Bicultural? Yes and No.

Jim Thompson

Andrei Codrescu, a native of Romania who came to the United States in the mid-sixties, is a self-made poetic exile. When he was nineteen, he fled Romania of his own volition, in order to get to the world and above all the literature that was obscured from view by the Communist regime. In February, when he did a reading in Fort Collins, I had the chance to speak to him, and I questioned him about his views on biculturalism. He dismissed the term biculturalism as a mere label, and expounded a bit on why he does not believe in biculturalism, but he later sent me his book, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape, that discusses these ideas and related matters at more length. This book seems to simultaneously support and somewhat contradict what he told me that day. For example, he uses the label Exile, not bicultural, but it is clear that the two terms, though not interchangeable, are related. He also discusses the transition from the Romanian to the English language, and this transition is another trait of biculturalism, though he might not call it such. Codrescu believes memory is essential to the job of exiles to redefine the center, and it is this same question of memory that has been essential to all bicultural writers. But much of what I could say or summarize about Codrescu, his book, and the topic of biculturalism, he says better, so from whom is it more desirable to hear the words than from the subject himself?

When I asked Andrei Codrescu which works of poetry or fiction of his best describe some kind of bicultural tension, he immediately became somewhat defensive. "I can't put any works in labeling like that. I have a tendency to resist any labeling." And, with mild contempt, "I'll read books by women or Hispanic authors, but if I see a feminist or Hispanic section in a bookstore, I stay away. I don't practice multiculturalism. It writes itself. Those who spend their time drifting around and influencing other cultures, I am one of those. Cultures don't make a claim for what I write, and I make no claim for Romanian or other languages. It's wrong to politicize writers in English because they were born somewhere else." He told me that English is his sixth language, which indeed creates a problem when trying to discuss him in terms of being between two cultures. "Everything that went before was fed by the previous language."

Language is the area where Codrescu seems to momentarily loosen his choke-hold on the term biculturalism. He agrees that going from one language to another constitutes a type of displacement. But (choke-hold tightening again) this displacement, he says, is merely a formal problem, one dealing with solely aesthetics, not a political problem. When I asked him if language difference was the only cultural displacement experienced, he sensed where I was again headed and headed me off at the pass. "I look for displacements. That's what I do. If being from another country has any relevance whatever, it is that I have experienced, lived through, acted out this displacement, and this helps me to know it when I see it." Indeed, in Codrescu's poetry or fiction displacement abounds, which has caused some critics to apply another term, surrealist, to his work, and much to his dismay. This misnomer will be discussed later.

Andrei Codrescu's aversion to biculturalism is understandable. Any term devised by a majority (I) in order to describe and circumscribe a minority (Other) is bound to be overgeneralizing and appropriative, not doing justice (indeed, sometimes doing an injustice) to some or all of the persons being described. It is no wonder he is defensive. For Codrescu, it seems, biculturalism is a shoe that is a few sizes too small for his foot, but at the same time is a shoe so large as to contain the foot of nearly anybody to try it on. The latter shoe is particularly remarkable in this context. Is not everybody in a sense bicultural? In The Disappearance of the Outside, Codrescu agrees, but on his own terms.

For him, the overarching term is the Outside, a term whose meaning oscillates throughout the book. Everybody is "bicultural" (nowhere in the book does he use this term) in the sense that everyone exists at a certain point between the inside and the Outside. Given the usual connotations of the word, one would think that the Outside is a place one would not want to be, but on the contrary, the Outside is for Codrescu precisely the place where we need to go:

The Outside exists both in a physical, geographical dimension, as parts of our planet yanked out of their specific ecology and made to turn about the petty tyranny of our desires, and in a metaphysical dimension, as an area accessible by religious feeling. In its physical sense it is the place where the human creature is equal to all other living things, where it operates ecologically in order to balance (create) the world, where it speaks with animals with or without shamans, where indeed it can forget itself. In its metaphysical sense it is that place of dreaming, accessible by imagination and poetry, where we have stubbornly insisted on going since we began as a species. This is the place of the original creative gesture, the apex of fertility where there is no difference between mind and matter. (200)

As a child, the Outside for Codrescu was all too simply the rooms, the kitchen, living room, and other rooms inside the house in which he and his cousins were not allowed to enter. During the day, the children were "banished" to the outdoors, the literal outside, which was liberating for their childhood antics but was "somehow 'inferior' to the inside of the house whence [they] had been banished." But sometimes "a curious reversal took place" when they were told to go inside for doing something bad. Being forbidden to play outside was "a dire punishment indeed because no matter how 'superior' the inside was to the 'outside,' it was horrifying to go inside on a beautiful day...The inside, it seemed, was the place where everything was circumscribed, diminished, made smaller" (9).

