Source:
Bhabha, H. K. (2012). The location of culture. Routledge.What is Sacred:
I am slowly going through this because it is too much to gorge. But the writing is beautiful and I am attracted to the beauty of prose. Here is a snippet from the beginning of chapter 8 DissemiNation. This chapter starts with his musings on his own migration.
I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and emigres and refugees; gathering on the edge of 'foreign' cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafes of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another's language; gathering of the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other words lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the gathering of people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status--the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asks "where should the birds fly after the last sky?" (139)
Connections to Current/Future Work:
To write like this. To force the reader, through an inundation of imagery and mystery to keep reading. To reveal just enough. To slick the water with palu and bring the fish in.
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