Sigrid Nunez : 『私』の中の外国人

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Sigrid Nunez, the author of three books, A Feather on the Breath of God(1995), A Naked Sleeper (1996), and Mitz: A Marmoset of Bloobsbury(1998), published her fourth book For Rounenna (2001), which she beginswith a reference to her first book.After my first book was published, I received some letters.Thus referring to her first book, Nunez tells us that the narrator of herfourth book is the same person with that of her first book. Though Nunezleft Staten Island in her second and third books and took Manhattan orLondon as her terrains, She returns in this book to Staten Island, where shehad begun her narrative in A Feather on the Breath of God.The first section of my essay will focus on the descriptions of thehousing project in Staten Island in both books. It is a residential area forthose who are not yet accepted into the States for several reasonsrespectively, including immigrants who have just arrived. Almost all thepeople who live there share one feeling, a feeling that they do not belongwhere they exist. They feel that they are not in the right place, and that theyare on their way from somewhere else to somewhere else, in short, afeeling of moving, of homelessness, of diaspora.On the other hand, for people outside the project, it is also a mistake.They never tread into it, let alone go across it. They will go around ithowever long it might take. They, the people outside, can somehowdistinguish the residents of the project from other Americans. By whatbrand, by what mark can they tell the people of the project from the otherAmericans? People of the project are strangers, outsiders, aliens for them.They live in the States, some might have a green card, some might have anAmerican citizenship, but they are still foreigners in America and thusStaten Island is symbolically a foreign country inside, or rather, at the heartof, America.Out of Staten Island, ‘I’ the narrator tries to escape into Manhattan. Thesecond section of this essay will focus on “A Feather on the Breath ofGod”, the third chapter of the first book, in which ‘I’ is dedicated to aballet. This chapter can be read as a memory of a phase in the process ofgrowth in which ‘I’, the girl who has an American citizenship as abirthright and speaks American English as her mother tongue, has to cut offand cast off her foreignness rootwd in her existence in order to be anAmerican.What ‘I’ find in the world symbolized by a ballet is a way by which togo out of the world of reality and to be accepted into another world. Theformer world is associated with her parents, foreignness and Staten Island,and the latter with art, America and Manhattan. While the former isassociated with order, beauty and purity, the latter with a chaos, a squalor,and impurity.It is suggested that what she is trying to discard is something vital to her,something closely connected to the core of her life by the fact that herdedication to ballet includes abhorrence to eating. She persuades herselfnot to eat by emphasizing the repulsiveness of food imagining what foodturns into once eaten and digested. And the very state of chaos, ambiguityand impurity of food once in our body is precisely the metaphor offoreigners with their ambiguous identities, belonging to plural or nocountries, with languages imperfect and scattered with so many loan wordsand imperfect grammar, the foreignness woven into the texture of her life.As she consciously hates and refuses food, so she abominates and rejectsthe foreigner in herself, in order to be an American, in order to leave thehousing project in Staten Island which symbolizes a foreign country insideAmerica.However, when she grows up to be an English teacher for immigrants,that other self, that foreign self, which is supposed to have been cast off inher puberty, still abides in the depth of her heart, though oppressed, hiddeneven to herself. That is why ‘I’ is so ravished by a Russian immigrant, whois not only married but also a villain, almost a criminal, once suspected of amurder in his old country. If it had not been for that other self, she wouldnot have been so attracted by him or by his language. A Feather on theBreath of God depicts the process in which ‘I’ meets her other self, whichleads her to write lives for those who cannot write themselves. The thirdsection of my essay will explicate how through her love for a foreignerwho reminds her of her own father she gets awakened to her instinct fortranslation as an act of mediation between foreigners and other people.For Rouenna, Nunez’s fourth book, is a short biography of a daughter ofPolish immigrants with whom ‘I’ share some period of childhood in thehousing project in Staten Island, but at the same time, it is a story of StatenIsland itself. Or rather a story of leaving and returning Staten Island.‘I’ is now writing in Manhattan. She hasn’t been to Staten Island for along time. Though it is a home she had discarded many years before andwhich she has to abhor and reject, she, strangely enough, shares withRouenna a mixture of shame and love for that place. The fourth section ofthis essay will follow the process how Rouenna enables ‘I’, who has beenleading a lonely and sterile life, revives as a narrator.The vague uneasiness and fear and irresistible attraction ‘I’ feel towardRouenna derives from the memory of her past revived at her advent, theforeignness she once cut off and threw away in order to be an American.Rouenna appeals to the foreigner who lurks inside ‘I’. This is suggested bythe Rouenna’s connection with food. Rouenna urges the foreigner to writeher story because she cannot write it herself, to carry it out of her body andconvey it into the world. It is not until after Rouenna’s sudden death that‘I’ realized the significance of their relationship, when her love forRouenna makes her to return to Staten Island and thus enables her to reviveas a narrator after a long sterile period.

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