This odd confusion of boundaries persisted throughout his childhood, but ultimately brought him closer to the Outside:

The cursed outside was our home, while our home in the approved inside was a place of exile. Our children's existence took place under the double sign of this paradox that divided the world into ours and not ours, with bad and good attached but reversed in allegory and reality...It so happened, for reasons more psychological than allegorical, that the story of my journey from womb to adolescence was one of increasing delight in the outside and growing horror of interiors. (11)

But literal freedom was to come only with exile, "the place [he] had been dreaming of ever since hearing books were not forbidden there," the "place that was not any one country." For Codrescu, and for all the others seeking a way out, "exile was the pure Outside." Codrescu already knew he wanted to be a writer, and to him, "the idea of being a writer and the idea of being an exile were synonymous." He knew that he would be deemed an enemy of the State for leaving, but as he states it, "the decision to be a poet, I told myself, carried with it intrinsically the necessity of exile." He was determined to follow in the footsteps of those Romanian exiled writers he idolized--Constantin Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco--even if it meant never returning to Romania. Of these great exiles, Codrescu says, "the meaning of their exile overshadowed by far the meaning of their creations with which, at the time, we had but a furtive acquaintance" (37-40).

In this sense, Codrescu was a poetic exile who left on his own, as opposed to a political one who is banished by the State, but what necessarily follows poetic exile is political exile. He would be a political exile until the downfall of the communist regime in 1988. "The difference between the poetic and the political is only three letters. Those letters belong to the State, which can insert them at will, in forms ranging from conscription in the army to erasure from memory." "The demons that chased me were more poetic than political, though a case can be made for the reverse." In either case, Exile was a country of its own to which he was to escape, and "as a country, Exile has a far larger pantheon of heroes than, let's say, the United States of America" (40-1).

But the United States is where he ended up after finding no room for refugees in Europe. "I applied for visas in several countries, and was accepted by three: Australia, Canada, and the United States. All were English-speaking countries, which would now be my new language. There was no question as to which I would choose: the drumbeats I had heard on the smuggled tapes of Western music came directly from the United States. That's where the Pied Piper lived" (42). The America of the 1960s was the perfect place for a young exile like Codrescu. "At that time, exile was the status quo. Generations were in exile from each other, thousands of young people roamed the continent in deliberate religious abandon. Exile was a part of the popular culture" (42).

The exile as status quo, the Outside of the 60s, disappeared almost as soon as it had come, and Codrescu's timing, and the timing of other exiles, could not have been better. "It hadn't been the same for the preceding generation of exiles and it will not be same for the next generation. I had come at the right time, at a time when my expectations for the world corresponded to the West's expectations of itself. It was a fortunate juncture. I was nineteen years old and so was the world." This quote echoes the quote in his introduction to Alien Candor, after which follows, "my poetic exile happened to correspond to the metaphorical exile of a whole generation. In Eastern Europe, poets had been valued because they carried the weight of a complete opposition. In America, without missing a beat, the job was the same" (13). Instead of the solitude, loss, and despair of the exiles who came before, there was acceptance, community, and a feeling of comfort. But even in that age of the celebration of differences, his Romanian origin did separate him somewhat from most Americans, but he had a head start in being a poet. "I tried to be neither an "ethnic" nor a "minority," but an aristocrat, a poet" (47). The only thing left to do was to master the English language.

This transition into English seems to be the one thing that can be looked at least problematically in terms of biculturalism. While learning and writing in English, Codrescu was very deliberately harboring the Romanian in him from the disappearance into the American poetic. Here, a large excerpt must be quoted:

I must make a distinction here between the kind of expatriate who takes lavishly to a new culture and tries to pass, and my own breathless plunge into American life. I was at all time elaborating on my native paradoxes. I saw myself, and still do, as the ambassador of Romanian poetry, or at least a conveyor of certain Balkanic mysteries of great importance. I did not stop being a Romanian poet when I became an American one. The Romanian language became my covert dimension, a secret engine, like childhood, while American English covered all the aspects of my lived life. In the deep interior I maintained this core of crisis, prayer, high diction—the phrases of drama—in the Romanian language. My daily language, American English, received both fuel and poetry from this core. Eventually they fused, but it took time. (46)

