Diaspora, psychoanalysis, and literature
Were it not for the diaspora that came before me, I would not have written my main novels, O Papagaio e o Doutor—translated into English under the title “The Parrot and the Doctor”—and Baal, forthcoming in Portuguese. Both of these novels look at diaspora but from different angles. The heroine in “The Parrot and the Doctor” descends from immigrants, while the hero of Baal is himself an immigrant.
When we talk about immigration, we generally find ourselves thinking about the compelling events that trigger it, like war, and also about the objective challenges of emigration or immigration. In my literature, what interests me are the subjective consequences of this process. Gilberto Freyre said he was a writer with systematic sociological training. Similarly, I say I am a writer with systematic psychoanalytical training. To be quite bold, I would add that I am a “human ear,” like Svetlana, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 and author of Voices from Chernobyl, a novel where she says she isn’t interested in the facts of Chernobyl but in the life within the souls of the people she heard. I too listen in order to write, and I write by stylizing orality.
What interests me in novels about the diaspora are the emotional histories of immigrants and their descendants, which tend to remain hidden for a variety of reasons, one of which is the intolerance to which immigrants and their descendants are constantly exposed.
In addition to racial, religious, and sex discrimination, there is ethnic discrimination, which applies to groups set apart by their unique social and cultural traits, as reflected in language, religion, or behavior. This type of intolerance finds expression primarily in the form of xenophobia.
Let us remember that the word “xenophobia” comes from the Greek: from “xenos,” meaning “strange,” and from “phobos,” meaning fear. “Xenophobia” thus connotes fear of the stranger, of the foreigner, an aversion to him or her.
I myself experienced this as the descendant of Lebanese immigrants who moved to Brazil in the late nineteenth century to avoid serving in the Turkish army, or, more simply put, to flee war. Lebanon was then part of the Ottoman Empire. People made the crossing in a ship’s hold under precarious conditions, but—contrary to what we find happening today—the vast majority of the immigrants survived. There were fewer people on earth.
I wrote “The Parrot and the Doctor” 25 years ago, drawing inspiration from my analysis with Lacan and my ancestors’ crossing. I was fortunate because I had as a reader Michèle Sarde, former professor of French literature at the University of Georgetown. Michèle wrote the foreword to the French edition. In it, she says: “Today, it makes no sense to ask whether a narrative belongs to this or that literary genre—novel or autobiography. ‘A book is a product of a self different from the self we express in society, through our habits, in our lives,’ wrote Proust in Contra Sainte-Beuve. . . .It is enough to classify ‘The Parrot and the Doctor’ as post-modern. Novel or autobiography, self-fiction or novel-essay, novella or story, self-portrait or prose poem—Kundera’s Europe, García Márquez’s America, and the universities of the North freed us from this false problem long ago, which the great writers, who are just as indifferent to literary critics as to PhDs from the Sorbonne, had already solved.”
One of the novel’s themes is Brazilian xenophobia towards the Lebanese, Lebanese xenophobia towards Brazilians, and the protagonist’s xenophobia towards herself.
“The Parrot and the Doctor” is a metaphor of immigration. It takes place in Brazil but could take place anywhere at all. For this precise reason, the country in the novel is not called Brazil but Açu, which means “great” or “big” in Tupi-Guaraní.
I was only able to write this novel because I had undergone analysis. As a result, I could observe myself and, through the story, reveal the various forms of xenophobia lying at the heart of an identity crisis capable of imploding the world. To begin with, the novel shows us xenophobia against immigrants. The first Lebanese who came to Brazil left their native land behind to escape the Turks. Paradoxically, in the tropics they were called “Turks,” or “people eaters.” When they worked as traveling salesmen and showed up on farms to sell their goods, the women would all run off. Above all, the Brazilians wanted to keep their distance.
Yet it must be said that if the native-born is xenophobic towards the immigrant, the immigrant is likewise xenophobic towards the native-born. And so in the novel, the protagonist’s Lebanese grandmother calls native-born Brazilians “brasilii,” effectively belittling them. As to her grandfather, he takes pride in not being a brasilii; he insists on pointing out that he descended from the great Phoenician people, who have a 4,000-year history, unlike the native-born, whose history goes back a mere 400 years.
The xenophobia of immigrants towards the native-born has serious consequences for their descendants, who end up feeling divided between their ancestors and their compatriots. The only way out of this dilemma is to distance themselves, and this is what happens with Seriema, heroine of “The Parrot and the Doctor,” who travels to France to undergo analysis and discover why she is an impossible being.
