On Belonging and Not Belonging: Migration, Translation, Dislocation by Mary Jacobus (review)

Reviewed by: On Belonging and Not Belonging: Migration, Translation, Dislocation by Mary Jacobus Sonia Weiner Mary Jacobus. On Belonging and Not Belonging: Migration, Translation, Dislocation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2022. Pp. 248. $29.95 hardcover, $29.95 ebook. In On Belonging and Not Belonging: Migration, Translation, Dislocation, Mary Jacobus embarks upon an intellectual journey informed by her early encounters with the migrations and displacements of World War II. Drawing on a diverse selection of texts, Jacobus forms a prism through which she examines the referential world and its contemporary migration crisis. Her book reads as an essayistic meditation on questions seminal to our present moment and considers how notions of belonging and not belonging are negotiated and transformed by migration, translation, and dislocation within and across geographic, historic, and literary spaces. Jacobus does not aim to "resolve" the tensions inherent in this dialogue; rather, she plays with and around them, in an ongoing game of hide-and-go-seek, underlining the "contradictory impulse" at the heart of her inquiry into migratory writers and artists: that of "simultaneously wanting and not wanting to belong" (1), while never able to embody either position fully. Walter Benjamin's theory of translation is central to Jacobus's enterprise; it is through his idea of a work's "translatability" as lying "in its potential to engender new meanings in other linguistic and cultural contexts" (7), that we can understand her technique of connecting between diverse literary genres such as prose, poetry, and plays, and multiple media such as words, photography, visual arts, and films, from different historical periods and varying geographical locations. Jacobus highlights [End Page 474] ways in which authors and artists attempt to "liberate the language imprisoned in a work" through focusing on themes of not/belonging, migration, and displacement, to reiterate that which cannot be communicated at all, namely the text's untranslatability, which echoes the metaphysical and existential condition of the migrant, itinerant, exile, refugee, and other. This shared impulse warrants discussing the texts in conjunction, although some readers might be uncomfortable with the lack of a more historical, literary, or aesthetic approach. As such, the book emerges as Jacobus's own act of recreation and remediation. The chapters (with the exception of the fifth) orchestrate three authors/poets/filmmakers, alongside critical thinkers such as Said, Adorno, Derrida, Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, Levinas and Agamben, who provide background 'music.' The first chapter, "Identity Poetics," explores the possibilities translation offers the writerly subjectivity, opening it to the unfamiliar, the frustrating, or the enabling. The evocative term, identity poetics, introduced as "identity constructed and discovered in another language, rather than inherited or given" (11), is a process that is flexible and ongoing, and hence "potentially transformative" (12). The chapter juxtaposes the freedom Jhumpa Lahiri experiences writing her book In Other Words in Rome in her acquired Italian with Ovid's alienation expressed in Tristia, written during his exile from Rome on the Black Sea. For Lahiri, linguistic exile is a "homecoming" that affirms the "distance and desire, silence and longing" that are at the core of her postcolonial identity (20). Alternately, banished to the "beyond" (24), Ovid resists adaptation, even as he laments the deterioration of his Latin along with his writerly identity. Jacobus observes that Tristia "paradoxically affirms the triumph of the literacy whose loss it laments" (27). The third text, David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, reconceives Ovid's exile as a linguistic encounter with the other who is already within as well as beyond him. If the discussion of Lahiri and Ovid focuses on their poetics of identity, Malouf's writerly identity remains problematically unexamined. Three photographs of the Danube, a river that runs through the discussions of Ovid, Malouf, and Heidegger (in the coda), by Inge Morath, are reproduced within the chapter with no clear analytic function. The title of the second chapter, "Of Birds and Men," a play on John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and its dustbowl migrants, intertwines forced migration with bird migration in the region of the Mediterranean to "admit the poetry of transhistorical time into the urgency of contemporary migration studies" (37). Taking Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI (the flight from Troy), translated by Seamus...

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