Culture, identity, and our mongrel selves

Written by Farah B for Nuseiba

Recently I finished reading In Search of Fatima by Ghada Karmi. I don’t usually read memoirs but this comes recommended by Edward Said so I thought, why not. If the book’s bad I’ll just stop reading it. Karmi is Palestinian. One of the strongest threads running through her story was her discussion of her displacement from Palestine, and the difficulties she faced in England negotiating her disparate aspects of identity as a woman, as a Muslim, as a Palestinian and a new emerging elements of self in conflict with the old. Her story strongly resonated with me largely for two reasons.

Firstly, my family comes from Kashmir. Living in a territorial dispute since Partition in 1947 between Pakistan, China and India, means that Kashmiris experiences the same displacement and denial of cultural experience like Karmi describes in her book of Palestinians. Those who migrate elsewhere also experience the same struggles with maintaining a culture across a diaspora and the challenges to that minority culture from the majority population in the adopted country. Secondly, and this is something the majority of first/second generation immigrants face, we all exist (to adopt Stuart Hall’s language) as “products of cultural hybridity”. As a female, first generation, Kashmiri Muslim living in Australia I face a struggle between my different senses of self, and must continually reconcile these disparate elements like Karmi discusses when she grows up in England. She describes having to find an accommodation between her Palestinian origins and the new society they had joined; between her identity as an Arab Muslim and that of the European, Christian-dominated country around them. While growing up she was “forced to feel [her] way forward uncertainly, trying to make sense of these contradictions and resolving them in [her] own different ways.”

Pierre Bordieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ highlights the social constructedness of our subjectivities and identities. He argues that the habitus produces individual and collective practices. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which are deposited in each subject in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action. For Karmi her habitus was as a Palestine Muslim; for me it is as a Kashmir Muslim. However, the culture of Kashmir and the interpretation of my religion is something which I have had to construct for myself, affected by living in Australia for over 20 years. Karmi discusses in detail her struggle to reconcile her identities. She asks specifically “Was I Arab or English or a hybrid?” Her solution was to deny her Palestinian culture and religious identity. For Karmi Palestine was no longer ‘home’; though she had specific memories of home and her old life, after being displaced for so long her associations and identity had shifted and changed. Similarly for me (and my family) while Kashmir is referred to as ‘home’, it can never exist as home as it once was. Our memories of ‘home’ are memories of the past lived by the body, but the body has moved on, it has been relocated, reinscribed, and the habitus that was once lived is lived now only through the mediation of subsequent layers of material hybridity.

Later in the book Karmi subsequently returns to Damascus to rediscover her identity and heritage; however it does not provide reconciliation. She was an ‘alien’; looking and sounding Arab, but “in myself I was not [Arab], and they sensed it.” Karmi also has to deal with the number of men who assume that because she had grown up in the West, she was promiscuous and becomes the subject of a number of sexual advances (and one she describes would probably constitute sexual assault.) In the last chapter Karmi goes back to her old house (now lived in by Israeli Jews) to try and reconcile her sense of self and rediscover her ‘habitus’. However, she doesn’t find the reconciliation she hopes she will. The habitus has changed and evolved. It can no longer represent what it once did. Her house is no longer her own; the symbols have shifted meaning since her time there. Both the self and the habitus have been displaced.

Karmi largely focuses her story on the problems she faced with identity construction. However, she does raise some pertinent issues regarding the role of gender and changed habitus. Karmi talks a lot about her impressions and perceptions of her mother and sister’s reactions to English society. She notes that living in exile meant that her mother never really accepted England as her family’s new home. Her mother wants to move back to the Middle East; however her appeals to go back lessen the longer they stay in England. Karmi attributes this to the fact that her mother would be unsure of her role as a woman if they were to return. Living in England for so long did affect Karmi’s mother; her role as a mother and as a woman had changed. Her social circle opened up, she had a strong role within the Arab community as a matriarchal figure. Going back to live in the Middle East meant this role would have changed and in all likelihood been constricted. Similarly, at a later point Karmi discusses her sister’s marriage and intent to move back to Damascus. She wonders how her sister (Siham) will live in Syria considering Siham has too been affected by her life in England. Now, I don’t want to suggest that the West represents liberation for the oppressed Middle Eastern woman because the reality is a lot more complex. Indeed, by Karmi’s own account her family had a lower middle class life in Jerusalem and as such already enjoyed a certain level of social mobility and freedom. When in England her father encourages her and her older sister to study medicine. And to be fair, her discussion is based on what she perceives as her mother and sister’s struggle. However, her discussion here mirrors what I can see in my own mother. She is not unaffected by living in Australia for so long and has constructed her own sense of self in reference to her lived experiences (even if she will not admit the change). Though wanting to return to Kashmir, denying any affect Australia has had would be imprudent. Yet, the question remains: is it totally fair for Karmi and myself to assume that our mother’s roles would be more restricted if they were to subsequently return to their habitus? Women in Kashmir do not occupy the same role as they once did, and (admittedly presumably) neither do women in Damascus. The habitus and self move on. Both sides of my family in Kashmir are also fairly middle class and yet, even without that economic and social mobility all of my aunts would probably be (and are) some of the strongest women I know. However, Kashmir is still largely a patriarchal culture. The current struggle therefore for women is to negotiate gender as another aspect of identity and challenge discourses surrounding power, behaviour, action and interpretation.

She ends her book stating her exile was “undefined by space or time, and from where I was, there would be no return.” Maybe for all of us as “products of cultural hybridity” there can never be any meaningful reconciliation. No one can ever truly maintain that specific juncture in time and space; it exists only in memory and in the past. The habitus and self are constantly in a state of flux. The relationship between these competing aspects of culture, religion and gender is necessarily a constant power struggles between lived subjectivities. As women we must inhabit multiple identities, to speak a number of cultural languages, to negotiate and translate between them. We must continually construct and re-construct a hybridized, plural identity, creating dialectics between the past lived cultural experience and our new senses of self. We must be members of several cultural communities and negotiate on the edges of the borderlines, and to end with Stuart Hall, “the negotiations between and across these complex ‘borderlines’ are characteristic of modernity itself.”