Discussing Mobility in Liminal Spaces and Border Zones: An Analysis of Abbas Khider’s Der falsche Inder (2008) and Briefe in die Auberginenrepublik (2013) (original) (raw)
Traversing through different geographical and temporal spaces can render social worlds that make plain the interdependencies of power and movement. Practices of everyday life are enmeshed in new cultures of discourse that are localized in spaces of transit. Liminal spaces and border zones have become today’s stages of negotiating both the concept of an abject human body and the possibility of new social realities. This paper focuses on what can be learned from the strategies revealed in narratives of mobile subjects to understand the significance and difficulties of writing social life in in-between places. Using Victor Turner’s conceptions of “liminality” and “comunitas”, I provide a comparative reading of Abbas Khider’s Der falsche Inder (2008) and Briefe in die Auberginenrepublik (2013) to trace how different forms of movement can function as indicators for the destabilization of identities and dislocation of a sense of belonging, but also open up opportunities to recognize agency. I discuss the ambiguities of the conditions of contemporary borderlands which Khider’s protagonists inhabit and utilize. Experiencing the conditions of indefinite liminality, Rasul Hamid struggles to establish relationships to the places through which he journeys in Der falsche Inder. While he gets to know many people on his way, it is only with those already marginalized that he can form temporary relationships. His social world is characterized by uncertainties, with which he only comes to terms in writing himself into being in his diaries and notes. Articulating himself, his aspirations and sexual desires, however, becomes a dangerous affair as he is struggles to negotiate the different cultural codes that he encounters. I argue that Rasul’s account can be seen to signify the new position of borderland men as what Giorgio Agamben terms “denizens”. The lack of belonging and relationship to place characterizes the organization of social spheres in borderzones portrayed in the novel. The threshold condition looms large as circulating subjectivities adapt to their precariousness. In Briefe in die Auberginenrepublik, Salim who is already in exile in Bengasi sends his love Samia a letter to Bagdad, which builds the narrative framework of the novel. A list of characters are introduced as his writing crosses borders, and his deeply personal account meets their lives. Even though, Samia has long left Bagdad and there is no one to receive Salim’s writing, the letter serves as a trope that reveals the struggles which communal practices encounter in war zones. Despite the destabilized political order, quotidian traditions and rituals remain recurrent practices with which characters reassure themselves their purpose in the places of transit and uncertainty. I argue that the arrangement of personal accounts through the narrative structure of the letter facilitates a discussion in which the strategies of mobility and survival become visible. Rearticulating pre-existing perceptions of threshold people against the framework of “helplessness” is useful for recognizing agency amidst chaos. While everyday practices are imbued by conflict and displacement, individuals develop coping strategies for alternative organizations of a life on the border.
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