But something of the Romanian language has remained, which has tended to lend to his work a 'surreal' aspect. Given his search for displacements, which is made easier by his own displacement, surrealism, the style with displacements of all types at its core, does not seem so far-fetched an association. He does not admit this association, even as the editor of The Exquisite Corpse, a journal that has borrowed its name from a surrealist game. Since I do not know the Romanian language, I am at a loss to explain just how these surrealities enter at the meeting point of Romanian and English, so I'll again leave it up to him:

What people usually mistake for surrealism is a different way of speaking. The metaphorical echoes of Romanian into English sound surreal. By that token, anyone sounding strange to a listener is a surrealist: we are all each other's surrealists...But I am not a surrealist: I am a Romanian, an exile...Balkanic exilism is distinguished by the fierce speed of its self-affirmation in the midst of fragmentation: each fragment is still within the explosion. The art of "meditation in an emergency" is our art. We speak a language propelled everywhere by paradoxes, little vehicles really, modes of historical transportation we have had to evolve to survive, as Romanians, at the crossroads of Great Power ambitions, and as Jews, of course, at the crossroads of anybody's ambitions...The polished surface of generalized ignorance in our time allows for [people] only a handful of labels. Surrealism is one of those... (158-9)

Codrescu contrasts the Romanian and English (which he now appropriately calls American) languages to a great extent. The underlying difference is that American deals on the level of reality while Romanian deals on the level of myth (again, one could see how the fusion of the two might make fodder for the surrealist critique). Specifically,

The horizontal dimension of the American of commerce and industry contrasts sharply with the (primitive) poetic vertical of a language like Romanian, spoken against things. Where America seeks to clarify, Romanian seeks to establish a climate, to make common cause against the world. Romanian is metaphorical, onomatopoeic, lyrical, exaggerated. American is brisk, precise, honest, factual. Romanians often talk for the sake of talking: a form of song. In America only jive and rap compare to it: marginal areas of the main linguistic zone. Romanian is antihistorical. American is all action. Learning American was my introduction to the world. Where I had turned away from things before, I now had to face them and say, How do you do? Instead of soaring immediately above the point, I had to speak to the point" (172).

In the 1970s, "the wholesale abandonment of poetic religions had begun amid a new search for roots, identity, and, ultimately, nationalism." With the mass desertion of metaphorical exiles, Codrescu was left clinging to his own condition of exile, trying to salvage the Outside. Where before he "had been granted a reprieve from the reality of [his] exile by the ascendance of the myth," he now found himself "in a place that had emptied itself in a few years like a Mexican town at siesta time." Alone as he felt, he began frantically to seek out other literal exiles for a "belated connection," thinking that the "heroic unity" of Exile could be renewed. But, as he found out, exile "was held together not by its heroes but by quixotic dignity and pain...It was as if each exile was an unfinished sentence, a phrase impossible to understand without the native text from which it had been plucked...The unity was an outraged sense of betrayal by history." Codrescu now felt on the verge of obsolescence, wondering about the necessity of his culture in the larger scheme. He had been in love with the myth of exile, not the reality, and this put him "in exile from [his] fellow exiles."

Codrescu now believes that being a real exile has its advantages, especially in terms of perception, and therefore, writing. In the chapter entitled "Living with Amnesia," Codrescu describes, among other things, the unique position of the exile that allows a less obstructed view of the world. In his own words, "The movement of exiles redraws the map to create areas of emergence for lost worlds...It can be argued that all the imaginary countries of literature have been authored by literal or metaphorical exiles. Western consciousness is the creation of peripheral souls. Under pressure from them, the center [the inside] must redefine itself" (92).

Since anyone today, even on the inside, can be a metaphorical exile, the job of redefining this center is now a job for the real exiles, who alone are in this position from which to see unhindered the Western consciousness. Codrescu is well aware of the labeling he is doing by separating Eastern and Western, but must do it anyway, for lack of a better method. "Not having lost their 'real' countries, Western writers seem stuck with alienation, which is a kind of psychological exile afflicting the entire society. Mirroring their splintering psyches, they end up producing models for the booksellers' seasonal market." The artist in the West is stuck in a vicious, self-referential cycle "where the use of his imagination, no matter what his ideological sentiments, is the only thing required of him" (93). This Western writer, stuck with alienation (he's the "tolerated outsider," which is after all no more than "a slumming insider" [99]) is easily subsumed and coopted by the mechanical center, and hence is in no position to redefine that center.

