Below is an awkward essay I wrote on Naipaul's Mimic Men. I think I lost a sense of direction while writing this (while trying to bring in a little bit of Glissant and some other writings from the literature course), but anything Naipaul is interesting, so I hope this isn't too horrible.
V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men allows for thought-provoking contemplation of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Guha’s “The migrant’s Time.” As a novelist of Caribbean origins, Naipaul’s upbringing in a racially and culturally mixed Trinidadian society invites analysis from fellow-Caribbean author Glissant’s concepts. In addition, Guha’s article on the migrant experience is relevant to the protagonist of the novel, Ralph Singh, who experiences exile or the migrant life in London. However, both Glissantian Poetics of Relation and Guha’s Migrant’s Time miss the universalistic implications of Naipaul’s oeuvre. A close reading of The Mimic Men therefore challenges the reader to think beyond the experiences of exile or migration while providing an example to think critically through rhizomatic approaches to identity from Glissant. This essay will begin with Guha’s heterogeneous temporalities and migration, applying it critically to Naipaul before examining Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in the context of Ralph Singh, a deracinated Indo-Caribbean migrant (or exile) living in a Kensington hotel. The significance of mimicry in this context will shed light on relationality as a contradictory tactic against totalitarian roots.
Guha’s notion of migrant’s time brings to the forefront the temporal and spatial configuration of a migrant. The temporal and spatial ousting, or feeling of adrift is central (Guha 156). According to Guha, “There is no way for those who live in a community to make themselves intelligible to each other except by temporalizing their experience of being together” (156). The importance of temporality in shaping community or sense of belonging is central to Ralph Singh, narrator and author of the fictive memoir which constitutes The Mimic Men. By shifting chronologically in his memoir, Singh temporalizes his experience of childhood in Isabella, the fictionalized Trinidad of Naipaul’s youth, as well as imbuing his university student days in England and experience as a politician in his island homeland with spatio-temporal attributes that resist linearity. Accordingly, for Singh, it never occurred to him “that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might become an extension of that life" (Naipaul 293). The end of writing his memoir in such a manner that resists linearity while functioning as an additional part of his life, speaks volumes to the heterogeneous temporalities embedded in the structure of the novel. The multiple temporalities of the novel also functions to show the inability of Singh to connect or relate with those around him. For example, during his youth in Isabella, he often dreams of an imagined Indo-Aryan ancestry in Asia which, though only a few generations removed, cannot be found in the disorder of the Caribbean colonial society that developed from slavery (146). Imagining an Aryan past allows for Singh to claim some kinship or relation to a distant past, which also disconnects him from the rest of Isabella. Thus, because of a lack of similar spatio-temporal overlap with other people of Isabella, Singh experiences a mismatch in the black and white world of the colonial Caribbean.
Even before arriving in England, the indeterminateness of Singh’s ethnic community in Isabella is central to his feeling of being shipwrecked. Once in London, he feels, “Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by any encounter” (32). This sense of being adrift, beginning in the island of his birth, illustrates the spatio-temporal disconnect between Singh and those he was socialized with in Isabella. However, this feeling of disconnect lingers in England, the colonial metropole. Guha wrote of a mismatch of the migrant’s everydayness and that of their host community (Guha 158). Singh’s experience as a student and later exile appears to affirm that experience. However, Singh also experiences a sense of freedom in London, where “There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship" (Naipaul 24). Despite this relative freedom from his past experience as a colonial subject in Isabella, he chooses to perpetuate the limited expression and stereotypical roles assigned to the colonized subject. His experience of “assimilation” is one of mimetic play, assimilating into what the metropole made open to subjects as a colonial dandy. Singh’s inexorable drift and attempt to assimilate mark him as alien, per Guha (Guha 159). Naipaul’s protagonist is unable to connect with those around him in Isabella, despite a shared mimetic relationship with regards to the colonial metropole, nor is he able to find connection in London, where the illusion of connection and the individual cells of urban life create disorder (Naipaul 22). Significantly, intimacy, particularly sexual relationships and Singh’s marriage, do not allow him to express deeper kinship or transcend the individual (22).
