Interview: Joyce and Auden were early influences on Indian philosopher Homi Bhabha, and his postcolonial theories apply to modern Ireland, he tells Belinda McKeon
I'm not sure why, but it comes as something of a surprise to discover that Homi Bhabha likes poetry. Loves it, in fact. As a graduate student at Oxford, his thesis topic was a toss-up between Robert Lowell and VS Naipaul and the novelist won out - the rest is a chapter in the history of critical theory marked "postcolonialism".
But the poet remains a central interest for Bhabha - he bought the newly-published edition of Lowell's letters to bring to Dublin when he was preparing for his participation in this year's Irish Seminar. He reads Heaney, too, and Hughes, and Ashbery and Simic and most of all Auden, but it's Lowell on whom he speaks most passionately today. "I think he's always tracing a very interesting and dangerous path in his poetry, between the claims of history and the claims of contemporary life. Social, political, cultural . . . it's that kind of edge that he courageously trod. And his voracious appetite to write about the most fragile and dangerous qualities of the psychic landscape. And on the other hand, to make poetry out of politics." This Lowell sounds a lot like Bhabha.
If the poetry comes as a surprise, given the extent to which feminism and the politics of "mother cultures" have influenced his own work, it's no shock to discover that it was the first woman in his life who shaped, to a large extent, the development of Homi Bhabha's intellectual voice. "I was very, very much set on my way, particularly with the literary career that I made, by my mother," he says. "She was very important in my early formation. She had started college, but she didn't finish, and yet she seemed to have a great passion for literature of all kinds, particularly modern literature. And so although she did not have the educational background - because she hadn't graduated - to deal in a more informed way with the literature she loved, she was never daunted by difficulty or experimentation in literature."
He was "unusually young", he says, when they read together works by Beckett, Joyce and Auden - an experience that left him unafraid, later on, to tackle complex theorists such as Hegel, Derrida and Lacan, and that gave him the strength to steer clear of "the stereotypical English response that if you can't say it in baby talk, don't say it at all".
Yet his mother, too, he implies, was in a sense reading beyond her years, "because she didn't have the formal education, and that is important with those kinds of writers." Such an emphasis on the university, such conviction in its central importance, is perhaps unsurprising coming from a thinker who has blazed his trail through more than half a dozen universities since earning his primary degree in his native city.
Bhabha left Bombay to complete not one but three graduate degrees at Oxford. He has taught at Princeton, Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Chicago, and is currently Anne F Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard. But although he is in one sense very much a product of the academy, and frequently accused by commentators of being lost among its more jargonistic halls, Bhabha's intellectual journeys, and his memories of those first such journeys with his mother, point back to an earlier, less institutional influence on his thought. Her maiden name, Dubash, referred not simply to her family's occupation as ship-builders, but to a trait endemic to the Parsi culture as a whole: the crossing of cultural and geographical boundaries, the merging of languages, the making of vessels to traverse spaces between one country, one people, and another.
The Parsis, a little-known, "lower and upper bourgeois" minority group, are a largely professional class that, in the mid-19th century, performed the role of mediator or negotiator between Britain and other Indian communities, both Hindu and Muslim. They were known for multilingualism, for being "culturally open", even Europeanised, explains Bhabha. In a very real way, Parsi Bombay was Bhabha's first tutorial in the liberal arts.
It was his first taste, too, of those particular energies that would fuel the ideas with which he made his name in the early 1990s, in books such as Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture. These were energies of hybridity, of mimicry, of cultural contestation and contradiction, of transition and translation - all notions that have become central to Bhabha's vocabulary as he has developed his theories of postcolonialism, from his doctoral thesis on Naipaul to his current work on Frantz Fanon and on narration in the context of war crime and torture trials.
It's not difficult to grasp the core of Bhabha's postcolonial theory; that the mission to civilise or colonise is always threatened or shaken into ambivalence by the very presence, the stare and the speech, of those who form the object of that mission. Try to change something, or someone, and you'll find they change you too; force authority on another and to some degree you'll find that authority questioned, threatened, even ridiculed, so that it no longer seems solid. The resultant space that opens up - a space of uncertainty, of regarding both oneself and the other person or other race anew, but of illuminating strongly and often unforgivingly the society in question - is termed by Bhabha the "third space". As third, it is above and beyond duality, rigidity, mere opposition.
These ideas, applied to situations and artistic works of or about minoritisation and migration, form the building blocks of Bhabha's theory. For some, however, they form more of a brick wall. Bhabha knows that there are those who dismiss his work as deliberately difficult, as elitist, as inaccessible. He takes the claims seriously. He knows the frustration of bafflement and incomprehension; as a graduate student attending seminars on the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, he found himself leaving the room to make tea, "running out so that I wouldn't have to confront the difficulties".