The exile, on the other hand, "his entire existence is predicated on a gap. The basic, material facts of breaking with one's entire sensorial universe put a different kind of strain on the imagination, which is called to replace one lost world with another." This replacement of the real with the imaginary entails, above all, faith. Whereas Western artists "have specialized in the loss of faith," the "only thing an exile cannot fail in is his faith. The faith in the made thing is what is so distressing and so important. And why the creations of exiles have gained a central part in contemporary discourse, and why they mean trouble for the central machine" (93). It is because exiles have already lost their original centers that the loss of another center poses no threat to their existence.

"Western artists are not taking kindly to this invasion by exiles. As peripheral people in charge of shoveling art into the maw of the center, they demand of these exiles who are (clearly!) the peripherals of the periphery to make sense of their freedom. The cultural slum raises defenses against the culturally homeless because it is asked to provide a creative space that it does not possess and has no idea how to take back from the electronic media" (94). This statement obviously doesn't hold up as well when taken out of the context of Codrescu's larger argument, but the glimpse it provides of his views on the subject of the exile imagination is worth the decontextualization.

The redefinition of the center, the replacement of lost worlds, calls for, among other things, the power of memory. Memory is the only weapon for fighting the "organized forgetting" (a la Kundera) forced on us by totalitarian regimes and mass-media capitalism that erase our actual history and replace it via authorized texts with a more convenient one:

Against the authorized text, exiles have invented a number of devices. One of these is the imaginative memory that thrives on excess. To remember unabashedly, monstrously, sensually is to test the convenient versions of the past. Remembering like this quickly exhausts the officially allotted quotas of nostalgia. This is ontological remembering, anamnesis, the flashback that contains everything in brilliant detail. Memory in exile is powerful, it has hair triggers that can go off on the most tenuous analogies. (103)

Kundera for instance, he says, "has no [actual] memory at all. He fills in the spaces where the feelings are with details that seem appropriate but are in fact wholly imaginary. It is by this method that I have written my autobiography." A made-up memory is better than a forgetting. "The imaginary memory of exiles, no matter how imaginary, still holds on to its faith in content, making pure self-referentiality impossible. It is this, more than anything else, that challenges the Center" (104). This challenge, says Codrescu, is one that must be taken up as soon as possible, because "as the interior becomes all there is, there is less and less to compare it to. The memory of the outside is also a form of interiority: the outside resides in memory" (198). Again the borders are becoming confused, but that redrawing of borders is just what Codrescu deems necessary for escape from conformism.

What to conclude? As you can see, Andrei Codrescu's Exile bears an obvious resemblance to the 'bicultural being': the undeniable insistence of the Outside opposed to both the residual Romanian and the new American insides; the implications of a change in language, a retention of the old attendant to the adoption of the new; the redemptive function of memory, memory as the ground on which to stand between the origin and end of exile. All of this points to that being who is on the blurred boundary of two different cultures. But Codrescu doesn't stop with that boundary alone. The inside (and therefore the Outside and all its potentialities) is everywhere. Exile, whether real, mythical, or metaphorical, is a crossing of, a blurring of boundaries, and is now a requirement for our future survival.

What he told me was a mere formal, aesthetic problem of this transition has now indeed become a political one, because, as he admits, there is little difference between the poetic and the political. That the inside and the Outside, like the poetic and political, oscillate, that he wished to retain something of the Romanian in his poetry, that he wished to go back to witness the blasted remains of the inside of Romania, is telling of the still-present tension between the inside and the Outside, a 'bicultural tension' some might say. I am not using his own discourse against him, not attempting to prove that what he said to me about biculturalism is wrong. I respect and appreciate his aversion to labeling, but I think he would agree that sometimes, in order to get beyond the forces that incite us to rampant labeling, the labels themselves must first be played out. Since labels (the essence of language) are really all we are taught, all we have with which to work, the labels must be employed to facilitate their own destruction in the wake of recognition of the Outside. That kind of use-turned-subversion of labels (and language) is, after all, one of the things that makes The Disappearance of the Outside so compelling.

In the spirit of this essay, that of letting the writer speak as much as possible for himself, I can not resist ending with a quote that resists finality, for the work to be done is far from it:

The countertext, whether it is a new reading or a new writing, is a gate that shuts behind its (non)authors. The outside of exile where (non)authors find themselves is hell before it is heaven. Exiles write in a language they are quickly losing, their references gone. As their world shrinks, their poetry burns. When they abandon their old language for a new one, most of them are lost. This is true for many Romanians of my postwar generation. One would assume that the survivors—those who made a successful transition—are now true liberators. Alas, this isn't the case because neither the interior nor the Outside has fixed boundaries, and their struggle continues even as they define each other. (108)

Codrescu, Andrei. Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1995. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1996.

---. The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape by Andrei Codrescu. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990.

©Copyright Jim Thompson