Chapter 5 (In)Hospitable Languages and Linguistic Hospitality in Hyphenated American Literature: the Case of Ha Jin1
In: The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and CultureSearch for other papers by José R. Ibáñez in
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Abstract
In Adieu to Emmanuelle Levinas, Jacques Derrida observed that the author of Totality and Infinity privileged the term ‘dwelling’ over that of ‘hospitality’ although this work “bequeaths to us an immense treatise of hospitality” (Derrida [1997] 1999, 21). As interpreter of the concept of hospitality in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida also reminded us of the conditions of the host, as the one that gives asylum, while, at the same time, the law of hospitality, the law of the place (house, hotel, hospital, hospice, family, city, nation, language, etc.) become the delimitation where that host maintains his/her authority (Derrida 2000b, 4). More recently, Abi Doukhan has accounted for a dimension of the Levinassian hospitality, the exilic structure, which has been disregarded by many commentators of the Lithuanian-born philosopher (Doukhan 2010, 235).
In this paper, I intend to examine Ha Jin’s (a Chinese-born American migrant writer and one of the most successful Asian-American authors in current American fiction) exilic condition. Forced to remain in the United States after viewing on television the response of Chinese authorities to the demonstrations at Tiannamen Square in June 1989, Ha Jin has developed his entire literary career in English, a language that he learned after the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Writing in this language thus became “a matter of survival” (Weinberger 2006, 46), a safe haven to which this author retreated in an attempt to exile himself from Chinese, a language loaded with “a lot of political jargon” (Fay 2009, 122) and unsuitable for the representation of his fictional worlds.
I will be paying close attention to some of Ha Jin’s best known essays: “In Defence of Foreignness” and The Writer as Migrant. In this latter book, this Chinese-American writer delves into the Manichean relationship that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipaul, among other foreign authors, had with the English language so as to justify his own decision to write in English. Having accepted being an outcast from his native language (Chinese), Ha Jin’s adopted language (English) became, metaphorically speaking, a hospitable space in which he could secure a successful literary career at the expense of being accused of betrayal by both Chinese intellectuals and authorities.