In addition to these two forms of xenophobia, there is a third: the immigrant descendant’s xenophobia towards him or herself. And so when our heroine goes to see the psychoanalyst, she omits her ancestors’ story, of those who left Lebanon behind for life in the Americas. In other words, she scotomises the saga of her Lebanese grandparents, who were called “people eaters” in Brazil. Like other children of immigrants, Seriema wants the tragic past of immigration to be forgotten.
This leads me to affirm that the descendant of immigrants tends to dissimulate his own history because he doesn’t want to be who he is; he doesn’t want to be the child or grandchild of someone who had to exile himself from his native land and who was humiliated in the country to which he immigrated. In other words, he is a victim of self-xenophobia. Immigration is a narcissistic wound passed down from generation to generation, and a descendant’s history depends on each immigrant’s relationship to his past.
As I painstakingly analyzed my own family’s history, I realized there are two subjective positions. The first is the position of the immigrant who wants to forget the past, while the second is that of the immigrant who tends to glorify it. True to the first position, the protagonist’s grandmother in “The Parrot and the Doctor” has little to say about immigration: “From Lebanon to Brazil, at the age of 14, five children—because maktub, it is written, and that’s it.” She covers up the past and, perhaps for narcissistic reasons, presents herself as the origin of it all.
When an ancestor behaves this way, the descendant is deprived of his true origins; she suffers, in a manner of speaking, an amputation. The past is like a black hole. To avoid suffering, she must say “no” to her ancestor’s cover-up and remember the past however she can, that is, by re-inventing it.
The second subjective position is that of the immigrant who venerates the past, like our heroine’s grandfather. Because he is a story-teller, he introduces his granddaughter to the East through tales of “the realms of the lily and papyrus, of the Nile and the pharaohs, sun-bathed obelisks, pyramids, and their guardian, the sphinx.” According to the novel’s heroine, the very roots of her grandfather’s stories made them magic: “small ancient pearls that he dispensed in our language and in Arabic, that were instilled like a mystery.” Thanks to this grandfather who exalted his past, the heroine likewise values it: “The kingdoms, the history, the language of august courts unveiling itself like an odalisque to pique our imagination and even our desire. . . .The Orient of the Orient, but of the Occident as well—Andalusia, al Andalus, the Spain of unconquerable fortified cities. The Alhambra, aquala hamra, the red castle the color of a flambeau. . .courts where poets were demigods and a good verse was as valued as a viceroyalty. Civilization, astronomy, astrology, trigonometry, algebra—of Arabic origin—as almofada (pillow), almoço (lunch), almofariz (mortar), words beginning with al. ”
The immigrant who values his past affords his descendant the possibility of addressing it, of comprehending the reason for immigration and overcoming this penchant for xenophobia. As a result, he can have both his ancestor’s country and his own.
Since war is inevitable, so too is immigration, but oblivion can be avoided—memori-cide is a crime as serious as homicide. An immigrant can avoid this by teaching his language to his descendant. Accordingly, this immigrant will not have a descendant who doesn’t speak his language, and the descendant will not be deprived of his own linguistic past. I suffered this deprivation in the flesh. My ancestors not only failed to teach me their language; they also used it to say things I wasn’t supposed to know. That is another reason why I sought out Lacan, the analyst who inspired the Doctor in “The Parrot and the Doctor.”
The novel focuses both on immigration and on the analytical cure, from which the heroine, because of her roots, cannot escape. Since she is from a family of Lebanese immigrants who settled in Brazil, she experiences the drama of a Western descendant of Eastern people.
Seriema’s own particular drama has to do with gender. She doesn’t identify with her biological gender for two reasons. First, she is a modern woman and has ancestors with whom she cannot identify because she sees them as backward. They live only for marriage and motherhood and, furthermore, cannot imagine life without a male child. Second, her biological gender is a problem for our heroine because she is the first-born in an Eastern family—in other words, she holds a position meant for a male. If she is to earn her primogeniture and consider herself a man, she cannot surrender to her female body and become a mother.
The heroine’s drama manifests itself during her analysis when she tells the Doctor she can’t have children because she can’t give them her last name. In other words, motherhood contradicts Seriema’s imaginary gender. Thanks to her work in analysis, however, Seriema gains the ability to choose a father for her child and become a mother.
“The Parrot and the Doctor” shows us how this plays out. It paints a clear picture of how an analyst proceeds, demonstrating the resources he uses to overcome the analysand’s resistance and bring her to the point where she can acknowledge her roots and her sexual identity.
Years after writing this book, I wrote a play whose theme is likewise psychoanalysis. It centers on the same two characters, the analysand and the Doctor. Performed in Brazil and France, the play is entitled “Goodbye, Doctor.”
We will now read the first two scenes and then move on to a discussion.