Perhaps most intriguing to Guha, Singh’s experience of youth of and politics in creole Isabella is one of disorder and half-societies, imitating ideas and slogans of England in a context of inapplicability. Guha saw creole societies as spaces of creative overcoming of translation (Guha 159). For Singh, however, the ‘creole’ space of Isabella represented racial, ethnic, political, and social disorder. Disorder, wrought by colonialism, slavery and mimicry of the metropole, leads to Singh declaring the following:
A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes. (Naipaul 248)
In other words, the creole character of Isabella made Singh feel alienated and castaway, but also removed from his Indian roots. Mixed-race characters also cause a similar feeling for Singh, who sees them as contributing to the disorderly nature of a colonial society in which ties to the landscape are inorganic, even for descendants of indigenous Caribs absorbed by intermarriage (146). Thus, creole nature of society in Isabella is inextricably woven into Singh’s search for order, only to find disorder in the colony and seat of Empire. Furthermore, this serves to illustrate the complexity of migrant’s time for those of double Diasporas, as descendants of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean who later move to England. The uprootedness and heterogeneous temporalities of such communities speaks to a larger problem of identity that can be experienced by non-migrants as well.
However, Glissant’s concept of poetics of relation may be more useful for reconsidering rootedness, movement, and identity for double or triple Diasporas, such as Singh. For Glissant, relations are to be found in a rhizome-like sense of rootedness, or one without totalitarian roots. In other words, each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other, acting as a kind of anticonformism (Glissant 11). According to Glissant, “Thus the particular resists a generalizing universal and soon begets specific and local senses of identity, in concentric circles (provinces then nations)” (14). Glissantian reconceptualization of identity and rootedness is inherently flexible, creating room for Indo-Caribbean identity within the spectrum of Caribbean cultures. In addition, relation is made up of shared knowledge, which undoubtedly reflects the shared experiences of people of a variety of racial or ethnic backgrounds in Isabella. In The Mimic Men, such a perspective is not on the table, although the shared knowledge of Singh and his classmates at the Imperial School, including his black political partner, Browne, indicate a relationality based on colonialism. This, in turn, demonstrates Glissant’s argument on the totalitarian root of colonialism, which in turn shaped the totalitarian drive for a single root in postcolonial nationalism (14). The limitations of such a totalitarian root appear in Singh’s experience, particularly with regards to the continued dependence on England reducing the meaning of independence to playacting (Naipaul 227).
Singh does not experience Isabella through a rhizomatic approach, despite his birth there, and as an alienated colonial subject, whose education inculcates the importance of England, does not identify with the landscape or people of the island. Indeed, he marvels at the cohesion of Isabella:
I had never thought of obedience as a problem. Now it seemed to me the miracle of society. Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves. (246)
Colonialism is the force that held it together, creating a controlled chaos in which Singh believed himself to be adrift. Attempting to fill the vacuum left by decolonization with a totalitarian root of nationalism only exacerbated the contradictions of a society in which politicians appropriated concepts and slogans of the metropole without thought. Socialism, or nationalization, for instance, characterize the misplaced mimicry of kinship to England that does not rethink the implications of non-Caribbean ideas in a Caribbean reality. Thus, the socialism of Singh and Browne disappears after the first issue of their paper (223). For Singh, "The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost” (10).
Intriguingly, Glissant’s concept of internal exile is perhaps most relevant to the experience of Singh. Glissant defines it as occurring to individuals living where solutions concerning the relationship of community to its surroundings are not consented to by the community as a whole (Glissant 19). For The Mimic Men, Singh’s experiences internal exile within Isabella because of the entrenched racial divisions that separate the population from determining its relationship to the island as a whole. Divided by generation, race, and class, Singh cannot identify with Isabella but becomes an exile from his home. As a child, the family home was to be kept separate from the intrusion of school and community, which gradually infiltrates his experience without his or his family’s consent through exposure to the interiority of life for other racial groups, particularly working-class black Browne and French Creole Deschampsneufs. By not opening himself to a rhizome-like understanding of relation, Singh is unable to escape the internal exile of his youth or career as a politician, eventually choosing permanent exile in a Kensington hotel. As mentioned previously, the heterogeneous temporalities put forth by Guha help to illuminate why Singh’s struggles to assimilate or find kinship in London. An internal alienation and exile also explains why Singh encounters similarly exiled Londoners who are playing with social identities, political affiliations, or rebelliousness, such as university students playing at being iconoclasts (Naipaul 50). Playacting of meaning does not confer kinship, or lasting kinship, for neither Singh nor the white characters he encounters in London.
