week 8: Psychogeography
lecture transcripts about poetry of the third space
I’m teaching this semester, a poetry class within an anthro department, looking at writers and writing that work in different “Englishes” shaped by their intersecting identities. Each week, we read a packet of poems and essays, and I deliver a short lecture at the beginning of class. And I’m sharing those lectures here! This one was from April 1st. The packet included an excerpt from Rinaldo Walcott’s “Diaspora Against the Nation-State” and the poems “Aleppo” by Hala Alyan, “Argela Remembrance” by Suheir Hammad, “My Family Never Stopped Migrating We Just Stopped” by José Olivarez, and “Lateefa” by Mohja Kahf.
Psychogeography
April 1, 2025
Mohja Kahf’s poem Lateefa is set in a New Jersey that is home to “An Afro-Caribbean Muslim woman / eating paprika-tossed Hungarian potato / salad at the wedding of a Pakistani-American to a West Indian man.” Without getting into an overly romanticized reading about the “melting pot,” the world illustrated in this poem celebrates the collapse of national geographies predicated on the drawing of border lines that separate those who belong from those who do not. As we discussed last week, citizenship requires the existence of an alien Other to define itself against. And often the conversation about national homelands is a conversation about national belonging, i.e. citizenship. But when our imaginations are released from conceptions of home predicated on the viability of the nation-state, new and more interesting belongings can take shape. This is not to say that the homeland should be erased, nor that identifying with one’s origins should be erased. Rather, as Mohja Kahf puts it in the poem Lateefa, “If we love what we are we can make it / survive here.” Culture persists even in the absence of country.
In Against National Sovereignty: The Postcolonial New World Order and the Containment of Decolonization, Nandita Sharma writes
Under postcolonialism, only people who could credibly claim to be a “nation” were able to lay claim to territorial sovereignty. To be “national,” however, often depended on laying claim to the racialized geographies first established by European imperial-states. National geographies were formed by the placement of limits to both national citizenship and to immigration. Indeed, actions taken by states after WWII solidified the link between nation-state sovereignty and citizenship and immigration restrictions. It became unimaginable that states would not – and should not – control the entry of people into their territories or determine who could become their citizens.
Rinaldo Walcott’s reading of Sharma “[warns] us against seeing the state, nation, and sovereignty and achieving them as a form of freedom rather than yet another tool for managing populations.” The existence of the nation requires the existence of citizenship. The existence of the citizen requires the existence of the non-citizen, the alien Other. Citizenship is a fictional sense of belonging that exists only in contrast to exclusion, to who is shut out. As discussed by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism “National security and a separatist identity are the watchwords…the newly triumphant politicians seemed to require borders and passports first of all.” The “newly triumphant politicians” he references are those who authored the nation-states born of postcolonialism, nation-states that were quick to recreate the infrastructures of their former colonizers. “What had once been the imaginative liberation of a people,” he continues, “and the audacious metaphoric charting of spiritual territory usurped by colonial masters were quickly translated into and accommodated by a world system of barriers, maps, frontiers, police forces, customs, and exchange controls.”
Despite the removal of the colonizer, the postcolonial nation-state continues to participate in many of the systems introduced under colonialism: state violence, ruling elites, marginalized demographics. “The frontiers are there, the frontiers are sacred,” writes Basil Davidson—“What else, after all, could guarantee privilege and power to ruling elites?” Even when tucked safely into one’s homeland, the overall experience of “belonging” to a country, a nation, the state, varies across lines of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and other identity markers that create the hierarchies of citizenship built into the foundation of the nation state. In Diaspora Against the Nation-State, Rinaldo Walcott makes a case for “what it means to land somewhere and to belong to a polity or community not defined by a state.” Because the state is not, as promised, a site of belonging, but a tool for population management. “When the postcolonial nation-state achieves its sovereignty against the colonizer,” continues Walcott, “it turns to managing its internal minorities or the less powerful within the state.” Is this the freedom that was promised—Edward Said’s “imaginative liberation of a people, Aimé Césaire’s “invention of new souls”—? Surely not.
In the absence of national belonging, what Darwish refers to as “a misunderstanding between existence and borders,” what remains, what endures, is that nebulous thing we call cultural identity. In the context of diaspora, Stuart Hall writes that “Cultural identity…is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘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.” That orientation toward the future, toward a mutable and agent kind of becoming, calls to mind the opening lines of José Olivarez’s poem My Family Never Finished Migrating We Just Stopped: “we invented cactus. to survive the winters / we created steel.” We invented, we created, when the old ways stopped working, when the space between nationalist belonging to the homeland and assimilation into the host land—both useless undertakings—calls for a new, third, invented thing. This is not to erase the homeland, but to find ways to belong to it without requiring allegiance to the state that sits atop that land. Think of the image in the Hala Alyan poem Aleppo: “The Syria in my grandmother”—the homeland as it exists in the body, in the family, rather than in the state— which echoes to me, again, the lines from Mohja Kahf: “If we love what we are we can make it / survive here”—which is echoed again in the lines from Suheir Hammad in argela remembrance “we call ourselves the east / and face each other when we pray.” It is probably cliche to say that home is other people, but that is where tangible belonging can exist, in accountability to actual people rather than to the apparatus of the state, whose source of power is in extending belonging to the few while keeping out the many.
“Diaspora counterposes the nation-state,” writes Rinaldo Walcott, “because in its most disruptive form it claims the world in its unsettledness as its domain.” The argument here, borrowed from the imaginative work of anti-Zionist Jewish people, is that everyone should be safe wherever they are, rather than requiring a state wherein by design some are safe and others are not. “That the sanctity of life is not tied to a nation-state” continues Walcott, “but rather to an ethical orientation and practice…ruptures the idea that the nation-state is the only site of life and its future.” And it ruptures the idea that the nation-state is the only site of belonging, that having someone to keep out is what brings us closer together. All countries are invented, and usually none of us residing within them have had a say in that invention. But we invent our communities and we invent our homes. We invent our languages, and in poetry we break them and invent them again. I think about the appearance of the police officer at the end of the poem Lateefa, unable to understand this gathering as a wedding—“What wedding, lady? I don’t see no priest”—which I read as a celebration of kinds of gathering, kinds of belonging, that are illegible to the state and its agents. What new possibilities can we turn to, with the nation state growing obsolete behind us?
I’ll keep these un-paywalled for the first week after posting! Next week’s unit is called Whatever Is Lost Is Worshipped.
xoxo
S