Nonetheless, Lacan became a major influence on Bhabha's work. Does he ever worry, when he is writing, that he is producing similarly thirst-inducing material? "There's no real way of knowing," he says, "about your own writing, not when you are in the process of doing it. Some things are clear because you've thought a lot about them and then, by the time you actually put them down they have a sort of lucidity and a lightness and a clarity to them. There are other moments when, because you have been so immersed in the thinking, and in the processes of thinking, when you put it down, the sentences may look quite lucid, but in fact a lot of the work that you've put into it is not there, so they become actually quite enigmatic and difficult to understand."
For Bhabha the second type of moment is not the most problematic. Fittingly, there is a third space of writing, and it is the most challenging. "Then there are moments where, as you are writing, you know you want to describe something, you know you want to analyse, to say something, but you don't have the analytic tools for it or the analytic language for it at that point."
At such a point, he says, there are two options. "You can either stop there and somehow make it better - you know, just dress it up on the basis of what you already know. Or you can grapple with language, almost phenomenologically, provide some even hazy horizon of that idea. And I tend to usually do the latter. I want people to know there is something. I don't know what it is, but I know there is another move to be made, and I suppose it's also an invitation to have the reader come into the space with me. Knowing that I'm not the master of it."
Let's flesh out this third space a little in a context that might make most sense in contemporary Ireland. In the encounter between the "native" Irish citizen and one of the non-natives, the non-nationals, the "multicultural" peoples who have come here over the last decade in much greater numbers than before, what sort of action or attitude might open up such a third space? Could such a space emerge, for example, in the action of the Irish- language speaking immigrant group, iMeasc, which wrote to this newspaper recently to dispute the idea that English, to the exclusion of Irish, would be the sole language of choice for newcomers to Ireland? The group was formed in response to concerns that the national media would "use immigrants as a weapon against the Irish language, and on a lesser level, native Irish culture", and seeks to be taken seriously not as an aberration but "as a growing reality within modern Ireland".
Bhabha, understandably, has not heard of the group's campaign, but he greets its description with a mix of wonder and excitement. "That's a very relevant and important issue," he says. "When I originally thought about the third space, I thought that whenever we talk about the encounters that constitute differences, we always seem to think that the parties to the encounter already come armed with differences. That when people come together, all that happens is that there is either a consensus or there is a clash. But then I started thinking, no, when people come together, something happens in the process of change, of dialogue, of negotiation. Something else has to happen. And that emergent something else - which happens in a process of translation, often in a process of transition - the material it is generating doesn't simply follow the rules that are brought to the table. It sets up its own rules, it sets up its own games, it sets up its own meanings. And I thought, this is a very rich area to explore, and I try to explore it again and again."
The emergence of the third space is not an organic process, says Bhabha - it is not predictable or natural in that sense. Yet it is positive and productive. Isn't it striking that many of the things worth doing or experiencing as humans are similarly "unnatural"? Bhabha laughs. "Yes, against nature. I think that all the things that are traditionally described as the things that humans do have been naturalised and normalised in particular ways. And in fact, the variety of human interaction is much wider than that."
There is a sense, however, that in the current global climate such variety is being narrowed by large-scale paranoia, and it is from this sense that Bhabha's latest thinking about human interaction has taken its cue. He's interested, at the moment, in the concept of "what the United Nations might call human security" as a holding place for all the questions of power, difference, culture, representation and identity that continue to preoccupy him. Security, he believes, has become a way of seeing other cultures, a lens and a shield with which to meet what is new and unfamiliar. What it has replaced are ethical or moral lenses, approaches to otherness in terms of progressiveness or backwardness. "Now, when you look at somebody, it's not simply, 'Are you like me or unlike me? Has your culture produced great artists? What are your rituals?' It's, 'Is your culture safe or not? Will it produce terrorists?'"
At first glance, this lens of security seems an entirely negative one: a lens of suspicion and resentment, of power-play and distrust. But to see it in this way, to think only of stony-faced immigration officers and deportations in the night, would be to forget how Bhabha's philosophy works.
The Irish Seminar 200: Genealogies of Culture, directed by Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons and Kevin Whelan, continues until Jul 15; tel: 01-6110554; e-mail: irishsem@nd.edu; www.nd.edu/~irishsem. A public lecture by Siobhan Kilfeather, Genealogies of Irish Feminism, at 8pm on Wed, Jul 12, in Room G32, Earlsfort Terrace