On the universal features of rootedness, however, Glissantian poetics of relation elucidate the struggle against a totalitarian root as well as the struggle of internal exile. Moreover, a rhizomatic understanding of rootedness and belonging also presents to us the mimicry at work in English society, such as the aforementioned university students. Indeed, while birth “on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder", London was not a refuge (141). In fact, Singh finds himself dreaming of landscapes he knew before after settling in London, the very “escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from" (36). In London he is not a Londoner, nor in Isabella does he belong. Mimetic expressions of identity do not allow for an escape from this conundrum. Similarly, numerous white characters, including English-born residents, are adrift metaphorically or socially. The other residents of the hotel in which Singh decides to take permanent residence are described as follows:
But we who belong here are neither maimed nor very old. Three-quarters of the men here are of my age; they have responsible jobs to which they go off in their motorcars every morning. We are people who for one reason or another have withdrawn, from our respective countries, from the city where we find ourselves, from our families. We have withdrawn from unnecessary responsibility and attachment. We have simplified our lives. I cannot believe that our establishment is unique. It comforts me to think that in this city alone there must be hundreds and thousands like ourselves (296).
Singh’s co-residents, in a building designed for temporary living, find solace and belonging in a space defined by transience. They have chosen to simplify their lives and remove themselves from their nationalities, cities, and families, deliberately choosing non-relation with established or conventional forms of belonging. The residents of the hotel, through a shared space that allows for individual expression, have some semblance of rootedness, despite the transitory nature of the space they occupy. A rhizomatic construct of identity aids in understanding the broadly shared experience of alienation and mimicry in social roles that occurs in a colonial setting or the center of Empire.
In summation, Guha’s Migrant’s Time and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation pave the path for deeper interpretation of The Mimic Men while suffering their own limitations. The experience of Singh, both internal exile in Isabella and exile in London, challenges Guha’s conceptions by looking at individual displacement from local vantage points or afar. Glissantian concepts such as internal exile assist in interpreting Singh’s displacement in the land of his birth, while perhaps speaking to the general conditions of life in the city which, despite the conglomeration of people, prove illusory for kinship. Mimetic expressions of being and belonging allow for one to perform the roles forced upon on, or to temporarily endeavor to create or define meaning, albeit of an illusory nature for Singh. Utilizing the figure of rhizome roots rather than a singular root permits the identification with a multiplicity of origins or ties, pertinent to creolization and a “disorderly” society such as Isabella. Undoubtedly, inclusion of white characters in the novel contributes to thinking about migration and movement broadly, including forms of rootedness and rootlessness among Singh’s housemates in the hotel. Mimicry of social conventions, roles, or family do not create authentic forms of being for Singh, even when in relation to other forms, because it helps prevent one from expressing an authentic individualized self, albeit one that still requires relationality and flux.
V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men allows for thought-provoking contemplation of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Guha’s “The migrant’s Time.” As a novelist of Caribbean origins, Naipaul’s upbringing in a racially and culturally mixed Trinidadian society invites analysis from fellow-Caribbean author Glissant’s concepts. In addition, Guha’s article on the migrant experience is relevant to the protagonist of the novel, Ralph Singh, who experiences exile or the migrant life in London. However, both Glissantian Poetics of Relation and Guha’s Migrant’s Time miss the universalistic implications of Naipaul’s oeuvre. A close reading of The Mimic Men therefore challenges the reader to think beyond the experiences of exile or migration while providing an example to think critically through rhizomatic approaches to identity from Glissant. This essay will begin with Guha’s heterogeneous temporalities and migration, applying it critically to Naipaul before examining Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in the context of Ralph Singh, a deracinated Indo-Caribbean migrant (or exile) living in a Kensington hotel. The significance of mimicry in this context will shed light on relationality as a contradictory tactic against totalitarian roots.
Guha’s notion of migrant’s time brings to the forefront the temporal and spatial configuration of a migrant. The temporal and spatial ousting, or feeling of adrift is central (Guha 156). According to Guha, “There is no way for those who live in a community to make themselves intelligible to each other except by temporalizing their experience of being together” (156). The importance of temporality in shaping community or sense of belonging is central to Ralph Singh, narrator and author of the fictive memoir which constitutes The Mimic Men. By shifting chronologically in his memoir, Singh temporalizes his experience of childhood in Isabella, the fictionalized Trinidad of Naipaul’s youth, as well as imbuing his university student days in England and experience as a politician in his island homeland with spatio-temporal attributes that resist linearity. Accordingly, for Singh, it never occurred to him “that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might become an extension of that life" (Naipaul 293). The end of writing his memoir in such a manner that resists linearity while functioning as an additional part of his life, speaks volumes to the heterogeneous temporalities embedded in the structure of the novel. The multiple temporalities of the novel also functions to show the inability of Singh to connect or relate with those around him. For example, during his youth in Isabella, he often dreams of an imagined Indo-Aryan ancestry in Asia which, though only a few generations removed, cannot be found in the disorder of the Caribbean colonial society that developed from slavery (146). Imagining an Aryan past allows for Singh to claim some kinship or relation to a distant past, which also disconnects him from the rest of Isabella. Thus, because of a lack of similar spatio-temporal overlap with other people of Isabella, Singh experiences a mismatch in the black and white world of the colonial Caribbean.
