Travelling Archetypes

Mary Jacobus’s new book sets out to address a set of capacious terms—belonging, displacement, translation and migration—but its granular readings of literary and cultural texts ensures a seamless movement between the elemental conditions these concepts imply and their quotidian lived reality. On Belonging and Not Belonging brings to bear an impressive scholarship on its key problematic of belonging through reference to multiple art forms and artists; taking in poetry, fiction, autofiction/ memoir, film and photography from this century and the last. Jacobus examines the connective tissue that mediates questions of belonging through art, culture and (bio)politics but makes a quiet case for the ways we belong with, and to, literary and creative arts. The essays collected in the book offer six structuring frames through which to think the central problem of belonging, but they all draw lines of contact between the classical and the contemporary, revealing the enduring nature of Jacobus’s key ideas. The first, ‘Identity Poetics’, takes up the issue of translation by exploring how writers live and work in a different language. Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s move to Italy also saw her publishing novels in her newly acquired language, while Ovid’s exile to Tomis is reimagined by David Malouf in his 1978 novella, An Imaginary Life. Translated to new geographical and literary contexts, these writers are prompted to examine their sense of (un)belonging through linguistic unhomeliness. Jacobus’s question is how writing and living in a foreign language affect one’s sense of self and of belonging. This is often central to the act of migration and border crossing. In the case of sanctuary seekers, as Jacques Derrida has noted, ‘the first act of violence’ on the foreigner is one of language. This is the legal language in which the request for hospitality is made (as Jacobus notes in the following essay, ‘Of Birds and Men’), but it is also the requirement to articulate oneself in another language; to translate—or carry across—the self into a new context. The threads of human migration and belonging again unspool from the classical and mythical to the contemporary in Chapter Two, which dwells Mary Jacobus, On Belonging and Not Belonging: Translation, Migration, Displacement. Princeton University Press, 2021, £22 hardback, 248 pp. ISBN: 9780691212388.