“I have run with the money
I have hid like a thief
Rewritten histories with armies and my crooks
Invented memories
I did burn all the books
And I can still hear his laughter
And I can still hear his song
The man’s too big
The man’s too strong.”
– “The Man’s Too Strong,” Dire Straits
I guess every piece of writing—regardless of the style—needs to have a claim, a thesis, an argument—whatever you like to call it. They should be “putting something on the table,” otherwise, the dominant work-oriented part of your brain tells you, “if you aren’t going to gain anything from it, why should you be wasting your time?” So, below is my claim for this piece—dedicated to all sensible brains of the world—to make it worth reading, and convince them they will indeed not tick away the moments that make up the dull day. Because I’d like every one of you to get a sneak peek at a world of wonders: Milan Kundera–—a Czech author and a French thinker—whose best-known work is “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and my favorite work of his, “Ignorance.” The book’s condensed beauty is even more dazzling: “Ignorance” is a very short read with only 142 pages! Not to sound so dramatic, but perhaps Kundera will change your life too—like he did mine. He seems to have a little for everyone.
My argument is a gut feeling. There are two ways of thinking that a book is a masterpiece. You may read some and admire the craftsmanship of the author and the loftiness of the work—call it the power of literature, the narrative, how beautifully it is written, the message it conveys, etc. But, they remain just like that—nothing more: you close the book, take a couple of deep breaths to fully digest it, look around and go on with your life. Yet, in some rare cases, the admiration happens to be in a much more personal way. You try to resist the urge to underline every sentence and fold every single page to later return to it, and you become enchanted by running across to yourself in the tiniest details across the pages. This, I think, is the best way of admiring a book—at least, for you. The starter pack of how Milan Kundera’s “Ignorance” became one of these for me includes a 12-hour plane flight across the Atlantic Ocean, a train station, and three songs on repeat—“Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel, “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas and “The Man’s Too Strong” by Dire Straits. Because I too—albeit fortunately in much luckier circumstances—was returning to my home country, Turkey, after an arguably long while. That’s why, I will primarily deal with the psychopolitics of the émigrée experience rather than its legal trifles—namely, the struggle of leaving the place one is born and raised in, and the effort to stand still while creating a new social identity in the emigrated place. Since it’s an aspect that is often overlooked in discourses surrounding immigrants. Part of the reason why I will often refer to such an individual as the “émigrée”—a term borrowed by Carol Rumens, a British poet, whose poem carrying the same name deals with a similar experience—rather than “immigrant,” in the remainder of the piece also stems from this. Since the experience I am laying on the table doesn’t necessarily require an official legal change, and the Law’s authority to artificially assign people to various national spaces. I hope that, although symbolic, this linguistic distinction will make my claim clearer.
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“Ignorance” tells the story of two Czech expatriates, Irene and Josef, Irene’s lover back in Prague, flying away from Czechoslovakia due to the 1968 Warsaw Pact Invasion. When the Velvet Revolution overthrows the governing Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Irene decides to return after twenty years living as an exiled immigrant. This would be a fairly simple overview of the book. But wait! One should always be careful in reading Kundera, because the story he conveys is never merely about the tale itself, particularly in that the characters Kundera creates merely serve as a medium for his philosophical gloss. Kundera’s gift of exploring the cores of human identity and its subjectivity via mingling politics, literature, history, art, and philosophy always turns his novel-façaded works into thought-provoking essays.
Where Irene returns is a country that has long ceased to be a home. Times have changed, neither the space nor the people that the culturally-stuck émigrée Irene has left behind remained the same, and there is an unconcealable gap between the sides—now waving hands to each other across the opposite shores: “I wonder: Would an Odyssey be conceivable today? Is the epic of the return still pertinent to our time? When Odysseus woke on Ithaca’s shore that morning, could he have listened in ecstasy to the music of the Great Return if the old olive tree had been felled and he recognized nothing around him?” Portraying the hardships of returning to one’s homeland after years, “Ignorance” reworks the Odysseian themes of homecoming, challenging the Homeric nostalgia and asserting, rather, that “The Great Return ” may not be that great at all.
Nostalgia, from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (suffering), is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. In “Ignorance,” Kundera presents an inverse relationship between memory and nostalgia, which Homer “glorified…with a laurel wreath and thereby laid out a moral hierarchy of emotions.” Long émigrées are amnesiacs, their memories are selective, and the émigrée constantly needs to evoke the fragments of time to keep them alive. “We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go.” Why does the émigrée remember this piece and not the other? The émigrée does not know, because nostalgia is self-absorbed and self-suffocating, and it inevitably reinvents a past that never was:
“But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory’s activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.”
Kundera offers an avant-garde point of view on the problem of nostalgia in order to prohibit it from restructuring our past, disarranging our personal history, and intermingling with our present and future. Through the ignorance of Irene and her inability to realize how nostalgia for her past love blends with the surprises of her new love, Kundera forces us to end our own ignorance and reminds us of our unfreedom to reimagine the nonexisting past or dismiss the undesired fragments of it: “now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.”