Even before arriving in England, the indeterminateness of Singh’s ethnic community in Isabella is central to his feeling of being shipwrecked. Once in London, he feels, “Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by any encounter” (32). This sense of being adrift, beginning in the island of his birth, illustrates the spatio-temporal disconnect between Singh and those he was socialized with in Isabella. However, this feeling of disconnect lingers in England, the colonial metropole. Guha wrote of a mismatch of the migrant’s everydayness and that of their host community (Guha 158). Singh’s experience as a student and later exile appears to affirm that experience. However, Singh also experiences a sense of freedom in London, where “There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship" (Naipaul 24). Despite this relative freedom from his past experience as a colonial subject in Isabella, he chooses to perpetuate the limited expression and stereotypical roles assigned to the colonized subject. His experience of “assimilation” is one of mimetic play, assimilating into what the metropole made open to subjects as a colonial dandy. Singh’s inexorable drift and attempt to assimilate mark him as alien, per Guha (Guha 159). Naipaul’s protagonist is unable to connect with those around him in Isabella, despite a shared mimetic relationship with regards to the colonial metropole, nor is he able to find connection in London, where the illusion of connection and the individual cells of urban life create disorder (Naipaul 22). Significantly, intimacy, particularly sexual relationships and Singh’s marriage, do not allow him to express deeper kinship or transcend the individual (22).
Perhaps most intriguing to Guha, Singh’s experience of youth of and politics in creole Isabella is one of disorder and half-societies, imitating ideas and slogans of England in a context of inapplicability. Guha saw creole societies as spaces of creative overcoming of translation (Guha 159). For Singh, however, the ‘creole’ space of Isabella represented racial, ethnic, political, and social disorder. Disorder, wrought by colonialism, slavery and mimicry of the metropole, leads to Singh declaring the following:
A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes. (Naipaul 248)
In other words, the creole character of Isabella made Singh feel alienated and castaway, but also removed from his Indian roots. Mixed-race characters also cause a similar feeling for Singh, who sees them as contributing to the disorderly nature of a colonial society in which ties to the landscape are inorganic, even for descendants of indigenous Caribs absorbed by intermarriage (146). Thus, creole nature of society in Isabella is inextricably woven into Singh’s search for order, only to find disorder in the colony and seat of Empire. Furthermore, this serves to illustrate the complexity of migrant’s time for those of double Diasporas, as descendants of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean who later move to England. The uprootedness and heterogeneous temporalities of such communities speaks to a larger problem of identity that can be experienced by non-migrants as well.
However, Glissant’s concept of poetics of relation may be more useful for reconsidering rootedness, movement, and identity for double or triple Diasporas, such as Singh. For Glissant, relations are to be found in a rhizome-like sense of rootedness, or one without totalitarian roots. In other words, each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other, acting as a kind of anticonformism (Glissant 11). According to Glissant, “Thus the particular resists a generalizing universal and soon begets specific and local senses of identity, in concentric circles (provinces then nations)” (14). Glissantian reconceptualization of identity and rootedness is inherently flexible, creating room for Indo-Caribbean identity within the spectrum of Caribbean cultures. In addition, relation is made up of shared knowledge, which undoubtedly reflects the shared experiences of people of a variety of racial or ethnic backgrounds in Isabella. In The Mimic Men, such a perspective is not on the table, although the shared knowledge of Singh and his classmates at the Imperial School, including his black political partner, Browne, indicate a relationality based on colonialism. This, in turn, demonstrates Glissant’s argument on the totalitarian root of colonialism, which in turn shaped the totalitarian drive for a single root in postcolonial nationalism (14). The limitations of such a totalitarian root appear in Singh’s experience, particularly with regards to the continued dependence on England reducing the meaning of independence to playacting (Naipaul 227).
