No longer at home

The Writer as Migrant, by Ha Jin

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Ed West

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Three quest-ions, labelled as ‘Aristot- elian’ by the author, begin the Rice University Campbell Lectures delivered by Ha Jin in 2007: to whom, as whom, and in whose interest does a writer write? To which the reader might respond: can any writer truthfully answer any of these questions? The identity of a writer and of his readers is a matter debated long before Aristotle and well into the groves of post-modernist academe. From Homer blindly taking dictation from his muse to Joyce sweating away in the smithy of his soul, the writer has been perceived by himself and by his audience as innumerable things, none truer than another. Ha Jin’s own experience exemplifies these changes of identity. From teenage soldier in the People’s Liberation Army to winner of the American National Book Award, 30 years later, Ha Jin, now author of a dozen books and teacher at Boston university, has drastically changed convictions, country, status and language. When he first settled in the United States, he viewed himself, he tells us, ‘as a Chinese writer who could write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese. I was unaware of the complexity and unfeasibility of the position I had adopted, especially for a person in my situation.’ This led him to explore the migrant writers’ transient condition, and the changing personalities they assume during their travels. The three Aristotelian questions are the starting-points of three meditations that analyse, in turn, the exiled writer who crowns himself, or finds himself crowned, spokesperson of his tribe; the responsibilities of the writer who migrates, not only from country to country, but from language to language; and the writer who, from abroad, must still construct in his mind a place that he can call home.