in her life: family, parents, friends, home, the jewels stolen from the house in America, is falling into decay, some of them even disappearing. This is the moment when the author decides to reconnect with her Romanian roots. The novel may ooze a patriotic feeling for the native country, yet, the feeling covering like a bond all the stages of the author’s destiny is one dominated by the desire of freedom of a woman endowed with strength and optimism. Aura Imbarus’ belief has always been: the lack of someone or something creates the desire and the obsession and addiction to have them.

The living expression of the misfit is given by the cleavage in ethnic groups that try to survive in the new living American environment by a paradoxical seclusion in the native language. The exiled writers adapt to the American pragmatism but they are not capable to adapt to the hostland’s language and culture, which are difficult to assimilate for those who are pegged in their own cultural traditions and their own language, a form of a much stronger identity affiliation or status, capable to resist integration and assimilation.

The Global Immigrant Fairy-Exile

In pointing out how theories of "Immigrant Theater" might in fact be exclusionary, I realized that this particular exclusion, while perhaps the most obvious, was not alone. Immigrant experience can be itself rendered marginal even in presumably more progressive scholarship on "hypenated" identities and the artistic productions that try to express them. Saviana Stănescu created an extraordinary embroidery between ’immigrant’, ‘ethnic’ and theatre. The result is the “global immigrant theatre” where Saviana Stănescu hopes to generate some insight into the particular challenges of understanding Romanian-American Immigrant Theater.

The alienation Saviana Stanescu refers to is related to the language. Leaving the homeland meant also leaving the native language. And this change of languages is almost like geologic shift. You are forced to recover you identity, to reshape your worthiness and, to reinvent yourself in a new land and language, eventually. Saviana Stanescu succeeded so well, that beyond everyone expectations, she invented a global immigrant through the agency of her plays. Moreover, after her arrival in the U.S., Saviana thought of a first project she called “To write about the Immigrants Experience”, which she managed to put into practice around 2000 and has proved to be a very successful experiment, consisting in taking pictures, interviewing and creating large collages with the immigrants she met there. She started to talk to them, many were poor and still illegal immigrants and she discovered so many stories that had nothing in common with the American Dream cliché. As she considered herself an alien, Stanescu needed to understand their lives, their dreams, their nightmares. And then, she used everything they said in her plays. Stanescu’s characters are Romanian, Russian, Latino, Moldavian immigrants. Moreover, the actors and the stage directors she worked with, also belong to the world of immigration. Her characters are so divers, she likes to call them “clowns in the circle of life” and very easy to “read”, but the way they handle difficult or dangerous situations have a specific good-humor that help them survive in a clean and honest manner. None of them is trying to cheat and this makes them easy to love. Stanescu creates a unique blend of international immigrant characters in a delicate lighthearted way. It is perhaps the first time when a self-exiled author manages to re-create the image of the immigrant theatre in a cosmopolitan manner. Even if the main characters are foreigners, in the sense the author herself declares as an “alien”, their immigrant stories are distinctive and fundamental to their identities as newly-hatched Americans. But they have tapped into the city’s heartbeat and know they are part of it. They are ready to build a place for themselves, to dream beyond the current challenges, to negotiate the system (even U.S. Homeland Security) because they are ready – even determined – to call New York their home (Eisner in Introduction: 34)

The American Dream is nothing but a turn-down myth that concluded its course before being completely lived by those who have experienced exile. Zangwill’s “melting pot” is a metaphor used by Gabriel Pleșea to define America in Aruncă pâinea ta pe ape, the author succeeding in best catching the actual concept of globalization, the absorption of national identities into only one, the American one, the homogenizing of the society at a social condition level, a social stratification on two categories, the owners and the clerks, those who have their own small business, a shop, a restaurant, or the employees, all related by the same respect for work to their work and to the law:

The ethnic groups resisted the integration in this melting pot: they wanted to be what they used to be before. They had their schools, churches, temples, synagogues, praying houses, their own parades and festivals […] many streets were full of signboards in Hebrew or in Chinese, whereas in subway stations and inside the wagons the announcements were in English and Spanish (34).

There are many ways and possibilities to know the personality of a writer. The adventure of knowledge mediated through his or her books, I think is more important than at first hand contact, and sometimes is in the benefit of literature.

The voices of female immigrant Romanian writers are tenacious in the Romanian-American diaspora literature that has developed under the ‘post-colonial’ umbrella. Domnica Rădulescu, Aura Imbarus and Saviana Stănescu can all, in different ways, be considered female writers in exile, even if an exile by choice. They have all reached a new, “foreign” land, and each one interacts with the English language as both “a home” for their words and an alien tongue in different areas: fiction, journalistic, memoir and theatre. Moreover, they managed to give a new face to the hyphenated artistic act, embedded into the new concept of the global immigrant. This new approach of the emigration concept makes me want to leave an open gate to a further study, as I believe that the ‘global immigrant’ will soon represent an important topic of research within scientific and literary scholarship.

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