Singh does not experience Isabella through a rhizomatic approach, despite his birth there, and as an alienated colonial subject, whose education inculcates the importance of England, does not identify with the landscape or people of the island. Indeed, he marvels at the cohesion of Isabella:
I had never thought of obedience as a problem. Now it seemed to me the miracle of society. Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves. (246)
Colonialism is the force that held it together, creating a controlled chaos in which Singh believed himself to be adrift. Attempting to fill the vacuum left by decolonization with a totalitarian root of nationalism only exacerbated the contradictions of a society in which politicians appropriated concepts and slogans of the metropole without thought. Socialism, or nationalization, for instance, characterize the misplaced mimicry of kinship to England that does not rethink the implications of non-Caribbean ideas in a Caribbean reality. Thus, the socialism of Singh and Browne disappears after the first issue of their paper (223). For Singh, "The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost” (10).
Intriguingly, Glissant’s concept of internal exile is perhaps most relevant to the experience of Singh. Glissant defines it as occurring to individuals living where solutions concerning the relationship of community to its surroundings are not consented to by the community as a whole (Glissant 19). For The Mimic Men, Singh’s experiences internal exile within Isabella because of the entrenched racial divisions that separate the population from determining its relationship to the island as a whole. Divided by generation, race, and class, Singh cannot identify with Isabella but becomes an exile from his home. As a child, the family home was to be kept separate from the intrusion of school and community, which gradually infiltrates his experience without his or his family’s consent through exposure to the interiority of life for other racial groups, particularly working-class black Browne and French Creole Deschampsneufs. By not opening himself to a rhizome-like understanding of relation, Singh is unable to escape the internal exile of his youth or career as a politician, eventually choosing permanent exile in a Kensington hotel. As mentioned previously, the heterogeneous temporalities put forth by Guha help to illuminate why Singh’s struggles to assimilate or find kinship in London. An internal alienation and exile also explains why Singh encounters similarly exiled Londoners who are playing with social identities, political affiliations, or rebelliousness, such as university students playing at being iconoclasts (Naipaul 50). Playacting of meaning does not confer kinship, or lasting kinship, for neither Singh nor the white characters he encounters in London.
On the universal features of rootedness, however, Glissantian poetics of relation elucidate the struggle against a totalitarian root as well as the struggle of internal exile. Moreover, a rhizomatic understanding of rootedness and belonging also presents to us the mimicry at work in English society, such as the aforementioned university students. Indeed, while birth “on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder", London was not a refuge (141). In fact, Singh finds himself dreaming of landscapes he knew before after settling in London, the very “escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from" (36). In London he is not a Londoner, nor in Isabella does he belong. Mimetic expressions of identity do not allow for an escape from this conundrum. Similarly, numerous white characters, including English-born residents, are adrift metaphorically or socially. The other residents of the hotel in which Singh decides to take permanent residence are described as follows:
But we who belong here are neither maimed nor very old. Three-quarters of the men here are of my age; they have responsible jobs to which they go off in their motorcars every morning. We are people who for one reason or another have withdrawn, from our respective countries, from the city where we find ourselves, from our families. We have withdrawn from unnecessary responsibility and attachment. We have simplified our lives. I cannot believe that our establishment is unique. It comforts me to think that in this city alone there must be hundreds and thousands like ourselves (296).
Singh’s co-residents, in a building designed for temporary living, find solace and belonging in a space defined by transience. They have chosen to simplify their lives and remove themselves from their nationalities, cities, and families, deliberately choosing non-relation with established or conventional forms of belonging. The residents of the hotel, through a shared space that allows for individual expression, have some semblance of rootedness, despite the transitory nature of the space they occupy. A rhizomatic construct of identity aids in understanding the broadly shared experience of alienation and mimicry in social roles that occurs in a colonial setting or the center of Empire.
In summation, Guha’s Migrant’s Time and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation pave the path for deeper interpretation of The Mimic Men while suffering their own limitations. The experience of Singh, both internal exile in Isabella and exile in London, challenges Guha’s conceptions by looking at individual displacement from local vantage points or afar. Glissantian concepts such as internal exile assist in interpreting Singh’s displacement in the land of his birth, while perhaps speaking to the general conditions of life in the city which, despite the conglomeration of people, prove illusory for kinship. Mimetic expressions of being and belonging allow for one to perform the roles forced upon on, or to temporarily endeavor to create or define meaning, albeit of an illusory nature for Singh. Utilizing the figure of rhizome roots rather than a singular root permits the identification with a multiplicity of origins or ties, pertinent to creolization and a “disorderly” society such as Isabella. Undoubtedly, inclusion of white characters in the novel contributes to thinking about migration and movement broadly, including forms of rootedness and rootlessness among Singh’s housemates in the hotel. Mimicry of social conventions, roles, or family do not create authentic forms of being for Singh, even when in relation to other forms, because it helps prevent one from expressing an authentic individualized self, albeit one that still requires relationality and flux.
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