Forgetting Nationality: Nationalism vs. Cosmopolitanism

Christie DanielsUniversity of Texas at El Paso

Many rhetorical and postcolonial scholars have established the notion of the nation as a rhetorical construct.

While the nation often seems to be something natural or something acquired through birth, the truth is that it is something conceived in the mind and through the vehicle of language.

What forms a nation or national identity becomes paramount when national borders are crossed.

Many narratives of diaspora, immigration, and emigration often revolve around the precise meaning of national identity outside of its own borders.

Rhetoric plays a central role in this discussion due to its role in the creation, maintenance, and reinscription of such identities.

In particular, the rhetorical canon of memory is often at the forefront of this conversation.

Literary works such as Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth vividly illustrates the centrality of memory and forgetting to narratives involving national and cultural identity.

Nationalism/National IdentityDiscussions involving ethnicity, diaspora, and immigration inherently involve an exploration of national or ethnic identity.

These identities emerge as a result of the use of language and rhetoric.

For instance, Benedict Anderson, in his book, Imagined Communities, explains that “from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and that one could be ‘invited into’ the imagined community. Thus today, even the most insular nations accept the principle of naturalization (wonderful word!), no matter how difficult in practice they make it” (Anderson 145).

Here, the nation and its citizens are defined and delineated through discourse.

Etienne Balibar reinforces this argument with his conception of fictive ethnicity.

Articulating this, her asserts that societies are largely created and cohered through the means of narrative and that it is these narrative constructs which bond a people together as one when they would otherwise be distinct and independent (Balibar 221).

Moreover, according to Balibar, notions of collective identification such as national or ethnic identities are, in actuality, individual identities situated within an ideological acceptance, at least on some level, of these larger narratives of connection and the societal mores contained within them.

This façade of collectivity is used in an exclusionary manner in that insiders and outsiders are readily identifiable (Balibar 222).

Explicating this, Balibar argues that, “No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but … represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture, and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions” (Balibar 224).

Edward Said echoes these points, when he says, commenting on nationalism that it “always involves narratives—of the nation’s past, its founding fathers and documents, seminal events, and so on. But these narratives are never undisputed or merely a matter or neutral recital of facts” (Said 177).

Ultimately, it is this transcending of individual persons and concerns that allows the construct of the nation to shape the daily lives of its citizens in ways that are often significant and material.

Remembering

One of the central features of the power of narrative is its ability to replicate and reproduce itself.

Here, the rhetorical canon of memory plays a central role.

Richard Esbenshade explains that, “Memory too becomes available for any desired ad hoc construction of identity” (Esbenshade 86).

Anderson reiterates this by asserting that there are portion of identity that must be transmitted through the narrative as they cannot be remembered (Anderson 204).

In order to justify this assertion, Anderson claims that “Nations, however, have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural” (Anderson 205).

Continuing, he states that cognizance of a particular situatedness, along with all of the implications that go along with an individual context, provide the impetus for a unifying narrative (Anderson 205).

Moreover, Anderson posits that nations have a need to explain a variety of deaths and violent acts for the purpose of national unity and he sets forth that “to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as ‘our own’” (Anderson 206).

Edward Said also deals with the issue of memory and nationalism.

“Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority” (Said 176).

Here, Said argues that individuals look to the collective, or in this case national, identity to situate and ground them.

Memory, Said asserts, is intricately involved in this process (Said 179).

Yet his conception of memory is not simply one of retrieval.

Said claims that “The modern art of memory is much more subject to inventive reordering and redeploying than that” (Said 180).

Herein, events are politically chosen and molded into a narrative of the rememberer’s choosing.

As such, memory is a constructive and inherently rhetorical process which involves several competing interests, ideologies, and concerns and is rarely, if ever, stable and constant (Said 182).  

Yet, theoretical musings are not the only place where these issues are raised. In her novel, White Teeth, Zadie Smith deals with many of these same issues as she portrays the characters of Samad, and his twin sons Millat and Magid.

There are many instances of the attempt to remember a mythical nostalgic view of the homeland as well as individual identity. These characters, in fact, embody precise what Balibar argues when he claims that collective identity is inherently individual.

The father, Samad, tries to reiterate and reinvigorate his faith (and his allegiance to it) by chanting “To the pure all things are pure.

To the pure all things are pure. To the pure all things are pure” (Smith 115). As he futilely tries to remain pure, there is also the realization that his religion does not allow for compromises and the like (Smith 117).

Ultimately, this attempt to remember is one that is unsuccessful as he gives into temptation. In fact at one point, Smith ominously writes, “And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western Sons” (Smith 135). And ultimately the sons do pay the price.

In an act of nostalgic remembering, Samad laments the loss of tradition from his sons’ generation. Extolling the virtues of tradition, Samad explains, “tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. That didn’t mean he could live by them, abide by them, or grow in the manner they demanded, but roots were roots and roots were good” (Smith 161). He assumes that his sons have no appreciation for their tradition.