We should also keep in mind that “Ignorance” is a particularly personal work for Kundera. Although conveyed in a distant manner with the third-person narrator, sometimes he can’t help but interfere in media res with the I-voice. As a Czech émigrée living in France himself, Kundera projects his own rootlessness, alienation, memory, and amnesia into the experiences of Irene and Josef: “The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other.” Thus, for Kundera, the émigrée is someone who is forced to observe the parts of himself—whether alienated or unalienated from his self-conception—through the narrations of the ones he left behind and in the immigrated place. He constantly reflects, observes, and constructs himself, his essence is always under restoration—thanks to the double consciousness he is subjected to, no matter where he currently resides: “This is something that is very common for a lot of people who emigrated from Czechoslovakia. It was the same reaction. When you come back after living a long time in another country, you have this feeling that people don’t understand what you did, how you lived. They are not interested so they impose on you how they knew you before you left. So these two people, Irene and Josef, have this experience, which is existential and not a pleasant experience. They feel more lost than before.”
In addition to distorting one’s recollection of his past and understanding of time, Homeric nostalgia complicates one’s relationship with the national space as well. This can either be in the form of rootlessness or ignorant oblivion: “Josef had neither reason nor occasion to concern himself with recollections bound to the country he no longer lived in: such is the law of masochistic memory: as segments of their lives melt into oblivion, men slough off whatever they dislike, and feel lighter, freer.”
According to Homi K. Bhahbha, a critical theorist and the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, the émigrée arguably symbolizes the uncanny or unhomely aspect of national identity as he “will not be contained within the heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse,” and instead articulates “the imagined community” (a term coined by Benedict Anderson on 1983) of the nation. This comfort, however, demonstrates the invisible exclusion mechanism in the emigrated country, which constantly haunts the émigrée. Things, after all, may not be psychologically different even when the émigrée is granted citizenship—let alone the “ethnic” nationalism, even “civic” nationalism unfortunately doesn’t always grant social membership within a state—: either when the émigrée is given a new citizenship from the emigrated place, takes the one back that was bereaved from him, or, and, in some rare and fortunate occasions, somewhat manages to have both—like Kundera himself finally did by 2019.
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Understandably, such questions may easily daze and confuse a person who finds traces of himself from the émigrée experience. How can we find a way of reconciling the émigrée’s identity in flux with his inter and intrapersonal relationships? The answer isn’t merely the concern of the émigrée, but rather anyone who seeks to find a way to build a better nationalism and is concerned with the rise of chauvinistic, populist nationalism and its impact on human rights, especially amid the days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the nation’s amnesia doesn’t only scrunch its own identity, but constantly haunts the historical margins and minority groups—like, for the sake of this piece’s topic, that of the émigrée. From Germany’s imposition on the Turkish labor migrants who began to flee to Germany in the 1960s to speak German in order to be treated like German citizens (which, on paper, they already have the citizenship) to societal exclusion of Syrian refugees residing in Turkey (often, no citizenship) to the Melilla and Ceuta border fences in Morocco to deportation, the emotional labor of the émigrée is psychopolitical—reflecting itself in the émigrée’s sense of self, citizenship, language and social identity.
The émigrée’s experience isn’t merely helpful for himself in terms of not falling prey to the power of nostalgia and narration in recollection. The émigrée also helps the nations to remember because nations too are amnesiac. Pride, the sense of superiority, the grouping against the “enemy,” language, the desire to preserve one’s own nation through rituals, performances, and symbols constantly reproduce the nation, which, in return, perpetually shapes the nation’s narration and inevitably enhances the collective amnesia— while ironically trying to build a collective identity to commemorate. Yet, how can the identity be a whole without the essential parts it chooses not to remember? According to Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, the aim of Art is to produce sensation. Cinema produces images that move in time and space, and the task of art is to produce “signs” that will push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions of creation. For Deleuze, Art can only be sensed but not recognized, for it splits perceptual processings, prohibits our rush to conceptual ordering, imagination, and memory. If the reader’s perspective can be that of the anchor character, to the extent that the reader can perceive the events through the character’s eyes and filter them through the psyche of the character, the experience can be transferred from the domain of the fictional world to the real life, or, the reception and perception of the reader. Likewise, education curriculums integrating art, political science, literature, history, and philosophy can really “be the change” with this method if we really are as eager to have one as we often like to present ourselves on social media. Until this point, the School was successful to transfer the ambivalence and liminality of the national space to construction of a national identity, and the national memory into a strictly narrated education curriculum. Perhaps, now it’s the time for it to make sure that we can be safely carried away to the other corners of the world—rootless, yet belonging—through diving deeper into the artistic and literary works like those of Kundera’s. And perhaps, now is the time to find a new, authentic light, for “in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”