The Bleeding Edges of Identity and Space

Before I begin, may I say how much I enjoyed Gloria Anzaldua’s “The Homeland.”  My skimming of her interview resulted in a disproportional amount of highlighting–there may be nothing left untouched once I really get down to absorbing it.

But what I wanted to think about here are the identity and border issues she raises that plague so many parts of the world–Israel/Palestine and Bhutanese refugees in Nepal are two examples that come to my mind.  While the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has a relatively high profile in world politics, the refuge situation in Nepal is less well known.  (I only learned about it last year when I spoke with a Nepalese woman who now lives with her family in Jefferson City.)  In the nineteenth century, people from Nepal migrated across a strip of India to settle in unoccupied southern regions of Bhutan.  In the latter half of the twentieth century, the dominant Bhutan culture/government put increasing pressure on the ethnic Nepalese, denying them jobs and citizenship rights.  When the ethnic Nepalese finally retaliated in the 1980’s, they were brutally attacked and driven from their homes.  With no other place to go, tens of thousands returned to their ethnic homeland.  Today, more than sixteen years later, the refugees, now numbering 106,000 individuals, languish in refugee camps.  They cannot work in Nepal because they are not citizens, but neither will the Bhutan government facilitate their return to their homes in Bhutan.

The woman I spoke with was a first responder to the humanitarian crisis when the starving and destitute refugees first arrived in Nepal.  She said that aid organizations have eexperienced donor fatigue as time drags on, and many individuals are turning to crime and prostitution in lieu of work.  In 2007, the U.S. made noises about allowing 60,000 of the refugees come to the U.S.  This was a ray of hope to some, but an unsatisfactory consolation prize for those who want nothing less than their property returned.

These situations give very poignant testimony to the instability of what homeland means.  How far back does a culture/ethnicity/nationality go to determine identify?  And when these identities “grate[ ] against” each other, why is it individuals who bleed? (44)  As was pointed out in Remote Sensing, air time is directed at the “aberrant” behavior of the individuals, rather than on the policies of the dominant players.  U.S. politicians dream of “rounding up” thousands of undocumented workers and sending them home–but they rarely address the policies “back home” from which the individuals are fleeing.  In the situation in Nepal, discussion of applying pressure to Bhutan is virtually nonexistent.

It seems to me that it is more than a matter of the Empire flexing its muscles, but rather the framing of these issues in popular discourse in an inherently “U.S.-ian” approach that assumes the agency of the individual, absolving the larger power structures of responsibility.  I’m not sure what to say that hasn’t already been said by postcolonial theorists, so I will conclude by simply saying that I find all this contortion of once freeing Enlightenment philosophy monumentally disturbing.

-Naomi

P.S. Props and apologies to anyone who didn’t require my primer on the situation in Nepal.  I consider myself something of a news junkie, but I never heard about the Bhutanese refugees until the story was assigned to me for a magazine article last year.