His solution is to send Magid, the good brother, back to Bangladesh in attempt to at least have one of his sons value and learn the traditions of their homeland.

The results of this decision are less than ideal: “There are no words. The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white-suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is a fully paid-up green-bow-tie wearing fundamentalist terrorist” (Smith 336).

The son he refers to as a “fundamentalist terrorist” is Millat and he, as his father’s words indicate, is no better off for having stayed in England.

In fact, Millat employs a type of remembering that does hearken back to his father’s attempts at purity. Illustrating this attempt to remember, Millat mimicking a movie he has seen, proclaims “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Muslim” (Smith 369).

This is, of course, a fabrication but Smith alludes to his family’s revered ancestor who was involved in a mutiny and something that is written in Millat’s blood.

So, it can be said, that Millat’s militant proclivities are an example of memory and a reconstructive type of memory where the tradition that Millat attempts to cling to represents a confused, jumbled incomplete construction of a former tradition.

Ultimately, the lesson to be learned is best summed up by the character of Palipana in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost: “There has been always slaughter in passion” (Ondaatje 102).

Involuntary forgettingDiscussions of remembering necessarily involve

discussions of forgetting. One important type of forgetting is that which is involuntary or coerced.

Esbenshade, writing in response to the situation of post World War II East-Central Europe explains how the usual means of remembering for a nation, its history, becomes muddied and compromised.

Here he notes how governments actively engaged in a process of obscuring and hiding the truth. As such, the historian becomes a bureaucrat and writers take on the role of historian as they attempt to cut through the veil of state propaganda and deceit (Esbenshade 74).

Esbenshade continues: In the face of official manipulation and distortion of history (forced forgetting), the writer’s individual memory became the source for, and representation of, national history, its advantages and pitfalls” (Esbenshade 74).

That is, and it is important to note, that the writers of this time period become responsible for the nation’s narrative and rewriting it in a such a way that reflects truth and actuality.

Authors such as Michael Ondaatje in his work, Anil’s Ghost, embody the spirit of the writer to which Esbenshade refers.

The protagonist of the novel, Anil, confronted with the mystery of the skeleton that is referred to as Sailor before they can identify him.

In indignation she responds, “Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest” (Ondaatje 56). In fact, as a forensic scientist, Anil is engaged in the very act of unearthing the truth that has long been hidden.

Ondaatje also uses the character of Palipana to reiterate the point of history and narratives being forcibly removed as he writes, “In the last few years he had found the hidden histories, intentionally lost, that altered the perspective and knowledge of earlier times. It was how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie” (Ondaatje 105).

Many instances of the dangers of telling the truth and the safety in lies pepper Ondaatje’s novel.

However, the very act of writing these instances into the book reaffirms the notion of writer as truth-teller that Esbenshade identifies.

In short, writers such as Ondaatje, through remembering these and shedding light on hidden and eradicated events, are, in essence, responsible for their own kind of forced forgetting whereby they endeavor to use the truth to obliterate the lies and deception of the past from the collective narrative of the nation.

Voluntary Forgetting

Forgetting is not always an act of deception. At times, it is necessary to move forward.

In fact, Esbenshade explains that “Nietzsche’s ‘rhetoric of forgetting’ has turned forgetting into a positive and productive postmodernist activity. Indeed, with so many competing and conflicting memories and histories, is it not better to banish all metanarrative, to let memory bloom in all its manifestations, true, false, or otherwise? Alternatively, why should memory necessarily be anchored to any ‘truth,’ any reality?” (Esbenshade 86).

This theoretical perspective is especially important in contexts where the truth and the past are ugly, violent, and inhuman/inhumane.

Such is the environment depicted in Anil’s Ghost. Consequently, when Anil returns to Sri Lanka, she is greeted with “First thing after fifteen years. The return of the prodigal’” and she responds “‘I’m not a prodigal.’” (Ondaatje10).

This is an important distinction for Anil. She doesn’t come to Sri Lanka to stay.

She is not begging to come back and in actuality did not think that she would be selected to go back.

She is not in the situation of the prodigal son who was worse off for having left but rather she is better off for having left.

Finally, Anil is not returning to a land with family, she is returning simply to a place where she used to live.

ConclusionIn the end nations and national identities are forged

through discourse. Discourse creates the nation. It creates the ideology that guides the nation and all its action. It creates the identities that bond people together. All of these discursive activities, if done well, can be positive forces in a society.

Yet, when things are not done well, these activities can be the same activities which trap, restrain, and imprison people. Sometimes, it is necessary to remember and other times, it is necessary to forget.

The act of remembering can be a reconstructive act just as the act of forgetting can be one of eschewing.

When national identities and the passion embodied by them cease to be useful and only appear harmful, forgetting them and embracing concepts such as cosmopolitanism allows for an escape from violence and oppression.

In the words of Appiah, “In a single polis there is no wisdom” (639). That is, when home becomes a place rife with deceit, corruption, and inhumanity, the time has come to forget.